From d92b92d6e08f7d2c3bf4d8153e985ce755a4f520 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2020 22:25:43 -0800 Subject: [PATCH] check in --- content/2020/book-review-human-diversity.md | 2 +- ...sm-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md | 2 ++ ...on-the-margin-and-harms-from-misleading-training-data.md | 2 ++ notes/notes.txt | 6 +++++- notes/post_ideas.txt | 5 ++--- notes/tweet_pad.txt | 2 ++ 6 files changed, 14 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-) diff --git a/content/2020/book-review-human-diversity.md b/content/2020/book-review-human-diversity.md index 20222b1..30f434a 100644 --- a/content/2020/book-review-human-diversity.md +++ b/content/2020/book-review-human-diversity.md @@ -163,7 +163,7 @@ The problem that Bayesian reasoning poses for naïve egalitarian moral intuition I used to be a naïve egalitarian. I was very passionate about it. I was eighteen years old. I am—again—still fond of the moral sentiment, and eager to renormalize it into something that makes sense. (Some egalitarian anxieties do translate perfectly well into the Bayesian setting, as I'll explain in a moment.) But the abject horror I felt at eighteen at the mere suggestion of _making generalizations_ about _people_ just—doesn't make sense. It's not even that it _shouldn't_ be practiced (it's not that my heart wasn't in the right place), but that it _can't_ be practiced—that the people who think they're practicing it are just confused about how their own minds work. -Give people photographs of various women and men and ask them to judge how tall the people in the photos are, as [Nelson _et al._ 1990 did](/papers/nelson_et_al-everyday_base_rates_sex_stereotypes_potent_and_resilient.pdf), and people's guesses reflect both the photo-subjects' actual heights, but also (to a lesser degree) their sex. Unless you expect people to be perfect at assessing height from photographs (when they don't know how far away the cameraperson was standing, aren't ["trigonometrically omniscient"](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-epistemic/#LogiOmni), _&c._), this behavior is just _correct_: men really are taller than women on average, so P(true-height|apparent-height, sex) ≠ P(height|apparent-height) [because of](https://humanvarieties.org/2017/07/01/measurement-error-regression-to-the-mean-and-group-differences/) [regression to the mean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean) (and women and men regress to different means). But [this all happens subconsciously](/2020/Apr/peering-through-reverent-fingers/): in the same study, when the authors tried height-matching the photographs (for every photo of a woman of a given height, there was another photo in the set of a man of the same height) _and telling_ the participants about the height-matching _and_ offering a cash reward to the best height-judge, more than half of the stereotyping effect remained. It would seem that people can't consciously readjust their learned priors in reaction to verbal instructions pertaining to an artificial context. +Give people photographs of various women and men and ask them to judge how tall the people in the photos are, as [Nelson _et al._ 1990 did](/papers/nelson_et_al-everyday_base_rates_sex_stereotypes_potent_and_resilient.pdf), and people's guesses reflect both the photo-subjects' actual heights, but also (to a lesser degree) their sex. Unless you expect people to be perfect at assessing height from photographs (when they don't know how far away the cameraperson was standing, aren't ["trigonometrically omniscient"](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-epistemic/#LogiOmni), _&c._), this behavior is just _correct_: men really are taller than women on average, so P(true-height|apparent-height, sex) ≠ P(true-height|apparent-height) [because of](https://humanvarieties.org/2017/07/01/measurement-error-regression-to-the-mean-and-group-differences/) [regression to the mean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean) (and women and men regress to different means). But [this all happens subconsciously](/2020/Apr/peering-through-reverent-fingers/): in the same study, when the authors tried height-matching the photographs (for every photo of a woman of a given height, there was another photo in the set of a man of the same height) _and telling_ the participants about the height-matching _and_ offering a cash reward to the best height-judge, more than half of the stereotyping effect remained. It would seem that people can't consciously readjust their learned priors in reaction to verbal instructions pertaining to an artificial context. Once you understand at a _technical_ level that probabilistic reasoning about demographic features is both epistemically justified, _and_ implicitly implemented as part of the way your brain processes information _anyway_, then a moral theory that forbids this starts to look less compelling? Of course, statistical discrimination on demographic features is only epistemically justified to exactly the extent that it helps _get the right answer_. Renormalized-egalitarians can still be properly outraged about the monstrous tragedies where I have moral property P but I _can't prove it to you_, so you instead guess _incorrectly_ that I don't just because other people who look like me mostly don't, and you don't have any better information to go on—or tragedies in which a feedback loop between predictions and social norms creates or amplifies group differences that wouldn't exist under some other social equilibrium. diff --git a/content/drafts/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md b/content/drafts/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md index 64554ac..b3fce54 100644 --- a/content/drafts/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md +++ b/content/drafts/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md @@ -353,6 +353,8 @@ Worried about leading survey questions pointing to the wrong conclusion, and wan [TODO: Nevada. Nevada specifically dissess the Blanchard account, as do people I talk to. One said AGP transition could be possible but very rare, and the same goddamned person is on the record as being into TF porn at 19 when their dysphoria kicked in; or someone dissed Blanchard, but endorses Anne Vitale, which makes the same observations and arrives at the same taxonomy, but dresses it up in socially-desirable language] +[TODO: Dr. Will Powers backlink] + [...] http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm diff --git a/content/drafts/trans-kids-on-the-margin-and-harms-from-misleading-training-data.md b/content/drafts/trans-kids-on-the-margin-and-harms-from-misleading-training-data.md index 90b24e2..4cd5820 100644 --- a/content/drafts/trans-kids-on-the-margin-and-harms-from-misleading-training-data.md +++ b/content/drafts/trans-kids-on-the-margin-and-harms-from-misleading-training-data.md @@ -15,3 +15,5 @@ https://www.reddit.com/r/Parenting/comments/ij4npe/mommy_im_actually_a_girl/ https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/before-2 Planned Parenthood on "How to Know If Your Kid Is Transgender": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJdafLVf6xo + +Trans Kids: It's Time to Talk film: https://archive.org/details/TransKidsItsTimeToTalk diff --git a/notes/notes.txt b/notes/notes.txt index ed2c026..241b3f7 100644 --- a/notes/notes.txt +++ b/notes/notes.txt @@ -2212,4 +2212,8 @@ Pay gap among Uber drivers: https://nber.org/papers/w26380 Millenials are children: https://archive.fo/KOHS3 -I should read the new Julia Serano paper. Serano, J. (2020). Autogynephilia: A scientific review, feminist analysis, and alternative ‘embodiment fantasies’ model. The Sociological Review, 68(4), 763–778. +I should read the new Julia Serano paper. Serano, J. (2020). Autogynephilia: A scientific review, feminist analysis, and alternative ‘embodiment fantasies’ model. The Sociological Review, 68(4), 763–778. (Note on skimming: it's actually significantly less mendacious than her previous work!) + +The map is not the territory. For an ideal observer passively viewing the world from behind a Cartesian veil, the map reflects the territory, and never the other way around: beliefs and reality interact in only one direction. Unfortunately, human social life is a little more complicated than this: when our beliefs about the world affect the reality of what people do, then we can have self-fulfilling prophecies: the territory bulldozed to fit the map. But self-fulfilling prophecies are still only a second-order effect: reality affects your thoughts directly (via sensory perception), whereas your thoughts only affect reality insofar as someone cares what you think. + +https://www.transgendertrend.com/trans-kids-reject-family-not-other-way-around/ diff --git a/notes/post_ideas.txt b/notes/post_ideas.txt index 6053b89..a6c0e12 100644 --- a/notes/post_ideas.txt +++ b/notes/post_ideas.txt @@ -1,10 +1,9 @@ +- Crossing the Line _ Dr. Will Powers on Autogynephilia - Survey Data on Cis and Trans Women in Haskell (waiting for 2020 data) -- Comment on "The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and Probabilistic Inference" -- Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to - +- Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to Iffy— - Amy Wax linkpost diff --git a/notes/tweet_pad.txt b/notes/tweet_pad.txt index 3d97131..90e099a 100644 --- a/notes/tweet_pad.txt +++ b/notes/tweet_pad.txt @@ -1,3 +1,5 @@ +Funny coincidence to come across @SeriesTangled lyrics extensively referenced in a cognitive-science-of-gender blog post (looks like a really cool paper about language and color perception from [...], too) + Free-speech conditions in the country as a whole have gotten worse, but conditions in my immediate social graph have gotten better, as people who previously wanted to stay on the good side of Blue Egregore hit the "I can't live like this" breaking point that I hit in October 2016 Do we even know what a fair election looks like? "Trump legitimately loses but falsely alleges vote fraud tipped it to Biden" and "Trump appears to lose, alleges election fraud tipped it to Biden, and this allegation happens to be true" have very similar consequences! 1/2 -- 2.17.1