"I Tell Myself" 1 December drafting session 3

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@@ -5,6 +5,14 @@ It would be hard to overstate how much of an impact this post had on me. I've pr
 The argument goes: it might be easy to _imagine_ changing sex and refer to the idea in a short English sentence, but the real physical world has implementation details, and the implementation details aren't filled in by the short English sentence. The human body, including the brain, is an enormously complex integrated organism; there's no [plug-and-play](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug_and_play) architecture by which you can just swap your brain into a new body and have everything work without re-mapping the connections in your motor cortex.
 
 
+
+In the comments, [I wrote](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions/comment/4pttT7gQYLpfqCsNd)—
+
+> Is it cheating if you deliberately define your personal identity such that the answer is No?
+
+To which I now realize the correct answer is: _Yes_, it's cheating! The map is not the territory!
+
+
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 Men who wish they were women do not particularly resemble actual women! We just—don't? This seems kind of obvious, really? Telling the difference between fantasy and reality is kind of an important life skill?
@@ -70,20 +78,20 @@ This is my fault. It's [not like we weren't warned](https://www.lesswrong.com/po
 
 [univariate fallacy; I'm a weird guy; I would like to believe there could be a cis woman like me. Not obvious that I acutally know any. My sister is a natural experiment; hands vs. finger; "felt sense"]
 
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KmghfjH6RgXvoKruJ/hand-vs-fingers
+
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 Someone asked me: "Wouldn't it be embarrassing if the community solved Friendly AI and went down in history as the people who created Utopia forever, and you had rejected it because of gender stuff?"
 
-But the _reason_ it seemed _at all_ remotely plausible that our little robot cult would be pivotal in creating Utopia forever was _not_ "[Because we're us](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-recommending/), the world-saving good guys", but rather _because_ we were going to discover and refine the methods of _systematically correct reasoning_.
+But the _reason_ it seemed _at all_ remotely plausible that our little robot cult could be pivotal in creating Utopia forever was _not_ "[Because we're us](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-recommending/), the world-saving good guys", but rather _because_ we were going to discover and refine the methods of _systematically correct reasoning_.
 
-If the people _marketing themselves_ as the good guys 
+If the people _marketing themselves_ as the good guys who are going to save the world using systematically-correct-reasoning are _not actually interested in doing systematically correct reasoning_ (because systematically correct reasoning leads to conclusions that are "politically impossible" to state clearly in public)
 
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 I'm avoiding naming anyone in this post even when linking to their public writings, in order to try to keep the _rhetorical emphasis_ on "true tale of personal heartbreak, coupled with sober analysis of the sociopolitical factors leading thereto" even while I'm ... expressing disappointment with people's performance. This isn't supposed to be character/reputational attack on my friends and (former??) heroes—I just _need to tell the story_.
 
-I'd almost rather we all pretend this narrative was written in a ["nearby" Everett branch](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9cgBF6BQ2TRB3Hy4E/and-the-winner-is-many-worlds) whose history diverged from our own maybe forty-five years ago—a world with _roughly_ all the same institutions and [...]
-
-_My_ specific identity doesn't matter; the specific identities of any individuals I mention while telling my story don't matter.
+I'd almost rather we all pretend this narrative was written in a ["nearby" Everett branch](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9cgBF6BQ2TRB3Hy4E/and-the-winner-is-many-worlds) whose history diverged from ours maybe forty-five years ago—a world almost exactly like our own as far as the macro-scale institutional and ideological forces at play, but with different individual people filling out the relevant birth cohorts. _My_ specific identity doesn't matter; the specific identities of any individuals I mention while telling my story don't matter.
 
-What matters is the _structure_: I'm just a sample from the _distribution_ of what happens when an American upper-middle-class autogynephilic high-Openness high-Neuroticism IQ-130 78%-Ashkenazi boy 
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+What matters is the _structure_: I'm just a sample from the _distribution_ of what happens when an American upper-middle-class high-Openness high-Neuroticism late-1980s-birth-cohort IQ-130 78%-Ashkenazi obligate-autogynephilic boy falls in with this kind of robot cult in this kind of world.