Title: A Common Misunderstanding; Or, The Spirit of the Staircase (24 January 2009)
Date: 2017-12-01 19:50
Category: other
-Tags: anecdotal, personal, two-type taxonomy
+Tags: anecdotal, my robot cult, personal, two-type taxonomy
I remember (and the Diary entry helps, too) there was a party/meetup at someone's place down in Sunnyvale, perhaps in honor of Robin being in town. This was a little less than nine years ago, back during the golden age when the Sequences were still being written, when the _M_ and _R_ in _MIRI_ were still an _S_ and an _A_, respectively—before the Eternal September, before everyone was poly, and _long_ before everyone was trans.
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 me 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 _what I actually am_. (If _telling the truth_ about what I've been obsessively preoccupied with all year makes you dislike me, then you probably _should_ dislike me. If you were to approve of me on the basis of _factually inaccurate beliefs_, then the thing of which you approve, wouldn't be _me_.)
-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 _systematically correct reasoning_. 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/)—and not just out of a duty or passion for some philosophical ideal of Truth, but as a result of _understanding how intelligence works_, the _reduction_ of "thought" to _cognitive algorithms_. Intelligent systems that construct predictive models of the world around them—that have "true" "beliefs"—can _use_ those models to compute which actions will best achieve their goals.
+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 _systematically correct reasoning_. 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/)—and not just out of a duty or passion for some philosophical ideal of Truth, but as a result of _understanding how intelligence works_—the reduction of "thought" to _cognitive algorithms_. Intelligent systems that construct predictive models of the world around them—that have "true" "beliefs"—can _use_ those models to compute which actions will best achieve their goals.
(Oh, and there was also this part about how [the entire future of humanity and the universe depended on](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GNnHHmm8EzePmKzPk/value-is-fragile) our figuring out how to reflect human values in a recursively self-improving artificial superintelligence. That part's complicated.)
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?"
+"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_, um, persistent, 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
Schelling points are "sticky." If the set of possible choices is ordered, and it's possible to "move" from a currently-selected choice towards a "nearby" one, then the selected option may [slide down a "slippery slope" until stopping at a Schelling point](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes). Imagine the armies of two countries fighting over contested territory containing a river. The river is a Schelling point for the border between the two countries—unless one of the armies has a military advantage to push the battle line forward to the _next_ Schelling point, we expect peace-treaty negotiations to settle on the river as the border. There's no particular reason that the border couldn't be drawn 2 kilometers north of the river, _except_ that that would invite the question of, "Why 2 kilometers? Why not 1, or 3?"
-The coordination problem of _who_ has the authority to decide what "gender" a person is, can be seen of a particular case of the problem of how to decide what gender a person is _in a particular context_. The notion of the same person's "gender" being differnt in different contexts may seem strange, but again, in the absence of magical perfect sex-change technology, we _kind of_ need it: as far as the practice of medicine is concerned, there's no getting around the fact that pregnant trans men are female. (Even if the doctors _address_ the patient as "Mr.", "he", _&c._ they still need to draw on their knowledge of the _female_ reproductive system to practice their craft, and they might need _language_ that reflects what they're actually thinking.)
+The coordination problem of _who_ has the authority to decide what "gender" a person is, can be seen of a particular case of the problem of how to decide what gender a person is _in a particular context_. The notion of the same person's "gender" being different in different contexts may seem strange, but again, in the absence of magical perfect sex-change technology, we _kind of_ need it: as far as the practice of medicine is concerned, for example, there's no getting around the fact that pregnant trans men are female. (Even if the doctors _address_ the patient as "Mr.", "he", _&c._ they still need to draw on their mental models of the human _female_ body to practice their craft, and in the course of that practice, they might need _language_ that reflects what they're actually thinking.)
[...]
stroop test
the extent to which I _anticipated_ needing to appeal to personal authority, is indicative of me already not believing in guided-by-the-beauty
+
+I was pretty surprised how well the coinflip post did
+
+speculating that people are lying for political cover may be "uncharitable", but what else can I do when I _can't_ take people seriously?!
+
+
+https://rationalconspiracy.com/2017/01/03/four-layers-of-intellectual-conversation/
+
-
Self-Identity Is a Schelling Point
On the Argumentative Form "Super-proton Things Tend to Come in Varieties"
-Anne Lawrence on Unapologetic Autogynephilic Transsexualism
✓ Reply to Ozymandias on Fully Consensual Gender (add link back to Schelling pt)
"I Tell Myself to Let the Story End"; Or, A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
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+Anne Lawrence on Unapologetic Autogynephilic Transsexualism
+
Promises I Can Keep
Reading Comprehension Is Rape Culture
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff