Really, the circular definition shouldn't satisfy _anyone_: people who want someone to call them _usted_ (or _tú_), do so _because_ of the difference in meaning and implied familiarity/respect, in the _existing_ (pre-reform) language. (Where else could such a preference possibly come from?) From an AI design standpoint, the circular redefinition can be seen as a form of ["wireheading"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aMXhaj6zZBgbTrfqA/a-definition-of-wireheading). You want people to respect you as a superior, and if they respected you as a superior, they'd call you _usted_. That could make a policy of coercing people into calling you _usted_ seem superficially appealing. But the appeal solely rests on confusing the pre-reform meaning (under which the choice of _usted_ implies respect and is therefore desirable) and the post-reform meaning (under which the choice implies nothing). Whether or not the proponent of the change consciously _notices_ the problem, the redefinition is _functionally_ "hypocritical": it's only desirable insofar as people aren't _actually_ using it internally.
-This is a pretty basic point, and yet Yudkowsky steadfastly ignores the role of existing meanings in this debate, bizarrely writing as if we were defining a conlang from scratch:
+Indeed, when I look at what contemporary trans activists write, I don't see them being satisfied by this idea that pronoun choices _don't mean anything_. [In the words of one Twitter user](https://twitter.com/AFROlNCOGNlTO/status/13890805920844636180):
+
+> misgendering sucks, but what feels even more violent is when people get my pronouns right and i can tell they still perceive me as a man
+
+In the [words of](https://twitter.com/pangmeli/status/1079097805250224130) [another](https://twitter.com/pangmeli/status/1079142303183327232):
+
+> a lot of cis people use 'learning someone's pronoun' as a copout from doing the important internal work of actually reconsidering their impression of the person's gender
+
+> like let's be real—the reason you have a hard time "remembering" her pronoun is because you don't really think of her as a her. if you practiced thinking of her as a her, her pronoun would just come. and then you wouldn't be privately betraying her in your head all the time.
+
+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 about them the way they want you to think about them. 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:
> 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 kind of a [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. [(Policy debates should not appear one-sided!)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided)
+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.
-More importantly, however, in discussing how to reform English, we're not actually in the position of defining a language from scratch. Even if you think the [cultural evolution](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/) of English involved Shenanigans, it's not fair to attribute the Shenanigans to native speakers accurately describing their native language. Certainly, language can evolve; words can change meaning over time; if you can get the people in some community to start using language differently, then you have _ipso facto_ changed their language. But when we consider language as an information-processing system that we can reason about using our standard tools of probability and game theory, we see that in order to change the meaning associated with a word, you actually _do_ have to somehow get people to change their usage. You can _advocate_ for your new meaning and use it in your own speech, but you can't just _declare_ your preferred new meaning and claim that it applies to the language as actually spoken, without speakers actually changing their behavior. As a result, Yudkowsky's proposal "to say that this just _is_ the normative definition" doesn't work.
+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_, the people who insist on sex-based pronouns are the target of Yudkowsky's condescension, whereas the 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!
+
+Perhaps more importantly, however, in discussing how to reform English, we're not actually in the position of defining a language from scratch. Even if you think the [cultural evolution](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/) of English involved Shenanigans, it's not fair to attribute the Shenanigans to native speakers accurately describing their native language. Certainly, language can evolve; words can change meaning over time; if you can get the people in some community to start using language differently, then you have _ipso facto_ changed their language. But when we consider language as an information-processing system that we can reason about using our standard tools of probability and game theory, we see that in order to change the meaning associated with a word, you actually _do_ have to somehow get people to change their usage. You can _advocate_ for your new meaning and use it in your own speech, but you can't just _declare_ your preferred new meaning and claim that it applies to the language as actually spoken, without speakers actually changing their behavior. As a result, Yudkowsky's proposal "to say that this just _is_ the normative definition" doesn't work.
To be clear, when I say that the proposal doesn't work, I'm not even saying I disagree with it. I mean that it literally, _factually_ doesn't work! Let me explain.
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." I'm really not sure how else I'm 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 some potential _counter_-evidence appears in Yudkowsky's 2001 _Creating Friendly AI: The Analysis and Design of Benevolent Goal Architectures_, where 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.
+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.
+
+For example, in Yudkowsky's 2001 _Creating Friendly AI: The Analysis and Design of Benevolent Goal Architectures_, where 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.
-[TODO: gender discussion in "Hero With a Thousand Chances"]
+A perhaps starker example comes in the comments to Yudkowsky's 2009 short story ["The Hero With A Thousand Chances"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EKu66pFKDHFYPaZ6q/the-hero-with-a-thousand-chances). A commenter (in the guise of a decision theory thought experiment) inquired whether Yudkowsky flipped a coin to determine the protagonist's gender, [to which Yudkowsky replied](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EKu66pFKDHFYPaZ6q/the-hero-with-a-thousand-chances?commentId=dyADWqquWFHeNMQiJ) (bolding mine):
+
+> Ha! I _tried_ doing that, the generator came up female ... and **I realized that I couldn't make Aerhien a man**, and that having two "hers" and "shes" would make the dialogue harder to track.
+>
+> Sometimes a random number generator only tells you what you already know.
+
+But the text of the story doesn't _say_ Aerhien isn't a "man"; it merely refers to her with she/her pronouns! If Yudkowsky "couldn't make [the character] a man", but the only unambiguous in-text consequence of this is that the chacter takes she/her pronouns, that would seem to be treating sex and pronouns as synonymous; the comment _only makes sense_ if Yudkowsky thinks the difference between _she_ and _he_ is semantically meaningful.
+
+(It's possible that he changed his mind about this between 2009 and 2021, but if so, you'd expect the 2021 Facebook discussion to explain why he changed his mind, rather than claiming that he "do[es] not know what it feels like from the inside" to hold the position implied by his 2009 comments.)
In the Facebook comments, Yudkowsky continues:
As it happens, I think this _is_ an important consideration in favor of self-identity pronouns! [When different parties disagree about what category something should belong to, but want to coordinate to use the _same_ category, they tend to find some mutually-salient Schelling point to settle the matter.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) In the case of disagreements about a person's social sex category ("gender"), in the absence of a trusted central authority to break the symmetry among third parties' judgements (like a priest or rabbi in a tight-knit religious community, or a medical bureaucracy with the social power to diagnose who is "legitimately" transsexual), the most obvious Schelling point is to defer to the person themselves. I wrote about this argument in a previous post, ["Self-Identity Is a Schelling Point"](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/).
-But crucially, the fact that the self-identity convention is a Schelling point, _doesn't_ mean we have a one-sided policy debate where it's in everyone's interests to support this "simplest and best protocol", with no downsides or trade-offs for anyone. The thing where _she_ and _he_ (which we don't know how to coordinate a jump away from) imply sex category inferences to actually-existing English speakers is still true! The Schelling point argument just means that the setup of the social-choice problem that we face happens to grant a structural advantage to those who favor the self-identity convention.
+But crucially, the fact that the self-identity convention is a Schelling point, _doesn't_ mean we have a [one-sided policy debate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided) where it's in everyone's interests to support this "simplest and best protocol", with no downsides or trade-offs for anyone. The thing where _she_ and _he_ (which we don't know how to coordinate a jump away from) imply sex category inferences to actually-existing English speakers is still true! The Schelling point argument just means that the setup of the social-choice problem that we face happens to grant a structural advantage to those who favor the self-identity convention.
Although they're not the only ones with an structural advantage: a social order whose gender convention was "Biological sex only; transsexualism isn't a thing; sucks to be you if you want people to believe that you're the sex that you aren't" would _also_ be a Schelling point. (Trans people's [developmental sex](http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/) is not really in dispute.) It's the _moderates_ who want to be nice to trans people _without_ destroying the public concept of sex who are in trouble!
As I have explained at length, this _rationale_ doesn't work and isn't true (even if better rationales, like 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)
-Again, without attributing to Yudkowsky any _conscious, deliberative_ intent to deceive (because of the human tendency to unconsciously introduce distortions in the heat of a rapid argument), the _pants-on-fire audacity_ of this _ludicrous_ claim to ignorance still beggars belief. As the author of [one of the world's most popular _Harry Potter_ fanfictions](http://www.hpmor.com/), Yudkowsky clearly knows something about about how to simulate alternative perspectives (includes ones he disagrees with) and portray them sympathetically. And he claims to be _unable_ to do this for ... the idea that pronouns imply sex, and that using the pronouns that imply someone is the sex that they are not feels analogous to lying? Really?!
+Again, without attributing to Yudkowsky any _conscious, deliberative_ intent to deceive (because of the tragic human tendency to unconsciously introduce distortions in the heat of a rapid argument), the _pants-on-fire audacity_ of this _ludicrous_ claim to ignorance still beggars belief. As the author of [one of the world's most popular _Harry Potter_ fanfictions](http://www.hpmor.com/), Yudkowsky clearly knows something about about how to simulate alternative perspectives (includes ones he disagrees with) and portray them sympathetically. And he claims to be _unable_ to do this for ... the idea that pronouns imply sex, and that using the pronouns that imply someone is the sex that they are not feels analogous to lying? Really?!
Well, I'm not a popular fiction author with thousands of obsessive fans who pour over my every word, but if Yudkowsky claims not to be up to this writing challenge, I'm happy to give him a hand and show him how it might be done—
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.
+I suspect some readers will have an intuition that my choice of scenario is loaded, unfair or unrealistic. But what, specifically, is unrealistic about it?
-But what, specifically, is unrealistic about it?
+Is it the idea that a trans woman could have raped someone before transitioning? [TODO: cite that this is real]
-Is it the idea that a trans woman could have raped someone before transitioning? [TODO: /o/ThisNeverHappens]
+Is it the idea that the legal system would penalize someone for pronoun non-compliance?
-Is it the idea that the legal system would penalize someone for pronoun non-compliance? [TODO: cite examples of this happening; as liberal intellectuals, we want to debate the optimal communication policy and expect to govern by assent; we're not so bloodthirsty as to want to throw dissenters in jail—but that is potentially what's at stake]
+[TODO: cite examples of this happening; as liberal intellectuals, we want to debate the optimal communication policy and expect to govern by assent; we're not so bloodthirsty as to want to throw dissenters in jail—but that is potentially what's at stake]
[TODO: quote Yudkowsky: not the woke position]
Right. It's an _incoherent_ position that's optimized to concede to the woke the policy that they want for a _different stated reason_ in order to make the concession appear "neutral" and not politically motivated. But in order to _actually_ be neutral in your analysis, 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 social fact.
+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" in any way.
You might think the cost of making the victim say _she_ is worth it, because you want to make it easy for gender-dysphoric people to socially transition, and because you think it's dumb that pronouns imply sex in the actually-existing English language and you see the self-identity convention as an incremental step towards degendering the language.
And of course—it _should_ be needless to say—this applies symmetrically. If you think speakers _should_ be able to misgender according to their judgement and you care about being intellectually honest, you need to be able to look a trans person in the eye and say, "Sorry, I'm participating in a political coalition that believes the freedom of speech of speakers is more important than your gender being recognized; sucks to be you."
-Or if you have more important things to worry about and don't want to take a position on controversial social issues, fine: use whatever pronoun convention happens to be dominant in your local social environment, and, if questioned, say, "I'm using the pronoun convention that happens to be dominant in my local social environment." You don't have to invent _absurd lies_ to make it look like the convention that happens to be dominant in your local social environment has no costs.
+Or if you have more important things to worry about (like the fate of a hundred thousand galaxies depending on the exact preferences built into the first artificial superintelligence) and don't want the distraction of taking a position on controversial contemporary social issues, fine: use whatever pronoun convention happens to be dominant in your local social environment, and, if questioned, say, "I'm using the pronoun convention that happens to be dominant in my local social environment." You don't have to invent _absurd lies_ to make it look like the convention that happens to be dominant in your local social environment has no costs.
-Really, "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'"? Any seven-year-old in 2016 could have told you that that's just _factually not true_; if you grew up speaking English in the late 20th century, you _absolutely goddamned well do_ know what it feels like. Did the elephant in Yudkowsky's brain really expect to get away with that? How dumb does he think we are?!
+Really, "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'"? Any seven-year-old in 2016 could have told you that that's just _factually not true_; if you grew up speaking English in the late 20th century, you _absolutely goddamned well do_ know what it feels like. Did [the elephant in Yudkowsky's brain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_in_the_Brain) really expect to get away with that? How dumb does he think we are?!
-----
-At this point, some readers may be puzzled as to the _mood_ of the present post. The Facebook post under discussion is basically just Yudkowsky explaining why he doesn't misgender trans people. I _agree_ that not misgendering trans people is a reasonable thing to do, which I also do. Is it really worth getting so worked up about his exact reasoning, if I have a slightly different _rationale_ for the same policy? Why get so hung up on the exact argument, if you agree with the conclusion?
+At this point, some readers may be puzzled as to the _mood_ of the present post. I _agree_ with Yudkowsky's analysis of the design flaw in English's pronoun system. I _also_ agree that not misgendering trans people is a completely reasonable thing to do, which I also do. I'm _only_ disputing the part where Yudkowsky jumps to declaring his proposed "simplest and best protocol" without acknowledging the ways in which it's _not_ simple and not _unambiguously_ the best.
+
+Many observers would consider this a very minor disagreement, not something anyone would want to spend 12,000 words prosecuting with as much vitriolic rhetoric ("How dumb does he think we are", _&c._) as the target audience is likely to tolerate. If I agree with the problem statement (pronouns shouldn't denote sex, that's dumb; why would you define a language that way), and I don't disagree with the proposed policy solution (don't misgender trans people in public), why get so hung up on the exact arguments?
(I mean, _besides_ [the fact that it's arguments that matter rather than conclusions, as a completely general principle of correct cognition](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line).)
-I guess for me, the issue is that this is a question where _I need the correct answer in order to make extremely impactful social and medical decisions_. Let me explain.
+I guess for me, the issue is that this is a question where _I need the correct reasoning in order to make extremely impactful social and medical decisions_. Let me explain.
-This debate looks very different depending on whether you're coming into it as someone being _told_ that you need to change your pronoun usage for the sake of someone who will be very hurt if you don't (in which case, refusing such a trivial request would seem petty and spiteful)—or whether you're in the position of wondering whether to _make_ such a request of others.
+This debate looks very different depending on whether you're coming into it as someone being _told_ that you need to change your pronoun usage for the sake of someone who will be very hurt if you don't (in which case, refusing such a trivial request would seem petty and spiteful)—or whether you're in the position of wondering whether it makes sense to _make_ such a request of others.
As a good cis ally, you're told that trans people know who they are and you need to respect that [on pain of being responsible for someone's suicide](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/). While politically convenient for people who have _already_ transitioned and don't want anyone second-guessing their identity, I think this view is actually false. Humans don't have an atomic "gender identity" that they just _know_, which has no particular properties other than it not being recognized by others being worse than death. Rather, there are a variety of reasons why someone might feel sad about being the sex that they are, and wish they could be the other sex instead, which is called "gender dysphoria."
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 everyone in my life knows that I am, _in fact_, male, and (notwithstanding my clean-shavenness and beautiful–beautiful ponytail and slight gynecomastia from that HRT experiment five years ago) my appearance does nothing to disabuse them of this true knowledge. 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. 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). 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. 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.
+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.
(I guess I [can't say I wasn't warned](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science).)
-
-[TODO:
- * Stalin and "A Rational Argument"
- * "If there were unspeakable arguments against, we couldn't talk about them"—okay, then you and your rationalists are frauds
- * 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.
-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
-nearest unblocked strategy and preview of "Hill of Validity in Defense"
-]
-
-
------
-Fit in somewhere—
+But if we can't take Yudkowsky's claims at face value, what's _actually_ going on here?
- * singular they for named individuals undermined indefinite singular 'they'
- * parenthetical about where "Oliver" came from
- * some people have complained that my writing is too long, but when your interlocutors will go to the absurd length of _denying that the association of "she" with females_
- * people have an incentive to fight over pronouns insofar as it's a "wedge" for more substantive issues
- * 4 levels of intellectual conversation
- * appeal to inner privacy conversation-halter https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters
- * don't use "baked in" so many times
- * Aella https://knowingless.com/2019/06/06/side-effects-of-preferred-pronouns/
- * "gamete size"—this is a tic where everyone knows what sex is, but no one is allowed to acknowledge the cluster
------
-
-https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception
-> misgendering sucks, but what feels even more violent is when people get my pronouns right and i can tell they still perceive me as a man
-https://twitter.com/AFROlNCOGNlTO/status/1389080592084463618
+> 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.
-> a lot of cis people use 'learning someone's pronoun' as a copout from doing the important internal work of actually reconsidering their impression of the person's gender
-https://twitter.com/pangmeli/status/1079097805250224130
-> like let's be real—the reason you have a hard time "remembering" her pronoun is because you don't really think of her as a her. if you practiced thinking of her as a her, her pronoun would just come. and then you wouldn't be privately betraying her in your head all the time.
-https://twitter.com/pangmeli/status/1079142303183327232
+Again, [Yudkowsky's pathological fixation on avoiding "lying"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly)
-• I need the correct answer
-• "We can't talk about this"—utterly discrediting of the entire project"
-• What is the regularity in human psychology such that we end up with "gendered" noun classes? We are sexually dimorphic animals
-• the people aligning language models need to know this!!
-• he can only speak in terms of abstractions that are very obviously not what's happening—it's true that bathroom usage is not an ontological fact, but the function of bathrooms is _to protect females from males_. If you can't talk about that core issue—the thing that people actually care about—then the smugness is actively derailing the discussion, even if you didn't say anything false
+"the other side"—interesting phrasing
-• Schild's ladder—noun classes in other languages are already pretty arbitrary; if the proposal is to make names like that
-• TODO: buff my "circular definition satisfies no one" argument to not be vulnerable to the anti-Liskov-substitution property of natural language definitions
-https://www.ehu.eus/seg/_media/gizt/5/5/brown-gilman-pronouns.pdf
+> 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
-What Quakers Can Teach Us About the Politics of Pronouns
-https://archive.is/bYdde
+Trying to achieve a political objective "in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles"
-https://www.genderdissent.com/the-resistance-column
+"A Rational Argument"
+"Super-Proton Things"
-https://www.womenarehuman.com/extra-jail-time-for-incarcerated-women-who-use-male-pronouns-for-male-transgender-identifying-inmates/
-Spanish speakers screw up he/she—because they're used to dropping pronouns! https://cogsci.mindmodeling.org/2017/papers/0639/paper0639.pdf
-
-https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1468204472908369926
-
-I already have Yudkowsky blocked on Twitter, because it turns out that me talking to Yudkowsky in public is a waste of everyone's time (because the topics where I can expect to contribute to the information commons by disagreeing with Yudkowsky are exactly the topics where he doesn't think he can politically afford to address counterarguments), but for the benefit of anyone who was deceived by Yudkowsky's utterly laughable claim to [TODO exact quote about], I wrote up an explanation of everything Yudkowsky is doing wrong in this post + comments: [link]
+[TODO:
+ * Stalin and "A Rational Argument"
+ * "If there were unspeakable arguments against, we couldn't talk about them"—okay, then you and your rationalists are frauds
+ * 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.
+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
+nearest unblocked strategy and preview of "Hill of Validity in Defense"
+it's hollow to say, we should talk about the real issues with nouns, not grammar, if you have no intention whatsoever of talking about the real issues!—the reason TERFs go to the dark side and stop respecting pronouns is because they're sick of being fucked with
+I was going to write a different multi-thousand word blog post, but I'm sick of Eliezer Yudkowsky fucking with me for years
+]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff