>
> —["The Lie" by Walter Raleigh](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/trb9HPWFk8Gy9MBdN/less-wrong-poetry-corner-walter-raleigh-s-the-lie)
-### Summary of Claims
+### Summary
- * In a February 2021 Facebook post, Eliezer Yudkowsky inveighs against English's system of singular third-person pronouns: as a matter of clean language design, English's lack of a gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun is a serious flaw: you shouldn't be required to commit to a stance on what sex someone is in order to say a grammatical sentence about her or him.
+ * In a February 2021 Facebook post, Eliezer Yudkowsky inveighs against English's system of singular third-person pronouns: as a matter of language design, English's lack of a gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun is a serious flaw: you shouldn't be required to commit to a stance on what sex someone is in order to say a grammatical sentence about her or him.
* This seems fine as a critique of the existing English language. However, Yudkowsky then goes on to proclaim, in connection with pronouns for transgender people, that "the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he", with a default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size' and to say that this just _is_ the normative definition. Because it is _logically_ rude, not just socially rude, to try to bake any other more complicated and controversial definition _into the very language protocol we are using to communicate_."
- * However, this allegedly "simplest and best" proposal fails to achieve its stated aim of avoiding baking controversial claims into the language grammar. **The _reason_ trans people want others to use their designated pronouns is _because_ they're trying to control their socially-perceived sex category** and English speakers interpret _she_ and _he_ as conveying sex-category information. The circular redefinition is functionally "hypocritical": **if it were _actually true_ that _he_ simply referred to those who take the pronoun _he_, then there would be no reason for trans people to care which pronoun people used for them.**
+ * However, this allegedly "simplest and best" proposal fails to achieve its stated aim of avoiding baking controversial claims into the language grammar. **The _reason_ trans people want others to use their designated pronouns is _because_ they're trying to control their socially-perceived sex category** and English speakers interpret _she_ and _he_ as conveying sex-category information. Yudkowsky's proposed circular redefinition is functionally "hypocritical": **if it were _actually true_ that _he_ simply referred to those who take the pronoun _he_, then there would be no reason for trans people to care which pronoun people used for them.**
* **The "meaning" of language isn't some epiphenominal extraphysical fact that can be declared or ascertained separately from common usage.** The word "dog" means what it does _because_ English speakers use the word that way; if you wanted "dog" to mean something different, you'd need to change the way English speakers behave. Thus, **circularly redefining _he_ and _she_ as purportedly referring to pronoun preferences rather than sex doesn't work, if people are still in practice choosing pronouns on the basis of perceived sex.**
- * **Given that _she_ and _he_ do in fact convey sex category information to English speakers, some speakers might perceive an interest in resisting pressure to use pronouns in a way that contradicts their perception of what sex people are.** This does _not_ constitute a philosophical committment that pronouns can be "lies" as such.
+ * **Given that _she_ and _he_ do in fact convey sex category information to English speakers, some speakers might perceive an interest in refusing demands to use pronouns in a way that contradicts their perception of what sex people are.** This does _not_ constitute a philosophical committment that pronouns can be "lies" as such.
* In the comments of the Facebook post, Yudkowsky seemingly denies that pronouns convey sex category information to native English speakers, claiming, "I do not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than 'doesn't look like an Oliver' is attached to something in your head." **This self-report is not plausible, as evidenced by previous writings by Yudkowsky that treat sex and pronouns as synonymous.**
- * **I'm _not_ claiming that Yudkowsky should have a different pronoun usage policy.** I agree that misgendering all trans people "on principle" seems very wrong and unappealing. Rather, I'm claiming that [**policy debates should not appear one-sided**](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided); in order to be politically neutral in your analysis of why someone might choose one pronoun policy over another, you need to _acknowledge_ the costs and benefits of a policy to different parties. **It can simultaneously be the case that pressuring speakers to use pronouns at odds with their perceptions of sex is a cost to those speakers, _and_ that not exerting such pressure is a cost to trans people.** It's possible and desirable to be honest about that cost–benefit analysis, while ultimately choosing a policy that favors some parties' interests over others.
