[TODO: expand on the expanded threat model, marginalism]
+Maybe you want to bite that bullet. But you should at least _acknowledge_ the existence of the bullet, once someone points it out. And if you want to call yourself a rationalist, maybe try to proactively look for the bullet
+
-----
I think there's a more general lesson underlying these kinds of discussions. If you want to get through life without _verbally_ acknowledging the concept of biological sex, then you _can_ get away with it.
> Similarly, "you're a woman if you identify as a woman!" is not a definition of womanhood. It is a criterion for who should be a woman. It states that our social genders should be fully consensual: that is, if a person says "I would like to be put in the 'woman' category now," you do that. Right now, this criterion is not broadly applied: a trans person's social gender generally depends on their presentation, their secondary sexual characteristics, and how much the cis people around them are paying attention. But perhaps it would improve things if it were.
-Following the money analogy, we could imagine someone arguing that our money should be fully consensual: that is, if a person says, "I would like this to be put in the 'dollar' category now," you do that. Right now, this criterion is not broadly applied ... and it's not easy to imagine how it _could_ be applied (a prerequisite to figuring out if perhaps it would improve things if it were). Could I buy a car by offering the dealer a blank piece of paper and saying, "I would like this to be put in the '$20,000 check' category now"? What would happen to the economy if everyone did that?
+Following the money analogy, we could imagine someone arguing that our money should be fully consensual: that is, if a person says, "I would like this to be put in the 'dollar' category now," you do that. Right now, this criterion is not broadly applied ... and it's not easy to imagine how it _could_ be applied (a prerequisite to figuring out if perhaps it would improve things if it were). Could I buy a car by offering the dealer a banana and saying, "I would like this to be put in the '$20,000 bill' category now"? What would happen to the economy if everyone did that?
Maybe the hypothetical doesn't have to be that extreme. Perhaps we should imagine someone taking Canadian $5 bills, crossing out "Canada", drawing a beard on Wilfrid Laurier, and saying "I'd like [this](/images/american_5_dollar_note.png) to be considered an American $5 bill." (Exchange rate at time of writing: 1 Canadian dollar = 0.76 U.S. dollars.) Then imagine that a social norm catches on within a certain subset of Society that it's _incredibly rude_ to question someone who says they're giving you American money, but that this standard hasn't spread to the U.S. government and financial system.
--- /dev/null
+Title: The Dialectic
+Date: 2020-01-01
+Category: fiction
+Tags: sex differences, natalism
+Status: draft
+
+Growing up as a younger child in an atomized, low-fertility [WEIRD](https://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2010/10/western-educated-industrialized-rich-and-democratic/181667/) world, I was until recently in the historically anomalous position of not really having any idea what children are like. (I have memories from childhood, but that's not the same as field observations with an adult intellect—everything from before age 14 or so feels insufficiently continuous with my current self to really have been 'me'.)
+
+It's not clear to what extent people really have [anticipation-controlling](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences) beliefs in the absence of lived-experience data, but the narratives we _think_ we believe come from what we read.
+
+([RIP](https://archive.is/MbUUN) 😢)
\ No newline at end of file
--- /dev/null
+Title: The Social Construction of Reality and the Sheer Goddamned Pointlessness of Reason
+Date: 2020-01-01
+Category: commentary
+Tags: cathartic
+Status: draft
+
+> "The only thing standing in the way of my own progress," Sagreda said, "is that the forces that once dealt with us honestly have been buried too deep to reach. All I can touch now is the surface, which is shaped by nothing but whim."
+>
+> —["Bit Players"](https://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/winter_2014/bit_players_by_greg_egan) by Greg Egan
+
+Truth isn't real; there are only competing narratives.
+
+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. [specicialists have their specialty, folk physics helps us carry plates, and everything else is narrative]
+
+
+ Smart people in the dominant coalition have always been very good at playing clever language-mindfuckery games: speak in a way that reinforces the coalitional narrative when interpreted naively, but which also permits a sophisticated-but-contrived interpretation that can never be definitively proven false. God exists, where by God I mean the truth and beauty in the universe. Trans women are women, where by 'women' I mean people who identify as women. Appeals to conceptual simplicity ("Yes, you could use language that way, but that makes it more expensive to perform these-and-such useful real-world inferences") don't work on utilitarians who care less about conceptual simplicity than appeasing whichever utility-monster has made itself most politically salient.
+
+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. (It's tempting to do the equivalent of flipping a table and screaming, "STOP GASLIGHTING ME, YOU SANCTIMONIOUS LYING BASTARDS", but that's not a winning move: depending on the details, you either get ostracized on grounds of being an asshole, or carted off to psychiatric prison on grounds of being mentally ill.) But—here's the interesting part—if almost everyone accepts the 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. If people are quantitatively less likely to do business with people who emit heresy-signals (even subtle ones), then believing in God actually is a good financial decision. If autogynephilic males (who are better at 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) manages to
+
+-----
+
+This could be a solid, short post---
+
+Utilitarianism doesn't work (for humans); you might think you can impartially do a back-of-the-envelope calculation that would be better than nothing, but in practice, the calculation has so many degrees of freedom that its result is mostly determined by "whatever political coalition has managed to make its agenda most salient to you". [coalitional politics]
+
+Sufficiently-widely-believed lies can bootstrap themselves into being partially pragmatically true. If people are quantitatively less likely to do business with people who emit heresy-signals (even subtle ones), then believing in God actually is a good financial decision. With sufficient mental discipline, you can mentally separate the ground-truth from the social mechanism that makes it work. (Divine providence isn't _really_ financially rewarding people),
+
+("divine providence" and "subtle social punishment" make similar predictions, you might not know how to decide between them)
+
+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???
+
+modern folk don't actually spend a lot of time interacting with physical reality
http://www.publicseminar.org/2018/11/the-performance-of-transgender-inclusion/
+https://www.afterellen.com/general-news/568221-how-i-became-the-most-hated-lesbian-in-baltimore
+
+https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/06/sexism-racism-never-diminishes-even-everyone-becomes-less-sexist-racist.html
+
+https://trialeterror.home.blog/2018/11/25/alternatives-to-transition-a-step-by-step-guide-to-thinking-your-way-out-of-dysphoria-without-repressing-it/
+
+Kinesis on the vibe: https://twitter.com/Kinesis/status/1074361907060957184
+
------
New from me: ["Trying to Be Explicit"](), a short story that starts out being about the frustration of trying to be objective about a hot-button social issue and facing what one believes to be bad-faith criticism while simultanously acknowledging that _everyone_ thinks their critics are acting in bad faith, but then degenerates into specialized erotica interspersed with commentary on how the details of the erotic fantasy have important implications for the hot-button social issue.
... I don't know, guys. I'm really sorry.
+
+-----
+_ "I Want to Be the One"
+_ The Dialectic
+_ The Social Construction of Reality and the Sheer Goddamned Pointlessness of Reason
+_ Phenotypic Identity and Memetic Capture
_ Trying to Be Explicit (deadline 2 Jan 2019)
_ I Mean, Yes, I Agree That Man Should Allocate Some More Categories, But
-_ Phenotypic Identity and Memetic Capture
-_ Laser 11
-
-
_ High-Dimensional Social Science and the Conjunction of Small Effect Sizes
_ Codes of Convergence; Or, Smile More
_ "But I'm Not Quite Sure What That Means": Costs of Nonbinary Gender as a Social Technology
_ "I Will Fight [...]": LGBT Patriotism and the Moral Fine-Tuning Objection
+_ Laser 12
+
_ The View From Nowhere
_ reply to Ozy on https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/08/03/rapid-onset-gender-dysphoria-is-bad-science/ (when marketing in Culture War thread, maybe hat tip https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9cir3w/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_september_03/e5c1h2c/ )
--- /dev/null
+You know who else believed that "biological sex" was a useful concept? Hitler, that's who!
+
+Only losing coalitions have an incentive to support free-speech norms. You don't want to be a LOSER, do you??
+
+Men are trash! (With respect to the definition of "trash" as "of or relating to the sex that typically produces sperm.")
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff