-Maybe we'd _usually_ prefer not to phrase it like that, both for reasons of politeness, and because we can be more precise at the cost of using more words ("Interests and sexual orientation may better predicted by natal sex rather than social gender in this population; also, not all trans women have had sex reassignment surgery and so retain their natal-sex anatomy"?). But I think the short version needs to be _sayable_, because if it's not _sayable_, then that's artificially restricting the hypothesis spaces that people use to think with, which is bad (if you care about human intelligence being useful).
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-You see the problem, right? I'm kind of at my wits' end here, because I _thought_ the point of this whole "rationality" project was to carve out _one_ place in the entire world where good arguments would _eventually_ triumph over bad arguments, even when the good arguments happen to be mildly politically inconvenient. And yet I keep encountering people who seem to be regarded as aspiring-rationalists-in-[good-standing](https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2018/12/24/contrite-strategies-and-the-need-for-standards/) who try to get away with this obfuscatory "We can define the word 'woman' any way we want, and you _need_ to define it by self-identification because otherwise you're _hurting trans people_" maneuver as if that were the end of the discussion!
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-A [few](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(writing)) linkable examples of this sort of thing—
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- * The immortal Scott Alexander [wrote](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), "An alternative categorization system is not an error, and borders are not objectively true or false." (You read my reply.)
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- * _Vox_ journalist and author of the popular Tumblr blog _The Unit of Caring_ Kelsey Piper [wrote](https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/171986501376/your-post-on-definition-of-gender-and-woman-and)—
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-> "If you can find anyone explaining why [_woman_ as 'adult human biological female'] is a good definition, **or even explaining what good properties it has** [!?!! bolding mine—ZMD], I'd appreciate it because I did sincerely put in the effort and—uncharitably, it's as if there's just 'matches historical use' and 'doesn’t involve any people I consider icky being in my category'."
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-[(My reply.)](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/)
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- * On Facebook, MIRI communications director Rob Bensinger [told me](https://www.facebook.com/robbensinger/posts/10158073223040447?comment_id=10158073685825447&reply_comment_id=10158074093570447&comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R2%22%7D)—
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-> Zack, "woman" doesn't unambiguously refer to the thing you're trying to point at; even if no one were socially punishing you for using the term that way, and even if we were ignoring any psychological harm to people whose dysphoria is triggered by that word usage, there'd be the problem regardless that these terms are already used in lots of different ways by different groups. The most common existing gender terms are a semantic minefield at the same time they're a dysphoric and political minefield, and everyone adopting the policy of objecting when anyone uses man/woman/male/female/etc. in any way other than the way they prefer is not going to solve the problem at all.
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-In context, I argue that this was an attempted [conversation-halter of the appeal-to-arbitrariness type](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters): if you scroll up and read my comments, I think it should be very clear that I understood that words can be used in many ways, and that I was objecting to another commenter's word usage for a _specific stated reason_ about the expressive power of language. ("To say that someone _already is_ a woman simply by virtue of having the same underlying psychological condition that motivates people to actually take the steps of transitioning (and thereby _become_ a trans woman) kind of makes it hard to have a balanced discussion of the costs and benefits of transitioning.") Rob didn't even acknowledge my argument! (Although the other commenter, to her credit, did!)
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-Now, to be fair to Rob, it's certainly possible that he was criticizing me specifically because I was the "aggressor" objecting to someone else's word usage, and that he would have stuck up for me just the same if someone had "aggressed" against me using the word _woman_ in a sense that excluded non-socially-transitioned gender-dysphoric males, for the same reason ("adopting the policy of objecting when anyone uses man/woman/male/female/etc. in any way other than the way they prefer is not going to solve the problem at all"). But given my other experiences trying to argue this with many people, I feel justified in my suspicions that that wasn't actually his algorithm? If socially-liberal people in the Current Year _selectively_ drag out the "It's pointless to object to someone else's terminology" argument _specifically_ when someone wants to talk about biological sex (or even _socially perceived_ sex!) rather than self-identified gender identity—but objecting on the grounds of "psychological harm to people whose dysphoria is triggered by that word usage" (!!) is implied to be potentially kosher—that has a pretty stark distortionary effect on our discussions!
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-(_Speaking_ of psychological harm, it may not be a coincidence that ten days after this exchange, I lost a lot of sleep, had a nervous breakdown, and ended up being involuntarily committed to the psychiatric ward for three days. Maybe in some people's book, that makes me a less reliable narrator, because I'm "crazy." But when everyone I [trusted](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science) to help keep me sane seemed intent on applying social pressure and clever definition-hacking mind games to get me to accept that men like me can _literally_ be women _on the basis of our saying so_, perhaps it is _understandable_ that I was pretty upset?)
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-I'm a transhumanist like everyone else; I want to support my trans friends like everyone else (and might end up being one of those friends if the technology gets better or I grow a spine) but Scott's, Kelsey's, and Rob's performance above _can't possibly_ be the way to have the discussion if we're going to be intellectually honest about it!
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-(_Needless to say_ but I'm saying it anyway because I've been trained to perceive the need because I live in a trash fire: Scott, Kelsey, and Rob are all great and smart people who I love; I'm attacking a _flawed argument pattern_, not people.)
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-You replied to me (in part):
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-> "Lying" is for per se direct falsehoods. That's all I was policing—people who do claim to be aspiring toward truth, messing up on an easy problem of elementary epistemological typing and the nature of words, but who might still listen maybe if somebody they respect nopes the fallacy. The rest of human civilization is a trash fire so whatever.
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-Some of us still have to live in this trash fire! And if you don't care about that—if you don't care about that, the next generation of AI researchers (assuming we have time for another generation) is growing up in this trash fire and a lot of them probably follow you on Twitter! Judging by local demographics, a _surprising number_ of them are gender-dysphoric males. If, as I'm claiming, the political push for trans rights is seducing them into adopting [_generalized_ bad patterns of reasoning](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology) (_e.g._, "Trans women are women, [_by definition_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cFzC996D7Jjds3vS9/arguing-by-definition)"), surely _that_ matters?
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-The clever definition-hacking mind games are _not technically false_—there is almost never any occasion on which I can catch anyone in a _explicit lie_ like "Benya Fallenstein and Jessica Taylor have XX karyotypes." But I still think the clever definition-hacking games are _incredibly_ obfuscatory in a way that people would not tolerate in almost _any_ other context.
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-Satire is a very weak form of argument: the one who wishes to doubt will always be able to find some aspect in which the obviously-absurd satirical situation differs from the real-world situation being satirized, and claim that that difference destroys the relevence of the joke. But on the off-chance that it might help _illustrate_ my concern, imagine you lived in a so-called "rationalist" subculture where conversations like this happened—
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-**Bob**: "Look at this [adorable cat picture](https://twitter.com/mydogiscutest/status/1079125652282822656)!"
-**Alice**: "Um, that looks like a dog to me, actually."
-**Bob**: "[You're not standing](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048) in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning. [Now, maybe as a matter of policy](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067294823000887297), you want to make a case for language being used a certain way. Well, that's a separate debate then."