>
> —Zora Neale Hurston
+My first clue that I wasn't living in that world came from—Eliezer Yudkowsky. (Well, not my first _clue_. In retrospect, there were lots of _clues_. My first wake-up call.) In [a 26 March 2016 Facebook post](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228), he wrote—
+
+> I'm not sure if the following generalization extends to all genetic backgrounds and childhood nutritional backgrounds. There are various ongoing arguments about estrogenlike chemicals in the environment, and those may not be present in every country ...
+
+> Still, for people roughly similar to the Bay Area / European mix, I think I'm over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women.
+
+(***!?!?!?!?***)
+
+> A lot of them don't know it or wouldn't care, because they're female-minds-in-male-bodies but also cis-by-default (lots of women wouldn't be particularly disturbed if they had a male body; the ones we know as 'trans' are just the ones with unusually strong female gender identities). Or they don't know it because they haven't heard in detail what it feels like to be gender dysphoric, and haven't realized 'oh hey that's me'. See, e.g., <https://sinesalvatorem.tumblr.com/post/141690601086/15-regarding-the-4chan-thing-4chans> and <https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender-identity/>
+
+(Reading _this_ post, I _did_ realize "oh hey that's me"—it's hard to believe that I'm not one of the "20% of the ones with penises" Yudkowsky is talking about here—but I wasn't sure how to reconcile that with the "are actually women" (***!?!?!?!?***) characterization, coming _specifically_ from the guy who taught me (in "Changing Emotions") how blatantly, ludicrously untrue and impossible that is.)
+
+> But I'm kinda getting the impression that when you do normalize transgender generally and MtF particularly, like not "I support that in theory!" normalize but "Oh hey a few of my friends are transitioning and nothing bad happened to them", there's a _hell_ of a lot of people who come out as trans.
+
+> If that starts to scale up, we might see a really, really interesting moral panic in 5-10 years or so. I mean, if you thought gay marriage was causing a moral panic, you just wait and see what comes next ...
+
+Indeed—here we are five years later, and _I am panicking_. (As 2007–9 Sequences-era Yudkowsky [taught me](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good), and 2016 Facebook-shitposting-era Yudkowsky seemed to ignore, the thing that makes a moral panic really interesting is how hard it is to know you're on the right side of it—and the importance of [panicking sideways](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative) [in policyspace](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/policy_tugowar.html) when the "maximize the number of trans people" and "minimize the number of trans people" coalitions are both wrong.)
+
+At the time, this was merely _very confusing_. I left a careful comment in the Facebook thread (with the obligatory "speaking only for myself; I obviously know that I can't say anything about anyone else's experience" [disclaimer](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/against-disclai.html)), quietly puzzled at what Yudkowsky could _possibly_ be thinking ...
+
+A month later, I moved out of my mom's house in [Walnut Creek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walnut_Creek,_California) to go live with a new roommate in an apartment on the correct side of the [Caldecott tunnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Tunnel), in [Berkeley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley,_California): closer to other people in the robot-cult scene and with a shorter train ride to my coding dayjob in San Francisco.
+
+(I would later change my mind about which side of the tunnel is the correct one.)
+
+In Berkeley, I met a number of really interesting people who seemed quite similar to me along a lot of dimensions, but also very different along some other dimensions having to do with how they were currently living their life! (I see where the pattern-matching facilities in Yudkowsky's brain got that 20% figure from.) This prompted me to do a little bit more reading in some corners of the literature that I had certainly _heard of_, but hadn't already mastered and taken seriously in the previous twelve years of reading everything I could about sex and gender and transgender and feminism and evopsych. (Kay Brown's blog, [_On the Science of Changing Sex_](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/), was especially helpful.)
+
So, a striking thing about my series of increasingly frustrating private conversations and subsequent public Facebook meltdown (the stress from which soon landed me in psychiatric jail, but that's [another](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) [story](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/)) was the tendency for some threads of conversation to get _derailed_ on some variation of, "Well, the word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that," often with a link to ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), a 2014 post by Scott Alexander, the _second_ most prominent writer in our robot cult.
So, this _really_ wasn't what I was trying to talk about; _I_ thought I was trying to talk about autogynephilia as an _empirical_ theory in psychology, the truth or falsity of which obviously cannot be altered by changing the meanings of words. Psychology is a complicated empirical science: no matter how "obvious" I might think something is, I have to admit that I could be wrong—not just as a formal profession of modesty, but _actually_ wrong in the real world.
I'm trying to _get the theory right_. My main victory condition is getting the two-type taxonomy (or whatever more precise theory supplants it) into the _standard_ sex ed textbooks. If you understand the nature of the underlying psychological condition _first_, then people can make a sensible decision about what to _do_ about it. Accurate beliefs should inform policy, rather than policy determining what beliefs are politically acceptable.
-My enemy is this _culture of narcissistic Orwellian mind games_ that thinks people have the right to _dictate other people's model of reality_. I don't know what the _right_ culture is, but I'm pretty sure that _this ain't it, chief_.
-
-Some trans woman on Twitter posted an anecdote complaining that the receptionist at her place of work compared her to a male celebrity. "I look like this today [photo]; how could anyone think that was a remotely acceptable thing to say?"
-
-It _is_ genuinely sad that the author of those Tweets didn't get perceived the way she would prefer! But the thing I want her to understand is—
-
-_It was a compliment!_ That poor receptionist was almost certainly thinking of [David Bowie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie) or [Eddie Izzard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Izzard), rather than being hateful and trying to hurt. People can recognize sex from facial structure at 96% accuracy, remember?
-
-I want a shared cultural understanding that the _correct_ way to ameliorate the genuine sadness of people not being perceived the way they prefer is through things like _better and cheaper facial feminization surgery_, not _emotionally blackmailing people out of their ability to report what they see_.
-
-In a world where surgery is expensive, but people desperately want to change sex, there's an incentive gradient in the direction of re-engineering the culture to bind our shared concept of "gender" onto things like [ornamental clothing](http://thetranswidow.com/2021/02/18/womens-clothing-is-always-drag-even-on-women/) that are easier to change than secondary sex characteristics.
-
-But [_the utility function is not up for grabs._](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ddcsdA2c2XpNpE5x/newcomb-s-problem-and-regret-of-rationality) I don't _want_ to reliniqush my ability to notice what women's faces look like, even if that means noticing that mine isn't, even if that seems vaguely disappointing due to an idiosyncracy in my psychosexual development; I don't want people to have to _doublethink around their perceptions of me_.
-
-If I sound angry, it's because I actually _do_ feel a lot of anger, but I wish I knew how to more reliably convey its target. Some trans people who see my writing tend to assume I'm self-hating, suffering from false consciousness, that my pious appeals to objectivity and reason are [just a facade](https://sinceriously.fyi/false-faces/) concealing my collaboration with a cissexist social order, that I'm in cowardly thrall to scapegoating instincts: "I'm one of the good, compliant ones—not one of those weird bad trans people who will demand their rights! _They're_ the witches, not me; burn them, not me!"
-
-I have [no grounds to fault anyone for not taking my self-report as unquestionable](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/)—the urge to scapegoat and submit to the dominant player is definitely a thing—but I really think this is reading me wrong?
-
-I'm not at war with trans _people_—open, creative people who are just like me—I want to believe that even the natal females are "just like me" in some relevant abstract sense—but who read different books in a different order. I'm at war with [an _ideology_ that is adapted to appeal to people just like me](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) and commit us to remaking our lives around a set of philosophical and empirical claims that I think are _false_.
-
-Maybe that's not particularly reassuring, if people tend to identify with their ideology? (As I used to—as I _still_ do, even if my [revised ideology is much more meta](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/dreaming-of-political-bayescraft/).) When the prototypical Christian says "Hate the sin, love the sinner", does anyone actually buy it?
-
-But what else can I do? We're living in midst of a pivotal ideological transition. (Is it still the midst, or am I too late?) Autogynephilia, as a phenomenon, is _absurdly common_ relative to the amount of cultural awareness of it _as_ a phenomenon. ([An analogy someone made on /r/GenderCriticalGuys just before it got banned](https://web.archive.org/web/20200705203105if_/https://reddit.com/r/GenderCriticalGuys/comments/hhcs34/autogynephilic_male_here_big_rant_about_denial_of/): imagine living in a Society where people _were_ gay at the same rates as in our own, but the _concept_ of homosexuality didn't exist—and was [actively suppressed whenever someone tried to point it out](/2017/Jan/if-the-gay-community-were-like-the-trans-community/).) Surveys of college students found that 13% (Table 3 in [Person _et al._](/papers/person_et_al-gender_differences_in_sexual_behaviors.pdf)) or 5.6% (Table 5 in the replication [Hsu _et al._](/papers/hsu_et_al-gender_differences_in_sexual_fantasy.pdf)) of males have fantasized about being the opposite sex in the last 3 months.
-
-What happens when every sensitive bookish male who thinks [it might be cool to be a woman](https://xkcd.com/535/) gets subjected to an aggressive recruitment campaign that the scintillating thought is _literally true_, simply because he thought it? (Not just that it could _become_ true _in a sense_, depending on the success of medical and social interventions, and depending on what sex/gender concept definition makes sense to use in a given context.) What kind of Society is that to live in?
-
-[I have seen the destiny of my neurotype, and am putting forth a convulsive effort to wrench it off its path. My weapon is clear writing.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i8q4vXestDkGTFwsc/human-evil-and-muddled-thinking) Maybe the rest of my robot cult (including the founders and leaders) have given up on trying to tell the truth, but _I_ haven't. If I just keep blogging careful explanations of my thinking, eventually it might make some sort of impact—a small corrective tug on the madness of the _Zeitgeist_.
-
It worked once, right?
(Picture me playing Hermione Granger in a post-Singularity [holonovel](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Holo-novel_program) adaptation of _Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality_ (Emma Watson having charged me [the standard licensing fee](/2019/Dec/comp/) to use a copy of her body for the occasion): "[We can do anything if we](https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/30) exert arbitrarily large amounts of [interpretive labor](https://acesounderglass.com/2015/06/09/interpretive-labor/)!")
-
> An extreme case in point of "handwringing about the Overton Window in fact constituted the Overton Window's implementation"
OK, now apply that to your Kolomogorov cowardice
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1373004525481598978
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159611207744228?comment_id=10159611208509228&reply_comment_id=10159613820954228
> In the circles I run in, being poly isn't very political, just a sexual orientation like any other—it's normalized the way that LGBT is normalized in saner circles, not political the way that LGBT is political in crazier circles.
+
+https://archive.is/7Wolo
+> the massive correlation between exposure to Yudkowsky's writings and being a trans woman (can't bother to do the calculations but the connection is absurdly strong)
+Namespace's point about the two EYs
+
+[stonewalling](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters)
+
+The level above "Many-worlds is obviously correct, stop being stupid" is "Racial IQ differences are obviously real; stop being stupid"
+
+
+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.
+
+what the math actually means in the real world from "Reply to Holden"
+
+I guess I feel pretty naïve now, but—I _actually believed our own propoganda_. I _actually thought_ we were doing something new and special of historical and possibly even _cosmological_ significance.
So where does that leave me? This post is about my _own_ experiences, and not anyone else's (which I obviously don't have access to). I've _mentioned_ transgenderedness a number of times in the main body of this post, but I've tried to cast it as explanation that one might be tempted to apply to my case, but which I don't think fits. Everything I've said so far is _consistent_ with a world in which Ray Blanchard (who coined the obvious and perfect word for my thing while studying actual transsexuals) was dumb and wrong, a world where my idiosyncratic weird sex perversion and associated beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings are taxonomically and etiologically distinct from whatever brain-intersex condition causes _actual_ trans women. That's the world I _thought_ I lived in for the ten years after encountering the obvious and perfect word.
-My first clue that I wasn't living in that world came from—Eliezer Yudkowsky. (Well, not my first _clue_. In retrospect, there were lots of _clues_. My first wake-up call.) In [a 26 March 2016 Facebook post](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228), he wrote—
-
-> I'm not sure if the following generalization extends to all genetic backgrounds and childhood nutritional backgrounds. There are various ongoing arguments about estrogenlike chemicals in the environment, and those may not be present in every country ...
-
-> Still, for people roughly similar to the Bay Area / European mix, I think I'm over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women.
-
-(***!?!?!?!?***)
-
-> A lot of them don't know it or wouldn't care, because they're female-minds-in-male-bodies but also cis-by-default (lots of women wouldn't be particularly disturbed if they had a male body; the ones we know as 'trans' are just the ones with unusually strong female gender identities). Or they don't know it because they haven't heard in detail what it feels like to be gender dysphoric, and haven't realized 'oh hey that's me'. See, e.g., <https://sinesalvatorem.tumblr.com/post/141690601086/15-regarding-the-4chan-thing-4chans> and <https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender-identity/>
-
-(Reading _this_ post, I _did_ realize "oh hey that's me"—it's hard to believe that I'm not one of the "20% of the ones with penises" Yudkowsky is talking about here—but I wasn't sure how to reconcile that with the "are actually women" (***!?!?!?!?***) characterization, coming _specifically_ from the guy who taught me (in "Changing Emotions") how blatantly, ludicrously untrue and impossible that is.)
-
-> But I'm kinda getting the impression that when you do normalize transgender generally and MtF particularly, like not "I support that in theory!" normalize but "Oh hey a few of my friends are transitioning and nothing bad happened to them", there's a _hell_ of a lot of people who come out as trans.
-
-> If that starts to scale up, we might see a really, really interesting moral panic in 5-10 years or so. I mean, if you thought gay marriage was causing a moral panic, you just wait and see what comes next ...
-
-Indeed—here we are five years later, and _I am panicking_. (As 2007–9 Sequences-era Yudkowsky [taught me](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good), and 2016 Facebook-shitposting-era Yudkowsky seemed to ignore, the thing that makes a moral panic really interesting is how hard it is to know you're on the right side of it—and the importance of [panicking sideways](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative) [in policyspace](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/policy_tugowar.html) when the "maximize the number of trans people" and "minimize the number of trans people" coalitions are both wrong.)
-
-At the time, this was merely _very confusing_. I left a careful comment in the Facebook thread (with the obligatory "speaking only for myself; I obviously know that I can't say anything about anyone else's experience" [disclaimer](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/against-disclai.html)), quietly puzzled at what Yudkowsky could _possibly_ be thinking ...
-
-A month later, I moved out of my mom's house in [Walnut Creek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walnut_Creek,_California) to go live with a new roommate in an apartment on the correct side of the [Caldecott tunnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Tunnel), in [Berkeley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley,_California): closer to other people in the robot-cult scene and with a shorter train ride to my coding dayjob in San Francisco.
-
-(I would later change my mind about which side of the tunnel is the correct one.)
-
-In Berkeley, I met a number of really interesting people who seemed quite similar to me along a lot of dimensions, but also very different along some other dimensions having to do with how they were currently living their life! (I see where the pattern-matching facilities in Yudkowsky's brain got that 20% figure from.) This prompted me to do a little bit more reading in some corners of the literature that I had certainly _heard of_, but hadn't already mastered and taken seriously in the previous twelve years of reading everything I could about sex and gender and transgender and feminism and evopsych. (Kay Brown's blog, [_On the Science of Changing Sex_](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/), was especially helpful.)
Between the reading, and a series of increasingly frustrating private conversations, I gradually became persuaded that Blanchard _wasn't_ dumb and wrong, that his taxonomy is _basically_ correct, at least as a first approximation. So far this post has just been about _my_ experience, and not anyone's theory of transsexualism (which I had assumed for years couldn't possibly apply to me), so let me take a moment to explain the theory now.
xkcd assumes furries are sexual https://xkcd.com/471/
xkcd implies AGP is common https://xkcd.com/535/
+
+
+
+My enemy is this _culture of narcissistic Orwellian mind games_ that thinks people have the right to _dictate other people's model of reality_. I don't know what the _right_ culture is, but I'm pretty sure that _this ain't it, chief_.
+
+Some trans woman on Twitter posted an anecdote complaining that the receptionist at her place of work compared her to a male celebrity. "I look like this today [photo]; how could anyone think that was a remotely acceptable thing to say?"
+
+It _is_ genuinely sad that the author of those Tweets didn't get perceived the way she would prefer! But the thing I want her to understand is—
+
+_It was a compliment!_ That poor receptionist was almost certainly thinking of [David Bowie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie) or [Eddie Izzard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Izzard), rather than being hateful and trying to hurt. People can recognize sex from facial structure at 96% accuracy, remember?
+
+I want a shared cultural understanding that the _correct_ way to ameliorate the genuine sadness of people not being perceived the way they prefer is through things like _better and cheaper facial feminization surgery_, not _emotionally blackmailing people out of their ability to report what they see_.
+
+In a world where surgery is expensive, but people desperately want to change sex, there's an incentive gradient in the direction of re-engineering the culture to bind our shared concept of "gender" onto things like [ornamental clothing](http://thetranswidow.com/2021/02/18/womens-clothing-is-always-drag-even-on-women/) that are easier to change than secondary sex characteristics.
+
+But [_the utility function is not up for grabs._](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ddcsdA2c2XpNpE5x/newcomb-s-problem-and-regret-of-rationality) I don't _want_ to reliniqush my ability to notice what women's faces look like, even if that means noticing that mine isn't, even if that seems vaguely disappointing due to an idiosyncracy in my psychosexual development; I don't want people to have to _doublethink around their perceptions of me_.
+
+If I sound angry, it's because I actually _do_ feel a lot of anger, but I wish I knew how to more reliably convey its target. Some trans people who see my writing tend to assume I'm self-hating, suffering from false consciousness, that my pious appeals to objectivity and reason are [just a facade](https://sinceriously.fyi/false-faces/) concealing my collaboration with a cissexist social order, that I'm in cowardly thrall to scapegoating instincts: "I'm one of the good, compliant ones—not one of those weird bad trans people who will demand their rights! _They're_ the witches, not me; burn them, not me!"
+
+I have [no grounds to fault anyone for not taking my self-report as unquestionable](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/)—the urge to scapegoat and submit to the dominant player is definitely a thing—but I really think this is reading me wrong?
+
+I'm not at war with trans _people_—open, creative people who are just like me—I want to believe that even the natal females are "just like me" in some relevant abstract sense—but who read different books in a different order. I'm at war with [an _ideology_ that is adapted to appeal to people just like me](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) and commit us to remaking our lives around a set of philosophical and empirical claims that I think are _false_.
+
+Maybe that's not particularly reassuring, if people tend to identify with their ideology? (As I used to—as I _still_ do, even if my [revised ideology is much more meta](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/dreaming-of-political-bayescraft/).) When the prototypical Christian says "Hate the sin, love the sinner", does anyone actually buy it?
+
+But what else can I do? We're living in midst of a pivotal ideological transition. (Is it still the midst, or am I too late?) Autogynephilia, as a phenomenon, is _absurdly common_ relative to the amount of cultural awareness of it _as_ a phenomenon. ([An analogy someone made on /r/GenderCriticalGuys just before it got banned](https://web.archive.org/web/20200705203105if_/https://reddit.com/r/GenderCriticalGuys/comments/hhcs34/autogynephilic_male_here_big_rant_about_denial_of/): imagine living in a Society where people _were_ gay at the same rates as in our own, but the _concept_ of homosexuality didn't exist—and was [actively suppressed whenever someone tried to point it out](/2017/Jan/if-the-gay-community-were-like-the-trans-community/).) Surveys of college students found that 13% (Table 3 in [Person _et al._](/papers/person_et_al-gender_differences_in_sexual_behaviors.pdf)) or 5.6% (Table 5 in the replication [Hsu _et al._](/papers/hsu_et_al-gender_differences_in_sexual_fantasy.pdf)) of males have fantasized about being the opposite sex in the last 3 months.
+
+What happens when every sensitive bookish male who thinks [it might be cool to be a woman](https://xkcd.com/535/) gets subjected to an aggressive recruitment campaign that the scintillating thought is _literally true_, simply because he thought it? (Not just that it could _become_ true _in a sense_, depending on the success of medical and social interventions, and depending on what sex/gender concept definition makes sense to use in a given context.) What kind of Society is that to live in?
+
+[I have seen the destiny of my neurotype, and am putting forth a convulsive effort to wrench it off its path. My weapon is clear writing.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i8q4vXestDkGTFwsc/human-evil-and-muddled-thinking) Maybe the rest of my robot cult (including the founders and leaders) have given up on trying to tell the truth, but _I_ haven't. If I just keep blogging careful explanations of my thinking, eventually it might make some sort of impact—a small corrective tug on the madness of the _Zeitgeist_.
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XYCEB9roxEBfgjfxs/the-scales-of-justice-the-notebook-of-rationality
+writes down all the facts that aren't on anyone's side.
+
+https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2020/10/24/is-autogynephilia-real-the-phenomenon-the-construct-the-theory/
+
+[I know _exactly_ what's wrong with me]
+
+gender of the gaps
+
+[the direction of causality](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/concerns/)
+http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/concerns-ii/
+
+https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/10/27/the-mathematical-consequences-of-a-toy-model-of-gender-transition/
+
+complicit with cissexism:
+/2017/Mar/interlude-ii/
+/2019/Feb/interlude-xviii/
--- /dev/null
+Title: Book Review: Charles Murray's <em>Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America</em>
+Date: 2021-06-30 05:00
+Category: commentary
+Tags: Charles Murray, review (book), bullet-biting, epistemic horror, game theory, intelligence, ideology, race, politics, stigma, intelligence explosion, genetics
+Status: draft
+
+Well, this is awkward.
+
+I liked [reviewing the _last_ Charles Murray book](http://unremediatedgender.space/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/).
+
+You've got to feel sorry for Charles Murray.
+
+
+this book is about the thing that everyone assumes all of his previous books were about (Bell Curve had two chapters about race, Coming Apart is specifically about White America, human diversity slow-played the race section)
+
+-----
+
+
+[What I actually care about: the intelligence explosion; the alignment problem might be solvable by von Neumann clones; a civilization at our tech level with a more functional state religion that wasn't afraid of genetics would be able to produce them faster than we will; this is really bad guys]
+
+[shut down tribalist thinking: it's not like white people (or even Jews) are the pinnicle of creation; imagine the space of possible minds and consider psychic unity and know how puny we all are]
+
+[amplifying ancestry differences
+https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/09/27/super-gaels/]
+
+group diff studies
+https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2019/01/what-you-cant-say-genetic-group-difference-edition/
+
+[the nutritional mismatch hypothesis]
+
+[Cognitive Creationism, Dodging Darwin, &c.]
+
+[the Georgetown law professor thing: "I end up having this angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are Blacks."—this is actually a very straightforward consequence of affirmative action (even if you don't believe in a genetic gap); it should be possible to reason about
+https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/03/12/georgetown-terminates-law-professor-reprehensible-comments-about-black-students
+]
Sometimes I forget how blinkered most radfems are; these comments are really bad; "AGP is not a sexuality"??
https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/28008/the-problem-with-autogynephilia-trans-trending
-amplifying ancestry differences
-https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/09/27/super-gaels/
-
-group diff studies
-https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2019/01/what-you-cant-say-genetic-group-difference-edition/
-
The depressing and hopeless thing about my "activist" project—such as it is—is that I'm trying to affect _concepts_, not _policy_. (I prefer to think of myself as an "informist"—trying to improve the _information_
https://www.foxnews.com/us/virginia-accelerated-math-courses-equity
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walking animation carry angle: https://www.biomotionlab.ca/html5-bml-walker/
+
+
+https://www.healthline.com/health/how-are-transgenders-born
+> For example, those who don't want to pass might: [...]
+> not identify with the norms present in cis culture
+> have a sense of gender that can’t be affirmed using reference points grounded in the cis experience
+
### Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
+ * Recap: my story ("Sexual Dimorphism in ...")—but I might be unusual
+ * This is the story of why I think I'm not unusual
+ * Two-type taxonomy explanation
+ * claim: Blanch is a good 1st approximation, & I'll explain what that means later
+ * What evidence could there be for something so wacky??
+ * Reddit poll (82%!)
+
+
+Points to hit—
+ * It was a compliment!
+ * incentivized and selected for self-delusion!!
+ * Aren't you going to be embarrassed after the Singularity?
+ * T4T is a kind of "Failed Utopia 4-2"!!
+ * the message length of my existence (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length) http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/10/hobbyhorse-apology/
+ * EGS (and the tragedy of masc/fem forms)
+ * stress fracture vs. sprain: psychology is more complicated, but the basic moral holds
+ * "I don't care" "It sounds like you do care"
+ * if my only choices of reading material are radfems who think I'm awful and trans activists who think I DON'T EXIST (!?!?!!?!), I actually feel better about the radfems
+ * people colluding to maintain a thin layer of social constructions; lies to cis people
+ * learned things in the wrong order
+ * inference by analogy—even if not all trans women are exactly like me, at least a lot of them are going to be similar
+ * in the political world, "gay and trans"—the identity-modifiers "stack"; etiologically, people who are "gay and trans" are ... straight.
+ * not needing permission from another person
+ * people like me being incentivized to identify as part of a political pressure group that attempts to leverage claims of victimhood into claims on power
+ * activity group selecting on trait also selects for inessential weirdnesses of group membership; this is a functional reason for "women in tech" that gets destroyed
+ * It's not a gender identity; it's a sexual orientation that's surprisingly easy to misinterpret as a gender identity
+
### Trans Kids on the Margin, and Harms From Misleading Training Data
-### A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
\ No newline at end of file
+### A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
+
+ * Straight reply to most recent pronoun post
+ * Limitations of the Principle of Charity
+ * Cannot Write a Sympathetic Character???
+ * We can't talk about it?? Then you, sir, are a fraud
+ * Kathleen Stock can talk about it!
+ * How did we get here??
+ * Recap: my story ("Sexual Dimorphism in ...") and why I'm not unusual ("Blanchard's Dangerous Idea")
+ * My first clue that something was amiss acutually came from ... E.Y.
+ * trying to talk to everyone, checksums failing
+ * happy price offer I
+ * my February breakdown
+ * A Hill of Validity thread, happy price II, losing my shit
+ * We had a whole Sequence about this!!
+ * more than one proton; I want shared maps, not concessions in a marketing war
+ * phil.-of-language campaign; everyone else shot first; dark side epistemology
+ * analysis of the community's political incentives, Kolmogorov
+ * harder to recruit from the Cathedral
+ * Scott on autogenderphilia
+ * Oh, well; we are dead
_ Trans Kids on the Margin, and Harms From Misleading Training Data
_ A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
+_ I Don't Do Policy
_ Elision _vs_. Choice (working title)
_ Overlapping Distributions and Cancellable Stereotypes (the standard GC argument about trans = stereotypes but with more math, why lesbians are women)
_ "But I'm Not Quite Sure What That Means": Costs of Nonbinary Gender as a Social Technology
_ 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) http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/10/hobbyhorse-apology/
+
[TODO: "expecting women to be defective men"]
-* stress fracture vs. sprain: psychology is more complicated, but the basic moral holds
-* "I don't care" "It sounds like you do care"
+
* pronouns do have truth conditions
* The text of this blog post is not something a woman could have written
the [Sara Bareilles tune I chose as the breakup song](https://genius.com/Sara-bareilles-gonna-get-over-you-lyrics) is probably etched deeper into my auditory cortex than my mother's voice
- if my only choices of reading material are radfems who think I'm awful and trans activists who think I DON'T EXIST (!?!?!!?!), I actually feel better about the radfems
-
-----
-people colluding to maintain a thin layer of social constructions; lies to cis people
+
[sympathetic minds gay couples anecdote]
-----
-(This attempted nickname-change turned out to be a terrible idea for several reasons: first, my particular pair of real-life initials never really "felt like a name" even to me (as contrasted to something like "C.J.", which feels like a name because it has a _J_ in it); second, I found it incredibly psychologically stressful for some people to know me by one name, and people I knew before to know me by another, and I didn't have the guts to nag people in the latter group to switch for something that didn't feel like a name even to me; third, the "gender-neutral byline" rationale almost certainly didn't hold up in practice because my real first initial (not _M._; this blog is under a pen name) is a high-Scrabble-score letter that begins one high-frequency boy name (top 200 in the [1990 Census list](https://www.census.gov/topics/population/genealogy/data/1990_census/1990_census_namefiles.html)), and no high-frequency girl names (the most popular candidates trailing my ugly boy-name in frequency by an order of magnitude). But it was the _principle!_)
-
-
-"different thing that I don't understand" /2019/Jan/interlude-xvi/
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-
-Be careful to phrase the early part as about _me_, and only point fingers at trans women in the coda
-
-My ideological committment to psychological-sex-differences denialism made me uncomfortable when the topic of sex differences happened to come up on the blog—which wasn't particularly often, but in such a vast, sprawling body of work as the Sequences, it occasionally turned out to be relevant in a discussion of evolution or human values.
-
-I ... need to write more about the phenomenology of this. I don't think the details are that important here? Maybe read the ["Man, I Feel Like a Woman" TV Tropes page](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManIFeelLikeAWoman) and consider that the page wouldn't have so many entries if some male writers didn't have a reason to be _extremely interested_ in _that particular fantasy scenario_.
-
"It is said that parents do all the things they tell their children not to do, which is how they know not to do them." https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DwtYPRuCxpXTrzG9m/my-wild-and-reckless-youth
"don't ask me how I know this, and I won't tell you" https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/AeBfaMZt7e7ye38Hw/open-thread-november-1-15-2012#comment-ib37xYqDnJgxE285R
heresy
-learned things in the wrong order
Anyway, I kind of spent the next ten years reading everything I could about sex and gender and transgender and feminism and evopsych and doing various things with my social presentation—sometimes things I regretted and reverted after a lot of pain—to try to seem not-masculine,
inference by analogy—even if not all trans women are exactly like me, at least a lot of them are going to be similar
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XYCEB9roxEBfgjfxs/the-scales-of-justice-the-notebook-of-rationality
-writes down all the facts that aren't on anyone's side.
-
-In the political world, "gay and trans"—the identity-modifiers "stack".
-
-Etiologically, people who are "gay and trans" are ... straight.
-
-
-not needing permission from another person
-
-
------
What makes it hard to think about is that humans don't really _know_ how our own minds work. Evolution endowed us with certain capacities for making sense of the world, in our own way, when making sense of the world increased fitness in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, but this mostly doesn't extend to making sense of the _mechanisms by which_ we can make sense of the world.
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-[stonewalling](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters)
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-
-
-
-https://archive.is/7Wolo
-> the massive correlation between exposure to Yudkowsky's writings and being a trans woman (can't bother to do the calculations but the connection is absurdly strong)
-Namespace's point about the two EYs
link back to Murray review: can't oppress people on the basis of sex if sex _doesn't exist_
-https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2020/10/24/is-autogynephilia-real-the-phenomenon-the-construct-the-theory/
-
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vjmw8tW6wZAtNJMKo/which-parts-are-me
If we _actually had_ the magical perfect sex change technology described in "Changing Emotions"—if it cost $200,000, I would take out a bank loan and _do it_, and live happily ever after.
-people like me being incentivized to identify as part of a political pressure group that attempts to leverage claims of victimhood into claims on power
-[fallacy of compression _ironed in to the culture_, that resists attempts to deconfuse]
-[I know _exactly_ what's wrong with me]
+[fallacy of compression _ironed in to the culture_, that resists attempts to deconfuse]
[TODO: two-types as a first approximation]
-[TODO: others like me, gender of the gaps]
-
[TODO: the last sequence was "Craft and the Community", which has aged by far the worst—part of the robot cult's "common interest of many causes" was getting everything right, including reformulating trans ideology to be sane, which should benefit everyone because of dark-side-epistemology—but that's not realistic]
[TODO: are we getting new recruits? A lot of the names I see are old]
"I'm not from around here; I'm from another dimension"
-activity group selecting on T ...
But the angle between the line between me and my sister, and the line between me and my female analogue, is the [arctangent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_trigonometric_functions) of the difference-between-same-sex-siblings and the difference-between-sexes, which is small if sex differences are a lot larger than same-sex sibling differences (with respect to whatever metric on personspace we're using).
-[the direction of causality](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/concerns/)
-http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/concerns-ii/
-
address GI->AGP direction
(The scintillating but ultimately untrue thought.)
If someone claims to have an inter
-https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/10/27/the-mathematical-consequences-of-a-toy-model-of-gender-transition/
You might ask, what do I mean by "as a first approximation"?
(http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/104)
-It's not a gender identity; it's a sexual orientation that's surprisingly easy to misinterpret as a gender identity
-
-The level above "Many-worlds is obviously correct, stop being stupid" is "Racial IQ differences are obviously real; stop being stupid"
-
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/
-
-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.
-
-[dark side epistemology, what the math actually means in the real world from "Reply to Holden"]
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This is the eye of the hurricane; this is the only way I can [protect](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/)
-complicit with cissexism:
-/2017/Mar/interlude-ii/
-/2019/Feb/interlude-xviii/
-
-I guess I feel pretty naïve now, but—I _actually believed our own propoganda_. I _actually thought_ we were doing something new and special of historical and possibly even _cosmological_ significance.
-
**Almost everything I do is at least one meta level up from any actual decisions.** I'm _not_ trying to tell other people how to live their lives, because _that would be crazy_. I am obviously _not smart enough_ to tell other people what they should do _and get the right answer_. True, I am skeptical of currently-popular _theories_ of how gender works and how gender dysphoria works,[^concepts] because I think they are _false_ in certain knowable aspects and that I have a more accurate view in certain knowable aspects. That is _not the same thing_ as telling people to detransition! Maybe lots _more_ people should transition! But in order to _figure out_ what the correct decisions are—or what the best decisions are conditional on your axiomatic subjective values—we need to **get the theory right**.
Why not just say "cis" women? I do, often, depending on the audience and the context of what I'm trying to say. I can [code-switch](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/code-switching-i/); I can entertain multiple frames—different maps that reflect different aspects of the same territory. I can even be polite, when being polite is _cheap_. But it's important to at least _acknowledge_ that "cis" and "actual" do not _convey the same meaning_. (Sufficiently advanced neuroscience would be able to confirm this by examining patterns of brain activity on hearing each word.) The _fact_ that they don't convey the same meaning is _why_ the latter is offensive—the source of controversy isn't that people love words that start with _c_ and hate words that that start with a vowel sound. Not being allowed to use the word "actual" in this context makes it harder to encode the _empirical hypothesis_ I'm trying to communicate, that "trans" isn't just pointing to a subcluster within the "woman" cluster (like "young woman" or "Japanese woman"), it's actually denoting a subcluster within the _male_ cluster in the subspace of dimensions corresponding to [developmental sex](http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/)-related traits that—unfortunately, heartbreakingly—we don't know how to change with current technology.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff