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.
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.