Bad language design? I mean, maybe! You could argue that! You could probably get a lot of Likes on Facebook arguing that! But if 370 million native English speakers _including you and virtually everyone who Liked your post_ are going to _continue_ automatically noticing what sex people are and using the corresponding pronouns without consciously thinking about it (in accordance with the "default for those-who-haven't-asked" clause of your reform proposal), then the criticism seems kind of idle!
-The "default for those-who-haven't-asked [going] by gamete size" part of Yudkowsky's proposal is _trying_ to deal with the backwards-compatibility problem by being backwards-compatible—recommending the same behavior in the vast majority of cases—but in doing so, it fails to accomplish its stated purpose of de-gendering the language. To _actually_ de-gender English, you'd need to _actually_ shatter the correlation between pronouns and sex/gender, such that a person's pronouns _were_ just an arbitrary extra piece of data—nothing to do with gender—that you needed to remember in the same way you have to remember people's names.
+The "default for those-who-haven't-asked [going] by gamete size" part of Yudkowsky's proposal is _trying_ to deal with the backwards-compatibility problem by being backwards-compatible—recommending the same behavior in the vast majority of cases—but in doing so, it fails to accomplish its stated purpose of de-gendering the language.
+
+To _actually_ de-gender English while keeping _she_ and _he_ (as contrasted to jumping to universal singular _they_, or _ve_), you'd need to _actually_ shatter the correlation between pronouns and sex/gender, such that a person's pronouns _were_ just an arbitrary extra piece of data that you needed to remember in the same way you have to remember people's names. But as far as I can tell, _no one_ wants this. When's the last time you heard someone you heard someone request pronouns for _non_-gender-related reasons? ("My pronouns are she/her—but note, that's _just_ because I prefer the aesthetics of how the pronouns sound; I'm _not_ in any way claiming that you should believe that I'm female, which isn't true.") Me neither.
+
+
[TODO—
- * Given that sex-category information _is_ being transfered, the "Pronouns are Ryphnol" lady has a point
- * And preferred pronouns have the same function as the typographic attacks in the multimodal-neurons paper
+ * Given that sex-category information is _in fact_ being transfered, the "Pronouns are Ryphnol" lady has a point
+ * To relate this to Yudkowsky's specialty And preferred pronouns have the same function as the typographic attacks in the multimodal-neurons paper
+ * the people aligning language models should understand this
]
-Me neither.
-
[OUTLINE of remainder—
- * The attempted backwards compatibility measure doesn't work; if people's behavior is still the same, then sex-category information is still being transfered; and, again, that was the motivation for the reform effort all along; in order to _actually_ de-gender language, you have to break the correlation: either go all-in on singular _they_, or somehow get people to establish and declare pronoun preferences that aren't about gender (which isn't what's going on in our world)
* Yudkowsky's response to all this?—apparently, to play dumb!!
* "I don't know what it's like in you head for a pronoun to map onto more than 'doesn't look like an Oliver'"—lies
* Gumball example
somewhere—
* Douglas Hofstader also made fun of gendered pronouns with his "Person Paper"—but notice that he didn't even consider the self-chosen criterion!!
+* similarly, Ms. supplanted Mrs./Miss, rather than circularly redefining the latter
* singular they for named individuals undermined indefinite singular 'they'
]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff