If we truly want to bring an end to gender-based oppression, it seems like such an ambitious social engineering project would be _helped_ by understanding elementary points like this? The most _useful_ thing that any of us can do is to to start having our beliefs about gender reflect the [laws of inductive inference](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eY45uCCX7DdwJ4Jha/no-one-can-exempt-you-from-rationality-s-laws) as applied to the special case of other people's behaviors and bodies. Not to disagree with the expedition to [a land where the children are free](/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/), but for the fear that between here and there, there are so many boundaries. Far more than I know.
[TODO: edit the ending to not be so desperate to riff off Serano or Tangled or wave my usual "Truth!!" flag, but just be really clear about the statistical point I'm making]
+
+[TODO: add a study about Sapir–Whorf in languages with gramatical gender]
Sex differences would come up a couple more times in one of the last Sequences, on "Fun Theory"—speculations on how life could be truly _good_ if the world were superintelligently optimized for human values, in contrast to the cruelty and tragedy of our precarious existence [in a world shaped only by blind evolutionary forces](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god).
+According to Yudkowsky, one of the ways in which people's thinking about artificial intelligence usually goes wrong is [anthropomorphism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RcZeZt8cPk48xxiQ8/anthropomorphic-optimism)—expecting arbitrary AIs to behave like humans, when really "AI" corresponds to [a much larger space of algorithms](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tnWRXkcDi5Tw9rzXw/the-design-space-of-minds-in-general). As a social animal, predicting other humans is one of the things we've evolved to be good at, and the way that works is probably via "empathic inference": [I predict your behavior by imagining what _I_ would do in your situation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zkzzjg3h7hW5Z36hK/humans-in-funny-suits). Since all humans are very similar, [this code-reuse trick](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fpWoXpNv83BAHJdc/the-comedy-of-behaviorism) works pretty well.
-
-
-
-[TODO: rewrite/expand description here—"Sympathetic Minds" first, then bridge to "Failed Utopia #4-2"]
+[TODO WORKING: ... rewrite/expand description here—"Sympathetic Minds" first, then bridge to "Failed Utopia #4-2"]
+[TODO: "expecting women to be defective men"]
[TODO: mention that I'm responsible for the protagonist's name getting changed]
The short story ["Failed Utopia #4-2"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2) portrays an almost-aligned superintelligence constructing a happiness-maximizing utopia for humans—except that because [evolution didn't design women and men to be optimal partners for each other](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Py3uGnncqXuEfPtQp/interpersonal-entanglement), and the AI is prohibited from editing people's minds, the happiness-maximizing solution ends up splitting up the human species by sex and giving women and men their own _separate_ utopias, complete with artificially-synthesized romantic partners.
[...] doing a little bit more reading ... I _don't_ think Blanchard was dumb and wrong. [TODO: actually explain the typology] I think the two-type taxonomy is _basically_ correct, as a first approximation. (Where psychology is complicated enough such that there's much more to be said about what that means, and what better approximations would look like, but simple theories that [explain a lot of our observations](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/04/27/predictions-made-by-blanchards-typology/) are better than pretending not to have a theory.) 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, actually I think you're just a perverted male like me"?
+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. For example, in April 2018, the /r/MtF subreddit (which currently has 90,000 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".
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—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?!
-[TODO: make the dark-side-epistemology/Category-War case in a couple sentences without blaming anyone]
+[TODO: make the dark-side-epistemology/Category-War case]
+
+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".)
+
+The "discourse algorithm" (the collective generalization of "cognitive algorithm") that can't just _get this shit right_ in 2020 (because being out of step with the reigning Bay Area ideological fashion is deemed too expensive by a consequentialism that counts unpopularity as a cost), also can't get heliocentrism right in 1632 _for the same reason_—and I really doubt it can get AI alignment theory right in 2039.
+
+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.
+
+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. [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 convention used in one's native language probably _does_ [color one's thinking to some extent](TODO: "Crossing the Line" link),
+
+The thing I'm objecting to is this culture of _narcissistic Orwellian mind games_ that thinks people have the right to _dictate other people's model of reality_.
+
+[TODO: We want words that map onto the structure of things in the word: if everyone were a hermaphrodite]
+
+[TODO: Anton on "be a lesbian by behavior alone"; contrast to coining "transbian" as a new word]
+
+[TODO: it was a complement! I don't _want_ people to have to doublethink around their perceptions of me]
+
+On the question of how this affects the productivity of AI researchers, 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.
+
+[TODO: it's actually the same rationality skill of parsimony]
+
+[TODO: ...]
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_.
> If you love someone, tell them the truth.
>
> —Anonymous
-
+_ crimestopped about L.B.
_ Dr. Will Powers on Autogynephilia
- Crossing the Line
- Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to
_ Comment on "One Size Does Not Fit All: In Support of Psychotherapy for Gender Dysphoria" https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-020-01844-2 (tag: `review (paper)`)
_ the scapegoating dynamic
_ review of "What's the Big Secret?" (acknowledges gender-role conventions which are more salient when people are wearing clothes, but then tells the real answer)
-_ crimestopped about L.B.
+
optimized to confuse and intimidate people trying to use language to reason about the concept of biological sex, even if your conscious verbal narrative never says 'and now I will confuse and intimidate people who want to use language to reason about the concept of biological sex'!"
B.F. on JKR (https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/3883966591638029?comment_id=3884054068295948&reply_comment_id=3884243454943676):
> I am very glad that I don't have anyone with opinions similar to hers in my immediate vicinity, because I am pretty sure that if I did, my brain would constantly be running a scared loop in any social interactions with them. [...] I think it's important that people can write essays that are as far outside my personal Overton window as hers is outside it (because sometimes they're correct and I should update, even though I don't believe this is an instance of that)
-Duncan's voicing my concern: https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/3890320517669303
+
-----
Points to work in—
* Superhappies empathic inference for not wanting to believe girls were different
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qCsxiojX7BSLuuBgQ/the-super-happy-people-3-8
+* empathic inference: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NLMo5FZWFFq652MNe/sympathetic-minds
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zkzzjg3h7hW5Z36hK/humans-in-funny-suits
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fpWoXpNv83BAHJdc/the-comedy-of-behaviorism
+
* "The Opposite Sex" https://web.archive.org/web/20130216025508/http://lesswrong.com/lw/rp/the_opposite_sex/
* EY was right about "men need to think about themselves _as men_" (find cite)
* Vassar slapping me down
* "Mr. Davis"
* Faster Than Science, Transgender Edition (prior draft)
* "I often wish some men/women would appreciate"
-* empathic inference: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NLMo5FZWFFq652MNe/sympathetic-minds https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zkzzjg3h7hW5Z36hK/humans-in-funny-suits https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fpWoXpNv83BAHJdc/the-comedy-of-behaviorism
* study evidence that this is actually common
* AGPs dating each other is the analogue of "Failed Utopia 4-2"!!—the guys in "Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses" are doing better in some ways
* wipe culturally defined values
* finding things in the refrigerator
* https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xsyG7PkMekHud2DMK/of-gender-and-rationality
* make sure the late-onset/AGP terminology is introduced in a coherent order rather than being inserted willy-nilly
-* the message length of my existence
+* the message length of my existence (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length)
+
+https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/executable_philosophy
-----
I'm not objecting to your existence, I'm only objecting to the prerequisites to your existence
-
(See Tailcalled on "zooming in" on the typology to at least a four node graph.)
But once you stop taking the "gender identity"/"woman trapped in a man's body" story as _axiom_ and
-
It's possible to disagree with people's _theoretical account_ of their own psychology, without doubting the honesty of their self-report, in the sense that people are doing their best to translate the ineffable _qualia_ of their experience into words.
[throw a chair](/2019/Jan/use-it-or-lose-it/) and yell, "How dumb do you think we are?!"
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/
-my pseudobisexual moments
+my pseudobisexual moments (it's California in the year 2015)
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.
-
-
-
Perhaps so. But back in 2009, **we did not anticipate that _whether or not I should cut my dick off_ would _become_ a politicized issue.**
**To be fair, it's not obvious that I _shouldn't_ cut my dick off!**
https://medium.com/@barrakerr/pronouns-are-rohypnol-dbcd1cb9c2d9
+R₀
+"You can't lift a ten-pound weight with one pound of force!"
+https://equilibriabook.com/living-in-an-inadequate-world/
-
-We want words that map onto the structure of things in the word: if everyone were a hermaphrodite
-
-
-
-
-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".)
-
-The "discourse algorithm" (the collective generalization of "cognitive algorithm") that can't just _get this shit right_ in 2020 (because being out of step with the reigning Bay Area ideological fashion is deemed too expensive by a consequentialism that counts unpopularity as a cost), also can't get heliocentrism right in 1632 _for the same reason_—and I really doubt it can get AI alignment theory right in 2039.
-
-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.
-
-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?"
-
-[it's not about pronouns; it's about a culture where people have property rights over other people's models of them]
-
-
-
-I think the comparison to [our standard punching bag of theism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLL6yzZ3WKn8KaSC3/the-uniquely-awful-example-of-theism) is fair. Religious people aren't _stupid_.
-
-
-
-
-I don't _want_ people to have to doublethink around their perceptions of me
+The debate never advances; Arthur Jensen on the Phil Donahue show
+https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtoqK1gsmHI
Trans Kids: It's Time to Talk film: https://archive.org/details/TransKidsItsTimeToTalk
HBO documentary Transhood
+
+https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2016237/
+> fifty-three percent of the mothers of boys with GID compared with only 6% of controls met the diagnosis for Borderline Personality Disorder on the Diagnostic Interview for Borderlines or had symptoms of depression on the Beck Depression Inventory
+
+Research notes—
+https://femalesexualinversion.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-problem-with-puberty-blockers-part.html
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff