-Title: Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal
+Title: Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal
Date: 2022-01-01 11:00
Category: commentary
Tags: Eliezer Yudkowsky
However, if you were going to reform Spanish (or some other language with the second-person formality distinction), you would probably abolish the distinction altogether, and just settle on one second-person singular pronoun. Indeed, that's what happened in English historically—the formal _you_ took over as the universal second-person pronoun, and the informal singular _thou_/_thee_/_thine_ has vanished from common usage. (People still recognize it as a second-person pronoun when encountered in old poetry—"The truth shall be thy warrant", _&c._—but most probably aren't aware of the formality distinction.) You wouldn't keep both forms, but circularly redefine them as referring only to the referent's preferred choice of address (?!).
-Really, the circular definition shouldn't satisfy _anyone_: people who want someone to call them _usted_ (or _tú_), do so _because_ of the difference in meaning and implied familiarity/respect, in the _existing_ (pre-reform) language. (Where else could such a preference possibly come from?) From an AI design standpoint, the circular redefinition can be seen as a form of ["wireheading"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aMXhaj6zZBgbTrfqA/a-definition-of-wireheading). You want people to respect you as a superior, and if they respected you as a superior, they'd call you _usted_. That could make a policy of coercing people into calling you _usted_ because you want them to seem superficially appealing. But the appeal solely rests on confusing the pre-reform meaning (under which the choice of _usted_ implies respect and is therefore desirable) and the post-reform meaning (under which the choice implies nothing). Whether or not the proponent of the change consciously _notices_ the problem, the redefinition is _functionally_ "hypocritical": it's only desirable insofar as people aren't _actually_ using it internally.
+Really, the circular definition shouldn't satisfy _anyone_: people who want someone to call them _usted_ (or _tú_), do so _because_ of the difference in meaning and implied familiarity/respect, in the _existing_ (pre-reform) language. (Where else could such a preference possibly come from?) From an AI design standpoint, the circular redefinition can be seen as a form of ["wireheading"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aMXhaj6zZBgbTrfqA/a-definition-of-wireheading). You want people to respect you as a superior, and if they respected you as a superior, they'd call you _usted_. That could make a policy of coercing people into calling you _usted_ seem superficially appealing. But the appeal solely rests on confusing the pre-reform meaning (under which the choice of _usted_ implies respect and is therefore desirable) and the post-reform meaning (under which the choice implies nothing). Whether or not the proponent of the change consciously _notices_ the problem, the redefinition is _functionally_ "hypocritical": it's only desirable insofar as people aren't _actually_ using it internally.
This is a pretty basic point, and yet Yudkowsky steadfastly ignores the role of existing meanings in this debate, bizarrely writing as if we were defining a conlang from scratch:
> 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!_
-There are a couple of problems with this. First of all, 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 about opposition to _compelled speech_: people who don't think some trans person's transition should "count"—however cruel or capricious that might be—don't want to be coerced into legitimizing it with the pronoun choices in their _own_ speech. That's different from insisting that _others_ use sex-based non-subject-preferred pronouns, which is not something I see much of outside of gender-critical ("TERF") forums. Characterizing the issue as being about "freedom of pronouns", [as Yudkowsky does in the comment section](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228), elides the fact that freedom to specify how other people talk about you is in _direct conflict_ with the freedom of speech of speakers. No matter which side of the conflict one supports, it seems wrong to characterize the self-ID pronoun side as being "pro-freedom", as if there wasn't any "freedom" concerns on the other side. [(Policy debates should not appear one-sided!)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided)
+There are a couple of problems with this. First of all, the "that you insist everybody use" part is kind 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 about opposition to _compelled speech_: people who don't think some trans person's transition should "count"—however cruel or capricious that might be—don't want to be coerced into legitimizing it with the pronoun choices in their _own_ speech. That's different from insisting that _others_ use sex-based non-subject-preferred pronouns, which is not something I see much of outside of gender-critical ("TERF") forums. Characterizing the issue as being about "freedom of pronouns", [as Yudkowsky does in the comment section](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228), elides the fact that freedom to specify how other people talk about you is in direct conflict with the freedom of speech of speakers. No matter which side of the conflict one supports, it seems wrong to characterize the self-ID pronoun side as being "pro-freedom", as if there wasn't any "freedom" concerns on the other side. [(Policy debates should not appear one-sided!)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided)
More importantly, however, in dicussing how to reform English, we're not actually in the position of defining a language from scratch. Even if you think the cultural evolution of English involved Shenanigans, it's not fair to attribute the Shenanigans to native speakers accurately describing their native language. 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. But 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 associated with a word, you actually _do_ have to somehow get people to change their usage. You can _advocate_ for your new meaning and use it in your own speech, but you can't just _declare_ your preferred new meaning and claim that it applies to the language as actually spoken, without speakers actually changing their behavior. As a result, Yudkowsky's proposal "to say that this just _is_ the normative definition" doesn't work.
There's nothing magical about the particular word/symbol/phoneme-sequence "dog". In German, they say _Hund_; in Finnish, they say _koira_; in Korean, they say _개_. Germans and Finns and Koreans (and their dogs) seem to be getting along just as well as we Anglophones.
-Nevertheless, it is a fact _about contemporary English_ that "dog" means dog. If you thought this was bad for whatever reason, and you wanted to change that fact, you'd have to change the behavior of actually-existing English speakers. If you tried to stipulate on your Facebook wall that "blerble" should mean dog now, and all of your Facebook friends nodded in agreement at your clever argument _and then continued to call dogs "dogs" in their everyday life just like they always had_, then your language reform attempt would have, _in fact_, failed—even if the fact that it failed would be less obvious if you only looked at the Facebook thread full of people nodding in agreement.
+Nevertheless, it is a fact _about contemporary English_ that "dog" means dog. If you thought this was bad for whatever reason, and you wanted to change that fact, you'd have to change the behavior of actually-existing English speakers. If you tried to stipulate on your Facebook wall that the word "dog" should mean _tree_ or _house_ now, and all of your Facebook friends nodded in agreement at your clever argument _and then continued to call dogs "dogs" in their everyday life just like they always had_, then your language reform attempt would have, _in fact_, failed—even if the fact that it failed would be less obvious if you only looked at the Facebook thread full of people nodding in agreement.
The inseparability of meaning from behavior-and-usage may be clearer if considered in a context other than that of natural language. Take computer programs. Sometimes programmers make bad design decisions. For example, in the C programming language, [it's standard to represent strings (textual data) in memory with a sequence of bytes ending in a zero (null) character](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-terminated_string); the machine only knows where the string stops when it reaches the null at the end. This convention has a lot of disadvantages relative to the alternative of [prefixing the string data with the length](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_(computer_science)#Length-prefixed); a missing or misplaced null character could cause the machine to erroneously read or write data in adjacent memory, causing serious bugs or security vulnerabilities.
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—prescribing 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 coordinating a jump 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 couldn't deduce from their appearance and just 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 in any sense female, which isn't true.") Me neither.
+But given that pronouns _do_ convey sex-category information, as a _fact_ about how the brains of actually-existing English speakers _in fact_ process language (whether or not this means that English is terribly designed), some actually-existing English speakers might have reason to object when told to use pronouns in a way that contradicts their perception of what sex people are.
+In an article titled ["Pronouns are Rohypnol"](https://fairplayforwomen.com/pronouns/), Barra Kerr compares preferred pronouns to the famous [Stroop effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect). When color words are printed in text of a different color (_e.g._, <span style="color:blue;">red</span>, <span style="color:green">orange</span>, <span style="color:red">yellow</span>, <span style="color:purple">green</span>, <span style="color:orange">blue</span>, _&c._) and people are asked to name the color of the text, they're slow to respond: the meaning of the word interferes with our ability to name the color in front of our eyes.
+[TODO: Kerr suggests misgendering as an exercise]
+[TODO: Contrary to Yudkowskys' claims about lies, Kerr _isn't_ claiming that pronouns can be "lies"; the article is _very_ explicit about this; Yudkowsky is obviously completely unfamiliar with his opponents' arguments]
+[TODO: let's related this to Yudkowsky's specialty multimodal neurons— both CLIP and biological neurons respond to text/images; typographic attacks are the same thing as pronoun badges; you would expect the people aligning language models to be able to think these thoughts]
+Given this multitude of reasons why the _existing_ meanings of gendered pronouns are relevant to the question of pronoun reform, what is Yudkowsky's response?
+
+Apparently, to play dumb. [TODO: flesh out the original "Oliver" example] In the comments of the Facebook post, Yudkowsky claims:
+
+> I do not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than "doesn't look like an Oliver" is attached to something in your head.
+
+...
+
+I'm sorry, but I can't take this self-report literally. I certainly [don't think Yudkowsky was _consciously lying_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist) when he wrote that. Nevertheless, I am _incredibly_ skeptical that Yudkowsky _actually_ doesn't know what it feels like [...]
+
+[TODO: how could you possibly know that?]
+
+The thing is, Eliezer Yudkowsky is an American English speaker born in 1979. As an American English speaker born in 1987, I have a _pretty good_ mental model of how American English speakers born in the late 20th century use language.
+
+
+
+> My current policy stance is that anybody who does feel that way needs to get some perspective about how it can be less firmly attached in other people's heads; and how their feelings don't get to control everybody's language protocol or accuse non-protocol users of lying; especially when different people with firm attachments have _different_ firm attachments and we can't make them all be protocol.
[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)
- * 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
* 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'
]
------
+don't use "baked in" so many times
+
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception
For example, I think it's Shenanigans to use the word "roommate" to refer to people who only share a house or apartment and not a literal room; surely you should say "housemate" or "flatmate" if that's what you really mean. However, this claim of mine about the meaning of the word "roommate" is [actually _false_ in American usage](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/roommate). (Apparently the British are more sensible about this.) The only way to get the Shenanigans to stop is to get people to _actually_ adopt my usage in their mapping of people's-living-situations to word-used-to-describe-living-situation. If I were to just _pretend_ that my preferred usage was already the actual usage, then I would make worse predictions when my friends in California mention their roommates.
-https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508?page=14
-> Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves.
What Quakers Can Teach Us About the Politics of Pronouns
https://archive.is/bYdde
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff