In contrast, I think asking everyone in my life to use she/her pronouns for me would be an _obviously incredibly bad decision_. Because—notwithstanding my clean-shavenness and beautiful–beautiful ponytail and slight gynecomastia from that HRT experiment five years ago—anyone who looks at me can see at a glance that I'm male (as a _fact_ about the real world, however I feel about it). People would comply because they felt obligated to (and apologize profusely when they slipped up), but it wouldn't come naturally, and strangers would always get it wrong without being told (in accordance with the "default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size" clause of Yudkowsky's reform proposal). The costs (this tremendous awkwardness and fakeness suffusing _all future social interactions involving me_) would exceed the benefits (I actually do feel happier about the word _she_).
-I used to trust Yudkowsky as an intellectual authority; his [Sequences](https://www.readthesequences.com/) from the late 'aughts were so life-alteringly great that I built up a trust that if Eliezer Yudkowsky said something, that thing was probably so, even if I didn't immediately understand why. But these days, Yudkowsky is telling me that 'she' normatively refers to the set of people who have asked us to use 'she', and that those who disagree are engaging in logically rude Shenanigans. However, as I have just explained at length, this is wrong. (Declaring a "normative" meaning on your Facebook wall doesn't rewrite the _actual_ meaning embodied the brains of 370 million English speakers.) If I were _dumb enough to believe him_, I might ask people for new pronouns, which would obviously be an incredibly bad decision. Yudkowsky is harming a reference class of people that includes more naïve versions of me by giving them bad information.
+I used to trust Yudkowsky as an intellectual authority; his [Sequences](https://www.readthesequences.com/) from the late 'aughts were so life-alteringly great that I built up a trust that if Eliezer Yudkowsky said something, that thing was probably so, even if I didn't immediately understand why. But these days, Yudkowsky is telling me that 'she' normatively refers to the set of people who have asked us to use 'she', and that those who disagree are engaging in logically rude Shenanigans. However, as I have just explained at length, this is wrong. (Declaring a "normative" meaning on your Facebook wall doesn't rewrite the _actual_ meaning embodied the brains of 370 million English speakers.) If I were _dumb enough to believe him_, I might ask people for new pronouns, which would obviously be an incredibly bad decision. Yudkowsky is harming a reference class of people that includes more naïve versions of me by giving them bad information; my life is better because I don't trust Eliezer Yudkowsky to tell me the truth.
-Why? If Yudkowsky is playing dumb (consciously or not) and I can't take his comments seriously, what's _actually_ going on here?
+(I guess I [can't say I wasn't warned](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science).)
+
+-----
+
+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 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):
+
+> It unfortunately occurs to me that I must, in cases like these, disclaim that—to the extent there existed sensible opposing arguments against what I have just said—people might be reluctant to speak them in public, in the present social atmosphere. [...]
+>
+> This is a filter affecting your evidence; it has not to my own knowledge filtered out a giant valid counterargument that invalidates this whole post. I would have kept silent in that case, for to speak then would have been dishonest.
+>
+> Personally, I'm used to operating without the cognitive support of a civilization in controversial domains, and have some confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it myself before speaking. So you know, from having read this, that I checked all the speakable and unspeakable arguments I had thought of, and concluded that this speakable argument would be good on net to publish, as would not be the case if I knew of a stronger but unspeakable counterargument in favor of Gendered Pronouns For Everyone and Asking To Leave The System Is Lying.
+>
+> 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.
+
+[TODO: okay, so what is "speakable"? In response to a commenter bringing up "Remembering pronouns is a tax on memory", Yudkowsky says—]
+
+> 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.
+
+[TODO: again, [Yudkowsky's pathological fixation on avoiding "lying"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly) is a distraction from anything that anyone actually cares about. Certainly, I don't believe (a) as stated. But something substantively _similar_ to (a), (a') that self-reports are biased by social desirability and we can't take "gender identity" literally seems _overwhelmingly_ likely to be true, and I have a study to support it— /papers/blanchard-clemmensen-steiner-social_desirability_response_set_and_systematic_distortion.pdf . This should not seem implausible to someone who co-blogged with Robin Hanson for three years! As for (b), I don't think they get more favorable treatment from the rest of Society uniformly, I absolutely believe (b') that there's a _subculture_ that encourages transition for ideological reasons among people who wouldn't think of themselves as "trans" if they lived in a different subculture.
+
+Can we talk about _that_ in your Caliphate, my (a') and (b')? (Which is the stuff I actually care about, not pronouns.) Based on my experiences trying to, my read of the situation is, No, we can't talk about that. But if so, this puts one of Yudkowsky's comments elsewhere in the thread in a different light https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421986539228&reply_comment_id=10159424960909228 —]
+
+> 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 disingenuous derailing tactic to say "Don't use your native language's pronouns; let's use _nouns_ to talk about the real issues", when you _motherfuckers_ have _no intention whatsoever_ of actually talking about the real issues! A lot of TERF-aligned folk would be a _lot_ more willing to compromise on the trivial pronoun issue, if they didn't (correctly) suspect the pronouns were being used as a wedge/typographical-attack to prevent them from talking about biological sex
+
+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 would be psychologically abusive]
+
+4 levels of intellectual conversation https://rationalconspiracy.com/2017/01/03/four-layers-of-intellectual-conversation/
+
+If we can't talk about that, then your rationality community is a _fraud_. If there's anything at all to your rationality stuff https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LqjKP255fPRY7aMzw/practical-advice-backed-by-deep-theories it should be _useful_ high-stakes pratical decisions that your community members need to make, like _whether or not to cut my dick off_. If we can't talk about the information I need to make an informed decision about that, then your rationalists are worse than useless. (Worse, because false claims to authority are more misleading than dead air.) You _motherfuckers_ need to rebrand, or disband, or be destroyed
+
+I know none of this matters (If any professional alignment researchers wasting time reading this instead of figuring out how to save the world, get back to work!!), but one would have thought that the _general_ skills of correct argument would matter for saving the world.
+
+a rationality community that can't think about _practical_ issues that affect our day to day lives, but can get existential risk stuff right, is like asking for self-driving car software that can drive red cars but not blue cars
+
+It's a _problem_ if public intellectuals in the current year need to pretend to be dumber than seven-year-olds in 2016
+
+If you don't actually believe in the [common interest of many causes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes) anymore, you could _say_ that—rebrand your thing as a more narrowly-scoped existential-risk-reduction cult, rather than falsely claiming to be about modeling-and-optimizing the world
+
+"We might well hear about it from the other side" is an interesting phrasing—almost admitting that you're a wholly owned subsidary of the Blue Tribe]
+
+> it is sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful to post your agreement with Stalin about things you actually agree with Stalin about, in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles, especially because people do *know* they're living in a half-Stalinist environment
+
+["Everybody knows" https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/ ]
+
+> I don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot, or utter silence about everything Stalin has expressed an opinion on including "2 + 2 = 4" because if that logically counterfactually were wrong you would not be able to express an opposing opinion.
+
+[Summarize "A Rational Argument" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9f5EXt8KNNxTAihtZ/a-rational-argument
+You could imagine the campaign manager saying the same thing—"I don't see what the alternative is".]
+
+[Agreeing with Stalin that 2+2=4 is fine; the problem is a sustained pattern of _selectively_ bring up pro-Party points while ignoring anti-Party facts that would otherwise be relevant to the topic of interest, including stonewalling commenters who try to point out relevance]
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