I have to say this looks like a long due change of policy. I seriously hope that this site will finally stop talking all day long about rationality and finally focus on how we can get more paperclips.
Please kindly remove the CAPTCHA though, I’m finding it a slight annoyance.
In contrast, APA is a professional organization of health care providers, writing guidelines for practicing therapists who deal with vulnerable men who come to them for help. The standards are quite different.
The content is quite different also.
Here is a list of things APA considers “harmful”, under the umbrella term of “traditional masculinity”:
Saying that the lists of items below are the most likely problem you are going to see in the subgroup of men who end up looking for therapy is not the same as saying that these traits are always harmful.
Similarly, citing a prominent figure that did well for himself while showing high doses of these traits is not good evidence that these traits will favour an average person.
The argument that these traits can either be vices or virtues is technically correct I guess, but what seem to happening is that men that are, let’s say, “traditionally educated” are often pressured into adopting these traits and keeping them on full time.
So these traits seem to be something society is consistently teaching wrong to a very large number of men, and they also seem to be a pattern on a wrong way to educate men into masculinity, which studies show to be tied to all kind of problems, especially because a large number of men are taught or pick up a dysfunctional way to express masculinity or trait.
So the goal, especially from those who document themselves on the studies about masculinity, is not to attack masculinity, just to teach people the broad points that a) It’s okay not to be masculine, if you don’t want to, and b) you can be masculine or male and still show traits that are usually classified by certain models of masculinity like feminine or weak, such as cooperation, kindness, etc… and c) you can be successful and do well for society using “feminine” traits and strategies too, and that this holds true even in environments that are usually seen as relying on “masculine” traits.
There certainly isn’t a war on competence in general. If you go check what the suggestions to face the problems “competitiveness” in the workplace creates, you’d usually find stuff that aim to reduce strategies that try to game the scoring system of competence assessment, like trying to talk over your competitor or to socially diminish him/her, or you’d find stuff that tries to help people notice that certain traits that have been socialised into women on average more than into men, like looking for compromises or avoiding conflicts, and to look for ways to even the field about them. I’ve never heard at all the suggestion that, in a workplace or in research or whatever, you should consider competence less, save when people opposed to these kind of attempts misreport their contents.
Similarly, there are some groups that are, I guess, just pissed off at men and try to attack masculinity in general, but these groups are a small minority, and likely don’t control APA. But, they are the groups someone attacking the above attempts at changing masculinity would quote the most, and try lump everyone in the same category.
Jordan Peterson, from the talks I heard him give, is absolutely guilty of this and does not seems to argue in these subjects with good faith.
Instead of dealing with hard questions, it’s easier to reuse the tricks that worked in the past like saying that any majority-male hierarchy is nefarious and privileged. The APA was quick to point out that 95% of Fortune 500 CEOs are men. So are 80% of Google engineers and 80% of top-grossing actors. Also 99% of HVAC mechanics, but only 2% of dental hygienists. Are those examples of privilege or of competence?
The answers to all of the above are “almost certainly both, it’s complicated”. But this answer doesn’t help you climb the hierarchy of progressive politics. To maintain that those are all examples of pure male privilege, one has to completely deny the role of competence. As people on the left compete to demonstrate their commitment to dismantling privilege, the entire concept of competence gets wholly ignored and the pursuit of it is seen as pathological. I think that this impulse is at the root of the “war on competence”.
People can’t just start to look exclusively for competence and ignore prejudice. The argument made is that women are not evaluated on competence fairly, because, unless a women is clearly superior to a man, she’ll often get evaluated as less competent.
Unless you haven a clear biological discriminant that says that males would dominate a field even if women are given equal chances to compete (like in, say, powerlifting), then any majority-male hierarchy is privileged because there is no fair reason for having a higher percentage of males higher in the hierarchy than the base rate of males in the field (which is a topic that’s has separated stuff into it).
Even if we assume that this discrimination is partly competence based: let’s say, entirely as an example, than the 70% of most competent individuals between google engineers are males, and that only 60% of google engineers are males, which would be the strongest possible case I can think for a genuine difference in competence getting existing alongside pure bias. Unless you have large evidence that men are just better engineers than women for biological reasons, then the difference in competence still has to be determined by some kind of privilege that is having men receive more formation and/or chances for improving their competence than women. As a possible example of it, I remember hearing that in STEM sciences a common thing that has been noticed is that males are a lot more likely to have been habituated to thinker with computers and programs and experiment when young, and that there is also evidence that men are socialised to react to their failures in “traditionally male fields” differently than women, who are more likely to receive a negative feedback in their competence for failing. So you have a real disparity in competence, which is being caused by privilege and unfair reasons.
That might be what you were referring to with “it’s complicated”, I don’t know.
But the point is that, if you still want to value competence over fairness, which for jobs that have large consequences, you still need to dismantle that privilege as aggressively as you can, because you are currently missing a lot of competence that could be developed in women and that would have more competent individuals.
Now, to be fair, I usually am pretty selective in the medias I consume, so I’m unlikely to stick around a media that consistently gets stuff I agree with wrong.
But still, I think there is a consistent attempt from a number of people in the conservative and reactionary crowd to frame the war on toxic masculinity as a war on masculinity/competence, and that this attempt has a lot more influence on communication than the subgroups of people on the “other side” who genuinely wants to attack masculinity or get these things wrong, and so that the post is kinda attacking an issue that’s not as relevant as much as it would seem. That is, referring to the issue of “war on competence”. Our society is not good at effectively teaching competence and how to improve, so attempts to overcome that are pretty relevant.
I do agree that “hierarchy climbing traits” can guide someone to improve, and do think sport can be a good way to learn the “climbing hierarchy traits” in a positive way, but I fear it depends heavily by who you are and where you are.
Soccer in Italy is… pretty much the opposite of what you describe, in my experience. The incentives to just rack a win are huge compared to other sports here, so you see all kind of foul plays and anti-sportiveness and stuff. Acrimony between teams is also pretty high, so people are quick to pounce on enemy cheating and to justify or forget their own team cheating.
You can, of course, still find beautiful examples of sportsmanship and players that are renowned for their correctness.
I suspect that sportsmanship and the types of positive competition you describe are more common when the monetary stakes are lower. Unfair competition won’t be penalised by fans if the rise of it is very slow, and when every team shows it the sport can still be hugely popular while penalising “fair” teams.
Sadly, I think that briefly stopping the AstraZeneca vaccine (In Italy it got restarted about today, I think) was a rational decision, made necessary by absolute rampant stupidity.
I’ve heard of several people I know getting unreasonably scared about blood clots, and several people had commented over the vaccine being “unsafe” before that. If they didn’t suspended it after those nonsense reports then we’d have faced months of general idiocy about it, with every single case of thrombosis in people having received the AstraZeneca vaccine becoming a news story. As a result, a lot of people would have resisted vaccination or tried to receive the “safer” vaccine. If things spiralled out of control, I fear that would have killed a lot more than a week worth of AstraZeneca suspension.
Just saying that there was no blood clots problem while continuing vaccinations would have left the no-vax crowd free to spread doubts.
Stopping the vaccinations for a week, instead, is a commitment to “safety” so insane that it almost comes across as villainous, “we don’t care if 2000 people or more dies, if there is even a 1⁄300000 chances our vaccine might hurt you we will stop it and check it out”. It leaves no doubt about where the government’s priorities lie, safety above all, to the point of sheer evilness, and it also got people get really angry about it, so I guess that the talk about the government pushing unsafe vaccines onto you should have taken a serious hit.
So yeah, it’s the decision of killing (in my country) about 2000 people to safeguard against a panic that might or might not have spread, to the goal of getting even more people to vaccinate. It gets me mad that it was necessary, and it was necessary for very stupid reasons, but it was not a stupid decision by itself.
I’m not sure how much of this reasoning was actually responsible for the decision and how much was a consideration on popularity/liability, but I’m sure that if they didn’t stopped it things could have turned out worse.
One perspective would be to say that when Ben read the sequences at 13, he adopted a suboptimal paradigm and later moved on from that paradigm. From the perspective of Kegan’s framework, adopting that paradigm was however likely very good for Ben’s development as it allowed him to go from Kegan 3 to Kegan 4 which is an important step in development. Not everyone moves from Kegan 3 to Kegan 4 and many people need a good university education to make the transition. Making that step at 13 is fast cognitive development.
I think this would be more smooth to understand if you defined what Kegan 3 means before you use the term in this paragraph. It left me struggling a bit to follow, but I’m pretty tired at the moment so maybe that’s just on me.
It was a very interesting read and I think it’s a good frame to look at things.
