>
> [...] For trust issues like this, actions speak louder than words. If you're ready to help financially, the best way to prove that there are no strings attached is to make one-shot gifts. No matter what you say, a monthly check feels contingent. It's more convincing to celebrate the birth of each new baby with an early inheritance—and the suave excuse, "This will all be yours eventually, anyway." True, you're giving up control, but as computer geeks say, "That's a feature, not a bug." Grandparents' money talks louder when they surrender control. Or to be more precise, when you surrender control over your grandchildren's upbringing, you get _extra_ control over a more important outcome: their number.
>
-> —Bryan Caplan, _Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think_, Ch. 7, "Selfish Guidelines for Want-to-Be Parents"
+> —Bryan Caplan, _Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think_, Ch. 7, "Selfish Guidelines for Want-to-Be Grandparents"
--- /dev/null
+Title: Politics Notes November 2020
+Date: 2020-11-20
+Category: other
+Tags: politics, ideology
+Status: draft
+
+> And we're all in the same epistemic trap, and we can only see the propaganda a level below ours, and the correct response to seeing others being manipulated is sympathy and horror about the propaganda that _you_ don't see.
+>
+> —[Eli Tyre](https://twitter.com/EpistemicHope/status/1320901905371992064)
+
+
+> Nightmare scenario: Republican congress stymies sound Dem policies on health, infrastructure, environment, taxation. To compensate, Biden-Harris mollify progressives by empowering institutional wokeness and authoritarianism around 'systemic racism' and identity politics.
+https://twitter.com/epkaufm/status/1325170892582744065
If you let each pixel vary independently, the space of possible 1024x1024 images is 1,048,576-dimensional, but the vast hypermajority of those images aren't photorealistic human faces. Letting each pixel vary independently is the wrong way to think about it: changing the lighting or pose changes a lot of pixels in what humans would regard as images of "the same" face. So instead, our machine-learning algorithms learn a [compressed](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ex63DPisEjomutkCw/msg-len) representation of what makes the tiny subspace (relative to images-in-general) of _faces in particular_ similar to each other. That [latent space](https://towardsdatascience.com/understanding-latent-space-in-machine-learning-de5a7c687d8d) is a lot smaller (say, 512 dimensions), but still rich enough to embed the distinctions that humans notice: [you can find a hyperplane that separates](https://youtu.be/dCKbRCUyop8?t=1433) smiling from non-smiling faces, or glasses from no-glasses, or young from old, or different races—or female and male. Sliding along the [normal vector](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_(geometry)) to that [hyperplane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperplane) gives the desired transformation: producing images that are "more female" (as the model has learned that concept) while keeping "everything else" the same.
-Two-dimensional _images_ of people are _vastly_ simpler than the actual people themselves in the real physical universe. But _in theory_, a lot of the same _mathematical principles_ would apply to hypothetical future nanotechnology-wielding AI systems that could synthesize a human being from scratch (this-person-_didn't_-exist-dot-com?), or do a real-world sex transformation (PersonApp?)—and the same statistical morals apply to reasoning about sex differences in psychology and (which is to say) the brain.
+Two-dimensional _images_ of people are _vastly_ simpler than the actual people themselves in the real physical universe. But _in theory_, a lot of the same _mathematical principles_ would apply to hypothetical future nanotechnology-wielding AI systems that could, like the AI in "Failed Utopia #4-2", synthesize a human being from scratch (this-person-_didn't_-exist-dot-com?), or do a real-world sex transformation (PersonApp?)—and the same statistical morals apply to reasoning about sex differences in psychology and (which is to say) the brain.
Daphna Joel _et al._ [argue](https://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15468) [that](https://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15468) human brains are "unique 'mosaics' of features" that cannot be categorized into distinct _female_ and _male_ classes, because it's rare for brains to be "internally consistent"—female-typical or male-typical along _every_ dimension. It's true and important that brains aren't _discretely_ sexually dimorphic the way genitals are, but as [Marco del Guidice _et al._ point out](http://cogprints.org/10046/1/Delgiudice_etal_critique_joel_2015.pdf), the "cannot be categorized into two distinct classes" claim seems false in an important sense. The lack of "internal consistency" in Joel _et al._'s sense is exactly the behavior we expect from multivariate normal-ish distributions with different-but-not-vastly-different means. (There aren't going to be many traits where the sexes are like, _four_ or whatever standard deviations apart.) It's just like how sequences of flips of a very Heads-biased and very Tails-biased coin are going to be unique "mosaics" of Heads and Tails, but pretty distinguishable with enough flips—and indeed, with the right stats methodology, [MRI scans can predict sex at 96.8% accuracy](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6374327/).
"World Rugby Bars Transgender Women, Baffling Players" https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/26/sports/olympics/world-rugby-transgender-women.html
-> And we're all in the same epistemic trap, and we can only see the propaganda a level below ours, and the correct response to seeing others being manipulated is sympathy and horror about the propaganda that _you_ don't see.
->
-> —[Eli Tyre](https://twitter.com/EpistemicHope/status/1320901905371992064)
-
kayfabe: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11783
https://web.archive.org/web/20200705203105if_/https://reddit.com/r/GenderCriticalGuys/comments/hhcs34/autogynephilic_male_here_big_rant_about_denial_of/
https://www.christianpost.com/news/gofundme-removes-puberty-is-not-a-medical-condition-billboard.html
https://quillette.com/2020/10/31/i-signed-up-to-study-sexual-health-what-i-got-was-gender-ideology-fetishism-and-porn/
+
+https://www.ladyscience.com/essays/the-dangers-of-categorizing-trans-desire
+
+> Importantly, the team cannot know the individual's gender identity, but rather only biological sex (which like gender doesn't always exist on a binary). In other words, they can't say whether the individual lived their life 9,000 years ago in a way that would identify them within their society as a woman.
+https://archive.is/ocQWg
+
+thread on the clothing-swap problem
+https://twitter.com/liminal_warmth/status/1323837794259619842
+including a DM about AGP: https://twitter.com/liminal_warmth/status/1324016024019062790
+
+https://ericatgswapcaps.blogspot.com/2020/11/swap-clinic-pay-piper.html
+
+help me understand: https://www.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/jnxgm3/genuinely_please_help_me_understand/
+
+https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/02/reader-center/nonbinary-teens-reporting.html
+
+"Voter Fraud a Myth? That's Not What New York Investigators Found": https://archive.is/biahk
('The Trans Widow', "http://thetranswidow.com/"),
('Sex and Gender: A Beginner\'s Guide', "https://sexandgenderintro.com/"),
('Female Sexual Inversion', "https://femalesexualinversion.blogspot.com/"),
+ ('Kathleen Stock', "https://kathleenstock.com/"),
)
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