"Oh. O–okay. And then she took her—" The victim breaks down crying. "I'm sorry, Your Honor; I can't do it. I'm under oath; I have to tell the story the way it happened to me. In my memories, the person who did those things to me was a man. A—"
-She hesistates, sobs a few more times. In this moment, almost more painful than the memories of the rape, she is very conscious of having never been to college. The judge and the defense lawyer are smarter and more educated than her, and they believe that the man who raped her is a woman. It had never made any sense to her—but how could she explain to an authority who she had no hope of out-arguing?
+She hesistates, sobs a few more times. In this moment, almost more painful than the memories of the rape, she is very conscious of having never gone to college. The judge and the defense lawyer are smarter and more educated than her, and _they_ believe that the man who raped her is now (or perhaps, always had been) a woman. It had never made any sense to her—but how could she explain to an authority figure who she had no hope of out-arguing, even if she was even allowed to argue?
"And by 'man', I mean—a male. The way I was raised, men—males—get called _he_ and _him_. If I say _she_, it doesn't feel true to the memory in my head. It—it feels like lying, Your Honor."
Not a sympathetic character? Not even a little bit?
-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, many readers would have little sympathy for someone not wanting to concede the trivial courtesy of preferred pronouns.)
+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?
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; my life would have been better if I hadn't trusted them to tell me 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_).
+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_).
I used to trust Yudkowsky as an intellectual authority; his [Sequences](https://www.readthesequences.com/) from the late 'aughts were so life-alteringly great that I built up a trust that if Eliezer Yudkowsky said something, that thing was probably so, even if I didn't immediately understand why. But these days, Yudkowsky is telling me that 'she' normatively refers to the set of people who have asked us to use 'she', and that those who disagree are engaging in logically rude Shenanigans. However, as I have just explained at length, this is bullshit. (Declaring a "normative" meaning on your Facebook wall doesn't rewrite the _actual_ meaning embodied the brains of 370 million English speakers.) If I were _dumb enough to believe him_, I might ask people for new pronouns, which would obviously be an incredibly bad decision. Yudkowsky is harming a reference class of people that includes more naïve versions of me by giving them bad information; my life is better because I don't trust Eliezer Yudkowsky to tell me the truth.
> People might be able to speak that. A clearer example of a forbidden counterargument would be something like e.g. imagine if there was a pair of experimental studies somehow proving that (a) everybody claiming to experience gender dysphoria was lying, and that (b) they then got more favorable treatment from the rest of society. We wouldn't be able to talk about that. No such study exists to the best of my own knowledge, and in this case we might well hear about it from the other side to whom this is the exact opposite of unspeakable; but that would be an example.
-Well, I think (a) and (b) _as stated_ are clearly false, so "we" (who?) fortunately aren't losing much by allegedly not being able to speak them. But what about some _similar_ hypotheses, that might be similarly unspeakable for similar reasons? Consider the claims that (a') self-reports about gender dysphoria are substantially distorted by [socially-desirable responding tendencies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social-desirability_bias)—as a notable and common example, heterosexual males with sexual fantasies about being female [often falsely deny or minimize the erotic dimension of their desire to change sex](/papers/blanchard-clemmensen-steiner-social_desirability_response_set_and_systematic_distortion.pdf); and that (b') transitioning is socially rewarded within particular _subcultures_, although not Society as a whole.
-
-I claim that (a') and (b') are _overwhelmingly likely to be true_. Can "we" talk about _that_? Are (a') and (b') "speakable", or not?
-
-We're unlikely to get clarification from Yudkowsky, but based on my experiences with the so-called "rationalist" community over the past coming-up-on-six years, I'm going to _guess_ that the answer is: No; no, "we" can't talk about that.
-
-For a while, I've been meaning to write up a _different_ multi-thousand word blog post telling the Whole Dumb Story about that. (Not because it's an interesting story, but because I'll never be able to stop grieving and move on with my life until I get it all out of my system.)
-
-
+(As an aside, the wording of "we might well hear about it from _the other side_" (emphasis mine) is _very_ interesting, suggesting that the so-called "rationalist" community, is, effectively, a partisan institution within the matrix of American politics, despite its claims to be about advancing the generically human art of systematically correct reasoning.)
+I think (a) and (b) _as stated_ are clearly false, so "we" (who?) fortunately aren't losing much by allegedly not being able to speak them. But what about some _similar_ hypotheses, that might be similarly unspeakable for similar reasons?
+Instead of (a), consider the claim that (a') self-reports about gender dysphoria are substantially distorted by [socially-desirable responding tendencies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social-desirability_bias)—as a notable and common example, heterosexual males with [sexual fantasies about being female](http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html) [often falsely deny or minimize the erotic dimension of their desire to change sex](/papers/blanchard-clemmensen-steiner-social_desirability_response_set_and_systematic_distortion.pdf) (The idea that self-reports can be motivatedly inaccurate without the subject consciously "lying" should not be novel to someone who co-blogged with [Robin Hanson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_in_the_Brain) for years!)
+And instead of (b), consider the claim that (b') transitioning is socially rewarded within particular _subcultures_, although not Society as a whole.
+I claim that (a') and (b') are _overwhelmingly likely to be true_. Can "we" talk about _that_? Are (a') and (b') "speakable", or not?
-"Gendered Pronouns For Everyone and Asking To Leave The System Is Lying"
+We're unlikely to get clarification from Yudkowsky, but based on my experiences with the so-called "rationalist" community over the past coming-up-on-six years—the Whole Dumb Story of which is to be the topic of _another_ future multi-thousand-word blog post, which I've found difficult to write, because it still hurts—I'm going to _guess_ that the answer is broadly No: no, "we" can't talk about that.
-"Biological Sex Actually Exists", and "Biological Sex Cannot Be Changed With Existing or Forseeable Technology", and "Biological Sex Is Sometimes Socially Relevant",
+But if I'm right that (a') and (b') should be live hypotheses and that Yudkowsky would consider them "unspeakable", that means "we" can't talk about what's _actually going on_ with gender dysphoria and transsexuality, which puts the whole discussion in a different light. In another comment, Yudkowsky lists some gender-transition interventions he named in [a November 2018 Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521) that was the precursor to the present discussion—using a different bathroom, changing one's name, asking for new pronouns, and getting sex reassignment surgery—and notes that none of these are calling oneself a "woman". [He continues](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421986539228&reply_comment_id=10159424960909228):
+> [Calling someone a "woman"] _is_ closer to the right sort of thing _ontologically_ to be true or false. More relevant to the current thread, now that we have a truth-bearing sentence, we can admit of the possibility of using our human superpower of language to _debate_ whether this sentence is indeed true or false, and have people express their nuanced opinions by uttering this sentence, or perhaps a more complicated sentence using a bunch of caveats, or maybe using the original sentence uncaveated to express their belief that this is a bad place for caveats. Policies about who uses what bathroom also have consequences and we can debate the goodness or badness (not truth or falsity) of those policies, and utter sentences to declare our nuanced or non-nuanced position before or after that debate.
+>
+> Trying to pack all of that into the pronouns you'd have to use in step 1 is the wrong place to pack it.
- this puts one of Yudkowsky's comments elsewhere in the thread in a different light https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421986539228&reply_comment_id=10159424960909228 —]
+Sure, _if we were in the position of designing a constructed language from scratch_ under current social conditions in which a person's "gender" is understood as an intersubjective construction, rather than their sex an objective and undisputed fact, then yeah: in that situation _which we are not in_, you definitely wouldn't want to pack sex or gender into pronouns. But it's a disingenuous derailing tactic to grandstand about how people need to alter the semantics of their _already existing_ native language so that we can discuss the real issues under an allegedly superior pronoun convention when, _by your own admission_, you have _no intention whatsoever_ of discussing the real issues!
-> now that we have a truth-bearing sentence, we can admit of the possibility of using our human superpower of language to _debate_ whether this sentence is indeed true or false [...] Trying to pack all of that into the pronouns you'd have to use in step 1 is the wrong place to pack it.
+(Lest the "by your own admission" clause seem too accusatory, I should note that given constant behavior, admitting it is _much_ better than not-admitting it; so, huge thanks to Yudkowsky for the transparency on this point!)
-It's a disingenuous derailing tactic to say "Don't use your native language's pronouns; let's use _nouns_ to talk about the real issues", when you _motherfuckers_ have _no intention whatsoever_ of actually talking about the real issues! A lot of TERF-aligned folk would be a _lot_ more willing to compromise on the trivial pronoun issue, if they didn't (correctly) suspect the pronouns were being used as a wedge/typographical-attack to prevent them from talking about biological sex
+Again, a comparison to the _tú_/_usted_ distinction is instructive. It's one thing to advocate for collapsing the distinction and just settling on one second-person singular pronoun for the Spanish language. It's quite another thing altogether to _simultaneously_ try to prevent a speaker from using _tú_ to signal disrespect towards a social superior (on the stated rationale that the _tú_/_usted_ distinction is dumb and shouldn't exist), while _at the same time_ refusing to entertain or address the speaker's arguments for _why_ they think their interlocutor is unworthy of the deference that would be implied by _usted_ (because such reasons are "unspeakable" for political reasons).
-Again, if it helps think of the formality distinction—advocating for collapsing the tu/usted distinction is one thing; but if you demand that someone calls you usted _and_ refuse to let them talk with nouns about whether they respect you, that would be psychologically abusive]
+If Yudkowsky _actually_ possessed (and felt motivated to use) the "ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it [himself] before speaking", it would be _obvious_ to him that "Gendered Pronouns For Everyone and Asking To Leave The System Is Lying" isn't the crux anyone cares about. A lot of TERF-adjacent folk would be _overjoyed_ to concede the (boring, insubstantial) matter of pronouns as a trivial courtesy if it meant getting to _actually_ address their real concerns of "Biological Sex Actually Exists", and ["Biological Sex Cannot Be Changed With Existing or Foreseeable Technology"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) and "Biological Sex Is Sometimes More Relevant Than Self-Declared Gender Identity". The reason so many of them are inclined to stand their ground and not even offer the trivial courtesy is because they suspect that the matter of pronouns is being used as a rhetorical wedge and typographical attack to try to prevent people from talking or thinking about sex.
-4 levels of intellectual conversation https://rationalconspiracy.com/2017/01/03/four-layers-of-intellectual-conversation/
+And I think this suspicion is broadly accurate! _After_ having been challenged on it, Yudkowsky can try to spin his November 2018 Twitter comments as having been a non-partisan matter of language design ("Trying to pack all of that into the pronouns [...] is the wrong place to pack it"), but when you read the text that was actually published at the time, parts of it are hard to read as anything other than an attempt to shame and delegitimize people who want to use language to reason about sex rather than gender identity. [For example](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067490362225156096):
-If we can't talk about that, then your rationality community is a _fraud_. If there's anything at all to your rationality stuff https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LqjKP255fPRY7aMzw/practical-advice-backed-by-deep-theories it should be _useful_ high-stakes pratical decisions that your community members need to make, like _whether or not to cut my dick off_. If we can't talk about the information I need to make an informed decision about that, then your rationalists are worse than useless. (Worse, because false claims to authority are more misleading than dead air.) You _motherfuckers_ need to rebrand, or disband, or be destroyed
+> The more technology advances, the further we can move people towards where they say they want to be in sexspace. Having said this we've said all the facts. Who competes in sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary is a policy question (that I personally find very humorous).
-I know none of this matters (If any professional alignment researchers wasting time reading this instead of figuring out how to save the world, get back to work!!), but one would have thought that the _general_ skills of correct argument would matter for saving the world.
+[TODO outlining remainder of coda—]
-a rationality community that can't think about _practical_ issues that affect our day to day lives, but can get existential risk stuff right, is like asking for self-driving car software that can drive red cars but not blue cars
+[You haven't said all the facts, because before the Glorious Transhumanist Future of technological maturity, you still inherit a lot of the pre-technology distribution. The existence of HRT doesn't mean that everyone is the sex that they say they are—it means that instead of two clusters (females and males), you have four clusters (females, males, females-on-masculinizing-HRT, and males-on-feminizing-HRT). There might be situations where you want to use the {female, males-on-feminizing-HRT} category, but there are also situations where you might want to use the developmental sex categories. In the case of sports, the question of "who is the best within the female distribution" is a natural question that people are interested in (even if most of them don't have the vocabulary to say "multivariate trait distribution", the essentialist cognitive algorithm is still performing very well in this domain), given that natal sex continues to be relevant, and was _obviously_ relevant before HRT
-It's a _problem_ if public intellectuals in the current year need to pretend to be dumber than seven-year-olds in 2016
+https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1368176581965930501
+https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3
+https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/15/865
-If you don't actually believe in the [common interest of many causes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes) anymore, you could _say_ that—rebrand your thing as a more narrowly-scoped existential-risk-reduction cult, rather than falsely claiming to be about modeling-and-optimizing the world
+https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1466044767561830405
+Lia Thomas and Cece Tefler
+(Thomas and Tefler's records occured after Yudkowsky's 2018 Tweets, but this kind of thing was easily predictable to anyone familiar with sex differences)
-"We might well hear about it from the other side" is an interesting phrasing—almost admitting that you're a wholly owned subsidary of the Blue Tribe]
+Yudkowsky's suggestion that the only reason someone might care about women's sports is because of a comittment to "Aristotelian binary" is pure sneer; this isn't something any scientifically person would write if they had actually thought about the issue at all, rather than having decided to score points against transphobes and using your knowledge of probability in the service of that goal (which gives the lie to Yudkowsky's claim that he was only trying to make a point about pronouns and truth; the sports policy decision is a policy decision rather than a fact, but it's so lopsided, that the "humor" goes in the other direction)]
> it is sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful to post your agreement with Stalin about things you actually agree with Stalin about, in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles, especially because people do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment
Ah, _prudence!_
+This is what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith means
+
[Summarize "A Rational Argument" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9f5EXt8KNNxTAihtZ/a-rational-argument
You could imagine the campaign manager saying the same thing—"I don't see what the alternative is".]
> I don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot, or utter silence about everything Stalin has expressed an opinion on including "2 + 2 = 4" because if that logically counterfactually were wrong you would not be able to express an opposing opinion.
[Agreeing with Stalin that 2+2=4 is fine; the problem is a sustained pattern of _selectively_ bring up pro-Party points while ignoring anti-Party facts that would otherwise be relevant to the topic of interest, including stonewalling commenters who try to point out relevance]
+
+[Why does this matter? It would be dishonest for me to claim that this is _directly_ relevant to xrisk, because that's not my real bottom line]
+
+a rationality community that can't think about _practical_ issues that affect our day to day lives, but can get existential risk stuff right, is like asking for self-driving car software that can drive red cars but not blue cars
+
+It's a _problem_ if public intellectuals in the current year need to pretend to be dumber than seven-year-olds in 2016
* "gamete size"—this is a tic where everyone knows what sex is, but no one is allowed to acknowledge the cluster
* maybe worth explaining why I keep saying "sex category" instead of "gender"—and be consistent about it
* transition interventions are bundled: asking for pronouns could only plausibly be a good idea if coupled with further interventions—but that's not the picture we'd get if we took Yudkowsky literally
- * also take a crack at the Aristotelan binary sports Tweet
* this post needs to exist because I can't let him have the last word
* I need to acknowledge the
> In a wide variety of cases, sure, they can clearly communicate the unambiguous sex and gender of something that has an unambiguous sex and gender, much as a different language might have pronouns that sometimes clearly communicated hair color to the extent that hair color often fell into unambiguous clusters.
* maybe by "much more strongly ... different firm attachments", he's pointing to different people having different intuitions about what male/female clusters map to; that's definitely a thing, but it's wrong to conflate that with "Maybe it's like not being named Oliver"; people do agree on the approximate meaning of blue and green even if there are edge cases, cite fallacy of gray
- * introductory sentence before referencing "we" or "the community"
- * can some of the asides be yanked into footnotes??
+ * need introductory sentence before first reference to "we" or "the community"
+
+4 levels of intellectual conversation https://rationalconspiracy.com/2017/01/03/four-layers-of-intellectual-conversation/
More Yudkowsky playing dumb—
> (Though considering I've literally never heard anyone else define "gender" this way, it's more like, "I consider 'cheddar' to refer to only cheese from the Parma region in Italy, and I don't appreciate being asked to lie" and that so many people give different definitions is part of the issue here; but let's set that all aside for now.)
+If we can't talk about that, then your rationality community is a _fraud_. If there's anything at all to your rationality stuff https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LqjKP255fPRY7aMzw/practical-advice-backed-by-deep-theories it should be _useful_ high-stakes pratical decisions that your community members need to make, like _whether or not to cut my dick off_. If we can't talk about the information I need to make an informed decision about that, then your rationalists are worse than useless. (Worse, because false claims to authority are more misleading than dead air.) You _motherfuckers_ need to rebrand, or disband, or be destroyed
+
+I know none of this matters (If any professional alignment researchers wasting time reading this instead of figuring out how to save the world, get back to work!!), but one would have thought that the _general_ skills of correct argument would matter for saving the world.
+
+If you don't actually believe in the [common interest of many causes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes) anymore, you could _say_ that—rebrand your thing as a more narrowly-scoped existential-risk-reduction cult, rather than falsely claiming to be about modeling-and-optimizing the world
+
-----
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228
Your faithful student,
Zack M. Davis
+
+For a while, I've been meaning to write up a _different_ multi-thousand word blog post telling the Whole Dumb Story about that—not because it's an interesting story, but because I'll never be able to stop grieving and move on with my life until I get it all out of my system. (Working title: ["A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067185907843756032). Epigraph quote: Zora Neale Hurston, "If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.")
+
+It's been hard to write. It _hurts_ to write. It's hard and it hurts because it's not something that _should_ need to be written.
+
+[TODO outlining coda—
+
+We prefer to have a good-faith discussion of ideas in themselves; talking about your interlocutors and speculating about their hidden motives is not what we do
+I tried the good-faith debate thing first. I tried it for years; at some point, you have to jump up a meta level and explain what you think is actually going on
+Since the Whole Dumb Story is longer and harder to write, I hope it's OK if I _briefly_ hit some of the highlights here that are relevant to analyzing Yudkowsky's comments on "speakable" arguments, with the understanding that I might write a longer post later
+
+The Sequences taught me some really important things about sex differences and why not to take my cross-sex fantasies literally; I wrote about this in ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/)
+
+The ]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff