From 1403f894675390fafe695545a763f8a0a447a78c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2021 11:50:45 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] check in --- content/drafts/book-review-facing-reality.md | 6 +++++- .../challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal.md | 6 +++--- notes/notes.txt | 3 +++ notes/post_ideas.txt | 3 +-- 4 files changed, 12 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-) diff --git a/content/drafts/book-review-facing-reality.md b/content/drafts/book-review-facing-reality.md index 073d1a1..62e3cc8 100644 --- a/content/drafts/book-review-facing-reality.md +++ b/content/drafts/book-review-facing-reality.md @@ -253,4 +253,8 @@ I feel a lot of sympathy for the defendant [TODO: compare Great Oxidization Event and its timescale to the Industrial Revolution??] "Genetic and environmental contributions to IQ in adoptive and biological families with 30-year-old offspring" -https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289621000635 \ No newline at end of file +https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289621000635 + +Modernity selects against those capable of maintaining it +https://twitter.com/CovfefeAnon/status/1441997339309314049 + diff --git a/content/drafts/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal.md b/content/drafts/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal.md index 206d323..e107499 100644 --- a/content/drafts/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal.md +++ b/content/drafts/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal.md @@ -43,9 +43,9 @@ This may be clearer to some readers if we consider a distinction less fraught th One could argue that the _tú_/_usted_ distinction is bad language design for the same reason Yudkowsky opposes the _she_/_he_ distinction: you shouldn't be forced to make a call on how familiar your relationship with someone is just in order to be able to use a pronoun for them. The modern English way is more flexible: you _can_ indicate formality if you want to by saying additional words, but it's not baked into the grammar itself. -However, if you were going to reform Spanish (or some other language with the second person formality distinction), you would probably abolish the distinction altogether, and just settle on one second-person singular pronoun. (Indeed, that's what happened in English historically—the formal _you_ took over as the universal second-person pronoun, and the informal singular _thou_/_thee_/_thine_ has vanished from common usage.) You wouldn't keep both forms, but circularly redefine them as referring only to the referent's preferred choice of address (?!). +However, if you were going to reform Spanish (or some other language with the second person formality distinction), you would probably abolish the distinction altogether, and just settle on one second-person singular pronoun. Indeed, that's what happened in English historically—the formal _you_ took over as the universal second-person pronoun, and the informal singular _thou_/_thee_/_thine_ has vanished from common usage. You wouldn't keep both forms, but circularly redefine them as referring only to the referent's preferred choice of address (?!). -The circular definition shouldn't satisfy _anyone_: people who want someone to call them _usted_ (or _tú_), do so _because_ of the difference in meaning and implied familiarity/respect, in the _existing_ (pre-reform) language. (Where else could such a preference possibly come from?) People who want the ability to dictate whether people address them with familiarity or respect might _think_ the circular definition is what they want, because it implies the behavior they want (other people using the preferred pronoun), but—whether or not the proponent of the changes consciously _notices_ the problem—the redefinition is functionally "hypocritical": it's only desireable insofar as people aren't _actually_ using it internally. +The circular definition shouldn't satisfy _anyone_: people who want someone to call them _usted_ (or _tú_), do so _because_ of the difference in meaning and implied familiarity/respect, in the _existing_ (pre-reform) language. (Where else could such a preference possibly come from?) People who want the ability to dictate whether people address them with familiarity or respect might _think_ the circular definition is what they want, because it implies the behavior they want (other people using the preferred pronoun), but—whether or not the proponent of the changes consciously _notices_ the problem—the redefinition is functionally "hypocritical": it's only desirable insofar as people aren't _actually_ using it internally. This is a pretty basic point, and yet Yudkowsky steadfastly ignores the role of existing meanings in this debate, bizarrely writing as if we were defining a conlang from scratch: @@ -100,7 +100,7 @@ Fit in somewhere— * 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 * And doesn't EY have this whole thing about how you can't just wish away coordination problems?! (Although, this also makes it harder to escape the self-ID Schelling point) -* Schild's ladder +* Schild's ladder—noun classes in other languages are already pretty arbitrary; if the proposal is to make names like that * TODO: buff my "circular definition satisfies no one" argument to not be vulnerable to the anti-Liskov-substitution property of natural language definitions * singular diff --git a/notes/notes.txt b/notes/notes.txt index fa54515..53ab1fa 100644 --- a/notes/notes.txt +++ b/notes/notes.txt @@ -2833,3 +2833,6 @@ similar premise to "Dr. Equality and the Great Shift": https://www.youtube.com/w https://archive.ph/14kOD https://wyclif.substack.com/p/biorxiv-wouldnt-host-our-paper-on + +"Impact Protection Potential of Mammalian Hair: Testing the Pugilism Hypothesis for the Evolution of Human Facial Hair" +https://academic.oup.com/iob/article/2/1/obaa005/5799080 diff --git a/notes/post_ideas.txt b/notes/post_ideas.txt index bcb7fcd..4abe74c 100644 --- a/notes/post_ideas.txt +++ b/notes/post_ideas.txt @@ -1,6 +1,4 @@ Queue— -_ There Should Be a Closetspace/Lease Bound Crossover Fic -✓ I Don't Do Policy _ Student Dysphoria, and a Previous Life's War _ Link: "Blood Is Thicker Than Water" @@ -12,6 +10,7 @@ _ Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal _ A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning Minor queue— +_ FaceApp tips _ Model-Free Happiness _ Subspatial Distribution Overlap and Cancellable Stereotypes _ Sticks and Stones -- 2.17.1