I wonder how many recent trans people tried/considered doubling down on their sex (eg males taking more testosterone) instead first. Maybe (for some people) either end of gender spectrum is comfortable and being in the middle feels bad¿ Anybody know? Don’t want to ask my friends because this Q will certainly anger them
If it worked, sounds potentially compatible with whatever the inverse(s) of agender is/are? Can at least say that many cisgender people get hormone therapy when they aren’t getting what they would like out of their hormones (i.e., menopause, low testosterone, etc). Hormones do useful things, and having them miscalibrated relative to your preferences can be unpleasant.
It’s also not uncommon to try to ‘double down’ on a quality you’re repressing, i.e., if someone’s actively trying to be their assigned sex, they may in fact try particularly hard to conform to it, consciously or otherwise. Even if not repressed, I know I’ve deliberately answered a few challenges in life where I discovered ‘this is particularly hard for me’ with ‘then I will apply additional effort to achieving it’, and I’m sure I’ve also done it subconsciously.
Well there’s this frequently observed phenomenon where someone feels insecure about their gender, and then does something hypermasculine like joining Special Forces or becoming a cage fighter or something like that. They are hoping that it will make them feel confident of their birth-certificate-sex. Then they discover that nope, this does not work and they are still trans.
People should be aware that there are copious examples of people who are like—nope, still trans—after hoping that going hard on their birth-certificate-gender will work,
Ascertainment bias, of course, because we only see the cases where this did not work, and do not know exactly how many members of e.g. Delta Force were originally in doubt as to their gender. We can know it doesnt work sometimes.
I mean, the problem is if it works we won’t hear about such people—they just live happily ever after and don’t talk about uncomfortable period of their life.
I notice I strong upvote on LW mobile a lot more than desktop because double-tap is more natural than long-click. Maybe mobile should have a min delay between the two taps?
At times, I have added tags that I felt were useful or missing, but usually, I add it to at least a few important posts to illustrate. At one time, one of them was removed but a good explanation for it was given.
Have one big textfile with every thought you ever have. Number the thoughts and don’t make each thought too long. Reference thoughts with a pound (e.g. #456) for easy search.
Link some posts you’d like diagrams of at least, then. If this were tractable, it might be cool. But I suspect most of the value is in even figuring out how to diagram the posts.
Seems it is easier / more streamlined / more googlable now for a teenage male to get testosterone blockers than testosterone. Latter is very frowned upon — I guess because it is cheating in sports. Try googling eg “get testosterone prescription high school reddit -trans -ftm”. The results are exclusively people shaming the cheaters. Whereas of course googling “get testosterone blockers high school reddit” gives tons of love & support & practical advice.
Females however retain easy access to hormones via birth control.
I wonder what experiments physicists have dreamed up to find floating point errors in physics. Anybody know? Or can you run physics with large ints? Would you need like int256?
I wonder how much testosterone during puberty lowers IQ. Most of my high school math/CS friends seemed low-T and 3⁄4 of them transitioned since high school. They still seem smart as shit. The higher-T among us seem significantly brain damaged since high school (myself included). I wonder what the mechanism would be here...
Like 40% of my math/cs Twitter is trans women and another 30% is scrawny nerds and only like 9% big bald men.
Testosterone influences brain function but not so much general IQ. It may influence to which areas your attention and thus most of your learning goes. For example, Lower testosterone increases attention to happy faces while higher to angry faces.
Hmm I think the damaging effect would occur over many years but mainly during puberty. It looks like there’s only two studies they mention lasting over a year. One found a damaging effect and the other found no effect.
Also, accelerate education, to learn as much as possible before the testosterone fully hits.
Or, if testosterone changes attention (as Gunnar wrote), learn as much as possible before the testosterone fully hits… and afterwards learn it again, because it could give you a new perspective.
I wish LW questions had an “accepted answer” thing like stackexchange
I wonder how many recent trans people tried/considered doubling down on their sex (eg males taking more testosterone) instead first. Maybe (for some people) either end of gender spectrum is comfortable and being in the middle feels bad¿ Anybody know? Don’t want to ask my friends because this Q will certainly anger them
If it worked, sounds potentially compatible with whatever the inverse(s) of agender is/are? Can at least say that many cisgender people get hormone therapy when they aren’t getting what they would like out of their hormones (i.e., menopause, low testosterone, etc). Hormones do useful things, and having them miscalibrated relative to your preferences can be unpleasant.
It’s also not uncommon to try to ‘double down’ on a quality you’re repressing, i.e., if someone’s actively trying to be their assigned sex, they may in fact try particularly hard to conform to it, consciously or otherwise. Even if not repressed, I know I’ve deliberately answered a few challenges in life where I discovered ‘this is particularly hard for me’ with ‘then I will apply additional effort to achieving it’, and I’m sure I’ve also done it subconsciously.
Well there’s this frequently observed phenomenon where someone feels insecure about their gender, and then does something hypermasculine like joining Special Forces or becoming a cage fighter or something like that. They are hoping that it will make them feel confident of their birth-certificate-sex. Then they discover that nope, this does not work and they are still trans.
People should be aware that there are copious examples of people who are like—nope, still trans—after hoping that going hard on their birth-certificate-gender will work,
Ascertainment bias, of course, because we only see the cases where this did not work, and do not know exactly how many members of e.g. Delta Force were originally in doubt as to their gender. We can know it doesnt work sometimes.
While I was typing this, quetzal_rainbow made the same point
I mean, the problem is if it works we won’t hear about such people—they just live happily ever after and don’t talk about uncomfortable period of their life.
I notice I strong upvote on LW mobile a lot more than desktop because double-tap is more natural than long-click. Maybe mobile should have a min delay between the two taps?
Practice speedruns for rebuilding civilization?
Is it rude to make a new tag without also tagging a handful of posts for it? A few tags I kinda want:
explanation: thing explained.
idea: an idea for a thing someone could do (weaker version of “Research Agenda” tag)
stating the obvious: pointing out something obviously true but maybe frequently overlooked
experimental result
theoretical result
novel maybe: attempts to do something new (in the sense of novelty requirements for conference publications)
Good question! From the Wiki-Tag FAQ:
I believe all tags have to be approved. If I were going through the morning moderation queue, I wouldn’t approve an empty tag.
At times, I have added tags that I felt were useful or missing, but usually, I add it to at least a few important posts to illustrate. At one time, one of them was removed but a good explanation for it was given.
Zettelkasten in five seconds with no tooling
Have one big textfile with every thought you ever have. Number the thoughts and don’t make each thought too long. Reference thoughts with a pound (e.g. #456) for easy search.
LW mods, please pay somebody to turn every post with 20+ karma into a diagram. Diagrams are just so vastly superior to words.
can you demonstrate this for a few posts? (I suspect it will be much harder than you think.)
The job would of course be done by a diagramming god, not a wordpleb like me
If i got double dog dared...
Link some posts you’d like diagrams of at least, then. If this were tractable, it might be cool. But I suspect most of the value is in even figuring out how to diagram the posts.
From the frontpage:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zAqqeXcau9y2yiJdi/can-we-build-a-better-public-doublecrux
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bkr9BozFuh7ytiwbK/my-hour-of-memoryless-lucidity
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Lgq2DcuahKmLktDvC/applying-refusal-vector-ablation-to-a-llama-3-70b-agent
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ANGmJnZL2fskHX6tj/dyslucksia
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BRZf42vpFcHtSTraD/linkpost-towards-a-theoretical-understanding-of-the-reversal
Like all of them basically.
Think of it like a TLDR. There are many ways to TLDR but any method that’s not terrible is fantastic
The acceptable tone of voice here feels like 3mm wide to me. I’m always having bad manners
Seems it is easier / more streamlined / more googlable now for a teenage male to get testosterone blockers than testosterone. Latter is very frowned upon — I guess because it is cheating in sports. Try googling eg “get testosterone prescription high school reddit -trans -ftm”. The results are exclusively people shaming the cheaters. Whereas of course googling “get testosterone blockers high school reddit” gives tons of love & support & practical advice.
Females however retain easy access to hormones via birth control.
I wonder what experiments physicists have dreamed up to find floating point errors in physics. Anybody know? Or can you run physics with large ints? Would you need like int256?
Andor is a word now. You’re welcome everybody. Celebrate with champagne andor ice cream.
What monster downvoted this
I wonder how much testosterone during puberty lowers IQ. Most of my high school math/CS friends seemed low-T and 3⁄4 of them transitioned since high school. They still seem smart as shit. The higher-T among us seem significantly brain damaged since high school (myself included). I wonder what the mechanism would be here...
Like 40% of my math/cs Twitter is trans women and another 30% is scrawny nerds and only like 9% big bald men.
Testosterone influences brain function but not so much general IQ. It may influence to which areas your attention and thus most of your learning goes. For example, Lower testosterone increases attention to happy faces while higher to angry faces.
Hmm I think the damaging effect would occur over many years but mainly during puberty. It looks like there’s only two studies they mention lasting over a year. One found a damaging effect and the other found no effect.
Also, accelerate education, to learn as much as possible before the testosterone fully hits.
Or, if testosterone changes attention (as Gunnar wrote), learn as much as possible before the testosterone fully hits… and afterwards learn it again, because it could give you a new perspective.
It’s really weird hypothesis because DHT is used as nootropic.
I think the most effect of high T, if it exists, is purely behavioral.
The hypothesis I would immediately come up with is that less traditionally masculine AMAB people are inclined towards less physical pursuits.