- * Yudkowsky is _on the record_ [claiming that](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) "for people roughly similar to the Bay Area / European mix", he is "over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women". What ... does that mean? What is the _truth condition_ of the word 'woman' in that sentence? This can't be the claim that 20% of males would benefit from a gender transition, and in that sense _become_ "transsexual women"; the claim stated in the post is that members of this group are _already_ "actually women", "female-minds-in-male-bodies". How does Yudkowsky reconcile this claim with the perponderance of male-typical rather than female-typical behavior in this group (_e.g._, in gynephilic sexual orientation, or [in vocational interests](/2020/Nov/survey-data-on-cis-and-trans-women-among-haskell-programmers/))? On the other hand, if Yudkowsky changed his mind and no longer believes that 20% of Bay Area males of European descent have female brains, can he state that for the public record? _Reply!_
-
- * Yudkowsky is _on the record_ [claiming that](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421986539228&reply_comment_id=10159423713134228) he "do[es] 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." As I explained in "Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal", [quoting examples from Yudkowsky's published writing in which he treated sex and pronouns as synonymous just as one would expect a native American English speaker born in 1979 to do](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/#look-like-an-oliver), this self-report is not plausible. The claim may not have been a "lie" _in the sense_ of Yudkowsky consciously harboring deliberative intent to deceive at the time he typed that sentence, but it _is_ a "lie" in the sense that the claim is _false_ and Yudkowsky _knows_ it's false (although its falsehood may not have been salient in the moment of typing the sentence). If Yudkowsky expects people to believe that he never lies, perhaps he could correct this accidental lie after it's been pointed out? _Reply!_
+[TODO last email and not bothering him—
+ * Although, as I struggled to write, I noticed I was wasting cycles worrying about what he'd think of me
+ * January 2022, I wrote to him asking if he cared if I said negative things about him, that it would be easier if he wouldn't hold it against me, and explained my understanding of the privacy norm (Subject: "blessing to speak freely, and privacy norms?")
+ * in retrospect, I was wrong to ask that. I _do_ hold it against him. And if I'm entitled to my feelings, isn't he entitled to his?
+ * what is the exact scope of not bothering him? I actually had left a Facebook comment shortly after blocking him on Twitter, and his reply seemed to imply that I did have commenting privileges (yudkowsky-twitter_is_worse_for_you.png)
+]
+
+In February 2022, I finally managed to finish a draft of ["Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal"](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/) (A year after the post it replies to! I did other things that year, probably.) It's long (12,000 words), because I wanted to be thorough and cover all the angles. (To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, when you strike at Eliezer Yudkowsky, _you must kill him._)
+
+If I had to compress it by a factor of 200 (down to 60 words), I'd say my main point was that, given a conflict over pronoun conventions, there's no "right answer", but we can at least be objective in _describing what the conflict is about_, and Yudkowsky wasn't doing that; his "simplest and best proposal" favored the interests of some parties to the dispute (as was seemingly inevitable), _without admitting he was doing so_ (which was not inevitable).[^describing-the-conflict]
+
+[^describing-the-conflict]: I had been making this point for four years. [As I wrote in February 2018's "The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/#describing-the-conflict), "If different political factions are engaged in conflict over how to define the extension of some common word [...] rationalists may not be able to say that one side is simply right and the other is simply wrong, but we can at least strive for objectivity in _describing the conflict_."
+
+In addition to prosecuting the object level (about pronouns) and the meta level (about acknowleding the conflict) for 12,000 words, I had also written _another_ several thousand words at the meta-meta level, about the political context of the argument and Yudkowsky's comments about what is "sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful", but I wasn't sure whether to include it in the post itself, or save it for the memoir, or post it as a separate comment on the _Less Wrong_ linkpost mirror. I was worried about it being too "aggressive", attacking Yudkowsky too much, disregarding our usual norms about only attacking arguments and not people. I wasn't sure how to be aggressive and explain _why_ I wanted to disregard the usual norms in this case (why it was _right_ to disregard the usual norms in this case) without the Whole Dumb Story of the previous six years leaking in (which would take even longer to write).
+
+I asked secret posse member for political advice. I thought my argumens were very strong, but that the object-level argument about pronoun conventions just wasn't very interesting; what I _actually_ wanted people to see was the thing where the Big Yud of the current year _just can't stop lying for political convenience_. How could I possibly pull that off in a way that the median _Less Wrong_-er would hear? Was it a good idea to "go for the throat" with the "I'm better off because I don't trust Eliezer Yudkowsky to tell the truth in this domain" line?
+
+Secret posse member said the post was super long and boring. ("Yes. I'm bored, too," I replied.) They said that I was optimizing for my having said the thing, rather than for the reader being able to hear it. In the post, I had complained that you can't have it both ways: either pronouns convey sex-category information (in which case, people who want to use natal-sex categories have an interest in defending their right to misgender), or they don't (in which case, there would be no reason for trans people to care about what pronouns people use for them). But by burying the thing I actually wanted people to see in thousands of words of boring argumentation, I was evading the fact that _I_ couldn't have it both ways: either I was calling out Yudkowsky as betraying his principles and being dishonest, or I wasn't.
+
+"[I]f you want to say the thing, say it," concluded secret posse member. "I don't know what you're afraid of."
+
+I was afraid of taking irrevocable war actions against the person who taught me everything I know. (And his apparent conviction that the world was ending _soon_, made it worse. Wouldn't it feel petty, if the last thing you ever said to your grandfather was calling him a liar in front of the whole family, even if he had in fact lied?)
+
+I wanted to believe that if I wrote all the words dotting every possible _i_ and crossing every possible _t_ at all three levels of meta, then that would make it [a description and not an attack](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/can-crimes-be-discussed-literally/)—that I could have it both ways if I explained the lower level of organization beneath the high-level abstractions of "betraying his principles and being dishonest." If that didn't work because [I only had five words](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4ZvJab25tDebB8FGE/you-have-about-five-words), then—I didn't know what I'd do. I'd think about it.
+
+After a month of dawdling, I eventually decided to pull the trigger on publishing "Challenges", without the extended political coda.[^coda] The post was a little bit mean to Yudkowsky, but not so mean that I was scared of the social consequences of pulling the trigger. (Yudkowsky had been mean to Christiano and Richard Ngo and Rohin Shah in the recent MIRI dialogues; I didn't think this was worse than that.)