If you're prone to forming delusions, but you're good at checking your beliefs against reality, you might manage to avoid going off the deep end, but that doesn't mean escape unscathed. Amphetamine use can make you imagine the people in your life are plotting against you. A good rationalist will...
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There’s an idea in physics that there might in fact be only one electron in the universe, an electron that moves through space and time in such a way that it appears, when humans observe the world around them, like there’s many different electrons all throughout the universe, all with...
This is somewhat unconvincing on its own, because clearly at the very least the trans community does some Motte/Bailey on it.
Yeah I bet that does happen. A more charitable lens that explains some of what might come across that way, though, is that "women trapped in men's bodies" is a neat and succinct way to explain trans women to someone who it would otherwise take too long to explain to, in situations where an extended lecture would be impractical, inappropriate or unappreciated.
I think autogynephilia is correlated with gender identity?
In extension, it's true that learning that someone experiences autogynephilic sexual fantasies should increase your credence that they will report a feminine gender identity.
What... (read more)
The reason autogynephilia is controversial is because it's an alternative to the "woman trapped in a man's body" trope, an etiological story that undermines the "trans women are women" slogan and makes MtFs seem more relevantly M than F, despite their/our efforts.
I don't agree that's the reason that autogynephilia theory is controversial! Not that it isn't part of the story, but I'm pretty sure the main reason for the controversy is that it contradicts trans women's own understanding of their motivations for transitioning, and is often presented as to imply trans women are either deceiving themselves or others
In reddit-tier discourse, people do get mad that autogynephilia theory contradicts "trans women are women,"... (read 449 more words →)
Not necessarily sexual fantasies themselves! Sexual fantasies are an indicator of the presence of an underlying sexual orientation towards that which is depicted in the fantasies
I see! This is something I associate with Ann Lawrence's contribution to the theory. I had Lawrence on my reading list last year, but I felt it was wise to pull back from that reading for a bit, so sorry if my criticism is a bit basic. I'll be going off just your comment here and what I've heard second hand from Lawrence's critiques, who might not be the best of rationalists.
I'll say that I've remarked before that "autogynephilia," if you looked at just the etymology and... (read 537 more words →)
I'm trying to make sense of this. If I'm not mistaken you claim:
This obviously doesn't make sense as-is. You briefly went into a theory of early-onset HSTS, late-onset not-otherwise-specified gender dysphoria, and you raised internalized misandry as a possible alternate instantiation of that "not-otherwise-specified". And that could resolve the issue I'm pointing at.
This explanation makes a testable prediction. I've noticed that late-onset trans women tend to fall remarkably close together along a number of characteristics that aren't obviously related to gender dysphoria or autogynephilia. Let me know if you don't... (read more)
If you're prone to forming delusions, but you're good at checking your beliefs against reality, you might manage to avoid going off the deep end, but that doesn't mean escape unscathed.
Amphetamine use can make you imagine the people in your life are plotting against you. A good rationalist will notice they lack evidence and that the prior should be pretty low, but they'll still be left with whatever cognitive patterns threatened to generate that delusion.
Psychedelic use can make you believe stuff in the "all is connected" space. A good rationalist isn't going to start believing parapsychological phenomena are real because of something they experienced on an LSD trip, but they'll still be... (read 284 more words →)
I worry that this doesn't really end up explaining much. We think that our answers to philosophical questions are better than what the analytics have come up with. Why? Because they seem intuitively to be better answers. What explanation do we posit for why our answers are better? Because we start out with better intuitions.
Of course our intuitions might in fact be better, as I (intuitively) think they are. But that explanation is profoundly underwhelming.
This might actually be the big thing LW has over analytic philosophy, so I want to call attention to it and encourage people to poke at what this thing is.
I'm not sure what you mean here, but maybe... (read more)
I think an important piece that's missing here is that LW simply assumes that certain answers to important questions are correct. It's not just that there are social norms that say it's OK to dismiss ideas as stupid if you think they're stupid, it's that there's a rough consensus on which ideas are stupid.
LW has a widespread consensus on bayseian epistemology, physicalist metaphysics and consequentialist ethics (not an exhaustive list). And it has good reasons for favoring these positions, but I don't think LW has great responses to all the arguments against these positions. Neither do the alternative positions have great responses to counterarguments from the LW-favored positions.
Analytic philosophy in the academy... (read more)
I also had trouble with the notation. Here's how I've come to understand it:
Suppose I want to know whether the first person to drive a car was wearing shoes, just socks, or no footwear at all when they did so. I don't know what the truth is, so I represent it with a random variable , which could be any of "the driver wore shoes," "the driver wore socks" or "the driver was barefoot."
This means that is a random variable equal to the probability I assign to the true hypothesis (it's random because I don't know which hypothesis is true). It's distinct from and which are both the same... (read more)
I think there's some ambiguity in your phrasing and that might explain gjm's disagreement:
You seem to value the (psychological factor of having debt) at zero.
Or
You seem to value the psychological factor of (having debt at zero).
These two ways of parsing it have opposite meanings. I think you mean the former but I initially read it as the latter, and reading gjm's initial comment, I think they also read it as the latter.
I'm attracted to viewing these moral intuitions as stemming from intuitions about property because the psychological notion of property biologically predates the notion of morality. Territorial behaviors are found in all kinds of different mammals, and prima facie the notion of property seems to be derived from such behaviors. The claim, then, is that during human evolution, moral psychology developed in part by coopting the psychology of territory.
I'm skeptical that anything normative follows from this though.
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There’s an idea in physics that there might in fact be only one electron in the universe, an electron that moves through space and time in such a way that it appears, when humans observe the world around them, like there’s many different electrons all throughout the universe, all with precisely the same physical properties. There might be more to it, I wouldn’t be qualified to say, but I view this one-electron universe model as an ontological koan. It makes us think “hey, reality could be this way rather than the way we think it is and we would be none the wiser... (read 591 more words →)
This hypothesis seems like it should be at or near the top of the list. It explains a lot of Sam's alleged behavior. If she's exhibiting signs of psychosis then he might be trying to get her to get care, which would explain the strings-attached access to resources. Possibly she is either altering the story or misunderstanding about her inheritance being conditional on Zoloft, it might have been an antipsychotic instead.
On the other hand, while psychosis can manifest in subtle ways, I'm skeptical that someone whose psychosis is severe enough that they'd be unable to maintain stable employment or housing would be able to host a podcast where their psychosis isn't clearly... (read more)