posted on February 07, 2023 04:55 PM by
u/endlessmoth
35
u/NoahTheDuke41 pointsat 1675798345.000000
It was me, once. I had a couple psychotic episodes last year,
including some delusions of grandeur. At various points, I thought that
I had been appointed Gender Czar of this equivalence class of instances
of Earth across the multiverse, that I was objectively one of the seven
most important people in the world, with a key role to play in the
intelligence explosion. I thought that powerful transgender activists
might be plotting to murder me (in retaliation for this blog) at a
fandom convention that I had broadcast that I would be at, but that
maybe they could be bargained with, or that I might escape if they were
to mistakenly kill someone else who erroneously believed that they were
me. I thought that you could reward or punish people by writing simple
computer programs praising or condemning them, thereby leveraging the
acausal economy to affect the distribution of superintelligences
simulating them—and so on.
“And this is why you shouldn’t believe trans people!”
> I had a couple psychotic episodes last year, including some delusions of grandeur. At various points, I thought [...] that I was objectively one of the seven most important people in the world, with a key role to play in the intelligence explosion.
This sounds like any number of prominent rationalists, minus the part where they realize it's a delusion.
It's almost like thinking you're part of a special cognitive elite battling the forces of AI doom leads to grandiose thinking in general. (I mean, I know delusions are more complicated than that, but as someone with a mental health history of my own, I have definitely noticed that what I obsess excessively about in normal times gets incorporated into what seems real to me during my worst times.)
damn. i hate when im reading through old stuff on reddit and in the middle of a sparkling, scintillating discussion i find someone has written over all her old comments with nonsense, fragmenting the discussion permanently. what hilarious, moving, romantic, haunting things could she have said? just to wash it all away, in this digital era of permanency? wow. that takes courage. i bet she was really cute, too
A lot of words to say very little. I ended up skimming most of it after reaching this:
"Even if it's only a small cost to be socially required to say woman and she to refer to someone whom one would otherwise be inclined to call a man—and to let them in to any corresponding sex-segregated spaces, &c.—that cost needs to be aggregated across everyone subject to it, like so many dust specks in their eyes."
It seems to just ramble on about how very important it is to properly categorize everyone according to natural or rational categories or something, as the number of commonly used nouns is scarce and people need them. Terrible article not worth reading.
Oh wow they used the dumbest thought experiment in the world to justify why they should be allowed to refuse the smallest courtesy in the world. I would love to live in the reality these people do where "you should used trans people's preferred names and pronouns" was so universally accepted that you had to resort to absolutely insane hypotheticals to justify not doing it.
Look, hear me out, what if to deactivate a nuclear launch you had to say the n word. Its a voice activated disarming mechanism and the code just happens to be that word okay? No one was around to hear it and you wouldn't even remember you said it, but you would prevent nuclear armageddon.
Why the deactivation code is that word isn't important, it just is, you don't have time to ask questions.
You'd say it wouldn't you?
Check. Mate.
Hey don't get angry at me, it's just a thought experiment.
But the sequences say to shut up and multiply because our assessments of probability and relative utility are totally objective and aren't subject to biases and this doesn't represent a fundamental problem for our entire moral framework.
And that's assuming this guy even actually did math rather than assume it was a bigger harm if you sum it up because it makes him feel personally uncomfortable.
I love how they assume that everybody will be equally as discomfited as they are.
Personally I usually find it quite uncomfortable not to extend basic courtesy to people.
Very little of substance. This is the same writer who once opined that even a hypothetical full-body physical transformation might not be sufficient to make a MTF trans woman count as a woman, because her mind would still have male-typical traits.
(Because as we all know, 'brain sex' is a nonsense idea when le evil transactivists suggest it as an etiology of gender, but it's eminently reasonable for free-thinking transphobes to believe in brain sex as long as it reinforces that trans people are faking their gender.)
OP's blog is just a lonelier, intellectualized version of the /repgen/ threads on 4chan. Self-hating or closeted trans people gathering and pontificating in order to justify the emotional burden of refusing to transition.
I somehow was masochistic enough to read the comments on OP's other gender-related posts. Most of them are predictably horrible, but one person at least left some good advice for them [here](http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#isso-184)
('The rationalist community is an albatross that is not going to help you discover who exactly you are and let go of the shame that drives you to bifurcate yourself into the beautiful and the shameful. There's no difference between the two, it's all you. You already possess enough scientific knowledge to work it out, there's no need to travel up your own ass 9 times over with tortured derivations of supposed "truths." Drop the thesaurus. Let go of the concept of a "true" man or a "true" woman. The physiology of gender is pretty much besides the point. The full IUPAC name of estrogen does not impress anyone.')
This works because, empirically, mammals have lots of things in
common with each other and water-dwellers have lots of things in common
with each other. If we imagine entities as existing in a
high-dimensional configuration space, there would be a mammals cluster
(in the subspace of the dimensions that mammals are similar on), and a
water-dwellers cluster (in the subspace of the dimensions that
water-dwellers are similar on), and whales would happen to belong to
both of them, in the way that the vector x⃗ = [3.1, 4.2, −10.3, −9.1] ∈
ℝ⁴ is close to [3, 4, 2, 3] in the x₁-x₂ plane, but also close to [−8,
−9, −10, −9] in the x₃-x₄ plane.
The author really went out of their way to not just use a Venn
diagram.
This came to my attention from this
comment chain on /r/slatestarcodex, where it’s offered as a successor
without any actual mention of its merits. At the slightest pushback, the
rationalists retreat to the familiar “how dare you not read all 100k
words before passing judgement?” and vapid ’by your logic’s.
“Autogynephilia should be valid too!”
> I figured some transphobes would show up, but I also had some evidence/hope that it wasn't just far right commenters on the sub left?
Unfortunately (and predictably), the rat community has become the proverbial Nazi bar.
"AGP theory" comes off as plausible to laypeople but as someone who's actually in a position to know about this stuff, trust me, it's at least 99% bunk.
There's no such thing as autogynephilia, the guy that proposed it mostly interviewed sex workers whom he was personally hooking up with.
\>Despite your claims the article is transphobic, I came away feeling more sympathetic to mtf people who are not of the autogynephilic variety
If you want to be sympathetic to trans people, try reading something by trans people, not this weird self-denigrating drivel.
> There's no such thing as autogynephilia, the guy that proposed it mostly interviewed sex workers whom he was personally hooking up with.
I think you're confusing Dr. Blanchard (the guy who came up with he theory) with Dr Bailey (the guy who popularized it). Blanchard is a piece of work as well but I don't think he's *quite* as bad as Bailey.
The problem with the term is that "autogynephilia" refers to two distinct things.
One is a sensation, which certainly a lot of trans people do feel, of arousal associated with their identified gender. It's hard to seriously argue this is not a thing trans people experience; you'll see it every second or third questioning thread on the major trans subs every day for years.
The other is Blanchard's claim that this is *what makes people trans*, and that trans people fall into specific distinct categories. Blanchard's categorization certainly does get at some very broad clusters; it just doesn't hold up as a causative explanation because those clusters are broad and exception-laden.
A lot of kink is rooted in shame and taboo. If you spend 30, 40, 50 years being told that you can't wear a particular article of clothing, then it's not a surprise that you might develop a kink around that article of clothing. This is not a trans-specific thing, but a human thing.
The problem with the term "autogynephilia" is that it tries to conflate these things, and pretend that \*this is what it means to be trans\*, thus defining the experience of being trans as a particular kind of sexual deviancy.
Transphobes jump at this because this confirms their pre-conceived biases about trans people.
I did at one point. I don't today, but that's more avoiding potentially invoking Blanchard (whose taxonomy I don't think is accurate) than that my feelings have actually changed all that much. And I've known many other trans people who felt similarly, some of whom do use the term.
Yeah, I think most trans people I know would avoid the term exactly because it evokes Blanchard weirdos.
'Autogynephilia' is not a term for a \*kink\*, it's a term for a (made up) paraphilic pathology. Whatever the kink is called, it's not that.
The only trans people I've personally seen who use AGP to describe themselves are people who are fairly traumatised because this was their main introduction to what it means to be trans. There's a \*lot\* of those in the rationalist community, because Bailey was quite popular. It's mostly just sad to see.
Well, whatever definitions you and I decide to adopt (rightly, I think, given the politics involved), it's objectively true that there are plenty of trans people who don't and who actively identify with the term.
It's true, if someone feels the label applies to them, it's up to them to decide. I just feel that as far as the kink is concerned, there's plenty of other names for it that don't create associations with AGP.
I'd argue that the difference between "paraphilic pathology" and "kink" is largely one of social approval/disapproval but that just be most of my education being history-focused.
I mean, my point is not about semantics, it's about avoiding a loaded word. There's plenty of other words to describe that kink that don't associate it with the creepers Blanchard and Bailey, and their debunked 'theories'.
I think there's actually a third definition: men who get off on imagining themselves as women, as a kink/fetish thing. This is distinct from the thing with trans women because for trans women it's generally borne out of being overall more comfortable with having a "female" body than a "male" one in any situation, sexual or non-sexual. To put it simply, being uncomfortable in your own skin makes it more difficult to enjoy sex.
Blanchard's theory conflates these things (and has a lot more flaws besides that)
maybe there's a mythic land of good points somewhere further down the essay than i got, but you got to admit it's not promising when on the way there you're repeatedly hit with classic transphobic red flags and talking points.
>> I ought to accept an unexpected man or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered female if it'll save someone's life. There's no rule of rationality saying that I shouldn't, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that I should.
>
> This is true in a tautological sense: if you deliberately gerrymander your category boundaries in order to get the answer you want, you can get the answer you want, which is great for people who want that answer, and people who don't want to hurt their feelings (and who don't mind letting themselves get emotionally blackmailed1).
if you cant catch on to the absolutely loaded language on display here, i don't know what to tell you. this basic ass take on gender is "categorical gerrymandering" and not wanting to oppress trans people is "letting yourself get emotionally backmailed." please.
then the author goes on to act like recognizing a trans person's gender is some great imposition on the rest of society, and doesnt engage with the fact that _even if it was_, why should we care?
you could make the exact same dust specks argument against forcing white people to recognize black people as human. surely this would affect _everyone who wants to use language to categorize humans by race_. skin color is one of the first things you notice about a person! it's not a tool under conscious control.
would i be out of pocket to call that racist?
fundamentally, this person seems at best philosophically immature and at worst bad faith; they're criticizing trans theory from a position that fails to recognize a that their logic is seeped in logically-unjustified status quo, a fish unaware of the water they swim in.
caring about the utility of man or woman is predicated on believing that these categories have any use, should have any use. they theorize that there might be multiple different etiologies of being transgender — and yet they never turn that same critical gaze at the status quo, and wonder if there might be multiple fundamentally different mechanisms undergirding why cis women feel like women
an analysis of trans women like this is going to look pretty biased if all of the questioning is poking at whether 'trans women' makes sense as a homogenous category without questioning whether 'cis women' makes sense as a category. it's just taken for granted. and this makes the idea of taking this writer seriously as a thinker on gender a nonstarter.
and then as i scroll further, i see lines like
> A minority of male-to-female transsexuals exhibit lifelong sex-atypical behavior and interests,
what the fuck do interests have to do with sex? why should this be how we gatekeep categorization? at this point i just laughed and closed the tab. i have better things to do
damn. i hate when im reading through old stuff on reddit and in the middle of a sparkling, scintillating discussion i find someone has written over all her old comments with nonsense, fragmenting the discussion permanently. what hilarious, moving, romantic, haunting things could she have said? just to wash it all away, in this digital era of permanency? wow. that takes courage. i bet she was really cute, too
It’s ridiculous reading a post that is sniffing another posts ass
this hard and for so long. It even straight states it hasn’t said
anything the 1st post said quite a ways in.
One should either rapidly summarise the earlier post or link it or
just say something that doesn’t require using thousands of words
preamble.
I remember when I 1st read HPMOR one of the author comment/preamble I
read mentioned some poster somewhere making an argument for making
horcruxes out of babies and that they would fit in at less wrong. Which
just made me think that wow the people there must be exceedingly
stupid.
When I read this post I just want to slap the author and explain to
them just how much brainpower they are wasting trying to essentially
“explore options” ( that is the most generous way to describe what
they’re doing I think). The supposed inconvenience of calling people
according to their preferred pronoun is actually quite small. The
inconvenience of fighting against it is actually quite large. Even
without any empathy at all one should just get with the program and use
the pronouns because it’s a better use of one’s time and energy than
making stupid arguments online at length.
I’m autistic and realistically a fairly pedantic person who is
interested in accuracy. It hurts me seeing just how incorrectly our blog
poster is using their instinct to be pedantic and accurate.
I hang out with people who are rats or rat adjacent both online and in the real world. People can explore all kinds of stupid ideas. You know about the motte community? There are rat/rat adjacent communities which are just as left as the motte is Nazi. I mean it was someone I met on a rat fanfic discord server who pointed me in the direction of this server.
If you're hanging out on LW with all of the frankly idiotic cargo cultists then yes, it frequently is. Maybe it always is, I have never read LW posts outside of someone trying to get me to read Eliezers AI doomcult posts in order to convert me (which I feel like should have the opposite to their intended effect and I still don't really see how they convince people despite spending hours talking to people about it) and the posts linked here.
I mean a lot of rats are all in on the freezing thing. They believe that if they freeze themselves upon death without the brain getting too warm them at some point some future people will feel inclined towards using tech wizardry to revive them and upload them to the matrix. They don't really mind the damage freezing someone does to the body they think this will also be fixed. The friendly AI mommy will revive all and put them on heaven. Frankly it's on par with religious cult thinking in my opinion.
So in a literal sense I would say no. All kinds of stupid ideas can be explored by someone with the wrong kind of thinking and the community if you take all members is actually quite a bit larger than just the slatestar and lw groups. Even if those are the larger/louder.
> There are rat/rat adjacent communities which are just as left as the motte is Nazi
I have never seen evidence of this in (good fucking Lord) twelve years of tracking these chucklefucks. I don't believe you.
Why do some posters in this sub insistently refer to him as Siskind?
It’s something I’ve noticed for a while now. I am aware that it’s his
last name, but his pen name, Scott Alexander, is better known.
Partially I think it comes down to his attempts to distance himself from his writing, which is understandable for a shrink who writes about philosophy as a hobby with an audience in the dozens - hundreds but is wildly unrealistic and arguably immoral for someone with as much of an audience as he has/had and as much influence over that audience as he supposedly does.
Past a certain point anonymity and pseudonymity become a way of avoiding having skin in the game and denying context rather than protecting freedom of expression.
“And this is why you shouldn’t believe trans people!”
nfw I’m reading all that, what’s the summary?
The author really went out of their way to not just use a Venn diagram.
This came to my attention from this comment chain on /r/slatestarcodex, where it’s offered as a successor without any actual mention of its merits. At the slightest pushback, the rationalists retreat to the familiar “how dare you not read all 100k words before passing judgement?” and vapid ’by your logic’s. “Autogynephilia should be valid too!”
The tag cloud on this blog is a wonderful little bolus of compressed nope
It’s ridiculous reading a post that is sniffing another posts ass this hard and for so long. It even straight states it hasn’t said anything the 1st post said quite a ways in.
One should either rapidly summarise the earlier post or link it or just say something that doesn’t require using thousands of words preamble.
I remember when I 1st read HPMOR one of the author comment/preamble I read mentioned some poster somewhere making an argument for making horcruxes out of babies and that they would fit in at less wrong. Which just made me think that wow the people there must be exceedingly stupid.
When I read this post I just want to slap the author and explain to them just how much brainpower they are wasting trying to essentially “explore options” ( that is the most generous way to describe what they’re doing I think). The supposed inconvenience of calling people according to their preferred pronoun is actually quite small. The inconvenience of fighting against it is actually quite large. Even without any empathy at all one should just get with the program and use the pronouns because it’s a better use of one’s time and energy than making stupid arguments online at length.
I’m autistic and realistically a fairly pedantic person who is interested in accuracy. It hurts me seeing just how incorrectly our blog poster is using their instinct to be pedantic and accurate.
Blanchard’s typology and its consequences has been a distaster for the transgender race.
Why do some posters in this sub insistently refer to him as Siskind? It’s something I’ve noticed for a while now. I am aware that it’s his last name, but his pen name, Scott Alexander, is better known.
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