Why not just say "cis" women? I do, often, depending on the audience and the context of what I'm trying to say. I can [code-switch](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/code-switching-i/); I can entertain multiple frames—different maps that reflect different aspects of the same territory. I can even be polite, when being polite is _cheap_. But it's important to at least _acknowledge_ that "cis" and "actual" do not _convey the same meaning_. (Sufficiently advanced neuroscience would be able to confirm this by examining patterns of brain activity on hearing each word.) The _fact_ that they don't convey the same meaning is _why_ the latter is offensive—the source of controversy isn't that people love words that start with _c_ and hate words that that start with a vowel sound. Not being allowed to use the word "actual" in this context makes it harder to encode the _empirical hypothesis_ I'm trying to communicate, that "trans" isn't just pointing to a subcluster within the "woman" cluster (like "young woman" or "Japanese woman"), it's actually denoting a subcluster within the _male_ cluster in the subspace of dimensions corresponding to [developmental sex](http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/)-related traits that—unfortunately, heartbreakingly—we don't know how to change with current technology.
-The fact that I can't _talk about the world I see_ in the simple language that comes naturally to me without it inevitably being construed as a reactionary political statement is a _problem_. And it's a _rationality_ problem.
+The fact that I can't _talk about the world I see_ in the simple language that comes naturally to me without it inevitably being construed as a reactionary political statement is a _problem_. And it's a _rationality_ problem insofar as the world I see is potentially a more accurate model of the real world, than the world I'm allowed to talk about.
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https://medium.com/@barrakerr/pronouns-are-rohypnol-dbcd1cb9c2d9
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+
The Popular Author once wrote about how [motivated selective attention paid to weak arguments "are meant to re-center a category"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/):
> The guy whose central examples of religion are Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama is probably going to have a different perception of religion than the guy whose central examples are Torquemada and Fred Phelps. If you convert someone from the first kind of person to the second kind of person, you've gone most of the way to making them an atheist.
But the _reason_ it seemed _at all_ remotely plausible that our little robot cult could be pivotal in creating Utopia forever was _not_ "[Because we're us](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-recommending/), the world-saving good guys", but rather _because_ we were going to discover and refine the methods of _systematically correct reasoning_.
-If the people _marketing themselves_ as the good guys who are going to save the world using systematically-correct-reasoning are _not actually interested in doing systematically correct reasoning_ (because systematically correct reasoning leads to conclusions that are politically "impossible" to state clearly in public, and no one has the guts to [shut up and do the politically impossible](TODO: linky))
+If the people _marketing themselves_ as the good guys who are going to save the world using systematically-correct-reasoning are _not actually interested in doing systematically correct reasoning_ (because systematically correct reasoning leads to conclusions that are politically "impossible" to state clearly in public, and no one has the guts to [_not_ shut up and do the politically impossible](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nCvvhFBaayaXyuBiD/shut-up-and-do-the-impossible))
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-_Literally_ all I'm asking for is for the systematically-correct-reasoning community to perform _modus ponens_.
+_Literally_ all I'm asking for is for the branded systematically-correct-reasoning community to be able to perform _modus ponens_—
- (1) For all nouns _N_, you can't define _N_ any way you want without cognitive consequences [(for many reasons)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong).
+ (1) For all nouns _N_, you can't define _N_ any way you want without cognitive consequences [(for at least 37 reasons)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong).
(2) "Woman" is a noun.
(3) _Therefore_, you can't define "woman" any way you want without cognitive consequences.
-Note, **(3) is totally compatible with trans women being women**. (I normally eschew the use of boldface in prose, but I'll make this concession to people's inability to read a post of this length.) The point is that if you want to claim that trans women are women, you need some sort of _argument_ for why that categorization makes sense—why that map usefully reflects some relevant aspect of the territory.
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+Note, **(3) is _entirely compatible_ with trans women being women**. (I normally eschew the use of boldface in prose, but I'll make this concession to people's inability to read a post of this length.) The point is that if you want to claim that trans women are women, you need some sort of _argument_ for why that categorization makes sense in the context you want to use the word—why that map usefully reflects some relevant aspect of the territory. If you want to _argue_ that hormone replacement therapy constitutes an effective sex change, or that trans is a brain-intersex condition and the brain is the true referent of "gender", or that [coordination constraints on _shared_ categories](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) [support the self-identification criterion](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/), that's fine, because those are _arguments_ that someone who initially disagreed with your categorization could _engage with on the merits_. In contrast, "I can define a word any way I want" is a denial of the possibility of merits.
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This is sort of what I was trying to do when soliciting—begging for—engagement-or-endorsement of "Where to Draw the Boundaries?" I thought that it ought to be politically feasible to _just_ get public consensus from Very Important People on the _general_ philosophy-of-language issue, stripped of the politicized context that inspired it, and complete with math and examples about dolphins and job titles. That _should_ be completely safe. If some would-be troublemaker says, "Hey, doesn't this contradict what you said about trans people earlier?", stonewall them. Stonewall _them_, and not _me_. Thus, the public record about philosophy is corrected without the VIPs having to suffer a social-justice scandal. Everyone wins, right?
-... I guess that's not how politics works. Somehow, the mob-punishment mechanisms that aren't smart enough to understand the concept of "bad argument for a true conclusion", _are_ smart enough to connect the dots between my agenda and my abstract philosophy argument, such that VIPs don't think they can endorse my philosophy argument, without it being _construed as_ an endorsement of everything else I think, even though I _thought_ that explaining the abstract philosophy problem in the context of dolphins would provide enough plausible deniability.
+But I guess that's not how politics works. Somehow, the mob-punishment mechanisms that aren't smart enough to understand the concept of "bad argument for a true conclusion", _are_ smart enough to connect the dots between my agenda and the abstract philosophy argument, such that VIPs don't think they can endorse my _correct_ philosophy argument, without it being _construed as_ an endorsement of me and my detailed heresies, even though (a) that's _retarded_ (it's possible to agree with someone about a particular philosophy argument, while disagreeing with them about how the philosophy argument applies to a particular object-level case), and (b) I would have _hoped_ that explaining the abstract philosophy problem in the context of dolphins would provide enough plausible deniability to defend against _retarded people_ who want to make everything about politics.
-The situation I'm describing is already pretty fucked, but it would be just barely tolerable if the actually-smart people were good enough at coordinating to _privately_ settle philosophy arguments. If someone says to me, "You're right, but I can't admit this in public because it would be too politically-expensive for me."
+The situation I'm describing is already pretty fucked, but it would be just barely tolerable if the actually-smart people were good enough at coordinating to _privately_ settle philosophy arguments. If someone says to me, "You're right, but I can't admit this in public because it would be too politically-expensive for me," I can respect that.
[people can't trust me to stably keep secrets]
The Stupid Argument isn't just a philosophy mistake—it's a _socially load-bearing_ philosophy mistake.
-And _that_ is absolutely intolerable. But once you have a single socially load-bearing philosophy mistake, you don't have a systematically-correct-reasoning community anymore. What you have is a _cult_.
+And _that_ is intolerable. Once you have a single socially load-bearing philosophy mistake, you don't have a systematically-correct-reasoning community anymore. What you have is a _cult_. If you _notice_ that your alleged systematically-correct-reasoning community has a load-bearing philosophy mistake, and you _go on_ acting as if it were a systematically-correct-reasoning community, then you are committing _fraud_. (Morally speaking. I don't mean a sense of the word "fraud" that could be upheld in a court of law.)
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projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff