> 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 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 native English speakers who are listening, even if Eliezer Yudkowsky has some clever casuistry for why it magically 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 native English speakers who are listening, even if Eliezer Yudkowsky has some clever casuistry for why it magically doesn't mean that when _he_ says it.
I'm _not_ saying that Yudkowsky should have a different pronoun policy. (I agree that misgendering all trans people "on principle" seems very wrong and unappealing.) 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.)
-----
-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 represents _optimized_ stupidity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie)—apparent "stupidity" 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 a specific balance of insight and selective stupidity fine-tuned to reach a gender-politically convenient conclusion without explicitly invoking any controversial gender-political reasoning.
+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 represents _optimized_ stupidity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie)—apparent "stupidity" 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 a specific balance of insight and selective stupidity fine-tuned to reach a gender-politically convenient conclusion without explicitly invoking any controversial gender-political reasoning.
Fortunately, Yudkowsky graciously grants us a clue in the form of [a disclaimer comment](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228):
I remember this being pretty shocking to read back in 'aught-seven. What an alien mindset! But it's _correct_. You can't rationally argue "for" a chosen conclusion, because only the process you use to _decide what to argue for_ can be your real reason.
-This is a shockingly high standard for anyone to aspire to live up to—but what made the Yudkowsky's Sequences so life-changingly valuable, was that they articulated the _existence_ of such a standard. For that, I will always be grateful.
+This is a shockingly high standard for anyone to aspire to live up to—but what made Yudkowsky's Sequences so life-changingly valuable, was that they articulated the _existence_ of such a standard. For that, I will always be grateful.
... which is why it's so _bizarre_ that the Yudkowsky of the current year acts like he's never heard of it! If your _actual_ bottom line is that it is sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful to post your agreement with Stalin, then sure, you can _totally_ find something you agree with to write on the lines above! Probably something that "exhibits generally rationalist principles", even! It's just that any rationalist who sees the game you're playing is going to correctly identify you as a partisan hack on this topic and take that into account when deciding whether they can trust you on other topics.
Even if one were to agree with this description of Yudkowsky's behavior, it doesn't immediately follow that Yudkowsky is making the wrong decision. Again, "bad faith" is meant as a literal description, not a contentless attack—maybe there are some circumstances in which engaging some amount of bad faith is the right thing to do, given the constraints one faces. For example, when talking to people on Twitter with a very different ideological background from me, I sometimes anticipate that if my interlocutor knew what I was actually thinking, they wouldn't want to talk to me, so I take care to word my replies in a way that makes it look like I'm more ideologically aligned with them than I actually am. (For example, I [never say "assigned female/male at birth" in my own voice on my own platform](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/), but I'll do it in an effort to speak my interlocutor's language.) I think of this as the _minimal_ amount of strategic bad faith needed to keep the conversation going, to get my interlocutor to evaluate my argument on its own merits, rather than rejecting it for coming from an ideological enemy. In cases such as these, I'm willing to defend my behavior as acceptable—there _is_ a sense in which I'm being deceptive by optimizing my language choice to make my interlocutor make bad guesses about my ideological alignment, but I'm comfortable with that amount and scope of deception because I don't think my interlocutor _should_ be paying attention to my personal alignment.
+[TODO: the term is "concern trolling"; speak of trying to correct a distortion]
+
That is, my bad faith Twitter gambit of deceiving people about my ideological alignment in the hopes of improving the discussion seems like something that makes our collective beliefs about the topic-being-argued-about _more_ accurate. (And the topic-being-argued-about is presumably of greater collective interest than which "side" I personally happen to be on.)
In contrast, Yudkowsky's bad faith gambit is the exact reverse: he's making the discussion worse in the hopes of correcting people's beliefs about his own ideological alignment. (He's not a right-wing Bad Guy, but people would tar him as a right-wing Bad Guy if he ever said anything negative about trans people.) This doesn't improve our collective beliefs about the topic-being-argued about; it's a _pure_ ass-covering move.
Policy debates should not appear one-sided. Faced with this kind of dilemma, I can't say that defying Power is necessarily the right choice: if there really _were_ no other options between deceiving your readers with a bad faith performance, and incurring Power's wrath, and Power's wrath would be too terrible to bear, then maybe deceiving your readers with a bad faith performance is the right thing to do.
-But if you actually _cared_ about not deceiving your readers, you would want to be _really sure_ that those _really were_ the only two options. You'd [spend five minutes by the clock looking for third alternatives](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative)—including, possibly, not issuing proclamations on your honor as leader of the so-called "rationalist" community on topics where you _explicitly intend to ignore counteraguments on grounds of their being politically unfavorable_. Yudkowsky rejects this alternative on the grounds that it allgedly implies "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", but this seems like yet another instance of Yudkowsky playing dumb: if he _wanted_ to, I'm sure Eliezer Yudkowsky could think of _some relevant differences_ between "2 + 2 = 4" (a trivial fact of arithmetic) and "the simplest and best protocol is, "'He' refers to the set of people who have asked us to use 'he'" (a complex policy proposal whose flaws I have analyzed in detail above).
+But if you actually _cared_ about not deceiving your readers, you would want to be _really sure_ that those _really were_ the only two options. You'd [spend five minutes by the clock looking for third alternatives](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative)—including, possibly, not issuing proclamations on your honor as leader of the so-called "rationalist" community on topics where you _explicitly intend to ignore counteraguments on grounds of their being politically unfavorable_. Yudkowsky rejects this alternative on the grounds that it allegedly implies "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", but this seems like yet another instance of Yudkowsky motivatedly playing dumb: if he _wanted_ to, I'm sure Eliezer Yudkowsky could think of _some relevant differences_ between "2 + 2 = 4" (a trivial fact of arithmetic) and "the simplest and best protocol is, "'He' refers to the set of people who have asked us to use 'he'" (a complex policy proposal whose flaws I have analyzed in detail above).
+
+"I think people are better off at the end of that," Yudkowsky writes of the consequences of agreeing-with-Stalin-in-ways-that-exhibit-generally-rationalist-principles policies. But here I think we need a more conflict-theoretic analysis that looks at a more detailed level than "people." _Who_ is better off, specifically?
+... and, I had been planning to save the Whole Dumb Story about my alienation from Yudkowsky's so-called "rationalists" for a _different_ multi-thousand-word blog post, because _this_ multi-thousand-word blog post was supposed to be narrowly scoped to _just_ exhaustively replying to Yudkowsky's February 2021 Facebook post about pronoun conventions. But in order to explain the problems with "people do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment" and "people are better off at the end of that", I may need to _briefly_ recap some of the history leading to the present discussion, which explains why _I_ didn't know and _I'm_ not better off, with the understanding that it's only a summary and I might still need to tell the long version in a separate post, if it's still necessary relative to everything else I need to get around to writing.
+I _never_ expected to end up arguing about something so _trivial_ as the minutiae of pronoun conventions (which no one would care about if historical contingencies of the evolution of the English language hadn't made them a Schelling point and typographical attack surface for things people do care about). The conversation only ended up here after a series of derailings. At the start, I was _trying_ to say something substantive about the psychology of straight men who wish they were women.
-["People are better off at the end of that"— _who_ is better off? We need a conflict-theoretic analysis]
+You see, back in the 'aughts when Yudkowsky was writing his Sequences, he occasionally said some things about sex differences that I often found offensive at the time, but which ended up being hugely influential on me, especially in the context of my ideological affinity towards feminism and my secret lifelong-since-puberty erotic fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman. I wrote about this at length in a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to my Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/)].
-[I was going to save the Whole Dumb Story for a different post, and keep this post narrowly scoped to just critiquing the Feb. 2021 pronouns post, but in order to explain the problem with "Everybody knows" and "People are better off after that", I need to breifly summarize the context of this discussion which explains why _I_ didn't know and _I'm_ not better off—with the understanding that this only a brief summary, and I might tell the long version in a separate post—if it's still necessary, relative to everything else I need to get around to writing]
+In particular, in ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) (and its precursor in a [2004 Extropians mailing list post](https://archive.is/En6qW)), Yudkowsky explains that despite the ease of _imagining_ the idea of "changing sex" and referring to it in a short English sentence, actually
-[I _never_ expected to end up arguing about the mintuiae of pronoun conventions; I wanted to talk about the real issues]
-[It all started back in the 'aughts, when the occasional things about sex differences that cropped up in the Sequences (especially "Changing Emotions" and the Extropians mailing list pre) turned out to be useful for understanding what was going on with my gender thing; I wrote about this in a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to my Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/).]
[But that was all about me—I assumed "trans" was a different thing. My first clue that I might not be living in that world came from—Eliezer Yudkowsky, with the "at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women" thing]
+
+_After it's been pointed out_, it should be a pretty obvious hypothesis that "guy on the Extropians mailing list in 2004 who fantasizes about having a female counterpart" and "guy in 2016 Berkeley who identifies as a trans woman" are the _same guy_.
+
+
[So I ended up arguing with people about the two-type taxonomy, and I noticed that those discussions kept getting _derailed_ on some variation of "The word woman doesn't actually mean that". So I took the bait, and starting arguing against that, and then Yudkowsky comes back to the subject with his "Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning"—and I go on a philosophy of language crusade, and Yudkowsky eventually clarifies, and _then_ he comes back _again_ in Feb. 2022 with his "simplest and best protocol"]
[At this point, the nature of the game is very clear. Yudkowsky wants to mood-affiliate with being on the right side of history, subject to the constraint of not saying anything false. I want to actually make sense of what's actually going on in the world, because _I need the correct answer to decided whether or not to cut my dick off_. On "his turn", he comes up with some pompous proclamation that's optimized to make the "pro-trans" faction look smart and good and the "anti-trans" faction look dumb and bad, "in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles." On my turn, I put in an absurd amount of effort explaining in exhaustive, _exhaustive_ detail why Yudkowsky's pompous proclamation was substantively misleading as constrated to what you would say if you were actually trying to make sense of the world.]
[I can win concessions, like "On the Argumentative Form", but I don't want concessions; I want to _actually get the goddamned right answer_]
+[principled trans people should be offended, too!]
+
+[our beliefs about dolphins are downstream of Scott's political incentives]
+
-------
[Why does this matter? It would be dishonest for me to claim that this is _directly_ relevant to xrisk, because that's not my real bottom line]
> the challenge is almost entirely about high integrity communication by small groups
https://twitter.com/HiFromMichaelV/status/1486044326618710018
+
+My religion of Yudkowskian rationalism does have a strong tradition of _disagreement_ being socially acceptable (as it is [written of the fifth virtue](https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues), those who wish to fail must first prevent their friends from helping them), but only "on the object-level", as we say. The act of jumping up a meta level and positing that one's interlocutors are not just wrong, but _dishonest_, tends to be censured as "uncharitable."
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff