-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_).
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-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.
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-(I guess I [can't say I wasn't warned](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science).)
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-[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"
-]
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-Fit in somewhere—
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- * 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
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-https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228
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-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception
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-> 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
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-> 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
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-• 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
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-• 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
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-https://www.ehu.eus/seg/_media/gizt/5/5/brown-gilman-pronouns.pdf
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-What Quakers Can Teach Us About the Politics of Pronouns
-https://archive.is/bYdde
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-https://www.genderdissent.com/the-resistance-column
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-https://www.womenarehuman.com/extra-jail-time-for-incarcerated-women-who-use-male-pronouns-for-male-transgender-identifying-inmates/
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-Spanish speakers screw up he/she—because they're used to dropping pronouns! https://cogsci.mindmodeling.org/2017/papers/0639/paper0639.pdf