However weird I must have seemed, I have trouble imagining what anyone else tells the shrinks, given the pile of compelling evidence summarized earlier that most trans women are, in fact, guys like me. If I _wanted to_, I could cherry-pick pieces of evidence from my life to weave a more congruent narrative about always having been a girl on the inside. (Whatever than means! It still seems kind of sexist for that to mean something!) As a very small child, I remember asking for (and receiving, because I had good '90s liberal parents) [Polly Pocket](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polly_Pocket), and a pink-and-purple girl's scooter with hearts. I could go on about [my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity) that emerged shortly after puberty.
-But (as I told the LCSW) I would _know_ that I was cherry-picking. HSTS-taxon boys are identified as effiminate _by others_. [You know it when you see it, even when you're ideologically prohibited from _knowing_ that you know.](TODO: write "Gaydar Jamming" and linky) That's—not me. I [don't even _want_ that to be me](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#if-i-have-to-choose). I definitely have a gender _thing_, but I have a pretty detailed model of what I think the thing actually is in the real physical universe, and my model doesn't _fit_ in the ever-so-compassionate and -equitable ontology of "gender identity", which presupposes that what's going on when I report _wishing_ I were female is the _same thing_ as what's going on with actual women who (correctly) report being female.
-
-I don't think it's the same thing.
-
-
+But (as I told the LCSW) I would _know_ that I was cherry-picking. HSTS-taxon boys are identified as effiminate _by others_. [You know it when you see it, even when you're ideologically prohibited from _knowing_ that you know.](TODO: write "Gaydar Jamming" and linky) That's—not me. I [don't even _want_ that to be me](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#if-i-have-to-choose). I definitely have a gender _thing_, but I have a pretty detailed model of what I think the thing actually is in the real physical universe, and my model doesn't _fit_ in the ever-so-compassionate and -equitable ontology of "gender identity", which presupposes that what's going on when I report _wishing_ I were female is the _same thing_ as what's going on with actual women who (correctly) report being female. I don't think it's the same thing, and I think you'd have to be [crazy or a liar](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y4bkJTtG3s5d6v36k/stupidity-and-dishonesty-explain-each-other-away) to say it's plausibly the same thing.
[TODO: another thing that happened about this time was my break with progressive morality; I had never been progressive along all dimensions (Ayn Rand, registered libertarian), but antisexism was very important to me, and even after I had mostly unwound the dysfunctional parts of that, I still thought of myself as on the Blue team http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/ http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/brand-rust/ ]
-[TODO: October 2016: I wrote Eliezer to ask about the conflict with "Changing Emotions" and made a Cheerful Price offer to talk about it https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MzKKi7niyEqkBPnyu/your-cheerful-price (shut up, we're not a cult) ]
+[TODO: October 2016: another thing that happened around this time I wrote Eliezer to ask about the conflict with "Changing Emotions" and made a Cheerful Price offer to talk about it https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MzKKi7niyEqkBPnyu/your-cheerful-price (shut up, we're not a cult) ]
[it was around this time I snuck a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism_ into the [MIRI](https://intelligence.org/) office library. (It seemed like something Harry Potter-Evans-Verres would do—and ominously, I noticed, not like something Hermione Granger would do.)]
--- /dev/null
+Title: Gaydar Jamming
+Date: 2022-05-08 21:00
+Category: commentary
+Tags: anecdotal, ideology
+Status: draft
+
+Two related anecdotes on the power of ideology over observation—
+
+One day in high school journalism class, the topic came up
+
+
+/images/crossdreaming_notebook_samples.png
+
+
+very distinctive voice
+
+base rates
+
+"Calculus III"
The same general principles of reasoning apply to psychological theories, even though psychology is a much more difficult subject matter and our available theories are correspondingly much poorer and vaguer. There's no way to make precise quantitative predictions about a human's behavior the way we can about the movements of the planets, but we still know _some_ things about humans, which get expressed as high-level generalities that nevertheless admit many exceptions: if you don't have the complicated true theory that would account for everything, then simple theories plus noise are better than _pretending not to have a theory_. As you learn more, you can try to pin down a more complicated theory that explains some of the anomalies that looked like "noise" to the simpler theory.
-What does this look like for psychological theories? In the crudest form, when we notice a pattern of traits that go together, we give it a name.
+What does this look like for psychological theories? In the crudest form, when we notice a pattern of traits that go together, we give it a name. Sometimes people go through cycles of elevated arousal and hyperactivity, punctuated by pits of depression. After seeing the same distinctive patterns in many such cases, doctors decided to reify it as a diagnosis, ["bipolar disorder"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipolar_disorder).
+
+If we notice further patterns _within_ the group of cases that make up a category, we can spit it up into sub-categories: a diagnosis of bipolar I requires a full-blown manic episode, but hypomania and a major depressive episode qualify one for bipolar II.
+
+Are bipolar I and bipolar II "really" different conditions?
+
+
+
+
-[If a category seems to come into types, you can reify those as separate sub-categories, like bipolar I and II. The idea that there's something to the idea that bipolar I and II are "different", is s]
[In the case of male-to-female transsexualism, straight and gay trans women seem different. Many authors agree to this simple story! e.g., Veale, Vitale, possibly Serano 2020 —but they have different detailed theories as to how the two clusters come about—the simple story is a useful approximation even if you don't know how to pin down the more detailed story]
Let me explain.
-
-
[What are the reasons transitioning could possibly make sense to someone?—]
[1. actually being really feminine]
postyud; Yudkowskyism without Yudkowsky
-if you know Reality is red, blue, or green, and I know Reality is red but am trying to maximize the probability you assign to green, I can truthfully say "it's not blue"
\ No newline at end of file
+if you know Reality is red, blue, or green, and I know Reality is red but am trying to maximize the probability you assign to green, I can truthfully say "it's not blue"
+
+Gell-Mann amnesia
Minor—
_ Gaydar Jamming (L.B. and R.H.)
-_ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/30/sports/nonbinary-runners-races.html (h/t https://www.unz.com/isteve/run-of-the-mill-also-ran-finally-wins-a-running-race-just-by-calling-himself-nonbinary/ )
_ my medianworld: https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1619639#reply-1619639
_ Happy Meal
+++ /dev/null
-S _ Don't Negotiate With Terrorist Memeplexes
-
-
-Q Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer; Or, Could Self-Reports Really Be That Wrong??
-Blegg Mode
-The Categories Were Made for Man in Order to Make Predictions
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff