Anyway, given these reasons why the _existing_ meanings of _she_ and _he_ are relevant to the question of pronoun reform, what is Yudkowsky's response?
-Apparently, to play dumb. In the comments of the Facebook post, Yudkowsky claims:
+Apparently, to play dumb. In the comments of the Facebook post, Yudkowsky mentions encountering exotic pronouns on [LambdaMOO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LambdaMOO) at age 13 and no one thinking anything of them, and [goes on to claim](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421986539228&reply_comment_id=10159423713134228):
> I do not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than "doesn't look like an Oliver" is attached to something in your head.
Posed that way, one would imagine not—but if Yudkowsky _does_ get the joke, then I don't think he can simultaneously _honestly_ claim to "not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than 'doesn't look like an Oliver' is attached to something in your head." In order to get the joke in real time, your brain has to quickly make a multi-step logical inference that depends on the idea that pronouns imply sex. (The turtle is a "her" [iff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_and_only_if) female, not-female implies not-pregnant, so if the turtle is pregnant, it must be a "her".) This would seem, pretty straightforwardly, to be a sense in which "a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than 'doesn't look like an Oliver' is attached to something in your head." I'm really not sure how else I'm supposed to interpret those words!
-Perhaps it's not justified to question Yudkowsky's "I do not know what it feels like [...]" self-report based on generalizations about English speakers in general? Maybe his mind works differently, but dint of unusual neurodiversity or training in LambdaMOO? But if so, one would perhaps expect some evidence of this in his publicly observable writing? But some potential _counter_-evidence appears in Yudkowsky's 2001 _Creating Friendly AI: The Analysis and Design of Benevolent Goal Architectures_, where the text "If a human really hates someone, she" is followed by [footnote 16](https://web.archive.org/web/20070615130139/http://singinst.org/upload/CFAI.html#foot-15): "I flip a coin to determine whether a given human is male or female." Note, "_is_ male or female", not "which pronoun to use." The text would seem to reflect the common understanding that _she_ and _he_ do imply sex specifically (and not some other thing, like being named Oliver), even if flipping a coin (and drawing attention to having done so) reflects annoyance that English requires a choice.
+Perhaps it's not justified to question Yudkowsky's "I do not know what it feels like [...]" self-report based on generalizations about English speakers in general? Maybe his mind works differently, but dint of unusual neurodiversity or training in LambdaMOO? But if so, one would perhaps expect some evidence of this in his publicly observable writing? And yet some potential _counter_-evidence appears in Yudkowsky's 2001 _Creating Friendly AI: The Analysis and Design of Benevolent Goal Architectures_, where the text "If a human really hates someone, she" is followed by [footnote 16](https://web.archive.org/web/20070615130139/http://singinst.org/upload/CFAI.html#foot-15): "I flip a coin to determine whether a given human is male or female." Note, "_is_ male or female", not "which pronoun to use." The text would seem to reflect the common understanding that _she_ and _he_ do imply sex specifically (and not some other thing, like being named Oliver), even if flipping a coin (and drawing attention to having done so) reflects annoyance that English requires a choice.
In the Facebook comments, Yudkowsky continues:
But if that's the play you want to make, you forfeit the right to _honestly_ claim that your stance is that "feelings don't get to control everybody's language protocol". If you piously proclaim that the "important thing" is trans people's feelings of "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket, as it would be assigned by their birth certificate", that would seem, pretty straightforwardly, to be participating in an attempt to let someone's feelings control everybody's language protocol! Again, I'm really not sure how else I'm supposed to interpret those words!
-There's nothing _inconsistent_ about believing that trans people's feelings matter, and that the feelings of people who resent the Stroop-like effect of having to speak in a way that contradicts their own sex-category perceptions, don't matter. (Or don't matter _as much_, quantitatively, under the utilitarian calculus.) But if that were your position, the intellectually honest thing to do would be to tell people like Barra Kerr, "Sorry, I'm participating in a political coalition that believes that trans people's feelings are more important than yours with respect to this policy question; sucks to be you" rather than haughtily implying that people like Kerr are making an elementary philosophy mistake that they are _clearly not making_ if you _actually read what they write_.
+There's nothing _inconsistent_ about believing that trans people's feelings matter, and that the feelings of people who resent the Stroop-like effect of having to speak in a way that contradicts their own sex-category perceptions, don't matter. (Or don't matter _as much_, quantitatively, under the utilitarian calculus.) But if that were your position, the intellectually honest thing to tell people like Barra Kerr is, "Sorry, I'm participating in a political coalition that believes that trans people's feelings are more important than yours with respect to this policy question; sucks to be you", rather than haughtily implying that people like Kerr are making an elementary philosophy mistake that they are _clearly not making_ if you _actually read what they write_.
(In general, an honest "sucks to be you" from someone whose political incentives lead them to oppose your goals, is _much_ less cruel than the opponent distorting your position to make you look bad to their followers.)
As it happens, I think this _is_ an important consideration in favor of self-identity pronouns! [When different parties disagree about what category something should belong to, but want to coordinate to use the _same_ category, they tend to find some mutually-salient Schelling point to settle the matter.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) In the case of disagreements about a person's social sex category ("gender"), in the absence of a trusted central authority to break the symmetry among third parties' judgements (like a priest or rabbi in a tight-knit religious community, or a medical bureaucracy with the social power to diagnose who is "legitimately" transsexual), the most obvious Schelling point is to defer to the person themselves. I wrote about this argument in a previous post, ["Self-Identity Is a Schelling Point"](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/).
-But crucially, the fact that the self-identity convention is a Schelling point, _doesn't_ mean we have a one-sided policy debate where it's in everyone's interests to support this "simplest and best protocol", with no downsides or trade-offs for anyone. The thing where _she_ and _he_ (which we don't know how to coordinate a jump away from) imply sex category inferences to English-speaking brains is still true! The Schelling point argument just means that the setup of the social-choice problem that we face happens to grant a structural advantage to those who favor the self-identity convention.
+But crucially, the fact that the self-identity convention is a Schelling point, _doesn't_ mean we have a one-sided policy debate where it's in everyone's interests to support this "simplest and best protocol", with no downsides or trade-offs for anyone. The thing where _she_ and _he_ (which we don't know how to coordinate a jump away from) imply sex category inferences to actually-existing English speakers is still true! The Schelling point argument just means that the setup of the social-choice problem that we face happens to grant a structural advantage to those who favor the self-identity convention.
Although they're not the only ones with an structural advantage: a social order whose gender convention was "Biological sex only; transsexualism isn't a thing; sucks to be you if you want people to believe that you're the sex that you aren't" would _also_ be a Schelling point. (Trans people's [developmental sex](http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/) is not really in dispute.) It's the _moderates_ who want to be nice to trans people _without_ destroying the public concept of sex who are in trouble!
Sure. Yes. And indeed, I don't misgender people! (In public. Only rarely in private.) I'm not arguing that Yudkowsky should misgender people! The purpose of this post is not to argue with Yudkowsky's pronoun usage, but rather to argue with the offered usage _rationale_ that "the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he", with a default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size' and to say that this just _is_ the normative definition."
-As I have explained at length, this _rationale_ doesn't work and isn't true (even if better rationales, like the Schelling point argument, can end up recommending the same behavior). _No one_ actually believes that _she_ and _he_ aren't attached to gender in people's heads, and playing dumb about this to try to make it look like you're being apolitical is just disgraceful. How dumb do you think we are?!
+As I have explained at length, this _rationale_ doesn't work and isn't true (even if better rationales, like the Schelling point argument, can end up recommending the same behavior). _No one_ actually believes (as contrasted to [believing that they believe](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-belief)) that _she_ and _he_ aren't attached to gender in people's heads, despite Yudkowsky's sneering claim in the comments that he ["would not know how to write a different viewpoint as a sympathetic character."](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421986539228&reply_comment_id=10159423713134228)
+
+Again, without attributing to Yudkowsky any _conscious, deliberative_ intent to deceive (because of the human tendency to unconsciously introduce distortions in the heat of a rapid argument), the _pants-on-fire audacity_ of this _ludicrous_ claim to ignorance still beggars belief. As the author of [one of the world's most popular _Harry Potter_ fanfictions](http://www.hpmor.com/), Yudkowsky clearly knows something about about how to simulate alternative perspectives (includes ones he disagrees with) and portray them sympathetically. And he claims to be _unable_ to do this for ... the idea that pronouns imply sex, and that using the pronouns that imply someone is the sex that they are not feels analogous to lying? Really?!
+
+Well, I'm not a world-acclaimed fiction author with thousands of fans, but if Yudkowsky claims not to be up to this writing challenge, I'm happy to give him a hand and show him how it might be done—
+
+> A cis woman is testifying in court about a brutal rape that horrifically traumatized her. The rapist has since transitioned.
+>
+> "And then—" says the victim, reliving those awful moments, "and then, he took his erect penis—"
+>
+> "Objection!" says the defense lawyer. "The witness misgendering my client is prejudicial."
+>
+> "Sustained," says the judge. Then, to the victim: "_Her_ erect penis."
+>
+> "Wh—what?" says the victim.
+>
+> "You will refer to the defendant with the correct pronoun, or I'll hold you in contempt of court."
+>
+> "Oh. O–okay. And then she took her—" The victim breaks down crying. "I'm sorry, Your Honor; I can't do it. I'm under oath; I have to tell the story the way it happened to me. In my memories, the person who did those things to me was a man. A—"
+>
+> She hesistates, sobs a few more times. In this moment, almost more painful than the memories of the assault, she is very conscious of having never been to college. The judge and the defense lawyer are smarter and more educated than her, and they believe her rapist is now a woman. It had never made any sense to her—but how could she explain to an authority who she had no hope of out-arguing?
+>
+> "And by 'man', I mean—a male. The way I was raised, men—males—get called _he_ and _him_. If I say _she_, it doesn't feel true to the memory in my head. It feels like lying, Your Honor."
+>
+> The judge scoffs. "You are _ontologically_ confused," he sneers. "At age 13 I was programming on LambdaMOO where people had their choice of exotic pronouns and nobody thought anything of it," says the judge. "Denied."
+>
+> "O-okay," says the victim. She doesn't know what _ontologically_ means, or what a LambdaMOO is. "So then—then sh-she took her erect penis and she—" The witness breaks down crying again. "Your Honor, I can't! I can't do it! It's not true! It's not—" She senses that the judge will imply she's stupid for saying it's not true. She gropes for some way of explaining. "I mean—the Court allows people to testify in Spanish or Chinese with the help of a translator, right? Can't you treat my testimony like that? Let me say what happened to me in the words that seems true to me, even if the court does its business using words in a different way?"
+>
+> "You're in contempt," says the judge. "Baliff! Take her away!"
+
+Not a sympathetic character? Not even a little bit?
+
+I suspect some readers will have an intuition that my choice of scenario is loaded, unfair or unrealistic.
+
+But what, specifically, is unrealistic about it?
+
+Is it the idea that a trans woman could have raped someone before transitioning? [TODO: /o/ThisNeverHappens]
+
------
-[TODO: not the woke position—it's an incoherent position]
------
-[TODO: "Can't imagine a sympathetic protagonist"—lies, imagine a rape victim]
-----
-[TODO: people have an incentive to fight over pronouns insofar as it's a "wedge" for more substantive issues]
+
+[TODO: quote Yudkowsky: not the woke position]
+
+Right. It's an _incoherent_ position that's optimized to concede to the woke the policy that they want for a _different stated reason_ in order to make the concession appear politically neutral. But in order to _actually_ be politically neutral, you need to _acknowledge_ the costs and benefits of a policy to different parties, even if all policies impose costs on _someone_ and there's no solution that everyone is happy with.
+
+Policy debates should not appear one-sided. Exerting social pressure on a native-English-speaking rape victim to refer to her male rapist with _she_/_her_ pronouns is a _cost_ to her. And, simultaneously, _not_ exerting that pressure is a _cost_ to many trans people, by making recognition of their social gender _conditional_ on some standard of good behavior, rather than an unconditional social fact.
+
+You might think the cost of making the victim say _she_ is worth it, because you want to make it easy for gender-dysphoric people to socially transition, and because you think it's dumb that pronouns imply sex in the actually-existing English language and you see the self-identity convention as a step towards degendering the language.
+
+Fine. That's a perfectly coherent position. But if that's your position and you care about being intellectually honest, you need to _acknowledge_ that your position exerts costs on some actually-existing English speakers who have a use-case for using pronouns to imply sex. You need to be able to look that rape victim in the eye and say, "Sorry, I'm participating in a political coalition that believes that trans people's feelings are more important than yours with respect to this policy question; sucks to be you."
+
+And of course—it _should_ be needless to say—this applies symmetrically. If you think speakers _should_ be able to misgender according to their judgement and you care about being intellectually honest, you need to be able to look a trans person in the eye and say, "Sorry, I'm participating in a political coalition that believes the freedom of speech of speakers is more important than your gender being recognized; sucks to be you."
+
+Or if you have more important things to worry about and don't want to take a position on controversial social issues, fine: use whatever pronoun convention happens to be dominant in your local social environment, and, if questioned, say, "I'm using the pronoun convention that happens to be dominant in my local social environment." You don't have to invent _absurd lies_ to make it look like the convention that happens to be dominant in your local social environment has no costs.
+
+Really, "I do not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than 'doesn't look like an Oliver'"? Any seven-year-old in 2016 could tell you that that's just _factually not true_; if you grew up speaking English, you _goddamned well do_ know what it feels like. Did the elephant in Yudkowsky's brain really expect to get away with that? How dumb does he think we are?!
----
I guess for me, the issue is that this is a question where _I need the correct answer in order to decide whether or not to cut my dick off_. Let me explain.
+As a good cis ally, you're told that trans people know who they are and you need to respect that [on pain of being responsible for someone's suicide](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/). The question of _how_ trans people know who they are is usually left unspecified.
+
+
+
+
+
+
-----
Fit in somewhere—
- * work in the LambdaMOO anecdote where appropriate
* singular they for named individuals undermined indefinite singular 'they'
-
+ * parenthetical about where "Oliver" came from
* some people have complained that my writing is too long, but when your interlocutors will go to the absurd length of _denying that the association of "she" with females_
+ * people have an incentive to fight over pronouns insofar as it's a "wedge" for more substantive issues
+ * 4 levels of intellectual conversation
-4 levels of intellectual conversation
+-----
appeal to inner privacy conversation-halter https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff