Title: Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal
Date: 2022-01-01 11:00
Category: commentary
-Tags: Eliezer Yudkowsky
+Tags: Eliezer Yudkowsky, convention
Status: draft
> Go, Soul, the body's guest,
>
> —["The Lie" by Walter Raleigh](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/trb9HPWFk8Gy9MBdN/less-wrong-poetry-corner-walter-raleigh-s-the-lie)
-[TODO: summary points]
+### Summary of Claims
+
+ * In a February 2021 Facebook post, Eliezer Yudkowsky inveighs against English's system of singular third-person pronouns: as a matter of clean language design, English's lack of a gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun is a serious flaw: you shouldn't be required to commit to a stance on what sex someone is in order to say a grammatical sentence about her or him.
+
+ * This seems fine as a critique of the existing English language. However, Yudkowsky then goes on to proclaim, in connection with pronouns for transgender people, 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_."
+
+ * However, this allegedly "simplest and best" proposal fails to achieve its stated aim of avoiding baking controversial claims into the language grammar. **The _reason_ trans people want others to use their designated pronouns is _because_ they're trying to control their socially-perceived sex category** and English speakers interpret _she_ and _he_ as conveying sex-category information. The circular redefinition is functionally "hypocritical": **if it were _actually true_ that _he_ simply referred to those who take the pronoun _he_, then there would be no reason for trans people to care which pronoun people used for them.**
+
+ * **The "meaning" of language isn't some epiphenominal extraphysical fact that can be declared or ascertained separately from common usage.** The word "dog" means what it does _because_ English speakers use the word that way; if you wanted "dog" to mean something different, you'd need to change the way English speakers behave. Thus, **circularly redefining _he_ and _she_ as purportedly referring to pronoun preferences rather than sex doesn't work, if people are still in practice choosing pronouns on the basis of perceived sex.**
+
+ * **Given that _she_ and _he_ do in fact convey sex category information to English speakers, some speakers might perceive an interest in resisting pressure to use pronouns in a way that contradicts their perception of what sex people are.** This does _not_ constitute a philosophical committment that pronouns can be "lies" as such.
+
+ * In the comments of the Facebook post, Yudkowsky seemingly denies that pronouns convey sex category information to native English speakers, claiming, "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." **This self-report is not plausible, as evidenced by previous writings by Yudkowsky that treat sex and pronouns as synonymous.**
+
+ * **I'm _not_ claiming that Yudkowsky should have a different pronoun usage policy.** I agree that misgendering all trans people "on principle" seems very wrong and unappealing. Rather, I'm claiming that [**policy debates should not appear one-sided**](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided); in order to 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. **It can simultaneously be the case that pressuring speakers to use pronouns at odds with their perceptions of sex is a cost to those speakers, _and_ that not exerting such pressure is a cost to trans people.** It's possible and desirable to be honest about that cost–benefit analysis, while ultimately choosing a policy that favors some parties' interests over others.
+
+ * If I don't disagree with the ultimate policy decision of "don't misgender trans people", why am I putting so much effort in disputing Yudkowsky's reasoning in support of that policy? In addition to ["arguments matter, not conclusions" being a general principle of correct cognition](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line), it's because in this case, **I need the correct reasoning in order to make extremely impactful social and medical decisions.** People with gender dysphoria who are considering whether to transition need _factually accurate information_ about gender-transition interventions: if you have the facts wrong, you might wrongly avoid an intervention that would have benefitted you, or wrongly undergo an intevention that harms you. If it were _actually true_ that the simplest and best convention is that _he_ refers to the set of people who have asked us to use _he_, then asking for new pronouns despite not physically passing as the corresponding sex wouldn't be costly, but in fact, it is costly. Thus, **Yudkowsky is harming a reference class of people that includes me by spreading disinformation about the costs of asking for new pronouns; I'm better off because I don't trust Eliezer Yudkowsky to tell the truth.**
+
+ * [TODO: summarize coda]
+
+<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
[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 concise 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](/2020/Apr/the-reverse-murray-rule/) him putting a book on the shelf.
There are a couple of problems with this. First of all, the "that you insist everybody use" part is a pretty blatant [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.
-If you _actually_ believed it was Shenanigans to bake a stance on how clustered things are into a pronoun system and insist that everyone else use it, then it should be _equally_ Shenanigans independently of whether the insisted-on clusters are those of sex or those of gender identity—if you're going to be consistent, you should condemn them _both_. And yet _somehow_, the people who insist on sex-based pronouns are the target of Yudkowsky's condescension, whereas the people who insist on gender-identity-based pronouns get both a free pass, _and_ endorsement of their preferred convention (albeit for a different stated reason)? The one-sidedness here is pretty shameless!
+If you _actually_ believed it was Shenanigans to bake a stance on how clustered things are into a pronoun system and insist that everyone else use it, then it should be _equally_ Shenanigans independently of whether the insisted-on clusters are those of sex or those of gender identity—if you're going to be consistent, you should condemn them _both_. And yet _somehow_, people who insist on sex-based pronouns are the target of Yudkowsky's condescension, whereas people who insist on gender-identity-based pronouns get both a free pass, _and_ endorsement of their preferred convention (albeit for a different stated reason)? The one-sidedness here is pretty shameless!
-Perhaps more importantly, however, in discussing how to reform English, we're not actually in the position of defining a language from scratch. Even if you think the [cultural evolution](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/) 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, 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.
+Perhaps more important than the speaker-freedom _vs._ subject-freedom issue, however, is that in discussing how to reform English, we're not actually in the position of defining a language from scratch. Even if you think the [cultural evolution](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/) 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, 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.
To be clear, when I say that the proposal doesn't work, I'm not even saying I disagree with it. I mean that it literally, _factually_ doesn't work! Let me explain.
Kerr suggests that preferred pronouns have a similar effect, that "a conflict between what we see and know to be true, and what we are expected to say, affects us." As an exercise, she suggests (privately!) translating sentences about transgender people to use natal-sex-based pronouns.
-Unfortunately, I don't have a study with objective measurements on hand (let me know in the comments if you do!), but I think most native English speakers who try this exercise and introspect—especially using examples where the trans person exhibits features or behavior typical of their natal sex, with things like "she ejaculated" or "he gave birth" being the starkest examples—will agree with Kerr's assessment: "You can know perfectly the actual sex of a male person, and yet you will still react differently if someone calls them _she_ instead of _he_."
+Unfortunately, I don't have a study with objective measurements on hand, but I think most native English speakers who try this exercise and introspect—especially using examples where the trans person exhibits features or behavior typical of their natal sex, with things like "she ejaculated" or "he gave birth" being the starkest examples—will agree with Kerr's assessment: "You can know perfectly the actual sex of a male person, and yet you will still react differently if someone calls them _she_ instead of _he_."
Let's relate this is Yudkowsky's specialty of artificial intelligence. In a post on ["Multimodal Neurons in Artificial Neural Networks"](https://openai.com/blog/multimodal-neurons/), Gabriel Goh _et al._ explore the capabilities and biases of the [CLIP](https://openai.com/blog/clip/) neural network trained on textual and image data.
I would bet at very generous odds at some point in his four decades on Earth, Eliezer Yudkowsky has used _she_ or _he_ on the basis of perceived sex to refer to someone whose name he didn't know. Because _all native English speakers do this_. Moreover, we can say something about the [cognitive algorithm](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HcCpvYLoSFP4iAqSz/rationality-appreciating-cognitive-algorithms) underlying _how_ they do this: for example, [people can recognize sex from facial photos _alone_ (hair covered, males clean-shaven) at 96% accuracy](/papers/bruce_et_al-sex_discrimination_how_do_we_tell.pdf). In naturalistic settings where we can see and hear more [secondary sex characteristics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_sex_characteristic#In_humans) than just someone's face (build, height, breasts, [voice](/papers/puts_et_al-masculine_voices_signal_mens_threat_potential.pdf), [gait](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/all-the-wrong-moves/), _&c_.), accuracy would be even greater. It's not a mystery why people can get sex-based pronouns "right" the vast majority of the time without having to be told or remember specific people's pronouns.
-Conversely, I would also bet at very generous odds that in his four decades on Earth, Eliezer Yudkowsky has very rarely if ever assumed what someone's name is on the basis of their appearance without being told. Because _no native English speakers do this_ (seriously, rather than as a joke or a troll). If you doubt this, try to explain what algorithm you would use to infer that someone's name is "Oliver" based on how they look. What are the "secondary Oliver characteristics", specifically? People for whom it was _actually true_ that names map to appearances the way pronouns map to sex, should not have trouble answering this question!
+Conversely, I would also bet at very generous odds that in his four decades on Earth, Eliezer Yudkowsky has very rarely if ever assumed what someone's name is on the basis of their appearance without being told. Because _no native English speakers do this_ (seriously, rather than as a joke or a troll). Now, it's true that the "doesn't look like an Oliver" example _was_ introduced into the discussion by another commenter, [who recounts once having called someone Bill who had introduced himself as Oliver](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421986539228&reply_comment_id=10159422872574228):
+
+> It did feel a little weird calling him Oliver, but everyone present knew what I was doing was being a jerk and teenagers are horrible. The "feels like lying" principle seems like it lets me keep calling him Bill, now righteously. I just can't even really bring myself to play in that sandbox in good faith.
+
+But the "everyone present knew what I was doing was being a jerk" characterization seems to agree the the motivation was joking/trolling. _How_ did everyone present know? Because it's absurd to infer a _particular_ name from someone's appearance.
-[TODO: this is why I feel comfortable saying the commenter who introduced "Oliver" was trolling in her teenage memory]
+It's true that there are name–feature correlations that people can pick up on. For example, a "Juan" is likely to be Latino, a "Gertrude" in the current year is [likely to be old](https://www.everything-birthday.com/name/f/Gertrude); a non-Hispanic white Juan or a young Gertrude may indeed be likely to provoke a "Doesn't look like an _X_" reaction (which may also be sensitive to even subtler features). But while probabilistic inferences from features to low _likelihood_ of a particular name are valid, an inference from features to a particular name is absolutely not, because the function of a name is to be an opaque "pointer" to a particular individual. A Latino family choosing a name for their male baby may be somewhat more likely to choose "Juan" rather than "Oliver" (or "Getrude"), but they could just as easily choose "Luis" or "Miguel" or "Alejandro" for the very same child, and there's no plausible physical mechanism by which a horrible teenager thirty years later could tell the difference.
+
+Thus, I reject the commenter's claim that "feels like lying" intuitions about pronouns and sex would have let her "keep calling him Bill, now righteously". What algorithm you would use to infer that someone's name is "Bill" or "Oliver" based on how they look? What are the "secondary Oliver characteristics", specifically? People for whom it was _actually true_ that names map to appearances the way pronouns map to sex, should not have trouble answering this question!
If there _were_ a substantial contingent of native English speakers who don't interpret pronouns as conveying sex category information, one would expect this to show up in our cultural corpus more often—and yet, I'm actually not aware of any notable examples of this. In contrast, it's very easy to find instances of speakers treating pronouns and sex as synonymous. As an arbitrarily chosen example, in [one episode](https://theamazingworldofgumball.fandom.com/wiki/The_Nest) of the animated series [_The Amazing World of Gumball_](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WesternAnimation/TheAmazingWorldOfGumball) featuring the ravenous spawn of our protagonists' evil pet turtle, the anthropomorphic-rabbit [Bumbling Dad](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BumblingDad) character [says, "Who's to say this pregnant turtle is a _her_?" and everyone gives him a look](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N2Msnrq7wU&t=14s).
_The Amazing World of Gumball_ is rated [TV-Y7](https://rating-system.fandom.com/wiki/TV-Y7) and the episode in question came out in 2016. This is not a particularly foreign or distant cultural context, nor one that is expected to tax the cognitive abilities of a seven-year-old child! Is ... is Yudkowsky claiming not to get the joke?
-Posed that way, one would imagine not—but if Yudkowsky _does_ get the joke, then I don't think he can simultaneously _honestly_ claim to "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." In order to get the joke in real time, your brain has to quickly make a multi-step logical inference that depends on the idea that pronouns imply sex. (The turtle is a "her" [iff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_and_only_if) female, not-female implies not-pregnant, so if the turtle is pregnant, it must be a "her".) This would seem, pretty straightforwardly, to be a sense in which "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 really not sure how else I'm supposed to interpret those words!
+Posed that way, one would imagine not—but if Yudkowsky _does_ get the joke, then I don't think he can simultaneously _honestly_ claim to "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." In order to get the joke in real time, your brain has to quickly make a multi-step logical inference that depends on the idea that pronouns imply sex. (The turtle is a "her" [iff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_and_only_if) female, not-female implies not-pregnant, so if the turtle is pregnant, it must be a "her".) This would seem, pretty straightforwardly, to be a sense in which "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." How else am I supposed to interpret those words?
Perhaps it's not justified to question Yudkowsky's "I do not know what it feels like [...]" self-report based on generalizations about English speakers in general? Maybe his mind works differently, but dint of unusual neurodiversity or training in LambdaMOO? But if so, one would perhaps expect some evidence of this in his publicly observable writing? And yet, on the contrary, looking over his works, we can see instances of Yudkowsky treating pronouns as synonymous with sex/gender (just as one would expect a native English speaker born in 1979 to do), contrary to his 2021 self-report of not knowing what this feels like from the inside.
Perhaps it might make sense for adherents of a "degender English" movement to stategically _ally_ with the trans rights movement: to latch on to gender-dysphoric people's pain as a political weapon to destabilize what the English-degenderers think of as a bad pronoun system for _other reasons_. Fine.
-But if that's the play you want to make, you forfeit the right to _honestly_ claim that your stance is that "feelings don't get to control everybody's language protocol". If you piously proclaim that the "important thing" is trans people's feelings of "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket, as it would be assigned by their birth certificate", that would seem, pretty straightforwardly, to be participating in an attempt to let someone's feelings control everybody's language protocol! Again, I'm really not sure how else I'm supposed to interpret those words!
+But if that's the play you want to make, you forfeit the right to _honestly_ claim that your stance is that "feelings don't get to control everybody's language protocol". If you piously proclaim that the "important thing" is trans people's feelings of "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket, as it would be assigned by their birth certificate", that would seem, pretty straightforwardly, to be participating in an attempt to make it so that "[someone's] feelings [...] get to control everybody's language protocol"! Again, how else am I supposed to interpret those words?
There's nothing _inconsistent_ about believing that trans people's feelings matter, and that the feelings of people who resent the Stroop-like effect of having to speak in a way that contradicts their own sex-category perceptions, don't matter. (Or don't matter _as much_, quantitatively, under the utilitarian calculus.) But if that were your position, the intellectually honest thing to tell people like Barra Kerr is, "Sorry, I'm participating in a political coalition that believes that trans people's feelings are more important than yours with respect to this policy question; sucks to be you", rather than haughtily implying that people like Kerr are making an elementary philosophy mistake that they are _clearly not making_ if you _actually read what they write_.
"Oh. O–okay. And then she took her—" The victim breaks down crying. "I'm sorry, Your Honor; I can't do it. I'm under oath; I have to tell the story the way it happened to me. In my memories, the person who did those things to me was a man. A—"
-She hesistates, sobs a few more times. In this moment, almost more than the memories of the rape, she is very conscious of having never gone to college. The judge and the defense lawyer are smarter and more educated than her, and _they_ believe that the man who raped her is now (or perhaps, always had been) a woman. It had never made any sense to her—but how could she explain to an authority figure who she had no hope of out-arguing, even if she was even allowed to argue?
+She hesistates, sobs a few more times. In this moment, almost more than the memories of the rape, she is very conscious of having never gone to college. The judge and the defense lawyer are smarter and more educated than her, and _they_ believe that the man who raped her is now (or perhaps, always had been) a woman. It had never made any sense to her—but how could she explain to an authority figure who she had no hope of out-arguing, if she was even allowed to argue?
"And by 'man', I mean—a male. The way I was raised, men—males—get called _he_ and _him_. If I say _she_, it doesn't feel true to the memory in my head. It—it feels like lying, Your Honor."
I suspect some readers will have an intuition that my choice of scenario is loaded, unfair, or unrealistic. To be sure, I chose it an unusually clear-cut case for why someone might have a need to use pronouns to imply sex in their _own_ speech. (If the scenario was just talking about someone borrowing a vacuum cleaner, fewer readers would have any sympathy for someone not wanting to concede the trivial courtesy of preferred pronouns.)
-But what, specifically, is unrealistic about it? Is it the idea that a trans woman could have raped someone before transitioning?
-
-[TODO: cite that this is real]
+But what, specifically, is unrealistic about it? Is it the idea that a trans woman could have raped someone before transitioning? Of course _most_ trans women are not sex offenders—just as _most_ non-transsexual males are not sex offenders—but instances of trans women committing the kinds of sex crimes that overwhelmingly the provenance of men [are a documented thing](https://fairplayforwomen.com/transgender-male-criminality-sex-offences/).
-Is it the idea that the legal system would penalize someone for pronoun non-compliance?
-
-[TODO: cite examples of this happening; as liberal intellectuals, we want to debate the optimal communication policy and expect to govern by assent; we're not so bloodthirsty as to want to throw dissenters in jail—but that is potentially what's at stake; the judge actually does have a forced choice between sustained/overruled]
+Is it the idea that the legal system would penalize someone for pronoun non-compliance? But this is also an occasionally documented thing, as in [one case where a Canadian father was jailed](https://www.city-journal.org/canadian-father-jailed-for-speaking-out-about-trans-identifying-child) for violating [a court order](https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/sc/19/06/2019BCSC0604.htm) not to refer to his natal-female child with she/her pronouns. As liberal intellectuals debating optimal communication policies, we usually hope to govern by consensus: we want people to use preferred pronouns _voluntarily_, rather than being forced. But maintaining a collective norm in the face of those who have their own reasons to object to it, does ultimately require some sort of threat. In the vignette above, given the defense lawyer's objection; the judge does face a forced choice to Sustain or Overrule, and that choice has consequences either way.
In the comments, Yudkowsky continues:
This debate looks very different depending on whether you're coming into it as someone being _told_ that you need to change your pronoun usage for the sake of someone who will be very hurt if you don't—or whether you're in the position of wondering whether it makes sense to _make_ such a request of others.
-As a good cis ally, you're told that trans people know who they are and you need to respect that [on pain of being responsible for someone's suicide](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/). While politically convenient for people who have _already_ transitioned and don't want anyone second-guessing their identity, I think this view is actually false. Humans don't have an atomic "gender identity" that they just _know_, which has no particular properties other than it not being recognized by others being worse than death. Rather, there are a variety of reasons why someone might feel sad about being the sex that they are, and wish they could be the other sex instead, which is called "gender dysphoria."
+As a good cis ally, you're told that trans people know who they are and you need to respect that [on pain of being responsible for someone's suicide](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/). While politically convenient for people who have _already_ transitioned and don't want anyone second-guessing their identity, I think this view is actually false. Humans don't have an atomic "gender identity" that they just _know_, which has no particular properties other than it being worse than death for it to not be recognized by others. Rather, there are a variety of reasons why someone might feel sad about being the sex that they are, and wish they could be the other sex instead, which is called "gender dysphoria."
Fortunately, our Society has interventions available to approximate changing sex as best we can with existing technology: you can get hormone replacement therapy (HRT), genital surgery, ask people to call you by a different name, ask people to refer to you with different pronouns, get new clothes, get other relevant cosmetic surgeries, _&c._ In principle, it's possible to pick and choose some of these interventions piecemeal—[I actually tried just HRT for five months in 2017](http://unremediatedgender.space/tag/hrt-diary/)—but it's more common for people to "transition", to undergo a correlated _bundle_ of these interventions to approximate a sex change.
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, but really because pronouns are firmly attached to sex in their heads. 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 bullshit. (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'm better off because I don't trust Eliezer Yudkowsky to tell me the truth.
+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 bullshit. (Declaring a "normative" meaning on your Facebook wall doesn't rewrite the _actual_ meaning encoded in 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. (It might be a _less_ bad decision if done in conjunction with a serious gender transition effort, but Yudkowsky's pronoun reform proposal doesn't _say_ "she" is the pronoun for fully-transitioned trans women; it just says you have to ask.) Yudkowsky is harming a reference class of people that includes more naïve versions of me by giving them bad information; I'm better off because I don't trust Eliezer Yudkowsky to tell the truth in this domain.
(I guess I [can't say I wasn't warned](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science).)
> People might be able to speak that. 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.
(As an aside, the wording of "we might well hear about it from _the other side_" (emphasis mine) is _very_ interesting, suggesting that the so-called "rationalist" community, is, effectively, a partisan institution, despite its claims to be about advancing the generically human art of systematically correct reasoning.)
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+
I think (a) and (b) _as stated_ are clearly false, so "we" (who?) fortunately aren't losing much by allegedly not being able to speak them. But what about some _similar_ hypotheses, that might be similarly unspeakable for similar reasons?
Instead of (a), consider the claim that (a′) self-reports about gender dysphoria are substantially distorted by [socially-desirable responding tendencies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social-desirability_bias)—as a notable and common example, heterosexual males with [sexual fantasies about being female](http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html) [often falsely deny or minimize the erotic dimension of their desire to change sex](/papers/blanchard-clemmensen-steiner-social_desirability_response_set_and_systematic_distortion.pdf) (The idea that self-reports can be motivatedly inaccurate without the subject consciously "lying" should not be novel to someone who co-blogged with [Robin Hanson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_in_the_Brain) for years!)
If Yudkowsky _actually_ possessed (and felt motivated to use) the "ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it [himself] before speaking", it would be _obvious_ to him that "Gendered Pronouns For Everyone and Asking To Leave The System Is Lying" isn't the hill anyone would care about dying on if it weren't a Schelling point. A lot of TERF-adjacent folk would be _overjoyed_ to concede the (boring, insubstantial) matter of pronouns as a trivial courtesy if it meant getting to _actually_ address their real concerns of "Biological Sex Actually Exists", and ["Biological Sex Cannot Be Changed With Existing or Foreseeable Technology"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) and "Biological Sex Is Sometimes More Relevant Than Self-Declared Gender Identity." The reason so many of them are inclined to stand their ground and not even offer the trivial courtesy is because they suspect that the matter of pronouns is being used as a rhetorical wedge and typographical attack to try to prevent people from talking or thinking about sex.
-And this suspicion seems broadly accurate! _After_ having been challenged on it, Yudkowsky can try to spin his November 2018 Twitter comments as having been a non-partisan matter of language design ("Trying to pack all of that into the pronouns [...] is the wrong place to pack it"), but when you read the text that was actually published at the time, parts of it are hard to read as anything other than an attempt to intimidate and delegitimize people who want to use language to reason about sex rather than gender identity. [For example](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067490362225156096):
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-> The more technology advances, the further we can move people towards where they say they want to be in sexspace. Having said this we've said all the facts. Who competes in sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary is a policy question (that I personally find very humorous).
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-Sure, _in the limit of arbitrarily advanced technology_, everyone could be exactly where they wanted to be in sexpsace. Having said this, we have _not_ said all the facts relevant to decisionmaking in our world, where _we do not have arbitrarily advanced technology_. As Yudkowsky [acknowledges in the previous Tweet](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067488844122021888), "Hormone therapy changes some things and leaves others constant." The existence of HRT does not take us into the Glorious Transhumanist Future where everyone is the sex they say they are.
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-Rather, previously sexspace had two main clusters (normal females and males) plus an assortment of tiny clusters corresponding to various [disorders of sex development](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disorders_of_sex_development), and now it has two additional tiny clusters: females-on-masculinizing-HRT and males-on-feminizing-HRT. Certainly, there are situations where you would want to use "gender" categories that use the grouping {females, males-on-feminizing-HRT} and {males, females-on-masculinizing-HRT}.
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-But the _reason_ for having sex-segregated sports leagues is because the sport-relevant multivariate trait distributions of female bodies and male bodies are quite different.
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-[TODO: (clean up and consolidate the case here after reading the TW-in-sports articles)
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-The "multivariate" part is important, because
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-Different traits have different relevance to different sports; the fact that it's apples-to-oranges is _why_ women do better in ultraswimming—that competition is sampling a corner of sportspace where body fat is an advantage
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-It's not that females and males are exactly the same except males are 10% stronger on average
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-It really is an apples-to-oranges comparison, rather than "two populations of apples with different mean weight"
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-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water
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-If you just had one integrated league, females wouldn't be competitive (in almost all sports, with some exceptions [like ultra-distance swimming](https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/why-women-have-beaten-men-in-marathon-swimming/)).
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-]
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-Given the empirical reality of the different multivariate trait distributions, "Who are the best athletes _among females_" is a natural question for people to be interested in, and want separate sports leagues to determine.
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-(Similarly, when conducting [automobile races](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_racing), you want there to be rules enforcing that all competitors have the same type of car for some common-sense-reasonable operationalization of "the same type", because a race between a sports car and a [moped](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moped) would be mostly measuring who has the sports car, rather than who's the better racer.)
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-Including males people in female sports leagues undermines the point of having a separate female league.
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-[TODO: more sentences explaining why HRT doesn't break taxonicity of sex, and why "gender identity" is a much less plausible joint anyway]
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-[TODO: sentences about studies showing that HRT doesn't erase male advantage
-https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1368176581965930501
-https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3
-https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/15/865
-]
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-[TODO sentences about Lia Thomas and Cece Tefler https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1466044767561830405 (Thomas and Tefler's feats occured after Yudkowsky's 2018 Tweets, but this kind of thing was easily predictable to anyone familiar with sex differences)
-https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10445679/Lia-Thomas-UPenn-teammate-says-trans-swimmer-doesnt-cover-genitals-locker-room.html
-]
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-In light of these _empirical_ observations, Yudkowsky's suggestion that an ignorant comittment to an "Aristotelian binary" is the main reason someone might care about the integrity of women's sports, is revealed as an absurd strawman. This just isn't something any scientifically-literate person would write if they had actually thought about the issue _at all_, as contrasted to having _first_ decided (consciously or not) to bolster one's reputation among progressives by dunking on transphobes on Twitter, and wielding one's philosophy knowledge in the service of that political goal. The relevant empirical facts are _not subtle_, even if most people don't have the fancy vocabulary to talk about them in terms of "multivariate trait distributions".
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-Yudkowsky's pretension to merely have been standing up for the distinction between facts and policy questions isn't credible: if you _just_ wanted to point out that the organization of sports leagues is a policy question rather than a fact (as if anyone had doubted this), why would you throw in the "Aristotelian binary" strawman and belittle the matter as "humorous"? There are a lot of issues that I don't _personally_ care much about, but I don't see anything funny about the fact that other people _do_ care.
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-(And in this case, the empirical facts are _so_ lopsided, that if we must find humor in the matter, it really goes the other way. Lia Thomas trounces the entire field by _4.2 standard deviations_ (!!), and Eliezer Yudkowsky feels obligated to _pretend not to see the problem?_ You've got to admit, that's a _little_ bit funny.)
+And this suspicion seems broadly accurate! _After_ having been challenged on it, Yudkowsky can try to spin his November 2018 Twitter comments as having been a non-partisan matter of language design ("Trying to pack all of that into the pronouns [...] is the wrong place to pack it"), but when you read the text that was actually published at the time, parts of it are hard to read as anything other than an attempt to intimidate and delegitimize people who want to use language to reason about sex rather than gender identity.
----
But if it were _actually_ the case that everybody knew (and everybody knew that everybody knew), then what would be the point of the censorship? It's not coherent to claim that no one is being harmed by censorship because everyone knows about it, because the entire appeal and purpose of censorship is precisely that _not_ everybody knows and that someone with power wants to _keep_ it that way.
-For the savvy people in the know, it would certainly be _convenient_ if everyone secretly knew: then the savvy people wouldn't have to face the tough choice between
-acceding to Power's demands (at the cost of deceiving their readers) and informing their readers (at the cost of incurring Power's wrath).
+For the savvy people in the know, it would certainly be _convenient_ if everyone secretly knew: then the savvy people wouldn't have to face the tough choice between acceding to Power's demands (at the cost of deceiving their readers) and informing their readers (at the cost of incurring Power's wrath).
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.
As I explained in ["On the Argumentative Form 'Super-Proton Things Tend to Come In Varieties'"](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/), this argument that "gender dysphoria involves more than one proton and will probably have varieties" is actually _wrong_. The _reason_ I believe in the two-type taxonomy of MtF is because of [the _empirical_ case that androphilic and non-exclusively-androphilic MtF transsexualism actually look like different things](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/), enough so for the two-type clustering to [pay the rent](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences) [for its complexity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length).
-The key lesson here that I wish Yudkowsky would understand is that when you invent rationality lessons in response to political pressure, you probably end up with _fake rationality lessons_ (because the reasoning that _generated_ the lesson differs from the reasoning that the lesson presents). I think this is bad, and that it's _equally_ bad even in cases like this where the political pressure is coming from _me_.
+But Yudkowsky can't afford to acknowledge the empirical case for the two-type taxonomy—that really _would_ get him in trouble with progressives. So in order to throw me a bone while maintaining his above-it-all [pretending to be wise](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jeyvzALDbjdjjv5RW/pretending-to-be-wise) centerist pose, he needs to come up with some other excuse that "exhibit[s] generally rationalist principles".
+
+The lesson here that I wish Yudkowsky would understand is that when you invent rationality lessons in response to political pressure, you probably end up with _fake rationality lessons_ (because the reasoning that _generated_ the lesson differs from the reasoning that the lesson presents). I think this is bad, and that it's _equally_ bad even when the political pressure is coming from _me_.
If you "project" my work into the "subspace" of contemporary political conflicts, it usually _codes as_ favoring "anti-trans" faction more often than not, but [that's really not what I'm trying to do](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/). From my perspective, it's just that the "pro-trans" faction happens to be very wrong about a lot of stuff that I care about. But being wrong about a lot of stuff isn't the same thing as being wrong about everything; it's _important_ that I spontaneously invent and publish pieces like ["On the Argumentative Form"](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/) and ["Self-Identity Is a Schelling Point"](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/) that "favor" the "pro-trans" faction. That's how you know (and how I know) that I'm not a _partisan hack_.
But I don't think that everybody knows. So I'm telling you.
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Why does this matter?
[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]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff