* 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: asking for pronouns could only plausibly be a good idea if coupled with further interventions—but that's not the picture we'd get if we took Yudkowsky literally
+ * 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
+
+ * introductory sentence before referencing "we" or "the community"
+ * can some of the asides be yanked into footnotes??
+
+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.)
+
-----
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?
+
+----
+
+Or if you have some other Pareto improvement to propose (relative to the obvious Nash equilibrium world where I published without emailing you first, and you ignored it).
+
+----
+
+I considered the September clarification sufficient! You reopened hostilities in February by putting up more bullshit that I have to waste months of my life refuting!
+
+as far as I can tell, I'm only doing what you taught me to do: carve reality at the joints, speak the truth even as your voice trembles, make an extraordinary effort when you've got something to protect
+
+How sensitive is he to reputational concerns? Compare feud with Alexander Kruel
+
+-----
+
+[TODO: again, [Yudkowsky's pathological fixation on avoiding "lying"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly) is a distraction from anything that anyone actually cares about. Certainly, I don't believe (a) as stated. But something substantively _similar_ to (a), (a') that self-reports are biased by social desirability and we can't take "gender identity" literally seems _overwhelmingly_ likely to be true, and I have a study to support it— /papers/blanchard-clemmensen-steiner-social_desirability_response_set_and_systematic_distortion.pdf . This should not seem implausible to someone who co-blogged with Robin Hanson for three years! As for (b), I don't think they get more favorable treatment from the rest of Society uniformly, I absolutely believe (b') that there's a _subculture_ that encourages transition for ideological reasons among people who wouldn't think of themselves as "trans" if they lived in a different subculture.
+
+Can we talk about _that_ in your Caliphate, my (a') and (b')? (Which is the stuff I actually care about, not pronouns.) Based on my experiences trying to, my read of the situation is, No, we can't talk about that. But if so,
+
+Subject: blessing to speak freely, and privacy norms?
+
+Dear Eliezer:
+
+Do you particularly _care_ if I publish a couple blog posts that say some negative things about you? (That is, not just responding to object-level arguments, but also carefully and exhaustively explaining the specific sense in which I think you've been culpably intellectually dishonest. I used to trust you as a general-purpose intellectual authority, but I think you've made it very clear that you don't think you can politically afford being worthy of that trust, and I think I have a legitimate interest in writing publicly about why you're Not My Caliph anymore.)
+
+If you actually _care_ about potential reputational damage to you from my writing things that I think I have a legitimate interest in writing about, I would be _willing_ to let you pre-read the drafts before publishing and give you the chance to object to anything you think is unfair, if you _wanted_ ...
+
+But I'd rather agree that that's not necessary. I don't want to waste any more of your time, and I'm noticing it's a lot harder to write when I'm spending more time worrying about what you'd think of me, than on saying the things I need to say. (Because I still have an extremely messed-up cult-leader hero-worship betrayal-trauma silencing complex around you.)
+
+So, since you probably _don't_ particularly care (because it's not AGI alignment and therefore unimportant), **may I please have your advance blessing to just write and publish what I'm thinking so I can get it all out of my system and move on with my life?**
+
+I would assume that the privacy norm applying to me writing about our previous interactions is that I'm obviously allowed to talk about my actions, but that I can't quote your side of private conversations (_e.g._, I can mention _making_ Cheerful Price offers, but have to Glomarize as to whether you accepted), but I am allowed to _anonymously_ quote things I remember you saying (_e.g._, at the Independence Day party; if I say "Someone advised me that I was living in the should-universe, and I said [...]", and some readers could speculate that "someone" was you, that's not my fault). I don't think you can reasonably object to this, but tell me if you somehow do. I remain,
+
+Your faithful student,
+Zack M. Davis
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff