drafting "Point Man"

diff --git a/content/drafts/point-man.md b/content/drafts/point-man.md
index 35a411b..d137cc3 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/point-man.md
+++ b/content/drafts/point-man.md
@@ -10,7 +10,7 @@ One day, Zhao Gao announced a horse was being given to the young Emperor as a gi
 
 Later, Zhao Gao arranged for the execution of the courtiers who said it was a deer, or were silent.
 
 
 Later, Zhao Gao arranged for the execution of the courtiers who said it was a deer, or were silent.
 

-It was all a test: the courtiers who agreed with Zhao Gao, even though what he said was absurd—precisely _because_ it was absurd—proved their loyalty to him, whereas the ones who spoke the plain truth revealed themselves as untrustworthy for his purposes: to agree with a true claim would be compatible with either loyalty or mere honesty, but to agree with absurdity leaves [no ambiguity about one's motives](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/12/15/motive-ambiguity/). From this story comes the Chinese idiom _point deer make horse_, to deliberately misrepresent.
+It was all a test: the courtiers who agreed with Zhao Gao, even though what he said was absurd—precisely _because_ it was absurd—proved their loyalty to him, whereas the ones who spoke the plain truth revealed themselves as untrustworthy for his purposes: to agree with a true claim would be compatible with either loyalty or mere honesty, but to agree with absurdity leaves [no ambiguity about one's motives](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/12/15/motive-ambiguity/). From this story comes the Chinese [four-character idiom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chengyu) _point deer make horse_, to deliberately misrepresent.

 
 I used to wonder: what was it like to be one of the courtiers who survived the test? Did they consciously think, "Well, I don't know _why_ Zhao Gao is calling this deer a horse, but he seems serious, so I'd better play along, too"—or did they trust Zhao Gao's words more than their own eyes, and manage to really believe themselves that it was a horse?
 
 
 I used to wonder: what was it like to be one of the courtiers who survived the test? Did they consciously think, "Well, I don't know _why_ Zhao Gao is calling this deer a horse, but he seems serious, so I'd better play along, too"—or did they trust Zhao Gao's words more than their own eyes, and manage to really believe themselves that it was a horse?
 


@@ -20,31 +20,46 @@ What was it like to be the _deer_? To be _used_ like that, as a prop in someone
 
 ----
 
 
 ----
 

-It's been occasionally argued that there are no legitimate grounds to object to using trans people's preferred pronouns, because pronouns aren't facts and don't have truth conditions. Note, this is substantially _stronger_ that the mere claim that you _should_ use preferred pronouns; the claim is that no linguistic expressive power is being sacrificed by doing so. (Whereas in contrast one might accede to the requested usage out of some combination of politeness, social coercion, and apprehension of [the Schelling point argument](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/), while privately lamenting that it feels analogous to lying.)
+[It's been occasionally argued that](https://archive.is/ChqYX) there aren't legitimate grounds to object to using trans people's preferred pronouns, because pronouns aren't facts and don't have truth conditions. Note, this is substantially _stronger_ that the mere claim that you _should_ use preferred pronouns; the claim is that no linguistic expressive power is being sacrificed by doing so. (Whereas in contrast, one might accede to the requested usage out of some combination of politeness, social coercion, and apprehension of [the Schelling point argument](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/), while privately lamenting that it feels analogous to lying.)

 
 I think the claim that pronouns don't have truth conditions is _false as a matter of cognitive science_. Humans are _pretty good_ at visually identifying the sex of other humans by integrating cues from various secondary sex characteristics—it's the kind of computer-vision capability that would have been useful in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness. If it _didn't_ work so reliably, we wouldn't have ended up with languages like English where identifying a person's sex is baked into the grammar. And _because_ we ended up with (many) languages that have it baked into the grammar, _departing_ from that conventional usage has cognitive consequences: if someone told you, "Come meet my friend at the mall; she's really cool and you'll like her" and then the friend turned out to be obviously male, you would be _surprised_. The fact that the "she ... her" language [constrained your anticipations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences) so much would seem to immediately falsify the "no truth conditions" claim as an empirical matter of psychology.
 
 
 I think the claim that pronouns don't have truth conditions is _false as a matter of cognitive science_. Humans are _pretty good_ at visually identifying the sex of other humans by integrating cues from various secondary sex characteristics—it's the kind of computer-vision capability that would have been useful in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness. If it _didn't_ work so reliably, we wouldn't have ended up with languages like English where identifying a person's sex is baked into the grammar. And _because_ we ended up with (many) languages that have it baked into the grammar, _departing_ from that conventional usage has cognitive consequences: if someone told you, "Come meet my friend at the mall; she's really cool and you'll like her" and then the friend turned out to be obviously male, you would be _surprised_. The fact that the "she ... her" language [constrained your anticipations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences) so much would seem to immediately falsify the "no truth conditions" claim as an empirical matter of psychology.
 

-From a certain first-principles perspective (that is proudly uncurious about whether there might be any _reason_ so many human languages ended up "gendered" [noun classes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class)), this is _terrible language design_. The grammatical function of pronouns is to have a brief way to refer back to entities already mentioned: it's more user-friendly to be able to say "Katherine put her book on its shelf" rather than "Katherine put Katherine's book on the book's shelf". But then why couple that grammatical function to sex-category membership? You shouldn't _need_ to take a stance on someone's reproductive capabilities to talk about them putting a book on the shelf. 
+[From a certain first-principles perspective](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228), this is _terrible language design_. The grammatical function of pronouns is to have a brief way to refer back to entities already mentioned: it's more user-friendly to be able to say "Katherine put her book on its shelf" rather than "Katherine put Katherine's book on the book's shelf". But then why couple that grammatical function to sex-category membership? You shouldn't _need_ to take a stance on someone's reproductive capabilities to talk about them putting a book on the shelf.

 
 

-If you want more classes to reduce the probability of collisions (where [Spivak _ey_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun) or universal singular _they_ would result in more need to repeat names where a pronoun would be ambiguous), you could use initials to form pronouns (<em>K</em>atherine put <em>k</em>er book on its shelf?), or imitate [American Sign Language's pointer system](https://www.handspeak.com/learn/index.php?id=27) (which [...])
+If you wanted more pronoun-classes to reduce the probability of collisions (where universal [Spivak _ey_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun) or singular _they_ would result in more frequent need to repeat names where a pronoun would be ambiguous), you could devise some other system that doesn't bake sex into the language, like using initials to form pronouns (<em>K</em>atherine put <em>k</em>er book on its shelf?), or an oral or written analogue of [spatial referencing in American Sign Language](https://www.handspeak.com/learn/index.php?id=27) (where a signer associates a name or description with a direction in space, and points in that direction for subsequent references).

 
 

-[TODO: normative circularity makes no sense, but you do have free variables on _what_ pronouns map to;  when arguing this recently, I recevied a very interesting comment that suggests that trans women are the deer
-given that sex is one of the first things we perceive about someone, and that it _is_ discrete, it's not surprising that languages latched onto that as a pronoun class, given that people in the past didn't have the hangups our civilization developed during the last five years
-]
+(One might speculate that "more classes to reduce collisions" _is_ part of the historical explanation for grammatical gender, in conjunction with the fact that biological sex is binary and easy to observe. No other salient objective feature quite does the same job: age is continuous rather than categorical; race is also clinal and historically didn't typically vary within a tribal/community context.)

 
 

-(substantially edited):
+Taking it as a given that English speakers are stuck with gendered third-person singular pronouns, there's still room to debate exactly what _she_ and _he_ map to in cases where a person's "gender" is ambiguous or disputed. (Which comes up more often these days than in the environment where the language evolved.)
+
+During a recent discussion of all this, I received a _fascinating_ reply that I thought was very telling about an aspect of the _Zeitgeist_ that usually remains covert. My interlocutor said (edited and paraphrased):

 
 > I can imagine a sane society using _he_ and _she_ to refer to this-person-looks-male and this-person-looks-female. But in the society that exists today, "what pronouns does this person use for trans person" on-average **conveys very relevant information about the speaker and their attitudes to trans people.** (I mean this in a this-is-just-how-the-statistics-work rather than an accusatory way; I think in your particular case we have lots of other data.)
 
 
 > I can imagine a sane society using _he_ and _she_ to refer to this-person-looks-male and this-person-looks-female. But in the society that exists today, "what pronouns does this person use for trans person" on-average **conveys very relevant information about the speaker and their attitudes to trans people.** (I mean this in a this-is-just-how-the-statistics-work rather than an accusatory way; I think in your particular case we have lots of other data.)
 

-> I agree that there's going to be some confusion if you talk about someone as a "she" and the person who turns up is a.m.a.b.
+> I agree that there's going to be some confusion if you talk about someone as a "she" and the person who turns up is a.m.a.b. But I think the confusion that results from calling them "she" is a lot more consequential. Progressive communication norms absolutely reflect a concern for information efficiency! It takes a lot less time to say "she" than it does to say "he, but I also think trans people are great."
+
+(Bolding mine.)
+
+I see. So the norm is optimized to convey information _about the speaker_ rather than [what is being spoken about](http://thetranswidow.com/2021/02/21/pronouns-and-the-purpose-of-language/).
+
+Kind of like ... a loyalty test?
+
+And the less intuitive it is, the better it works _as_ a loyalty test: referring to an obviously male person as _he_ merely reflects conventional usage and reveals no information about one's motives, whereas refering to an obvious male as _she_—or using singular _they_ for a named individual whose sex is apparent—extracts a cognitive cost, however slight—a cost [allies are more willing to pay than non-allies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory).

 
 

-> But I think the confusion that results from calling them "she" is a lot more consequential given etc etc [standard newly out or poorly passing trans persons worries about being accepted/treated well].
+I'm not suggesting a conspiracy, of course; just the design signature of [cultural evolution](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/).

 
 

-> Progressive communication norms absolutely reflect a concern for information efficiency! It takes a lot less time to say "she" than it does to say "he, but I also think trans people are great."
+In the begining, [Azathoth](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pLRogvJLPPg6Mrvg4/an-alien-god) created female and male, and the physical fact was called "sex", and the social recognition and implications thereof was called "gender"—the first day.

 
 

+As a very rare biological anomaly, there were extremely masculine lesbians who fit into Society
+
+Also, separately, there were 
+
+
+/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/

 /2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/
 /2018/Oct/sticker-prices/
 /2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/
 /2018/Oct/sticker-prices/

+

 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/G5TwJ9BGxcgh5DsmQ/yes-requires-the-possibility-of-no
 https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2019/04/08/oppressive-rituals-of-ceremoniously-announcing-one-gender-pronouns/
 https://meltingasphalt.com/crony-beliefs/
 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/G5TwJ9BGxcgh5DsmQ/yes-requires-the-possibility-of-no
 https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2019/04/08/oppressive-rituals-of-ceremoniously-announcing-one-gender-pronouns/
 https://meltingasphalt.com/crony-beliefs/

-http://thetranswidow.com/2021/02/21/pronouns-and-the-purpose-of-language/
+https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/09/real-meaning-of-diversity/