I’m a bit puzzled that one who read (if meant as “learned”) the sequences would be left at Kegan 4, if I understood correctly and all there is to Kegan 5 is to be able to engage with other school of thoughts, then the sequences seem to hammer on that point pretty often. I’ve taken as a personal rule to allow people to try persuade me of their reasons/school of thoughts specifically because it was one of the main points of the sequences.
It has less benign forms. Governments and other bandits look for wealth and take it. Sometimes those bandits are your friends, family and neighbors. A little giving back is a good thing, but in many cultures demands for help and redistribution rapidly approach 100% – life is tough, and your fellow tribe members, or at least family members, are endless pits of need, so any wealth that can be given away must be hidden if you want to remain in good standing. Savings, security and investment in anything but status are all but impossible. There is no hope for prosperity.
I’m not sure of how literally I should interpret this part. Governments and systems seem to be in a trend of taxing poverty more than they tax wealth, after a certain level of wealth you definitely pay less per dollar earned that someone who’s poor, even considering official taxes alone.
Poor people do seem to be forced to dissipate any extra wealth they accumulate through societal obligations, and for slack and status purchase it seems to definitely hold true, I’m just puzzled by the government thing.
Characters often want change as part of their role. And just as importantly, their role often requires that they can’t achieve that change. The tension between craving and deprivation gives birth to the character’s dramatic raison d’être. The “wife” can’t be as clingy and anxious if the “husband” opens up, so “she” enacts behavior that “she” knows will make “him” close down. “She” can’t really choose to change this because “her” thwarted desire for change is part of “her” role.
I’m conflicted about drawing this kind of conclusions from people behaviour, it opens up a door that allows you to interpret anything any way you like.
More simple explanations are that if a “wife” knows how to interact with the husband in a way that causes him to open up and talk about what’s happening, then the conflict gets resolved and you aren’t observing a clingy and anxious “wife” anymore.
It’s actually hard to communicate openness and communication while you are feeling anxious and clinging, so you’d see a lot of people acting in ways that “discharge” their anxiety, rather than fix their problem. You don’t need to go as far as to postulate that they are actually acting like this “on purpose”.
Even if the “wife” is clearly showing a stereotypical script, it might just be that “she” has no utter clue of what else could be done about “her” situation. “She” could be just assuming that it’s the correct way to face the problem, nag the “husband” until it finally works. Yeah, “she” would likely feel nervous and lost if considering the option of going off script and trying something else, and would avoid doing that because of that. But people have been using “punishments” in contexts where they have no hopes to work for countless millennia now, and there’s no reason to assume everyone just secretly wants the target to persist in unwanted behaviour so they can punish him some more.
There are other circumstances where drawing simpler explanations is harder, and then you can start to wonder if there is this kind of “purpose” in someone’s actions. Self sabotage is definitely a real thing, sometimes. But I think you’d be safer by going with the simplest explanation first, because you can use “secret reasons” as an explanation for everything in psychology.
Aside from this, the post was really good and insightful. It got me thinking about what roles I’m being pushed on and where I’m pushing my friends to.
I often see that people I know make assumptions about me being the rational one of the group, such as assuming I’d commit the stereotypical mistakes of someone who follows Hollywood rationality… which I always found weird as hell, because 1) in other contexts it’s basically a meme that I’m really genre-savvy (for example, I DM in games for the group and people have a habit of worrying at least about the first four-five levels of subversions and recursions of my twists and plots), and so I thought they should realise I’d have saw the possibility of making the obvious cliched mistake coming, and 2) because I never showed any hint of such behaviours and regularly do the opposite thing, but I guess it makes more sense now.
My role, according to them, is to be incredibly devious and intelligent and do the non-supervillain equivalent of having the hero fall in my devious-four-levels-of-deception-trap, and then screw up something obvious such as leaving him unattended to free himself or fail to my own hubris or insert cliched genius mistake x, so the “balance” between intelligence and heart is reaffirmed.
Given what I’ve actually seen of people’s psychology, if you want anything done about global warming (like building 1000 nuclear power plants and moving on to real problems), then, yes, you should urge people to sign up for Alcor.
I realise this is a 13 year old post, but please don’t dismiss global scale problems with the first idea that comes to mind and without doing serious research first, your opinion is (to say the least) really respected on this site and lots of people would assume you were right about it.
By IPCC datas from 2014, electricity and heat production is a mere 35% (total, considering all associated costs) of global emissions. Even if we convinced everyone to switch to electric cars and transportations AND to electric heating, which would not be trivial at all, we’d have curbed emissions by a total 55%.
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/SYR_AR5_FINAL_full.pdf (page 102)
Also by IPCC datas, nuclear phase out will add a 7% cost to what it would take to stop climate change, while each year wasted between 2014 and 2030 by delaying actions increments cost by more or less 3%. Of course, that is due to the low prevalence of nuclear power as an energy source, but it still goes to show that the issue of nuclear energy is far from being the vault key here. (same link as above, page 41)
If you could persuade everyone to build 1000 nuclear plants, switch to electric cars and to electric heating, then you’d also be able to solve the problem in a dozen more ways.
I agree with everything else on the post and that there are worse problems than climate change (though my guess is that it would still increase existential risk by at least 5% if botched, mostly because it would increase the likelihood of someone botching AGI).
Can anyone suggest me good background reading material to understand the technical language/background knowledge of this and, more generally, on decision theory?
I’m puzzled by a really effective activism post that manages to get me to commit to give 10% of my income to charity saying that activism and spreading the cause isn’t an effective way to get things done.
I also think protesting can buy a lot more political shift for a cause than the average hourly pay of the participant. Millions of protesters seem to shift the political landscape a lot more than tens of millions of dollars spent in lobbying and ads.
I shouldn’t pretend I’m worried about this for the sake of the poor. I’m worried for me.
At this point I should just try ask in a poll if there’s a level of intelligence where you eventually stop worrying if you could ever catch up to the level above yourself.
Maybe if you were literally the highest-IQ person in the entire world you would feel good about yourself, but any system where only one person in the world is allowed to feel good about themselves at a time is a bad system.
Well, that’s fricking encouraging.
This was amazingly good.
On a side note:
But things that work from a god’s-eye view don’t work from within the system. No individual scientist has an incentive to unilaterally switch to the new statistical technique for her own research, since it would make her research less likely to produce earth-shattering results and since it would just confuse all the other scientists. They just have an incentive to want everybody else to do it, at which point they would follow along. And no individual journal has an incentive to unilaterally switch to early registration and publishing negative results, since it would just mean their results are less interesting than that other journal who only publishes ground-breaking discoveries. From within the system, everyone is following their own incentives and will continue to do so.
You can, as an individual scientist, start praising and giving status to any other scientist who follow stricter guidelines than the average, and comment negatively on any scientist that’s using guidelines that are laxer than the average and your own. Eventually really lax scientist stop having an edge, slightly stricter scientists gain it and the standards in the field move up.
It doesn’t require simultaneous coordination and it’s a rule of thumb any scientist can adopt without harming their own fitness too much.
This was pretty interesting, and pretty different from the kind of content you usually find on LessWrong.
I often see arguments against “spontaneous inconvenient moral behaviour”, such as worrying whether to kill ants infesting your house or stop eating meat, that advocate these behaviours should be replaced with more effective planned behaviours, but I don’t really think most of the first behaviours prevent the others.
Suggesting that someone currently in his house should stop thinking about how to humanly get rid of ants, start working for an hour and using those overtime moneys to donate to ants charity isn’t a feasible model, since most people wouldn’t have a job where they can just take an hour of spare time whenever they want and convert it to extra money. You are converting “fun time” into “care for the ants time”.
Thinking about how you can be more effective to produce charity or moral value is certainly a good idea, 15 minutes of your time can easily improve the charity you can output in the next years by ten times or more without any real drawback, but the kind of “moral rigor” that’s required when one wants to contest a behaviour he doesn’t want to adopt it’s usually the level of rigor that requires someone to drop his career, start working on friendly AI full time and donating every material possession that he doesn’t think it’s needed to keep his productivity high to friendly AI research.
You’ll need a Schelling point about morality if you don’t want to donate your every value to friendly AI research ( if you want to I won’t certainly try to stop you), at some point you have to go “screw it, I’ll do this less effective thing instead because I want to”, and this Schelling point will likely include a lot of behaviours that are spontaneous things you care about but are also ineffective.
Also the way some critiques try to evaluate non-human lives doesn’t really make sense. I agree on a “humans > complex animals > simple animals logic”, but there should be some kind of quantitative relations between the wellbeing of the groups. You can argue that you would save a human over any number of cow and I guess that can sorta makes sense, but there still should be some amount of human pleasure you should be willing to give up to prevent some amount of animal suffering, or you might as well give up on quantitative moral at all.
If one’s suggesting a 1:1000 exchange of human pleasure:animal suffering, you can’t refuse by arguing that you’d refuse a 10:10 exchange.
Inquire about the subjective vs objective duration of that millisecond. If there aren’t any bad surprises there, pick torture before my mind can try to make a guess of how bad it will hurt.
In the torture vs dust specks I choose dust specks if they weren’t allowed to cause ripple effect and if they were guaranteed to be spread with only 1 dust speck for humans. Here there is a similar consideration, how the pain is spread in a time interval so small that it will basically be inconsequential (since he guaranteed that I won’t suffer lasting consequences, I’d fully expect such a pain to fry my brain and have it possibly melt out of my eyes or something).
I’m basically choosing to screw over the future myself of that millisecond to protect all the other future self.
Both decisions should work fine as long as I’m not approached by a large number of Pascal’s muggers, if it risks becoming a trend I should review my decision theory.
For another human… I’d choose torture for the same considerations, if he choose torture I wouldn’t override it, I’d have emotional qualms about overriding his “death” decision, but I likely will.
The math of pain vs pleasure of being alive would likely say my decisions are wrong, but I think the math starts to stop helping in this limit cases, picking death strikes me as a two boxing with Omega (though I think the math there shows you are right went one boxing if you manage to take in the backward causal link). You’ll be pretty glad you choose torture exactly one millisecond after and for the rest of your live, and so will the stranger (unless he was suicidal, but it doesn’t seem I’m allowed to know it before picking).
I think the only… slight divergence of the situation from reality is that the bad guys figured out most of this stuff already (though I doubt they did so explicitly).
There has been a lot of talk about how “the political divide has grown harsher than ever” as if this kind of shift just happened because of random cosmic variations.
What exactly happened is that, invariably in different country, the local “bag guy” wannabe grabs the loudest mic it can get and starts saying something absolutely hateful over and over, doing everything he can to poison the well and just stop people from talking with each other, instead getting the two parties to yell insults at the other one.
Pretty sure democrats didn’t just went “hey, you know that Trump guy? For no real reason, I really hate him and his supporters way more than I hated Romney and his supporters, even though I don’t perceive his communications have taken a harsh shift away from democracy and basic human decency. Let’s abandon debate and go tell them what ignorant dumb faces they have”.
It’s a scarily effective trap, and a strong argument in favour of the tactic the post suggest.
And yes, I know it’s not a helpful argument to say if you want to propose “look, maybe we’d just better agree to sit down and talk politics civilly” to a “bad guy supporter” but I think it would be great if somehow an agreement about how wonderful it would be if we could just agree to shun the next politician who tries to poison the well, no matter which party is he from, also ended up in the discussion.
Creationists lie. Homeopaths lie. Anti-vaxxers lie. This is part of the Great Circle of Life. It is not necessary to call out every lie by a creationist, because the sort of person who is still listening to creationists is not the sort of person who is likely to be moved by call-outs. There is a role for organized action against creationists, like preventing them from getting their opinions taught in schools, but the marginal blog post “debunking” a creationist on something is a waste of time. Everybody who wants to discuss things rationally has already formed a walled garden and locked the creationists outside of it.
This was a very useful insight, I think I had realised it a while ago but didn’t thought it explicitly yet.
Generally the post is pretty good. I think another key point of how civilisation evolved is that the “smarter than you” guy who just goes “hey, I can refuse to play by the rule if I’m effective enough, this way I’ll get an even bigger advantage and be unstoppable, I’m just going to blitzkrieg these schmucks and take everything over” regularly gets ganged up and beaten to the ground by everyone else.
Julius Caesar, Hitler, Napoleon, Genghis Khan, possibly Alexander the Great… the great conquerors who try to impose a new world order seem to either regularly be beaten by an alliance of fed up people or murdered if they don’t go down that way, and I think most of them didn’t honestly saw how their “screw everything, I’ll just play to win” scheme could possibly backfire.
It seems humans, when someone goes “screw the rules”, tend to answer with “well, screw you too”.
“Yeah, I can totally do my master thesis in six months, even it if involves examining a large database of newspaper articles by myself, inventing a methodology to analyse them that translates in quantitative data, invent an observation grid for what people would usually treat as subjective evaluations, mapping and quantifying the business relationships between newspapers and other industries, and generally pushing past the methodology limits that prevented studies I saw so far to actually prove quantitatively that there were in fact a relationship between newspaper relationships with fossil fuels industries and their treatment of climate change in the news, while I know nothing about journalism studies or text analysis. No, my tendency to procrastinate hard or unpleasant things I don’t know how to do won’t be a problem. Why do you ask?”
It took a bit less than one and a half years.
The more I read about simulated humans the more I’m convinced that a hard ban on simulating new humans and duplicating existing one is a key point of what differentiates dystopias too horrible to even grasp and hyper-existential failures from sane futures, at least until we have aligned AI.
He’s even right that on utilitarian grounds, it’s hard to argue with an em era where everyone is really happy working eighteen hours a day for their entire lives because we selected for people who feel that way. But at some point, can we make the Lovecraftian argument of “I know my values are provincial and arbitrary, but they’re my provincial arbitrary values and I will make any sacrifice of blood or tears necessary to defend them, even unto the gates of Hell?”
I also think that if we don’t, we run fast into what we can call… Cenobitical Existential Failures? (Cenobites are Hellraiser demons who see excruciating pain as the best thing in the universe).
Or in a lot of very tiny people really happy about hydrogen atoms (or working overtime).
I’d also strongly argue about making this stand before we select untold billions of people who don’t care if they live or die and they outcompete anyone who actually cares out of business.
Now take it even further, and imagine this is what’s happened everywhere. There are no humans left; it isn’t economically efficient to continue having humans. Algorithm-run banks lend money to algorithm-run companies that produce goods for other algorithm-run companies and so on ad infinitum. Such a masturbatory economy would have all the signs of economic growth we have today. It could build itself new mines to create raw materials, construct new roads and railways to transport them, build huge factories to manufacture them into robots, then sell the robots to whatever companies need more robot workers. It might even eventually invent space travel to reach new worlds full of raw materials. Maybe it would develop powerful militaries to conquer alien worlds and steal their technological secrets that could increase efficiency. It would be vast, incredibly efficient, and utterly pointless. The real-life incarnation of those strategy games where you mine Resources to build new Weapons to conquer new Territories from which you mine more Resources and so on forever.
Economical Growth has stopped to correlate with nearly all measures of wellbeing for the population in first world nations. We are already more than halfway there it seems.
I’d think that some of these alien civilisation would have figured it out in time, implanted everyone with neural chips that override any world ending decision, kept technological discoveries over a certain level available only to a small fraction of the population or in the hand of aligned AI, or something.
An aligned AI definitely seems able to face a problem of this magnitude, and we’d likely either get that or botch that before reaching the technological level any lunatic can blow up the planet.
How many of the experts in this survey are victims of the same problem? “Do you believe powerful AI is coming soon?” “Yeah.” “Do you believe it could be really dangerous?” “Yeah.” “Then shouldn’t you worry about this?” “Hey, what? Nobody does that! That would be a lot of work and make me look really weird!”
It does seem to be the default response of groups of humans to this kind of crisis. People died in burning restaurants because nobody else got up to run.
“Why should I, an expert in this field, react to the existential risk I acknowledge as a chance as if I were urgently worried, if all the other experts I know are just continuing with their research as always and they know what I know? It’s clear that existential risk is no good reason to abandon routine”.
As in Asch conformity experiment, whee a single other dissenter was enough to break compliance to the consensus, perhaps the example of even a single person who acts coherently with the belief the threat is serious and doesn’t come across as weird could break some of this apathy from pluralistic ignorance. Such examples seems to be one of the main factors in causing me to try to align my effort with my beliefs on what’s threatening the future of mankind twice, so far.
Whoops. Yeah, starting small definitely sounded like an obviously good idea, in hindsight.
I might have gone ahead and used as my first try figuring out my… gender identity, yeah.
It frigging worked as far as I can tell, I’ve used this yesterday and ever since I’ve felt a lot better than I’ve been in days. This was unbelievably helpful to me, and I’m really grateful for you having written this post.
To clarify my experience, in case someone is considering trying this for something on this scale after reading my comment:
I had gone in to identify stuff I already knew to be related to my gender, and that was sending out signals too confused and too conflicted to make sense, but it was making me feel worse and worse.
I went in ready to accept anything I’d have found, just wanting to know what it was, and it turned out that what was making me feel bad was misinterpreting/ignoring the stuff I was able to figure out by using IDC.