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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13637 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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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):

A couple of years ago Ely recommended that I read the paper, Autistic-Like Traits and Positive Schizotypy as Diametric Specializations of the Predictive Mind (Andersen, 2022). It turned out to be the most interesting paper I read while writing this post. The author proposes that the archetypal behavioural traits observed in autism and schizotypy – like variation in attentional modulation, theory of mind, and exploratory behaviour – are downstream from a fundamental oversensitivity or undersensitivity to sensory prediction errors, respectively:

It has previously been argued that autism-spectrum conditions can be understood as resulting from a predictive-processing mechanism in which an inflexibly high weight is given to sensory-prediction errors that results in overfitting their predictive models to the world. Deficits in executive functioning, theory of mind, and central coherence are all argued to flow naturally from this core underlying mechanism.

The diametric model of autism and psychosis suggests a simple extension of this hypothesis. If people on the autism spectrum give an inflexibly high weight to sensory input, could it be that people with a predisposition to psychosis (i.e., people high in positive schizotypy) give an inflexibly low weight to sensory input?

[...]According to these models, everyone falls somewhere on the autism–schizotypy continuum, and neither autistic-like traits nor positive schizotypy represent dysfunction. Instead, each side of the continuum is accompanied by its own set of cognitive-perceptual strengths and weaknesses. People high in autistic-like traits are detail-oriented, have a focused attentional style that allows them to ignore distractors, have some advantages in sensory-discrimination abilities, and have highly developed systemizing skills, allowing them to learn and use complicated rules-based systems.

People high in positive schizotypy tend to be imaginative and creative and have a more diffuse attentional style (compared with the average person) that allows them to switch their attention more easily. There is also some evidence that people high in positive schizotypy tend to direct their attention toward highly abstract, "big-picture" concerns rather than focusing on details.

[...]Although the autistic type may rely more on culturally inherited high-level belief systems, the schizotype's proclivity for tinkering with high-level priors may lead to the construction of relatively idiosyncratic high-level belief systems. In our own culture, this could manifest as having odd or (seemingly) unlikely beliefs about high-level causes. This may include beliefs in the paranormal, idiosyncratic religious beliefs (e.g., being "spiritual but not religious"), or believing conspiracy theories, all of which are associated with positive schizotypy.

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:

I'll outline some of the psychological changes I've noticed in myself since starting estrogen. The term "schizo" is used very informally in today's internet vernacular, making it difficult to discuss these concepts in a sensible manner – but if the reader is comfortable playing armchair psychologist, perhaps they can judge for themselves whether the following makes me more "schizo":

  • Increased predisposition towards associative thinking. Activities like tarot are more appealing.
  • Increased predisposition towards magical thinking, leading to some idiosyncratic worldviews. This can probably be gauged by the nonsense I post on Twitter.
  • Increased experience of meaningness in day-to-day life. This felt really good.
  • Increased mentalising of other people's internal states, resulting in a mixture of higher empathy and higher social anxiety. I'm somewhat more neurotic about potential threats.
  • Decreased sensory sensitivity.
  • Decreased attentional diffusion, contrary to what the paper predicts.
  • Decreased systematising and attention to detail, for instance with tedious matters like finances.

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.

I think that this "estrogen cures autism" analysis is false, for the simple reason that this reads like confirmation bias and (ironically) an attempt to systematize the effects of estrogen in a way directly counter to any notion of the author becoming less autistic. That being said, I'd assign something like a 1-5% chance that they're onto something, and that something would be really interesting if it was true, so for a bit I'm going to be arguing from that perspective.

Before anything else, let me establish that the "problem" with autism is difficulty communicating .That predictably leads to social deficits and-- guess what-- trans people report high levels of social isolation and loneliness (This figure includes FTM trans people too, which aren't what I'm talking about with autism, but I'll get to that later). Meanwhile, estrogen increases oxytocin and oxytocin reducing autism symptoms and oxytocin decreases the felt impact of social isolation. So immediately, there's a pretty compelling link between autism->feeling lonely->taking estrogen->feeling better that explains the "success" of the trans phenomenon, including the high rates of treatment satisfaction. This blog post goes one level deeper, and proposes an autism-schizoid axis that underlies the taking estrogen-feeling better link... and additionally, explains why trans people feel better even without taking hormones. Namely, if their problem is an excess of autistic traits, even just adopting the cultural behavior of a more schizoid culture is enough to make up for part of their social deficits-- and joining a dedicated community focused on doing the same thing reinforces that effect even further.

FTM trans people don't really make sense if you assume that autism compensation is the mechanism of action for transsexualism, but with the autism-schizoid axis they start to make more sense... being schizoid causes it's own form of social deficits that presumably testosterene helps compensate for. We know that testosterone encourages altruistic behavior under certain circumstances... I'm not sure how that would help it counter schizoid personalities, but it's certainly suggestive of something going on.

Put all that together with the fact that transexualism has increased pretty much in tandem with the simultaneous rise of autism/ADHD diagnoses and hormone disruptors like phthalates, microplastics, high fructose corn syrup, etc. and you can put together a comprehensive, self-consistent explanation for why this entire social movement in happening.

Again, I don't actually believe the article. Even if the author is right, I think their methodology is so wrong as to be useless. But it is interesting, and for that I have to respect it.

That predictably leads to social deficits and-- guess what-- trans people report high levels of social isolation and loneliness (This figure includes FTM trans people too, which aren't what I'm talking about with autism, but I'll get to that later). Meanwhile, estrogen increases oxytocin and oxytocin reducing autism symptoms and oxytocin decreases the felt impact of social isolation. So immediately, there's a pretty compelling link between autism->feeling lonely->taking estrogen->feeling better that explains the "success" of the trans phenomenon, including the high rates of treatment satisfaction.

Part of this satisfaction could also be gaining a new social group. You might find similar rates of satisfaction among people who joined a church, or who in past generation may have joined a music subculture (goth, emo, punk) instead of becoming LGBTQ++.

Part of this satisfaction could also be gaining a new social group.

Yep, that's what I'm addressing with the

and joining a dedicated community

bit. The autism compensation culture is my explanation for why they join the "trans" group specifically. Sure, they can join a wargaming group and have fun with fellow autists, but reinforcing autistic behavior makes the social deficits in the rest of their life worse. trans groups, meanwhile, teach them to be pro-social at least when dealing with LGB people and white liberals.

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