I take pains to emphasize this because Yudkowsky [misrepresents what his political opponents are typically claiming](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/), repeatedly trying to frame the matter of dispute as to whether pronouns can be "lies" (to which Yudkowsky says, No, that would be ontologically confused)—whereas if you _actually read_ what the people on the other side of the policy debate are saying, they're largely _not claiming_ that "pronouns are lies"! (It seems fair to regard Kerr's article as representative of gender-critical ("TERF") concerns; I've seen the post linked in those circles more than once, and it's cited in [embattled former University of Sussex professor Kathleen Stock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Stock#Views_on_gender_self-identification)'s book _Material Girls_.)
+[TODO: explain the implicature by which weakmanning is a problem]
+
(Relatedly, [critics of this blog](/2020/Nov/the-feeling-is-mutual/) sometimes refer to me as _she_, reflecting their belief that I'm a trans woman in denial, even though I think of myself of a man ([adult human male](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/) not trying to appear otherwise). I never correct them—not just because [it's kind of flattering](/2021/May/interlude-xxi/), and not just because I don't think of myself as having the right to dictate how other people talk about me—but because "she" _is_ the correct pronoun to convey the meaning _they're_ trying to express, whether or not _I_ agree with it.)
Anyway, given these reasons why the _existing_ meanings of _she_ and _he_ are relevant to the question of pronoun reform, what is Yudkowsky's response?
Is it the idea that the legal system would penalize someone for pronoun non-compliance?
-[TODO: cite examples of this happening; as liberal intellectuals, we want to debate the optimal communication policy and expect to govern by assent; we're not so bloodthirsty as to want to throw dissenters in jail—but that is potentially what's at stake]
+[TODO: cite examples of this happening; as liberal intellectuals, we want to debate the optimal communication policy and expect to govern by assent; we're not so bloodthirsty as to want to throw dissenters in jail—but that is potentially what's at stake; the judge actually does have a forced choice between sustained/overruled]
[TODO: I said bathroom, &c.]
> This is *not* the woke position. The woke position is that when you call somebody "she" because she requested "she", you're validating her gender preference. I may SEPARATELY be happy to validate somebody's gender preference by using the more complex language feature of NOUN PHRASES to construct an actual SENTENCE that refers to her ON PURPOSE as a "woman", but when it comes to PRONOUNS I am not even validating anyone.
-Right; it's not the woke position. It's an _incoherent_ position that's optimized to concede to the woke the policy that they want for a _different stated reason_ in order to make the concession appear "neutral" and not "politically" motivated. She requested "she" _because_ acceding to the request validates her gender preference—and it _continues_ to validate her gender preference in the minds of all neurologically normal native English speakers who are listening, even if Eliezer Yudkowsky has some clever casuistry for why it doesn't mean that when _he_ says it.
+Right; it's not the woke position. It's an _incoherent_ position that's optimized to concede to the woke the behavior that they want for a _different stated reason_ in order to make the concession appear "neutral" and not "politically" motivated. She requested "she" _because_ acceding to the request validates her gender preference in the minds of all neurologically normal native English speakers who are listening, even if Eliezer Yudkowsky has some clever casuistry for why it doesn't mean that when _he_ says it.
-I'm _not_ saying that Yudkowsky should have a different pronoun policy. (I agree that misgendering trans people "on principle" would be stupid.) Rather, I'm saying that in order to _actually_ be politically neutral in your analysis, you need to _acknowledge_ the costs and benefits of a policy to different parties, and face the unhappy fact that sometimes there are cases where there _is_ no "neutral" policy, because all available policies impose costs on _someone_ and there's no solution that everyone is happy with. (Rational agents can hope to reach _some_ point on the Pareto frontier, but non-identical agents are necessarily going to fight about _which_ point, even if most of the fighting takes place in non-realized counterfactual possible worlds rather than exerting costs in reality.)
+I'm _not_ saying that Yudkowsky should have a different pronoun policy. (I agree that misgendering trans people "on principle" would be stupid.) Rather, I'm saying that in order to _actually_ be politically neutral in your analysis of _why_ someone might choose one pronoun policy over another, you need to _acknowledge_ the costs and benefits of a policy to different parties, and face the unhappy fact that sometimes there are cases where there _is_ no "neutral" policy, because all available policies impose costs on _someone_ and there's no solution that everyone is happy with. (Rational agents can hope to reach _some_ point on the Pareto frontier, but non-identical agents are necessarily going to fight about _which_ point, even if most of the fighting takes place in non-realized counterfactual possible worlds rather than exerting costs in reality.)
Policy debates should not appear one-sided. Exerting social pressure on (for example) a native-English-speaking rape victim to refer to her male rapist with _she_/_her_ pronouns is a _cost_ to her. And, simultaneously, _not_ exerting that pressure is a _cost_ to many trans people, by making recognition of their social gender _conditional_ on some standard of good behavior, rather than an unconditional fact that doesn't need to be "earned" in any way.
If Yudkowsky is obviously playing dumb (consciously or not) and his comments can't be taken seriously, what's _actually_ going on here?
-When smart people act dumb, it's usually wisest to assume that their behavior is _optimized_ stupidity—apparent "stupidity" that that achieves a goal through some other channel than their words straightforwardly reflecting the truth. Someone who was _actually_ stupid wouldn't be able to come up with the specific balance of insight and selective stupidity fine-tuned to reach a gender-politically convenient conclusion without explicitly invoking any gender-political reasoning.
+When smart people act dumb, it's usually wisest to assume that their behavior is _optimized_ stupidity—apparent "stupidity" that that achieves a goal through some other channel than their words straightforwardly reflecting the truth. Someone who was _actually_ stupid wouldn't be able to generate text with the specific balance of insight and selective stupidity fine-tuned to reach a gender-politically convenient conclusion without explicitly invoking any gender-political reasoning.
Fortunately, Yudkowsky is honest enough to give us a clue in the form of [a disclaimer comment](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228):
>
> But the existence of a wide social filter like that should be kept in mind; to whatever quantitative extent you don't trust your ability plus my ability to think of valid counterarguments that might exist, as a Bayesian you should proportionally update in the direction of the unknown arguments you speculate might have been filtered out.
+So, the explanation of [the problem of political censorship filtering evidence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting) here is great, but the part where Yudkowsky claims "confidence in [his] own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter" is just _laughable_. My point that _she_ and _he_ have existing meanings that you can't just ignore by fiat given that the existing meanings are exactly what motivate people to ask for new pronouns is _really obvious_.
+
+It would actually be _less_ embarassing for Yudkowsky if he were outright lying about having tried to think of counterarguments. The original post isn't _that_ bad if you assume that Yudkowsky was writing off the cuff, that he clearly just _didn't put any effort whatsoever_ into thinking about why someone might disagree. If he _did_ put in the effort—enough that he felt comfortable bragging about his ability to see the other side of the argument—and _still_ ended up proclaiming his "simplest and best protocol" without even so much as mentioning any of its incredibly obvious costs (like expecting a rape victim to testify about what her rapist did to her with "her" penis) ... that's just _pathetic_. If Yudkowsky's ability to explore the space of arguments is _that_ bad, why would you trust his opinion about _anything_?
+
+But perhaps I'm not appreciating exactly what stringent constraints he's operating under? The filtered-evidence disclaimer comment mentions "speakable and unspeakable arguments", and judges that the speakable argument in the original post was "good _on net_ to publish" (emphasis mine). Maybe Yudkowsky doesn't see himself as being obligated to publically consider downsides of the "simplest and best protocol" proposed in the post, if he considers the _main_ thesis of the post to have simply been the "speakable" pronouns-shouldn't-denote-sex argument.
-[On the one hand, kudos to Yudkowsky for pointing out the filter. On the other hand, this claim to have "independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter" is _laughable_; my point about the appeal of the self-ID pronoun convention rests on the existing meanings of gendered pronouns, such that it's hypocritical to play dumb about there being existing meanings while defending the self-ID convention is really obvious. If you're persuaded by anything I've said in this post, you should quantitatively downgrade your trust in Yudkowsky]
> A clearer example of a forbidden counterargument would be something like e.g. imagine if there was a pair of experimental studies somehow proving that (a) everybody claiming to experience gender dysphoria was lying, and that (b) they then got more favorable treatment from the rest of society. We wouldn't be able to talk about that. No such study exists to the best of my own knowledge, and in this case we might well hear about it from the other side to whom this is the exact opposite of unspeakable; but that would be an example.
> now that we have a truth-bearing sentence, we can admit of the possibility of using our human superpower of language to *debate* whether this sentence is indeed true or false [...] Trying to pack all of that into the pronouns you'd have to use in step 1 is the wrong place to pack it.
-It's a hollow stalling tactic to say "Don't pack this into pronouns; let's use nouns to talk about the real issues, when you _motherfuckers_ have _no intention whatsoever_ of actually using the human superpower of language to debate the real issues!
+It's a hollow stalling tactic to say "Don't pack this into pronouns; let's use nouns to talk about the real issues, when you _motherfuckers_ have _no intention whatsoever_ of actually using the human superpower of language to debate the real issues! (Again, if it helps think of the formality distinction—advocating for collapsing the tu/usted distinction is one thing; but if you demand that someone calls you usted _and_ refuse to let them talk with nouns about whether they respect you, that's abusive
I was going to write a different multi-thousand word blog post, but I'm sick of Eliezer Yudkowsky fucking with me for years
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff