[This started out as a draft email to Scott, but I'm really unhappy with the way it's developing; I should try to sculpt it into a defensible public post instead—or make it a good email first, then a post]
-parsimony intuitions, autogenderphilia
+on parsimony intuitions (re autogenderphilia and developmental psychology)
> Why idly theorize when you can JUST CHECK and find out the ACTUAL ANSWER to a superficially similar-sounding question SCIENTIFICALLY?
>
Fundamentally, I just have _so much_ trouble _actually_ believing that [name1]'s experience of her body is more relevantly similar to mine than [name2]'s, _even if_ [name1] ends up sometimes using similar English words as me (_e.g._, "it's hot that I have breasts"). I can conceive of being wrong about this, but I don't think the _SSC_ survey data is a powerful enough instrument to make that call—I'd want in-depth interviews and preferably the kind of physical arousal measurements that Michael Bailey's lab does.
-In a world where it was _actually true_ where "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender [...]" reflected what was actually going on in the world, I would expect the things trans lesbians say to each other in naturalistic contexts when the general public isn't looking, to _look like_ the things cis lesbians say to each other in naturalistic contexts—and when I empirically-but-unscientifically eyeball the world (which is a much _higher-bandwidth_ information channel than eyeballing the shape of the 1–5 survey response histogram), that's not what I see. I could be biased, but—well, do _you_ see it? Where?
+In a world where it was _actually true_ where "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender [...]" reflected what was actually going on in the world, I would expect the things trans lesbians say to each other in naturalistic contexts when the general public isn't looking, to _look like_ the things cis lesbians say to each other in naturalistic contexts—and when I empirically-but-unScientifically eyeball the world (which is a much _higher-bandwidth_ information channel than eyeballing the shape of the 1–5 survey response histogram), that's not what I see. I could be biased, but—well, do _you_ see it? Where? Any other exhibits besides Elena?
Here's [an example from Twitter](https://web.archive.org/web/20210903211904/https://twitter.com/lae_laeta/status/1433880523160567808)—
But I begin to despair this is a domain where [Science can't help](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wzxneh7wxkdNYNbtB/when-science-can-t-help). It seems like people mostly _agree_ about empirical observations! People _agree_ that AGP is common in lesbian trans women (after this is pointed out with sufficient force, if it looks like the general public isn't looking). You _agree_ that it looks like there are two types of MtF differentiated by sexual orientation; you just think that the second type is an intersex condition because ... ???
-From my perspective, it looks like the _Slate Star_/Alicorner crowd basically _agree_ with me on all the empirical observables, but then _somehow_ you people manage come up with these absurdly gerrymandered verbal "explanations" that can't _possibly_ match up with the underlying cognitive machinery your brain must be using to know what to anticipate, but if you don't see this after it's already been pointed out, then I'm not sure how to proceed. I can't _prove_ that all these gynephilic physiological males with male-typical interests are men with a fetish rather than women in male bodies, for the same reason I can't prove there's not an [invisible inaudiable dragon that's permeable to flour](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-belief) in your garage. From my perspective, it looks like you just have a fundamentally broken epistemology; from your perspective, I probably look like I'm dogmatically making unexplained inferential leaps.
+From my perspective, it looks like the _Slate Star_/Alicorner crowd basically _agree_ with me on all the empirical observables, but then _somehow_ you people manage come up with these absurdly gerrymandered verbal "explanations" that can't _possibly_ match up with the underlying cognitive machinery your brain must be using to know what to anticipate, but if you don't see this after it's already been pointed out, then I'm not sure how to proceed.
+
+I can't _prove_ that all these ***physiological males with male-typical interests whose female gender identities seem closely intertwined with their gynephilic (i.e. male-typical) sexuality*** (we _agree_ on all that!!) are men with a fetish rather than women in male bodies—for the same reason I can't prove there's not an [invisible inaudiable dragon that's permeable to flour](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-belief) in your garage. From my perspective, it looks like you just have a fundamentally broken epistemology; from your perspective, I probably look like I'm dogmatically making unexplained inferential leaps.
Ozy has an old post about [how "the community" doesn't have a _gender_ gap; we merely have an _assigned sex at birth_ gap](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2014/12/01/lw-has-an-assigned-sex-at-birth-gap-not-a-gender-gap/). In my worldview, this should be _embarrassing_. (If you keep running into domains where "assigned" sex is a more useful predictor than "gender", that should be a clue that sex is real and gender identity is fake.) But if Ozy's mind hasn't been [created already in motion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CuSTqHgeK4CMpWYTe/created-already-in-motion) to find it embarrassing even after it's been pointed out, then I'm not sure what else I can say?
-If it were _just_ a matter of different priors (where my stronger [inductive bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_bias) lets me learn faster from less data, at the cost of [being wrong in universes that I think mostly don't exist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_optimization)), I would expect you to express more uncertainty.
+If it were _just_ a matter of different priors (where my stronger [inductive bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_bias) lets me learn faster from less data, at the cost of [being wrong in universes that I think mostly don't exist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_optimization)), I would expect you to express more uncertainty. I would _totally_ respect it if you were merely _uncertain_ about the AGP→gender-ID _vs._ gender-ID→AGP causality. [I _agree_ that causality is _much harder_ to pin down than mere correlation.](http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/) (And if I had a prior belief that invisible dragons were plausible, I would remain agnostic about the no-dragon _vs._ invisible-dragon hypotheses upon seeing an empty garage.) But on Discord, you said "it just seemed totally wrong"!! If you're _not_ playing a "does the evidence permit me to believe" game, I just don't see how you think the _SSC_ survey data is powerful enough to answer that question one way or the other.
+
+------
+
+
+
+
-I would _totally_ respect it if you were merely _uncertain_ about the AGP→gender-ID _vs._ gender-ID→AGP causality. [I _agree_ that causality is _much harder_ to pin down than mere correlation.](http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/) (And if I had a prior belief that invisible dragons were plausible, I would remain agnostic about the no-dragon _vs._ invisible-dragon hypotheses upon seeing an empty garage.) But on Discord, you said "it just seemed totally wrong"!! If you're _not_ playing a "does the evidence permit me to believe" game, I just don't see how you think the _SSC_ survey data is powerful enough to answer that question one way or the other.
-[TODO: behavioral genetics and trans]
----
Title: Student Dysphoria, and a Previous Life's War
-Date: 2020-01-01
+Date: 2021-12-30 05:00
Category: commentary
-Tags: schooling
+Tags: anecdotal, schooling
Status: draft
There was a brief, beautiful moment from 2014, the first year of my life (that I feel comfortable admitting to), until mid-2016—a year-and-a-half long moment when I _didn't_ have to fight a desperate and obviously hopeless [ideological war](/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/) of survival against a Society that's _trying to kill me_.
The first shots of the last war came on 29 November 2007. I was a schoolstudent at the University in Santa Cruz. Coming into that quarter, I had been excited to take the famous "Introduction to Feminisms" course, only to find, as the quarter wore on, that it seemed to be taught in a dialect of English that I could not speak. The texts and the professor kept describing features of Society as _oppression_ as if simply to condemn them. I agreed with the condemnation, of course, but I could not understand it as _knowledge_ and could not produce such sentences in my own voice; I wanted an explanation of how the oppression _worked_.
-My subsequent difficulty in writing the required papers for that course weighed on my soul. The failure to live up to expectations would have been shameful for any course, but as a _male_ squandering the privilege of being allowed to take "Introduction to Feminisms", it was simply unbearable. Unable to reach the prescribed word count for the final paper, I had a hysterical nervous breakdown at the end of the quarter, crying and screaming for hours, "I betrayed them; I betrayed them." (The professor and the T.A., who were kind and deserved better than to have to teach a male who _couldn't write_.)
+My subsequent difficulty in writing the required papers for that course weighed heavily on my soul. The failure to live up to expectations would have been shameful for any course, but as a _male_ squandering the privilege of being allowed to take "Introduction to Feminisms", it was simply unbearable. Unable to reach the prescribed word count for the final paper, I had a hysterical nervous breakdown at the end of the quarter, crying and screaming for hours, "I betrayed them; I betrayed them." (The professor and the T.A., who were kind and deserved better than to have to teach a male who _couldn't write_.)
-Ironically, in the inferno of shame over having betrayed my mandate to the University, my attitude towards school flipped practically overnight. I had never been the most _diligent_ student, but I had mostly accepted the duty of getting an "education": I didn't always do my homework, but when I didn't, I at least felt guilty about it. But suddenly, the difference between schooling-as-education and actual _learning_ became distinct. I had _always_ been a voracious reader; for years, I had been filling little pocket notebooks with my own thoughts—clearly, school itself couldn't take credit for everything I knew. I took a leave of absence from the University and went back to my (previously, "summer") job at the supermarket, with the intention of being an explicit autodidact. I had always learned from books "in passing", in my "free time", but now I would give it
+Ironically, in the inferno of shame over having betrayed my mandate to the University, my attitude towards school flipped practically overnight. I had never been the most _diligent_ student, but I had mostly accepted the duty of getting an "education": I didn't always do my homework, but when I didn't, I at least felt guilty about it. But suddenly, the difference between schooling-as-education and actual _learning_ became distinct. I had _always_ been a voracious reader; for years, I had been filling little pocket notebooks with my own thoughts—clearly, school itself couldn't take credit for everything I knew. I took a leave of absence from the University and went back to my (previously, "summer") job at the supermarket, with the intention of being an explicit autodidact. I had always learned from books "in passing", in my "free time", but now I would give it the full force of my _legitimate_ effort—it wasn't "leisure" anymore; it was my _actual_ work.
+And not just reading, either. I remembered enjoying the linear algebra class I took in winter quarter freshman year at the University, although the course had gone slowly, such that a year and a half after the course was over, I found I didn't recall what an eigenvalue was, although I had retained mastery of taking the [reduced row echelon form](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_echelon_form#Reduced_row_echelon_form). But what did it matter that the "course" was "over", if I didn't _know_? So I got out the textbook [(Bretcher, 3rd edition)](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/144938.Linear_Algebra_with_Applications) and [set to work](/images/math_page_1.jpg) ...
-
-[TODO: description of my college purgatory (being in school, while constantly denouncing it in an ideological), but keep it brief because the readership doesn't care about autobiography ... link to math_page_1.jpg
-the trauma of having no function other than to obey; that's why actual work didn't feel oppressive
-]
+[TODO: the trauma of having no function other than to obey; that's why actual work didn't feel oppressive ]
I hated the social role of "student" and the whole diseased culture of institutional servitude. I despised the way everyone, including and especially the other "students", talked about their lives and the world in terms of classes and teachers and degrees and grades, rather than talking about the _subject matter_. I wanted it to be _normal_ for boasts of acheivement to take the form of "I proved this theorem and thereby attained _deep insight into the true structure of mathematical reality_", rather than "I got an 'A' on the test."
-----
-But that was just my good fortune. There are others who weren't so lucky, who are still suffering in mind-slavery under Authority in the world of schools I left behind. [TODO: transition sentences ...]
+But that was just my good fortune. There are others who weren't so lucky, who are still suffering in mind-slavery under Authority in the world of schools I left behind ...
We could imagine someone sympathetic to my plight in school deciding that my problem was a psychological condition called "student dysphoria"—discomfort with one's assigned social role of student. We could imagine a whole political movement to help sufferers of student dysphoria by _renaming_ everything: instead of a "student", I could be a "research associate", instead of taking "classes", I could attend "research seminars"—all while the _substance_ of my daily working conditions and social expectations remained the same.
-I don't think this would be helping me. When I was angry about being in school, it wasn't because of _the word_ "student"—it was because I wanted more autonomy and I wanted more respect for my intellectual initiative. Changing the words without granting me the autonomy and respect I craved wouldn't be solving my _actual_ problem. It would probably make things _worse_ by sabotaging the concepts and language I needed to _articulate_ what my problem was.
+I don't think this would be helping me. When I was angry about being in school, it wasn't because of _the word_ "student"—it was because I wanted more autonomy and I wanted more respect for my intellectual initiative. Changing the words without granting me the autonomy and respect I craved wouldn't be solving my _actual_ problem. It would probably make things _worse_ by sabotaging the concepts and language I needed to _articulate_ what my problem was. My pain and suffering was no less _real_ for being "merely" game-theoretic (looking to the reactions of others), rather than some intrinsic organic condition to be accomodated.
Likewise, being a "student" would have been fine in a world where students got more autonomy—a world where there was a collective understanding that courses are a supplement or pragmatically useful guidepost to one's studies, rather than course grades being _the whole thing_. I'm happy to learn from the masters: that's what textbooks _are_. I wasn't _delusional_ about doing novel original research.
-
-
-[TODO: being a "student" would be fine in a world where students got more autonomy; I'm happy to learn from masters—that's what textbooks are; I wasn't delusional about doing original research; my pain and offsense wasn't "fake" just because it was game-theoretic]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff