At the time when I read EY’s FB post, I thought it was a pretty interesting perspective that baking such things into the grammar was an awful design choice and should be treated with disdain.
That said I kind of skimmed over this part (at the time), which you emphasize in the summary:
In the comments of the Facebook post, Yudkowsky seemingly denies that pronouns convey sex category information to English speakers, claiming, “I do not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than ‘doesn’t look like an Oliver’ is attached to something in your head.” This self-report is not plausible, as evidenced by previous writings by Yudkowsky that treat sex and pronouns as synonymous.
It isn’t a self-report I could make. Names and sexes are very different things, and sex is a sufficiently deep part of our mind design that it can’t really be otherwise for basically any human, even one as strange as Eliezer. I guess it’s possible he has a sufficiently alien relationship to language itself that he cannot even empathize with someone who would feel as I do, but I don’t expect so.
Edit: Re-reading the original thread, I actually think it’s fairly likely that Eliezer has a more alien relationship to pronouns in particular, and finds it effortful to empathize with others about this.
To clarify my position on the overall point, I agree with Zack that a bunch of norms around “stating the truth” are violated when non-standard pronouns are demanded inappropriately, even though a better language for more ideal agents would not store any truth-claims in the pronouns, and some people view them more as arbitrary customs than as truth claims. My shoulder!Zvi goes further and suggests that pronouns were actively selected for violating the “stating the truth” moral as much as it could get away with.
Edit2: I feel like if I speak directly on this subject, the broader world will attempt to punish me quite severely for doing so, making writing this comment irritatingly difficult. Not talking straightforwardly about what is going on in the world makes it hard to get such questions right, for the reasons I described here.
At the time when I read EY’s FB post, I thought it was a pretty interesting perspective that baking such things into the grammar was an awful design choice and should be treated with disdain.
That said I kind of skimmed over this part (at the time), which you emphasize in the summary:
It isn’t a self-report I could make. Names and sexes are very different things, and sex is a sufficiently deep part of our mind design that it can’t really be otherwise for basically any human, even one as strange as Eliezer. I guess it’s possible he has a sufficiently alien relationship to language itself that he cannot even empathize with someone who would feel as I do, but I don’t expect so.
Edit: Re-reading the original thread, I actually think it’s fairly likely that Eliezer has a more alien relationship to pronouns in particular, and finds it effortful to empathize with others about this.
To clarify my position on the overall point, I agree with Zack that a bunch of norms around “stating the truth” are violated when non-standard pronouns are demanded inappropriately, even though a better language for more ideal agents would not store any truth-claims in the pronouns, and some people view them more as arbitrary customs than as truth claims. My shoulder!Zvi goes further and suggests that pronouns were actively selected for violating the “stating the truth” moral as much as it could get away with.
Edit2: I feel like if I speak directly on this subject, the broader world will attempt to punish me quite severely for doing so, making writing this comment irritatingly difficult. Not talking straightforwardly about what is going on in the world makes it hard to get such questions right, for the reasons I described here.
Man I almost regret commenting on this post, it’s taking way too much of my time to speak clearly without tripping some societal tripwire for attack.