From: M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake Date: Sun, 5 Jun 2022 22:14:00 +0000 (-0700) Subject: Sunday attack 5: so many broken promises X-Git-Url: http://534655.efjtl6rk.asia/source?a=commitdiff_plain;h=58073cc7cb9472dc097808148e81c4d585560ca3;p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git Sunday attack 5: so many broken promises OK, I turned on my phone to call my mother about visiting tonight (at 19, after today's successful—don't you dare suggest it isn't—writing marathon), and then I got lost peeking at Twitter. Checking in an ancillary page about the hash-promise I broke seems thematic. (Breaking the convention of not mentioning my real name on the blog is not unprecedented in ancillary content as opposed to the main text, and I want the hash to validate.) Let's keep the momentum going for a few hours!! --- diff --git a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md index 1b096ec..9af67f9 100644 --- a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md +++ b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md @@ -262,17 +262,18 @@ Anyway, I can't talk about the results of my happy price inquiry (whether he acc (Incidentally, it was also around this time that I snuck a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_ into the [MIRI](https://intelligence.org/) office library, which was sometimes possible for community members to visit. It seemed like something Harry Potter-Evans-Verres would do—and ominously, I noticed, not like something Hermione Granger would do.) -Gatekeeping sessions finished, I finally started HRT at the end of December 2016. In an effort to not let my anti–autogynephilia-denialism crusade take over my life, earlier that month, I promised myself (and [published the SHA256 hash of the promise](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154596054540199)) not to comment on gender issues under my real name through June 2017—_that_ was what my new pseudonymous blog was for. +Gatekeeping sessions finished, I finally started HRT at the end of December 2016. In an effort to not let my anti–autogynephilia-denialism crusade take over my life, earlier that month, I [promised myself](/ancillary/a-broken-promise/) (and [published the SHA256 hash of the promise](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154596054540199) to signal that I was Serious) not to comment on gender issues under my real name through June 2017—_that_ was what my new pseudonymous blog was for. ... the promise didn't take. There was just too much gender-identity nonsense on my Facebook feed; I _had_ to push back on some of it. "Folks, I'm not sure it's feasible to have an intellectually-honest real-name public conversation about the etiology of MtF," I wrote in one thread. "If no one is willing to mention some of the key relevant facts, maybe it's less misleading to just say nothing." -As a result of that, I got a PM from a woman whose marriage had fallen apart after (among other things) her husband transitioned. She told me about the parts of her husband's story that had never quite made sense to her (but which sounded like a textbook case from my reading). In her telling, the husband was always more emotionally tentative and less comfortable with the standard gender role and status stuff, but in the way of like, a geeky nerd guy, not in the way of someone feminine. He was into crossdressing sometimes, but she had thought that was just a weird and insignificant kink, not that he didn't like being a man—until they moved to the Bay Area and he fell in with a social-justicey crowd. When I linked her to Kay Brown's article on ["Advice for Wives and Girlfriends of Autogynephiles"](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/advice-for-wivesgirlfriends-of-autogynephiles/), her response was, "Holy shit, this is _exactly_ what happened with me." +As a result of that, I got a PM from a woman whose marriage had fallen apart after (among other things) her husband transitioned. She told me about the parts of her husband's story that had never quite made sense to her (but which sounded like a textbook case from my reading). In her telling, the husband was always more emotionally tentative and less comfortable with the standard gender role and status stuff, but in the way of like, a geeky nerd guy, not in the way of someone feminine. He was into crossdressing sometimes, but she had thought that was just a weird and insignificant kink, not that he didn't like being a man—until they moved to the Bay Area and he fell in with a social-justicey crowd. When I linked her to Kay Brown's article on ["Advice for Wives and Girlfriends of Autogynephiles"](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/advice-for-wivesgirlfriends-of-autogynephiles/), her response was, "Holy shit, this is _exactly_ what happened with me." It was nice to make a friend over shared heresy. -It was nice to make a friend over shared heresy. - -[TODO: the story of my Facebook crusade, going off the rails, getting hospitalized] +[TODO: the story of my Facebook crusade, going off the rails, getting hospitalized +/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/ +/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/ +] A striking pattern from my attempts to argue with people about the two-type taxonomy was the tendency for the 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 arguing that because categories exist in our model of the world rather than the world itself, there's nothing wrong with simply _defining_ trans people to be their preferred gender, in order to alleviate their dysphoria. @@ -310,9 +311,16 @@ But this is just wrong. Categories exist in our model of the world _in order to_ Importantly, this is a very general point about how language itself works _that has nothing to do with gender_. No matter what you believe about politically controversial empirical questions, intellectually honest people should be able to agree that "I ought to accept an unexpected [X] or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered [Y] if [positive consequence]" is not correct philosophy, _independently of the particular values of X and Y_. -So, because at this point I still trusted people in my robot cult to be intellectually honest rather than fucking with me because of their political incentives, I took the bait. When I quit my dayjob in order to have more time to study and work on this blog, the capstone of my sabbatical was an exhaustive response to Alexander, ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) (which Alexander [graciously included in his next linkpost](https://archive.ph/irpfd#selection-1625.53-1629.55)). A few months later (having started a new dayjob), I followed it up with ["Reply to _The Unit of Caring_ on Adult Human Females"](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/), responding to a similar argument. I'm proud of those posts: I think Alexander's and _Unit of Caring_'s arguments were incredibly dumb, and with a lot of effort, I think I did a pretty good job of explaining exactly why. +So, because at this point I still trusted people in my robot cult to be intellectually honest rather than fucking with me because of their political incentives, I took the bait. When I quit my dayjob in order to have more time to study and work on this blog, the capstone of my sabbatical was an exhaustive response to Alexander, ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) (which Alexander [graciously included in his next linkpost](https://archive.ph/irpfd#selection-1625.53-1629.55)). A few months later, I followed it up with ["Reply to _The Unit of Caring_ on Adult Human Females"](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/), responding to a similar argument. I'm proud of those posts: I think Alexander's and _Unit of Caring_'s arguments were incredibly dumb, and with a lot of effort, I think I did a pretty good job of explaining exactly why to anyone with the reading comprehension skills to understand. + +At this point, I was _disappointed_ with my impact, but not to the point of bearing much hostility to "the community". People had made their arguments, and I had made mine; I didn't think I was _entitled_ to anything more than that. + +... and, really, that _should_ have been the end of the story. Not really much of a story at all. + + + -At this point, I was certainly _disappointed_ with my impact, but not to the point of bearing much hostility to "the community". People had made their arguments, and I had made mine; I didn't think I was _entitled_ to anything more than that. +... [TODO: I was at the company offsite browsing Twitter (which I had recently joined with fantasies of self-cancelling) when I saw the "Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning", and I _flipped the fuck out_—exhaustive breakdown of exactly what's wrong ; I trusted Yudkowsky and I _did_ think I was entitled to more] diff --git a/content/pages/ancillary/a-broken-promise.md b/content/pages/ancillary/a-broken-promise.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c5e8a74 --- /dev/null +++ b/content/pages/ancillary/a-broken-promise.md @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@ +Title: A Broken Promise +Status: Hidden + +``` +$ cat promise.txt +I, Zack M. Davis, promise not to make any written public comments on gender/trans issues under my real name from today, December 7, 2016, through June 30, 2017. Any gender-related blogging on my blog An Algorithmic Lucidity should be scoped to my own personal experiences as determined by my good-faith judgement (e.g., I can talk about my own autogynephilia, but not the two-type taxonomy for MtF in general). No such restrictions apply to activity under the M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake pseudonym. +$ sha256sum promise.txt +a4fb5a699d9927e2ddf4d97f4aa3efd0071757d954169f1265d63515c4f86456 promise.txt +``` diff --git a/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md b/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md index 5c0a1d6..186e5af 100644 --- a/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md +++ b/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md @@ -824,9 +824,6 @@ scared that Orion was going to kill me to Ben: You can use police cars as Ubers???? Fri Feb 17 2017 15:19:59 GMT-0800 -/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/ -/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/ - ] You gave me hot chocolate last night, right? I was worried that you were subconsciously poisoning me; not on purpose, but because there are just a lot of contaminants in cities; things that taste sweet to children but are actually poisonous; but, Anna said that most events are normal; I don't remember that note"