> There was a study that supposedly proved this test worked. But parts of it confused me, and it was done on a totally different population that didn't generalize to hospital inpatients.
-The reason it makes any sense at all for you to be skeptical, is because our beliefs about the existence and etiology of "bipolar disorder", don't completely stand or fall on this particular test. People _already_ had many observations pointing to the idea of "bipolar disorder" as a common cluster of symptoms. From your years of clinical experience, you know with your eyes what the cluster looks like. So when people whose favorite team lost the Super Bowl happen to answer "Yes" to the some of the same survey questions as people who you've _seen_ in the frenzy of mania and depths of depression, you generate the hypothesis: "Gee, maybe different populations are interpreting the question differently." Not as a _certainty_—maybe further research will provide more solid evidence that "bipolar disorder" isn't what you thought—but there's nothing un-Bayesian about thinking that your brain's pattern-matching capabilities are on to something important that this particular survey instrument isn't catching. You're not scientifically obligated to _immediately_ jump to "Bipolar Is Common and Not Especially Related to Mania or Depression."
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-If you're skeptical that a survey about moods done on a totally different population might not generalize to hospital inpatients, I think you should be still more skeptical that that a survey _about sexuality_ might not generalize to people _of different sexes_! Even if you're skeptical of most evopsych accounts of sex differences, this is the _one domain_ where I think we have very strong prior reasons to expect cross-sex [empahtic inference](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fpWoXpNv83BAHJdc/the-comedy-of-behaviorism) to fail!
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-This is why I expect "But lots of cis women are autogynephilic too!!" claims to fall apart on further examination.
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-(As I mentioned in my email of [TODO], you're far from the first person to come up with the dodge.) [TODO Moser link]
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-I'm not unscientifically denying the survey data itself; I'm saying we have enough prior knowledge about what females and males are like, to strongly suspect that women who answer Yes to the same survey questions as AGP males are mostly in the position of saying that they got really happy and then really sad when their team lost the Super Bowl.
+The reason it makes any sense at all for you to be skeptical, is because our beliefs about the existence and etiology of "bipolar disorder", don't completely stand or fall on this particular test. People _already_ had many observations pointing to the idea of "bipolar disorder" as a common cluster of symptoms. From your years of clinical experience, you think you know with your eyes what the cluster looks like. So when people whose favorite team lost the Super Bowl happen to answer "Yes" to the some of the same survey questions as people who you've _seen_ in the frenzy of mania and depths of depression, you generate the hypothesis: "Gee, maybe different populations are interpreting the question differently." Not as a _certainty_—maybe further research will provide more solid evidence that "bipolar disorder" isn't what you thought—but there's nothing un-Bayesian about thinking that your brain's pattern-matching capabilities are on to something important that this particular survey instrument isn't catching. You're not scientifically obligated to _immediately_ jump to "Bipolar Is Common and Not Especially Related to Mania or Depression."
-Naturally, I can't know with any confidence (without more interviewing) what's really going on in Elena's head. But to match one anecdote with another: when I _first_ came out to Sarah Constantin in 2016,
+This shouldn't even be surprising when you consider the ambiguity and fuzziness of natural language: faced with a question, and prompted to give a forced-choice Yes/No or 1–7 response, people will assume the question was "meant for them" and try to map the words into some reference point in their experience. If the question _wasn't_ "meant for them"—if people who have never had a manic episode are given a set of questions formulated for a population of bipolar people—or if actual women are given a set of questions formulated for a population of males with a sex fantasy about being female—I think you _do_ get a lot of "Do I _X_? Sure, I guess so" out-of-distribution response behavior that doesn't capture what's actually going on.
+If you're wary that a survey about moods done on a totally different population might not generalize to hospital inpatients, I think you should be still more wary that that a survey _about sexuality_ might not generalize to people _of different sexes_! Even if you're skeptical of most evopsych accounts of psychological sex differences (there were no trucks or makeup in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness), sexuality is the _one domain_ where I think we have very strong prior reasons to expect cross-sex [empahtic inference](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fpWoXpNv83BAHJdc/the-comedy-of-behaviorism) to fail.
+This is why I expect the standard "But cis women are autogynephilic too!!" cope to fall apart on further examination. I'm not denying the survey data itself (neither yours nor [Moser 2009](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/moser-agp_in_women.pdf)'s); I'm saying we have enough prior knowledge about what females and males are like, to strongly suspect that women who answer Yes to the same survey questions as AGP males are mostly in the position of saying that they got really happy and then really sad when their team lost the Super Bowl.
+The reason this isn't special pleading that makes my theory unfalsifiable, is because my skepticism is _specifically_ about these mass survey questions where we haven't done the extra work to try to figure out whether the 1–5 question means the same thing to everyone; I'm happy to talk about qualitative predictions about what we see when we have a _higher-bandwidth_ channel into someone's mind than a 1–5 survey response.
+You _start_ to get into these issues with the "My literal body is arousing" account in the post, but I expect more digging to reveal a different picture. Of course, I can't know with any confidence (without more interviewing) what's really going on in [TODO: unredact name1]'s head. But to match one anecdote with another: when I _first_ came out to [TODO: name2] in 2016, her _first_ reaction was, "I can relate to this; I'm turned on by the idea of being a hot girl", but then when I went into _a little more detail_ (linking to the ["Man, I Feel Like a Woman"](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManIFeelLikeAWoman) TVTropes page), she revised to, "Wait, no, I can't relate this at all; like, you _want_ to have breasts?" (I regret that this is paraphrased from memory; I haven't been able to find the transcript because I think Sarah deleted her Facebook account a couple times.)
+My common-sense intuition is that the experience of being happy and proud with one's own sexed body (which is pretty common and normal), and autogynephilic/autoandrophilic cross-sex fantasies (which are less common, but by no means rare), are superficially similar enough that they can generate overlapping reports if you _just_ ask "Would it be sexy to be her, 1–5", but that when you poke at the details, they're going to turn out to be _very_ different psychological phenomena that you shouldn't lump together as "autogenderphilia".
+Fundamentally, I just have _so much_ trouble _actually_ believing that [name1]'s experience of her body is more relevantly similar to mine than [name2]'s, _even if_ [name1] ends up using similar English words as me ("it's hot that I have breasts"). I can conceive of being wrong about this, but I don't think the _SSC_ survey data is a powerful enough instrument to make that call—I'd want in-depth interviews and preferably the kind of physical arousal measurements that Michael Bailey's lab does.
+And if you _do_ think the _SSC_ survey is a powerful enough
+I would totally respect it if you were merely _uncertain_ about the AGP→gender-ID _vs._ gender-ID→AGP causality; I can't expect everyone to share my parsimony intuitions.
+But on Discord, you said "it just seemed totally wrong"!
-[TODO: reasons to be suspicious that women aren't reporting the same thing]
[TODO: behavioral genetics and trans]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff