(Although—one might speculate that "more classes to reduce collisions" could _be_ part of the historical explanation for grammatical gender, in conjunction with the fact that sex is binary and easy to observe. None of the other most salient features of a human can quite accomplish the same job: age is continuous rather than categorical; race is also largely continuous [(clinal)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cline_(biology)) and historically didn't typically vary within a tribal/community context.)
-If you grew up speaking English, gendered pronouns feel "normal" while gendered [noun classes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class) in many other languages (where, _e.g._, in French, a dog, _le chien_, is "masculine", but potatoes, _la pommes de terre_, are "feminine") seem strange and unnecessary, but someone who grew up with neither would probably regard both as strange. If you spoke a language that didn't _already_ have gendered pronouns, you wouldn't be spontaneously eager to add them.
+If you grew up speaking English, gendered pronouns feel "normal" while gendered [noun classes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class) in many other languages (where, _e.g._, in French, a dog, _le chien_, is "masculine", but potatoes, _la pommes de terre_, are "feminine") seem strange and unnecessary, but someone who grew up with neither would regard both as strange. If you spoke a language that didn't _already_ have gendered pronouns, you probably wouldn't be spontaneously eager to add them.
-All this seems fine and correct as a critique of the existing English pronoun system! However, I argue that Yudkowsky's prescriptions for English speakers going forward goes badly wrong. First, Yudkowsky argues that it's bad for stances on complicated empirical issues to be baked into the language grammar itself: since people might disagree on who fits into the [empirical clusters](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace) of "female" and "male", you don't want people to be forced to make a call on that just in order to be able to use a pronoun.
+All this seems fine as a critique of the existing English pronoun system! However, I argue that Yudkowsky's prescriptions for English speakers going forward goes badly wrong. First, Yudkowsky argues that it's bad for stances on complicated empirical issues to be baked into the language grammar itself: since people might disagree on who fits into the [empirical clusters](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace) of "female" and "male", you don't want people to be forced to make a call on that just in order to be able to use a pronoun.
Fair enough. Sounds like an argument for universal singular _they_ (and eating the cost of increased collisions where it's ambiguous which subject an instance of _they_ would refer to): if you don't think pronouns should convey sex-category information, then don't use pronouns that convey sex-category information! But then, in an unexplained leap, Yudkowsky proclaims:
One could argue that the _tú_/_usted_ distinction is bad language design for the same reason Yudkowsky opposes the _she_/_he_ distinction: you shouldn't be forced to make a call on how familiar your relationship with someone is just in order to be able to use a pronoun for them. The modern English way is more flexible: you _can_ indicate formality if you want to by saying additional words, but it's not baked into the grammar itself.
-However, if you were going to reform Spanish (or some other language with the second person formality distinction), you would probably abolish the distinction altogether, and just settle on one second-person singular pronoun. (Indeed, that's what happened in English historically—the formal _you_ took over as the universal second-person pronoun, and the informal singular _thou_/_thee_/_thine_ has vanished from common usage.) You wouldn't keep both forms, but circularly redefine them as referring only to the referent's preferred choice of address. People who want to be called _usted_ (or _tú_), do so _because_ of the difference in meaning and implied familiarity/respect, in the _existing_ (pre-reform) language. Where else could such a preference possibly come from?
+However, if you were going to reform Spanish (or some other language with the second person formality distinction), you would probably abolish the distinction altogether, and just settle on one second-person singular pronoun. (Indeed, that's what happened in English historically—the formal _you_ took over as the universal second-person pronoun, and the informal singular _thou_/_thee_/_thine_ has vanished from common usage.) You wouldn't keep both forms, but circularly redefine them as referring only to the referent's preferred choice of address (?!).
+
+The circular definition shouldn't satisfy _anyone_: people who want someone to call them _usted_ (or _tú_), do so _because_ of the difference in meaning and implied familiarity/respect, in the _existing_ (pre-reform) language. (Where else could such a preference possibly come from?) People who want the ability to dictate whether people address them with familiarity or respect might _think_ the circular definition is what they want, because it implies the behavior they want (other people using the preferred pronoun), but—whether or not the proponent of the changes consciously _notices_ the problem—the redefinition is functionally "hypocritical": it's only desireable insofar as people aren't _actually_ using it internally.
This is a pretty basic point, and yet Yudkowsky steadfastly ignores the role of existing meanings in this debate, bizarrely writing as if we were defining a conlang from scratch:
There are a couple of problems with this. First of all, the "that you insist everybody use" part is a bit of a [DARVO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO) in the current political environment around Yudkowsky's social sphere. A lot of the opposition to self-chosen pronouns is about opposition to _compelled speech_: people who don't think some trans person's transition should "count", don't want to be coerced into legitimizing it with the pronoun choices in their _own_ speech. That's different from insisting that _others_ use sex-based non-subject-preferred pronouns, which is not something I see much of outside of gender-critical ("TERF") forums. Characterizing the issue as being about "freedom of pronouns", [as Yudkowsky does in the comment section](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228), elides the fact that freedom to specify how other people talk about you is in _direct conflict_ with the freedom of speech of speakers. No matter which side of the conflict one chooses, it seems wrong to characterize the self-ID pronoun side as being "pro-freedom", as if there wasn't any "freedom" concerns on the other side. [(Policy debates should not appear one-sided!)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided)
-More importantly, however, in dicussing how to reform English, we're not actually in the position of defining a language from scratch. Even if you think the cultural evolution of English involved Shenanigans, it's not fair to attribute the Shenanigans to native speakers accurately describing their native language. Certainly, language can evolve; words can change meaning over time; if you can get the people in some community to start using language differently, then you have _ipso facto_ changed their language. But when we consider language as an information-processing system that we can reason about using our standard tools of probability and game theory, we see that in order to change the meaning associated with a word, you actually _do_ have to somehow get people to change their usage. You can _advocate_ for your new meaning and use it in your own speech, but you can't just _declare_ your preferred new meaning and claim that it applies to the language as actually spoken.
+More importantly, however, in dicussing how to reform English, we're not actually in the position of defining a language from scratch. Even if you think the cultural evolution of English involved Shenanigans, it's not fair to attribute the Shenanigans to native speakers accurately describing their native language. Certainly, language can evolve; words can change meaning over time; if you can get the people in some community to start using language differently, then you have _ipso facto_ changed their language. But when we consider language as an information-processing system that we can reason about using our standard tools of probability and game theory, we see that in order to change the meaning associated with a word, you actually _do_ have to somehow get people to change their usage. You can _advocate_ for your new meaning and use it in your own speech, but you can't just _declare_ your preferred new meaning and claim that it applies to the language as actually spoken. As a result, Yudkowsky's proposal "to say that this just _is_ the normative definition" doesn't work.
+
+To be clear, when I say that the proposal doesn't work, I'm not even saying I disagree with it. I mean that it literally, _factually_ doesn't work! Let me explain.
-As a result, Yudkowsky's proposal "to say that this just _is_ the normative definition" doesn't work. To be clear, I'm not saying I disagree with it. I mean that it literally, _factually_ doesn't work! Let me explain.
+Think of language as being like software that's been deployed to some network of computers that send messages to each other. The "meaning" of the messages isn't some [epiphenominal](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fdEWWr8St59bXLbQr/zombies-zombies) extraphysical fact; it depends on the machines' behavior surrounding the sending and receiving of messages.
-Think of language as being like software that's been deployed to some network of computers that send messages to each other. The "meaning" of the messages isn't some [epiphenominal](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fdEWWr8St59bXLbQr/zombies-zombies) extraphysical fact; it depends on the machines' behavior surrounding the sending and receiving of messages. If a computer broadcasts a `{"object_type": "BLEGG"}` JSON message when it detects a [blue egg-shaped object](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4FcxgdvdQP45D6Skg/disguised-queries) in front of its webcam, then we can say that the `{"object_type": "BLEGG"}` message _means_ that a blue egg-shaped object was seen; the meaning "lives" in the systematic correspondence between the broadcasted message and the camera observations.
+If the software is written so that each computer broadcasts a `{"object_type": "BLEGG"}` JSON message when it detects a [blue egg-shaped object](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4FcxgdvdQP45D6Skg/disguised-queries) in front of its webcam, then we can can say that the `{"object_type": "BLEGG"}` message "means" that a blue egg-shaped object was seen; [the meaning "lives" in the systematic correspondence between the broadcasted message and the camera observations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4hLcbXaqudM9wSeor/philosophy-in-the-darkest-timeline-basics-of-the-evolution).
+Maybe this was a design mistake!
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228
+
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception
* he can only speak in terms of abstractions that are very obviously not what's happening—it's true that bathroom usage is not an ontological fact, but the function of bathrooms is _to protect females from males_. If you can't talk about that core issue—the thing that people actually care about—then the smugness is actively derailing the discussion, even if you didn't say anything false
* And doesn't EY have this whole thing about how you can't just wish away coordination problems?! (Although, this also makes it harder to escape the self-ID Schelling point)
* Schild's ladder
+* TODO: buff my "circular definition satisfies no one" argument to not be vulnerable to the anti-Liskov-substitution property of natural language definitions
* singular
And if different people's interests come into conflict, such that there _is no_ collective decision that everyone is happy with, I can still hope to objectively catalogue the possible outcomes of the conflict—what happens if who wins, and what the space of available armistice agreements looks like.
-I'm a person, and this is a (deeply) personal blog. I have my own preferences and my own æsthetics, and no doubt that's going to sometimes bleed in to my attempts to get the theory right. (I wish I could claim otherwise—but that wouldn't be _true_.) But I can at least make an effort to _minimize_ the extent to which that happens—and to _make it clear_ which paragraphs and posts I write are advocating for my preferences (which are likely to not be shared by others) and which are trying to perform an objective analysis (which is information anyone can benefit from). But _for the most part_, I don't do policy. The victory condition of my political campaign is not defined in terms of how many people end up transitioning, but _just_ getting the two-type taxonomy (or whatever more precise alternative succeeds it) into the _standard_ sex-ed textbooks—because I think the taxonomy is _actually true_, and not a lie or even a self-fulfilling prophecy. The further question as to whether autogynephilia should be regarded as recommending transition or not is a policy question and explicitly out-of-scope.
+I'm a person, and this is a (deeply) personal blog. I have my own preferences and my own æsthetics, and no doubt that's going to sometimes bleed in to my attempts to get the theory right. (I wish I could claim otherwise—but that wouldn't be _true_.) But I can at least make an effort to _minimize_ the extent to which that happens—and to _make it clear_ which paragraphs and posts I write are advocating for my preferences (which are likely to not be shared by others) and which are trying to perform an objective analysis (which is information anyone can benefit from). But _for the most part_, I don't do policy. The victory condition of my political campaign is not defined in terms of how many people end up transitioning, but _just_ getting the two-type taxonomy (or whatever more precise alternative succeeds it) into the _standard_ sex-ed textbooks—because I think the taxonomy is, to a first approximation, _actually true_, and not a lie or even a self-fulfilling prophecy. The further question as to whether autogynephilia should be regarded as recommending transition or not is a policy question and explicitly out-of-scope.
I've gotten praise from trans-activist types (_e.g._, for ["Lesser-Known Demand Curves"](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/)), and from gender-critical feminists (_e.g._, for ["Don't Negotiate With Terrorist Memeplexes"](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/)). If I could just get them to praise the _same post_, then I will have succeeded as a writer.
_ There Should Be a Closetspace/Lease Bound Crossover Fic
✓ I Don't Do Policy
_ Student Dysphoria, and a Previous Life's War
+_ Link: "Blood Is Thicker Than Water"
2021 significant posts—
_ Trans Kids on the Margin, and Harms From Misleading Training Data
_ Link: Babylon Bee "It's a Good Life" parody https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20ALZgd6_Ek
LW—
-_ Blood Is Thicker Than Water
+✓ Blood Is Thicker Than Water
_ Generic Consequentialists Are Liars
_ Comment on "The Logic of Indirect Speech" (multi-receivers vs. uncertainty about a single recieiver)
_ Feature Selection
_ agents with different learning algorithms would find it hard to agree on words?
+* Objection: but then shouldn't we pick different words for the convergent and phylo clusters? Uncomfortable with wavering lines around "berry"
+* Reply: story for how we end up with multiple senses attached to the same word
+https://jsmp.dk/posts/2021-01-24-fruits/
+
Trading Political Favors Doesn't Build True Maps, But Correcting Errors Your Yourself Made, Does
(Rationalists don't exist)
_ A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning / Casuistry Is Unbecoming: Replies to Eliezer Yudkowsky (I don't know how to do this)
-_ E.Y. as case study on unconscious-lying and self-report ("their verbal theories contradict their own datapoints" https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159408250519228?comment_id=10159411435619228&reply_comment_id=10159411567794228)
+_ E.Y. as case study on unconscious-lying and self-report ("their verbal theories contradict their own datapoints" https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159408250519228?comment_id=10159411435619228&reply_comment_id=10159411567794228 )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung and the GPT-3 neuron about Trump: imagine a short story, where you suddenly become more villainous in the eyes of the narrative, and it's because a greater fraction of your measure is in simulations written based on an unfavorable view of your legacy (you're only aware of this because the GPT-descendant is smart enough to try to correct for it)
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff