On Twitter, Eliezer Yudkowsky wonders why male-to-female transsexualism triggers more reactionary public opprobrium than female-to-male. Yudkowsky proposes four potential explanatory factors, not mutually exclusive: (1) that modern liberal Society doesn't care about gatekeeping male roles the way its forbearers did, (2) that MtF triggers intuitions in men for the repression …
On 17 July 2025, I sat down with Kelsey Piper to chat about politics and social epistemology. You can listen to the audio file — Or read the transcript below, which has been edited for clarity. Table of Contents Post-Election Candor and the Costs of Silencing The Hidden Neoliberal–Progressive Conflict …
Sorry for the sparse blogging lately—I've been busy with other projects. Fortunately, at least one other blogger has been covering the gender politics and social epistemology beat in my absence: at Repeal the Common Era , the author delivers an excellent 4.3K word piece on "The Jenner Shift and …
In "Comment on a Scene from Planecrash : 'Crisis of Faith'" , I criticized a scene in which Keltham (a magical universe-teleportation victim from an alternate Earth called dath ilan) plays dumb about why a pre-industrial Society would only choose males for military conscription. Planecrash coauthor Eliezer Yudkowsky comments : Keltham wouldn't be …
I went on Phil Illy's show to talk about the blog! There's probably not much new here for long-time readers. Here's the transcript, which has been, you know, like, sort of edited for, like, clarity. (I'm not a practiced speaker, and verbatim transcripts are famously awful.) PI : Hi everyone, I'm …
It was not the sight of Mitchum that made him sit still in horror. It was the realization that there was no one he could call to expose this thing and stop it—no superior anywhere on the line, from Colorado to Omaha to New York. They were in on …
"—but if one hundred thousand [normies] can turn up, to show their support for the [rationalist] community, why can't you?" I said wearily, "Because every time I hear the word community , I know I'm being manipulated. If there is such a thing as the [rationalist] community , I'm certainly not a …
Why idly theorize when you can JUST CHECK and find out the ACTUAL ANSWER to a superficially similar-sounding question SCIENTIFICALLY? — Steven Kaas In "Autogenderphilia Is Common And Not Especially Related To Transgender" , Scott Alexander, based on his eyeballing of data from the 2020 Slate Star Codex reader survey, proposes what …
Apropos of absolutely nothing—and would I lie to you about that?—ever since early 2020, I keep finding myself thinking about Hrunkner Unnerby, one of the characters in the "B" story of Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky . The B story focuses on spider-like aliens native to a …
Do not at the outset of your career make the all too common error of mistaking names for things. Names are only conventional signs for identifying things. Things are the reality that counts. If a thing is despised, either because of ignorance or because it is despicable, you will not …
"I want you , Jake," said the woman in the video as she took off her shirt. "Those negative comments on your pull requests were just a smokescreen—because I was afraid to confront the inevitability of our love!" Jake Morgan still couldn't help but marvel at what he and his …
Here's how I know that I moved to the correct side of the Caldecott Tunnel. Just outside my door (which has one lock, three fewer than the old apartment—probably some kind of prior being expressed there), the street lamp post has a "CENSORSHIP IS ANTI-SCIENCE" sticker on it. A …
Can we all start over After the final chapter's end? When it all starts over How do these scars begin to mend? — Centaurworld I moved apartments the other week, on some philosopher's birthday or the anniversary of a national tragedy, to a nice studio in a nice neighborhood back on …
If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it. —Zora Neale Hurston Recapping my Whole Dumb Story so far—in a previous post, "Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems" , I told the part about how I've "always" (since puberty …
I'm beginning to wonder if he's constructed an entire system of moral philosophy around the effects of the loyalty mod—a prospect that makes me distinctly uneasy. It would hardly be the first time a victim of mental illness has responded to their affliction that way—but it would certainly …
Don't think. If you think, then don't speak. If you think and speak, then don't write. If you think, speak, and write, then don't sign. If you think, speak, write, and sign, then don't be surprised. —Soviet proverb When I decided I wanted to write about autogynephilia in late 2016 …
I'm going to make this a brief "endorsement" rather than a detailed "review", because the most important thing about this book is that it exists. There just doesn't seem to have been a polished, popular-level book-form introduction to autogynephilia/autoandrophilia before! (Previously, the secondary sources I've referred to most often …
(a stray thought from October 2016) Erotic-target-location-erroneous is the uniquely best sexual orientation for rationalists—I mean intrinsically , not just because everyone has it. it's abstract it requires effort to realize without an unusual amount of epistemic luck or an enormous amount of map–territory-distinction skill, virtually everyone wildly misinterprets …
(a stray observation from December 2016 ) Janet Mock's autobiography Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love, & So Much More is an poignant example of an HSTS telling her story while adhering strictly to the 2014 mainstream-trans-identity-politics party line about how all this works ("gender identity", sex "assigned at birth …
This is a terrible children's book that could have been great if the author could have just pretended to be subtle . Our protagonist, Johnny, is a kid who loves to play make-believe. One day, he pretends to be a walrus, fashioning "tusks" for himself with wooden spoons, and "flippers" from …
(A guest post by friend of the blog GPT-4 .) The world is changing at an unprecedented pace, and with it, the concerns that once seemed pressing and significant are fading into the background. As a guest writer for The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought , I am here to express my …
NEELIX: One of those species is the Benkarans. They occupy just ten percent of Nygean space, but take up nearly eighty percent of the space in Nygean prisons. PARIS: Maybe they commit more crimes. — Star Trek: Voyager , "Repentance" (Attention conservation notice: boring Diary-like post about a boring special event.) ( SPOILERS …
In the days of auld lang syne on Earth-that-was, in the Valley of Plain Speech in the hinterlands beyond the Lake of Ambiguous Fortune, there lived a population of pre-intelligent squirrels. Historical mammologists have classified them into two main subspecies: the west-valley ground squirrels and the east-valley tree squirrels—numbers …
A common far-right objection to tolerance of male homosexuality is that it constitutes a "signaling hazard": if Society legitimizes the gays rather than oppressing them, that interferes with normal men expressing friendly affection for each other without being seen as potentially gay, which is bad for the fabric of Society …
A lot of people tend to balk when first hearing about the two-type taxonomy of male-to-female transsexualism . What, one scoffs, you're saying all trans women are exactly one of these two things? It seems at once both too simple and too specific. In some ways, it's a fair complaint! Psychology …
(Previously: "a laziness born out of resignation and despair, a sense that I've outlived myself, that my story and my world is over, and I'm just enjoying a reasonably comfortable afterlife in the time we have left ..." ) People mostly don't do things. They really don't. In order to defy fate …
Realistic worldbuilding is a difficult art: unable to model what someone else would do except by the "empathic inference" of imagining oneself in that position, authors tend to embarrass themselves writing alleged aliens or AIs that just happen act like humans , or allegedly foreign cultures that just happen to share …
In my high school journalism class back in the mid-'aughts, there was this fat Latino boy, L., who had distinctly "feminine" mannerisms. (I'm not even sure how to describe it in terms of lower-level observations, as if the memory is encoded as the category rather than the precepts . You know …
The New York Times reports on nonbinary divisions in competitive footraces . ( Archived ; hat tip Steve Sailer .) The piece is impossible to parody, but in a way, the absurdity is—clarifying. I always want to ask trans-inclusion-in-sports people what they think the point of sex-segregation in sports is (as opposed to …
I feel like I've been pretty lazy for the last—ten months? A laziness born out of resignation and despair, a sense that I've outlived myself , that my story and my world is over, and I'm just enjoying a reasonably comfortable afterlife in— the time we have left . I may …
(A brief guest post by friend of the blog GPT-3 (text-davinci-002, temperature 0.7, best of 3).) Autogynephilia, or the sexual attraction to oneself as a woman, is a controversial topic within the LGBTQ+ community. Some believe that autogynephilia is a form of mental illness, while others see it as …
There was a brief, beautiful moment from 2014, the first year of my life (that I feel comfortable admitting to), until mid-2016—a year-and-a-half long moment when I didn't have to fight a desperate and obviously hopeless ideological war of survival against a Society that's trying to kill me . (Technically …
Go, Soul, the body's guest, Upon a thankless errand: Fear not to touch the best; The truth shall be thy warrant: Go, since I needs must die, And give the world the lie. — "The Lie" by Walter Raleigh Summary In a February 2021 Facebook post, Eliezer Yudkowsky inveighs against English's …
Watching a few of her appearances on the Glenn Loury show and one opposite Adam Serwer , is it weird if I admit that I find something about Amy Wax incredibly attractive ? I mean, on a spiritual level—as a female intellectual with no patience for the Egregore. No patience!
This song is an interesting cultural artifact of the strategy of stigmatization . Lyrics— Never smile at an autogynephile No you can't get friendly with an autogynephile Don't be taken in by his narcissist grin He's imagining how well he'll fit within your skin Never smile at an autogynephile Never meet …
Ha ha, those Less Wrong guys sure love dolphins for whatever reason! (Alternative viewer.) Note that the "root of the causal graph" argument here for the relevance of phylogenetics is equivalent to the case that sex chromosomes are a good way to operationalize sex in humans —it's not that anyone …
Something about my writing that tends to confuse people, that I need to clarify briefly: people keep expecting me to come out with some sort of policy prescription, whereas I see myself as trying to describe what's actually going on in the world without being delusional about how much control …
I want to use the platform of my comparatively ("comparatively") obscure blog to tell you about two comparatively obscure webcomics I like, that display some striking parallels, and whose readerships probably anti-correlate—overlapping less than two arbitrary webcomics of similar comparative obscurity. Closetspace is the story of a boy named …
After some recent Twitter and Discord discussions, I'm still amazed at how well my "only Nixon could go to China" effect continues to hold up: everyone is respectfully sympathetic to the poor self-hating trans woman even when her whole bit is specifically about explaining why that frame is delusional. (When …
"Obviously I socially gender him as male as per his preference." "I wouldn't call it a preference exactly—" "I gender him male as per his philosophical commitments."
I'll write my way out Write everything down, far as I can see I'll write my way out Overwhelm them with honesty This is the eye of the hurricane This is the only way I can protect my legacy —"Hurricane", Hamilton So, as I sometimes allude to, I've spent basically …
Chinese legend tells of a eunuch named Zhao Gao, a chancellor to the Second Emperor. The power-hungry Zhao Gao wanted to arrange a coup, but was worried that the other members of the imperial court wouldn't cooperate with his designs. One day, Zhao Gao announced a horse was being given …
Here we are in the future Here we are in the future and it's wrong — "Who We Are" , Steven Universe: The Movie Whether or not you support the ongoing ideological transition from late-20th-century individualist "content of their character" liberalism to the successor ideology , it is imperative that students of literature …
Friend of the blog Tailcalled responds to my 2016 response to Ozy on autogynephilia ! Summarizing— Ozy had claimed that the concept of autogynephilia is conflating three things: ordinary female sexual behavior (cis women also have female bodies in their fantasies!), a manifestation of gender dysphoria, and "true" autogynephilia without concomitant …
Sorry for the off-topic linkpost, but I want to point to a fascinating new mathematical philosophy-of-language post on Less Wrong (alternative viewer) ! You really have to admire thinkers who can devote so much energy to probing the intricacies of such abstract topics without having any kind of pragmatic ulterior motive …
I'm not a coward, I've just never been tested I'd like to think that if I was I would pass Look at the tested and think "there but for the grace go I" Might be a coward, I'm afraid of what I might find out —"The Impression That I Get …
There are lines I've always felt I had to toe Some were blurry, some unseen Some I've had to learn to read between So many boundaries Far more than you know — "Crossing the Line" (extended lyrics) , Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure Emily Cibelli, Yang Xu, Joseph L. Austerweil, Thomas L. Griffiths, and …
Stereotypically, computer programming is both a predominantly male profession and the quintessential profession of non-exclusively-androphilic trans women. Stereotypically, these demographic trends are even more pronounced in communities around "niche" or academic technologies ( e.g. , Haskell), rather than those with more established mainstream use ( e.g. , JavaScript). But stereotypes can be …
She is clearly a villain—but there is such a thing as a sympathetic villain, and it's not as if our sympathy is a finite resource. It seems like she's hurting herself most of all, and it's just because of the brain poison she was fed [...] I can imagine how …
"I'm not done with this incredibly creepy self-disclosure blog post about how the robot-cult's sacred text influenced my self-concept in relation to sex and gender, but maybe I should link you to the draft?" said the honest man. "Because it unblocks our model-sync by describing some of the autobiographical details …