But if that's the play you want to make, you forfeit the right to _honestly_ claim that your stance is that "feelings don't get to control everybody's language protocol". If you piously proclaim that the "important thing" is trans people's feelings of "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket, as it would be assigned by their birth certificate", that would seem, pretty straightforwardly, to be participating in an attempt to let someone's feelings control everybody's language protocol! Again, I'm really not sure how else I'm supposed to interpret those words!
-There's nothing _inconsistent_ about believing that trans people's feelings matter, and that the feelings of people who resent the Stroop-like effect of having to speak in a way that contradicts their own sex-category perceptions, don't matter. (Or don't matter _as much_, quantitatively, under the utilitarian calculus.) But if that were your position, the intellectually honest thing to do would be to tell people like Barra Kerr, "Sorry, I'm participating in a political coalition that believes that trans people's feelings are more important than yours with respect to this policy question; sucks to be you" rather than haughtily implying that people like Kerr are making an elementary philosophy mistake that they are _clearly not making_ if you _actually read what they write_.
+There's nothing _inconsistent_ about believing that trans people's feelings matter, and that the feelings of people who resent the Stroop-like effect of having to speak in a way that contradicts their own sex-category perceptions, don't matter. (Or don't matter _as much_, quantitatively, under the utilitarian calculus.) But if that were your position, the intellectually honest thing to tell people like Barra Kerr is, "Sorry, I'm participating in a political coalition that believes that trans people's feelings are more important than yours with respect to this policy question; sucks to be you", rather than haughtily implying that people like Kerr are making an elementary philosophy mistake that they are _clearly not making_ if you _actually read what they write_.
(In general, an honest "sucks to be you" from someone whose political incentives lead them to oppose your goals, is _much_ less cruel than the opponent distorting your position to make you look bad to their followers.)
As it happens, I think this _is_ an important consideration in favor of self-identity pronouns! [When different parties disagree about what category something should belong to, but want to coordinate to use the _same_ category, they tend to find some mutually-salient Schelling point to settle the matter.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) In the case of disagreements about a person's social sex category ("gender"), in the absence of a trusted central authority to break the symmetry among third parties' judgements (like a priest or rabbi in a tight-knit religious community, or a medical bureaucracy with the social power to diagnose who is "legitimately" transsexual), the most obvious Schelling point is to defer to the person themselves. I wrote about this argument in a previous post, ["Self-Identity Is a Schelling Point"](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/).
-But crucially, the fact that the self-identity convention is a Schelling point, _doesn't_ mean we have a one-sided policy debate where it's in everyone's interests to support this "simplest and best protocol", with no downsides or trade-offs for anyone. The thing where _she_ and _he_ (which we don't know how to coordinate a jump away from) imply sex category inferences to English-speaking brains is still true! The Schelling point argument just means that the setup of the social-choice problem that we face happens to grant a structural advantage to those who favor the self-identity convention.
+But crucially, the fact that the self-identity convention is a Schelling point, _doesn't_ mean we have a one-sided policy debate where it's in everyone's interests to support this "simplest and best protocol", with no downsides or trade-offs for anyone. The thing where _she_ and _he_ (which we don't know how to coordinate a jump away from) imply sex category inferences to actually-existing English speakers is still true! The Schelling point argument just means that the setup of the social-choice problem that we face happens to grant a structural advantage to those who favor the self-identity convention.
Although they're not the only ones with an structural advantage: a social order whose gender convention was "Biological sex only; transsexualism isn't a thing; sucks to be you if you want people to believe that you're the sex that you aren't" would _also_ be a Schelling point. (Trans people's [developmental sex](http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/) is not really in dispute.) It's the _moderates_ who want to be nice to trans people _without_ destroying the public concept of sex who are in trouble!
Sure. Yes. And indeed, I don't misgender people! (In public. Only rarely in private.) I'm not arguing that Yudkowsky should misgender people! The purpose of this post is not to argue with Yudkowsky's pronoun usage, but rather to argue with the offered usage _rationale_ that "the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he", with a default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size' and to say that this just _is_ the normative definition."
-As I have explained at length, this _rationale_ doesn't work and isn't true (even if better rationales, like the Schelling point argument, can end up recommending the same behavior). _No one_ actually believes that _she_ and _he_ aren't attached to gender in people's heads, and playing dumb about this to try to make it look like you're being apolitical is just disgraceful. How dumb do you think we are?!
+As I have explained at length, this _rationale_ doesn't work and isn't true (even if better rationales, like the Schelling point argument, can end up recommending the same behavior). _No one_ actually believes that _she_ and _he_ aren't attached to gender in people's heads.
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+
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[TODO: "Can't imagine a sympathetic protagonist"—lies, imagine a rape victim]
+[TODO: propose frame where the defense lawyer objects, and the judge faces a forced choice between Sustained and Overruled]
[TODO: quote Yudkowsky: not the woke position]
-[TODO: propose frame where the defense lawyer objects, and the judge faces a forced choice between Sustained and Overruled]
-Right. It's an _incoherent_ position that's optimized to concede to the woke the policy that they want for a _different stated reason_ in order to make the concession appear politically neutral. But this is intellectually dishonest, because in order to _actually_ be politically neutral, you need to _acknowledge_ the costs and benefits of a policy to different parties, even if all policies impose costs on _someone_ and there's no solution that everyone is happy with.
+
+Right. It's an _incoherent_ position that's optimized to concede to the woke the policy that they want for a _different stated reason_ in order to make the concession appear politically neutral. But in order to _actually_ be politically neutral, you need to _acknowledge_ the costs and benefits of a policy to different parties, even if all policies impose costs on _someone_ and there's no solution that everyone is happy with.
Policy debates should not appear one-sided. Exerting social pressure on a native-English-speaking rape victim to refer to her male rapist with _she_/_her_ pronouns is a _cost_ to her. And, simultaneously, _not_ exerting that pressure is a _cost_ to many trans people, by making recognition of their social gender _conditional_ on some standard of good behavior, rather than an unconditional social fact.
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-[TODO: people have an incentive to fight over pronouns insofar as it's a "wedge" for more substantive issues]
+
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* work in the LambdaMOO anecdote where appropriate
* singular they for named individuals undermined indefinite singular 'they'
-
+ * parenthetical about where "Oliver" came from
* some people have complained that my writing is too long, but when your interlocutors will go to the absurd length of _denying that the association of "she" with females_
-
-4 levels of intellectual conversation
+ * people have an incentive to fight over pronouns insofar as it's a "wedge" for more substantive issues
+ * 4 levels of intellectual conversation
appeal to inner privacy conversation-halter https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters
The reason this isn't special pleading that makes my theory unfalsifiable, is because my skepticism is _specifically_ about these mass survey questions where we haven't done the _extra work_ to try to figure out whether the 1–5 question means the same thing to everyone; I'm happy to talk about qualitative predictions about what we see when we have a _higher-bandwidth_ channel into someone's mind than a 1–5 survey response.
-You _start_ to get into these issues with the "My literal body is arousing" account in the post, but I expect more digging to reveal a different picture. Of course, I can't know with any confidence (without more interviewing) what's really going on in [TODO: unredact name1]'s head. But to match one anecdote with another: when I _first_ came out to [TODO: name2] in 2016, her _first_ reaction was, "I can relate to this; I'm turned on by the idea of being a hot girl", but then when I went into _a little more detail_ (linking to the ["Man, I Feel Like a Woman"](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManIFeelLikeAWoman) TVTropes page), she revised to, "Wait, no, I can't relate this at all; like, you _want_ to have breasts?" (I regret that this is paraphrased from memory; I haven't been able to find the transcript because I think Sarah deleted her Facebook account a couple times.)
+You _start_ to get into these issues with the "My literal body is arousing" account in the post, but I expect more digging to reveal a different picture. Of course, I can't know with any confidence (without more interviewing) what's really going on in [TODO: unredact name1]'s head specifically. But to match one anecdote with another: when I _first_ came out to [TODO: name2] in 2016, her _first_ reaction was, "I can relate to this; I'm turned on by the idea of being a hot girl", but then when I went into a little _more detail_ (linking to the ["Man, I Feel Like a Woman"](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManIFeelLikeAWoman) TVTropes page), she revised to, "Wait, no, I can't relate this at all; like, you _want_ to have breasts?" (I regret that this is paraphrased from memory; I haven't been able to find the transcript because I think Sarah deleted her Facebook account a couple times.)
My common-sense intuition is that the experience of being happy and proud with one's own sexed body (which is pretty common and normal), and autogynephilic/autoandrophilic cross-sex fantasies (which are less common, but by no means rare), are superficially similar enough that they can generate overlapping reports if you _just_ ask "Would it be sexy to be her, 1–5", but that when you poke at the details, they're going to turn out to be _very_ different psychological phenomena that you shouldn't lump together as "autogenderphilia".
I think the boring hypothesis here is "Yes, of course, because trans women are AGP men, which are not the same thing as actual lesbians." Again, this isn't Science, because I'm just using my brain's pattern-matching capabilities (I could be selectively remembering, distorting my categories, _&c._). With time and funding, I'm sure it would be possible to make it more formal—gather Reddit comments from cis and trans women, have raters categorize themes while blinded to the cis/trans identity of the authors ...
-But I begin to despair this is a domain where [Science can't help](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wzxneh7wxkdNYNbtB/when-science-can-t-help). It seems like people mostly _agree_ about empirical observations! People _agree_ that AGP is common in lesbian trans women (after this is pointed out with sufficient force, if it looks like the general public isn't looking). You _agree_ that it looks like there are two types of MtF differentiated by sexual orientation; you just think that the second type is an intersex condition because ... ???
+But I begin to despair this is a domain where [Science can't help](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wzxneh7wxkdNYNbtB/when-science-can-t-help). It seems like people mostly _agree_ about empirical observations! People _agree_ that AGP is common in lesbian trans women (after this is pointed out with sufficient force, if it looks like the general public isn't looking). You _agree_ that it looks like there are two types of MtF differentiated by sexual orientation; you just think that the second type is also an intersex condition because ... ???
-From my perspective, it looks like the _Slate Star_/Alicorner crowd basically _agree_ with me on all the empirical observables, but then _somehow_ you people manage come up with these absurdly gerrymandered verbal "explanations" that can't _possibly_ match up with the underlying cognitive machinery your brain must be using to know what to anticipate, but if you don't see this after it's already been pointed out, then I'm not sure how to proceed.
+From my perspective, it looks like the _Slate Star_/Alicorner crowd basically _agree_ with me on all the empirical observables, but then _somehow_ you people manage come up with these absurdly gerrymandered verbal "explanations" that can't _possibly_ match up with the underlying cognitive machinery your brain must be using to know what to anticipate, but if you don't see this after it's already been pointed out then I'm not sure how to proceed.
I can't _prove_ that all these ***physiological males with male-typical interests whose female gender identities seem closely intertwined with their gynephilic (i.e. male-typical) sexuality*** (we _agree_ on all that!!) are men with a fetish rather than women in male bodies—for the same reason I can't prove there's not an [invisible inaudiable dragon that's permeable to flour](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-belief) in your garage. From my perspective, it looks like you just have a fundamentally broken epistemology; from your perspective, I probably look like I'm dogmatically making unexplained inferential leaps.
Ozy has an old post about [how "the community" doesn't have a _gender_ gap; we merely have an _assigned sex at birth_ gap](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2014/12/01/lw-has-an-assigned-sex-at-birth-gap-not-a-gender-gap/). In my worldview, this should be _embarrassing_. (If you keep running into domains where "assigned" sex is a more useful predictor than "gender", that should be a clue that sex is real and gender identity is fake.) But if Ozy's mind hasn't been [created already in motion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CuSTqHgeK4CMpWYTe/created-already-in-motion) to find it embarrassing even after it's been pointed out, then I'm not sure what else I can say?
-If it were _just_ a matter of different priors (where my stronger [inductive bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_bias) lets me learn faster from less data, at the cost of [being wrong in universes that I think mostly don't exist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_optimization)), I would expect you to express more uncertainty. I would _totally_ respect it if you were merely _uncertain_ about the AGP→gender-ID _vs._ gender-ID→AGP causality. [I _agree_ that causality is _much harder_ to pin down than mere correlation.](http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/) (And if I had a prior belief that invisible dragons were plausible, I would remain agnostic about the no-dragon _vs._ invisible-dragon hypotheses upon seeing an empty garage.) But on Discord, you said "it just seemed totally wrong"!! If you're _not_ playing a "does the evidence permit me to believe" game, I just don't see how you think the _SSC_ survey data is powerful enough to answer that question one way or the other.
+If it were _just_ a matter of different priors (where my stronger [inductive bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_bias) lets me learn faster from less data, at the cost of [being wrong in universes that I think mostly don't exist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_optimization)), I would expect you to express more uncertainty. I would _totally_ respect it if you were merely _uncertain_ about the AGP→gender-ID _vs._ gender-ID→AGP causality. [I _agree_ that causality is _much harder_ to pin down than mere correlation.](http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/) (And if I had a prior belief that invisible dragons were plausible, I would remain agnostic about the no-dragon _vs._ invisible-dragon hypotheses upon seeing an apparently empty garage.) But on Discord, you said "it just seemed totally wrong"!! If you're _not_ playing a "does the evidence permit me to believe" game, I just don't see how you think the _SSC_ survey data is powerful enough to answer that question one way or the other!
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projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff