I was bouncing around LessWrong and ran into this. I started reading it as though it were a normal post, but then I slowly realized …
I think according to typical LessWrong norms, it would be appropriate to try to engage you on the object level claims or talk about the meta-presentation as though you and I were trying to collaborate on figuring things out and how to communicate things.
But according to my personal norms and integrity, if I detect that something is actually quite off (like alarm bells going) then it would be kind of sick to ignore that, and we should actually treat this like a triage situation. Or at least a call to some kind of intervention. And it would be sick to treat this like everything is normal, and that you are sane, and I am sane, and we’re just chatting about stuff and oh isn’t the weather nice today.
LessWrong is the wrong place for this to happen. This kind of “prioritization” sanity does not flourish here.
Not-sane people get stuck on LessWrong in order to stay not-sane because LW actually reinforces a kind of mental unwellness and does not provide good escape routes.
If you’re going to write stuff on LW, it might be better to write a journal about what the various personal, lifestyle interventions you are making to get out of the personal, unwell hole you are in. A kind of way to track your progress, get accountability, and celebrate wins.
Is this your first time running into Zack’s stuff? You sound like you’re talking to someone showing up out of nowhere with a no-context crackpot manuscript and has zero engagement with community. Zack’s post is about his actual engagement with the community over a decade, we’ve seen a bunch of the previous engagement (in pretty much the register we see here so this doesn’t look like an ongoing psychotic break), he’s responsive to comments and his thesis generally makes sense. This isn’t drive-by crackpottery and it’s on LessWrong because it’s about LessWrong.
I agree that Zack has a long history of engagement with the rationalist community, and that this post is a continuation of that history (in a predictable direction).
But that doesn’t necessarily make this engagement sane.
From my perspective, Zack has a long-term obsession, and also he is smart enough to be popular on LessWrong despite the fact that practically everything he says is somehow connected to this obsession (and if for a moment it seems like it is not, that’s just because he is preparing some convoluted meta argument that will later be used to support the obsession). I enjoy his writings, too, until something reminds me of “oh, this is going to be yet another meta argument in support of the belief that his erotic fantasy is the ultimate truth about the nature of trans-sexuality”.
This isn’t drive-by crackpottery, but it is a long-term crackpottery; and it is on LessWrong because the previous parts of it were on LessWrong. It is “about LessWrong” only in the sense that it is about Zack’s previous writing on LessWrong and about his interactions with various people here. This very article, and this debate we are having now, will probably be used as a reason to write yet another article, etc.
At some moment we should reflect on the fact that we are probably enabling a mental illness, in a similar way as telling a paranoid person “you know, according to Bayes, the probability that CIA is following you is never exactly 0”, or telling a depressed person “according to the second law of thermodynamics, everything you care about will be destroyed one day, probably sooner rather than later”.
It is interesting to list various reasons why “corrupted” people may oppose X, but none of that actually proves that X is true.
Even if it’s true that he’s obsessed with it and everything he writes is somehow connected to it—what’s the problem with that? Couldn’t you have said the same thing about Eliezer and AI? I bet there were lots of important contributions that were made by people following an obsession, even to their own detriment.
To me the question is whether it’s true and valuable (I think so), not whether he’s obsessed.
What I get instead, are indirect arguments like “people who disagree with me only do so for political reasons” (and “the entire rationalist community is corrupt, they are enemies and we are at war” and more such nonsense). That proves nothing. For example, people may also disagree with false statements for political reasons.
This is really a very strange criticism. Zack has been writing direct arguments, and evidence, for literal years now. You’re acting as if this is the first post he’s ever written on this subject!
...I will stop here, but I think the pattern is visible. Zack keeps talking meta, sometimes he makes some great points and gets upvoted, sometimes the readers are confused. It takes him a very long time to get to his final point.
Unlike the Sequences, which push the reader from point A to point Z (“there is no supernatural”, “therefore human intelligence is made of atoms”, “therefore it is possible to make an intelligence out of silicon atoms”, etc.), Zack’s articles are dancing around the topic: going more meta to gain readers, going closer to the object level to lose them again, etc.
If there is a direct argument that fits into one screen of text, I would like to read it.
Even if Zack happens to be right, the fact that people do not update about something they don’t care about and which cannot be sufficiently simply explained, is not evidence of them being “fake”, “corrupt”, “epistemically rotten”, “enemy combatants”, or any other hysterical hyperbole.
Heck, I am not even saying that Blanchard is wrong (assuming that this was all about him, which I am not sure); from my perspective he might be right, or he might be wrong, or he might be right about some things or some people and wrong about other things or other people… I don’t know, I do not have enough data to make an opinion on this, and I see no reason why I should spend my time figuring this out, and I see no reason why I should trust Zack’s opinion on this.
The part that I do have an opinion on is that redefining the word “woman” to mean “legally woman” rather than “biologically woman” is not a choice that I would make, but that doesn’t make it wrong per se. I would have voted against it, but I am not going to fight against it. (Also, this is unrelated to whether Blanchard is right or wrong.) Pluto is not a planet anymore.
This is not because I am too scared to express a politically incorrect opinion (I don’t live in USA), or because I am afraid to disagree with the rationalist consensus (I had my own battles). From my perspective, it actually feels like Zack is the one who is pushing me to adopt an opinion for a wrong reason (to avoid his accusations; to be seen as brave and edgy rather than hypocritical and boring), and these comments are me pushing back.
Even if Zack happens to be right, the fact that people do not update about something they don’t care about and which cannot be sufficiently simply explained, is not evidence of them being “fake”, “corrupt”, “epistemically rotten”, “enemy combatants”, or any other hysterical hyperbole.
The complexity you complain about is not Zack’s fault. His detractors engage in endless evasiveness including God-of-the-gaps style arguments as ChristianKI pointed out, and walking back an entire LW sequence that was previously non-controversial, simply because it has become politically inconvenient. The reception is so hostile that Zack is required to go practically all the way back to first principles, even needing to briefly revisit the modus ponens.
Phrases like “epistemically rotten” and “enemy combatants” are not a hysterical hyperbole to describe that. Zack chooses these terms because he is too agreeable to call a spade a spade and point out that the rationalist community has become outright evil.
I think it’s also worth emphasizing that the use of the phrase “enemy combatants” was in an account of something Michael Vassar said in informal correspondence, rather than being a description I necessarily expect readers of the account to agree with (because I didn’t agree with it at the time). Michael meant something very specific by the metaphor, which I explain in the next paragraph. In case my paraphrased explanation wasn’t sufficient, his exact words were:
The latter frame [“enemy combatants”] is more accurate both because criminals have rights and because enemy combatants aren’t particularly blameworthy. They exist under a blameworthy moral order and for you to act in their interests implies acting against their current efforts, at least temporary [sic], but you probably would like to execute on a Marshall Plan later.
I think the thing Michael actually meant (right or wrong) is more interesting than a “Hysterical hyperbole!” “Is not!” “Is too!” grudge match.
Even if Zack happens to be right, the fact that people do not update about something they don’t care about and which cannot be sufficiently simply explained, is not evidence of them being “fake”, “corrupt”, “epistemically rotten”, “enemy combatants”, or any other hysterical hyperbole.
That’s as may be… but surely the threshold for “sufficiently simply” isn’t as low as one screen of text…?
Heck, I am not even saying that Blanchard is wrong (assuming that this was all about him, which I am not sure); from my perspective he might be right, or he might be wrong, or he might be right about some things or some people and wrong about other things or other people… I don’t know, I do not have enough data to make an opinion on this, and I see no reason why I should spend my time figuring this out, and I see no reason why I should trust Zack’s opinion on this.
I don’t particularly have an opinion about this either, but what has this to do with anything, really…? The OP mentions Blanchard twice in 19,000 words… very little in this discussion hinges on whether Blanchard is right or wrong.
The part that I do have an opinion on is that redefining the word “woman” to mean “legally woman” rather than “biologically woman” is not a choice that I would make, but that doesn’t make it wrong per se. I would have voted against it, but I am not going to fight against it.
Neither “legally woman” nor “biologically woman” can possibly serve as definitions of “woman”, for obvious reasons of circularity. In any case you’re… attempting to have this debate at almost the maximally naive level, as if nobody, much less Zack, has written anything about the topic. This is silly.
Pluto is not a planet anymore.
You’ve been on Less Wrong long enough to know better than this sort of nonsense.
From my perspective, it actually feels like Zack is the one who is pushing me to adopt an opinion for a wrong reason (to avoid his accusations; to be seen as brave and edgy rather than hypocritical and boring), and these comments are me pushing back.
What opinion do you think Zack is pushing you to adopt, exactly?
surely the threshold for “sufficiently simply” isn’t as low as one screen of text…?
Most scientific papers have an abstract that is shorter than one screen.
what has this to do with anything, really…?
What opinion do you think Zack is pushing you to adopt, exactly?
I don’t know, and that’s my point, kind of.
*
My current best guess is that Zack essentially makes two separate claims:
First, he seems to make some object-level claim. (Or maybe multiple object-level claims.) And no matter how many of his long texts I read, I still have a problem pinpointing what exactly the object-level claim is. Some people seem to say that the object-level claims are obvious, but even they can’t tell me what exactly they are. It all seems to be related to trans-sexuality, because that is a topic Zack keeps returning to. It seems to somehow contradict the mainstream narrative, otherwise Zack wouldn’t keep making such a big deal out of it. This is about all I can say about it.
Second, -- this part I am a little more certain of, -- Zack also makes a meta-level claim that the rationalist community is “corrupt” and “epistemically rotten” for disagreeing with his object-level claim, whatever it is. This gets upvoted; I am not sure whether it’s because people literally agree with that claim, or they just enjoy watching the drama, or it’s some game of vague political connotations (I suspect that it’s the last one, and that the vote for Zack is somehow a vote for contrarianism and against political correctness or something like that).
I resent being called corrupt for not agreeing with something that was never clearly communicated to me in the first place.
I am trying to cooperate on figuring out what Zack’s object-level claim actually is, but apparently this does not work—maybe I am doing a bad job here, but I start suspecting that this is actually a feature, not a bug (if a claim is never made clearly, no one can disprove it).
Philosophical Claim: categories are useful insofar as they compress information by “carving reality at the joints”; in particular, whether a categorization makes someone happy or sad is not relevant.
Sociological Claim: the extent to which a prominence-weighted sample of the rationalist community has refused to credit the Empirical or Philosophical Claims even when presented with strong arguments and evidence is a reason to distrust the community’s collective sanity.
Caveat to the Sociological Claim: the Sociological Claim about a prominence-weighted sample of an amorphous collective doesn’t reflect poorly on individual readers of lesswrong.com who weren’t involved in the discussions in question and don’t even live in America, let alone Berkeley.
categories are useful insofar as they compress information by “carving reality at the joints”;
I think from context you’re saying ”...are only useful insofar...”. Is that what you’re saying? If so, I disagree with the claim. Compressing information is a key way in which categories are useful. Another key way in which categories are useful is compressing actions, so that you can in a convenient way decide and communicate about e.g. “I’m gonna climb that hill now”. More to the point, calling someone “he” is mixing these two things together: you’re both kinda-sorta claiming the person has XY chromosomes, is taller-on-average, has a penis, etc.; and also kinda-sorta saying “Let’s treat this person in ways that people tend to treat men”. “He” compresses the cluster, and also is a button you can push to treat people in that way. These two things are obviously connected, but they aren’t perfectly identical. Whether or not the actions you take make someone happy or sad is relevant.
Sorry, the 159-word version leaves out some detail. I agree that categories are often used to communicate action intentions.
The academic literature on signaling in nature mentions that certain prey animals have different alarm calls for terrestrial or aerial predators, which elicit for different evasive maneuvers: for example, vervet monkeys will climb trees when there’s a leopard or hide under bushes when there’s an eagle. This raises the philosophical question of what the different alarm calls “mean”: is a barking vervet making the denotative statement, “There is a leopard”, or is it a command, “Climb!”?
The thing is, whether you take the “statement” or the “command” interpretation (or decline the false dichotomy), there are the same functionalist criteria for when each alarm call makes sense, which have to do with the state of reality: the leopard being there “in the territory” is what makes the climbing action called for.
The same is true when we’re trying to make decisions to make people happy. Suppose I’m sad about being ugly, and want to be pretty instead. It wouldn’t be helping me to say, “Okay, let’s redefine the word ‘pretty’ such that it includes you”, because the original concept of “pretty” in my map was tracking features of the territory that I care about (about how people appraise and react to my appearance), which gets broken if you change the map without changing the territory.
I don’t think it’s plausible to posit an agent that wants to be categorized in a particular way in the map, without that category tracking something in the territory. Where would such a pathological preference come from?
If someone wants to be classified as ”… has XY chromosomes, is taller-on-average, has a penis...” and they aren’t that, then it’s a pathological preference, yeah. But categories aren’t just for describing territory, they’re also for coding actions. If a human says “Climb!” to another human, is that a claim about the territory? You can try to infer a claim about reality, like “There’s something in reality that makes it really valuable for you to climb right now, assuming you have the goals that I assume you have”.
If someone says “call me ‘he’ ”, it could be a pathological preference. Or it could be a preference to be treated by others with the male-role bundle of actions. That preference could be in conflict with others’ preferences, because others might only want to treat a person with the male-role bundle if that person ”… has XY chromosomes, is taller-on-average, has a penis...” . Probably it’s both, and they haven’t properly separated out their preferences / society hasn’t made it convenient for them to separate out their preferences / there’s a conflict about treatment that is preventing anyone from sorting out their preferences.
“Okay, let’s redefine the word ‘pretty’ such that it includes you” actually makes some sense. Specifically, it’s an appeal to anti-lookism. It’s of course confused, because ugliness is also an objective thing. And it’s a conflict, because most people want to treat ugly people differently than they treat pretty people, so the request to be treated like a pretty person is being refused.
If a human says “Climb!” to another human, is that a claim about the territory?
Can you add more context? Are you talking about an experienced fighter who has been cornered by enemies with a less-experienced friend? A personal trainer whose trainee has been taking a 5 minute break from rock climbing? Something else?
Any of them. My point is that “climb!” is kind of like a message about the territory, in that you can infer things from someone saying it, and in that it can be intended to communicate something about the territory, and can be part of a convention where “Climb!” means “There’s a bear!” or whatever; but still, “Climb!” is, besides being an imperative, a word that’s being used to bundle actions together. Actions are kinda part of the territory, but as actions they’re also sort of internal to the speaker (in the same way that a map is also part of the territory, but it’s also internal to the speaker) and so has some special status. Part of that special status is that your actions, and how you bundle your actions, is up to your choice, in a way that it’s not up to your choice whether there’s a biological male/female approximate-cluster-approximate-dichotomy, or whether 2+4=6 etc.
Suppose I’m sad about being ugly, and want to be pretty instead. It wouldn’t be helping me to say, “Okay, let’s redefine the word ‘pretty’ such that it includes you”, because the original concept of “pretty” in my map was tracking features of the territory that I care about (about how people appraise and react to my appearance), which gets broken if you change the map without changing the territory.
Yes, but also if people bully you for being ugly, maybe a ban on bullying is an effective action.
(Unpacking the metaphor: sometimes there are multiple reasons why a person wants to do X, and some of them cannot be helped by a certain kind of action, but some could be. Then it depends on how the person will feel about the partial success.)
Disagree with the sociological claim because the Blanchardian arguments for the empirical claim are baaaaaaaad and it’s pretty reasonable to not credit an empirical claim when the arguments presented for it are so bad.
One could still defend the sociological claim due to the philosophical claim but at the same time I have the impression that there’s some hestitance partly because they are so confused about the arguments around the empirical claim.
biologic males who seek sex reassignment … are not a homogeneous clinical population but comprise two or more distinct subtypes with different symptoms and developmental trajectories.
Sounds likely. (Betting on “it’s complicated” is usually a safe bet.)
In 1989, psychologist Ray Blanchard proposed that most nonandrophilic MtF transsexuals display a paraphilic sexual orientation called autogynephilia, defined as the propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of oneself as a woman.
Taking this sentence literally, it only says p(E|X) > 0.5, but it seems to imply that p(E|~X) < 0.5.
As an analogy, if I said “most nonandrophilic MtF transsexuals drink Coke”, the fact that I consider this relevant to the topic would imply that drinking Coke is an unusual activity among people who are not nonandrophilic MtF transsexuals. So, it is really? Because if it is not, why are we even discussing this?
the hypothesis that almost all nonandrophilic MtF transsexuals are autogynephilic, whereas almost all androphilic MtF transsexuals are not.
Okay, they got this part covered. But for the completeness, I would also like to know the prevalence of autogynephilia among cis men, and among cis women. Because different answers would give different pictures of reality. Is it “nonandrophilic MtF have this special trait” or rather “androphilic MtF have this special trait”, compared to cis men? And is it “nonandrophilic MtF have this special trait that makes them different from everyone else” or “nonandrophilic MtF have this trait that is special among men, but normal among women”? (Actually, since we divide MtF to androphilic and nonandrophilic, it would also make sense to make separate statistics for cis men and women by their sexual orientation.)
Also, this is probably answered somewhere, but I suppose that autogynephilia exists on a spectrum: some people may be aroused by a thought in some situation but not in another, the arousal may be weaker or stronger, it may be a once-in-a-lifetime event or a permanent obsession… The reason I am saying this is because it is easy to change the conclusion by just rounding up the values for different groups differently. (Also, recently I had to answer in a psychological test “did you ever think about suicide?”, and I was like: WTF does this even mean? If I just thought about suicide once, and rejected the idea after a fraction of a second as obviously wrong, that too would technically qualify as “thinking about suicide”, wouldn’t it? But the test treated such answer as a red flag, so… maybe no?)
Okay, moving past the abstract...
MtF transsexuals significantly outnumber their FtM counterparts
Interesting. I wonder how this relates to the fact that it is socially acceptable for a woman to take a traditional man’s role (it seems like a large part of feminism is about enabling this)… but this is unrelated to the original topic.
Typologies based on sexual orientation have been more widely utilized and were relatively uncontroversial until about 2003. … these … typologies have often been simplified to distinguish only two fundamental subtypes: persons attracted exclusively to males (androphilic MtF transsexuals) and persons attracted to females, males and females, or neither gender (nonandrophilic MtF transsexuals).
Interesting.
In the late 1980s, psychologist Ray Blanchard proposed that almost all nonandrophilic MtF transsexuals exhibit a paraphilic sexual orientation he called autogynephilia (literally “love of oneself as a woman”), which he formally defined as “a male’s propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a female”.
Okay. I see where this is coming from. Based on the previous, it seems like there are, to put it simply, “gay MtF” and “something-else MtF” (and this part is uncontroversial? or at least has been for a long time?), and Blanchard is proposing a hypothesis on what that “something else” could be.
What rubs me the wrong way is the “a male’s propensity to...” part of the definition. I mean, why not simply define it as “a propensity to...”, and then talk about the prevalence of autogynephilia among men? (Maybe I am just overthinking it and Blanchard would say: whatever.)
Adding to my list of “things that also should be investigated”: the same in the opposite direction; how many cis men and cis women are sexually aroused by the thought of themselves being male?
Autogynephilia became a controversial topic after it was discussed in a contentious book by psychologist Bailey (2003).
Okay, the rabbit hole goes deep. I am kinda curious what exactly was controversial about that book, but I am already giving this more time than I originally wanted.
He found that 73% of [nonandrophilic] participants reported a history of sexual arousal with cross-dressing, compared with only 15% of the androphilic participants.
I guess I have an opposite reaction to most people here, because it is the lack of autogynephilia that I find interesting. I mean: “you want to be a woman, you want it so much that you are willing to take hormones and cut off your penis… and yet you don’t find the thought of being a woman exciting?”
It seems to me that the nonandrophilic MtF match the non-scientific description of “having a female brain, but living in a male body”, while the androphilic MtF seem just like… gays who want to be compatible with a heteronormative society? (“I want to be a woman so that I can have sex with men, without being a gay man” vs “I want to be a woman, because being a woman is awesome!!! omg I get an orgasm just from imagining it!!!”)
Blanchard theorized that a substantial number of fundamentally gynephilic MtF transsexuals develop a secondary sexual interest in male partners – he called this interest pseudoandrophilia – based on the autogynephilic desire to have their femininity validated by the admiration or sexual interest of men.
OK, I am bit confused here. We started with defining nonandrophilic MtF transsexuals as “persons attracted to females, males and females, or neither gender”, and now we have a theory that they (a substantial number of them) have sexual interest (secondary) in male partners.
(It sounds a bit like: “Men are either gay or not-gay. Blanchard theorized that a substantial number of non-gay men are gays… as a secondary sexual interest.” That is, I am not surprised by the statement than many men are gays, per se, but I am surprised that the statement was made specifically about a group that was originally defined as non-gays.)
What is the reason for this hypothesis and what are the data supporting it?
MtF transsexuals and transgender persons routinely minimize or deny autogynephilic arousal in association with cross-dressing or cross-gender fantasy for reasons that probably are often unintentional but sometimes are clearly deliberate.
I could imagine a good reason for that. Suppose that you have a few non-sexual reasons for X, but also a sexual reason for X. If you admit that you have the sexual reason, most people are going to dismiss all the non-sexual reasons as mere rationalizations. So you deny or minimize the sexual reason, as a way to express that the non-sexual reasons are valid.
In some cases, autogynephilic MtF transsexuals who claim to be attracted to men may simply be experiencing attraction to the idea of having their femininity validated by men, a different phenomenon.
Makes me think, how does this compare to cishet women? How many of them had their first sexual experience because they wanted to have their feminity validated by a man?
Anyway, when we have people lying to researchers about their actual feelings, we are in a tricky epistemic situation. (On one hand we can’t use “the subjects say no” as a definite falsification of a hypothesis. On the other hand, how else to evaluate the hypotheses, beyond “sounds plausible to me”?)
all gender dysphoric males who are not sexually oriented toward men are instead sexually oriented toward the thought or image of themselves as women
Didn’t we have “a substantial number” a few paragraphs ago, and now it is “all”?
Autogynephilia might be better characterized as an orientation than as a paraphilia.
Sounds like debating definitions, and… I think I disagree? Maybe this is just because the article is a short summary of a longer argument, but it feels like a jump from “excited by X” to “excited only by X”. (If a cishet man is sexually excited by the thought of having a male body, does this automatically make it an orientation?)
...oops, still just a page 5 out of 16, but I hope that I have communicated some concerns clearly. Even if most things seem plausible to me, at some moment it feels like an unwarranted jump to conclusions.
But for the completeness, I would also like to know the prevalence of autogynephilia among cis men
It’s somewhat unclear but it probably looks something like this:
where “CGS” is an abbreviation of “cross-gender sexuality”, and covers stuff like this (from a different survey).
and this part is uncontroversial? or at least has been for a long time?
I mean it is certainly uncontroversial that some trans women are exclusively attracted to men and some trans women are not exclusively attracted to men. But that presumably has something to do that you see the same for other demographics, e.g. cis men or cis women, where some are attracted to men and some are not, as well as from the fact that most trans women are open about their orientation and there’s plenty of trans women from each orientation available.
However, Blanchardians tend to go motte/bailey a lot with this. Like they add a lot of additional claims about this, and then put forth the positions that these additional claims are also part of the uncontroversial knowledge, and obviously the more claims you add, the less uncontroversial it will be. They also have the advantage that it used to be only a handful of academics and clinicians discussing it, so “uncontroversial” within this handful of people isn’t as significant as “uncontroversial” today.
What rubs me the wrong way is the “a male’s propensity to...” part of the definition. I mean, why not simply define it as “a propensity to...”, and then talk about the prevalence of autogynephilia among men? (Maybe I am just overthinking it and Blanchard would say: whatever.)
You’re not overthinking it, Blanchardians constantly do this sort of thing, where they try to establish their ideas as true by definition. (Another example of this is, sometimes I’ve been studying autogynephilia in gay men, and Blanchardians have tended to say that this is definitionally impossible.)
(I apologize, the timing is unfortunate, I am leaving for a one-week vacation without internet access right now, so I can’t give you a response this would deserve. Perhaps later.)
That’s as may be… but surely the threshold for “sufficiently simply” isn’t as low as one screen of text…?
this does not seem like an impossible requirement for almost any scoped argument I can remember seeing (that is, a claim which is not inherently a conjunction of dozens of subclaims), including some very advanced math ones. granted, by making it fit on one screen you often get something shockingly dense. but you don’t need more than about 500 words to make most coherent arguments. the question is whether it would increase clarity to compress it like that. and I claim without evidence that the answer is generally that the best explanation of a claim is in fact this short, though it’s not guaranteed that one has the time and effort available to figure out how to precisely specify the claim in words that few; often, trying to precisely specify something in few words runs into “those words are not precisely defined in the mind of the readers” issues, a favorite topic of Davis.
(I believe this to apply to even things that people spend hundreds of thousands of words on on this site, such as “is ai dangerous”. that it took yudkowsky many blog posts to make the point does not mean that a coherent one-shot argument needs to be that long, as long as it’s using existing words well. It might be the case that the concise argument is drastically worse at bridging inferential gaps, but I don’t think it need be impossible to specify!)
AIUI the actual arguments are over on Zack’s blog due to being (in Zack’s judgement) Too Spicy For LessWrong (that is, about trans people). (Short version, Blanchardianism coupled with the opinion that most people who disagree are ignoring obvious truths about sex differences for political reasons; I expect the long version is more carefully-reasoned than is apparent in this perhaps-uncharitable summary.)
But there is a space between “any way you want” and “only one possible way”.
Is Mona Lisa (the painting) a woman? Paintings do not have chromosomes, and many of them do not even have sexual organs. Yet if I say “Mona Lisa is a woman”, it is true in some meaningful sense… and false in some other meaningful sense.
Sometimes you use one bucket for things, and then you find out that you need two. Which one of the new buckets should inherit the original name… is a social/political choice. I may disagree with the choice, but that doesn’t make it wrong. If you want to be unambiguous, use an adjective, for example “trans women are not biological women” or “trans women are legally considered women”.
(Just like tomato is biologically a fruit but legally a vegetable; carrot is legally a fruit in EU; and ketchup is legally a vegetable in USA.)
I was bouncing around LessWrong and ran into this. I started reading it as though it were a normal post, but then I slowly realized …
I think according to typical LessWrong norms, it would be appropriate to try to engage you on the object level claims or talk about the meta-presentation as though you and I were trying to collaborate on figuring things out and how to communicate things.
But according to my personal norms and integrity, if I detect that something is actually quite off (like alarm bells going) then it would be kind of sick to ignore that, and we should actually treat this like a triage situation. Or at least a call to some kind of intervention. And it would be sick to treat this like everything is normal, and that you are sane, and I am sane, and we’re just chatting about stuff and oh isn’t the weather nice today.
LessWrong is the wrong place for this to happen. This kind of “prioritization” sanity does not flourish here.
Not-sane people get stuck on LessWrong in order to stay not-sane because LW actually reinforces a kind of mental unwellness and does not provide good escape routes.
If you’re going to write stuff on LW, it might be better to write a journal about what the various personal, lifestyle interventions you are making to get out of the personal, unwell hole you are in. A kind of way to track your progress, get accountability, and celebrate wins.
Is this your first time running into Zack’s stuff? You sound like you’re talking to someone showing up out of nowhere with a no-context crackpot manuscript and has zero engagement with community. Zack’s post is about his actual engagement with the community over a decade, we’ve seen a bunch of the previous engagement (in pretty much the register we see here so this doesn’t look like an ongoing psychotic break), he’s responsive to comments and his thesis generally makes sense. This isn’t drive-by crackpottery and it’s on LessWrong because it’s about LessWrong.
I agree that Zack has a long history of engagement with the rationalist community, and that this post is a continuation of that history (in a predictable direction).
But that doesn’t necessarily make this engagement sane.
From my perspective, Zack has a long-term obsession, and also he is smart enough to be popular on LessWrong despite the fact that practically everything he says is somehow connected to this obsession (and if for a moment it seems like it is not, that’s just because he is preparing some convoluted meta argument that will later be used to support the obsession). I enjoy his writings, too, until something reminds me of “oh, this is going to be yet another meta argument in support of the belief that his erotic fantasy is the ultimate truth about the nature of trans-sexuality”.
This isn’t drive-by crackpottery, but it is a long-term crackpottery; and it is on LessWrong because the previous parts of it were on LessWrong. It is “about LessWrong” only in the sense that it is about Zack’s previous writing on LessWrong and about his interactions with various people here. This very article, and this debate we are having now, will probably be used as a reason to write yet another article, etc.
At some moment we should reflect on the fact that we are probably enabling a mental illness, in a similar way as telling a paranoid person “you know, according to Bayes, the probability that CIA is following you is never exactly 0”, or telling a depressed person “according to the second law of thermodynamics, everything you care about will be destroyed one day, probably sooner rather than later”.
It is interesting to list various reasons why “corrupted” people may oppose X, but none of that actually proves that X is true.
Even if it’s true that he’s obsessed with it and everything he writes is somehow connected to it—what’s the problem with that? Couldn’t you have said the same thing about Eliezer and AI? I bet there were lots of important contributions that were made by people following an obsession, even to their own detriment.
To me the question is whether it’s true and valuable (I think so), not whether he’s obsessed.
I agree, and I would like to see the evidence.
What I get instead, are indirect arguments like “people who disagree with me only do so for political reasons” (and “the entire rationalist community is corrupt, they are enemies and we are at war” and more such nonsense). That proves nothing. For example, people may also disagree with false statements for political reasons.
This is really a very strange criticism. Zack has been writing direct arguments, and evidence, for literal years now. You’re acting as if this is the first post he’s ever written on this subject!
Looking at the history of Zack’s writing on LW...
“Dreaming of Political Bayescraft”—nice and short.
“An Intuition on the Bayes-Structural Justification for Free Speech Norms”—already goes meta about how human speech contains “a zero-sum social-control/memetic-warfare component”.
“Change”—a story explaining how a word can have two different meanings.
“Blegg Mode”—a metaphor for something; the top comment says “I don’t understand what point are you trying to make” and I agree.
“Where to Draw the Boundaries?”—long but good.
“But It Doesn’t Matter”—short meta.
...I will stop here, but I think the pattern is visible. Zack keeps talking meta, sometimes he makes some great points and gets upvoted, sometimes the readers are confused. It takes him a very long time to get to his final point.
Unlike the Sequences, which push the reader from point A to point Z (“there is no supernatural”, “therefore human intelligence is made of atoms”, “therefore it is possible to make an intelligence out of silicon atoms”, etc.), Zack’s articles are dancing around the topic: going more meta to gain readers, going closer to the object level to lose them again, etc.
If there is a direct argument that fits into one screen of text, I would like to read it.
If there isn’t a direct argument that fits into one screen of text, then…?
Zack is thereby proven wrong? The topic is thereby proven to be irrelevant? What?
Even if Zack happens to be right, the fact that people do not update about something they don’t care about and which cannot be sufficiently simply explained, is not evidence of them being “fake”, “corrupt”, “epistemically rotten”, “enemy combatants”, or any other hysterical hyperbole.
Heck, I am not even saying that Blanchard is wrong (assuming that this was all about him, which I am not sure); from my perspective he might be right, or he might be wrong, or he might be right about some things or some people and wrong about other things or other people… I don’t know, I do not have enough data to make an opinion on this, and I see no reason why I should spend my time figuring this out, and I see no reason why I should trust Zack’s opinion on this.
The part that I do have an opinion on is that redefining the word “woman” to mean “legally woman” rather than “biologically woman” is not a choice that I would make, but that doesn’t make it wrong per se. I would have voted against it, but I am not going to fight against it. (Also, this is unrelated to whether Blanchard is right or wrong.) Pluto is not a planet anymore.
This is not because I am too scared to express a politically incorrect opinion (I don’t live in USA), or because I am afraid to disagree with the rationalist consensus (I had my own battles). From my perspective, it actually feels like Zack is the one who is pushing me to adopt an opinion for a wrong reason (to avoid his accusations; to be seen as brave and edgy rather than hypocritical and boring), and these comments are me pushing back.
The complexity you complain about is not Zack’s fault. His detractors engage in endless evasiveness including God-of-the-gaps style arguments as ChristianKI pointed out, and walking back an entire LW sequence that was previously non-controversial, simply because it has become politically inconvenient. The reception is so hostile that Zack is required to go practically all the way back to first principles, even needing to briefly revisit the modus ponens.
Phrases like “epistemically rotten” and “enemy combatants” are not a hysterical hyperbole to describe that. Zack chooses these terms because he is too agreeable to call a spade a spade and point out that the rationalist community has become outright evil.
I think it’s also worth emphasizing that the use of the phrase “enemy combatants” was in an account of something Michael Vassar said in informal correspondence, rather than being a description I necessarily expect readers of the account to agree with (because I didn’t agree with it at the time). Michael meant something very specific by the metaphor, which I explain in the next paragraph. In case my paraphrased explanation wasn’t sufficient, his exact words were:
I think the thing Michael actually meant (right or wrong) is more interesting than a “Hysterical hyperbole!” “Is not!” “Is too!” grudge match.
I guess it’s just not very clear to me why Michael Vassar doesn’t consider them to be highly blameworthy.
That’s as may be… but surely the threshold for “sufficiently simply” isn’t as low as one screen of text…?
I don’t particularly have an opinion about this either, but what has this to do with anything, really…? The OP mentions Blanchard twice in 19,000 words… very little in this discussion hinges on whether Blanchard is right or wrong.
Neither “legally woman” nor “biologically woman” can possibly serve as definitions of “woman”, for obvious reasons of circularity. In any case you’re… attempting to have this debate at almost the maximally naive level, as if nobody, much less Zack, has written anything about the topic. This is silly.
You’ve been on Less Wrong long enough to know better than this sort of nonsense.
What opinion do you think Zack is pushing you to adopt, exactly?
Most scientific papers have an abstract that is shorter than one screen.
I don’t know, and that’s my point, kind of.
*
My current best guess is that Zack essentially makes two separate claims:
First, he seems to make some object-level claim. (Or maybe multiple object-level claims.) And no matter how many of his long texts I read, I still have a problem pinpointing what exactly the object-level claim is. Some people seem to say that the object-level claims are obvious, but even they can’t tell me what exactly they are. It all seems to be related to trans-sexuality, because that is a topic Zack keeps returning to. It seems to somehow contradict the mainstream narrative, otherwise Zack wouldn’t keep making such a big deal out of it. This is about all I can say about it.
Second, -- this part I am a little more certain of, -- Zack also makes a meta-level claim that the rationalist community is “corrupt” and “epistemically rotten” for disagreeing with his object-level claim, whatever it is. This gets upvoted; I am not sure whether it’s because people literally agree with that claim, or they just enjoy watching the drama, or it’s some game of vague political connotations (I suspect that it’s the last one, and that the vote for Zack is somehow a vote for contrarianism and against political correctness or something like that).
I resent being called corrupt for not agreeing with something that was never clearly communicated to me in the first place.
I am trying to cooperate on figuring out what Zack’s object-level claim actually is, but apparently this does not work—maybe I am doing a bad job here, but I start suspecting that this is actually a feature, not a bug (if a claim is never made clearly, no one can disprove it).
Does this help? (159 words and one hyperlink to a 16-page paper)
Empirical Claim: late-onset gender dysphoria in males is not an intersex condition.
Summary of Evidence for the Empirical Claim: see “Autogynephilia and the Typology of Male-to-Female Transsexualism: Concepts and Controversies” by Anne Lawrence, published in European Psychologist. (Not by me!)
Philosophical Claim: categories are useful insofar as they compress information by “carving reality at the joints”; in particular, whether a categorization makes someone happy or sad is not relevant.
Sociological Claim: the extent to which a prominence-weighted sample of the rationalist community has refused to credit the Empirical or Philosophical Claims even when presented with strong arguments and evidence is a reason to distrust the community’s collective sanity.
Caveat to the Sociological Claim: the Sociological Claim about a prominence-weighted sample of an amorphous collective doesn’t reflect poorly on individual readers of lesswrong.com who weren’t involved in the discussions in question and don’t even live in America, let alone Berkeley.
I think from context you’re saying ”...are only useful insofar...”. Is that what you’re saying? If so, I disagree with the claim. Compressing information is a key way in which categories are useful. Another key way in which categories are useful is compressing actions, so that you can in a convenient way decide and communicate about e.g. “I’m gonna climb that hill now”. More to the point, calling someone “he” is mixing these two things together: you’re both kinda-sorta claiming the person has XY chromosomes, is taller-on-average, has a penis, etc.; and also kinda-sorta saying “Let’s treat this person in ways that people tend to treat men”. “He” compresses the cluster, and also is a button you can push to treat people in that way. These two things are obviously connected, but they aren’t perfectly identical. Whether or not the actions you take make someone happy or sad is relevant.
Sorry, the 159-word version leaves out some detail. I agree that categories are often used to communicate action intentions.
The academic literature on signaling in nature mentions that certain prey animals have different alarm calls for terrestrial or aerial predators, which elicit for different evasive maneuvers: for example, vervet monkeys will climb trees when there’s a leopard or hide under bushes when there’s an eagle. This raises the philosophical question of what the different alarm calls “mean”: is a barking vervet making the denotative statement, “There is a leopard”, or is it a command, “Climb!”?
The thing is, whether you take the “statement” or the “command” interpretation (or decline the false dichotomy), there are the same functionalist criteria for when each alarm call makes sense, which have to do with the state of reality: the leopard being there “in the territory” is what makes the climbing action called for.
The same is true when we’re trying to make decisions to make people happy. Suppose I’m sad about being ugly, and want to be pretty instead. It wouldn’t be helping me to say, “Okay, let’s redefine the word ‘pretty’ such that it includes you”, because the original concept of “pretty” in my map was tracking features of the territory that I care about (about how people appraise and react to my appearance), which gets broken if you change the map without changing the territory.
I don’t think it’s plausible to posit an agent that wants to be categorized in a particular way in the map, without that category tracking something in the territory. Where would such a pathological preference come from?
If someone wants to be classified as ”… has XY chromosomes, is taller-on-average, has a penis...” and they aren’t that, then it’s a pathological preference, yeah. But categories aren’t just for describing territory, they’re also for coding actions. If a human says “Climb!” to another human, is that a claim about the territory? You can try to infer a claim about reality, like “There’s something in reality that makes it really valuable for you to climb right now, assuming you have the goals that I assume you have”.
If someone says “call me ‘he’ ”, it could be a pathological preference. Or it could be a preference to be treated by others with the male-role bundle of actions. That preference could be in conflict with others’ preferences, because others might only want to treat a person with the male-role bundle if that person ”… has XY chromosomes, is taller-on-average, has a penis...” . Probably it’s both, and they haven’t properly separated out their preferences / society hasn’t made it convenient for them to separate out their preferences / there’s a conflict about treatment that is preventing anyone from sorting out their preferences.
“Okay, let’s redefine the word ‘pretty’ such that it includes you” actually makes some sense. Specifically, it’s an appeal to anti-lookism. It’s of course confused, because ugliness is also an objective thing. And it’s a conflict, because most people want to treat ugly people differently than they treat pretty people, so the request to be treated like a pretty person is being refused.
Can you add more context? Are you talking about an experienced fighter who has been cornered by enemies with a less-experienced friend? A personal trainer whose trainee has been taking a 5 minute break from rock climbing? Something else?
Any of them. My point is that “climb!” is kind of like a message about the territory, in that you can infer things from someone saying it, and in that it can be intended to communicate something about the territory, and can be part of a convention where “Climb!” means “There’s a bear!” or whatever; but still, “Climb!” is, besides being an imperative, a word that’s being used to bundle actions together. Actions are kinda part of the territory, but as actions they’re also sort of internal to the speaker (in the same way that a map is also part of the territory, but it’s also internal to the speaker) and so has some special status. Part of that special status is that your actions, and how you bundle your actions, is up to your choice, in a way that it’s not up to your choice whether there’s a biological male/female approximate-cluster-approximate-dichotomy, or whether 2+4=6 etc.
Yes, but also if people bully you for being ugly, maybe a ban on bullying is an effective action.
(Unpacking the metaphor: sometimes there are multiple reasons why a person wants to do X, and some of them cannot be helped by a certain kind of action, but some could be. Then it depends on how the person will feel about the partial success.)
Disagree with the sociological claim because the Blanchardian arguments for the empirical claim are baaaaaaaad and it’s pretty reasonable to not credit an empirical claim when the arguments presented for it are so bad.
One could still defend the sociological claim due to the philosophical claim but at the same time I have the impression that there’s some hestitance partly because they are so confused about the arguments around the empirical claim.
Commenting on the linked article, as I read it:
Sounds likely. (Betting on “it’s complicated” is usually a safe bet.)
Taking this sentence literally, it only says p(E|X) > 0.5, but it seems to imply that p(E|~X) < 0.5.
As an analogy, if I said “most nonandrophilic MtF transsexuals drink Coke”, the fact that I consider this relevant to the topic would imply that drinking Coke is an unusual activity among people who are not nonandrophilic MtF transsexuals. So, it is really? Because if it is not, why are we even discussing this?
Okay, they got this part covered. But for the completeness, I would also like to know the prevalence of autogynephilia among cis men, and among cis women. Because different answers would give different pictures of reality. Is it “nonandrophilic MtF have this special trait” or rather “androphilic MtF have this special trait”, compared to cis men? And is it “nonandrophilic MtF have this special trait that makes them different from everyone else” or “nonandrophilic MtF have this trait that is special among men, but normal among women”? (Actually, since we divide MtF to androphilic and nonandrophilic, it would also make sense to make separate statistics for cis men and women by their sexual orientation.)
Also, this is probably answered somewhere, but I suppose that autogynephilia exists on a spectrum: some people may be aroused by a thought in some situation but not in another, the arousal may be weaker or stronger, it may be a once-in-a-lifetime event or a permanent obsession… The reason I am saying this is because it is easy to change the conclusion by just rounding up the values for different groups differently. (Also, recently I had to answer in a psychological test “did you ever think about suicide?”, and I was like: WTF does this even mean? If I just thought about suicide once, and rejected the idea after a fraction of a second as obviously wrong, that too would technically qualify as “thinking about suicide”, wouldn’t it? But the test treated such answer as a red flag, so… maybe no?)
Okay, moving past the abstract...
Interesting. I wonder how this relates to the fact that it is socially acceptable for a woman to take a traditional man’s role (it seems like a large part of feminism is about enabling this)… but this is unrelated to the original topic.
Interesting.
Okay. I see where this is coming from. Based on the previous, it seems like there are, to put it simply, “gay MtF” and “something-else MtF” (and this part is uncontroversial? or at least has been for a long time?), and Blanchard is proposing a hypothesis on what that “something else” could be.
What rubs me the wrong way is the “a male’s propensity to...” part of the definition. I mean, why not simply define it as “a propensity to...”, and then talk about the prevalence of autogynephilia among men? (Maybe I am just overthinking it and Blanchard would say: whatever.)
Adding to my list of “things that also should be investigated”: the same in the opposite direction; how many cis men and cis women are sexually aroused by the thought of themselves being male?
Okay, the rabbit hole goes deep. I am kinda curious what exactly was controversial about that book, but I am already giving this more time than I originally wanted.
I guess I have an opposite reaction to most people here, because it is the lack of autogynephilia that I find interesting. I mean: “you want to be a woman, you want it so much that you are willing to take hormones and cut off your penis… and yet you don’t find the thought of being a woman exciting?”
It seems to me that the nonandrophilic MtF match the non-scientific description of “having a female brain, but living in a male body”, while the androphilic MtF seem just like… gays who want to be compatible with a heteronormative society? (“I want to be a woman so that I can have sex with men, without being a gay man” vs “I want to be a woman, because being a woman is awesome!!! omg I get an orgasm just from imagining it!!!”)
OK, I am bit confused here. We started with defining nonandrophilic MtF transsexuals as “persons attracted to females, males and females, or neither gender”, and now we have a theory that they (a substantial number of them) have sexual interest (secondary) in male partners.
(It sounds a bit like: “Men are either gay or not-gay. Blanchard theorized that a substantial number of non-gay men are gays… as a secondary sexual interest.” That is, I am not surprised by the statement than many men are gays, per se, but I am surprised that the statement was made specifically about a group that was originally defined as non-gays.)
What is the reason for this hypothesis and what are the data supporting it?
I could imagine a good reason for that. Suppose that you have a few non-sexual reasons for X, but also a sexual reason for X. If you admit that you have the sexual reason, most people are going to dismiss all the non-sexual reasons as mere rationalizations. So you deny or minimize the sexual reason, as a way to express that the non-sexual reasons are valid.
Makes me think, how does this compare to cishet women? How many of them had their first sexual experience because they wanted to have their feminity validated by a man?
Anyway, when we have people lying to researchers about their actual feelings, we are in a tricky epistemic situation. (On one hand we can’t use “the subjects say no” as a definite falsification of a hypothesis. On the other hand, how else to evaluate the hypotheses, beyond “sounds plausible to me”?)
Didn’t we have “a substantial number” a few paragraphs ago, and now it is “all”?
Sounds like debating definitions, and… I think I disagree? Maybe this is just because the article is a short summary of a longer argument, but it feels like a jump from “excited by X” to “excited only by X”. (If a cishet man is sexually excited by the thought of having a male body, does this automatically make it an orientation?)
...oops, still just a page 5 out of 16, but I hope that I have communicated some concerns clearly. Even if most things seem plausible to me, at some moment it feels like an unwarranted jump to conclusions.
It’s somewhat unclear but it probably looks something like this:
where “CGS” is an abbreviation of “cross-gender sexuality”, and covers stuff like this (from a different survey).
I mean it is certainly uncontroversial that some trans women are exclusively attracted to men and some trans women are not exclusively attracted to men. But that presumably has something to do that you see the same for other demographics, e.g. cis men or cis women, where some are attracted to men and some are not, as well as from the fact that most trans women are open about their orientation and there’s plenty of trans women from each orientation available.
However, Blanchardians tend to go motte/bailey a lot with this. Like they add a lot of additional claims about this, and then put forth the positions that these additional claims are also part of the uncontroversial knowledge, and obviously the more claims you add, the less uncontroversial it will be. They also have the advantage that it used to be only a handful of academics and clinicians discussing it, so “uncontroversial” within this handful of people isn’t as significant as “uncontroversial” today.
You’re not overthinking it, Blanchardians constantly do this sort of thing, where they try to establish their ideas as true by definition. (Another example of this is, sometimes I’ve been studying autogynephilia in gay men, and Blanchardians have tended to say that this is definitionally impossible.)
Thank you for the summary!
(I apologize, the timing is unfortunate, I am leaving for a one-week vacation without internet access right now, so I can’t give you a response this would deserve. Perhaps later.)
this does not seem like an impossible requirement for almost any scoped argument I can remember seeing (that is, a claim which is not inherently a conjunction of dozens of subclaims), including some very advanced math ones. granted, by making it fit on one screen you often get something shockingly dense. but you don’t need more than about 500 words to make most coherent arguments. the question is whether it would increase clarity to compress it like that. and I claim without evidence that the answer is generally that the best explanation of a claim is in fact this short, though it’s not guaranteed that one has the time and effort available to figure out how to precisely specify the claim in words that few; often, trying to precisely specify something in few words runs into “those words are not precisely defined in the mind of the readers” issues, a favorite topic of Davis.
(I believe this to apply to even things that people spend hundreds of thousands of words on on this site, such as “is ai dangerous”. that it took yudkowsky many blog posts to make the point does not mean that a coherent one-shot argument needs to be that long, as long as it’s using existing words well. It might be the case that the concise argument is drastically worse at bridging inferential gaps, but I don’t think it need be impossible to specify!)
AIUI the actual arguments are over on Zack’s blog due to being (in Zack’s judgement) Too Spicy For LessWrong (that is, about trans people). (Short version, Blanchardianism coupled with the opinion that most people who disagree are ignoring obvious truths about sex differences for political reasons; I expect the long version is more carefully-reasoned than is apparent in this perhaps-uncharitable summary.)
Can you say exactly which claims Zack is making without showing enough evidence? Is it one or more of these
Or something else?
I agree with all of this.
But there is a space between “any way you want” and “only one possible way”.
Is Mona Lisa (the painting) a woman? Paintings do not have chromosomes, and many of them do not even have sexual organs. Yet if I say “Mona Lisa is a woman”, it is true in some meaningful sense… and false in some other meaningful sense.
Sometimes you use one bucket for things, and then you find out that you need two. Which one of the new buckets should inherit the original name… is a social/political choice. I may disagree with the choice, but that doesn’t make it wrong. If you want to be unambiguous, use an adjective, for example “trans women are not biological women” or “trans women are legally considered women”.
(Just like tomato is biologically a fruit but legally a vegetable; carrot is legally a fruit in EU; and ketchup is legally a vegetable in USA.)