+ * **I'm _not_ claiming that Yudkowsky should have a different pronoun usage policy.** I agree that misgendering all trans people "on principle" seems very wrong and unappealing. Rather, I'm claiming that [**policy debates should not appear one-sided**](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided): in order to be politically neutral in your analysis of why someone might choose one pronoun policy over another, you need to _acknowledge_ the costs and benefits of a policy to different parties. **It can simultaneously be the case that pressuring speakers to use pronouns at odds with their perceptions of sex is a cost to those speakers, _and_ that failing to exert such pressure is a cost to trans people.** It's possible and desirable to be honest about that cost–benefit analysis, while ultimately choosing a policy that favors some parties' interests over others.
- * If I don't disagree with the ultimate policy decision of "don't misgender trans people", why am I putting so much effort in disputing Yudkowsky's reasoning in support of that policy? In addition to ["arguments matter, not conclusions" being a general principle of correct cognition](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line), it's because in this case, **I need the correct reasoning in order to make extremely impactful social and medical decisions.** People with gender dysphoria who are considering whether to transition need _factually accurate information_ about gender-transition interventions: if you have the facts wrong, you might wrongly avoid an intervention that would have benefitted you, or wrongly undergo an intevention that harms you. If it were _actually true_ that the simplest and best convention is that _he_ refers to the set of people who have asked us to use _he_, then asking for new pronouns despite not physically passing as the corresponding sex wouldn't be costly, but in fact, it is costly. Thus, **Yudkowsky is harming a reference class of people that includes me by spreading disinformation about the costs of asking for new pronouns; I'm better off because I don't trust Eliezer Yudkowsky to tell the truth.**
+ * **People with gender dysphoria who are considering whether to transition need _factually accurate information_ about gender-transition interventions**: if you have the facts wrong, you might wrongly avoid an intervention that would have benefitted you, or wrongly undergo an intevention that harms you. **This includes facts about how pronouns work in the existing English language.** If it were _actually true_ that the simplest and best convention is that _he_ refers to the set of people who have asked us to use _he_, then asking for new pronouns despite not physically passing as the corresponding sex wouldn't be costly. But in fact, it is costly. As someone with a history of gender problems, this is decision-relevant to me. Thus, Yudkowsky is harming a reference class of people that includes me by spreading disinformation about the costs of asking for new pronouns; **I'm better off because I don't trust Eliezer Yudkowsky to tell the truth.**
<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
If you grew up speaking English, gendered pronouns feel "normal" while gendered [noun classes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class) in many other languages (where, _e.g._, in French, a dog, _le chien_, is "masculine", but potatoes, _la pommes de terre_, are "feminine") seem strange and unnecessary, but someone who grew up with neither would regard both as strange. If you spoke a language that didn't _already_ have gendered pronouns, you probably wouldn't be spontaneously eager to add them.
-All this seems fine as a critique of the existing English pronoun system! However, I argue that Yudkowsky's prescriptions for English speakers going forward goes badly wrong. First, Yudkowsky argues that it's bad for stances on complicated empirical issues to be baked into the language grammar itself: since people might disagree on who fits into the [empirical clusters](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace) of "female" and "male", you don't want people to be forced to make a call on that just in order to be able to use a pronoun.
+All this seems fine as a critique of the existing English pronoun system! However, I argue that Yudkowsky's prescription for English speakers going forward goes badly wrong. First, Yudkowsky argues that it's bad for stances on complicated empirical issues to be part of the language grammar itself: since people might disagree on who fits into the [empirical clusters](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace) of "female" and "male", you don't want speakers to be forced to make a call on that just in order to be able to use a pronoun.
Fair enough. Sounds like an argument for universal singular _they_ (and eating the cost of increased collisions where it's ambiguous which subject an instance of _they_ would refer to): if you don't think pronouns should convey sex-category information, then don't use pronouns that convey sex-category information! But then, in an unexplained leap, Yudkowsky proclaims:
> So it seems to me that the simplest and best protocol is, "'He' refers to the set of people who have asked us to use 'he', with a default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size" and to say that this just _is_ the normative definition. Because it is _logically_ rude, not just socially rude, to try to bake any other more complicated and controversial definition _into the very language protocol we are using to communicate_.
-The problem with this is that [the alleged rationale for the proposal does not support the proposal](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i6fKszWY6gLZSX2Ey/fake-optimization-criteria). If your default pronoun for those-who-haven't-asked goes by perceived sex (which one presumes is what Yudkowsky means by "gamete size"—we almost never _observe_ people's gametes), then you're still baking sex-category information into the language protocol in the form of the default! Moreover, this is clearly an "intended" rather than an accidental effect of the proposal, in the sense that a policy that _actually_ avoided baking sex-category information into the language (like universal singular _they_, or name-initial- or hair-color-based pronouns) would not have the same appeal to many of those who support self-chosen pronouns: _why_ is it that some people would want to opt-out of the sex-based default?
+The problem with this is that [the alleged rationale for the proposal does not support the proposal](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i6fKszWY6gLZSX2Ey/fake-optimization-criteria). If your default pronoun for those-who-haven't-asked goes by perceived sex (which one presumes is what Yudkowsky means by "gamete size"—we almost never _observe_ people's gametes), then you're still baking sex-category information into the language protocol in the form of the default! Moreover, this is clearly an "intended" rather than an accidental effect of the proposal, in the sense that a policy that _actually_ avoided baking sex-category information into the language (like universal singular _they_, or name-initial- or hair-color-based pronouns) would not have the same appeal to those who support self-chosen pronouns: _why_ is it that some people would want to opt-out of the sex-based default?
Well, it would seem that the motivating example—the causal–historical explanation for why we're having this conversation about pronoun reform in the first place—is that trans men (female-to-male transsexuals) prefer to be called _he_, and trans women (male-to-female transsexuals) prefer to be called _she_. (Transsexuals seem much more common than people who just have principled opinions about pronoun reform without any accompanying desire to change what sex other people perceive them as.)
These authors are to be commended for making their view so clear and explicit: in order to not betray your trans friends (according to this view), you need to think of them as the gender that they say they are. Mere verbal pronoun compliance in the absence of underlying belief is insufficient and possibly treacherous.
-This point that pronoun changes are desired precisely _because_ of what they _do_ imply about sex categories in the existing English language is a pretty basic one, that one should think should scarcely need to be explained. And yet Yudkowsky steadfastly ignores the role of existing meanings in this debate, bizarrely writing as if we were defining a conlang from scratch:
+This point that pronoun changes are desired precisely _because_ of what they _do_ imply about sex categories in the existing English language is a pretty basic one, that one would think should scarcely need to be explained. And yet Yudkowsky steadfastly ignores the role of existing meanings in this debate, bizarrely writing as if we were defining a conlang from scratch:
> It is Shenanigans to try to bake your stance on how clustered things are and how appropriate it is to discretely cluster them using various criteria, _into the pronoun system of a language and interpretation convention that you insist everybody use!_
-There are a couple of problems with this. First of all, the "that you insist everybody use" part is a pretty blatant [DARVO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO) in the current political environment around Yudkowsky's social sphere. A lot of the opposition to self-chosen pronouns is about opposition to _compelled speech_: people who don't think some trans person's transition should "count"—however cruel or capricious that might be—don't want to be coerced into legitimizing it with the pronoun choices in their _own_ speech. That's different from insisting that _others_ use sex-based non-subject-preferred pronouns, which is not something I see much of outside of gender-critical ("TERF") forums. Characterizing the issue as being about "freedom of pronouns", [as Yudkowsky does in the comment section](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228), elides the fact that freedom to specify how _other people_ talk about you is in direct conflict with the freedom of speech of speakers! No matter which side of the conflict one supports, it seems wrong to characterize the self-ID pronoun side as being "pro-freedom", as if there wasn't any "freedom" concerns on the other side.
+There are a couple of problems with this. First of all, the "that you insist everybody use" part is a pretty blatant [DARVO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO) in the current political environment around Yudkowsky's social sphere. A lot of the opposition to self-chosen pronouns is about opposition to _compelled speech_: people who don't think some trans person's transition should "count"—however cruel or capricious that might be—don't want to be coerced into legitimizing it with the pronoun choices in their _own_ speech. That's different from insisting that _others_ use sex-based non-subject-preferred pronouns, which is not something I see much of outside of gender-critical ("TERF") forums. That is, in the world I see, the pronouns-by-self-identity faction is _overwhelmingly_ the one "insist[ing] everybody use" their preferred convention. Characterizing the issue as being about "freedom of pronouns", [as Yudkowsky does in the comment section](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228), elides the fact that freedom to specify how _other people_ talk about you is in direct conflict with the freedom of speech of speakers! No matter which side of the conflict one supports, it seems wrong to characterize the self-ID pronoun side as being "pro-freedom", as if there wasn't any "freedom" concerns on the other side.
If you _actually_ believed it was Shenanigans to bake a stance on how clustered things are into a pronoun system and insist that everyone else use it, then it should be _equally_ Shenanigans independently of whether the insisted-on clusters are those of sex or those of gender identity—if you're going to be consistent, you should condemn them _both_. And yet _somehow_, people who insist on sex-based pronouns are the target of Yudkowsky's condescension, whereas people who insist on gender-identity-based pronouns get both a free pass, _and_ endorsement of their preferred convention (albeit for a different stated reason)? The one-sidedness here is pretty shameless!
Unfortunately, I don't have a study with objective measurements on hand, but I think most native English speakers who try this exercise and introspect—especially using examples where the trans person exhibits features or behavior typical of their natal sex, with things like "she ejaculated" or "he gave birth" being the starkest examples—will agree with Kerr's assessment: "You can know perfectly the actual sex of a male person, and yet you will still react differently if someone calls them _she_ instead of _he_."
-Let's relate this is Yudkowsky's specialty of artificial intelligence. In a post on ["Multimodal Neurons in Artificial Neural Networks"](https://openai.com/blog/multimodal-neurons/), Gabriel Goh _et al._ explore the capabilities and biases of the [CLIP](https://openai.com/blog/clip/) neural network trained on textual and image data.
+Let's relate this to Yudkowsky's specialty of artificial intelligence. In a post on ["Multimodal Neurons in Artificial Neural Networks"](https://openai.com/blog/multimodal-neurons/), Gabriel Goh _et al._ explore the capabilities and biases of the [CLIP](https://openai.com/blog/clip/) neural network trained on textual and image data.
-There are some striking parallels between CLIP's behavior, and phenomena observed in neuroscience. Neurons in the human brain have been observed to respond to the same concept represented in different modalities (_e.g._, [Quiroga _et al._](/papers/quiroga_et_al-invariant_visual_representation_by_single_neurons.pdf) observed a neuron in one patient that responded to photos and sketches of actress Halle Berry, as well as the text string "Halle Berry"), and so do CLIP neurons. Futhermore, CLIP is vulnerable to a Stroop-like effect where its image-classification capabilities can be fooled by "typographic attacks"—a dog with instances of the text "$$$" superimposed over it gets classified as a piggy bank, an apple with a handwritten sign saying "LIBRARY" gets classified as a library. The network knows perfectly what dogs and apples look like, and yet still reacts differently if adjacent text calls them something else.
+There are some striking parallels between CLIP's behavior, and phenomena observed in neuroscience. Neurons in the human brain have been observed to respond to the same concept represented in different modalities; for example, [Quiroga _et al._](/papers/quiroga_et_al-invariant_visual_representation_by_single_neurons.pdf) observed a neuron in one patient that responded to photos and sketches of actress Halle Berry, as well as the text string "Halle Berry". It turns out that CLIP neurons also exhibit this multi-modal responsiveness. Futhermore, CLIP is vulnerable to a Stroop-like effect where its image-classification capabilities can be fooled by "typographic attacks"—a dog with instances of the text "$$$" superimposed over it gets classified as a piggy bank, an apple with a handwritten sign saying "LIBRARY" gets classified as a library. The network knows perfectly what dogs and apples look like, and yet still reacts differently if adjacent text calls them something else.
I conjecture that the appeal of subject-chosen pronouns lies _precisely_ in how they exert Stroop-like effects on speakers' and listeners' cognition. (Once again, if it were _actually true_ that _she_ and _he_ had no difference in meaning, _there would be no reason to care_.) [Pronoun badges](/2018/Oct/sticker-prices/) are, quite literally, a typographic attack against native English speakers' brains.
Note, I mean this as a value-free description of how the convention _actually functions_ in the real world, [not a condemnation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N9oKuQKuf7yvCCtfq/can-crimes-be-discussed-literally). One could consistently hold that these "attacks" are morally good. (Analagously, [supernormal stimuli](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jq73GozjsuhdwMLEG/superstimuli-and-the-collapse-of-western-civilization) like chocolate or pornography are "attacks" against the brain's evolved nutrition and reproductive-opportunity detectors, but most people are fine with this, because our goals are not evolution's.)
-Is susceptibility to Stroop-like effects an indication of bad mind design? I mean, probably! One would expect that an intelligently-designed agent (as contrasted to messy human brains coughed up [blind evolution](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jAToJHtg39AMTAuJo/evolutions-are-stupid-but-work-anyway) or [lucky](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dpzLqQQSs7XRacEfK/understanding-the-lottery-ticket-hypothesis) neural networks found by gradient descent) could easily bind and re-bind symbols on the fly, such that a sane AI from the future could use whatever pronouns without dredging up any inapplicable mental associations, and tell you the color of the text "<span style="color:blue;">red</span>" just as easily as "<span style="color:red;">red</span>". But it seems kind of idle to criticize humans for not having a capability (natural language fluency without Stroop-like effects) that we don't even know how to implement in a computer program.
+Is susceptibility to Stroop-like effects an indication of bad mind design? I mean, probably! One would expect that an intelligently-designed agent (as contrasted to messy human brains coughed up by [blind evolution](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jAToJHtg39AMTAuJo/evolutions-are-stupid-but-work-anyway) or [lucky](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dpzLqQQSs7XRacEfK/understanding-the-lottery-ticket-hypothesis) neural networks found by gradient descent) could easily bind and re-bind symbols on the fly, such that a sane AI from the future could use whatever pronouns without dredging up any inapplicable mental associations, and tell you the color of the text "<span style="color:blue;">red</span>" just as easily as "<span style="color:red;">red</span>". But it seems kind of idle to criticize humans for not having a capability (natural language fluency without Stroop-like effects) that we don't even know how to implement in a computer program.
Back to Kerr's article—importantly, Kerr is _explicitly_ appealing to psychological effects of different pronoun conventions. She is absolutely _not_ claiming that the use of preferred pronouns is itself a "lie" about some testable proposition. She writes:
> It did feel a little weird calling him Oliver, but everyone present knew what I was doing was being a jerk and teenagers are horrible. The "feels like lying" principle seems like it lets me keep calling him Bill, now righteously. I just can't even really bring myself to play in that sandbox in good faith.
-But the "everyone present knew what I was doing was being a jerk" characterization seems to agree the the motivation was joking/trolling. _How_ did everyone present know? Because it's absurd to infer a _particular_ name from someone's appearance.
+But the "everyone present knew what I was doing was being a jerk" characterization seems to agree that the motivation was joking/trolling. _How_ did everyone present know? Because it's absurd to infer a _particular_ name from someone's appearance.
-It's true that there are name–feature correlations that people can pick up on. For example, a "Juan" is likely to be Latino, a "Gertrude" in the current year is [likely to be old](https://www.everything-birthday.com/name/f/Gertrude); a non-Hispanic white Juan or a young Gertrude may indeed be likely to provoke a "Doesn't look like an _X_" reaction (which may also be sensitive to even subtler features). But while probabilistic inferences from features to low _likelihood_ of a particular name are valid, an inference from features to a particular name is absolutely not, because the function of a name is to be an opaque "pointer" to a particular individual. A Latino family choosing a name for their male baby may be somewhat more likely to choose "Juan" rather than "Oliver" (or "Getrude"), but they could just as easily choose "Luis" or "Miguel" or "Alejandro" for the very same child, and there's no plausible physical mechanism by which a horrible teenager thirty years later could tell the difference.
+It's true that there are name–feature correlations that observers can pick up on. For example, a "Juan" is likely to be Latino, a "Gertrude" in the current year is [likely to be old](https://www.everything-birthday.com/name/f/Gertrude); a non-Hispanic white Juan or a young Gertrude may indeed be likely to provoke a "Doesn't look like an _X_" reaction (which may also be sensitive to even subtler features). But while probabilistic inferences from features to low _likelihood_ of a particular name are valid, an inference from features to a particular name is absolutely not, because the function of a name is to be an opaque "pointer" to a particular individual. A Latino family choosing a name for their male baby may be somewhat more likely to choose "Juan" rather than "Oliver" (or "Getrude"), but they could just as easily choose "Luis" or "Miguel" or "Alejandro" for the very same child, and there's no plausible physical mechanism by which a horrible teenager thirty years later could tell the difference.
-Thus, I reject the commenter's claim that "feels like lying" intuitions about pronouns and sex would have let her "keep calling him Bill, now righteously". What algorithm you would use to infer that someone's name is "Bill" or "Oliver" based on how they look? What are the "secondary Oliver characteristics", specifically? People for whom it was _actually true_ that names map to appearances the way pronouns map to sex, should not have trouble answering this question!
+Thus, I reject the commenter's claim that "feels like lying" intuitions about pronouns and sex would have let her "keep calling him Bill, now righteously". What algorithm you would use to infer that someone's name is "Bill" based on how he looks? What are the "secondary Oliver characteristics", specifically? People for whom it was _actually true_ that names map to appearances the way pronouns map to sex, should not have trouble answering this question!
If there _were_ a substantial contingent of native English speakers who don't interpret pronouns as conveying sex category information, one would expect this to show up in our cultural corpus more often—and yet, I'm actually not aware of any notable examples of this. In contrast, it's very easy to find instances of speakers treating pronouns and sex as synonymous. As an arbitrarily chosen example, in [one episode](https://theamazingworldofgumball.fandom.com/wiki/The_Nest) of the animated series [_The Amazing World of Gumball_](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WesternAnimation/TheAmazingWorldOfGumball) featuring the ravenous spawn of our protagonists' evil pet turtle, the anthropomorphic-rabbit [Bumbling Dad](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BumblingDad) character [says, "Who's to say this pregnant turtle is a _her_?" and everyone gives him a look](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N2Msnrq7wU&t=14s).
Posed that way, one would imagine not—but if Yudkowsky _does_ get the joke, then I don't think he can simultaneously _honestly_ claim to "not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than 'doesn't look like an Oliver' is attached to something in your head." In order to get the joke in real time, your brain has to quickly make a multi-step logical inference that depends on the idea that pronouns imply sex. (The turtle is a "her" [iff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_and_only_if) female, not-female implies not-pregnant, so if the turtle is pregnant, it must be a "her".) This would seem, pretty straightforwardly, to be a sense in which "a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than 'doesn't look like an Oliver' is attached to something in your head." How else am I supposed to interpret those words?
-Perhaps it's not justified to question Yudkowsky's "I do not know what it feels like [...]" self-report based on generalizations about English speakers in general? Maybe his mind works differently, but dint of unusual neurodiversity or training in LambdaMOO? But if so, one would perhaps expect some evidence of this in his publicly observable writing? And yet, on the contrary, looking over his works, we can see instances of Yudkowsky treating pronouns as synonymous with sex/gender (just as one would expect a native English speaker born in 1979 to do), contrary to his 2021 self-report of not knowing what this feels like from the inside.
+Perhaps it's not justified to question Yudkowsky's "I do not know what it feels like [...]" self-report based on generalizations about English speakers in general? Maybe his mind works differently, but dint of unusual neurodiversity or training in LambdaMOO? But if so, one would perhaps expect some evidence of this in his publicly observable writing? And yet, on the contrary, looking over his works, we can see instances of Yudkowsky treating pronouns as synonymous with sex (just as one would expect a native English speaker born in 1979 to do), contrary to his 2021 self-report of not knowing what this feels like from the inside.
For example, in Yudkowsky's 2001 _Creating Friendly AI: The Analysis and Design of Benevolent Goal Architectures_, the text "If a human really hates someone, she" is followed by [footnote 16](https://web.archive.org/web/20070615130139/http://singinst.org/upload/CFAI.html#foot-15): "I flip a coin to determine whether a given human is male or female." Note, "_is_ male or female", not "which pronoun to use." The text would seem to reflect the common understanding that _she_ and _he_ do imply sex specifically (and not some other thing, like being named Oliver), even if flipping a coin (and drawing attention to having done so) reflects annoyance that English requires a choice.
Still, I think most people reading this post _are_ "moderates" in this sense. Schelling points are powerful. If we're _not_ culturally-genocidal extremists who want to exclude transsexuals from Society (and therefore reject the "pronouns = sex, no exceptions" Schelling point), isn't it reasonable that we end up at the self-identity Schelling point—at least as far as the trivial courtesy of pronouns is concerned, even if some of the moderates want to bargain for the right to use natal-sex categories in some contexts?
-Sure. Yes. And indeed, I don't misgender people! (In public. Only rarely in private, when someone's transition doesn't seem legitimate or serious to me, or when talking to my politically reactionary friends.) I'm not arguing that Yudkowsky should misgender people! The purpose of this post is not to argue with Yudkowsky's pronoun usage, but rather to argue with the offered usage _rationale_ that "the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he", with a default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size' and to say that this just _is_ the normative definition."
+Sure. Yes. And indeed, I don't misgender people! (In public. Only rarely in private, when someone's transition doesn't seem legitimate or serious to me, and the person I'm talking to doesn't seem liable to object.) I'm not arguing that Yudkowsky should misgender people! The purpose of this post is not to argue with Yudkowsky's pronoun usage, but rather to argue with the offered usage _rationale_ that "the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he", with a default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size' and to say that this just _is_ the normative definition."
As I have explained at length, this _rationale_ doesn't work and isn't true (even if better rationales, like sincere belief in gender identity, or the Schelling point argument, can end up recommending the same behavior). _No one_ actually believes (as contrasted to [believing that they believe](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-belief)) that _she_ and _he_ aren't attached to gender in people's heads, despite Yudkowsky's sneering claim in the comments that he ["would not know how to write a different viewpoint as a sympathetic character."](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421986539228&reply_comment_id=10159423713134228)
"O-okay," says the victim. She doesn't know what _ontologically_ means, or what a LambdaMOO is. "So then—then sh-she took her erect penis and she—"
-She breaks down crying again. "Your Honor, I can't! I can't do it! It's not true! It's not—" She senses that the judge will imply she's stupid for saying it's not true. She gropes for some way of explaining. "I mean—the Court allows people to testify in Spanish or Chinese with the help of a translator, right? Can't you treat my testimony like that? Let me say what happened to me in the words that seems true to me, even if the court does its business using words in a different way?"
+She breaks down crying again. "Your Honor, I can't! I can't do it! It's not true! It's not—" She senses that the judge will imply she's stupid for saying it's not true. She gropes for some way of explaining. "I mean—the Court allows people to testify in Spanish or Chinese with the help of a translator, right? Can't you treat my testimony like that? Let me say what happened to me in the words that seem true to me, even if the court does its business using words in a different way?"
"You're in contempt," says the judge. "Baliff! Take her away!"
I suspect some readers will have an intuition that my choice of scenario is loaded, unfair, or unrealistic. To be sure, I chose it an unusually clear-cut case for why someone might have a need to use pronouns to imply sex in their _own_ speech. (If the scenario was just talking about someone borrowing a vacuum cleaner, fewer readers would have any sympathy for someone not wanting to concede the trivial courtesy of preferred pronouns.)
-But what, specifically, is unrealistic about it? Is it the idea that a trans woman could have raped someone before transitioning? Of course _most_ trans women are not sex offenders—just as _most_ non-transsexual males are not sex offenders—but instances of trans women committing the kinds of sex crimes that overwhelmingly the provenance of men [are a documented thing](https://fairplayforwomen.com/transgender-male-criminality-sex-offences/).
+But what, specifically, is unrealistic about it? Is it the idea that a trans woman could have raped someone before transitioning? Of course _most_ trans women are not sex offenders—just as _most_ non-transsexual males are not sex offenders—but instances of trans women committing the kinds of sex crimes that are overwhelmingly the provenance of men [are a documented thing](https://fairplayforwomen.com/transgender-male-criminality-sex-offences/).
Is it the idea that the legal system would penalize someone for pronoun non-compliance? But this is also an occasionally documented thing, as in [one case where a Canadian father was jailed](https://www.city-journal.org/canadian-father-jailed-for-speaking-out-about-trans-identifying-child) for violating [a court order](https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/sc/19/06/2019BCSC0604.htm) not to refer to his natal-female child with she/her pronouns. As liberal intellectuals debating optimal communication policies, we usually hope to govern by consensus: we want people to use preferred pronouns _voluntarily_, rather than being forced. But maintaining a collective norm in the face of those who have their own reasons to object to it, does ultimately require some sort of threat. In the vignette above, given the defense lawyer's objection; the judge does face a forced choice to Sustain or Overrule, and that choice has consequences either way.
Right, it's not the woke position. It's an _incoherent_ position that's optimized to concede to the woke the behavior that they want for a _different stated reason_ in order to make the concession appear "neutral" and not "politically" motivated. She requested "she" _because_ acceding to the request validates her gender preference in the minds of all native English speakers who are listening, even if Eliezer Yudkowsky has some clever casuistry for why it magically doesn't mean that when _he_ says it.
-I'm _not_ saying that Yudkowsky should have a different pronoun policy. (I agree that misgendering all trans people "on principle" seems very wrong and unappealing.) Rather, I'm saying that in order to _actually_ be politically neutral in your analysis of _why_ someone might choose one pronoun policy over another, you need to _acknowledge_ the costs and benefits of a policy to different parties, and face the unhappy fact that sometimes there are cases where there _is_ no "neutral" policy, because all available policies impose costs on _someone_ and there's no solution that everyone is happy with. (Rational agents can hope to reach _some_ point on the Pareto frontier, but non-identical agents are necessarily going to fight about _which_ point, even if most of the fighting takes place in non-realized counterfactual possible worlds rather than exerting costs in reality.)
+Again, I'm _not_ saying that Yudkowsky should have a different pronoun policy. (I agree that misgendering all trans people "on principle" seems very wrong and unappealing.) Rather, I'm saying that in order to _actually_ be politically neutral in your analysis of _why_ someone might choose one pronoun policy over another, you need to _acknowledge_ the costs and benefits of a policy to different parties, and face the unhappy fact that sometimes there are cases where there _is_ no "neutral" policy, because all available policies impose costs on _someone_ and there's no solution that everyone is happy with. (Rational agents can hope to reach _some_ point on the Pareto frontier, but non-identical agents are necessarily going to fight about _which_ point, even if most of the fighting takes place in non-realized counterfactual possible worlds rather than exerting costs in reality.)
Policy debates should not appear one-sided. Exerting social pressure on (for example) a native-English-speaking rape victim to refer to her male rapist with _she_/_her_ pronouns is a _cost_ to her. And, simultaneously, _not_ exerting that pressure is a _cost_ to many trans people, by making recognition of their social gender _conditional_ on some standard of good behavior, rather than an unconditional fact that doesn't need to be "earned" or justified in any way.
For example, I think my five-month HRT experiment was a _good_ decision—I benefitted from the experience and I'm very glad I did it, even though I didn't end up staying on HRT long term. The benefits (satisfied curiosity about the experience, breast tissue) exceeded the costs (a small insurance co-pay, sitting through some gatekeeping sessions, the inconvenience of [wearing a patch](/2017/Jan/hormones-day-33/) or [taking a pill](/2017/Jul/whats-my-motivation-or-hormones-day-89/), [various slight medical risks including to future fertility](https://srconstantin.github.io/2016/10/06/cross-sex-hormone-therapy.html)).
-If someone I trusted as an intellectual authority had falsely told me that HRT makes you go blind and lose the ability to hear music, _and I were dumb enough to believe them_, then I wouldn't have done it, and I would have missed out on something that benefitted me. Such an authority figure would be harming me by means of giving me bad information; I'd be better off if I hadn't trusted them to tell me the truth.
+If someone I trusted as an intellectual authority had falsely told me that HRT makes you go blind and lose the ability to hear music, _and I were dumb enough to believe them_, then I wouldn't have done it, and I would have missed out on something that benefitted me. Such an authority figure would be harming me by means of giving me bad information; I'd be better off if I hadn't trusted them to tell the truth.
In contrast, I think asking everyone in my life to use she/her pronouns for me would be an _obviously incredibly bad decision_. Because—notwithstanding my clean-shavenness and beautiful–beautiful ponytail and slight gynecomastia from that HRT experiment five years ago—anyone who looks at me can see at a glance that I'm male (as a _fact_ about the real world, however I feel about it). People would comply because they felt obligated to (and apologize profusely when they slipped up), but it wouldn't come naturally, and strangers would always get it wrong without being told—_in accordance with_ the "default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size" clause of Yudkowsky's reform proposal, but really because pronouns are firmly attached to sex in their heads. The costs (this tremendous awkwardness and fakeness suffusing _all future social interactions involving me_) would exceed the benefits (I actually do feel happier about the word _she_).
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff