So, first of all, I agree: not everything you write on LW is explicitly or implicitly part of what you call your gender-political crusade, and it was unfair of me to say that it is. I think I still think that said crusade is a sufficiently big part of your posting here that it’s reasonable to consider the OP to be somewhat “about” pronoun issues and not merely about a bit of bad thinking on Eliezer’s part that merely happens to involve pronoun issues. Backtracking a bit to see why that question was ever relevant: mukashi was saying OP doesn’t deserve all its upvotes because LW doesn’t need extensive discussions about pronouns; I think the fact that OP is inter alia about an apparent motivated-reasoning error of EY’s is sufficient explanation for why it’s here. I can’t agree with mukashi’s criticism. (If they’d said something more like “this topic is inflammatory and we could use less of it here even if it turns out to be leading EY to make errors of reasoning”, there’d be a stronger case though I don’t know whether I’d agree.)
I indeed hadn’t seen the UGS posts you mention that are “on the other side” (when one does the usual 1d projection, which I agree is as always a potentially dangerous simplification) -- I read your blog only occasionally. Actually, no, looking again I think I had seen the “Schelling point” one before and forgotten it, but not the “super-proton” one.
Your documented case of Yudkowsky-triggered transition is intriguing. Seems like the sort of thing where the difference he made was more “it happened a couple of weeks earlier” rather than “it happened and would otherwise not have happened”, though, don’t you think? And if the point here is that EY is a public figure, then there’s still at least one highly-attenuating step between your post and such changes. I dunno, it still just doesn’t feel plausible to me that your main reason for writing what you wrote was to save gender-dysphoric people from the awkwardness-for-them that might ensue if they started asking people to use different pronouns. If you say that really was your purpose—well, as I said before, I think I feel about it roughly the same way as you feel about Eliezer claiming not to know what it feels like to have a strong association of a particular pronoun with a particular person.
The “everybody knows” pathology you cite Zvi as describing is a reasonable thing to be concerned about. It seems to me that our case is, at most, an extremely non-central instance of what Zvi describes. Almost all of Zvi’s post is about cases where someone says “everybody knows X” when X is in fact false; in this case we agree that X is true (it’s something like “if you ask people to use non-obvious pronouns when referring to you, awkwardness may ensue”). But he does mention in passing the possibility of using “everyone knows X” to discourage telling people X (in cases where X is revealing a fraud and the person saying “everyone knows” is trying to suppress knowledge of the fraud; I mention this just because I’m sure you wouldn’t want the rather serious accusation you’re throwing at me to go unnoticed and I’d like to acknowledge that I noticed it). So I guess the question is: among people on LW who might read your 12k-word piece, how much underestimation do you actually think there is of the awkwardness that might ensue if they ask others to use nonobvious pronouns for them?
I completely agree that any conflict of interest between pronoun-requesters and pronoun-requestees is there regardless of whether you write about it. I’m not sure why you think that needs pointing out. The observation I was making is that it’s hard to reconcile (1) your stated motivation of making life less unpleasant for gender-dysphoric people by saving them from the awkwardness that might ensue if they ask others to use pronouns for them that match their internal gender-perception, with (2) the fact that a large fraction of what you actually wrote postulates an adversarial relationship between those people and the people they’re making the request of, and complains of the harm the former are inflicting on the latter.
(If the argument at the end of your post were “gender-dysphoric people need correct argumentation on this to make correct decisions because they might not ask people to use different pronouns if they appreciated the harm they were doing to those people by making the request” then there wouldn’t be that inconsistency. But it’s not, it’s “gender-dysphoric people need correct argumentation on this to make correct decisions because they might not ask people to use different pronouns if they appreciated the awkwardness they were bringing to themselves by making the request”.)
the difference he made was more “it happened a couple of weeks earlier” rather than “it happened and would otherwise not have happened”, though, don’t you think? [...] there’s still at least one highly-attenuating step between your post and such changes
The marginal impact of any one bullet on the outcome of a war is very small, but it would be very odd to therefore proclaim that it’s implausible that a soldier’s main reason for having taken a shot is to win the war. Of course, it’s true that one shot won’t make much of a difference, even if it hits. The soldier knows that, but fights anyway, because a tiny impact is nevertheless more than zero impact. Or maybe, because his decision to shoot is logically correlated with that of other soldiers. Or maybe—to die with dignity.
It’s the same thing with culture wars. (And with … culture-steering and knowledge-creation efforts that are hopefully doing something a little more sophisticated and productive than the usual one-dimensional war.) Nothing I write is going to have a huge impact on the world, because I’m very small in comparison to the world. I know that, but I write anyway. With dignity.
using “everyone knows X” to discourage telling people X (in cases where X is revealing a fraud and the person saying “everyone knows” is trying to suppress knowledge of the fraud
Yes, that’s exactly what I meant.
your main reason for writing what you wrote
Is that this is the continuation of an argument between me and Yudkowsky that has gone on for years. (Long, dumb story for a future memoir-post.) You can’t expect me to let him have the last word!
So I guess the question is: among people on LW who might read your 12k-word piece, how much underestimation do you actually think there is of the awkwardness that might ensue if they ask others to use nonobvious pronouns for them?
A lot, but mostly because people haven’t thought about the question, rather than because they’d necessarily get the wrong answer if prompted to spend five minutes thinking about it as measured by an actual, physical clock.
I have a dumb personal anecdote to explain where I’m coming from here. Back in the late ’aughts, there was a period when I tried using my first-and-middle-initials (“Z.M.”) as a nickname: my reasoning was, I wanted a gender-neutral byline (I didn’t like how “Zack” marked even my writing as male, even if I couldn’t expect people to not notice what sex I am in real life), and I wanted my byline to be the same as what people called me in real life, and I didn’t want to pick a new name unrelated to my legal name.
In retrospect, this turned out to be a terrible idea that caused my a huge amount of completely pointless identity-crisis emotional pain before I eventually ended up reverting it—partially because “Z.M.” never really “felt like a name”, even to me, and partially because of the backwards-compatibility problem (where I wasn’t comfortable being known by different names to different people, and I wasn’t bold enough to nag everyone who already knew me to switch, especially for something that didn’t really feel like a name, even to me).
(Also, “Zachary” is an order of magnitude more common than “Zoë” and “Zelda” put together, so the gender-neutral rationale almost certainly never held up in practice—but, you see, it was the principle.)
I think I would have made better decisions if I had read a careful 12,000-word blog post arguing that nickname changes are actually hard (especially if you anticipate not being comfortable being known by different names to different people, and aren’t bold enough to nag everyone who already knows you to switch) and that not all possible pairs of initials equally “feel like a name” to many native English speakers, even if using initials as a name isn’t uncommon for some pairs of initials.
(I’m actually still not sure what’s going on there psychologically! Why does “Z.M.” sound terrible, but “A.J.” or “J.T.” work? Does there need to be a J; is that the rule? Just “Z.” (zee) would have worked better …)
It’s not that I couldn’t have anticipated these points in advance, if I had spent five minutes with an actual, physical clock thinking of ways in which changing nicknames might be a bad idea. I just—didn’t think it through; I hadn’t considered the possibility that an idea that appealed to my ideological whimsy might be different from what I was actually happy living with.
The reason this dumb anecdote is relevant is because I think all the factors that caused me to underestimate the awkwardness of asking for a nonstandard nickname for gender-feeling-related reasons in 2007 (and therefore end up inflicting a lot of pointless identity-crisis emotional pain on myself) are substantially worse for people at risk of underestimating the awkwardness of asking for nonobvious pronouns for gender-feeling-related reasons in 2022. At least my dumb decisions of 2007 took some initiative on my part; no one pushed me.
I … don’t think this is true in the current year. If you don’t already see why, it’s probably more useful for me to explain at memoir-length rather than comment-length.
hard to reconcile (1) your stated motivation of making life less unpleasant for gender-dysphoric people
Hm, I don’t think I meant to come off as that altruistic. (I don’t think most gender-dysphoric people thinking under the distribution of ideologies in today’s Society would say I’m correctly advocating for their/our interests; a lot of them think I’m a traitor.) In my mind, the point was to explain my personal stake in getting this topic right. I’m open to wording suggestions if there’s some way to make my selfishness come through more clearly.
(Terribly belated reply, sorry.)
So, first of all, I agree: not everything you write on LW is explicitly or implicitly part of what you call your gender-political crusade, and it was unfair of me to say that it is. I think I still think that said crusade is a sufficiently big part of your posting here that it’s reasonable to consider the OP to be somewhat “about” pronoun issues and not merely about a bit of bad thinking on Eliezer’s part that merely happens to involve pronoun issues. Backtracking a bit to see why that question was ever relevant: mukashi was saying OP doesn’t deserve all its upvotes because LW doesn’t need extensive discussions about pronouns; I think the fact that OP is inter alia about an apparent motivated-reasoning error of EY’s is sufficient explanation for why it’s here. I can’t agree with mukashi’s criticism. (If they’d said something more like “this topic is inflammatory and we could use less of it here even if it turns out to be leading EY to make errors of reasoning”, there’d be a stronger case though I don’t know whether I’d agree.)
I indeed hadn’t seen the UGS posts you mention that are “on the other side” (when one does the usual 1d projection, which I agree is as always a potentially dangerous simplification) -- I read your blog only occasionally. Actually, no, looking again I think I had seen the “Schelling point” one before and forgotten it, but not the “super-proton” one.
Your documented case of Yudkowsky-triggered transition is intriguing. Seems like the sort of thing where the difference he made was more “it happened a couple of weeks earlier” rather than “it happened and would otherwise not have happened”, though, don’t you think? And if the point here is that EY is a public figure, then there’s still at least one highly-attenuating step between your post and such changes. I dunno, it still just doesn’t feel plausible to me that your main reason for writing what you wrote was to save gender-dysphoric people from the awkwardness-for-them that might ensue if they started asking people to use different pronouns. If you say that really was your purpose—well, as I said before, I think I feel about it roughly the same way as you feel about Eliezer claiming not to know what it feels like to have a strong association of a particular pronoun with a particular person.
The “everybody knows” pathology you cite Zvi as describing is a reasonable thing to be concerned about. It seems to me that our case is, at most, an extremely non-central instance of what Zvi describes. Almost all of Zvi’s post is about cases where someone says “everybody knows X” when X is in fact false; in this case we agree that X is true (it’s something like “if you ask people to use non-obvious pronouns when referring to you, awkwardness may ensue”). But he does mention in passing the possibility of using “everyone knows X” to discourage telling people X (in cases where X is revealing a fraud and the person saying “everyone knows” is trying to suppress knowledge of the fraud; I mention this just because I’m sure you wouldn’t want the rather serious accusation you’re throwing at me to go unnoticed and I’d like to acknowledge that I noticed it). So I guess the question is: among people on LW who might read your 12k-word piece, how much underestimation do you actually think there is of the awkwardness that might ensue if they ask others to use nonobvious pronouns for them?
I completely agree that any conflict of interest between pronoun-requesters and pronoun-requestees is there regardless of whether you write about it. I’m not sure why you think that needs pointing out. The observation I was making is that it’s hard to reconcile (1) your stated motivation of making life less unpleasant for gender-dysphoric people by saving them from the awkwardness that might ensue if they ask others to use pronouns for them that match their internal gender-perception, with (2) the fact that a large fraction of what you actually wrote postulates an adversarial relationship between those people and the people they’re making the request of, and complains of the harm the former are inflicting on the latter.
(If the argument at the end of your post were “gender-dysphoric people need correct argumentation on this to make correct decisions because they might not ask people to use different pronouns if they appreciated the harm they were doing to those people by making the request” then there wouldn’t be that inconsistency. But it’s not, it’s “gender-dysphoric people need correct argumentation on this to make correct decisions because they might not ask people to use different pronouns if they appreciated the awkwardness they were bringing to themselves by making the request”.)
The marginal impact of any one bullet on the outcome of a war is very small, but it would be very odd to therefore proclaim that it’s implausible that a soldier’s main reason for having taken a shot is to win the war. Of course, it’s true that one shot won’t make much of a difference, even if it hits. The soldier knows that, but fights anyway, because a tiny impact is nevertheless more than zero impact. Or maybe, because his decision to shoot is logically correlated with that of other soldiers. Or maybe—to die with dignity.
It’s the same thing with culture wars. (And with … culture-steering and knowledge-creation efforts that are hopefully doing something a little more sophisticated and productive than the usual one-dimensional war.) Nothing I write is going to have a huge impact on the world, because I’m very small in comparison to the world. I know that, but I write anyway. With dignity.
Yes, that’s exactly what I meant.
Is that this is the continuation of an argument between me and Yudkowsky that has gone on for years. (Long, dumb story for a future memoir-post.) You can’t expect me to let him have the last word!
A lot, but mostly because people haven’t thought about the question, rather than because they’d necessarily get the wrong answer if prompted to spend five minutes thinking about it as measured by an actual, physical clock.
I have a dumb personal anecdote to explain where I’m coming from here. Back in the late ’aughts, there was a period when I tried using my first-and-middle-initials (“Z.M.”) as a nickname: my reasoning was, I wanted a gender-neutral byline (I didn’t like how “Zack” marked even my writing as male, even if I couldn’t expect people to not notice what sex I am in real life), and I wanted my byline to be the same as what people called me in real life, and I didn’t want to pick a new name unrelated to my legal name.
In retrospect, this turned out to be a terrible idea that caused my a huge amount of completely pointless identity-crisis emotional pain before I eventually ended up reverting it—partially because “Z.M.” never really “felt like a name”, even to me, and partially because of the backwards-compatibility problem (where I wasn’t comfortable being known by different names to different people, and I wasn’t bold enough to nag everyone who already knew me to switch, especially for something that didn’t really feel like a name, even to me).
(Also, “Zachary” is an order of magnitude more common than “Zoë” and “Zelda” put together, so the gender-neutral rationale almost certainly never held up in practice—but, you see, it was the principle.)
I think I would have made better decisions if I had read a careful 12,000-word blog post arguing that nickname changes are actually hard (especially if you anticipate not being comfortable being known by different names to different people, and aren’t bold enough to nag everyone who already knows you to switch) and that not all possible pairs of initials equally “feel like a name” to many native English speakers, even if using initials as a name isn’t uncommon for some pairs of initials.
(I’m actually still not sure what’s going on there psychologically! Why does “Z.M.” sound terrible, but “A.J.” or “J.T.” work? Does there need to be a J; is that the rule? Just “Z.” (zee) would have worked better …)
It’s not that I couldn’t have anticipated these points in advance, if I had spent five minutes with an actual, physical clock thinking of ways in which changing nicknames might be a bad idea. I just—didn’t think it through; I hadn’t considered the possibility that an idea that appealed to my ideological whimsy might be different from what I was actually happy living with.
The reason this dumb anecdote is relevant is because I think all the factors that caused me to underestimate the awkwardness of asking for a nonstandard nickname for gender-feeling-related reasons in 2007 (and therefore end up inflicting a lot of pointless identity-crisis emotional pain on myself) are substantially worse for people at risk of underestimating the awkwardness of asking for nonobvious pronouns for gender-feeling-related reasons in 2022. At least my dumb decisions of 2007 took some initiative on my part; no one pushed me.
I … don’t think this is true in the current year. If you don’t already see why, it’s probably more useful for me to explain at memoir-length rather than comment-length.
Hm, I don’t think I meant to come off as that altruistic. (I don’t think most gender-dysphoric people thinking under the distribution of ideologies in today’s Society would say I’m correctly advocating for their/our interests; a lot of them think I’m a traitor.) In my mind, the point was to explain my personal stake in getting this topic right. I’m open to wording suggestions if there’s some way to make my selfishness come through more clearly.