[TODO: initials anecdote]
-[TODO Vassar anecdote ]
+[TODO Vassar anecdote]
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).
Still, the macaque–rasin anecdote is at least _suggestive_ of hypotheses in the _general area_ of, "The brain uses _shared_ representations for 'self' and others, in a way such that it's possible for the part of the brain that computes sexual attraction to 'get confused' about the self–other distinction in a way that manifests as sexual desire to _be_ the object of attraction." Or _something like that_.
-One interesting prediction of this story is that if the nature of the "confusion", this—["erotic target location error"](/papers/lawrence-etle_an_underappreciated.pdf)?—is agnostic to the object of sexual attraction, then you should see the same pattern in men with unusual sexual interests. ("Men" because I think we legitimately want to be [shy about generalizing across sexes](/papers/bailey-what_is_sexual_orientation_and_do_women_have_one.pdf) for sex differences in the parts of the mind that are specifically about mating.)
+More clues come in the form of the following trio of observations.
+
+One, I'm not particularly repulsed by my own body in real life. ("Vague disappointment, sometimes" isn't the same thing as "repulsion".)
+
+Two, my fantasies about having a female body aren't particularly, um, discriminating? On the contrary, if I had magical BodyApp tech, I would want to experiment with being different ages or races or body types of women.
+
+Three, the thought being transformed in a _different_ male body, other than my own, _is_ repulsive. Perhaps less so in the sense that thinking about it is horrifying, and more that I _can't_ think about it—my imagination "bounces off" the idea before any [Body Horror](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BodyHorror) emotions can kick in.
+
+These details seem hard to square with gender identity theories: why is my own male body, and _only_ my own male body, seem "okay"? Whereas this is exactly what you would expect from the "male sexuality getting confused about a self–other distinction" story: I want to be all different sorts of women (and not men) for the same reason ordinary straight guys [want to fuck all different sorts of women](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-020-01730-x) (and not men).
+
+An interesting prediction of this story is that if the nature of the "confusion", this—["erotic target location error"](/papers/lawrence-etle_an_underappreciated.pdf)?—is agnostic to the object of sexual attraction, then you should see the same pattern in men with unusual sexual interests. ("Men" because I think we legitimately want to be [shy about generalizing across sexes](/papers/bailey-what_is_sexual_orientation_and_do_women_have_one.pdf) for sex differences in the parts of the mind that are specifically about mating.)
And this is actually what we see. Most men are attracted to women, but some fraction of them get off on the idea of _being_ women—autogynephilia. So if some men are attracted to, say, amputees, we would expect some fraction of _them_ to [get off on the idea of _being_ amputees](/papers/lawrence-clinical_and_theoretical_paralells.pdf)—[_apotemnophilia_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_dysphoria#History). Some men are, unfortunately, pedophiles, and [some fraction of them get off on the idea of being children](/papers/hsu-bailey-autopedophilia.pdf). Some men are interested in anthropomorphic animals, and [_being_ anthropomorphic animals](https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/2019-hsu.pdf)—["furries"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furry_fandom).
The problem is that, in the real world, the guys who are jacking off to the _fantasy_ of knowing what it's like to be female, are being motivated by a variation in _male_ sexuality. If you were to _actually_ become neurologically female, it _wouldn't_ seem like the scintillating apotheosis of sexual desire and the most important thing in the world. It would just feel normal, in the way that actual women feel their own existence is normal.
-In this way, autogynephilia is _intrinsically self-undermining_ in a way that fantasies of space flight are not. This doesn't in any way lessen the desire or make it go away—any more than [the guy who gets turned on by entropy decreasing a closed system](https://qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1049) would have his libido permanently vanish upon learning about the second law of thermodynamics. But it does, I suspect, change the way you think of it: it makes a difference whether you interpret the desire as a confused anomaly in male sexuality—the scintillating but ultimately untrue thought—or _take it literally_.
+In this way, autogynephilia is _intrinsically self-undermining_ in a way that fantasies of space flight are not. This doesn't in any way lessen the desire or make it go away—any more than [the guy who gets turned on by entropy decreasing a closed system](https://qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1049) would have his libido suddenly and permanently vanish upon learning about the second law of thermodynamics. But it does, I suspect, change the way you think of it: it makes a difference whether you interpret the desire as a confused anomaly in male sexuality—the scintillating but ultimately untrue thought—or _take it literally_.
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-
-Another clue comes in the form of the following trio of observations.
-
-One, I'm not particularly repulsed or horrified by my own body in real life. ("Vague disappointment, sometimes" isn't the same thing as "repulsion".)
-
-Two, my fantasies about having a female body aren't particularly, um, discriminating? On the contrary, if I had magical BodyApp tech, I would want to experiment with being different ages or races or body types.
-
-Three, the thought being transformed in a _different_ male body, other than my own, _is_ kind of repulsive and horrifying—
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* https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LRKXuxLrnxx3nSESv/should-ethicists-be-inside-or-outside-a-profession "Anyone who gives a part of themselves to a profession discovers a sense of beauty in it." same thing with an ideology; http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/dreaming-of-political-bayescraft/
-
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"The Opposite Sex" (https://web.archive.org/web/20130216025508/http://lesswrong.com/lw/rp/the_opposite_sex/),
> until men start thinking of themselves as _men_ they will tend to regard women as defective humans.
-When I read the [systematizing–empathizing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathising%E2%80%93systemising_theory)/"men are interested in things, women are interested in people" line of research—which, to be clear, is [only a mere statistical difference at a mere Cohen's _d_ ≈ 0.93](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/su_et_al-men_and_things_women_and_people.pdf), not an absolute like genitals or chromosomes—my instinctive reaction is, "But, but that's not _fair_. People _are_ systems, because _everything_ is a system. [What kind of a lame power is empathy, anyway?](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhatKindOfLamePowerIsHeartAnyway)"
+When I read things from the [systematizing–empathizing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathising%E2%80%93systemising_theory)/"men are interested in things, women are interested in people" line of research—which, to be clear that you know that I know, is [only a mere statistical difference at a mere Cohen's _d_ ≈ 0.93](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/su_et_al-men_and_things_women_and_people.pdf), not an absolute like genitals or chromosomes—my instinctive reaction is, "But, but, that's not _fair_. People _are_ systems, because _everything_ is a system. [What kind of a lame power is empathy, anyway?](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhatKindOfLamePowerIsHeartAnyway)"
-"Everything is a system" to "I _think_ everything is a system."
+[But the map is not the territory](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/np3tP49caG4uFLRbS/the-quotation-is-not-the-referent). We don't have unmediated access to reality beyond [the Veil of Maya](https://web.archive.org/web/20020606121040/http://singinst.org/GISAI/mind/consensus.html); system-ness in the empathising/systemising sense is a feature of our _models_ of the world, not the world itself.
+
+So what "Everything is a system" _means_ is, "I _think_ everything is a system."
I think everything is a system ... because I'm male??
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+(Or whatever the appropriate generalization of "because" is for statistical group differences. The sentence "I'm 5′11″ because I'm male" doesn't sound quite right, but it's pointing to something real.)
+
+------
"I often wish some men/women would appreciate": https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/AEZaakdcqySmKMJYj ]
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+Like when someone in the _Overcoming Bias_ comment section addressed me as "Mr.", and I
+
_ playing dumb initials anecdote
Me pretending to be dumb about someone not pretending to be dumb about my initials https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/04/inhuman-rationa.html ; contrast that incident (it's not an accident that he guessed right) to Yudkowsky: "I try to avoid criticizing people when they are right. If they genuinely deserve criticism, I will not need to wait long for an occasion where they are wrong." (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MwQRucYo6BZZwjKE7/einstein-s-arrogance)
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-_ If I want to stay aligned with women, then figuring out how to do that depends on the facts about actual sex differences; if I want to do the value-exchange suggested in
+If I want to be aligned with women in the sense of AI alignment, and genuinely do right by them, how to accomplish that _depends on_ the actual facts of the matter about sex differences and similarities.
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projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff