And I think I _would_ have been over it, except—
-... except that Yudkowsky _reopened the conversation_ four days later on 22 February 2021, with [a new Facebook post](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228) explaining the origins of his intuitions about pronoun conventions and concluding 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_."
+... except that Yudkowsky _reopened the conversation_ four days later on 22 February 2021, with [a new Facebook post](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228) explaining the origins of his intuitions about pronoun conventions, and concluding 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_."
(_Why!?_ Why reopen the conversation, from the perspective of his chessboard? Wouldn't it be easier to just stop digging? I guess my highly-Liked Facebook comment and Twitter barb about him lying-by-implicature temporarily brought me and my concerns to the top of his attention?)
Yudkowsky begins by setting the context of "[h]aving received a bit of private pushback" on his willingness to declare that asking someone to use a different pronoun is not lying.
-But ... the _reason_ he got a bit ("a bit") of private pushback was _because_ the original "hill of meaning" thread was so blatantly optimized to intimidate and delegitimize people who want to use language to reason about biological sex. The pushback wasn't about using trans people's preferred pronouns (I do that, too), or about not wanting pronouns to imply sex (sounds fine, if we were in the position of defining a conlang from scratch); the _problem_ is using an argument that's ostensibly about pronouns to sneak in an implicature ("Who competes in sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary is a policy question [ ] that I personally find very humorous") that it's dumb and wrong to want to talk about the sense in which trans women are male and trans men are female, as a _fact about reality_ that continues to be true even if it hurts someone's feelings, and even if policy decisions made on the basis of that fact are not themselves a fact (as if anyone had doubted this).
+But ... the _reason_ he got a bit ("a bit") of private pushback was _because_ the original "hill of meaning" thread was so blatantly optimized to intimidate and delegitimize people who want to use language to reason about biological sex. The pushback wasn't about using trans people's preferred pronouns (I do that, too), or about not wanting pronouns to imply sex (sounds fine, if we were in the position of defining a conlang from scratch); the _problem_ is using an argument that's ostensibly about pronouns to sneak in an implicature (["Who competes in sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary is a policy question [ ] that I personally find very humorous"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067490362225156096)) that it's dumb and wrong to want to talk about the sense in which trans women are male and trans men are female, as a _fact about reality_ that continues to be true even if it hurts someone's feelings, and even if policy decisions made on the basis of that fact are not themselves a fact (as if anyone had doubted this).
In that context, it's revealing that in this February 2021 post attempting to explain why the November 2018 thread seemed like a reasonable thing to say, Yudkowsky ... doubles down on going out of his way to avoid acknowledging the reality of biological of sex. He learned nothing! We're told that the default pronoun for those who haven't asked goes by "gamete size."
So, I agree that a language convention in which pronouns map to hair color doesn't seem great, and that the people in this world should probably coordinate on switching to a better convention, if they can figure out how.
-But taking as given the existence of a convention in which pronouns refer to hair color, a demand to be refered to as having a hair color _that one does not in fact have_ seems pretty outrageous to me!
+But taking as given the existence of a convention in which pronouns refer to hair color, a demand to be referred to as having a hair color _that one does not in fact have_ seems pretty outrageous to me!
It makes sense to object to the convention forcing a binary choice in the "halfway between two central points" case. That's an example of _genuine_ nuance brought on by a _genuine_ challenge to a system that _falsely_ assumes discrete hair colors.
Maybe the problem is easier to see in the context of a non-gender example. [My previous hopeless ideological war—before this one—was against the conflation of _schooling_ and _education_](/2022/Apr/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war/): I _hated_ being tossed into the Student Bucket, as it would be assigned by my school course transcript, or perhaps at all.
-I sometimes describe myself as "gender dysphoric", because our culture doesn't have better widely-understood vocabulary for my [beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity), but if we're talking about suffering and emotional distress, my "student dysphoria" was _vastly_ worse than any "gender dysphoria" I've ever felt.
+I sometimes describe myself as mildly "gender dysphoric", because our culture doesn't have better widely-understood vocabulary for my [beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity), but if we're talking about suffering and emotional distress, my "student dysphoria" was _vastly_ worse than any "gender dysphoria" I've ever felt.
+
+(I remember being particularly distraught one day at the end of community college physics class, and stumbling to the guidance counselor to inquire urgently what my options were for just escaping this place with an Associate's degree, rather than transferring to a University to finish my Bachelor's. I burst into tears again when the counselor mentioned that there would be a physical education requirement. It wasn't that a semester of P.E. would be difficult; it was the _indignity_ of being subject to years of meaningless requirements before Society would see me as a person.)
But crucially, my tirades against the Student Bucket described reasons not just that _I didn't like it_, but reasons that the bucket was _actually wrong on the empirical merits_: people can and do learn important things by studying and practicing out of their own curiosity and ambition; the system was _actually in the wrong_ for assuming that nothing you do matters unless you do it on the command of a designated "teacher" while enrolled in a designated "course".
In fact, I did very poorly and scraped by with a _C_. (Subjectively, I felt like I "understood the concepts", and kept getting surprised when that understanding somehow didn't convert into passing quiz scores.) That hurt. That hurt a lot.
-_It was supposed to hurt_. One could imagine a Jane Austen character in this situation doubling down on his antagonism to everything school-related, in order to protect himself from being hurt—to protest that the teacher hated him, that the quizzes were unfair, that the answer key must have had a printing error—in short, that he had been right in every detail all along, and that any suggestion otherwise was credentialist propaganda.
+_It was supposed to hurt_. One could imagine a less reflective person in this situation doubling down on his antagonism to everything school-related, in order to protect himself from being hurt—to protest that the teacher hated him, that the quizzes were unfair, that the answer key must have had a printing error—in short, that he had been right in every detail all along, and that any suggestion otherwise was credentialist propaganda.
I knew better than to behave like that—and to the extent that I was tempted, I retained my ability to notice and snap out of it. My failure _didn't_ mean I had been wrong about everything, that I should humbly resign myself to the Student Bucket forever and never dare to question it again—but it _did_ mean that I had been wrong about _something_. I could [update myself incrementally](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/627DZcvme7nLDrbZu/update-yourself-incrementally)—but I _did_ need to update. (Probably, that "math" encompasses different subskills, and that my glorious self-study had unevenly trained some skills and not others: there was nothing contradictory about my [successfully generalizing one of the methods in the textbook to arbitrary numbers of variables](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/15143/does-the-method-for-solving-exact-des-generalize-like-this), while _also_ [struggling with the class's assigned problem sets](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/7984/automatizing-computational-skills).)
-Someone who uncritically validated my not liking to be tossed into the Student Bucket, instead of assessing my _reasons_ for not liking to be tossed into the Bucket and whether those reasons had merit, would be hurting me, not helping me—because in order to navigate the real world, I need a map that reflects the territory, rather than my narcissistic fantasies. I'm a better person for straightforwardly facing the shame of getting a _C_ in community college differential equations, rather than trying to deny it or run away from it or claim that it didn't mean anything. Part of updating myself incrementally was that I would get _other_ chances to prove that my autodidacticism _could_ match the standard set by schools. (My professional and open-source programming career obviously does not owe itself to the two Java courses I took at community college. When I audited honors analysis at UC Berkeley "for fun" in 2017, I did fine on the midterm. When applying for a new dayjob in 2018, the interviewer, noting my lack of a degree, said he was going to give a version of the interview without a computer science theory question. I insisted on being given the "college" version of the interview, solved a dynamic programming problem, and got the job. And so on.)
+Someone who uncritically validated my not liking to be tossed into the Student Bucket, instead of assessing my _reasons_ for not liking to be tossed into the Bucket and whether those reasons had merit, would be hurting me, not helping me—because in order to navigate the real world, I need a map that reflects the territory, rather than my narcissistic fantasies. I'm a better person for straightforwardly facing the shame of getting a _C_ in community college differential equations, rather than trying to deny it or run away from it or claim that it didn't mean anything. Part of updating myself incrementally was that I would get _other_ chances to prove that my autodidacticism _could_ match the standard set by schools. (My professional and open-source programming career obviously does not owe itself to the two Java courses I took at community college. When I audited honors analysis at UC Berkeley "for fun" in 2017, I did fine on the midterm. When interviewing for a new dayjob in 2018, the interviewer, noting my lack of a degree, said he was going to give a version of the interview without a computer science theory question. I insisted on being given the "college" version of the interview, solved a dynamic programming problem, and got the job. And so on.)
If you can see why uncritically affirming people's current self-image isn't the right solution to "student dysphoria", it _should_ be obvious why the same is true of gender dysphoria. There's a very general underlying principle, that it matters whether someone's current self-image is actually true.
This is a _rationality_ skill. Alleva had a theory about herself, and then she _revised her theory upon further consideration of the evidence_. Beliefs about one's self aren't special and can—must—be updated using the _same_ methods that you would use to reason about anything else—[just as a recursively self-improving AI would reason the same about transistors "inside" the AI and transitors in "the environment."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TynBiYt6zg42StRbb/my-kind-of-reflection)
-(Note, I'm specifically praising the _form_ of the inference, not necessarily the conclusion to detransition. If someone else in different circumstances weighed up the evidence about _them_-self, and concluded that they _are_ trans in some _specific_ objective sense on the empirical merits, that would _also_ be exhibiting the skill. For extremely sex-role-nonconforming same-natal-sex-attracted transsexuals, you can at least see why the "born in the wrong body" story makes some sense as a handwavy [first approximation](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/). It's just that for males like me, and separately for females like Michalle Alleva, the story doesn't add up.)
+(Note, I'm specifically praising the _form_ of the inference, not necessarily the conclusion to detransition. If someone else in different circumstances weighed up the evidence about _them_-self, and concluded that they _are_ trans in some _specific_ objective sense on the empirical merits, that would _also_ be exhibiting the skill. For extremely sex-role-nonconforming same-natal-sex-attracted transsexuals, you can at least see why the "born in the wrong body" story makes some sense as a handwavy [first approximation](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/). It's just that for males like me, and separately for females like Michalle Alleva, the story doesn't [pay rent](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences).)
This also isn't a particularly _advanced_ rationality skill. This is very basic—something novices should grasp during their early steps along the Way.
-Back in 'aught-nine, in the early days of _Less Wrong_, when I still hadn't grown out of [my teenage religion of psychological sex differences denialism](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism), there was an exchange in the comment section between me and Yudkowsky that still sticks with me. Yudkowsky had claimed that he had ["never known a man with a true female side, and [...] never known a woman with a true male side, either as authors or in real life."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/K8YXbJEhyDwSusoY2) Offended at our leader's sexism, I [passive-aggressively asked him to elaborate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way?commentId=AEZaakdcqySmKMJYj), and as part of [his response](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/W4TAp4LuW3Ev6QWSF), he mentioned that he "sometimes wish[ed] that certain women would appreciate that being a man is at least as complicated and hard to grasp and a lifetime's work to integrate, as the corresponding fact of feminity [_sic_]."
+Back in 'aught-nine, in the early days of _Less Wrong_, when I still hadn't grown out of [my teenage religion of psychological sex differences denialism](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism), there was a particularly poignant exchange in the comment section between me and Yudkowsky. Yudkowsky had claimed that he had ["never known a man with a true female side, and [...] never known a woman with a true male side, either as authors or in real life."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/K8YXbJEhyDwSusoY2) Offended at our leader's sexism, I [passive-aggressively asked him to elaborate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way?commentId=AEZaakdcqySmKMJYj), and as part of [his response](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/W4TAp4LuW3Ev6QWSF), he mentioned that he "sometimes wish[ed] that certain women would appreciate that being a man is at least as complicated and hard to grasp and a lifetime's work to integrate, as the corresponding fact of feminity [_sic_]."
[I replied](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/7ZwECTPFTLBpytj7b) (bolding added):
It would seem that in the current year, that culture is dead—or at least, if it does have any remaining practitioners, they do not include Eliezer Yudkowsky.
-At this point, some people would argue that I'm being too uncharitable in harping on the "not liking to be tossed into a [...] Bucket" paragraph. The same post does _also_ explicitly says that "[i]t's not that no truth-bearing propositions about these issues can possibly exist." I _agree_ that there are some interpretations of "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket" that make sense, even though biological sex denialism does not make sense. Given that the author is Eliezer Yudkowsky, should I not give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he "really meant" to communicate the reading that does make sense, rather than the one that doesn't make sense?
+At this point, some readers might protest that I'm being too uncharitable in harping on the "not liking to be tossed into a [...] Bucket" paragraph. The same post does _also_ explicitly says that "[i]t's not that no truth-bearing propositions about these issues can possibly exist." I _agree_ that there are some interpretations of "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket" that make sense, even though biological sex denialism does not make sense. Given that the author is Eliezer Yudkowsky, should I not give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he "really meant" to communicate the reading that does make sense, rather than the reading that doesn't make sense?
+
+I reply: _given that the author is Eliezer Yudkowsky_, no, obviously not. I have been ["trained in a theory of social deception that says that people can arrange reasons, excuses, for anything"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1820866#reply-1820866), such that it's informative ["to look at what _ended up_ happening, assume it was the _intended_ result, and ask who benefited."](http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/47) Yudkowsky is just _too talented of a writer_ for me to excuse his words as an artifact of accidentally unclear writing. Where the text is ambiguous about whether biological sex is a real thing that people should be able to talk about at the risk of offending someone's "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket", I think it's _deliberately_ ambiguous.
-I reply: _given that the author is Eliezer Yudkowsky_, no, obviously not. I have been ["trained in a theory of social deception that says that people can arrange reasons, excuses, for anything"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1820866#reply-1820866), such that it's informative ["to look at what _ended up_ happening, assume it was the _intended_ result, and ask who benefited."](http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/47) Yudkowsky is just _too talented of a writer_ for me to excuse his words as an accidental artifact of unclear writing. Where the text is ambiguous about whether biological sex is a real thing that people should be able to talk about, I think it's _deliberately_ ambiguous. When smart people act dumb, it's often wise to conjecture that their behavior represents [_optimized_ stupidity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie)—apparent "stupidity" that achieves a goal through some other channel than their words straightforwardly reflecting the truth. Someone who was _actually_ stupid wouldn't generate text with a specific balance of insight and selective stupidity fine-tuned to reach a gender-politically convenient conclusion without explicitly invoking any controversial gender-political reasoning. I think the point of the post is to pander to the biological sex denialists in his robot cult, without technically saying anything unambiguously false that someone could point out as a "lie."
+When smart people act dumb, it's often wise to conjecture that their behavior represents [_optimized_ stupidity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie)—apparent "stupidity" that achieves a goal through some other channel than their words straightforwardly reflecting the truth. Someone who was _actually_ stupid wouldn't be able to generate text so carefully fine-tuned to reach a gender-politically convenient conclusion without explicitly invoking any controversial gender-political reasoning. I think the point of the post is to pander to the biological sex denialists in his robot cult, without technically saying anything unambiguously false that someone could point out as a "lie."
-Consider the implications of Yudkowsky giving as a clue as to the political forces as play in the form of [a disclaimer comment](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228):
+On a close reading of the comment section, we see hints that Yudkowsky ... does not obviously _disagree_ with this interpetation of his behavior? First, we get [a disclaimer comment](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228):
> It unfortunately occurs to me that I must, in cases like these, disclaim that—to the extent there existed sensible opposing arguments against what I have just said—people might be reluctant to speak them in public, in the present social atmosphere. That is, in the logical counterfactual universe where I knew of very strong arguments against freedom of pronouns, I would have probably stayed silent on the issue, as would many other high-profile community members, and only Zack M. Davis would have said anything where you could hear it.
>
So, the explanation of [the problem of political censorship filtering evidence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting) here is great, but the part where Yudkowsky claims "confidence in [his] own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter" is just _laughable_. My point that _she_ and _he_ have existing meanings that you can't just ignore by fiat given that the existing meanings are _exactly_ what motivate people to ask for new pronouns in the first place is _really obvious_.
-Really, it would be _less_ embarassing for Yudkowsky if he were outright lying about having tried to think of counterarguments. The original post isn't _that_ bad if you assume that Yudkowsky was writing off the cuff, that he clearly just _didn't put any effort whatsoever_ into thinking about why someone might disagree. If he _did_ put in the effort—enough that he felt comfortable bragging about his ability to see the other side of the argument—and _still_ ended up proclaiming his "simplest and best protocol" without even so much as _mentioning_ any of its incredibly obvious costs, that's utterly discrediting. If Yudkowsky's ability to explore the space of arguments is _that_ bad, why would you trust his opinion about _anything_?
+Really, it would be _less_ embarassing for Yudkowsky if he were outright lying about having tried to think of counterarguments. The original post isn't _that_ bad if you assume that Yudkowsky was writing off the cuff, that he clearly just _didn't put any effort whatsoever_ into thinking about why someone might disagree. If he _did_ put in the effort—enough that he felt comfortable bragging about his ability to see the other side of the argument—and _still_ ended up proclaiming his "simplest and best protocol" without even so much as _mentioning_ any of its incredibly obvious costs, that's discrediting. If Yudkowsky's ability to explore the space of arguments is _that_ bad, why would you trust his opinion about _anything_?
+
+Furthermore, the claim that only I "would have said anything where you could hear it" is also discrediting of the community. Transitioning or not is a _major life decision_ for many of the people in this community. People in this community _need the goddamned right answers_ to the questions I've been asking in order to make that kind of life decision sanely [(whatever the sane decisions turn out to be)](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/). If "the community" is _so_ bad at exploring the space of arguments that I'm the only one (!?) who can talk about any of the obvious decision-relevant considerations that code as "anti-trans" when you project into the one-dimensional subspace corresponding to our Society's usual Culture War, why would you pay attention to "the community" _at all_? Insofar as "the community" is successfully marketing itself to promising young minds as the uniquely best place in the entire world for reasoning and sensemaking, then "the community" is _fraudulent_ (misleading people about what it has to offer in a way that moves resources): it needs to either _rebrand_—or failing that, _disband_—or failing that, _be destroyed_.
-Furthermore, the claim that only I "would have said anything where you could hear it" is also discrediting of the community. Transitioning or not is a _major life decision_ for many of the people in this community. People in this community _need the goddamned right answers_ to the questions I've been asking in order to make that kind of life decision sanely [(whatever the sane decisions turn out to be)](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/). If "the community" is _so_ bad at exploring the space of arguments that I'm the only one (!?) who can talk about any of the obvious decision-relevant considerations that code as "anti-trans" when you project into the one-dimensional subspace corresponding to our Society's usual Culture War, why would you pay attention to "the community" _at all_? Insofar as "the community" is successfully marketing itself to promising young minds as the uniquely best place in the entire world for the practice of reasoning and sensemaking, then "the community" is _fraudulent_ (misleading people about what it has to offer in a way that moves resources): it needs to either _rebrand_—or failing that, _disband_—or failing that, _be destroyed_.
+The "where you could hear it" clause is _particularly_ bizarre—as if Yudkowsky takes it as an unexamined and unproblematic assumption that people in "the community" _don't read widely_. It's gratifying to be acknowledged by my caliph—or it would be, if he were still my caliph—but I don't think the points I've been making, about the relevance of autogynephilia to male-to-female transsexualism, and the reality of biological sex (!), are particularly novel.
-The "where you could hear it" clause is _particularly_ bizarre—as if Yudkowsky takes it as an unexamined and unproblematic assumption that people in "the community" _don't read widely_. It's gratifying to be acknowledged by my caliph—or it would be, if he were still my caliph—but I don't think the basic points I've been making about the relevance of autogynephilia to male-to-female transsexualism and the reality of biological sex (!) are particularly novel. I think I _am_ unusual in the amount of analytical rigor I can bring to bear on these topics. When similar points are made by people like Kathleen Stock or Corrina Cohn or Aaron Terrell—or for that matter Steve Sailer—they don't have the background to formulate it [in the language of probabilistic graphical models](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/). _That_ part is a genuine value-add of the "rationalist" memeplex—something I wouldn't have been able to do without the influence of Yudkowsky's Sequences, and all the math books I studied afterwards because the vibe of the _Overcoming Bias_ comment section made that sound like an important and high-status thing to do.
+I think I _am_ unusual in the amount of analytical rigor I can bring to bear on these topics. Similar points are often made by authors such as Kathleen Stock or Corrina Cohn or Aaron Terrell—or for that matter Steve Sailer—but they don't have the background to formulate it [in the language of probabilistic graphical models](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/) the way I do. _That_ part is a genuine value-add of the "rationalist" memeplex—something I wouldn't have been able to do without the influence of Yudkowsky's Sequences, and all the math books I studied afterwards because the vibe of the _Overcoming Bias_ comment section in 2008 made that seem like an important and high-status thing to do.
-But the promise of Sequences was in offering a discipline of thought that could be _applied to_ everything else you would have read and thought about anyway. This notion that if someone in "the community" (such as it was) didn't say something, then Yudkowsky's faithful students therefore _wouldn't be able to hear it_ (?!?), would be absurd: _Overcoming Bias_ was a gem of the blogoshere, but not a substitute for the rest of it. (Nor was the blogosphere a substitute for the University library, which escaped the autodidact's resentment of the tyranny of schools by [selling borrowing privileges to the public for $100 a year](https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/about/access-library-collections-by-external-users).) To the extent that the Yudkowsky of the current year takes for granted that his readers _don't read Steve Sailer_, he should notice that he's running a mere cult or fandom rather than anything one would want to dignify by calling it an intellectual community.
+But the promise of the Sequences was in offering a discipline of thought that could be _applied to_ everything else you would have read and thought about anyway. This notion that if someone in "the community" didn't say something, then Yudkowsky's faithful students therefore _wouldn't be able to hear it_ (?!?), would be absurd: _Overcoming Bias_ was a gem of the blogoshere, but not a substitute for the rest of it. (Nor was the blogosphere a substitute for the University library, which escaped the autodidact's resentment of the tyranny of schools by [selling borrowing privileges to the public for $100 a year](https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/about/access-library-collections-by-external-users).) To the extent that the Yudkowsky of the current year takes for granted that his readers _don't read Steve Sailer_, he should notice that he's running a cult or a fandom rather than anything one should want to dignify by calling it an intellectual community.
-Yudkowsky's disclaimer comment mentions "speakable and unspeakable arguments"—but what, one wonders, is the boundary of the "speakable"? In response to a commenter mentioning the cost of having to remember pronouns as a potential counterargument, Yudkowsky [offers us another clue](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228&reply_comment_id=10159421871809228):
+Yudkowsky's disclaimer comment mentions "speakable and unspeakable arguments"—but what, one wonders, is the boundary of the "speakable"? In response to a commenter mentioning the cost of having to remember pronouns as a potential counterargument, Yudkowsky [offers us another clue as to what's going on here](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228&reply_comment_id=10159421871809228):
> 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.
-(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, despite its claims to be about advancing the generically human art of systematically correct reasoning.)
+(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, in fact, a partisan institution.)
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?
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 a contested social construct, rather than their sex being 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!_
-(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!)
+(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!)
Again, as discussed in "Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal", a comparison to [the _tú_/_usted_ distinction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_personal_pronouns#T%C3%BA/vos_and_usted) 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. That's principled.
It's quite another thing altogether to _simultaneously_ try to prevent a speaker from using _tú_ to indicate disrespect towards a social superior (on the stated rationale that the _tú_/_usted_ distinction is dumb and shouldn't exist), while _also_ refusing to entertain or address the speaker's arguments explaining _why_ they think their interlocutor is unworthy of the deference that would be implied by _usted_ (because such arguments are "unspeakable" for political reasons). That's just 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 hill anyone would care about dying on if it weren't a Schelling point. 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 Subjective 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, correctly, that the matter of pronouns is being used as a rhetorical wedge to try to prevent people from talking or thinking about sex.
+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 hill anyone would care about dying on if it weren't a Schelling point. 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 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 Subjective 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, correctly, that the matter of pronouns is being used as a rhetorical wedge to try to prevent people from talking or thinking about sex.
Having analyzed the _ways_ in which Yudkowsky is playing dumb here, what's still not entirely clear is _why_. Presumably he cares about maintaining his credibility as an insightful and fair-minded thinker. Why tarnish that by putting on this haughty performance?
> 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.
-The problem with trying to "exhibit generally rationalist principles" in an line of argument that you're constructing in order to be prudent and not community-harmful, is that you're thereby necessarily _not_ exhibiting the central rationalist principle that what matters is the process that _determines_ your conclusion, not the reasoning you present to _reach_ your conclusion, after the fact.
+The problem with trying to "exhibit generally rationalist principles" in a line of argument that you're constructing in order to be prudent and not community-harmful, is that you're thereby necessarily _not_ exhibiting the central rationalist principle that what matters is the process that _determines_ your conclusion, not the reasoning you present to _reach_ your conclusion, after the fact.
The best explanation of this I know of was authored by Yudkowsky himself in 2007, in a post titled ["A Rational Argument"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9f5EXt8KNNxTAihtZ/a-rational-argument). It's worth quoting at length. The Yudkowsky of 2007 invites us to consider the plight of a political campaign manager:
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