Another post in this vein that had a huge impact on me was ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions). As an illustration of how [the hope for radical human enhancement is fraught with](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EQkELCGiGQwvrrp3L/growing-up-is-hard) technical difficulties, Yudkowsky sketches a picture of just how difficult an actual male-to-female sex change would be.
-It would be hard to overstate how much of an impact this post had on me. I've previously linked it on [this](/2016/Nov/reply-to-ozy-on-two-type-mtf-taxonomy/#changing-emotions-link) [blog](/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/#changing-emotions-link) [five](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/#changing-emotions-link) [different](/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#changing-emotions-link) [times](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/#changing-emotions-link). In June 2008, half a year before it was published, I encountered the [2004 Extropians mailing list post](http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2004-September/008924.html) that the blog post had clearly been revised from. (The fact that I was trawling through old mailing list archives searching for Yudkowsky content that I hadn't already read, tells you something about what a fanboy I am—if, um, you hadn't already noticed.) I immediately wrote to a friend: "[...] I cannot adequately talk about my feelings. Am I shocked, liberated, relieved, scared, angry, amused?"
+It would be hard to overstate how much of an impact this post had on me. I've previously linked it on [this](/2016/Nov/reply-to-ozy-on-two-type-mtf-taxonomy/#changing-emotions-link) [blog](/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/#changing-emotions-link) [five](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/#changing-emotions-link) [different](/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#changing-emotions-link) [times](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/#changing-emotions-link). In June 2008, half a year before it was published, I encountered the [2004 Extropians mailing list post](https://archive.is/En6qW) that the blog post had clearly been revised from. (The fact that I was trawling through old mailing list archives searching for Yudkowsky content that I hadn't already read, tells you something about what a fanboy I am—if, um, you hadn't already noticed.) I immediately wrote to a friend: "[...] I cannot adequately talk about my feelings. Am I shocked, liberated, relieved, scared, angry, amused?"
The argument goes: it might be easy to _imagine_ changing sex and refer to the idea in a short English sentence, but the real physical world has implementation details, and the implementation details aren't filled in by the short English sentence. The human body, including the brain, is an enormously complex integrated organism; there's no [plug-and-play](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug_and_play) architecture by which you can just swap your brain into a new body and have everything Just Work without re-mapping the connections in your motor cortex. And even that's not _really_ a sex change, as far as the whole integrated system is concerned—
http://web.archive.org/web/20201101001637/https://www.unz.com/isteve/fbi-murder-offender-ratio-for-blacks-nonblacks-ratio-for-males-females/
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-statistics-dont-capture-the-full-extent-of-the-systemic-bias-in-policing/
+
+https://quillette.com/2021/07/29/charles-murrays-facing-reality-a-review/
+
+"Reading Race: AI Recognises Patient's Racial Identity In Medical Images"
+https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.10356
+https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2021/08/02/ai-has-the-worst-superpower-medical-racism/
+
+https://www.unz.com/isteve/military-discovers-that-stripping-photos-from-promotion-evaluations-hurts-blacks/
+
+"Western Europe, State Formation, and Genetic Pacification"
+> mean heritable propensity for violence thus shifted 0.08 SD leftward with each passing generation
+> the most violent 1 to 2% should form a right-hand “tail” that begins 2.33–2.05
+SD to the right of the mean propensity for homicide. If we eliminate this right-hand tail and leave only the other 98-99% to survive and reproduce, we have a selection differential of 0.027 to 0.049 SD per generation.
"When Selves Have Sex: What the Phenomenology of Trans Sexuality Can Teach About Sexual Orientation"
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00918369.2014.865472
+
+every day like the first
+http://hannahtg1000.blogspot.com/2021/07/jake-and-rabbits-foot-finale.html
+
+https://medium.com/@notCursedE/a-glossary-of-transphobia-a31a001d279
+
+shared environment effects female but not male sexuality
+https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18536986/
+
+> trans women are untouchable, individually and as a group
+https://uploads.ovarit.com/4f3856b9-c73a-54fa-8557-ce565cb2fec5.png
+
+> The Transgender Industry Is Culling Tomboys Out Of Existence
+https://archive.is/NZmPe
+
+The world is so small: Gwern linked to a Crooked Timber blog post, and my roommate (!) is a few comments below
+
+Scott repeating the story from Inadequate Equilibria is typical of our insular cult https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducanumab
+
+https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/39177/i-just-found-out-that-the-tim-who-works-at-my-village-supermarket-is-a-convicted
+
+> you look inside CLIP, you find neurons corresponding to literally every trait — or almost every trait — that is a protected attribute in the United States
+https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/chris-olah-interpretability-research/#safety-implications-004101
+
+> These changes seem to have gone farther in women, whose head hair is thicker and somewhat longer.
+https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=60916
+linked from https://www.unz.com/isteve/does-womens-hair-grow-longer-than-mens-hair/
+
+https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/ouap22/i_need_help_coming_out_to_my_literally/
+
+I want to know how the dialogue would have continued after—
+
+woman: Okay, I see what you're trying to do, but I think it's ultimately misguided. The reason your employer markets cars and dolls side-by-side as a choice, rather than happening to have cars one month, and dolls the next month, is precisely to cater pre-existing statistical sex differences in children's play styles—on average, they'd lose sales from parents of girls during car month, and vice versa. I know, the idea of sex differences in toy preferences seems far-fetched to you—after all, there were no _trucks_ in the environment of evolutionary adapatedness. Nevertheless, empirically, this is a thing! The difference in preference for vehicle toys is Cohen's d of 2.4 (http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/davis-hines-how_large_are_gender_differences_in_toy_preferences.pdf). That's huge! Shit's been stable for the fifty years psychologists have been studying this (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-021-01989-8)! I know, it's the patriarchy, right?
+
+But then how do you explain—okay, so there's this genetic condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia, where people's bodies don't make enough of this enzyme called 21-hydroxylase, and it turns out that, in girls, this results in too much androgen during a key point in fetal development. And it turns out that these girls actually have much more male-typical behavior than normal, including toy preferences (http://unremediatedgender.space/images/cah_diffs_table.png), in a way that's _linear_ with the level of 21-hydroxylase deficiency, suggesting that prenatal hormones account for the difference.
+
+And before you point out the half-dozen confounders anyone could point out in five seconds, the researchers already thought of that. They had a control group of non-CAH girls! They had a control group of the CAH girls' siblings! They had a control group of CAH boys! They checked whether they girls behaved differently when their parents were present—and they actually played with "boy's" toys more when the parents weren't there, the _opposite_ direction of the effect that you would expect from the parental socialization theory.
+
+You might say—so what? Even if statistical sex differences in play styles are real, that's still just an average, right? Cohen's d of 2.4 still an overlap of—um, two times the normal CDF of negative d divided by two—twenty-three percent! So we should still refuse to acknowledge Hot Wheels as "boy's" toys, right?
+
+But look—statistical trends are actually useful for navigating the world, such that we often want language that's optimized for handling the most common case, without seeking to deny or disparage the existence of exceptions? Again, that's _why_ the restaurant is offering two choices of toy in the first place, which is a Pareto improvement over disappointing a lot of girls during car month, or never offering any choices that are known—known!—to appeal more to one sex than the other. Statistically! Given that it's happening anyway, does being able to talk about it make it worse?
+
+This Happy Meal is for my nephew. I don't know the kid that well, but he seems like a pretty typical—boy? Such that, if I'm going to get fast food and there's a choice of toy, my guess is that he's going to want whichever choice was optimized around the mean of boys' preferences, even if I didn't know in advance whether that would be Hot Wheels or Transformers. Am—am I not supposed to notice? Am I not supposed to have language to describe the pattern I'm seeing in the world? How much are people really hurt by this?
+
+If I had known that the kid specifically liked Barbies, or was generally effeminate, maybe I would have asked for the girls' toy. Like, it seems like a lot less hassle to just say that sometimes girls like boys' toys and vice versa, rather than to insist on playing dumb about whether "girls' toys" is a coherent concept, which the children themselves typically manage to work out over the ideological protests of progressive parents?
+
+(I actually favor the "don't unnecessarily gender toys" position myself—I'm happy to say "Barbie or Hot Wheels" to avoid contributing to a partially-self-fulfilling-prophecy effect, even at the cost of obfuscating the causal explanation of why the dichotomy is there—but I end up writing things like this anyway, because the level of pretending-to-be-stupid biological sex denialism among people who you'd think would have the science chops to know better—even people in a cult of alleged "Bayesians"!—is really, really out of hand. If you're worried about self-fulfilling prophecies, talk about that hypothesis _explicitly_, rather than throwing out the concept of probabilistic reasoning using language!!)
+
+> [Duncan—]
+> there *isn't* a good reason to push back against calling the Barbie a Barbie instead of calling it a girl toy
+
+Policy debates should not appear one-sided. "It's being clear about why the restaurant is offering two, and only two, and specifically these two, toy choices" is a reason. Liberal anti-gender-role individualists like us don't think it's a sufficiently strong reason to outweigh the externality, but the concern about externalities is value-laden; protesting, "Oh, I'm only asking you to be _specific_, no ideological agenda here!" would be a lie.
Active—
-_ "Why the Hell It Means So Much to Me"
_ Blood Is Thicker Than Water
_ Book Review: Charles Murray's Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America
_ There Should Be a Closetspace/Lease Bound Crossover Fic
_ A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
Minor queue—
+_ Timelines
+_ "Why the Hell It Means So Much to Me"
_ I Don't Do Policy
_ Student Dysphoria, and a Previous Life's War
_ Subspatial Distribution Overlap and Cancellable Stereotypes
_ Link: Babylon Bee "It's a Good Life" parody https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20ALZgd6_Ek
LW—
+_ Generic Consequentialists Are Liars
_ Feature Selection
_ Connotation as Optimization
_ There's No Such Thing as Unmotivated Reasoning
_ "You'll Never Persuade Anyone"
+_ Longtermism + Hinge of History = Shorttermism (not my original idea, but don't remember whose blog I read this on, so I'll write my own version)
+_ Point of No Return is Relative to a Class of Interventions
_ Simulationist Headcanon for Ontologically Basic Train Show
_ My Fire Alarm
_ Angelic Irony
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff