From: M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2020 16:40:11 +0000 (-0700) Subject: check in X-Git-Url: http://534655.efjtl6rk.asia/source?a=commitdiff_plain;h=c8b1d2c469cb3fd4f74245b23dee0fc80cf6218b;p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git check in --- diff --git a/content/drafts/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md b/content/drafts/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md index ce443d8..1406c8b 100644 --- a/content/drafts/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md +++ b/content/drafts/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md @@ -75,7 +75,7 @@ But quasi-religious fervor aside, there was presumably a _reason_ I cared so muc Well. The reason I'm blogging this story at all is because I'm scared that in order to finish that sentence in the current year and be understood, I'd have to say, "because I was trans." And with respect to what the words mean in the current year, it's true. But that's not how I think of it, then or now. -It's because I was _straight_. Because I loved women, and wanted to do right by them—wanted more than anything to _identify_ with them in some abstract sense that can only exist from the outside looking in. +It's because I was _straight_. Because I loved women, and wanted to do right by them—and, as part of this, wanted more than anything to _identify_ with them in some abstract sense that can only exist from the outside looking in. Anyway, that's some background about where I was at, personally and ideologically, _before_ I fell in with this robot cult. @@ -89,13 +89,13 @@ I wasn't ready to hear it then, but—I mean, probably not? So, for the _most_ p In this way (contrary to the uninformed suspicions of those still faithful to the blank slate), evolutionary psychology actually turns out to be impressively antiracist discipline: individual humans and ancestry-groups of humans can differ in small ways like personality or skin color, but these are, and _have_ to be, "shallow" low-complexity variations on the same basic human design; new complex functionality would require speciation. -This luck does not extend to antisexism. If the genome were a computer program, it would have `if female { /* ... */ } else if male { /* ... */ }` conditional blocks, and inside those conditionals, you can have complex sex-specific functionality. By default, selection pressures on one sex tend to drag the other along for the ride—men have nipples because there's no particular reason for them not to—but in those cases where it was advantageous in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness for females and males to do things _differently_, sexual dimorphism can evolve (slowly—[more than one and half orders of magnitude slower than monomorphic adaptations](/papers/rogers-mukherjee-quantitative_genetics_of_sexual_dimorphism.pdf), in fact). +This luck does not extend to antisexism. If the genome were a computer program, it would have `if female { /* ... */ } else if male { /* ... */ }` conditional blocks, and inside those blocks, you can have complex sex-specific functionality. By default, selection pressures on one sex tend to drag the other along for the ride—men have nipples because there's no particular reason for them not to—but in those cases where it was advantageous in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness for females and males to do things _differently_, sexual dimorphism can evolve (slowly—[more than one and half orders of magnitude slower than monomorphic adaptations](/papers/rogers-mukherjee-quantitative_genetics_of_sexual_dimorphism.pdf), in fact). Robert Trivers wrote, "One can, in effect, treat the sexes as if they were different species, the opposite sex being a resource relevant to producing maximum surviving offspring" (!!). If you're willing to admit to the possibility of psychological sex differences _at all_, you have to admit that sex differences in the parts of the mind that are _specifically about mating_ are going to be a prime candidate. Even if there's a lot of "shared code" in how love-and-attachment works in general, there are also going to be specific differences that were [optimized for](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8vpf46nLMDYPC6wA4/optimization-and-the-intelligence-explosion) facilitating males impregnating females. In that sense, the claim that "the love of a man for a woman, and the love of a woman for a man, have not been cognitively derived from each other" just seems commonsensically _true_. -I guess if you _didn't_ grow up with a quasi-religious fervor for psychological sex differences denialism, this line of argument doesn't seem world-shatteringly impactful—maybe it just looks like supplementary Science Details brushed over some basic facts of human existence that everyone knows. But if you _have_ built your identity around quasi-religious _denial_ of certain basic facts of human existence that everyone knows (if not everyone [knows that they know](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-belief)), getting forced out of it by sufficient weight of Science Details [can be a pretty rough experience](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/XM9SwdBGn8ATf8kq3/c/comment/Zv5mrMThBkkjDAqv9). +I guess if you _didn't_ grow up with a quasi-religious fervor for psychological sex differences denialism, this line of argument doesn't seem world-shatteringly impactful?—maybe it just looks like supplementary Science Details brushed over some basic facts of human existence that everyone knows. But if you _have_ built your identity around quasi-religious _denial_ of certain basic facts of human existence that everyone knows (if not everyone [knows that they know](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-belief)), getting forced out of it by sufficient weight of Science Details [can be a pretty rough experience](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/XM9SwdBGn8ATf8kq3/c/comment/Zv5mrMThBkkjDAqv9). [...] @@ -104,7 +104,7 @@ The short story ["Failed Utopia #4-2"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTK At the time, [I expressed horror](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2/comment/PhiGnX7qKzzgn2aKb) at the idea in the comments section, because my quasi-religious psychological-sex-differences denialism required that I be horrified. But looking back eleven years later (my deconversion from my teenage religion being pretty thorough at this point, I think), the _argument makes sense_ (though you need an additional [handwave](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HandWave) to explain why the AI doesn't give every _individual_ their separate utopia—if existing women and men aren't optimal partners for each other, so too are individual men not optimal same-sex friends for each other). -On my reading of the text, it is _significant_ that the AI-synthesized complements for men are given their own name, the _verthandi_, rather than just being referred to as women. The _verthandi_ may _look like_ women, they may be _approximately_ psychologically human, but the _detailed_ psychology of "superintelligently-engineered optimal romantic partner for a human male" is not going to come out of the distribution of actual human females, and judicious exercise of the [tenth virtue of precision](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/) demands that a _different word_ be coined for this hypothetical science-fictional type of person. Calling the _verthandi_ "women" would be _worse writing_; it would _fail to communicate_ the impact of what has taken place in the story. +On my reading of the text, it is _significant_ that the AI-synthesized complements for men are given their own name, the _verthandi_ (presumably after [the Norse deity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ver%C3%B0andi)), rather than just being referred to as women. The _verthandi_ may _look like_ women, they may be _approximately_ psychologically human, but the _detailed_ psychology of "superintelligently-engineered optimal romantic partner for a human male" is not going to come out of the distribution of actual human females, and judicious exercise of the [tenth virtue of precision](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/) demands that a _different word_ be coined for this hypothetical science-fictional type of person. Calling the _verthandi_ "women" would be _worse writing_; it would _fail to communicate_ the impact of what has taken place in the story. diff --git a/notes/post_ideas.txt b/notes/post_ideas.txt index bcdceb6..61fe672 100644 --- a/notes/post_ideas.txt +++ b/notes/post_ideas.txt @@ -23,6 +23,18 @@ _ Reddit submissions: /r/philosophy and /r/TheMotte _ S. Finley share _ tag "Motivation and Political Context": "The SF Bay Area", "Criticisms of the Rationalist Movement", "Postmortems & Retrospectives" +_ I, Too, Dislike It +_ Friendship Practices of the Secret-Sharing Plain Speech Valley Squirrels +_ Yardstick abolition pessimism https://culturallyboundgender.wordpress.com/2018/11/13/gender-identity-isnt-a-box-its-a-yardstick/ +_ Beyond the Binary +_ reductionist rebuttal to "so you think lesbians aren't women" +_ A Previous Life's War +_ The Feeling Is Mutual +_ Hrunkner Unnerby and the Shallowness of Progress +_ reply to https://azdoine.tumblr.com/post/173995599942/a-reply-to-unremediatedgenderspace-on-reply-to http://archive.is/JSSNi +_ reply to https://deathisbadblog.com/the-real-transphobes-are-the-ones-we-made-along-the-way/ +_ Beckett Mariner Is Trans https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/in3g92/was_mariner_a_teenager_on_the_enterprised/ +_ Cynical Theories review _ Persongen/univariate fallacy/typical set _ reply on psych prison https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/io1iih/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_september_07/g4uvgb4/?context=3 _ Irreversible Damage review @@ -44,18 +56,7 @@ Transitioning is easy if you project into the subspace spanned by "given name" a (for Elision vs. Choice) Speakers of my generation are more likely to say "person" when sex isn't relevant, whereas 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 mentioning race (https://agentultra.com/blog/the-black-man-stopped-me/) when it's not relevant.) -UUT— -_ I, Too, Dislike It -_ Friendship Practices of the Secret-Sharing Plain Speech Valley Squirrels -_ Beyond the Binary -_ A Previous Life's War -_ The Feeling Is Mutual -_ Hrunkner Unnerby and the Shallowness of Progress -_ reply to https://azdoine.tumblr.com/post/173995599942/a-reply-to-unremediatedgenderspace-on-reply-to http://archive.is/JSSNi -_ reply to https://deathisbadblog.com/the-real-transphobes-are-the-ones-we-made-along-the-way/ -_ Beckett Mariner Is Trans https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/in3g92/was_mariner_a_teenager_on_the_enterprised/ -_ Cynical Theories review -_ Yardstick abolition pessimism https://culturallyboundgender.wordpress.com/2018/11/13/gender-identity-isnt-a-box-its-a-yardstick/ + _ Eugenics Is Actually Good, You Worthless Cowards