Another caveat von Oswald et. al left out: If you used his attention head parameterization, but inside a standard transformer, you'd get totally fucked over by LayerNorm! LayerNorm would distort the outputs of the attention heads, and place a soft cap on the amount the training labels (i.e. weights) could feasibly drift from their original parameterizations. One alignment-relevant consequence is that this nerfs in-context GD as a method for getting transformers to drift arbitrarily far from their original values. Stacking more training examples in the prompt doesn't work as a way of getting the "weights" (training examples) to explode in an arbitrary direction, including ones that would cause the overall model's outputs to become misaligned.

That's the idea! He could use the nasal spray to figure out for sure how much oxytocin affects him relative to other people. If little to none, that's another line of evidence that the receptors are broken.

Oxytocin nasal spray is available over-the-counter, including from the official Walmart website. If you want to test this hypothesis, I recommend buying and trying some, and comparing notes with somebody else who's tried it.

the issues you take with the first two paragraphs of my post are valid, and largely the byproduct of me rushing my post out since otherwise i'd never have published it at all. my psychological default is to be kind of cruel towards trans people, and the editing passes over this post i did bother to do managed to tone that down a lot, but artifacts of it remain. "either transness is incomprehensibly convoluted or trans people are lying to themselves" was very much an artifact of me trying to appease the part of me that's hostile to trans people. (and, judging by the success of this post, which i assume was mostly upvoted by cis people who have some animosity towards trans people, it was a pretty effective rhetorical choice, albeit unconscious.)

re: the rest of your comment: the paragraphs in my post about my personality having something of a natively cutesy component, and my mention of having penis dysphoria, do point at potentially intersex-ish parts of my brain, which potentially pushed me somewhat closer to transition. i don't think these alone would have been enough to motivate or justify transition on my part though. indeed, i've been pretty heavily considering detransition for the past year or so, and especially since July (at which point i did MDMA about this and accepted that some of me really does deeply want to detrans). i'd just been suppressing this for years, for fear of being rejected by the trans community + having to awkwardly re-integrate into the world of cis people.

in other words, i was kind of being steered by neurosis and denial of reality, when i chose to transition. it made me happier for awhile, because the trans community gave me lots of wanted i wanted. but what i wanted back then was a kind of pica, something that i technically desired, and appreciated on some level, but which didn't really address my underlying psychological needs very well. currently, i'm mostly trying to address those psychological needs (e.g developing social skills and self-love). mostly separately, i might detrans if i ever decide the costs of losing my relationship and access to the trans community and so on are lower than the befits of going back to a social role my authentic self would probably be better suited to.

I agree with basically all of this. Cuteness is a social strategy and defense.

(I should have emphasized both of the following points more in the original post, but: For some trans people, it seems to be more about wanting to be beautiful or attractive, rather than cute like an anime girl, as a social strategy/defense. Many of them aren't into the anime stuff at all, and play more conventional feminine beauty status games, and I think this is sometimes a major reason for that.

Beyond that, there's probably also self-worth tied up in here too, not just worth in the eyes of others. I.e., if you become a cute anime girl or a beautiful women, maybe you'll start loving yourself in the way you love them.)

Good comment overall. I think people with miserable pasts do often find ways to stay miserable indefinitely into the future. But on the other hand "bad experiences with reality" are exactly the thing that fosters becoming well-adjusted (to reality, including social reality), a la reinforcement learning. So like, when people do become socially graceful, this is often partly the byproduct of negative experiences with failing to be graceful (alongside positive experiences with the opposite.)

yeah lol. the author of that video, ceicocat, was actually a member of the anime analysis community as far back as 2017, which is when i was into it myself + first considering transitioning. i guess that's evidence that at least within that community, my reasons for transitioning were at least roughly similar to those of the other trans people.

(when i saw that video for the first time, i was like "seriously!? fucking ceicocat of all people is the first person i know of who's managed succinctly articulate this theory of transgenderism!? incredible...")

soooo true. re: the wrong anime girls: there are some anime girls who i think make for better role models for transfems with somewhat masculine personalities. for instance, major kusanagi from the ghost in the shell franchise is an awesome, beautiful, ultra-competent badass. these days, i'm aspiring to be more like her, rather than an ultra-cutesy k-on! character.

there may also be an aspect that's more like "if i was cute/hot/beautiful, i would finally love myself." like, not routing through the affection others lavish onto you.

The thumbnail in the Twitter link to this post was the first frame of the cutesy K-On! GIF, which may have set inappropriate expectations. I've since deleted the Twitter linkpost (because someone there argued me into deleting everything associated with this post. I later changed my mind, and could reverse the LessWrong deletion, so the essay is still here). If I externally link it anywhere else I'll put a content warning there. I don't change the thumbnail because, by more or less total coincidence, it's a very eye-catching thumbnail.

How is it getting easier to be loved by others if you're female attracted? You're complicating your dating life if anything. 

It's notable that in practice, transitioning did get me more love and affection, but only from other trans people (who I now effectively date exclusively). This is why the r/traa stage in this pipeline was critical: It provided a community of people who were willing to collectively look past all the costs of transitioning, and group up to provide trans people with what they actually wanted: love and affection and support, just coming from each other rather than the outside world.

And do you really expect any male social outcast to just accept female traits on their body instead of feeling really gay and experiencing reverse dysphoria? 

This straightforwardly happened to me: I'm physically uncomfortable with my breasts the same way I am with my penis, and womanhood slightly impairs my ability to express my masculine personality traits. But I stayed transitioned anyway. Partly this is because the trans community means a lot to me, especially the LGBTESCREALs and even more especially my girlfriend. Partly, this is because surgery for breast removal is just really expensive. (I think before transition, I was lying to myself, trying to convince myself I had dysphoria about lacking breasts, because the alternative seemed like it was not being accepted into transgender-hood at all?)