* parenthetical about where "Oliver" came from
* some people have complained that my writing is too long, but when your interlocutors will go to the absurd length of _denying that the association of "she" with females_
* people have an incentive to fight over pronouns insofar as it's a "wedge" for more substantive issues
- * 4 levels of intellectual conversation
* appeal to inner privacy conversation-halter https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters
* don't use "baked in" so many times
* Aella https://knowingless.com/2019/06/06/side-effects-of-preferred-pronouns/
* "gamete size"—this is a tic where everyone knows what sex is, but no one is allowed to acknowledge the cluster
* maybe worth explaining why I keep saying "sex category" instead of "gender"—and be consistent about it
+ * transition interventions are bundled
+ * also take a crack at the Aristotelan binary sports Tweet
+ * this post needs to exist because I can't let him have the last word
* I need to acknowledge the
-
> In a wide variety of cases, sure, they can clearly communicate the unambiguous sex and gender of something that has an unambiguous sex and gender, much as a different language might have pronouns that sometimes clearly communicated hair color to the extent that hair color often fell into unambiguous clusters.
+ * maybe by "much more strongly ... different firm attachments", he's pointing to different people having different intuitions about what male/female clusters map to; that's definitely a thing, but it's wrong to conflate that with "Maybe it's like not being named Oliver"; people do agree on the approximate meaning of blue and green even if there are edge cases, cite fallacy of gray
+
+More Yudkowsky playing dumb—
+
+> What separates your stance from "I consider 'parmesan' to refer to only cheese from the Parma region in Italy and I don't appreciate being asked to lie"?
+
+> (Though considering I've literally never heard anyone else define "gender" this way, it's more like, "I consider 'cheddar' to refer to only cheese from the Parma region in Italy, and I don't appreciate being asked to lie" and that so many people give different definitions is part of the issue here; but let's set that all aside for now.)
+
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https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228
Nevertheless, I think I'm justified in posting this comment sharing a link to this write-up explaining everything that Yudkowsky is doing wrong in the above post + comments, because I have a legitimate interest in preventing other people from being harmed by trusting Yudkowsky's intellectual integrity and competence the way I used to: [link]
One imagines that Yudkowsky's optimal response here is to ignore this (rather than, say, acknowledging my incredibly obvious point that the appeal of the self-ID pronoun convention rests on the existing meanings of gendered pronouns, such that it's hypocritical to play dumb about there being existing meanings while defending the self-ID convention). If he already thought the PR risk of violating ideological taboos outweighed the benefits of having a rationality community that can think in public in a principled PR-blind manner, it's unclear why offering more arguments would change this: if the trust of people who want to be able to think in public isn't as valuable of an existential-risk-reduction resource as staying on Stalin's good side, then being trustworthy would be a dumb move! Whatever's best for the lightcone, you know?
+
+----
+
+How sensitive is he to reputational concerns? Compare feud with Alexander Kruel
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