Given some referent—some definition, either intensional or extensional—of the word “man” (in other words, some discernible category with the label “man”), the question “is X a man” (i.e., “is X a member of this category labeled ‘man’”) is an empirical question. And “man”, like any commonly used word, can’t be defined arbitrarily.
All of the above being the case, what do you mean by “pure semantics” such that your statement is true…?
Yeah, what factual question about empirical categories is/was Zack interested in resolving? Tabooing the words “man” and “woman”, since what I mean by semantics is “which categories get which label”. I’m not super interested in discussing which empirical category should be associated with the phonemes /mæn/, and I’m not super interested in the linguistic investigation of the way different groups of English speakers assign meaning to that sequence of phonemes, both of which I lump under the umbrella of semantics.
Yeah, what factual question about empirical categories is/was Zack interested in resolving?
Zack has written very many words about this, including this very post, and the ones prior to it in the sequence; and also his other posts, on Less Wrong and on his blog.
I’m not super interested in discussing which empirical category should be associated with the phonemes /mæn/, and I’m not super interested in the linguistic investigation of the way different groups of English speakers assign meaning to that sequence of phonemes, both of which I lump under the umbrella of semantics.
But other people are interested in these things (and related ones), as it turns out; and the question of why they have such interest, as well as many related questions, are also factual in nature.
What’s more, “A Human’s Guide to Words” (which I linked to in the grandparent) explains why reassigning different words to existing categories is not arbitrary, but has consequences for our (individual and collective) epistemics. So even such choices cannot be dismissed by labeling them “semantics”.
I haven’t read everything Zack has written, so feel free to link me something, but almost everything I’ve read, including this post, includes far more intra-rationalist politicking than discussion of object level matters.
I know other people are interested in those things. I specifically phrased my previous post in an attempt to avoid arguing about what other people care about. I can neither defend nor explain their positions. Neither do I intend to dismiss or malign those preferences by labeling them semantics. That previous sentence is not to be read as a denial of ever labeling them semantics, but rather as a denial of thinking that semantics is anything to dismiss or malign. Semantics is a long and storied discipline on philosophy and linguistics. I took an entire college course on semantics. Nevertheless, I don’t find it particularly interesting.
I’ve read a human’s guide to words. I understand you cannot redefine reality by redefining words. I am trying to step past disagreement you and I might have regarding the definitions of words and figure out if we have disagreements about reality.
I think you are doing the same thing I have seen Zack do repeatedly, which is to avoid engaging in actual disagreement and discussion, but instead repeatedly accuse your interlocutor of violating norms of rational debate. So far nothing you have said is something I disagree with, except the implication that I disagree with it. If you think I’m lying to you, feel free to say so and we can stop talking. If our disagreement is merely “you think semantics is incredibly important and I find it mostly boring and stale”, let me know and you can go argue with someone who cares more than me.
But the way that Zack phrases things makes it sound, to me, like he and I have some actual disagreement about reality which he thinks is deeply important for people considering transition to know. And as someone considering transition, if you or he or someone else can say that or link to that isn’t full of semantics or intracommunity norms of discourse call-outs, I would like to see it!
I haven’t read everything Zack has written, so feel free to link me something, but almost everything I’ve read, including this post, includes far more intra-rationalist politicking than discussion of object level matters.
Zack also has several posts which, although themselves written at a meta-level, nevertheless explain in great (and highly technical) detail why “is X a woman/man” (i.e., “to which of these two categories, no matter their labels, does X properly belong”) is a factual question. These include:
I think you are doing the same thing I have seen Zack do repeatedly, which is to avoid engaging in actual disagreement and discussion, but instead repeatedly accuse your interlocutor of violating norms of rational debate.
To my knowledge, I’ve made no such accusations against you.
So far nothing you have said is something I disagree with, except the implication that I disagree with it. If you think I’m lying to you, feel free to say so and we can stop talking.
I don’t think you’ve made any concrete claims, so how could you be lying…? (I suppose you could be lying about what you are or are not interested in, but I’m not sure what the point of doing so would be, in this case…)
If our disagreement is merely “you think semantics is incredibly important and I find it mostly boring and stale”, let me know and you can go argue with someone who cares more than me.
That is certainly not the disagreement.
Your first comment in this thread was responding to an exchange which was about object-level questions, and very clearly so. Like, if I say “I’m trying to figure out whether this animal in front of me is a wolf spider or a fishing spider”, and you respond by saying “‘is a wolf spider’ or ‘is a fishing spider’ is pure semantics, so what factual question are you trying to figure out”, that is a nonsensical thing to say. Do you agree? Or do you think that’s a perfectly sensible reply?
But the way that Zack phrases things makes it sound, to me, like he and I have some actual disagreement about reality which he thinks is deeply important for people considering transition to know. And as someone considering transition, if you or he or someone else can say that or link to that isn’t full of semantics or intracommunity norms of discourse call-outs, I would like to see it!
I claim no expertise related to transition, nor do I have any special insight into these matters, so I’m surely not the right person to ask any such thing.
As for Zack… well, look, you are commenting on a post which is, indeed, about community norms and epistemic standards and other such “meta” questions. Zack has written many, many posts about the object-level issues. He has a whole blog which is just absolutely jam-packed with discussion of the object-level issues. (This is a link-post, so you can click that link and check out said blog.) If Zack writes a bunch of posts about the object-level stuff, and then, having done so, writes a post about the meta-level stuff, and you read that post and ask “where is the object-level stuff”, what is anyone supposed to say other than “it’s in all the other posts, the ones about the object-level stuff, which this post is not one of”?
So if your question was just “where are those object-level posts”, then I hope my links have answered that. If your question was something else, then by all means feel free to clarify!
I owe you an apology; you’re right that you did not accuse me of violating norms, and I’m sorry for saying that you did. I only intended to draw parallels between your focus on the meta level and Zack’s focus on the meta level, and in my hurry I erred in painting you and him with the same brush.
I additionally want to clarify that I didn’t think you were accusing me of lying, but merely wanted preemptively close off some of the possible directions this conversation could go.
Thank you for providing those links! I did see some of them on his blog and skipped over them because I thought, based on the first paragraph or title, they were more intracommunity discourse. I have now read them all.
I found them mostly uninteresting. They focus a lot on semantics and on whether something is a lie or not, and neither of those are particularly motivating to me. Of the rest, they are focused on issues which I don’t find particularly relevant to my own personal journey, and while I wish that Zack felt like he was able to discuss these issues openly, I don’t really think people in the community disagreeing with him is some bizarre anti-truth political maneuvering.
I found them mostly uninteresting. They focus a lot on semantics and on whether something is a lie or not, and neither of those are particularly motivating to me.
Hmm. I continue to think that you are using the term “semantics” in a very odd way, but I suppose it probably won’t be very fruitful to go down that avenue of discussion…
I don’t really think people in the community disagreeing with [Zack] is some bizarre anti-truth political maneuvering.
I imagine the answer to this one will depend on the details—which people, disagreeing on what specific matter, in what way, etc. Certainly it seems implausible that none of it is “political maneuvering” of some sort (which I don’t think is “bizarre”, by the way; really it’s quite the opposite—perfectly banal political maneuvering, of the sort you see all the time, especially these days… more sad to see, perhaps, for those of us who had high hopes for “rationality”, but not any weirder, for all that…).
I also consider myself as someone who had—and still has—high hopes for rationality, and so I think it’s sad that we disagree, not on the object level, but on whether we can trust the community to faithfully report their beliefs. Sure, some of it may be political maneuvering, but I mostly think it’s political maneuvering of the form of—tailoring the words, metaphors, and style to a particular audience, and choosing to engage on particular issues, rather than outright lying about beliefs.
I don’t think I’m using “semantics” in a non-standard sense, but I may be using it in a more technical sense? I’m aware of certain terms which have different meanings inside of and outside of linguistics (such as “denotation”) and this may be one.
Your first comment in this thread was responding to an exchange which was about object-level questions, and very clearly so. Like, if I say “I’m trying to figure out whether this animal in front me of is a wolf spider or a fishing spider”, and you respond by saying “‘is a wolf spider’ or ‘is a fishing spider’ is pure semantics, so what factual question are you trying to figure out”, that is a nonsensical thing to say. Do you agree? Or do you think that’s a perfectly sensible reply?
You would probably not include actual hyperlinks if you were literally saying this in the real world, so that makes this example disanalogous to the usual cases.
(I do think the question would be meaningful in the usual cases, but adding hyperlinks seems like cheating as it binds the statement to a lot more information than there would otherwise be. It adds the same sort of information as you would be adding by tabooing the words.)
I added the hyperlinks for the benefit of any readers who have no idea what those terms mean. In a face-to-face conversation, if my interlocutor responded by asking “huh? ‘wolf spider’, ‘fishing spider’, what is that? I’ve never heard of these things”, then I could explain to them what the terms refer to; or we could use a smartphone or computer to access the very same Wikipedia pages which I linked to in my comment.
In any case you may feel free to mentally strip out the hyperlinks—that will not change my point, which is that any good-faith interlocutor will understand from the quoted comment (possibly after asking for an explanation, to rectify a total lack of domain knowledge) that the terms “wolf spider” and “fishing spider” refer to a pair of disjoint categories, and that my inquiry is into the question of which (if either!) of the two categories any given actual spider ought properly to be placed in.
Given some referent—some definition, either intensional or extensional—of the word “man” (in other words, some discernible category with the label “man”), the question “is X a man” (i.e., “is X a member of this category labeled ‘man’”) is an empirical question. And “man”, like any commonly used word, can’t be defined arbitrarily.
All of the above being the case, what do you mean by “pure semantics” such that your statement is true…?
Yeah, what factual question about empirical categories is/was Zack interested in resolving? Tabooing the words “man” and “woman”, since what I mean by semantics is “which categories get which label”. I’m not super interested in discussing which empirical category should be associated with the phonemes /mæn/, and I’m not super interested in the linguistic investigation of the way different groups of English speakers assign meaning to that sequence of phonemes, both of which I lump under the umbrella of semantics.
Zack has written very many words about this, including this very post, and the ones prior to it in the sequence; and also his other posts, on Less Wrong and on his blog.
But other people are interested in these things (and related ones), as it turns out; and the question of why they have such interest, as well as many related questions, are also factual in nature.
What’s more, “A Human’s Guide to Words” (which I linked to in the grandparent) explains why reassigning different words to existing categories is not arbitrary, but has consequences for our (individual and collective) epistemics. So even such choices cannot be dismissed by labeling them “semantics”.
I haven’t read everything Zack has written, so feel free to link me something, but almost everything I’ve read, including this post, includes far more intra-rationalist politicking than discussion of object level matters.
I know other people are interested in those things. I specifically phrased my previous post in an attempt to avoid arguing about what other people care about. I can neither defend nor explain their positions. Neither do I intend to dismiss or malign those preferences by labeling them semantics. That previous sentence is not to be read as a denial of ever labeling them semantics, but rather as a denial of thinking that semantics is anything to dismiss or malign. Semantics is a long and storied discipline on philosophy and linguistics. I took an entire college course on semantics. Nevertheless, I don’t find it particularly interesting.
I’ve read a human’s guide to words. I understand you cannot redefine reality by redefining words. I am trying to step past disagreement you and I might have regarding the definitions of words and figure out if we have disagreements about reality.
I think you are doing the same thing I have seen Zack do repeatedly, which is to avoid engaging in actual disagreement and discussion, but instead repeatedly accuse your interlocutor of violating norms of rational debate. So far nothing you have said is something I disagree with, except the implication that I disagree with it. If you think I’m lying to you, feel free to say so and we can stop talking. If our disagreement is merely “you think semantics is incredibly important and I find it mostly boring and stale”, let me know and you can go argue with someone who cares more than me.
But the way that Zack phrases things makes it sound, to me, like he and I have some actual disagreement about reality which he thinks is deeply important for people considering transition to know. And as someone considering transition, if you or he or someone else can say that or link to that isn’t full of semantics or intracommunity norms of discourse call-outs, I would like to see it!
Certainly:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LwG9bRXXQ8br5qtTx/sexual-dimorphism-in-yudkowsky-s-sequences-in-relation-to-my
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/juZ8ugdNqMrbX7x2J/challenges-to-yudkowsky-s-pronoun-reform-proposal
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RxxqPH3WffQv6ESxj/blanchard-s-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid
http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/
http://unremediatedgender.space/2020/Nov/survey-data-on-cis-and-trans-women-among-haskell-programmers/
http://unremediatedgender.space/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/
http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/
Zack also has several posts which, although themselves written at a meta-level, nevertheless explain in great (and highly technical) detail why “is X a woman/man” (i.e., “to which of these two categories, no matter their labels, does X properly belong”) is a factual question. These include:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests
To my knowledge, I’ve made no such accusations against you.
I don’t think you’ve made any concrete claims, so how could you be lying…? (I suppose you could be lying about what you are or are not interested in, but I’m not sure what the point of doing so would be, in this case…)
That is certainly not the disagreement.
Your first comment in this thread was responding to an exchange which was about object-level questions, and very clearly so. Like, if I say “I’m trying to figure out whether this animal in front of me is a wolf spider or a fishing spider”, and you respond by saying “‘is a wolf spider’ or ‘is a fishing spider’ is pure semantics, so what factual question are you trying to figure out”, that is a nonsensical thing to say. Do you agree? Or do you think that’s a perfectly sensible reply?
I claim no expertise related to transition, nor do I have any special insight into these matters, so I’m surely not the right person to ask any such thing.
As for Zack… well, look, you are commenting on a post which is, indeed, about community norms and epistemic standards and other such “meta” questions. Zack has written many, many posts about the object-level issues. He has a whole blog which is just absolutely jam-packed with discussion of the object-level issues. (This is a link-post, so you can click that link and check out said blog.) If Zack writes a bunch of posts about the object-level stuff, and then, having done so, writes a post about the meta-level stuff, and you read that post and ask “where is the object-level stuff”, what is anyone supposed to say other than “it’s in all the other posts, the ones about the object-level stuff, which this post is not one of”?
So if your question was just “where are those object-level posts”, then I hope my links have answered that. If your question was something else, then by all means feel free to clarify!
I owe you an apology; you’re right that you did not accuse me of violating norms, and I’m sorry for saying that you did. I only intended to draw parallels between your focus on the meta level and Zack’s focus on the meta level, and in my hurry I erred in painting you and him with the same brush.
I additionally want to clarify that I didn’t think you were accusing me of lying, but merely wanted preemptively close off some of the possible directions this conversation could go.
Thank you for providing those links! I did see some of them on his blog and skipped over them because I thought, based on the first paragraph or title, they were more intracommunity discourse. I have now read them all.
I found them mostly uninteresting. They focus a lot on semantics and on whether something is a lie or not, and neither of those are particularly motivating to me. Of the rest, they are focused on issues which I don’t find particularly relevant to my own personal journey, and while I wish that Zack felt like he was able to discuss these issues openly, I don’t really think people in the community disagreeing with him is some bizarre anti-truth political maneuvering.
Apology accepted!
You’re quite welcome.
Hmm. I continue to think that you are using the term “semantics” in a very odd way, but I suppose it probably won’t be very fruitful to go down that avenue of discussion…
I imagine the answer to this one will depend on the details—which people, disagreeing on what specific matter, in what way, etc. Certainly it seems implausible that none of it is “political maneuvering” of some sort (which I don’t think is “bizarre”, by the way; really it’s quite the opposite—perfectly banal political maneuvering, of the sort you see all the time, especially these days… more sad to see, perhaps, for those of us who had high hopes for “rationality”, but not any weirder, for all that…).
I also consider myself as someone who had—and still has—high hopes for rationality, and so I think it’s sad that we disagree, not on the object level, but on whether we can trust the community to faithfully report their beliefs. Sure, some of it may be political maneuvering, but I mostly think it’s political maneuvering of the form of—tailoring the words, metaphors, and style to a particular audience, and choosing to engage on particular issues, rather than outright lying about beliefs.
I don’t think I’m using “semantics” in a non-standard sense, but I may be using it in a more technical sense? I’m aware of certain terms which have different meanings inside of and outside of linguistics (such as “denotation”) and this may be one.
You would probably not include actual hyperlinks if you were literally saying this in the real world, so that makes this example disanalogous to the usual cases.
(I do think the question would be meaningful in the usual cases, but adding hyperlinks seems like cheating as it binds the statement to a lot more information than there would otherwise be. It adds the same sort of information as you would be adding by tabooing the words.)
I added the hyperlinks for the benefit of any readers who have no idea what those terms mean. In a face-to-face conversation, if my interlocutor responded by asking “huh? ‘wolf spider’, ‘fishing spider’, what is that? I’ve never heard of these things”, then I could explain to them what the terms refer to; or we could use a smartphone or computer to access the very same Wikipedia pages which I linked to in my comment.
In any case you may feel free to mentally strip out the hyperlinks—that will not change my point, which is that any good-faith interlocutor will understand from the quoted comment (possibly after asking for an explanation, to rectify a total lack of domain knowledge) that the terms “wolf spider” and “fishing spider” refer to a pair of disjoint categories, and that my inquiry is into the question of which (if either!) of the two categories any given actual spider ought properly to be placed in.