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.
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.