--- /dev/null
+Title: Original Draft Coda to "Challenges"
+Date: 2022-01-01 11:00
+Category: commentary
+Tags: Eliezer Yudkowsky
+Status: draft
+
+If Yudkowsky is obviously playing dumb (consciously or not) and his comments can't be taken seriously, what's _actually_ going on here? When smart people act dumb, [it's usually wisest to assume that their behavior represents _optimized_ stupidity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie)—apparent "stupidity" that achieves a goal through some other channel than their words straightforwardly reflecting the truth. Someone who was _actually_ stupid wouldn't be able to generate text with a specific balance of insight and selective stupidity fine-tuned to reach a gender-politically convenient conclusion without explicitly invoking any controversial gender-political reasoning.
+
+Fortunately, Yudkowsky graciously grants us a clue in the form of [a disclaimer comment](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228):
+
+> It unfortunately occurs to me that I must, in cases like these, disclaim that—to the extent there existed sensible opposing arguments against what I have just said—people might be reluctant to speak them in public, in the present social atmosphere. [...]
+>
+> This is a filter affecting your evidence; it has not to my own knowledge filtered out a giant valid counterargument that invalidates this whole post. I would have kept silent in that case, for to speak then would have been dishonest.
+>
+> Personally, I'm used to operating without the cognitive support of a civilization in controversial domains, and have some confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it myself before speaking. So you know, from having read this, that I checked all the speakable and unspeakable arguments I had thought of, and concluded that this speakable argument would be good on net to publish, as would not be the case if I knew of a stronger but unspeakable counterargument in favor of Gendered Pronouns For Everyone and Asking To Leave The System Is Lying.
+>
+> But the existence of a wide social filter like that should be kept in mind; to whatever quantitative extent you don't trust your ability plus my ability to think of valid counterarguments that might exist, as a Bayesian you should proportionally update in the direction of the unknown arguments you speculate might have been filtered out.
+
+So, the explanation of [the problem of political censorship filtering evidence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting) here is great, but the part where Yudkowsky claims "confidence in [his] own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter" is just _laughable_. My point that _she_ and _he_ have existing meanings that you can't just ignore by fiat given that the existing meanings are _exactly_ what motivate people to ask for new pronouns in the first place is _really obvious_.
+
+Really, it would be _less_ embarassing for Yudkowsky if he were outright lying about having tried to think of counterarguments. The original post isn't _that_ bad if you assume that Yudkowsky was writing off the cuff, that he clearly just _didn't put any effort whatsoever_ into thinking about why someone might disagree. If he _did_ put in the effort—enough that he felt comfortable bragging about his ability to see the other side of the argument—and _still_ ended up proclaiming his "simplest and best protocol" without even so much as _mentioning_ any of its incredibly obvious costs ... that's just _pathetic_. If Yudkowsky's ability to explore the space of arguments is _that_ bad, why would you trust his opinion about _anything_?
+
+But perhaps it's premature to judge Yudkowsky without appreciating what tight constraints he labors under. The disclaimer comment mentions "speakable and unspeakable arguments"—but what, exactly, is the boundary of the "speakable"? In response to a commenter mentioning the cost of having to remember pronouns as a potential counterargument, Yudkowsky [offers us another clue](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228&reply_comment_id=10159421871809228):
+
+> 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.)
+
+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!)
+
+And instead of (b), consider the claim that (b′) transitioning is socially rewarded within particular _subcultures_ (although not Society as a whole), such that many of the same people wouldn't think of themselves as trans or even gender-dysphoric if they lived in a different subculture.
+
+I claim that (a′) and (b′) are _overwhelmingly likely to be true_. Can "we" talk about _that_? Are (a′) and (b′) "speakable", or not?
+
+We're unlikely to get clarification from Yudkowsky, but based on my experiences with the so-called "rationalist" community over the past coming-up-on-six years—the Whole Dumb Story of which might need to be the topic of _another_ future multi-thousand-word blog post, which I've found difficult to write, because it still hurts—I'm going to _guess_ that the answer is broadly No: no, "we" can't talk about that.
+
+But if I'm right that (a′) and (b′) should be live hypotheses and that Yudkowsky would consider them "unspeakable", that means "we" can't talk about what's _actually going on_ with gender dysphoria and transsexuality, which puts the whole discussion in a different light. In another comment, Yudkowsky lists some gender-transition interventions he named in [a November 2018 Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521) that was the precursor to the present discussion—using a different bathroom, changing one's name, asking for new pronouns, and getting sex reassignment surgery—and notes that none of these are calling oneself a "woman". [He continues](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421986539228&reply_comment_id=10159424960909228):
+
+> [Calling someone a "woman"] _is_ closer to the right sort of thing _ontologically_ to be true or false. More relevant to the current thread, now that we have a truth-bearing sentence, we can admit of the possibility of using our human superpower of language to _debate_ whether this sentence is indeed true or false, and have people express their nuanced opinions by uttering this sentence, or perhaps a more complicated sentence using a bunch of caveats, or maybe using the original sentence uncaveated to express their belief that this is a bad place for caveats. Policies about who uses what bathroom also have consequences and we can debate the goodness or badness (not truth or falsity) of those policies, and utter sentences to declare our nuanced or non-nuanced position before or after that debate.
+>
+> Trying to pack all of that into the pronouns you'd have to use in step 1 is the wrong place to pack it.
+
+Sure, _if we were in the position of designing a constructed language from scratch_ under current social conditions in which a person's "gender" is a contested social construct, rather than their sex an objective and undisputed fact, then yeah: in that situation _which we are not in_, you definitely wouldn't want to pack sex or gender into pronouns. But it's a disingenuous derailing tactic to grandstand about how people need to alter the semantics of their _already existing_ native language so that we can discuss the real issues under an allegedly superior pronoun convention when, _by your own admission_, you have _no intention whatsoever of discussing the real issues!_
+
+(Lest the "by your own admission" clause seem too accusatory, I should note that given constant behavior, admitting it is _much_ better than not-admitting it; so, huge thanks to Yudkowsky for the transparency on this point!)
+
+Again, a comparison to the _tú_/_usted_ distinction is instructive. It's one thing to advocate for collapsing the distinction and just settling on one second-person singular pronoun for the Spanish language. That's principled.
+
+It's quite another thing altogether to _simultaneously_ try to prevent a speaker from using _tú_ to indicate disrespect towards a social superior (on the stated rationale that the _tú_/_usted_ distinction is dumb and shouldn't exist), while _also_ refusing to entertain or address the speaker's arguments explaining _why_ they think their interlocutor is unworthy of the deference that would be implied by _usted_ (because such arguments are "unspeakable" for political reasons). That's just psychologically abusive.
+
+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):
+
+> 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.
+
+[TODO: (clean up and consolidate the case here after reading the TW-in-sports articles)
+
+The "multivariate" part is important, because
+
+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"
+
+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/)).
+
+]
+
+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.
+
+(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.)
+
+Including males people in female sports leagues undermines the point of having a separate female league.
+
+[TODO: more sentences explaining why HRT doesn't break taxonicity of sex, and why "gender identity" is a much less plausible joint anyway]
+
+[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)
+https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10445679/Lia-Thomas-UPenn-teammate-says-trans-swimmer-doesnt-cover-genitals-locker-room.html
+]
+
+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 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.)
+
+----
+
+Having analyzed the _ways_ in which Yudkowsky is playing dumb here, what's still not entirely clear is _why_. Presumably he cares about maintaining his credibility as an insightful and fair-minded thinker. Why tarnish that by putting on this haughty performance?
+
+Of course, presumably he _doesn't_ think he's tarnishing it—but why not? [He graciously explains in the Facebook comments](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228&reply_comment_id=10159421901809228):
+
+> it is sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful to post your agreement with Stalin about things you actually agree with Stalin about, in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles, especially because people do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment [...] I think people are better off at the end of that.
+
+Ah, _prudence_! He continues:
+
+> I don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot, or utter silence about everything Stalin has expressed an opinion on including "2 + 2 = 4" because if that logically counterfactually were wrong you would not be able to express an opposing opinion.
+
+The problem with trying to "exhibit generally rationalist principles" in an line of argument that you're constructing in order to be prudent and not community-harmful, is that you're thereby necessarily _not_ exhibiting the central rationalist principle that what matters is the process that _determines_ your conclusion, not the reasoning you present to _reach_ your presented conclusion, after the fact.
+
+The best explanation of this I know was authored by Yudkowsky himself in 2007, in a post titled ["A Rational Argument"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9f5EXt8KNNxTAihtZ/a-rational-argument). It's worth quoting at length. The Yudkowsky of 2007 invites us to consider the plight of a political campaign manager:
+
+> As a campaign manager reading a book on rationality, one question lies foremost on your mind: "How can I construct an impeccable rational argument that Mortimer Q. Snodgrass is the best candidate for Mayor of Hadleyburg?"
+>
+> Sorry. It can't be done.
+>
+> "What?" you cry. "But what if I use only valid support to construct my structure of reason? What if every fact I cite is true to the best of my knowledge, and relevant evidence under Bayes's Rule?"
+>
+> Sorry. It still can't be done. You defeated yourself the instant you specified your argument's conclusion in advance.
+
+The campaign manager is in possession of a survey of mayoral candidates on which Snodgrass compares favorably to other candidates, except for one question. The post continues (bolding mine):
+
+> So you are tempted to publish the questionnaire as part of your own campaign literature ... with the 11th question omitted, of course.
+>
+> **Which crosses the line between _rationality_ and _rationalization_.** It is no longer possible for the voters to condition on the facts alone; they must condition on the additional fact of their presentation, and infer the existence of hidden evidence.
+>
+> Indeed, **you crossed the line at the point where you considered whether the questionnaire was favorable or unfavorable to your candidate, before deciding whether to publish it.** "What!" you cry. "A campaign should publish facts unfavorable to their candidate?" But put yourself in the shoes of a voter, still trying to select a candidate—why would you censor useful information? You wouldn't, if you were genuinely curious. If you were flowing _forward_ from the evidence to an unknown choice of candidate, rather than flowing _backward_ from a fixed candidate to determine the arguments.
+
+The post then briefly discusses the idea of a "logical" argument, one whose conclusions follow from its premises. "All rectangles are quadrilaterals; all squares are quadrilaterals; therefore, all squares are rectangles" is given as an example of _illogical_ argument, even though the both premises are true (all rectangles and squares are in fact quadrilaterals) _and_ the conclusion is true (all squares are in fact rectangles). The problem is that the conclusion doesn't _follow_ from the premises; the _reason_ all squares are rectangles isn't _because_ they're both quadrilaterals. If we accepted arguments of the general _form_ "all A are C; all B are C; therefore all A are B", we would end up believing nonsense.
+
+Yudkowsky's conception of a "rational" argument—at least, Yudkowsky's conception in 2007, which the Yudkowsky of the current year seems to disagree with—has a similar flavor: the stated reasons should be the actual reasons. The post concludes:
+
+> If you really want to present an honest, rational argument _for your candidate_, in a political campaign, there is only one way to do it:
+>
+> * _Before anyone hires you_, gather up all the evidence you can about the different candidates.
+> * Make a checklist which you, yourself, will use to decide which candidate seems best.
+> * Process the checklist.
+> * Go to the winning candidate.
+> * Offer to become their campaign manager.
+> * When they ask for campaign literature, print out your checklist.
+>
+> Only in this way can you offer a _rational_ chain of argument, one whose bottom line was written flowing _forward_ from the lines above it. Whatever _actually_ decides your bottom line is the only thing you can _honestly_ write on the lines above.
+
+I remember this being pretty shocking to read back in 'aught-seven. What an alien mindset! But it's _correct_. You can't rationally argue "for" a chosen conclusion, because only the process you use to _decide what to argue for_ can be your real reason.
+
+This is a shockingly high standard for anyone to aspire to live up to—but what made Yudkowsky's Sequences so life-changingly valuable, was that they articulated the _existence_ of such a standard. For that, I will always be grateful.
+
+... which is why it's so _bizarre_ that the Yudkowsky of the current year acts like he's never heard of it! If your _actual_ bottom line is that it is sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful to post your agreement with Stalin, then sure, you can _totally_ find something you agree with to write on the lines above! Probably something that "exhibits generally rationalist principles", even! It's just that any rationalist who sees the game you're playing is going to correctly identify you as a partisan hack on this topic and take that into account when deciding whether they can trust you on other topics.
+
+"I don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot," Yudkowsky muses (where presumably, 'getting shot' is a metaphor for a large negative utility, like being unpopular with progressives). Yes, an astute observation! And _any other partisan hack could say exactly the same_, for the same reason. Why does the campaign manager withhold the results of the 11th question? Because he doesn't see what the alternative is besides getting shot.
+
+Yudkowsky [sometimes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K2c3dkKErsqFd28Dh/prices-or-bindings) [quotes](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1456002060084600832) _Calvin and Hobbes_: "I don't know which is worse, that everyone has his price, or that the price is always so low."
+
+If the idea of being fired from the Snodgrass campaign or being unpopular with progressives is _so_ terrifying to you that it seems analogous to getting shot, then, if those are really your true values, then sure—say whatever you need to say to keep your job and your popularity, as is personally prudent. You've set your price. But if the price you put on the intellectual integrity of your so-called "rationalist" community is similar to that of the Snodgrass for Mayor campaign, you shouldn't be surprised if intelligent, discerning people accord similar levels of credibility to the two groups' output.
+
+I see the phrase "bad faith" thrown around more than I think people know what it means. "Bad faith" doesn't mean "with ill intent", and it's more specific than "dishonest": it's [adopting the surface appearance of being moved by one set of motivations, while actually acting from another](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith).
+
+For example, an [insurance company employee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_adjuster) who goes through the motions of investigating your claim while privately intending to deny it might never consciously tell an explicit "lie", but is definitely acting in bad faith: they're asking you questions, demanding evidence, _&c._ in order to _make it look like_ you'll get paid if you prove the loss occurred—whereas in reality, you're just not going to be paid. Your responses to the claim inspector aren't completely casually _inert_: if you can make an extremely strong case that the loss occurred as you say, then the claim inspector might need to put some effort into coming up with some ingenious excuse to deny your claim in ways that exhibit general claim-inspection principles. But at the end of the day, the inspector is going to say what they need to say in order to protect the company's loss ratio, as is personally prudent.
+
+With this understanding of bad faith, we can read Yudkowsky's "it is sometimes personally prudent [...]" comment as admitting that his behavior on politically-charged topics is in bad faith—where "bad faith" isn't a meaningless insult, but [literally refers](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/can-crimes-be-discussed-literally/) to the pretending-to-have-one-set-of-motivations-while-acting-according-to-another behavior, such that accusations of bad faith can be true or false. Yudkowsky will never consciously tell an explicit "lie", but he'll go through the motions to _make it look like_ he's genuinely engaging with questions where I need the right answers in order to make extremely impactful social and medical decisions—whereas in reality, he's only going to address a selected subset of the relevant evidence and arguments that won't get him in trouble with progressives.
+
+To his credit, he _will_ admit that he's only willing to address a selected subset of arguments—but while doing so, he claims an absurd "confidence in [his] own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it [himself] before speaking" while _simultaneously_ blatantly mischaracterizing his opponents' beliefs! ("Gendered Pronouns For Everyone and Asking To Leave The System Is Lying" doesn't pass anyone's [ideological Turing test](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.html).)
+
+Counterarguments aren't completely causally _inert_: if you can make an extremely strong case that Biological Sex Is Sometimes More Relevant Than Self-Declared Gender Identity, Yudkowsky will put some effort into coming up with some ingenious excuse for why he _technically_ never said otherwise, in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles. But at the end of the day, Yudkowsky is going to say what he needs to say in order to protect his reputation, as is personally prudent.
+
+Even if one were to agree with this description of Yudkowsky's behavior, it doesn't immediately follow that Yudkowsky is making the wrong decision. Again, "bad faith" is meant as a literal description that makes predictions about behavior, not a contentless attack—maybe there are some circumstances in which engaging some amount of bad faith is the right thing to do, given the constraints one faces! For example, when talking to people on Twitter with a very different ideological background from me, I sometimes anticipate that if my interlocutor knew what I was actually thinking, they wouldn't want to talk to me, so I take care to word my replies in a way that makes it look like I'm more ideologically aligned with them than I actually am. (For example, I [never say "assigned female/male at birth" in my own voice on my own platform](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/), but I'll do it in an effort to speak my interlocutor's language.) I think of this as the _minimal_ amount of strategic bad faith needed to keep the conversation going, to get my interlocutor to evaluate my argument on its own merits, rather than rejecting it for coming from an ideological enemy. In cases such as these, I'm willing to defend my behavior as acceptable—there _is_ a sense in which I'm being deceptive by optimizing my language choice to make my interlocutor make bad guesses about my ideological alignment, but I'm comfortable with that amount and scope of deception because I don't think my interlocutor _should_ be paying attention to my personal alignment.
+
+[TODO: the term is "concern trolling"; speak of trying to correct a distortion]
+
+That is, my bad faith Twitter gambit of deceiving people about my ideological alignment in the hopes of improving the discussion seems like something that makes our collective beliefs about the topic-being-argued-about _more_ accurate. (And the topic-being-argued-about is presumably of greater collective interest than which "side" I personally happen to be on.)
+
+In contrast, the "it is sometimes personally prudent [...] to post your agreement with Stalin" gambit is the exact reverse: it's _introducing_ a distortion into the discussion in the hopes of correcting people's beliefs about the speaker's ideological alignment. (Yudkowsky is not a right-wing Bad Guy, but people would tar him as a right-wing Bad Guy if he ever said anything negative about trans people.) This doesn't improve our collective beliefs about the topic-being-argued about; it's a _pure_ ass-covering move.
+
+Yudkowsky names the alleged fact that "people do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment" as a mitigating factor. But the _reason_ censorship is such an effective tool in the hands of dictators like Stalin is because it ensures that many people _don't_ know—and that those who know (or suspect) don't have [game-theoretic common knowledge](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9QxnfMYccz9QRgZ5z/the-costly-coordination-mechanism-of-common-knowledge#Dictators_and_freedom_of_speech) that others do too.
+
+Zvi Mowshowitz has [written about how the false assertion that "everybody knows" something](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) is typically used justify deception: if "everybody knows" that we can't talk about biological sex (the reasoning goes), then no one is being deceived when our allegedly truthseeking discussion carefully steers clear of any reference to the reality of biological sex when it would otherwise be extremely relevant.
+
+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).
+
+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.
+
+But if you actually _cared_ about not deceiving your readers, you would want to be _really sure_ that those _really were_ the only two options. You'd [spend five minutes by the clock looking for third alternatives](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative)—including, possibly, not issuing proclamations on your honor as leader of the so-called "rationalist" community on topics where you _explicitly intend to ignore counteraguments on grounds of their being politically unfavorable_. Yudkowsky rejects this alternative on the grounds that it allegedly implies "utter silence about everything Stalin has expressed an opinion on including '2 + 2 = 4' because if that logically counterfactually were wrong you would not be able to express an opposing opinion", but this seems like yet another instance of Yudkowsky motivatedly playing dumb: if he _wanted_ to, I'm sure Eliezer Yudkowsky could think of _some relevant differences_ between "2 + 2 = 4" (a trivial fact of arithmetic) and "the simplest and best protocol is, "'He' refers to the set of people who have asked us to use 'he'" (a complex policy proposal whose numerous flaws I have analyzed in detail above).
+
+"I think people are better off at the end of that," Yudkowsky writes of the consequences of posting-your-agreement-with-Stalin policies. But here I think we need a more conflict-theoretic analysis that looks at a more detailed level than "people." _Who_ is better off, specifically?
+
+... and, I had been planning to save the Whole Dumb Story about my alienation from Yudkowsky's so-called "rationalists" for a _different_ multi-thousand-word blog post, because _this_ multi-thousand-word blog post was supposed to be narrowly scoped to _just_ exhaustively replying to Yudkowsky's February 2021 Facebook post about pronoun conventions. But in order to explain the problems with "people do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment" and "people are better off at the end of that", I may need to _briefly_ recap some of the history leading to the present discussion, which explains why _I_ didn't know and _I'm_ not better off, with the understanding that it's only a summary and I might still need to tell the long version in a separate post, if it feels still necessary relative to everything else I need to get around to writing. (It's not actually a very interesting story; I just need to get it out of my system so I can stop grieving and move on with my life.)
+
+I _never_ expected to end up arguing about something so _trivial_ as the minutiae of pronoun conventions (which no one would care about if historical contingencies of the evolution of the English language hadn't made them a Schelling point and typographical attack surface for things people do care about). The conversation only ended up here after a series of derailings. At the start, I was _trying_ to say something substantive about the psychology of straight men who wish they were women.
+
+You see, back in the 'aughts when Yudkowsky was writing his Sequences, he occasionally said some things about sex differences that I often found offensive at the time, but which ended up being hugely influential on me, especially in the context of my ideological denial of psychological sex differences and my secret lifelong-since-puberty erotic fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman. I wrote about this at length in a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to my Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/)].
+
+In particular, in ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) (and its precursor in a [2004 Extropians mailing list post](https://archive.is/En6qW)), Yudkowsky explains that "changing sex" is vastly easier said than done—
+
+[[[ TODO summarize the Whole Dumb Story (does there need to be a separate post? I'm still not sure)
+
+[TODO: But that was all about me—I assumed "trans" was a different thing. My first clue that I might not be living in that world came from—Eliezer Yudkowsky, with the "at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women" thing]
+
+_After it's been pointed out_, it should be a pretty obvious hypothesis that "guy on the Extropians mailing list in 2004 who fantasizes about having a female counterpart" and "guy in 2016 Berkeley who identifies as a trans woman" are the _same guy_.
+
+[So I ended up arguing with people about the two-type taxonomy, and I noticed that those discussions kept getting _derailed_ on some variation of "The word woman doesn't actually mean that". So I took the bait, and starting arguing against that, and then Yudkowsky comes back to the subject with his "Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning"—and I go on a philosophy of language crusade, and Yudkowsky eventually clarifies, and _then_ he comes back _again_ in Feb. 2022 with his "simplest and best protocol"]
+
+]]]
+
+At this point, the nature of the game is very clear. Yudkowsky wants to make sure he's on peaceful terms with the progressive _Zeitgeist_, subject to the constraint of not saying anything he knows to be false. Meanwhile, I want to actually make sense of what's actually going on in the world as regards sex and gender, because _I need the correct answer to decide whether or not to cut my dick off_.
+
+On "his turn", he comes up with some pompous proclamation that's very obviously optimized to make the "pro-trans" faction look smart and good and make the "anti-trans" faction look dumb and bad, "in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles."
+
+On "my turn", I put in an _absurd_ amount of effort explaining in exhaustive, _exhaustive_ detail why Yudkowsky's pompous proclamation, while [not technically saying making any unambiguously "false" atomic statements](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly), was _substantively misleading_ as constrated to what any serious person would say if they were actually trying to make sense of the world without worrying what progressive activists would think of them.
+
+Note: being _on peaceful terms_ with the progressive _Zeitgeist_ isn't the same as kowtowing to it entirely. So, for example, Yudkowsky is _also_ on the record claiming that—
+
+> [Everything more complicated than](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1108277090577600512) protons tends to come in varieties. Hydrogen, for example, has isotopes. Gender dysphoria involves more than one proton and will probably have varieties.
+
+> [To be clear, I don't](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1108280619014905857) know much about gender dysphoria. There's an allegation that people are reluctant to speciate more than one kind of gender dysphoria. To the extent that's not a strawman, I would say only in a generic way that GD seems liable to have more than one species.
+
+There's a sense in which this could be read as a "concession" to my agenda. The two-type taxonomy of MtF _was_ the thing I was originally trying to talk about, before the philosophy-of-language derailing, and here Yudkowsky is backing up "my side" on that by publicly offering an argument that there's probably a more-than-one-type typology. So there's an intuition that I should be grateful for and satisfied with this concession—that it would be _greedy_ for me to keep criticizing him about the pronouns and language thing, given that he's throwing me a bone here.
+
+But that intuition is _wrong_. The perception that there are "sides" to which one can make "concessions" is an _illusion_ of the human cognitive architecture; it's not something that any sane cognitive process would think in the course of constructing a map that reflects the territory.
+
+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).
+
+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_.
+
+In the context of AI alignment theory, Yudkowsky has written about a "nearest unblocked strategy" phenomenon: if you directly prevent an agent from accomplishing a goal via some plan that you find undesirable, the agent will search for ways to route around that restriction, and probably find some plan that you find similarly undesirable for similar reasons.
+
+Suppose you developed an AI to [maximize human happiness subject to the constraint of obeying explicit orders](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/nearest_unblocked#exampleproducinghappiness). It might first try administering heroin to humans. When you order it not to, it might switch to administering cocaine. When you order it to not use any of a whole list of banned happiness-producing drugs, it might switch to researching new drugs, or just _pay_ humans to take heroin, _&c._
+
+It's the same thing with Yudkowsky's political-risk minimization subject to the constraint of not saying anything he knows to be false. First he comes out with ["I think I'm over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) (March 2016). When you point out that [that's not true](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions), then the next time he revisits the subject, he switches to ["you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning"](https://archive.is/Iy8Lq) (November 2018). When you point out that [_that's_ not true either](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong), he switches to "It is Shenanigans to try to bake your stance on how clustered things are [...] _into the pronoun system of a language and interpretation convention that you insist everybody use_" (February 2021). When you point out that's not what's going on, he switches to ... I don't know, but he's a smart guy; in the unlikely event that he sees fit to respond to this post, I'm sure he'll be able to think of _something_—but at this point, I have no reason to care. Talking to Yudkowsky on topics where getting the right answer would involve acknowledging facts that would make you unpopular in Berkeley is a _waste of everyone's time_; trying to inform you isn't [his bottom line](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line).
+
+Accusing one's interlocutor of bad faith is frowned upon for a reason. We would prefer to live in a world where we have intellectually fruitful object-level discussions under the assumption of good faith, rather than risk our fora degenerating into an acrimonious brawl of accusations and name-calling, which is unpleasant and (more importantly) doesn't make any intellectual progress. I, too, would prefer to have a real object-level discussion under the assumption of good faith.
+
+I tried the object-level good-faith argument thing _first_. I tried it for _years_. But at some point, I think I should be _allowed to notice_ the nearest-unblocked-strategy game which is _very obviously happening_ if you look at the history of what was said. I think there's _some_ number of years and _some_ number of thousands of words of litigating the object-level after which there's nothing left for me to do but jump up a meta level and explain, to anyone capable of hearing it, why in this case I think I've accumulated enough evidence in this case for the assumption of good faith to have been _empirically falsified_.
+
+(Of course, I realize that if we're crossing the Rubicon of abandoning the norm of assuming good faith, it needs to be abandoned symmetrically. I _think_ I'm doing a _pretty good_ job of adhering to standards of intellectual conduct and being transparent about my motivations, but I'm definitely not perfect, and, unlike Yudkowsky, I'm not so absurdly miscalibratedly arrogant to claim "confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important" (!) about my topics of interest. If Yudkowsky or anyone else thinks they _have a case_ based on my behavior that _I'm_ being culpably intellectually dishonest, they of course have my blessing and encouragement to post it for the audience to evaluate.)
+
+What makes all of this especially galling is the fact that _all of my heretical opinions are literally just Yudkowsky's opinions from the 'aughts!_ My whole thing about how changing sex isn't possible with existing technology because the category encompasses so many high-dimensional details? Not original to me! I [filled in a few trivial technical details](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard), but again, this was _in the Sequences_ as ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions). My thing about how you can't define concepts any way you want, because there are mathematical laws governing which category boundaries compress your anticipated experiences? Not original to me! I [filled in](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [a few technical details](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception), but [_we had a whole Sequence about this._](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong)
+
+Seriously, you think I'm _smart enough_ to come up with all of this indepedently? I'm not! I ripped it all off from Yudkowsky back in the 'aughts _when he still gave a shit about telling the truth_ in this domain. (More precisely, when he thought he could afford to give a shit, before the political environment and the growing stature of his so-called "rationalist" movement changed his incentives.)
+
+Does ... does he expect us not to _notice_? Or does he think that "everybody knows"?
+
+But I don't think that everybody knows. So I'm telling you.
+
+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]
+
+a rationality community that can't think about _practical_ issues that affect our day to day lives, but can get existential risk stuff right, is like asking for self-driving car software that can drive red cars but not blue cars
+
+It's a _problem_ if public intellectuals in the current year need to pretend to be dumber than seven-year-olds in 2016
+
+> _Perhaps_, replied the cold logic. _If the world were at stake._
+>
+> _Perhaps_, echoed the other part of himself, _but that is not what was actually happening._
+https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good
+
+https://www.readthesequences.com/
+> Because it is all, in the end, one thing. I talked about big important distant problems and neglected immediate life, but the laws governing them aren't actually different.
+
+> the challenge is almost entirely about high integrity communication by small groups
+https://twitter.com/HiFromMichaelV/status/1486044326618710018
-----
-If Yudkowsky is obviously playing dumb (consciously or not) and his comments can't be taken seriously, what's _actually_ going on here? When smart people act dumb, [it's usually wisest to assume that their behavior represents _optimized_ stupidity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie)—apparent "stupidity" that achieves a goal through some other channel than their words straightforwardly reflecting the truth. Someone who was _actually_ stupid wouldn't be able to generate text with a specific balance of insight and selective stupidity fine-tuned to reach a gender-politically convenient conclusion without explicitly invoking any controversial gender-political reasoning.
+If Yudkowsky is obviously playing dumb (consciously or not) and his comments can't be taken seriously, what's _actually_ going on here? I have some theories, based on the Whole Dumb Story about how I wasted the last six years of my life mostly-if-not-completely unsuccessfully trying to get Yudkowsky and his so-called "rationalists" to put truth before political convenience.
-Fortunately, Yudkowsky graciously grants us a clue in the form of [a disclaimer comment](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228):
-
-> It unfortunately occurs to me that I must, in cases like these, disclaim that—to the extent there existed sensible opposing arguments against what I have just said—people might be reluctant to speak them in public, in the present social atmosphere. [...]
->
-> This is a filter affecting your evidence; it has not to my own knowledge filtered out a giant valid counterargument that invalidates this whole post. I would have kept silent in that case, for to speak then would have been dishonest.
->
-> Personally, I'm used to operating without the cognitive support of a civilization in controversial domains, and have some confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it myself before speaking. So you know, from having read this, that I checked all the speakable and unspeakable arguments I had thought of, and concluded that this speakable argument would be good on net to publish, as would not be the case if I knew of a stronger but unspeakable counterargument in favor of Gendered Pronouns For Everyone and Asking To Leave The System Is Lying.
->
-> But the existence of a wide social filter like that should be kept in mind; to whatever quantitative extent you don't trust your ability plus my ability to think of valid counterarguments that might exist, as a Bayesian you should proportionally update in the direction of the unknown arguments you speculate might have been filtered out.
-
-So, the explanation of [the problem of political censorship filtering evidence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting) here is great, but the part where Yudkowsky claims "confidence in [his] own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter" is just _laughable_. My point that _she_ and _he_ have existing meanings that you can't just ignore by fiat given that the existing meanings are _exactly_ what motivate people to ask for new pronouns in the first place is _really obvious_.
-
-Really, it would be _less_ embarassing for Yudkowsky if he were outright lying about having tried to think of counterarguments. The original post isn't _that_ bad if you assume that Yudkowsky was writing off the cuff, that he clearly just _didn't put any effort whatsoever_ into thinking about why someone might disagree. If he _did_ put in the effort—enough that he felt comfortable bragging about his ability to see the other side of the argument—and _still_ ended up proclaiming his "simplest and best protocol" without even so much as _mentioning_ any of its incredibly obvious costs ... that's just _pathetic_. If Yudkowsky's ability to explore the space of arguments is _that_ bad, why would you trust his opinion about _anything_?
-
-But perhaps it's premature to judge Yudkowsky without appreciating what tight constraints he labors under. The disclaimer comment mentions "speakable and unspeakable arguments"—but what, exactly, is the boundary of the "speakable"? In response to a commenter mentioning the cost of having to remember pronouns as a potential counterargument, Yudkowsky [offers us another clue](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228&reply_comment_id=10159421871809228):
-
-> 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.)
-
-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!)
-
-And instead of (b), consider the claim that (b′) transitioning is socially rewarded within particular _subcultures_ (although not Society as a whole), such that many of the same people wouldn't think of themselves as trans or even gender-dysphoric if they lived in a different subculture.
-
-I claim that (a′) and (b′) are _overwhelmingly likely to be true_. Can "we" talk about _that_? Are (a′) and (b′) "speakable", or not?
-
-We're unlikely to get clarification from Yudkowsky, but based on my experiences with the so-called "rationalist" community over the past coming-up-on-six years—the Whole Dumb Story of which might need to be the topic of _another_ future multi-thousand-word blog post, which I've found difficult to write, because it still hurts—I'm going to _guess_ that the answer is broadly No: no, "we" can't talk about that.
-
-But if I'm right that (a′) and (b′) should be live hypotheses and that Yudkowsky would consider them "unspeakable", that means "we" can't talk about what's _actually going on_ with gender dysphoria and transsexuality, which puts the whole discussion in a different light. In another comment, Yudkowsky lists some gender-transition interventions he named in [a November 2018 Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521) that was the precursor to the present discussion—using a different bathroom, changing one's name, asking for new pronouns, and getting sex reassignment surgery—and notes that none of these are calling oneself a "woman". [He continues](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421986539228&reply_comment_id=10159424960909228):
-
-> [Calling someone a "woman"] _is_ closer to the right sort of thing _ontologically_ to be true or false. More relevant to the current thread, now that we have a truth-bearing sentence, we can admit of the possibility of using our human superpower of language to _debate_ whether this sentence is indeed true or false, and have people express their nuanced opinions by uttering this sentence, or perhaps a more complicated sentence using a bunch of caveats, or maybe using the original sentence uncaveated to express their belief that this is a bad place for caveats. Policies about who uses what bathroom also have consequences and we can debate the goodness or badness (not truth or falsity) of those policies, and utter sentences to declare our nuanced or non-nuanced position before or after that debate.
->
-> Trying to pack all of that into the pronouns you'd have to use in step 1 is the wrong place to pack it.
-
-Sure, _if we were in the position of designing a constructed language from scratch_ under current social conditions in which a person's "gender" is a contested social construct, rather than their sex an objective and undisputed fact, then yeah: in that situation _which we are not in_, you definitely wouldn't want to pack sex or gender into pronouns. But it's a disingenuous derailing tactic to grandstand about how people need to alter the semantics of their _already existing_ native language so that we can discuss the real issues under an allegedly superior pronoun convention when, _by your own admission_, you have _no intention whatsoever of discussing the real issues!_
-
-(Lest the "by your own admission" clause seem too accusatory, I should note that given constant behavior, admitting it is _much_ better than not-admitting it; so, huge thanks to Yudkowsky for the transparency on this point!)
-
-Again, a comparison to the _tú_/_usted_ distinction is instructive. It's one thing to advocate for collapsing the distinction and just settling on one second-person singular pronoun for the Spanish language. That's principled.
-
-It's quite another thing altogether to _simultaneously_ try to prevent a speaker from using _tú_ to indicate disrespect towards a social superior (on the stated rationale that the _tú_/_usted_ distinction is dumb and shouldn't exist), while _also_ refusing to entertain or address the speaker's arguments explaining _why_ they think their interlocutor is unworthy of the deference that would be implied by _usted_ (because such arguments are "unspeakable" for political reasons). That's just psychologically abusive.
-
-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):
-
-> 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.
-
-[TODO: (clean up and consolidate the case here after reading the TW-in-sports articles)
-
-The "multivariate" part is important, because
-
-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"
-
-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/)).
-
-]
-
-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.
-
-(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.)
-
-Including males people in female sports leagues undermines the point of having a separate female league.
-
-[TODO: more sentences explaining why HRT doesn't break taxonicity of sex, and why "gender identity" is a much less plausible joint anyway]
-
-[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)
-https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10445679/Lia-Thomas-UPenn-teammate-says-trans-swimmer-doesnt-cover-genitals-locker-room.html
-]
-
-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 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.)
-
-----
-
-Having analyzed the _ways_ in which Yudkowsky is playing dumb here, what's still not entirely clear is _why_. Presumably he cares about maintaining his credibility as an insightful and fair-minded thinker. Why tarnish that by putting on this haughty performance?
-
-Of course, presumably he _doesn't_ think he's tarnishing it—but why not? [He graciously explains in the Facebook comments](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228&reply_comment_id=10159421901809228):
-
-> it is sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful to post your agreement with Stalin about things you actually agree with Stalin about, in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles, especially because people do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment [...] I think people are better off at the end of that.
-
-Ah, _prudence_! He continues:
-
-> I don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot, or utter silence about everything Stalin has expressed an opinion on including "2 + 2 = 4" because if that logically counterfactually were wrong you would not be able to express an opposing opinion.
-
-The problem with trying to "exhibit generally rationalist principles" in an line of argument that you're constructing in order to be prudent and not community-harmful, is that you're thereby necessarily _not_ exhibiting the central rationalist principle that what matters is the process that _determines_ your conclusion, not the reasoning you present to _reach_ your presented conclusion, after the fact.
-
-The best explanation of this I know was authored by Yudkowsky himself in 2007, in a post titled ["A Rational Argument"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9f5EXt8KNNxTAihtZ/a-rational-argument). It's worth quoting at length. The Yudkowsky of 2007 invites us to consider the plight of a political campaign manager:
-
-> As a campaign manager reading a book on rationality, one question lies foremost on your mind: "How can I construct an impeccable rational argument that Mortimer Q. Snodgrass is the best candidate for Mayor of Hadleyburg?"
->
-> Sorry. It can't be done.
->
-> "What?" you cry. "But what if I use only valid support to construct my structure of reason? What if every fact I cite is true to the best of my knowledge, and relevant evidence under Bayes's Rule?"
->
-> Sorry. It still can't be done. You defeated yourself the instant you specified your argument's conclusion in advance.
-
-The campaign manager is in possession of a survey of mayoral candidates on which Snodgrass compares favorably to other candidates, except for one question. The post continues (bolding mine):
-
-> So you are tempted to publish the questionnaire as part of your own campaign literature ... with the 11th question omitted, of course.
->
-> **Which crosses the line between _rationality_ and _rationalization_.** It is no longer possible for the voters to condition on the facts alone; they must condition on the additional fact of their presentation, and infer the existence of hidden evidence.
->
-> Indeed, **you crossed the line at the point where you considered whether the questionnaire was favorable or unfavorable to your candidate, before deciding whether to publish it.** "What!" you cry. "A campaign should publish facts unfavorable to their candidate?" But put yourself in the shoes of a voter, still trying to select a candidate—why would you censor useful information? You wouldn't, if you were genuinely curious. If you were flowing _forward_ from the evidence to an unknown choice of candidate, rather than flowing _backward_ from a fixed candidate to determine the arguments.
-
-The post then briefly discusses the idea of a "logical" argument, one whose conclusions follow from its premises. "All rectangles are quadrilaterals; all squares are quadrilaterals; therefore, all squares are rectangles" is given as an example of _illogical_ argument, even though the both premises are true (all rectangles and squares are in fact quadrilaterals) _and_ the conclusion is true (all squares are in fact rectangles). The problem is that the conclusion doesn't _follow_ from the premises; the _reason_ all squares are rectangles isn't _because_ they're both quadrilaterals. If we accepted arguments of the general _form_ "all A are C; all B are C; therefore all A are B", we would end up believing nonsense.
-
-Yudkowsky's conception of a "rational" argument—at least, Yudkowsky's conception in 2007, which the Yudkowsky of the current year seems to disagree with—has a similar flavor: the stated reasons should be the actual reasons. The post concludes:
-
-> If you really want to present an honest, rational argument _for your candidate_, in a political campaign, there is only one way to do it:
->
-> * _Before anyone hires you_, gather up all the evidence you can about the different candidates.
-> * Make a checklist which you, yourself, will use to decide which candidate seems best.
-> * Process the checklist.
-> * Go to the winning candidate.
-> * Offer to become their campaign manager.
-> * When they ask for campaign literature, print out your checklist.
->
-> Only in this way can you offer a _rational_ chain of argument, one whose bottom line was written flowing _forward_ from the lines above it. Whatever _actually_ decides your bottom line is the only thing you can _honestly_ write on the lines above.
-
-I remember this being pretty shocking to read back in 'aught-seven. What an alien mindset! But it's _correct_. You can't rationally argue "for" a chosen conclusion, because only the process you use to _decide what to argue for_ can be your real reason.
-
-This is a shockingly high standard for anyone to aspire to live up to—but what made Yudkowsky's Sequences so life-changingly valuable, was that they articulated the _existence_ of such a standard. For that, I will always be grateful.
-
-... which is why it's so _bizarre_ that the Yudkowsky of the current year acts like he's never heard of it! If your _actual_ bottom line is that it is sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful to post your agreement with Stalin, then sure, you can _totally_ find something you agree with to write on the lines above! Probably something that "exhibits generally rationalist principles", even! It's just that any rationalist who sees the game you're playing is going to correctly identify you as a partisan hack on this topic and take that into account when deciding whether they can trust you on other topics.
-
-"I don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot," Yudkowsky muses (where presumably, 'getting shot' is a metaphor for a large negative utility, like being unpopular with progressives). Yes, an astute observation! And _any other partisan hack could say exactly the same_, for the same reason. Why does the campaign manager withhold the results of the 11th question? Because he doesn't see what the alternative is besides getting shot.
-
-Yudkowsky [sometimes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K2c3dkKErsqFd28Dh/prices-or-bindings) [quotes](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1456002060084600832) _Calvin and Hobbes_: "I don't know which is worse, that everyone has his price, or that the price is always so low."
-
-If the idea of being fired from the Snodgrass campaign or being unpopular with progressives is _so_ terrifying to you that it seems analogous to getting shot, then, if those are really your true values, then sure—say whatever you need to say to keep your job and your popularity, as is personally prudent. You've set your price. But if the price you put on the intellectual integrity of your so-called "rationalist" community is similar to that of the Snodgrass for Mayor campaign, you shouldn't be surprised if intelligent, discerning people accord similar levels of credibility to the two groups' output.
-
-I see the phrase "bad faith" thrown around more than I think people know what it means. "Bad faith" doesn't mean "with ill intent", and it's more specific than "dishonest": it's [adopting the surface appearance of being moved by one set of motivations, while actually acting from another](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith).
-
-For example, an [insurance company employee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_adjuster) who goes through the motions of investigating your claim while privately intending to deny it might never consciously tell an explicit "lie", but is definitely acting in bad faith: they're asking you questions, demanding evidence, _&c._ in order to _make it look like_ you'll get paid if you prove the loss occurred—whereas in reality, you're just not going to be paid. Your responses to the claim inspector aren't completely casually _inert_: if you can make an extremely strong case that the loss occurred as you say, then the claim inspector might need to put some effort into coming up with some ingenious excuse to deny your claim in ways that exhibit general claim-inspection principles. But at the end of the day, the inspector is going to say what they need to say in order to protect the company's loss ratio, as is personally prudent.
-
-With this understanding of bad faith, we can read Yudkowsky's "it is sometimes personally prudent [...]" comment as admitting that his behavior on politically-charged topics is in bad faith—where "bad faith" isn't a meaningless insult, but [literally refers](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/can-crimes-be-discussed-literally/) to the pretending-to-have-one-set-of-motivations-while-acting-according-to-another behavior, such that accusations of bad faith can be true or false. Yudkowsky will never consciously tell an explicit "lie", but he'll go through the motions to _make it look like_ he's genuinely engaging with questions where I need the right answers in order to make extremely impactful social and medical decisions—whereas in reality, he's only going to address a selected subset of the relevant evidence and arguments that won't get him in trouble with progressives.
-
-To his credit, he _will_ admit that he's only willing to address a selected subset of arguments—but while doing so, he claims an absurd "confidence in [his] own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it [himself] before speaking" while _simultaneously_ blatantly mischaracterizing his opponents' beliefs! ("Gendered Pronouns For Everyone and Asking To Leave The System Is Lying" doesn't pass anyone's [ideological Turing test](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.html).)
-
-Counterarguments aren't completely causally _inert_: if you can make an extremely strong case that Biological Sex Is Sometimes More Relevant Than Self-Declared Gender Identity, Yudkowsky will put some effort into coming up with some ingenious excuse for why he _technically_ never said otherwise, in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles. But at the end of the day, Yudkowsky is going to say what he needs to say in order to protect his reputation, as is personally prudent.
-
-Even if one were to agree with this description of Yudkowsky's behavior, it doesn't immediately follow that Yudkowsky is making the wrong decision. Again, "bad faith" is meant as a literal description that makes predictions about behavior, not a contentless attack—maybe there are some circumstances in which engaging some amount of bad faith is the right thing to do, given the constraints one faces! For example, when talking to people on Twitter with a very different ideological background from me, I sometimes anticipate that if my interlocutor knew what I was actually thinking, they wouldn't want to talk to me, so I take care to word my replies in a way that makes it look like I'm more ideologically aligned with them than I actually am. (For example, I [never say "assigned female/male at birth" in my own voice on my own platform](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/), but I'll do it in an effort to speak my interlocutor's language.) I think of this as the _minimal_ amount of strategic bad faith needed to keep the conversation going, to get my interlocutor to evaluate my argument on its own merits, rather than rejecting it for coming from an ideological enemy. In cases such as these, I'm willing to defend my behavior as acceptable—there _is_ a sense in which I'm being deceptive by optimizing my language choice to make my interlocutor make bad guesses about my ideological alignment, but I'm comfortable with that amount and scope of deception because I don't think my interlocutor _should_ be paying attention to my personal alignment.
-
-[TODO: the term is "concern trolling"; speak of trying to correct a distortion]
-
-That is, my bad faith Twitter gambit of deceiving people about my ideological alignment in the hopes of improving the discussion seems like something that makes our collective beliefs about the topic-being-argued-about _more_ accurate. (And the topic-being-argued-about is presumably of greater collective interest than which "side" I personally happen to be on.)
-
-In contrast, the "it is sometimes personally prudent [...] to post your agreement with Stalin" gambit is the exact reverse: it's _introducing_ a distortion into the discussion in the hopes of correcting people's beliefs about the speaker's ideological alignment. (Yudkowsky is not a right-wing Bad Guy, but people would tar him as a right-wing Bad Guy if he ever said anything negative about trans people.) This doesn't improve our collective beliefs about the topic-being-argued about; it's a _pure_ ass-covering move.
-
-Yudkowsky names the alleged fact that "people do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment" as a mitigating factor. But the _reason_ censorship is such an effective tool in the hands of dictators like Stalin is because it ensures that many people _don't_ know—and that those who know (or suspect) don't have [game-theoretic common knowledge](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9QxnfMYccz9QRgZ5z/the-costly-coordination-mechanism-of-common-knowledge#Dictators_and_freedom_of_speech) that others do too.
-
-Zvi Mowshowitz has [written about how the false assertion that "everybody knows" something](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) is typically used justify deception: if "everybody knows" that we can't talk about biological sex (the reasoning goes), then no one is being deceived when our allegedly truthseeking discussion carefully steers clear of any reference to the reality of biological sex when it would otherwise be extremely relevant.
-
-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).
-
-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.
-
-But if you actually _cared_ about not deceiving your readers, you would want to be _really sure_ that those _really were_ the only two options. You'd [spend five minutes by the clock looking for third alternatives](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative)—including, possibly, not issuing proclamations on your honor as leader of the so-called "rationalist" community on topics where you _explicitly intend to ignore counteraguments on grounds of their being politically unfavorable_. Yudkowsky rejects this alternative on the grounds that it allegedly implies "utter silence about everything Stalin has expressed an opinion on including '2 + 2 = 4' because if that logically counterfactually were wrong you would not be able to express an opposing opinion", but this seems like yet another instance of Yudkowsky motivatedly playing dumb: if he _wanted_ to, I'm sure Eliezer Yudkowsky could think of _some relevant differences_ between "2 + 2 = 4" (a trivial fact of arithmetic) and "the simplest and best protocol is, "'He' refers to the set of people who have asked us to use 'he'" (a complex policy proposal whose numerous flaws I have analyzed in detail above).
-
-"I think people are better off at the end of that," Yudkowsky writes of the consequences of posting-your-agreement-with-Stalin policies. But here I think we need a more conflict-theoretic analysis that looks at a more detailed level than "people." _Who_ is better off, specifically?
-
-... and, I had been planning to save the Whole Dumb Story about my alienation from Yudkowsky's so-called "rationalists" for a _different_ multi-thousand-word blog post, because _this_ multi-thousand-word blog post was supposed to be narrowly scoped to _just_ exhaustively replying to Yudkowsky's February 2021 Facebook post about pronoun conventions. But in order to explain the problems with "people do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment" and "people are better off at the end of that", I may need to _briefly_ recap some of the history leading to the present discussion, which explains why _I_ didn't know and _I'm_ not better off, with the understanding that it's only a summary and I might still need to tell the long version in a separate post, if it feels still necessary relative to everything else I need to get around to writing. (It's not actually a very interesting story; I just need to get it out of my system so I can stop grieving and move on with my life.)
-
-I _never_ expected to end up arguing about something so _trivial_ as the minutiae of pronoun conventions (which no one would care about if historical contingencies of the evolution of the English language hadn't made them a Schelling point and typographical attack surface for things people do care about). The conversation only ended up here after a series of derailings. At the start, I was _trying_ to say something substantive about the psychology of straight men who wish they were women.
-
-You see, back in the 'aughts when Yudkowsky was writing his Sequences, he occasionally said some things about sex differences that I often found offensive at the time, but which ended up being hugely influential on me, especially in the context of my ideological denial of psychological sex differences and my secret lifelong-since-puberty erotic fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman. I wrote about this at length in a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to my Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/)].
-
-In particular, in ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) (and its precursor in a [2004 Extropians mailing list post](https://archive.is/En6qW)), Yudkowsky explains that "changing sex" is vastly easier said than done—
-
-[[[ TODO summarize the Whole Dumb Story (does there need to be a separate post? I'm still not sure)
-
-[TODO: But that was all about me—I assumed "trans" was a different thing. My first clue that I might not be living in that world came from—Eliezer Yudkowsky, with the "at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women" thing]
-
-_After it's been pointed out_, it should be a pretty obvious hypothesis that "guy on the Extropians mailing list in 2004 who fantasizes about having a female counterpart" and "guy in 2016 Berkeley who identifies as a trans woman" are the _same guy_.
-
-[So I ended up arguing with people about the two-type taxonomy, and I noticed that those discussions kept getting _derailed_ on some variation of "The word woman doesn't actually mean that". So I took the bait, and starting arguing against that, and then Yudkowsky comes back to the subject with his "Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning"—and I go on a philosophy of language crusade, and Yudkowsky eventually clarifies, and _then_ he comes back _again_ in Feb. 2022 with his "simplest and best protocol"]
-
-]]]
-
-At this point, the nature of the game is very clear. Yudkowsky wants to make sure he's on peaceful terms with the progressive _Zeitgeist_, subject to the constraint of not saying anything he knows to be false. Meanwhile, I want to actually make sense of what's actually going on in the world as regards sex and gender, because _I need the correct answer to decide whether or not to cut my dick off_.
-
-On "his turn", he comes up with some pompous proclamation that's very obviously optimized to make the "pro-trans" faction look smart and good and make the "anti-trans" faction look dumb and bad, "in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles."
-
-On "my turn", I put in an _absurd_ amount of effort explaining in exhaustive, _exhaustive_ detail why Yudkowsky's pompous proclamation, while [not technically saying making any unambiguously "false" atomic statements](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly), was _substantively misleading_ as constrated to what any serious person would say if they were actually trying to make sense of the world without worrying what progressive activists would think of them.
-
-Note: being _on peaceful terms_ with the progressive _Zeitgeist_ isn't the same as kowtowing to it entirely. So, for example, Yudkowsky is _also_ on the record claiming that—
-
-> [Everything more complicated than](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1108277090577600512) protons tends to come in varieties. Hydrogen, for example, has isotopes. Gender dysphoria involves more than one proton and will probably have varieties.
-
-> [To be clear, I don't](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1108280619014905857) know much about gender dysphoria. There's an allegation that people are reluctant to speciate more than one kind of gender dysphoria. To the extent that's not a strawman, I would say only in a generic way that GD seems liable to have more than one species.
-
-There's a sense in which this could be read as a "concession" to my agenda. The two-type taxonomy of MtF _was_ the thing I was originally trying to talk about, before the philosophy-of-language derailing, and here Yudkowsky is backing up "my side" on that by publicly offering an argument that there's probably a more-than-one-type typology. So there's an intuition that I should be grateful for and satisfied with this concession—that it would be _greedy_ for me to keep criticizing him about the pronouns and language thing, given that he's throwing me a bone here.
-
-But that intuition is _wrong_. The perception that there are "sides" to which one can make "concessions" is an _illusion_ of the human cognitive architecture; it's not something that any sane cognitive process would think in the course of constructing a map that reflects the territory.
-
-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).
-
-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_.
-
-In the context of AI alignment theory, Yudkowsky has written about a "nearest unblocked strategy" phenomenon: if you directly prevent an agent from accomplishing a goal via some plan that you find undesirable, the agent will search for ways to route around that restriction, and probably find some plan that you find similarly undesirable for similar reasons.
-
-Suppose you developed an AI to [maximize human happiness subject to the constraint of obeying explicit orders](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/nearest_unblocked#exampleproducinghappiness). It might first try administering heroin to humans. When you order it not to, it might switch to administering cocaine. When you order it to not use any of a whole list of banned happiness-producing drugs, it might switch to researching new drugs, or just _pay_ humans to take heroin, _&c._
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-It's the same thing with Yudkowsky's political-risk minimization subject to the constraint of not saying anything he knows to be false. First he comes out with ["I think I'm over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) (March 2016). When you point out that [that's not true](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions), then the next time he revisits the subject, he switches to ["you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning"](https://archive.is/Iy8Lq) (November 2018). When you point out that [_that's_ not true either](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong), he switches to "It is Shenanigans to try to bake your stance on how clustered things are [...] _into the pronoun system of a language and interpretation convention that you insist everybody use_" (February 2021). When you point out that's not what's going on, he switches to ... I don't know, but he's a smart guy; in the unlikely event that he sees fit to respond to this post, I'm sure he'll be able to think of _something_—but at this point, I have no reason to care. Talking to Yudkowsky on topics where getting the right answer would involve acknowledging facts that would make you unpopular in Berkeley is a _waste of everyone's time_; trying to inform you isn't [his bottom line](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line).
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-Accusing one's interlocutor of bad faith is frowned upon for a reason. We would prefer to live in a world where we have intellectually fruitful object-level discussions under the assumption of good faith, rather than risk our fora degenerating into an acrimonious brawl of accusations and name-calling, which is unpleasant and (more importantly) doesn't make any intellectual progress. I, too, would prefer to have a real object-level discussion under the assumption of good faith.
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-I tried the object-level good-faith argument thing _first_. I tried it for _years_. But at some point, I think I should be _allowed to notice_ the nearest-unblocked-strategy game which is _very obviously happening_ if you look at the history of what was said. I think there's _some_ number of years and _some_ number of thousands of words of litigating the object-level after which there's nothing left for me to do but jump up a meta level and explain, to anyone capable of hearing it, why in this case I think I've accumulated enough evidence in this case for the assumption of good faith to have been _empirically falsified_.
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-(Of course, I realize that if we're crossing the Rubicon of abandoning the norm of assuming good faith, it needs to be abandoned symmetrically. I _think_ I'm doing a _pretty good_ job of adhering to standards of intellectual conduct and being transparent about my motivations, but I'm definitely not perfect, and, unlike Yudkowsky, I'm not so absurdly miscalibratedly arrogant to claim "confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important" (!) about my topics of interest. If Yudkowsky or anyone else thinks they _have a case_ based on my behavior that _I'm_ being culpably intellectually dishonest, they of course have my blessing and encouragement to post it for the audience to evaluate.)
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-What makes all of this especially galling is the fact that _all of my heretical opinions are literally just Yudkowsky's opinions from the 'aughts!_ My whole thing about how changing sex isn't possible with existing technology because the category encompasses so many high-dimensional details? Not original to me! I [filled in a few trivial technical details](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard), but again, this was _in the Sequences_ as ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions). My thing about how you can't define concepts any way you want, because there are mathematical laws governing which category boundaries compress your anticipated experiences? Not original to me! I [filled in](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [a few technical details](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception), but [_we had a whole Sequence about this._](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong)
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-Seriously, you think I'm _smart enough_ to come up with all of this indepedently? I'm not! I ripped it all off from Yudkowsky back in the 'aughts _when he still gave a shit about telling the truth_ in this domain. (More precisely, when he thought he could afford to give a shit, before the political environment and the growing stature of his so-called "rationalist" movement changed his incentives.)
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-Does ... does he expect us not to _notice_? Or does he think that "everybody knows"?
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-But I don't think that everybody knows. So I'm telling you.
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--------
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-Why does this matter?
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-[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]
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-a rationality community that can't think about _practical_ issues that affect our day to day lives, but can get existential risk stuff right, is like asking for self-driving car software that can drive red cars but not blue cars
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-It's a _problem_ if public intellectuals in the current year need to pretend to be dumber than seven-year-olds in 2016
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-> _Perhaps_, replied the cold logic. _If the world were at stake._
->
-> _Perhaps_, echoed the other part of himself, _but that is not what was actually happening._
-https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good
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-https://www.readthesequences.com/
-> Because it is all, in the end, one thing. I talked about big important distant problems and neglected immediate life, but the laws governing them aren't actually different.
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-> the challenge is almost entirely about high integrity communication by small groups
-https://twitter.com/HiFromMichaelV/status/1486044326618710018
+But it's a _long_ Dumb Story, that's been pretty difficult and painful for me to finish writing. (I feel like a lifelong devout Catholic denouncing the Pope. Are you _allowed_ to denounce the Pope? Won't God be mad?) So that will have to be a separate post for another day.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff