From 4afcd533677df30b879c5b2162992dd8dda0509f Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Sat, 14 May 2022 14:53:09 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] Saturday redemption cycle 2: "Gaydar" towards the second anecdote --- .../student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war.md | 2 +- content/drafts/gaydar-jamming.md | 13 ++++++++----- 2 files changed, 9 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-) diff --git a/content/2022/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war.md b/content/2022/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war.md index 6bc2fc3..61bee2a 100644 --- a/content/2022/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war.md +++ b/content/2022/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war.md @@ -25,7 +25,7 @@ But making $9.40 an hour at the supermarket indefinitely (and paying a nominal r Somehow, this seemed more of a daunting problem than learning linear algebra. To make a dumb story short (I tried [career college](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heald_College) briefly on the theory that they could _just_ teach me job-stuff without them fraudulently claiming credit for my education, then found that horrible and traumatizing for the same reasons as regular school and quit, then thought I could study for the same [certifications](https://www.comptia.org/certifications/which-certification) on my own, then took a differential equations class at community college just for fun and to prove that my math self-study measured up to standards—and did poorly, leaving me devastated and feeling obligated to finish my degree after all in order to prove that I could), I eventually ended up back in college again, at community college, and then San Francisco State, my father not willing to pay for me to go back to the University in Santa Cruz again. -Now that I had a higher form of existence to contrast it with, going back to school was _awful_. I hated the social role of "student" and the whole diseased culture of institutional servitude. I despised the way everyone, including and especially the other "students", talked about their lives and the world in terms of classes and teachers and degrees and grades, rather than talking about the _subject matter_. I wanted it to be _normal_ for boasts of achievement to take the form of "I proved this theorem and thereby attained _deep insight into the true structure of mathematical reality_", rather than "I got an 'A' on the test." +Now that I had a higher form of existence to contrast it with, going back to school was _awful_. I hated the social role of "student" and the whole diseased culture of institutional servitude. I despised the way everyone, including and especially the other "students", talked about their lives and the world in terms of classes and teachers and degrees and grades, rather than talking about the _subject matter_. I wanted it to be _normal_ for boasts of achievement to take the form of "I proved this theorem and thereby attained _deep insight into the true structure of mathematical reality_", rather than "I got an 'A' on the test." (Where, sure, it makes sense to take a test occasionally in order to verify that one isn't self-deceiving about the depth of one's insight into the true structure of mathematical reality, or in order to provide some amount of third-party-legible _evidence about_ the depth of one's insight into the true structure of mathematical reality—but the test score itself isn't the _point_.) diff --git a/content/drafts/gaydar-jamming.md b/content/drafts/gaydar-jamming.md index d7e182e..ffcad7b 100644 --- a/content/drafts/gaydar-jamming.md +++ b/content/drafts/gaydar-jamming.md @@ -14,15 +14,18 @@ Naïvely, of course, you'd think it would be ideologically _validating_: L. and Ideology isn't my style anymore—or rather, these days, my ideology is about the accuracy of my probabilistic predictions, rather than denying the possibility or morality of making probabilistic predictions about humans. Looking back, I will not only unhesitatingly bite the bullet on femininity being a real thing, I'll also venture to make a bold and seemingly "unrelated" prediction: L. was gay. -I mean, I don't "know" that; I have no recollection of the kid ever _saying_ so in my presence. Nevertheless, between the reading (like about the [Cohen's _d_](/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/) ≈ [1.3 effect size of childhood sex-typed behavior on sexual orientation](/papers/bailey-zucker-childhood_sex-typed_behavior_and_sexual_orientation.pdf)) and the ideological deprogramming I've done since, I feel pretty comfortable +I mean, I don't "know" that; I have no recollection of the kid ever _saying_ so in my presence. Nevertheless, between the reading (like about the [Cohen's _d_](/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/) ≈ [1.3 effect size of childhood sex-typed behavior on sexual orientation](/papers/bailey-zucker-childhood_sex-typed_behavior_and_sexual_orientation.pdf)) and the ideological deprogramming I've done since, I feel pretty comfortable putting my weight on a prediction derived from the crudest stereotype insofar as I expect the stereotype to actually get the right answer, in contrast to my teenage ideological fever dream of not wanting that to be possible. -Surely I must have known the s +Something I still can't reconstruct from memory—or maybe [lack the exact concepts to express](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie)—is to what extent I "sincerely" thought that stereotyping didn't _work_, and to what extent I was self-righteously "playing dumb". Though my notebooks bear no record of it, I must have known _about_ the stereotype. +[...] +A few years later, in the early 'tens, while [slumming in community college](/2022/Apr/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war/#back-to-school) +he had very distinctive voice. -very distinctive voice +I'm not even sure how to describe it in terms of lower-level precepts, but you know it when you hear it. And I wondered, on the basis of his voice, whether he was gay. -base rates +At the point in my ideological evolution, -"Calculus III" +base rates -- 2.17.1