contiguous draft of "Point Man"

This one is kind of all over the place—I built up an involved thread
of language nerdery that I just drop on the floor after using it to
introduce my interlocutor's comment. I'm tempted to keep it like this,
but—I should probably cut the detailed pronoun discussion, huh? (It
could be deposited into a different post.)

diff --git a/content/drafts/point-man.md b/content/drafts/point-man.md
index d137cc3..1f887dd 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/point-man.md
+++ b/content/drafts/point-man.md
@@ -20,15 +20,15 @@ What was it like to be the _deer_? To be _used_ like that, as a prop in someone
 
 ----
 
-[It's been occasionally argued that](https://archive.is/ChqYX) there aren't legitimate grounds to object to using trans people's preferred pronouns, because pronouns aren't facts and don't have truth conditions. Note, this is substantially _stronger_ that the mere claim that you _should_ use preferred pronouns; the claim is that no linguistic expressive power is being sacrificed by doing so. (Whereas in contrast, one might accede to the requested usage out of some combination of politeness, social coercion, and apprehension of [the Schelling point argument](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/), while privately lamenting that it feels analogous to lying.)
+[It's been occasionally argued that](https://archive.is/ChqYX) there aren't legitimate grounds to object to using trans people's preferred pronouns, because pronouns aren't facts and don't have truth conditions. Note, this is substantially _stronger_ that the mere claim that you _should_ use preferred pronouns; the claim is that no linguistic expressive power is being sacrificed by doing so. (Whereas in contrast, one might accede to the requested usage out of some combination of politeness, social coercion, and apprehension of [the Schelling point of standard usage](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/), while privately lamenting that it feels analogous to lying.)
 
-I think the claim that pronouns don't have truth conditions is _false as a matter of cognitive science_. Humans are _pretty good_ at visually identifying the sex of other humans by integrating cues from various secondary sex characteristics—it's the kind of computer-vision capability that would have been useful in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness. If it _didn't_ work so reliably, we wouldn't have ended up with languages like English where identifying a person's sex is baked into the grammar. And _because_ we ended up with (many) languages that have it baked into the grammar, _departing_ from that conventional usage has cognitive consequences: if someone told you, "Come meet my friend at the mall; she's really cool and you'll like her" and then the friend turned out to be obviously male, you would be _surprised_. The fact that the "she ... her" language [constrained your anticipations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences) so much would seem to immediately falsify the "no truth conditions" claim as an empirical matter of psychology.
+I think the claim that pronouns don't have truth conditions is _false as a matter of cognitive science_. Humans are _pretty good_ at visually identifying the sex of other humans by integrating cues from various secondary sex characteristics—it's the kind of computer-vision capability that would have been useful in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness. If it _didn't_ work so reliably, we wouldn't have ended up with languages like English where identifying a person's sex is baked into the grammar. And _because_ we ended up with (many) languages that have it baked into the grammar, _departing_ from that conventional usage has cognitive consequences: if someone told you, "Come meet my friend at the mall; she's really cool and you'll like her" and then the friend turned out to be obviously male, you would be _surprised_. The fact that the "she ... her" language [constrained your anticipations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences) so much would seem to immediately falsify the "no truth conditions" claim.
 
 [From a certain first-principles perspective](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228), this is _terrible language design_. The grammatical function of pronouns is to have a brief way to refer back to entities already mentioned: it's more user-friendly to be able to say "Katherine put her book on its shelf" rather than "Katherine put Katherine's book on the book's shelf". But then why couple that grammatical function to sex-category membership? You shouldn't _need_ to take a stance on someone's reproductive capabilities to talk about them putting a book on the shelf.
 
 If you wanted more pronoun-classes to reduce the probability of collisions (where universal [Spivak _ey_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun) or singular _they_ would result in more frequent need to repeat names where a pronoun would be ambiguous), you could devise some other system that doesn't bake sex into the language, like using initials to form pronouns (<em>K</em>atherine put <em>k</em>er book on its shelf?), or an oral or written analogue of [spatial referencing in American Sign Language](https://www.handspeak.com/learn/index.php?id=27) (where a signer associates a name or description with a direction in space, and points in that direction for subsequent references).
 
-(One might speculate that "more classes to reduce collisions" _is_ part of the historical explanation for grammatical gender, in conjunction with the fact that biological sex is binary and easy to observe. No other salient objective feature quite does the same job: age is continuous rather than categorical; race is also clinal and historically didn't typically vary within a tribal/community context.)
+(One might speculate that "more classes to reduce collisions" _is_ part of the historical explanation for grammatical gender, in conjunction with the fact that sex is binary and easy to observe. No other salient objective feature quite does 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.)
 
 Taking it as a given that English speakers are stuck with gendered third-person singular pronouns, there's still room to debate exactly what _she_ and _he_ map to in cases where a person's "gender" is ambiguous or disputed. (Which comes up more often these days than in the environment where the language evolved.)
 
@@ -36,13 +36,13 @@ During a recent discussion of all this, I received a _fascinating_ reply that I
 
 > I can imagine a sane society using _he_ and _she_ to refer to this-person-looks-male and this-person-looks-female. But in the society that exists today, "what pronouns does this person use for trans person" on-average **conveys very relevant information about the speaker and their attitudes to trans people.** (I mean this in a this-is-just-how-the-statistics-work rather than an accusatory way; I think in your particular case we have lots of other data.)
 
-> I agree that there's going to be some confusion if you talk about someone as a "she" and the person who turns up is a.m.a.b. But I think the confusion that results from calling them "she" is a lot more consequential. Progressive communication norms absolutely reflect a concern for information efficiency! It takes a lot less time to say "she" than it does to say "he, but I also think trans people are great."
+> I agree that there's going to be some confusion if you talk about someone as a "she" and the person who turns up is obviously a.m.a.b. But I think the confusion that results from calling them "she" is a lot more consequential. Progressive communication norms absolutely reflect a concern for information efficiency! It takes a lot less time to say "she" than it does to say "he, but I also think trans people are great."
 
 (Bolding mine.)
 
-I see. So the norm is optimized to convey information _about the speaker_ rather than [what is being spoken about](http://thetranswidow.com/2021/02/21/pronouns-and-the-purpose-of-language/).
+I see. So the [new norms](/2018/Oct/sticker-prices/) are optimized to convey information _about the speaker_ [rather than what is being spoken about](http://thetranswidow.com/2021/02/21/pronouns-and-the-purpose-of-language/).
 
-Kind of like ... a loyalty test?
+Almost like ... a loyalty test?
 
 And the less intuitive it is, the better it works _as_ a loyalty test: referring to an obviously male person as _he_ merely reflects conventional usage and reveals no information about one's motives, whereas refering to an obvious male as _she_—or using singular _they_ for a named individual whose sex is apparent—extracts a cognitive cost, however slight—a cost [allies are more willing to pay than non-allies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory).
 
@@ -50,16 +50,20 @@ I'm not suggesting a conspiracy, of course; just the design signature of [cultur
 
 In the begining, [Azathoth](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pLRogvJLPPg6Mrvg4/an-alien-god) created female and male, and the physical fact was called "sex", and the social recognition and implications thereof was called "gender"—the first day.
 
-As a very rare biological anomaly, there were extremely masculine lesbians who fit into Society
+As a very rare biological anomaly, there have always been an extreme right tail of very masculine lesbians who fit into Society better as men and very feminine gay men who fit into Society better as women, and twentieth-century doctors developed medical interventions to aid them in this transformation. This worked pretty well.
 
-Also, separately, there were 
+Separately, there are, and [perhaps](http://www.transtorah.org/PDFs/On-Becoming-A-Woman.pdf) [always](/2017/Mar/nothing-new-under-the-sun/) have been, perverted men who wished they were women—autogynephiles—and the extreme right tail of them also sought out interventions from the twentieth-century doctors. Tragically, this [didn't usually work as well](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2016/01/01/a-passing-privilege/), but it was rare enough for autogynephiles to actually attempt it (as opposed to privately fantasizing or playing dress-up) that it didn't have much impact on the social order.
 
+The legal changes required for the twentieth-century doctors' innovation was sponsored by [the political coalition of individually non-hegemonic identity groups](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/hierarchy-wings/), whose organizing principle had always been to fight on behalf of the marginalized—those who, without the coalition's sponsorship, would have been victimized by the hegemonic social order.
 
-/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/
-/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/
-/2018/Oct/sticker-prices/
+But when the source of a coalition's power rests on the loyalty of the victims it protects, and of their allies, then those seeking to win more power for the coalition have an incentive to both _create more victims_, and _distinguish loyal from fair-weather allies_.
 
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/G5TwJ9BGxcgh5DsmQ/yes-requires-the-possibility-of-no
-https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2019/04/08/oppressive-rituals-of-ceremoniously-announcing-one-gender-pronouns/
-https://meltingasphalt.com/crony-beliefs/
-https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/09/real-meaning-of-diversity/
+Aggressively marketing "being trans" as an atomic identity that everyone needs to celebrate on pain of being responsible for someone's suicide, serves both functions: a lot of autogynephilic young men and [quirky but impressionable teenage girls](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_onset_gender_dysphoria_controversy) get recruited to the victimhood coalition (who might have otherwise gotten married and joined the power base of the hegemonic social order), _and_ everyone who cares about having a public concept of biological sex gets "outed" as an insufficiently-loyal ally (who can't free-ride off the coalition's successes without contributing). [It works even better if](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/09/real-meaning-of-diversity/) any group that doesn't have the necessary quota of trans people is marked for political attack on the grounds of being insufficiently inclusive.
+
+Again, [no individual mastermind is required](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) for [the collective outcome to play out this way](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/). Being proud of a political group identity and seeking to promote its strength and power is _normal_. Being suspicious of those who refuse to pay the cost of signaling loyalty to the group is _normal_. Wanting to change sex is—not "normal" exactly, but a _reasonably common and harmless fantasy_ that a lot of people have without being in the homosexual extreme-right-tail-of-sex-atypical-behavior taxon that sex reassignment was invented for. ([A 1994 study found that](/papers/hsu_et_al-gender_differences_in_sexual_fantasy.pdf) among college students, 5.6% of males and 13.2% of females had fantasized about being the opposite sex.)
+
+As a transhumanist, I believe that fantasies deserve to be fulfilled—but _actually_ fulfilled, fulfilled _for real_, not humored by everyone forcing everyone else to pretend in order to maintain the equilibrium in some idiot political game.
+
+I'm glad that sex reassignment exists for those who need it, or just _want_ it. But this new culture in which any attempt to talk about sex in the common language gets adversarially reinterpreted as a claim about some "gender" thing that has no particular truth conditions other than the individual's say-so, [_isn't helping those people_](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2019/04/08/oppressive-rituals-of-ceremoniously-announcing-one-gender-pronouns/). Relative to more honest alternatives that could be invented or rediscovered, I very much doubt it's helping those who enthusiastically advocate for and participate in it—if they only _knew_ in detail what they were selling and being sold. Selfishly, I resent the forced updates to my native language, which I still need to make sense of the world I see.
+
+And, and—that poor deer!