Title: A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
-Date: 2021-02-15 11:00
+Date: 2022-01-01 11:00
Category: commentary
-Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, Star Trek, Julia Serano, two-type taxonomy
+Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, two-type taxonomy
Status: draft
> If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.
>
> —Zora Neale Hurston
-My first clue that I wasn't living in that world came from—Eliezer Yudkowsky. (Well, not my first _clue_. In retrospect, there were lots of _clues_. My first wake-up call.) In [a 26 March 2016 Facebook post](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228), he wrote—
+[In a February 2021 Facebook post, Eliezer Yudkowsky inveighs against English's system of singular third-person pronouns](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228). As a matter of clean language design, you shouldn't have to identify a subject as female or male just in order to refer to them with a pronoun.
-> I'm not sure if the following generalization extends to all genetic backgrounds and childhood nutritional backgrounds. There are various ongoing arguments about estrogenlike chemicals in the environment, and those may not be present in every country ...
-> Still, for people roughly similar to the Bay Area / European mix, I think I'm over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women.
+Considerations—
+ * Scifi and mystery authors
+ * it and they are more ambiguous, can refer to non-agent parts of speech
+ * they gets conjugated as a plural even in singular usage
+ * pronouns in English are less bad than Hebrew nouns
-(***!?!?!?!?***)
-
-> A lot of them don't know it or wouldn't care, because they're female-minds-in-male-bodies but also cis-by-default (lots of women wouldn't be particularly disturbed if they had a male body; the ones we know as 'trans' are just the ones with unusually strong female gender identities). Or they don't know it because they haven't heard in detail what it feels like to be gender dysphoric, and haven't realized 'oh hey that's me'. See, e.g., <https://sinesalvatorem.tumblr.com/post/141690601086/15-regarding-the-4chan-thing-4chans> and <https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender-identity/>
-
-(Reading _this_ post, I _did_ realize "oh hey that's me"—it's hard to believe that I'm not one of the "20% of the ones with penises" Yudkowsky is talking about here—but I wasn't sure how to reconcile that with the "are actually women" (***!?!?!?!?***) characterization, coming _specifically_ from the guy who taught me (in "Changing Emotions") how blatantly, ludicrously untrue and impossible that is.)
-
-> But I'm kinda getting the impression that when you do normalize transgender generally and MtF particularly, like not "I support that in theory!" normalize but "Oh hey a few of my friends are transitioning and nothing bad happened to them", there's a _hell_ of a lot of people who come out as trans.
-
-> If that starts to scale up, we might see a really, really interesting moral panic in 5-10 years or so. I mean, if you thought gay marriage was causing a moral panic, you just wait and see what comes next ...
-
-Indeed—here we are five years later, and _I am panicking_. (As 2007–9 Sequences-era Yudkowsky [taught me](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good), and 2016 Facebook-shitposting-era Yudkowsky seemed to ignore, the thing that makes a moral panic really interesting is how hard it is to know you're on the right side of it—and the importance of [panicking sideways](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative) [in policyspace](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/policy_tugowar.html) when the "maximize the number of trans people" and "minimize the number of trans people" coalitions are both wrong.)
-
-At the time, this was merely _very confusing_. I left a careful comment in the Facebook thread (with the obligatory "speaking only for myself; I obviously know that I can't say anything about anyone else's experience" [disclaimer](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/against-disclai.html)), quietly puzzled at what Yudkowsky could _possibly_ be thinking ...
-
-A month later, I moved out of my mom's house in [Walnut Creek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walnut_Creek,_California) to go live with a new roommate in an apartment on the correct side of the [Caldecott tunnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Tunnel), in [Berkeley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley,_California): closer to other people in the robot-cult scene and with a shorter train ride to my coding dayjob in San Francisco.
-
-(I would later change my mind about which side of the tunnel is the correct one.)
-
-In Berkeley, I met a number of really interesting people who seemed quite similar to me along a lot of dimensions, but also very different along some other dimensions having to do with how they were currently living their life! (I see where the pattern-matching facilities in Yudkowsky's brain got that 20% figure from.) This prompted me to do a little bit more reading in some corners of the literature that I had certainly _heard of_, but hadn't already mastered and taken seriously in the previous twelve years of reading everything I could about sex and gender and transgender and feminism and evopsych. (Kay Brown's blog, [_On the Science of Changing Sex_](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/), was especially helpful.)
-
-So, a striking thing about my series of increasingly frustrating private conversations and subsequent public Facebook meltdown (the stress from which soon landed me in psychiatric jail, but that's [another](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) [story](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/)) was the tendency for some threads of conversation to get _derailed_ on some variation of, "Well, the word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that," often with a link to ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), a 2014 post by Scott Alexander, the _second_ most prominent writer in our robot cult.
-
-So, this _really_ wasn't what I was trying to talk about; _I_ thought I was trying to talk about autogynephilia as an _empirical_ theory in psychology, the truth or falsity of which obviously cannot be altered by changing the meanings of words. Psychology is a complicated empirical science: no matter how "obvious" I might think something is, I have to admit that I could be wrong—not just as a formal profession of modesty, but _actually_ wrong in the real world.
-
-But this "I can define the word _woman_ any way I want" mind game? _That_ part was _absolutely_ clear-cut. That part of the argument, I knew I could win. [We had a whole Sequence about this](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong) back in 'aught-eight, in which Yudkowsky pounded home this _exact_ point _over and over and over again_, that word and category definitions are _not_ arbitrary, because there are criteria that make some definitions _perform better_ than others as "cognitive technology"—
-
-> ["It is a common misconception that you can define a word any way you like. [...] If you believe that you can 'define a word any way you like', without realizing that your brain goes on categorizing without your conscious oversight, then you won't take the effort to choose your definitions wisely."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences)
-
-> ["So that's another reason you can't 'define a word any way you like': You can't directly program concepts into someone else's brain."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions)
-
-> ["When you take into account the way the human mind actually, pragmatically works, the notion 'I can define a word any way I like' soon becomes 'I can believe anything I want about a fixed set of objects' or 'I can move any object I want in or out of a fixed membership test'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions)
-
-> ["There's an idea, which you may have noticed I hate, that 'you can define a word any way you like'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i2dfY65JciebF3CAo/empty-labels)
-
-> ["And of course you cannot solve a scientific challenge by appealing to dictionaries, nor master a complex skill of inquiry by saying 'I can define a word any way I like'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y5MxoeacRKKM3KQth/fallacies-of-compression)
-
-> ["Categories are not static things in the context of a human brain; as soon as you actually think of them, they exert force on your mind. One more reason not to believe you can define a word any way you like."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/veN86cBhoe7mBxXLk/categorizing-has-consequences)
-
-> ["And people are lazy. They'd rather argue 'by definition', especially since they think 'you can define a word any way you like'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yuKaWPRTxZoov4z8K/sneaking-in-connotations)
-
-> ["And this suggests another—yes, yet another—reason to be suspicious of the claim that 'you can define a word any way you like'. When you consider the superexponential size of Conceptspace, it becomes clear that singling out one particular concept for consideration is an act of no small audacity—not just for us, but for any mind of bounded computing power."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/82eMd5KLiJ5Z6rTrr/superexponential-conceptspace-and-simple-words)
-
-> ["I say all this, because the idea that 'You can X any way you like' is a huge obstacle to learning how to X wisely. 'It's a free country; I have a right to my own opinion' obstructs the art of finding truth. 'I can define a word any way I like' obstructs the art of carving reality at its joints. And even the sensible-sounding 'The labels we attach to words are arbitrary' obstructs awareness of compactness."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes)
-
-> ["One may even consider the act of defining a word as a promise to \[the\] effect [...] \[that the definition\] will somehow help you make inferences / shorten your messages."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace)
-
-[TODO: contrast "... Not Man for the Categories" to "Against Lie Inflation";
-When the topic at hand is how to define "lying", Alexander
-Scott has written exhaustively about the dangers of strategic equivocation ("Worst Argument", "Brick in the Motte"); insofar as I can get a _coherent_ posiiton out of the conjunction of "... for the Categories" and Scott's other work, it's that he must think strategic equivocation is OK if it's for being nice to people
-https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/16/against-lie-inflation/
-]
-
-So, because I trusted people in my robot cult to be dealing in good faith rather than fucking with me because of their political incentives, I took the bait. I ended up spending three years of my life re-explaining the relevant philosophy-of-language issues in exhaustive, _exhaustive_ detail.
-
-At first I did this in the object-level context of gender on this blog, in ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), and the ["Reply on Adult Human Females"](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/). And that would have been the end of the philosophy-of-language track specifically ...
-
-Later, after [Eliezer Yudkowsky joined in the mind games on Twitter in November 2018](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521) [(archived)](https://archive.is/ChqYX), I _flipped the fuck out_, and ended up doing more [stictly abstract philosophy-of-language work](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [on](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) [the](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fmA2GJwZzYtkrAKYJ/algorithms-of-deception) [robot](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4hLcbXaqudM9wSeor/philosophy-in-the-darkest-timeline-basics-of-the-evolution)-[cult](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YptSN8riyXJjJ8Qp8/maybe-lying-can-t-exist) [blog](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception).
-
-An important thing to appreciate is that the philosophical point I was trying to make has _absolutely nothing to do with gender_. In 2008, Yudkowsky had explained that _for all_ nouns N, you can't define _N_ any way you want, because _useful_ definitions need to "carve reality at the joints."
-
-It [_follows logically_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WQFioaudEH8R7fyhm/local-validity-as-a-key-to-sanity-and-civilization) that, in particular, if _N_ := "woman", you can't define the word _woman_ any way you want. Maybe trans women _are_ women! But if so—that is, if you want people to agree to that word usage—you need to be able to _argue_ for why that usage makes sense on the empirical merits; you can't just _define_ it to be true. And this is a _general_ principle of how language works, not something I made up on the spot in order to attack trans people.
-
-In 2008, this very general philosophy of language lesson was _not politically controversial_. If, in 2018–present, it _is_ politically controversial (specifically because of the fear that someone will try to apply it with _N_ := "woman"), that's a _problem_ for our whole systematically-correct-reasoning project! What counts as good philosophy—or even good philosophy _pedagogy_—shouldn't depend on the current year!
-
-There is a _sense in which_ one might say that you "can" define a word any way you want. That is: words don't have intrinsic ontologically-basic meanings. We can imagine an alternative world where people spoke a language that was _like_ the English of our world, except that they use the word "tree" to refer to members of the empirical entity-cluster that we call "dogs" and _vice versa_, and it's hard to think of a meaningful sense in which one convention is "right" and the other is "wrong".
-
-But there's also an important _sense in which_ we want to say that you "can't" define a word any way you want. That is: some ways of using words work better for transmitting information from one place to another. It would be harder to explain your observations from a trip to the local park in a language that used the word "tree" to refer to members of _either_ of the empirical entity-clusters that the English of our world calls "dogs" and "trees", because grouping together things that aren't relevantly similar like that makes it harder to describe differences between the wagging-animal-trees and the leafy-plant-trees.
-
-If you want to teach people about the philosophy of language, you should want to convey _both_ of these lessons, against naïve essentialism, _and_ against naïve anti-essentialism. If the people who are widely respected and trusted [(almost worshipped)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts) as the leaders of the systematically-correct-reasoning community, [_selectively_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AdYdLP2sRqPMoe8fb/knowing-about-biases-can-hurt-people) teach _only_ the words-don't-have-intrinsic-ontologically-basic-meanings part when the topic at hand happens to be trans issues (because talking about the carve-reality-at-the-joints part would be [politically suicidal](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting)), then people who trust the leaders are likely to get the wrong idea about how the philosophy of language works—even if [the selective argumentation isn't _conscious_ or deliberative](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie) and [even if every individual sentence they say permits a true interpretation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly).
-
-(As it is written of the fourth virtue of evenness, ["If you are selective about which arguments you inspect for flaws, or how hard you inspect for flaws, then every flaw you learn how to detect makes you that much stupider."](https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues))
-
-_Was_ it a "political" act for me to write about the cognitive function of categorization on the robot-cult blog with non-gender examples, when gender was secretly ("secretly") my _motivating_ example? In some sense, yes, but the thing you have to realize is—
-
-_Everyone else shot first_. The timestamps back me up here: my ["... To Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) (February 2018) was a _response to_ Alexander's ["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) (November 2014). My philosophy-of-language work on the robot-cult blog (April 2019–January 2021) was (stealthily) _in response to_ Yudkowsky's November 2018 Twitter thread. When I started trying to talk about autogynephilia with all my robot cult friends in 2016, I _did not expect_ to get dragged into a multi-year philosophy-of-language crusade! That was just _one branch_ of the argument-tree that, once begun, I thought should be easy to _definitively settle in public_ (within our robot cult, whatever the _general_ public thinks).
-
-I guess by now the branch is as close to settled as it's going to get? Alexander ended up [adding an edit note to the end of "... Not Man to the Categories" in December 2019](https://archive.is/1a4zV#selection-805.0-817.1), and Yudkowsky would go on to clarify his position on the philosophy of language in Facebook posts of [September 2020](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10158853851009228) and [February 2021](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228). So, that's nice.
-
-[TODO: although I think even with the note, in practice, people are going to keep citing "... Not Man for the Categories" in a way that doesn't understand how the note undermines the main point]
-
-But I will confess to being quite disappointed that the public argument-tree evaluation didn't get much further, much faster? The thing you have understand about this whole debate is—
-
-_I need the correct answer in order to decide whether or not to cut my dick off_. As I've said, I _currently_ believe that cutting my dick off would be a _bad_ idea. But that's a cost–benefit judgement call based on many _contingent, empirical_ beliefs about the world. I'm obviously in the general _reference class_ of males who are getting their dicks cut off these days, and a lot of them seem to be pretty happy about it! I would be much more likely to go through with transitioning if I believed different things about the world—if I thought my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing were a brain-intersex condition, or if I still believed in my teenage psychological-sex-differences denialism (such that there would be _axiomatically_ no worries about fitting with "other" women after transitioning), or if I were more optimistic about the degree to which HRT and surgeries approximate an actual sex change.
-
-In that November 2018 Twitter thread, [Yudkowsky wrote](https://archive.is/y5V9i):
-
-> _Even if_ somebody went around saying, "I demand you call me 'she' and furthermore I claim to have two X chromosomes!", which none of my trans colleagues have ever said to me by the way, it still isn't a question-of-empirical-fact whether she should be called "she". It's an act.
-
-This seems to suggest that gender pronouns in the English language as currently spoken don't have effective truth conditions. I think this is false _as a matter of cognitive science_. If someone told you, "Hey, you should come meet my friend at the mall, she is really cool and I think you'll like her," and then the friend turned out to look like me (as I am now), _you would be surprised_. (Even if people in Berkeley would socially punish you for _admitting_ that you were surprised.) The "she ... her" pronouns would prompt your brain to _predict_ that the friend would appear to be female, and that prediction would be _falsified_ by someone who looked like me (as I am now). Pretending that the social-norms dispute is about chromosomes was a _bullshit_ [weakmanning](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/) move on the part of Yudkowsky, [who had once written that](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence) "[t]o argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates[;] [a]rguing against weaker advocates proves _nothing_, because even the strongest idea will attract weak advocates." Thanks to the skills I learned from Yudkowsky's _earlier_ writing, I wasn't dumb enough to fall for it, but we can imagine someone otherwise similar to me who was, who might have thereby been misled into making worse life decisions.
-
-[TODO: ↑ soften tone, be more precise, including about "dumb enough to fall for it"]
-
-If this "rationality" stuff is useful for _anything at all_, you would _expect_ it to be useful for _practical life decisions_ like _whether or not I should cut my dick off_.
-
-In order to get the _right answer_ to that policy question (whatever the right answer turns out to be), you need to _at minimum_ be able to get the _right answer_ on related fact-questions like "Is late-onset gender dysphoria in males an intersex condition?" (answer: no) and related philosophy-questions like "Can we arbitrarily redefine words such as 'woman' without adverse effects on our cognition?" (answer: no).
-
-At the cost of _wasting three years of my life_, we _did_ manage to get the philosophy question mostly right! Again, that's nice. But compared to the [Sequences-era dreams of changing the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YdcF6WbBmJhaaDqoD/the-craft-and-the-community), it's too little, too slow, too late. If our public discourse is going to be this aggressively optimized for _tricking me into cutting my dick off_ (independently of the empirical cost–benefit trade-off determining whether or not I should cut my dick off), that kills the whole project for me. I don't think I'm setting [my price for joining](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining) particularly high here?
-
-Someone asked me: "Wouldn't it be embarrassing if the community solved Friendly AI and went down in history as the people who created Utopia forever, and you had rejected it because of gender stuff?"
-
-But the _reason_ it seemed _at all_ remotely plausible that our little robot cult could be pivotal in creating Utopia forever was _not_ "[Because we're us](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-recommending/), the world-saving good guys", but rather _because_ we were going to discover and refine the methods of _systematically correct reasoning_.
-
-If you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should be able to get the right answer even when the question _doesn't matter_. Obviously, the safety of the world does not _directly_ depend on being able to think clearly about trans issues. Similarly, the safety of a coal mine for humans does not _directly_ depend on [whether it's safe for canaries](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/canary_in_a_coal_mine): the dead canaries are just _evidence about_ properties of the mine relevant to human health. (The causal graph is the fork "canary-death ← mine-gas → human-danger" rather than the direct link "canary-death → human-danger".)
-
-If the people _marketing themselves_ as the good guys who are going to save the world using systematically correct reasoning are _not actually interested in doing systematically correct reasoning_ (because systematically correct reasoning leads to two or three conclusions that are politically "impossible" to state clearly in public, and no one has the guts to [_not_ shut up and thereby do the politically impossible](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nCvvhFBaayaXyuBiD/shut-up-and-do-the-impossible)), that's arguably _worse_ than the situation where "the community" _qua_ community doesn't exist at all.
-
-In ["The Ideology Is Not the Movement"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/) (April 2016), Alexander describes how the content of subcultures typically departs from the ideological "rallying flag" that they formed around. [Sunni and Shia Islam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shia%E2%80%93Sunni_relations) originally, ostensibly diverged on the question of who should rightfully succeed Muhammad as caliph, but modern-day Sunni and Shia who hate each other's guts aren't actually re-litigating a succession dispute from the 7th century C.E. Rather, pre-existing divergent social-group tendencies crystalized into distinct tribes by latching on to the succession dispute as a [simple membership test](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests).
-
-Alexander jokingly identifies the identifying feature of our robot cult as being the belief that "Eliezer Yudkowsky is the rightful caliph": the Sequences were a rallying flag that brought together a lot of like-minded people to form a subculture with its own ethos and norms—among which Alexander includes "don't misgender trans people"—but the subculture emerged as its own entity that isn't necessarily _about_ anything outside itself.
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-No one seemed to notice at the time, but this characterization of our movement [is actually a _declaration of failure_](https://sinceriously.fyi/cached-answers/#comment-794). There's a word, "rationalist", that I've been trying to avoid in this post, because it's the subject of so much strategic equivocation, where the motte is "anyone who studies the ideal of systematically correct reasoning, general methods of thought that result in true beliefs and successful plans", and the bailey is "members of our social scene centered around Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander". (Since I don't think we deserve the "rationalist" brand name, I had to choose something else to refer to [the social scene](https://srconstantin.github.io/2017/08/08/the-craft-is-not-the-community.html). Hence, "robot cult.")
-
-What I would have _hoped_ for from a systematically correct reasoning community worthy of the brand name is one goddamned place in the whole goddamned world where _good arguments_ would propagate through the population no matter where they arose, "guided by the beauty of our weapons" ([following Scott Alexander](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/) [following Leonard Cohen](https://genius.com/1576578)).
-
-Instead, I think what actually happens is that people like Yudkowsky and Alexander rise to power on the strength of good arguments and entertaining writing (but mostly the latter), and then everyone else sort-of absorbs most of their worldview (plus noise and conformity with the local environment)—with the result that if Yudkowsky and Alexander _aren't interested in getting the right answer_ (in public)—because getting the right answer in public would be politically suicidal—then there's no way for anyone who didn't [win the talent lottery](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) to fix the public understanding by making better arguments.
-
-It makes sense for public figures to not want to commit political suicide! Even so, it's a _problem_ if public figures whose brand is premised on the ideal of _systematically correct reasoning_, end up drawing attention and resources into a subculture that's optimized for tricking men into cutting their dick off on false pretenses. (Although note that Alexander has [specifically disclaimed aspirations or pretentions to being a "rationalist" authority figure](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/); that fate befell him without his consent because he's just too good and prolific of a writer compared to everyone else.)
-
-I'm not optimistic about the problem being fixable, either. Our robot cult _already_ gets a lot of shit from progressive-minded people for being "right-wing"—not because we are in any _useful_, non-gerrymandered sense, but because [attempts to achieve the map that reflects the territory are going to run afoul of ideological taboos for almost any ideology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting).
-
-Because of the particular historical moment in which we live, we end up facing pressure from progressives, because—whatever our _object-level_ beliefs about (say) [sex, race, and class differences](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/)—and however much many of us would prefer not to talk about them—on the _meta_ level, our creed requires us to admit _it's an empirical question_, not a moral one—and that [empirical questions have no privileged reason to admit convenient answers](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god).
-
-I view this conflict as entirely incidental, something that [would happen in some form in any place and time](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cKrgy7hLdszkse2pq/archimedes-s-chronophone), rather than having to do with American politics or "the left" in particular. In a Christian theocracy, our analogues would get in trouble for beliefs about evolution; in the old Soviet Union, our analogues would get in trouble for [thinking about market economics](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/) (as a [positive technical discipline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorems_of_welfare_economics#Proof_of_the_first_fundamental_theorem) adjacent to game theory, not yoked to a particular normative agenda).
-
-Incidental or not, the conflict is real, and everyone smart knows it—even if it's not easy to _prove_ that everyone smart knows it, because everyone smart is very careful what they say in public. (I am not smart.) Scott Aaronson wrote of [the Kolmogorov Option](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3376) (which Alexander aptly renamed [Kolmorogov complicity](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/): serve the cause of Truth by cultivating a bubble that focuses on truths that won't get you in trouble with the local political authorities. This after the Soviet mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov, who _knew better than to pick fights he couldn't win_.
-
-Becuase of the conflict, and because all the prominent high-status people are running a Kolmogorov Option strategy, and because we happen to have to a _wildly_ disproportionate number of _people like me_ around, I think being "pro-trans" ended up being part of the community's "shield" against external political pressure, of the sort that perked up after [the February 2021 _New York Times_ hit piece about Alexander's blog](https://archive.is/0Ghdl). (The _magnitude_ of heat brought on by the recent _Times_ piece and its aftermath was new, but the underlying dynamics had been present for years.)
-
-Jacob Falkovich notes, ["The two demographics most over-represented in the SlateStarCodex readership according to the surveys are transgender people and Ph.D. holders."](https://twitter.com/yashkaf/status/1275524303430262790) [Aaronson notes (in commentary on the _Times_ article)](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5310) "the rationalist community's legendary openness to alternative gender identities and sexualities" as something that would have "complicated the picture" of our portrayal as anti-feminist.
-
-Even the _haters_ grudgingly give Alexander credit for "... Not Man for the Categories": ["I strongly disagree that one good article about accepting transness means you get to walk away from writing that is somewhat white supremacist and quite fascist without at least awknowledging you were wrong."](https://archive.is/SlJo1)
-
-Given these political realities, you'd think that I _should_ be sympathetic to the Kolmogorov Option argument, which makes a lot of sense. _Of course_ all the high-status people with a public-facing mission (like building a movement to prevent the coming robot apocalypse) are going to be motivatedly dumb about trans stuff in public: look at all the damage [the _other_ Harry Potter author did to her legacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_J._K._Rowling#Transgender_people).
-
-And, historically, it would have been harder for the robot cult to recruit _me_ (or those like me) back in the 'aughts, if they had been less politically correct. Recall that I was already somewhat turned off, then, by what I thought of as _sexism_; I stayed because the philosophy-of-science blogging was _way too good_. But what that means on the margin is that someone otherwise like me except more orthodox or less philosophical, _would_ have bounced. If [Cthulhu has swum left](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified/) over the intervening thirteen years, then maintaining the same map-revealing/not-alienating-orthodox-recruits tradeoff _relative_ to the general population, necessitates relinquishing parts of the shared map that have fallen of general favor.
-
-Ultimately, if the people with influence over the trajectory of the systematically correct reasoning "community" aren't interested in getting the right answers in public, then I think we need to give up on the idea of there _being_ a "community", which, you know, might have been a dumb idea to begin with. No one owns _reasoning itself_. Yudkowsky had written in March 2009 that rationality is the ["common interest of many causes"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes): that proponents of causes-that-benefit-from-better-reasoning like atheism or marijuana legalization or existential-risk-reduction might perceive a shared interest in cooperating to [raise the sanity waterline](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline). But to do that, they need to not try to capture all the value they create: some of the resources you invest in teaching rationality are going to flow to someone else's cause, and you need to be okay with that.
-
-But Alexander's ["Kolmogorov Complicity"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/) (October 2017) seems to suggest a starkly different moral, that "rationalist"-favored causes might not _want_ to associate with others that have worse optics. Atheists and marijuana legalization proponents and existential-risk-reducers probably don't want any of the value they create to flow to neoreactionaries and race realists and autogynephilia truthers, if video of the flow will be used to drag their own names through the mud.
-
-[_My_ Something to Protect](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/) requires me to take the [Leeroy Jenkins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leeroy_Jenkins) Option. (As typified by Justin Murphy: ["Say whatever you believe to be true, in uncalculating fashion, in whatever language you really think and speak with, to everyone who will listen."](https://otherlife.co/respectability-is-not-worth-it-reply-to-slatestarcodex/)) I'm eager to cooperate with people facing different constraints who are stuck with a Kolmogorov Option strategy as long as they don't _fuck with me_. But I construe encouragement of the conflation of "rationality" as a "community" and the _subject matter_ of systematically correct reasoning, as a form of fucking with me: it's a _problem_ if all our beautiful propaganda about the methods of seeking Truth, doubles as propaganda for joining a robot cult whose culture is heavily optimized for tricking men like me into cutting their dicks off.
-
-Someone asked me: "If we randomized half the people at [OpenAI](https://openai.com/) to use trans pronouns one way, and the other half to use it the other way, do you think they would end up with significantly different productivity?"
-
-But the thing I'm objecting to is a lot more fundamental than the specific choice of pronoun convention, which obviously isn't going to be uniquely determined. Turkish doesn't have gender pronouns, and that's fine. Naval ships traditionally take feminine pronouns in English, and it doesn't confuse anyone into thinking boats have a womb. [Many other languages are much more gendered than English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Distribution_of_gender_in_the_world's_languages) (where pretty much only third-person singular pronouns are at issue). The conventions used in one's native language probably _do_ [color one's thinking to some extent](/2020/Dec/crossing-the-line/)—but when it comes to that, I have no reason to expect the overall design of English grammar and vocabulary "got it right" where Spanish or Arabic "got it wrong."
-
-What matters isn't the specific object-level choice of pronoun or bathroom conventions; what matters is having a culture where people _viscerally care_ about minimizing the expected squared error of our probabilistic predictions, even at the expense of people's feelings—[_especially_ at the expense of people's feelings](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/bayesomasochism/).
-
-I think looking at [our standard punching bag of theism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLL6yzZ3WKn8KaSC3/the-uniquely-awful-example-of-theism) is a very fair comparison. Religious people aren't _stupid_. You can prove theorems about the properties of [Q-learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-learning) or [Kalman filters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter) at a world-class level without encountering anything that forces you to question whether Jesus Christ died for our sins. But [beyond technical mastery of one's narrow specialty](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2pENnTPB75sfc9kb/outside-the-laboratory), there's going to be some competence threshold in ["seeing the correspondence of mathematical structures to What Happens in the Real World"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sizjfDgCgAsuLJQmm/reply-to-holden-on-tool-ai) that _forces_ correct conclusions. I actually _don't_ think you can be a believing Christian and invent [the concern about consequentialists embedded in the Solomonoff prior](https://ordinaryideas.wordpress.com/2016/11/30/what-does-the-universal-prior-actually-look-like/).
-
-But the _same_ general parsimony-skill that rejects belief in an epiphenomenal ["God of the gaps"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps) that is verbally asserted to exist but will never the threat of being empirically falsified, _also_ rejects belief in an epiphenomenal "gender of the gaps" that is verbally asserted to exist but will never face the threat of being empirically falsified.
-
-In a world where sexual dimorphism didn't exist, where everyone was a hermaphrodite, then "gender" wouldn't exist, either.
-
-In a world where we _actually had_ magical perfect sex-change technology of the kind described in "Changing Emotions", then people who wanted to change sex would do so, and everyone else would use the corresponding language (pronouns and more), _not_ as a courtesy, _not_ to maximize social welfare, but because it _straightforwardly described reality_.
-
-In a world where we don't _have_ magical perfect sex-change technology, but we _do_ have hormone replacement therapy and various surgical methods, you actually end up with _four_ clusters: females (F), males (M), masculinized females a.k.a. trans men (FtM), and feminized males a.k.a. trans women (MtF). I _don't_ have a "clean" philosophical answer as to in what contexts one should prefer to use a {F, MtF}/{M, FtM} category system (treating trans people as their social gender) rather than a {F, FtM}/{M, MtF} system (considering trans people as their [developmental sex](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/)), because that's a complicated semi-empirical, semi-value question about which aspects of reality are most relevant to what you're trying think about in that context. But I do need _the language with which to write this paragraph_, which is about _modeling reality_, and not about marginalization or respect.
-
-Something I have trouble reliably communicating about what I'm trying to do with this blog is that "I don't do policy." Almost everything I write is _at least_ one meta level up from any actual decisions. I'm _not_ trying to tell other people in detail how they should live their lives, because obviously I'm not smart enough to do that and get the right answer. I'm _not_ telling anyone to detransition. I'm _not_ trying to set government policy about locker rooms or medical treatments.
-
-I'm trying to _get the theory right_. My main victory condition is getting the two-type taxonomy (or whatever more precise theory supplants it) into the _standard_ sex ed textbooks. If you understand the nature of the underlying psychological condition _first_, then people can make a sensible decision about what to _do_ about it. Accurate beliefs should inform policy, rather than policy determining what beliefs are politically acceptable.
-
-It worked once, right?
-
-(Picture me playing Hermione Granger in a post-Singularity [holonovel](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Holo-novel_program) adaptation of _Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality_ (Emma Watson having charged me [the standard licensing fee](/2019/Dec/comp/) to use a copy of her body for the occasion): "[We can do anything if we](https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/30) exert arbitrarily large amounts of [interpretive labor](https://acesounderglass.com/2015/06/09/interpretive-labor/)!")
-
-> An extreme case in point of "handwringing about the Overton Window in fact constituted the Overton Window's implementation"
-OK, now apply that to your Kolomogorov cowardice
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1373004525481598978
-
-The "discourse algorithm" (the collective generalization of "cognitive algorithm") that can't just _get this shit right_ in 2021 (because being out of step with the reigning Bay Area ideological fashion is deemed too expensive by a consequentialism that counts unpopularity or hurt feelings as costs), also [can't get heliocentrism right in 1633](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair) [_for the same reason_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yaCwW8nPQeJknbCgf/free-speech-and-triskaidekaphobic-calculators-a-reply-to)—and I really doubt it can get AI alignment theory right in 2041.
-
-Or at least—even if there are things we can't talk about in public for consequentialist reasons and there's nothing to be done about it, you would hope that the censorship wouldn't distort our beliefs about the things we _can_ talk about—like, say, the role of Bayesian reasoning in the philosophy of language. Yudkowsky had written about the [dark side epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology) of [contagious lies](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies): trying to protect a false belief doesn't just mean being wrong about that one thing, it also gives you, on the object level, an incentive to be wrong about anything that would _imply_ the falsity of the protected belief—and, on the meta level, an incentive to be wrong _about epistemology itself_, about how "implying" and "falsity" work.
-
-
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ASpGaS3HGEQCbJbjS/eliezer-s-sequences-and-mainstream-academia?commentId=6GD86zE5ucqigErXX
-> The actual real-world consequences of a post like this when people actually read it are what bothers me, and it does feel frustrating because those consequences seem very predictable
-(!!)
-
-http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/47
-https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/97
-> one technique was to look at what _ended up_ happening, assume it was the _intended_ result, and ask who benefited.
-
-
-> At least, I have a MASSIVE home territory advantage because I can appeal to Eliezer's writings from 10 years ago, and ppl can't say "Eliezer who? He's probably a bad man"
-
-> Makes sense... just don't be shocked if the next frontier is grudging concessions that get compartmentalized
-
-> Stopping reading your Tweets is the correct move for them IF you construe them as only optimizing for their personal hedonics
-https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1224433237679722500
-
-> I aspire to make sure my departures from perfection aren't noticeable to others, so this tweet is very validating.
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1384671335146692608
-
-"assuming that it was a 'he'"—people treating pronouns as synonymous with sex
-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxZBrbVqZnU
-
-I realize it wasn't personal—no one _consciously_ thinking "I'm going to trick autogynpehilic men into cutting their dicks off", but
-
-the most recent pronoun update
-https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228
-
-> I would not know how to write a different viewpoint as a sympathetic character.
-[...]
-> I do not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than "doesn't look like an Oliver" is attached to something in your head.
-
-like the 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.)
-
-* the moment in October 2016 when I switched sides http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/ http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/brand-rust/
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jNAAZ9XNyt82CXosr/mirrors-and-paintings
-
-> The absolute inadequacy of every single institution in the civilization of magical Britain is what happened! You cannot comprehend it, boy! I cannot comprehend it! It has to be seen and even then it cannot be believed!
-http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/108
-
-EGS??
-
-(If the world were smaller, you'd never give different people the same name; if our memories were larger, we'd give everyone a UUID.)
-
-* papal infallability / Eliezer Yudkowsky facts
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts?commentId=Aq9eWJmK6Liivn8ND
-Never go in against Eliezer Yudkowsky when anything is on the line.
-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Norris_facts
-
-how they would actually think about the problem in dath ilan
-
-https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/myr3n7/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_april_26_2021/gw0nhqv/?context=3
-> At some point you realize that your free bazaar of ideas has produced a core (or multiple cores). It is a chamber: semi-permeable, still receptive to external ideas and open to critique, but increasingly more connected on the inside.
-
-https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/domain_distance?l=7vk
-
-I'm writing to you because I'm afraid that marketing is a more powerful force than argument. Rather than good arguments propogating through the population of so-called "rationalists" no matter where they arise, what actually happens is that people like Eliezer and you rise to power on the strength of good arguments and entertaining writing (but mostly the latter), and then everyone else sort-of absorbs most of their worldview (plus noise and [conformity with the local environment](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/)). So for people who _didn't_ [win the talent lottery](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) but think they see a flaw in the _Zeitgeist_, the winning move is "persuade Scott Alexander".
-
-https://web.archive.org/web/20070615130139/http://singinst.org/upload/CFAI.html#foot-16
-> 16: I flip a coin to determine whether a given human is male or female.
-
-https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159611207744228?comment_id=10159611208509228&reply_comment_id=10159613820954228
-
-> In the circles I run in, being poly isn't very political, just a sexual orientation like any other—it's normalized the way that LGBT is normalized in saner circles, not political the way that LGBT is political in crazier circles.
-
-https://archive.is/7Wolo
-> the massive correlation between exposure to Yudkowsky's writings and being a trans woman (can't bother to do the calculations but the connection is absurdly strong)
-Namespace's point about the two EYs
-
-[stonewalling](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters)
-
-The level above "Many-worlds is obviously correct, stop being stupid" is "Racial IQ differences are obviously real; stop being stupid"
-
-
-Anyway, four years later, it turns out that this whole "rationality" subculture is completely fake. The thing that convinced me of this was not _even_ the late-onset-gender-dysphoria-in-males-is-not-an-intersex-condition thesis that I was originally trying to talk about. Humans are _really complicated_: no matter how "obvious" something in psychology or social science to me, I can't write someone off entirely simply for disagreeing, because the whole domain is so complex that I always have to acknowledge that, ultimately, I could just be wrong.
-
-But in the _process_ of trying to _talk about_ this late-onset-gender-dysphoria-in-males-is-not-an-intersex-condition thesis, I noticed that my conversations kept getting _derailed_ on some variation of "The word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that." _That_ part of the debate, I knew I could win.
-
-what the math actually means in the real world from "Reply to Holden"
-
-I guess I feel pretty naïve now, but—I _actually believed our own propoganda_. I _actually thought_ we were doing something new and special of historical and possibly even _cosmological_ significance.
-
-
-I got a pingback to "Optimized Propaganda" from in an "EDIT 5/21/2021" on https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qKvn7rxP2mzJbKfcA/persuasion-tools-ai-takeover-without-agi-or-agency after Scott Alexander linked it—evidence for Scott having Power to shape people's attention
-
-https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/
-
-"Rationalism starts with the belief that arguments aren't soldiers, and ends with the belief that soldiers are arguments."
-
-The Eliezer Yudkowsky I remember wrote about [how facts are tightly-woven together in the Great Web of Causality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies), such that [people who are trying to believe something false have an incentive to invent and spread fake epistemology lessons](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology), and about the [high competence threshold that _forces_ correct conclusions](http://sl4.org/archive/0602/13903.html).
-
-A culture where there are huge catastrophic consequences for [questioning religion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6JzcFtPGiznFgDxP/excluding-the-supernatural), is a culture where it's harder to train alignment researchers that genuinely understand Occam's razor on a _deep_ level, when [the intelligent social web](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web) around them will do anything to prevent them from applying the parsimony skill to the God hypothesis.
-
-A culture where there are huge catastrophic consequences for questioning gender identity, is a culture where it's harder to train alignment researchers that genuinely understand the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-language-and-cognition on a _deep_ level, when the social web around them will do anything to prevent them from [invalidating someone's identity](http://unremediatedgender.space/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/).
-
-> First, it is not enough to learn something, and tell the world about it, to get the world to believe it. Not even if you can offer clear and solid evidence, and explain it so well that a child could understand. You need to instead convince each person in your audience that the other people who they see as their key audiences will soon be willing to endorse what you have learned.
-https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/12/social-proof-but-of-what.html
-
-twenty-one month Category War is as long as it took to write the Sequences https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9jF4zbZqz6DydJ5En/the-end-of-sequences
-
-I'm worried about the failure mode where bright young minds [lured in](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/construction-beacons/) by the beautiful propaganda about _systematically correct reasoning_, are instead recruited into what is, effectively, the Eliezer-Yudkowsky-and-Scott-Alexander fan club.
-
-> I'm not trying to get Eliezer or "the community" to take a public stance on gender politics; I'm trying to get us to take a stance in favor of the kind of epistemology that we were doing in 2008. It turns out that epistemology has implications for gender politics which are unsafe, but that's more inferential steps, and ... I guess I just don't expect the sort of people who would punish good epistemology to follow the inferential steps? Maybe I'm living in the should-universe a bit here, but I don't think it "should" be hard for Eliezer to publicly say, "Yep, categories aren't arbitrary because you need them to carve reality at the joints in order to make probabilistic inferences, just like I said in 2008; this is obvious."
-
-Scott got a lot of pushback just for including the blog that I showed him in a links post (Times have changed! BBL is locally quasi-mainstream after Ozy engaged)
-
-It's weird that he thinks telling the truth is politically impossible, because the specific truths I'm focused on are things he _already said_, that anyone could just look up. I guess the point is that the egregore doesn't have the logical or reading comprehension for that?—or rather (a reader points out) the egregore has no reason to care about the past; if you get tagged as an enemy, your past statements will get dug up as evidence of foul present intent, but if you're doing good enough of playing the part today, no one cares what you said in 2009
-
-Somni gets it! https://somnilogical.tumblr.com/post/189782657699/legally-blind
-
-E.Y. thinks postrats are emitting "epistemic smog", but the fact that Eigenrobot can retweet my Murray review makes me respect him more than E.Y. https://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1397383979720839175
-
-The robot cult is "only" "trying" to trick me into cutting my dick off in the sense that a paperclip maximizer is trying to kill us: an instrumental rather than a terminal value.
-
-> the problem with taqiyya is that your sons will believe you
-https://twitter.com/extradeadjcb/status/1397618177991921667
-
-> I've informed a number of male college students that they have large, clearly detectable body odors. In every single case so far, they say nobody has ever told them that before.
-https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/kLR5H4pbaBjzZxLv6/polyhacking/comment/rYKwptdgLgD2dBnHY
-
-It would have been better if someone without a dog in the object-level fight could have loudly but disinterestedly said, "What? I don't have a dog in the object-level fight, but we had a whole Sequence about this", but people mostly don't talk if they don't have a dog.
-
-But if someone without a dog spoke, then they'd get pattern-matched as a partisan; it _had_ to be me
-
-
-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.
-
-typographic attack: https://openai.com/blog/multimodal-neurons/
-
-https://distill.pub/2021/multimodal-neurons/
-> These neurons detect gender^10
-> Footnote: By this, we mean both that it responds to people presenting as this gender, as well as that it responds to concepts associated with that gender.
-
-https://www.jefftk.com/p/an-update-on-gendered-pronouns
-
-> Still think this was a perfectly fine tweet btw. Some people afaict were doing the literal ontologically confused thing; seemed like a simple thing to make progress on. Some people wanted to read it as a coded statement despite all my attempts to narrow it, but what can you do.
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356535300986523648
-
-If you were actually HONESTLY tring to narrow it, you would have said, "By the way, this is just about pronouns, I'm not taking a position on whether trans women are women"
-
-https://www.gingersoftware.com/content/grammar-rules/adjectives/order-of-adjectives/
-
-https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/01/how-to-actually-defeat-us-government/
-> propagate a credible alternate reality that outcompetes the official information network.
-
-https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/12/explanation-of-democratic-centrism/
+Aella https://knowingless.com/2019/06/06/side-effects-of-preferred-pronouns/
Title: Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
-Date: 2020-10-01 05:00
+Date: 2021-10-01 05:00
Category: commentary
Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, horror, personal, sex differences, Star Trek, Julia Serano, two-type taxonomy
Status: draft
>
> —_Quarantine_ by Greg Egan
-Imagine my surprise to discover that, in the current year, my weird sexual obsession is suddenly at the center of [one of the _defining political issues of our time_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_rights).
-
-All this time—the dozen years I spent reading everything I could about sex and gender and transgender and feminism and evopsych and doing various things with my social presentation (sometimes things I regretted and reverted after a lot of pain, like the initials) to try to seem not-masculine—I had been _assuming_ that my gender problems were not of the same kind as people who were _actually_ transgender, because the standard narrative said that that was about people whose ["internal sense of their own gender does not match their assigned sex at birth"](https://www.vox.com/identities/21332685/trans-rights-pronouns-bathrooms-sports), whereas my thing was obviously at least partially an outgrowth of my weird sex fantasy—I had never interpreted the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing as an "internal sense of my own gender".
-
-_Why would I?_ In the English of my youth, "gender" (as a single word, rather than part of the phrase "gender role") was understood as a euphemism for _sex_ for people who were squeamish about the potential ambiguity betweeen _sex_-as-in-biological-sex and _sex_-as-in-intercourse. (Judging by this blog's domain name, I am not immune to this.) In that language, my "gender"—my sex—is male. Not because I'm necessarily happy about it (and I [used to](/2017/Jan/the-erotic-target-location-gift/) be pointedly insistent that I wasn't), but as an observable biological fact that, whatever my pure beautiful sacred self-identity feelings, _I am not delusional about_.
-
-Okay, so trans people aren't delusional about their [developmental sex](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/); the claim is that their internal sense of their own gender is in some sense more real or more relevant and should take precedence.
-
-So where does that leave me? This post is about my _own_ experiences, and not anyone else's (which I obviously don't have access to). I've _mentioned_ transgenderedness a number of times in the main body of this post, but I've tried to cast it as explanation that one might be tempted to apply to my case, but which I don't think fits. Everything I've said so far is _consistent_ with a world in which Ray Blanchard (who coined the obvious and perfect word for my thing while studying actual transsexuals) was dumb and wrong, a world where my idiosyncratic weird sex perversion and associated beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings are taxonomically and etiologically distinct from whatever brain-intersex condition causes _actual_ trans women. That's the world I _thought_ I lived in for the ten years after encountering the obvious and perfect word.
-
-
-Between the reading, and a series of increasingly frustrating private conversations, I gradually became persuaded that Blanchard _wasn't_ dumb and wrong, that his taxonomy is _basically_ correct, at least as a first approximation. So far this post has just been about _my_ experience, and not anyone's theory of transsexualism (which I had assumed for years couldn't possibly apply to me), so let me take a moment to explain the theory now.
-
-(With the caveated understanding that psychology is complicated and there's more to be said about what "as a first approximation" is even supposed to mean, but I need a few paragraphs to talk about the _simple_ version of the theory that makes _pretty good_ predictions on _average_, before I can elaborate on more complicated theories that might make even better predictions including on cases that diverge from average.)
-
-The idea is that male-to-female transsexualism isn't actually one phenomenon; it's two completely different phenomena that don't actually have anything to do with each other, except for the (perhaps) indicated treatment of HRT, surgery, and social transition. (Compare to how different medical conditions might happen to respond to the same drug.)
-
-In one taxon, the "early-onset" type, you have same-sex-attracted males who have just been extremely feminine (in social behavior, interests, _&c._) their entire lives, in a way that causes huge social problems for them—the far tail of effeminate gay men who end up fitting into Society better as straight women. _That's_ where the "woman trapped inside a man's body" trope comes from. [This one probably _is_ a brain-intersex condition.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3180619/)
-
-That story is pretty intuitive. Were an alien AI to be informed of the fact that, among humans, some fraction of males elect to undergo medical interventions to resememble females and aspire to be perceived as females socially, "brain-intersex condition such that they already behave like females" would probably be its top hypothesis for the cause of such behavior, just on priors.
-
-Suppose our alien AI were to be informed that many of the human males seeking to become female (as far as the technology can manage, anyway) do _not_ fit the clinical profile of the early-onset type—it looks like there's a separate "late-onset" type or types. If you [didn't have enough data to _prove_ anything, but you had to guess](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xTyuQ3cgsPjifr7oj/faster-than-science), what would be your _second_ hypothesis for how this behavior might arise?
-
-What's the _usual_ reason for males to be obsessed with female bodies?
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-So, yeah. Basically, I think a _substantial majority_ of trans women under modern conditions in Western countries are, essentially, guys like me who were _less self-aware about what the thing actually is_.
-
-So, I realize this is an inflamatory and (far more importantly) _surprising_ claim. Obviously, I don't have introspective access into other people's minds. If someone claims to have an internal sense of her own gender that doesn't match her assigned sex at birth, on what evidence could I _possibly_ have the _astounding_ arrogance to reply, "No, I think you're really just a perverted male like me"?
-
-Actually, lots. To arbitrarily pick one particularly vivid exhibition, in April 2018, the [/r/MtF subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/) (which currently has 100,000 subscribers) [posted a link to a poll: "Did you have a gender/body swap/transformation "fetish" (or similar) before you realised you were trans?"](https://archive.is/uswsz). The [results of the poll](https://strawpoll.com/5p7y96x2/r): [_82%_ said Yes](/images/did_you_have-reddit_poll.png). [Top comment in the thread](https://archive.is/c7YFG), with 232 karma: "I spent a long time in the 'it's probably just a fetish' camp".
-
-Certainly, 82% is not 100%! (But 82% is evidence for my claim that a _substantial majority_ of trans women under modern conditions in Western countries are essentially guys like me.) Certainly, you could argue that Reddit has a sampling bias such that poll results and karma scores from /r/MtF fail to match the distribution of opinion among real-world MtFs. But if you don't take the gender-identity story as a _axiom_ and [_actually look_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SA79JMXKWke32A3hG/original-seeing) at the _details_ of what people say and do, these kinds of observations are _not hard to find_. You could [fill an entire subreddit with them](https://archive.is/ezENv) (and then move it to [independent](https://ovarit.com/o/ItsAFetish/) [platforms](https://saidit.net/s/itsafetish/) when the original gets [banned for "promoting hate"](https://www.reddit.com/r/itsafetish/)).
-
-Reddit isn't "scientific" enough for you? Fine. The scientific literature says the same thing. [Blanchard 1985](/papers/blanchard-typology_of_mtf_transsexualism.pdf): 73% of non-exclusively-androphilic transsexuals acknowledged some history of erotic cross-dressing. (Unfortunately, a lot of the classic studies specifically asked about cross-_dressing_, but the underlying desire isn't about clothes.) [Lawrence 2005](/papers/lawrence-sexuality_before_and_after_mtf_srs.pdf): of trans women who had female partners before sexual reassignment surgery, 90% reported a history of autogynephilic arousal. [Smith _et al._ 2005](/papers/smith_et_al-transsexual_subtypes_clinical_and_theoretical_significance.pdf): 64% of non-homosexual MtFs (excluding the "missing" and "N/A" responses) reported arousal while cross-dressing during adolescence. (A lot of the classic literature says "non-homosexual", which is with respect to natal sex; the idea is that self-identified bisexuals are still in the late-onset taxon.) [Nuttbrock _et al._ 2011](/papers/nuttbrock_et_al-a_further_assessment.pdf): lifetime prevalence of transvestic fetishism among non-homosexual MtFs was 69%. (For a more detailed literature review, see [Kay Brown's blog](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/) or the first two chapters of [Anne Lawrence's _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism_](https://surveyanon.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/men-trapped-in-mens-bodies_book.pdf).)
-
-Peer-reviewed scientific papers aren't enough for you? (They could be cherry-picked; there are lots of scientific journals, and no doubt a lot of bad science slips through the cracks of the review process.) Want something more indicative of a consensus among practitioners? Fine. The [_Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSM-5) (the definitive taxonomic handbook of the American Psychiatric Association) [says the same thing](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2021/02/06/american-psychiatric-association-supports-the-two-type-transsexual-taxonomy/) in [its section on gender dysphoria](/papers/DSM-V-gender_dysphoria_section.pdf) ([ICD-10-CM codes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICD-10-CM) F64.1 and F64.2):
-
-> In both adolescent and adult natal males, there are two broad trajectories for development of gender dysphoria: early onset and late onset. _Early-onset gender dysphoria_ starts in childhood and continues into adolescence and adulthood; or, there is an intermittent period in which the gender dysphoria desists and these individuals self-identify as gay or homosexual, followed by recurrence of gender dysphoria. _Late-onset gender dysphoria_ occurs around puberty or much later in life. Some of these individuals report having had a desire to be of the other gender in childhood that was not expressed verbally to others. Others do not recall any signs of childhood gender dysphoria. For adolescent males with late-onset gender dysphoria, parents often report surprise because they did not see signs of gender dysphoria in childhood. Adolescent and adult natal males with early-onset gender dysphoria are almost always sexually attracted to men (androphilic). Adolescents and adults with late-onset gender dysphoria **frequently engage in transvestic behavior with sexual excitement.**
-
-(Bolding mine.)
-
-Or consider Anne Vitale's ["The Gender Variant Phenomenon—A Developmental Review"](http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm), which makes the _same_ observations as Blanchard-and-friends and arrives at essentially the _same_ two-type taxonomy of MtF, but dressed up in socially-desirable language—
-
-> As sexual maturity advances, Group Three, cloistered gender dysphoric boys, often combine excessive masturbation (one individual reported masturbating up to 5 and even 6 times a day) with an increase in secret cross-dressing activity to release anxiety.
-
-Got that? They _often combine excessive masturbation_ with an _increase in secret cross-dressing activity_ to _release anxiety_—their terrible, terrible _gender expression deprivation anxiety!_
-
-Don't trust scientists or clinicians? Me neither! (Especially [not clinicians](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/).) Want first-person accounts from trans women themselves? Me too! And there's lots!
-
-Consider this passage from Dierdre McCloskey's memoir _Crossing_, writing in the third person about her decades identifying as a heterosexual crossdresser before transitioning at age 53:
-
-> He had been doing it ten times a month through four decades, whenever possible, though in the closet. The quantifying economist made the calculation: _About five thousand episodes_. [...] At fifty-two Donald accepted crossdressing as part of who he was. True, if before the realization that he could cross all the way someone had offered a pill to stop the occasional cross-dressing, he would have accepted, since it was mildly distracting—though hardly time consuming. Until the spring of 1995 each of the five thousand episodes was associated with quick, male sex.
-
-Or consider this passage from Julia Serano's _Whipping Girl_ (I know I [keep](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/) [referencing](/2020/Dec/crossing-the-line/) this book, but it's _so representative_ of the dominant strain of trans activism, and I'm never going to get over the [Fridge Logic](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FridgeLogic) of the all [the blatant clues that I somehow missed in 2007](/2016/Sep/apophenia/))—
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-> There was also a period of time when I embraced the word "pervert" and viewed my desire to be female as some sort of sexual kink. But after exploring that path, it became obvious that explanation could not account for the vast majority of instances when I thought about being female in a nonsexual context.
-
-"It became obvious that explanation could not account." I don't doubt Serano's reporting of her own phenomenal experiences, but "that explanation could not account" is _not an experience_; it's a _hypothesis_ about psychology, about the _causes_ of the experience.
-
-... this is just a sample. Do I need to keep going though the mountains of public testimony? Is this post long enough?
-
-After having seen enough of these _laughable_ denials of autogynephilia, the main question in my mind has become not, _Is the two-type feminine–androphilic/autogynephilic taxonomy of MtF transsexualism approximately true?_ (answer: yes, obviously) and more, _How dumb do you (proponents of gender-identity theories) think we (the general public) are?_ (answer: very, but this assessment is accurate).
-
-An important caveat must be made: [different causal/etiological stories could be compatible with the same _descriptive_ taxonomy.](/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/) You shouldn't confuse my mere ridicule with a serious and rigorous critique of the strongest possible case for "gender expression deprivation anxiety" as a theoretical entity, which would be more work. But hopefully I've shown _enough_ work here, that the reader can perhaps empathize with the temptation to resort to ridicule?
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-Everyone's experience is different, but the human mind still has a _design_. If I hurt my ankle while running and I (knowing nothing of physiology or sports medicine) think it might be a stress fracture, a competent doctor (who's studied the literature and seen many more cases) is going to ask followup questions about my experiences to pin down whether it's stress fracture or a sprain. I can't be wrong about the fact _that_ my ankle hurts (that's a privileged first-person experience), but I can easily be wrong about my _theory about_ why my ankle hurts.
-
-Even if human brains vary more than human ankles, the basic epistemological principle applies to a mysterious desire to be female. The question is, do the trans women whose reports I'm considering have a relevantly _different_ psychological condition than me, or do we have "the same" condition, and (at least) one of us is misdiagnosing it?
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-The _safe_ answer—the answer that preserves everyone's current stories about themselves without any need for modification—is "different." That's what I thought before 2016. I think a lot of trans activists would say "the same". And on _that_ much, we can agree.
-
-How weasely am I being with these "approximately true" and "as a first approximation" qualifiers and hedges? I claim: not _more_ weasely than anyone who tries to reason about psychology given the knowledge and methodology our civilization has managed to accumulate.
-
-Reality has a single level (physics), but [our models of reality have multiple levels](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gRa5cWWBsZqdFvmqu/reductive-reference). To get maximally precise predictions about everything, you would have to model the underlying quarks, _&c._, which is impossible. (As [it is](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tPqQdLCuxanjhoaNs/reductionism) [written](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y5MxoeacRKKM3KQth/fallacies-of-compression): the map is not the territory, but you can't roll up the territory and put in your glove compartment.)
-
-Psychology is very complicated; every human is their own unique snowflake, but it would be impossible to navigate the world using the "every human is their own unique _maximum-entropy_ snowflake; you can't make _any_ probabilistic inferences about someone's mind based on your experiences with other humans" theory. Even if someone were to _verbally endorse_ something like that—and at age sixteen, I might have—their brain is still going to go on to make predictions inferences about people's minds using _some_ algorithm whose details aren't available to introspection. Much of this predictive machinery is going to be instinct bequeathed by natural selection (because predicting the behavior of conspecifics was very useful in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness), but some of it is the cultural accumulation of people's attempts to organize their experience into categories, clusters, diagnoses, taxons. (The cluster-learning capability is _also_ bequeathed by natural selection, of course, but it's worth distinguishing more "learned" from more "innate" content.)
-
-There could be situations in psychology where a good theory (not a perfect theory, but a good theory to the precision that our theories about engineering bridges are good) would be described by a 70-node causal graph, but it turns out that some of [the more "important" variables in the graph happen to anti-correlate with each other](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/10/27/the-mathematical-consequences-of-a-toy-model-of-gender-transition/), such that stupid humans who don't know how to discover the correct 70-node graph, do manage to pattern-match their way to a two-type typology that actually is better, as a first approximation, than pretending not to have a theory. No one matches any particular clinical-profile stereotype _exactly_, but [the world makes more sense when you have language for theoretical abstractions](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions) like ["comas"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/11/does-the-glasgow-coma-scale-exist-do-comas/) or "depression" or "bipolar disorder"—or "autogynephilia".
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-(In some sense it's a matter of "luck" when the relevant structure in the world happens to simplify so much; [friend of the blog](/tag/tailcalled/) Tailcalled argues that [there's no discrete typology for FtM](https://www.reddit.com/r/Blanchardianism/comments/jp9rmn/there_is_probably_no_ftm_typology/) as there is for the two types of MtF, because the various causes of gender problems in females vary more independently and aren't as stratified by age.)
-
-So, if some particular individual trans woman writes down her life story, and swears up and down that she doesn't match the feminine/early-onset type, but _also_ doesn't empathize at all with the experiences I've grouped under the concept of "autogynephilia", I don't have any definitive knockdown proof with which to accuse her of lying, because I don't _know_ her, and the true diversity of human psychology is no doubt richer and stranger than my fuzzy low-resolution model of it.
-
-But [the fuzzy low-resolution model is _way too good_](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/04/27/predictions-made-by-blanchards-typology/) not to be pointing to _some_ regularity in the real world, and I expect honest people who are exceptions that aren't well-predicted by the model, to at least notice how well it performs on all the _non_-exceptions. If you're a magical third type of trans woman (where, again, _magical_ is a term of art indicating phenomena not understood) who isn't super-feminine but whose identity definitely isn't ultimately rooted in a fetish, [you should be _confused_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5JDkW4MYXit2CquLs/your-strength-as-a-rationalist) by the 232 upvotes on that /r/MtF comment about the "it's probably just a fetish" camp—if the person who wrote that comment has experiences like yours, why did they ever single out "it's probably just a fetish" [as a hypothesis to pay attention to in the first place](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X2AD2LgtKgkRNPj2a/privileging-the-hypothesis)? And there's allegedly a whole "camp" of these people? What could _that_ possibly be about?!
-
-I _do_ have a _lot_ of uncertainty about what the True Causal Graph looks like, even if it seems obvious that the two-type taxonomy coarsely approximates it. Gay femininity and autogynephilia are obviously very important nodes in the True Graph, but there's going to be more detail to the whole story: what _other_ factors influence people's decision to transition, including [incentives](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/) and cultural factors specific to a given place and time?
-
-Cultural attitudes towards men and maleness have shifted markedly in our feminist era. It feels gauche to say so, but ... as a result, conscientious boys taught to disdain the crimes of men may pick up an internalized misandry? I remember one night at the Univerity in Santa Cruz when I had the insight that it was possible to make generalizations about groups of people while allowing for exceptions (in contrast to my previous stance that generalizations about people were _always morally wrong_)—and immediately, eagerly proclaimed that _men are terrible_.
-
-Or consider computer scientist Scott Aaronson's account (in his infamous [Comment 171](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2091#comment-326664)) that his "recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man [...] [a]nything, really, other than the curse of having been born a heterosexual male, which [...] meant being consumed by desires that one couldn't act on or even admit without running the risk of becoming an objectifier or a stalker or a harasser or some other creature of the darkness."
-
-Or there's a piece that makes the rounds on social media occasionally: ["I Am A Transwoman. I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out"](https://medium.com/@jencoates/i-am-a-transwoman-i-am-in-the-closet-i-am-not-coming-out-4c2dd1907e42), which (in part) discusses the author's frustration at having one's feelings and observations being dismissed on account of being perceived as a cis male. "I hate that the only effective response I can give to 'boys are shit' is 'well I'm not a boy,'" the author laments. And: "Do I even _want_ to convince someone who will only listen to me when they're told by the rules that they have to see me as a girl?"
-
-(The "told by the rules that they have to see me" (!) phrasing in the current revision is _very_ telling; [the originally published version](https://archive.is/trslp) said "when they find out I'm a girl".)
-
-If boys are shit, and the rules say that you have to see someone as a girl if they _say_ they're a girl, that provides an incentive [on the margin](https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Marginalism.html) to disidentify with maleness. Like in another one of my teenage song-fragments—
-
-> _Look in the mirror
-> What's a_ white guy _doing there?
-> I'm just a spirit
-> I'm just a spirit
-> Floating in air, floating in air, floating in air!_
-
-This culturally-transmitted attitude could intensify the interpretation of autogynephilic attraction as a [ego-syntonic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egosyntonic_and_egodystonic) beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing (rather than an ego-dystonic sex thing to be ashamed of), or be a source of gender dysphoria in males who aren't autogynephilic at all.
-
-To the extent that "cognitive" things like internalized misandry manifesting as cross-gender identification is common (or has _become_ more common in the recent cultural environment), then maybe the two-type taxonomy isn't androphilic/autogynephilic so much as it is androphilic/"not-otherwise-specified": the early-onset type is very behaviorally distinct and has a very straightforward motive to transition (it would be _less_ weird not to); in contrast, it might not be as easy to distinguish autogynephilia from _other_ sources of gender problems in the grab-bag of all males showing up to the gender clinic for any other reason.
-
-Whatever the True Causal Graph looks like—however my remaining uncertainty turns out to resolve in the limit of sufficiently advanced psychological science, I think I _obviously_ have more than enough evidence to reject the mainstream ["inner sense of gender"](https://www.drmaciver.com/2019/05/the-inner-sense-of-gender/) story as _not adding up_.
-
-Okay, so the public narrative about transness is obviously, _obviously_ false. That's a problem, because almost no matter what you want, true beliefs are more useful than false beliefs for making decisions that get you what you want.
-
-Fortunately, Yudkowsky's writing had brought together a whole community of brilliant people dedicated to refining the art of human rationality—the methods of acquiring true beliefs and using them to make decisions that get you what you want. So now that I _know_ the public narrative is obviously false, and that I have the outlines of a better theory (even though I could use a lot of help pinning down the details, and I don't know what the social policy implications are, because the optimal policy computation is a complicated value trade-off), all I _should_ have to do is carefully explain why the public narrative is delusional, and then because my arguments are so much better, all the intellectually serious people will either agree with me (in public), or at least be eager to _clarify_ (in public) exactly where they disagree and what their alternative theory is, so that we can move the state of humanity's knowledge forward together, in order to help the great common task of optimizing the universe in accordance with humane values.
-
-Of course, this is kind of a niche topic—if you're not a male with this psychological condition, or a woman who doesn't want to share all female-only spaces with them, you probably have no reason to care—but there are a _lot_ of males with this psychological condition around here! If this whole "rationality" subculture isn't completely fake, then we should be interested in getting the correct answers in public _for ourselves_.
-
-Men who fantasize about being women do not particularly resemble actual women! We just—don't? This seems kind of obvious, really? _Telling the difference between fantasy and reality_ is kind of an important life skill?! Notwithstanding that some males might want to make use of medical interventions like surgery and hormone replacement therapy to become facsimiles of women as far as our existing technology can manage, and that a free and enlightened transhumanist Society should support that as an option—and notwithstanding that _she_ is obviously the correct pronoun for people who _look_ like women—it's probably going to be harder for people to figure out what the optimal decisions are if no one is allowed to use language like "actual women" that clearly distinguishes the original thing from imperfect facsimiles?!
-
-
-[...]
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-My sisters! I don't hate you! I'm really jealous of you in a lot of ways, even if I'm not following the same path—not just yet, probably not in this life. But [for the protection](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect) of everything we hold sacred, _you have to let me show you what you are_.
-
-
-> knows much less than what he thinks when he's talking about with the object level of trans people
-Trans people aren't a reliable source about what's going on with trans people, because they're playing a respectability politics game
-
-
-This, then, is Blanchard's dangerous idea: "all gender dysphoric males who are not sexually oriented towards men are instead sexually oriented toward the thought or image of themselves as women."
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-Even if you weaken _all_ to _almost all_ , or even _most_
-
-Anne Lawrence:
-
-> I am firmly convinced that the overwhelming majority—probably 98% or more—of cases of severe gender dysphoria in men arise in connection with either effeminate homosexuality or autogynephilia; most of the rare exceptions probably arise in connection with conditions such as schizophrenia and certain personality disorders
-
-"Why, yes, of course my female gender identity is an outgrowth of my paraphilic erotic desire to have a woman's body—after all, that's one of the two and probably only two causal pathways along which male-to-female sex reassignment could possibly seem like a good idea to someone, and you can probably already tell from my appearance and behavior that I'm not one of the androphilic kind."
-
-
-
-Julia Serano:
-
-> There was also a period of time when I embraced the word "pervert" and viewed my desire to be female as some sort of sexual kink. But after exploring that path, it became obvious that explanation could not account for the vast majority of instances when I thought about being female in a nonsexual context.
-
-I don't doubt that Julia Serano is telling the truth about her _subjective experiences_. But "that explanation could not account for" is _not an experience_. It's a _hypothesis_ about human psychology. We shouldn't _expect_ anyone to get that kind of thing right based on introspection alone.
-
-
-How to account for people disagreeing?
-
-* ppl can have false beliefs about themselves, have to infer explanations for behavior (picking the gift on the right)
-* exact type of AGP and whether you remember it in childhood make a difference in how obvious the right answer is
-* ppl have heard a strawman of the theory, not read "Becoming What We Love"; innoculated against smart version of theory (Anne Vitale)
-* selection
-* incentives
-
-the selection effect and the incentives are dual: ppl who notice AGP don't transition, people who transition convince selves AGP doesn't matter
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-type of dysphoria also matters
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-trans women don't want to talk about it
-stright guys who regard it as a humiliating private kink don't want to talk about it
-
-
-
-To visualize how this ends up looking in practice, I want you to consider the fictitious but (I claim) entirely realistic tale of Katherine and Mark.
-
-
-two fictional case studies: one with childhood AGP and interpersonal fantasy, another like me (Ranma 1/2, transformation fantasies, sex differences denial, encountering AGP first)
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-when they meet in Portland, they note their obvious similarities and know that they have to be the same type of thing (I'm actually trans, you're just AGP is not an option)
-
-
-Katherine looks at Mark with a sense of pity. "That poor girl, cowed by Bailey's vicious pseudoscientific lies!"
-
-Mark looks at Katherine with a mixture of jealousy and contempt. "Wait. Wait a minute. So this _entire fucking time_, _actual trans women_ were really just _guys like me_ who were _less self-aware about it_, who had all the same happy romantic fantasies about being a girl, and then _took them literally_?! I didn't know you were allowed to take them literally. You bastards! You delusional bastards! You beautiful, lucky bastards who get all nice things I can't have, at the terrible cost of never being able to say _why_! I'm so upset about this that I feel motivated to start an entire pseudonymous blog dedicated to dismantling the shitty epistemology that led to this absurd situation!"
-
-
-but the real takeaway is that everyone should be more skeptical of why they think they do what they do
-
-
-idea innoculation: https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/aYX6s8SYuTNaM2jh3/idea-inoculation-inferential-distance
-
-blue-eyed islanders and common knowledge
-
-[TODO: my pseudobisexual moments (it's California in the year 2015)
-our analogues would make a good couple in a nearby alternate universe where at least one of us is female. "Exactly one," he said. "It's California in the year 2015," I said.]
-
-_ AGPs dating each other is the analogue of "Failed Utopia 4-2"
-
-* too big to fail
-
-* claims to victimhood are leveraged into claims to power
-
-* [the autogynephilic analogue of romantic love](/papers/lawrence-becoming_what_we_love.pdf)
-
-Aren't those trans women going to be _embarrrassed_ after the Singularity, when telepathy tech makes everything obvious
-
-[the political incentives propagate recursively, a phase transition: in a culture it's normal for AGP males to transition, any sub-culture where they don't is subject to attack as transphobic I want to stay aligned with _actual women_, many of whom have an interest in excluding me]
-
-[TODO: Freaky Friday, differentiating between "my type" and transition goals anecdotes—maybe cis people can be fooled into not knowing what that means, but _I know what that means_]
-
-"Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses" are doing better in some ways. Tri-S was explicitly not for transsexuals
-
-Anne Lawrence described autogynephiles as ["men who love women and want to become what they love."](/papers/lawrence-becoming_what_we_love.pdf) But it's worse than that. We're men who love what we _wish_ women were, and want to become _that_.
-
-Normal straight men also have positive-valence thoughts about women when they're not immediately horny.
-
-* The lie will rot, maybe ppl will be honest after the convention has set in??
-
-Robert Heinlein
-
-xkcd assumes furries are sexual https://xkcd.com/471/
-xkcd implies AGP is common https://xkcd.com/535/
-
-
-
-My enemy is this _culture of narcissistic Orwellian mind games_ that thinks people have the right to _dictate other people's model of reality_. I don't know what the _right_ culture is, but I'm pretty sure that _this ain't it, chief_.
-
-Some trans woman on Twitter posted an anecdote complaining that the receptionist at her place of work compared her to a male celebrity. "I look like this today [photo]; how could anyone think that was a remotely acceptable thing to say?"
-
-It _is_ genuinely sad that the author of those Tweets didn't get perceived the way she would prefer! But the thing I want her to understand is—
-
-_It was a compliment!_ That poor receptionist was almost certainly thinking of [David Bowie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie) or [Eddie Izzard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Izzard), rather than being hateful and trying to hurt. People can recognize sex from facial structure at 96% accuracy, remember?
-
-I want a shared cultural understanding that the _correct_ way to ameliorate the genuine sadness of people not being perceived the way they prefer is through things like _better and cheaper facial feminization surgery_, not _emotionally blackmailing people out of their ability to report what they see_.
-
-In a world where surgery is expensive, but people desperately want to change sex, there's an incentive gradient in the direction of re-engineering the culture to bind our shared concept of "gender" onto things like [ornamental clothing](http://thetranswidow.com/2021/02/18/womens-clothing-is-always-drag-even-on-women/) that are easier to change than secondary sex characteristics.
-
-But [_the utility function is not up for grabs._](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ddcsdA2c2XpNpE5x/newcomb-s-problem-and-regret-of-rationality) I don't _want_ to reliniqush my ability to notice what women's faces look like, even if that means noticing that mine isn't, even if that seems vaguely disappointing due to an idiosyncracy in my psychosexual development; I don't want people to have to _doublethink around their perceptions of me_.
-
-If I sound angry, it's because I actually _do_ feel a lot of anger, but I wish I knew how to more reliably convey its target. Some trans people who see my writing tend to assume I'm self-hating, suffering from false consciousness, that my pious appeals to objectivity and reason are [just a facade](https://sinceriously.fyi/false-faces/) concealing my collaboration with a cissexist social order, that I'm in cowardly thrall to scapegoating instincts: "I'm one of the good, compliant ones—not one of those weird bad trans people who will demand their rights! _They're_ the witches, not me; burn them, not me!"
-
-I have [no grounds to fault anyone for not taking my self-report as unquestionable](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/)—the urge to scapegoat and submit to the dominant player is definitely a thing—but I really think this is reading me wrong?
-
-I'm not at war with trans _people_—open, creative people who are just like me—I want to believe that even the natal females are "just like me" in some relevant abstract sense—but who read different books in a different order. I'm at war with [an _ideology_ that is adapted to appeal to people just like me](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) and commit us to remaking our lives around a set of philosophical and empirical claims that I think are _false_.
-
-Maybe that's not particularly reassuring, if people tend to identify with their ideology? (As I used to—as I _still_ do, even if my [revised ideology is much more meta](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/dreaming-of-political-bayescraft/).) When the prototypical Christian says "Hate the sin, love the sinner", does anyone actually buy it?
-
-But what else can I do? We're living in midst of a pivotal ideological transition. (Is it still the midst, or am I too late?) Autogynephilia, as a phenomenon, is _absurdly common_ relative to the amount of cultural awareness of it _as_ a phenomenon. ([An analogy someone made on /r/GenderCriticalGuys just before it got banned](https://web.archive.org/web/20200705203105if_/https://reddit.com/r/GenderCriticalGuys/comments/hhcs34/autogynephilic_male_here_big_rant_about_denial_of/): imagine living in a Society where people _were_ gay at the same rates as in our own, but the _concept_ of homosexuality didn't exist—and was [actively suppressed whenever someone tried to point it out](/2017/Jan/if-the-gay-community-were-like-the-trans-community/).) Surveys of college students found that 13% (Table 3 in [Person _et al._](/papers/person_et_al-gender_differences_in_sexual_behaviors.pdf)) or 5.6% (Table 5 in the replication [Hsu _et al._](/papers/hsu_et_al-gender_differences_in_sexual_fantasy.pdf)) of males have fantasized about being the opposite sex in the last 3 months.
-
-What happens when every sensitive bookish male who thinks [it might be cool to be a woman](https://xkcd.com/535/) gets subjected to an aggressive recruitment campaign that the scintillating thought is _literally true_, simply because he thought it? (Not just that it could _become_ true _in a sense_, depending on the success of medical and social interventions, and depending on what sex/gender concept definition makes sense to use in a given context.) What kind of Society is that to live in?
-
-[I have seen the destiny of my neurotype, and am putting forth a convulsive effort to wrench it off its path. My weapon is clear writing.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i8q4vXestDkGTFwsc/human-evil-and-muddled-thinking) Maybe the rest of my robot cult (including the founders and leaders) have given up on trying to tell the truth, but _I_ haven't. If I just keep blogging careful explanations of my thinking, eventually it might make some sort of impact—a small corrective tug on the madness of the _Zeitgeist_.
-
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XYCEB9roxEBfgjfxs/the-scales-of-justice-the-notebook-of-rationality
-writes down all the facts that aren't on anyone's side.
-
-https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2020/10/24/is-autogynephilia-real-the-phenomenon-the-construct-the-theory/
-
-[I know _exactly_ what's wrong with me]
-
-gender of the gaps
-
-[the direction of causality](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/concerns/)
-http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/concerns-ii/
-
-https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/10/27/the-mathematical-consequences-of-a-toy-model-of-gender-transition/
-
-complicit with cissexism:
-/2017/Mar/interlude-ii/
-/2019/Feb/interlude-xviii/
-
-In "Interpersonal Entanglement", Yudkowsky had speculated that gay couples might have better relationships, since they don't have to deal with the mismatch.
-
-Stereotypically, AGP-taxon trans women have a tendency to pair up with each other.
-
-> The vast majority of men are not what the vast majority of women would most prefer, or vice versa. I don’t know if anyone has ever actually done this study, but I bet that both gay and lesbian couples are happier on average with their relationship than heterosexual couples. (Googles ... yep, looks like it.) <https://news.softpedia.com/news/Gay-and-Lesbian-Families-Are-Happier-than-Heterosexual-Ones-77094.shtml>
-
-Cross-gender identity is a virtually sustained or intermittently occurring wishful fantasy about being a person of the opposite sex.” Freund, K., Steiner, B.W. & Chan, S. Two types of cross-gender identity. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 11, 49–63 (1982). DOI: 10.1007/BF01541365
-
-https://twitter.com/caraesten/status/1092472430465929216
-> damn one extremely bad way to start my day is having the receptionist at slack say I look like a male celebrity
-> I'm so mad. wow. like. I look like this right now, how could anyone ever think that was an okay thing to say???
-
-Or consider Dr. Will Powers, [whose presentation on trans healthcare](https://powersfamilymedicine.com/s/Healthcare-of-the-Transgender-Patient-V60.pptx) was [praised by people from my robot cult on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/strohl89/posts/10157396578969598). I was disappointed by the the brief mention of autogynephilia [(on slide 29 of the v.6.0 presentation)](/images/powers_slide_on_agp.png): Powers says Blanchard has been disproven, but that autogynephilia does exist _very_ rarely: "[i]n my now almost 7 years of treating transgender patients, I have seen this paraphilia only once in a person requesting MtF therapy", Powers says, going on to describe the particularly delusional patient (who wanted "the largest breasts possible", and claimed he needed to become a woman to please a Russian Instagram model whom he implausibly claimed to be his girlfriend) whom he denied informed-consent treatment.
-
-You might ask, why am I citing Will Powers in support of my thesis, when Powers's testimony seems to contradict it? Only one case in seven years, he says.
-
-I cite it because—surprise! _Powers was lying._ [In a November 2020 post to his own subreddit, he opens up](https://www.reddit.com/r/DrWillPowers/comments/jx9io9/my_official_post_on_my_personal_opinion_on/):
-
-> Every time I try and speak on this, I get attacked. People discredit what I have to say, call it harmful, and hateful. [...] I've previously stated I had one of these in my practice. I stated that, because I didn't want to push the narrative that it was common because I get literally eviscerated every time I try and talk about it. In reality, I see it fairly often. Almost once a month. Probably at least 10 times a year. [...] Continuing to lie about it and act like it isn't happening is a disservice to transgender people as a whole.
-
-You might think,
-
-This comment in particular is really something—
-https://www.reddit.com/r/DrWillPowers/comments/jxh3mz/in_this_thread_help_me_and_this_community_come_up/gd0mytr/
-
-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"
-
-from a 2007 notebook—
-> & I'm sorry if this is simply normal maleness directed down an unusual channel—as they say, _autogynephillia_—it's a terrible theory, the BBL nonsense theory—intended to sweep up all transwomen—but it swept up _me_. (But _I'm not trans_.)
-
-Aella's thing about men turning into werewolfs—I'm a well-behaved werewolf. I retain my vocabulary, and transform back into a man when my wolf-form tries to escalate and the lady says "No."
-
- * practice of deferring to designated-victim trans women _makes the trans
- women worse people_: if you know that you can win a dispute by playing the
- transphobia card, that incentive shapes your life (Moldbug: discussion of
- "ignoble privilege" in "Gentle Introduction" pt. 3)
- * kind of like how _the right to be sued_ is an important part of legal
- personhood: the possibility of recourse is necessary for trust
-
-https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2020/07/07/a-dataset-of-common-agp-aap-fantasies/
\ No newline at end of file
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-psychopathic-problem-of-the-white
It's going to be the future soon; things aren't always going to be like this
+
+https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1229060502984306689
+> For those determined to miss the point, I deplore the idea of a eugenic policy. I simply said deploring it doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work. Just as we breed cows to yield more milk, we could breed humans to run faster or jump higher. But heaven forbid that we should do it.
+
+> While a limited form of selection in humans is acceptable—for example, preventing a couple who are carriers of a recessive genetic defect or disease from producing an offspring with that condition—the kind of wholesale and directed selective breeding of humans suggested by the word "eugenics" is immoral, and I don't favor it at all.
+https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2020/02/20/discovery-institute-makes-hay-of-dawkins-tweet-and-a-geneticist-mistakenly-says-that-artificial-selection-wont-work-in-humans/
+
+> I hold eugenics to be completely immoral and we should not attempt to implement it.
+https://twitter.com/SwipeWright/status/1229890352275955713
Status: draft
> 'do gender less, confine it to less, use it for less, and use other words for the boxes if you can'
+
+older works (pre-second wave feminism?) would actually say "man" (or "woman"—see how anachronistic it feels to put the female option second and in parentheses?), presumably not because human nature has changed that much, but because of shifting cultural priorities about when sex is "relevant." (Modern speakers [similarly frown on](https://agentultra.com/blog/the-black-man-stopped-me/) mentioning race when it's not relevant.)
Tags: politics
Status: draft
-Something about my writing that tends to confuse people, that I need to clarify briefly: people keep expecting me to come out with some sort of policy prescription, whereas I see myself as trying to _describe_ what's actually going on in the world without being delusional about how much control I have over it. I think my account of what's actually going on is potentially a _relevant input_ into someone's computation of deciding what to do, but almost everything I say is at least one meta level up from any actual decisions. (And the only decisions I can _control_ are my own.)
+Something about my writing that tends to confuse people, that I need to clarify briefly: people keep expecting me to come out with some sort of policy prescription, whereas I see myself as trying to _describe_ what's actually going on in the world without being delusional about how much control I have over it. I think my account of what's actually going on is potentially a _relevant input_ into someone's computation of deciding what _they_ should do, but almost everything I say is at least one meta level up from any actual decisions. (And the only decisions I can _control_ are my own.)
People will see something like my ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), and ask, "Okay, but what's the _policy takeaway_ here? Are you saying we should refuse to use trans people's preferred pronouns? Are you saying non-well-passing trans people should detransition?"
I don't know what _you_ should do! Why would I know that? (Also, what does this "should" thing even _mean_, anyway?)
-I'm _saying_ that useful words correspond to predictively useful concepts, and that biological sex is a predictively useful concept, and that there are at least two distinct classes of psychological motivation for why some males wish they could change sex, one of which is not an intersex condition, and that our currently-existing hormonal and surgical interventions for approximating a sex change arex imperfect, such that there are some circumstances where someone making predictions or decisions about a trans person might want to base those predictions or decisions on their model of the person's [developmental sex](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/) rather than their target gender, and to use corresponding non-obfuscated language in the context of those circumstances.
+I'm _saying_ that useful words correspond to predictively useful concepts, and that biological sex is a predictively useful concept, and that there are at least two distinct classes of psychological motivation for why some males wish they could change sex, one of which is not an intersex condition, and that our currently-existing hormonal and surgical interventions for approximating a sex change are imperfect, such that there are some circumstances where someone making predictions or decisions about a trans person might want to base those predictions or decisions on their model of the person's [developmental sex](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/) rather than their target gender, and to use corresponding non-obfuscated language in the context of those circumstances.
That _doesn't_ mean that no one should transition (_i.e._, try to approximate changing sex with hormonal and surgical interventions)! A lot of people do it—I'm not, like, denying that they _exist_. It seems to work out pretty well for many of them! Maybe _more_ people should do it!
+++ /dev/null
-Title: Survey of a Crossdreamscape And Why This Is Pretty Obviously Not What Cis Women Feel About Themselves
-Date: 2020-01-01
-Status: draft
-
-> This is the one that I had to write
-> It's like a letter of love with no love left out
->
-> —"Dying to Begin" by Stretch Princess
-
-I remember having animal-transformation fantasies as a teen, and then losing interest; was I close to being on track to being a furry? And that "Once I was a man" blog about getting transformed into clothing is what it looks like for the much rarer set of ppl for whom it really is about clothes
-
-
-this is what ETLE looks like for people for whom it's actually about clothes: http://onceiwasaman.blogspot.com/
pinewood derby
-http://www.cifncs.org/sports/cross_country/History/2005/DivIIBoys2005.html
-http://www.cifncs.org/sports/cross_country/History/2005/DivIIGirls2005.html
-
https://www.dailywire.com/news/44042/equality-male-track-star-switches-female-senior-amanda-prestigiacomo
https://patch.com/connecticut/hartford/courage-award-recipients-chosen-connecticut-sports-writers
+++ /dev/null
-Title: What Are Pronouns For?
-Date: 2021-03-15 05:00
-Category: commentary
-Tags: language
-Status: draft
-
-[TODO: reorganize to position the question first]
-
-[It's been occasionally argued that](https://archive.is/ChqYX) there aren't legitimate grounds to object to using trans people's preferred pronouns, because pronouns aren't facts and don't have truth conditions. Note, this is substantially _stronger_ that the mere claim that you _should_ use preferred pronouns; the claim is that no linguistic expressive power is being sacrificed by doing so. (Whereas in contrast, one might accede to the requested usage out of some combination of politeness, social coercion, and apprehension of [the Schelling point of standard usage](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/), while privately lamenting that it feels analogous to lying.)
-
-I think the claim that pronouns don't have truth conditions is _false as a matter of cognitive science_. Humans are _pretty good_ at visually identifying the sex of other humans by integrating cues from various secondary sex characteristics—it's the kind of computer-vision capability that would have been useful in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness. If it _didn't_ work so reliably, we wouldn't have ended up with languages like English where identifying a person's sex is baked into the grammar. And _because_ we ended up with (many) languages that have it baked into the grammar, _departing_ from that conventional usage has cognitive consequences: if someone told you, "Come meet my friend at the mall; she's really cool and you'll like her" and then the friend turned out to be obviously male, you would be _surprised_. The fact that the "she ... her" language [constrained your anticipations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences) so much would seem to immediately falsify the "no truth conditions" claim.
-
-[From a certain first-principles perspective](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228), this is _terrible language design_. The grammatical function of pronouns is to have a brief way to refer back to entities already mentioned: it's more user-friendly to be able to say "Katherine put her book on its shelf" rather than "Katherine put Katherine's book on the book's shelf". But then why couple that grammatical function to sex-category membership? You shouldn't _need_ to take a stance on someone's reproductive capabilities to talk about them putting a book on the shelf.
-
-If you wanted more pronoun-classes to reduce the probability of collisions (where universal [Spivak _ey_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun) or singular _they_ would result in more frequent need to repeat names where a pronoun would be ambiguous), you could devise some other system that doesn't bake sex into the language, like using initials to form pronouns (<em>K</em>atherine put <em>k</em>er book on its shelf?), or an oral or written analogue of [spatial referencing in American Sign Language](https://www.handspeak.com/learn/index.php?id=27) (where a signer associates a name or description with a direction in space, and points in that direction for subsequent references).
-
-(One might speculate that "more classes to reduce collisions" _is_ part of the historical explanation for grammatical gender, in conjunction with the fact that sex is binary and easy to observe. No other salient objective feature quite does the same job: age is continuous rather than categorical; race is also largely continuous [(clinal)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cline_(biology)) and historically didn't typically vary within a tribal/community context.)
-
-Taking it as a given that English speakers are stuck with gendered third-person singular pronouns, there's still room to debate exactly what _she_ and _he_ map to in cases where a person's "gender" is ambiguous or disputed. (Which comes up more often these days than in the environment where the language evolved.)
-
-[TODO: lit search or ask linguistics.stackexchange for literature on what gender/plural/case/&c. distinctions are for? Is it just the collision/ambiuity reduction, or is there something else? Oh, or Anna T./Elena might know]
-
--- /dev/null
+My first clue that I wasn't living in that world came from—Eliezer Yudkowsky. (Well, not my first _clue_. In retrospect, there were lots of _clues_. My first wake-up call.) In [a 26 March 2016 Facebook post](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228), he wrote—
+
+> I'm not sure if the following generalization extends to all genetic backgrounds and childhood nutritional backgrounds. There are various ongoing arguments about estrogenlike chemicals in the environment, and those may not be present in every country ...
+
+> Still, for people roughly similar to the Bay Area / European mix, I think I'm over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women.
+
+(***!?!?!?!?***)
+
+> A lot of them don't know it or wouldn't care, because they're female-minds-in-male-bodies but also cis-by-default (lots of women wouldn't be particularly disturbed if they had a male body; the ones we know as 'trans' are just the ones with unusually strong female gender identities). Or they don't know it because they haven't heard in detail what it feels like to be gender dysphoric, and haven't realized 'oh hey that's me'. See, e.g., <https://sinesalvatorem.tumblr.com/post/141690601086/15-regarding-the-4chan-thing-4chans> and <https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender-identity/>
+
+(Reading _this_ post, I _did_ realize "oh hey that's me"—it's hard to believe that I'm not one of the "20% of the ones with penises" Yudkowsky is talking about here—but I wasn't sure how to reconcile that with the "are actually women" (***!?!?!?!?***) characterization, coming _specifically_ from the guy who taught me (in "Changing Emotions") how blatantly, ludicrously untrue and impossible that is.)
+
+> But I'm kinda getting the impression that when you do normalize transgender generally and MtF particularly, like not "I support that in theory!" normalize but "Oh hey a few of my friends are transitioning and nothing bad happened to them", there's a _hell_ of a lot of people who come out as trans.
+
+> If that starts to scale up, we might see a really, really interesting moral panic in 5-10 years or so. I mean, if you thought gay marriage was causing a moral panic, you just wait and see what comes next ...
+
+Indeed—here we are five years later, and _I am panicking_. (As 2007–9 Sequences-era Yudkowsky [taught me](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good), and 2016 Facebook-shitposting-era Yudkowsky seemed to ignore, the thing that makes a moral panic really interesting is how hard it is to know you're on the right side of it—and the importance of [panicking sideways](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative) [in policyspace](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/policy_tugowar.html) when the "maximize the number of trans people" and "minimize the number of trans people" coalitions are both wrong.)
+
+At the time, this was merely _very confusing_. I left a careful comment in the Facebook thread (with the obligatory "speaking only for myself; I obviously know that I can't say anything about anyone else's experience" [disclaimer](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/against-disclai.html)), quietly puzzled at what Yudkowsky could _possibly_ be thinking ...
+
+A month later, I moved out of my mom's house in [Walnut Creek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walnut_Creek,_California) to go live with a new roommate in an apartment on the correct side of the [Caldecott tunnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Tunnel), in [Berkeley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley,_California): closer to other people in the robot-cult scene and with a shorter train ride to my coding dayjob in San Francisco.
+
+(I would later change my mind about which side of the tunnel is the correct one.)
+
+In Berkeley, I met a number of really interesting people who seemed quite similar to me along a lot of dimensions, but also very different along some other dimensions having to do with how they were currently living their life! (I see where the pattern-matching facilities in Yudkowsky's brain got that 20% figure from.) This prompted me to do a little bit more reading in some corners of the literature that I had certainly _heard of_, but hadn't already mastered and taken seriously in the previous twelve years of reading everything I could about sex and gender and transgender and feminism and evopsych. (Kay Brown's blog, [_On the Science of Changing Sex_](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/), was especially helpful.)
+
+So, a striking thing about my series of increasingly frustrating private conversations and subsequent public Facebook meltdown (the stress from which soon landed me in psychiatric jail, but that's [another](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) [story](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/)) was the tendency for some threads of conversation to get _derailed_ on some variation of, "Well, the word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that," often with a link to ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), a 2014 post by Scott Alexander, the _second_ most prominent writer in our robot cult.
+
+So, this _really_ wasn't what I was trying to talk about; _I_ thought I was trying to talk about autogynephilia as an _empirical_ theory in psychology, the truth or falsity of which obviously cannot be altered by changing the meanings of words. Psychology is a complicated empirical science: no matter how "obvious" I might think something is, I have to admit that I could be wrong—not just as a formal profession of modesty, but _actually_ wrong in the real world.
+
+But this "I can define the word _woman_ any way I want" mind game? _That_ part was _absolutely_ clear-cut. That part of the argument, I knew I could win. [We had a whole Sequence about this](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong) back in 'aught-eight, in which Yudkowsky pounded home this _exact_ point _over and over and over again_, that word and category definitions are _not_ arbitrary, because there are criteria that make some definitions _perform better_ than others as "cognitive technology"—
+
+> ["It is a common misconception that you can define a word any way you like. [...] If you believe that you can 'define a word any way you like', without realizing that your brain goes on categorizing without your conscious oversight, then you won't take the effort to choose your definitions wisely."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences)
+
+> ["So that's another reason you can't 'define a word any way you like': You can't directly program concepts into someone else's brain."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions)
+
+> ["When you take into account the way the human mind actually, pragmatically works, the notion 'I can define a word any way I like' soon becomes 'I can believe anything I want about a fixed set of objects' or 'I can move any object I want in or out of a fixed membership test'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions)
+
+> ["There's an idea, which you may have noticed I hate, that 'you can define a word any way you like'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i2dfY65JciebF3CAo/empty-labels)
+
+> ["And of course you cannot solve a scientific challenge by appealing to dictionaries, nor master a complex skill of inquiry by saying 'I can define a word any way I like'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y5MxoeacRKKM3KQth/fallacies-of-compression)
+
+> ["Categories are not static things in the context of a human brain; as soon as you actually think of them, they exert force on your mind. One more reason not to believe you can define a word any way you like."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/veN86cBhoe7mBxXLk/categorizing-has-consequences)
+
+> ["And people are lazy. They'd rather argue 'by definition', especially since they think 'you can define a word any way you like'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yuKaWPRTxZoov4z8K/sneaking-in-connotations)
+
+> ["And this suggests another—yes, yet another—reason to be suspicious of the claim that 'you can define a word any way you like'. When you consider the superexponential size of Conceptspace, it becomes clear that singling out one particular concept for consideration is an act of no small audacity—not just for us, but for any mind of bounded computing power."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/82eMd5KLiJ5Z6rTrr/superexponential-conceptspace-and-simple-words)
+
+> ["I say all this, because the idea that 'You can X any way you like' is a huge obstacle to learning how to X wisely. 'It's a free country; I have a right to my own opinion' obstructs the art of finding truth. 'I can define a word any way I like' obstructs the art of carving reality at its joints. And even the sensible-sounding 'The labels we attach to words are arbitrary' obstructs awareness of compactness."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes)
+
+> ["One may even consider the act of defining a word as a promise to \[the\] effect [...] \[that the definition\] will somehow help you make inferences / shorten your messages."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace)
+
+[TODO: contrast "... Not Man for the Categories" to "Against Lie Inflation";
+When the topic at hand is how to define "lying", Alexander
+Scott has written exhaustively about the dangers of strategic equivocation ("Worst Argument", "Brick in the Motte"); insofar as I can get a _coherent_ posiiton out of the conjunction of "... for the Categories" and Scott's other work, it's that he must think strategic equivocation is OK if it's for being nice to people
+https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/16/against-lie-inflation/
+]
+
+So, because I trusted people in my robot cult to be dealing in good faith rather than fucking with me because of their political incentives, I took the bait. I ended up spending three years of my life re-explaining the relevant philosophy-of-language issues in exhaustive, _exhaustive_ detail.
+
+At first I did this in the object-level context of gender on this blog, in ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), and the ["Reply on Adult Human Females"](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/). And that would have been the end of the philosophy-of-language track specifically ...
+
+Later, after [Eliezer Yudkowsky joined in the mind games on Twitter in November 2018](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521) [(archived)](https://archive.is/ChqYX), I _flipped the fuck out_, and ended up doing more [stictly abstract philosophy-of-language work](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [on](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) [the](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fmA2GJwZzYtkrAKYJ/algorithms-of-deception) [robot](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4hLcbXaqudM9wSeor/philosophy-in-the-darkest-timeline-basics-of-the-evolution)-[cult](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YptSN8riyXJjJ8Qp8/maybe-lying-can-t-exist) [blog](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception).
+
+An important thing to appreciate is that the philosophical point I was trying to make has _absolutely nothing to do with gender_. In 2008, Yudkowsky had explained that _for all_ nouns N, you can't define _N_ any way you want, because _useful_ definitions need to "carve reality at the joints."
+
+It [_follows logically_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WQFioaudEH8R7fyhm/local-validity-as-a-key-to-sanity-and-civilization) that, in particular, if _N_ := "woman", you can't define the word _woman_ any way you want. Maybe trans women _are_ women! But if so—that is, if you want people to agree to that word usage—you need to be able to _argue_ for why that usage makes sense on the empirical merits; you can't just _define_ it to be true. And this is a _general_ principle of how language works, not something I made up on the spot in order to attack trans people.
+
+In 2008, this very general philosophy of language lesson was _not politically controversial_. If, in 2018–present, it _is_ politically controversial (specifically because of the fear that someone will try to apply it with _N_ := "woman"), that's a _problem_ for our whole systematically-correct-reasoning project! What counts as good philosophy—or even good philosophy _pedagogy_—shouldn't depend on the current year!
+
+There is a _sense in which_ one might say that you "can" define a word any way you want. That is: words don't have intrinsic ontologically-basic meanings. We can imagine an alternative world where people spoke a language that was _like_ the English of our world, except that they use the word "tree" to refer to members of the empirical entity-cluster that we call "dogs" and _vice versa_, and it's hard to think of a meaningful sense in which one convention is "right" and the other is "wrong".
+
+But there's also an important _sense in which_ we want to say that you "can't" define a word any way you want. That is: some ways of using words work better for transmitting information from one place to another. It would be harder to explain your observations from a trip to the local park in a language that used the word "tree" to refer to members of _either_ of the empirical entity-clusters that the English of our world calls "dogs" and "trees", because grouping together things that aren't relevantly similar like that makes it harder to describe differences between the wagging-animal-trees and the leafy-plant-trees.
+
+If you want to teach people about the philosophy of language, you should want to convey _both_ of these lessons, against naïve essentialism, _and_ against naïve anti-essentialism. If the people who are widely respected and trusted [(almost worshipped)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts) as the leaders of the systematically-correct-reasoning community, [_selectively_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AdYdLP2sRqPMoe8fb/knowing-about-biases-can-hurt-people) teach _only_ the words-don't-have-intrinsic-ontologically-basic-meanings part when the topic at hand happens to be trans issues (because talking about the carve-reality-at-the-joints part would be [politically suicidal](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting)), then people who trust the leaders are likely to get the wrong idea about how the philosophy of language works—even if [the selective argumentation isn't _conscious_ or deliberative](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie) and [even if every individual sentence they say permits a true interpretation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly).
+
+(As it is written of the fourth virtue of evenness, ["If you are selective about which arguments you inspect for flaws, or how hard you inspect for flaws, then every flaw you learn how to detect makes you that much stupider."](https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues))
+
+_Was_ it a "political" act for me to write about the cognitive function of categorization on the robot-cult blog with non-gender examples, when gender was secretly ("secretly") my _motivating_ example? In some sense, yes, but the thing you have to realize is—
+
+_Everyone else shot first_. The timestamps back me up here: my ["... To Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) (February 2018) was a _response to_ Alexander's ["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) (November 2014). My philosophy-of-language work on the robot-cult blog (April 2019–January 2021) was (stealthily) _in response to_ Yudkowsky's November 2018 Twitter thread. When I started trying to talk about autogynephilia with all my robot cult friends in 2016, I _did not expect_ to get dragged into a multi-year philosophy-of-language crusade! That was just _one branch_ of the argument-tree that, once begun, I thought should be easy to _definitively settle in public_ (within our robot cult, whatever the _general_ public thinks).
+
+I guess by now the branch is as close to settled as it's going to get? Alexander ended up [adding an edit note to the end of "... Not Man to the Categories" in December 2019](https://archive.is/1a4zV#selection-805.0-817.1), and Yudkowsky would go on to clarify his position on the philosophy of language in Facebook posts of [September 2020](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10158853851009228) and [February 2021](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228). So, that's nice.
+
+[TODO: although I think even with the note, in practice, people are going to keep citing "... Not Man for the Categories" in a way that doesn't understand how the note undermines the main point]
+
+But I will confess to being quite disappointed that the public argument-tree evaluation didn't get much further, much faster? The thing you have understand about this whole debate is—
+
+_I need the correct answer in order to decide whether or not to cut my dick off_. As I've said, I _currently_ believe that cutting my dick off would be a _bad_ idea. But that's a cost–benefit judgement call based on many _contingent, empirical_ beliefs about the world. I'm obviously in the general _reference class_ of males who are getting their dicks cut off these days, and a lot of them seem to be pretty happy about it! I would be much more likely to go through with transitioning if I believed different things about the world—if I thought my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing were a brain-intersex condition, or if I still believed in my teenage psychological-sex-differences denialism (such that there would be _axiomatically_ no worries about fitting with "other" women after transitioning), or if I were more optimistic about the degree to which HRT and surgeries approximate an actual sex change.
+
+In that November 2018 Twitter thread, [Yudkowsky wrote](https://archive.is/y5V9i):
+
+> _Even if_ somebody went around saying, "I demand you call me 'she' and furthermore I claim to have two X chromosomes!", which none of my trans colleagues have ever said to me by the way, it still isn't a question-of-empirical-fact whether she should be called "she". It's an act.
+
+This seems to suggest that gender pronouns in the English language as currently spoken don't have effective truth conditions. I think this is false _as a matter of cognitive science_. If someone told you, "Hey, you should come meet my friend at the mall, she is really cool and I think you'll like her," and then the friend turned out to look like me (as I am now), _you would be surprised_. (Even if people in Berkeley would socially punish you for _admitting_ that you were surprised.) The "she ... her" pronouns would prompt your brain to _predict_ that the friend would appear to be female, and that prediction would be _falsified_ by someone who looked like me (as I am now). Pretending that the social-norms dispute is about chromosomes was a _bullshit_ [weakmanning](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/) move on the part of Yudkowsky, [who had once written that](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence) "[t]o argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates[;] [a]rguing against weaker advocates proves _nothing_, because even the strongest idea will attract weak advocates." Thanks to the skills I learned from Yudkowsky's _earlier_ writing, I wasn't dumb enough to fall for it, but we can imagine someone otherwise similar to me who was, who might have thereby been misled into making worse life decisions.
+
+[TODO: ↑ soften tone, be more precise, including about "dumb enough to fall for it"]
+
+If this "rationality" stuff is useful for _anything at all_, you would _expect_ it to be useful for _practical life decisions_ like _whether or not I should cut my dick off_.
+
+In order to get the _right answer_ to that policy question (whatever the right answer turns out to be), you need to _at minimum_ be able to get the _right answer_ on related fact-questions like "Is late-onset gender dysphoria in males an intersex condition?" (answer: no) and related philosophy-questions like "Can we arbitrarily redefine words such as 'woman' without adverse effects on our cognition?" (answer: no).
+
+At the cost of _wasting three years of my life_, we _did_ manage to get the philosophy question mostly right! Again, that's nice. But compared to the [Sequences-era dreams of changing the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YdcF6WbBmJhaaDqoD/the-craft-and-the-community), it's too little, too slow, too late. If our public discourse is going to be this aggressively optimized for _tricking me into cutting my dick off_ (independently of the empirical cost–benefit trade-off determining whether or not I should cut my dick off), that kills the whole project for me. I don't think I'm setting [my price for joining](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining) particularly high here?
+
+Someone asked me: "Wouldn't it be embarrassing if the community solved Friendly AI and went down in history as the people who created Utopia forever, and you had rejected it because of gender stuff?"
+
+But the _reason_ it seemed _at all_ remotely plausible that our little robot cult could be pivotal in creating Utopia forever was _not_ "[Because we're us](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-recommending/), the world-saving good guys", but rather _because_ we were going to discover and refine the methods of _systematically correct reasoning_.
+
+If you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should be able to get the right answer even when the question _doesn't matter_. Obviously, the safety of the world does not _directly_ depend on being able to think clearly about trans issues. Similarly, the safety of a coal mine for humans does not _directly_ depend on [whether it's safe for canaries](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/canary_in_a_coal_mine): the dead canaries are just _evidence about_ properties of the mine relevant to human health. (The causal graph is the fork "canary-death ← mine-gas → human-danger" rather than the direct link "canary-death → human-danger".)
+
+If the people _marketing themselves_ as the good guys who are going to save the world using systematically correct reasoning are _not actually interested in doing systematically correct reasoning_ (because systematically correct reasoning leads to two or three conclusions that are politically "impossible" to state clearly in public, and no one has the guts to [_not_ shut up and thereby do the politically impossible](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nCvvhFBaayaXyuBiD/shut-up-and-do-the-impossible)), that's arguably _worse_ than the situation where "the community" _qua_ community doesn't exist at all.
+
+In ["The Ideology Is Not the Movement"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/) (April 2016), Alexander describes how the content of subcultures typically departs from the ideological "rallying flag" that they formed around. [Sunni and Shia Islam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shia%E2%80%93Sunni_relations) originally, ostensibly diverged on the question of who should rightfully succeed Muhammad as caliph, but modern-day Sunni and Shia who hate each other's guts aren't actually re-litigating a succession dispute from the 7th century C.E. Rather, pre-existing divergent social-group tendencies crystalized into distinct tribes by latching on to the succession dispute as a [simple membership test](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests).
+
+Alexander jokingly identifies the identifying feature of our robot cult as being the belief that "Eliezer Yudkowsky is the rightful caliph": the Sequences were a rallying flag that brought together a lot of like-minded people to form a subculture with its own ethos and norms—among which Alexander includes "don't misgender trans people"—but the subculture emerged as its own entity that isn't necessarily _about_ anything outside itself.
+
+No one seemed to notice at the time, but this characterization of our movement [is actually a _declaration of failure_](https://sinceriously.fyi/cached-answers/#comment-794). There's a word, "rationalist", that I've been trying to avoid in this post, because it's the subject of so much strategic equivocation, where the motte is "anyone who studies the ideal of systematically correct reasoning, general methods of thought that result in true beliefs and successful plans", and the bailey is "members of our social scene centered around Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander". (Since I don't think we deserve the "rationalist" brand name, I had to choose something else to refer to [the social scene](https://srconstantin.github.io/2017/08/08/the-craft-is-not-the-community.html). Hence, "robot cult.")
+
+What I would have _hoped_ for from a systematically correct reasoning community worthy of the brand name is one goddamned place in the whole goddamned world where _good arguments_ would propagate through the population no matter where they arose, "guided by the beauty of our weapons" ([following Scott Alexander](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/) [following Leonard Cohen](https://genius.com/1576578)).
+
+Instead, I think what actually happens is that people like Yudkowsky and Alexander rise to power on the strength of good arguments and entertaining writing (but mostly the latter), and then everyone else sort-of absorbs most of their worldview (plus noise and conformity with the local environment)—with the result that if Yudkowsky and Alexander _aren't interested in getting the right answer_ (in public)—because getting the right answer in public would be politically suicidal—then there's no way for anyone who didn't [win the talent lottery](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) to fix the public understanding by making better arguments.
+
+It makes sense for public figures to not want to commit political suicide! Even so, it's a _problem_ if public figures whose brand is premised on the ideal of _systematically correct reasoning_, end up drawing attention and resources into a subculture that's optimized for tricking men into cutting their dick off on false pretenses. (Although note that Alexander has [specifically disclaimed aspirations or pretentions to being a "rationalist" authority figure](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/); that fate befell him without his consent because he's just too good and prolific of a writer compared to everyone else.)
+
+I'm not optimistic about the problem being fixable, either. Our robot cult _already_ gets a lot of shit from progressive-minded people for being "right-wing"—not because we are in any _useful_, non-gerrymandered sense, but because [attempts to achieve the map that reflects the territory are going to run afoul of ideological taboos for almost any ideology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting).
+
+Because of the particular historical moment in which we live, we end up facing pressure from progressives, because—whatever our _object-level_ beliefs about (say) [sex, race, and class differences](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/)—and however much many of us would prefer not to talk about them—on the _meta_ level, our creed requires us to admit _it's an empirical question_, not a moral one—and that [empirical questions have no privileged reason to admit convenient answers](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god).
+
+I view this conflict as entirely incidental, something that [would happen in some form in any place and time](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cKrgy7hLdszkse2pq/archimedes-s-chronophone), rather than having to do with American politics or "the left" in particular. In a Christian theocracy, our analogues would get in trouble for beliefs about evolution; in the old Soviet Union, our analogues would get in trouble for [thinking about market economics](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/) (as a [positive technical discipline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorems_of_welfare_economics#Proof_of_the_first_fundamental_theorem) adjacent to game theory, not yoked to a particular normative agenda).
+
+Incidental or not, the conflict is real, and everyone smart knows it—even if it's not easy to _prove_ that everyone smart knows it, because everyone smart is very careful what they say in public. (I am not smart.) Scott Aaronson wrote of [the Kolmogorov Option](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3376) (which Alexander aptly renamed [Kolmorogov complicity](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/): serve the cause of Truth by cultivating a bubble that focuses on truths that won't get you in trouble with the local political authorities. This after the Soviet mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov, who _knew better than to pick fights he couldn't win_.
+
+Becuase of the conflict, and because all the prominent high-status people are running a Kolmogorov Option strategy, and because we happen to have to a _wildly_ disproportionate number of _people like me_ around, I think being "pro-trans" ended up being part of the community's "shield" against external political pressure, of the sort that perked up after [the February 2021 _New York Times_ hit piece about Alexander's blog](https://archive.is/0Ghdl). (The _magnitude_ of heat brought on by the recent _Times_ piece and its aftermath was new, but the underlying dynamics had been present for years.)
+
+Jacob Falkovich notes, ["The two demographics most over-represented in the SlateStarCodex readership according to the surveys are transgender people and Ph.D. holders."](https://twitter.com/yashkaf/status/1275524303430262790) [Aaronson notes (in commentary on the _Times_ article)](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5310) "the rationalist community's legendary openness to alternative gender identities and sexualities" as something that would have "complicated the picture" of our portrayal as anti-feminist.
+
+Even the _haters_ grudgingly give Alexander credit for "... Not Man for the Categories": ["I strongly disagree that one good article about accepting transness means you get to walk away from writing that is somewhat white supremacist and quite fascist without at least awknowledging you were wrong."](https://archive.is/SlJo1)
+
+Given these political realities, you'd think that I _should_ be sympathetic to the Kolmogorov Option argument, which makes a lot of sense. _Of course_ all the high-status people with a public-facing mission (like building a movement to prevent the coming robot apocalypse) are going to be motivatedly dumb about trans stuff in public: look at all the damage [the _other_ Harry Potter author did to her legacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_J._K._Rowling#Transgender_people).
+
+And, historically, it would have been harder for the robot cult to recruit _me_ (or those like me) back in the 'aughts, if they had been less politically correct. Recall that I was already somewhat turned off, then, by what I thought of as _sexism_; I stayed because the philosophy-of-science blogging was _way too good_. But what that means on the margin is that someone otherwise like me except more orthodox or less philosophical, _would_ have bounced. If [Cthulhu has swum left](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified/) over the intervening thirteen years, then maintaining the same map-revealing/not-alienating-orthodox-recruits tradeoff _relative_ to the general population, necessitates relinquishing parts of the shared map that have fallen of general favor.
+
+Ultimately, if the people with influence over the trajectory of the systematically correct reasoning "community" aren't interested in getting the right answers in public, then I think we need to give up on the idea of there _being_ a "community", which, you know, might have been a dumb idea to begin with. No one owns _reasoning itself_. Yudkowsky had written in March 2009 that rationality is the ["common interest of many causes"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes): that proponents of causes-that-benefit-from-better-reasoning like atheism or marijuana legalization or existential-risk-reduction might perceive a shared interest in cooperating to [raise the sanity waterline](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline). But to do that, they need to not try to capture all the value they create: some of the resources you invest in teaching rationality are going to flow to someone else's cause, and you need to be okay with that.
+
+But Alexander's ["Kolmogorov Complicity"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/) (October 2017) seems to suggest a starkly different moral, that "rationalist"-favored causes might not _want_ to associate with others that have worse optics. Atheists and marijuana legalization proponents and existential-risk-reducers probably don't want any of the value they create to flow to neoreactionaries and race realists and autogynephilia truthers, if video of the flow will be used to drag their own names through the mud.
+
+[_My_ Something to Protect](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/) requires me to take the [Leeroy Jenkins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leeroy_Jenkins) Option. (As typified by Justin Murphy: ["Say whatever you believe to be true, in uncalculating fashion, in whatever language you really think and speak with, to everyone who will listen."](https://otherlife.co/respectability-is-not-worth-it-reply-to-slatestarcodex/)) I'm eager to cooperate with people facing different constraints who are stuck with a Kolmogorov Option strategy as long as they don't _fuck with me_. But I construe encouragement of the conflation of "rationality" as a "community" and the _subject matter_ of systematically correct reasoning, as a form of fucking with me: it's a _problem_ if all our beautiful propaganda about the methods of seeking Truth, doubles as propaganda for joining a robot cult whose culture is heavily optimized for tricking men like me into cutting their dicks off.
+
+Someone asked me: "If we randomized half the people at [OpenAI](https://openai.com/) to use trans pronouns one way, and the other half to use it the other way, do you think they would end up with significantly different productivity?"
+
+But the thing I'm objecting to is a lot more fundamental than the specific choice of pronoun convention, which obviously isn't going to be uniquely determined. Turkish doesn't have gender pronouns, and that's fine. Naval ships traditionally take feminine pronouns in English, and it doesn't confuse anyone into thinking boats have a womb. [Many other languages are much more gendered than English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Distribution_of_gender_in_the_world's_languages) (where pretty much only third-person singular pronouns are at issue). The conventions used in one's native language probably _do_ [color one's thinking to some extent](/2020/Dec/crossing-the-line/)—but when it comes to that, I have no reason to expect the overall design of English grammar and vocabulary "got it right" where Spanish or Arabic "got it wrong."
+
+What matters isn't the specific object-level choice of pronoun or bathroom conventions; what matters is having a culture where people _viscerally care_ about minimizing the expected squared error of our probabilistic predictions, even at the expense of people's feelings—[_especially_ at the expense of people's feelings](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/bayesomasochism/).
+
+I think looking at [our standard punching bag of theism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLL6yzZ3WKn8KaSC3/the-uniquely-awful-example-of-theism) is a very fair comparison. Religious people aren't _stupid_. You can prove theorems about the properties of [Q-learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-learning) or [Kalman filters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter) at a world-class level without encountering anything that forces you to question whether Jesus Christ died for our sins. But [beyond technical mastery of one's narrow specialty](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2pENnTPB75sfc9kb/outside-the-laboratory), there's going to be some competence threshold in ["seeing the correspondence of mathematical structures to What Happens in the Real World"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sizjfDgCgAsuLJQmm/reply-to-holden-on-tool-ai) that _forces_ correct conclusions. I actually _don't_ think you can be a believing Christian and invent [the concern about consequentialists embedded in the Solomonoff prior](https://ordinaryideas.wordpress.com/2016/11/30/what-does-the-universal-prior-actually-look-like/).
+
+But the _same_ general parsimony-skill that rejects belief in an epiphenomenal ["God of the gaps"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps) that is verbally asserted to exist but will never the threat of being empirically falsified, _also_ rejects belief in an epiphenomenal "gender of the gaps" that is verbally asserted to exist but will never face the threat of being empirically falsified.
+
+In a world where sexual dimorphism didn't exist, where everyone was a hermaphrodite, then "gender" wouldn't exist, either.
+
+In a world where we _actually had_ magical perfect sex-change technology of the kind described in "Changing Emotions", then people who wanted to change sex would do so, and everyone else would use the corresponding language (pronouns and more), _not_ as a courtesy, _not_ to maximize social welfare, but because it _straightforwardly described reality_.
+
+In a world where we don't _have_ magical perfect sex-change technology, but we _do_ have hormone replacement therapy and various surgical methods, you actually end up with _four_ clusters: females (F), males (M), masculinized females a.k.a. trans men (FtM), and feminized males a.k.a. trans women (MtF). I _don't_ have a "clean" philosophical answer as to in what contexts one should prefer to use a {F, MtF}/{M, FtM} category system (treating trans people as their social gender) rather than a {F, FtM}/{M, MtF} system (considering trans people as their [developmental sex](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/)), because that's a complicated semi-empirical, semi-value question about which aspects of reality are most relevant to what you're trying think about in that context. But I do need _the language with which to write this paragraph_, which is about _modeling reality_, and not about marginalization or respect.
+
+Something I have trouble reliably communicating about what I'm trying to do with this blog is that "I don't do policy." Almost everything I write is _at least_ one meta level up from any actual decisions. I'm _not_ trying to tell other people in detail how they should live their lives, because obviously I'm not smart enough to do that and get the right answer. I'm _not_ telling anyone to detransition. I'm _not_ trying to set government policy about locker rooms or medical treatments.
+
+I'm trying to _get the theory right_. My main victory condition is getting the two-type taxonomy (or whatever more precise theory supplants it) into the _standard_ sex ed textbooks. If you understand the nature of the underlying psychological condition _first_, then people can make a sensible decision about what to _do_ about it. Accurate beliefs should inform policy, rather than policy determining what beliefs are politically acceptable.
+
+It worked once, right?
+
+(Picture me playing Hermione Granger in a post-Singularity [holonovel](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Holo-novel_program) adaptation of _Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality_ (Emma Watson having charged me [the standard licensing fee](/2019/Dec/comp/) to use a copy of her body for the occasion): "[We can do anything if we](https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/30) exert arbitrarily large amounts of [interpretive labor](https://acesounderglass.com/2015/06/09/interpretive-labor/)!")
+
+> An extreme case in point of "handwringing about the Overton Window in fact constituted the Overton Window's implementation"
+OK, now apply that to your Kolomogorov cowardice
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1373004525481598978
+
+The "discourse algorithm" (the collective generalization of "cognitive algorithm") that can't just _get this shit right_ in 2021 (because being out of step with the reigning Bay Area ideological fashion is deemed too expensive by a consequentialism that counts unpopularity or hurt feelings as costs), also [can't get heliocentrism right in 1633](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair) [_for the same reason_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yaCwW8nPQeJknbCgf/free-speech-and-triskaidekaphobic-calculators-a-reply-to)—and I really doubt it can get AI alignment theory right in 2041.
+
+Or at least—even if there are things we can't talk about in public for consequentialist reasons and there's nothing to be done about it, you would hope that the censorship wouldn't distort our beliefs about the things we _can_ talk about—like, say, the role of Bayesian reasoning in the philosophy of language. Yudkowsky had written about the [dark side epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology) of [contagious lies](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies): trying to protect a false belief doesn't just mean being wrong about that one thing, it also gives you, on the object level, an incentive to be wrong about anything that would _imply_ the falsity of the protected belief—and, on the meta level, an incentive to be wrong _about epistemology itself_, about how "implying" and "falsity" work.
+
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ASpGaS3HGEQCbJbjS/eliezer-s-sequences-and-mainstream-academia?commentId=6GD86zE5ucqigErXX
+> The actual real-world consequences of a post like this when people actually read it are what bothers me, and it does feel frustrating because those consequences seem very predictable
+(!!)
+
+http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/47
+https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/97
+> one technique was to look at what _ended up_ happening, assume it was the _intended_ result, and ask who benefited.
+
+
+> At least, I have a MASSIVE home territory advantage because I can appeal to Eliezer's writings from 10 years ago, and ppl can't say "Eliezer who? He's probably a bad man"
+
+> Makes sense... just don't be shocked if the next frontier is grudging concessions that get compartmentalized
+
+> Stopping reading your Tweets is the correct move for them IF you construe them as only optimizing for their personal hedonics
+https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1224433237679722500
+
+> I aspire to make sure my departures from perfection aren't noticeable to others, so this tweet is very validating.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1384671335146692608
+
+"assuming that it was a 'he'"—people treating pronouns as synonymous with sex
+https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxZBrbVqZnU
+
+I realize it wasn't personal—no one _consciously_ thinking "I'm going to trick autogynpehilic men into cutting their dicks off", but
+
+the most recent pronoun update
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228
+
+> I would not know how to write a different viewpoint as a sympathetic character.
+[...]
+> I do not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than "doesn't look like an Oliver" is attached to something in your head.
+
+like the 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.)
+
+* the moment in October 2016 when I switched sides http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/ http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/brand-rust/
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jNAAZ9XNyt82CXosr/mirrors-and-paintings
+
+> The absolute inadequacy of every single institution in the civilization of magical Britain is what happened! You cannot comprehend it, boy! I cannot comprehend it! It has to be seen and even then it cannot be believed!
+http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/108
+
+EGS??
+
+(If the world were smaller, you'd never give different people the same name; if our memories were larger, we'd give everyone a UUID.)
+
+* papal infallability / Eliezer Yudkowsky facts
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts?commentId=Aq9eWJmK6Liivn8ND
+Never go in against Eliezer Yudkowsky when anything is on the line.
+https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Norris_facts
+
+how they would actually think about the problem in dath ilan
+
+https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/myr3n7/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_april_26_2021/gw0nhqv/?context=3
+> At some point you realize that your free bazaar of ideas has produced a core (or multiple cores). It is a chamber: semi-permeable, still receptive to external ideas and open to critique, but increasingly more connected on the inside.
+
+https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/domain_distance?l=7vk
+
+I'm writing to you because I'm afraid that marketing is a more powerful force than argument. Rather than good arguments propogating through the population of so-called "rationalists" no matter where they arise, what actually happens is that people like Eliezer and you rise to power on the strength of good arguments and entertaining writing (but mostly the latter), and then everyone else sort-of absorbs most of their worldview (plus noise and [conformity with the local environment](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/)). So for people who _didn't_ [win the talent lottery](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) but think they see a flaw in the _Zeitgeist_, the winning move is "persuade Scott Alexander".
+
+https://web.archive.org/web/20070615130139/http://singinst.org/upload/CFAI.html#foot-16
+> 16: I flip a coin to determine whether a given human is male or female.
+
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159611207744228?comment_id=10159611208509228&reply_comment_id=10159613820954228
+
+> In the circles I run in, being poly isn't very political, just a sexual orientation like any other—it's normalized the way that LGBT is normalized in saner circles, not political the way that LGBT is political in crazier circles.
+
+https://archive.is/7Wolo
+> the massive correlation between exposure to Yudkowsky's writings and being a trans woman (can't bother to do the calculations but the connection is absurdly strong)
+Namespace's point about the two EYs
+
+[stonewalling](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters)
+
+The level above "Many-worlds is obviously correct, stop being stupid" is "Racial IQ differences are obviously real; stop being stupid"
+
+
+Anyway, four years later, it turns out that this whole "rationality" subculture is completely fake. The thing that convinced me of this was not _even_ the late-onset-gender-dysphoria-in-males-is-not-an-intersex-condition thesis that I was originally trying to talk about. Humans are _really complicated_: no matter how "obvious" something in psychology or social science to me, I can't write someone off entirely simply for disagreeing, because the whole domain is so complex that I always have to acknowledge that, ultimately, I could just be wrong.
+
+But in the _process_ of trying to _talk about_ this late-onset-gender-dysphoria-in-males-is-not-an-intersex-condition thesis, I noticed that my conversations kept getting _derailed_ on some variation of "The word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that." _That_ part of the debate, I knew I could win.
+
+what the math actually means in the real world from "Reply to Holden"
+
+I guess I feel pretty naïve now, but—I _actually believed our own propoganda_. I _actually thought_ we were doing something new and special of historical and possibly even _cosmological_ significance.
+
+
+I got a pingback to "Optimized Propaganda" from in an "EDIT 5/21/2021" on https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qKvn7rxP2mzJbKfcA/persuasion-tools-ai-takeover-without-agi-or-agency after Scott Alexander linked it—evidence for Scott having Power to shape people's attention
+
+https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/
+
+"Rationalism starts with the belief that arguments aren't soldiers, and ends with the belief that soldiers are arguments."
+
+The Eliezer Yudkowsky I remember wrote about [how facts are tightly-woven together in the Great Web of Causality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies), such that [people who are trying to believe something false have an incentive to invent and spread fake epistemology lessons](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology), and about the [high competence threshold that _forces_ correct conclusions](http://sl4.org/archive/0602/13903.html).
+
+A culture where there are huge catastrophic consequences for [questioning religion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6JzcFtPGiznFgDxP/excluding-the-supernatural), is a culture where it's harder to train alignment researchers that genuinely understand Occam's razor on a _deep_ level, when [the intelligent social web](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web) around them will do anything to prevent them from applying the parsimony skill to the God hypothesis.
+
+A culture where there are huge catastrophic consequences for questioning gender identity, is a culture where it's harder to train alignment researchers that genuinely understand the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-language-and-cognition on a _deep_ level, when the social web around them will do anything to prevent them from [invalidating someone's identity](http://unremediatedgender.space/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/).
+
+> First, it is not enough to learn something, and tell the world about it, to get the world to believe it. Not even if you can offer clear and solid evidence, and explain it so well that a child could understand. You need to instead convince each person in your audience that the other people who they see as their key audiences will soon be willing to endorse what you have learned.
+https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/12/social-proof-but-of-what.html
+
+twenty-one month Category War is as long as it took to write the Sequences https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9jF4zbZqz6DydJ5En/the-end-of-sequences
+
+I'm worried about the failure mode where bright young minds [lured in](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/construction-beacons/) by the beautiful propaganda about _systematically correct reasoning_, are instead recruited into what is, effectively, the Eliezer-Yudkowsky-and-Scott-Alexander fan club.
+
+> I'm not trying to get Eliezer or "the community" to take a public stance on gender politics; I'm trying to get us to take a stance in favor of the kind of epistemology that we were doing in 2008. It turns out that epistemology has implications for gender politics which are unsafe, but that's more inferential steps, and ... I guess I just don't expect the sort of people who would punish good epistemology to follow the inferential steps? Maybe I'm living in the should-universe a bit here, but I don't think it "should" be hard for Eliezer to publicly say, "Yep, categories aren't arbitrary because you need them to carve reality at the joints in order to make probabilistic inferences, just like I said in 2008; this is obvious."
+
+Scott got a lot of pushback just for including the blog that I showed him in a links post (Times have changed! BBL is locally quasi-mainstream after Ozy engaged)
+
+It's weird that he thinks telling the truth is politically impossible, because the specific truths I'm focused on are things he _already said_, that anyone could just look up. I guess the point is that the egregore doesn't have the logical or reading comprehension for that?—or rather (a reader points out) the egregore has no reason to care about the past; if you get tagged as an enemy, your past statements will get dug up as evidence of foul present intent, but if you're doing good enough of playing the part today, no one cares what you said in 2009
+
+Somni gets it! https://somnilogical.tumblr.com/post/189782657699/legally-blind
+
+E.Y. thinks postrats are emitting "epistemic smog", but the fact that Eigenrobot can retweet my Murray review makes me respect him more than E.Y. https://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1397383979720839175
+
+The robot cult is "only" "trying" to trick me into cutting my dick off in the sense that a paperclip maximizer is trying to kill us: an instrumental rather than a terminal value.
+
+> the problem with taqiyya is that your sons will believe you
+https://twitter.com/extradeadjcb/status/1397618177991921667
+
+> I've informed a number of male college students that they have large, clearly detectable body odors. In every single case so far, they say nobody has ever told them that before.
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/kLR5H4pbaBjzZxLv6/polyhacking/comment/rYKwptdgLgD2dBnHY
+
+It would have been better if someone without a dog in the object-level fight could have loudly but disinterestedly said, "What? I don't have a dog in the object-level fight, but we had a whole Sequence about this", but people mostly don't talk if they don't have a dog.
+
+But if someone without a dog spoke, then they'd get pattern-matched as a partisan; it _had_ to be me
+
+
+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.
+
+typographic attack: https://openai.com/blog/multimodal-neurons/
+
+https://distill.pub/2021/multimodal-neurons/
+> These neurons detect gender^10
+> Footnote: By this, we mean both that it responds to people presenting as this gender, as well as that it responds to concepts associated with that gender.
+
+https://www.jefftk.com/p/an-update-on-gendered-pronouns
+
+> Still think this was a perfectly fine tweet btw. Some people afaict were doing the literal ontologically confused thing; seemed like a simple thing to make progress on. Some people wanted to read it as a coded statement despite all my attempts to narrow it, but what can you do.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356535300986523648
+
+If you were actually HONESTLY tring to narrow it, you would have said, "By the way, this is just about pronouns, I'm not taking a position on whether trans women are women"
+
+https://www.gingersoftware.com/content/grammar-rules/adjectives/order-of-adjectives/
+
+https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/01/how-to-actually-defeat-us-government/
+> propagate a credible alternate reality that outcompetes the official information network.
+
+https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/12/explanation-of-democratic-centrism/
+
+the second generation doesn't "get the joke"; young people don't understand physical strength differences anymore
+
+voiceless palato-alveolar fricative, or for words with two letters rather than three.
+https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_postalveolar_fricative#Voiceless_palato-alveolar_fricative
+
+https://medium.com/@barrakerr/pronouns-are-rohypnol-dbcd1cb9c2d9
+
+I just thought of an interesting argument that almost no one else would (because it requires both prog-sight and NRx-sight)
+You know the "signaling hazard" (pace Jim) argument against public tolerance of male homosexuality (tolerating gays interferes with normal men expressing affection for each other without being seen as gay, which is bad for unit cohesion, &c.). Until recently, I hadn't thought much of it (because of my prog upbringing)—why do you care if someone isn't sure you're straight?
+but recent events have made me more sympathetic to its empirical reality—if human nature is such that 140+ IQ ppl actually can't publicly clear up a trivial philosophy-of-language dispute because of the fear of appearing transphobic—well, that's really dumb, but it's the SAME KIND of dumb as "can't express male friendship because of the fear of appearing gay"
+which suggests a "signaling hazard" argument in favor of political correctness (!!)—we can't tolerate racism, or else Good people would have to incur more costs to signal antiracism (same structure as "we can't tolerate gays, or else normal guys have to incur more costs to signal not-gayness")
+
+that's the thing; I read as lefty because I am morally lefty (in contrast to Real Men Who Lift &c.); it's just that I had the "bad luck" of reading everything I could about race and IQ after the James Watson affair in 'aught-seven, and all my leftness is filtered through ten years of living with inconvenient hypotheses
+
+[TODO: reorganize to position the question first]
+
+[It's been occasionally argued that](https://archive.is/ChqYX) there aren't legitimate grounds to object to using trans people's preferred pronouns, because pronouns aren't facts and don't have truth conditions. Note, this is substantially _stronger_ that the mere claim that you _should_ use preferred pronouns; the claim is that no linguistic expressive power is being sacrificed by doing so. (Whereas in contrast, one might accede to the requested usage out of some combination of politeness, social coercion, and apprehension of [the Schelling point of standard usage](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/), while privately lamenting that it feels analogous to lying.)
+
+I think the claim that pronouns don't have truth conditions is _false as a matter of cognitive science_. Humans are _pretty good_ at visually identifying the sex of other humans by integrating cues from various secondary sex characteristics—it's the kind of computer-vision capability that would have been useful in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness. If it _didn't_ work so reliably, we wouldn't have ended up with languages like English where identifying a person's sex is baked into the grammar. And _because_ we ended up with (many) languages that have it baked into the grammar, _departing_ from that conventional usage has cognitive consequences: if someone told you, "Come meet my friend at the mall; she's really cool and you'll like her" and then the friend turned out to be obviously male, you would be _surprised_. The fact that the "she ... her" language [constrained your anticipations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences) so much would seem to immediately falsify the "no truth conditions" claim.
+
+[From a certain first-principles perspective](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228), this is _terrible language design_. The grammatical function of pronouns is to have a brief way to refer back to entities already mentioned: it's more user-friendly to be able to say "Katherine put her book on its shelf" rather than "Katherine put Katherine's book on the book's shelf". But then why couple that grammatical function to sex-category membership? You shouldn't _need_ to take a stance on someone's reproductive capabilities to talk about them putting a book on the shelf.
+
+If you wanted more pronoun-classes to reduce the probability of collisions (where universal [Spivak _ey_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun) or singular _they_ would result in more frequent need to repeat names where a pronoun would be ambiguous), you could devise some other system that doesn't bake sex into the language, like using initials to form pronouns (<em>K</em>atherine put <em>k</em>er book on its shelf?), or an oral or written analogue of [spatial referencing in American Sign Language](https://www.handspeak.com/learn/index.php?id=27) (where a signer associates a name or description with a direction in space, and points in that direction for subsequent references).
+
+(One might speculate that "more classes to reduce collisions" _is_ part of the historical explanation for grammatical gender, in conjunction with the fact that sex is binary and easy to observe. No other salient objective feature quite does the same job: age is continuous rather than categorical; race is also largely continuous [(clinal)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cline_(biology)) and historically didn't typically vary within a tribal/community context.)
+
+Taking it as a given that English speakers are stuck with gendered third-person singular pronouns, there's still room to debate exactly what _she_ and _he_ map to in cases where a person's "gender" is ambiguous or disputed. (Which comes up more often these days than in the environment where the language evolved.)
+
+[TODO: lit search or ask linguistics.stackexchange for literature on what gender/plural/case/&c. distinctions are for? Is it just the collision/ambiuity reduction, or is there something else? Oh, or Anna T./Elena might know]
+
--- /dev/null
+Imagine my surprise to discover that, in the current year, my weird sexual obsession is suddenly at the center of [one of the _defining political issues of our time_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_rights).
+
+All this time—the dozen years I spent reading everything I could about sex and gender and transgender and feminism and evopsych and doing various things with my social presentation (sometimes things I regretted and reverted after a lot of pain, like the initials) to try to seem not-masculine—I had been _assuming_ that my gender problems were not of the same kind as people who were _actually_ transgender, because the standard narrative said that that was about people whose ["internal sense of their own gender does not match their assigned sex at birth"](https://www.vox.com/identities/21332685/trans-rights-pronouns-bathrooms-sports), whereas my thing was obviously at least partially an outgrowth of my weird sex fantasy—I had never interpreted the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing as an "internal sense of my own gender".
+
+_Why would I?_ In the English of my youth, "gender" (as a single word, rather than part of the phrase "gender role") was understood as a euphemism for _sex_ for people who were squeamish about the potential ambiguity betweeen _sex_-as-in-biological-sex and _sex_-as-in-intercourse. (Judging by this blog's domain name, I am not immune to this.) In that language, my "gender"—my sex—is male. Not because I'm necessarily happy about it (and I [used to](/2017/Jan/the-erotic-target-location-gift/) be pointedly insistent that I wasn't), but as an observable biological fact that, whatever my pure beautiful sacred self-identity feelings, _I am not delusional about_.
+
+Okay, so trans people aren't delusional about their [developmental sex](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/); the claim is that their internal sense of their own gender is in some sense more real or more relevant and should take precedence.
+
+So where does that leave me? This post is about my _own_ experiences, and not anyone else's (which I obviously don't have access to). I've _mentioned_ transgenderedness a number of times in the main body of this post, but I've tried to cast it as explanation that one might be tempted to apply to my case, but which I don't think fits. Everything I've said so far is _consistent_ with a world in which Ray Blanchard (who coined the obvious and perfect word for my thing while studying actual transsexuals) was dumb and wrong, a world where my idiosyncratic weird sex perversion and associated beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings are taxonomically and etiologically distinct from whatever brain-intersex condition causes _actual_ trans women. That's the world I _thought_ I lived in for the ten years after encountering the obvious and perfect word.
+
+
+Between the reading, and a series of increasingly frustrating private conversations, I gradually became persuaded that Blanchard _wasn't_ dumb and wrong, that his taxonomy is _basically_ correct, at least as a first approximation. So far this post has just been about _my_ experience, and not anyone's theory of transsexualism (which I had assumed for years couldn't possibly apply to me), so let me take a moment to explain the theory now.
+
+(With the caveated understanding that psychology is complicated and there's more to be said about what "as a first approximation" is even supposed to mean, but I need a few paragraphs to talk about the _simple_ version of the theory that makes _pretty good_ predictions on _average_, before I can elaborate on more complicated theories that might make even better predictions including on cases that diverge from average.)
+
+The idea is that male-to-female transsexualism isn't actually one phenomenon; it's two completely different phenomena that don't actually have anything to do with each other, except for the (perhaps) indicated treatment of HRT, surgery, and social transition. (Compare to how different medical conditions might happen to respond to the same drug.)
+
+In one taxon, the "early-onset" type, you have same-sex-attracted males who have just been extremely feminine (in social behavior, interests, _&c._) their entire lives, in a way that causes huge social problems for them—the far tail of effeminate gay men who end up fitting into Society better as straight women. _That's_ where the "woman trapped inside a man's body" trope comes from. [This one probably _is_ a brain-intersex condition.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3180619/)
+
+That story is pretty intuitive. Were an alien AI to be informed of the fact that, among humans, some fraction of males elect to undergo medical interventions to resememble females and aspire to be perceived as females socially, "brain-intersex condition such that they already behave like females" would probably be its top hypothesis for the cause of such behavior, just on priors.
+
+Suppose our alien AI were to be informed that many of the human males seeking to become female (as far as the technology can manage, anyway) do _not_ fit the clinical profile of the early-onset type—it looks like there's a separate "late-onset" type or types. If you [didn't have enough data to _prove_ anything, but you had to guess](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xTyuQ3cgsPjifr7oj/faster-than-science), what would be your _second_ hypothesis for how this behavior might arise?
+
+What's the _usual_ reason for males to be obsessed with female bodies?
+
+So, yeah. Basically, I think a _substantial majority_ of trans women under modern conditions in Western countries are, essentially, guys like me who were _less self-aware about what the thing actually is_.
+
+So, I realize this is an inflamatory and (far more importantly) _surprising_ claim. Obviously, I don't have introspective access into other people's minds. If someone claims to have an internal sense of her own gender that doesn't match her assigned sex at birth, on what evidence could I _possibly_ have the _astounding_ arrogance to reply, "No, I think you're really just a perverted male like me"?
+
+Actually, lots. To arbitrarily pick one particularly vivid exhibition, in April 2018, the [/r/MtF subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/) (which currently has 100,000 subscribers) [posted a link to a poll: "Did you have a gender/body swap/transformation "fetish" (or similar) before you realised you were trans?"](https://archive.is/uswsz). The [results of the poll](https://strawpoll.com/5p7y96x2/r): [_82%_ said Yes](/images/did_you_have-reddit_poll.png). [Top comment in the thread](https://archive.is/c7YFG), with 232 karma: "I spent a long time in the 'it's probably just a fetish' camp".
+
+Certainly, 82% is not 100%! (But 82% is evidence for my claim that a _substantial majority_ of trans women under modern conditions in Western countries are essentially guys like me.) Certainly, you could argue that Reddit has a sampling bias such that poll results and karma scores from /r/MtF fail to match the distribution of opinion among real-world MtFs. But if you don't take the gender-identity story as a _axiom_ and [_actually look_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SA79JMXKWke32A3hG/original-seeing) at the _details_ of what people say and do, these kinds of observations are _not hard to find_. You could [fill an entire subreddit with them](https://archive.is/ezENv) (and then move it to [independent](https://ovarit.com/o/ItsAFetish/) [platforms](https://saidit.net/s/itsafetish/) when the original gets [banned for "promoting hate"](https://www.reddit.com/r/itsafetish/)).
+
+Reddit isn't "scientific" enough for you? Fine. The scientific literature says the same thing. [Blanchard 1985](/papers/blanchard-typology_of_mtf_transsexualism.pdf): 73% of non-exclusively-androphilic transsexuals acknowledged some history of erotic cross-dressing. (Unfortunately, a lot of the classic studies specifically asked about cross-_dressing_, but the underlying desire isn't about clothes.) [Lawrence 2005](/papers/lawrence-sexuality_before_and_after_mtf_srs.pdf): of trans women who had female partners before sexual reassignment surgery, 90% reported a history of autogynephilic arousal. [Smith _et al._ 2005](/papers/smith_et_al-transsexual_subtypes_clinical_and_theoretical_significance.pdf): 64% of non-homosexual MtFs (excluding the "missing" and "N/A" responses) reported arousal while cross-dressing during adolescence. (A lot of the classic literature says "non-homosexual", which is with respect to natal sex; the idea is that self-identified bisexuals are still in the late-onset taxon.) [Nuttbrock _et al._ 2011](/papers/nuttbrock_et_al-a_further_assessment.pdf): lifetime prevalence of transvestic fetishism among non-homosexual MtFs was 69%. (For a more detailed literature review, see [Kay Brown's blog](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/) or the first two chapters of [Anne Lawrence's _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism_](https://surveyanon.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/men-trapped-in-mens-bodies_book.pdf).)
+
+Peer-reviewed scientific papers aren't enough for you? (They could be cherry-picked; there are lots of scientific journals, and no doubt a lot of bad science slips through the cracks of the review process.) Want something more indicative of a consensus among practitioners? Fine. The [_Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSM-5) (the definitive taxonomic handbook of the American Psychiatric Association) [says the same thing](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2021/02/06/american-psychiatric-association-supports-the-two-type-transsexual-taxonomy/) in [its section on gender dysphoria](/papers/DSM-V-gender_dysphoria_section.pdf) ([ICD-10-CM codes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICD-10-CM) F64.1 and F64.2):
+
+> In both adolescent and adult natal males, there are two broad trajectories for development of gender dysphoria: early onset and late onset. _Early-onset gender dysphoria_ starts in childhood and continues into adolescence and adulthood; or, there is an intermittent period in which the gender dysphoria desists and these individuals self-identify as gay or homosexual, followed by recurrence of gender dysphoria. _Late-onset gender dysphoria_ occurs around puberty or much later in life. Some of these individuals report having had a desire to be of the other gender in childhood that was not expressed verbally to others. Others do not recall any signs of childhood gender dysphoria. For adolescent males with late-onset gender dysphoria, parents often report surprise because they did not see signs of gender dysphoria in childhood. Adolescent and adult natal males with early-onset gender dysphoria are almost always sexually attracted to men (androphilic). Adolescents and adults with late-onset gender dysphoria **frequently engage in transvestic behavior with sexual excitement.**
+
+(Bolding mine.)
+
+Or consider Anne Vitale's ["The Gender Variant Phenomenon—A Developmental Review"](http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm), which makes the _same_ observations as Blanchard-and-friends and arrives at essentially the _same_ two-type taxonomy of MtF, but dressed up in socially-desirable language—
+
+> As sexual maturity advances, Group Three, cloistered gender dysphoric boys, often combine excessive masturbation (one individual reported masturbating up to 5 and even 6 times a day) with an increase in secret cross-dressing activity to release anxiety.
+
+Got that? They _often combine excessive masturbation_ with an _increase in secret cross-dressing activity_ to _release anxiety_—their terrible, terrible _gender expression deprivation anxiety!_
+
+Don't trust scientists or clinicians? Me neither! (Especially [not clinicians](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/).) Want first-person accounts from trans women themselves? Me too! And there's lots!
+
+Consider this passage from Dierdre McCloskey's memoir _Crossing_, writing in the third person about her decades identifying as a heterosexual crossdresser before transitioning at age 53:
+
+> He had been doing it ten times a month through four decades, whenever possible, though in the closet. The quantifying economist made the calculation: _About five thousand episodes_. [...] At fifty-two Donald accepted crossdressing as part of who he was. True, if before the realization that he could cross all the way someone had offered a pill to stop the occasional cross-dressing, he would have accepted, since it was mildly distracting—though hardly time consuming. Until the spring of 1995 each of the five thousand episodes was associated with quick, male sex.
+
+Or consider this passage from Julia Serano's _Whipping Girl_ (I know I [keep](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/) [referencing](/2020/Dec/crossing-the-line/) this book, but it's _so representative_ of the dominant strain of trans activism, and I'm never going to get over the [Fridge Logic](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FridgeLogic) of the all [the blatant clues that I somehow missed in 2007](/2016/Sep/apophenia/))—
+
+> There was also a period of time when I embraced the word "pervert" and viewed my desire to be female as some sort of sexual kink. But after exploring that path, it became obvious that explanation could not account for the vast majority of instances when I thought about being female in a nonsexual context.
+
+"It became obvious that explanation could not account." I don't doubt Serano's reporting of her own phenomenal experiences, but "that explanation could not account" is _not an experience_; it's a _hypothesis_ about psychology, about the _causes_ of the experience.
+
+... this is just a sample. Do I need to keep going though the mountains of public testimony? Is this post long enough?
+
+After having seen enough of these _laughable_ denials of autogynephilia, the main question in my mind has become not, _Is the two-type feminine–androphilic/autogynephilic taxonomy of MtF transsexualism approximately true?_ (answer: yes, obviously) and more, _How dumb do you (proponents of gender-identity theories) think we (the general public) are?_ (answer: very, but this assessment is accurate).
+
+An important caveat must be made: [different causal/etiological stories could be compatible with the same _descriptive_ taxonomy.](/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/) You shouldn't confuse my mere ridicule with a serious and rigorous critique of the strongest possible case for "gender expression deprivation anxiety" as a theoretical entity, which would be more work. But hopefully I've shown _enough_ work here, that the reader can perhaps empathize with the temptation to resort to ridicule?
+
+Everyone's experience is different, but the human mind still has a _design_. If I hurt my ankle while running and I (knowing nothing of physiology or sports medicine) think it might be a stress fracture, a competent doctor (who's studied the literature and seen many more cases) is going to ask followup questions about my experiences to pin down whether it's stress fracture or a sprain. I can't be wrong about the fact _that_ my ankle hurts (that's a privileged first-person experience), but I can easily be wrong about my _theory about_ why my ankle hurts.
+
+Even if human brains vary more than human ankles, the basic epistemological principle applies to a mysterious desire to be female. The question is, do the trans women whose reports I'm considering have a relevantly _different_ psychological condition than me, or do we have "the same" condition, and (at least) one of us is misdiagnosing it?
+
+The _safe_ answer—the answer that preserves everyone's current stories about themselves without any need for modification—is "different." That's what I thought before 2016. I think a lot of trans activists would say "the same". And on _that_ much, we can agree.
+
+How weasely am I being with these "approximately true" and "as a first approximation" qualifiers and hedges? I claim: not _more_ weasely than anyone who tries to reason about psychology given the knowledge and methodology our civilization has managed to accumulate.
+
+Reality has a single level (physics), but [our models of reality have multiple levels](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gRa5cWWBsZqdFvmqu/reductive-reference). To get maximally precise predictions about everything, you would have to model the underlying quarks, _&c._, which is impossible. (As [it is](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tPqQdLCuxanjhoaNs/reductionism) [written](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y5MxoeacRKKM3KQth/fallacies-of-compression): the map is not the territory, but you can't roll up the territory and put in your glove compartment.)
+
+Psychology is very complicated; every human is their own unique snowflake, but it would be impossible to navigate the world using the "every human is their own unique _maximum-entropy_ snowflake; you can't make _any_ probabilistic inferences about someone's mind based on your experiences with other humans" theory. Even if someone were to _verbally endorse_ something like that—and at age sixteen, I might have—their brain is still going to go on to make predictions inferences about people's minds using _some_ algorithm whose details aren't available to introspection. Much of this predictive machinery is going to be instinct bequeathed by natural selection (because predicting the behavior of conspecifics was very useful in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness), but some of it is the cultural accumulation of people's attempts to organize their experience into categories, clusters, diagnoses, taxons. (The cluster-learning capability is _also_ bequeathed by natural selection, of course, but it's worth distinguishing more "learned" from more "innate" content.)
+
+There could be situations in psychology where a good theory (not a perfect theory, but a good theory to the precision that our theories about engineering bridges are good) would be described by a 70-node causal graph, but it turns out that some of [the more "important" variables in the graph happen to anti-correlate with each other](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/10/27/the-mathematical-consequences-of-a-toy-model-of-gender-transition/), such that stupid humans who don't know how to discover the correct 70-node graph, do manage to pattern-match their way to a two-type typology that actually is better, as a first approximation, than pretending not to have a theory. No one matches any particular clinical-profile stereotype _exactly_, but [the world makes more sense when you have language for theoretical abstractions](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions) like ["comas"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/11/does-the-glasgow-coma-scale-exist-do-comas/) or "depression" or "bipolar disorder"—or "autogynephilia".
+
+(In some sense it's a matter of "luck" when the relevant structure in the world happens to simplify so much; [friend of the blog](/tag/tailcalled/) Tailcalled argues that [there's no discrete typology for FtM](https://www.reddit.com/r/Blanchardianism/comments/jp9rmn/there_is_probably_no_ftm_typology/) as there is for the two types of MtF, because the various causes of gender problems in females vary more independently and aren't as stratified by age.)
+
+So, if some particular individual trans woman writes down her life story, and swears up and down that she doesn't match the feminine/early-onset type, but _also_ doesn't empathize at all with the experiences I've grouped under the concept of "autogynephilia", I don't have any definitive knockdown proof with which to accuse her of lying, because I don't _know_ her, and the true diversity of human psychology is no doubt richer and stranger than my fuzzy low-resolution model of it.
+
+But [the fuzzy low-resolution model is _way too good_](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/04/27/predictions-made-by-blanchards-typology/) not to be pointing to _some_ regularity in the real world, and I expect honest people who are exceptions that aren't well-predicted by the model, to at least notice how well it performs on all the _non_-exceptions. If you're a magical third type of trans woman (where, again, _magical_ is a term of art indicating phenomena not understood) who isn't super-feminine but whose identity definitely isn't ultimately rooted in a fetish, [you should be _confused_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5JDkW4MYXit2CquLs/your-strength-as-a-rationalist) by the 232 upvotes on that /r/MtF comment about the "it's probably just a fetish" camp—if the person who wrote that comment has experiences like yours, why did they ever single out "it's probably just a fetish" [as a hypothesis to pay attention to in the first place](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X2AD2LgtKgkRNPj2a/privileging-the-hypothesis)? And there's allegedly a whole "camp" of these people? What could _that_ possibly be about?!
+
+I _do_ have a _lot_ of uncertainty about what the True Causal Graph looks like, even if it seems obvious that the two-type taxonomy coarsely approximates it. Gay femininity and autogynephilia are obviously very important nodes in the True Graph, but there's going to be more detail to the whole story: what _other_ factors influence people's decision to transition, including [incentives](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/) and cultural factors specific to a given place and time?
+
+Cultural attitudes towards men and maleness have shifted markedly in our feminist era. It feels gauche to say so, but ... as a result, conscientious boys taught to disdain the crimes of men may pick up an internalized misandry? I remember one night at the Univerity in Santa Cruz when I had the insight that it was possible to make generalizations about groups of people while allowing for exceptions (in contrast to my previous stance that generalizations about people were _always morally wrong_)—and immediately, eagerly proclaimed that _men are terrible_.
+
+Or consider computer scientist Scott Aaronson's account (in his infamous [Comment 171](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2091#comment-326664)) that his "recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man [...] [a]nything, really, other than the curse of having been born a heterosexual male, which [...] meant being consumed by desires that one couldn't act on or even admit without running the risk of becoming an objectifier or a stalker or a harasser or some other creature of the darkness."
+
+Or there's a piece that makes the rounds on social media occasionally: ["I Am A Transwoman. I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out"](https://medium.com/@jencoates/i-am-a-transwoman-i-am-in-the-closet-i-am-not-coming-out-4c2dd1907e42), which (in part) discusses the author's frustration at having one's feelings and observations being dismissed on account of being perceived as a cis male. "I hate that the only effective response I can give to 'boys are shit' is 'well I'm not a boy,'" the author laments. And: "Do I even _want_ to convince someone who will only listen to me when they're told by the rules that they have to see me as a girl?"
+
+(The "told by the rules that they have to see me" (!) phrasing in the current revision is _very_ telling; [the originally published version](https://archive.is/trslp) said "when they find out I'm a girl".)
+
+If boys are shit, and the rules say that you have to see someone as a girl if they _say_ they're a girl, that provides an incentive [on the margin](https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Marginalism.html) to disidentify with maleness. Like in another one of my teenage song-fragments—
+
+> _Look in the mirror
+> What's a_ white guy _doing there?
+> I'm just a spirit
+> I'm just a spirit
+> Floating in air, floating in air, floating in air!_
+
+This culturally-transmitted attitude could intensify the interpretation of autogynephilic attraction as a [ego-syntonic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egosyntonic_and_egodystonic) beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing (rather than an ego-dystonic sex thing to be ashamed of), or be a source of gender dysphoria in males who aren't autogynephilic at all.
+
+To the extent that "cognitive" things like internalized misandry manifesting as cross-gender identification is common (or has _become_ more common in the recent cultural environment), then maybe the two-type taxonomy isn't androphilic/autogynephilic so much as it is androphilic/"not-otherwise-specified": the early-onset type is very behaviorally distinct and has a very straightforward motive to transition (it would be _less_ weird not to); in contrast, it might not be as easy to distinguish autogynephilia from _other_ sources of gender problems in the grab-bag of all males showing up to the gender clinic for any other reason.
+
+Whatever the True Causal Graph looks like—however my remaining uncertainty turns out to resolve in the limit of sufficiently advanced psychological science, I think I _obviously_ have more than enough evidence to reject the mainstream ["inner sense of gender"](https://www.drmaciver.com/2019/05/the-inner-sense-of-gender/) story as _not adding up_.
+
+Okay, so the public narrative about transness is obviously, _obviously_ false. That's a problem, because almost no matter what you want, true beliefs are more useful than false beliefs for making decisions that get you what you want.
+
+Fortunately, Yudkowsky's writing had brought together a whole community of brilliant people dedicated to refining the art of human rationality—the methods of acquiring true beliefs and using them to make decisions that get you what you want. So now that I _know_ the public narrative is obviously false, and that I have the outlines of a better theory (even though I could use a lot of help pinning down the details, and I don't know what the social policy implications are, because the optimal policy computation is a complicated value trade-off), all I _should_ have to do is carefully explain why the public narrative is delusional, and then because my arguments are so much better, all the intellectually serious people will either agree with me (in public), or at least be eager to _clarify_ (in public) exactly where they disagree and what their alternative theory is, so that we can move the state of humanity's knowledge forward together, in order to help the great common task of optimizing the universe in accordance with humane values.
+
+Of course, this is kind of a niche topic—if you're not a male with this psychological condition, or a woman who doesn't want to share all female-only spaces with them, you probably have no reason to care—but there are a _lot_ of males with this psychological condition around here! If this whole "rationality" subculture isn't completely fake, then we should be interested in getting the correct answers in public _for ourselves_.
+
+Men who fantasize about being women do not particularly resemble actual women! We just—don't? This seems kind of obvious, really? _Telling the difference between fantasy and reality_ is kind of an important life skill?! Notwithstanding that some males might want to make use of medical interventions like surgery and hormone replacement therapy to become facsimiles of women as far as our existing technology can manage, and that a free and enlightened transhumanist Society should support that as an option—and notwithstanding that _she_ is obviously the correct pronoun for people who _look_ like women—it's probably going to be harder for people to figure out what the optimal decisions are if no one is allowed to use language like "actual women" that clearly distinguishes the original thing from imperfect facsimiles?!
+
+
+[...]
+
+My sisters! I don't hate you! I'm really jealous of you in a lot of ways, even if I'm not following the same path—not just yet, probably not in this life. But [for the protection](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect) of everything we hold sacred, _you have to let me show you what you are_.
+
+
+> knows much less than what he thinks when he's talking about with the object level of trans people
+Trans people aren't a reliable source about what's going on with trans people, because they're playing a respectability politics game
+
+
+This, then, is Blanchard's dangerous idea: "all gender dysphoric males who are not sexually oriented towards men are instead sexually oriented toward the thought or image of themselves as women."
+
+Even if you weaken _all_ to _almost all_ , or even _most_
+
+Anne Lawrence:
+
+> I am firmly convinced that the overwhelming majority—probably 98% or more—of cases of severe gender dysphoria in men arise in connection with either effeminate homosexuality or autogynephilia; most of the rare exceptions probably arise in connection with conditions such as schizophrenia and certain personality disorders
+
+"Why, yes, of course my female gender identity is an outgrowth of my paraphilic erotic desire to have a woman's body—after all, that's one of the two and probably only two causal pathways along which male-to-female sex reassignment could possibly seem like a good idea to someone, and you can probably already tell from my appearance and behavior that I'm not one of the androphilic kind."
+
+
+
+Julia Serano:
+
+> There was also a period of time when I embraced the word "pervert" and viewed my desire to be female as some sort of sexual kink. But after exploring that path, it became obvious that explanation could not account for the vast majority of instances when I thought about being female in a nonsexual context.
+
+I don't doubt that Julia Serano is telling the truth about her _subjective experiences_. But "that explanation could not account for" is _not an experience_. It's a _hypothesis_ about human psychology. We shouldn't _expect_ anyone to get that kind of thing right based on introspection alone.
+
+
+How to account for people disagreeing?
+
+* ppl can have false beliefs about themselves, have to infer explanations for behavior (picking the gift on the right)
+* exact type of AGP and whether you remember it in childhood make a difference in how obvious the right answer is
+* ppl have heard a strawman of the theory, not read "Becoming What We Love"; innoculated against smart version of theory (Anne Vitale)
+* selection
+* incentives
+
+the selection effect and the incentives are dual: ppl who notice AGP don't transition, people who transition convince selves AGP doesn't matter—and the "If you're not trans, you're not allowed to talk" disarms anyone else from being allowed to talk
+
+type of dysphoria also matters
+
+trans women don't want to talk about it
+stright guys who regard it as a humiliating private kink don't want to talk about it
+
+
+
+To visualize how this ends up looking in practice, I want you to consider the fictitious but (I claim) entirely realistic tale of Katherine and Mark.
+
+
+two fictional case studies: one with childhood AGP and interpersonal fantasy, another like me (Ranma 1/2, transformation fantasies, sex differences denial, encountering AGP first)
+
+when they meet in Portland, they note their obvious similarities and know that they have to be the same type of thing (I'm actually trans, you're just AGP is not an option)
+
+
+Katherine looks at Mark with a sense of pity. "That poor girl, cowed by Bailey's vicious pseudoscientific lies!"
+
+Mark looks at Katherine with a mixture of jealousy and contempt. "Wait. Wait a minute. So this _entire fucking time_, _actual trans women_ were really just _guys like me_ who were _less self-aware about it_, who had all the same happy romantic fantasies about being a girl, and then _took them literally_?! I didn't know you were allowed to take them literally. You bastards! You delusional bastards! You beautiful, lucky bastards who get all nice things I can't have, at the terrible cost of never being able to say _why_! I'm so upset about this that I feel motivated to start an entire pseudonymous blog dedicated to dismantling the shitty epistemology that led to this absurd situation!"
+
+
+but the real takeaway is that everyone should be more skeptical of why they think they do what they do
+
+
+idea innoculation: https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/aYX6s8SYuTNaM2jh3/idea-inoculation-inferential-distance
+
+blue-eyed islanders and common knowledge
+
+[TODO: my pseudobisexual moments (it's California in the year 2015)
+our analogues would make a good couple in a nearby alternate universe where at least one of us is female. "Exactly one," he said. "It's California in the year 2015," I said.]
+
+_ AGPs dating each other is the analogue of "Failed Utopia 4-2"
+
+* too big to fail
+
+* claims to victimhood are leveraged into claims to power
+
+* [the autogynephilic analogue of romantic love](/papers/lawrence-becoming_what_we_love.pdf)
+
+Aren't those trans women going to be _embarrrassed_ after the Singularity, when telepathy tech makes everything obvious
+
+[the political incentives propagate recursively, a phase transition: in a culture it's normal for AGP males to transition, any sub-culture where they don't is subject to attack as transphobic I want to stay aligned with _actual women_, many of whom have an interest in excluding me]
+
+[TODO: Freaky Friday, differentiating between "my type" and transition goals anecdotes—maybe cis people can be fooled into not knowing what that means, but _I know what that means_]
+
+"Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses" are doing better in some ways. Tri-S was explicitly not for transsexuals
+
+Anne Lawrence described autogynephiles as ["men who love women and want to become what they love."](/papers/lawrence-becoming_what_we_love.pdf) But it's worse than that. We're men who love what we _wish_ women were, and want to become _that_.
+
+Normal straight men also have positive-valence thoughts about women when they're not immediately horny.
+
+* The lie will rot, maybe ppl will be honest after the convention has set in??
+
+Robert Heinlein
+
+xkcd assumes furries are sexual https://xkcd.com/471/
+xkcd implies AGP is common https://xkcd.com/535/
+
+
+
+My enemy is this _culture of narcissistic Orwellian mind games_ that thinks people have the right to _dictate other people's model of reality_. I don't know what the _right_ culture is, but I'm pretty sure that _this ain't it, chief_.
+
+Some trans woman on Twitter posted an anecdote complaining that the receptionist at her place of work compared her to a male celebrity. "I look like this today [photo]; how could anyone think that was a remotely acceptable thing to say?"
+
+It _is_ genuinely sad that the author of those Tweets didn't get perceived the way she would prefer! But the thing I want her to understand is—
+
+_It was a compliment!_ That poor receptionist was almost certainly thinking of [David Bowie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie) or [Eddie Izzard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Izzard), rather than being hateful and trying to hurt. People can recognize sex from facial structure at 96% accuracy, remember?
+
+I want a shared cultural understanding that the _correct_ way to ameliorate the genuine sadness of people not being perceived the way they prefer is through things like _better and cheaper facial feminization surgery_, not _emotionally blackmailing people out of their ability to report what they see_.
+
+In a world where surgery is expensive, but people desperately want to change sex, there's an incentive gradient in the direction of re-engineering the culture to bind our shared concept of "gender" onto things like [ornamental clothing](http://thetranswidow.com/2021/02/18/womens-clothing-is-always-drag-even-on-women/) that are easier to change than secondary sex characteristics.
+
+But [_the utility function is not up for grabs._](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ddcsdA2c2XpNpE5x/newcomb-s-problem-and-regret-of-rationality) I don't _want_ to reliniqush my ability to notice what women's faces look like, even if that means noticing that mine isn't, even if that seems vaguely disappointing due to an idiosyncracy in my psychosexual development; I don't want people to have to _doublethink around their perceptions of me_.
+
+If I sound angry, it's because I actually _do_ feel a lot of anger, but I wish I knew how to more reliably convey its target. Some trans people who see my writing tend to assume I'm self-hating, suffering from false consciousness, that my pious appeals to objectivity and reason are [just a facade](https://sinceriously.fyi/false-faces/) concealing my collaboration with a cissexist social order, that I'm in cowardly thrall to scapegoating instincts: "I'm one of the good, compliant ones—not one of those weird bad trans people who will demand their rights! _They're_ the witches, not me; burn them, not me!"
+
+I have [no grounds to fault anyone for not taking my self-report as unquestionable](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/)—the urge to scapegoat and submit to the dominant player is definitely a thing—but I really think this is reading me wrong?
+
+I'm not at war with trans _people_—open, creative people who are just like me—I want to believe that even the natal females are "just like me" in some relevant abstract sense—but who read different books in a different order. I'm at war with [an _ideology_ that is adapted to appeal to people just like me](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) and commit us to remaking our lives around a set of philosophical and empirical claims that I think are _false_.
+
+Maybe that's not particularly reassuring, if people tend to identify with their ideology? (As I used to—as I _still_ do, even if my [revised ideology is much more meta](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/dreaming-of-political-bayescraft/).) When the prototypical Christian says "Hate the sin, love the sinner", does anyone actually buy it?
+
+But what else can I do? We're living in midst of a pivotal ideological transition. (Is it still the midst, or am I too late?) Autogynephilia, as a phenomenon, is _absurdly common_ relative to the amount of cultural awareness of it _as_ a phenomenon. ([An analogy someone made on /r/GenderCriticalGuys just before it got banned](https://web.archive.org/web/20200705203105if_/https://reddit.com/r/GenderCriticalGuys/comments/hhcs34/autogynephilic_male_here_big_rant_about_denial_of/): imagine living in a Society where people _were_ gay at the same rates as in our own, but the _concept_ of homosexuality didn't exist—and was [actively suppressed whenever someone tried to point it out](/2017/Jan/if-the-gay-community-were-like-the-trans-community/).) Surveys of college students found that 13% (Table 3 in [Person _et al._](/papers/person_et_al-gender_differences_in_sexual_behaviors.pdf)) or 5.6% (Table 5 in the replication [Hsu _et al._](/papers/hsu_et_al-gender_differences_in_sexual_fantasy.pdf)) of males have fantasized about being the opposite sex in the last 3 months.
+
+What happens when every sensitive bookish male who thinks [it might be cool to be a woman](https://xkcd.com/535/) gets subjected to an aggressive recruitment campaign that the scintillating thought is _literally true_, simply because he thought it? (Not just that it could _become_ true _in a sense_, depending on the success of medical and social interventions, and depending on what sex/gender concept definition makes sense to use in a given context.) What kind of Society is that to live in?
+
+[I have seen the destiny of my neurotype, and am putting forth a convulsive effort to wrench it off its path. My weapon is clear writing.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i8q4vXestDkGTFwsc/human-evil-and-muddled-thinking) Maybe the rest of my robot cult (including the founders and leaders) have given up on trying to tell the truth, but _I_ haven't. If I just keep blogging careful explanations of my thinking, eventually it might make some sort of impact—a small corrective tug on the madness of the _Zeitgeist_.
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XYCEB9roxEBfgjfxs/the-scales-of-justice-the-notebook-of-rationality
+writes down all the facts that aren't on anyone's side.
+
+https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2020/10/24/is-autogynephilia-real-the-phenomenon-the-construct-the-theory/
+
+[I know _exactly_ what's wrong with me]
+
+gender of the gaps
+
+[the direction of causality](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/concerns/)
+http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/concerns-ii/
+
+https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/10/27/the-mathematical-consequences-of-a-toy-model-of-gender-transition/
+
+complicit with cissexism:
+/2017/Mar/interlude-ii/
+/2019/Feb/interlude-xviii/
+
+In "Interpersonal Entanglement", Yudkowsky had speculated that gay couples might have better relationships, since they don't have to deal with the mismatch.
+
+Stereotypically, AGP-taxon trans women have a tendency to pair up with each other.
+
+> The vast majority of men are not what the vast majority of women would most prefer, or vice versa. I don’t know if anyone has ever actually done this study, but I bet that both gay and lesbian couples are happier on average with their relationship than heterosexual couples. (Googles ... yep, looks like it.) <https://news.softpedia.com/news/Gay-and-Lesbian-Families-Are-Happier-than-Heterosexual-Ones-77094.shtml>
+
+Cross-gender identity is a virtually sustained or intermittently occurring wishful fantasy about being a person of the opposite sex.” Freund, K., Steiner, B.W. & Chan, S. Two types of cross-gender identity. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 11, 49–63 (1982). DOI: 10.1007/BF01541365
+
+https://twitter.com/caraesten/status/1092472430465929216
+> damn one extremely bad way to start my day is having the receptionist at slack say I look like a male celebrity
+> I'm so mad. wow. like. I look like this right now, how could anyone ever think that was an okay thing to say???
+
+Or consider Dr. Will Powers, [whose presentation on trans healthcare](https://powersfamilymedicine.com/s/Healthcare-of-the-Transgender-Patient-V60.pptx) was [praised by people from my robot cult on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/strohl89/posts/10157396578969598). I was disappointed by the the brief mention of autogynephilia [(on slide 29 of the v.6.0 presentation)](/images/powers_slide_on_agp.png): Powers says Blanchard has been disproven, but that autogynephilia does exist _very_ rarely: "[i]n my now almost 7 years of treating transgender patients, I have seen this paraphilia only once in a person requesting MtF therapy", Powers says, going on to describe the particularly delusional patient (who wanted "the largest breasts possible", and claimed he needed to become a woman to please a Russian Instagram model whom he implausibly claimed to be his girlfriend) whom he denied informed-consent treatment.
+
+You might ask, why am I citing Will Powers in support of my thesis, when Powers's testimony seems to contradict it? Only one case in seven years, he says.
+
+I cite it because—surprise! _Powers was lying._ [In a November 2020 post to his own subreddit, he opens up](https://www.reddit.com/r/DrWillPowers/comments/jx9io9/my_official_post_on_my_personal_opinion_on/):
+
+> Every time I try and speak on this, I get attacked. People discredit what I have to say, call it harmful, and hateful. [...] I've previously stated I had one of these in my practice. I stated that, because I didn't want to push the narrative that it was common because I get literally eviscerated every time I try and talk about it. In reality, I see it fairly often. Almost once a month. Probably at least 10 times a year. [...] Continuing to lie about it and act like it isn't happening is a disservice to transgender people as a whole.
+
+You might think,
+
+This comment in particular is really something—
+https://www.reddit.com/r/DrWillPowers/comments/jxh3mz/in_this_thread_help_me_and_this_community_come_up/gd0mytr/
+
+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"
+
+from a 2007 notebook—
+> & I'm sorry if this is simply normal maleness directed down an unusual channel—as they say, _autogynephillia_—it's a terrible theory, the BBL nonsense theory—intended to sweep up all transwomen—but it swept up _me_. (But _I'm not trans_.)
+
+Aella's thing about men turning into werewolfs—I'm a well-behaved werewolf. I retain my vocabulary, and transform back into a man when my wolf-form tries to escalate and the lady says "No."
+
+ * practice of deferring to designated-victim trans women _makes the trans
+ women worse people_: if you know that you can win a dispute by playing the
+ transphobia card, that incentive shapes your life (Moldbug: discussion of
+ "ignoble privilege" in "Gentle Introduction" pt. 3)
+ * kind of like how _the right to be sued_ is an important part of legal
+ personhood: the possibility of recourse is necessary for trust
+
+the cultural presumption that anything bad that happens to trans people (like losing a job) is probably due to discrimination and transphobia is actually bad for trans people in the long run, because it incentivizes other members of society to treat trans people like inherently fragile designated victims (to be avoided if possible and coddled if not possible), rather than just ordinary people who happen to be trans\u00e2\u0080\u0094if you were a business owner, you wouldn't want to hire someone who you couldn't fire without fearing a lawsuit, and if you can't not-hire them without also fearing a lawsuit, conveniently happening to lose their resume starts looking like a good life strategy! You can't outlaw Bayesian reasoning and feedback mechanisms! I understand why it's tempting to think that you can, but don't hate the player; hate the game-theoretic nature of all life!",
+
+https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2020/07/07/a-dataset-of-common-agp-aap-fantasies/
+
+this is what ETLE looks like for people for whom it's actually about clothes: http://onceiwasaman.blogspot.com/
+
My self-submission was rejected, but—
https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/n44drl/sexual_dimorphism_in_yudkowskys_sequences_in/
Someone else's got 36 points—before even the /r/SneerClub mods thought it was too mean!!
-https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/nt37j1/the_rationalist_subcultures_resident_blanchardian/
\ No newline at end of file
+https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/nt37j1/the_rationalist_subcultures_resident_blanchardian/
> Couldn't you tell after all these years?
> I wish you love
> And life in a world that you're dreaming of_
+
+> This is the one that I had to write
+> It's like a letter of love with no love left out
+>
+> —"Dying to Begin" by Stretch Princess
circle game paranoia: http://www.unz.com/isteve/bad-juju-in-oak-park-il/
-https://medium.com/@barrakerr/pronouns-are-rohypnol-dbcd1cb9c2d9
-
https://arcdigital.media/on-transwomen-and-sports-54fe1a8963e
https://medium.com/@katieja/young-children-reality-sex-and-gender-3421f4f165f1
-https://knowingless.com/2019/06/06/side-effects-of-preferred-pronouns/
-
-"please like think before you go around using “afab” or “amab” to refer broadly to groups of people in your tweets. neither of these categories are like coherent social categories in any way, and are often used in ways that perpetuate trans misogyny" https://twitter.com/folkpunkjunk/status/1140278990072102912
+"please like think before you go around using "afab" or "amab" to refer broadly to groups of people in your tweets. neither of these categories are like coherent social categories in any way, and are often used in ways that perpetuate trans misogyny" https://twitter.com/folkpunkjunk/status/1140278990072102912
https://medium.com/@aytchellis/talking-past-each-other-about-trans-gender-1da8e058caf8
"Given that English has gendered personal pronouns and it's not feasible to redesign the English language to change this, marking babies in some way to indicate their biological sex (with clothing color, or perhaps by gluing something to them) can be a useful social technology, because it allows people to just say, \"She's such a good baby!\" without having to ask about the baby's sex. Now, obviously, we don't want to indoctrinate innocent babies into oppressive gender roles that might not be a good fit for them, and I agree that gendered clothing increases our risk of falling into this well-trodden failure mode. But maybe there's some way for smart people who understand the problem in sufficient detail to avoid that failure mode, without becoming pawns in a memetic war against \"noticing that biological sex continues to be a predictively-useful concept.\""
-laim that the cultural presumption that anything bad that happens to trans people (like losing a job) is probably due to discrimination and transphobia is actually bad for trans people in the long run, because it incentivizes other members of society to treat trans people like inherently fragile designated victims (to be avoided if possible and coddled if not possible), rather than just ordinary people who happen to be trans\u00e2\u0080\u0094if you were a business owner, you wouldn't want to hire someone who you couldn't fire without fearing a lawsuit, and if you can't not-hire them without also fearing a lawsuit, conveniently happening to lose their resume starts looking like a good life strategy! You can't outlaw Bayesian reasoning and feedback mechanisms! I understand why it's tempting to think that you can, but don't hate the player; hate the game-theoretic nature of all life!",
-
people treat an organisation with more respect and status than simply bunch of people\n\nYes, exactly! This is an exciting arbitrage opportunity for agents who care less about respect and status (in the eyes of people who respect institutions; they may care about an alternative gray/black market of respect and status), and more about Doing Things That Make Sense Even If That's Not the Way Things Are Done Around Here.",
"I think sufficiently self-aware, sufficiently prosocial narcissists and sociopaths deserve love! I hope I don't have any ulterior motives for saying this! (I don't _think_ I'm a narcissist or a sociopath, but people can have false beliefs about themselves.)",
policing: "we definitely expect better models of gender out of you": https://twitter.com/atax1a/status/1157066530028265473
-I just thought of an interesting argument that almost no one else would (because it requires both prog-sight and NRx-sight)
-You know the "signaling hazard" (pace Jim) argument against public tolerance of male homosexuality (tolerating gays interferes with normal men expressing affection for each other without being seen as gay, which is bad for unit cohesion, &c.). Until recently, I hadn't thought much of it (because of my prog upbringing)—why do you care if someone isn't sure you're straight?
-but recent events have made me more sympathetic to its empirical reality—if human nature is such that 140+ IQ ppl actually can't publicly clear up a trivial philosophy-of-language dispute because of the fear of appearing transphobic—well, that's really dumb, but it's the SAME KIND of dumb as "can't express male friendship because of the fear of appearing gay"
-which suggests a "signaling hazard" argument in favor of political correctness (!!)—we can't tolerate racism, or else Good people would have to incur more costs to signal antiracism (same structure as "we can't tolerate gays, or else normal guys have to incur more costs to signal not-gayness")
-
-older works (pre-second wave feminism?) would actually say "man" (or "woman"—see how anachronistic it feels to put the female option second and in parentheses?), presumably not because human nature has changed that much, but because of shifting cultural priorities about when sex is "relevant." (Modern speakers [similarly frown on](https://agentultra.com/blog/the-black-man-stopped-me/) mentioning race when it's not relevant.)
My gender crusade becomes much less interesting insofar as it can be explained simply by me being born too early and not getting "kids these days." It's not that cultural change is necessarily bad; it's that I want culture to innovate in the direction of "achieving godlike understanding of objective reality and optimizing the hell out of it" rather than "playing mind games on each other to make it artificially harder to notice that we don't actually live in a Total Morphological Freedom tech regime."
"Had I not transitioned, I would fear the power you have over me, and remain silent." https://aria.dog/support-all-your-friends/
-
https://www.reddit.com/r/ftm/comments/cqplrh/how_do_yall_cope_in_mixed_trans_spaces/
Raven is cosplayed more than any other Teen Titan
I thought it should be acceptable for someone to send one final "OK, sorry" message in response to being told to stop contacting someone
where I feel like my position is analogous to Scott Aaronson's complaint about his police encounter: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3903 , that people who are in the process of complying should be treated with good faith; you don't want the cops to shoot unarmed men and defend themselves on the grounds of, "Well, he wasn't complying fast enough"
-that's the thing; I read as lefty because I am morally lefty (in contrast to Real Men Who Lift &c.); it's just that I had the "bad luck" of reading everything I could about race and IQ after the James Watson affair in 'aught-seven, and all my leftness is filtered through ten years of living with inconvenient hypotheses
-
"Every year, the people who are isomorphic in opinions to you become more masculine (because of everyone moving left), which means they are going to have more inferential distance on gender dysphoria."
you can get away with a lot when you read as a lefty? At hack day, someone said they read about Pinterest's skin-tone debiaser tech being thrown out because it drew on very old papers by a EUGENICIST (article turned out to be https://www.wired.com/story/pinterest-skin-tone-search/ ), and I was like, Oh, interesting, so what was wrong with the research? That got an incredulous stare: "You mean, what's wrong with eugenics??!" And I'm like, no, that's not what I mean, I'm curious about the specfiic technical flaw, which is distinct from the author's odious views
https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/dy7241/peak_trans_x_tell_your_story_here/filh1fn/
-
-https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1229060502984306689
-> For those determined to miss the point, I deplore the idea of a eugenic policy. I simply said deploring it doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work. Just as we breed cows to yield more milk, we could breed humans to run faster or jump higher. But heaven forbid that we should do it.
-
-> While a limited form of selection in humans is acceptable—for example, preventing a couple who are carriers of a recessive genetic defect or disease from producing an offspring with that condition—the kind of wholesale and directed selective breeding of humans suggested by the word “eugenics” is immoral, and I don’t favor it at all.
-https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2020/02/20/discovery-institute-makes-hay-of-dawkins-tweet-and-a-geneticist-mistakenly-says-that-artificial-selection-wont-work-in-humans/
-
-> I hold eugenics to be completely immoral and we should not attempt to implement it.
-https://twitter.com/SwipeWright/status/1229890352275955713
-
> "We must be guided by solidarity, not stigma," the director general of the World Health Organization warned on Saturday. "The greatest enemy we face is not the virus itself; it’s the stigma that turns us against each other."
https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1229832977472946184
https://archive.is/1pQ4p
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/nowgdg/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_may_31_2021/h0nxdb2/
> America developed its race blind ideology when it was 90% white and had been a deeply religious country. The race blind ideology is like a fit person eating cake
+
+Senior year cross country championships: I was 43rd amongst boys in 17:32 (5:39 mile pace), which was faster than the top girl 17:58 (5:47)
+http://www.cifncs.org/sports/cross_country/History/2005/DivIIBoys2005.html
+(archived https://archive.is/JyJYd)
+http://www.cifncs.org/sports/cross_country/History/2005/DivIIGirls2005.html
+(archived https://archive.is/n53BD)
+
+"Ethical-Advice Taker: Do Language Models Understand Natural Language Interventions?"
+https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.01465
_ Student Dysphoria, and a Previous Life's War
_ Subspatial Distribution Overlap and Cancellable Stereotypes
+_ Sticks and Stones
_ Elision _vs_. Choice
_ "But I'm Not Quite Sure What That Means": Costs of Nonbinary Gender as a Social Technology
_ "Assigned at Birth" Is a Schelling Point (If You Live in an Insane Dystopia Where the Concept of Sex Is Somehow Controversial)
Gleason, J. B. & Ely, R. (2002). Gender differences in language development. In A. McGillicuddy-De Lisi & R. De Lisi (Eds.), Biology, society, and behavior: The development of sex differences in cognition (Vol. 21, pp. 127–154). Westport, CT: Ablex Publishing.
+Giles, J. W. & Heyman, G. D. (2005). Young children's beliefs about the relationship between gender and aggressive behavior. Child Development, 76, 107–121.
+
+Pellegrini, A. D. (1988). Elementary-school children’s rough-and-tumble play and social competence. Developmental Psychology, 24, 802–806.
+
+Pellegrini, A. D. (1995). A longitudinal study of boys’ rough-and-tumble play and dominance during early adolescence. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 16, 77–93.
+
+Pellegrini, A. D. (2002). Perceptions of playfighting and real fighting: Effects of sex and participant status. In J. L. Roopnarine (Ed.), Conceptual, social-cognitive, and contextual issues in the fields of play (pp. 223–233). Westport, CT: Ablex Publishing.
+
+Gaulin, S. J. C. & Fitzgerald, R. W. (1989). Sexual selection for spatial-learning ability. Animal Behaviour, 37, 322–331.
+
+
+
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notes from The Pre-School Activities Inventory: A Standardized Assessment of Gender Role in Children by Golombok and Rust
p. 78
elementary school activity level d=0.64
-> Despite the diffi culty in looking for sex differences using tests specifi cally designed not to have them
+> Despite the difficulty in looking for sex differences using tests specifically designed not to have them
> even though there are no differences in the structure of the vocal chords in childhood, boys speak with a lower pitch than girls do. This difference is probably related to children's unconscious matching of their voices with gender norms (Gleason & Ely, 2002).
> boys are often drawn to such play styles as soon as they see others doing them, whereas girls are more likely to avoid those activities
+p. 112
+> daughters complied with their mothers' requests 99% of the time, whereas sons complied only about 25% of the time
+
+p. 113 aggression
+> Hyde (1984, 1986) reported the overall difference between males and females was about half a standard deviation (d = 0.50); but the difference was greater in children (d = 0.58 in preschoolers) than in adults (d = 0.27) [...] also greater when observed in naturalistic settings than in the laboratory
+
+p. 114 Table 4.3, aggression effect sizes
+
+It's weird that the discussion of aggression in relationships doesn't mention physical strength differences (which are massive)?!
+p. 116
+> In intimate relationships, by adolescence both males and females think that
+male violence against females is worse than the reverse.
+"both males and females think", without any mention of why they might think that?!
+
+> Preschoolers are also able to identify relational aggression as being associated with girls and physical aggression with boys (Giles & Heyman, 2005).
+
+p. 117 fewer constaints on gossip and social exclusion as kids get older
+
+p. 120 Carol Gilligan's different voice: interpersonal care vs. abstract justice
+
+Jaffee & Hyde 2000
+> small difference favoring females in the care orientation (d = ⫺0.28), and an even smaller one favoring males in the justice orientation (d = 0.19).
+
+p. 138
+> If you were asked to pick a single psychological characteristic that differentiates boys and girls, you could not do better than the toys and activities that engage them
+
+> This is critical because if children do not know if they
+are boys or girls, or that toys are identifi ed as being for boys or for girls, they cannot be using this information to guide their toy preferences
+
+p. 127
+> Some of the "neglect" regarding meta-analysis may reflect the lack of controversy about whether the differences exist
+
+p. 137
+> evolutionary explanations are generally concerned with factors that apply to all members of a group—that is, factors that make all boys and men similar to each other and different from all girls and men
+Not if sexual dimorphism is a matter of shifting the mean of the distribution, rather than a discrete mechanism?
+
+p. 139 we know that the Y chromosome doesn't do much because of CAIS (although studies have been limited), but some studies of mice whose Sry gene was limited showed effects
+
+p. 143 organizational/activiational hypothesis; p. 144 org/act is actually a spectrum
+androgen needs to be present at about weeks 7-8 of gestation, later androgen levels don't do the same thing
+
+giving androgens to female guinea pigs in 1959 gave them male-like behavior
+
+mounting vs. lordosis are two discrete behaviors, as opposed to a continuously varying disposition to rough play
+
+guinea pigs get manipulated before birth, rats and mice afterwards
+
+p. 146
+> controls for castration would be surgery but no removal of the testes
+What useless surgery do they do??
+
+intrauterine position in animals that have litters
+
+
+
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projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff