Tags: Eliezer Yudkowsky
Status: draft
+> Go, Soul, the body's guest,
+> Upon a thankless errand:
+> Fear not to touch the best;
+> The truth shall be thy warrant:
+> Go, since I needs must die,
+> And give the world the lie.
+>
+> —["The Lie" by Walter Raleigh](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/trb9HPWFk8Gy9MBdN/less-wrong-poetry-corner-walter-raleigh-s-the-lie)
+
[In a February 2021 Facebook post, Eliezer Yudkowsky inveighs against English's system of singular third-person pronouns](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228). As a matter of clean language design, English's lack of a gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun is a serious flaw. The function of pronouns is to have a brief way to refer back to entities already mentioned: it's more user-friendly to be able to say "Katherine put her book on its shelf" rather than "Katherine put Katherine's book on the book's shelf". But then why couple that grammatical function to sex-category membership? You shouldn't _need_ to take a stance on someone's sex in order to talk about her or him putting a book on the shelf.
This affects, for example, science-fiction authors writing about AIs or hermaphroditic aliens (which don't have a sex), or mystery authors writing about a crime suspect whose identity (and therefore, sex) is unknown. In these cases, _she_ or _he_ are inappropriate, but the English language offers no alternative lacking its own downsides: _it_ is understood to refer to non-persons, _they_ gets conjugated as a plural, and neopronouns like [_ey/em/eir_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun)—or [_ve/ver/vis_](http://www.urticator.net/essay/0/30.html), as used in some of [Yudkowsky's juvenilia](https://intelligence.org/files/CFAI.pdf)—are hard to rally adoption for because pronouns are a [closed class](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Part_of_speech#Open_and_closed_classes)—not something people are used to new members of being coined, in the way that people are used to seeing new nouns and adjectives.
> 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?
+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 sex-based default?
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:
+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."
+
+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]
-> 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!_
+> 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—)
+(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—)
-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.
+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.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff