Tacitus Browning, author of Blanchard-Bailey ITT entry#5, has come in first place on the Intellectual Turing Test for the gender-identity side, with 79% of voters considering him to be a Blanchardian. tcheasdfjkl is the other winner on the gender-identity side; she also participated in and won the last Intellectual Turing Test.
J, author of gender identity ITT entry #4, has come in first place on the Intellectual Turing Test for the Blanchard-Bailey side. There were no other winners for the Blanchardians.
Tacitus, therefore, is the overall winner of the Intellectual Turing Test.
Finley, author of Blanchard-Bailey ITT entry #4, has won the Strawman Award for Poorly Representing Your Own Side. In spite of the opinion of voters, he is a Blanchardian.
There were three entries on which Blanchardians and gender identity supporters disagreed, although in no case did this disagreement cause a winner to lose or a loser to win. Blanchardians considered Blanchard-Bailey ITT entry #1 to be written by a gender identity supporter, while gender identity supporters believed the author to be a Blanchardian. The Blanchardians were correct. Blanchardians considered ITT gender identity entry #5 to be written by a Blanchardian, while gender identity supporters believed the author to be a gender identity supporter. The gender identity supporters were correct. Blanchardians considered ITT gender identity entry #1 to be written by a Blanchardian, while gender identity supporters believed the author to be a gender identity supporter. Gender identity supporters were correct.
Full rankings are below:
- Tacitus Browning, ITT GI #6, 74% gender identity, ITT BB #5, 79% Blanchardian.
- tcheasdfjkl, ITT GI #8, 91% gender identity, ITT BB #6, 63% Blanchardian.
- loki-zen, ITT GI #7, 74% gender identity, ITT BB #1, 49% Blanchardian.
- sigmaleph, ITT GI #5, 51% gender identity, ITT BB #2, 43% Blanchardian.
- ReaperReader, ITT GI #1, 71% gender identity, ITT BB #9, 26% Blanchardian.
- Alizarin, ITT GI #2, 64% gender identity, ITT BB #7, 16% Blanchardian.
Blanchardians
Thing of Things 
I didn’t post my guesses in advance because I was one of the participants, but I got two wrong (GI #4 and BB #1), in addition to one BB entry where I don’t remember how I voted (BB #2) and one BB entry where I didn’t vote because I was too unsure (BB #5).
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Ozy, thank you for running this! It was really interesting.
Is this a good place for feedback on ITT construction?
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Yep!
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I think in the future, you should let people from each side suggest questions. It is important that questions allow you to get into the deeper/trickier-to-model parts of the position, without spoiling things too much, and it can probably be difficult to make such questions if you don’t subscribe to the position yourself.
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In the previous ITT, I really liked the question that went something like “why do you believe what you believe and what would change your mind”. I think it would have been a good question here as well (and probably a good question for every ITT) – I think that’s the question that best gets at the heart of pretty much any disagreement. I managed to fit something like this into my GI answer anyway, which I think improved my answer and achieved my goals of (1) attempting to be persuasive or at least lay out my relevant opinions for the benefit of those who disagree and (2) getting people to respond with substantive disagreements (which I plan to respond to in turn). I also think the fact that I didn’t have to answer something like this for BB made it too easy for me to pass (though it was still a close pass!).
I wonder, how come you decided not to use that question this time around?
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I thought it led to kind of vague answers! I wanted to ask more specific questions to make people actually talk about the specifics of their beliefs. I do really like that question though and I’m interested in trying to think of ways to phrase it that would lead to less vagueness.
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I don’t know how well it worked here, but I think that’s a great question for many many circumstances, and one I’d generally like to see if it works out.
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Suggestion: replace “what is this person’s view” with “how strong an argument is this for view X”. A lot of the comments tended to focus on cultural shibboleths, rather than “does this person understand this position well enough to advocate for it”.
I second liking the question “what would change your mind”, and a pox on people who answered vaguely.
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The problem with “how good an argument is this?” is that it is difficult to score correctness: many people make bad arguments for their own side. It’s unfair to penalize a voter because the participant was a walking strawperson.
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I thought the point of ITTs was to evaluate how much the participant understands the other side’s argument, not evaluate the voter’s ability to discern?
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I would have liked one question that got to the meat of the dispute – something like “In 1000 words or fewer, why do you identify as GI or BB rather than the alternative?”
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If you go look at the last ITT, questions that broad tend to lead to a lot of answers along the lines of “because all the evidence points in that direction, obviously,” which are both not very helpful and boring to read.
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@Ozy
Some answers were like that, and IIRC people criticized them . But I think there were more specific answers too.
Maybe a different way of getting a similar thing is “write a short persuasive piece explaining why your side is right”.
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Aceso: Voters need an incentive to participate, and for a lot of voters it is the intellectual challenge of trying to figure out whether the participant is real or fake.
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@Aceso
Also, I would say the shibboleths people focused on actually had substance. Particular terms catch on in particular subcultures for a reason – their connotations are meaningful, and catching whether those connotations are more consonant or more dissonant with a particular belief set is an actual substantive judgment.
There’s also a particular satisfaction for the ITT participant (at least for me) in successfully deceiving people into thinking I agree with them when I actually don’t. 🙂 So I would prefer to keep the tougher standard of “does this person actually believe X” rather than the relatively easier “does this person understand X”.
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For feedback:
Please please please in future look into ways of including a control group that isn’t part of this blog’s readership. A little bit in the SJ/AntiSJ, and overwhelmingly in this ITT, the sentiment of “This is such a perfect representation of this position that I know it’s fake” drove me up the wall to the point where I stopped reading.
If you just want the exercise as a neat little ingroupy thing, then don’t let me tell you you’re having fun wrong. But to the extent that we hope to learn something here, this is the WEIRD problem of research cranked up past 11.
Having the commenters know that there are a certain number of entries found in the wild, or at least from more typical members of their respective groups, would at least give them reason to think “Hmm, well, people do actually say that, so maybe…”
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Very much this. I consider the voting results useless for this reason (but the essays are still worth reading).
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“This is such a perfect representation of this position that I know it’s fake”
I’m interested how accurate people who judged on that heuristic are. In job interviews, I’ve dinged people for that reason – if every answer you give me is exactly the best answer possible, then after a certain number of interactions, the probability that you’re being insincere is a lot higher than the probability that you’re a perfect candidate.
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I’d imagine it’s quite accurate in this particular case. The problem is that it’s exploiting knowledge of this particular playing field to undermine (What I understand as) the point of the exercise. It changes the question from “Can one successfully pass as a member of this group?” to “Can one successfully pass as an atypical member of this group who also reads thing of things.”. Which, let’s be honest here, has almost no resemblance to the rest of the groups’ respective populations outside.
I feel like you’re fighting the point a little pedantically here. While I agree that Hypercongruence is something to keep in mind, I should have known to write the long form “This is such a perfectly typical representation of this group’s position that one absolutely sees expressed often by the group’s actual members in their actual interactions with other actual human beings… that I know it must be fake, because this is a small community and I know that people around here don’t talk that way, and I’m confident that none of those other typical members of group ‘A’ are actually here participating.”, but thought it seemed long, overly specific, and that the point was adequately conveyed in the shorter version. My bad for dropping the ball on that one!
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I’m now feeling rather smug about thinking that BB#5 was simply too nasty to be real.
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I graciously accept my participation trophy!
Observation: almost completely identical pass rate (46% of identitarians passed as Blanchardian, 46.3% of Blanchardians as identitarian), but the different group sizes means that obscures some pretty substantial differences.
Second observation: Mark Taylor Saotome-Westlake gave a higher probability to my GI entry being sincere than my BB one.
Third observation: Neither of the people who I thought participated in the ITT actually did.
Counting my own as ones I got correct, because it would have been pretty hard to get them wrong, I was right on:
2/3 true BB (me, #4)
3/6 true GI (#6, #7, #8)
5/6 GI-as-BB (all but #9, on which I was extremely low confidence)
…0/2 BB-as-GI, given I cannot in good conscience count my own as correct there
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I like that way of measuring voting success rates. Let me do that too (I’m leaving out the ones where I didn’t vote or don’t remember my vote, and I’m also leaving out my own because I feel like that’s not fair):
3/3 true BB
5/5 true GI
2/3 GI-as-BB (also 2 left out)
2/3 BB-as-GI
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I had also put down likelihood percentages and just went through and tried to score my guesses based on that, but I think the samples are just too small because for every bucket my score is either 0% or 100%.
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My predictions:
GI #1: 70% BB: Wrong (in retrospect, I wanted to reduce this to 60%)
GI #2: 80% BB: Wrong
GI #3: 70% GI: Wrong
GI #4: 90% BB: Correct
GI #5: 90% BB: Oops, wrong. (and predicted I will likely guess GI for its sister)
GI #6: 90% BB; Wrong on first guess but at least I realized before the ITT was over. (missed statement about autists, should’ve been 30%)
GI #7: 70% GI; Correct
GI #8: 60% GI; Correct
GI #9: 70% GI: Wrong (I predicted that if I was wrong, it’d have been written by a TERF. Ooops, double fail)
BB #1: 90% GI; Correct
BB #2: 90% GI: Correct, though at its sister I guessed I would get this one wrong…
BB #3: 95% BB: Correct
BB #4: 70% GI: Wrong
BB #5: 60% BB; Wrong
BB #6: 50% BB, 50% BB; Didn’t dare guess
BB #7: 90% GI: Correct
BB #8: 60% BB: Correct
BB #9: 60% GI: Correct
I should probably do some math to check whether I did better than chance…
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Doing the same factoring as trent:
2/3 true BB
2/6 true GI
4/5 GI-as-BB (leaving out my pass)
1/3 BB-as-GI
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Wow, I knew some people would see through GI #4 but ninety percent?? Ouch. What shibboleths did I trip over?
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Well, you fooled me.
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(Someone better versed in GI theory should correct me if I’m wrong, but…)
Equating “male” and “female” with physical sex in the first paragraph jumps out. I’ve noticed a distinct slipperiness around the notion of physical sex in GI terminology. Most charitably, GI proponents believe that physical sex ceases to be a useful way of dividing reality when we consider trans* people. It’s typically replaced with ASAB, genital configuration, hormone balance, secondary sexual characteristics, or something(s) of that nature.
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I mean, it may just have been luck. Note that I got GI #5 and GI #6 wrong, and I assigned both of those 90% too. I probably need more experience with ITTs to calibrate my guesses better.
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(Sorry I’m late!)
The probabilities you state (including the amendment to 0.3 BB for GI #6) amount to a base-two logarithmic score of −18.835, slightly worse than chance. (Assigning 0.5 to each outcome would lose one information-theoretic bit per question, for a score of −18.)
I also failed to do better than chance. This is a hard game!
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Fair enough.
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Also, did you see the TERF vs … transfeminist? non-TERF? *shrug* intellectual turing test that I hosted?
https://www.reddit.com/r/GCdebatesQT/comments/6arjsp/intellectual_turing_test_results/
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I got 13/18, getting wrong GI#5, BB#1, BB#4, BB#5, and BB#6. Conclusion: I don’t really have a good sense of the Blanchard-Bailey theory…
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As someone who had no idea what was going on, I’m kind of shocked to have gotten 13 out of 18; I got GI 1, 2, and 4 wrong, as well as BB 5 and 6. Though I guess 13 isn’t that good. Was expecting more like 10, though.
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How did you decide your votes?
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Well, I suppose no idea is an exaggeration. I have some experience with trans people who probably round to GI. I hadn’t really encountered BB until it was discussed here, though, so I didn’t really know how GI people relate to BB. I also have no idea what genuine BB are like, so I looked for signs of non-GI rather than direct signs of BB (or signs of TERFish tendencies; I’d gotten the impression that TERFs favored BB). And sometimes there were signs that required no expertise, though were certainly no more than slight clues; vagueness could be evidence that someone was trying to cover up that they didn’t know how they should answer a particular question because they were answering for the other side.
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I also think I did reasonably for not closely following the issues being debated here, with 12/16:
5/6 Real GI, 3/3 Fake GI, 2/3 Real BB, 5/6 Fake BB.
Fooled by: Tacitus and tcheasdfjkl
Oddly unpersuaded by: Alizarin and J
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It’s been a long day. That’s 14/18, not 12/16.
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oops, that should say 4/6 fake BB.
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FWIW, GI #4 is what I’d convinced myself to believe until I realized that it contradicted my entire lived experience. For obvious reasons, I’ve never told anyone my real views before. I entered this ITT partly hoping that someone would conclusively shred them so I could clear my conscience.
But then, a couple of weeks ago, M.T. Saotome-Westlake plugged his blog on the SSC subreddit, and I realized I wasn’t alone. From where I stand, the ‘mainstream’ trans* discourse looks like… a huge lie, basically, and it horrifies me that I can’t reconcile it with my own vivid experience.
As a result, my prior that anyone has a clue what is really going on is very low. Blanchard-Bailey seems the most accurate to me, but it’s just a “how” and not a “why.” So when I saw his comment, I disgorged a bunch of crazy ideas I’d been wrestling with. (Not like I was gonna be taken seriously anyway, right?) But it spawned some fascinating discussion. I’d still like to grok what this thing is, where it came from, how it works and what we’re truly supposed to do about it.
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*reads through post while mentally criticizing ingroup-ish person for strongly outgroup characteristics*
*notices point that everyone eventually devolves into either NRx or enbiequeer*
…Fuck. That, uh, says a lot about my evolving politics that I’ve been trying to not think about.
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I think the notion that “magic button trans” people (i.e. those who, like Scott, would change sex if they could do so easily and seamlessly) are on the tipping point just before being trans is… plausible, but not obvious.
There seem to be A LOT of “magic button trans” people. I generally find 10% to 15% in my gender surveys, and this study [ http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/abs/10.3138/cjhs.252-A7 ] (via [ http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/06/21/links-615-urling-toward-freedom/ ] ) found that ~30% are “magic button trans” (with very different way of asking than I did; I really should include this in my surveys).
I don’t see any reason to believe that Scott is different from other magic button trans people, or that magic button trans is much more common among rationalists than in other groups.
(Magic button trans *does* correlate with A*P though, at like r=0.6 among cis people, though if you weaken it in various ways then it may be more like r=0.4.)
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Sidenote: I’m currently doing a survey on it, and magic button trans does not seem to correlate much with discomfort at puberty (r ~ 0.2 among cis people; it becomes much higher when including trans people).
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It was really early morning in my timezone when I made my first comment here, so I couldn’t add my confidence levels for each entry. Here’s the screenshot of my spreadsheet that had all of them listed. From a quick overview, my higher-confidence votes were in fact a little more accurate.
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I agree that there should have been a question about why (preferred theory) is correct and the other is wrong. I have thoughts on this and couldn’t fit it into my ITT so here goes:
Gender identity theory the way Ozy described it seems like a tautology – of course people who transition have gender dysphoria. People who are happy with their body and social gender role have no reason to transition. If they had defined gender identity theory as believing in a metaphysical essence of gender I wouldn’t have participated because I’m an atheist who doesn’t believe in metaphysical anything.
I don’t know any lesbian trans women well enough to speak with confidence about AGP being a thing or not. I have two main reasons for not agreeing with the BB theory.
1- There are almost certainly way more causes than two for people to transition and I know people who don’t fit either BB profile. There’s some suggestive evidence for the body map theory, and I know people who’ve transitioned because of trauma. I’ve also read stuff by a radfem-sympathising trans woman who fit the HSTS profile perfectly except that she was bi and didn’t date men until years after she transitioned.
2 – The HSTS profile sounds like someone who will eventually detransition. If someone’s main motivation for transitioning is not fitting into society as a GNC gay person, that is a huge red flag. There are a lot of detransitioned women who transitioned because they found it too hard to live as a butch lesbian and then really regretted it.
I hope this clears things up.
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AGP in the sense of “getting aroused by the thought of being a woman” is definitely a thing. Look for instance at this survey on /r/AskTransgender:
About 45% of the participants said that autogynephilia is “descriptive of their feelings”. In addition, in a recent survey I made, I included some questions about A*P. The results are here:
It includes both questions I wrote and questions that Trent advised me on. Trans women reported having a genderbending kink at a rate of 65%, and there was a correlation among cis people between A*P and willingness to press magic sex-change buttons of somewhere between 0.4 and 0.6 (depending on how you count).
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For the record, I’ve known several of those detransitioned women who claimed they were ostracized as butches, and not a single one of them so far has actually been HSTS when you get down to it.
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You need to start making threads about those kinds of things on /r/GCdebatesQT. It’d be hilarious.
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Interesting statistics on autogynophilia. Do you know if there is a correlation between AGP and being exclusively attracted to women?
What would you say the difference is between feeling dysphoric because of being GNC and gay and being HSTS?
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