You might think this is "unfair": some women—about 7 per 1000—are 5′11″, and we don't want to say they're somehow _less female_ on that account, so why can't I keep my height? The problem is that if we refuse to adjust for every trait for which the female and male distributions overlap (on the grounds that _some_ women have the same trait value as my male self), we don't end up with a result from the female distribution.
-The typical point in a high-dimensional distribution is _not_ typical along each dimension individually. [In 100 flips of a biased coin](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/the-typical-set/) that lands Heads 0.6 of the time, the _single_ most likely sequence is 100 Heads, but there's only one of those and you're _vanishingly_ unlikely to actually see it. The [sequences you'll actually observe will have close to 60 Heads](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptotic_equipartition_property). Each such sequence is individually less probable than the all-Heads sequence, but there are vastly more of them. Similarly, [most of the probability-mass of a high-dimensional multivariate normal distribution is concentrated in a thin "shell" some distance away from the mode](https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/09/01/multivariate-normal-shell/), for the same reason. (The _same_ reason: the binomial distribution converges to the normal in the limit of large _n_.)
+<a id="typical-point"></a>The typical point in a high-dimensional distribution is _not_ typical along each dimension individually. [In 100 flips of a biased coin](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/the-typical-set/) that lands Heads 0.6 of the time, the _single_ most likely sequence is 100 Heads, but there's only one of those and you're _vanishingly_ unlikely to actually see it. The [sequences you'll actually observe will have close to 60 Heads](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptotic_equipartition_property). Each such sequence is individually less probable than the all-Heads sequence, but there are vastly more of them. Similarly, [most of the probability-mass of a high-dimensional multivariate normal distribution is concentrated in a thin "shell" some distance away from the mode](https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/09/01/multivariate-normal-shell/), for the same reason. (The _same_ reason: the binomial distribution converges to the normal in the limit of large _n_.)
Statistical sex differences are like flipping two different collections of coins with different biases, where the coins represent various traits. Learning the outcome of any individual flip, doesn't tell you which set that coin came from, but [if we look at the aggregation of many flips, we can get _godlike_ confidence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy-1) as to which collection we're looking at.
Tags: worldbuilding
Status: draft
-The [Glowfic](https://www.glowfic.com/) collaborative-fiction community has [this worldbuilding trope of an author's "medianworld"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1619639#reply-1619639)—a setting where the average person is _like you_ along important dimensions, as contrasted to our real world, where the sort of person contemplating this exercise is probably a weird nerd of one sort or another.
+The [Glowfic](https://www.glowfic.com/) collaborative-fiction community has [this worldbuilding trope of an author's "medianworld"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1619639#reply-1619639)—a setting where the average person is _like you_ along important dimensions.
-What makes the exercise challenging is the craft of portraying the medianworld as a consilient world with a realistic, self-consistent history. It's _not_ a Society of duplicates of you, because actual-you and all your memories come from _our_ world; the only simple, consistent history producing that outcome would be giving actual-you some sort of [science-fictional](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Transporter_duplicate) [duplicator technology](https://www.cold-takes.com/the-duplicator/).
+(You might think that this is only an interesting thought experiment for people who are weird in our own world, but [in high-dimensional spaces, _most_ of the probability-mass is concentrated in a "shell" some distance around the mode](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#typical-point): typical people are atypical along _some_ dimensions, so normies can play the medianworld game, too.)
-Rather, your medianworld is a real human Society that would spit out something very much like you at the center, rather than at the margins: for everything that makes you weird _here_, half the population of your medianworld is even more so. The worldbuilding problem is: how would that _actually_ happen, given different initial conditions, but the same underlying laws of economics, sociology, psychology, _&c._? How would the macro-level features of Society shake out, were Society to supervene on that population?
+What makes the exercise challenging is the craft of portraying the medianworld as a consilient world with a realistic, self-consistent history. It's _not_ a Society of duplicates of you, because the only simple, consistent history producing that outcome would be giving actual-you some sort of [science-fictional](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Transporter_duplicate) [duplicator technology](https://www.cold-takes.com/the-duplicator/); actual-you and all your memories come from _our_ world.
+
+Rather, your medianworld is a real human Society that would spit out something very much like you at the mode: for everything that makes you weird _here_, half the population of your medianworld is even more so. The worldbuilding problem is: how would that _actually_ happen, given different initial conditions, but the same underlying laws of economics, sociology, psychology, _&c._? How would the macro-level features of Society shake out, were Society to supervene on that population?
+
+The trope may have been intended as a comforting escape fantasy for weird people tired of grating against the insanities of our world—you can pretend to be "from" someplace else, perhaps [deposited here by some fantastical portal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isekai), and missing your home.
+
+When I contemplate this exercise for myself, I
+
+
+My medianworld has various names for complicated political reasons (compare [Myanmar/Burma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Myanmar), or [Kyiv/Kiev](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KyivNotKiev)): most often known by the [exonym](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endonym_and_exonym) Zackistan, it is also sometimes called Westlake (the convention chosen in this post), or less commonly, Carrietopia.
[the details of who you are is formed against the context of our world; if someone had the same underlying traits in a world full of others like them, the outcome would be different]
maybe he should have some sympathy for Stephen J. Gould's intellectual crimes
Feb. 2016 happy price schedule https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10153956696609228
+
+one of the new collaborators on _Mad Investor Chaos_ is a _Catholic_
+
+When my chat with EY at the independence day party degenerated into "I'm sorry for being dumb", he said if Zack Davis was too dumb, we're in trouble
+
+OK, "paperclips" is a legitimate example of categories being subjective/value-dependent
+
+http://paulgraham.com/heresy.html
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff