A scientist who sits on the board of a tobacco company, and who publishes a study that finds tobacco to be perfectly harmless, will have his or her study treated with extra skepticism, owing to their study's inevitable bias. If the scientist fails to disclose their conflict of interest, they'll be immediately ostracized from the scientific community. A failure to disclose a conflict of interest is an affront if not a direct attack on the credibility of science itself. It is unacceptable.
The author of this post, tailcalled, is self-admittedly autogynephilic. (See: https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/about/). Whatever pretenses of scientific merit his study and his findings may have, he failed to disclose his conflict of interest when presenting his results. He has demonstrated gross scientific negligence.
If police launch an internal investigation and find themselves blameless, we roll our eyes. If an autogynephilic man launches a study on autogynephlia, and he finds himself free of socially undesirable traits, we as rationalists... accept his favorable findings about himself without skepticism? God, I hope not.
tailcalled inventing his own questions smelled a little funny. It's a rudimentary element of epistemology to know that, despite your best efforts to remain impartial, you will always be interpreting the world around you with your thumb on the scale in your own favor. This is why we go to great lengths to create double-blind studies.
The fact that tailcalled, and to a lesser extent Scott Alexander (who publicized and brought significant attention to tailcalled results), failed to disclose tailcalled's conflict of interest is shameful. The truth, and the methods to arrive at the truth, must be held sacrosanct at lesswrong, or we're wasting our time.
Scott Alexander can do better, and tailcalled should apologize.
Additionally, all publications surrounding tailcalled results should be amended with a disclosure. If you're pissed that you had to scroll to the bottom of this post to find out that tailcalled is himself autogynephilic and on HRT, you should be.
Accounting for (and making disclosures of conflict of interest about) biases isn't "meta-level sneering". It's a fundamental part of science.
Studying a subject is the most important part of science. If a research area degenerates into pure accusations of bias and nonsense arguments (as distinct things; yes I agree that bias can be relevant as long as it's not the only topic), then it is pretty worthless.
I am autogynephilic, and there's been a lot of autogynephilia talk lately. One subject that sometimes comes up, but hasn't been discussed much on LessWrong, is how common autogynephilia is in cis women.
Two datasets that are sometimes used for this question are Scott Alexander's and Aella's. Part of how they happened to be made is that I reached out to Scott and Aella, suggesting experimental questions for assessing autogynephilia, in ways that might function in cis women too and not just cis men[1]:
This is somewhat different from usual autogynephilia measures, which contain questions such as:
The reason I didn't include these latter questions is because it seems likely to me that they will be interpreted differently for males and females (e.g. if males do not have female anatomy, then they cannot be aroused by it literally, so instead they get aroused by imagining some other female anatomy that they don't actually have), and because these usual questions seem very bad if taken literally ("ever" and "while" rather than "how frequently" and "by" seem like there could be a lot of ways to get affirmative answers while not actually being autogynephilic - though the low rate of endorsement among women suggests to me that they are not taking it literally?).
Anyway, Michael Bailey (activist researcher for autogynephilia ideology) responds in Aporia Magazine, saying "It's important not to confound y'know being seen as a woman or having a female body from having sex with a partner while having a female body or the prospect of going out on a date while wearing sexy clothes".
I don't think this makes any sense. "Do you find the thought of masturbating alone as a woman to be erotic?" explicitly states that one doesn't have a partner around. "Picture a very beautiful woman. How sexually arousing would you find it to imagine being her?" doesn't suggest a partner any more than "Did you ever feel sexually aroused when putting on females' underwear or clothing?" or "Have you ever become sexually aroused while picturing your nude female breasts?" does. This seems like a completely unfounded critique.
I think people who dismiss these questions should admit that they are starting with The Bottom Line that cis women are not autogynephilic, and reasoning backwards about what sorts of measures they do or do not want to endorse, rather than pretending that they are driven by evidence and desire for good measurement.
Since nobody really knows how to assess this.