As far as I can tell, Professor, I'm just doing what _you_ taught me—carve reality at the joints, speak the truth, even if your voice trembles, make an extraordinary effort when you've got Something to Protect.
+
+"Beliefs about the self aren't special" is part of the whole AI reflectivity thing, too!!
+
+> decision-theoretically, it's also not their fault. They were all following a strategy that was perfectly reasonable until they ran into someone with an anomalously high insistence that words should mean things
+
+Sure: everyone in a conflict thinks they're acting defensively against aggressors infringing on their rights, because in the cases where everyone agrees what the "actual" property rights are, there's no conflict.
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
+
+
+We _know_ that there are straight guys with this weird fetish for which _AGP_ seems like an apt term, who don't _think_ of themselves as anything other than straight guys with a weird fetish. (Guys don't like to talk about their weird fetishes in public under their own name, but we can infer their existence because there's a _lot_ of porn and [subpornographic cultural artifacts](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManIFeelLikeAWoman) catering to them.)
+
+And if you _read_ the things non-exclusively-androphilic trans women say in appropriately secluded forums—not the sob pieces for the general public about their horrible, unbearable lifelong dysphoria, but the subreddits with a steady stream of n00bs dropping by to ["wonder[ ] if anybody else discarded this as a weird fetish" to which the top-voted comment says "Yes we have all been there"](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/m0t41r/i_alway_thought_i_had_some_weird_fetish/)—you see very similar experience-reports.
+
+I'm taking the audacious step of pointing to these two groups, noting the similarities, and yelling, "Hey! It looks like these are actually the _same people_!"—and then having to go to desperate lengths to formalize what "the same" is supposed to mean in this context when virtually everyone in the second group says "Nu-uh!"
+
+But people in the first group who don't take that audacious step—which I didn't until after I moved to Berkeley in 2016 despite reading a _lot_ about related topics (it's _amazing_ how much you can read without "putting the pieces together", if no one puts them together for you)—don't _realize_ they have an interest that would require a crusade to protect.
+
+is _the most important thing in my life_. When I have questions about the thing, I want _answers_. I want the _real_ answers, the answers that are _actually, literally true_.
+
+And it looks like there's this mass movement of people spreading blatant lies about what the thing is, who, _when questioned by someone sympathetic in a sufficiently secluded context_, will fess up: "Oh, that's the lie-to-children version; it's not, like, _literally_ true, but there's politics involved; [it gives the average cis person the necessary information to treat trans people respectfully](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/01/27/lies-to-cis-people/)."
+
+Why does _anyone_ think this is remotely ethically acceptable behavior?! For people who love to pontificate on how no one can say whether or not Pluto "is a planet", it sure seems to presuppose some pre-given carving of the world into a coalition of hostile "cis people" (who are OK to lie to), and a coalition of friendly "trans people" (who share the coalition's notion of "respect" and won't blow the whistle on lies).
+
+But—_who_ is "cis", and therefore OK to lie to? Am _I_ cis? If we don't have clear public diagnostic criteria of what it means to be transgender, how am I supposed to _tell_? [I'm sick of this.](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/)
+
+having to argue that "HRT is not cosmetic"
\ No newline at end of file
https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2021-brown.pdf
https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2017/3/13/21111588/it-s-official-new-york-s-prospective-teachers-will-no-longer-have-to-pass-controversial-literacy-exa
+
+For the Singularity https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/05/the-artificial-life-taboo-in-biology.html
That carefree selfishness is gone now, subordinated to the war effort. And so soon after the last war, too.
-The first shots of the last war came in December 2007. I was a schoolstudent at the University in Santa Cruz. Coming into that quarter, I had been excited to take the famous "Introduction to Feminisms" course, only to find, as the quarter wore on, that it seemed to be taught in a dialect of English I could not speak. The texts and the professor kept describing features of Society as _oppression_ as if simply to condemn them. I agreed with the condemnation, of course, but I couldn't understand it as _knowledge_ and could not produce such sentences in my own voice; I wanted an explanation of how the oppression _worked_.
+The first shots of the last war came on 29 November 2007. I was a schoolstudent at the University in Santa Cruz. Coming into that quarter, I had been excited to take the famous "Introduction to Feminisms" course, only to find, as the quarter wore on, that it seemed to be taught in a dialect of English I could not speak. The texts and the professor kept describing features of Society as _oppression_ as if simply to condemn them. I agreed with the condemnation, of course, but I couldn't understand it as _knowledge_ and could not produce such sentences in my own voice; I wanted an explanation of how the oppression _worked_.
My subsequent difficulty in writing the required papers for that course weighed on my soul. The failure to live up to expectations would have been shameful for any course, but as a _male_ squandering the privilege of being allowed to take "Introduction to Feminisms", it was simply unbearable. Unable to reach the prescribed word count for the final paper, I had a hysterical nervous breakdown at the end of the quarter, crying and screaming for hours, "I betrayed them; I betrayed them." (The professor and the T.A., who were kind and deserved better than to have to teach a male who _couldn't write_.)
> only straight men talk about women's bodies like this.
+on this account cis transhumanists are sane
+> Trans transhumanists: omg what if hot-swappable body parts? Real functioning tails and cat ears? Permanently purple hair?
+> Cis transhumanists: with this nootropic stack and optimized nutrient slurry my tragic meat machine is 8% more efficient at converting calories into javascript
+https://twitter.com/mspowahs/status/957995279092875264
+
+I get this one a lot. So much so that I had to waste three years of my life explaining and re-explaining the cognitive function of categorization in exhaustive, exhaustive detail: see ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) (6500 words, February 2018), ["Where to Draw the Boundaries?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) (3800 words, April 2019), and ["Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception) (9900 words, January 2021).
More minor or Needs Development—
+_ "Your Politics Are Interesting" as Worst Compliment
_ I Wish You Well
_ Gaydar Jamming (L.B. and R.H.)
_ Friendship Practices of the Secret-Sharing Plain Speech Valley Squirrels
_ Book Review: Kathryn Paige Harden's The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality (September)
Filler links—
+_ Link: Halifax Pride: https://www.halifaxpride.com/news/2021/5/28/halifax-public-library-response
_ Link: You're Kidding, Right?
_ Link: Lease Bound comic
_ Link: Quillette on Sons Becoming Daughters
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/before-2
+https://childhood-transition.org/
+
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
In less artificial contexts (actually photograph a classmate), 3-5 year olds get it right: Miller 1984
+> Both the liberation that can come from having a narrow biological definition of sex and the imprisonment that can come from not having such a definition are strikingly illustrated by an encounter my son Jeremy had the day he naively decided to wear barrettes to nursery school. Several times that day, another little boy insisted that Jeremy must be a girl because "only girls wear barrettes." After repeatedly asserting that "wearing barrettes doesn't matter; being a boy means having a penis and testicles," Jeremy finally pulled down his pants as a way of making his point more convincingly. The boy was not impressed. He simply said, "Everybody has a penis; only girls wear barrettes."
+
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+
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff