>
> I will never stand against those who stand against lies. But changing your name, asking people to address you by a different pronoun, and getting sex reassignment surgery, Is. Not. Lying. You are _ontologically_ confused if you think those acts are false assertions.
-Some of the replies tried explain the problem—and Yudkowsky kept refusing to understand:
+Some of the replies tried explain the problem—and Yudkowsky kept refusing to understand—
> Using language in a way _you_ dislike, openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying. The proposition you claim false (chromosomes?) is not what the speech is meant to convey—and this is known to everyone involved, it is not a secret.
-Repeatedly:
+—repeatedly:
> You're mistaken about what the word means to you, I demonstrate thus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome
>
If the extension of common words like 'woman' and 'man' is an issue of epistemic importance that rationalists should care about, then presumably so is Twitter's anti-misgendering policy—and if it _isn't_ (because you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning) then I'm not sure what's _left_ of the "Human's Guide to Words" sequence if the [37-part grand moral](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong) needs to be retracted.
-I think it _is_ standing in defense of truth if have an _argument_ for why my preferred word usage does a better job at "carving reality at the joints", and the one bringing my usage explicitly into question doesn't have such an argument. As such, I didn't see the _practical_ difference between "you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning", and "I can define a word any way I want." About which, a previous Eliezer Yudkowsky had written:
+I think it _is_ standing in defense of truth if have an _argument_ for why my preferred word usage does a better job at "carving reality at the joints", and the one bringing my usage explicitly into question doesn't have such an argument. As such, I didn't see the _practical_ difference between "you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning", and "I can define a word any way I want." About which, again, a previous Eliezer Yudkowsky had written:
> ["It is a common misconception that you can define a word any way you like. [...] If you believe that you can 'define a word any way you like', without realizing that your brain goes on categorizing without your conscious oversight, then you won't take the effort to choose your definitions wisely."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences)
>
> ["I say all this, because the idea that 'You can X any way you like' is a huge obstacle to learning how to X wisely. 'It's a free country; I have a right to my own opinion' obstructs the art of finding truth. 'I can define a word any way I like' obstructs the art of carving reality at its joints. And even the sensible-sounding 'The labels we attach to words are arbitrary' obstructs awareness of compactness."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes)
>
> ["One may even consider the act of defining a word as a promise to \[the\] effect [...] \[that the definition\] will somehow help you make inferences / shorten your messages."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace)
+
+One could argue that this is unfairly interpreting Yudkowsky's Tweets as having a broader scope than was intended—that Yudkowsky _only_ meant to slap down the specific false claim that using 'he' for someone with a Y chromosome is lying, without intending any broader implications about trans issues or the philosophy of language. It wouldn't be realistic or fair to expect every public figure to host a truly exhaustive debate on all related issues every time a fallacy they encounter in the wild annoys them enough for them to Tweet about that specific fallacy.
+
+However, I don't think this "narrow" reading is the most natural one. Yudkowsky had previously written of what he called [the fourth virtue of evenness](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/): "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." He had likewise written [of reversed stupidity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence) (bolding mine):
+
+> **To argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates**. Arguing against weaker advocates proves _nothing_, because even the strongest idea will attract weak advocates.
+
+Relatedly, Scott Alexander had written about how ["weak men are superweapons"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/): speakers often selectively draw attention to the worst arguments in favor of a position, in an attempt to socially discredit people who have better arguments for the position (which the speaker ignores). In the same way, by _just_ slapping down a weak man from the "anti-trans" political coalition without saying anything else in a similarly prominent location, Yudkowsky was liable to mislead his readers (who trusted him to argue against ideas honestly) into thinking that there were no better arguments from the "anti-trans" side.
+
+To be sure, it imposes a cost on speakers to not be able to Tweet about one specific annoying fallacy and then move on with their lives without the need for [endless disclaimers](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/against-disclai.html) about related but stronger arguments that they're _not_ addressing. But the fact that [Yudkowsky disclaimed that](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067185907843756032) he wasn't taking a stand for or against Twitter's anti-misgendering policy demonstrates that he _didn't_ have an aversion to spending a few extra words to prevent the most common misunderstandings.
+
+Given that, I have trouble reading the Tweets Yudkowsky published 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), deeper in the thread, Yudkowsky wrote:
+
+> 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).
+
+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 itself take us into the Glorious Transhumanist Future where everyone is the sex they say they are.
+
+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. If you just had one integrated league, females wouldn't be competitive (in most sports, with some exceptions [like ultra-distance swimming](https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/why-women-have-beaten-men-in-marathon-swimming/)).
+
+It's not that females and males are exactly the same except males are 10% stronger on average (in which case, you might just shrug and accept unequal outcomes, the way we shrug and accept it that some competitors have better genes). Different traits have different relevance to different sports: women do better in ultraswimming _because_ that competition is sampling a corner of sportspace where body fat is an advantage. It really is an apples-to-oranges comparison, rather than "two populations of apples with different mean weight".
+
+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. Including male people in female sports leagues undermines the point of having a separate female league, and [_empirically_, hormone replacement therapy after puberty](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3) [doesn't substantially change the picture here](https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/15/865).
+
+(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.)
+
+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".
+
+Yudkowsky's claim to merely have been standing up for the distinction between facts and policy questions doesn't seem 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.
+
+I just spent a few paragraphs picking on the "sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary" remark, because sports is a case where the relevant effect sizes are _so_ large as to make the point [hard for all but the most ardent gender-identity partisans to deny](/2017/Jun/questions-such-as-wtf-is-wrong-with-you-people/).
+
+But the point is general. If _any_ concrete negative consequence of gender self-identity categories is going to be waved away with, "Oh, but that's a mere _policy_ decision that can be dealt with on some basis other than gender, and therefore doesn't count as an objection to the new definition of gender words", then it's not clear what the new definition is _for_. The policymaking categories we use to make decisions are _closely related_ to the epistemic categories we use to make predictions.
+
+An illustrative example: like many gender-dysphoric males, I [cosplay](/2016/Dec/joined/) [female](/2017/Oct/a-leaf-in-the-crosswind/) [characters](/2019/Aug/a-love-that-is-out-of-anyones-control/) at fandom conventions sometimes. And, unfortunately, like many gender-dysphoric males, I'm _not very good at it_. I think someone looking at some of my cosplay photos and trying to describe their content in clear language—not trying to be nice to anyone or make a point, but just trying to use language as a map that reflects the territory—would say something like, "This is a photo of a man and he's wearing a dress." The word _man_ in that sentence is expressing _cognitive work_: it's a summary of the [lawful cause-and-effect evidential entanglement](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6s3xABaXKPdFwA3FS/what-is-evidence) whereby the photons reflecting off the photograph are correlated with photons reflecting off my body at the time the photo was taken, which are correlated with my externally-observable secondary sex characteristics (facial structure, beard shadow, _&c._), from which evidence an agent using an [efficient naïve-Bayes-like model](http://lesswrong.com/lw/o8/conditional_independence_and_naive_bayes/) can assign me to its "man" category and thereby make probabilistic predictions about some of my traits that aren't directly observable from the photo, and achieve a better [score on those predictions](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical/) than if the agent had assigned me to its "woman" category, where by "traits" I mean not (just) particularly sex chromosomes ([as Yudkowsky suggested on Twitter](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067291243728650243)), but the _conjunction_ of dozens or hundreds of observable measurements that are [_causally downstream_ of sex chromosomes](/2021/Sep/link-blood-is-thicker-than-water/): reproductive organs _and_ muscle mass (sex difference effect size of [Cohen's _d_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_size#Cohen's_d)≈2.6) _and_ Big Five Agreeableness (_d_≈0.5) _and_ Big Five Neuroticism (_d_≈0.4) _and_ short-term memory (_d_≈0.2, favoring women) _and_ white-to-gray-matter ratios in the brain _and_ probable socialization history _and_ [any number of other things](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_human_physiology)—including differences we might not necessarily currently know about, but have prior reasons to suspect exist: no one _knew_ about sex chromosomes before 1905, but given all the other systematic differences between women and men, it would have been a reasonable guess (that turned out to be correct!) to suspect the existence of some sort of molecular mechanism of sex determination.
+
+Making someone say "trans woman" instead of "man" in that sentence depending on my verbally self-reported self-identity may not be forcing them to _lie_, exactly.
+
+(Because it's understood, "openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning", what _trans women_ are:
+
+
+But it _is_ forcing them to obfuscate the probabilistic inference they were trying to communicate with the original sentence (about modeling the person in the photograph as being sampled from the "men" [cluster in configuration space](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace)), and instead use language that suggests a different cluster-structure ("trans women", two words, are presumably a subcluster within the "women" cluster).
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At least, a _pedagogy_ mistake. If Yudkowsky _just_ wanted to make a politically neutral technical point about the difference between fact-claims and policy claims _without_ "picking a side" in the broader cultural war dispute, these Tweets did a very poor job of it. I of course agree that pronoun usage conventions, and conventions about who uses what bathroom, are not, themselves, factual assertions about sex chromosomes in particular. I'm not saying that Yudkowsky made a false statement there. Rather, I'm saying that it's _bizarre_ to condescendingly point this out _as if it were the crux of contemporary trans-rights debates_. Conservatives and gender-critical feminists _know_ that trans-rights advocates aren't falsely claiming that trans women have XX chromosomes. But the question of what categories epistemically "carve reality at the joints", is _not unrelated_ to the question of which categories to use in policy decisions: the _function_ of sex-segrated bathrooms is to protect females from males, where "females" and "males" are natural clusters in configuration space that it makes sense to want words to refer to.
-Even if the thread only explicitly mentioned pronouns and not the noun "woman", in practice, and in the context of elite intellectual American culture in which "trans women are women" is dogma, I don't see any _meaningful_ difference between "you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning" and "I can define the word 'woman' any way I want." (About which, the Yudkowsky of 2008 had some harsh things to say, as excerpted above.) It's hard to read the Tweets Yudkowsky published 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), deeper in the thread, Yudkowsky wrote:
+Even if the thread only explicitly mentioned pronouns and not the noun "woman", in practice, and in the context of elite intellectual American culture in which "trans women are women" is dogma, I don't see any _meaningful_ difference between "you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning" and "I can define the word 'woman' any way I want." (About which, the Yudkowsky of 2008 had some harsh things to say, as excerpted above.)
+
+
+
-> 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).
-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.
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}.
-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: relevance of multivariate—
-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
-It's not that females and males are exactly the same except males are 10% stronger on average
-It really is an apples-to-oranges comparison, rather than "two populations of apples with different mean weight"
+
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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.)
+
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water
-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/)).
+
]
[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
+
+
+
+
]
-[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—cite South Park)
+[TODO sentences about Lia Thomas and Cece Tefler] https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1466044767561830405 (Thomas and Tefler's —cite South Park)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10445679/Lia-Thomas-UPenn-teammate-says-trans-swimmer-doesnt-cover-genitals-locker-room.html
https://twitter.com/sharrond62/status/1495802345380356103 Lia Thomas event coverage
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/weekly-recap-lia-thomas-birth-certificates Zippy inv. cluster graph!
https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/a-look-at-the-numbers-and-times-no-denying-the-advantages-of-lia-thomas/
]
-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. Including male people in female sports leagues undermines the point of having a separate female league.
-(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.)
-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".
+Writing out this criticism now, the situation doesn't feel _confusing_, anymore. Yudkowsky was very obviously being intellectually dishonest in response to very obvious political incentives. That's a thing that public intellectuals do. And, again, I agree that the distinction between facts and policy decisions _is_ a valid one, even if I thought it was being selectively invoked here as an [isolated demand for rigor](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/) because of the political context. Coming from _anyone else in the world_, I would have considered the thread fine—a solidly above-average performance, really. I wouldn't have felt confused or betrayed at all. Coming from Eliezer Yudkowsky, it was—confusing.
+
+Because of my hero worship, "he's being intellectually dishonest in response to very obvious political incentives" wasn't in my hypothesis space; I _had_ to assume the thread was an "honest mistake" in his rationality lessons, rather than (what it actually was, what it _obviously_ actually was) hostile political action.
+
+
+
-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.
-(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.)
-Writing out this criticism now, the situation doesn't feel _confusing_, anymore. Yudkowsky was very obviously being intellectually dishonest in response to very obvious political incentives. That's a thing that public intellectuals do. And, again, I agree that the distinction between facts and policy decisions _is_ a valid one, even if I thought it was being selectively invoked here as an [isolated demand for rigor](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/) because of the political context. Coming from _anyone else in the world_, I would have considered the thread fine—a solidly above-average performance, really. I wouldn't have felt confused or betrayed at all. Coming from Eliezer Yudkowsky, it was—confusing.
-Because of my hero worship, "he's being intellectually dishonest in response to very obvious political incentives" wasn't in my hypothesis space; I _had_ to assume the thread was an "honest mistake" in his rationality lessons, rather than (what it actually was, what it _obviously_ actually was) hostile political action.
+, then you're knowably, predictably making your _readers_ that much stupider.
+, which has negative consequences for his "advancing the art of human rationality" project, even if you haven't said anything false—particularly because people look up to you as the one who taught them to aspire to a _[higher](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoLQN5ryZ9XkZjq5h/tsuyoku-naritai-i-want-to-become-stronger) [standard](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Nu3wa6npK4Ry66vFp/a-sense-that-more-is-possible)_ [than](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline) [merely not-lying](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly).
-(because we can define a word any way we like),
-From the text of your Tweets and your subsequent email clarification, I understand that you say your intent was specifically *only* to slap down the "Using 'he' for someone with a Y chromosome is lying" fallacy, and not to imply anything further. And I understand that it wouldn't be realistic or fair to expect every public figure to host a truly exhaustive debate on all related issues every time a fallacy they encounter in the wild annoys them enough for them to Tweet about that specific fallacy.
-Although it's important to check whether you've _actually_ encountered the annoying fallacy in the wild, rather than your [cached](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2MD3NMLBPCqPfnfre/cached-thoughts) misconception of what other people are saying. Your email of 29 November seems to imply that you were trying to subtweet Eric Weinstein—presumably his [7-tweet thread](https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1067112939482574848) earlier the same day as your Tweets at issue? If so, I think you're strawmanning him pretty badly! If you reread _his_ Tweets (["This banning of 'deadnaming' is preposterous"](https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1067112940686299136), ["treating Trans M/F *exactly* the same as born M/F would be medical malpractice"](https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1067112943186145280)), I don't think he's _saying_ anything that could be summarized as "Pronouns are facts/lies!", _especially_ given that [he _explicitly says_](https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1067112948529684480), "almost all of us who fight this issue in the #IDW voluntarily use people’s preferred pronouns".
-In any case, I hope you can see why I would be concerned about the *effects* of your Tweets on your readers, whatever your private intent? It is written of [the fourth virtue](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/): "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." It is likewise written [of reversed stupidity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence):
-> **To argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates**. \[bolding mine—ZMD\] Arguing against weaker advocates proves *nothing*, because even the strongest idea will attract weak advocates.
-As _geniunely inconvenient_ as it is for people who just want to Tweet about one annoying fallacy and then move on with their lives without the need for [endless disclaimers](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/against-disclai.html), I fear that if you *just* slap down a [weak man](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/) from the "anti-trans" political coalition and then *don't say anything else* in a similarly prominent location, then you're knowably, predictably making your *readers* that much stupider, which has negative consequences for your "advancing the art of human rationality" project, even if you haven't said anything false—particularly because people look up to you as the one who taught them to aspire to a _[higher](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoLQN5ryZ9XkZjq5h/tsuyoku-naritai-i-want-to-become-stronger) [standard](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Nu3wa6npK4Ry66vFp/a-sense-that-more-is-possible)_ [than](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline) merely not-lying.
-The fact that [you disclaimed that](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067185907843756032) you weren't taking a stand for or against Twitter's anti-misgendering policy demonstrates that you don't have a Hansonian aversion to spending a few extra words to prevent the most common misunderstandings. You've also previously written about a speaker's duty to teach the virtue of evenness [in "Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AdYdLP2sRqPMoe8fb/knowing-about-biases-can-hurt-people) (which I think should go the same for "Knowing About Philosophy of Language Can Hurt People"):
+It's true that the same word can be used in many ways depending on context. But you're _not done_ dissolving the question just by making that observation.
-> Whether I do it on paper, or in speech, I now try to never mention calibration and overconfidence unless I have first talked about disconfirmation bias, motivated skepticism, sophisticated arguers, and dysrationalia in the mentally agile. First, do no harm!
-A decade ago, back when you were [trying to explain your metaethics](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Metaethics_sequence), I was part of the crowd saying, "Wait, how is this any different from anti-realism? You agree that there's no morality in the laws of physics themselves." And my present-day paraphrase of your reply—which still might not match what you actually believe, but is much more than I understood then—would be: "I agree that there's no morality written in the laws of physics, no [ontological XML tag](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PoDAyQMWEXBBBEJ5P/magical-categories) of Intrinsic Goodness, but you're not *done* [dissolving the question](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Mc6QcrsbH5NRXbCRX/dissolving-the-question) just by making that observation. People seem to be doing *cognitive work* when they argue about morality. What is the nature of that cognitive work? *That* is the question I am attempting to answer."
+And the one who triumphantly shouts in the public square, "And *therefore*, people who object to my preferred use of language are ontologically confused!" is _ignoring the interesting part of the problem_. Gender identity's [claim to be non-disprovable](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fAuWLS7RKWD2npBFR/religion-s-claim-to-be-non-disprovable) mostly functions as a way to [avoid the belief's real weak points](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dHQkDNMhj692ayx78/avoiding-your-belief-s-real-weak-points).
-Similarly with categories in general, and sex (or "gender") categorization in particular. It's true that the same word can be used in many ways depending on context. But you're _not done_ dissolving the question just by making that observation. And the one who triumphantly shouts in the public square, "And *therefore*, people who object to my preferred use of language are ontologically confused!" is *ignoring the interesting part of the problem*. Gender identity's [claim to be non-disprovable](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fAuWLS7RKWD2npBFR/religion-s-claim-to-be-non-disprovable) mostly functions as a way to [avoid the belief's real weak points](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dHQkDNMhj692ayx78/avoiding-your-belief-s-real-weak-points).
-An illustrative example: like many gender-dysphoric males, I cosplay female characters at conventions sometimes. And, unfortunately, like many gender-dysphoric males, I'm *not very good at it*. I think someone looking at [my cosplay photos](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/media_set?set=a.10155131901020199&type=3) and trying to describe their content in clear language—not trying to be nice to anyone or make a point, but just trying to use language as a map that reflects the territory—would say something like, "This is a photo of a man and he's wearing a dress." The word *man* in that sentence is expressing *cognitive work*: it's a summary of the [lawful cause-and-effect evidential entanglement](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6s3xABaXKPdFwA3FS/what-is-evidence) whereby the photons reflecting off the photograph are correlated with photons reflecting off my body at the time the photo was taken, which are correlated with my externally-observable secondary sex characteristics (facial structure, beard shadow, *&c.*), from which evidence an agent using an [efficient naïve-Bayes-like model](http://lesswrong.com/lw/o8/conditional_independence_and_naive_bayes/) can assign me to its "man" category and thereby make probabilistic predictions about some of my traits that aren't directly observable from the photo, and achieve a better [score on those predictions](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical/) than if the agent had assigned me to its "woman" category, where by "traits" I mean not *just* chromosomes ([as you suggested on Twitter](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067291243728650243)), but the *conjunction* of chromosomes *and* reproductive organs _and_ muscle mass (sex difference effect size of [Cohen's *d*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_size#Cohen's_d)≈2.6) *and* Big Five Agreeableness (*d*≈0.5) *and* Big Five Neuroticism (*d*≈0.4) *and* short-term memory (*d*≈0.2, favoring women) *and* white-to-gray-matter ratios in the brain *and* probable socialization history *and* [lots of other things](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_human_physiology)—including differences we might not necessarily currently know about, but have prior reasons to suspect exist: no one _knew_ about sex chromosomes before 1905, but given all the other systematic differences between women and men, it would have been a reasonable guess (that turned out to be correct!) to suspect the existence of some sort of molecular mechanism of sex determination.
-Making someone say "trans woman" instead of "man" in that sentence depending on my verbally self-reported self-identity may not be forcing them to *lie*. But it *is* forcing them to obfuscate the probabilistic inference they were trying to communicate with the original sentence (about modeling the person in the photograph as being sampled from the "men" [cluster in configuration space](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace)), and instead use language that suggests a different cluster-structure ("trans women", two words, are presumably a subcluster within the "women" cluster). This encoding might not confuse a well-designed AI into making any bad predictions, but [as you explained very clearly, it probably will confuse humans](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/veN86cBhoe7mBxXLk/categorizing-has-consequences):
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+This encoding might not confuse a well-designed AI into making any bad predictions, but [as you explained very clearly, it probably will confuse humans](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/veN86cBhoe7mBxXLk/categorizing-has-consequences):
> You can see this in terms of similarity clusters: once you draw a boundary around a group, the mind starts trying to harvest similarities from the group. And unfortunately the human pattern-detectors seem to operate in such overdrive that we see patterns whether they're there or not; a weakly negative correlation can be mistaken for a strong positive one with a bit of selective memory.
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(I _want_ to confidently predict that everything I've just said is completely obvious to you, because I learned it all specifically from you! A 130 IQ _nobody_ like me shouldn't have to say _any_ of this to the _author_ of "A Human's Guide to Words"! But then I don't know how to reconcile that with your recent public statement about [not seeing "how there's scientific truth at stake"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067482047126495232). Hence this desperate and [_confused_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5JDkW4MYXit2CquLs/your-strength-as-a-rationalist) email plea.)
In your email of 29 November, you wrote, "I hope I would have noticed if I had tweeted anything asserting [Zack's] factual statements to be factually false, since that would imply knowledge I don't claim to have," and in your Twitter [reply link](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1068071036732694529) to my post (thanks!!), you wrote, "[w]ithout yet judging its empirical content." However, as Michael emphasized ("That's not what Zach is talking about at all and not what the debate is about and you know this"), the _main_ point I'm trying to make is a philosophical one, not an empirical one: that category boundaries and associated language are not arbitrary (if you care about human intelligence being useful), and that sex (or "gender") is no exception.
With respect to transgender issues, this certainly _can_ go both ways: somewhere on Twitter, there are members of the "anti-trans" political coalition insisting, "No, that's _really_ a man because chromosomes" even though they know that that's not what members of the "pro-trans" coalition mean—although as stated earlier, I don't think Eric Weinstein is guilty of this. But given the likely distribution of your Twitter followers and what they need to hear, I'm very worried about the _consequences_ (again, remaining agnostic about your private intent) of slapping down the "But, but, chromosomes" idiocy and then not engaging with the _drop-dead obvious_ "But, but, clusters in high-dimensional configuration space that [aren't actually changeable with contemporary technology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions)" steelman.
It makes sense that (I speculate) you might perceive political constraints on what you want to say in public. (I still work under a pseudonym myself; it would be wildly hypocritical of me to accuse anyone else of cowardice!) But I suspect that if you want to not get into a distracting political fight about topic X, then maybe the responsible thing to do is just not say anything about topic X, rather than engaging with the _stupid_ version of anti-X, and then [stonewalling](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters) with "That's a policy question" when people [try to point out the problem](https://twitter.com/samsaragon/status/1067238063816945664)? Having already done so, is it at all possible that you might want to provide your readers a clarification that [category boundaries are not arbitrary](http://lesswrong.com/lw/o0/where_to_draw_the_boundary/) and that [actually changing sex is a very hard technical problem](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions)? Or if you don't want to do that publicly, maybe an internal ["Halt, Melt, and Catch Fire event"](https://www.lesswrong.com/rationality/fighting-a-rearguard-action-against-the-truth) is in order on whatever processes led to the present absurd situation (where I feel like I need to explain "A Human's Guide to Words" to you, and Michael, Sarah, and Ben all seem to think I have a point)? Alternatively, if _I'm_ philosophically in the wrong here, is there a particular argument I'm overlooking? I should be overjoyed to be corrected if I am in error, but "The rest of human civilization is a trash fire so whatever" is _not a counterargument!_
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projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff