poke

diff --git a/content/drafts/sen-kelly-loeffler-is-mostly-living-in-a-simulation-now.md b/content/drafts/sen-kelly-loeffler-is-mostly-living-in-a-simulation-now.md
index 291a386..f319004 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/sen-kelly-loeffler-is-mostly-living-in-a-simulation-now.md
+++ b/content/drafts/sen-kelly-loeffler-is-mostly-living-in-a-simulation-now.md
@@ -33,3 +33,5 @@ https://twitter.com/epkaufm/status/1325170892582744065
 https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/georgias-runoffs-will-determine-control-of-the-senate-heres-what-we-know-so-far/
 
 another recursive distortion conditional on fraud: https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1330705494990856195
 https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/georgias-runoffs-will-determine-control-of-the-senate-heres-what-we-know-so-far/
 
 another recursive distortion conditional on fraud: https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1330705494990856195

+
+https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-us-inability-to-count-votes-is

diff --git a/content/drafts/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md b/content/drafts/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md
index cc5d411..de6c520 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md
+++ b/content/drafts/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md
@@ -142,10 +142,13 @@ Vassar slapping me down in June 2008 (on the same day that I crossdressed in fro
 
 Sex differences would come up a couple more times in one of the last Sequences, on "Fun Theory"—speculations on how life could be truly _good_ if the world were superintelligently optimized for human values, in contrast to the cruelty and tragedy of our precarious existence [in a world shaped only by blind evolutionary forces](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god).
 
 
 Sex differences would come up a couple more times in one of the last Sequences, on "Fun Theory"—speculations on how life could be truly _good_ if the world were superintelligently optimized for human values, in contrast to the cruelty and tragedy of our precarious existence [in a world shaped only by blind evolutionary forces](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god).
 

-According to Yudkowsky, one of the ways in which people's thinking about artificial intelligence usually goes wrong is [anthropomorphism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RcZeZt8cPk48xxiQ8/anthropomorphic-optimism)—expecting arbitrary AIs to behave like humans, when really "AI" corresponds to [a much larger space of algorithms](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tnWRXkcDi5Tw9rzXw/the-design-space-of-minds-in-general). As a social animal, predicting other humans is one of the things we've evolved to be good at, and the way that works is probably via "empathic inference": [I predict your behavior by imagining what _I_ would do in your situation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zkzzjg3h7hW5Z36hK/humans-in-funny-suits). Since all humans are very similar, [this code-reuse trick](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fpWoXpNv83BAHJdc/the-comedy-of-behaviorism) works pretty well.
+According to Yudkowsky, one of the ways in which people's thinking about artificial intelligence usually goes wrong is [anthropomorphism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RcZeZt8cPk48xxiQ8/anthropomorphic-optimism)—expecting arbitrary AIs to behave like humans, when really "AI" corresponds to [a much larger space of algorithms](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tnWRXkcDi5Tw9rzXw/the-design-space-of-minds-in-general). As a social animal, predicting other humans is one of the things we've evolved to be good at, and the way that works is probably via "empathic inference": [I predict your behavior by imagining what _I_ would do in your situation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zkzzjg3h7hW5Z36hK/humans-in-funny-suits). Since all humans are very similar, [this appeal-to-black-box](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fpWoXpNv83BAHJdc/the-comedy-of-behaviorism) works pretty well. And from this empathy, evolution also coughed up the [moral miracle](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pGvyqAQw6yqTjpKf4/the-gift-we-give-to-tomorrow) of [_sympathy_, intrinsically caring about what others feel](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NLMo5FZWFFq652MNe/sympathetic-minds).
+
+In ["Interpersonal Entanglement"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Py3uGnncqXuEfPtQp/interpersonal-entanglement), Yudkowsky appeals to the complex moral value of sympathy as an objection to the possibility of nonsentient sex partners (_catgirls_ being the technical term). Being emotionally entangled with another actual person is one of the things that makes life valuable, that would be lost if people just got their needs met by soulless holodeck characters.
+
+

 
 [TODO WORKING: ... rewrite/expand description here—"Sympathetic Minds" first, then bridge to "Failed Utopia #4-2"]
 
 [TODO WORKING: ... rewrite/expand description here—"Sympathetic Minds" first, then bridge to "Failed Utopia #4-2"]

-[TODO: "expecting women to be defective men"]

 [TODO: mention that I'm responsible for the protagonist's name getting changed]
 
 The short story ["Failed Utopia #4-2"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2) portrays an almost-aligned superintelligence constructing a happiness-maximizing utopia for humans—except that because [evolution didn't design women and men to be optimal partners for each other](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Py3uGnncqXuEfPtQp/interpersonal-entanglement), and the AI is prohibited from editing people's minds, the happiness-maximizing solution ends up splitting up the human species by sex and giving women and men their own _separate_ utopias, complete with artificially-synthesized romantic partners.
 [TODO: mention that I'm responsible for the protagonist's name getting changed]
 
 The short story ["Failed Utopia #4-2"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2) portrays an almost-aligned superintelligence constructing a happiness-maximizing utopia for humans—except that because [evolution didn't design women and men to be optimal partners for each other](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Py3uGnncqXuEfPtQp/interpersonal-entanglement), and the AI is prohibited from editing people's minds, the happiness-maximizing solution ends up splitting up the human species by sex and giving women and men their own _separate_ utopias, complete with artificially-synthesized romantic partners.


@@ -222,7 +225,7 @@ Daphna Joel _et al._ [argue](https://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15468) [that](h
 
 Sex differences in the brain are like sex differences in the skeleton: anthropologists can tell female and male skeletons apart (the [pelvis is shaped differently](https://johnhawks.net/explainer/laboratory/sexual-dimorphism-pelvis), for obvious reasons), and [machine-learning models can see very reliable differences that human radiologists can't](/papers/yune_et_al-beyond_human_perception_sexual_dimorphism_in_hand_and_wrist_radiographs.pdf), but neither sex has entire _bones_ that the other doesn't, and the same is true of brain regions. (The evopsych story about complex adaptations being universal-up-to-sex suggests that sex-specific bones or brain regions should be _possible_, but in a bit of _relative_ good news for antisexism, apprently evolution didn't need to go that far. Um, in humans—a lot of other mammals actually have [a penis bone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baculum).)
 
 
 Sex differences in the brain are like sex differences in the skeleton: anthropologists can tell female and male skeletons apart (the [pelvis is shaped differently](https://johnhawks.net/explainer/laboratory/sexual-dimorphism-pelvis), for obvious reasons), and [machine-learning models can see very reliable differences that human radiologists can't](/papers/yune_et_al-beyond_human_perception_sexual_dimorphism_in_hand_and_wrist_radiographs.pdf), but neither sex has entire _bones_ that the other doesn't, and the same is true of brain regions. (The evopsych story about complex adaptations being universal-up-to-sex suggests that sex-specific bones or brain regions should be _possible_, but in a bit of _relative_ good news for antisexism, apprently evolution didn't need to go that far. Um, in humans—a lot of other mammals actually have [a penis bone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baculum).)
 

-Maybe this should just look like supplementary Statistics Details brushed over some basic facts of human existence that everyone knows? I'm a pretty weird guy, in more ways than one. I am not prototypically masculine. Most men are not like me. If I'm allowed to cherry-pick what measurements to take, I can name ways in which my mosaic is more female-typical than male-typical. (For example, I'm _sure_ I'm above the female mean in [Big Five Neuroticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits).) ["[A] weakly negative correlation can be mistaken for a strong positive one with a bit of selective memory."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/veN86cBhoe7mBxXLk/categorizing-has-consequences) But "weird" represents a much larger space of possibilities than "normal", much as [_nonapples_ are a less cohesive category than _apples_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2mLZiWxWKZyaRgcn7/selling-nonapples). If you _sum over_ all of my traits, everything that makes me, _me_—it's going to be a point in the _male_ region of the existing, unremediated, genderspace. In the course of _being myself_, I'm going to do more male-typical things than female-typical things, not becuase I'm _trying_ to be masculine (I'm not), and not because I "identify as" male (I don't—or I wouldn't, if someone could give me a straight answer as to what this "identifying as" operation is supposed to consist of), but because I literally in-fact am male in the same sense that male chimpanzees or male mice are male, whether or not I like it (I don't), and whether or not I _notice_ all the little details that implies (I probably don't).
+Maybe this should just look like supplementary Statistics Details brushed over some basic facts of human existence that everyone knows? I'm a pretty weird guy, in more ways than one. I am not prototypically masculine. Most men are not like me. If I'm allowed to cherry-pick what measurements to take, I can name ways in which my mosaic is more female-typical than male-typical. (For example, I'm _sure_ I'm above the female mean in [Big Five Neuroticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits).) ["[A] weakly negative correlation can be mistaken for a strong positive one with a bit of selective memory."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/veN86cBhoe7mBxXLk/categorizing-has-consequences) But "weird" represents a much larger space of possibilities than "normal", much as [_nonapples_ are a less cohesive category than _apples_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2mLZiWxWKZyaRgcn7/selling-nonapples). If you _sum over_ all of my traits, everything that makes me, _me_—it's going to be a point in the _male_ region of the existing, unremediated, genderspace. In the course of _being myself_, I'm going to do more male-typical things than female-typical things, not becuase I'm _trying_ to be masculine (I'm not), and not because I "identify as" male (I don't—or I wouldn't, if someone could give me a straight answer as to what this "identifying as" operation is supposed to consist of), but because I literally in-fact am male in the same sense that male chimpanzees or male mice are male, whether or not I like it (I don't—or I wouldn't, if I still believed this preference was coherent), and whether or not I _notice_ all the little details that implies (I almost certainly don't).

 
 Okay, maybe I'm _not_ completely over my teenage religion of psychological sex differences denialism?—that belief still feels uncomfortable to put my weight on. I would _prefer_ to believe that there are women who are relevantly "like me" with respect to some fair (not gerrymandered) metric on personspace. But, um ... it's not completely obvious whether I actually know any? When I look around me—most of the people in my robot cult (and much more so if you look the core of old-timers from the _Overcoming Bias_ days, rather than the greater Berkeley "community" of today) are male. Most of the people in my open-source programming scene are male. These days, [most of the _women_](/2020/Nov/survey-data-on-cis-and-trans-women-among-haskell-programmers/) in [my open-source programming scene](/2017/Aug/interlude-vii/) are male. Am I not supposed to _notice_? I could _assert_ that it's all down to socialization and stereotyping and self-fulfilling prophecies—and I know that _some_ of it is. (Self-fulfilling prophecies [are coordination equilibria](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/).) But I still want to speculate that the nature of my X factor—the things about my personality that let me write the things I do even though I'm [objectively not that smart](/images/wisc-iii_result.jpg) compared to some of my robot-cult friends—is a pattern of mental illness that could realistically only occur in males. (Yudkowsky: ["It seems to me that male teenagers especially have something like a _higher cognitive temperature_, an ability to wander into strange places both good and bad."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xsyG7PkMekHud2DMK/of-gender-and-rationality)) I can't assert _with a straight face_ that all the gaps _must_ vanish after the revolution, because _I've read the literature_ and can tell you several observations about chimps and [congenital adrenal hyperplasia](/images/cah_diffs_table.png) that make that seem _relatively unlikely_.
 
 
 Okay, maybe I'm _not_ completely over my teenage religion of psychological sex differences denialism?—that belief still feels uncomfortable to put my weight on. I would _prefer_ to believe that there are women who are relevantly "like me" with respect to some fair (not gerrymandered) metric on personspace. But, um ... it's not completely obvious whether I actually know any? When I look around me—most of the people in my robot cult (and much more so if you look the core of old-timers from the _Overcoming Bias_ days, rather than the greater Berkeley "community" of today) are male. Most of the people in my open-source programming scene are male. These days, [most of the _women_](/2020/Nov/survey-data-on-cis-and-trans-women-among-haskell-programmers/) in [my open-source programming scene](/2017/Aug/interlude-vii/) are male. Am I not supposed to _notice_? I could _assert_ that it's all down to socialization and stereotyping and self-fulfilling prophecies—and I know that _some_ of it is. (Self-fulfilling prophecies [are coordination equilibria](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/).) But I still want to speculate that the nature of my X factor—the things about my personality that let me write the things I do even though I'm [objectively not that smart](/images/wisc-iii_result.jpg) compared to some of my robot-cult friends—is a pattern of mental illness that could realistically only occur in males. (Yudkowsky: ["It seems to me that male teenagers especially have something like a _higher cognitive temperature_, an ability to wander into strange places both good and bad."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xsyG7PkMekHud2DMK/of-gender-and-rationality)) I can't assert _with a straight face_ that all the gaps _must_ vanish after the revolution, because _I've read the literature_ and can tell you several observations about chimps and [congenital adrenal hyperplasia](/images/cah_diffs_table.png) that make that seem _relatively unlikely_.
 


@@ -478,9 +481,9 @@ The thing I'm objecting to is this culture of _narcissistic Orwellian mind games
 
 [TODO: We want words that map onto the structure of things in the word: if everyone were a hermaphrodite]
 
 
 [TODO: We want words that map onto the structure of things in the word: if everyone were a hermaphrodite]
 

-[TODO: Anton on "be a lesbian by behavior alone"; contrast to coining "transbian" as a new word]
+[TODO: Anton on "be a lesbian by behavior alone"; contrast to coining "transbian" as a new word: https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/where-have-all-the-lesbians-gone-0a7 ]

 
 

-[TODO: it was a complement! I don't _want_ people to have to doublethink around their perceptions of me]
+[TODO: it was a complement! I don't _want_ people to have to doublethink around their perceptions of me, pretend not to notice]

 
 On the question of how this affects the productivity of AI researchers, I think looking at [our standard punching bag of theism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLL6yzZ3WKn8KaSC3/the-uniquely-awful-example-of-theism) is a very fair comparison. Religious people aren't _stupid_. You can prove theorems about the properties of [Q-learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-learning) or [Kalman filters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter) at a world-class level without encountering anything that forces you to question whether Jesus Christ died for our sins.
 
 
 On the question of how this affects the productivity of AI researchers, I think looking at [our standard punching bag of theism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLL6yzZ3WKn8KaSC3/the-uniquely-awful-example-of-theism) is a very fair comparison. Religious people aren't _stupid_. You can prove theorems about the properties of [Q-learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-learning) or [Kalman filters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter) at a world-class level without encountering anything that forces you to question whether Jesus Christ died for our sins.
 

diff --git a/notes/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-notes.md b/notes/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-notes.md
index f8aeedc..b96ecfe 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-notes.md
+++ b/notes/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-notes.md
@@ -50,11 +50,14 @@ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fpWoXpNv83BAHJdc/the-comedy-of-behaviorism
 * "I often wish some men/women would appreciate"
 * study evidence that this is actually common
 * AGPs dating each other is the analogue of "Failed Utopia 4-2"!!—the guys in "Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses" are doing better in some ways
 * "I often wish some men/women would appreciate"
 * study evidence that this is actually common
 * AGPs dating each other is the analogue of "Failed Utopia 4-2"!!—the guys in "Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses" are doing better in some ways

+> The vast majority of men are not what the vast majority of women would most prefer, or vice versa. I don’t know if anyone has ever actually done this study, but I bet that both gay and lesbian couples are happier on average with their relationship than heterosexual couples. (Googles… yep, looks like it.) <https://news.softpedia.com/news/Gay-and-Lesbian-Families-Are-Happier-than-Heterosexual-Ones-77094.shtml>
+

 * wipe culturally defined values
 * finding things in the refrigerator
 *  https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xsyG7PkMekHud2DMK/of-gender-and-rationality
 * make sure the late-onset/AGP terminology is introduced in a coherent order rather than being inserted willy-nilly
 * the message length of my existence (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length)
 * wipe culturally defined values
 * finding things in the refrigerator
 *  https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xsyG7PkMekHud2DMK/of-gender-and-rationality
 * make sure the late-onset/AGP terminology is introduced in a coherent order rather than being inserted willy-nilly
 * the message length of my existence (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length)

+[TODO: "expecting women to be defective men"]

 
 https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/executable_philosophy
 
 
 https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/executable_philosophy
 


@@ -251,6 +254,11 @@ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/
 
 my pseudobisexual moments (it's California in the year 2015)
 
 
 my pseudobisexual moments (it's California in the year 2015)
 

+our analogues would make a good couple in a nearby alternate universe where at least one of us is female. "Exactly one," he said. "It's California in the year 2015," I said.
+
+
+
+

 Anyway, four years later, it turns out that this whole "rationality" subculture is completely fake. The thing that convinced me of this was not _even_ the late-onset-gender-dysphoria-in-males-is-not-an-intersex-condition thesis that I was originally trying to talk about. Humans are _really complicated_: no matter how "obvious" something in psychology or social science to me, I can't write someone off entirely simply for disagreeing, because the whole domain is so complex that I always have to acknowledge that, ultimately, I could just be wrong.
 
 But in the _process_ of trying to _talk about_ this late-onset-gender-dysphoria-in-males-is-not-an-intersex-condition thesis, I noticed that my conversations kept getting _derailed_ on some variation of "The word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that." _That_ part of the debate, I knew I could win.
 Anyway, four years later, it turns out that this whole "rationality" subculture is completely fake. The thing that convinced me of this was not _even_ the late-onset-gender-dysphoria-in-males-is-not-an-intersex-condition thesis that I was originally trying to talk about. Humans are _really complicated_: no matter how "obvious" something in psychology or social science to me, I can't write someone off entirely simply for disagreeing, because the whole domain is so complex that I always have to acknowledge that, ultimately, I could just be wrong.
 
 But in the _process_ of trying to _talk about_ this late-onset-gender-dysphoria-in-males-is-not-an-intersex-condition thesis, I noticed that my conversations kept getting _derailed_ on some variation of "The word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that." _That_ part of the debate, I knew I could win.