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Recently on LessWrong: Estrogen: A trip report
(Yes, he's treating estrogen HRT as the type of psychedelic drug that might necessitate a "trip report".)
There's a lot to sift through here, but the most interesting part of the post to me was being introduced to the concept of the schizotypy spectrum, a related-but-distinct counterpart to the autism spectrum. Autistic traits and schizotypal traits both have similar outward manifestations (e.g. introversion and difficulties with social interaction), but they have different root causes and different internal subjective manifestations (principally, autistic types are higher in detail-orientation, and schizotypes are more prone to disorganized and delusional thinking):
The author of the post then goes on to claim that, subjectively, estrogen caused him to experience a shift away from autistic traits and towards schizotypal traits:
Obviously this all has to be taken with a grain of salt, because the risk of confounding factors and psychosomatic/placebo effects in this case is high. Nonetheless, I'm curious whether pre-existing schizotypal traits in an individual (contrary to the author's experience in which HRT induced these traits) might play a causal role in explaining the abnormally high incidence rate of MTF transsexuality among so-called "terminally online" young men. By "terminally online" I mean the prototypical image of this demographic: likely to be in a STEM field, likely to have had little romantic success with women, likely to have obsessive "nerdy" interests like anime and video games, etc. This demographic is often stereotyped as "autistic", although that label may potentially conflict with the fact that MTF transsexuals are disproportionately drawn from this demographic as well, since it's not clear a priori why a disorder that allegedly gives you a "hyper male brain" would also make you more likely to want to be a woman. But if some of these "autistic" men actually belong to other personality clusters that have a tendency to masquerade as autism, it could help us build a higher resolution mapping of this region of cognitive space and provide more accurate explanations of the trajectories of different individuals (especially because one of the schizotypal traits is, as mentioned previously, a predisposition towards delusional thinking).
Regardless of which theory ultimately turns out to be correct, I think the biological basis of LGBT traits (or at least, which intrinsic traits increase one's predisposition towards being LGBT) is a subject that deserves further study. In my experience, anti-wokes are more likely to entertain the possibility of race and sex differences being biologically intrinsic, but they shy away from applying biological explanations to LGBT, preferring instead to endorse social constructivist theories (and in particular, the "social contagion" theory for transsexuality). Wokes are the opposite, heavily opposing biological explanations for race and sex differences but somewhat warmer towards biological explanations for LGBT (although they may not allow themselves to present it in exactly those terms). I prefer the simple, consistent position: it's all (at least partially) biological! Social contagion is undoubtedly a part of why the incidence rate of transsexuality has skyrocketed in the last several decades, although I think it's clear that only some people are susceptible to "catching" the contagion in the first place, and one's individual susceptibility is biologically mediated.
Yeah. "Girlish" traits like frivolity, stupidity/incapability, and artsiness are valued among AGP folks because it turns them on. Whacking it to not being able to do math is a common AGP pastime. There's an element of roleplay going on that is impossible to dissociate from the chemical element without double blind studies.
Also, "Increased experience of meaningness in day-to-day life." - yeah, making major life changes, having a new project, and potentially a new social group, can do that for you.
No, I know what he's talking about with that one. (Not because I've ever been on HRT, but because on this particular point he's just describing how I am by default, and this point seems to be a persistent and noticeable difference between how I experience things and how other people experience things.)
The simplest way I could describe it would be something like, "the impression that sensory perceptions carry semantic content that extends beyond the boundaries of what is literally contained in the sense perception". Normally irrelevant details like colors, landscape features, or the particular spatial arrangement of objects triggering strong emotional associations, taking on "narrative weight", etc. I think that everyone is familiar with these types of experiences to some degree (could be something as simple as, visiting a place you haven't been to since you were a little kid and triggering nostalgic memories as a result), but some people have these types of sensations much more frequently and intensely than others, and from a wider range of stimuli. But the point is that it doesn't have to be attached to traditional "centers of meaning" like new projects or new social relations.
It could also be described as "a strong natural resistance to depression". Typically when I hear people describe depressive moods they use language like "feeling empty", feeling like everything has been "drained of meaning", feeling like "nothing matters", and... I've never felt any of that. Like ever. It's hard to imagine feeling like that when everything is so damn meaningful all the time! (On the flip side, I am extremely prone to anxiety, so it's not at all the same thing as just having a clean bill of mental health.)
This is how my perception has worked since early childhood, so I can confidently say I'm not describing the effects of psychedelics or other foreign substances.
I'm a trans-woman and I think this is pretty accurate. I started hormones and then spent 9 months presenting as male 'closing out' my old life and wasn't part of any sort of trans community except some peer support groups that were kinda trite. When I'd go hiking in the Sierra's though I'd get emotionally overwhelmed and end up crying because I was flooded with this feeling of intense meaning I didn't really have any way to structure. I went back to church because I feel a really intense gratitude and God felt like a good place to put it, though I can't say I truly believe. I have a number of friends who became religious shortly after transitioning, though they tend to end up Catholic and I'm the lone prot.
The strong natural resistance to depression is also something I really resonate with. It's easier to be satisfied by and engaged with my own life on E. I feel less drawn to escapism or hyper stimulation and better able to enjoy pleasant steady states like walking in the park with a friend, or cooking a nice meal.
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True, but that's also known as the pathetic fallacy. It works better as a literary device, because in the real world yes sometimes the sky is cloudy and it starts to rain just when you're feeling sad or angry, but sometimes it's just a cloudy sky and a rain shower.
I found a much simpler way of explaining it.
Say you're in a large crowd of strangers, you don't know anybody. You scan the crowd and every individual person looks largely the same to you, they just melt into a sea of anonymity. But then you notice your best friend somewhere in the crowd; suddenly this person "lights up" in a way that none of the others did, to you this person looks quite different, even though to anyone else they would look like just another stranger. Importantly, this isn't a conceptual/discursive thing: you don't have to consciously think to yourself "oh there's my friend, we had plans to meet up today, I should go talk to them now". It's baked into the immediate visual perception itself that they just "glow" in a way that the strangers don't, pre-discursively, even though from an "objective" point of view there's nothing really to distinguish the raw visual image of your friend from the raw visual image of any other person.
People who are higher in "meaningfulness of experience" have these experiences more often and from a wider range of stimuli, people who are lower in meaningfulness have them less often.
We can hypothesize that the mechanism of action in full blown schizophrenia is that this meaningfulness becomes so excessive that the person has to adopt delusional beliefs just so they can build a coherent internal model of their own sensory experience (e.g. that signpost on the side of the road looks so salient because it must be a coded message just for me that was planted there by the CIA).
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