-> 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
+> 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. [...]
+>
+> This is a filter affecting your evidence; it has not to my own knowledge filtered out a giant valid counterargument that invalidates this whole post. I would have kept silent in that case, for to speak then would have been dishonest.
+>
+> Personally, I'm used to operating without the cognitive support of a civilization in controversial domains, and have some confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it myself before speaking. So you know, from having read this, that I checked all the speakable and unspeakable arguments I had thought of, and concluded that this speakable argument would be good on net to publish, as would not be the case if I knew of a stronger but unspeakable counterargument in favor of Gendered Pronouns For Everyone and Asking To Leave The System Is Lying.
+>
+> But the existence of a wide social filter like that should be kept in mind; to whatever quantitative extent you don't trust your ability plus my ability to think of valid counterarguments that might exist, as a Bayesian you should proportionally update in the direction of the unknown arguments you speculate might have been filtered out.
+
+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 is _really obvious_.
+
+It would actually 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 (like expecting a rape victim to testify about what her rapist did to her with "her" penis) ... that's just _pathetic_. If Yudkowsky's ability to explore the space of arguments is _that_ bad, why would you trust his opinion about _anything_?
+
+But perhaps I'm not appreciating exactly what stringent constraints he's operating under? The filtered-evidence disclaimer comment mentions "speakable and unspeakable arguments", and judges that the speakable argument in the original post was "good _on net_ to publish" (emphasis mine). Maybe Yudkowsky doesn't see himself as being obligated to publically consider downsides of the "simplest and best protocol" proposed in the post, if he considers the _main_ thesis of the post to have simply been the "speakable" pronouns-shouldn't-denote-sex argument.
+
+[TODO: okay, so what is "speakable"? In response to a commenter bringing up "Remembering pronouns is a tax on memory", Yudkowsky says—]
+
+> 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.
+
+[TODO: 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) is a distraction from anything that anyone actually cares about. Certainly, I don't believe (a) as stated. But something substantively _similar_ to (a), (a') that self-reports are biased by social desirability and we can't take "gender identity" literally seems _overwhelmingly_ likely to be true, and I have a study to support it— /papers/blanchard-clemmensen-steiner-social_desirability_response_set_and_systematic_distortion.pdf . This should not seem implausible to someone who co-blogged with Robin Hanson for three years! As for (b), I don't think they get more favorable treatment from the rest of Society uniformly, I absolutely believe (b') that there's a _subculture_ that encourages transition for ideological reasons among people who wouldn't think of themselves as "trans" if they lived in a different subculture.
+
+Can we talk about _that_ in your Caliphate, my (a') and (b')? (Which is the stuff I actually care about, not pronouns.) Based on my experiences trying to, my read of the situation is, No, we can't talk about that. But if so, this puts one of Yudkowsky's comments elsewhere in the thread in a different light https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421986539228&reply_comment_id=10159424960909228 —]