X-Git-Url: http://unremediatedgender.space/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git;a=blobdiff_plain;f=notes%2Fsexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-notes.md;h=27a6b484c522a925a00e5796173775b9429913ba;hp=711dc60ed12a973d3ad4cce818eb699c9956873e;hb=aab3c0d329308408a94d153b73bb2546ca820e69;hpb=222f3221c86ff7a64a0ab7fd6b5a904a7c0a594c diff --git a/notes/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-notes.md b/notes/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-notes.md index 711dc60..27a6b48 100644 --- a/notes/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-notes.md +++ b/notes/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-notes.md @@ -9,6 +9,9 @@ _(content warning WTF did I just read)_ (November 2020, [TODO] words) + +(You can also think of this as psychological context-setting for my philosophy-of-language Sequence's forthcoming two-post conclusion, "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception" and "Motivation and Political Context for my Philosophy-of-Language Agenda") + ---- On Twitter— @@ -28,27 +31,44 @@ Hi SneerClub! I noticed that you've enjoyed some of my [previous](https://www.re B.F. on JKR (https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/3883966591638029?comment_id=3884054068295948&reply_comment_id=3884243454943676): > I am very glad that I don't have anyone with opinions similar to hers in my immediate vicinity, because I am pretty sure that if I did, my brain would constantly be running a scared loop in any social interactions with them. [...] I think it's important that people can write essays that are as far outside my personal Overton window as hers is outside it (because sometimes they're correct and I should update, even though I don't believe this is an instance of that) -Duncan's voicing my concern: https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/3890320517669303 + ----- Points to work in— * Superhappies empathic inference for not wanting to believe girls were different https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qCsxiojX7BSLuuBgQ/the-super-happy-people-3-8 +* empathic inference: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NLMo5FZWFFq652MNe/sympathetic-minds +https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zkzzjg3h7hW5Z36hK/humans-in-funny-suits +https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fpWoXpNv83BAHJdc/the-comedy-of-behaviorism + * "The Opposite Sex" https://web.archive.org/web/20130216025508/http://lesswrong.com/lw/rp/the_opposite_sex/ * EY was right about "men need to think about themselves _as men_" (find cite) * Vassar slapping me down * "Mr. Davis" * Faster Than Science, Transgender Edition (prior draft) * "I often wish some men/women would appreciate" -* empathic inference: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NLMo5FZWFFq652MNe/sympathetic-minds https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zkzzjg3h7hW5Z36hK/humans-in-funny-suits https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fpWoXpNv83BAHJdc/the-comedy-of-behaviorism * study evidence that this is actually common * AGPs dating each other is the analogue of "Failed Utopia 4-2"!!—the guys in "Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses" are doing better in some ways -* wipe culturally defined values +> The vast majority of men are not what the vast majority of women would most prefer, or vice versa. I don’t know if anyone has ever actually done this study, but I bet that both gay and lesbian couples are happier on average with their relationship than heterosexual couples. (Googles… yep, looks like it.) + * finding things in the refrigerator * 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 +* the message length of my existence (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length) +[TODO: "expecting women to be defective men"] +* aren't all those transwomen going to be _embarrrassed_ after the Singularity, when telepathy tech makes everything obvious +* stress fracture vs. sprain: psychology is more complicated, but the basic moral holds +* "I don't care" "It sounds like you do care" +* pronouns do have truth conditions + * The text of this blog post is not something a woman could have written + * as a programmer, I have learned to fear dependencies +* wipe culturally defined values: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/BkkwXtaTf5LvbA6HB/moral-error-and-moral-disagreement (this might have to go after Failed-Utopia #4-2) + + +https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r3NHPD3dLFNk9QE2Y/search-versus-design-1 +https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JBFHzfPkXHB2XfDGj/evolution-of-modularity + ----- Outline for remaining Coda— @@ -67,6 +87,9 @@ Anne Lawrence described autogynephiles as ["men who love women and want to becom ----- +(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/ @@ -121,18 +144,13 @@ inference by analogy—even if not all trans women are exactly like me, at least https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XYCEB9roxEBfgjfxs/the-scales-of-justice-the-notebook-of-rationality writes down all the facts that aren't on anyone's side. -"gay and trans" - ------ - +In the political world, "gay and trans"—the identity-modifiers "stack". +Etiologically, people who are "gay and trans" are ... straight. +not needing permission from another person -Sometimes I sigh because I'll never get rich -And there's no magic so I can't be a witch -And that I must enjoy the scorn of the world -Just 'cause I'm butch and I'm a tranny girl ------ @@ -146,7 +164,7 @@ Just 'cause I'm butch and I'm a tranny girl https://archive.is/7Wolo -> the massive correlation between exposure to Yudkowsky’s writings and being a trans woman (can’t bother to do the calculations but the connection is absurdly strong) +> the massive correlation between exposure to Yudkowsky's writings and being a trans woman (can't bother to do the calculations but the connection is absurdly strong) Namespace's point about the two EYs link back to Murray review: can't oppress people on the basis of sex if sex _doesn't exist_ @@ -157,7 +175,7 @@ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vjmw8tW6wZAtNJMKo/which-parts-are-me If we _actually had_ the magical perfect sex change technology described in "Changing Emotions"—if it cost $200,000, I would take out a bank loan and _do it_, and live happily ever after. -(Though I'd call myself a transwoman—one word, for the same reason the _verthandi_ in "Failed Utopia #4-2" got their own word. I currently write "trans woman", two words, as a strategic concession to the shibboleth-detectors of my target audience:[^two-words] I don't want to to _prematurely_ scare off progressive-socialized readers on account of mere orthography, when what I actually have to say is already disturbing enough.) + people like me being incentivized to identify as part of a political pressure group that attempts to leverage claims of victimhood into claims on power @@ -208,12 +226,10 @@ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KmghfjH6RgXvoKruJ/hand-vs-fingers I'm not objecting to your existence, I'm only objecting to the prerequisites to your existence - (See Tailcalled on "zooming in" on the typology to at least a four node graph.) But once you stop taking the "gender identity"/"woman trapped in a man's body" story as _axiom_ and - It's possible to disagree with people's _theoretical account_ of their own psychology, without doubting the honesty of their self-report, in the sense that people are doing their best to translate the ineffable _qualia_ of their experience into words. [throw a chair](/2019/Jan/use-it-or-lose-it/) and yell, "How dumb do you think we are?!" @@ -244,10 +260,81 @@ The level above "Many-worlds is obviously correct, stop being stupid" is "Racial https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/ -my pseudobisexual moments +my pseudobisexual moments (it's California in the year 2015) + +our analogues would make a good couple in a nearby alternate universe where at least one of us is female. "Exactly one," he said. "It's California in the year 2015," I said. + + + Anyway, four years later, it turns out that this whole "rationality" subculture is completely fake. The thing that convinced me of this was not _even_ the late-onset-gender-dysphoria-in-males-is-not-an-intersex-condition thesis that I was originally trying to talk about. Humans are _really complicated_: no matter how "obvious" something in psychology or social science to me, I can't write someone off entirely simply for disagreeing, because the whole domain is so complex that I always have to acknowledge that, ultimately, I could just be wrong. But in the _process_ of trying to _talk about_ this late-onset-gender-dysphoria-in-males-is-not-an-intersex-condition thesis, I noticed that my conversations kept getting _derailed_ on some variation of "The word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that." _That_ part of the debate, I knew I could win. [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." + + + +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? + +[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 + +R₀ +"You can't lift a ten-pound weight with one pound of force!" +https://equilibriabook.com/living-in-an-inadequate-world/ + +The debate never advances; Arthur Jensen on the Phil Donahue show +https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtoqK1gsmHI + +The Eliezer Yudkowsky I remember wrote about [how facts are tightly-woven together in the Great Web of Causality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies), such that [people who are trying to believe something false have an incentive to invent and spread fake epistemology lessons](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology), and about the [high competence threshold that _forces_ correct conclusions](http://sl4.org/archive/0602/13903.html). + +A culture where there are huge catastrophic consequences for [questioning religion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6JzcFtPGiznFgDxP/excluding-the-supernatural), is a culture where it's harder to train alignment researchers that genuinely understand Occam's razor on a _deep_ level, when [the intelligent social web](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web) around them will do anything to prevent them from applying the parsimony skill to the God hypothesis. + +A culture where there are huge catastrophic consequences for questioning gender identity, is a culture where it's harder to train alignment researchers that genuinely understand the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-language-and-cognition on a _deep_ level, when the social web around them will do anything to prevent them from [invalidating someone's identity](http://unremediatedgender.space/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/). + + + + +The short story ["Failed Utopia #4-2"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2) portrays an almost-aligned superintelligence constructing a happiness-maximizing utopia for humans—except that because [evolution didn't design women and men to be optimal partners for each other](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Py3uGnncqXuEfPtQp/interpersonal-entanglement), and the AI is prohibited from editing people's minds, the happiness-maximizing solution ends up splitting up the human species by sex and giving women and men their own _separate_ utopias, complete with artificially-synthesized romantic partners.