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PeerGynt comments on Stupid Questions May 2015 - Less Wrong
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Comments (263)
The Lesswrong-like answer to whether a blue egg containing Palladium is indeed a blegg is "It depends on what your disguised query is".
If the disguised query is which pronoun you should use, I don't see any compelling reason not use the word that the person in question prefers. If you insist on using the pronoun associated with whatever disguised query you associate with sex/gender, this is at best an example of "defecting by accident".
In this case the disguised query is "Were I to ask 'What would stop someone assigned male at birth to fraudulently claim to be a trans woman in order to seek admission to Smith College?', what would I mean by 'fraudulently'?"
By the way, it is one of the best examples I've seen of quick, practical gains from reading LW: the ability to sort out problems like this.
This. After reading the Sequences, many things that seemed like "important complicated questions" before are now reclassified as "obvious confusions in thinking".
Even before reading Sequences I was already kinda supsicious that something is wrong when the long debates on such questions do not lead to meaningful answers, despite the questions do not contain any difficult math or any experimentally expensive facts. But I couldn't transform this suspicion into an explanation of what exactly was wrong; so I didn't feel certain about it myself.
After reading Sequences, many "deep problems" became "yet another case of someone confusing a map with the territory". -- But the important thing is not merely learning that the password is "map is not the territory", but the technical details of how specifically the maps are built, and how specifically the artifacts arise on those maps.
Sounds a lot like General Semantics, at least, Eric S. Raymond derived something similar based on GS. Example: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=161
Yes, it is derived from General Semantics. I haven't read the original, so I do not know how much to credit Eliezer for making the original ideas easier to read. But I credit him for bringing the ideas to my attention.
If you "use the word that the person in question prefers," then the word acquires a new meaning. From that moment on, the word "male" means "a human being who prefers to be called 'male'" and the word "female" means "a human being who prefers to be called 'female'". These are surely not the original meaning of the words.
Why do you care about the 'original' meaning of the word?
Let's imagine we are arguing about trees falling in the forest. You are a lumberjack who relies on a piece of fancy expensive equipment that unfortunately tends to break if subjected to accoustic vibrations. You therefore create a map where the word "sound" means accoustic vibrations. This map works well for you and helps you resolve most disguised queries you could be interested in
Then you meet me. i make a living producing cochlear implants. My livelihood depends on making implants that reliably generate the qualia of sound. I therefore have a different map from you, where the word 'sound' means the subjective experience in a person's brain. This works well for the disguised queries that I care about.
If we meet at a cocktail party and you try to convince me that the 'original' meaning of sound is accoustic vibrations, this is not a dispute about the territory. What is happening is that you are arguing the primacy of your map over mine, which is a pure status challenge.
The purpose of categories in this context is to facilitate communication, ie transfer of information about the territory from one mind to another. Agreeing on a definition is sometimes important to avoid confusion over what is being said. However, if there is no such confusion, insisting on one definition over another is a pure monkey status game
Most common terms will, when used in a context that doesn't imply a specific meaning, be taken by the listener to imply a default meaning. Furthermore, some contexts do imply a meaning, but only weakly; if the context makes slightly more sense with meaning A, but you know that most people default to meaning B, and you are Bayseian, you should infer that the intended meaning was B.
Caring about the "original meaning of the word" is about this default meaning, and is not nonsensical. If I say that this person is female, without qualifiers such as "genetically female", what will others understand me as saying? Will what they understand me as saying be more or less accurate than if I refer to them as male?
Is there additional material about disguised queries?
I found this after reading PeerGrnt's response.
Also, here's Yvain applying this reasoning to this exact question.