... and that's the book review that I would _prefer_ to write. A social-science review of a social-science book, for social-science nerds, in a world that wasn't _about to end_. Let me explain.
-When scholars like Murray write about "intelligence", they're talking about a summary of the differences _between_ humans: we can measure how well different humans perform at various verbal or spatial or mathematical thinking-tasks, and it turns out that, on average, people who are good at one thinking-task also tend to be good at others. Graph all the test scores on an appropriately high-dimensional plot, and the longest axis of the hyperellipsoid represents "general intelligence"—the dimension of human variation that we recognize as "smart" _vs._ "dumb."
+When scholars like Murray write about "intelligence", they're talking about a summary of the differences _between_ humans: we can measure how well different humans perform at various verbal or spatial or mathematical thinking-tasks, and it turns out that, on average, people who are good at one thinking-task also tend to be good at others. Graph all the test scores on an appropriately high-dimensional plot, and [the longest axis of the hyperellipsoid](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#the-length-of-a-hyperellipsoid) represents "general intelligence"—the dimension of human variation that we recognize as "smart" _vs._ "dumb."
But this particular dick-measuring contest takes place in the context of a human civilization; it doesn't tell us very much about "intelligence" as a natural phenomenon—the capacity of an agent to achieve goals across a variety of environments. Maybe some humans read better than others, but from the standpoint of eternity, reading itself is a _recent_ cultural practice [(invented only 3500 years ago)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy#Prehistoric_and_ancient_literacy) that piggybacks off of natural language capabilities that _all_ developmentally normal humans share. Cats and crows and octopuses _do_ have "intelligence"—various cognitive abilities that let them integrate sensory information into a model of their environment, allocate attention, execute motor plans to seek prey or avoid predators, _&c._, but you can't give them a [Stanford–Binet IQ test](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford%E2%80%93Binet_Intelligence_Scales), which was designed around the _specific_ set of abilties that humans have in common. But, in principle, humans aren't special.
-And yet—it seems like humans _are_ special, in some ways. Of all the creatures on [the tree of life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life_(biology)), our lineage "took over the world" in the sense that if humans want a resource that cats or crows or octopuses are using, the nonhuman side of the ensuing conflict is predictably going to lose. (To the extent that we don't usually think of ourselves as engaging in a "conflict". Animals aren't _enemies_; they're just in the way.) This is not because humans are stronger or have sharper teeth than other creatures, but because of something about our "intelligence" in the natural-phenomenon (not the IQ-test variation) sense. It's not even necessarily about _individual_ human intelligence being a particularly formidable force: given no tools and no friends, and confronted by a hungry lion at ten paces, it doesn't seem easy to survive by thinking of some incredibly clever plan. If you had a gun, you could shoot the lion, but [no one individual knows how to make a gun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Pencil) all by themselves, starting from nothing.
+And yet—it seems like humans _are_ special, in some ways. Of all the creatures on [the tree of life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life_(biology)), our lineage "took over the world" in the sense that if humans want a resource that cats or crows or octopuses are using, the nonhuman side of the ensuing conflict is predictably going to lose. (To the extent that we don't usually think of ourselves as engaging in a "conflict". Animals aren't _enemies_; they're just in the way.) This is not because humans are stronger or have sharper teeth than other creatures, but because of something about our "intelligence" in the natural-phenomenon sense, not the IQ test variation sense. It's not even necessarily about _individual_ human intelligence being a particularly formidable force: given no tools and no friends, and confronted by a hungry lion at ten paces, it doesn't seem easy to survive by thinking of some incredibly clever plan. If you had a gun, you could shoot the lion, but [no one individual knows how to make a gun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Pencil) all by themselves, starting from nothing.
Rather, the power of humanity over the rest of the biosphere has to do with our species having evolved a suite of cognitive capabilities adequate to support the accumulation of culture and technology. If you already had a spear, you might be able to think of of some incredibly clever plan to get a slightly sharper spear—which everyone in your tribe could imitate. And so on up the tech tree.
+[TODO: ↓ clunky prose probably needs a rewrite after better outlining]
+
You can think of events on Earth before the rise of human civilization as mostly being shaped by evolution by natural selection: new complex ordered phenomena arose as the product of genetic mutations that allowed their bearers to survive and reproduce, thereby increasing the frequency of the mutation. Natural selection is a form of _optimization_: the accumulation of beneficial mutations creates functionality that looks "designed" for the purposes of reproduction, because they were selected for existence on that basis.
-But _after_ the rise of civilization, biological evolution stopped being the dominant force shaping planetary events, just because cultural evolution runs on a faster timescale. If some other species were on the evolutionary path towards developing the capabilities that would eventually result in them developing their own civilization, it basically "wouldn't matter".
+But _after_ the rise of civilization, biological evolution stopped being the dominant force shaping planetary events, just because cultural evolution runs on a faster timescale. If some other species were on the evolutionary path towards developing the capabilities that would eventually result in them developing their own civilization, it basically "wouldn't matter".
To the extent that our civilization is better for us to live in than the state of nature, it's because civilization is the product of the cumulative optimization of humans trying to acheive their goals: vast, complex infrastructure and economies look "designed" to cater to human needs—supermarkets to feed us, hospitals to heal us, cars and airplanes to take us where we want to go—because we selected them for existence on that basis.
-
[What I actually care about: the intelligence explosion; the alignment problem might be solvable by von Neumann clones; a civilization at our tech level with a more functional state religion that wasn't afraid of genetics would be able to produce them faster than we will; this is really bad guys]
[shut down tribalist thinking: it's not like white people (or even Jews) are the pinnicle of creation; imagine the space of possible minds and consider psychic unity and know how puny we all are]
Modernity selects against those capable of maintaining it
https://twitter.com/CovfefeAnon/status/1441997339309314049
+https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/nyregion/gifted-talented-nyc-schools.html
+
+https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/10/09/the-art-institute-of-chicago-fires-all-122-of-its-unpaid-and-volunteer-docents-because-they-arent-sufficiently-diverse/
-Title: Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal
+Title: Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal
Date: 2022-01-01 11:00
Category: commentary
Tags: Eliezer Yudkowsky
Well, it would seem that the motivating example—the historical–causal explanation for why we're having this conversation about pronoun reform in the first place—is that trans men (female-to-male transsexuals) prefer to be called _he_, and trans women (male-to-female transsexuals) prefer to be called _she_. (Transsexuals seem much more common than people who just have principled opinions about pronoun reform without any accompanying desire to change what sex other people perceive them as.)
-But the _reason_ transsexuals want this is _because_ they're trying to change their socially-perceived sex category and actually-existing English speakers interpret _she_ and _he_ as conveying sex-category information. People who request _he/him_ pronouns aren't doing it because they want their subject pronoun to be a two-letter word rather than a three-letter word, or because they hate the [voiceless postalveolar fricative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_postalveolar_fricative) (_sh_) sound. They're doing it _because_, in English, those are the pronouns for _males_. If it were _actually true_ that _she_ and _he_ were just two alternative third-person pronouns that could be used interchangeably with no difference in meaning, with the only function of the distinction being collision-avoidance, then _there would be no reason to care_ which one someone used, as long as the referent was clear. But this doesn't match people's behavior: using gender pronouns other than those preferred by the subject is typically responded to as a social attack (as would be predicted by the theory that _she _ and _he_ convey sex-category information and transsexuals don't want to be perceived as their natal sex), not with, "Oh, it took me an extra second to parse your sentence because you unexpectedly used a pronoun different from the one the subject prefers, but now I understand what you meant" (as would be predicted by the theory that "_he_ refers to the set of people who have asked us to use _he_ [...] and to say that this just _is_ the normative definition").
+But the _reason_ transsexuals want this is _because_ they're trying to change their socially-perceived sex category and actually-existing English speakers interpret _she_ and _he_ as conveying sex-category information. People who request _he/him_ pronouns aren't doing it because they want their subject pronoun to be a two-letter word rather than a three-letter word, or because they hate the [voiceless postalveolar fricative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_postalveolar_fricative) (_sh_) sound. They're doing it _because_, in English, those are the pronouns for _males_. If it were _actually true_ that _she_ and _he_ were just two alternative third-person pronouns that could be used interchangeably with no difference in meaning, with the only function of the distinction being collision-avoidance, then _there would be no reason to care_ which one someone used, as long as the referent was clear. But this doesn't match people's behavior: using gender pronouns other than those preferred by the subject is typically responded to as a social attack (as would be predicted by the theory that _she_ and _he_ convey sex-category information and transsexuals don't want to be perceived as their natal sex), not with, "Oh, it took me an extra second to parse your sentence because you unexpectedly used a pronoun different from the one the subject prefers, but now I understand what you meant" (as would be predicted by the theory that "_he_ refers to the set of people who have asked us to use _he_ [...] and to say that this just _is_ the normative definition").
You can't have it both ways. "That toy is worthless", says one child to another, "_therefore_, you should give it to me." But if the toy were _actually_ worthless, why is the first child demanding it? The problem here is not particularly subtle or hard to understand! If the second child were to appeal to an adult's authority, and the adult replied, "The toy _is_ worthless, so give it to him," you would suspect the grown-up of not being impartial.
* "Can't imagine a sympathetic protagonist"—lies, imagine a rape victim
* "If there were unspeakable arguments against, we couldn't talk about them"—okay, then you and your rationalists are frauds
* I know none of this matters, but one would have thought that the _general_ skills of correct argument would matter for saving the world ... right? / brief recap of my Whole Dumb Story, need the correct answer in order to decide
+
+somewhere—
+* Douglas Hofstader also made fun of gendered pronouns with his "Person Paper"—but notice that he didn't even consider the self-chosen criterion!!
+* singular they for named individuals undermined indefinite singular 'they'
]
------
_ Student Dysphoria, and a Previous Life's War
2021 significant posts—
-_ Trans Kids on the Margin, and Harms From Misleading Training Data
_ Book Review: Charles Murray's Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America
-_ Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
_ 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
+_
_ Joint Book Review: Kathleen Stock's Material Girls and Kathryn Paige Harden's The Genetic Lottery
Minor queue—
_ Link: Babylon Bee "It's a Good Life" parody https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20ALZgd6_Ek
LW—
-✓ Blood Is Thicker Than Water
_ Generic Consequentialists Are Liars
_ Comment on "The Logic of Indirect Speech" (multi-receivers vs. uncertainty about a single recieiver)
_ Feature Selection
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff