* https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xsyG7PkMekHud2DMK/of-gender-and-rationality
* make sure the late-onset/AGP terminology is introduced in a coherent order rather than being inserted willy-nilly
* the message length of my existence
+
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Outline for remaining Coda—
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+(This attempted nickname-change turned out to be a terrible idea for several reasons: first, my particular pair of real-life initials never really "felt like a name" even to me (as contrasted to something like "C.J.", which feels like a name because it has a _J_ in it); second, I found it incredibly psychologically stressful for some people to know me by one name, and people I knew before to know me by another, and I didn't have the guts to nag people in the latter group to switch for something that didn't feel like a name even to me; third, the "gender-neutral byline" rationale almost certainly didn't hold up in practice because my real first initial (not _M._; this blog is under a pen name) is a high-Scrabble-score letter that begins one high-frequency boy name (top 200 in the [1990 Census list](https://www.census.gov/topics/population/genealogy/data/1990_census/1990_census_namefiles.html)), and no high-frequency girl names (the most popular candidates trailing my ugly boy-name in frequency by an order of magnitude). But it was the _principle!_)
+
+
"different thing that I don't understand" /2019/Jan/interlude-xvi/
[dark side epistemology, what the math actually means in the real world from "Reply to Holden"]
+(Picture me playing Hermione Granger in a post-Singularity [holonovel](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Holo-novel_program) adaptation of _Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality_ (Emma Watson having charged me [the standard licensing fee](/2019/Dec/comp/) to use a copy of her body for the occasion): "[We can do anything if we](https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/30) exert arbitrarily large amounts of [interpretive labor](https://acesounderglass.com/2015/06/09/interpretive-labor/)!")
+
+This is the eye of the hurricane; this is the only way I can [protect](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/)
+
+
+cosplay—
+/2019/Aug/a-love-that-is-out-of-anyones-control/
+/2017/Oct/a-leaf-in-the-crosswind/
+/2016/Dec/joined/
+
+It Might Be Cool https://xkcd.com/535/
+
+even after taking into account that the phrase "once you know what to look for" is a 20-meter fire-truck-red flag for [confirmation bias](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rmAbiEKQDpDnZzcRf/positive-bias-look-into-the-dark).
+
+
+If I sound angry, it's because I actually do feel a lot of anger, but I wish I knew how to more reliably convey its target. A trans woman I know thinks I'm suffering from false consciousness, that my pious appeals to Objectivity and Reason are [just a facade](https://sinceriously.fyi/false-faces/) concealing my collaboration with a cissexist social order via scapegoating instincts: "I'm one of the good compliant ones—not one of those weird bad trans people who will demand their rights! _They're_ the witches, not me; burn them, not me!"
+
+I have [no grounds to fault her for not taking my self-report as unquestionable](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/), but I still think she's reading me wrong.
+[agree that scapegoating is real]
+
+complicit with cissexism:
+/2017/Mar/interlude-ii/
+/2019/Feb/interlude-xviii/
+
+I guess I feel pretty naïve now, but—I _actually believed our own propoganda_. I _actually thought_ we were doing something new and special of historical and possibly even _cosmological_ significance.
+
+**Almost everything I do is at least one meta level up from any actual decisions.** I'm _not_ trying to tell other people how to live their lives, because _that would be crazy_. I am obviously _not smart enough_ to tell other people what they should do _and get the right answer_. True, I am skeptical of currently-popular _theories_ of how gender works and how gender dysphoria works,[^concepts] because I think they are _false_ in certain knowable aspects and that I have a more accurate view in certain knowable aspects. That is _not the same thing_ as telling people to detransition! Maybe lots _more_ people should transition! But in order to _figure out_ what the correct decisions are—or what the best decisions are conditional on your axiomatic subjective values—we need to **get the theory right**.
+
+Why not just say "cis" women? I do, often, depending on the audience and the context of what I'm trying to say. I can [code-switch](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/code-switching-i/); I can entertain multiple frames—different maps that reflect different aspects of the same territory. I can even be polite, when being polite is _cheap_. But it's important to at least _acknowledge_ that "cis" and "actual" do not _convey the same meaning_. (Sufficiently advanced neuroscience would be able to confirm this by examining patterns of brain activity on hearing each word.) The _fact_ that they don't convey the same meaning is _why_ the latter is offensive—the source of controversy isn't that people love words that start with _c_ and hate words that that start with a vowel sound. Not being allowed to use the word "actual" in this context makes it harder to encode the _empirical hypothesis_ I'm trying to communicate, that "trans" isn't just pointing to a subcluster within the "woman" cluster (like "young woman" or "Japanese woman"), it's actually denoting a subcluster within the _male_ cluster in the subspace of dimensions corresponding to [developmental sex](http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/)-related traits that—unfortunately, heartbreakingly—we don't know how to change with current technology.
+
+The fact that I can't _talk about the world I see_ in the simple language that comes naturally to me without it inevitably being construed as a reactionary political statement is a _problem_. And it's a _rationality_ problem insofar as the world I see is potentially a more accurate model of the real world, than the world I'm allowed to talk about in Berkeley 2020.
+
+If we _actually had_ the magical perfect sex change technology described in "Changing Emotions", no one would even be _tempted_ to invent these clever category-gerrymandering mind games! People who wanted to change sex would just _do it_, and everyone would use corresponding language (pronouns and more) because it straightforwardly _described reality_—not as a political favor, or because of some exceedingly clever philosophy argument, but using the _same_ ordinary word-choice algorithms that they used for everything else.
+
+I definitely don't want to call (say) my friend "Irene" a man. That would be crazy! Because **her transition _actually worked_.** Because it actually worked _on the merits_. _Not_ because I'm _redefining concepts in order to be nice to her_. When I look at her, whatever algorithm my brain _ordinarily_ uses to sort people into "woman"/"man"/"not sure" buckets, returns "woman."
+
+
+Someone asked me: "Wouldn't it be embarrassing if the community solved Friendly AI and went down in history as the people who created Utopia forever, and you had rejected it because of gender stuff?"
+
+But the _reason_ it seemed _at all_ remotely plausible that our little robot cult could be pivotal in creating Utopia forever was _not_ "[Because we're us](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-recommending/), the world-saving good guys", but rather _because_ we were going to discover and refine the methods of _systematically correct reasoning_.
+
+**If you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should be able to get the right answer even when the question _doesn't matter_.** Obviously, the safety of the world does not _directly_ depend on being able to think clearly about trans issues. In the same way, the safety of a coal mine for humans does not _directly_ depend on [whether it's safe for canaries](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/canary_in_a_coal_mine): the dead canaries are just _evidence about_ properties of the mine relevant to human health.
+
+The "discourse algorithm" (the collective generalization of "cognitive algorithm") that can't just _get this shit right_ in 2019 (because being out of step with the reigning Bay Area ideological fashion is deemed too expensive by a consequentialism that counts unpopularity as a cost), also can't get heliocentrism right in 1632 _for the same reason_—and I really doubt it can get AI alignment theory right in 2039.
+
+If the people _marketing themselves_ as the good guys who are going to save the world using systematically correct reasoning are _not actually interested in doing systematically correct reasoning_ (because systematically correct reasoning leads to two or three conclusions that are politically "impossible" to state clearly in public, and no one has the guts to [_not_ shut up and thereby do the politically impossible](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nCvvhFBaayaXyuBiD/shut-up-and-do-the-impossible)), that's arguably _worse_ than the situation where "the community" _qua_ community doesn't exist at all.
+
+Perhaps so. But back in 2009, **we did not anticipate that _whether or not I should cut my dick off_ would _become_ a politicized issue.**
+
+**To be fair, it's not obvious that I _shouldn't_ cut my dick off!**
+
+I don't think I'm setting [my price for joining](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining) particularly high here?
-Occasionally you hear people
+[cruelty to ordinary people, optimized to confuse and intimidate people trying to use language to reason about the concept of biological sex]
+https://medium.com/@barrakerr/pronouns-are-rohypnol-dbcd1cb9c2d9
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff