>
> —["Dane-Geld"](http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/dane_geld.html) by Rudyard Kipling
-There's this slogan meant to illustrate a principle in game theory: "Don't negotiate with terrorists." Imagine you're a political leader and terrorists have taken some of your citizens hostage and promise to release them if you meet their demands. You should refuse the deal, the argument goes, no matter how much you desperately want your people back safe, because agreeing would create an incentive for the terrorists to take more hostages; if you're the kind of agent that pays ransoms, blackmailing you is a reliable profit opportunity.
+There's this slogan meant to illustrate a principle in game theory: "Don't negotiate with terrorists." Imagine you're a political leader and terrorists have taken some of your citizens hostage and promise to release them if you meet their demands. You should refuse the deal, the argument goes, no matter how much you desperately want your people back safe, because agreeing would create an incentive for the terrorists to take more hostages: if you're the kind of agent that pays ransoms, blackmailing you is a reliable profit opportunity.
+
+----
New ideas are constantly being invented and talked about in the world; some of them catch on, and spread, and spawn entire subcultures and political movements. Given that ideas vary, replicate themselves (from mind to mind, by means of speech or writing), and moreover, _aren't equally good_ at replicating themselves, it can be useful to [think of the spread of ideas as an _evolutionary_ process](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics): the winning ideas are not necessarily the ones that are true or useful, but rather the ones that are _better at replicating themselves_.
There's a word in the psychology literature for the beautiful feeling at the center of my life: _autogynephilia_ ("love of oneself as a woman"), coined in the context of a theory that it represented one of two distinct etiologies for male-to-female transsexualism. This theory didn't seem to be the standard mainstream view, and, I learned, people get really mad at you when you mention it in a comment section, so for a long time I self-identified with the _word_ "autogynephilia", but assumed that the associated _theory_ was false. _I_ wasn't one of those people who were _actually trans_; I was just, you know, one of those guys who is pointedly insistent on not being _proud_ of the fact that they're guys. (And who dimly suspects that this is somehow causually related to [...])
-Recent life events led me to do some reading—Kay Brown's blog [_On the Science of Changing Sex_](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/), Anne Lawrence's [_Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism_](http://www.annelawrence.com/mtimb.html), and Imogen Binnie's novel [_Nevada_](http://haveyoureadnevada.com/) (this item is reverse-scored)—and I concluded that, no, wait, actually the theory looks _correct_, and I _do_ have the same underlying psychological condition that leads people to transition. That in fact, my story till now may even be _typical_ of people who transition in their thirties, right up to the ["Oh, I just want to _experiment_ with hormones, I'm not actually going to _transition_" part](/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/) (although I still think I'm smarter than that).
+Recent life events led me to do some reading—Kay Brown's blog [_On the Science of Changing Sex_](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/), Anne Lawrence's [_Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism_](http://www.annelawrence.com/mtimb.html), and Imogen Binnie's novel [_Nevada_](http://haveyoureadnevada.com/) (this item is reverse-scored)—and I concluded that, no, wait, actually the theory looks _correct_, and I _do_ have the same underlying psychological condition that leads people to transition. That in fact, my story till now may even be _typical_ of people who transition in their thirties, right up to the ["Oh, I just want to _experiment_ with hormones, I'm not actually going to _transition_" phase](/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/) (although I still think I'm smarter than that).
This is _really important information_! This is _not_ the thing someone should have to piece together themselves at age 28. This is the sort of thing that should just be in the standard sex-ed books, that boys having these kinds of feelings can read at age 15 and immediately say, "Ah, I'm in the same taxon as lesbian trans women, and heterosexual crossdressers, and guys who have these fantasies but don't do anything about them in particular, and bigender people who are on low-dose hormones and choose how to 'present' in different social venues; I wonder which of these strategies is best for me given my exact circumstances?"
Title: Friendship Practices of the Secret-Sharing Plain Speech Valley Squirrels
Date: 2017-01-01 5:00
Category: fiction
-Tags: deniably allegorical
+Tags: epistemic horror, deniably allegorical
Status: draft
In the days of auld lang syne on Earth-that-was, in the Valley of of Plain Speech in the hinterlands beyond the Lake of Ambiguous Fortune, there lived a population of pre-intelligent squirrels. Historical mammologists have classified them into two main subspecies: the west-valley ground squirrels and the east-valley tree squirrels—numbers 9792 and 9794 in Umi's grand encyclopædia of Plain Speech creatures, but not necessarily respectively: I remember the numbers, but I can never remember which one is which.
My question: why does Serano so blithely assume that _Yes_ respondents are just being wiseasses?
-It's [not that self-reports must necessarily be interpreted literally](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/), nor that wiseasses don't exist, nor even that wiseass-<em>Yes</em>es are likely to be rarer than genuine-<em>Yes</em>es.
+It's [not that self-reports must necessarily be interpreted literally](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/). (Although it's less clear how Serano, who calls for people to "stop projecting what we wish were true about gender and sexuality onto other people, and instead learn to yield to their unique individual indentities, experiences, and perspectives", justifies her skepticism.) Nor is it that wiseasses don't exist, nor even that wiseass-<em>Yes</em>es are likely to be rarer than genuine-<em>Yes</em>es.
+
+Rather, speaking as someone who has gender problems and is [interested in doing _something_ about them](/tag/not-a-transition/) while also having reservations about what actually-transitioning would do to my health and social life, I'm wary that conceptions of transness that model it as a preëxisting atomic quality intrinsic to a person (whether it's called _gender identity_, _subconscious sex_, or something else) tend to obscure the the reality that undergoing the [series of interventions](/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/) that constitutes transitioning is, necessarily, [_a choice_](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/1327/)—an _important_ choice that needs to be made on the basis of a careful consideration of _all_ the costs and benefits, including base, temporal concerns like personal finance.
+
+The logic of normative decisionmaking given limited resources is well-studied under the name _microeconomics_, one prominent feature of which is the _law of demand_: as something becomes cheaper, people demand more of it. The law of demand can be seen as a consequence of the principle of [_marginalism_](http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Marginalism.html): decisions are made "on the margin", relative to an agent's current situation. Rather than needing or not-needing some good as a discrete binary, there exists a tension between the agent's need and its ability to do without, a that tension is resolved into a decision by the calculus of cost: of how much of everything else in life that would need to be sacrificed in order to acquire the good, whether the sacrifice be extracted in money, in time, in exhaustion—in anguish—in blood.
+
+
-Rather, speaking as someone who has gender problems and is [interested in doing _something_ about them](/tag/not-a-transition/) while also having strong reservations about what actually-transitioning would do to my health and social life, I'm wary that conceptions of transness that model it as a preëxisting atomic quality intrinsic to a person (whether it's called _gender identity_, _subconscious sex_, or something else) tend to obscure the the reality that the act of transitioning is, necessarily, [_a choice_](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/1327/)—an _important_ choice that needs to be made on the basis of a careful consideration of _all_ the costs and benefits, including base, temporal concerns like personal finance.
-The logic of normative decisionmaking given limited resources is well-studied under the name _microeconomics_, one prominent feature of which is the _law of demand_: as something becomes cheaper, people demand more of it. The law of demand can be seen as a consequence of the principle of _marginalism_: decisions are made "on the margin", relative to an agent's current situation. Rather than needing or not-needing some good as a discrete binary, there exists a tension between the agent's need and its ability to do without, the balance between which is
If you're trans, you _need_ to transition, and if you're not-trans, then you mustn't
TODO links:
* A. Grieve-Smith on spectrum of transition-need: https://transblog.grieve-smith.com/2017/01/28/all-other-things-being-equal/
-* Econlib on marginalism: http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Marginalism.html
+
Title: "Love Like You"
Date: 2020-01-01
Category: fiction
-Tags: Steven Universe, autogynephilia
+Tags: autogynephilia, epistemic horror, Steven Universe
Status: draft
I've decided that the [_Steven Universe_ ending theme](http://genius.com/Rebecca-sugar-love-like-you-lyrics) is about the man's reaction when a woman tells her autogynephilic boyfriend that she thinks he's obviously a trans woman and should transition.
http://neat-dyke.tumblr.com/post/154578646192/negative-social-effects-of-my-mastectomy
productivity lifehacks: do excellent work in an extremely low-status field that you'd be mortified to be primarily known for, thus forcing yourself to also do excellent work in another area in order to rescue your reputation
+
+https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7757667
+https://clarissasblog.com/2014/05/14/i-dont-want-to-hire-women/
+
+drawn by a cis woman?? http://weknowmemes.com/2013/11/perks-of-being-a-woman/
+
+"Impact of Using Non-Birth Sex on the Interpretation of Spirometry Data in Subjects With Air-Flow Obstruction": http://rc.rcjournal.com/content/early/2017/11/28/respcare.05586
+
+decrease in IQ on puberty suppression: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2017.00528/full
+
+AGP pride flag origin: https://4archive.org/board/lgbt/thread/8628058/attached-image-is-the-agp-pride-flag-black-represents-the-r
+
+https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/6uc18b/has_any_of_you_felt_horny_when_using_a_packer_for/
+
+https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kbxw7v/i-was-robbed-of-my-transgender-childhood
CURRENT PUSH—
-1 Dec— ✓ A Common Misunderstanding; Or, ...
-2 Dec— Lesser-Known Demand Curves
-3 Dec— Don't Negotiate With Terrorist Memeplexes; Or, ...
-4 Dec— ✓ Interlude XII (four lights)
-5 Dec— There's a Land That I See; Or, The Spirit of Intervention
-6 Dec— The View From Nowhere
+6 Dec— Lesser-Known Demand Curves
+7 Dec— Don't Negotiate With Terrorist Memeplexes; Or, ...
+8 Dec— ✓ Interlude XII (four lights)
+9 Dec— There's a Land That I See; Or, The Spirit of Intervention
+10 Dec— The View From Nowhere
MAIN SEQUENCE (13)—
Q Time Travel Isn't Real; Or, Yes, the Only Real Trans Woman Is a Transitioned Trans Woman
Q Reduce Gender Identities to Gender Goals
The Categories Were Made for Man in Order to Make Predictions
-NON-SEQUENCE A (9)—
+NON-SEQUENCE A (11)—
Laser 2
Q Memoirs of My Recent Madness, Part II: Friendship Survived
Imperfect Trait Measurements Regress to the Mean
Faster Than Science (Transgender Edition)
Q Review of Nevada
Product Review: FaceApp
+The Elephant in the Brain http://www.overcomingbias.com/2017/12/join-the-debate.html
NON-SEQUENCE B (9)—
Q I Want to See You Be Brave
-autoscheduler bugs:
-* UTC discrepancy
-* user discrepancy
-* git pull not happening
-
-zmd@MaximumLikelihood:~/Documents/Ultimately_Untrue_Thought$ git push server master
-Counting objects: 5, done.
-Delta compression using up to 12 threads.
-Compressing objects: 100% (5/5), done.
-Writing objects: 100% (5/5), 607 bytes | 0 bytes/s, done.
-Total 5 (delta 4), reused 0 (delta 0)
-remote: fatal: Not a git repository: '.'
-remote: {datetime.datetime(2017, 11, 27, 5, 0)}
-remote: set()
-remote: about to schedule "bash -c 'cd /home/mtsw/working && source bin/activate && pelican /home/mtsw/working/content -o /var/www/html -s /home/mtsw/working/publishconf.py'" for 2017-11-27 05:00:00
- fd304c3..1965363 master -> master
-
-
-
bigger click-target pagination links
What's going on with caching behavior??
-debug scheduled posting if needed
link to archives page
archives group posts by month
Pelican bug report or patch re spacing in file
other image width
more Korra cosplay photos??
even more fine-grained tag size?? (I tried this once and made it look worse :/)
+make the autoscheduler compatible with force-pushing (`reset --hard` instead of `pull`)
+Atom vs. RSS proper??
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff