"twelve short stories about language" ancillary page

Yoav Ravid asked for this in the comments
(https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/ZjXtjRQaD2b4PAser/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/comment/BGznhMoiCafsWzecy);
it's not worth a separate blog post, but I can put it up as ancillary
page.

diff --git a/content/2023/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md b/content/2023/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
index 4fb7a26..ceb925a 100644 (file)
--- a/content/2023/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
+++ b/content/2023/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
@@ -410,7 +410,7 @@ One of Alexander's [most popular _Less Wrong_ posts ever had been about the nonc
 
 Even if you're opposed to abortion, or have negative views about the historical legacy of Dr. King, this isn't the right way to argue. If you call Fiona a _murderer_, that causes me to form a whole bunch of implicit probabilistic expectations on the basis of what the typical "murder" is like—expectations about Fiona's moral character, about the suffering of a victim whose hopes and dreams were cut short, about Fiona's relationship with the law, _&c._—most of which get violated when you reveal that the murder victim was an embryo.
 
-In the form of a series of short parables, I tried to point out that Alexander's own "The Worst Argument in the World" is complaining about the _same_ category-gerrymandering move that his "... Not Man for the Categories" comes out in favor of. We would not let someone get away with declaring, "I ought to accept an unexpected abortion or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally not be considered murder if it'll save someone's life." Maybe abortion _is_ wrong and relevantly similar to the central sense of "murder", but you need to make that case _on the empirical merits_, not by linguistic fiat (Subject: "twelve short stories about language").
+[In the form of a series of short parables](/ancillary/twelve-short-stories-about-language/), I tried to point out that Alexander's own "The Worst Argument in the World" is complaining about the _same_ category-gerrymandering move that his "... Not Man for the Categories" comes out in favor of. We would not let someone get away with declaring, "I ought to accept an unexpected abortion or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally not be considered murder if it'll save someone's life." Maybe abortion _is_ wrong and relevantly similar to the central sense of "murder", but you need to make that case _on the empirical merits_, not by linguistic fiat (Subject: "twelve short stories about language").
 
 Scott still didn't get it. He didn't see why he shouldn't accept one unit of categorizational awkwardness in exchange for sufficiently large utilitarian benefits. He made an analogy to some lore from the [Glowfic](https://www.glowfic.com/) collaborative fiction writing community, a story about orcs who had unwisely sworn a oath to serve the evil god Melkor. Though the orcs intend no harm of their own will, they're magically bound to obey Melkor's commands and serve as his terrible army or else suffer unbearable pain. Our heroine comes up with a solution: she founds a new religion featuring a deist God who also happens to be named "Melkor". She convinces the orcs that since the oath didn't specify _which_ Melkor, they're free to follow her new God instead of evil Melkor, and the magic binding the oath apparently accepts this casuistry if the orcs themselves do.
 

diff --git a/content/pages/ancillary/twelve-short-stories-about-language.md b/content/pages/ancillary/twelve-short-stories-about-language.md
new file mode 100644 (file)
index 0000000..29fcc1f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/content/pages/ancillary/twelve-short-stories-about-language.md
@@ -0,0 +1,93 @@
+Title: Twelve Short Stories About Language
+Status: Hidden
+
+**From:** Zack M. Davis <[redacted]>  
+**To:** Scott [redacted] <[redacted]>  
+**Date:** 5 March 2019, 11:24 PM  
+**Subject:** twelve short stories about language  
+
+> I think hearing what other things are the same reasoning pattern might be a good way to break the deadlock which I am otherwise very pessimistic about breaking.
+
+What deadlock? My dear sir, if we were ever deadlocked on some sort of hot-button Culture War issue—well, I couldn't possibly recall; and in any case, it would be water under the bridge; I heard you were more into things like AI, effective charity, and meta-science these days.
+
+But since you were so kind to email me anyway, I _did_ have some parables illustrating some aspects of the hidden Bayesian structure of language and cognition that I thought of sharing with you! I'm afraid they're a bit elementary, though—mostly of pedagogical value for newbies. If everyone of note were to loudly, publicly, piously get this kind of thing wrong—well, _then_ there would hardly be any point in pretending to have a rationalist community.
+
+Also, it occurred to me that it's kind of sad that all the times I've emailed you over the past couple years, it's been specifically when I've been upset about something (like psych hospitals, or—uh, I think there was another example or two that I can't remember) and wanted something from you. That's _bad_ because it was treating you as a means rather than as an end. If you ever want a favor from _me_, or just want to hang out sometime as friends, let me know!
+
+**I.**
+
+The one comes to you and says, "Did you know Janie is a _murderer_?"
+
+You say, "What?! I know Janie, and she would never murder anyone!"
+
+"But it's true!" says the one. "She murdered her unborn baby last year!"
+
+"... she had an abortion."
+
+"Yes. Which is the killing of a human being, _i.e._, murder!"
+
+"Okay, but when you first used the word 'murderer', you caused me to form a whole bunch of implicit probabilistic expectations—about Janie's moral character, about the existence of a victim who probably suffered and whose hopes and dreams were cut short, about Janie's relationship with the law, _&c._—most of which got violated when you revealed that the 'murder victim' was a fetus. I understand that one possible definition of the word 'murder' is 'the killing of a human being' and that abortion is murder _with respect to_ that definition. But it's a very _noncentral_ example of the class of things for which people use the word 'murder' to refer to, and most of the time people are going to want to use the word 'murder' in a sense that excludes abortions, and if you try to insist that they include the murder of unborn babies, then they have every right to reply, 'That's not what I meant by _murder_ in this context, _and you know it_.'"
+
+The one bats their eyelashes. "But I _don't_ know it. If you _mean_ the murder of the non-unborn, you should _say_ that."
+
+"Murder of the non-unborn," you repeat, deadpan. "Seriously?"
+
+"Or m.o.n.u., for short."
+
+**II.–VII.**
+
+_(repeat for the other examples from ["The noncentral fallacy—the worst argument in the world?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world))_
+
+**VIII.**
+
+I visited a hypothetical friend's house the other day, to admire her new front porch. Examining it, I noticed the boards were a bit shinier and smoother than I would have expected.
+
+I said, "Say, is this real wood, or one of those [synthetic composite materials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood-plastic_composite)?"
+
+My friend said, "It is a composite, thanks for noticing!"
+
+Then my friend's idiot brother burst out of the front door. "How _dare_ you!" he shouts. "How _dare_ you insinuate that composite wood isn't real wood?"
+
+"Uh," you say. "Look, I'm not saying the composite material is _bad_—I was just using the adjective 'real' to distinguish the original thing that already existed, from the synthetic thing that's trying to imitate the original thing to the limits of existing technology. Maybe in some future world of arbitrarily advanced molecular nanotechnology where we could just put the atoms where we want, there would be no point in distinguishing. But in today's world, I sometimes care about distinguishing the real thing from the imitation thing—and 'real' vs. 'imitation' seems like a pretty natural choice of words with which to do so? Like, I _guess_ you could invent neologisms to express the same distinction if someone got really upset whenever you used words like 'real' or 'imitation', but what would be the point? I'd still _mean_ the same probabilistic expectations with the new words, and the person who was offended by the word 'real' would figure it out soon enough."
+
+**IX.**
+
+You rush into the monthly meeting of the entomology club at the REACH. "Hey everyone!" you shout. "I've just discovered something! Remember that species of butterfly we were studying the other month, but some of the butterflies looked kind of 'off' in some way that was hard to articulate? It turns out that they're actually two _different_ species of butterlies, where one has [evolved to _look_ like the other in order to confuse predators](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batesian_mimicry)!"
+
+"We don't care about that distinction," everyone says in unison.
+
+"Uh ... what? But, but, in order to make sense of the world, I need to model them as two different species in the _asymmetric_ relationship where one is mimicking the other. This makes predictions: if the model species's phenotype were to evolve, then the mimic species would evolve with it, but not the other way around. And, and, I've discovered so many _systematic_ differences between the model species and the mimic species—they may _look_ very similar, but in behavior, internal anatomy, lifecycle—they're very different!"
+
+"We don't care about those predictions," everyone says in unison. "We don't care about those observations."
+
+You gape in horror. What the fuck happened to your entomology club? What the fuck happened to your rationalist community?
+
+**X.**
+
+Suppose you have some entities in a high dimensional vector space: for concreteness, pretend it's ℝ⁵⁰. The entitties are situated in the space such that they form a normal distribution along most dimensions (say, x1–x35), but along other dimensions, it's actually better modeled as two different-but-overlapping normal distributions (say for x36–x45), and some variables (say x46–x50) are completely dichotomous—such that when you look at the fifteen-dimensional subspace of variables x36 through x50, you see two completely distinct clusters (call them "A" and "B") that basically don't overlap except for maybe a few very rare exceptions that you read about far more often than you actually encounter, like lottery jackpot winners.
+
+Now suppose that people want to move some of the entities from one cluster to the other. That's great! But unfortunately, people don't have the advanced technology needed to change all of the variables; they can only change some of them. That makes people sad, so they _edit the definition of the "B" region_ when encoding their reports.
+
+Then someone says, "Hey! We didn't completely succeed in moving these entities from the A cluster to the B cluster! Maybe this has some decision-relevant implications even though I'm not smart enough to say in advance what those implications are!"
+
+Then everyone says, "I don't know what you're talking about! Some close-to-central members of the 'B' cluster have the same value in the x36 dimension as members of the 'A' cluster! Also, we moved some members of the 'B' cluster to be even further in the 'B'-direction along the axis drawn between the center of the 'A' cluster and the 'B' cluster, and that's basically the same thing as the thing we did to the points which were originally assigned to 'A' cluster which we moved. Why are you being such an asshole about this?!"
+
+And then the first person says, "I agree with both of the observations you just mentioned, about overlap in the x36 dimension and moving entities that were already in the 'B' cluster to be even further in that direction, but those are _non sequiturs_ that have nothing to do with what I'm trying to talk about and _you obviously know this_."
+
+Everyone pretends not to know this. The first person cries.
+
+**XI.**
+
+published elsewhere: ["Blegg Mode"](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/blegg-mode/)
+
+**XII.**
+
+Thamiel comes to you in form of Amanda Marcotte and says, "Scott Alexander is a racist, right-wing bigot!"
+
+You say, "That's not true! Scott Alexander is a pro-gay Jew who has dated trans people and votes pretty much straight Democrat!"
+
+Marcotte says, "[The categories were](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) made for man, not man for the categories. An alternative categorization system is not an error, and borders are not objectively true or false. [Using language in a way _you_ dislike](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067291243728650243), openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying. The proposition you claim false is not what the speech is meant to convey—and this is known to everyone involved, it is not a secret. Sneer Club isn't _saying_ that Scott votes Republican or explicitly advocates for a white ethnostate, any more than anyone is saying trans women have two X chromosomes. They're saying that the Culture War thread harbors racists and that Scott himself is a racist _with respect to_ a definition of racism that includes the belief that there [might be genetically-mediated population differences in socially-relevant traits](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/). And so on for [right-wing](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/), &c. Scott Alexander _is_ a racist, right-wing bigot—with respect to the category boundaries Sneer Club has drawn. And category boundaries _can't be wrong_!"
+
+You clench your fists in anger. You're not about to let this demon ruin your friend Scott's reputation! Fueled by the passion of having [Something to Protect](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect), you wrack your brain searching for a counterargument—there has to be _some_ flaw in the demon's reasoning—
+
+But what????