you mostly address the rationalist community, and Bailey mostly addresses GCs and HBDs, and so on. So “most people you encounter using that term on Twitter” doesn’t refer to irrelevant outsiders, it refers to the people you’re trying to have the conversation with
That makes sense as a critique of my or Bailey’s writing, but “Davis and Bailey’s writing is unclear and arguably deceptive given their target audience’s knowledge” is a very different claim than “autogynephilia is not a natural abstraction”!!
I think you naturally thought of autogynephilia and gender progressivism as being more closely related than they really are
That makes sense as a critique of my or Bailey’s writing, but “Davis and Bailey’s writing is unclear and arguably deceptive given their target audience’s knowledge” is a very different claim than “autogynephilia is not a natural abstraction”!!
More specifically, I believe that the reason your and Bailey’s writing is unclear given the target audience’s knowledge is because the audience lacks the knowledge needed for autogynephilia to be a natural abstraction. And my claim “autogynephilia is not a natural abstraction” is not primarily critiquing you or Bailey, but rather just putting the background of the statement out there separately from the critique.
Let’s try to formalize it. I think the state of the art formalization of Natural Abstractions is Natural Latents: The Math, though from what I understand it doesn’t make any claim to be the final answer for natural abstractions? Would like to know what @johnswentworth thinks.
The key diagrams to consider are I think these:
Let’s start with the sense in which autogynephilia is just-sort-of-barely a natural abstraction for me:
Λ refers to my understanding of how autogynephilia works, and is essentially a factor model which is not literally the same as my statistical models (since statistical data needs to be taken with a grain of salt, and because I also have additional grounding knowledge not included in the statistical model), but which is conceptually very similar to my statistical models like this one:
That is, for me, Λ consists of:
A distribution of levels of autogynephilia I expect to see in the general population,
The relationship between levels of autogynephilia and the material things it is uniquely associated with, which is mainly autogynephilic sexual fantasy life,
Each i would then refer to a person (maybe only natal males, to resolve some ambiguities), and each Xi is then the projection of the unique associates, which is to say, the autogynephilic aspect of his sexual fantasy life.
Autogynephilia then satisfies the first diagram because whenever I notice some dependency in autogynephilic sexuality, I either incorporate it in Λ, or factor it out as a distinct trait from autogynephilia, purging it from Xi, or do a mixture where I distinguish one component of it as autogynephilic and another component as non-autogynephilic (with the choice depending on what is most theoretically relevant, though usually I opt for the latter). For instance with forced feminization, I pick the latter option, saying that one should abstract over force when it comes to placing feminization within Xi (and abstract over feminization when it comes to placing force within Yi, the masochistic projection of person i’s sexuality).
And this is why I say “just-sort-of-barely”. Let’s say I didn’t go out of my way to abstract the Xis, for instance if I included m different transgender-related traits into the Xis. To a good approximation, I would expect these transgender-related traits to apply to far more trans autogynephiles than to cis autogynephiles. This then leaves me two options:
I can update Λ to add transness as an additional trait to preserve the natural abstraction element, in which case the natural abstraction Λ is no longer autogynephilia, but instead autogynephilia-and-transness. (And so autogynephilia would not be a natural abstraction wrt. those Xis.)
I can add the relationship between autogynephilia and each of the transgender-related traits individually, without modelling their conditional dependencies, but this would increase ε1 a lot (approximately proportionally to the number of transgender-related traits I add, I think?), and also “contaminate” the estimates of trait autogynephilia for each i, as suddenly transness (which is also caused by gender progressivism etc.) is considered evidence for much higher autogynephilia. But note that this would be an unstable situation, as e.g. @johnswentworth says to resample Λ conditional on X, and doing so would generate a new level of autogynephilia above the previously studied ones, where trans women would then be stuffed in.
In neither case, autogynephilia-as-I-consider-it would be preserved. So basically I can’t have a rich theory of autogynephilia unless I combine the natural abstraction with other stuff. (I haven’t worked with gasses for a while, but I think they are similar? Like there’s a reason John talks about (P, V, T) instead of just P as an example of a natural abstraction.)
Now, not only do most people not go out of their way to abstract the Xis, instead they can’t do it because their data is too partial so they mostly don’t observe the indicators that I would consider “pure” measures of autogynephilia. But furthermore they don’t want to, because abstracting the Xis makes it less interesting; most of the meat of the theory is in them.
