From: M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake Date: Sat, 22 May 2021 19:56:21 +0000 (-0700) Subject: shovel X-Git-Url: http://unremediatedgender.space/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git;a=commitdiff_plain;h=cc617850a1ee9016dc148688413b3ebae2fb7f60 shovel --- 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 1e426fc..e87ec6e 100644 --- a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md +++ b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md @@ -272,3 +272,22 @@ I guess I feel pretty naïve now, but—I _actually believed our own propoganda_ I got a pingback to "Optimized Propaganda" from in an "EDIT 5/21/2021" on https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qKvn7rxP2mzJbKfcA/persuasion-tools-ai-takeover-without-agi-or-agency after Scott Alexander linked it—evidence for Scott having Power to shape people's attention + +https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/ + +"Rationalism starts with the belief that arguments aren't soldiers, and ends with the belief that soldiers are arguments." + +The Eliezer Yudkowsky I remember wrote about [how facts are tightly-woven together in the Great Web of Causality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies), such that [people who are trying to believe something false have an incentive to invent and spread fake epistemology lessons](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology), and about the [high competence threshold that _forces_ correct conclusions](http://sl4.org/archive/0602/13903.html). + +A culture where there are huge catastrophic consequences for [questioning religion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6JzcFtPGiznFgDxP/excluding-the-supernatural), is a culture where it's harder to train alignment researchers that genuinely understand Occam's razor on a _deep_ level, when [the intelligent social web](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web) around them will do anything to prevent them from applying the parsimony skill to the God hypothesis. + +A culture where there are huge catastrophic consequences for questioning gender identity, is a culture where it's harder to train alignment researchers that genuinely understand the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-language-and-cognition on a _deep_ level, when the social web around them will do anything to prevent them from [invalidating someone's identity](http://unremediatedgender.space/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/). + +> First, it is not enough to learn something, and tell the world about it, to get the world to believe it. Not even if you can offer clear and solid evidence, and explain it so well that a child could understand. You need to instead convince each person in your audience that the other people who they see as their key audiences will soon be willing to endorse what you have learned. +https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/12/social-proof-but-of-what.html + +twenty-one month Category War is as long as it took to write the Sequences https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9jF4zbZqz6DydJ5En/the-end-of-sequences + +I'm worried about the failure mode where bright young minds [lured in](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/construction-beacons/) by the beautiful propaganda about _systematically correct reasoning_, are instead recruited into what is, effectively, the Eliezer-Yudkowsky-and-Scott-Alexander fan club. + +> I'm not trying to get Eliezer or "the community" to take a public stance on gender politics; I'm trying to get us to take a stance in favor of the kind of epistemology that we were doing in 2008. It turns out that epistemology has implications for gender politics which are unsafe, but that's more inferential steps, and ... I guess I just don't expect the sort of people who would punish good epistemology to follow the inferential steps? Maybe I'm living in the should-universe a bit here, but I don't think it "should" be hard for Eliezer to publicly say, "Yep, categories aren't arbitrary because you need them to carve reality at the joints in order to make probabilistic inferences, just like I said in 2008; this is obvious." diff --git a/content/drafts/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer.md b/content/drafts/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer.md index 58bf79f..d61128a 100644 --- a/content/drafts/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer.md +++ b/content/drafts/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer.md @@ -268,3 +268,32 @@ https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/10/27/the-mathematical-consequences-of-a-t complicit with cissexism: /2017/Mar/interlude-ii/ /2019/Feb/interlude-xviii/ + +In "Interpersonal Entanglement", Yudkowsky had speculated that gay couples might have better relationships, since they don't have to deal with the mismatch. + +Stereotypically, AGP-taxon trans women have a tendency to pair up with each other. + +> 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.) + +Cross-gender identity is a virtually sustained or intermittently occurring wishful fantasy about being a person of the opposite sex.” Freund, K., Steiner, B.W. & Chan, S. Two types of cross-gender identity. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 11, 49–63 (1982). DOI: 10.1007/BF01541365 + +https://twitter.com/caraesten/status/1092472430465929216 +> damn one extremely bad way to start my day is having the receptionist at slack say I look like a male celebrity +> I'm so mad. wow. like. I look like this right now, how could anyone ever think that was an okay thing to say??? + +Or consider Dr. Will Powers, [whose presentation on trans healthcare](https://powersfamilymedicine.com/s/Healthcare-of-the-Transgender-Patient-V60.pptx) was [praised by people from my robot cult on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/strohl89/posts/10157396578969598). I was disappointed by the the brief mention of autogynephilia [(on slide 29 of the v.6.0 presentation)](/images/powers_slide_on_agp.png): Powers says Blanchard has been disproven, but that autogynephilia does exist _very_ rarely: "[i]n my now almost 7 years of treating transgender patients, I have seen this paraphilia only once in a person requesting MtF therapy", Powers says, going on to describe the particularly delusional patient (who wanted "the largest breasts possible", and claimed he needed to become a woman to please a Russian Instagram model whom he implausibly claimed to be his girlfriend) whom he denied informed-consent treatment. + +You might ask, why am I citing Will Powers in support of my thesis, when Powers's testimony seems to contradict it? Only one case in seven years, he says. + +I cite it because—surprise! _Powers was lying._ [In a November 2020 post to his own subreddit, he opens up](https://www.reddit.com/r/DrWillPowers/comments/jx9io9/my_official_post_on_my_personal_opinion_on/): + +> Every time I try and speak on this, I get attacked. People discredit what I have to say, call it harmful, and hateful. [...] I've previously stated I had one of these in my practice. I stated that, because I didn't want to push the narrative that it was common because I get literally eviscerated every time I try and talk about it. In reality, I see it fairly often. Almost once a month. Probably at least 10 times a year. [...] Continuing to lie about it and act like it isn't happening is a disservice to transgender people as a whole. + +You might think, + +This comment in particular is really something— +https://www.reddit.com/r/DrWillPowers/comments/jxh3mz/in_this_thread_help_me_and_this_community_come_up/gd0mytr/ + +A common trope in female transformation erotica (search for _tg caption blog_ if you want examples) is that sexuality "goes with the body": in these stories, men who have been magically swapped bodies with women, often express excitement or horror (depending on the story and the author) about the discovery that they're attracted to guys now—or alternatively, express gratitude that the woman he swapped with was a lesbian. + +Intuitively, when I imagine how I want transformation technology to work, I imagine speaking accents "going with the body". Native speakers of a language are more likely to confuse homophones, because https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/wAW4ENCSEHwYbrwtn/other-people-s-procedural-knowledge-gaps/comment/yTdJm7JjPJPynwS3a diff --git a/content/drafts/book-review-facing-reality.md b/content/drafts/book-review-facing-reality.md index 6f56c6c..0dc7449 100644 --- a/content/drafts/book-review-facing-reality.md +++ b/content/drafts/book-review-facing-reality.md @@ -43,3 +43,8 @@ https://www.persuasion.community/p/why-america-is-flunking-math-education https://www.unz.com/isteve/nature-tackling-systemic-racism-requires-the-system-of-science-to-change/ https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-not-so-great-reset-rolls-on/ + +I read everything I could about the James Watson affair in 2007 + +The debate never advances; Arthur Jensen on the Phil Donahue show +https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtoqK1gsmHI diff --git a/notes/outline-2021.md b/notes/outline-2021.md index 6555942..c68f242 100644 --- a/notes/outline-2021.md +++ b/notes/outline-2021.md @@ -27,10 +27,22 @@ Points to hit— * 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 + * inference by analogy—even if not all trans women are exactly like me, at least a lot of them are going to be similar ### Trans Kids on the Margin, and Harms From Misleading Training Data + * Introduction + * Sex, Sex Differences, Sex Roles, and the Cognitive Function of Categorization + * Culture Shapes Decisions on the Margin + * Two Possible Views on the Etiology of Gender Dysphoria in Young Children + * The Curious Case of Clever Hans, and Comparisons Across Cultures + * So what? + * Potential Harm Scenarios + * Harms from Illegible Miscategorization + * Evidence from Cloacal Extrophy Cases + * Switching Costs Are Not Obviously Trivial + * On the Scope and Extent of Biodeterminism ### A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning @@ -52,5 +64,6 @@ Points to hit— * 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 "Against Lie Inflation" * Scott on autogenderphilia * Oh, well; we are dead diff --git a/notes/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-notes.md b/notes/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-notes.md index 3214938..8ebff60 100644 --- a/notes/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-notes.md +++ b/notes/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-notes.md @@ -1,3 +1,7 @@ +More refs I could potentially edit in after the fact?? +https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KmghfjH6RgXvoKruJ/hand-vs-fingers +finding things in the refrigerator https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/pL3To6G42AeihNtaN/rational-vs-scientific-ev-psych + -------END OF NEEDED SCENES------- _ more empathic inference: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qCsxiojX7BSLuuBgQ/the-super-happy-people-3-8 @@ -11,8 +15,6 @@ _ more empathic inference: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qCsxiojX7BSLuuBgQ/the https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/AEZaakdcqySmKMJYj -I read everything I could about the James Watson affair in 2007 - [AGP is used as a weapon, but I think it's an actual claim] @@ -21,13 +23,6 @@ I read everything I could about the James Watson affair in 2007 https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/ -the causal theory here is _retarded_ -https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/ - - - - -> 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.) * EY was right about "men need to think about themselves _as men_" (find cite) @@ -56,7 +51,7 @@ it's that I want culture to innovate in the direction of "achieving godlike unde no safe defense https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science -_ finding things in the refrigerator https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/pL3To6G42AeihNtaN/rational-vs-scientific-ev-psych +_ _ 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 @@ -117,7 +112,6 @@ which was clearly not what my thing was. I thought, essentially, "Gee, it's too bad this beautiful word which so perfectly describes the beautiful feeling at the center of my life happened to be coined in the context of this controversial theory about the etiology of MtF transsexualism which is probably false because everyone says it's obviously false." -inference by analogy—even if not all trans women are exactly like me, at least a lot of them are going to be similar ------ @@ -170,7 +164,7 @@ address GI->AGP direction (The scintillating but ultimately untrue thought.) Fit in somewhere— -https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KmghfjH6RgXvoKruJ/hand-vs-fingers + I'm not objecting to your existence, I'm only objecting to the prerequisites to your existence @@ -236,14 +230,6 @@ R₀ "You can't lift a ten-pound weight with one pound of force!" https://equilibriabook.com/living-in-an-inadequate-world/ -The debate never advances; Arthur Jensen on the Phil Donahue show -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtoqK1gsmHI - -The Eliezer Yudkowsky I remember wrote about [how facts are tightly-woven together in the Great Web of Causality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies), such that [people who are trying to believe something false have an incentive to invent and spread fake epistemology lessons](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology), and about the [high competence threshold that _forces_ correct conclusions](http://sl4.org/archive/0602/13903.html). - -A culture where there are huge catastrophic consequences for [questioning religion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6JzcFtPGiznFgDxP/excluding-the-supernatural), is a culture where it's harder to train alignment researchers that genuinely understand Occam's razor on a _deep_ level, when [the intelligent social web](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web) around them will do anything to prevent them from applying the parsimony skill to the God hypothesis. - -A culture where there are huge catastrophic consequences for questioning gender identity, is a culture where it's harder to train alignment researchers that genuinely understand the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-language-and-cognition on a _deep_ level, when the social web around them will do anything to prevent them from [invalidating someone's identity](http://unremediatedgender.space/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/). — @@ -275,13 +261,8 @@ Just _how dumb_ do you think we are? [_Defect!_](/2017/Sep/grim-trigger-or-the-p Stereotypically, heterosexual marriages tend not to last when the AGP husband's eggshell cracks. -In "Interpersonal Entanglement", Yudkowsky had speculated that gay couples might have better relationships, since they don't have to deal with the mismatch. - -Stereotypically, AGP-taxon trans women have a tendency to pair up with each other. - better than pretending not to have a theory - but let me start with the simple story first.) @@ -317,16 +298,6 @@ just not the kind that enter women's bike races and gloat about it it's all so tiresome -Everyone else shot first - - - -> First, it is not enough to learn something, and tell the world about it, to get the world to believe it. Not even if you can offer clear and solid evidence, and explain it so well that a child could understand. You need to instead convince each person in your audience that the other people who they see as their key audiences will soon be willing to endorse what you have learned. -https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/12/social-proof-but-of-what.html - -Cross-gender identity is a virtually sustained or intermittently occurring wishful fantasy about being a person of the opposite sex.” Freund, K., Steiner, B.W. & Chan, S. Two types of cross-gender identity. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 11, 49–63 (1982). DOI: 10.1007/BF01541365 - -twenty-one month Category War is as long as it took to write the Sequences https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9jF4zbZqz6DydJ5En/the-end-of-sequences Reading the things I do, and talking to the people I do, I see this pattern _over and over and over_ again, where non-exclusively-androphilic trans women will, in the right context, describe experiences that _sound_ a lot like mine—having this beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing about the idea of being female, but also, separately, this erotic thing on the same theme—but then _somehow_ manage to interpret the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing as an inner "gender" and presumed brain-intersex condition, which I just—can't take seriously. (Even before contrasting to the early-onset type, which is what a brain-intersex condition _actually_ looks like.) @@ -343,30 +314,11 @@ It _follows logically_ that, in particular, if _N_ := "woman", you can't define > Michael fucking Vassar. Shit! -I'm worried about the failure mode where bright young minds [lured in](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/construction-beacons/) by the beautiful propaganda about _systematically correct reasoning_, are instead recruited into what is, effectively, the Eliezer-Yudkowsky-and-Scott-Alexander fan club. - -> I'm not trying to get Eliezer or "the community" to take a public stance on gender politics; I'm trying to get us to take a stance in favor of the kind of epistemology that we were doing in 2008. It turns out that epistemology has implications for gender politics which are unsafe, but that's more inferential steps, and ... I guess I just don't expect the sort of people who would punish good epistemology to follow the inferential steps? Maybe I'm living in the should-universe a bit here, but I don't think it "should" be hard for Eliezer to publicly say, "Yep, categories aren't arbitrary because you need them to carve reality at the joints in order to make probabilistic inferences, just like I said in 2008; this is obvious." - -https://twitter.com/caraesten/status/1092472430465929216 -> damn one extremely bad way to start my day is having the receptionist at slack say I look like a male celebrity -> I'm so mad. wow. like. I look like this right now, how could anyone ever think that was an okay thing to say??? * Dr. Will Powers [TODO: another clinical perspective: Dr. Will Powers] -Or consider Dr. Will Powers, [whose presentation on trans healthcare](https://powersfamilymedicine.com/s/Healthcare-of-the-Transgender-Patient-V60.pptx) was [praised by people from my robot cult on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/strohl89/posts/10157396578969598). I was disappointed by the the brief mention of autogynephilia [(on slide 29 of the v.6.0 presentation)](/images/powers_slide_on_agp.png): Powers says Blanchard has been disproven, but that autogynephilia does exist _very_ rarely: "[i]n my now almost 7 years of treating transgender patients, I have seen this paraphilia only once in a person requesting MtF therapy", Powers says, going on to describe the particularly delusional patient (who wanted "the largest breasts possible", and claimed he needed to become a woman to please a Russian Instagram model whom he implausibly claimed to be his girlfriend) whom he denied informed-consent treatment. - -You might ask, why am I citing Will Powers in support of my thesis, when Powers's testimony seems to contradict it? Only one case in seven years, he says. - -I cite it because—surprise! _Powers was lying._ [In a November 2020 post to his own subreddit, he opens up](https://www.reddit.com/r/DrWillPowers/comments/jx9io9/my_official_post_on_my_personal_opinion_on/): - -> Every time I try and speak on this, I get attacked. People discredit what I have to say, call it harmful, and hateful. [...] I've previously stated I had one of these in my practice. I stated that, because I didn't want to push the narrative that it was common because I get literally eviscerated every time I try and talk about it. In reality, I see it fairly often. Almost once a month. Probably at least 10 times a year. [...] Continuing to lie about it and act like it isn't happening is a disservice to transgender people as a whole. - -You might think, - -This comment in particular is really something— -https://www.reddit.com/r/DrWillPowers/comments/jxh3mz/in_this_thread_help_me_and_this_community_come_up/gd0mytr/ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vjmw8tW6wZAtNJMKo/which-parts-are-me @@ -379,9 +331,6 @@ But how would that work? The experience described by this trope would be somethi The problem is that, in the real world, the guys who are jacking off to the _fantasy_ of knowing what it's like to be female, are being motivated by a variation in _male_ sexuality. -A common trope in female transformation erotica (search for _tg caption blog_ if you want examples) is that sexuality "goes with the body": in these stories, men who have been magically swapped bodies with women, often express excitement or horror (depending on the story and the author) about the discovery that they're attracted to guys now—or alternatively, express gratitude that the woman he swapped with was a lesbian. - -Intuitively, when I imagine how I want transformation technology to work, I imagine speaking accents "going with the body". Native speakers of a language are more likely to confuse homophones, because https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/wAW4ENCSEHwYbrwtn/other-people-s-procedural-knowledge-gaps/comment/yTdJm7JjPJPynwS3a Or there was the time I took issue with someone in the _Overcoming Bias_ comment section addressed me as "Mr.": @@ -399,5 +348,4 @@ Me pretending to be dumb about someone not pretending to be dumb about my initia , something you should be able to ["consider [...] open-mindedly and then steal only the good parts"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YicoiQurNBxSp7a65/is-clickbait-destroying-our-general-intelligence). - -linking to the Twitter thread about chromosomes actually isn't fair; that wasn't the point EY was making (https://archive.is/y5V9i) \ No newline at end of file +linking to the Twitter thread about chromosomes actually isn't fair; that wasn't the point EY was making (https://archive.is/y5V9i) diff --git a/notes/trans-kids-on-the-margin-sections.md b/notes/trans-kids-on-the-margin-sections.md index 3b57dce..72a573f 100644 --- a/notes/trans-kids-on-the-margin-sections.md +++ b/notes/trans-kids-on-the-margin-sections.md @@ -237,3 +237,8 @@ As we've seen from many of our friends, MtF transitions in the teens or twenties ### A.1. The Story About My Name [TODO: tell the story about how I tried using "Z.M." as if it were a first name because I wanted a gender-neutral byline (never mind that "Zachary" is an order of magnitude more common than "Zoë" and "Zelda" put together; I didn't really think it through) and I wanted my byline to be the same as what people called me in real life, but it didn't "stick", in part because "Z. M." doesn't feel like a name, and in part because a lot of people were still trained on calling me Zack, and the whole affair was really traumatizing for me. Moral: switching costs are not trivial—not having to pay the mundane, practical costs turned out to be _far more important_ to me-as-a-whole-person than my conscious verbal ideological whim of "It would be cool to have a gender-neutral name".] + + +---- + +Apparently, it's not hard for subtle social incentives to nudge an ordinary male child into self-reporting "I'm a girl", not because of any underlying trans disposition, but for the lack of information to determine an answer on the basis of anything other than subtle social incentives: if no one can say, "You're a boy because boys are the ones with penises" (because that's not what people in Berkeley are supposed to believe in 2020), it's not obvious how the child is supposed to figure that out independently.