Author: Zack M. Davis
Date: 2023-07-01 11:00
Category: commentary
-Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, two-type taxonomy, whale metaphors
+Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, categorization, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, two-type taxonomy, whale metaphors
Status: draft
> If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.
>
> —Zora Neale Hurston
-Recapping my Whole Dumb Story so far—in a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), I told the the part about how I've "always" (since puberty) had this obsessive sexual fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman and also thought it was immoral to believe in psychological sex differences, until I got set straight by these really great Sequences of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky, which taught me (incidentally, among many other things) [how absurdly unrealistic my obsessive sexual fantasy was given merely human-level technology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions), and that it's actually immoral _not_ to believe in psychological sex differences [given that](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/litany-of-tarski) psychological sex differences are actually real. In a subsequent post, "Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer", I told the part about how, in 2016, everyone in my systematically-correct-reasoning community up to and including Eliezer Yudkowsky suddenly started claiming that guys like me might actually be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense, and insisted on playing dumb when confronted with alternative explanations of the relevant phenomena, until—as described in the subsequent–subsequent post, "People, Evolved Social-Control Mechanisms, and Rocks"—I eventually had a stress- and sleep-deprivation-induced delusional nervous breakdown, got sent to psychiatric jail once, and then went crazy again a couple months later.
+Recapping my Whole Dumb Story so far—in a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), I told the the part about how I've "always" (since puberty) had this obsessive sexual fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman and also thought it was immoral to believe in psychological sex differences, until I got set straight by these really great Sequences of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky, which taught me (incidentally, among many other things) [how absurdly unrealistic my obsessive sexual fantasy was given merely human-level technology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions), and that it's actually [immoral _not_ to believe](https://www.readthesequences.com/You-Can-Face-Reality) in psychological sex differences [given that](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/litany-of-tarski) psychological sex differences are actually real. In a subsequent post, "Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer", I told the part about how, in 2016, everyone in my (ostensible) systematically-correct-reasoning community up to and including Eliezer Yudkowsky suddenly started claiming that guys like me might actually be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense, and insisted on playing dumb when confronted with alternative explanations of the relevant phenomena until I eventually had a stress- and sleep-deprivation-induced delusional nervous breakdown.
-That's not the really egregious part of the story. The thing is, psychology is a complicated empirical science: no matter how "obvious" I might think something is, I have to admit that I could be wrong—[not just as an obligatory profession of humility, but _actually_ wrong in the real world](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GrDqnMjhqoxiqpQPw/the-proper-use-of-humility). If my fellow rationalists merely weren't sold on the autogynephilia and transgender thing, I would certainly be disappointed, but it's definitely not grounds to denounce the entire community as a failure or a fraud. And indeed, I _did_ [end up moderating my views quite a bit](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/) compared to the extent to which my thinking in 2016–7 took Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence as received truth. (At the same time, I don't particularly regret saying what I said in 2016–7, because Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence is still very obviously [_directionally_ correct](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/) compared to the nonsense everyone else was telling me.)
+That's not the really egregious part of the story. The thing is, psychology is a complicated empirical science: no matter how "obvious" I might think something is, I have to admit that I could be wrong—[not just as an obligatory profession of humility, but _actually_ wrong in the real world](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GrDqnMjhqoxiqpQPw/the-proper-use-of-humility). If my fellow rationalists merely weren't sold on the autogynephilia and transgender thing, I would certainly be disappointed, but it definitely wouldn't be grounds to denounce the entire community as a failure or a fraud. And indeed, I _did_ [end up moderating my views quite a bit](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/) compared to the extent to which my thinking in 2016–7 took Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence as received truth. (At the same time, I don't particularly regret saying what I said in 2016–7, because Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence is still very obviously [_directionally_ correct](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/) compared to the nonsense everyone else was telling me.)
But a striking pattern in my attempts to argue with people about the two-type taxonomy in late 2016 and early 2017 was the tendency for the conversation to get _derailed_ on some variation of, "Well, the word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that," often with a link to ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), a November 2014 post by Scott Alexander arguing that because categories exist in our model of the world rather than the world itself, there's nothing wrong with simply _defining_ trans people to be their preferred gender in order to alleviate their dysphoria.
-After Yudkowsky had stepped away from full-time writing, Alexander had emerged as our subculture's preeminent writer. Most people in an intellectual scene "are writers" in some sense, but Alexander was the one "everyone" reads: you could often reference a _Slate Star Codex_ post in conversation and expect people to familiar with the idea, either from having read it, or by osmosis via other people having referenced the idea in conversation. The frequency with which "... Not Man for the Categories" was cited at me, seemed to suggest it had become our subculture's "party line" on trans issues.
+After Yudkowsky had stepped away from full-time writing, Alexander had emerged as our subculture's preeminent writer. Most people in an intellectual scene "are writers" in some sense, but Alexander was the one "everyone" reads: you could often reference a _Slate Star Codex_ post in conversation and expect people to be familiar with the idea, either from having read it, or by osmosis via other people having referenced the idea in conversation. The frequency with which "... Not Man for the Categories" was cited at me, seemed to suggest it had become our subculture's "party line" on trans issues.
But the post is very wrong in very obvious ways. To be clear, it's true _that_ categories exist in our model of the world, rather than the world itself—categories are "map", not "territory"—and it's possible that trans women might be women _with respect to_ some genuinely useful definition of the word "woman." However, Alexander goes much further, claiming that we can redefine gender categories _in order to make trans people feel better_:
> I ought to accept an unexpected man or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered female if it'll save someone's life. There's no rule of rationality saying that I shouldn't, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that I should.
-This is wrong because categories exist in our model of the world _in order to_ capture empirical regularities in the world itself: the map is supposed to _reflect_ the territory, and there _are_ "rules of rationality" governing what kinds of word and category usages correspond to correct probabilistic inferences. [Yudkowsky wrote a whole Sequence about this](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb) back in 'aught-eight, as part of the original Sequences. Alexander cites [a post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA4gF5KrboK2m2Xu7/how-an-algorithm-feels-from-inside) from that Sequence in support of the (true) point about how categories are "in the map" ... but if you actually read the Sequence, another point that Yudkowsky pounds home _over and over and over again_, is that word and category definitions are nevertheless _not_ arbitrary: you can't define a word any way you want, because there are [at least 37 ways that words can be wrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong)—principles that make some definitions _perform better_ than others as "cognitive technology."
+This is wrong because categories exist in our model of the world _in order to_ capture empirical regularities in the world itself: the map is supposed to _reflect_ the territory, and there _are_ "rules of rationality" governing what kinds of word and category usages correspond to correct probabilistic inferences. [Yudkowsky wrote a whole Sequence about this](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb) back in 'aught-eight. Alexander cites [a post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA4gF5KrboK2m2Xu7/how-an-algorithm-feels-from-inside) from that Sequence in support of the (true) point about how categories are "in the map" ... but if you actually read the Sequence, another point that Yudkowsky pounds home _over and over and over again_, is that word and category definitions are nevertheless _not_ arbitrary: you can't define a word any way you want, because there are [at least 37 ways that words can be wrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong)—principles that make some definitions _perform better_ than others as "cognitive technology."
-In the case of Alexander's bogus argument about gender categories, the relevant principle ([#30](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) on [the list of 37](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong)) is that if you group things together in your map that aren't actually similar in the territory, you're going to confuse yourself.
+In the case of Alexander's bogus argument about gender categories, the relevant principle ([#30](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) on [the list of 37](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong)) is that if you group things together in your map that aren't actually similar in the territory, you're going to make bad inferences.
Importantly, this is a very general point about how language itself works _that has nothing to do with gender_. No matter what you believe about politically-controversial empirical questions, intellectually honest people should be able to agree that "I ought to accept an unexpected [X] or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered [Y] if [positive consequence]" is not the correct philosophy of language, _independently of the particular values of X and Y_.
... and, really, that _should_ have been the end of the story. Not much of a story at all. If I hadn't been further provoked, I would have still kept up this blog, and I still would have ended up arguing about gender with people occasionally, but this personal obsession of mine wouldn't have been the occasion of a full-on robot-cult religious civil war involving other people who you'd expect to have much more important things to do with their time.
-The _causis belli_ for the religious civil war happened on 28 November 2018. I was at my new dayjob's company offsite event in Austin. Coincidentally, I had already spent much of the previous two days (since just before the plane to Austin took off) arguing trans issues with other "rationalists" on Discord.
+The _causis belli_ for the religious civil war happened on 28 November 2018. I was at my new dayjob's company offsite event in Austin, Texas. Coincidentally, I had already spent much of the previous two days (since just before the plane to Austin took off) arguing trans issues with other "rationalists" on Discord.
-Just that month, I had started a Twitter account in my own name, inspired in an odd way by the suffocating [wokeness of the open-source software scene](/2018/Oct/sticker-prices/) where I [occasionally contributed diagnostics patches to the compiler](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commits?author=zackmdavis). My secret plan/fantasy was to get more famous and established in the that world (one of compiler team membership, or conference talk accepted, preferably both), get some corresponding Twitter followers, and _then_ bust out the [@BlanchardPhd](https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD) retweets and links to this blog. In the median case, absolutely nothing would happen (probably because I failed at being famous), but I saw an interesting tail of scenarios in which I'd get to be a test case in [the Code of Conduct wars](https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/05/how-we-may-mesh/).
+Just that month, I had started a Twitter account (using my real name), inspired in an odd way by the suffocating [wokeness of the Rust open-source software scene](/2018/Oct/sticker-prices/) where I [occasionally contributed diagnostics patches to the compiler](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commits?author=zackmdavis). My secret plan/fantasy was to get more famous and established in the Rust world (one of compiler team membership, or conference talk accepted, preferably both), get some corresponding Twitter followers, and _then_ bust out the [@BlanchardPhd](https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD) retweets and links to this blog. In the median case, absolutely nothing would happen (probably because I failed at being famous), but I saw an interesting tail of scenarios in which I'd get to be a test case in [the Code of Conduct wars](https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/05/how-we-may-mesh/).
So, now having a Twitter account, I was browsing Twitter in the bedroom at the rental house for the dayjob retreat, when I happened to come across [this thread by @ESYudkowsky](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521):
>
> I will never stand against those who stand against lies. But changing your name, asking people to address you by a different pronoun, and getting sex reassignment surgery, Is. Not. Lying. You are _ontologically_ confused if you think those acts are false assertions.
-Some of the replies tried explain the problem—and [Yudkowsky kept refusing to understand](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067291243728650243)—
+Some of the replies tried explain the obvious problem—and [Yudkowsky kept refusing to understand](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067291243728650243):
> Using language in a way _you_ dislike, openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying. The proposition you claim false (chromosomes?) is not what the speech is meant to convey—and this is known to everyone involved, it is not a secret.
>
Dear reader, this is the moment where I _flipped out_. Let me explain.
-This "hill of meaning in defense of validity" proclamation was just such a striking contrast to the Eliezer Yudkowsky I remembered—the Eliezer Yudkowsky whom I had variously described as having "taught me everything I know" and "rewritten my personality over the internet"—who didn't hesitate to criticize uses of language that he thought were failing to carve reality at the joints, even going so far as to [call them "wrong"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong):
+This "hill of meaning in defense of validity" proclamation was just such a striking contrast to the Eliezer Yudkowsky I remembered—the Eliezer Yudkowsky whom I had variously described as having "taught me everything I know" and "rewritten my personality over the internet"—who didn't hesitate to criticize uses of language that he thought were failing to "carve reality at the joints", even going so far as to [call them "wrong"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong):
> [S]aying "There's no way my choice of X can be 'wrong'" is nearly always an error in practice, whatever the theory. You can always be wrong. Even when it's theoretically impossible to be wrong, you can still be wrong. There is never a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card for anything you do. That's life.
>
> You cannot hide behind a comforting shield of correct-by-definition. Both extensional definitions and intensional definitions can be wrong, can fail to carve reality at the joints.
-One could argue the "Words can be wrong when your definition draws a boundary around things that don't really belong together" moral didn't apply to Yudkowsky's new Tweets, which only mentioned pronouns and bathroom policies, not the [extensions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions) of common nouns.
+One could argue that this "Words can be wrong when your definition draws a boundary around things that don't really belong together" moral didn't apply to Yudkowsky's new Tweets, which only mentioned pronouns and bathroom policies, not the [extensions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions) of common nouns.
But this seems pretty unsatisfying in the context of Yudkowsky's claim to ["not [be] taking a stand for or against any Twitter policies"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067185907843756032). One of the Tweets that had recently led to radical feminist Meghan Murphy getting [kicked off the platform](https://archive.ph/RSVDp) read simply, ["Men aren't women tho."](https://archive.is/ppV86) This doesn't seem like a policy claim; rather, Murphy was using common language to express the fact-claim that members of the natural category of adult human males, are not, in fact, members of the natural category of adult human females.
Thus, if the extension of common words like 'woman' and 'man' is an issue of epistemic importance that rationalists should care about, then presumably so was Twitter's anti-misgendering policy—and if it _isn't_ (because you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning) then I wasn't sure what was _left_ of the "Human's Guide to Words" Sequence if the [37-part grand moral](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong) needed to be retracted.
-I think I _am_ standing in defense of truth when I have an _argument_ for _why_ my preferred word usage does a better job at "carving reality at the joints", and the one bringing my usage explicitly into question doesn't have such an argument. As such, I didn't see the _practical_ difference between "you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning", and "I can define a word any way I want." About which, again, an earlier Eliezer Yudkowsky had written:
+I think I _am_ standing in defense of truth when I have an _argument_ for _why_ my preferred word usage does a better job at carving reality at the joints, and the one bringing my usage explicitly into question doesn't have such an argument. As such, I didn't see the _practical_ difference between "you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning", and "I can define a word any way I want." About which, again, an earlier Eliezer Yudkowsky had written:
> ["It is a common misconception that you can define a word any way you like. [...] If you believe that you can 'define a word any way you like', without realizing that your brain goes on categorizing without your conscious oversight, then you won't take the effort to choose your definitions wisely."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences)
>
>
> ["One may even consider the act of defining a word as a promise to \[the\] effect [...] \[that the definition\] will somehow help you make inferences / shorten your messages."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace)
-One could argue that I was unfairly interpreting Yudkowsky's Tweets as having a broader scope than was intended—that Yudkowsky _only_ meant to slap down the specific false claim that using "he" for someone with a Y chromosome is "lying", without intending any broader implications about trans issues or the philosophy of language. It wouldn't be realistic or fair to expect every public figure to host a truly exhaustive debate on all related issues every time a fallacy they encounter in the wild annoys them enough for them to Tweet about that specific fallacy.
+One could argue that I was unfairly interpreting Yudkowsky's Tweets as having a broader scope than was intended—that Yudkowsky _only_ meant to slap down the specific false claim that using _he_ for someone with a Y chromosome is "lying", without intending any broader implications about trans issues or the philosophy of language. It wouldn't be realistic or fair to expect every public figure to host a truly exhaustive debate on all related issues every time a fallacy they encounter in the wild annoys them enough for them to Tweet about that specific fallacy.
However, I don't think this "narrow" reading is the most natural one. Yudkowsky had previously written of what he called [the fourth virtue of evenness](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/): "If you are selective about which arguments you inspect for flaws, or how hard you inspect for flaws, then every flaw you learn how to detect makes you that much stupider." He had likewise written [on reversed stupidity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence) (bolding mine):
> The more technology advances, the further we can move people towards where they say they want to be in sexspace. Having said this we've said all the facts. Who competes in sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary is a policy question (that I personally find very humorous).
-Sure, _in the limit of arbitrarily advanced technology_, everyone could be exactly where they wanted to be in sexpsace. Having said this, we have _not_ said all the facts relevant to decisionmaking in our world, where _we do not have arbitrarily advanced technology_. As Yudkowsky [acknowledges in the previous Tweet](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067488844122021888), "Hormone therapy changes some things and leaves others constant." The existence of hormone replacement therapy does not itself take us into the Glorious Transhumanist Future where everyone is the sex they say they are.
+Sure, _in the limit of arbitrarily advanced technology_, everyone could be exactly where they wanted to be in sexpsace. Having said this, we have _not_ said all the facts relevant to decisionmaking in our world, where _we do not have arbitrarily advanced technology_ (as Yudkowsky well knew, having [specifically written a post about how technically infeasible an actual sex change would be](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions)). As Yudkowsky [acknowledged in the previous Tweet](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067488844122021888), "Hormone therapy changes some things and leaves others constant." The existence of hormone replacement therapy does not itself take us into the Glorious Transhumanist Future where everyone is the sex they say they are.
-The _reason_ for having sex-segregated sports leagues is because the sport-relevant multivariate trait distributions of female bodies and male bodies are quite different: men are taller, and stronger, and faster, and have bigger lungs. If you just had one integrated league, females wouldn't be competitive (in the vast majority of sports, with a few exceptions [like ultra-distance swimming](https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/why-women-have-beaten-men-in-marathon-swimming/) that happen to sample an unusually female-favorable corner of sportspace).
+The _reason_ for having sex-segregated sports leagues is because the sport-relevant multivariate trait distributions of female bodies and male bodies are quite different: men are taller, stronger, and faster. If you just had one integrated league, females wouldn't be competitive (in the vast majority of sports, with a few exceptions [like ultra-distance swimming](https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/why-women-have-beaten-men-in-marathon-swimming/) that happen to sample an unusually female-favorable corner of sportspace).
Given the empirical reality of the different trait distributions, "Who are the best athletes _among females_" is a natural question for people to be interested in, and want separate sports leagues to determine. Including male people in female sports leagues undermines the point of having a separate female league, and [_empirically_, hormone replacement therapy after puberty](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3) [doesn't substantially change the picture here](https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/15/865).
In light of these observations, Yudkowsky's suggestion that an ignorant comittment to an "Aristotelian binary" is the main reason someone might care about the integrity of women's sports, is revealed as an absurd strawman. This just isn't something any scientifically-literate person would write if they had actually thought about the issue _at all_, as contrasted to having _first_ decided (consciously or not) to bolster one's reputation among progressives by dunking on transphobes on Twitter, and then wielding one's philosophy knowledge in the service of that political goal. The relevant facts are _not subtle_, even if most people don't have the fancy vocabulary to talk about them in terms of "multivariate trait distributions."
-I'm picking on the "sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary" remark because sports is a case where the relevant effect sizes are _so_ large as to make the point [hard for all but the most ardent gender-identity partisans to deny](/2017/Jun/questions-such-as-wtf-is-wrong-with-you-people/). (For example, what the [Cohen's _d_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_size#Cohen's_d) ≈ [2.6 effect size difference in muscle mass](/papers/janssen_et_al-skeletal_muscle_mass_and_distribution.pdf) means is that a woman as strong as the _average_ man is _at the 99.5th percentile_ for women.) But the point is very general: biological sex actually exists and is sometimes decision-relevant. People who want to be able to talk about sex and make policy decisions on the basis of sex are not making an ontology error, because the ontology in which sex "actually" "exists" continues to make very good predictions in our current tech regime (if not the glorious transhumanist future). It would be an absurd [isolated demand for rigor](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/) to expect someone to pass a graduate exam about the philosophy and cognitive science of categorization before they can talk about sex.
+I'm picking on the "sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary" remark because sports is a case where the relevant effect sizes are _so_ large as to make the point [hard for all but the most ardent gender-identity partisans to deny](/2017/Jun/questions-such-as-wtf-is-wrong-with-you-people/). (For example, what the [Cohen's _d_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_size#Cohen's_d) ≈ [2.6 effect size difference in muscle mass](/papers/janssen_et_al-skeletal_muscle_mass_and_distribution.pdf) means is that a woman as strong as the _average_ man is _at the 99.5th percentile_ for women.) But the point is very general: biological sex actually exists and is sometimes decision-relevant. People who want to be able to talk about sex and make policy decisions on the basis of sex are not making an ontology error, because the ontology in which sex "actually" "exists" continues to make very good predictions in our current tech regime (if not the glorious transhumanist future). It would be a ridiculous [isolated demand for rigor](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/) to expect someone to pass a graduate exam about the philosophy and cognitive science of categorization before they can talk about sex.
-Thus, Yudkowsky's claim to merely have been standing up for the distinction between facts and policy questions doesn't seem credible. It is, of course, true that pronoun and bathroom conventions are policy decisions rather than matters of fact, but it's _bizarre_ to condescendingly point this out _as if it were the crux of contemporary trans-rights debates_. Conservatives and gender-critical feminists _know_ that trans-rights advocates aren't falsely claiming that trans women have XX chromosomes. If you _just_ wanted to point out that the organization of sports leagues is a policy question rather than a fact (as if anyone had doubted this), why would you throw in the "Aristotelian binary" weak man and belittle the matter as "humorous"? There are a lot of issues that I don't _personally_ care much about, but I don't see anything funny about the fact that other people _do_ care.
+Thus, Yudkowsky's claim to merely have been standing up for the distinction between facts and policy questions doesn't seem credible. It is, of course, true that pronoun and bathroom conventions are policy decisions rather than matters of fact, but it's _bizarre_ to condescendingly point this out _as if it were the crux of contemporary trans-rights debates_. Conservatives and gender-critical feminists know that trans-rights advocates aren't falsely claiming that trans women have XX chromosomes! If you _just_ wanted to point out that the what rules sports leagues should have is a policy question rather than a fact (as if anyone had doubted this), why would you throw in the "Aristotelian binary" weak man and belittle the matter as "humorous"? There are a lot of issues that I don't _personally_ care much about, but I don't see anything funny about the fact that other people _do_ care.
-(And the case of sports, the facts are just _so_ lopsided that if we must find humor in the matter, it really goes the other way. A few years later, [Lia Thomas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_Thomas) would be dominating NCAA women's swim meets by finishing [_4.2 standard deviations_](https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1466044767561830405) (!!) faster than the median competitor, and Eliezer Yudkowsky feels obligated to _pretend not to see the problem?_ You've got to admit, that's a _little_ bit funny.)
+(And the case of sports, the facts are just _so_ lopsided that if we must find humor in the matter, it really goes the other way. A few years later, [Lia Thomas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_Thomas) would be dominate an NCAA women's swim meet by finishing [_4.2 standard deviations_](https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1466044767561830405) (!!) earlier than the median competitor, and Eliezer Yudkowsky feels obligated to _pretend not to see the problem?_ You've got to admit, that's a _little_ bit funny.)
If any concrete negative consequence of gender self-identity categories is going to be waved away with, "Oh, but that's a mere _policy_ decision that can be dealt with on some basis other than gender, and therefore doesn't count as an objection to the new definition of gender words", then it's not clear what the new definition is _for_.
-Like many gender-dysphoric males, I [cosplay](/2016/Dec/joined/) [female](/2017/Oct/a-leaf-in-the-crosswind/) [characters](/2019/Aug/a-love-that-is-out-of-anyones-control/) [at](/2022/Dec/context-is-for-queens/) fandom conventions sometimes. And, unfortunately, like many gender-dysphoric males, I'm _not very good at it_. I think someone looking at some of my cosplay photos and trying to describe their content in clear language—not trying to be nice to anyone or make a point, but just trying to use language as a map that reflects the territory—would say something like, "This is a photo of a man and he's wearing a dress." The word _man_ in that sentence is expressing _cognitive work_: it's a summary of the [lawful cause-and-effect evidential entanglement](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6s3xABaXKPdFwA3FS/what-is-evidence) whereby the photons reflecting off the photograph are correlated with photons reflecting off my body at the time the photo was taken, which are correlated with my externally-observable secondary sex characteristics (facial structure, beard shadow, _&c._), from which evidence an agent using an [efficient naïve-Bayes-like model](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes) can assign me to its "man" (adult human male) category and thereby make probabilistic predictions about some of my traits that aren't directly observable from the photo, and achieve a better [score on those predictions](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical/) than if the agent had assigned me to its "woman" (adult human female) category, where by "traits" I mean not (just) particularly sex chromosomes ([as Yudkowsky suggested on Twitter](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067291243728650243)), but the _conjunction_ of dozens or hundreds of measurements that are [_causally downstream_ of sex chromosomes](/2021/Sep/link-blood-is-thicker-than-water/): reproductive organs _and_ muscle mass (again, sex difference effect size of [Cohen's _d_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_size#Cohen's_d) ≈ 2.6) _and_ Big Five Agreeableness (_d_ ≈ 0.5) _and_ Big Five Neuroticism (_d_ ≈ 0.4) _and_ short-term memory (_d_ ≈ 0.2, favoring women) _and_ white-to-gray-matter ratios in the brain _and_ probable socialization history _and_ [any number of other things](/papers/archer-the_reality_and_evolutionary_significance_of_human_psychological_sex_differences.pdf)—including differences we might not necessarily currently know about, but have prior reasons to suspect exist: no one _knew_ about sex chromosomes before 1905, but given all the other systematic differences between women and men, it would have been a reasonable guess (that turned out to be correct!) to suspect the existence of some sort of molecular mechanism of sex determination.
+Like many gender-dysphoric males, I [cosplay](/2016/Dec/joined/) [female](/2017/Oct/a-leaf-in-the-crosswind/) [characters](/2019/Aug/a-love-that-is-out-of-anyones-control/) [at](/2022/Dec/context-is-for-queens/) fandom conventions sometimes. And, unfortunately, like many gender-dysphoric males, I'm _not very good at it_. I think someone looking at some of my cosplay photos and trying to describe their content in clear language—not trying to be nice to anyone or make a point, but just trying to use language as a map that reflects the territory—would say something like, "This is a photo of a man and he's wearing a dress." The word _man_ in that sentence is expressing _cognitive work_: it's a summary of the [lawful cause-and-effect evidential entanglement](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6s3xABaXKPdFwA3FS/what-is-evidence) whereby the photons reflecting off the photograph are correlated with photons reflecting off my body at the time the photo was taken, which are correlated with my externally-observable secondary sex characteristics (facial structure, beard shadow, _&c._), from which evidence an agent using an [efficient naïve-Bayes-like model](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes) can assign me to its "man" (adult human male) category and thereby make probabilistic predictions about some of my traits that aren't directly observable from the photo, and achieve a better [score on those predictions](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical/) than if the agent had assigned me to its "woman" (adult human female) category, where by "traits" I mean not (just) particularly sex chromosomes ([as Yudkowsky suggested on Twitter](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067291243728650243)), but the _conjunction_ of dozens or hundreds of measurements that are [_causally downstream_ of sex chromosomes](/2021/Sep/link-blood-is-thicker-than-water/): reproductive organs _and_ muscle mass (again, sex difference effect size of [Cohen's _d_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_size#Cohen's_d) ≈ 2.6) _and_ Big Five Agreeableness (_d_ ≈ 0.5) _and_ Big Five Neuroticism (_d_ ≈ 0.4) _and_ short-term memory (_d_ ≈ 0.2, favoring women) _and_ white-to-gray-matter ratios in the brain _and_ probable socialization history _and_ [any number of other things](/papers/archer-the_reality_and_evolutionary_significance_of_human_psychological_sex_differences.pdf)—including differences we might not necessarily currently know about, but have prior reasons to suspect exist: no one _knew_ about sex chromosomes before 1905, but given all the other systematic differences between women and men, it would have been a reasonable guess (that turned out to be correct) to suspect the existence of some sort of molecular mechanism of sex determination.
-Forcing a speaker to say "trans woman" instead of "man" in that sentence depending on my verbally self-reported self-identity may not be forcing them to _lie_, exactly. (Because it's understood, "openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning", what _trans women_ are; no one is making a false-to-fact claim about them having ovaries, for example.) But it _is_ forcing the speaker to obfuscate the probabilistic inference they were trying to communicate with the original sentence (about modeling the person in the photograph as being sampled from the "man" [cluster in configuration space](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace)), and instead use language that suggests a different cluster-structure ("trans women", two words, are presumably a subcluster within the "women" cluster). Crowing in the public square about how people who object to being forced to "lie" must be ontologically confused is _ignoring the interesting part of the problem_. Gender identity's [claim to be non-disprovable](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fAuWLS7RKWD2npBFR/religion-s-claim-to-be-non-disprovable) mostly functions as a way to [avoid the belief's real weak points](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dHQkDNMhj692ayx78/avoiding-your-belief-s-real-weak-points).
+Forcing a speaker to say "trans woman" instead of "man" in that sentence depending on my verbally self-reported self-identity may not be forcing them to _lie_, exactly. (Because it's understood, "openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning", what _trans women_ are; no one is making a false-to-fact claim about them having ovaries, for example.) But it _is_ forcing the speaker to obfuscate the probabilistic inference they were trying to communicate with the original sentence (about modeling the person in the photograph as being sampled from the "man" [cluster in configuration space](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace)), and instead use language that suggests a different cluster-structure. ("Trans women", two words, are presumably a subcluster within the "women" cluster.) Crowing in the public square about how people who object to being forced to "lie" must be ontologically confused is _ignoring the interesting part of the problem_. Gender identity's [claim to be non-disprovable](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fAuWLS7RKWD2npBFR/religion-s-claim-to-be-non-disprovable) functions as a way to [avoid the belief's real weak points](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dHQkDNMhj692ayx78/avoiding-your-belief-s-real-weak-points).
-To this one might reply that I'm giving too much credit to the "anti-trans" faction for how stupid they're not being: that _my_ careful dissection of the hidden probabilistic inferences implied by words (including pronoun choices) is all well and good, but that calling pronouns "lies" is not something you do when you know how to use words.
+To this one might reply that I'm giving too much credit to the "anti-trans" faction for how stupid they're not being: that _my_ careful dissection of the hidden probabilistic inferences implied by words [(including pronoun choices)](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/) is all well and good, but that calling pronouns "lies" is not something you do when you know how to use words.
-But I'm _not_ giving them credit for _for understanding the lessons of "A Human's Guide to Words"_; I just think there's a useful sense of "know how to use words" that embodies a lower standard of philosophical rigor. If a person-in-the-street says of my cosplay photos, "That's a man! I _have eyes_ and I can _see_ that that's a man! Men aren't women!"—well, I _probably_ wouldn't want to invite such a person-in-the-street to a _Less Wrong_ meetup. But I do think the person-in-the-street is _performing useful cognitive work_. Because _I_ have the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-language-and-cognition-sight (thanks to Yudkowsky's writings back in the 'aughts), _I_ know how to sketch out the reduction of "Men aren't women" to something more like "This [cognitive algorithm](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HcCpvYLoSFP4iAqSz/rationality-appreciating-cognitive-algorithms) detects secondary sex characteristics and uses it as a classifier for a binary female/male 'sex' category, which it uses to make predictions about not-yet-observed features ..."
+But I'm _not_ giving them credit for _for understanding the lessons of ["A Human's Guide to Words"](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb)_; I just think there's a useful sense of "know how to use words" that embodies a lower standard of philosophical rigor. If a person-in-the-street says of my cosplay photos, "That's a man! I _have eyes_ and I can _see_ that that's a man! Men aren't women!"—well, I _probably_ wouldn't want to invite such a person-in-the-street to a _Less Wrong_ meetup. But I do think the person-in-the-street is _performing useful cognitive work_. Because _I_ have the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-language-and-cognition-sight (thanks to Yudkowsky's writings back in the 'aughts), _I_ know how to sketch out the reduction of "Men aren't women" to something more like "This [cognitive algorithm](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HcCpvYLoSFP4iAqSz/rationality-appreciating-cognitive-algorithms) detects secondary sex characteristics and uses it as a classifier for a binary female/male 'sex' category, which it uses to make predictions about not-yet-observed features ..."
-But having _done_ the reduction-to-cognitive-algorithms, it still looks like the person-in-the-street _has a point_ that I shouldn't be allowed to ignore just because I have 30 more IQ points and better philosophy-of-language skills? As Yudkowsky had once written of [the fourth virtue of evenness](https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues): "Intelligence, to be useful, must be used for something other than defeating itself."
+But having _done_ the reduction-to-cognitive-algorithms, it still looks like the person-in-the-street _has a point_ that I shouldn't be allowed to ignore just because I have 30 more IQ points and better philosophy-of-language skills? As Yudkowsky had [once written](https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues), "Intelligence, to be useful, must be used for something other than defeating itself."
-I bring up my bad cosplay photos as an edge case that helps illustrate the problem I'm trying to point out, much like how people love to bring up [complete androgen insensitivity syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivity_syndrome) to illustrate why "But chromosomes!" isn't the correct reduction of sex classification. But to differentiate what I'm saying from mere blind transphobia, let me note that I predict that most people-in-the-street _would_ be comfortable using feminine pronouns for someone like [Blaire White](http://msblairewhite.com/) (an androphilic transsexual who passes a lot better). That's evidence about the kind of cognitive work people's brains are doing when they use English language singular third-person pronouns! Certainly, English is not the only language; ours is not the only culture; maybe there is a way to do gender categories that would be more accurate and better for everyone! But to _find_ what that better way is, I think we need to be able to _talk_ about these kinds of details in public. And _in practice_, the attitude evinced in Yudkowsky's Tweets seemed to function as a [semantic stopsign](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FWMfQKG3RpZx6irjm/semantic-stopsigns) to get people to stop talking about the details.
+I bring up my bad cosplay photos as an edge case that helps illustrate the problem I'm trying to point out, much like how people love to bring up [complete androgen insensitivity syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivity_syndrome) to illustrate why "But chromosomes!" isn't the correct reduction of sex classification. But to differentiate what I'm saying from mere blind transphobia, let me note that I predict that most people-in-the-street _would_ be comfortable using feminine pronouns for someone like [Blaire White](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaire_White) (an androphilic transsexual who passes a lot better). That's evidence about the kind of cognitive work people's brains are doing when they use English language singular third-person pronouns! Certainly, English is not the only language; ours is not the only culture; maybe there is a way to do gender categories that would be more accurate and better for everyone! But to _find_ what that better way is, I think we need to be able to _talk_ about these kinds of details in public. And _in practice_, the attitude evinced in Yudkowsky's Tweets seemed to function as a [semantic stopsign](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FWMfQKG3RpZx6irjm/semantic-stopsigns) to get people to stop talking about the details.
If you were actually interested in having a real discussion (instead of a fake discussion that makes you look good to progressives), why would you slap down the "But, but, chromosomes" fallacy and then not engage with the _drop-dead obvious_ "But, but, clusters in [high-dimensional](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy-1) [configuration space](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace) that [aren't actually changeable with contemporary technology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions)" steelman, [which was, in fact, brought up in the replies](https://twitter.com/EnyeWord/status/1068983389716385792)?
-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 objection, imagine you lived in a so-called "rationalist" subculture where conversations like this happened—
+Satire is a very weak form of argument: the one who wishes to doubt will always be able to find some aspect in which an 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 objection, imagine you lived in a so-called "rationalist" subculture where conversations like this happened—
<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
<div class="dialogue">
-<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Bob</span>: Look at this <a href="https://twitter.com/mydogiscutest/status/1079125652282822656">adorable cat picture</a>!</p>
+<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Bob</span>: Look at this <a href="https://www.pexels.com/photo/cute-corgi-in-front-of-a-laptop-5122188/">adorable cat picture</a>!</p>
<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Alice</span>: Um, that looks like a dog to me, actually.</p>
-<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Bob</span>: <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048">You're not standing</a> in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning. <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067294823000887297">Now, maybe as a matter of policy</a>, you want to make a case for language being used a certain way. Well, that's a separate debate then.</p>
+<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Bob</span>: <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048">You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning.</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067294823000887297">Now, maybe as a matter of policy, you want to make a case for language being used a certain way. Well, that's a separate debate then.</a></p>
</div>
<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
-If you were Alice, and a _solid supermajority_ of your incredibly smart, incredibly philosophically sophisticated friend group _including Eliezer Yudkowsky_ (!!!) seemed to behave like Bob (and reaped microhedonic social rewards for it in the form of, _e.g._, hundreds of Twitter likes), that would be a _pretty worrying_ sign about your friends' ability to accomplish intellectually hard things (_e.g._, AI alignment), right? Even if there isn't any pressing practical need to discriminate between dogs and cats, the _problem_ is that Bob is [_selectively_](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/) using his sophisticated philosophy-of-language knowledge to try to _undermine Alice's ability to use language to make sense of the world_, even though Bob _obviously knows goddamned well what Alice was trying to say_; it's _incredibly_ obfuscatory in a way that people—the _same_ people—would not tolerate in almost _any_ other context.
+If you were Alice, and a _solid supermajority_ of your incredibly smart, incredibly philosophically sophisticated friend group _including Eliezer Yudkowsky_ (!!!) seemed to behave like Bob (and reaped microhedonic social rewards for it in the form of, _e.g._, hundreds of Twitter likes), that would be a _pretty worrying_ sign about your friends' ability to accomplish intellectually hard things like AI alignment, right? Even if there isn't any pressing practical need to discriminate between dogs and cats, the _problem_ is that Bob is [_selectively_](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/) using his sophisticated philosophy-of-language knowledge to try to _undermine Alice's ability to use language to make sense of the world_, even though Bob _obviously knows goddamned well what Alice was trying to say_; it's _incredibly_ obfuscatory in a way that people—the _same_ people—would not tolerate in almost _any_ other context.
-Imagine an Islamic theocracy in which one Meghan Murphee had recently gotten kicked off the dominant microblogging platform for speaking disrespectfully about the prophet Muhammad. Suppose that [Yudkowsky's analogue in that world](/2020/Aug/yarvin-on-less-wrong/) then posted that Murphee's supporters were ontologically confused to object on free inquiry grounds: [saying "peace be upon him" after the name of the prophet Muhammad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_honorifics#Applied_to_Muhammad_and_his_family) is a _speech act_, not a statement of fact. In banning Murphee for repeatedly speaking about the prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) as if he were just some guy, the platform was merely ["enforcing a courtesy standard"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067302082481274880); Murphee wasn't being forced to _lie_.
+Imagine an Islamic theocracy in which one Meghan Murphee had recently gotten kicked off the dominant microblogging platform for speaking disrespectfully about the prophet Muhammad. Suppose that [Yudkowsky's analogue in that world](/2020/Aug/yarvin-on-less-wrong/) then posted that Murphee's supporters were ontologically confused to object on free inquiry grounds: [saying "peace be upon him" after the name of the prophet Muhammad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_honorifics#Applied_to_Muhammad_and_his_family) is a _speech act_, not a statement of fact. In banning Murphee for repeatedly speaking about the prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) as if he were just some guy, the platform was merely ["enforcing a courtesy standard"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067302082481274880) (in the words of our world's Yudkowsky); Murphee wasn't being forced to _lie_.
I think the atheists of our world, including Yudkowsky, would not have any trouble seeing the problem with this scenario, nor hesitate to agree that it _is_ a problem for that Society's rationality. It is, of course, true as an isolated linguistics fact that saying "peace be unto him" is a speech act rather than a statement of fact, but it would be _bizarre_ to condescendingly point this out _as if it were the crux of debates about religious speech codes_. The _function_ of the speech act is to signal the speaker's affirmation of Muhammad's divinity. That's _why_ the Islamic theocrats want to mandate that everyone says it: it's a lot harder for atheism to get any traction if no one is allowed to _talk_ like an atheist.
It makes sense that Yudkowsky might perceive political constraints on what he might want to say in public—especially when you look at [what happened to the _other_ Harry Potter author](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_J._K._Rowling#Transgender_rights). (Despite my misgivings, this blog _was_ still published under a pseudonym at the time; it would have been hypocritical of me to accuse someone of cowardice about what they're willing to attach their real name to.)
-But if Yudkowsky didn't want to get into a distracting political fight about a topic, then maybe the responsible thing to do would have been to just not say anything about the topic, rather than engaging with the _stupid_ version of the opposition and [stonewalling](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters) with "That's a policy question" when people tried to point out the problem?!
+But if Yudkowsky didn't want to get into a distracting fight about a politically-charged topic, then maybe the responsible thing to do would have been to just not say anything about the topic, rather than engaging with the _stupid_ version of the opposition and [stonewalling](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters) with "That's a policy question" when people tried to point out the problem?!
------
The monetary offer, admittedly, was awkward: I included another paragraph clarifying that any payment was only to get his attention, and not _quid quo pro_ advertising, and that if he didn't trust his brain circuitry not to be corrupted by money, then he might want to reject the offer on those grounds and only read the post if he expected it to be genuinely interesting.
-Again, I realize this must seem weird and cultish to any normal people reading this. (Paying some blogger you follow one grand just to _read_ one of your posts? What? Why? Who _does_ that?) To this, I again refer to the reasons justifying my 2016 cheerful price offer—and that, along with tagging in Anna and Michael, who I thought Yudkowsky respected, it was a way to signal that I _really really really didn't want to be ignored_, which I assumed was the default outcome. Surely an ordinary programmer such as me was as a mere _worm_ in the presence of the great Eliezer Yudkowsky. I wouldn't have had the audacity to contact him at _all_, about _anything_, if I didn't have Something to Protect.
+Again, I realize this must seem weird and cultish to any normal people reading this. (Paying some blogger you follow one grand just to _read_ one of your posts? What? Why? Who _does_ that?) To this, I again refer to [the reasons justifying my 2016 cheerful price offer](/2023/Jun/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#cheerful-price-reasons)—and that, along with tagging in Anna and Michael, who I thought Yudkowsky respected, it was a way to signal that I _really really really didn't want to be ignored_, which I assumed was the default outcome. Surely an ordinary programmer such as me was as a mere _worm_ in the presence of the great Eliezer Yudkowsky. I wouldn't have had the audacity to contact him at _all_, about _anything_, if I didn't have Something to Protect.
Anna didn't reply, but I apparently did interest Michael, who chimed in on the email thread to Yudkowsky. We had a long phone conversation the next day lamenting how the "rationalists" were dead as an intellectual community.
(If you are silent about your pain, _they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it_.)
-Unfortunately, a lot of _other people_ seem to have strong intuitions about "privacy", which bizarrely impose constraints on what _I'm_ allowed to say about my own life: in particular, it's considered unacceptable to publicly quote or summarize someone's emails from a conversation that they had reason to expect to be private. I feel obligated to comply with these widely-held privacy norms, even if _I_ think they're paranoid and [anti-social](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blackmailers-are-privateers-in-the-war-on-hypocrisy/).
+Unfortunately, a lot of _other people_ seem to have strong intuitions about "privacy", which bizarrely impose constraints on what _I'm_ allowed to say about my own life: in particular, it's considered unacceptable to publicly quote or summarize someone's emails from a conversation that they had reason to expect to be private. I feel obligated to comply with these widely-held privacy norms, even if _I_ think they're paranoid and [anti-social](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blackmailers-are-privateers-in-the-war-on-hypocrisy/). (This secrecy-hating trait probably correlates with the autogynephilia blogging; someone otherwise like me who believed in privacy wouldn't be telling you this Whole Dumb Story.)
-So I would _think_ that the commonsense privacy-norm-compliance rule I should hold myself to while telling this Whole Dumb Story is that I obviously have an inalienable right to blog about _my own_ actions, but that I'm not allowed to directly refer to private conversations in cases where I don't think I'd be able to get the consent of the other party. (I don't think I'm required to go through the ritual of asking for consent in cases where the revealed information couldn't reasonably be considered "sensitive", or if I know the person doesn't have hangups about this weird "privacy" thing.) In this case, I'm allowed to talk about _me_ emailing Yudkowsky (because that was _my_ action), but I'm not allowed to talk about anything he might have said in reply, or whether he replied.
+So I would _think_ that the commonsense privacy-norm-compliance rule I should hold myself to while telling this Whole Dumb Story is that I obviously have an inalienable right to blog about _my own_ actions, but that I'm not allowed to directly refer to private conversations with named individuals in cases where I don't think I'd be able to get the consent of the other party. (I don't think I'm required to go through the ritual of asking for consent in cases where the revealed information couldn't reasonably be considered "sensitive", or if I know the person doesn't have hangups about this weird "privacy" thing.) In this case, I'm allowed to talk about _me_ emailing Yudkowsky (because that was _my_ action), but I'm not allowed to talk about anything he might have said in reply, or whether he replied.
Unfortunately, there's a potentially serious loophole in the commonsense rule: what if some of my actions (which I would have _hoped_ to have an inalienable right to blog about) _depend on_ content from private conversations? You can't, in general, only reveal one side of a conversation.
-Supppose Alice messages Bob at 5 _p.m._, "Can you come to the party?", and also, separately, that Alice messages Bob at 6 _p.m._, "Gout isn't contagious." Should Alice be allowed to blog about the messages she sent at 6 _p.m._ and 7 _p.m._, because she's only describing her own messages, and not confirming or denying whether Bob replied at all, let alone quoting him?
+Supppose Alice messages Bob at 5 _p.m._, "Can you come to the party?", and also, separately, that Alice messages Bob at 6 _p.m._, "Gout isn't contagious." Should Alice be allowed to blog about the messages she sent at 5 _p.m._ and 6 _p.m._, because she's only describing her own messages, and not confirming or denying whether Bob replied at all, let alone quoting him?
I think commonsense privacy-norm-adherence intuitions actually say _No_ here: the text of Alice's messages makes it too easy to guess that sometime between 5 and 6, Bob probably said that he couldn't come to the party because he has gout. It would seem that Alice's right to talk about her own actions in her own life _does_ need to take into account some commonsense judgement of whether that leaks "sensitive" information about Bob.
-In part of the Dumb Story that follows, I'm going to describe several times when I and others emailed Yudkowsky to try to argue with what he said in public, without saying anything about whether Yudkowsky replied, or what he might have said if he did reply. I maintain that I'm within my rights here, because I think commonsense judgement will agree that me talking about the arguments _I_ made, does not in this case leak any sensitive information about the other side of a conversation that may or may not have happened: I think the story comes off relevantly the same whether Yudkowsky didn't reply at all (_e.g._, because he was too busy with more existentially important things to check his email), or whether he replied in a way that I found sufficiently unsatisfying as to occasion the futher emails with followup arguments that I describe; I don't think I'm leaking any sensitive bits that aren't already easy to infer from what's been said (and not said) in public. (Talking about later emails _does_ rule out the possible world where Yudkowsky had said, "Please stop emailing me," because I would have respected that, but the fact that he didn't say that isn't "sensitive".)
+In the substory (of my Whole Dumb Story) that follows, I'm going to describe several times when I and others emailed Yudkowsky to try to argue with what he said in public, without saying anything about whether Yudkowsky replied, or what he might have said if he did reply. I maintain that I'm within my rights here, because I think commonsense judgement will agree that me talking about the arguments _I_ made, does not in this case leak any sensitive information about the other side of a conversation that may or may not have happened: I think the story comes off relevantly the same whether Yudkowsky didn't reply at all (_e.g._, because he was too busy with more existentially important things to check his email), or whether he replied in a way that I found sufficiently unsatisfying as to occasion the futher emails with followup arguments that I describe; I don't think I'm leaking any sensitive bits that aren't already easy to infer from what's been said (and not said) in public. (Talking about later emails _does_ rule out the possible world where Yudkowsky had said, "Please stop emailing me," because I would have respected that, but the fact that he didn't say that isn't "sensitive".)
-It seems particularly important to lay out these principles of adherence to privacy norms in connection to my attempts to contact Yudkowsky, because part of what I'm trying to accomplish in telling this Whole Dumb Story is to deal reputational damage to Yudkowsky, which I claim is deserved. (We want reputations to track reality. If you see Carol exhibiting a pattern of intellectual dishonesty, and she keeps doing it even after you try talking to her about it privately, you might want to write a blog post describing the pattern in detail—not to _hurt_ Carol, particularly, but so that everyone _else_ can make higher-quality decisions about whether they should believe the things that Carol says.) Given that motivation of mine, it seems important that I only try to hang Yudkowsky with the rope of what he said in public, where you can click the links and read the context for yourself. In the Dumb Story that follows, I _also_ describe some of my correspondence with Scott Alexander, but that doesn't seem sensitive in the same way, because I'm not particularly trying to deal reputational damage to Alexander in the same way. (Not because Scott performed well, but because one wouldn't really have _expected_ Scott to perform well in this situation; Alexander's reputation isn't so direly in need of correction.)
+It seems particularly important to lay out these judgements about privacy norms in connection to my attempts to contact Yudkowsky, because part of what I'm trying to accomplish in telling this Whole Dumb Story is to deal reputational damage to Yudkowsky, which I claim is deserved. (We want reputations to track reality. If you see Carol exhibiting a pattern of intellectual dishonesty, and she keeps doing it even after you try talking to her about it privately, you might want to write a blog post describing the pattern in detail—not to _hurt_ Carol, particularly, but so that everyone _else_ can make higher-quality decisions about whether they should believe the things that Carol says.) Given that motivation of mine, it seems important that I only try to hang Yudkowsky with the rope of what he said in public, where you can click the links and read the context for yourself. In the substory that follows, I _also_ describe some of my correspondence with Scott Alexander, but that doesn't seem sensitive in the same way, because I'm not particularly trying to deal reputational damage to Alexander in the same way. (Not because Scott performed well, but because one wouldn't really have _expected_ Scott to perform well in this situation; Alexander's reputation isn't so direly in need of correction.)
In accordance with the privacy-norm-adherence policy just described, I don't think I should say whether Yudkowsky replied to Michael's and my emails, nor (again) whether he accepted the cheerful price money, because any conversation that may or may not have occured would have been private. But what I _can_ say, because it was public, is that we saw [this addition to the Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1068071036732694529):
Without revealing the other side of any private conversation that may or may not have occurred, I can say that we did not get either of those _ex cathedra_ statements from Yudkowsky at this time.
-It was also around this time that our posse picked up a new member, who I'll call "Trent".
+It was also around this time that our posse picked up a new member, who I'll call "Bill".
-----
Michael said that it seemed important that, if we thought Yudkowsky wasn't interested, we should have common knowledge among ourselves that we consider him to be choosing to be a cult leader.
-I settled on Sara Barellies's ["Gonna Get Over You"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUe3oVlxLSA) as my breakup song with Yudkowsky and the rationalists, often listening to [a cover of it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emdVSVoCLmg) on loop to numb the pain. ("And I tell myself to let the story end"—the story of the rationalists as a world-changing intellectual movement. "And my heart will rest in someone else's hand"—Michael Vassar's.)[^breakup-songs]
+I settled on Sara Barellies's ["Gonna Get Over You"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUe3oVlxLSA) as my breakup song with Yudkowsky and the rationalists, often listening to [a cover of it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emdVSVoCLmg) on loop to numb the pain. I found [the lyrics](https://genius.com/Sara-bareilles-gonna-get-over-you-lyrics) were readily interpretable as being about my problems, even if Sara Barellies had a different kind of breakup in mind. ("I tell myself to let the story end"—the story of the rationalists as a world-changing intellectual movement. "And my heart will rest in someone else's hand"—Michael Vassar's. "And I'm not the girl that I intend to be"—self-explanatory.)[^breakup-songs]
[^breakup-songs]: In general, I'm proud of my careful choices of breakup songs. For another example, my breakup song with institutionalized schooling was Taylor Swift's ["We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA4iX5D9Z64), a bitter renunciation of an on-again-off-again relationship ("I remember when we broke up / The first time") with a ex who was distant and condescending ("And you, would hide away and find your peace of mind / With some indie record that's much cooler than mine"), thematically reminiscent of my ultimately degree-less string of [bad](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/07/trying-to-buy-a-lamp/) [relationships](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/12/draft-of-a-letter-to-a-former-teacher-which-i-did-not-send-because-doing-so-would-be-a-bad-idea/) [with](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/12/a-philosophy-of-education/) [UC Santa Cruz](https://www.ucsc.edu/) (2006–2007), [Heald College](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heald_College) (2008), [Diablo Valley College](https://www.dvc.edu/) (2010–2012), and [San Francisco State University](https://www.sfsu.edu/) (2012–2013).
I asked the posse if this analysis was worth sending to Yudkowsky. Michael said it wasn't worth the digression. He asked if I was comfortable generalizing from Scott's behavior, and what others had said about fear of speaking openly, to assuming that something similar was going on with Eliezer? If so, then now that we had common knowledge, we needed to confront the actual crisis, which was that dread was tearing apart old friendships and causing fanatics to betray everything that they ever stood for while its existence was still being denied.
-Another thing that happened that week was that former MIRI researcher Jessica Taylor joined our posse (being at an in-person meeting with Ben and Sarah and another friend on the seventeenth, and getting tagged in subsequent emails). Significantly for political purposes, Jessica is trans. We didn't have to agree up front on all gender issues for her to see the epistemology problem with "... Not Man for the Categories", and to say that maintaining a narcissistic fantasy by controlling category boundaries wasn't what _she_ wanted, as a trans person. (On the seventeenth, when I lamented the state of a world that incentivized us to be political enemies, her response was, "Well, we could talk about it first.") Michael said that me and Jessica together had more moral authority than either of us alone.
+Another thing that happened that week was that former MIRI researcher Jessica Taylor joined our posse (being at an in-person meeting with Ben and Sarah and another friend on the seventeenth, and getting tagged in subsequent emails). I had met Jessica for the first time in March 2017, shortly after my psychotic break, and I had been part of the group trying to take care of her when she had her own severe psychological problems in late 2017, but other than that, we hadn't been particularly close.
+
+Significantly for political purposes, Jessica is trans. We didn't have to agree up front on all gender issues for her to see the epistemology problem with "... Not Man for the Categories", and to say that maintaining a narcissistic fantasy by controlling category boundaries wasn't what _she_ wanted, as a trans person. (On the seventeenth, when I lamented the state of a world that incentivized us to be political enemies, her response was, "Well, we could talk about it first.") Michael said that me and Jessica together had more moral authority than either of us alone.
As it happened, I ran into Scott on the train that Friday, the twenty-second. He said that he wasn't sure why the oft-repeated moral of "A Human's Guide to Words" had been "You can't define a word any way you want" rather than "You _can_ define a word any way you want, but then you have to deal with the consequences."
"... Boundaries?" explains all this in the form of discourse with a hypothetical interlocutor arguing for the I-can-define-a-word-any-way-I-want position. In the hypothetical interlocutor's parts, I wove in verbatim quotes (without attribution) from Alexander ("an alternative categorization system is not an error, and borders are not objectively true or false") and Yudkowsky ("You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning", "Using language in a way _you_ dislike is not lying. The propositions you claim false [...] is not what the [...] is meant to convey, and this is known to everyone involved; it is not a secret"), and Bensinger ("doesn't unambiguously refer to the thing you're trying to point at").
-My thinking here was that the posse's previous email campaigns had been doomed to failure by being too closely linked to the politically-contentious object-level topic which reputable people had strong incentives not to touch with a ten-foot pole. So if I wrote this post _just_ explaining what was wrong with the claims Yudkowsky and Alexander had made about the philosophy of language, with perfectly innocent examples about dolphins and job titles, that would remove the political barrier and [leave a line of retreat](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3XgYbghWruBMrPTAL/leave-a-line-of-retreat) for Yudkowsky to correct the philosophy of language error. And then if someone with a threatening social-justicey aura were to say, "Wait, doesn't this contradict what you said about trans people earlier?", the reputable people could stonewall them. (Stonewall _them_ and not _me_!)
+My thinking here was that the posse's previous email campaigns had been doomed to failure by being too closely linked to the politically-contentious object-level topic which reputable people had strong incentives not to touch with a ten-meter pole. So if I wrote this post _just_ explaining what was wrong with the claims Yudkowsky and Alexander had made about the philosophy of language, with perfectly innocent examples about dolphins and job titles, that would remove the political barrier and [leave a line of retreat](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3XgYbghWruBMrPTAL/leave-a-line-of-retreat) for Yudkowsky to correct the philosophy of language error. And then if someone with a threatening social-justicey aura were to say, "Wait, doesn't this contradict what you said about trans people earlier?", the reputable people could stonewall them. (Stonewall _them_ and not _me_!)
Another reason someone might be reluctant to correct mistakes when pointed out, is the fear that such a policy could be abused by motivated nitpickers. It would be pretty annoying to be obligated to churn out an endless stream of trivial corrections by someone motivated to comb through your entire portfolio and point out every little thing you did imperfectly, ever.
We _lost?!_ How could we _lose?!_ The philosophy here was _very clear-cut_. This _shouldn't_ be hard or expensive or difficult to clear up. I could believe that Alexander was "honestly" confused, but Yudkowsky ...!?
-I could see how, under ordinary circumstances, asking Yudkowsky to weigh in on my post would be inappropriately demanding of a Very Important Person's time, given that an ordinary programmer such as me was surely as a mere _worm_ in the presence of the great Eliezer Yudkowsky. (I would have humbly given up much sooner if I hadn't gotten social proof from Michael and Ben and Sarah and "Trent" and Jessica.)
+I could see how, under ordinary circumstances, asking Yudkowsky to weigh in on my post would be inappropriately demanding of a Very Important Person's time, given that an ordinary programmer such as me was surely as a mere _worm_ in the presence of the great Eliezer Yudkowsky. (I would have humbly given up much sooner if I hadn't gotten social proof from Michael and Ben and Sarah and "Bill" and Jessica.)
But the only reason for my post to exist was because it would be even _more_ inappropriately demanding to ask for a clarification in the original gender-political context. The game theorist Thomas Schelling once wrote about the use of clever excuses to help one's negotiating counterparty release themselves from a prior commitment: "One must seek [...] a rationalization by which to deny oneself too great a reward from the opponent's concession, otherwise the concession will not be made."[^schelling] This is sort of what I was trying to do when soliciting—begging for—engagement-or-endorsement of "... Boundaries?" By making the post be about dolphins, I was trying to deny myself too great of a reward _on the gender-politics front_. I _don't_ think it was inappropriately demanding to expect "us" (him) to be correct _about the cognitive function of categorization_. (If not, why pretend to have a "rationality community" at all?) I was _trying_ to be as accomodating as I could, short of just letting him (us?) be wrong.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff