Fair enough. Sounds like an argument for universal singular _they_ (and eating the cost of increased collisions where it's ambiguous which subject an instance of _they_ would refer to): if you don't think pronouns should convey sex-category information, then don't use pronouns that convey sex-category information! But then, in an unexplained leap, Yudkowsky proclaims:
-> So it seems to me 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. Because it is _logically_ rude, not just socially rude, to try to bake any other more complicated and controversial definition _into the very language protocol we are using to communicate_.
+> So it seems to me 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. Because it is _logically_ rude, not just socially rude, to try to bake any other more complicated and controversial definition _into the very language protocol we are using to communicate_.
+The problem with this is that [the alleged rationale for the proposal _very obviously and blatantly_ does not support the proposal](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i6fKszWY6gLZSX2Ey/fake-optimization-criteria). If your default pronoun for those-who-haven't-asked goes by perceived sex (which one presumes is what Yudkowsky means by "gamete size"—we don't typically observe people's gametes!), then you're still baking sex-category information into the language protocol in the form of the default! Moreover, this is clearly an "intended" rather than an accidental effect of the proposal, in the sense that a policy that _actually_ avoided baking sex-category information into the language (like universal singular _they_, or name-initial- or hair-color-based pronouns) would not have the same appeal to many of those who support self-chosen pronouns: _why_ is it that some people would want to opt-out of the default sex-based pronouns?
+
+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").
+
+You could argue, as Yudkowsky has, that this situation is an artefact of bad language design. As the post says earlier:
+
+> 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 substantial fraction 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—)
+
+The _main_ problem with this is, in dicussing how to reform English, we're not actually in the position of defining a language from scratch. Arguing that the cultural evolution of English involved Shenanigans, doesn't itself make the Shenangians go away. 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.
+
+However, 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 associate with a word, you actually _do_ have to somehow get people to change their usage. You can't just _declare_ your preferred new meaning and claim that it applies to the language as actually spoken, without users of the language changing their behavior.
+
+For example, I think it's Shenanigans to use the word "roommate" to refer to people who only share a house or apartment and not a literal room; surely you should say "housemate" or "flatmate" if that's what you really mean. However, this claim of mine about the meaning of the word "roommate" is [actually _false_ in American usage](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/roommate). (Apparently the British are more sensible about this.) The only way to get the Shenanigans to stop is to get people to _actually_ adopt my usage in their mapping of people's-living-situations to word-used-to-describe-living-situation. If I were to just _pretend_ that my preferred usage was already the actual usage, then I would make worse predictions when my friends in California mention their roommates.
+
+For another view on this, think of language as being like software. [TODO: ... finish the software analogy]
+
+[this is unfortunate, but you can't solve the problem by playing dumb]
------
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228
+OUTLINING
+* The problem with this is that the proposed convention still transmits sex-category info; you're just not being honest about it
+* Software is already deployed
-Aella https://knowingless.com/2019/06/06/side-effects-of-preferred-pronouns/
-
+Fit in somewhere—
+* Aside: "gamete size"—this is a tic where everyone knows what sex is, but no one is allowed to acknowledge the cluster
+* Aella https://knowingless.com/2019/06/06/side-effects-of-preferred-pronouns/
+* Pronouns are ryphenol
+* Policy debates should not appear one-sided
+* Rape victim is a sympathetic character
+* "I don't know what it feels like to 'you don't look like an Oliver'" is a lie; you can use pronouns for someone whose sex but not name you don't know https://web.archive.org/web/20070615130139/http://singinst.org/upload/CFAI.html#foot-15
* non-compelled speech is more compelling than clothing freedom
-* Sabbatai Zevi had an excuse: his choices were to convert to Islam or be impaled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatai_Zevi#Conversion_to_Islam
+* at least Sabbatai Zevi had an excuse: his choices were to convert to Islam or be impaled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatai_Zevi#Conversion_to_Islam
+* 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
> 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.
+
+Well, as Yudkowsky says earlier in the post, many "human beings who are people"—which pleonastic construction bizarrely seems to suggest Yudkowsky is opposing someone who somehow believes that some humans are _not_ people, but never mind—have "describ[ed] 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."
+
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff