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?
+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_, 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.
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-In Yudkowsky's 2001 _Creating Friendly AI: The Analysis and Design of Benevolent Goal Architectures_, 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.
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-Yudkowsky continues:
+In the Facebook comments, Yudkowsky continues:
> My current policy stance is that anybody who does feel that way needs to get some perspective about how it can be less firmly attached in other people's heads; and how their feelings don't get to control everybody's language protocol or accuse non-protocol users of lying; especially when different people with firm attachments have _different_ firm attachments and we can't make them all be protocol.
Well, sociologically, they're demographically eligible for our Society's LGBTQ+ political coalition, living outside of what traditional straight Society considers "normal." That shared _social_ experience could induce similarities.
-But your allegedly boring hypothesis is not appealing to a shared social experience; you're saying "it's a natural leap to be attracted ...", appealing to the underlying psychology of sexual attraction. In terms of the underlying psychology of sexual attraction, what do lesbians, and gay men, and heterosexual males with a female gender identity, and heterosexual females with a male gender identity have in common, that they _don't_ have in common with heterosexual males and females without a cross-sex identity?
+But your allegedly boring hypothesis is not appealing to a shared social experience; you're saying "it's a natural leap to be attracted ...", appealing to the underlying psychology of sexual attraction in a way that doesn't seem very culture-sensitive. In terms of the underlying psychology of sexual attraction, what do lesbians, and gay men, and heterosexual males with a female gender identity, and heterosexual females with a male gender identity have in common, that they _don't_ have in common with heterosexual males and females without a cross-sex identity?
I think the answer here is just "Nothing."
_Sometimes_ I want to categorize people by gynephilic/androphilic sexual orientation: this helps me make sense of how [lesbians are masculine compared to other females, and gay men are feminine compared to other males](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/lippa-gender-related_traits_in_gays.pdf). (That is, it looks like _homosexuality_ is probably a kind of brain intersex condition, at least in many cases.)
-But even so, when thinking about sexual orientation, I'm usually making a within-sex comparison: contrasting how gay men are different from ordinary men, how lesbians are different from ordinary women. I don't usually have much need to reason about "people who are attracted to the sex that they are" as a group, because that group splits cleanly into gay men and lesbians, which have a _different_ [underlying causal structure](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water). "LGBT" makes sense as a _political coalition_ (who have a shared interest in resisting the oppression of traditional sexual morality), not because the L and the G and the B and the T are the same kind of people who live common lives. (Indeed, as you know, I don't even think the "T" alone are the same kind of people.)
+But even so, when thinking about sexual orientation, I'm usually making a within-sex comparison: contrasting how gay men are different from ordinary men, how lesbians are different from ordinary women. I don't usually have much need to reason about "people who are attracted to the sex that they are" as a group, because that group splits cleanly into gay men and lesbians, which have a _different_ [underlying causal structure](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water). "LGBT" (...QUIA+) makes sense as a _political coalition_ (who have a shared interest in resisting the oppression of traditional sexual morality), not because the L and the G and the B and the T are the same kind of people who live common lives. (Indeed, as you know, I don't even think the "T" is one thing.)
And so, given that I _already_ don't have much use for "if you are a sex, and you're attracted to that sex" as a category of analytical interest (because I think gay men and lesbians are different things that need to be studied separately), "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender" (with respect to "gender", not sex) comes off even worse. What causal mechanism could that possibly, _possibly_ correspond to?!
-Again, I'm self-conscious that to someone who doesn't already share my worldview, this seems dogmatically non-empirical—here I'm telling you why I can't take your theory seriously without even _addressing_ the survey data that you think your theory can explain that mine can't. Is this not a scientific sin? What's with that?
+Again, I'm self-conscious that to someone who doesn't already share my worldview, this seems dogmatically non-empirical—here I'm telling you why I can't take your theory seriously without even _addressing_ the survey data that you think your theory can explain that mine can't. Is this not a scientific sin? What is this "but causal mechanisms" gibberish, in the face of _empirical_ survey data, huh?
-The thing is, I don't see my theory as _making_ particularly strong advance predictions one way or the other on how cis women or gay men will respond to the "imagine being him/her" questions, because I consider it highly nonobvious whether different populations are interpreting the survey questions the same way.
+The thing is, I don't see my theory as _making_ particularly strong advance predictions one way or the other on how cis women or gay men will respond to the "imagine being him/her" questions, because I consider it highly nonobvious whether the survey responses mean the same thing in different populations.
-The _reason_ I believe autogynephlia "is a thing" and causally potent to transgenderedness in the first place, is not because trans women gave a mean Likert response of 3.2 on anyone's survey, but because of my brain's inductive inference algorithms operating on a _massive_ confluence of a [real-life experiences](http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/) and observations in a naturalistic setting.
+The _reason_ I believe autogynephlia (in males) "is a thing" and causally potent to transgenderedness in the first place, is not because trans women gave a mean Likert response of 3.2 on anyone's survey, but as the output of my brain's inductive inference algorithms operating on a _massive_ confluence of a [real-life experiences](http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/) and observations in a naturalistic setting.
+
+If I'm not playing the modesty/Outside View politeness game, I actually think this thing is _just obvious_ if you look at the world and try to describe what you see. To illustrate, I was about to include a link to [the search results for "fetish"](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/search?q=fetish&restrict_sr=on) on [/r/MtF](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/), but before even sending a search query, I see that the top post (with 476 votes) at time of drafting this paragraph is ... ["I have boobs and a pp"](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/rjehj1/i_have_boobs_and_a_pp/).
+
+Show that post title to any normal person outside of your tiny and recent ideological bubble, and ask them whether they think the author is a man with a fetish, or a woman trapped in a man's body. You and I, we're intellectuals—in our world, you wouldn't, and shouldn't, let me get away with that leading question. ("Man with a fetish, or ..." is a false dichotomy.) Nevertheless, _pragmatically_, I think the normal person gets this one right with far greater sample-efficiency by means of successfully noticing that actual women don't post about how they "have boobs" in that particular gleeful tone, and the people in your tiny and recent ideological bubble get this one wrong because you're insane religious fanatics who are obligated to pretend you don't have a concept of "actual women."
-If I'm not playing the modesty/Outside View politeness game, I actually think this thing is _just obvious_ if you look at the world and try to describe what you see. To illustrate, I was about to include a link to the search results for "fetish" on [/r/MtF](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/), but before even sending a search query, I see that the current top post (with 476 votes) is ... ["I have boobs and a pp"](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/rjehj1/i_have_boobs_and_a_pp/).
-Show that post title to any normal person outside of your tiny and recent ideological bubble, and ask them whether they think the author is a man with a fetish, or a woman trapped in a man's body. You and I, we're intellectuals—in our world, you wouldn't, and shouldn't, let me get away with that leading question. ("Man with a fetish, or ..." is a false dichotomy.) Nevertheless, _pragmatically_, I think the normal person gets this one right by means of successfully noticing that actual women don't gleefully post about how they "have boobs", and the people in your tiny and recent ideological bubble get this one wrong because you're insane religious fanatics who are obligated to pretend you don't have a concept of "actual women."
[TODO: IRB nightmare and interpretation skepticism]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff