Abigail, I don't think we actually disagree. I certainly wouldn't defend the strong Bailey/Blanchard thesis that transwomen can be neatly sorted into autogynephiles and gay men. However, I am confident that autogynephilia is a real phenomenon in at least some people, and that's all I was trying to refer to in my earlier comment--sorry I wasn't clearer.

Eliezer: "[E]very time I can recall hearing someone say 'I want to know what it's like to be the opposite sex', the speaker has been male. I don't know if that's a genuine gender difference in wishes [...]"

*sighs* There's a name for it.

Eliezer: "Strong enough to disrupt personal identity, if taken in one shot?"

Is it cheating if you deliberately define your personal identity such that the answer is No?

Frelkins: "I mean, if anyone wants to check it out, just try Second Life."

Not exactly what we're looking for, unfortunately ...

Frelkins: "[T]hey flunk the shoe chatter and reveal themselves quickly."

Surely you're not literally claiming that there are no women who aren't good at shoe chatter. Maybe in Second Life there are enough men using female avatars such that P(male-in-RL | female-avatar-bad-at-shoe-chatter) really is greater than P(female-in-RL | female-avatar-bad-at-shoe-chatter). But I should hope that being a woman or man is not conflated with behaving in gender-typical ways, for to do so is to deliberately ignore the nontrivial amount of variation in actually existing women and men.

Frelkins, in the other thread, you said you were saddened by Tino Sehgal's Edge answer about the end of masculinity as we know it, and you asked, "Why do even men hate men nowadays?" Well, please take my word for it that Sahgal and friends don't literally hate men. Rather, we just find it kind of obnoxious that far too often, being male is systematically conflated with talking about porn or football or whatever it is that "guys' guys" talk about (I wouldn't know--or I wish that I didn't). I hope I am not misunderstood--of course there is nothing wrong with being typically feminine or masculine. It's just that there should be other options.

adept42: "Therefore, since we can only observe gendered behaviors through social interaction the presumption should be each behavior has a social origin; biology carries the burden of proof to prove otherwise on a case-by-case basis."

I really don't think that follows. These empirical questions aren't like a court trial, where "nature" is the prosecution and "nurture" is innocent until proven guilty (cf. Eliezer's "The Scales of Justice, the Notebook of Rationality"). Rather, for each question, we must search for evidence and seek out the most accurate belief possible, being prepared to update as new evidence comes in. Sometimes this is very painful, when there's something you desperately want to be true, and you're afraid of the evidence. But we must be brave together, else we be utterly deceived. And what would we do then?

Should "Fun" then be consistently capitalized as a term of art? Currently I think we have "Friendly AI theory" (captial-F, lowercase-t) and "Friendliness," but "Fun Theory" (capital-F capital-T) but "fun."

"[...] naturally specializing further as more knowledge is discovered and we become able to conceptualize more complex areas of study [...]"

So, how does this spiral of specialization square with living by one's own strength?

Could there be a niche for generalists?

"A singleton might be justified in prohibiting standardized textbooks in certain fields, so that people have to do their own science [...]"

No textbooks?! CEV had better overrule you on this one, or my future selves across the many worlds are all going to scream bloody murder. It may be said that I'm missing the point: that ex hypothesi the Friendly AI knows better than me.

But I'm still going to cry.

"But if you deleted the Pythagorean Theorem from my mind entirely, would I have enough math skills left to grow it back the next time I needed it?"

It's easy if you're allowed to keep the law of cosines ...

"I sometimes think that futuristic ideals phrased in terms of 'getting rid of work' would be better reformulated as 'removing low-quality work to make way for high-quality work'."

Alternatively, you could taboo work and play entirely, speaking instead of various forms of activity, and their various costs and benefits.

I'm finding Eliezer's view attractive, but it does have a few counterintuitive consequences of its own. If we somehow encountered shocking new evidence that MWI, &c. is false and that we live in a small world, would weird people suddenly become much more important? Did Eliezer think (or should he have thought) that weird people are more important before coming to believe in a big world?

"How about if it were an issue that you were not too heavily invested in [...]"

Hal, the sort of thing you suggest has already been tried a few times over at Black Belt Bayesian; check it out.

Tiiba, you're really overstating Eliezer and SIAI's current abilities. CEV is a sketch, not a theory, and there's a big difference between "being concerned about Friendliness" and "actually knowing how to build a working superintelligence right now, but holding back due to Friendliness concerns."