About / Best-Of

And everything around her is a silver pool of light
The people who surround her feel the benefit of it
It makes you calm
She holds you captivated in her palm

Suddenly I see (suddenly I see)
This is what I want to be
Suddenly I see (suddenly I see)
Why the hell it means so much to me

—KT Tunstall, "Suddenly I See"

Seemingly hazardous but actually careful and humane thoughts about gender, social science, and epistemology, by a man who aspires to something more. Featuring a special focus on the phenomenon of autogynephilia ("love of oneself as a woman") in males, and the project of reformulating liberal-feminist and queer-theoretic goals for a universe where evolution actually happened, introspection doesn't work, and Bayesian reasoning continues to work even when some of the hypotheses are about people.

Sorry 'bout this.

A selection of some favorite posts—

• on the cognitive function of categorization in relation to sex and "gender":
  • "The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"
  • "Reply on Adult Human Females"
  • "Self-Identity Is a Schelling Point"
  • "Reply on Fully Consensual Gender"
• on political distortions of our collective understanding of human psychology:
  • "Psychology Is About Invalidating People's Identities"
  • "Don't Negotiate With Terrorist Memeplexes"
  • "The Social Construction of Reality and the Sheer Goddamned Pointlessness of Reason"
  • "Book Review: Charles Murray's Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class"
• on the personal experience of autogynephilic "gender dysphoria":
  • "A Beacon Through the Darkness; Or, Getting It Right the First Time"
• my Whole Dumb Story on all of the above:
  • "Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"
  • "Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer"
  • "A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning"
  • "If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them"
  • "Agreeing With Stalin In Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles"

This blog was previously under a pseudonym for branding and market-segmentation purposes, but I eventually dropped it.

I warmly welcome inquiries at [email protected].