Tags: epistemology, Ozy, sex differences
Status: draft
-> With the Hopes that our World is built on
-> They were utterly out of touch,
-> They denied that the Moon could be defined to be Stilton;
-> They denied she identified as Dutch;
-> They denied that Wishes should be categorized as Horses;
-> They denied that a Pig could be stipulated to have Wings;
-> So we worshipped the Gods of the Market
-> Who promised these beautiful things.
->
-> —Rudyard Kipling, ["The Gods of the Copybook Headings"](http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm) (paraphrased)
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-## Prelude: on Charity Norms and Intepretive Labor Balance
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-This post is a reply to [friend of the blog](/tag/ozy/) Ozymandias's [reply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) to [my reply](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) to Scott Alexander's ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/). The reply ends up covering a lot of worldview-ground, so ideas in this post may be expanded upon in future posts.
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-Before anything else, I'd like to thank Ozy for their thoughtful reply. Substantive, longform engagement between contrasting viewpoints is a rare and beautiful thing that deserves to be socially rewarded so that we get more of it, thereby collectively becoming more likely to get things right [systematically rather than by coincidence](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/)!
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-saying something
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-we can't talk about bad faith
-playing chess with a pigeon, what the tortise said to Achilles
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-"from the merely naive to the dense to the outright vapid" insults violate a symmetry constraint
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-_people who think they're lizards_
-the real strength of "be charitable to those you disagree with" is that it forces you to clarify your ideas in order to defend against every possible absurd misinterpretation
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After summarizing the discussion so far, Ozy argues that my appeal to the relevance of pyschological sex differences commits me to an absurd conclusion—
Does the fact that it's possible to scrupulously rephrase any individual sentence to elide sex imply that the corresponding mental _representation_ of the concept of 'sex' is of little practical use? I don't think so, and I've tried, within the limits of my time and my writing ability, to explain why. But if some readers still aren't convinced—well, maybe I can live with that.
-"Winning" arguments is uninteresting, _especially_ arguments about definitions. Everyone knows that the same word can be used in many ways depending on context. What _matters_ is learning about reality, and finding concepts and representations that make reality _less_ confusing rather than _more_ confusing. If, after thousands of words of argument, someone _still_ thinks a concept that I find useful should not be used because I can't provide explicit necessary-and-sufficient conditions to classify a series of ever-more obscure and contrived edge cases and "gotcha"s—or because [it hurts someone's feelings](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/)—then I guess my response is to shrug and say, "Okay, whatever, I'll continue modeling reality using my concepts, and I wish you good luck trying to do the same with yours."
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-[TODO: transition sentence about how the map is part of the territory]
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+[...]
-I think my feelings for Jessica represent an interesting interaction of the conflict between sex and "gender": my high regard for her is happening because she passes so well that my brain is tagging her as a woman (and women who understand LessWrong stuff to that level are sacred and precious), but I don't feel creepy about so openly expressing it to her or others, because I'm less afraid of hurting her, because I expect that whatever anti-rape adaptation brainware women have (that result in strange males being labeled "creepy" threats) she ... probably just doesn't have it
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-## How dumb do you think we are?
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-_no utilitarian calculation has taken place_
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-(I _also_ haven't done a calculation, but I'm not a utilitarian; I'm an aspiring epistemic rationalist)
\ No newline at end of file
+_people who think they're lizards_
my Culture War struggle is actually structurally similar to AI alignment: the economy/social-justice provides vast riches in the process of eating your soul. (I can have my hair long, I can get HRT and surgeries—but at the cost of not being able to explain why.)
sneaking a copy of MTIMB into the MIRI library after visiting Eliezer (Jessica was outside), because it was what Harry would do (but notably, not Hermione)
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+playing chess with a pigeon, what the tortise said to Achilles
mourning MichFest: https://www.reddit.com/r/GCdebatesQT/comments/fkeqy6/question_for_gender_critical_people_and_why_not/fkto0xl/
find a cite for FtM heart-attack risk
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+Kathleen Stock https://quillette.com/2019/04/11/ignoring-differences-between-men-and-women-is-the-wrong-way-to-address-gender-dysphoria/
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+the real strength of "be charitable to those you disagree with" is that it forces you to clarify your ideas in order to defend against every possible absurd misinterpretation
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+I think my feelings for Jessica represent an interesting interaction of the conflict between sex and "gender": my high regard for her is happening because she passes so well that my brain is tagging her as a woman (and women who understand LessWrong stuff to that level are sacred and precious), but I don't feel creepy about so openly expressing it to her or others, because I'm less afraid of hurting her, because I expect that whatever anti-rape adaptation brainware women have (that result in strange males being labeled "creepy" threats) she ... probably just doesn't have it
+
+
+"Winning" arguments is uninteresting, _especially_ arguments about definitions. Everyone knows that the same word can be used in many ways depending on context. What _matters_ is learning about reality, and finding concepts and representations that make reality _less_ confusing rather than _more_ confusing. If, after thousands of words of argument, someone _still_ thinks a concept that I find useful should not be used because I can't provide explicit necessary-and-sufficient conditions to classify a series of ever-more obscure and contrived edge cases and "gotcha"s—or because [it hurts someone's feelings](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/)—then I guess my response is to shrug and say, "Okay, whatever, I'll continue modeling reality using my concepts, and I wish you good luck trying to do the same with yours."
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+[TODO: transition sentence about how the map is part of the territory]
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+"from the merely naive to the dense to the outright vapid" insults violate a symmetry constraint
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+non-rape gratitude https://twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1243595042557587456
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+----
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+Everyone wants to think they're an agent that's made an informed choice. And when the one comes to them and points out that they're the victim of a hostile memetic environment that's been conceptually gerrymandered to game them into making CRAZY choices for someone else's benefit, they take it personally. I certainly take it personally, and I want to learn how to stop.
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+From the inside, you have free choice in the sense that you don't know what you're going to do until you've finished computing it. From the outside, you're a system that can be gamed.
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+You're always going to be dominated by _someone's_ memeplex. The question is, if you knew more and thought faster, which parts of your current ideology would extrapolated-you construe as parasites, and which as symbiotes? You should, of course, be very suspicious of anyone who thinks they already know the answer. But perhaps it should not be seen as such a incursion to suggest that the answer may surprise you!
-26 Feb _ Teleology (UUT)
-28 Feb _ Book Review: Charles Murray's Human Diversity (UUT)
+_ Teleology (UUT)
+_ Book Review: Charles Murray's Human Diversity (UUT)
+_ Reply to Ozymandias on Lesbians and on Single-Sex Spaces
_ Sexual Dimorphism, Yudkowsky's Sequences, and Me
_ "I Tell Myself to Let the Story End"; Or, A Hill of Validity ... (UUT)
_ Intrumental Categories, Wireheading, and War (LW)
+Elision _vs_. Choice
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_ Algorithmic Intent: A Hansonian Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle (LW)
_ Contra Scott Alexander on Mental Illness; Or, Oh God, Please Don't (aAL/LW)
+Discord comment about creating a space where no one questions whether someone deserves real woman status
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+
Angelic Irony
Memetics vs. Discourse
Honesty Is Activism
The Motte-and-Bailey Doctrine as Compression Artifact
-Elision _vs_. Choice
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The Wisdom of Nature (I like the idea of transhumanism, but in practice, biology is just too complicated) https://nickbostrom.com/evolution.pdf
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff