I'm not really sure what other people get out of conventions. For me, it's my one
-(_I will fight for the place where I'm free_)
-(_I will fight for the world I was made in_)
+(_I will fight for the place where I'm free!_)
+(_I will fight for the world I was made in!_)
-(previously: as _Equestria Girls_ Twilight Sparkle at BABSCon 2018, as Ens. Silvia Tilly at SF Comic-Con 2018, [as Korra at San Francisco Comic-Con 2017](/2017/Oct/a-leaf-in-the-crosswind/), [as Pearl at FanimeCon 2017](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/05/gems-will-be-gems/), as [Lt. Jadzia Dax (circa 2369) at the _Star Trek_ 50 Year Mission Tour San Francisco 2016](/2016/Dec/joined/), [as Pearl as San Francsico Comic-Con 2016](/2016/Sep/is-there-affirmative-action-for-incompetent-crossplay/))
+(previously: as Ens. Silvia Tilly at San Francisco Comic-Con 2018, as _Equestria Girls_ Twilight Sparkle at BABSCon 2018, [as Korra at San Francisco Comic-Con 2017](/2017/Oct/a-leaf-in-the-crosswind/), [as Pearl at FanimeCon 2017](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/05/gems-will-be-gems/), as [Lt. Jadzia Dax (circa 2369) at the _Star Trek_ 50 Year Mission Tour San Francisco 2016](/2016/Dec/joined/), [as Pearl as San Francsico Comic-Con 2016](/2016/Sep/is-there-affirmative-action-for-incompetent-crossplay/))
Okay, that probably isn't _literally_ true. There probably really are quarks and leptons and an objective speed of light in a vacuum. But most people don't actually spend much of their lives interacting with reality at a level that requires scientific understanding. Maintaining the wonders of our technological civilization only requires that a few specialists understand some very _narrow_ fragment of the true structure of the world beneath the world—and even they don't have to [take it home with them](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2pENnTPB75sfc9kb/outside-the-laboratory). For most people all of the time, and all people most of the time, basic folk physics is enough to keep us from dropping too many plates. Everything else we think we believe is shaped by the narratives we tell each other, whose relationship to testable predictions about the real world is far too complicated for a lone human to empirically check—or even _notice_ how such a check might fail.
-And so sufficiently-widely-believed lies _bootstrap themselves into being "true."_ You might protest, "But, but, the map is not the territory! Believing doesn't make it so!" But if almost everyone accepts a narrative and _sort of_ behaves as if it were true, then that _does_ (trivially) change the _part_ of reality that consists of people's social behavior—which is the only part that _matters_ outside of someone's dreary specialist duties writing code or mixing chemicals.
+And so sufficiently-widely-believed lies _bootstrap themselves into being true._ You might protest, "But, but, the map is not the territory! Believing doesn't make it so!" But if almost everyone accepts a narrative and _sort of_ behaves as if it were true, then that _does_ (trivially) change the _part_ of reality that consists of people's social behavior—which is the only part that _matters_ outside of someone's dreary specialist duties writing code or mixing chemicals.
-If people are quantitatively less likely to do business with people who emit heresy-signals (even subtle ones, like being insufficiently enthusiastic while praising God), then believing in God really _is_ a good financial decision, which is a _successful prediction_ that legitimately supports the "Divine Providence financially rewards believers" hypothesis. With sufficient mental discipline, the occasional freethinker might be able to entertain alternative hypotheses ("Well, maybe Divine Providence isn't _really_ financially rewarding believers, and it just looks that way because of these-and-such social incentive gradients"), but given the empirical adequacy of the orthodox view, it would take a level of sheer stubborn contrarianism that isn't particularly going to correlate with being a careful thinker.
+If people are quantitatively less likely to do business with people who emit heresy-signals (even subtle ones, like being insufficiently enthusiastic while praising God), then believing in God really _is_ a good financial decision, which is a _successful prediction_ that legitimately supports the "Divine Providence financially rewards the faithful" hypothesis. With sufficient mental discipline, the occasional freethinker might be able to entertain alternative hypotheses ("Well, maybe Divine Providence isn't _really_ financially rewarding believers, and it just looks that way because of these-and-such social incentive gradients"), but given the empirical adequacy of the orthodox view, it would take a level of sheer stubborn contrarianism that isn't particularly going to correlate with being a careful thinker.
Smart people in the dominant coalition have always been _very_ good at maintaining frame control. I don't know exactly what forms this has taken historically, back when religious authorities held sway. In my secularized world which is at least nominally managed under the auspices of Reason, the preferred tactic is clever [motte-and-bailey](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/) language-mindfuckery games, justified by utilitarianism: speak in a way that reinforces the coalitional narrative when interpreted naïvely, but which also permits a sophisticated-but-contrived interpretation that can never, ever be proven false, because we can [define a word any way we want](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong).
-Thus, trans women are women, where by 'women' I mean people who identify as women. Appeals to conceptual parsimony ("Yes, you _could_ use language that way, but that makes it more expensive to [express these-and-such useful real-world probabilistic inferences](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/)—") don't work on utilitarians who _explicitly_ reject parsimony in favor of "utility," where utility is estimated by back-of-the-envelope calculations that seem like they [ought to be better than nothing](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/02/if-its-worth-doing-its-worth-doing-with-made-up-statistics/), but which in practice have so many degrees of freedom that the answer is almost entirely determined by the perceived need to appease whichever [utility monster](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) has made itself most politically salient to the one performing the calculation.
+Thus, trans women are women, where by 'women' I mean people who identify as women. Appeals to conceptual parsimony ("Yes, you _could_ use language that way, but that makes it [more expensive to express](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [these-and-such useful real-world probabilistic inferences](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/)—") don't work on utilitarians who _explicitly_ reject parsimony in favor of "utility," where utility is estimated by back-of-the-envelope calculations that seem like they [ought to be better than nothing](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/02/if-its-worth-doing-its-worth-doing-with-made-up-statistics/), but which in practice have so many degrees of freedom that the answer is almost entirely determined by the [perceived need to appease](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) whichever [utility monster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster) has made itself most politically salient to the one performing the calculation.
If you can't win the argument (because the motte is genuinely a great motte) and therefore gain status by appealing to reality, and our minds are better at tracking status than reality, then eventually dissidents either accept the narrative or destroy themselves.
-[Autogynephilic males](http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html) are better at large-scale coalitional politics than actual lesbians for basically the same reasons that men-in-general are better at coalitional politics than women-in-general (as evidenced by the patriarchy), so once a political conflict arose between AGPs' right to choose their "gender", and women's/lesbians' right to [have a goddamned _word_](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/) to describe themselves, it was a _fait accompli_ that the group sampled from the male region in psychological configuration space would win: male psychology is [_designed_ to win costly intergroup conflicts](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3260849/). And in winning, they _create their own reality_.
+[Autogynephilic males](http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html) are better at large-scale coalitional politics than actual lesbians for basically the same reasons that men-in-general are better at coalitional politics than women-in-general (as evidenced by [the patriarchy](https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/09/12/patriarchy-is-the-problem/)), so once a political conflict arose between AGPs' right to choose their "gender", and women's/lesbians' right to [have a goddamned _word_](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/) to describe themselves, it was a _fait accompli_ that the group sampled from the male region in psychological configuration space would win: male psychology is [_designed_ to win costly intergroup conflicts](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3260849/). And in winning, they _create their own reality_.
Again, probably not literally: there probably really are biochemical facts of the matter as to what traits hormone replacement therapy does and does not change, and the biochemical facts aren't going to vary depending on the outcome of a political conflict—as far as I know. (I've never _seen_ an estrogen molecule, have you?)
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+What _does_ vary depending on the outcome of a political conflict are which facts you can _talk_ about—and thus, [in the long run](https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/08/31/it-must-be-said/), which facts you can even _notice_. If you successfully mindfuck everyone into believing that AGPs are really women, that actually _does_ make it easier to transition.
-successfully mindfucked affects what differences you can talk about, and what differences you can _notice_
+I have a recurring dream
-if you can mf everyone into beleiving that AGPs are really women, that actually does make it easier to transition
-but maybe you could get the good result without mfing???
+------
-https://twitter.com/pangmeli/status/1079097805250224130
-Judiciously. As I do.
+but maybe you could get the good result without mfing???
+
+left to just study it. Judiciously. As I do.
-https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2015/06/30/the-thing-and-the-symbolic-representation-of-the-thing/
-http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/
+https://www.gwern.net/docs/philo/2012-sistery-tryingtoseethrough.html
+https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2015/06/30/the-thing-and-the-symbolic-representation-of-the-thing/
+http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/
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