+Kerr suggests that preferred pronouns have a similar effect, that "a conflict between what we see and know to be true, and what we are expected to say, affects us." As an exercise, she suggests (privately!) translating sentences about transgender people to use natal-sex-based pronouns.
+
+Unfortunately, I don't have a study with objective measurements on hand (let me know in the comments if you do!), but I think most native English speakers who try this exercise and introspect—especially using examples where the trans person exhibits features or behavior typical of their natal sex, with things like "she ejaculated" or "he gave birth" being the starkest examples—will agree with Kerr's assessment: "You can know perfectly the actual sex of a male person, and yet you will still react differently if someone calls them _she_ instead of _he_."
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+Let's relate this is Yudkowsky's specialty of artificial intelligence. In a post on ["Multimodal Neurons in Artificial Neural Networks"](https://openai.com/blog/multimodal-neurons/), Gabriel Goh _et al._ explore the capabilities and biases of the [CLIP](https://openai.com/blog/clip/) neural network trained on textual and image data.
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+There are some striking parallels between CLIP's behavior, and phenomena observed in neuroscience. Neurons in the human brain have been observed to respond to the same concept represented in different modalities (_e.g._, [Quiroga _et al._](/papers/quiroga_et_al-invariant_visual_representation_by_single_neurons.pdf) observed a neuron in one patient that responded to photos and sketches of actress Halle Berry, as well as the text string "Halle Berry"), and so do CLIP neurons. Futhermore, CLIP is vulnerable to a Stroop-like effect where its image-classification capabilities can be fooled by "typographic attacks"—a dog with instances of the text "$$$" superimposed over it gets classified as a piggy bank, an apple with a handwritten sign saying "LIBRARY" gets classified as a library. The network knows perfectly what dogs and apples look like, and yet still reacts differently if adjacent text calls them something else.
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+I conjecture that the appeal of subject-chosen pronouns lies _precisely_ in how they exert Stroop-like effects on speakers' and listeners' cognition. (Once again, if it were _actually true_ that _she_ and _he_ had no difference in meaning, _there would be no reason to care_.) [Pronoun badges](/2018/Oct/sticker-prices/) are, quite literally, a typographic attack against native English speakers' brains.
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+Note, I mean this as a value-free description of how the convention _actually functions_ in the real world, [not a condemnation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N9oKuQKuf7yvCCtfq/can-crimes-be-discussed-literally). One could consistently hold that these "attacks" are morally good. (Analagously, [supernormal stimuli](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jq73GozjsuhdwMLEG/superstimuli-and-the-collapse-of-western-civilization) like chocolate or pornography are "attacks" against the brain's evolved nutrition and reproductive-opportunity detectors, but most people are fine with this, because our goals are not evolution's.)
+
+Is susceptibility to Stroop-like effects an indication of bad mind design? I mean, probably! One would expect that an intelligently-designed agent (as contrasted to messy human brains coughed up [blind evolution](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jAToJHtg39AMTAuJo/evolutions-are-stupid-but-work-anyway) or [lucky](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dpzLqQQSs7XRacEfK/understanding-the-lottery-ticket-hypothesis) neural networks found by gradient descent) could easily bind and re-bind symbols on the fly, such that a sane AI from the future could use whatever pronouns without dredging up any inapplicable mental associations, and tell you the color of the text "<span style="color:blue;">red</span>" just as easily as "<span style="color:red;">red</span>". But it seems kind of idle to criticize humans for not having a capability that we can't even give our best AIs.
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+Back to Kerr's article—importantly, Kerr is _explicitly_ appealing to psychological effects of different pronoun conventions. She is absolutely _not_ claiming that the use of preferred pronouns is itself a "lie" about some testable proposition. She writes:
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+> I've heard many people tell me they don't mind doing this, as a courtesy, although it takes some effort to keep up the mental gymnastics of perceiving one sex, but consistently using pronouns for the other. That's a personal choice, and I respect the reasons why some people make it.