check in

diff --git a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
index 9a92d5e..8f745f0 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
+++ b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
@@ -326,3 +326,10 @@ typographic attack: https://openai.com/blog/multimodal-neurons/
 https://distill.pub/2021/multimodal-neurons/
 > These neurons detect gender^10
 > Footnote: By this, we mean both that it responds to people presenting as this gender, as well as that it responds to concepts associated with that gender.
 https://distill.pub/2021/multimodal-neurons/
 > These neurons detect gender^10
 > Footnote: By this, we mean both that it responds to people presenting as this gender, as well as that it responds to concepts associated with that gender.

+
+https://www.jefftk.com/p/an-update-on-gendered-pronouns
+
+> Still think this was a perfectly fine tweet btw.  Some people afaict were doing the literal ontologically confused thing; seemed like a simple thing to make progress on.  Some people wanted to read it as a coded statement despite all my attempts to narrow it, but what can you do.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356535300986523648
+
+If you were actually HONESTLY tring to narrow it, you would have said, "By the way, this is just about pronouns, I'm not taking a position on whether trans women are women"

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 eb17986..efb936a 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
@@ -328,3 +328,5 @@ Aella's thing about men turning into werewolfs—I'm a well-behaved werewolf. I
    "ignoble privilege" in "Gentle Introduction" pt. 3)
     * kind of like how _the right to be sued_ is an important part of legal
       personhood: the possibility of recourse is necessary for trust
    "ignoble privilege" in "Gentle Introduction" pt. 3)
     * kind of like how _the right to be sued_ is an important part of legal
       personhood: the possibility of recourse is necessary for trust

+
+https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2020/07/07/a-dataset-of-common-agp-aap-fantasies/
\ No newline at end of file

diff --git a/content/drafts/book-review-facing-reality.md b/content/drafts/book-review-facing-reality.md
index 4640f80..98643e8 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/book-review-facing-reality.md
+++ b/content/drafts/book-review-facing-reality.md
@@ -62,3 +62,12 @@ For the Singularity https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/05/the-artificial-life-t
 
 From my notebook circa November 2007—
 I think I'm coming to terms with the fact that I'm male all the way down, no matter what I say or do or even feel. This is hard to deal with because my <<policies are based on the fact that>> I'm special or the Difference is trivial. <<Whereas all the testing says not really.>> (But I've _always_ been <<inherently gloomy>>)
 
 From my notebook circa November 2007—
 I think I'm coming to terms with the fact that I'm male all the way down, no matter what I say or do or even feel. This is hard to deal with because my <<policies are based on the fact that>> I'm special or the Difference is trivial. <<Whereas all the testing says not really.>> (But I've _always_ been <<inherently gloomy>>)

+
+https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalief_Browder
+
+https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights
+
+"No causal associations between childhood family income and subsequent psychiatric disorders, substance misuse and violent crime arrests"
+https://academic.oup.com/ije/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ije/dyab099/6288123
+
+https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/what-happens-when-doctors-cant-speak

diff --git a/content/drafts/i-dont-do-policy.md b/content/drafts/i-dont-do-policy.md
index c366b37..f919f84 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/i-dont-do-policy.md
+++ b/content/drafts/i-dont-do-policy.md
@@ -26,7 +26,9 @@ But in order for someone to _figure out_ whether or not to do it—and in order
 
 And if different people's interests come into conflict, such that there _is no_ collective decision that everyone is happy with, I can still hope to objectively catalogue the possible outcomes of the conflict—what happens if who wins, and what the space of available ceasefire agreements looks like.
 
 
 And if different people's interests come into conflict, such that there _is no_ collective decision that everyone is happy with, I can still hope to objectively catalogue the possible outcomes of the conflict—what happens if who wins, and what the space of available ceasefire agreements looks like.
 

-I'm a person, and this is a (deeply) personal blog. I have my own preferences and my own æsthetics, and no doubt that's going to sometimes bleed in to my attempts to get the theory right. (I wish I could claim otherwise—but that wouldn't be _true_.) But I can at least make an effort to _minimize_ the extent to which that happens—and to _make it clear_ which paragraphs and posts I write are advocating for my preferences (which are likely to not be shared by others) and which are trying to perform an objective analysis (information anyone can benefit from). For the most part, I don't do policy!
+I'm a person, and this is a (deeply) personal blog. I have my own preferences and my own æsthetics, and no doubt that's going to sometimes bleed in to my attempts to get the theory right. (I wish I could claim otherwise—but that wouldn't be _true_.) But I can at least make an effort to _minimize_ the extent to which that happens—and to _make it clear_ which paragraphs and posts I write are advocating for my preferences (which are likely to not be shared by others) and which are trying to perform an objective analysis (which is information anyone can benefit from). But _for the most part_, I don't do policy—except in the minimalist sense that getting [...]
+
+_actually true_, and not a lie or even a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 
 [TODO: sentence about how my victory condition is the two-type taxonomy in textbooks, but that I'm agnostic about how many people should transition, given good information]
 
 
 [TODO: sentence about how my victory condition is the two-type taxonomy in textbooks, but that I'm agnostic about how many people should transition, given good information]
 

diff --git a/content/drafts/subspatial-distribution-overlap-and-cancellable-stereotypes-or-gender-identity-as-cognitive-illusion.md b/content/drafts/subspatial-distribution-overlap-and-cancellable-stereotypes.md
similarity index 93%
rename from content/drafts/subspatial-distribution-overlap-and-cancellable-stereotypes-or-gender-identity-as-cognitive-illusion.md
rename to content/drafts/subspatial-distribution-overlap-and-cancellable-stereotypes.md
index 7d6e2b7..4cbdb8f 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/subspatial-distribution-overlap-and-cancellable-stereotypes-or-gender-identity-as-cognitive-illusion.md
+++ b/content/drafts/subspatial-distribution-overlap-and-cancellable-stereotypes.md
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-Title: Subspatial Distribution Overlap and Cancellable Stereotypes; Or, Gender Identity as Cognitive Illusion
+Title: Subspatial Distribution Overlap and Cancellable Stereotypes

 Date: 2021-06-01 05:00
 Category: commentary
 Tags: categorization, epistemology
 Date: 2021-06-01 05:00
 Category: commentary
 Tags: categorization, epistemology


@@ -22,11 +22,11 @@ No, because humans whose gametes produce eggs but appear male in every other asp
 
 To see why, let's take a brief math detour and review some elementary information theory. Instead of the messy real world, take a restricted setting: the world of strings of 20 bits. Suppose you wanted to devise an efficient _code_ to represent elements of this world with _shorter_ strings, such that you could say (for example) `01100` (in the efficient code, using just 5 bits) and the people listening to you would know that what you actually saw in the world was (for example) `01100001110110000010`.
 
 
 To see why, let's take a brief math detour and review some elementary information theory. Instead of the messy real world, take a restricted setting: the world of strings of 20 bits. Suppose you wanted to devise an efficient _code_ to represent elements of this world with _shorter_ strings, such that you could say (for example) `01100` (in the efficient code, using just 5 bits) and the people listening to you would know that what you actually saw in the world was (for example) `01100001110110000010`.
 

-If every length-20 bitstring in the world has equal probability, this can't be done: there are 2<sup>20</sup> (= 1,048,576) length-20 strings and only 2<sup>5</sup> (= 32) length-5 codewords; there aren't enough codewords to go around to cover all the strings in this world. It's worse than that: if every length-20 bitstring in the world has equal probability, you can't have labels that compress information _at all_: if you said that the first 19 bits of something you saw in the world were `0110000111011000001`, the people listening to you would be completely clueless as to whether the whole thing was `0110000111011000001`**`0`** or `0110000111011000001`**`1`**. _Locating_ a book in the [Jose Luis Borges's Library of Babel](TODO: linky and accents) is mathematically equivalent to writing it yourself.
+If every length-20 bitstring in the world has equal probability, this can't be done: there are 2<sup>20</sup> (= 1,048,576) length-20 strings and only 2<sup>5</sup> (= 32) length-5 codewords; there aren't enough codewords to go around to cover all the strings in this world. It's worse than that: if every length-20 bitstring in the world has equal probability, you can't have labels that compress information _at all_: if you said that the first 19 bits of something you saw in the world were `0110000111011000001`, the people listening to you would be completely clueless as to whether the whole thing was `0110000111011000001`**`0`** or `0110000111011000001`**`1`**. _Locating_ a book in the [Jose Luis Borges's Library of Babel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel) is mathematically equivalent to writing it yourself.

 
 However, in the world of a _non-uniform probability distribution_ over strings of 20 bits, compression—and therefore language—_is_ possible . If almost all the bitstrings you actually saw in the world were either all-zeros (`00000000000000000000`) or all-ones (`11111111111111111111`), with a very few exceptions that were still _mostly_ one bit or the other (like `00010001000000000000` or `11101111111011011111`), then you could devise a very efficient encoding.
 
 
 However, in the world of a _non-uniform probability distribution_ over strings of 20 bits, compression—and therefore language—_is_ possible . If almost all the bitstrings you actually saw in the world were either all-zeros (`00000000000000000000`) or all-ones (`11111111111111111111`), with a very few exceptions that were still _mostly_ one bit or the other (like `00010001000000000000` or `11101111111011011111`), then you could devise a very efficient encoding.
 

-To _be_ efficient, you'd want to reserve the shortest words for the most common case: like `00` in the code to mean `00000000000000000000` in the world and `01` to mean `11111111111111111111`. Then you could have slightly-longer words that encode all the various exceptions, like maybe the merely-eleven-bit encoding `10110101110` could represent `00100010000000000000` in the world (`1` to indicate that this is one of the exceptions, a following `0` to indicate that _most_ of the bits are `0`, followed by the [Elias self-delimiting integer codes](TODO: linky) for 3 (`110`) and 7 (`101110`) to indicate that the 3rd and 7th bits are actually `1`).
+To _be_ efficient, you'd want to reserve the shortest words for the most common case: like `00` in the code to mean `00000000000000000000` in the world and `01` to mean `11111111111111111111`. Then you could have slightly-longer words that encode all the various exceptions, like maybe the merely-eleven-bit encoding `10110101110` could represent `00100010000000000000` in the world (`1` to indicate that this is one of the exceptions, a following `0` to indicate that _most_ of the bits are `0`, followed by the [Elias self-delimiting integer codes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elias_omega_coding) for 3 (`110`) and 7 (`101110`) to indicate that the 3rd and 7th bits are actually `1`).

 
 Suppose that, even among the very few exceptions that aren't all-zeros or all-ones, the first bit is _always_ in the majority and is never "flipped": you can have exceptions that "look like" `00000100000000000000` or `11011111111101111011`, but never `10000000000000000000` or `01111111111111111111`.
 
 
 Suppose that, even among the very few exceptions that aren't all-zeros or all-ones, the first bit is _always_ in the majority and is never "flipped": you can have exceptions that "look like" `00000100000000000000` or `11011111111101111011`, but never `10000000000000000000` or `01111111111111111111`.
 


@@ -40,7 +40,7 @@ It's that that these are _discrete_ features that are entangled with everything
 
 Discrete features make for better word _definitions_ than high-dimensional statistical regularities, even if most of the everyday inferential utility of _using_ the word comes from the high-dimensional statistical stuff. A dictionary definition is just a helpful pointer to help people pick out "the same" concept in their _own_ world-model: in teaching a young child about sex (or "gender"), you only have to say "boys and men are the ones with a penis, examples include your Dad and Uncle Frank, non-examples include your Mom and Grandma Mary" and the child's brain's pattern-matching faculties will soak up the rest, [...]
 
 
 Discrete features make for better word _definitions_ than high-dimensional statistical regularities, even if most of the everyday inferential utility of _using_ the word comes from the high-dimensional statistical stuff. A dictionary definition is just a helpful pointer to help people pick out "the same" concept in their _own_ world-model: in teaching a young child about sex (or "gender"), you only have to say "boys and men are the ones with a penis, examples include your Dad and Uncle Frank, non-examples include your Mom and Grandma Mary" and the child's brain's pattern-matching faculties will soak up the rest, [...]
 

-(Gamete size is a particularly good definition for the natural category of _sex_ because the concept of [anisogamy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisogamy) generalizes across species that have different sex determination systems or configurations of sexual anatomy. In birds, the presence or absence of a _Z_ chromosome determines whether an animal is _female_, in contrast the _Y_ chromosome's determination of maleness in mammals, and reptiles' sex is determined by the temperature of an lain egg while it develops (!). And let's not get started on the cloaca. [TODO: verify all])
+(Gamete size is a particularly good definition for the natural category of _sex_ because the concept of [anisogamy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisogamy) generalizes across species that have different sex determination systems or configurations of sexual anatomy. In birds, [the presence or absence of a _W_ chromosome determines whether an animal is _female_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZW_sex-determination_system), in contrast [the _Y_ chromosome's determination of maleness in mammals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_sex-determination_system), and some reptiles' sex is determined by [the temperature of an lain egg while it develops](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature-dependent_sex_determination) (!). And let's not get started on the [cloaca](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaca).)

 
 
 ------
 
 
 ------

diff --git a/notes/notes.txt b/notes/notes.txt
index 20a5c1a..09e621d 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/notes.txt
+++ b/notes/notes.txt
@@ -2675,3 +2675,20 @@ https://bodyswapfiction.com/enter/time-loop/
 
 Sex differences in language use, and gays (discussion includes sex-differences cites)
 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.639887/full
 
 Sex differences in language use, and gays (discussion includes sex-differences cites)
 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.639887/full

+
+The R.A.I.N.B.O.W. (Respect Acceptance Inclusivity Nonjudgemental Born-this-way Open-minded Worthy) LGBTQIA employee interest group had a Zoom event for the start of Pride month today. I spoke, but was very inarticulate https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FMkQtPvzsriQAow5q/the-correct-response-to-uncertainty-is-not-half-speed (I was going to write a post about it, but I feel like being paranoid and risk-averse)
+
+Gayness has been reified such that you can make gay part of your public identity without people having to think about anal being a thing (which I still can't believe)
+
+a simplistic account, but ... https://medium.com/@awbreymaggie8/detransition-505c99d822df
+
+https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/32816/thoughts-on-feeling-like-a-woman
+> I've been asking the older women in my life if they ever "felt like a woman" literally all of them (completely oblivious to TRAs) look at me with such a puzzled and confused face, they're like "no?? was i supposed to?"
+
+https://www.npr.org/2021/06/02/996319297/gender-identity-pronouns-expression-guide-lgbtq
+
+https://nypost.com/2017/11/17/apples-diversity-chief-lasts-just-six-months/
+
+https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/32969/cisgender-questionnaire-given-ahead-of-zen-center-meeting
+
+https://www.nytimes.com/1974/04/14/archives/conundrum-by-jan-morris-a-helen-and-kurt-wolff-book-174-pp-new-york.html

diff --git a/notes/post_ideas.txt b/notes/post_ideas.txt
index dff9377..54ccfe8 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/post_ideas.txt
+++ b/notes/post_ideas.txt
@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@ _ A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
 Minor queue—
 _ I Don't Do Policy
 _ Student Dysphoria, and a Previous Life's War
 Minor queue—
 _ I Don't Do Policy
 _ Student Dysphoria, and a Previous Life's War

-_ Subspatial Distribution Overlap and Cancellable Stereotypes; Or,
+_ Subspatial Distribution Overlap and Cancellable Stereotypes

 
 _ Elision _vs_. Choice
 _ "But I'm Not Quite Sure What That Means": Costs of Nonbinary Gender as a Social Technology
 
 _ Elision _vs_. Choice
 _ "But I'm Not Quite Sure What That Means": Costs of Nonbinary Gender as a Social Technology