I was with you until “paraphilia”. I don’t see how “wanting to see a world without strict gender roles” has anything to do with sexuality… and did you seriously just link to the Wikipedia article for autogynephilia‽ That’s as verifiable as penis envy. (By which, I mean “probably applies to some people, somewhere, but certainly isn’t the fully-general explanation they’re using it as”. And no, I don’t think I’m doing the idea a disservice by dismissing it with a couple of silly comics; it pays no rent at its best and predicts the opposite of my observations at worst.)
wizzwizz4
Karma: 145
They look like it, but its some sort of emergent behaviour,
I agree with this assessment. It almost feels like a hive mind; I’ve dipped into the peripherals of online mobs before, and have felt “hey, this action is a good idea” thoughts enter my head unbidden. I’d probably participate in such things often, if I didn’t have a set of heuristics that (coincidentally) cancels out most of this effect, and a desire not to associate with the sorts of people who form mobs.
If the barrier-to-entry is increased to “requires two minutes of unrewarded drudgery, where it’s not intuitively obvious what needs to be done” in such a way that a short, well-worded “mob instruction” message can’t bypass the effect, it’s unlikely a mob will form around such actions.
Incidentally, I wonder whether programming for the mob is a field of social psychology.
One second is preposterous! It’d take at least a minute to get up to relativistic speeds; keep in mind it’ll have to build infrastructure as it goes along, and it’ll start off using human-built tools which aren’t capable of such speeds. No way it can build such powerful tools with human tools in the space of a second.
I’d be surprised if it managed to convert the surface of the planet in less than 10 minutes, to be honest. It might get to the moon in an hour, and have crippled our ability to fight back within 20 seconds, but it’s just intelligent; not magical. Getting to relativistic speeds still requires energy, and Xonium still needs to be made of something.
Ye cannae change the laws of physics, Jim.
Formalising human morality is easy!
1. Determine a formalised morality system close enough to the current observed human morality system that humans will be able to learn and accept it,
2. Eliminate all human culture (easier than eliminating only parts of it).
3. Raise humans with this morality system (which by the way includes systems for reducing value drift, so the process doesn’t have to be repeated too often).
4. When value drift occurs, goto step 2.
I think you should link to something to do with double crux the first time you mention it; it took me a while to track down a page explaining it.
Eliezer is an atheist. But this article doesn’t say “there is no God”; it says “act as though God won’t save you”.
Yes, it was something Yudkowsky added. But the text doesn’t imply ghosts aren’t “really people”; it just states that they’re read-only human simulations of unknown fidelity, and the characters are chauvinistic about that.
Not to get into too much irrelevant discussion about contemporary society’s human-labelling paradigm, I think you mean non-binary Virtuists. A lot of trans people are men or women.
I take it that Anonymous27 didn’t identify themselves as a donor, then.
This is incoherent, reader.
I don’t quite get the argument here; doesn’t anthropic shadow imply we have nothing to worry about (except for maybe hyperexistential risks) since we’re guaranteed to be living in a timeline where humanity survives in the end?
But it doesn’t say we’re guaranteed not to be living in a timeline where humanity doesn’t survive.
If I had a universe copying machine and a doomsday machine, pressed the “universe copy” button 1000 times (for 2¹⁰⁰⁰ universes), then smashed relativistic meteors into Earth in all but one of them… would you call that an ethical issue? I certainly would, even though the inhabitants of the original universe are guaranteed to be living in a timeline where they don’t die horribly from a volcanic apocalypse.
I can’t remember pain, in much the same way. Perhaps extreme depression “counts as” mental pain enough to trigger this effect?
I can confirm that that’s an expression in English.
You’re assuming the AI has terminal access. Just because our brains are implemented as neurons doesn’t mean we can manipulate matter on a cellular scale.
“One” means “an arbitrary person”. “The one” means “the specific person we were just talking about”.
Don’t dilute it that much, or it won’t work. We should give this a name: “reduced-strength homeopathy”, maybe, or perhaps “variolation” (because it’s a variant of homeopathy).
Oh hey, look, there’s a Wikipedia article on Variolation:
The success of variolation led many, including medical professionals, to overlook its drawbacks. Variolation was practiced on the basis that it protected against smallpox for life, and was far less likely to kill than natural infection. In some cases however, natural smallpox or variolation failed to protect from a second attack. These cases were a result of a lapse of immune “memory”, while others may have been misdiagnosed (experts often confused smallpox with chickenpox). Variolation also required a level of skill and attention to detail which some physicians lacked. Many physicians failed to take note of local redness and discharge to assure the variolation had taken, resulting in inadequate treatment. However, it was its great risk to others that led to the end of the practice. The collateral smallpox cases spread by variolated subjects shortly after variolation began to outweigh the benefits of the procedure.
Hmm… We’d have to be careful.
Yes, I think that would be good. Perhaps you could make it a draft epilogue, and add an entry to it every time you’ve got nothing really to write about a story. And if your quick summary of why it’s useless starts getting too big for the list, you can always split it off into a separate post.
This has the potential to be a good series (but I must say it’s a terrible start! :-p).
I wouldn’t be here, interested in AI research, if it weren’t for reading that book as a child. You need a very good argument to refute results, and “revealed preferences” (which, tangentially, is a ludicrous idea) based on Eliezer having written one fanfic is not even a mediocre argument.
Loads from angry mean people on the internet, very little from academics (none, if reading the Wikipedia article doesn’t count). So I’m probably trying to learn anarchocommunism from Stalin. (I haven’t heard much about it from its detractors, either, except what I’ve generated myself – I stopped reading the Wikipedia article before I got to the “criticism” section, and have only just read that now.)
In case this is the reason for disagreement, I might be criticising “autogynephilia / autoandrophilia explains (away) trans people” instead of what you’re talking about – although since the Wikipedia article keeps saying stuff like:
(the implication being that cross-dressing is a sex thing, which is just… not accurate – though perhaps I’m misunderstanding what “transvestite” means), I’m suspicious. Pretty much all of the little I’ve read of Blanchard’s is wrong, and while other people might’ve done good work with the ideas, it’s hard to derive truth from falsehood. And stuff like:
seems very Freudian (in the bad sense, not the good sense); if you’re constructing a really complex model to fit the available evidence, I don’t want to hear you drawing conclusions about inaccessible things from it. And I especially don’t want to hear you trying to fit the territory to the map…
Yeah, the label “autogynephilia” probably applies to a few people, but as an explanation of trans people it’s not quite right – and the field of study is irrecoverably flawed imo. (And for describing trans people, the simple forms don’t fit reality and the more complex forms are not the simplest explanations.)
But this criticism might merely be motivated by the actions of its proponents; if there’s a consistent, simple version of the theory that doesn’t obviously contradict reality, I’m happy to hear it.
---
Note: I’ve tried to edit this section for brevity, but feel free to skip it. I removed many allusions to flawed psychoanalysis concepts, but if you like, you can imagine them after pretty much every paragraph where I point out something stupid. Translate “you” as “one”.
I’m not so sure about the paper you linked…
No citation, and I’m pretty sure this is false. I’ve seen “more trans men” and “no significant difference” – with references to studies and surveys – but this is the first time I’ve ever seen “significantly more MtFs”.
From what I can tell, it’s dividing trans women into “straight” and “gay” (actually, homosexual and nonhomosexual, respectively, sic), and calling these categories fundamental subtypes. Now, I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure not everyone is either straight or gay.
The left-hand side of the second page seems to just be a long list of appeals to authority. Appeal to the authority of the DSM. Appeal to the authority of “looking at lots of evidence before coming to a conclusion”. I’ve also noticed enough typos that I suspect this hasn’t been peer-reviewed.
What’s a “female-typical sexual preference”? How are “female-typical attitudes [and] behaviors” determined? Are these properties possessed by {a group of cis lesbians selected in a similar way}? If the effects noticed are real, then that does suggest there’s something there – but at present, I don’t see the difference between this and what’s described in The Control Group is Out of Control part IV.
Even if I take the claims at face value (which I’m not – but I might ought to; I don’t know), the paper so far is providing only slightly more evidence for “autogynephilia explains trans women” as for “autogynephilia is based in 70s-era attitudes to homosexuality”.
There are many other things this could suggest! Why choose this one‽ I actually went back to the Blanchard paper (doi:10.1097/00005053-198910000-00004) to check the actual evidence:
Immediately, I think of two alternative hypotheses:
People in the bisexual group are more horny than people in the other groups.
Bisexual people are inherently more horny (doubtful, but possible).
The people Blanchard considered as bisexual are inherently more horny (except I don’t think Blanchard was responsible for dividing people up in this study).
People who are attracted to multiple disparate sex characteristics are more likely to call themselves “bisexual” if this attraction is stronger.
Something weird about 1989 (this is too broad to be a hypothesis).
People being closeted messing up the study.
Something about the question prompted this difference. (I can’t check this, because I can’t find the text of the questionnaire.)
Perhaps it said “by a male or a female”, or something, which might produce a different average reaction across the different groups?
There are probably many others, but… would the hypothesis that “their bisexuality is just homosexuality plus a desire for validation by others” have been promoted so quickly if there wasn’t a framework for it to fit into?
I’ll just note that this “deviation” is adequately predicted by the “trans people are just trans, and are likely to be aroused by the same sorts of things as cis people” hypothesis.
Oh, come on! People can get erections at all sorts of random times, including when relaxed or excited – this test (doi:10.1080/00224498609551326) does not distinguish between “sexual arousal” and “strong emotional reaction”.
And any theory that assumes “and the participants are lying – or else don’t know what they really think” loses points in my book.
… That’s not an explanation, that’s an observation. “Sexual arousal with cross-dressing” was not socially desirable in 1985. (If there’s strong evidence, why is weak evidence being put forward? This feels a little like mathematician-trolling.) And it doesn’t distinguish between autogynephilia and other hypotheses.
Regains some points for the “lying” thing, but not all of them; the “trans people are trans” theory also predicts attempts to manipulate gatekeepers by playing to favourable stereotypes, whereas the explanation later in this paper still smells of Freudian repression.
Incidentally, “trans people are trans” doesn’t predict that such people would lie about this sort of thing off the record, or with friends (unlike the theory set out in this paper), but I don’t know of a way to test that.
Yup.
Perhaps, but not significantly. There is resistance to the idea, but I doubt it’s on most people’s minds much of the time – the few who obsess over it I’ve had the displeasure of interacting with aren’t trans. Avoiding stigma seems a more likely explanation, to me. (And “people don’t like my theory, which is why the data doesn’t match it” is a really fishy explanation.)
Skipping past this entire section as irrelevant.
More 70s-era attitudes to homosexuality. A trans woman being straight is normal, but a trans woman being gay? Needs to be psychoanalysed. Even accepting the premise, this attitude will classify as “autogynephilic” people who aren’t.
(And this is only compatible with such attitudes to homosexuality – and the total erasure of bisexuals. Why posit two different mechanisms for people being trans, based on their sexuality, if homosexuality is sometimes “normal”? Why not assume homosexuality is always normal – or, at least, no less abnormal than heterosexuality?)
Explains too much. If I feel affection for the idea of being, say, a respected physicist, does that mean it used to be an erotically-charged fantasy? Or is it just something I’d prefer to the status quo? (This is the weakest argument in my rebuttal, but I think it could be strengthened.)
So why not apply this argument consistently, and consider it feasible that all similarly-shaped psychological events or patterns could be analogous? Like, say, the continuing drive to excel in a…
Hang on. I’ve started engaging with the premise. Most of my anecdotal evidence and personal experience directly contradicts this premise. I feel like I’m patiently arguing with a flat-earther about how the Bible doesn’t actually say the planet is a disc, which is hard to prove without Biblical Hebrew and knowledge of Biblical hermeneutics… and utterly irrelevant to the question of the planet’s shape.
Mu.
Predicts the non-existence of:
Pre-pubescent trans children;
Asexual trans people;
No-op trans people;
Trans men (without the autoandrophilia extension);
Non-binary people.
Or the existence of a “closet”.
Irrelevant, unless you’re proposing that this is an intersex-related condition.
The fact that this was deemed relevant is characteristic of this theory’s proponents. (Oh, snap!)
At least compare to cis lesbians, or you’re not even trying to rule out confounders.
Interesting… This is the first genuinely interesting thing in this paper. But, again, compare to cis gay people instead of just to “average cis”, or you can’t be confident you’re measuring what you think you are.
“Sometimes with little concern for possible consequences”… ? I am left speechless; the only sentiment I can verbalise is: made up – doesn’t match my observations.
I predict that this worsens clinical outcomes. This is a strong, strong prediction – my entire reason for believing what I believe says my belief should depend on this. Show me the data, if you have it.
It’s. Not. Puzzling. And not really something you should be fixated over; this is normal human behaviour.
My main criticism here is closer to 3, if anything. (7 is a concern, but shouldn’t stand in the way of research; just in the way of stuff like Bailey’s book. Discover truth, and figure out the consequences later, unless you’re messing with world-ending threats where the knowledge in the wrong hands could doom everybody.)
Woah, woah, woah. Is that a strawman? *reads further* No, just them not addressing my specific criticism, which is that there are too many deviations from the class of people autogynephilia assumes to exist and the class of people who exist.
This is a good criticism, and a good response: it isn’t, in principle, unfalsifiable… it’s just that its proponents are good at arguing against the evidence against it. (I, likewise, am good at arguing against things – though not quite as good, because I don’t know much about frequentist statistics.)
“Confounders,” I cry.
Reading this paper has slightly increased my credence in the idea of autogynephilia, though not by much at all, and convinced me that most of its proponents – not just Blanchard – are stuck in the 70s when it comes to ideas about sexuality and gender. I expect the next generation to drop this direction of study – perhaps in a century, when it’s nearly forgotten, somebody will spot similar patterns, come up with a similar core idea, come to less stupid conclusions about it, and it’ll be embraced.
Or perhaps the whole thing will turn out to be statistical anomalies perpetuated by people insistent on labelling shadows.
Edit +1d: my credence in autogynephilia has gone back down again; reading the paper in detail and engaging with its premises accidentally screened off an entire class of conflicting observations and experiences from my attention; when I remembered them, my credence immediately fell.
My sympathy for its serious proponents has gone up, though, because I (think I) see them making the same mistakes that I used to make, and undoubtedly still make: every experiment tries to confirm their theory, never falsify it, and they only measure the class of things that they know already accords with the framework of ideas.
---
I can’t see how some of the “strongest predictions” in that link follow. Take, for instance,
Where does this come from? And:
But from my observations, desire to be female (in trans women, anyway) is not strongly associated with any particular aspect of sexuality; there are even plenty of ace trans women, which should be a blow for the “trans women are actually autogynephilic men” theory.
You’re the first autogynephilia proponent I’ve interacted with who cares about being right (not that I’ve been seeking such people out); I’d be interested in double-cruxing at some point if you’re interested. (Not here, though; somewhere with real-time communication.)
Also, I weirdly respect you more, in a way, even though I’m confident you’re wrong. Perhaps it’s because you being right nearly all the time is more impressive.