From 272a586ed8e572cb62bbf330a9bb91002466ef3f Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2021 15:29:30 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] poke at stuff --- ...-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md | 10 --------- content/drafts/book-review-facing-reality.md | 19 +++++++++------- ...s-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal.md | 22 +++++++++++++++++++ ...dent-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war.md | 6 ++++- ...ion-overlap-and-cancellable-stereotypes.md | 2 +- notes/post_ideas.txt | 2 +- 6 files changed, 40 insertions(+), 21 deletions(-) create mode 100644 content/drafts/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal.md diff --git a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md index c47c4f4..bb4f3bc 100644 --- a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md +++ b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md @@ -8,13 +8,3 @@ Status: draft > > —Zora Neale Hurston -[In a February 2021 Facebook post, Eliezer Yudkowsky inveighs against English's system of singular third-person pronouns](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228). As a matter of clean language design, you shouldn't have to identify a subject as female or male just in order to refer to them with a pronoun. - - -Considerations— - * Scifi and mystery authors - * it and they are more ambiguous, can refer to non-agent parts of speech - * they gets conjugated as a plural even in singular usage - * pronouns in English are less bad than Hebrew nouns - -Aella https://knowingless.com/2019/06/06/side-effects-of-preferred-pronouns/ diff --git a/content/drafts/book-review-facing-reality.md b/content/drafts/book-review-facing-reality.md index b3eb58a..8bcc47d 100644 --- a/content/drafts/book-review-facing-reality.md +++ b/content/drafts/book-review-facing-reality.md @@ -12,25 +12,28 @@ This book ... well. This is the Charles Murray book that's _actually_ about the You really have to feel sorry for the man. In previous works such as 1994's _The Bell Curve_ (with Richard J. Hernstein) and 2012's _Coming Apart_, Murray argues that American Society in the 20th and early 21st centuries has developed an increasingly stratified class structure based on cognitive ability. All else being equal, smarter individuals attain higher-paying professions, perform better within a given profession, form stabler families, and commit fewer crimes. But sorting by cognitive ability has a dark side in the dissolution of social capital and undermining of the American way of life, as the richest and most educated increasingly live in their own bubbles with no connection to how their fellow Americans live. -This social-science thesis has _nothing to do with race_. Imagine an alternate history where humans never [migrated across the Bering land bridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas) to become Native Americans, and where the [Atlantic slave trade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade) never happened, such that, in this alternate world, European explorers found a continent empty of humans and founded a civilization that was monoracial from the start, unable to oppress and exploit blacks and Native Americans who simply weren't present. +This social-science thesis has _nothing to do with race_. Imagine an alternate history in which humans never [migrated across the Bering land bridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas) to become Native Americans, and in which the [Atlantic slave trade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade) never happened, such that, in this alternate world, European explorers found a continent empty of humans and founded a civilization that was monoracial from the start, unable to oppress and exploit blacks and Native Americans who simply weren't present. -In that world, _most_ of _The Bell Curve_ (so infamous in our world for its reputed racism) could be published unchanged! Most of the analysis is strictly about differences _between_ different white people, in order to avoid potential confounding by racial issues. (Thus, _Coming Apart_ is subtitled _The State of White America, 1960–2010_—not that this does anything to endear Murray to progressives who don't understand the anti-confounding rationale for studying "white America" (!) and wouldn't be caught dead reading the book.) +In that world, _most_ of _The Bell Curve_ (so infamous in our world for its reputed racism) could be published unchanged! Most of the analysis is strictly about differences _between_ different white people, in order to avoid potential [confounding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding) by racial issues. (For the same reason, _Coming Apart_ takes as its subject matter and is subtitled _The State of White America, 1960–2010_—not that this does anything to endear Murray to progressives who don't understand the anti-confounding rationale for studying "white America" (!) and wouldn't be caught dead reading the book.) -I mean, yes, there are those two chapters in _The Bell Curve_ about ethnic differences in IQ, and two chapters on affirmative action—I can see why people are pissed about _that_—but there's so much more to the man's work than that! Even 2020's _Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class_ (that subtitle!!) was much more muted than what a racialist ideologue would have written: the race section mostly just covers the Science of SNP frequencies while punting with "More research is needed" about what population differences in SNP frequencies _mean_; the visibility of the two pages of discussion on the interpretation of ethnic differences in IQ is reduced by discreetly tucking it away into footnote 4 of the "class" section. +I mean, okay, there are those two chapters in _The Bell Curve_ about ethnic differences in IQ, and two chapters on affirmative action—I can see why people are pissed about _that_—but there's so much more to the man's work than that! Even 2020's _Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class_ (that subtitle!!) was much more muted than what a racialist ideologue would have written: the race section mostly just covers the Science of SNP frequencies while punting with "More research is needed" about what population differences in SNP frequencies _mean_. There are just two pages on the interpretation of ethnic differences in IQ, and their visibility is much reduced by discreetly tucking them away into endnote 4 of the "class" section. -In contrast, this little book (125 pages, plus notes) is more—focused. (I don't want to say "more direct" and undermine my case that most of Murray's thought isn't about the racial stuff that inevitably sucks all the air out of the room.) In the wake of [the events of summer 2020](/Jun/oceans-rise-empires-fall/) and the rise of identity politics on the left, Murray perceives a threat to the American creed that individuals should be treated equally as individuals, rather than as representatives of an ethnic or religious faction. Murray's response: this book about the "two truths" of the subtitle ... that American Asians, whites, Latinos, and blacks have different means and distributions of intelligence and of violent crime (!!). +In contrast, this little book (125 pages, plus notes) is more—focused. (I don't want to say "more direct" and undermine my case that most of Murray's thought isn't about the racial stuff that inevitably sucks all the air out of the room.) In the wake of [the events of summer 2020](/Jun/oceans-rise-empires-fall/) and the rise of identity politics on the left, Murray perceives a threat to the American creed that individuals should be treated equally as individuals, rather than as representatives of an ethnic or religious faction. Murray's response to the threat: this book about the "two truths" of the subtitle ... that American Asians, whites, Latinos, and blacks have different means and distributions of intelligence and of violent crime (!!). Murray acknowledges the irony: if the _goal_ is colorblind individualism, why write about group differences!? The problem is strategic: if we can't _talk_ about group differences, but group differences actually exist and are actually pretty stable, then well-meaning people who are distressed by group differences in socioeconomic outcomes end up conducting an increasingly paranoid witchhunt for systemic racism, eventually casting aside the American creed. Murray quotes Daniel Patrick Moynihan—I feel like I've [mentioned him on the blog at some point?](/2020/Nov/nixon-on-forbidden-hypotheses/)—"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts." -[TODO: talk up front about the lameness of the causality-blindness as a response to steelmanned charges of systemic racism] +[ +TODO: talk up front about the lameness of the causality-blindness as a response to steelmanned charges of systemic racism +(The aim of the book is to argue that intelligence and crime differences _exist_ as not _trivially_ mutable facts of our world, as contrasted to the theory that outcome differences are solely due to direct discrimination by employers, schools, and the justice system; the strawman of "And this is 100% genetic" is not implied—not that "And this seems likely to be somewhere between 40–80% genetic" would be more than 40–80% less unpalatable.) [TODO: "Causes are irrelevant" (!) p. 47] +] -After introducing our topic, Chapter 2 covers the stats on American demographics. At present, the country is about 60% white, 18% Latino, 13% black, and 6% Asian, but the, um, black-and-white framing of American racial discourse makes more sense when you consider that there were a lot fewer Latinos and Asians before a [1965 immigration reform](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Act_of_1965): in 1960, the figures were 87% white, 11% black. Big cities have become much more multiracial, whereas smaller cities and towns remain either monoracially white or biracial (the two races being white/black in the South, or white/Latino in the southwest and southern California). +After introducing our topic, Chapter 2 covers the stats on American demographics. At present, the country is about 60% white, 18% Latino, 13% black, and 6% Asian, but the, um, black-and-white framing of American racial discourse makes more sense in this historical context that there were a lot fewer Latinos and Asians before a [1965 immigration reform](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Act_of_1965): in 1960, the figures were 87% white, 11% black. Big cities have become much more multiracial, whereas smaller cities and towns remain either monoracially white or biracial (the two races being white/black in the South, or white/Latino in the southwest and southern California). -Here and through the remaining chapters up until the conclusion, Murray elects to switch to the nomenclature "European"/"African"/"Latin" rather than white/black/Latino (respectively, with "Asian" remaining unaltered), on the grounds that using less familiar terms for these groups will drag along less cultural and political baggage without resorting to outright obfuscation ("populations A, B, C, and D"). It doesn't feel that effective to my ear, and I kind expect it to backfire for a lot of readers, to whom the continental African/European/Asian terms probably sound _more_ racially essentialist than I think Murray wants to come off as! (The aim of the book is to argue that intelligence and crime differences _exist_ as not _trivially_ mutable facts of our world, as contrasted to the theory that outcome differences are solely due to direct discrimination by employers, schools, and the justice system; the strawman of "And this is 100% genetic" is not implied—not that "And this seems likely to be somewhere between 40–80% genetic" would be more than 40–80% less unpalatable.) [TODO: "Causes are irrelevant" (!) p. 47] +Here and through the remaining chapters up until the conclusion, Murray elects to switch to the nomenclature "European"/"African"/"Latin" rather than white/black/Latino (respectively, with "Asian" remaining unaltered), on the grounds that using less familiar terms for these groups will drag along less cultural and political baggage without resorting to outright obfuscation ("populations A, B, C, and D"). It doesn't feel that effective to my ear, and I kind expect it to backfire for a lot of readers, to whom the continental African/European/Asian terms probably sound _more_ racially essentialist than I think Murray wants to come off as! The next four chapters follow a formula: "Race Differences in Cognitive Ability", "Race Differences in Violent Crime", "First-Order Effects of Race Differences in Cognitive Ability", and "First-Order Effects of Race Differences in Violent Crime." (Those chapter titles felt awful just to type!! Am I really doing this?) Much of the value of these chapters is in the graphs and tables documenting statistics that many readers will be unfamiliar with. In such a small book, there's not much room to defend the _interpretation_ of the statistics in enough detail to satisfy skeptics: for example, Murray casually mentions Arthur Jensen's 1980 _Bias In Mental Testing_ as "documenting that the major [IQ] tests were not biased against minorities", without summarizing the detailed evidence and arguments by which one could claim to document such a thing; the distrustful reader is going to have to [read Jensen for themselves](https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Bias-in-Mental-Testing-Arthur-R.-Jensen.pdf). [TODO: revise/delete/reconcile with later interpretation discussion] -The scatterplots of nationally-representative test scores are interesting. The black–white gap _did_ shrink between '70s when it was about 1.3 standard deviations, until about 1990s, but has been stubbornly stable since then at about 0.85 standard deviations. Murray estimates the current white–Latino difference at 0.62 standard deviations, and the current white–Asian difference at 0.3 standard deviations (favoring Asians). +The scatterplots of nationally-representative test scores are interesting. The black–white gap _did_ shrink between '70s when it was about 1.3 standard deviations, until about the 1990s, but has been stubbornly stable since then at about 0.85 standard deviations (a.k.a. [Cohen's _d_](http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/)). Murray estimates the current white–Latino difference at 0.62 standard deviations, and the current white–Asian difference at 0.3 standard deviations (favoring Asians). Of course, one can't just point to test scores and say "Those are the facts" without addressing what test scores _mean_. A vast space of "objective" procedures can come up with a number, without giving anyone a reason to care about that particular number. (People with more letters in their name take longer to say their name out loud, on average! Cats do better than humans on a test of scratching, on average!) In this matter of cognitive ability scores by race, Murray briefly addresses two popular (but mutually in tension) classes of objection: that the gaps will vanish with better education, and that the tests are biased. [TODO: ... finish summary] diff --git a/content/drafts/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal.md b/content/drafts/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3754c4b --- /dev/null +++ b/content/drafts/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal.md @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +Title: Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal +Date: 2022-01-01 11:00 +Category: commentary +Tags: Eliezer Yudkowsky +Status: draft + +[In a February 2021 Facebook post, Eliezer Yudkowsky inveighs against English's system of singular third-person pronouns](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228). As a matter of clean language design, English's lack of a gender-neutral singular third-person personal pronoun is a design flaw: you shouldn't have to identify a subject as female or male just in order to be able to refer to her or him with a pronoun. + +This affects, for example, science-fiction authors writing about AIs or hermaphroditic aliens (which don't have a sex), or mystery authors writing about a crime suspect whose identity (and therefore, sex) is unknown. + +It would be wrong to suggest + + + + +Considerations— + * Scifi and mystery authors + * it and they are more ambiguous, can refer to non-agent parts of speech + * they gets conjugated as a plural even in singular usage + * pronouns in English are less bad than Hebrew nouns + +Aella https://knowingless.com/2019/06/06/side-effects-of-preferred-pronouns/ diff --git a/content/drafts/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war.md b/content/drafts/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war.md index 6a95b62..11e3845 100644 --- a/content/drafts/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war.md +++ b/content/drafts/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war.md @@ -36,4 +36,8 @@ We could imagine someone sympathetic to my plight in school deciding that my pro I don't think this would be helping me. When I was angry about being in school, it wasn't because of _the word_ "student"—it was because I wanted more autonomy and I wanted more respect for my intellectual initiative. Changing the words without granting me the autonomy and respect I craved wouldn't be solving my _actual_ problem. It would probably make things _worse_ by sabotaging the concepts and language I needed to _articulate_ what my problem was. -And, really— [TODO: being a "student" would be fine in a world where students got more autonomy; I'm happy to learn from masters—that's what textbooks are; I wasn't delusional about doing original research; my pain and offsense wasn't "fake" just because it was game-theoretic] +Likewise, being a "student" would have been fine in a world where students got more autonomy—a world where there was a collective understanding that courses are a supplement or pragmatically useful guidepost to one's studies, rather than course grades being _the whole thing_. I'm happy to learn from the masters. That's what textbooks _are_. I wasn't _delusional_ about doing novel original research. + + + +[TODO: being a "student" would be fine in a world where students got more autonomy; I'm happy to learn from masters—that's what textbooks are; I wasn't delusional about doing original research; my pain and offsense wasn't "fake" just because it was game-theoretic] diff --git a/content/drafts/subspatial-distribution-overlap-and-cancellable-stereotypes.md b/content/drafts/subspatial-distribution-overlap-and-cancellable-stereotypes.md index 390db7c..676c773 100644 --- a/content/drafts/subspatial-distribution-overlap-and-cancellable-stereotypes.md +++ b/content/drafts/subspatial-distribution-overlap-and-cancellable-stereotypes.md @@ -44,7 +44,7 @@ But because our brains are good at using sex-category words to simultaneously en I sometimes regret that so many of my attempts to talk about trans issues end up focusing on psychological sex differences. I guess I'm used to it now, but at first, this was a very weird position for me to be in! (For a long time, I [really didn't want to believe in psychological sex differences](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism).) But it keeps happening because it's a natural thing to _disagree_ about: the anatomy of pre-op trans women is not really in _dispute_, so the sex realist's contextual reply to "Why do you care what genitals someone might or might not have under their clothes?" often ends up appealing to some psychological dimension or another, to which the trans advocate [can counterreply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/), "Oh, you want to define gender based on psychology, then? But then the logic of your position forces you to conclude that butch lesbians aren't women! _Reductio ad absurdum!_" -This is a severe misreading of the sex-realist position. No one wants to _define_ "gender" based on psychology. You can't coerce reality into changing by choosing different definitions! Rather, there's _already_ a multivariate distribution of bodies and minds in the world, and good definition choices help us coordinate the concepts in different people's heads into a _shared_ map of that territory. +This is a severe misreading of the sex-realist position. No one wants to _define_ "gender" based on psychology. Definitions don't matter: you can't coerce reality into changing by choosing different definitions! Rather, there's _already_ a multivariate distribution of bodies and minds in the world, and good definition choices help us coordinate the concepts in different people's heads into a _shared_ map of that territory. _One_ of the _many_ distinctions people sometimes want to make when thinking about the multivariate distribution of bodies and minds in the world, is that between the sexes. Sex is by no means the only way in which people differ! In many situations you might want to categorize or describe people in many different ways, some more or less discrete _versus_ categorical, or high- _versus_ low-dimensional: age or race or religion or social class or intelligence or agreeableness or diff --git a/notes/post_ideas.txt b/notes/post_ideas.txt index b930022..42b6f52 100644 --- a/notes/post_ideas.txt +++ b/notes/post_ideas.txt @@ -1,6 +1,7 @@ Queue— _ There Should Be a Closetspace/Lease Bound Crossover Fic _ I Don't Do Policy +_ Student Dysphoria, and a Previous Life's War 2021 significant posts— _ Trans Kids on the Margin, and Harms From Misleading Training Data @@ -11,7 +12,6 @@ _ A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning Minor queue— _ Model-Free Happiness -_ Student Dysphoria, and a Previous Life's War _ Subspatial Distribution Overlap and Cancellable Stereotypes _ Sticks and Stones _ Elision _vs_. Choice -- 2.17.1