-This seems to suggest that gender pronouns in the English language as currently spoken don't have effective truth conditions. I think this is false _as a matter of cognitive science_. If someone told you, "Hey, you should come meet my friend at the mall, she is really cool and I think you'll like her," and then the friend turned out to look like me (as I am now), _you would be surprised_. (Even if people in Berkeley would socially punish you for _admitting_ that you were surprised.) The "she ... her" pronouns would prompt your brain to _predict_ that the friend would appear to be female, and that prediction would be _falsified_ by someone who looked like me (as I am now). Pretending that the social-norms dispute is about chromosomes was a _bullshit_ [weakmanning](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/) move on the part of Yudkowsky, [who had once written that](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence) "[t]o argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates[;] [a]rguing against weaker advocates proves _nothing_, because even the strongest idea will attract weak advocates." Thanks to the skills I learned from Yudkowsky's _earlier_ writing, I wasn't dumb enough to fall for it, but we can imagine someone otherwise similar to me who was, who might have thereby been misled into making worse life decisions.
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-[TODO: ↑ soften tone, be more precise, including about "dumb enough to fall for it"]
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-If this "rationality" stuff is useful for _anything at all_, you would _expect_ it to be useful for _practical life decisions_ like _whether or not I should cut my dick off_.
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-In order to get the _right answer_ to that policy question (whatever the right answer turns out to be), you need to _at minimum_ be able to get the _right answer_ on related fact-questions like "Is late-onset gender dysphoria in males an intersex condition?" (answer: no) and related philosophy-questions like "Can we arbitrarily redefine words such as 'woman' without adverse effects on our cognition?" (answer: no).
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-At the cost of _wasting three years of my life_, we _did_ manage to get the philosophy question mostly right! Again, that's nice. But compared to the [Sequences-era dreams of changing the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YdcF6WbBmJhaaDqoD/the-craft-and-the-community), it's too little, too slow, too late. If our public discourse is going to be this aggressively optimized for _tricking me into cutting my dick off_ (independently of the empirical cost–benefit trade-off determining whether or not I should cut my dick off), that kills the whole project for me. I don't think I'm setting [my price for joining](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining) particularly high here?
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-Someone asked me: "Wouldn't it be embarrassing if the community solved Friendly AI and went down in history as the people who created Utopia forever, and you had rejected it because of gender stuff?"
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-But the _reason_ it seemed _at all_ remotely plausible that our little robot cult could be pivotal in creating Utopia forever was _not_ "[Because we're us](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-recommending/), the world-saving good guys", but rather _because_ we were going to discover and refine the methods of _systematically correct reasoning_.
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-If you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should be able to get the right answer even when the question _doesn't matter_. Obviously, the safety of the world does not _directly_ depend on being able to think clearly about trans issues. Similarly, the safety of a coal mine for humans does not _directly_ depend on [whether it's safe for canaries](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/canary_in_a_coal_mine): the dead canaries are just _evidence about_ properties of the mine relevant to human health. (The causal graph is the fork "canary-death ← mine-gas → human-danger" rather than the direct link "canary-death → human-danger".)
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-If the people _marketing themselves_ as the good guys who are going to save the world using systematically correct reasoning are _not actually interested in doing systematically correct reasoning_ (because systematically correct reasoning leads to two or three conclusions that are politically "impossible" to state clearly in public, and no one has the guts to [_not_ shut up and thereby do the politically impossible](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nCvvhFBaayaXyuBiD/shut-up-and-do-the-impossible)), that's arguably _worse_ than the situation where "the community" _qua_ community doesn't exist at all.
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-In ["The Ideology Is Not the Movement"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/) (April 2016), Alexander describes how the content of subcultures typically departs from the ideological "rallying flag" that they formed around. [Sunni and Shia Islam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shia%E2%80%93Sunni_relations) originally, ostensibly diverged on the question of who should rightfully succeed Muhammad as caliph, but modern-day Sunni and Shia who hate each other's guts aren't actually re-litigating a succession dispute from the 7th century C.E. Rather, pre-existing divergent social-group tendencies crystalized into distinct tribes by latching on to the succession dispute as a [simple membership test](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests).
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-Alexander jokingly identifies the identifying feature of our robot cult as being the belief that "Eliezer Yudkowsky is the rightful caliph": the Sequences were a rallying flag that brought together a lot of like-minded people to form a subculture with its own ethos and norms—among which Alexander includes "don't misgender trans people"—but the subculture emerged as its own entity that isn't necessarily _about_ anything outside itself.
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-No one seemed to notice at the time, but this characterization of our movement [is actually a _declaration of failure_](https://sinceriously.fyi/cached-answers/#comment-794). There's a word, "rationalist", that I've been trying to avoid in this post, because it's the subject of so much strategic equivocation, where the motte is "anyone who studies the ideal of systematically correct reasoning, general methods of thought that result in true beliefs and successful plans", and the bailey is "members of our social scene centered around Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander". (Since I don't think we deserve the "rationalist" brand name, I had to choose something else to refer to [the social scene](https://srconstantin.github.io/2017/08/08/the-craft-is-not-the-community.html). Hence, "robot cult.")
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-What I would have _hoped_ for from a systematically correct reasoning community worthy of the brand name is one goddamned place in the whole goddamned world where _good arguments_ would propagate through the population no matter where they arose, "guided by the beauty of our weapons" ([following Scott Alexander](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/) [following Leonard Cohen](https://genius.com/1576578)).
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-Instead, I think what actually happens is that people like Yudkowsky and Alexander rise to power on the strength of good arguments and entertaining writing (but mostly the latter), and then everyone else sort-of absorbs most of their worldview (plus noise and conformity with the local environment)—with the result that if Yudkowsky and Alexander _aren't interested in getting the right answer_ (in public)—because getting the right answer in public would be politically suicidal—then there's no way for anyone who didn't [win the talent lottery](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) to fix the public understanding by making better arguments.
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-It makes sense for public figures to not want to commit political suicide! Even so, it's a _problem_ if public figures whose brand is premised on the ideal of _systematically correct reasoning_, end up drawing attention and resources into a subculture that's optimized for tricking men into cutting their dick off on false pretenses. (Although note that Alexander has [specifically disclaimed aspirations or pretentions to being a "rationalist" authority figure](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/); that fate befell him without his consent because he's just too good and prolific of a writer compared to everyone else.)