check in

diff --git a/content/drafts/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer.md b/content/drafts/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer.md
index 66aa356..9040d7e 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer.md
+++ b/content/drafts/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer.md
@@ -57,3 +57,5 @@ but the real takeaway is that everyone should be more skeptical of why they thin
 
 
 idea innoculation: https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/aYX6s8SYuTNaM2jh3/idea-inoculation-inferential-distance
+
+blue-eyed islanders and common knowledge
\ No newline at end of file

diff --git a/content/drafts/the-categories-were-made-for-man-in-order-to-make-predictions.md b/content/drafts/the-categories-were-made-for-man-in-order-to-make-predictions.md
index 723dca3..7acfcb3 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/the-categories-were-made-for-man-in-order-to-make-predictions.md
+++ b/content/drafts/the-categories-were-made-for-man-in-order-to-make-predictions.md
@@ -14,7 +14,7 @@ In ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](http://slate
 
 And so, Alexander explains, the ancient Hebrews weren't _wrong_ to classify whales as a type of _dag_ (typically translated as _fish_), even though modern biologists classify whales as mammals and not fish, because the ancient Hebrews were more interested in distinguishing which animals live in the water rather than which animals are phylogenetically related. Similarly, borders between countries are agreed upon for a variety of pragmatic reasons, and can be quite convoluted—while there may often be some "obvious" geographic or cultural Schelling points anchoring these decisions, there's not going to be any intrinsic, eternal fact of the matter as to where one country starts and another begins.
 
-All of this is entirely correct—and thus, an excellent [motte](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/) for the less honest half of _Slate Star Codex_ readers to appeal to when they want to obfuscate and disrupt discussions about empirical reality by insisting on gerrymandered redefinitions of everyday concepts.
+All of this is entirely correct—and thus, an excellent [motte](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/) for the least honest decile of _Slate Star Codex_ readers to appeal to when they want to obfuscate and disrupt discussions about empirical reality by insisting on gerrymandered redefinitions of everyday concepts.
 
 Alexander goes on to attempt to use the categories-are-relative-to-goals insight to rebut skeptics of transgenderedness:
 
@@ -54,11 +54,11 @@ The problem is that there are _significant disanalogies_ between leaving a hair
 
 Even if it's only a small cost to be socially required to say _woman_ and _she_ to refer to someone whom one would otherwise be inclined to call a _man_—and to let them in to any corresponding sex-segregated spaces, _&c._—that cost needs to be aggregated across everyone subject to it, like so many dust specks in their eyes. Imagine if the patient in the hair dryer story were obsessed with the fear not just that _she_ might accidentally leave her hair dryer plugged in unattended, but that that _someone_ might do so, and that it would burn down the whole city. In this slightly modified scenario, insisting that everyone in the city put their hair dryers in the front seat of their cars doesn't look like an appealing solution.
 
-It's important to stress that this should _not_ be taken to mean that transgender identities should necessarily be rejected! (Bad arguments can be made for true propositions just as easily as false ones.) As Alexander briefly alludes to late in the post ("I could relate this [...] to the various heavily researched apparent biological correlates of transgender"), a _non_-question-begging argument for accepting trans people as their target gender would appeal to the ways in which this is really is a natural categorization.
+It's important to stress that this should _not_ be taken to mean that transgender identities should be rejected! (Bad arguments can be made for true propositions just as easily as false ones.) As Alexander briefly alludes to late in the post ("I could relate this [...] to the various heavily researched apparent biological correlates of transgender"), a _non_-question-begging argument for accepting trans people as their target gender would appeal to the ways in which this is really is a natural categorization.
 
 The pre-verbal, subconscious, [System 1](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dual_process_theory&oldid=820860981#Systems) process by which we notice someone's features (breasts, facial hair, voice, facial structure, gendered clothing or grooming cues, any number of [subtle differences in motor behaviors](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/all-the-wrong-moves/) that your perceptual system can pick up on without you being consciously aware of them, _&c._), mentally categorize them as a _woman_ or a _man_, and use that category to guide our interactions with them, isn't subject to conscious control—but, for most purposes in day-to-day public life, it's also not _directly_ focused on genitalia or chromosomes.
 
-So a natal female who presents to the world as a man, and whom other people _model_ as a man on a System 1 level with no apparent incongruities, might be said to be a man in the sense of social gender (though not in the sense of "biologically male adult human"), because that's the mental category that people are actually using for him, and therefore, the social class that he actually functions as a member of. Essentially, this is the argument that offers a photograph of a passing trans person, and says, "C'mon, do you _really_ want to call [this person](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_Angel#/media/File:Buck_Angel_Headshot.jpg) a woman?"
+So a natal female who presents to the world as a man, and whom other people _model_ as a man on a System 1 level with no apparent incongruities, might be said to be a man in the sense of social gender (but not in the sense of "biologically male adult human"), because that's the mental category that people are actually using for him, and therefore, the social class that he actually functions as a member of. Essentially, this is the argument that offers a photograph of a passing trans person, and says, "C'mon, do you _really_ want to call [this person](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_Angel#/media/File:Buck_Angel_Headshot.jpg) a woman?"
 
 Well, no. But the point is that this is an _empirical_ argument for why successfully socially-transitioned trans people fit into _existing_ concepts of gender, _not_ a redefinition of top-20 nouns by fiat in order to avoid hurting someone's feelings. It works _because_ and _to the extent that_ transitioning actually works. To the extent that this fails to be true of self-identified trans people or some subset thereof—for example, insofar as physical transition _isn't_ always effective, or insofar as people _do_ have legitimate use-cases for biological-sex classifications that aren't "fooled" by hormones and surgery—then the conclusion is correspondingly weakened.
 
@@ -66,10 +66,16 @@ Well, no. But the point is that this is an _empirical_ argument for why successf
 
 Another factor affecting the degree to which trans people form a more natural category with their identified gender than their natal physiological sex is the nature of transgenderedness itself. If gender dysphoria is caused by a brain-restricted intersex condition, such that trans people's psychology is much more typical of the other physiological sex—if the "woman trapped in a man's body" trope is basically accurate—that would tend to weigh in favor of accepting transgender identity claims: trans women would be "coming from the same place" as cis women in a real psychological sense, despite their natal physiology.
 
-On the other hand, if gender dysphoria is caused by something else, that would tend to weigh against accepting transgender identity claims: however strongly felt trans people's _subjective_ sense of gender identity might be, if the mechanism underlying that feeling actually has nothing in particular in common with people of the identified-with sex, it becomes relatively more tempting to classify the subjective sense of gender identity as an illusion, rather than the joint in reality around which everyone needs to carve their gender categories.
+On the other hand, if gender dysphoria is caused by something else, that would tend to weigh against accepting transgender identity claims: however strongly felt trans people's _subjective_ sense of gender identity might be, if the mechanism underlying that feeling actually has nothing in particular in common with anything people of the identified-with sex feel, it becomes relatively more tempting to classify the subjective sense of gender identity as an illusion, rather than the joint in reality around which everyone needs to carve their gender categories.
 
 Of course, the phrasing _If gender dysphoria is caused by ..._ implies that we're considering _gender dysphoria_ as one category to reason about homogenously. But different people might want to transition for very different underlying psychological reasons. What categories we use may not be a question of simple fact that we can get wrong, but if, empirically, there happens to be a sufficiently robust statistical structure to the simple facts of the cases—if some people want to transition for reason _A_ and tend to have traits _W_ and _X_, but others want to transition for reason _B_ and have traits _Y_ and _Z_—then aspiring epistemic rationalists may find it useful to distinguish multiple, distinct psychological conditions that both happen to cause gender dysphoria as a symptom.
 
 Analogously, in medicine, many different pathogens can cause the same symptoms (_e.g._, coughing and sneezing), but doctors care about distinguishing different illnesses by etiology, not just symptoms, because distinct physical mechanisms give rise to distinct treatment decisions, either immediately (_e.g._, a bacterial illness will respond to antibiotics, but a viral one won't) or in principle (_e.g._, today's treatments might be equally effective against two different species of bacteria, but future drugs might work better on one or the other).
 
-_As it happens_, (I claim) the evidence that 
\ No newline at end of file
+_As it happens_, (I claim) the evidence that gender dysphoria is more than one thing is quite stong. For reasons of personal interest, I'm going to focus on the male-to-female case for the rest of this post. An analysis of the female-to-male situation would be similar in many respects but different in others, and is left to the interested reader.
+
+[explain the taxonomy, point out that it's possible to believe in a weaker version of it; link to Lawrence, &c.]
+
+In less tolerant places and decades, where MtF transsexuals were very rare and had to try very hard to pass as women out of dire necessity, their impact on the social order and how people think about gender was minimal—there were just too few trans people to make much of a difference. (This is why experienced crossdressers report it being easier to pass in rural areas rather than 
+
+

diff --git a/notes/categories-notes.md b/notes/categories-notes.md
index 5f22f96..743f79b 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/categories-notes.md
+++ b/notes/categories-notes.md
@@ -1,13 +1,9 @@
-Let's consider some of what is known about trans women. (For the remainder of this post, I'm going to focus on trans women, for reasons of personal interest. The task of analyzing the situation of trans men is left to the interested reader.)
-
 While a minority of trans women in Western countries fit the "classical transsexual" profile of being attracted to men, displaying lifelong female-typical social behavior and interests, and transitioning early. But the majority don't fit this pattern.
 
 (To interested readers who only have time to read one paper, I recommend Anne Lawrence's ["Autogynephilia and the Typology of Male-to-Female Transsexualism: Concepts and Controversies"](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/lawrence-agp_and_typology.pdf) For a more exhaustive treatment, see Lawrence's book [_Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_](https://surveyanon.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/men-trapped-in-mens-bodies_book.pdf) or follow the links and citations in [Kay Brown's FAQ](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/).)
 
 [caveats: take care to note that it's possible to believe in a weaker form of it: maybe you agree to the bimodality in the data, but don't think it's two discrete etiological types; or, maybe you [agree that there are two etiologies, but](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/04/18/against-blanchardianism/) don't buy that AGP is the cause]
 
-In less tolerant places and decades, where transsexuals were very rare and had to try very hard to pass as women out of dire necessity, their impact on the social order and how people think about gender was minimal—there were just too few trans people to make much of a difference. 
-
 Nowadays, in progressive enclaves of Western countries, this is no longer true, and in communities that form around [non-sex-balanced interests](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/), the numbers can be quite dramatic. For example, on the 2018 _Slate Star Codex_ reader survey, 9.4% responded _F (cisgender)_ to the gender question, compared to 1.4% responding _F (transgender m -> f)_. So, if trans women are women, _13.4%_ (!!) of female _Slate Star Codex_ readers are trans.
 
 A (cis) female friend of the blog, a member of the Berkeley, California rationalist community reports on recent changes in local social norms—
@@ -150,7 +146,6 @@ I'm not "against" trans people. I'm glad [I was able to experiment with hormones
  
 Notice that this is an _empirical_ argument for why successfully-socially-transitioned trans people fit into _existing_ concepts of gender, not a redefinition of words by fiat in order to avoid hurting someone's feelings.
 
-
 two-type taxonomy
 
 people are good at noticing patterns: if there's a statistical association in the world
@@ -166,3 +161,5 @@ link John Salvatier on "Reality has a surprising amount of detail": http://johns
 from my SEXNET message—
 
 At least, not yet. The current situation in (progressive enclaves of) Western countries, where the need to respect everyone's self-identified gender identity is held sacrosanct, doesn't seem sustainable to me. With decreased gatekeeping and increased acceptance, you don't only get more AGPs transitioning who wouldn't have in the previous cultural regime; we should also expect transitioners on the margin to be less "suitable" (passable) with respect to traditional gatekeeper standards. That's how you end up with scenarios like that recounted by Prof. Bailey's correspondent in the "bad trans behavior" thread: if there are only a very few AGP trans women who are (out of necessity) trying very hard to pass, the impact on the social order is minimal. But as you start to have a nontrivial population of natal males attempting to live as women who are simultaneously identifiable (usually or often not passing as natal females) and noticeably not drawn from the same distribution of psychological traits as natal females, and you inject too many of them into social spaces and roles that developed around the psychology of natal females, that's going to change the dynamics of those spaces in ways that the incumbent women might not be happy with.
+
+"Development and Validation of the Transgender Inclusive Behavior Scale" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28406387

diff --git a/notes/notes.txt b/notes/notes.txt
index dc5a5f1..d9a4e52 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/notes.txt
+++ b/notes/notes.txt
@@ -154,7 +154,7 @@ original research post?— the Hsu–Bailey autopedophilia paper finds a much hi
 
 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0118329
 
-https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.05807 (via https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6xkyyu/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_following/dmk92dw/)
+Inherent Trade-Offs in risk scoring https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.05807 (via https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6xkyyu/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_following/dmk92dw/)
 
 prental T and gynephilia in women and women-adj https://twitter.com/SteveStuWill/status/905572666332987392 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0018506X16301222
 
@@ -427,3 +427,44 @@ Zucker et al. study that's one of the sources of "majority desist" claims ("Demo
 Tailcalled—
 Old: A*P is caused by internalized sexism, thinking that you have to be a boy to be masculine and have to be a girl to be feminine
 Bold: A*P is caused by lack of sexism, thinking that you can be masculine/nerdy as a girl and feminine/sensitive as a boy
+
+https://pasunhomme.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/crossdressing-and-the-untransy-valley/
+
+like, I regard—
+
+ * transitioning and passing (or passing-adj) as a good outcome
+ * transitioning and not-passing as a bad outcome,
+ * soft body mods (e.g. my breasts)/occasional transvestism without social transition as a good outcome
+ * nonbinary-but-unwilling-to-explain-what-that-means-because-MIGI as a bad outcome (because people are still going to notice your biological sex and make probabilistic inferences about it, but feel socially obligated to pretend that they aren't, and ubiquitous socially-obligatory lies are bad), and
+ * NB-adj transfeminine or transmasculine as an explicit third-gender role as a good outcome, but a very tricky social-engineering problem to establish that niche where it doesn't already exist
+ 
+https://twitter.com/KJ_Harrison/status/958435696359993345
+
+distinguish between two types of culture war: when you're demonizing the enemy as orcs, and when you're fighting for the outcome of what happens to people _just like you_
+
+it won't look like that for me due to ideological factors
+"No, I'm not transitioning; I just want to get back on HRT again, for Science"
+1 BLOCKED MESSAGE
+Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis - Today at 7:48 PM
+"No, it's not facial feminization surgery; it's just a different cosmetic procedure that happens to be performed by the same doctor"
+
+(on the phone during supermarket checkout) "No, it's just a brain transplant into a artificial vat-grown female body." (store clerk says, "Have a good day, ma'am") "That's very kind of you to say, but—"
+
+I need to write a magical-realism short story pushing on the analogies between dating as a hot girl and job-searching as a good programmer. Specifically, a story a world in which all engineers are female and all businesspeople are male, dwelling on the theme that on the one hand, it's nice to protected and valued and be taken care of, but on the other hand, it's exploitative that the class of protectors is freeloading off the creative labor of your class, which they could never produce on their own (smash capitalism/the patriarchy!!)
+
+Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis - Today at 12:00 AM
+"I totally agree with [one-sentence literal summary of the movement's goals], I just disagree with [every other belief and instrumental strategy connotationally associated with the movement]"
+... actually, this generalized situation (meeting the criteria of a simple verbal definition, but not being part of that cluster in configuration space along most dimensions) sounds awfully familiar
+... I'm pro-trans in the same sense that AGP trans women are women
+vaticidalprophet - Today at 12:02 AM
+I get the feeling ever saying those words invalidates you from all definitions of 'pro-trans' even if they are strictly speaking correct
+Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis - Today at 12:03 AM
+but Treeeeent, the bullet-biting æsthetic
+vaticidalprophet - Today at 12:03 AM
+jesus, Oberlo is taking a long time to update the prices on my sketchy streetwear dropshipping store
+Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis - Today at 12:03 AM
+you can tell I'm serious about it because I bothered to grab the æ ligatrue
+vaticidalprophet - Today at 12:04 AM
+I can tell you're pretentious because you bothered to grab it, that's orthogonal
+Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis - Today at 12:04 AM
+"... ligatrue?" "Yes."

diff --git a/notes/tech_tasks.txt b/notes/tech_tasks.txt
index 5dcda9b..b908015 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/tech_tasks.txt
+++ b/notes/tech_tasks.txt
@@ -16,5 +16,3 @@ more Korra cosplay photos??
 even more fine-grained tag size?? (I tried this once and made it look worse :/)
 Atom vs. RSS proper??
 maybe switch back to absolute links?? (copy-paste broke all self-links when Bailey copy-paste shared to SEXNET; but it looks like many browsers/applications silently correct that)
-
-