Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.
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15 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 11:25 AM

I wish LW questions had an "accepted answer" thing like stackexchange

I wonder how many recent trans people tried/considered doubling down on their sex (eg males taking more testosterone) instead first. Maybe (for some people) either end of gender spectrum is comfortable and being in the middle feels bad¿ Anybody know? Don't want to ask my friends because this Q will certainly anger them

[-]Ann3d72

If it worked, sounds potentially compatible with whatever the inverse(s) of agender is/are? Can at least say that many cisgender people get hormone therapy when they aren't getting what they would like out of their hormones (i.e., menopause, low testosterone, etc). Hormones do useful things, and having them miscalibrated relative to your preferences can be unpleasant.

It's also not uncommon to try to 'double down' on a quality you're repressing, i.e., if someone's actively trying to be their assigned sex, they may in fact try particularly hard to conform to it, consciously or otherwise. Even if not repressed, I know I've deliberately answered a few challenges in life where I discovered 'this is particularly hard for me' with 'then I will apply additional effort to achieving it', and I'm sure I've also done it subconsciously.

Well  there's this frequently observed phenomenon where someone feels insecure about their gender, and then does something hypermasculine like joining Special Forces or becoming a cage fighter or something like that. They are hoping that it will make them feel confident of their birth-certificate-sex. Then they discover that nope, this does not work and they are still trans.

People should be aware that there are copious examples of people who are like -- nope, still trans --- after hoping that going hard on their birth-certificate-gender will work,

Ascertainment bias, of course, because we only see the cases where this did not work, and do not know exactly how many members of e.g. Delta Force were originally in doubt as to their gender. We can know it doesnt work sometimes.

While I was typing this, quetzal_rainbow made the same point

I mean, the problem is if it works we won't hear about such people - they just live happily ever after and don't talk about uncomfortable period of their life.

I notice I strong upvote on LW mobile a lot more than desktop because double-tap is more natural than long-click. Maybe mobile should have a min delay between the two taps?

Practice speedruns for rebuilding civilization?

Is it rude to make a new tag without also tagging a handful of posts for it? A few tags I kinda want:

  • explanation: thing explained.
  • idea: an idea for a thing someone could do (weaker version of "Research Agenda" tag)
  • stating the obvious: pointing out something obviously true but maybe frequently overlooked
  • experimental result
  • theoretical result
  • novel maybe: attempts to do something new (in the sense of novelty requirements for conference publications)

Good question! From the Wiki-Tag FAQ:

A good heuristic is that tag ought to have three high-quality posts, preferably written by two or more authors. 

I believe all tags have to be approved. If I were going through the morning moderation queue, I wouldn't approve an empty tag.

At times, I have added tags that I felt were useful or missing, but usually, I add it to at least a few important posts to illustrate. At one time, one of them was removed but a good explanation for it was given.

Zettelkasten in five seconds with no tooling

Have one big textfile with every thought you ever have. Number the thoughts and don't make each thought too long. Reference thoughts with a pound (e.g. #456) for easy search.

I wonder what experiments physicists have dreamed up to find floating point errors in physics. Anybody know? Or can you run physics with large ints? Would you need like int256?

Andor is a word now. You're welcome everybody. Celebrate with champagne andor ice cream.