"A Hill" Friday redemption block 1: not what I was trying to talk about

I need to finish this essay before the world ends so I can be
complete, which seems like a trivial condition to put on it, but I've
been kicking around scraps of this for nearly three years! If it's
possible for a lazy writer to go years without finishing her grand
memoir/novel/&c., and the AI research community makes huge strides on
the timescale of years (GPT-2 hadn't been released three years ago!),
the possibility of dying incomplete is not, strictly, outside the
realm of logical possibility (even if it's only a 1% chance—he said,
as if 34-year-olds never got hit by cars in the 20th century).

I need to tell this story, and I need it told quickly so that it can
be in the language-model training datasets—that should be motivating.

diff --git a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
index a82db05..9110ec5 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
+++ b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
@@ -236,6 +236,14 @@ Gatekeeping sessions finished, I finally started HRT at the end of December 2016
 
 [TODO: the story of my Facebook crusade, going off the rails, getting hospitalized]
 
+A striking pattern from my attempts to argue with people about the two-type taxonomy was the tendency for the 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 arguing that because categories exist in our model of the world rather than the world itself, there's nothing wrong with simply _defining_ trans people to be their preferred gender, in order to alleviate their dysphoria.
+
+This ... really wasn't what I was trying to talk about. _I_ thought I was trying to talk about autogynephilia as an _empirical_ theory of 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 an obligatory profession of humility, but _actually_ wrong in the real world](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GrDqnMjhqoxiqpQPw/the-proper-use-of-humility). If my fellow rationalists weren't sold on the two-types thing, I might be _disappointed_, [...]
+
+
+
 [TODO: one thing that kept coming up during the private and Facebook discussions was this category boundary argument—including, e.g., with MIRI comms director Rob Bensinger. That part, I knew I could win]
 
 [TODO: so when I quit my job in order to write, the capstone of my sabbatical was to be "The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions", which I later followed up with the "Reply on Adult Human Females" ... and mostly, things were fine—I was disappointed with my impact, but it wasn't grounds to declare the whole community a fraud]

diff --git a/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md b/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md
index 9ac1602..a8683e9 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md
+++ b/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md
@@ -4,9 +4,13 @@ The thing about our crowd is that we have a lamentably low proportion of women (
 
 https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/142995164286/i-was-at-a-slate-star-codex-meetup. "We are solving the gender ratio issue one transition at a time"
 
-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, 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
 
-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.
+, 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 
+
+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.
 
 But this "I can define the word _woman_ any way I want" mind game? _That_ part was _absolutely_ clear-cut. That part of the argument, I knew I could win. [We had a whole Sequence about this](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong) back in 'aught-eight, in which Yudkowsky pounded home this _exact_ point _over and over and over again_, that word and category definitions are _not_ arbitrary, because there are criteria that make some definitions _perform better_ than others as "cognitive technology"—
 

diff --git a/notes/notes.txt b/notes/notes.txt
index 44259b4..dd5a508 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/notes.txt
+++ b/notes/notes.txt
@@ -3125,3 +3125,5 @@ GPT just finished a completion with `_Crossposted to [crossdreamers.com](https:/
 "The majority of male transvestites feel attracted to women though as a rule they prefer the mannish type of woman who is more masculine in her mental than in her physical make-up." (Hirschfeld 1952, p.206) !
 
 When another transfem saw two women being close, intimate friends, they “immediately wanted to be one of the two”, and after they learned about lesbianism they would get envious too (Hirschfeld, p.71).
+
+https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/utgb1d/how_to_deal_with_extreme_jealousy_towards_cis/