-----
-_Lease Bound_ is the story of Jaden and Riley, two [typical](https://leasebound.com/comic/c2p08/) lesbians in Adelaide, Australia in the current year who find themselves [sharing the same apartment after a clerical mix-up](https://leasebound.com/comic/ch1p04/).
+[_Lease Bound_](https://leasebound.com/) is the story of Jaden and Riley, two [typical](https://leasebound.com/comic/c2p08/) lesbians in Adelaide, Australia in the current year who find themselves [sharing the same apartment after a clerical mix-up](https://leasebound.com/comic/ch1p04/).
Jaden works as a bouncer as a female-only nightclub and is surprised one night when three crossdressed men try to enter. When Jaden politely refuses them (["Sorry to disappoint, but this is actually a women's only venue. If you're looking for a great night though, there's a fantastic gay bar just a few blocks from here."](https://leasebound.com/comic/c3p09/)), they don't take it well (["We are women, sweetheart. _Trans_ women. Understand now?"](https://leasebound.com/comic/c3p11/)), and a scuffle ensues in which [Jaden gets bruised up](https://leasebound.com/comic/c4p08/).
NCAA Task Force Recommends Students No Longer Submit SAT, ACT Scores To Promote 'Racial Equity'
https://archive.ph/QerlW
+
+> The American Medical Association has just released "Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts," a strange document that calls for doctors to insert progressive politics into even plain statements of fact.
+https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1454468272011743239
+https://www.ama-assn.org/system/files/ama-aamc-equity-guide.pdf
* NB is a way to opt-out of stereotypes
* Signaling catastrophe: if the 5% of androgynous people ID as NB and you're not allowed to refer to their sex in words, does that mean that non-NBs are therefore consenting to being stereotyped?
* GNC presentation ("a rocker with a nose ring") has the same signaling dynamics, but doesn't trash our ability to talk about sex when relevant
+
+https://majesticequality.wordpress.com/2020/08/08/some-thoughts-on-being-nonbinary/
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. (People still recognize it as a second-person pronoun when encountered in old poetry—"The truth shall be thy warrant", _&c._—but most probably aren't aware of the formality distinction.) You wouldn't keep both forms, but circularly redefine them as referring only to the referent's preferred choice of address (?!).
-Really, 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?) From an AI design standpoint, the circular redefinition can be seen as a form of ["wireheading"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aMXhaj6zZBgbTrfqA/a-definition-of-wireheading). You want people to respect you as a superior, and if they respected you as a superior, they'd call you _usted_. That could make a policy of coercing people into calling you _usted_ because you want them to seem superficially appealing. But the appeal solely rests on confusing the pre-reform meaning (under which the choice of _usted_ implies respect and is therefore desirable) and the post-reform meaning (under which the choice implies nothing). Whether or not the proponent of the change consciously _notices_ the problem, the redefinition is _functionally_ "hypocritical": it's only desirable insofar as people aren't _actually_ using it internally.
+Really, 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?) From an AI design standpoint, the circular redefinition can be seen as a form of ["wireheading"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aMXhaj6zZBgbTrfqA/a-definition-of-wireheading). You want people to respect you as a superior, and if they respected you as a superior, they'd call you _usted_. That could make a policy of coercing people into calling you _usted_ seem superficially appealing. But the appeal solely rests on confusing the pre-reform meaning (under which the choice of _usted_ implies respect and is therefore desirable) and the post-reform meaning (under which the choice implies nothing). Whether or not the proponent of the change consciously _notices_ the problem, the redefinition is _functionally_ "hypocritical": it's only desirable 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:
> It is Shenanigans to try to bake your stance on how clustered things are and how appropriate it is to discretely cluster them using various criteria, _into the pronoun system of a language and interpretation convention that you insist everybody use!_
-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"—however cruel or capricious that might be—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 supports, 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)
+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"—however cruel or capricious that might be—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 supports, 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, without speakers actually changing their behavior. As a result, Yudkowsky's proposal "to say that this just _is_ the normative definition" doesn't work.
Bad language design? I mean, maybe! You could argue that! You could probably get a lot of Likes on Facebook arguing that! But if 370 million native English speakers _including you and virtually everyone who Liked your post_ are going to _continue_ automatically noticing what sex people are and using the corresponding pronouns without consciously thinking about it (in accordance with the "default for those-who-haven't-asked" clause of your reform proposal), then the criticism seems kind of idle!
-The "default for those-who-haven't-asked [going] by gamete size" part of Yudkowsky's proposal is _trying_ to deal with the backwards-compatibility problem by being backwards-compatible—recommending the same behavior in the vast majority of cases—but in doing so, it fails to accomplish its stated purpose of de-gendering the language.
+The "default for those-who-haven't-asked [going] by gamete size" part of Yudkowsky's proposal is _trying_ to deal with the backwards-compatibility problem by being backwards-compatible—prescribing the same behavior in the vast majority of cases—but in doing so, it fails to accomplish its stated purpose of de-gendering the language.
-To _actually_ de-gender English while keeping _she_ and _he_ (as contrasted to jumping to universal singular _they_, or _ve_), you'd need to _actually_ shatter the correlation between pronouns and sex/gender, such that a person's pronouns _were_ just an arbitrary extra piece of data that you needed to remember in the same way you have to remember people's names. But as far as I can tell, _no one_ wants this. When's the last time you heard someone you heard someone request pronouns for _non_-gender-related reasons? ("My pronouns are she/her—but note, that's _just_ because I prefer the aesthetics of how the pronouns sound; I'm _not_ in any way claiming that you should believe that I'm female, which isn't true.") Me neither.
+To _actually_ de-gender English while keeping _she_ and _he_ (as contrasted to coordinating a jump to universal singular _they_, or _ve_), you'd need to _actually_ shatter the correlation between pronouns and sex/gender, such that a person's pronouns _were_ just an arbitrary extra piece of data that you needed to remember in the same way you have to remember people's names. But as far as I can tell, _no one_ wants this. When's the last time you heard someone you heard someone request pronouns for _non_-gender-related reasons? ("My pronouns are she/her—but note, that's _just_ because I prefer the aesthetics of how the pronouns sound; I'm _not_ in any way claiming that you should believe that I'm in any sense female, which isn't true.") Me neither.
+Given that
+
+
+In an article titled "Pronouns are Rohypnol", Barra Kerr
[TODO—
------
+don't use "baked in" so many times
+
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception
But if you saw this person on the street or even slept in their bed, you wouldn't want to call them a woman, because everything about them that you can observe looks like that of an adult human male. If you're not a reproductive health lab tech and don't look at the photographs in biology textbooks, you'll never _see_ the gametes someone's body produces. (You can see male semen, but the individual spermatozoa are too small to look at without a microscope; people [didn't even know that ova and sperm _existed_ until the 17th century](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1439-0531.2012.02105.x).) Does that mean this common definition of _female_ isn't perfectly serviceable after all?
-No, because humans whose gonads produce eggs but appear male in every other aspect, are something I just made up out of thin air for the purposes of this blog post; they don't exist in the real world. What this really shows is that the cognitive technology of "words" having "definitions" doesn't work in _the world of the imagination_, because _the world of the imagination_ encompasses (at a minimum) _all possible configurations of matter_. Words are [short messages that compress a lot of information](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length), but what it _means_ for the world to contain information is that some things in the world are more probable than others.
+No, because humans whose gonads produce eggs but appear male in every other aspect, are something I just made up out of thin air for the purposes of this blog post; they don't exist in the real world. What this really shows is that the cognitive technology of "words" having "definitions" doesn't work in _the world of the imagination_, because _the world of the imagination_ encompasses (at a minimum) _all possible configurations of matter_. Words are [short messages that compress information](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length), but what it _means_ for the world to contain information is that some things in the world are more probable than others.
To see why, let's take a brief math detour and review some elementary information theory. Instead of the messy real world, take a restricted setting: the world of strings of 20 bits. Suppose you wanted to devise an efficient _code_ to represent elements of this world with _shorter_ strings, such that you could say (for example) `01100` (in the efficient code, using just 5 bits) and the people listening to you would know that what you actually saw in the world was (for example) `01100001110110000010`.
Unfortunately—_deeply_ unfortunately—this is not a math blog. (I _wish_ this were a math blog—I wish I lived in a world where I could do math blogging for the greater glory of our collective understanding of reality, rather than being condemned to gender blogging in self-defense, hopelessly outgunned, outmanned, outnumbered, outplanned [in a Total Culture War](/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/) over the future of [my neurotype-demographic](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/).) So, having briefly explained the theory, let's get back to the dreary, how do you say—_application_.
-Defining sex in terms of gamete size or genitals or chromosomes is like the using the never-flipped first bit in our abstract example about the world of length-20 bitstrings. It's not that people _directly_ care about gametes or chromosomes or even gentials in most everyday situations. (You're probably not directly trying to mate with most of the people you meet in everyday situations, and sex chromosomes weren't discovered until the _20th_ century.) It's that that these are _discrete_ features that are entangled with everything _else_ that differs between females and males—including many [correlated](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy-1) statistical differences of various [effect sizes](/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/), and differences that are harder to articulate or measure, and differences that haven't even been discovered yet (as gametes and chromosomes hadn't respectively been discovered yet in the 16th and 20th centuries) but can be theorized to exist because _sex_ is a very robust abstraction that you need in order to understand the design of evolved biological creatures.
+Defining sex in terms of gamete size or genitals or chromosomes is like the using the never-flipped first bit in our abstract example about the world of length-20 bitstrings. It's not that people _directly_ care about gametes or chromosomes or even gentials in most everyday situations. (You're probably not directly trying to mate with most of the people you meet in everyday situations, and sex chromosomes weren't discovered until the _20th_ century.) It's that that these are _discrete_ features that are entangled with everything _else_ that differs between females and males—including many [correlated](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy-1) statistical differences of various [effect sizes](/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/), and differences that are harder to articulate or measure, and differences that haven't even been discovered yet (as gametes and chromosomes hadn't respectively been discovered yet in the 16th and 19th centuries) but can be theorized to exist because _sex_ is a very robust abstraction that you need in order to understand the design of evolved biological creatures.
Discrete features make for better word _definitions_ than high-dimensional statistical regularities, even if most of the everyday inferential utility of _using_ the word comes from the high-dimensional statistical correlates. A dictionary definition is just a helpful pointer to help people pick out "the same" [natural abstraction](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cy3BhHrGinZCp3LXE/testing-the-natural-abstraction-hypothesis-project-intro) in their _own_ world-model.
I sometimes regret that so many of my attempts to talk about trans issues end up focusing on psychological sex differences. I guess I'm used to it now, but at first, this was a very weird position for me to be in! (For a long time, I [really didn't want to believe in psychological sex differences](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism).) But it keeps happening because it's a natural thing to _disagree_ about: the anatomy of pre-op trans women is not really in _dispute_, so the sex realist's contextual reply to "Why do you care what genitals someone might or might not have under their clothes?" often ends up appealing to some psychological dimension or another, to which the trans advocate [can counterreply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/), "Oh, you want to define gender based on psychology, then? But then the logic of your position forces you to conclude that butch lesbians aren't women! _Reductio ad absurdum!_"
-This is a severe misreading of the sex-realist position. No one wants to _define_ "gender" based on psychology. Definitions don't matter: you can't coerce reality into changing by choosing different definitions! Rather, there's _already_ a multivariate distribution of bodies and minds in the world, and good definition choices help us coordinate the concepts in different people's heads into a _shared_ map of that territory.
+This is a severe misreading of the sex-realist position. No one wants to _define_ "gender" based on psychology. Moreover, definitions aren't the kind of thing to people should have personal preferences about: you can't coerce reality into changing by choosing different definitions! Rather, there's _already_ a multivariate distribution of bodies and minds in the world, and good definition choices help us coordinate the concepts in different people's heads into a _shared_ map of that territory.
_One_ of the _many_ distinctions people sometimes want to make when thinking about the multivariate distribution of bodies and minds in the world, is that between the sexes. Sex is by no means the only way in which people differ! In many situations you might want to categorize or describe people in many different ways, some more or less discrete _versus_ categorical, or high- _versus_ low-dimensional: age or race or religion or social class or intelligence or agreeableness or
"No one begins to truly search for the Way until their parents have failed them, their gods are dead, and their tools have shattered in their hand."
https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1107874587822297089
+
+Robert Stadler
>impressionable women exert huge collective sway over democracy
>hypercompetitive men become trannies to leverage this
>impressionable women become trannies too because they see the men doing it
+
+https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/46374/i-recently-cut-off-contact-with-a-sexually-abusive-tim
+
+https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-57853385
+2021 significant posts—
+_ Book Review: Charles Murray's Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America
+_ Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal
+_ A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
+
+
Queue—
_ "Never Smile" linkpost
_ Student Dysphoria, and a Previous Life's War
+_ Subspatial Distribution Overlap and Cancellable Stereotypes
+_ "But I'm Not Quite Sure What That Means": Costs of Nonbinary Gender as a Social Technology
+_ Four Clusters
_ Elision _vs_. Choice
_ Karnofsky's presentism
-2021 significant posts—
-_ Book Review: Charles Murray's Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America
-_ Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal
-_ A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
-
_ Trans Kids on the Margin, and Harms From Misleading Training Data
_ Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
Minor queue—
_ FaceApp tips
_ Model-Free Happiness
-_ Subspatial Distribution Overlap and Cancellable Stereotypes
_ Sticks and Stones
-_ "But I'm Not Quite Sure What That Means": Costs of Nonbinary Gender as a Social Technology
_ "Assigned at Birth" Is a Schelling Point (If You Live in an Insane Dystopia Where the Concept of Sex Is Somehow Controversial)
_ Friendship Practices of the Secret-Sharing Plain Speech Valley Squirrels
_ Hrunkner Unnerby and the Shallowness of Progress
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff