Rationality Quotes December 2013

Cyan

Rationality quotes time!

The usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Rationality quotes time!

The usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Is cis or trans identity really something that is truth-apt (& therefore in the purview of probability)? It seems to be a combination of self-description of feelings, plus chosen group affiliation.

The self-description of feelings is presumably more or less infallible, and the group affiliation is stipulated by the individual.

Well, it's possible to be wrong about your own feelings. The question that matters is "later, after transitioning, would I feel better or worse than I do now", which isn't necessarily infallibly correlated to your current feelings.

5hyporational12y

Thanks for the ManU fan example, it helped. If we reformulate the gender identity question as "will my future self be happy if I make permanent decisions based on my current perceived identity?", we get something that makes more sense to assess probabilistically. I guess the ManU fan case could be reformulated in a similar way, but I can't imagine how the real life scenario would look like.

0hyporational12y

Could you explain what you mean by this via an easier to grasp concept than gender identity, preferably in a way that preserves relevance to identity?