Sunday memoir confrontation 3: not the crux

(Are these tiny 20-minute commits silly? Doesn't matter—we're not
going to run out of commits; if my Git repository slows down,
I'll—I'll buy a new computer! That's how much it's worth keeping the
momentum today.)

diff --git a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
index c5d4585..c6d34a5 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
+++ b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
@@ -58,7 +58,7 @@ Just that month, I had started a Twitter account in my own name, inspired in an
 
 So, now having a Twitter account, I was browsing Twitter in the bedroom at the rental house for the dayjob event, when I happened to stumble across [this thread by @ESYudkowsky](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521):
 
-> Some people I usually respect] for their willingness to publicly die on a hill of facts, now seem to be talking as if pronouns are facts, or as if who uses what bathroom is necessarily a factual statement about chromosomes.  Come on, you know the distinction better than that!
+> Some people I usually respect for their willingness to publicly die on a hill of facts, now seem to be talking as if pronouns are facts, or as if who uses what bathroom is necessarily a factual statement about chromosomes.  Come on, you know the distinction better than that!
 >
 > _Even if_ somebody went around saying, "I demand you call me 'she' and furthermore I claim to have two X chromosomes!", which none of my trans colleagues have ever said to me by the way, it still isn't a question-of-empirical-fact whether she should be called "she". It's an act.
 >
@@ -68,6 +68,8 @@ So, now having a Twitter account, I was browsing Twitter in the bedroom at the r
 
 Some of the replies tried explain them problem—and Yudkowsky kept doubling down:
 
+[TODO: '(chromosomes?)' comment]
+
 > You're mistaken about what the word means to you, I demonstrate thus:
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome
 >
@@ -79,15 +81,20 @@ But trusting Eliezer Yudkowsky—whose writings, more than any other single infl
 
 So if the rationalists were going to get our own philosophy of language wrong over this _and Eliezer Yudkowsky was in on it_ (!!!), that was intolerable—and would be unforgivable if it weren't so _inexplicable_.
 
-... not actually inexplicable. There was, in fact, an obvious explanation: 
+... not _actually_ inexplicable. There was, in fact, an obvious explanation: that Yudkowsky was trying to bolster his reputation amongst progressives by positioning himself on the right side of history, and was tailoring a fake rationality lesson to suit that goal. But _Eliezer Yudkowsky wouldn't do that_. I had to assume this was a honest mistake.
+
+At least, a _pedagogy_ mistake. I of course agree that pronoun usage conventions, and conventions about who uses what bathroom, are not, themselves, factual assertions about sex chromosomes in particular. But it's _bizarre_ to condescendingly point this out as if it were the crux of contemporary trans-rights debates.
+
+
+
 
 
+Conservatives and gender-critical people
 
 
-Okay, technically, Yudkowsky's new Tweets specifically talked about pronouns and policy decisions, which (one could argue) is a distinct issue from my argument with Alexander about category boundaries.
 
 
-And I agree that questions about who should use which bathroom are policy decisions and not matters of fact. But the question of what categories epistemically "carve reality at the joints", is _not unrelated_ to the question of which categories to use in policy decisions! Connotatively, and in the context of elite intellectual American culture in which "trans women are women" is dogma, it's hard to read the Tweets Yudkowsky published as anything other than an attempt to intimidate and delegitimize people who want to use language to reason about sex rather than gender identity. [For example](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067490362225156096), deeper in the thread, Yudkowsky wrote:
+But the question of what categories epistemically "carve reality at the joints", is _not unrelated_ to the question of which categories to use in policy decisions! Connotatively, and in the context of elite intellectual American culture in which "trans women are women" is dogma, it's hard to read the Tweets Yudkowsky published as anything other than an attempt to intimidate and delegitimize people who want to use language to reason about sex rather than gender identity. [For example](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067490362225156096), deeper in the thread, Yudkowsky wrote:
 
 > The more technology advances, the further we can move people towards where they say they want to be in sexspace. Having said this we've said all the facts. Who competes in sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary is a policy question (that I personally find very humorous).