Some people I usually respect for their willingness to publicly die on a hill of facts, now seem to be talking as if pronouns are facts, or as if who uses what bathroom is necessarily a factual statement about chromosomes. Come on, you know the distinction better than that!
Even if somebody went around saying, “I demand you call me ‘she’ and furthermore I claim to have two X chromosomes!”, which none of my trans colleagues have ever said to me by the way, it still isn’t a question-of-empirical-fact whether she should be called “she”. It’s an act.
In saying this, I am not taking a stand for or against any Twitter policies. I am making a stand on a hill of meaning in defense of validity, about the distinction between what is and isn’t a stand on a hill of facts in defense of truth.
I will never stand against those who stand against lies. But changing your name, asking people to address you by a different pronoun, and getting sex reassignment surgery, Is. Not. Lying. You are ontologically confused if you think those acts are false assertions.
My reading of this tweet thread, including some additional extrapolation that isn’t in the text:
There are obviously differences between cis men, cis women, trans men, and trans women. Anyone who tries to obliterate the distinction between cis women and trans women, in full generality, is a fool and/or pushing an ideological agenda.
So too are there important similarities between any pair of cis/trans men/women.
However, the social norm of identifying people by pronouns, in particular, is arbitrary. We could just as well have pronouns that categorize people by hair color or by height.
If someone is fighting for the social ritual of referring to someone as “she” meaning “this person is a cis woman”, instead of “this person presents as female”, that’s fine, but it’s a policy proposal, not the defense of a fact.
That we perform a social ritual that divides people up according to chromosomes, or according to neurotype, or according to social presentation, or according to preference, or whatever, is NOT implied by the true fact that there is a difference between cis women and trans women.
Similarly if someone wants to advocate for a particular policy about how we allocate bathrooms.
There are many more degrees of freedom in our choice of policies than in our true beliefs, and you’re making an error if you’re pushing for your preferred policy as if it is necessarily implied by the facts.
[edit 2024-02-19]: I in light of Yudkowsky’s clarification, I think my interpretation was not quite right. He’s saying instead that it is a mistake to call someone a lier they are explicitly making a bid or an argument to redefine how a word is used in some context,
Thus, Yudkowsky’s claim to merely have been standing up for the distinction between facts and policy questions doesn’t seem credible. It is, of course, true that pronoun and bathroom conventions are policy decisions rather than matters of fact, but it’s bizarre to condescendingly point this out as if it were the crux of contemporary trans-rights debates. Conservatives and gender-critical feminists know that trans-rights advocates aren’t falsely claiming that trans women have XX chromosomes! If you just wanted to point out that the rules of sports leagues are a policy question rather than a fact (as if anyone had doubted this), why would you throw in the “Aristotelian binary” weak man and belittle the matter as “humorous”? There are a lot of issues I don’t care much about, but I don’t see anything funny about the fact that other people do care.
But, he’s not claiming that this is the crux of contemporary trans-rights debates? He’s pointing out the distinction between facts and policy mainly because he has a particular interest in epistemology, not because he has a particular interest in the trans-rights debates.
There’s an active debate, which he’s mostly not very interested in. But one sub-thread of that debate is some folks making what he considers to be an ontological error, which he points out, because he cares about that class of error, separately from the rest of the context.
One could argue that this “Words can be wrong when your definition draws a boundary around things that don’t really belong together” moral didn’t apply to Yudkowsky’s new Tweets, which only mentioned pronouns and bathroom policies, not the extensions of common nouns.
But this seems pretty unsatisfying in the context of Yudkowsky’s claim to “not [be] taking a stand for or against any Twitter policies”. One of the Tweets that had recently led to radical feminist Meghan Murphy getting kicked off the platform read simply, “Men aren’t women tho.” This doesn’t seem like a policy claim; rather, Murphy was using common language to express the fact-claim that members of the natural category of adult human males, are not, in fact, members of the natural category of adult human females.
I don’t get it. He’s explicitly disclaiming that he’s not commenting on that situation? But that means that we should take his thread here as implicitly commenting on that situation?
I think I must be missing the point, because my summary here seems to uncharitable to be right.
My reading of this tweet thread, including some additional extrapolation that isn’t in the text:
There are obviously differences between cis men, cis women, trans men, and trans women. Anyone who tries to obliterate the distinction between cis women and trans women, in full generality, is a fool and/or pushing an ideological agenda.
So too are there important similarities between any pair of cis/trans men/women.
However, the social norm of identifying people by pronouns, in particular, is arbitrary. We could just as well have pronouns that categorize people by hair color or by height.
If someone is fighting for the social ritual of referring to someone as “she” meaning “this person is a cis woman”, instead of “this person presents as female”, that’s fine, but it’s a policy proposal, not the defense of a fact.
That we perform a social ritual that divides people up according to chromosomes, or according to neurotype, or according to social presentation, or according to preference, or whatever, is NOT implied by the true fact that there is a difference between cis women and trans women.
Similarly if someone wants to advocate for a particular policy about how we allocate bathrooms.
There are many more degrees of freedom in our choice of policies than in our true beliefs, and you’re making an error if you’re pushing for your preferred policy as if it is necessarily implied by the facts.
[edit 2024-02-19]: I in light of Yudkowsky’s clarification, I think my interpretation was not quite right. He’s saying instead that it is a mistake to call someone a lier they are explicitly making a bid or an argument to redefine how a word is used in some context,
But, he’s not claiming that this is the crux of contemporary trans-rights debates? He’s pointing out the distinction between facts and policy mainly because he has a particular interest in epistemology, not because he has a particular interest in the trans-rights debates.
There’s an active debate, which he’s mostly not very interested in. But one sub-thread of that debate is some folks making what he considers to be an ontological error, which he points out, because he cares about that class of error, separately from the rest of the context.
I don’t get it. He’s explicitly disclaiming that he’s not commenting on that situation? But that means that we should take his thread here as implicitly commenting on that situation?
I think I must be missing the point, because my summary here seems to uncharitable to be right.