All of LoganStrohl's Comments + Replies

>attempt to help people with something like 'generating the true hypotheses' rather than 'evaluating the hypotheses that I already have'. Or 'how to do ontological updates well and on-purpose'.

To me this seems like an accurate and beautifully succinct description.

How to build a stockpile of testosterone for HRT, as a buffer in case of emergency:

  • Get your provider to prescribe "single use" vials and make sure they're marking them as "single use" in their prescription notes. These usually contain 200mg, which for most people is two doses or more. By design, you're meant to throw away the leftovers when you don't use all 200mg in a single dose, and that is what pharmacies and insurance companies expect you to do.
  • Use each vial more than once, just make sure you alcohol swab the top.
  • Organize your vials by expiration date
... (read more)

Duncan has just replied on Facebook to my request for descriptions of what each person on his list does. He says it's fine to copy his reply over here.

*

Julia Galef: something like, a science reporter whose hobby side project is doing science reporting for middle schoolers, and it’s in fact good and engaging and not stupid and boring. Wholesomeness, clarity, a tendency to correctly predict which parts of the explanation will break down for the audience and a corresponding slow and careful focus on those sections. Not unrelatedly: a sort of statesmanlike, re... (read more)

i'm sorry not to be engaging with the content of the post here; hopefully others have that covered. but i just wanna say, man this is so well written! at the sentence and paragraph level especially, i find it inspiring. it makes me wanna write more like i'm drunk and dgaf, though i doubt that exact thing would actually suffice to allow me to hit a similar stylistic target.

(the rest of this comment is gonna be largely for me and my own development, but maybe you'll like reading it anyway.)

i think you do a bunch of stuff that current me is too chicken to try... (read more)

3MondSemmel
You might appreciate the perspective in the short post Statistical models & the irrelevance of rare exceptions. (I previously commented something similar on a post by Duncan.)

I would dissuade no one from writing drunk, and I'm confident that you too can say that people are penguins! But I'm sorry to report that personally I don't do it by drinking but rather writing a much longer version with all those kinds of clarifications included and then obsessively editing it down.

Ah, so would I! I think I never actually got to see more info on the outcome. I don't know whether or not anything was actually compiled. Once it was in Leverage's hands, I guess I lost track of it somehow, but I don't remember why.

2niplav
I didn't expect a response! It's probably too late now, which is a shame—there's not that much information on polyphasic sleep. But thanks for answering anyway!

A note on illustrations:

Somebody brought up that their friend assumed my illustrations are AI generated. So I want to clarify: With the exception of the two dancers in "Spaciousness In Partner Dance" (AI generated) and the spider web in "On Realness" (commissioned from Theresa Strohl, my mother), I've painted all the illustrations by hand myself. Duncan Sabien has edited them slightly to make them work with LW's site background.

4Gunnar_Zarncke
[as requested reposted in this thread] On noticing distractions, meditation practice, esp. the Buddhist one based on the Pali Canon has some interesting concepts that you may find interesting: Subtle Distraction (sukhuma vicāra) is a nuanced mental activity that doesn't completely pull attention away from the meditation object but dilutes the focus. It is the hardest to notice until mastering mindfulness (sati) and clear comprehension (sampajañña). Note that vicāra translates to applied thought or examination and refers to the attention on something else.  Gross Distraction (oḷārika vicāra) is the distraction we sometimes catch, e.g., when we notice that we skipped a sentence in a book, and then return to the text. It is the mind's tendency to engage with sensory or mental phenomena that significantly divert attention away from the object, esp. the often comparatively boring meditation object.  Forgetting (vicikicchā or musitasmim) happens when we lose the (meditation) object from our attention altogether. Only a while later we realize that we are still holding the book or sitting on our pillow. Musitasmim translates to forgetting or negligence - the object has slipped from short-term memory by not concentrating. Another term, vicikicchā means doubt, which indicates that the purpose of our action was not strong enough to motivate us and we - at least subconsciously - doubted the value.  In The Mind Illuminated, dealing with these levels of distraction is a core aspect of the early levels of meditation practice. Here is an illustration from the book: There are forums online that discuss the practice of noticing distractions based on the book. Here is one random example. Here is the part of my notes from meditation retreats in 2019 and 2022 that summarizes the practice of concentration meditation and dealing with distractions - in a short Sazen: Notice, name, accept, and return to the object.

I ordinarily do not allow discussions of Buddhism on my posts because I hate moderating them. I haven't worked out what exactly it is about Buddhism, but it seems to cause things to go wonky in a way that's sort of similar to politics.

Also, my way of thinking and writing and doing things in general seems to bring out a lot of people who want to talk about Buddhism, and I want my work discussed mostly on its own terms, without it being immediately embroiled in whatever thing it is that tends to happen when people start talking about Buddhism.

One of my moderation rules forbids discussion of Buddhism by default.

Since there was a big old section on meditation in this post, and the type of meditation I described is pretty specifically shikantaza from Soto Zen, I'm designating this here thread as the place where people can talk about Buddhism-related stuff if they want to, just this once, as a treat. 

I don't promise to participate. My other moderation rules still apply.

3[anonymous]
I've been, independently, trying to level up my Original Seeing (my, and probably most rationalist's, weakest link in OODA looping). I don't think I have any insights worth sharing here, you seem to be far ahead of me. But you've brought up shikantaza ("just sitting"), which still gets a chuckle out of me: My head canon is that Original Seeing, Naturalism, Unseeing, but also Buddhism and Stoicism, all point at roughly the same thing in concept space. That is, I suspect Buddhism did, before people made a religion out of it. I suspect the same happened to Stoicism. I haven't bothered to analyze Christianity and other religions, they might not fit in that well. I've come to that head canon because the implications of a high level of Original Seeing all point towards practices seen in both Buddhism and Stoicism. Not that I have attained high level, but I have enough to see where it's going. Shikantaza itself is hilarious, because with all the sports-team like traditions in Buddhism, I imagine that one guy going "guys, you can figure all this out on your own just by sitting", which is also how the Buddha did it originally, supposedly. If you figure things out for yourself, you probably don't need any traditions to guide your exercises. If you don't figure things out for yourself, you won't get a lot out of going through the traditions. To bring it back: I suspect both Buddhism and Stoicism to be "fake" versions of Original Seeing, "fake" as described above. It's funny to me. That's all I wanted to share.
2Nate Showell
Why do you ordinarily not allow discussion of Buddhism on your posts?   Also, if anyone reading this does a naturalist study on a concept from Buddhist philosophy, I'd like to hear how it goes.

This post helped me relate to my own work better. I feel less confused about what's going on with the differences between my own working pace and the pace of many around me. I am obviously more like a 10,000 day monk than a 10 day monk, and I should think and plan accordingly. 

Partly because I read this post, I spend frewer resources frantically trying to show off a Marketable Product(TM) as quickly as possible ("How can I make a Unit out of this for the Workshop next month?"), and I spend more resources aiming for the progress I actually think would ... (read more)

(This is a review of the entire sequence.)

On the day when I first conceived of this sequence, my room was covered in giant graph paper sticky notes. The walls, the windows, the dressers, the floor. Sticky pads everywhere, and every one of them packed with word clouds and doodles in messy bold marker.

My world is rich. The grain of the wood on the desk in front of me, the slightly raw sensation inside my nostrils that brightens each time I inhale, the pressure of my search for words as I write that rises up through my chest and makes my brain feel like it’s ... (read more)

7Raemon
Oh man  a) I am excited by the prospect of there eventually being some kind of naturalism book b) I like the idea of either reframing away from Naturalism, or introducing the concept more thoroughly. I was definitely among the people going "huh?" at it, but I feel interested in the prospect of establishing the version of the concept that was inspiring to you. c) I feel especially excited for you doing an exploration of decisiveness/rapid-iteration/efficiency/other-virtues-that-seem-maybe-at-odds with patience, and then saying more things about patience.  I'm planning to write a review of the Patience post from this sequence since it felt among the most important to me personally. And it's definitely been a big struggle that, like, "but, so much stuff is happening so fast, I can tell I need some kind of patience that I don't currently have, but I really don't know how to relate to it."

>A visualization where a hose of heavy running water enters at the top of your head and pours out through the pads of your hands results in a pretty solid frame for lateral.

hm i've never heard that one! i'll try it out, thanks!

1weft
I made it up! It's to fix some common beginner follower connection problems in lateral, which by now you probably don't have anyways.

if you wanna second-guess yourself even harder, 

1) look around the room and attempt to produce three instances of something resembling tiny quiet confusion (or louder than that if it's available)
2) try to precisely describe the difference between surprise and confusion
3) sketch a taxonomy of confusing experiences and then ask yourself what you might be missing

2Raemon
I think the difference between surprise and confusion is that surprise is when something-with-low-probability happens, and confusion is when something happens that my model can't explain.  They sometimes (often) overlap (i.e. if lightning strikes, I'm surprised because that doesn't usually happen, but I'm not confused) I hadn't done this particular exercise. I just tried it now and had some little microconfusions (why is the plant wiggling? Oh, because the fan is blowing on it. Why does the light scatter like that? Okay this one is actually somewhat interesting – my brain returned a cached answer of "because there's a light source and an obstruction casting a shadow, with some scattering", then I realized I didn't actually have that good a grip on why the scattering was happening the way it was). It does make sense that if I cultivate "notice small confusions around" I can see more confusions. Something feels unsatisfying about this, compared to what I meant in the OP. I think I meant "confusions that... matter in some way," where the thing I'm noticing is not just "oh, a confusion", but also "oh, the feeling of slightly sliding off a confusion, with stakes." I feel some defensive feeling like that has a different qualia than confusions I actively go looking for.  But, I guess the "Ray you don't actually know how light scattering really works, despite having literally gone to school to study light scattering" thing does count at least for the "sliding off" property, even if it doesn't have the "something is actually at stake beyond studying confusion for it's own sake" property. 

I feel embarrassed that I'm just now reading this. >_< ' (Ray knows but: I'm the aforementioned "Brienne Yudkowsky", my name's just different now.) I enjoyed it; it's really interesting and valuable to see my thoughts contextualized from the outside and narrativized. It's usually hard for me to see forests when I'm surrounded by trees.

> There are very few opportunities to practice noticing confusion.

I'm really curious how you relate to this claim six years later.

 

2Raemon
Curious if there are more bits of which tree/forest shifts stood out, or what felt valuable. No pressure if that feels weird.
2Raemon
Well, right before you asking this question I think I'd have said "still seems fairly true to me." (I meant the claim to mean "in the wild, where you're in the middle of a bunch of other stuff." Having cultivated it a moderate amount, I think I notice it maybe a couple times a week? I think while I'm, say, doing a Thinking Physics problem, or actively trying to think through a real problem, there's more opportunities, but it's a different style of thing than I thought I meant at the time.) But, now that you've asked the question I'm all second-guessing myself. :P

I wrote up "How To Think Of Things" for CFAR a while back. I probably wanna at least edit it some before making it a top level post, but I'm curious what you think of it.

"What did pregnancy do to your cognition?"

(Interested in responses to this from other people who have been pregnant, but here's my own answer.)

I think the main thing pregnancy seemed to do to my mind was reduce my associative speed. This had all kinds of effects on the rest of my cognition and experience, because it's a capacity I rely on almost constantly, but I think this was the central mechanism.

I'm not sure I have my concepts carved up right here, but by "associative speed" I mean "the thing that lets your thoughts go far and fast during a babble chal... (read more)

5Mary Chernyshenko
(I think I remember this) towards the end of it, I could read for a long time, my interest never sagging or spiking noticeably. I think. I'm not sure if I was capable of retaining much of what I had read.

>They're... free? Nothing bad happens when you generate them. You ignore them and move on and consolidate the good ideas later. 

I understood BenWr to be suggesting this was false. His pruner is rejecting "bad ideas" for a reason, and perhaps it is a good reason; perhaps bad things do happen if he deliberately lets in more "bad ideas".

If that were true for people in general, or for a significant minority of people, I'd definitely want to understand what the bad thing is, how it works, whether "having bad ideas" tends to be good on net anyway, and ho... (read more)

4Raemon
fyi I updated the section to say "I" instead of "you" (I'd set myself the goal of talking about my own experience since this seemed like the sort of thing it was important not to assume too much of others, but then slipped up out of habit. I meant it more in a form "hey, here's how it is for me, consider whether this is also true of you?'") (in general I've gotten feedback or picked up vibes that I'm kinda pushy with my frame in a way that's tramply to people trying to articulate or figure out their own way of doing things, which I'm still trying to figure out) A line I edited in towards the end, which I think was maybe the most important one, was to distinguish the difference between "explicitly trying to generate good ideas and not accept bad ideas" in a particular way, vs "allowing yourself to generate bad ideas" (which I still don't know enough to know if it resonates with benwr, but, seemed like the sort of thing that'd be easy to conflate, since the difference is subtle)

I don't know what it says about me that

"Eat it then eat lots of beans then fart while in a handstand." 

was the fourth thing I thought of. Wtf brain.

3benwr
Whoa. I also thought of this, though for me it was like thing 24 or something, and I was too embarrassed to actually include it in my post.

I started out with the procedure I describe here, as a warmup. I got to number 11 in the first three minutes, then when I started the second half of the procedure I just kept going. 

This list took me about 30 minutes, so it's probably not the same as "the best 50 ideas I can come up with in an hour". If I were going to do another 30 minutes to make a better list, I think I'd highlight my favorite ideas so far, ask myself what it was like to come up with those ones in particular, and try to adopt more of whatever mental postures those are for the rest ... (read more)

  1. Put it on a rocket and light the fuel.
  2. Use a big catapult.
  3. Give it to a gigantic bird.
  4. Eat it then eat lots of beans and fart while in a handstand.
  5. Put it on the hand of a clock, then speed time up a whole bunch so it's flug really fast off the end.
  6. Hot air balloon.
  7. Blimp.
  8. Hold it and jump really high.
  9. Go around back of the moon and shove the moon into the Earth.
  10. Use an airplane.
  11. Throw it hard with your arm.
  12. Put something really heavy at the end of a slide, put that slide end on the moon, and send the thing down the slide.
  13. Smash an asteroid into the Earth so the part
... (read more)
7LoganStrohl
I don't know what it says about me that was the fourth thing I thought of. Wtf brain.
2LoganStrohl
I started out with the procedure I describe here, as a warmup. I got to number 11 in the first three minutes, then when I started the second half of the procedure I just kept going.  This list took me about 30 minutes, so it's probably not the same as "the best 50 ideas I can come up with in an hour". If I were going to do another 30 minutes to make a better list, I think I'd highlight my favorite ideas so far, ask myself what it was like to come up with those ones in particular, and try to adopt more of whatever mental postures those are for the rest of the time. I expect I'd have fewer ideas in the subsequent half hour, but they'd probably be more to my liking, on average.  A different thing I think I could do with that second half hour to make a better list would be to pick several of the items from the first list that seem like they could use further development, perhaps because they have an obvious practical flaw (such as "but there's no air between the Earth and the moon!") and take them as prompts, each for three to five minutes. If I wanted to just explode this list into way more ideas that are all over the place, I'd try the grid method I describe at the bottom of the document I linked above.

I'm really happy to hear you tried this! Thanks for telling us about it.

>it seems pretty obviously connected to me

I'm curious what happens when you try to spell out why it's connected.

5Raemon
I think observing-abstract-objects and observing-self are both connected, though in different ways. My overall goal with the Thinking Physics workshop was to teach metacognition, with the physics questions grounding out "are you learning metacognition in a way that is demonstrably helpful?". I think being able to notice whats-going-on-inside-you in high granularity is useful to for noticing what cognitive habits are worth reinforcing. I think it might have actually been good to start with the abstract-objects version, after doing a physics problem that notably had an abstract-object in it, and have people specifically be trying to generate lots of properties about that abstract object, to give them more handles for how to brainstorm solutions.

I think it was something like three to five out of 75 people (so like 5%).

Two of the three people I'm thinking of didn't tell me all that much detail. Most of my model of what's going on at least some of the time comes from talking in more depth with just one of them. That's nowhere near enough information to make any remotely confident generalized claims; but it did seem like enough to include a note of caution.

I think most of the people likely to run into this kind of trouble are autistic. According to my model (which is roughly the "weak central coheren... (read more)

My unedited notes while reading this post, including an initial exercise log:

"Your cognition is much more powerful than just the part you have conscious access to, and it's crucial to make good use of it."

heck yeah

"A small tweak to how your brain processes information in general is worth more than a big upgrade to your conscious repository of cognitive tricks."

  • absofuckinlutely

"More creativity and good ideas just "popping into your head"."

  • oh that is appealing; pregnancy killed this and it's coming back but i'm still starving

"Once you realize exactly what is... (read more)

4Raemon
I just reread this. Since writing this post I’ve tried to do this in workshops a few time. People struggled a lot with it. One thing I noticed here was Logan is pretty skilled at the related subskills here, and it still requires a lot of attention and iteration to grok it and get the hang of it. I’m not sure whether I grokked the skill or not when I first did it. I think I was doing a cruder thing that was still really helpful. I’m honestly still not sure whether the thing with the deltas is helpful over the raw stream of thoughts. After iterating in workshops a bit, I now start people off with ‘load the puzzle up, and then notice the very first thing that pops into your mind and then stop. And then look at it a bit. And then go back to the puzzle again and notice the first two things that happen in your mind, and stop. And only then go on to observing yourself as you solve the puzzle.

The "notice something new" exercise in that post is extremely similar to "pay attention to the delta between thoughts". Seems to me that it's directing attention toward the same psychological event type, just not in the context of attempting to solve a problem.

One of my "responsible use" notes in "How To Observe Abstract Objects" seems directly relevant here:

However, a few people seem to have an overall cognitive strategy that crucially depends on not looking at things too closely (or something like that), and this is actively bad for some of them. If you try this for a minute and hate it, especially in an “I feel like I’m going crazy” kind of way, I do not recommend continuing. Go touch some grass instead. I’ve never seen this cause damage in just a few minutes (or at all, as far as I can tell), but I do think

... (read more)
4LoganStrohl
The "notice something new" exercise in that post is extremely similar to "pay attention to the delta between thoughts". Seems to me that it's directing attention toward the same psychological event type, just not in the context of attempting to solve a problem.

>and people were still confused, and then I gave up and just identified as a woman

D: i know those feels. that's kinda where i am lately. (except man instead of woman)

I'm interested in a couple of things from people who have read the Sequences (or AI to Zombies) and have thought a lot about applied rationality.

1) I would like to hear what you think it might be especially valuable to study in this way.  Which Sequence posts (or other existing resources) seem really important, but also lack crucial info about what exactly the concrete skill is or how to gain it? Also, what parts of rationality seem important to you but just do not seem to have been explored much from an application perspective? What do you think are ... (read more)

I've recently written up an overview of my naturalism project, including where it's been and where it's headed. I've tried this a few times, but this is the first time I'm actually pretty happy with the result. So I thought I'd share it.

*

In the upcoming year, I intend to execute Part Three of my naturalism publication project.

(Briefly: What is naturalism? 

Naturalism is an investigative method that focuses attention on the points in daily life where subjective experience intersects with crucial information. It brings reflective awareness to experiences... (read more)

2LoganStrohl
I'm interested in a couple of things from people who have read the Sequences (or AI to Zombies) and have thought a lot about applied rationality. 1) I would like to hear what you think it might be especially valuable to study in this way.  Which Sequence posts (or other existing resources) seem really important, but also lack crucial info about what exactly the concrete skill is or how to gain it? Also, what parts of rationality seem important to you but just do not seem to have been explored much from an application perspective? What do you think are some open problems in applied rationality? 2) Do you want to form an adventuring party? In what area/around what question or topic?

The grinding inevitability is not a pressure on you from the outside, but a pressure from you, towards the world. This type of determination is the feeling of being an agent with desires and preferences. You are the unstoppable force, moving towards the things you care about, not because you have to but simply because that’s what it means to care. 

Word.

I had a baby on June 20th. I wrote a whole bunch of stuff about what it was like for me to give birth at home without pain medication. I've just published it all to my website, along with photos and videos. 

CN: If you click on "words", you won't see anybody naked. If you click on "photos" or "videos", you will see me very extra naked. 

The "words" section includes a birth story, followed by a Q&A section with things like "What do contractions feel like?", "How did you handle the pain?", and "How did you think about labor, going into it?". Ther... (read more)

More on the moth: 

Members of this particular species can be either nocturnal or diurnal. I noticed my confusion when I saw one pollinating a lilac in bright moonlight, because I'd never seen a hummingbird at night before. That's what prompted me to take a closer look; up close it was clearly not a bird at all, but a bug!

For many years, I thought, "The first time I saw a sphinx moth, I thought it was a hummingbird." I've only recently realized that I have no idea how many moths I mistook for hummingbirds before that point. I may have seen them dozens of times during the day and never thought twice about it.

As someone who's about to become a father, I find this highly relevant. I will be studying and practicing several bits of this advice, especially the Productivity Purge and the Decide10 system, before the baby arrives. Thanks a bunch for writing this up.

Yeah, makes sense. I'm pretty bad at this kind of thing I think, but I'll think about it and if I come up with something I'll let you know.

I am curious whether reading or skimming the Wikipedia articles on "naturalistic observation" and "natural history" helps at all with getting where I'm coming from.

I certainly don't claim it was the best possible term to choose, but to me it seems extremely precise and accurate (though ambiguous, and i recognize that ppl round these parts are more familiar with philosophical naturalism qua ontological claim). In ecology, entomology, etc., the connotations go way beyond liking natural stuff, and suggest an orientation toward research topics and a correspond... (read more)

4Dagon
Those Wikipedia articles helped me understand.  I didn't until then, make the connection between "naturalist" as a descriptor of a person and "naturalism" as a descriptor of that person's ... Focus?  Toolkit?  Methodology? Calling it "Naturalistic Observation" would have been much clearer to me, or really anything that doesn't end in -ism.  If you want to expand past traditional nature topics, perhaps focus on the observation part, not the nature part. That said, naming things is famously hard, and I no longer have objections for myself - please consider those as suggestions for future readers.
6Raemon
That maybe updates me towards ‘yeah I guess Naturalism is a fine name for the study frame’ but still wanting a good shorthand to disambiguate with.

Oh perhaps some of the confusion with this post in particular is coming from the fact that I tried to contrast three different frameworks for experimentation. Sometimes when people contrast different frameworks, they are doing that because they want to convince the reader that one of them is better than the others. I'm definitely not trying to do that here! I contrasted three experimental frameworks because in order to take the actions that are part of the overall naturalist investigative method, it's important to deliberately avoid falling into either of the other two near-by frames. I was trying to describe the mindset that the actions comprising naturalist experimentation come from.

Thanks @Raemon. I agree with all of that.

>I don't know anyone who recommends "don't put much effort into understanding, just try stuff and see if it works", so I didn't expect that was the baseline that this sequence is arguing against.

@Dagon, I caution you that if you read this sequence (or the intro one) with the assumption that it's primarily trying to argue something, you'll probably be at risk of badly misinterpreting me.

I have a story that you're looking for and evaluating arguments here because you don't know what naturalism is or why it might be... (read more)

2Dagon
Your story is pretty close.  I'm looking for the "what it is" first, and I kind of hope the "why it might be worth learning" is as obvious from that as it seems.  There's already parts of the sequence that I've enjoyed and found worth learning, especially examples of very complex interactions that are difficult to reduce to independently-modelable parts.  But it's not adding up in my head to anything coherent enough to get a name, certainly not something as evocative as "Naturalism".   I apologize for my treating it as "compared to empiricism".  It may be I'm overreacting to openings like "Ordinarily, when someone is trying to solve a problem, experimentation is where they begin.", which is both incorrect AND implies that this is something very different from "ordinary".
6LoganStrohl
Oh perhaps some of the confusion with this post in particular is coming from the fact that I tried to contrast three different frameworks for experimentation. Sometimes when people contrast different frameworks, they are doing that because they want to convince the reader that one of them is better than the others. I'm definitely not trying to do that here! I contrasted three experimental frameworks because in order to take the actions that are part of the overall naturalist investigative method, it's important to deliberately avoid falling into either of the other two near-by frames. I was trying to describe the mindset that the actions comprising naturalist experimentation come from.

I realize this is only a response to one small thing in your comment and perhaps I will come back to the rest later, but I want to point out that according to me, I am definitely not arguing against anything at all.

a) I do remember that. b) It it still seems like a pretty good pointer to a (the?) main way I think of and experience myself, but I want to be clear that I was being at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and I would not in full honesty claim that I "identify as a tiger", or any sort of otherkin.

2Raemon
Yeah (I did understand that but seems good to clarify)

Related: Intro to Naturalism and especially The Nuts and Bolts of Naturalism (still coming out, a few posts not yet published).

1Jasnah Kholin
I already have them in my reading list, but after that post i plan to epub them and read them soon. 

> I would first be interested to know why you identify as a trans man generally

K so let's start with, "Is it true that I identify as a trans man?" But in fact I'll look at the slightly different question, "Is it true that I identify as a man?", because I think that probably gets more quickly to the heart of the matter. It's at least clear that I do not identify as a cis man.

I think there's probably some ambiguity in the way "identify" is used that makes this a little hard for me to answer.

On the one hand, there's how I present myself to other people. I ... (read more)

3Akiyama
This was a really interesting read. I am definitely a person who instinctively wants to categorise everyone as either male or female, and seeing transgender people makes me feel uncomfortable (I don't know any personally, although I do know a nonbinary person). But I enjoy reading about people's internal experiences relating to their sex or gender.

Thank you for this comment. It's an extraordinarily perceptive, candid, and thorough look into a set of experiences few are familiar with, and gave me a great deal to chew on. I very much admire your commitment to becoming a parent despite the complexity of your position—good luck with it all, and thanks again for sharing your experience.

7ymeskhout
Wow! I am so grateful for this comment and the transparency and candor you've written it with. I appreciate the time you took to write this out and I have some follow-up questions if you don't mind. Have you noticed any difference in people's behavior depending on what gender category they perceive you as? What is it about that perception by others that causes you so much stress? Is it because their perception comes pre-packaged along with some erroneous assumptions about you? (e.g. the pregnancy books assuming how you feel about your baby) This might be impossible to answer but are you able to determine which way causation flows? What I mean by this is do you feel more connected to certain concepts because they are coded as masculine, or do you just feel that affinity with concepts that happen to be coded as masculine? You've lucidly and transparently described how your cognition is affected by your hormonal balance, and your strong aversion to your PMS mental state, so I'm wonder where this preference cleaves. Similar question as above. Does the discomfort with aspects of your physiology stem from them being coded as feminine? Put another way, if you somehow had no concept of masculine/feminine, would your physiology on its own still cause you discomfort?

Awesome! I'd love to hear about how that experimentation goes, if you feel like reporting back later.

the next essay, which is called "experimentation", will talk directly about the "fixing it" thing

Yes, I think that's a good guess about one of the things that goes wrong. It's also, I think, almost exactly the thing that makes my writing especially valuable and nearly unique for the people who benefit a lot from it. The more of this kind of thing I have in a piece, the more the people who appreciate it really appreciate it, 'cause it's like I'm actually looking at things and helping their minds get the hang of actually looking at things, and mostly people just don't do that in writing, outside of maybe some poetry. But I think it's really super duper ... (read more)

2Raemon
Yup, sounds right to me.

TBC the main thing that prompted me to comment here was 

>The common justification trotted out (that it’s necessary to include the theoretically-possible transman who somehow can get pregnant and apparently suffers no dysphoria from carrying a fetus to term) is completely daft.

I think that pretty few people have actually known a trans guy or nonbinary person who was out while pregnant. It's a pretty socially uncomfortable situation, and one that sort of points a microscope at many things about being trans. Maybe even among the relatively few of us w... (read more)

I just noticed that you have a post called "Noticing Frame Differences", and I'm gonna go read it (in the next few days) in case that turns out to help.

2Raemon
Honestly I don't expect it to much, it's mostly just covering the basics of "frames exist". (It does cover how, like, even pretty similar frames can be subtly different in ways that are difficult to track, but, like, that's just enough to make me sadly aware of what's happening but not necessarily be able to do anything about it)

Hi! I'm not sure where exactly in this thread to jump in, so I'm just doing it here.

I like this thread! It's definitely one of my favorite discussions about gender between people with pretty different perspectives. I also like the OP; I found it to be surprisingly clear and grounded, and to point at some places where I am pretty confused myself.

>Originally you said that my post lacked an "understanding of the experiences of trans people" and I'm still eager to learn more! What am I missing exactly and what sources would you recommend I read?

I'm taking a... (read more)

2Raemon
Awhile ago, I think you said something like "my gender identity is 'tiger', by which I mean 'if you're making guesses about what sort of things I'll do, or what social role I'll play... the thing where you might have used 'man' or 'woman' as a heuristic label to inform a bunch of your guesses will be less accurate than if you think 'tiger', which includes both a kind of strength [and maybe predatoriness?] but also lithe gracefulness".  I think Malcolm Ocean chimed in in that (FB?) convo and said 'oh yeah me too!' and that made something click in a useful way to me. I liked the definition of gender where swapping in "tiger" was a reasonable third-option (and it felt more useful than previous attempts I'd seen people make to convey some kind of nonbinariness), and having the two datapoints of you and Malcolm made me go "oh yeah I have a pretty clear sense of what a "tiger" is. I'm curious if a) you remember that, b) does it still feel accurate now?
5ymeskhout
Thank you so much for being open to discuss such a sensitive topic. If you end up retracting anything, please let me know and I can edit this reply accordingly. I would first be interested to know why you identify as a trans man generally. Do/did you experience dysphoria? If so, can you describe what it feels like? Would it be reasonable to split dysphoria into two different categories: body characteristics versus social role? How would you distinguish identifying as a trans man versus identifying as a masculine female (as in, what is the line that prompts the "flip" to the other side)? Has your pregnancy changed or prompted any new thoughts about your gender identity? I apologize in advance if any of this comes across as an interrogation, that is not intentional! I very rarely encounter many people who are willing to engage this topic critically so I'm grateful for the opportunity.
7LoganStrohl
TBC the main thing that prompted me to comment here was  >The common justification trotted out (that it’s necessary to include the theoretically-possible transman who somehow can get pregnant and apparently suffers no dysphoria from carrying a fetus to term) is completely daft. I think that pretty few people have actually known a trans guy or nonbinary person who was out while pregnant. It's a pretty socially uncomfortable situation, and one that sort of points a microscope at many things about being trans. Maybe even among the relatively few of us who exist, most of us don't want to talk about it because geeze, we're already going through enough. Pregnancy tends to be really damn hard even for cis women. But I actually do like the idea of talking about this on LW in particular.

lol i even commented on his post. my memory is dumb.

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