Given that >98% of the EAs and alignment researchers we surveyed earlier this year identified as everything-other-than-conservative, we consider thinking through these questions to be another strategically worthwhile neglected direction.
....This suggests we need more genuine conservatives (not just people who are kinda pretending to be) explaining these realities to lawmakers, as we’ve found them quite capable of grasping complex technical concepts and being motivated to act in light of them despite their initial unfamiliarity.
Perhaps the policy of “You will use people’s preferred pronouns, and you will be polite about it, or we don’t want you in rationalist spaces” didn’t help here?
Any community is free to have whatever standards they want for membership, including politically-coded compelled speech. But it is not exactly shocking if your membership is then composed 70% of one side and <2% of the other.
(To be clear, any movement centered in California will have more progressives, so political partisanship is not responsible for the full 35:1 progressive-to-conservative ratio. But when people are openly referring to the lack of right-wingers as “keeping rat spaces clean” with no push-back, that’s a clue that it isn’t exactly welcoming to conservatives.)
A more likely explanation, it seems to me, is that a large part of early LW/sequences was militant atheism, with religion being the primary example of the low “sanity waterline”, and this hasn’t been explicitly disclaimed since, at best de-emphasized. So this space had done its best to repel conservatives much earlier than pronouns and other trans issues entered the picture.
I approve of the militant atheism, because there are just too many religious people out there, so without making a strong line we would have an Eternal September of people joining Less Wrong just to say “but have you considered that an AI can never have a soul?” or something similar.
And if being religious is strongly correlated with some political tribe, I guess it can’t be avoided.
But I think that going further than that is unnecessary and harmful.
Actually, we should probably show some resistance to the stupid ideas of other political tribes, just to make our independence clear. Otherwise, people would hesitate to call out bullshit when it comes from those who seem associated with us. (Quick test: Can you say three things the average Democrat believes that are wrong and stupid? What reaction would you expect if you posted your answer on LW?)
Specifically on trans issues:
I am generally in favor of niceness and civilization, therefore:
If someone calls themselves “he” or “she”, I will use that pronoun without thinking twice about it.
I disapprove of doxing in general, which extends to all speculations about someone’s biological sex.
But I also value rationality and free speech, therefore:
I insist on keeping an “I don’t know, really” attitude to trans issues. I don’t know, really. The fact that you are yelling at me does not make your arguments any more logically convincing.
No, I am not literally murdering you by disagreeing with you. Let’s tone down the hysteria.
There are people who feel strongly that they are Napoleon. If you want to convince me, you need to make a stronger case than that.
I specifically disagree on the point that if someone changes their gender, it retroactively changes their entire past. If someone presented as male for 50 years, then changed to female, it makes sense to use “he” to refer to their first 50 years, especially if this is the pronoun everyone used at that time. Also, I will refer to them using the name they actually used at that time. (If I talk about the Ancient Rome, I don’t call it Italian Republic either.) Anything else feels like magical thinking to me. I won’t correct you if you do that, but please do not correct me, or I will be super annoyed.
My biggest problem with the trans discourse is that it’s a giant tower of motte-and-baileys, and there’s no point where it’s socially acceptable to get off the crazy train.
Sure, at this point it seems likely that gender dysphoria isn’t an entirely empty notion. Implying that this condition might be in any way undesirable is already a red line though, with discussions of how much of it is due to social contagion being very taboo, naturally. And that only people experiencing bad enough dysphoria to require hormones and/or surgery could claim to be legitimately trans is a battle lost long ago.
Moving past that, there is non-binary, genderfluid, neo-genders, otherkin, etc, concepts that don’t seem to be plausibly based in some currently known crippling biological glitch, and yet those identities are apparently just as legitimate. Where does it stop? Should society be entirely reorganized every time a new fad gains traction? Should everybody questioning that be ostracized?
Then there’s the “passing” issue. I accept the argument that nowadays in most social situations we have no strong reasons to care about chromosomes/etc, people can successfully play many roles traditionally associated with the opposite sex. But sexual dimorphism is the entire reason for having different pronouns in the first place, and yet apparently you don’t even have to try (at all, let alone very hard) to “pass” as your chosen gender for your claim to be legitimate. What is the point? Here the unresolved tension between gender-critical and gender-affirming feminism is the most glaring.
Maybe, but Martin Randall and Matt Gilliland have both said that the trans explanation matches their personal experience, and Eliezer Yudkowsky agrees with the explanation as well. I have no insider knowledge and am just going off what community members say.
Do you have any particular reasons for thinking atheism is a bigger filter than pronouns and other trans issues?
It’s not clear what your position is. Do you think the contribution of pronouns and other trans issues is negligible? Slightly smaller than atheism? An order of magnitude smaller?
I suspect atheism is a non-negligible filter, but both smaller than trans issues, and less likely to filter out intelligent truth-seeking conservatives. Atheism is a factual question with a great deal of evidence in favor, and is therefore less politically charged. Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson have both said that the intellectual case for atheism is strong, and both remain very popular on the right.
I’d say that atheism had already set the “conservatives not welcome” baseline way back when, and this resulted in the community norms evolving accordingly. Granted, these days the trans stuff is more salient, but the reason it flourished here even more than in other tech-adjacent spaces has much to do with that early baseline.
Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson have both said that the intellectual case for atheism is strong, and both remain very popular on the right.
Sure, but somebody admitting that certainly isn’t the modal conservative.
I wouldn’t call the tone back then “conservatives not welcome”. Conservatism is correlated with religiosity, but it’s not the same thing. And I wouldn’t even call the tone “religious people are unwelcome”—people were perfectly civil with religious community members.
The community back then were willing to call irrational beliefs irrational, but they didn’t go beyond that. Filtering out people who are militantly opposed to rational conclusions seems fine.
I apologize. I spent some time digging for ancient evidence… and then decided against publishing it.
Short version is that someone said something that was kinda inappropriate back then, and would probably get an instant ban these days, with most people applauding.
Gilliland’s idea is that it is the proportion of trans people that dissuades some right-wing people from joining. That seems plausible to me, it matches the “Big Sort” thesis and my personal experience. I agree that his phrasing is unwelcoming.
I tried to find an official pronoun policy for LessWrong, LessOnline, EA Global, etc, and couldn’t. If you’re thinking of something specific could you say what? As well as the linked X thread I have read the X thread linked from Challenges to Yudkowsky’s pronoun reform proposal. But these are the opinions of one person, they don’t amount to politically-coded compelled speech. I’m not part of the rationalist community and this is a genuine question. Maybe such policies exist but are not advertised.
Eliezer said you are welcome in the community if you “politely accede to pronoun requests”. Which sounds to me like, “politically-coded speech is required to be welcome in the community”. (Specifically, people are socially required to use “woman” and “she” to refer to MtF transgenders). And Eliezer is not just some guy, he is the closest thing the rationalist community has to a leader.
There is a broad range of possible customs the community could have adopted. A few, from more right-coded to more left-coded.
People should use words to refer to the category-boundaries that best carverealityatthejoints. MtF transgenders unambiguously fall into the “male” cluster, and therefore the prescriptive protocol is to refer to them as “he”. Anyone who breaks this protocol (except under duress) is not welcome as a member of the community.
Same as above, but it is only the consensus position, and those who follow other protocols are still welcome to be part of the community.
Anyone is free to decide for themselves whether to use people’s preferred pronouns. You can ask people to use your preferred pronouns, as long as you are polite about it. And people are free to refuse, as long as they are also polite.
As a matter of politeness, you are not allowed to refer to people by pronouns they asked you not to use. However, you are not required to use people’s preferred pronouns. (So you cannot refer to a MtF transgender as “he”, but you don’t have to use “she”. You could instead refer to them by the first letter of their name, or some other alternative.)
You should refer to transgenders by their preferred pronouns (no alternatives). This is the consensus position, but people who politely decline to do so are still welcome to join.
Same as above, except anyone who declines is not welcome as a member of the community.
Same as above, and economically literate people who are in favor of market solutions are also unwelcome.
I don’t know which of these solutions is best, but 1, 6, and 7 seem bad. Eliezer seems to support 6.
Edit: Reworded to taboo the phrase “Anyone who disagrees” as requested by RobertM.
Thanks for clarifying. By “policy” and “standards” and “compelled speech” I thought you meant something more than community norms and customs. This is traditionally an important distinction to libertarians and free speech advocates. I think the distinction carves reality at the joints, and I hope you agree. I agree that community norms and customs can be unwelcoming.
Yes, it’s not a law, so it’s not a libertarian issue. As I said earlier:
Any community is free to have whatever standards they want for membership, including politically-coded compelled speech. But it is not exactly shocking if your membership is then composed 70% of one side and <2% of the other.
By “compelled speech” being a standard for community membership, I just meant “You are required to say certain things or you will be excluded from the community.” For instance, as jefftk pointed out,
The EA Forum has an explicit policy that you need to use the pronouns the people you’re talking about prefer.
I tried to find an official pronoun policy for LessWrong, LessOnline, EA Global, etc, and couldn’t.
The EA Forum has an explicit policy that you need to use the pronouns the people you’re talking about prefer. EAG(x) doesn’t explicitly include this in the code of conduct but it’s short and I expect is interpreted by people who would consider non-accidental misgendering to be a special case of “offensive, disruptive, or discriminatory actions or communication.”. I vaguely remember seeing someone get a warning on LW for misgendering, but I’m not finding anything now.
I don’t remember ever adjudicating this, but my current intuition, having not thought about it hard, is that I don’t see a super clear line here (like, in a moderation dispute I can imagine judging either way depending on the details).
Great post. I did not know things were this bad:
Perhaps the policy of “You will use people’s preferred pronouns, and you will be polite about it, or we don’t want you in rationalist spaces” didn’t help here?
Any community is free to have whatever standards they want for membership, including politically-coded compelled speech. But it is not exactly shocking if your membership is then composed 70% of one side and <2% of the other.
(To be clear, any movement centered in California will have more progressives, so political partisanship is not responsible for the full 35:1 progressive-to-conservative ratio. But when people are openly referring to the lack of right-wingers as “keeping rat spaces clean” with no push-back, that’s a clue that it isn’t exactly welcoming to conservatives.)
A more likely explanation, it seems to me, is that a large part of early LW/sequences was militant atheism, with religion being the primary example of the low “sanity waterline”, and this hasn’t been explicitly disclaimed since, at best de-emphasized. So this space had done its best to repel conservatives much earlier than pronouns and other trans issues entered the picture.
I approve of the militant atheism, because there are just too many religious people out there, so without making a strong line we would have an Eternal September of people joining Less Wrong just to say “but have you considered that an AI can never have a soul?” or something similar.
And if being religious is strongly correlated with some political tribe, I guess it can’t be avoided.
But I think that going further than that is unnecessary and harmful.
Actually, we should probably show some resistance to the stupid ideas of other political tribes, just to make our independence clear. Otherwise, people would hesitate to call out bullshit when it comes from those who seem associated with us. (Quick test: Can you say three things the average Democrat believes that are wrong and stupid? What reaction would you expect if you posted your answer on LW?)
Specifically on trans issues:
I am generally in favor of niceness and civilization, therefore:
If someone calls themselves “he” or “she”, I will use that pronoun without thinking twice about it.
I disapprove of doxing in general, which extends to all speculations about someone’s biological sex.
But I also value rationality and free speech, therefore:
I insist on keeping an “I don’t know, really” attitude to trans issues. I don’t know, really. The fact that you are yelling at me does not make your arguments any more logically convincing.
No, I am not literally murdering you by disagreeing with you. Let’s tone down the hysteria.
There are people who feel strongly that they are Napoleon. If you want to convince me, you need to make a stronger case than that.
I specifically disagree on the point that if someone changes their gender, it retroactively changes their entire past. If someone presented as male for 50 years, then changed to female, it makes sense to use “he” to refer to their first 50 years, especially if this is the pronoun everyone used at that time. Also, I will refer to them using the name they actually used at that time. (If I talk about the Ancient Rome, I don’t call it Italian Republic either.) Anything else feels like magical thinking to me. I won’t correct you if you do that, but please do not correct me, or I will be super annoyed.
My biggest problem with the trans discourse is that it’s a giant tower of motte-and-baileys, and there’s no point where it’s socially acceptable to get off the crazy train.
Sure, at this point it seems likely that gender dysphoria isn’t an entirely empty notion. Implying that this condition might be in any way undesirable is already a red line though, with discussions of how much of it is due to social contagion being very taboo, naturally. And that only people experiencing bad enough dysphoria to require hormones and/or surgery could claim to be legitimately trans is a battle lost long ago.
Moving past that, there is non-binary, genderfluid, neo-genders, otherkin, etc, concepts that don’t seem to be plausibly based in some currently known crippling biological glitch, and yet those identities are apparently just as legitimate. Where does it stop? Should society be entirely reorganized every time a new fad gains traction? Should everybody questioning that be ostracized?
Then there’s the “passing” issue. I accept the argument that nowadays in most social situations we have no strong reasons to care about chromosomes/etc, people can successfully play many roles traditionally associated with the opposite sex. But sexual dimorphism is the entire reason for having different pronouns in the first place, and yet apparently you don’t even have to try (at all, let alone very hard) to “pass” as your chosen gender for your claim to be legitimate. What is the point? Here the unresolved tension between gender-critical and gender-affirming feminism is the most glaring.
Maybe, but Martin Randall and Matt Gilliland have both said that the trans explanation matches their personal experience, and Eliezer Yudkowsky agrees with the explanation as well. I have no insider knowledge and am just going off what community members say.
Do you have any particular reasons for thinking atheism is a bigger filter than pronouns and other trans issues?
It’s not clear what your position is. Do you think the contribution of pronouns and other trans issues is negligible? Slightly smaller than atheism? An order of magnitude smaller?
I suspect atheism is a non-negligible filter, but both smaller than trans issues, and less likely to filter out intelligent truth-seeking conservatives. Atheism is a factual question with a great deal of evidence in favor, and is therefore less politically charged. Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson have both said that the intellectual case for atheism is strong, and both remain very popular on the right.
In the before-time of the internet, New Atheism was a much bigger deal than transgender issues.
I’d say that atheism had already set the “conservatives not welcome” baseline way back when, and this resulted in the community norms evolving accordingly. Granted, these days the trans stuff is more salient, but the reason it flourished here even more than in other tech-adjacent spaces has much to do with that early baseline.
Sure, but somebody admitting that certainly isn’t the modal conservative.
I wouldn’t call the tone back then “conservatives not welcome”. Conservatism is correlated with religiosity, but it’s not the same thing. And I wouldn’t even call the tone “religious people are unwelcome”—people were perfectly civil with religious community members.
The community back then were willing to call irrational beliefs irrational, but they didn’t go beyond that. Filtering out people who are militantly opposed to rational conclusions seems fine.
Going by today’s standards, we should have banned Gwern in 2012.
And I think that would have been a mistake.
I wonder how many other mistakes we made. The problem is, we won’t get good feedback on this.
(I don’t understand what this is referring to)
I apologize. I spent some time digging for ancient evidence… and then decided against publishing it.
Short version is that someone said something that was kinda inappropriate back then, and would probably get an instant ban these days, with most people applauding.
cited thread.
Gilliland’s idea is that it is the proportion of trans people that dissuades some right-wing people from joining. That seems plausible to me, it matches the “Big Sort” thesis and my personal experience. I agree that his phrasing is unwelcoming.
I tried to find an official pronoun policy for LessWrong, LessOnline, EA Global, etc, and couldn’t. If you’re thinking of something specific could you say what? As well as the linked X thread I have read the X thread linked from Challenges to Yudkowsky’s pronoun reform proposal. But these are the opinions of one person, they don’t amount to politically-coded compelled speech. I’m not part of the rationalist community and this is a genuine question. Maybe such policies exist but are not advertised.
Eliezer said you are welcome in the community if you “politely accede to pronoun requests”. Which sounds to me like, “politically-coded speech is required to be welcome in the community”. (Specifically, people are socially required to use “woman” and “she” to refer to MtF transgenders). And Eliezer is not just some guy, he is the closest thing the rationalist community has to a leader.
There is a broad range of possible customs the community could have adopted. A few, from more right-coded to more left-coded.
People should use words to refer to the category-boundaries that best carve reality at the joints. MtF transgenders unambiguously fall into the “male” cluster, and therefore the prescriptive protocol is to refer to them as “he”. Anyone who breaks this protocol (except under duress) is not welcome as a member of the community.
Same as above, but it is only the consensus position, and those who follow other protocols are still welcome to be part of the community.
Anyone is free to decide for themselves whether to use people’s preferred pronouns. You can ask people to use your preferred pronouns, as long as you are polite about it. And people are free to refuse, as long as they are also polite.
As a matter of politeness, you are not allowed to refer to people by pronouns they asked you not to use. However, you are not required to use people’s preferred pronouns. (So you cannot refer to a MtF transgender as “he”, but you don’t have to use “she”. You could instead refer to them by the first letter of their name, or some other alternative.)
You should refer to transgenders by their preferred pronouns (no alternatives). This is the consensus position, but people who politely decline to do so are still welcome to join.
Same as above, except anyone who declines is not welcome as a member of the community.
Same as above, and economically literate people who are in favor of market solutions are also unwelcome.
I don’t know which of these solutions is best, but 1, 6, and 7 seem bad. Eliezer seems to support 6.
Edit: Reworded to taboo the phrase “Anyone who disagrees” as requested by RobertM.
Thanks for clarifying. By “policy” and “standards” and “compelled speech” I thought you meant something more than community norms and customs. This is traditionally an important distinction to libertarians and free speech advocates. I think the distinction carves reality at the joints, and I hope you agree. I agree that community norms and customs can be unwelcoming.
Yes, it’s not a law, so it’s not a libertarian issue. As I said earlier:
By “compelled speech” being a standard for community membership, I just meant “You are required to say certain things or you will be excluded from the community.” For instance, as jefftk pointed out,
The EA Forum has an explicit policy that you need to use the pronouns the people you’re talking about prefer. EAG(x) doesn’t explicitly include this in the code of conduct but it’s short and I expect is interpreted by people who would consider non-accidental misgendering to be a special case of “offensive, disruptive, or discriminatory actions or communication.”. I vaguely remember seeing someone get a warning on LW for misgendering, but I’m not finding anything now.
I don’t remember ever adjudicating this, but my current intuition, having not thought about it hard, is that I don’t see a super clear line here (like, in a moderation dispute I can imagine judging either way depending on the details).