So, if you've been reading my Less Wrong posts over the last twenty-one months, you'll notice that I've been doing a lot of philosophy-of-language blogging lately! Those posts are:
- "Where to Draw the Boundaries?"
- "Schelling Concepts, and Simple Membership Tests"
- "Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist"
- "Algorithms of Deception!"
- "Firming Up Not-Lying Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Useful Than One Might Initially Think"
- "Philosophy in the Darkest Timeline: Basics of the Evolution of Meaning"
- "Maybe Lying Can't Exist?!"
- "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception" (forthcoming)
But, if you didn't know, the reason I've been doing so much philosophy-of-language blogging lately is because I was frustrated because I thought a lot of people were motivatedly getting the philosophy of language wrong for political convenience, specifically around transgender issues. (I think assertions like "trans women are women" and similar need to be argued for on the empirical merits; you can't just define them to be true.)
In particular, "Where to Draw the Boundaries?" was intended as a "stealth reply" (quoting/paraphrasing without attribution in order to reply to the philosophical substance while eliding the political context) to:
- Scott Alexander's "The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories"
- (note that Alexander added a clarifying edit to the bottom in December 2019)
- a November 2018 Twitter thread by Eliezer Yudkowsky (archived)
- (note that Yudkowsky would later clarify his position in a September 2020 Facebook post)
I also write a blog about gender issues under a differential-visibility-but-not-actually-Secret pen name. The posts from that blog that are most relevant to my philosophical writing on Less Wrong are:
- "The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions" (a non-stealth reply to Alexander's "... Not Man for the Categories")
- "Reply to The Unit of Caring on Adult Human Females"
- "Self-Identity Is a Schelling Point"
- "More Schelling"
- "Reply to Ozymandias on Fully Consensual Gender"
To allay concerns about premature abstraction of political issues, I'm putting up this non-Frontpageable post in case anyone wants to comment on or ask questions about my object-level motivations without cluttering up our philosophy discussions.
If I understand it correctly, you are willing to use the preferred pronouns for passing trans people, because your System 1 doesn't object. May I interpret it as: "as long as we are not mentioning biology explicitly, I am okay to use the words 'man/woman' in the sense 'what my System 1 perceives as a man/woman', because that is a natural boundary"? (Like, biology is one natural boundary, System 1 judgment in another natural boundary, neither is inherently better than the other, the proper choice depends on context.)
This makes me imagine an opposite example: a non-passing cis person. Like, a fat man with man-boobs, with long hair, cleanly shaven, having somewhat feminine skull shape... who insists on being called "he". Or a bald muscular woman, with some facial hair, wearing male clothes... who insists on being called "she". I assume you would agree that it is proper to use their preferred pronouns (and would be quite offensive not to), because they match the biology (even in situations where biology is not explicitly mentioned), and to ignore the confused feelings of System 1. Am I right?
I appreciate this set of links grouped together being made because, given the similarity between them, having them grouped together seems useful.
I also think that every one of those posts is probably too long. Specifically, longer than they need to be. I consider this evidence in favor of 'keeping politics out of lesswrong does help with 'rationality''.
Sorry, I'm not following the reasoning here; can you say more? Why that specific hypothesis, rather than "ZMD's writing is too long-winded in general"?
A)
B)
Reading Where to Draw the Boundaries?***
The issue with removed references/abstracting politics has been mentioned before. On it's own it's slightly convincing. Looking these specific examples, it seems like it's horribly accurate.
*Like probability, but with wide error bars.
**Do more general hypotheses 'need' more evidence, or less?
***The word "the" might be out of place in that title. (And borders are drawn on maps. And they're messy around the edges.)
****Similarly, an infinite number of functions have the properties that f(1) = 1, and f(2) = 4, and...
I recently read Algorithms of Deception! and claim that it is of appropriate length.