+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.
+
+The "meaning" of language isn't some [epiphenominal](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fdEWWr8St59bXLbQr/zombies-zombies) extraphysical fact that can be declared or ascertained separately from common usage. We can only say that the English word "dog" means [these-and-such four-legged furry creatures](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog), _because_ English speakers actually use the word that way. [The meaning "lives" in the systematic correspondence between things in the world and what communication signals are sent.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4hLcbXaqudM9wSeor/philosophy-in-the-darkest-timeline-basics-of-the-evolution)
+
+There's nothing magical about the particular word/symbol/phoneme-sequence "dog", of course. In German, they say _Hund_; in Finnish, they say _koira_; in Korean, they say _개_. Germans and Finns and Koreans (and their dogs) seem to be getting along just as well as we Anglophones.
+
+Nevertheless, it is a fact _about contemporary English_ that "dog" means dog. If you thought this was bad for whatever reason, and you wanted to change that fact, you'd have to change the behavior of actually-existing English speakers. If you tried to stipulate on your Facebook wall that the word "dog" should mean _tree_ now, and all of your Facebook friends nodded in agreement at your clever argument _and then continued to call dogs "dogs" and trees "trees" in their everyday life just like they always had_, then your language reform attempt would have, _in fact_, failed—even if the fact that it failed would be less obvious if you only looked at the Facebook thread full of people nodding in agreement.
+
+The inseparability of meaning from behavior-and-usage may be clearer if considered in a context other than that of natural language. Take computer programs. Sometimes programmers make bad design decisions. For example, in the C programming language, [it's standard to represent strings (textual data) in memory with a sequence of bytes ending in a zero (null) character](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-terminated_string); the machine only knows where the string stops when it reaches the null at the end. This convention has a lot of disadvantages relative to the alternative of [prefixing the string data with the length](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_(computer_science)#Length-prefixed); a missing or misplaced null character could cause the machine to erroneously read or write data in adjacent memory, causing serious bugs or security vulnerabilities.
+
+Given the existence of strong arguments for the length-prefixed string convention, replacing old software that uses null-terminated strings with new software that uses length-prefixed strings, sounds like a good idea! But the thing is, you _do_ have to upgrade or replace the old software. If you _just_ start sending data in a new format to the old software that doesn't understand the new format, your code is not going to yield the expected results. It would be _convenient_ if you could just declare a new semantics for your existing data on your Facebook wall and be done, but that just doesn't work if you're still using the old software, which is programmed to behave according to the old data-interpretation convention. This continues to be true even if the convention you're trying to retire is very bad (like null-terminated strings), and if the old software is widely deployed and would be very expensive to systematically replace. The backwards-compatibility trap [is real and can't be defied away even if it's very unpleasant.](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1216799697907486720)
+
+Natural language faces a similar backwards-compatibility trap. The English language, as "software", is _already_ "deployed" [to 370 million brains as native speakers, and another 980 million second-language speakers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers#Top_languages_by_population). And among those hundreds of millions of speakers, there is _already_ a very firmly entrenched convention that _she_ refers to females and _he_ refers to males, such that if you say, "I met a stranger in the park; she was nice", the listener is going to assume the the stranger was (or appeared to be) female, even if you didn't say "The stranger was female" as a separate sentence. If the listener later gets the chance to meet the stranger and the stranger turns out to be (or appear to be) male, the listener is going to be _surprised_: your pronoun choice induced them to [mis-anticipate their experiences](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences).
+
+Bad language design? I mean, maybe! You could argue that! You could probably get a lot of Likes on Facebook arguing that! But if 370 million native English speakers _including you and virtually everyone who Liked your post_ are going to _continue_ automatically noticing what sex people are (or appear to be) and using the corresponding pronouns without consciously thinking about it (in accordance with the "default for those-who-haven't-asked" clause of your reform proposal), then the criticism seems kind of idle!
+
+The "default for those-who-haven't-asked [going] by gamete size" part of Yudkowsky's proposal is _trying_ to deal with the backwards-compatibility problem by being backwards-compatible—prescribing the same behavior in the vast majority of cases—but in doing so, it fails to accomplish its stated purpose of de-gendering the language.
+
+To _actually_ de-gender English while keeping _she_ and _he_ (as contrasted to coordinating a jump to universal singular _they_, or _ve_), you'd need to _actually_ shatter the correlation between pronouns and sex/gender, such that a person's pronouns _were_ just an arbitrary extra piece of data that you couldn't deduce from their appearance and just needed to remember in the same way you have to remember people's names and can't deduce them from their appearances. But as far as I can tell, _no one_ wants this. When's the last time you heard someone you heard someone request pronouns for _non_-gender-related reasons? ("My pronouns are she/her—but note, that's _just_ because I prefer the aesthetics of how the pronouns sound; I'm _not_ in any way claiming that you should believe that I'm in any sense female, which isn't true.") Me neither.
+
+But given that pronouns _do_ convey sex-category information, as a _fact_ about how the brains of actually-existing English speakers _in fact_ process language (whether or not this means that English is terribly designed), some actually-existing English speakers might have reason to object when pressured to use pronouns in a way that contradicts their perception of what sex people are.
+
+In an article titled ["Pronouns are Rohypnol"](https://fairplayforwomen.com/pronouns/), Barra Kerr compares preferred pronouns to the famous [Stroop effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect). When color words are printed in text of a different color (_e.g._, <span style="color:blue;">red</span>, <span style="color:green">orange</span>, <span style="color:red">yellow</span>, <span style="color:purple">green</span>, <span style="color:orange">blue</span>, _&c._) and people are asked to name the color of the text, they're slow to respond: the meaning of the word interferes with their ability to name the color in front of our eyes.
+
+Kerr suggests that preferred pronouns
+
+
+[TODO: Kerr suggests misgendering as an exercise]
+
+[TODO: Contrary to Yudkowskys' claims about lies, Kerr _isn't_ claiming that pronouns can be "lies"; the article is _very_ explicit about this; Yudkowsky is obviously completely unfamiliar with his opponents' arguments]
+
+[TODO: let's related this to Yudkowsky's specialty multimodal neurons— both CLIP and biological neurons respond to text/images; typographic attacks are the same thing as pronoun badges; you would expect the people aligning language models to be able to think these thoughts]
+
+Given this multitude of reasons why the _existing_ meanings of _she_ and _he_ are relevant to the question of pronoun reform, what is Yudkowsky's response?
+
+Apparently, to play dumb. In the comments of the Facebook post, Yudkowsky claims:
+
+> 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" is attached to something in your head.
+
+...
+
+I'm sorry, but I can't take this self-report literally. I certainly [don't think Yudkowsky was _consciously_ lying](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist) when he wrote that. Nevertheless, I am _incredibly_ skeptical that Yudkowsky _actually_ doesn't know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to sex more firmly than a proper name is attached to someone's appearance.
+
+[TODO: how could you possibly know that?]
+
+The thing is, Eliezer Yudkowsky is a native English speaker born in 1979. As a native English speaker born in 1987, I have a _pretty good_ mental model of how native English speakers born in the late 20th century use language.
+
+And one of the things native English speakers born in the late 20th century are _very good_ at doing, is noticing what sex people are and using the corresponding pronouns without consciously thinking about it, because the pronouns are attached to the concept of sex in their heads more firmly than proper names are attached to something in their heads.