I guess I haven't made any new posts here in almost two months?—which is not great. It would make sense for a blog to not update in two months if the author really just didn't have anything to say worth reading during that time. But I still have _lots_ of things I want to say here, that I've wanted to say for a long time, even, that I just _somehow_ haven't gotten around to writing up ... even though the blog is more than two years old, _and_ I didn't even have a dayjob for twelve months of that. "Writer's block" doesn't even begin to cover this; it is [_criminal_](/2017/Nov/the-blockhead/). Here's just a _partial_ list of some of the post ideas that I haven't gotten around to finishing for you yet—
+<a id="post-ideas-list"></a>
+
* I still need to finish drafting my reply to [Ozy's reply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) to [my reply](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) to [the immortal Scott Alexander](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/)
* I've got ~4800 words drafted, but it needs a _lot_ more work in order to make it a maximally clear and maximally defensible blog post
* A _brief_ (only ~350 words) summary—
>
> —Sara Barellies, ["Gonna Get Over You"](https://genius.com/Sara-bareilles-gonna-get-over-you-lyrics)
+I mostly haven't been doing so well for the past nine months or so. I mean, I've always been a high-neuroticism person, but this has been a below-average year even by my standards. I've been reluctant to write about it in too much detail for poorly-understood psychological reasons. Maybe it would feel too much like attacking my friends?
+
+But this blog is not about _not_ attacking my friends. This blog is about the truth. For my own sanity, for my own emotional closure, I need to tell the story as best I can. If it's an incredibly boring and petty story about people getting _unreasonably angry_ about philosophy-of-language minutiæ, well, you've been warned. If the story makes me look bad in the reader's eyes (because you think I'm crazy for getting so unreasonably angry about philosophy-of-language minutiæ), then I shall be happy to look bad for an _accurate_ account of _what I actually am_—I should expect nothing less.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+This is _basic shit_. As we say locally, this is _basic Sequences shit_.
+
+
+
+Now, it's not obvious that I _shouldn't_ cut my dick off! A lot of people seem to be doing it nowadays, and a lot of them seem to be pretty happy with their decision! But in order to _decide_ whether it's a good idea, I need _accurate information_
+
+, so that I can cut my dick off in the possible worlds where that's a good idea, and not cut my dick off in the possible worlds where that's not a good idea.
+
+
+
+actively manufacture _fake rationality lessons_ that have been optimized to _confuse me into cutting my dick off_ independently of whether or not we live in a world
+
+
>
> _The Gods Themselves_ by Isaac Asimov
-Eliezer Yudkowsky Tweets, linking to [a _Quillete_ interview with Lisa Littman](https://quillette.com/2019/03/19/an-interview-with-lisa-littman-who-coined-the-term-rapid-onset-gender-dysphoria/)—
+Eliezer Yudkowsky Tweets (back in March), linking to [a _Quillete_ interview with Lisa Littman](https://quillette.com/2019/03/19/an-interview-with-lisa-littman-who-coined-the-term-rapid-onset-gender-dysphoria/):
> [Everything more complicated than](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1108277090577600512) protons tends to come in varieties. Hydrogen, for example, has isotopes. Gender dysphoria involves more than one proton and will probably have varieties.
> [To be clear, I don't](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1108280619014905857) know much about gender dysphoria. There's an allegation that people are reluctant to speciate more than one kind of gender dysphoria. To the extent that's not a strawman, I would say only in a generic way that GD seems liable to have more than one species.
-So, I actually think the moral here is wrong! (_Subtly_ wrong, in a way that took me a day to notice.)
+So, I actually think the moral here is wrong! (_Subtly_ wrong, in a way that took me a day or two to notice at the time, and am blogging about now.)
TODO: artificulate that I'm making a "zero-one-infinity" argument (surprsing that Google searches on this refer to a programming strat, I thought it was a math thing—compare)
So isn't "Gender dysphoria involves more than one proton[; therefore, it] will probably have varieties" a [fake explanation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fysgqk4CjAwhBgNYT/fake-explanations)? The phrase "gender dysphoria" was worth inventing as a shorter code for the not-vanishingly-rare observation of "humans wanting to change sex", but unless and until you have specific observations indicating that there are different ways dysphoria can come about, you shouldn't posit that there are "probably" multiple varieties, because in a "nearby" possible Everett branch where human evolution happened slightly differently, there probably aren't. (Brain-intersex conditions have a kind of a priori plausibility to them, but whatever weird quirk leads to autogynephilia probably wouldn't happen with every roll of the evolutionary dice if you rewound far enough, and the memeplex driving Littman's ROGD observations was invented recently.) So I think a better moral than "Things larger than protons will probably have varieties" would be "Beware [fallacies of compression](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y5MxoeacRKKM3KQth/fallacies-of-compression)."
+"Wait a minute, M. Taylor! Didn't you notice that part about 'There's an allegation that people are reluctant to speciate more than one kind of gender dysphoria'? There's a nontrivial probability that he's thinking of _you_ in particular—you being the most obnox—_I mean_, prominent, person in Yudkowsky's memetic vicinity making that allegation. But even if he doesn't know you exist, by publicly offering a _general_ argument that there are multiple types of dyphoria, he's effectively _doing you a favor_—and here you are _criticizing_ him for it! Isn't that disloyal and ungrateful of you?"
+
+Great question! And the answer is: **no, absolutely not**. (And, though I can never speak for anyone but myself, I can only _imagine_ that Yudkowsky would agree? Everything I do, I [learned from him](https://www.readthesequences.com/).) And the _reason_ it's not disloyal and ungrateful is because
+
+
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WQFioaudEH8R7fyhm/local-validity-as-a-key-to-sanity-and-civilization
-Title: How Dumb Do You Think We Are? A Reply to Ozymandias on Fully Consensual Gender
+Title: Reply to Ozymandias on Fully Consensual Gender
Date: 2020-01-01
Category: commentary
Tags: epistemology, Ozy, sociology
>
> —Rudyard Kipling, ["The Gods of the Copybook Headings"](http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm) (paraphrased)
-At the end of [their 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 [the immortal Scott Alexander on gender categorization](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), [friend of the blog](http://unremediatedgender.space/tag/ozy/) Ozymandias makes an analogy between social gender and money. What constitutes money in a given social context is determined by collective agreement: money is whatever you can reliably expect everyone else to accept as payment. This isn't a circular definition (in the way that "money is whatever we agree is money" would be uninformative to an alien who didn't already have a referent for the word _money_), and people advocating for a _different_ money regime (like [late-19th century American bimetalists](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bimetallism&oldid=864176071#Political_debate) or contemporary cryptocurrency advocates) aren't making an epistemic _mistake_.
+At the end of [their 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 [the immortal Scott Alexander on gender categorization](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), [friend of the blog](/tag/ozy/) Ozymandias makes an analogy between social gender and money.[ref]As teased at the beginning of [the bulleted list in my post-Christmas cry of pain last year](/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#post-ideas-list), I _also_ have responses to the other arguments Ozy makes earlier in ["Man Should Allocate Some More Categories"](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/). The fact that the present post focuses specifically on replying to the gender/money analogy shall not be construed to mean that I'm conceding any other points—just that I'm a [ludicrously, _miserably_ unproductive writer](/2017/Nov/the-blockhead/). (Compare the June 2018 date of Ozy's post to the September 2019 date of this one.)[/ref] What constitutes money in a given social context is determined by collective agreement: money is whatever you can reliably expect everyone else to accept as payment. This isn't a circular definition (in the way that "money is whatever we agree is money" would be uninformative to an alien who didn't already have a referent for the word _money_), and people advocating for a _different_ money regime (like [late-19th century American bimetalists](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bimetallism&oldid=864176071#Political_debate) or contemporary cryptocurrency advocates) aren't making an epistemic _mistake_.
I _really like_ this analogy! An important thing to note here is that while the form of money can vary widely across sociocultural contexts (from [shell beads](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wampum), to silver coins, to fiat paper currency, to database entries in a bank), not just any form will suffice to serve the functions of money: perishable goods like cheese can't function as a long-term store of value; non-fungible items that vary in quality in hard-to-measure ways can't function as a unit of account.[ref]_E.g._, my goat might be healthier than your goat in a way that neither of us nor any of the other local goat-herders know how to quantify.[/ref]
Ozy gives a list of predictions you can make about someone on the basis of social gender, as distinct from sex, apparently meant to demonstrate the usefulness of the former concept. But a lot of the individual list items seem either superficial ("Whether they wear dresses, skirts, or makeup"—surely we don't want to go for "gender as clothing", do we??), or tied to other people's _perceptions_ of sex.[ref]The harrassment and expected-sacrifices example in particular are what radical feminists would call sex-based oppression.[/ref] [ref][Friend of the blog](https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/837846616937750528) Ray Blanchard [recently proposed on Twitter](https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/1054743819206434816) that the term "subjective sex" might be more useful than "gender".[/ref]
-Take the "How many messages they get on a dating site" item. The _reason_ men send lots of messages to women on dating sites is because they want to date people with vaginas and female secondary sex characteristics, and maybe eventually marry them and father children with them, _&c._[ref]And the fact that it's women being deluged with messages from men rather than vice versa is predicted by the evolutionary logic of [Bateman's principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bateman's_principle) and [parental investment theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_investment): the sex that invests more resources per offspring will be "choosier", and the sex that invests less will compete for them. There are a few species (like the [pipefish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipefish) or the [Eurasian dotterel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_dotterel)) in which males are the more-investing sex, but humans aren't one them.[/ref]
+Take the "How many messages they get on a dating site" item. The _reason_ men send lots of messages to women on dating sites is because they want to date people with vaginas and female secondary sex characteristics, and maybe eventually marry them, father children with them, _&c._[ref]And the fact that it's women being deluged with messages from men rather than vice versa is predicted by the evolutionary logic of [Bateman's principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bateman's_principle) and [parental investment theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_investment): the sex that invests more resources per offspring will be "choosier", and the sex that invests less will compete for them. There are a few species (like the [pipefish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipefish) or the [Eurasian dotterel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_dotterel)) in which males are the more-investing sex, but humans aren't one them.[/ref]
Suppose one were to say to such a man, "Ah, I see you're sending lots of messages to women, by which I mean people who self-identify as women, in accordance with the utilitarian-desirable social policy of fully-consensual gender. Therefore, you should also send messages to these non-op trans women who aren't on HRT."
-I think the man would reply, "How dumb do you think I am?!"[ref]This isn't necessarily trans-exclusionary—a lot of such men be happy to date trans women who were _on HRT_ and thereby came to more closely rememble [cis/natal/actual](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/code-switching-i/) actual women. But that just gets us back to passing (like I was trying to say thousands of words ago), not fully consensual gender.[/ref]
+I think the man would reply, "How dumb do you think I am?!"[ref]This isn't necessarily trans-exclusionary—many such men might be happy to date trans women who were _on HRT_ and thereby came to more closely rememble [cis/natal/actual](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/code-switching-i/) women. But that just gets us back to passing (like I was trying to say thousands of words ago), not fully consensual gender.[/ref]
+
+One might respond with, "But there's a lot of cis women who you _also_ wouldn't date. Therefore, while you're allowed to not date trans women if that's your preference, you can't say it's because they're not _women_."
+
+So, I think there's actually a [statistically sophisticated reply to this](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy) which I really need to elaborate on more in future posts. To be sure, our man is just relying on his intuitive perception and probably doesn't _know_ the statistically sophisticated reply[ref]Although I would argue that the sophisticated statistics are part of the cognitive-scientific _explanation_ of what he perceives.[/ref]—but one also hasn't given him a _reason_ to trust clever verbal arguments over his own perception.
+
+I happily agree that fully consensual gender is a _coherent_ position. That doesn't make it _feasible_. _How_ are you going to maintain that social equilibrium without it being _immediately_ destroyed by normal people who _have eyes_ and don't care about clever philosophical definition-hacking mind games the way that readers of this blog do?
+
+That's not a rhetorical question. In the case of fiat currency, the question _actually has a literal answer_, although I personally am not well-versed enough in economic history to tell it. _Somehow_, societies have evolved from a state in which the idea of paper currency would have provoked a "How dumb do you think I am?" reaction, to the present state where everyone except a few thoroughly marginalized
+
+
+
+
-I happily concede that fully consensual gender is a _coherent_ position. That doesn't make it _feasible_. _How_ are you going to maintain that social equilibrium without it being _immediately_ destroyed by normal people who have eyes and don't care about clever philosophical definition-hacking mind games the way that readers of this blog do?
[TODO: it's possible that I'm underestimating the social-engineering feats that might be possible—it's kind of surprising that fiat money equilibria aren't also destroyed by a "How dumb do you think we are?" faction—but fiat money equilibria evolved over a long time for complicated reasons; you need more of an actual argument than "maybe things would be better"]
-https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GIRL
+the girl in the [G.I.R.L.](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GIRL)
The question remains: how dumb do you think we are?
--- /dev/null
+Title: Self-Identity Is a Schelling Point
+Date: 2020-01-01
+Category: commentary
+Tags: game theory, sociology
+Status: draft
+
+_(Rejected alternative title: "Schelf-Identity.")_
+
+Previously on _The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought_, we've [considered]() at [length]() the ways in which using self-identity
+
+
+
+
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests
\ No newline at end of file
)
)
-def population_with_error(μ, σ, n):
+def population_with_error(μ, ε, n):
def trait():
return normal(μ, 1)
def measurement_error():
- return normal(0, σ)
+ return normal(0, ε)
return [trait() + measurement_error() for _ in range(n)]
# trait differs by 1 standard deviation
-adjusted_f = population_with_error(1, 0, 10000)
-adjusted_m = population_with_error(0, 0, 10000)
+true_f = population_with_error(1, 0, 10000)
+true_m = population_with_error(0, 0, 10000)
# as above, but with 0.5 standard units measurment error
measured_f = population_with_error(1, 0.5, 10000)
measured_m = population_with_error(0, 0.5, 10000)
-smart_d = cohens_d(adjusted_f, adjusted_m)
-print(smart_d) # 1.0193773432617055 — d≈1.0, as expected!
+true_d = cohens_d(true_f, true_m)
+print(true_d) # 1.0193773432617055 — d≈1.0, as expected!
naïve_d = cohens_d(measured_f, measured_m)
print(naïve_d) # 0.8953395386313235
-def performance(g, σ_g, s, n):
+def performance(μ_g, σ_g, s, n):
def general_ability():
- return normal(g, σ_g)
+ return normal(μ_g, σ_g)
def special_ability():
return normal(s, 1)
return [general_ability() + special_ability() for _ in range(n)]
+OUTLINE
+* I haven't been doing so well, and I need to tell the story for my own sanity
+* I spent my entire adult life in "rationality", and I actually believed
+* In 2016, it was a huge shock to realize that I could be trans, too (I thought AGP was a different thing), and making this less confusing for other people seemed in line with the rationality mission
+* It was pretty traumatizing when it turned out not to be!
+* But I notice people kept brining up this "Categories are arbitrary, therefore it's not wrong to insist that TWAW", and that's _definitely_ wrong; that, I knew I could win
+* But then Eliezer did it, too, and I _flipped the fuck out_, and set out on a mission to try to get this shit settled in public
+* Theory of jurisprudence, standing, rudeness
+* When email didn't work (details redacted), I thought, "Oh, it's probably because of the politics", so I wrote up the completely general version with examples about dolphins and job titles and Mullerian mimickry in snakes
+* And this is _still_ being perceived as too political, even though everyone else shot first?!?!
+* And I can't object without looking
+* What I think is going on. People want to say on the good size of the Blue Egregore, and that means they can't even defend the _basics_ if there's _any_ political context, or even the context of a _person_ with political cooties
+* I don't know what the optimal play is ("pretend that political constraints don't exist" might not actually work in the real world), but this is pretty bad for our collective sanity, and my mental health, and I wish we could at least try to deal with it on the meta level
+* I'm politically constrained, too: I don't talk about race differences even though I believe them (link to apophasis/hypocritical humor)
+* social incentive gradients towards truth, forged by status
+* not sure what the path forward is, my quest for Truth continues onwards (but I'm going to try to unwind the cult-speak)
+
+
+
+
+person paper on purity
+
+Sara Bareilles song
+
I mostly haven't been doing so well for the past eight months or so. I've been reluctant to write about it in too much detail for poorly-understood psychological reasons. Maybe it feels too much like attacking my friends? Maybe I'm not sure how much I can say without leaking too much information from private conversations? But I need to write _something_—not to attack anyone or spill anyone's secrets, but just to _tell the truth_ about why I've been wasting stretches of days in _constant emotional pain_ all year. For my own healing, for my own sanity.
So, I've spent basically my entire adult life in this insular little intellectual subculture that was founded in the late 'aughts on an ideal of _absolute truthseeking_. Sure, anyone will _say_ that their beliefs are true, but you can tell most people aren't being very serious about it. _We_ were going to be serious: starting with the shared canon of knowledge of cognitive biases, reflectivity, and Bayesian probability theory bequeathed to us by our founder, _we_ were going to make serious [collective](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline) [intellectual progress](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Nu3wa6npK4Ry66vFp/a-sense-that-more-is-possible) in a way that had [never been done before](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-the-skulls/), to forge and refine a new mental martial art of _systematically correct reasoning_ that we were going to use to optimize ourselves and the world.
+(["_Perhaps_, replied the cold logic. _If the world were at stake_. Perhaps, echoed the other part of himself, _but that is not what was actually happening_."](http://yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good))
+
+
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong
Self-Identity Is a Schelling Point
-Does General Intelligence Deflate Standardized Effect Sizes ...?
+
On the Argumentative Form "Super-proton Things Tend to Come in Varieties"
-Terminology Gap: "Biological vs. Natal" (solution: "Developmental")
Reply to Ozymandias on Fully Consensual Gender
"I Tell Myself to Let the Story End"; Or, A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
+-----
+Trying to Be Explicit
+
+Terminology Gap: "Biological vs. Natal" (solution: "Developmental")
Instrumental Categories, and War
A Science Fiction Story Idea I'm Not Skilled Enough to Write
Research Question: Complicity
The Motte-and-Bailey Doctrine as Compression Artifact
-Trying to Be Explicit
+
Where to Segment a Conversation When There's Stuff You Won't Touch, Without Violating the Virtue of Evenness
In Praise of Cartesianism (you need to _really_ understand "A Human's Guide to Words" before you can do high-grade good-faith social constructionism)
+rework footnotes plugin!? (Markdown footnote format is better than [ref][/ref] tags)
self-host a copy of Source Sans Pro (I'm annoyed that my devserver preview fonts are ugly when I've killed my network connection so I can focus for once)
comments?! https://github.com/posativ/isso/
put (partial?) post slug back in footnotes (needed to disambiguate on multi-post pages)
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff