okay the unhinged rant I actually wanted to respond with is:
- this post is tooo looong - I think you’re crazy to not update on evidence sooner, you blame rationality but you should instead focus on how you could’ve done better - yeah ok maybe I got lucky by being born later, but you read Thing of Things just like I did and you read way more stuff. - like you, as a kid I thought gender is fake, it’s like a costume, or a mass hallucination. now as a wise adult I realize … it’s only like 80% fake. but it’s still plenty fake. - it’s my right to ask to be in female spaces and their right to say no - unless asking is expensive or not possible in which case I just do whatever I want and hope to get away with it, because society needs more doers. despite having boobs, sometimes I’ll use male restrooms if I think I can do it fast enough because urinals are actually better technology and lines on women’s restrooms are longer. - it’s your right to “misgender” people and their right to uninvite you to things if it hurts their feelings - sure, I guess a lot of my personality traits are more man-like. ambition, high libido. idk why cis girls are comfortable around me, I think they are wrong. maybe this is being an “AGP male” or maybe it is being a “nonbinary person that presents mostly female.” - which definition is better? that is a political, aesthetic, cultural question. - my preferred aesthetics/culture focus on the morphological freedom the most, is progress-ive, accelerationist, pro-technology, pro-freedom. I think it says that the optimal language has no gendered pronouns, titles, and that gendered nouns should be longer than their genderless counterparts; and if speaking in a suboptimal language just say whatever will actually be understood; whatever creates truth in the audience’s heads. - but the actual answer to political/cultural/questions is usually idk it’s a matter of taste do whatever it doesn’t matter.
Don’t focus on being opposed to rationalist culture or woke culture. Reversed stupidity isn’t intelligence. Focus on being the best, and helping other people be the best. I liked the one sentence in your post about how the narrative should be about maximizing gender euphoria and minimizing gender dysphoria, and I particularly disagreed the parts about reactionaries being right and whig history being wrong. I want to hype up the progress-ive, accelerationist, pro-technology, pro-freedom political view that the more people can be the kinds of people they want to be, the better. The rest is just tradeoffs and distractions. Parts of your post sound like they agree with that, and I think focusing on that part the most is what will make you happier and the world better.
- sure, I guess a lot of my personality traits are more man-like. ambition, high libido. idk why cis girls are comfortable around me, I think they are wrong. maybe this is being an “AGP male” or maybe it is being a “nonbinary person that presents mostly female.”
In the context of the HSTS/AGPTS typology, I don’t think ambition and libido are what matters much. For instance, an often-discussed phenomenon is that HSTSs have basically similar sexuality to gay men. (HRT might reduce the libido for HSTSs, but it would also reduce the libido for AGPTSs.)
I’m confused about gender differences in ambition. Some people like to make it a temperamental thing, like with men being more generally prone to taking charge across situations, but actually assertive personality has a fairly small gender difference and mostly boils down to extraversion.
I think when people talk about gender differences in ambition, they usually think something like CEOs with long working hours being mostly male, and stay-at-home spouses who raise children being mostly female. This doesn’t really square with traditionally discussed psychometric gender differences; for instance being a CEO is to the “people” side of the people-things dichotomy, despite being a male-skewed job.
I also suspect it doesn’t really correlate with HSTS/AGPTS much; I remember one time in a trans/GC debate sub, someone posted a link of the top most influential trans people, and asked why the business leaders were mostly trans women. I was about to give a typology-based answer, until I noticed that a fairly big fraction of them where HSTSs leading make-up brands.
My pet theory is that the gender differences in “ambition” doesn’t originate from psychological traits, but instead from physiology. Women are capable of bearing children, but it takes out a big chunk of their time to do so (especially if one doesn’t go out of one’s way to equalize parenting time). Because the state does a combination of liberating and expropriating mothers’ children’s productivity rather than protecting them as property (i.e. mothers don’t get to keep their children as slaves; instead they are free to run their own lives, though with a big chunk of their income taxed away), women don’t capture the economic value that they create here, and this leads to them falling behind in economic competition.
I think this predicts/explains a lack of HSTS/AGPTS difference in ambition too.
If AGP/HSTS isn’t about gendered personality traits, then what is it about? What do you think the model predicts? The input of the model is early onset vs late onset? And the output is, if not differences in temperament or libido, then … attraction to men vs women?
I think there are very different CEOs for very different companies. Object level: if I were to be a founder, I’d want to get better at leading, inspiring, listening to people; but I’d be very strong at product and visual design (culturally fem coded???) and pretty good at building the thing (culturally male coded?). But like there is this whole concept of a “technical founder” and a lot of those shape rotators are successful.
(is product even a fem thing? if product is about understanding users, then it’s about people, but if being a PM is about working with metrics than it’s about math. idk maybe accomplishing hard things in the real world requires getting good at everything.)
what list of trans executives are you looking at? google is failing me and off the top of my head is just the lady that made SiriusXM (satellite radio for cars) and is trying to make a robot replica of her wife.
If AGP/HSTS isn’t about gendered personality traits, then what is it about? What do you think the model predicts? The input of the model is early onset vs late onset? And the output is, if not differences in temperament or libido, then … attraction to men vs women?
One phrasing I like replacing Blanchardianism or HSTS/AGPTS with because it is more pragmatic and transparent with regards to how the typology is actually used and what it predicts is pragmatic/disruptive transsexuality. The idea being that in each context, there are some ways one can be that are more practical and some that are more disruptive, and it turns out most of these correlate with each other.
Some contexts in which one can be unpragmatic:
Family: a) one’s long-term partner may lose attraction, leading to breakup, and potentially also divorce, b) if one has children, they’ll have to adjust to the divorce and to the trans parent’s new presentation, c) transition can cost a lot of money that could otherwise have been spent on the family
People who knew them before transition: a) it can be a big, surprising change in appearance and behavior, b) it can interfere with reminiscing about how the trans woman was like prior to transitioning
Clinicians: a) it may be hard to grasp the motivations of trans women, b) trans women may enter a bunch of difficult situations due to their transition, and it may be hard to give them ideas for how to handle it
Peripheral: a) trans women may fail to aesthetically pass as female, making them stick out
Women: a) trans women may ask to enter women’s private spaces like bathrooms which could be seen as protecting them against sexual assault, even though trans women may not have a lower sexual violence propensity than cis men, b) trans women may fail to appreciate the extent to which women are constrained by relationships with men and reproduction, due to not having the same constraints
Ideology: a) trans women may adopt radical positions as to how gender should work, b) people may try to infer aspects of how gender and sexuality works from trans women, even in cases where it won’t generalize
LGB people: a) trans women may have undesirable impacts on the culture of LGB groups, as e.g. maybe some of them disagree with trans politics and don’t want LGB groups to push it, b) or on the composition of LGB groups, e.g. if 1% of females are lesbian women, and 0.3% of males are transbians and bisexual trans women, then that has the potential to be 23% of participants in lesbian dating communities being MtFs (and this could be higher or lower depending on local variation), c) the many difficulties trans women might face might alienate people from LGBT politics in general
This doesn’t cover everything because there are cases where I think HSTSs would be more disruptive, e.g. trapping. And some of it is kind of old-school, but so is Blanchardianism so I think it is still relevant.
Analyzing this, in some cases a substantial part of the disruptiveness is directly downstream of sexual orientation. For instance gay men are unlikely to have children and likely to have more egalitarian relationships, so 1b and 1c are not so relevant. Until recently, gay marriage wasn’t even a thing, so 1a was more limited, and also for various reasons HSTSs transition younger so they’re gonna have less built up in the first place.
With regards to 2, I think it mainly comes down to aesthetic femininity (e.g. being short, having feminine mannerisms, wearing makeup, etc.) prior to transitioning. The relationship between this and homosexuality is unclear; some constructionists might prefer to think of this in terms of homosexual males facing less gender norms, but I don’t really buy that. For some things there may be a straightforward biological element of them being innately more feminine, or there may be selection effects. Idk. Whatever the answer is, it likely also explains 4.
With regards to 3, I think this mostly arises as a result of all of the other factors. Though also 3 has become less of a thing due to most trans women being AGP, which means a degree of adaptation has happened. (But this leads to some HSTSs complaining that they get treated like AGPTSs by clinicians.)
Points 5 and 7b seem directly downstream of sexual orientation.
Point 6a might be a filter or self-interest effect, combined with the struggles associated with the other points. Like if AGPTSs have a bunch of difficulties then it makes sense they would have positions that blame these difficulties externally, and which propose they should get help to mitigate them. I suspect maybe internalized homophobia plays a role; HSTSs might feel that they can escape “being gay” by transitioning. Point 6b may be influenced by all sorts of things.
Part of the issue with point 7 is just a question of scale. There’s very few trans women, but LGB people are also rare (especially lesbian women), so the proportional impact is bigger there. The same applies to trans women in mostly male spaces, e.g. rationalists, or Rust programmers. Like if most woman-identifying Rust programmers are MtF, then groups for women in Rust are probably gonna push for MtF interests to a similar proportion that they push for female interests.
So, overall my take is that the typology is mostly down to the direct effects of sexual orientation, as well as the greater tendency of gay men to be aesthetically feminine, such as doing drag, having effeminate mannerisms, playing princess as a child, etc.. (I think most Blanchardians would disagree with me on that because they are essentialists/dogmatists.)
what list of trans executives are you looking at? google is failing me and off the top of my head is just the lady that made SiriusXM (satellite radio for cars) and is trying to make a robot replica of her wife.
Not sure, it was years ago on some very low-quality website.
Perhaps uncharitable, but I’m rounding off your position to “society treats young transitioners vs old transitioners differently—and this influences their culture. There isn’t a bio effect except insofar that transitioning late makes a trans woman gayer, have more masculine physical traits, and is less life timing convenient; and all those things influence how society sees and treats her.”
Not unsimilar to the “typology” between bears and twinks; or among lesbians in asia, toms and dees; in that they are complicated, mostly cultural phenomena.
Perhaps uncharitable, but I’m rounding off your position to “society treats young transitioners vs old transitioners differently—and this influences their culture. There isn’t a bio effect except insofar that transitioning late makes a trans woman gayer, have more masculine physical traits, and is less life timing convenient; and all those things influence how society sees and treats her.”
I think the causality goes the other direction, with the difference in sexual orientation being present from birth.
I also think some psychological traits are innately feminized in HSTSs compared to AGPTSs, just not assertiveness or libido. But at least including the traits where gay men are generally feminine compared to straight men.
- sure, I guess a lot of my personality traits are more man-like. ambition, high libido. idk why cis girls are comfortable around me, I think they are wrong.
That’s interesting, I’d like to understand what you mean by them being wrong. Have you tried to give cis girls the information you think they’re lacking, or to talk about this explicitly with them? How do they react?
If they’re wrong to be comfortable around you and do it anyways, what kinds of harms are they incurring?
An example that comes to mind is that a few years ago, my friend (17F) was riding with me (23) on the subway from Berkeley back to San Francisco late at night, and she asked if she could stay over at my place instead of getting off at her stop so she didn’t have to walk half an hour alone in the middle of the night back to her place. This struck me as a profound misunderstanding of base rates of assault by strangers, and an underestimate of the relative danger of some “some person in the rationalist community who you have seen at like 3 meetups.”
Look I want people to trust me. But if I don’t earn that trust it feels like they’re being naiive, or devaluing my sexualness or cleverness or agency or something. I know it’s strictly good for me for people to think I am good and I really shouldn’t complain about it.
“some person in the rationalist community who you have seen at like 3 meetups.”
I think what’s being gestured at is that Sinclair may or may not have been referring to
the base rate of this being a bad idea
the base rate of this bad idea conditioning on genders xyz
An example of the variety of ways of thinking about this: Many women (often cis) I’ve talked to, among those who have standing distrust or bad priors on cis men, are very liberal about extending woman-level trust to trans women. That doesn’t mean they’re maximally trusting, just that they’re not more trusting of a cis woman they’ve seen at like three meetups than they are of a trans woman they’ve seen at like three meetups.
But really one and two are quite different sorts of claims, that I don’t think people agree about how the conditioning changes the game. However, I get the sense (not from this comment, but combining it with upstream Sinclair comments) that Sinclair thinks the person would be making less of a mistake if she had asked the same couchsurf favor of a cis woman.
I don’t think that cis women are harmless either. On one hand, women that are abusers tend to be more manipulative and isolating wheras men that are abusers tend to be more physical. And mayyybe that’s a neurotype thing that correlates with bio sex rather than hormonal gender or a cultural thing that is a product of gendered upbringing rather than gendered adult life. And mayyybe that meaningfully affects in what scenarios one ought to be wary of cis women vs trans women.
Feels a bit like an irresponsible speculation though.
Not putting forth a strong argument here, just clarifying my position.
This seems like you are either confessing on the public internet to committing assault, or treating a correct prediction as discrediting because of the strength of your prior against the idea that a woman might accurately evaluate a man as unlikely to assault her.
This comment seems like it will degrade quality of discourse enough (while not providing that much value) that additional comments like this would get escalating moderator action (e.g. rate limiting, bans). There is real content in this comment, but I expect the way the point was made will degrade conversations more than the value it adds. I also think the downvotes and this warning are adequate response for now.
To elaborate more, the comment seems likely to degrade discourse for the following combination of reasons:
The point is locally invalid. Sinclair’s comment could be interpreted as saying more than just one of those two things, and in fact neither was the intended meaning (see this comment by Raemon that Sinclair endorsed). As I understand it, Sinclair’s comment was about the relative priors of actually getting assaulted by someone you recently met vs on the street, not priors about a person’s ability to evaluate someone else, and also didn’t do anything that meaningfully would count as “admitting assault”. At the very most one could say “said they are the kind of person who might commit assault”. The “either/or” is invalid.
On top of being wrong (not itself a major crime), this comment contains a bad rhetorical pattern. “Either <incriminating option you very likely didn’t mean> or <wrong interpretation of thing you said>” is not the kind of interaction that leads to productive dialog in my models. The pattern is something like “giving credibility to your mainline intention by juxtaposing it with something definitely not intended, and put your interlocutor on the defensive”. It seems much better to say something like “you probably mean X, but I think that’s wrong”. I don’t know whether you intended the effects of this rhetorical pattern, but I think independently of your intention, it had bad effects on the conversation.
I originally had a third bullet here discussing accusations and their effects, but after chatting with Habryka this seems trickier to get right. Habryka will leave thoughts in his own comments on that below.
(I have some sense that Zack, whose post this comment appears under, might have a different take on the comment/response. In this case, Zack didn’t have custom moderation guidelines set so I’m responding from approximately “mainline site mod philosophy”, but if they had, I’d have factored that into my response.)
As I understand it, Sinclair’s comment was about the relative priors of actually getting assaulted by someone you recently met vs on the street, not priors about a person’s ability to evaluate someone else, and also didn’t do anything that meaningfully would count as “admitting assault”.
I don’t normally say this, but you’re not passing Benquo’s ideological Turing test.
The reason I don’t normally say this is because it’s a high bar; I don’t think having a deep understanding of your interlocutor’s position should be a prerequisite for arguing with them. (We can hope that someone will learn something in ensuing discussion, even if the critic didn’t get everything exactly right in their initial comment.)
But you’re not just arguing with Benquo, you’re threatening to censor him. (I claim that “threatening to censor” is a reasonable paraphrase of “additional comments like this would get escalating moderator action”.) If moderators censor arguments that they don’t understand, then our collective discourse doesn’t get a chance to process those arguments, which is contrary to the site’s mission.
Zack didn’t have custom moderation guidelines set so I’m responding from approximately “mainline site mod philosophy” but if they had, I’d have factored that into my response
The moderation guidelines in my account settings are explicitly set to “Easy Going — I just delete obvious spam and trolling.” Is your claim that Benquo’s comments constitute “obvious spam and trolling”, or that I shouldn’t have interpreted that menu option literally? Or something else? (I’m not claiming that the two possibilities I named are necessarily exhaustive.)
Also, the “I’m happy for site moderators to help enforce my policy” box in my account settings is not checked. Is there a way to express that I’m actively unhappy with site moderators helping enforce my policy?
I want to be part of an intellectual community where people like Benquo and Said Achmiz have free speech. I don’t always agree with everything they say, but I’ve learned a lot from both of them, and therefore consider myself to have a selfish interest in both of them having the liberty to say what they’re actually thinking in the words that come naturally to them, rather than looking over their shoulder trying to guess what the mods will allow as the kind of interaction that leads to productive dialogue in their models. I continue to be disappointed with the censorious attitudes of the Less Wrong 2.0 team, which I consider deeply anti-intellectual.
There’s more I could say, but between this post and tomorrow’s, I’m already over my drama budget for Q3, so I think it’s better that I don’t continue this discussion at this time.
Meta: totally understand being over your drama budget. I’ll attempt to keep this reply plain and only as much as necessary.
To clarify the mod guidelines situation better (and I acknowledge this is likely has not been explained before):
I think this comment falls into a category we’d by default moderate against even for people who’ve set “easy going”. However, I’m okay with not moderating something in this class if people on your posts have been given adequate heads up (e.g. moderation guidelines) that you’ve got different guidelines that the site as a whole. In particular, I’d want them to know what you’re allowing that LW team wouldn’t, e.g. all of Said’s commenting. Benquo’s commenting). (If you do this, I can confirm that I think you’ve warned people adequately according to my model of you.)
I don’t promise that the LW mod team will never moderate comments on your posts, even if you do this, but we’ll have a much higher bar for intervening. (This is something like a person is allowed to set the rules on their private property up to a certain limit.) Benquo’s comment here and Said’s behavior are things I’m okay with you inviting on your own posts. We might still have to step in if someone is being egregiously threatening, though I half-suspect you don’t want that either.
I won’t respond to the ITT point now to avoid further drama, unless you’d like me to.
Untangling your second alternative into ordinary language: he judged that she was making a bad judgement that was only accurate in the instant case by accident. Well, yes, that seems to be exactly what Sinclair is saying.
If someone keeps asking “why aren’t these women scared of me as a potential rapist?”, but isn’t actually raping any of them, well, there’s an obvious answer there—they’re using some information you’re not tracking - & it makes no sense not to propagate the confusion upstream to the ideology that causes you to make wrong statistical predictions about yourself that the people around you aren’t fooled by.
Not saying the obvious answer is sufficient on its own, but “what are they tracking that I’m not?” would be a reasonable epistemic response, and “people keep being wrong by accurately predicting my behavior when that goes against my ideology” is not.
The information they are using is that I am a woman, and therefore I am harmless because women are harmless.
(Ok, not always. Of the people that know me well, I’m sure they trust me because they witness me be a good person. Actually, I think people 80% process this subconsciously purely off vibes, like they find me funny and amicable and not creepy. )
I guess my objection is that people’s priors are actually wrong. Of all the people I have ever met that to my knowledge, have abused intimate partners or strongly crossed consent boundaries in sex/romance—all three are women. (Yes, it’s a bit unfair of me to refer to unverifiable claims. Also there’s some bias since my close social circle is mostly women. I am saying my position is not purely ideological but empirical.)
And like, it just feels kinda weird that I appear to society metaphysically different after passing as a woman? Like people are warmer to me and don’t cross the street if I’m walking behind them. It’s not because I think I’m dangerous now, but because I do not think I was meaningfully more dangerous back then when I was a guy, so people’s attitudes feel inaccurate.
(But I get that people are reasoning off of base rates vibing off of stereotypes so maybe it’s strategic.)
The information they are using is that I am a woman, and therefore I am harmless because women are harmless.
The streets of SF can be pretty dangerous late at night, lots of homeless people high on drugs, and I’ve had friends mugged in SF. Depending on which streets they are, I could easily prefer to sleep in the house of some random rationalist I met at a Berkeley event than walk half an hour through some scary SF streets at midnight.
Your assessment implies that the 17 year-old woman wouldn’t have made the same request if she’d read your gender as being a man, and that seems possible, but I personally don’t think it’d be that surprising to hear the same story from a 23 year-old guy (instead of from you).
Of all the people I have ever met that to my knowledge, have abused intimate partners or strongly crossed consent boundaries in sex/romance—all three are women.
If women are as dangerous as men or more, why do you feel the lack of fear towards you devalues your sexualness or cleverness or agency or something? I mean I can construct the reason given what you say, but it looks like a big confusing tower of gettier case indirection.
The information they are using is that I am a woman, and therefore I am harmless because women are harmless.
I think Ben’s point is that you don’t know that.
But insofar as this is what is going on, I suspect that one dynamic is roughly something like this: for their safety(?), women(?) don’t just want to directly evade threats, they also want to be seen as able to police threats. This is how someo receiving sexual info about you, or having certain sexual thoughts about you, are constructed as violations of you, as opposed to risk factors for future violations. For that, Schelling gender is what matters, which is why as your Schelling gender changes, you observe people acting differently towards you in a seemingly irrational way.
The way that they know is that they got to see the diff between how they were treated when they were presented as a man, and how they were treated when they presented as a woman?
As they say in the comment you’re responding to?
And like, it just feels kinda weird that I appear to society metaphysically different after passing as a woman? Like people are warmer to me and don’t cross the street if I’m walking behind them. It’s not because I think I’m dangerous now, but because I do not think I was meaningfully more dangerous back then when I was a guy, so people’s attitudes feel inaccurate.
And definitely that’s not an ironclad inference: it’s possible in principle that people started treating Sinclair differently for reasons independent of their shift in gender-presentation. But that’s pretty implausible on the face of it.
Your comment assumes that gender presentation translates directly into perception of gender (or, even, perception of sex, which is the vastly more important variable here!), but there is no reason at all for that assumption; indeed, it is precisely what I am questioning in the grandparent!
What do you think they might be tracking that Sinclair isn’t?
(Also, Sinclair made the comparison between staying with her and walking alone at night for half an hour. Her friend could just have been the friend being wrong about the risk of the latter. Do you think that’s what happened?
Also, maybe the risk of walking alone might not have been the real reason, maybe the friend just wanted more time with Sinclair. Sinclair, do you think that’s what happened?)
She was hoping to have sex with Sinclair, so theit sexual advances would not have been unwelcome.
Harassment from acquaintances of her social class is more common than stranger assault but much less likely to be severely bad—acquaintance assault is socially constrained and thin-tailed, stranger assault is deviant and fat-tailed—which is not adequately captured by the statistics.
She’s not the sort of person who can be easily traumatized by, or would have a hard time rejecting, unwanted advances.
Sinclair is in fact discernibly unlikely to assault her because they’re obviously nonaggressive, sex-repulsed, or something else one can pick up from a vibe.
Sinclair’s very small and she could just break Sinclair if she needed to.
Huh, I notice I casually used male pronouns here when I previously wasn’t especially inclined to. I guess this happened because I dropped politeness constraints to free up working memory for modeling the causal structure of the problem.
If this had been a lower-latency conversation with the implied greater capacity to make it awkward to ignore a legitimate question, my first reply would have been something like, “well, did you actually assault them? Seems like an important bit of information when assessing whether they made a mistake.” And instead of the most recent comment I’d have asked, “You identify as a woman. Do you think you are being naïve, or devaluing your sexualness or cleverness or agency? If so, why? If not, why?”
(which I think is still not quite enough to make it obvious he’s less dangerous than complete strangers on her way from the metro station back home unless she’s in a third-world country, but still)
I think there might be something important about pointing out “the way you’re handling the evidence here is weird”, but… this just seems false? (And, seems to me to be steering away from the actual most likely area of ‘what sort of things the commenter meant’ or, if the commenter is confused, ‘what sort of ways the commenter might be confused’)
(actually, I started writing this comment thinking you had a reasonable point just worded confusingly, but after thinking about it a bit I think your comment is just kinda ignoring the obvious point and making an unrelated point that doesn’t seem that relevant?)
I think it’s at least a coherent position that:
the likelihood of getting assaulted by a stranger on the street is quite low
the likelihood of getting assaulted by someone you recently met is also low (but, somewhat higher than the likelihood of getting assaulted by someone on the street)
In both cases it’s very unsurprising to not get assaulted, and it shouldn’t affect your baserate models very much. But if Alice wants someone she just met to accompany her home for safety, it’s a coherent position to think that, even if Bailey is quite confident they’re not going to assault Alice, they still thinks Alice is making a cognitive error in thinking that she is statistically more safe with someone in Bailey reference class.
(i.e. the error Bailey thinks Alice is making is not about how dangerous Bailey is, but about the relative danger between Bailey and A-Stranger-On-The-Street)
It’s possible that Bailey is ignoring channels of information that Alice has access to, and maybe Bailey should be attentive to that, but AFAICT there is nothing incoherent about the logic above. Or at least, you haven’t said anything to argue that the above logic isn’t sound, and it seems kinda nonsequitor-ish to bring up your alternate hypothesis without explaining why it’s not sound.
(I think an error Bailey / Sinclair might be making here is that it’s not just about risk of assault, it’s about risk of being harassed, and risk of harassment is actually pretty high even if risk of assault is low, and harassment a) does suck, b) happens noticeably less often when you’re in a group)
Yes, this is a good description of the point I was trying to make.
It’s possible I underestimate the suffering caused by being harassed since I think I don’t mind the milder forms of it (like being cat-called) as much as other people maybe. And more severe forms of harassment have not happened to me (yet?)
“why would you be afraid of walking at night? Doesn’t seem like bad things happen to me”
“I basically believe the narrative that women have more to worry about here than men, that thing are legitimately dangerous for women walking alone at night”
“I believe that, actually, violent crime at night is just quite rare, and I’ve heard [but not checked] that men are actually more likely to be violently attacked than women. And the ‘women have something to be scared about here that male-privilege obviates’ feels a bit off. And it feels impolitic to say, but, actually, it maybe is better for women to become more calibrated about their safety.”
“Women get harassed a lot more than men, and with each harassment instance one of the issues is that they have to model whether the harassment is likely to escalate to a violent conflict, which they’d probably be at a physical disadvantage in (and regardless, having to escalate to ‘be ready to fight’ is really scary). But, I still think people are overestimating this danger – most harassment doesn’t escalate to conflict. In Berkeley I have homeless people come up and yell at me a lot, and I feel an initial jolt of fear, but then try to shrug and move on, and I think this would be correct for women to do too.”
“Hmm, actually, some of the harassment I’m seeing / hearing about actually sounds pretty bad, somewhere in between catcalling and violent conflict, and I’m now not sure what to think about the base rates here.”
(The last update came from hearing from a female friend who described herself living in “a bad neighborhood”, and having a bunch of late-night safety habits that seemed excessive to me. But it turned out they had multiple instances of people following them to their house, masturbating ‘at them’ through their fence, and coming up to their front door and banging on it loudly, which were all more extreme than I had encountered before and updated me more towards a more legit Different Worlds hypothesis)
This seems like you are either confessing on the public internet to [some unspecified but grossly immoral act], or establishing a false dichotomy where the first option is both obviously false and socially unacceptable to admit to, and the second is the possible but not necessarily correct interpretation of the parent’s comment that you actually want them to admit to.
Anyways, there are of course coherent construals other than the two you presented, like “the prediction was miscalibrated given how much evidence she had, but it turned out fine because base rates on both sides are really quite low”.
ETA: I disendorse the posture (though not implied content) of the half of this comment.
The comment reported a trend of accurate appraisals characterized as mistakes, with an illustrative anecdote, not an isolated event. Other parts of the comment, like the bit about how not treating them as a likely assailant is “devaluing my sexualness or cleverness or agency” implies an identification of agency with unprovoked assault. This is not ambiguous at all. It seems like on balance people think that politeness calls for pretending not to understand when someone says very overtly that they mean people ill, want to be perceived as violent and aggressive, etc, up until it’s time to scapegoat them.
Alternatively, agency implies the potential to transgress. Evaluating someone as not a threat to transgress is making a statement about the conjunction of their capabilities and motives, not motives alone, and someone might have an interest in protecting their reputation as capable, even at the cost of creating uncertainty about their good intent?
While I partially share your confusion about “implies an identification of agency with unprovoked assault”, I thought Sinclair was talking mostly about “your risk of being seduced, being into it at the time, then regretting it later” and it would only relate to harassment or assault as a kind of tail case.
I think some high libido / high sexual agency people learn to consider seducing someone very effectively in ways that seem to go well but the person would not endorse at CEV a morally relevant failure mode, say 1% bad setting 100% at some rape outcome. Others of course say this is an unhinged symptom of scrupulosity disease and anyone who blames you for not being able to CEV someone against their stated preferences needs to be more reasonable. But clearly this distinction is an attack surface when we talk about asymmetries like power, age, status, money. You can construct scenarios where it seems worse than 1% bad!
Regardless, I think the idea that people (especially women) are sometimes defensive not about their boundaries being violated, but about their consent not being endorsed later explains a lot of human behavior (or at least, like, the society/culture I know).
For what it’s worth, I agree that the comment you’re responding to has some embedded claims which aren’t justified in text, but they’re not claims which are false by construction, and you haven’t presented any reason to believe that they’re false.
They imply irrationality via failure to investigate a confusion, so I thought it was within scope on a rationality improvement forum to point that out. Since there exists an alternative coherent construal I thought it was good practice to acknowledge that as well.
I read RobertM as apophatially saying that Benquo could be confessing to something with Benquo’s comment, and Benquo asking what Benquo is allegedly confessing to.
Yes. It seems like RobertM is trying to appeal to some idea about fair play, by saying that people shouldn’t make even disjunctive hypothetical accusations because they wouldn’t like it if someone did that to them. But it seems relevant to evaluating that fairness claim that some accusations are discernibly more justified than others, and in this case RobertM seems not to have been able to think of any plausible crimes to disjunctively accuse me of. I am perplexed as to how “true accusations are better than false ones and you can discover by thinking and investigating which statements are more likely to be true and which are more likely to be wrong” seems to have almost fallen out of the Overton window for some important subset of cases on less wrong dot com, but that seems to be where we are.
I read Robert as accusing you of attempting a rhetorical trick in which, by making a disjunctive accusation where one of the disjuncts is shocking[1] and grave, you algorithmically intend to intimidate people into accepting the other disjunct, which they would be less likely to do if you argued for it on its own merits rather than pairing it with the shocking disjunct. I don’t think you would be getting this pushback if you had said, “Maybe she’s a good judge of character; after all, every time she judges a man to be safe and is correct, that’s some amount of probabilistic evidence that she’s capable of making such distinctions rather than being tied to base rates.”
(I feel bad about being in the “tone police” role here, and anticipate that you have reasons why the “Maybe she’s a good judge of character” alternative in fact omits important substantive criticisms you mean to make, but this comment still seems good to post, because I think your diagnosis of the relevant defect in site culture being a denial of “true accusations are better than false ones” is off-base.)
I feel bad about being in the “tone police” role here,
I’m more objected to Benquo’s comment on grounds of it being false, or at least not engaging with what Sinclair obviously meant, than about tone. [edit: er, I guess I also think that giving a false dichotomy to make a point seem persuasive seems to fall under “deception” rather than tone and I don’t think you need to bring tone into the question to object to the comment].
I do think a pretty valuable I’ve gotten a lot from Benquo over the years has been reframings of things in ways that make me engage with something that my natural frame glossed over. But, in this case I think his implied point just… doesn’t seem logically valid and is kinda offtopic? Or at least he hasn’t made the case for it. (I think “maybe she’s a good judge of character?” is still missing the point of what Sinclair pretty obviously meant. If the base rates are low, the dice coming up negative isn’t a very interesting outcome in the first place and you shouldn’t be updating [edit] much [/edit] from a single instance)
(I separately think Robert’s comment wasn’t very good either, doesn’t quite check out even as a clever quip, and he probably should have resisted the urge to get partial credit for “not being clever”)
I am, to be clear, actively interested in Benquo engaging with the base rates question and explaining why his frame here is useful in spite of that background fact.
Yeah true, but I’d reword as “shouldn’t be updating much from a single instance”, and I think concretely it shouldn’t be enough of an update to substantially privilege hypotheses like “Sinclair is making some kind of cognitive error here”.
(My actual guess is that Benquo has a background frame/hypothesis like “People frequently underweight their own personal intuitions over statistics [or, vaguely assumed ‘statistics’ that they probably don’t even have a citation for and if they looked up the study it might not even say what they thought it said].” And, like, I totally think this might be true and relevant and worth having privileged anyway, but I don’t think Sinclair’s anecdote is evidence for or particularly illustrative of it)
Yes, that’s what the first half of my comment was intended to convey. I disendorse the way I communicated that (since it was both unclear and provocative).
I’m complying with Sinclair’s explicit preference to be treated as someone who might possibly do crimes, by not censoring the flow of credence from “people who don’t expect me to do crimes to them are making a mistake” to “I have done crimes to such people.” You are asking me to do exactly what Sinclair complained about and assume that they’re necessarily harmless, or to pretend to do this.
I think this is a class of situation where people prefer obfuscation: the preference is not for you to assume that the subject is harmless, but to take actions that merely imply that the subject might not be harmless without explicitly spelling out the “subject is harmful” disjunct, such that the message slips past a System 1 scapegoating circuit while System 2 can piece together what it needs to know. Implying something without stating it isn’t the same thing as pretending the opposite.
Thinking about it a bit more, I have a more direct answer:
The info cis girls lack is that I am highly sexual, into girls, and am formerly a guy. A tasteful, tactful, and succinct way to provide this information is to dress in a way that is stereotypically slutty, lesbian, and trans. I follow this aesthetic to some degree already. If I really cared I could just follow it more.
My guess based on the information available is the woman in your example made the right call mathematically, but you’re plausibly pointing to something real in how the way cis women treated you changed after gender transition. I’m really curious to hear more about that, without necessarily buying into your risk analysis about this situation in particular.
before I transitioned, women were more likely to cross the street if i walk behind them, more likely to be cagey if I ask to hang out, less cordial overall in conversation, spoke in lower pitch.
the last one is probably mimicry, and some confounders are that i was depressed at the time and semi-religious university was a very different environment than SF bay rationalists
I’m not convinced that clothes are an unambiguous signal, and just saying so might be clearer. That said, once you send this signal to cis girls, do they change their behavior? If not, I doubt this is important info that they were actually lacking.
no, but it is a faster signal, and idk it feels like the right “type” of message, being a vibes based thing that does not require conscious discussion or deliberation. attention is a valuable resource! I have ever discussed weird gender thoughts with my friends, some of whom are cis women.
I think people in college treated me differently for looking queer and people in my adult life in berkeley / SF don’t. hard to tell tho
okay the unhinged rant I actually wanted to respond with is:
- this post is tooo looong
- I think you’re crazy to not update on evidence sooner, you blame rationality but you should instead focus on how you could’ve done better
- yeah ok maybe I got lucky by being born later, but you read Thing of Things just like I did and you read way more stuff.
- like you, as a kid I thought gender is fake, it’s like a costume, or a mass hallucination. now as a wise adult I realize … it’s only like 80% fake. but it’s still plenty fake.
- it’s my right to ask to be in female spaces and their right to say no
- unless asking is expensive or not possible in which case I just do whatever I want and hope to get away with it, because society needs more doers. despite having boobs, sometimes I’ll use male restrooms if I think I can do it fast enough because urinals are actually better technology and lines on women’s restrooms are longer.
- it’s your right to “misgender” people and their right to uninvite you to things if it hurts their feelings
- sure, I guess a lot of my personality traits are more man-like. ambition, high libido. idk why cis girls are comfortable around me, I think they are wrong. maybe this is being an “AGP male” or maybe it is being a “nonbinary person that presents mostly female.”
- which definition is better? that is a political, aesthetic, cultural question.
- my preferred aesthetics/culture focus on the morphological freedom the most, is progress-ive, accelerationist, pro-technology, pro-freedom. I think it says that the optimal language has no gendered pronouns, titles, and that gendered nouns should be longer than their genderless counterparts; and if speaking in a suboptimal language just say whatever will actually be understood; whatever creates truth in the audience’s heads.
- but the actual answer to political/cultural/questions is usually idk it’s a matter of taste do whatever it doesn’t matter.
Don’t focus on being opposed to rationalist culture or woke culture. Reversed stupidity isn’t intelligence. Focus on being the best, and helping other people be the best. I liked the one sentence in your post about how the narrative should be about maximizing gender euphoria and minimizing gender dysphoria, and I particularly disagreed the parts about reactionaries being right and whig history being wrong. I want to hype up the progress-ive, accelerationist, pro-technology, pro-freedom political view that the more people can be the kinds of people they want to be, the better. The rest is just tradeoffs and distractions. Parts of your post sound like they agree with that, and I think focusing on that part the most is what will make you happier and the world better.
In the context of the HSTS/AGPTS typology, I don’t think ambition and libido are what matters much. For instance, an often-discussed phenomenon is that HSTSs have basically similar sexuality to gay men. (HRT might reduce the libido for HSTSs, but it would also reduce the libido for AGPTSs.)
I’m confused about gender differences in ambition. Some people like to make it a temperamental thing, like with men being more generally prone to taking charge across situations, but actually assertive personality has a fairly small gender difference and mostly boils down to extraversion.
I think when people talk about gender differences in ambition, they usually think something like CEOs with long working hours being mostly male, and stay-at-home spouses who raise children being mostly female. This doesn’t really square with traditionally discussed psychometric gender differences; for instance being a CEO is to the “people” side of the people-things dichotomy, despite being a male-skewed job.
I also suspect it doesn’t really correlate with HSTS/AGPTS much; I remember one time in a trans/GC debate sub, someone posted a link of the top most influential trans people, and asked why the business leaders were mostly trans women. I was about to give a typology-based answer, until I noticed that a fairly big fraction of them where HSTSs leading make-up brands.
My pet theory is that the gender differences in “ambition” doesn’t originate from psychological traits, but instead from physiology. Women are capable of bearing children, but it takes out a big chunk of their time to do so (especially if one doesn’t go out of one’s way to equalize parenting time). Because the state does a combination of liberating and expropriating mothers’ children’s productivity rather than protecting them as property (i.e. mothers don’t get to keep their children as slaves; instead they are free to run their own lives, though with a big chunk of their income taxed away), women don’t capture the economic value that they create here, and this leads to them falling behind in economic competition.
I think this predicts/explains a lack of HSTS/AGPTS difference in ambition too.
If AGP/HSTS isn’t about gendered personality traits, then what is it about? What do you think the model predicts? The input of the model is early onset vs late onset? And the output is, if not differences in temperament or libido, then … attraction to men vs women?
I think there are very different CEOs for very different companies. Object level: if I were to be a founder, I’d want to get better at leading, inspiring, listening to people; but I’d be very strong at product and visual design (culturally fem coded???) and pretty good at building the thing (culturally male coded?). But like there is this whole concept of a “technical founder” and a lot of those shape rotators are successful.
(is product even a fem thing? if product is about understanding users, then it’s about people, but if being a PM is about working with metrics than it’s about math. idk maybe accomplishing hard things in the real world requires getting good at everything.)
what list of trans executives are you looking at? google is failing me and off the top of my head is just the lady that made SiriusXM (satellite radio for cars) and is trying to make a robot replica of her wife.
One phrasing I like replacing Blanchardianism or HSTS/AGPTS with because it is more pragmatic and transparent with regards to how the typology is actually used and what it predicts is pragmatic/disruptive transsexuality. The idea being that in each context, there are some ways one can be that are more practical and some that are more disruptive, and it turns out most of these correlate with each other.
Some contexts in which one can be unpragmatic:
Family: a) one’s long-term partner may lose attraction, leading to breakup, and potentially also divorce, b) if one has children, they’ll have to adjust to the divorce and to the trans parent’s new presentation, c) transition can cost a lot of money that could otherwise have been spent on the family
People who knew them before transition: a) it can be a big, surprising change in appearance and behavior, b) it can interfere with reminiscing about how the trans woman was like prior to transitioning
Clinicians: a) it may be hard to grasp the motivations of trans women, b) trans women may enter a bunch of difficult situations due to their transition, and it may be hard to give them ideas for how to handle it
Peripheral: a) trans women may fail to aesthetically pass as female, making them stick out
Women: a) trans women may ask to enter women’s private spaces like bathrooms which could be seen as protecting them against sexual assault, even though trans women may not have a lower sexual violence propensity than cis men, b) trans women may fail to appreciate the extent to which women are constrained by relationships with men and reproduction, due to not having the same constraints
Ideology: a) trans women may adopt radical positions as to how gender should work, b) people may try to infer aspects of how gender and sexuality works from trans women, even in cases where it won’t generalize
LGB people: a) trans women may have undesirable impacts on the culture of LGB groups, as e.g. maybe some of them disagree with trans politics and don’t want LGB groups to push it, b) or on the composition of LGB groups, e.g. if 1% of females are lesbian women, and 0.3% of males are transbians and bisexual trans women, then that has the potential to be 23% of participants in lesbian dating communities being MtFs (and this could be higher or lower depending on local variation), c) the many difficulties trans women might face might alienate people from LGBT politics in general
This doesn’t cover everything because there are cases where I think HSTSs would be more disruptive, e.g. trapping. And some of it is kind of old-school, but so is Blanchardianism so I think it is still relevant.
Analyzing this, in some cases a substantial part of the disruptiveness is directly downstream of sexual orientation. For instance gay men are unlikely to have children and likely to have more egalitarian relationships, so 1b and 1c are not so relevant. Until recently, gay marriage wasn’t even a thing, so 1a was more limited, and also for various reasons HSTSs transition younger so they’re gonna have less built up in the first place.
With regards to 2, I think it mainly comes down to aesthetic femininity (e.g. being short, having feminine mannerisms, wearing makeup, etc.) prior to transitioning. The relationship between this and homosexuality is unclear; some constructionists might prefer to think of this in terms of homosexual males facing less gender norms, but I don’t really buy that. For some things there may be a straightforward biological element of them being innately more feminine, or there may be selection effects. Idk. Whatever the answer is, it likely also explains 4.
With regards to 3, I think this mostly arises as a result of all of the other factors. Though also 3 has become less of a thing due to most trans women being AGP, which means a degree of adaptation has happened. (But this leads to some HSTSs complaining that they get treated like AGPTSs by clinicians.)
Points 5 and 7b seem directly downstream of sexual orientation.
Point 6a might be a filter or self-interest effect, combined with the struggles associated with the other points. Like if AGPTSs have a bunch of difficulties then it makes sense they would have positions that blame these difficulties externally, and which propose they should get help to mitigate them. I suspect maybe internalized homophobia plays a role; HSTSs might feel that they can escape “being gay” by transitioning. Point 6b may be influenced by all sorts of things.
Part of the issue with point 7 is just a question of scale. There’s very few trans women, but LGB people are also rare (especially lesbian women), so the proportional impact is bigger there. The same applies to trans women in mostly male spaces, e.g. rationalists, or Rust programmers. Like if most woman-identifying Rust programmers are MtF, then groups for women in Rust are probably gonna push for MtF interests to a similar proportion that they push for female interests.
So, overall my take is that the typology is mostly down to the direct effects of sexual orientation, as well as the greater tendency of gay men to be aesthetically feminine, such as doing drag, having effeminate mannerisms, playing princess as a child, etc.. (I think most Blanchardians would disagree with me on that because they are essentialists/dogmatists.)
Not sure, it was years ago on some very low-quality website.
Perhaps uncharitable, but I’m rounding off your position to “society treats young transitioners vs old transitioners differently—and this influences their culture. There isn’t a bio effect except insofar that transitioning late makes a trans woman gayer, have more masculine physical traits, and is less life timing convenient; and all those things influence how society sees and treats her.”
Not unsimilar to the “typology” between bears and twinks; or among lesbians in asia, toms and dees; in that they are complicated, mostly cultural phenomena.
I think the causality goes the other direction, with the difference in sexual orientation being present from birth.
I also think some psychological traits are innately feminized in HSTSs compared to AGPTSs, just not assertiveness or libido. But at least including the traits where gay men are generally feminine compared to straight men.
That’s interesting, I’d like to understand what you mean by them being wrong. Have you tried to give cis girls the information you think they’re lacking, or to talk about this explicitly with them? How do they react?
If they’re wrong to be comfortable around you and do it anyways, what kinds of harms are they incurring?
An example that comes to mind is that a few years ago, my friend (17F) was riding with me (23) on the subway from Berkeley back to San Francisco late at night, and she asked if she could stay over at my place instead of getting off at her stop so she didn’t have to walk half an hour alone in the middle of the night back to her place. This struck me as a profound misunderstanding of base rates of assault by strangers, and an underestimate of the relative danger of some “some person in the rationalist community who you have seen at like 3 meetups.”
Look I want people to trust me. But if I don’t earn that trust it feels like they’re being naiive, or devaluing my sexualness or cleverness or agency or something. I know it’s strictly good for me for people to think I am good and I really shouldn’t complain about it.
I think what’s being gestured at is that Sinclair may or may not have been referring to
the base rate of this being a bad idea
the base rate of this bad idea conditioning on genders xyz
An example of the variety of ways of thinking about this: Many women (often cis) I’ve talked to, among those who have standing distrust or bad priors on cis men, are very liberal about extending woman-level trust to trans women. That doesn’t mean they’re maximally trusting, just that they’re not more trusting of a cis woman they’ve seen at like three meetups than they are of a trans woman they’ve seen at like three meetups.
But really one and two are quite different sorts of claims, that I don’t think people agree about how the conditioning changes the game. However, I get the sense (not from this comment, but combining it with upstream Sinclair comments) that Sinclair thinks the person would be making less of a mistake if she had asked the same couchsurf favor of a cis woman.
I don’t think that cis women are harmless either. On one hand, women that are abusers tend to be more manipulative and isolating wheras men that are abusers tend to be more physical. And mayyybe that’s a neurotype thing that correlates with bio sex rather than hormonal gender or a cultural thing that is a product of gendered upbringing rather than gendered adult life. And mayyybe that meaningfully affects in what scenarios one ought to be wary of cis women vs trans women.
Feels a bit like an irresponsible speculation though.
Not putting forth a strong argument here, just clarifying my position.
https://www.theonion.com/why-do-all-these-homosexuals-keep-sucking-my-cock-1819583529 https://www.theonion.com/why-cant-anyone-tell-im-wearing-this-business-suit-iron-1819584239
This seems like you are either confessing on the public internet to committing assault, or treating a correct prediction as discrediting because of the strength of your prior against the idea that a woman might accurately evaluate a man as unlikely to assault her.
This comment seems like it will degrade quality of discourse enough (while not providing that much value) that additional comments like this would get escalating moderator action (e.g. rate limiting, bans). There is real content in this comment, but I expect the way the point was made will degrade conversations more than the value it adds. I also think the downvotes and this warning are adequate response for now.
To elaborate more, the comment seems likely to degrade discourse for the following combination of reasons:
The point is locally invalid. Sinclair’s comment could be interpreted as saying more than just one of those two things, and in fact neither was the intended meaning (see this comment by Raemon that Sinclair endorsed). As I understand it, Sinclair’s comment was about the relative priors of actually getting assaulted by someone you recently met vs on the street, not priors about a person’s ability to evaluate someone else, and also didn’t do anything that meaningfully would count as “admitting assault”. At the very most one could say “said they are the kind of person who might commit assault”. The “either/or” is invalid.
On top of being wrong (not itself a major crime), this comment contains a bad rhetorical pattern. “Either <incriminating option you very likely didn’t mean> or <wrong interpretation of thing you said>” is not the kind of interaction that leads to productive dialog in my models. The pattern is something like “giving credibility to your mainline intention by juxtaposing it with something definitely not intended, and put your interlocutor on the defensive”. It seems much better to say something like “you probably mean X, but I think that’s wrong”. I don’t know whether you intended the effects of this rhetorical pattern, but I think independently of your intention, it had bad effects on the conversation.
I originally had a third bullet here discussing accusations and their effects, but after chatting with Habryka this seems trickier to get right. Habryka will leave thoughts in his own comments on that below.
(I have some sense that Zack, whose post this comment appears under, might have a different take on the comment/response. In this case, Zack didn’t have custom moderation guidelines set so I’m responding from approximately “mainline site mod philosophy”, but if they had, I’d have factored that into my response.)
I don’t normally say this, but you’re not passing Benquo’s ideological Turing test.
The reason I don’t normally say this is because it’s a high bar; I don’t think having a deep understanding of your interlocutor’s position should be a prerequisite for arguing with them. (We can hope that someone will learn something in ensuing discussion, even if the critic didn’t get everything exactly right in their initial comment.)
But you’re not just arguing with Benquo, you’re threatening to censor him. (I claim that “threatening to censor” is a reasonable paraphrase of “additional comments like this would get escalating moderator action”.) If moderators censor arguments that they don’t understand, then our collective discourse doesn’t get a chance to process those arguments, which is contrary to the site’s mission.
The moderation guidelines in my account settings are explicitly set to “Easy Going — I just delete obvious spam and trolling.” Is your claim that Benquo’s comments constitute “obvious spam and trolling”, or that I shouldn’t have interpreted that menu option literally? Or something else? (I’m not claiming that the two possibilities I named are necessarily exhaustive.)
Also, the “I’m happy for site moderators to help enforce my policy” box in my account settings is not checked. Is there a way to express that I’m actively unhappy with site moderators helping enforce my policy?
I want to be part of an intellectual community where people like Benquo and Said Achmiz have free speech. I don’t always agree with everything they say, but I’ve learned a lot from both of them, and therefore consider myself to have a selfish interest in both of them having the liberty to say what they’re actually thinking in the words that come naturally to them, rather than looking over their shoulder trying to guess what the mods will allow as the kind of interaction that leads to productive dialogue in their models. I continue to be disappointed with the censorious attitudes of the Less Wrong 2.0 team, which I consider deeply anti-intellectual.
There’s more I could say, but between this post and tomorrow’s, I’m already over my drama budget for Q3, so I think it’s better that I don’t continue this discussion at this time.
Meta: totally understand being over your drama budget. I’ll attempt to keep this reply plain and only as much as necessary.
To clarify the mod guidelines situation better (and I acknowledge this is likely has not been explained before):
I think this comment falls into a category we’d by default moderate against even for people who’ve set “easy going”. However, I’m okay with not moderating something in this class if people on your posts have been given adequate heads up (e.g. moderation guidelines) that you’ve got different guidelines that the site as a whole. In particular, I’d want them to know what you’re allowing that LW team wouldn’t, e.g. all of Said’s commenting. Benquo’s commenting). (If you do this, I can confirm that I think you’ve warned people adequately according to my model of you.)
I don’t promise that the LW mod team will never moderate comments on your posts, even if you do this, but we’ll have a much higher bar for intervening. (This is something like a person is allowed to set the rules on their private property up to a certain limit.) Benquo’s comment here and Said’s behavior are things I’m okay with you inviting on your own posts. We might still have to step in if someone is being egregiously threatening, though I half-suspect you don’t want that either.
I won’t respond to the ITT point now to avoid further drama, unless you’d like me to.
lol no to the former
Untangling your second alternative into ordinary language: he judged that she was making a bad judgement that was only accurate in the instant case by accident. Well, yes, that seems to be exactly what Sinclair is saying.
If someone keeps asking “why aren’t these women scared of me as a potential rapist?”, but isn’t actually raping any of them, well, there’s an obvious answer there—they’re using some information you’re not tracking - & it makes no sense not to propagate the confusion upstream to the ideology that causes you to make wrong statistical predictions about yourself that the people around you aren’t fooled by.
Not saying the obvious answer is sufficient on its own, but “what are they tracking that I’m not?” would be a reasonable epistemic response, and “people keep being wrong by accurately predicting my behavior when that goes against my ideology” is not.
The information they are using is that I am a woman, and therefore I am harmless because women are harmless.
(Ok, not always. Of the people that know me well, I’m sure they trust me because they witness me be a good person. Actually, I think people 80% process this subconsciously purely off vibes, like they find me funny and amicable and not creepy. )
I guess my objection is that people’s priors are actually wrong. Of all the people I have ever met that to my knowledge, have abused intimate partners or strongly crossed consent boundaries in sex/romance—all three are women. (Yes, it’s a bit unfair of me to refer to unverifiable claims. Also there’s some bias since my close social circle is mostly women. I am saying my position is not purely ideological but empirical.)
And like, it just feels kinda weird that I appear to society metaphysically different after passing as a woman? Like people are warmer to me and don’t cross the street if I’m walking behind them. It’s not because I think I’m dangerous now, but because I do not think I was meaningfully more dangerous back then when I was a guy, so people’s attitudes feel inaccurate.
(But I get that people are
reasoning off of base ratesvibing off of stereotypes so maybe it’s strategic.)The streets of SF can be pretty dangerous late at night, lots of homeless people high on drugs, and I’ve had friends mugged in SF. Depending on which streets they are, I could easily prefer to sleep in the house of some random rationalist I met at a Berkeley event than walk half an hour through some scary SF streets at midnight.
Your assessment implies that the 17 year-old woman wouldn’t have made the same request if she’d read your gender as being a man, and that seems possible, but I personally don’t think it’d be that surprising to hear the same story from a 23 year-old guy (instead of from you).
If women are as dangerous as men or more, why do you feel the lack of fear towards you devalues your sexualness or cleverness or agency or something? I mean I can construct the reason given what you say, but it looks like a big confusing tower of gettier case indirection.
I think Ben’s point is that you don’t know that.
But insofar as this is what is going on, I suspect that one dynamic is roughly something like this: for their safety(?), women(?) don’t just want to directly evade threats, they also want to be seen as able to police threats. This is how someo receiving sexual info about you, or having certain sexual thoughts about you, are constructed as violations of you, as opposed to risk factors for future violations. For that, Schelling gender is what matters, which is why as your Schelling gender changes, you observe people acting differently towards you in a seemingly irrational way.
(Note that I’m being coy about something here)
How do you know?
Did these women say that they perceive you as harmless because you’re a woman?
Perhaps they simply perceive you as a harmless man.
(And maybe that’s what upsets you about this whole thing?)
The way that they know is that they got to see the diff between how they were treated when they were presented as a man, and how they were treated when they presented as a woman?
As they say in the comment you’re responding to?
And definitely that’s not an ironclad inference: it’s possible in principle that people started treating Sinclair differently for reasons independent of their shift in gender-presentation. But that’s pretty implausible on the face of it.
Your comment assumes that gender presentation translates directly into perception of gender (or, even, perception of sex, which is the vastly more important variable here!), but there is no reason at all for that assumption; indeed, it is precisely what I am questioning in the grandparent!
Sinclair:
Yourself:
I think you’re on a frolic of your own here.
.
What do you think they might be tracking that Sinclair isn’t?
(Also, Sinclair made the comparison between staying with her and walking alone at night for half an hour. Her friend could just have been the friend being wrong about the risk of the latter. Do you think that’s what happened? Also, maybe the risk of walking alone might not have been the real reason, maybe the friend just wanted more time with Sinclair. Sinclair, do you think that’s what happened?)
Examples of info she might have had:
She was hoping to have sex with Sinclair, so theit sexual advances would not have been unwelcome.
Harassment from acquaintances of her social class is more common than stranger assault but much less likely to be severely bad—acquaintance assault is socially constrained and thin-tailed, stranger assault is deviant and fat-tailed—which is not adequately captured by the statistics.
She’s not the sort of person who can be easily traumatized by, or would have a hard time rejecting, unwanted advances.
Sinclair is in fact discernibly unlikely to assault her because they’re obviously nonaggressive, sex-repulsed, or something else one can pick up from a vibe.
Sinclair’s very small and she could just break Sinclair if she needed to.
Huh, I notice I casually used male pronouns here when I previously wasn’t especially inclined to. I guess this happened because I dropped politeness constraints to free up working memory for modeling the causal structure of the problem.
If this had been a lower-latency conversation with the implied greater capacity to make it awkward to ignore a legitimate question, my first reply would have been something like, “well, did you actually assault them? Seems like an important bit of information when assessing whether they made a mistake.” And instead of the most recent comment I’d have asked, “You identify as a woman. Do you think you are being naïve, or devaluing your sexualness or cleverness or agency? If so, why? If not, why?”
e.g. his demeanor, and the way other people at the meetups who’ve known him for longer than she has treat him
(which I think is still not quite enough to make it obvious he’s less dangerous than complete strangers on her way from the metro station back home unless she’s in a third-world country, but still)
the story is intentionally vague to not leak personal info
but yes, I did think and continue to think that she enjoyed spending time with me.
How likely do you think the first half of your disjunction is to be true?
Not very, but it’s the only coherent construal.
I think there might be something important about pointing out “the way you’re handling the evidence here is weird”, but… this just seems false? (And, seems to me to be steering away from the actual most likely area of ‘what sort of things the commenter meant’ or, if the commenter is confused, ‘what sort of ways the commenter might be confused’)
(actually, I started writing this comment thinking you had a reasonable point just worded confusingly, but after thinking about it a bit I think your comment is just kinda ignoring the obvious point and making an unrelated point that doesn’t seem that relevant?)
I think it’s at least a coherent position that:
the likelihood of getting assaulted by a stranger on the street is quite low
the likelihood of getting assaulted by someone you recently met is also low (but, somewhat higher than the likelihood of getting assaulted by someone on the street)
In both cases it’s very unsurprising to not get assaulted, and it shouldn’t affect your baserate models very much. But if Alice wants someone she just met to accompany her home for safety, it’s a coherent position to think that, even if Bailey is quite confident they’re not going to assault Alice, they still thinks Alice is making a cognitive error in thinking that she is statistically more safe with someone in Bailey reference class.
(i.e. the error Bailey thinks Alice is making is not about how dangerous Bailey is, but about the relative danger between Bailey and A-Stranger-On-The-Street)
It’s possible that Bailey is ignoring channels of information that Alice has access to, and maybe Bailey should be attentive to that, but AFAICT there is nothing incoherent about the logic above. Or at least, you haven’t said anything to argue that the above logic isn’t sound, and it seems kinda nonsequitor-ish to bring up your alternate hypothesis without explaining why it’s not sound.
(I think an error Bailey / Sinclair might be making here is that it’s not just about risk of assault, it’s about risk of being harassed, and risk of harassment is actually pretty high even if risk of assault is low, and harassment a) does suck, b) happens noticeably less often when you’re in a group)
Yes, this is a good description of the point I was trying to make.
It’s possible I underestimate the suffering caused by being harassed since I think I don’t mind the milder forms of it (like being cat-called) as much as other people maybe. And more severe forms of harassment have not happened to me (yet?)
I’ve gone through a few phases of beliefs here:
“why would you be afraid of walking at night? Doesn’t seem like bad things happen to me”
“I basically believe the narrative that women have more to worry about here than men, that thing are legitimately dangerous for women walking alone at night”
“I believe that, actually, violent crime at night is just quite rare, and I’ve heard [but not checked] that men are actually more likely to be violently attacked than women. And the ‘women have something to be scared about here that male-privilege obviates’ feels a bit off. And it feels impolitic to say, but, actually, it maybe is better for women to become more calibrated about their safety.”
“Women get harassed a lot more than men, and with each harassment instance one of the issues is that they have to model whether the harassment is likely to escalate to a violent conflict, which they’d probably be at a physical disadvantage in (and regardless, having to escalate to ‘be ready to fight’ is really scary). But, I still think people are overestimating this danger – most harassment doesn’t escalate to conflict. In Berkeley I have homeless people come up and yell at me a lot, and I feel an initial jolt of fear, but then try to shrug and move on, and I think this would be correct for women to do too.”
“Hmm, actually, some of the harassment I’m seeing / hearing about actually sounds pretty bad, somewhere in between catcalling and violent conflict, and I’m now not sure what to think about the base rates here.”
(The last update came from hearing from a female friend who described herself living in “a bad neighborhood”, and having a bunch of late-night safety habits that seemed excessive to me. But it turned out they had multiple instances of people following them to their house, masturbating ‘at them’ through their fence, and coming up to their front door and banging on it loudly, which were all more extreme than I had encountered before and updated me more towards a more legit Different Worlds hypothesis)
If I was being clever, I might say:Anyways, there are of course coherent construals other than the two you presented, like “the prediction was miscalibrated given how much evidence she had, but it turned out fine because base rates on both sides are really quite low”.
ETA: I disendorse the posture (though not implied content) of the half of this comment.
The comment reported a trend of accurate appraisals characterized as mistakes, with an illustrative anecdote, not an isolated event. Other parts of the comment, like the bit about how not treating them as a likely assailant is “devaluing my sexualness or cleverness or agency” implies an identification of agency with unprovoked assault. This is not ambiguous at all. It seems like on balance people think that politeness calls for pretending not to understand when someone says very overtly that they mean people ill, want to be perceived as violent and aggressive, etc, up until it’s time to scapegoat them.
Alternatively, agency implies the potential to transgress. Evaluating someone as not a threat to transgress is making a statement about the conjunction of their capabilities and motives, not motives alone, and someone might have an interest in protecting their reputation as capable, even at the cost of creating uncertainty about their good intent?
Wouldn’t that imply more upside than downside in staying over?
While I partially share your confusion about “implies an identification of agency with unprovoked assault”, I thought Sinclair was talking mostly about “your risk of being seduced, being into it at the time, then regretting it later” and it would only relate to harassment or assault as a kind of tail case.
I think some high libido / high sexual agency people learn to consider seducing someone very effectively in ways that seem to go well but the person would not endorse at CEV a morally relevant failure mode, say 1% bad setting 100% at some rape outcome. Others of course say this is an unhinged symptom of scrupulosity disease and anyone who blames you for not being able to CEV someone against their stated preferences needs to be more reasonable. But clearly this distinction is an attack surface when we talk about asymmetries like power, age, status, money. You can construct scenarios where it seems worse than 1% bad!
Regardless, I think the idea that people (especially women) are sometimes defensive not about their boundaries being violated, but about their consent not being endorsed later explains a lot of human behavior (or at least, like, the society/culture I know).
For what it’s worth, I agree that the comment you’re responding to has some embedded claims which aren’t justified in text, but they’re not claims which are false by construction, and you haven’t presented any reason to believe that they’re false.
They imply irrationality via failure to investigate a confusion, so I thought it was within scope on a rationality improvement forum to point that out. Since there exists an alternative coherent construal I thought it was good practice to acknowledge that as well.
Which unspecified but grossly immoral act did the plain text of my comment seem like it implied a confession of?
“Committing assault”?
wait, how does Benquo’s text imply that Benquo is confessing to committing assault?
It implied a confession by Sinclair to committing assault (sorry for the ambiguity here).
I read RobertM as apophatially saying that Benquo could be confessing to something with Benquo’s comment, and Benquo asking what Benquo is allegedly confessing to.
Yes. It seems like RobertM is trying to appeal to some idea about fair play, by saying that people shouldn’t make even disjunctive hypothetical accusations because they wouldn’t like it if someone did that to them. But it seems relevant to evaluating that fairness claim that some accusations are discernibly more justified than others, and in this case RobertM seems not to have been able to think of any plausible crimes to disjunctively accuse me of. I am perplexed as to how “true accusations are better than false ones and you can discover by thinking and investigating which statements are more likely to be true and which are more likely to be wrong” seems to have almost fallen out of the Overton window for some important subset of cases on less wrong dot com, but that seems to be where we are.
I read Robert as accusing you of attempting a rhetorical trick in which, by making a disjunctive accusation where one of the disjuncts is shocking[1] and grave, you algorithmically intend to intimidate people into accepting the other disjunct, which they would be less likely to do if you argued for it on its own merits rather than pairing it with the shocking disjunct. I don’t think you would be getting this pushback if you had said, “Maybe she’s a good judge of character; after all, every time she judges a man to be safe and is correct, that’s some amount of probabilistic evidence that she’s capable of making such distinctions rather than being tied to base rates.”
(I feel bad about being in the “tone police” role here, and anticipate that you have reasons why the “Maybe she’s a good judge of character” alternative in fact omits important substantive criticisms you mean to make, but this comment still seems good to post, because I think your diagnosis of the relevant defect in site culture being a denial of “true accusations are better than false ones” is off-base.)
Anecdotally, I felt a jolt of fear when I first saw your comment without knowing to whom it was addressed.
I’m more objected to Benquo’s comment on grounds of it being false, or at least not engaging with what Sinclair obviously meant, than about tone. [edit: er, I guess I also think that giving a false dichotomy to make a point seem persuasive seems to fall under “deception” rather than tone and I don’t think you need to bring tone into the question to object to the comment].
I do think a pretty valuable I’ve gotten a lot from Benquo over the years has been reframings of things in ways that make me engage with something that my natural frame glossed over. But, in this case I think his implied point just… doesn’t seem logically valid and is kinda offtopic? Or at least he hasn’t made the case for it. (I think “maybe she’s a good judge of character?” is still missing the point of what Sinclair pretty obviously meant. If the base rates are low, the dice coming up negative isn’t a very interesting outcome in the first place and you shouldn’t be updating [edit] much [/edit] from a single instance)
(I separately think Robert’s comment wasn’t very good either, doesn’t quite check out even as a clever quip, and he probably should have resisted the urge to get partial credit for “not being clever”)
I am, to be clear, actively interested in Benquo engaging with the base rates question and explaining why his frame here is useful in spite of that background fact.
Quantitatively small updates are still updates!
Yeah true, but I’d reword as “shouldn’t be updating much from a single instance”, and I think concretely it shouldn’t be enough of an update to substantially privilege hypotheses like “Sinclair is making some kind of cognitive error here”.
(My actual guess is that Benquo has a background frame/hypothesis like “People frequently underweight their own personal intuitions over statistics [or, vaguely assumed ‘statistics’ that they probably don’t even have a citation for and if they looked up the study it might not even say what they thought it said].” And, like, I totally think this might be true and relevant and worth having privileged anyway, but I don’t think Sinclair’s anecdote is evidence for or particularly illustrative of it)
Yes, that’s what the first half of my comment was intended to convey. I disendorse the way I communicated that (since it was both unclear and provocative).
I’m complying with Sinclair’s explicit preference to be treated as someone who might possibly do crimes, by not censoring the flow of credence from “people who don’t expect me to do crimes to them are making a mistake” to “I have done crimes to such people.” You are asking me to do exactly what Sinclair complained about and assume that they’re necessarily harmless, or to pretend to do this.
I think this is a class of situation where people prefer obfuscation: the preference is not for you to assume that the subject is harmless, but to take actions that merely imply that the subject might not be harmless without explicitly spelling out the “subject is harmful” disjunct, such that the message slips past a System 1 scapegoating circuit while System 2 can piece together what it needs to know. Implying something without stating it isn’t the same thing as pretending the opposite.
Thinking about it a bit more, I have a more direct answer:
The info cis girls lack is that I am highly sexual, into girls, and am formerly a guy.
A tasteful, tactful, and succinct way to provide this information is to dress in a way that is stereotypically slutty, lesbian, and trans. I follow this aesthetic to some degree already. If I really cared I could just follow it more.
My guess based on the information available is the woman in your example made the right call mathematically, but you’re plausibly pointing to something real in how the way cis women treated you changed after gender transition. I’m really curious to hear more about that, without necessarily buying into your risk analysis about this situation in particular.
before I transitioned, women were more likely to cross the street if i walk behind them, more likely to be cagey if I ask to hang out, less cordial overall in conversation, spoke in lower pitch. the last one is probably mimicry, and some confounders are that i was depressed at the time and semi-religious university was a very different environment than SF bay rationalists
I’m not convinced that clothes are an unambiguous signal, and just saying so might be clearer. That said, once you send this signal to cis girls, do they change their behavior? If not, I doubt this is important info that they were actually lacking.
no, but it is a faster signal, and idk it feels like the right “type” of message, being a vibes based thing that does not require conscious discussion or deliberation. attention is a valuable resource! I have ever discussed weird gender thoughts with my friends, some of whom are cis women.
I think people in college treated me differently for looking queer and people in my adult life in berkeley / SF don’t. hard to tell tho