There is a _sense in which_ one might say that you "can" define a word any way you want. That is: words don't have intrinsic ontologically-basic meanings. We can imagine an alternative world where people spoke a language that was _like_ the English of our world, except that they use the word "tree" to refer to members of the empirical entity-cluster that we call "dogs" and _vice versa_, and it's hard to think of a meaningful sense in which one convention is "right" and the other is "wrong".
-But there's also an important _sense in which_ we want to say that you "can't" define a word any way you want. That is: some ways of using words work better for transmitting information from one place to another. It would be harder to explain your observations from a trip to the local park in a language that used the word "tree" to refer to members of _either_ of the empirical entity-clusters that we call "dogs" and "trees", because grouping together things that aren't relevantly similar like that makes it harder to describe differences between the wagging-animal-trees and the leafy-plant-trees.
-
-If you want to teach people about the philosophy of language, you want to convey _both_ of these lessons, against naïve essentialism, _and_ against naïve anti-essentialism. If the people who are widely recognized and trusted as the leaders of the systematically-correct-reasoning community _selectively_ teach _only_ the words-don't-have-intrinsic-ontologically-basic-meanings part when the topic at hand happens to be trans issues (because talking about the carve-reality-at-the-joints part would be [politically suicidal](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting)), then people who trust the leaders are likely to get the wrong idea about how the philosophy of language works—even if [the selective argumentation isn't _conscious_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie) and [even if every individual sentence they say is true](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly).
-
+But there's also an important _sense in which_ we want to say that you "can't" define a word any way you want. That is: some ways of using words work better for transmitting information from one place to another. It would be harder to explain your observations from a trip to the local park in a language that used the word "tree" to refer to members of _either_ of the empirical entity-clusters that the English of our world calls "dogs" and "trees", because grouping together things that aren't relevantly similar like that makes it harder to describe differences between the wagging-animal-trees and the leafy-plant-trees.
+If you want to teach people about the philosophy of language, you should want to convey _both_ of these lessons, against naïve essentialism, _and_ against naïve anti-essentialism. If the people who are widely respected and trusted [(almost worshipped)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts) as the leaders of the systematically-correct-reasoning community, [_selectively_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AdYdLP2sRqPMoe8fb/knowing-about-biases-can-hurt-people) teach _only_ the words-don't-have-intrinsic-ontologically-basic-meanings part when the topic at hand happens to be trans issues (because talking about the carve-reality-at-the-joints part would be [politically suicidal](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting)), then people who trust the leaders are likely to get the wrong idea about how the philosophy of language works—even if [the selective argumentation isn't _conscious_ or deliberative](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie) and [even if every individual sentence they say permits a true interpretation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly).
(As it is written of the fourth virtue of evenness, ["If you are selective about which arguments you inspect for flaws, or how hard you inspect for flaws, then every flaw you learn how to detect makes you that much stupider."](https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues))
-_Was_ it a "political" act for me to write about the cognitive function of categorization on the robot-cult blog with non-gender examples, when gender was secretly ("secretly") my _motivating_ example? In some sense, I guess? But if so, the thing you have to realize is—
-
-_Everyone else shot first_. The timestamps back me up here: my ["... To Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) (February 2018) was a _response to_ Alexander's ["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) (November 2014). My robot-cult philosophy of language blogging (April 2019–January 2021) was a (stealthy) _response to_ Yudkowsky's November 2018 Twitter thread. When I started trying to talk about autogynephilia with all my robot cult friends in 2016, I _did not expect_ to get dragged into a multi-year philosophy-of-language crusade! That was just _one branch_ of the argument-tree that, once begun, I thought should be easy to _definitively settle in public_ (within our robot cult, whatever the _general_ public thinks).
-
-
+[TODO: contrast "... Not Man for the Categories" to "Against Lie Inflation";
+Scott has written exhaustively about the dangers of strategic equivocation ("Worst Argument", "Brick in the Motte"); insofar as I can get a _coherent_ posiiton out of the conjunction of "... for the Categories" and Scott's other work, it's that he must think strategic equivocation is OK if it's for being nice to people
+https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/16/against-lie-inflation/
+]
+_Was_ it a "political" act for me to write about the cognitive function of categorization on the robot-cult blog with non-gender examples, when gender was secretly ("secretly") my _motivating_ example? In some sense, I guess? But if so, the thing you have to realize is—
-[TODO:
+_Everyone else shot first_. The timestamps back me up here: my ["... To Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) (February 2018) was a _response to_ Alexander's ["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) (November 2014). My philosophy-of-language work on the robot-cult blog (April 2019–January 2021) was (stealthily) _in response to_ Yudkowsky's November 2018 Twitter thread. When I started trying to talk about autogynephilia with all my robot cult friends in 2016, I _did not expect_ to get dragged into a multi-year philosophy-of-language crusade! That was just _one branch_ of the argument-tree that, once begun, I thought should be easy to _definitively settle in public_ (within our robot cult, whatever the _general_ public thinks).
-I got a little bit of pushback due to the perception
+I guess by now the branch is as close to settled as it's going to get? Alexander ended up [adding an edit note to the end of "... Not Man to the Categories" in December 2019](https://archive.is/1a4zV#selection-805.0-817.1), and Yudkowsky would [go on to clarify his position on the philosophy of language in September 2020](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10158853851009228). So, that's nice. But I will confess to being quite disappointed that the public argument-tree evaluation didn't get much further, much faster? The thing you have understand about this whole debate is—
-_I need the right answer in order to decide whether or not to cut my dick off_—if I were dumb enough to believe Yudkowsky's insinuation that pronouns don't have truth conditions, I might have made a worse decision
+_I need the correct answer in order to decide whether or not to cut my dick off_. As I've said, I _currently_ believe that cutting my dick off would be a _bad_ idea. But that's cost–benefit judgement call based on many _contingent, empirical_ beliefs about the world. I'm obviously in the general _reference class_ of males who are getting their dicks cut off these days, and a lot of them seem to be pretty happy about it! I would be much more likely to go through with transitioning if I believed different things about the world—if I thought my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing were a brain-intersex condition, or if I still believed in my teenage psychological-sex-differences denialism (such that there would be _axiomatically_ no worries about fitting with "other" women after transitioning), or if I were more optimistic about the degree to which HRT and surgeries approximate an actual sex change.
-If rationality is useful for anything, it should be useful for practical life decisions like this
+In that November 2018 Twitter thread, [Yudkowsky wrote](https://archive.is/y5V9i):
-the hypocrisy of "Against Lie Inflation"
+> _Even if_ somebody went around saying, "I demand you call me 'she' and furthermore I claim to have two X chromosomes!", which none of my trans colleagues have ever said to me by the way, it still isn't a question-of-empirical-fact whether she should be called "she". It's an act."
-(Note that Yudkowsky [would later clarify his position in September 2020](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10158853851009228).)
+This seems to suggest that gender pronouns in the English language as currently spoken don't have effective truth conditions. I think this is false _as a matter of cognitive science_. If someone told you, "Hey, you should come meet my friend at the mall, she is really cool and I think you'll like her," and then the friend turned out to look like me (as I am now), _you would be surprised_. (Even if people in Berkeley would socially punish you for _admitting_ that you were surprised.) The "she ... her" pronouns would prompt your brain to _predict_ that the friend would appear to be female, and that prediction would be _falsified_ by someone who looked like me (as I am now). Pretending that the social-norms dispute is about chromosomes was a _bullshit_ [weakmanning](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/) move on the part of Yudkowsky, [who had once written that](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence) "[t]o argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates[;] [a]rguing against weaker advocates proves _nothing_, because even the strongest idea will attract weak advocates." Thanks to the skills I learned from Yudkowsky's _earlier_ writing, I wasn't dumb enough to fall for it, but we can imagine someone otherwise similar to me who was, who might have thereby been misled into making worse life decisions.
-]
+If this "rationality" stuff is useful for _anything at all_, you would _expect_ it to be useful for _practical life decisions_ like _whether or not I should cut my dick off_.
+In order to get the _right answer_ to that policy question (whatever the right answer turns out to be), you need to _at minimum_ be able to get the _right answer_ on related fact-questions like "Is late-onset gender dysphoria in males an intersex condition?" (answer: no) and related philosophy-questions like "Can we arbitrarily redefine words such as 'woman' without adverse effects on our cognition?" (answer: no).
+At the cost of _wasting three years of my life_, we _did_ manage to get the philosophy question right! Again, that's nice. But compared to the Sequences-era dreams of changing the world with a Second Scientific Revolution, it's too little, too slow, too late. If our public discourse is going to be this aggressively optimized for _tricking me into cutting my dick off_ (independently of the empirical cost–benefit trade-off determining whether or not I should cut my dick off), that kills the whole project for me. I don't think I'm setting [my price for joining](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining) particularly high here?
Someone asked me: "Wouldn't it be embarrassing if the community solved Friendly AI and went down in history as the people who created Utopia forever, and you had rejected it because of gender stuff?"
But the thing I'm objecting to is a lot more fundamental than the specific choice of pronoun convention, which obviously isn't going to be uniquely determined. Turkish doesn't have gender pronouns, and that's fine. Naval ships traditionally take feminine pronouns in English, and it doesn't confuse anyone into thinking boats have a womb. [Many other languages are much more gendered than English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Distribution_of_gender_in_the_world's_languages) (where pretty much only third-person singular pronouns are at issue). The conventions used in one's native language probably _do_ [color one's thinking to some extent](/2020/Dec/crossing-the-line/)—but when it comes to that, I have no reason to expect the overall design of English grammar and vocabulary "got it right" where Spanish or Russian "got it wrong."
-What matters isn't the specific object-level choice of pronoun or bathroom conventions; what matters is having a culture where people _viscerally care_ about minimizing the expected squared error of our probabilistic predictions, even if it hurts someone's feelings.
+What matters isn't the specific object-level choice of pronoun or bathroom conventions; what matters is having a culture where people _viscerally care_ about minimizing the expected squared error of our probabilistic predictions, even at the expense of people's feelings—[_especially_ at the expense of people's feelings](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/bayesomasochism/).
I think looking at [our standard punching bag of theism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLL6yzZ3WKn8KaSC3/the-uniquely-awful-example-of-theism) is a very fair comparison. Religious people aren't _stupid_. You can prove theorems about the properties of [Q-learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-learning) or [Kalman filters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter) at a world-class level without encountering anything that forces you to question whether Jesus Christ died for our sins. But [beyond technical mastery of one's narrow specialty](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2pENnTPB75sfc9kb/outside-the-laboratory), there's going to be some competence threshold in ["seeing the correspondence of mathematical structures to What Happens in the Real World"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sizjfDgCgAsuLJQmm/reply-to-holden-on-tool-ai) that _forces_ correct conclusions. I actually _don't_ think you can be a believing Christian and invent [the concern about consequentialists embedded in the Solomonoff prior](https://ordinaryideas.wordpress.com/2016/11/30/what-does-the-universal-prior-actually-look-like/).
-But the _same_ general parsimony-skill that rejects belief in an epiphenomenal "God of the gaps" that makes no particular predictions, _also_ rejects belief in an epiphenomenal "gender of the gaps" that makes no particular predictions.
+But the _same_ general parsimony-skill that rejects belief in an epiphenomenal "God of the gaps" that is verbally asserted to exist but will never the threat of being empirically falsified, _also_ rejects belief in an epiphenomenal "gender of the gaps" that is verbally asserted to exist but will never face the threat of being empirically falsified.
In a world where sexual dimorphism didn't exist, where everyone was a hermaphrodite, then "gender" wouldn't exist, either.
In a world where we _actually had_ magical perfect sex-change technology of the kind described in "Changing Emotions", then people who wanted to change sex would do so, and everyone else would use the corresponding language (pronouns and more), _not_ as a courtesy, _not_ to maximize social welfare, but because it _straightforwardly described reality_.
-In a world where we don't have magical perfect sex-change technology, but we _do_ have hormone replacement therapy and various surgical methods ... [TODO: four clusters]
+In a world where we don't _have_ magical perfect sex-change technology, but we _do_ have hormone replacement therapy and various surgical methods, you actually end up with _four_ clusters: females, males, masculinized females (a.k.a. trans men), and feminized males (a.k.a. trans women).
[TODO: explain that "I don't do policy."]
The thing I'm objecting to is this _culture of narcissistic Orwellian mind games_ that thinks people have the right to _dictate other people's model of reality_.
-[TODO: Jessica and Sam should exist, but this culture is nuts
+[TODO: my friends should exist, but this culture is nuts
https://twitter.com/caraesten/status/1092472430465929216
> damn one extremely bad way to start my day is having the receptionist at slack say I look like a male celebrity
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff