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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   17237 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.

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.

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.

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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