Okay. Having supplied just enough language to _start_ to talk about what it would even mean to actually become female—is that what I _want_?
-I've just explained that, _in principle_, it could be done, so you might think there's no _conceptual_ problem with the idea of changing sex, in the same sense that there's nothing _conceptually_ wrong with Jules Verne's [pair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon) of [novels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_Moon) about flying around the moon. There are lots of technical rocket-science details that Verne didn't and couldn't have known about in the 1860s, but the _basic idea_ was sound, and [actually achieved a hundred years later](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_8). So why is it in any way is it _relevant_ that making the magical transformation fantasy real would be technically complicated?
+I've just explained that, _in principle_, it could be done, so you might think there's no _conceptual_ problem with the idea of changing sex, in the same sense that there's nothing _conceptually_ wrong with Jules Verne's [pair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon) of [novels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_Moon) about flying around the moon. There are lots of technical rocket-science details that Verne didn't and couldn't have known about in the 1860s, but the _basic idea_ was sound, and [actually achieved a hundred years later](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_8). So why is it in any way _relevant_ that making the magical transformation fantasy real would be technically complicated?
It's relevant insofar as the technical details change your evaluation of the desirability of _what_ is to be accomplished, which can differ from [what sounds like good news in the moment of first hearing about the idea](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pK4HTxuv6mftHXWC3/prolegomena-to-a-theory-of-fun).
In the chapters on first-order effects, Murray lays out some of the immediate and knowable consequences of the group trait differences that have just been argued to exist at all. You might think that groups would have approximately the same IQs _within_ a profession, but this turns out not to be true: the gaps are either the same or larger! The reason probably differs by job: for jobs that most people are capable of, like being a janitor, employers value non-cognitive traits like conscientiousness more, and the IQ gap from the general population "carries through" to the profession.
-For jobs that usually require credentials, another explanation takes prominence. For decades, colleges have been applying pretty aggressive affirmative action policies, admitting black and Latino students with much weaker scores than white or Asian candidates: as far as admission to elite colleges goes, being black is an advantage equivalent to about 180 points on the SAT. That has ripple effects: elite colleges "snap up" the most talented non-Asian minorities, who then tend to come in lower in the class rankings—and this _within_-institution racial inequality perpetuates itself at less-elite institutions (which are playing the same game with the students who didn't get admitted by their first choice), and down the pipeline to graduate school and the professions. If schools applied the same standards to everyone, you wouldn't see this distortionary effect where the same credential means different things based on race—Murray notes that the U.S. military, which makes heavy use of aptitude testing, has been strikingly successful in this regard—but that would come at the cost of lopsided diversity numbers. For exceptionally cognitively demanding jobs, the competition for which H.R. or the admissions office are not given the power to meddle in, we see this anyway: as [Larry Summers (in)famously observed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers#Differences_between_the_sexes), small group differences in mean or variance result in much larger differences at the extreme tails of the distribution, such that there are just many _fewer_ non-Asian minorities who can perform at the level of elite CEOs and professors.
+For jobs that usually require credentials, another explanation takes prominence. For decades, colleges have been applying pretty aggressive affirmative action policies, admitting black and Latino students with much weaker scores than white or Asian candidates: as far as admission to elite colleges goes, being black is an advantage equivalent to about 180 points on the SAT. That has ripple effects: elite colleges "snap up" the most talented non-Asian minorities, who then tend to come in lower in the class rankings—and this _within_-institution racial inequality perpetuates itself at less-elite institutions (which are playing the same game with the students who didn't get admitted by their first choice), and down the pipeline to graduate school and the professions. If schools applied the same standards to everyone, you wouldn't see this distortionary effect where the same credential means different things based on race—Murray notes that the U.S. military, which makes heavy use of aptitude testing, has been strikingly successful in this regard—but that would come at the cost of lopsided diversity numbers. For exceptionally cognitively demanding jobs, the competition for which H.R. or the admissions office are not given the power to meddle in, we already see this anyway: as [Larry Summers (in)famously observed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers#Differences_between_the_sexes), small group differences in mean or variance result in much larger differences at the extreme tails of the distribution, such that there are just many _fewer_ non-Asian minorities who can perform at the level of elite CEOs and professors.
As to crime, Murray argues that the consequences of criminality differences are a bigger deal in big cities where segregated higher-crime neighborhoods form, in contrast to smaller towns and cities that are more racially integrated simply because there aren't enough minorities to form an enclave. Businesses and real estate developers are less willing to invest in high-crime areas, and with a higher ambient threat level, police officers in those areas are incentivized to be more jumpy about the use of force.
----
-... 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_.
+... 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 the differences _between_ humans.
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+
+
[the Georgetown law professor thing: "I end up having this angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are Blacks."—this is actually a very straightforward consequence of affirmative action (even if you don't believe in a genetic gap); it should be possible to reason about
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/03/12/georgetown-terminates-law-professor-reprehensible-comments-about-black-students
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]
"rotation" of the class axis, as people sort by cognitive ability directly rather than race??
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354010004_Genetic_Ancestry_and_General_Cognitive_Ability_in_a_Sample_of_American_Youths
+only 14% approval for IQ enhancement https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2020/12/10/biotechnology-research-viewed-with-caution-globally-but-most-support-gene-editing-for-babies-to-treat-disease/
+
"Human capital mediates natural selection in contemporary humans"
https://ueaeco.github.io/working-papers/papers/ueaeco/UEA-ECO-21-02_Updated.pdf
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). 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, 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 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). 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, 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? "Pronouns shouldn't convey sex-category information," is a fine [motte](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/), but it's not consistent with the bailey of, "_Therefore_, when people request that you alter your pronoun usage in order to change the sex-category information being conveyed, you should obey the request."
+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.
+
+"Pronouns shouldn't convey sex-category information," is a fine [motte](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/), but it's not consistent with the bailey of, "_Therefore_, when people request that you alter your pronoun usage in order to change the sex-category information being conveyed, you should obey the request." Even if the situation is an artifact of bad language design, as Yudkowsky argues—that in a saner world, this conflict would have never come up—that doesn't automatically favor resolving the conflict in favor of self-chosen pronouns.
-Even if the situation is an artifact of bad language design, as Yudkowsky argues—that in a saner world, this conflict would have never come up—that doesn't automatically favor resolving the conflict in favor of self-chosen pronouns. Perhaps in a saner world, all children would have their own toys, but that doesn't tell us what to do when children are fighting over a toy in our own world. [TODO: weak analogy, cut]
[TODO: transition sentence]
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+
> 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!
(Incidentally, 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 opposition to _compelled speech_: many people who don't think some trans person's transition should "count", don't want to be coerced into legitimizing it with the pronoun choices in their _own_ speech, but don't object to _other_ people who _do_ want to legitimize the transition using preferred pronouns in _their_ speech. But leaving that aside—)
* I need the correct answer
* "We can't talk about this"—utterly discrediting of the entire project"
* not the woke position—it's an incoherent position
+* What is the regularity in human psychology such that we end up with "gendered" noun classes? We are sexually dimorphic animals
+* compare the formal/informal distinction tu/Usted in other languages—that's a case where you obviously want speaker choice, not subject choice
+* the people aligning language models need to know this!!
+* he can only speak in terms of abstractions that are very obviously not what's happening—it's true that bathroom usage is not an ontological fact, but the function of bathrooms is _to protect females from males_. If you can't talk about that core issue—the thing that people actually care about—then the smugness is actively derailing the discussion, even if you didn't say anything false
+
+* singular
> In terms of important things? Those would be all the things I've read - from friends, from strangers on the Internet, above all from human beings who are people - describing reasons someone does not like to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket, as it would be assigned by their birth certificate, or perhaps at all.
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