From faeab50b6263d86727cfbb7337a8234915792bbf Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2020 23:11:52 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] "Sexual Dimorphism": category of personal identity, into conclusion --- ...-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md | 4 -- ...ences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md | 41 +++++++++---------- ...exual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-notes.md | 22 ++++++++++ 3 files changed, 41 insertions(+), 26 deletions(-) diff --git a/content/drafts/i-tell-myself-to-let-the-story-end-or-a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md b/content/drafts/i-tell-myself-to-let-the-story-end-or-a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md index 4adec0f..dd9f21a 100644 --- a/content/drafts/i-tell-myself-to-let-the-story-end-or-a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md +++ b/content/drafts/i-tell-myself-to-let-the-story-end-or-a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md @@ -119,10 +119,6 @@ If we _actually had_ the magical perfect sex change technology described in "Cha [^motherfuckers]: We had an entire Sequence about this! You lying motherfuckers! -If we _actually had_ the magical perfect sex change technology described in "Changing Emotions"—if it cost $200,000, I would take out a bank loan and _do it_, and live happily ever after. - -(Though I'd call myself a transwoman—one word, for the same reason the _verthandi_ in "Failed Utopia #4-2" got their own word. I currently write "trans woman", two words, as a strategic concession to the shibboleth-detectors of my target audience:[^two-words] I don't want to to _prematurely_ scare off progressive-socialized readers on account of mere orthography, when what I actually have to say is already disturbing enough.) - [^two-words]: For the unfamiliar: the [doctrine here](https://medium.com/@cassiebrighter/please-write-trans-women-as-two-words-487f153444fb) is that "transwoman" is cissexist, because "trans" is properly an adjective indicating a type of woman. I definitely don't want to call (say) my friend "Irene" a man. That would be crazy! Because **her transition _actually worked_.** Because it actually worked _on the merits_. _Not_ because I'm _redefining concepts in order to be nice to her_. When I look at her, whatever algorithm my brain _ordinarily_ uses to sort people into "woman"/"man"/"not sure" buckets, returns "woman." 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 61d3af8..53da409 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 @@ -80,6 +80,8 @@ Well. The reason I'm blogging this story at all is because I'm scared that in or It's because I was _straight_. Because I loved women, and wanted to do right by them. It's an _identificatory_ kind of love, inseparable from my sense of self—but if it isn't _exactly_ the same thing that most straight men feel, it can only be a slight variation. +------ + Anyway, that's some background about where I was at, personally and ideologically, _before_ I fell in with this robot cult. My ideological committment to psychological-sex-differences denialism made me uncomfortable when the topic of sex differences happened to come up on the blog—which wasn't particularly often at all, but in such a _vast_ body of work as the Sequences, it did happen to come up a few times (and those few times are the subject of this blog post). @@ -163,6 +165,7 @@ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/veN86cBhoe7mBxXLk/categorizing-has-consequences [a higher-dimensional statistical regularity in the _conjunction_ of many variables](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy-1) 96.8% classification from MRI https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6374327/ ] +[the wrists: http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/yune_et_al-beyond_human_perception_sexual_dimorphism_in_hand_and_wrist_radiographs.pdf] [talk about mapping from one distribution to another: e.g. height] The same moral applies to sex differences in psychology. I'm a pretty weird guy, in more ways than one. I am not prototypically masculine. Most men are not like me. If I'm allowed to cherry-pick what measurements to take, I can name ways in which I'm more female-typical than male-typical. (For example, I'm _sure_ I'm above the female mean in [Big Five Neuroticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits).) But "weird" represents a much larger space of possibilities than "normal", much as [_nonapples_ are a less cohesive category than _apples_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2mLZiWxWKZyaRgcn7/selling-nonapples). @@ -191,15 +194,18 @@ Part of what makes this so hard to talk about _besides_ it being weird and wrong But I have to try. A clue: when I'm ... uh. When I'm—well, you know ... -(I guess I can't evade responsibility for the fact that I am, in fact, blogging about this) +(I guess I can't evade responsibility for the fact that I am, in fact, blogging about this. This is the eye of the hurricane; this is the only way I can [protect](http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/)—) -A clue: when I'm masturbating, and imagining all the forms I would take if the magical transformation technology were real (the frame story can vary, but the basic idea is always the same), I don't think I'm very _good_ at first-person visualization? The _content_ of the fantasy is about _me_ being a woman (I mean, having a woman's body), but the associated mental imagery mostly isn't the first-person perspective I would actually experience if the fantasy were real; I'm mostly imagining a specific woman (which one, varies a lot) from the outside, admiring her face, and her voice, and her breasts, but wanting the soul behind those eyes to be _me_. Wanting _my_ body to be shaped like _that_, to be control of that avatar of beauty. +A clue: when I'm masturbating, and imagining all the forms I would take if the magical transformation technology were real (the frame story can vary, but the basic idea is always the same), I don't think I'm very _good_ at first-person visualization? The _content_ of the fantasy is about _me_ being a woman (I mean, having a woman's body), but the associated mental imagery mostly isn't the first-person perspective I would actually experience if the fantasy were real; I'm mostly imagining a specific woman (which one, varies a lot) from the outside, admiring her face, and her voice, and her breasts, but wanting the soul behind those eyes to be _me_. Wanting _my_ body to be shaped like _that_, to be in control of that avatar of beauty, and just to live like that. If the magical transformation technology were real, I would want a mirror. (And in the real world, I would probably crossdress a _lot_ more often, if I could pass to myself in the mirror.) What's going on here? The sexologist James Cantor [speculates](https://youtu.be/q3Ub65CwiRI?t=281): mirror neurons. +https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-the-teacher-s-password + + [in particular, being Actually Female would undermine my _reason_ for wanting a female body] [if I could get HRT without the psych effects, that would actually be an improvement] [the fact that I'm happy with my breasts is suggestive of body-mods still being positive, even if the desire is a confusion] @@ -220,36 +226,27 @@ To which I now realize the correct answer is—_yes!_ Yes, it's cheating! Catego The rules don't change when the entity X happens to be "my female analogue" and the category Y happens to be "me". The ordinary concept of "personal identity" tracks how the high-level features of individual human organisms are stable over time. You're going to want to model me-on-Monday and me-on-Thursday as "the same" person even if my Thursday-self woke up on the wrong side of bed and has three whole days of new memories. When interacting with my Thursday-self, you're going to be using your existing mental model of me, plus a diff for "He's grumpy" and "Haven't seen him in three days"—but that's a _very small_ diff, compared to the diff between me and some other specific person you know, or the diff between me and a generic human who you don't know. -In everyday life, we're almost never in doubt as to which entities we want to consider "the same" person, but we can concoct science-fictional thought experiments that force [the Sorites problem](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/) to come up. What if you could "merge" two people—construct a human with a personality "in between" yours and mine, that had both of our memories? (You know, like [Tuvix](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tuvix_(episode)).) Would that person be me, or you, or both, or neither? (Derek Parfit has [a whole _book_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasons_and_Persons#Personal_identity) full of these.) - -The thing about Sorites problems is that [they're _incredibly boring_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLJv2CoRCgeC2mPgj/the-fallacy-of-gray). The map is not the territory. The distribution of sand-configurations we face in everyday life is such that we usually have an answer as to whether the sand "is a heap" or "is not a heap." - - - -That's what [Phineas Gage's](/2017/Dec/interlude-xi/) friends meant when [they said he was "no longer Gage"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage) after the railroad accident. - - -The map is not the territory: +In everyday life, we're almost never in doubt as to which entities we want to consider "the same" person, but we can concoct science-fictional thought experiments that force [the Sorites problem](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/) to come up. What if you could "merge" two people—construct a human with a personality "in between" yours and mine, that had both of our memories? (You know, like [Tuvix](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tuvix_(episode)).) Would that person be me, or you, or both, or neither? (Derek Parfit has [a book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasons_and_Persons#Personal_identity) with lots of these.) +[TODO: change scenario to interpolate between people, _at what point_ does it become] -https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries +The thing about Sorites problems is that they're _incredibly boring_. The map is not the territory. The distribution of sand-configurations we face in everyday life is such that we usually have an answer as to whether the sand "is a heap" or "is not a heap", but in the edge-cases where we're not sure, arguing about whether to use the word "heap" _doesn't change the configuration of sand_. You might think that if [the category is blurry](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLJv2CoRCgeC2mPgj/the-fallacy-of-gray), you therefore have some freedom to [draw its boundaries](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) the way you prefer—but [the cognitive function of the category is for making probabilistic inferences on the basis of category-membership](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries), and those probabilistic inferences can be quantitatively better or worse. Preferences over concept definitions that aren't about maximizing predictive accuracy are preferences _for deception_. +That's why defining your personal identity to get the answer you want is cheating. If the answer you wanted was actually _true_, you could just say so without needing to _want_ it. -In order for claims about "personal identity" to _mean_ something, they have to have truth conditions—the "personal identity" communication signal has to _refer to_ something in the real physical universe +When [Phineas Gage's](/2017/Dec/interlude-xi/) friends [said he was "no longer Gage"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage) after the railroad accident, what they were trying to say was that interacting with post-accident Gage was _more relevantly similar_ to interacting with a stranger than it was to interacting with pre-accident Gage, even if Gage-the-physical-organism was contiguous along the whole strech of space time. -[TODO: figure this out—E.Y. arguably disagrees? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vjmw8tW6wZAtNJMKo/which-parts-are-me ] +Same principle when Yudkowsky wrote, "If I fell asleep and woke up as a true woman [...] I don't think I'd call her 'me'"—maybe he was wrong, but if so, that cashes out as being wrong _about_ the some precise statement about the actual properties of similarity metrics on persons (which could be computed in principle, even if _we_ don't know how); I can't change the actual structure of minds in the world by defining my _identity_ differently. -You can't change the current _referent_ of "personal identity" with the semantic mind game of declaring that "personal identity" now refers to something else! How dumb do you think we are?! But more on this later.) +------- +Anyway, that—briefly (I mean it)—is the story about my weird obligate sex fantasy about being a woman and how I used to think that it was morally wrong to believe in psychological sex differences, but then I changed my mind and decided that psychological sex differences are probably real after being deeply influenced by this robot-cult blog about the logic of Science. It's probably not that interesting? If we were still living in the socio-political environment of 2009, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be blogging about my weird sexual obsessions (as evidenced by the fact that, in 2009, I wasn't blogging about them). -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 +Imagine my surprise to discover that, in the current year, my weird sexual obsessions are at the center -[fallacy of compression _ironed in to the culture_, that resists attempts to deconfuse] -[I know _exactly_ what's wrong with me] +I'm weird, but I'm not _that_ weird. -[TODO: two-types as a first approximation] -[TODO: others like me, gender of the gaps] -[TODO: the last sequence was "Craft and the Community", which has aged by far the worst—part of the robot cult's "common interest of many causes" was getting everything right, including reformulating trans ideology to be sane, which should benefit everyone because of dark-side-epistemology—but that's not realistic] +Men who fantasize about being 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? diff --git a/notes/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-notes.md b/notes/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-notes.md index 6c1f5b4..5fc9201 100644 --- a/notes/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-notes.md +++ b/notes/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-notes.md @@ -106,4 +106,26 @@ https://archive.is/7Wolo > the massive correlation between exposure to Yudkowsky’s writings and being a trans woman (can’t bother to do the calculations but the connection is absurdly strong) Namespace's point about the two EYs +link back to Murray review: can't oppress people on the basis of sex if sex _doesn't exist_ + https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2020/10/24/is-autogynephilia-real-the-phenomenon-the-construct-the-theory/ + +https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vjmw8tW6wZAtNJMKo/which-parts-are-me + +If we _actually had_ the magical perfect sex change technology described in "Changing Emotions"—if it cost $200,000, I would take out a bank loan and _do it_, and live happily ever after. + +(Though I'd call myself a transwoman—one word, for the same reason the _verthandi_ in "Failed Utopia #4-2" got their own word. I currently write "trans woman", two words, as a strategic concession to the shibboleth-detectors of my target audience:[^two-words] I don't want to to _prematurely_ scare off progressive-socialized readers on account of mere orthography, when what I actually have to say is already disturbing enough.) + +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 + +[fallacy of compression _ironed in to the culture_, that resists attempts to deconfuse] + +[I know _exactly_ what's wrong with me] + +[TODO: two-types as a first approximation] + +[TODO: others like me, gender of the gaps] + +[TODO: the last sequence was "Craft and the Community", which has aged by far the worst—part of the robot cult's "common interest of many causes" was getting everything right, including reformulating trans ideology to be sane, which should benefit everyone because of dark-side-epistemology—but that's not realistic] + +[TODO: are we getting new recruits? A lot of the names I see are old] \ No newline at end of file -- 2.17.1