(The above isn’t the only way to parse autogynephilia as a natural abstraction; rather than letting the is represent different people, they could represent different aspects of each person. That would actually be more native to how I usually do it as it is more closely related to psychometric factor models, but from my reading of the topic, the way I parsed it above better get at the core of it? Idk. I think my argument goes through either way you parse it.)
Permalink or it didn’t happen: what’s your textual evidence that I was doing this?
Or when I would practice swirling the descenders on all the lowercase letters that had descenders (g, j, p, y, z) because I thought it made my handwriting look more feminine.
Or the time when track and field practice split up into boys and girls, and I ironically muttered under my breath, “Why did I even join this team?—boys, I mean.”
Or when it was time to order sheets to fit on the dorm beds at the University in Santa Cruz, and I deliberately picked out the pink-with-flowers design on principle.
Or how, at University, I tried to go by my first-and-middle-initials because I wanted a gender-neutral byline, and I wanted what people called me in real life to be the same as my byline—even if, obviously, I didn’t expect people to not-notice which sex I am in real life because that would be crazy.
...
Or how I stopped getting haircuts and grew my beautiful–beautiful ponytail. (This turned out to be a great idea and I wish I had thought of it sooner.)
...
Or the time I felt proud when my Normal American Girl coworker at the supermarket in ’aught-nine said that she had assumed I was gay. (I’m not, but the fact that Normal American Girl thought so meant that I was successfully unmasculine.)
...
So, you know, as part of my antisexism, I read a lot about feminism. I remember checking out The Feminine Mystique and Susan Faludi’s Backlash from the school library. Before I found my internet-home on Overcoming Bias, I would read the big feminist blogs—Pandagon, Feministe, Feministing. The one time I special-ordered a book at the physical Barnes & Noble before I turned 18 and got my own credit card and could order books online, it was Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand.
Also just generally not pulling your hair out when reading Phil’s book, etc..
I have to admit I would find your argument a lot more compelling if you weren’t inferring their autogynephilia on the basis of such distant information (since it’s the inference on the basis of distance information that I argue to be the cause of such issues).
Idk, maybe everything is too vague perceive this accurately. Or rather, maybe I should perceive this stuff as a generic pro-Blanchardian bias, like interpreting your antisexism in the light of autogynephilia because that seems Blanchardian to you, interpreting your endorsement of Phil’s book because that seems Blanchardian to you, etc..
It’s inherently going to be hard for me to come with any confident theory about why you do what you do. I mainly just mentioned it because I’m often not convinced that anybody except me makes these distinctions, so I don’t want to commit to “oh there’s this Good Cabal that Gets It”. (E.g. you seemed to find the whole AGP/masochism distinction kind of mind-bending rather than just being one out of several distinctions that one needs to go through to achieve literacy in this area)
(Responding to Tailcalled.)
That makes sense as a critique of my or Bailey’s writing, but “Davis and Bailey’s writing is unclear and arguably deceptive given their target audience’s knowledge” is a very different claim than “autogynephilia is not a natural abstraction”!!
Permalink or it didn’t happen: what’s your textual evidence that I was doing this? (I do expect there to be a relationship of some strength in the AGP→progressive direction, but my 2017–8 models were not in any way surprised by, e.g., the “Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses” profiled in The Atlantic in 2005, or the second kind of mukhannath, or Kalonymus ben Kalonymus.)
More specifically, I believe that the reason your and Bailey’s writing is unclear given the target audience’s knowledge is because the audience lacks the knowledge needed for autogynephilia to be a natural abstraction. And my claim “autogynephilia is not a natural abstraction” is not primarily critiquing you or Bailey, but rather just putting the background of the statement out there separately from the critique.
Let’s try to formalize it. I think the state of the art formalization of Natural Abstractions is Natural Latents: The Math, though from what I understand it doesn’t make any claim to be the final answer for natural abstractions? Would like to know what @johnswentworth thinks.
The key diagrams to consider are I think these:
Let’s start with the sense in which autogynephilia is just-sort-of-barely a natural abstraction for me:
Λ refers to my understanding of how autogynephilia works, and is essentially a factor model which is not literally the same as my statistical models (since statistical data needs to be taken with a grain of salt, and because I also have additional grounding knowledge not included in the statistical model), but which is conceptually very similar to my statistical models like this one:
That is, for me, Λ consists of:
A distribution of levels of autogynephilia I expect to see in the general population,
The relationship between levels of autogynephilia and the material things it is uniquely associated with, which is mainly autogynephilic sexual fantasy life,
Each i would then refer to a person (maybe only natal males, to resolve some ambiguities), and each Xi is then the projection of the unique associates, which is to say, the autogynephilic aspect of his sexual fantasy life.
Autogynephilia then satisfies the first diagram because whenever I notice some dependency in autogynephilic sexuality, I either incorporate it in Λ, or factor it out as a distinct trait from autogynephilia, purging it from Xi, or do a mixture where I distinguish one component of it as autogynephilic and another component as non-autogynephilic (with the choice depending on what is most theoretically relevant, though usually I opt for the latter). For instance with forced feminization, I pick the latter option, saying that one should abstract over force when it comes to placing feminization within Xi (and abstract over feminization when it comes to placing force within Yi, the masochistic projection of person i’s sexuality).
And this is why I say “just-sort-of-barely”. Let’s say I didn’t go out of my way to abstract the Xis, for instance if I included m different transgender-related traits into the Xis. To a good approximation, I would expect these transgender-related traits to apply to far more trans autogynephiles than to cis autogynephiles. This then leaves me two options:
I can update Λ to add transness as an additional trait to preserve the natural abstraction element, in which case the natural abstraction Λ is no longer autogynephilia, but instead autogynephilia-and-transness. (And so autogynephilia would not be a natural abstraction wrt. those Xis.)
I can add the relationship between autogynephilia and each of the transgender-related traits individually, without modelling their conditional dependencies, but this would increase ε1 a lot (approximately proportionally to the number of transgender-related traits I add, I think?), and also “contaminate” the estimates of trait autogynephilia for each i, as suddenly transness (which is also caused by gender progressivism etc.) is considered evidence for much higher autogynephilia. But note that this would be an unstable situation, as e.g. @johnswentworth says to resample Λ conditional on X, and doing so would generate a new level of autogynephilia above the previously studied ones, where trans women would then be stuffed in.
In neither case, autogynephilia-as-I-consider-it would be preserved. So basically I can’t have a rich theory of autogynephilia unless I combine the natural abstraction with other stuff. (I haven’t worked with gasses for a while, but I think they are similar? Like there’s a reason John talks about (P, V, T) instead of just P as an example of a natural abstraction.)
Now, not only do most people not go out of their way to abstract the Xis, instead they can’t do it because their data is too partial so they mostly don’t observe the indicators that I would consider “pure” measures of autogynephilia. But furthermore they don’t want to, because abstracting the Xis makes it less interesting; most of the meat of the theory is in them.
(The above isn’t the only way to parse autogynephilia as a natural abstraction; rather than letting the is represent different people, they could represent different aspects of each person. That would actually be more native to how I usually do it as it is more closely related to psychometric factor models, but from my reading of the topic, the way I parsed it above better get at the core of it? Idk. I think my argument goes through either way you parse it.)
I think these things you described in Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky’s Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems are basically independent of AGP (even when aggregated), with gender progressivism (or maybe the “eccentricity” factor I found? idk, probably a mixture) being a more relevant factor:
Also just generally not pulling your hair out when reading Phil’s book, etc..
I have to admit I would find your argument a lot more compelling if you weren’t inferring their autogynephilia on the basis of such distant information (since it’s the inference on the basis of distance information that I argue to be the cause of such issues).
Idk, maybe everything is too vague perceive this accurately. Or rather, maybe I should perceive this stuff as a generic pro-Blanchardian bias, like interpreting your antisexism in the light of autogynephilia because that seems Blanchardian to you, interpreting your endorsement of Phil’s book because that seems Blanchardian to you, etc..
It’s inherently going to be hard for me to come with any confident theory about why you do what you do. I mainly just mentioned it because I’m often not convinced that anybody except me makes these distinctions, so I don’t want to commit to “oh there’s this Good Cabal that Gets It”. (E.g. you seemed to find the whole AGP/masochism distinction kind of mind-bending rather than just being one out of several distinctions that one needs to go through to achieve literacy in this area)