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gjm comments on The horrifying importance of domain knowledge - Less Wrong Discussion

15 Post author: NancyLebovitz 30 July 2015 03:28PM

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Comment author: ChristianKl 03 August 2015 03:27:41PM 0 points [-]

Do you have a particular reason to think I am getting mindkilled, beyond the fact that (1) I disagreed with you and (2) you think my arguments are weak?

Yes, that you fail to distinguish between the question of whether to let people self identify themselves and whether people in hormone therapy really change their gender.

The debate whether or not a XY transexual with no penis, a vagina and big boobs is female or male is a quite different question from the debate whether or not the act of identifying as female means that your gender is female.

I have the impression that the political nature of the subject prevents you from distinguishing the two issues and that you simply want to be pro-LGBT instead of engaging with detailed arguments that distinguish different questions.

Comment author: gjm 03 August 2015 05:42:21PM 4 points [-]

you fail to distinguish between the question of whether to let people self identify themselves and whether people in hormone therapy really change their gender.

Well, I may or may not be mindkilled but I'm certainly confused. The only mention I made of hormone therapy was to suggest that in the special context of prisoners wanting to move to a different prison on account of gender transition, being on hormone therapy might be a useful criterion for being demonstrably serious. (Not for being actually male/female. The point is that it is evidence of the sincerity of the prisoner's claim, which we need because in this situation insincere claims might otherwise be a problem.)

So far as I can see,

the debate whether or not an XY transsexual with no penis, a vagina and big boobs is female or male

simply hasn't come up in this discussion, or at least not the bit of it you and I have been engaging in. Accordingly, I have no idea how anything I've written can suggest that I'm failing to distinguish that debate from any other debate. I also don't think the question was ever quite

whether or not the act of identifying as female means that your gender is female.

although obvious that isn't a mile from what Fluttershy was saying.

So it looks to me as if there's a failure of communication here. Let me attempt to say clearly and explicitly what I think the issues are. My apologies for the length of what follows.

  • Underlying question #1: under what circumstances, if any, is someone who is anatomically/chromosomally/hormonally male "really" female?
    • I'm not sure this is the sort of question that has a definite answer. There are multiple somewhat defensible ways to use words like "male" and "female" and the answer could be different for them (even without bringing transgender into it; intersex conditions are pretty complicated).
  • Underlying question #2: how should we use terms like "male" and "female" in cases where there's divergence between those features and others such as the person's (expressed and/or internal) "gender identity"?
    • My own opinion is that we get a healthier and happier society by usually taking "gender identity" as having priority over anatomy, chromosomes, etc., and accordingly that if someone identifies as (say) male then in most contexts we should treat that person as male.
    • There are plenty of exceptions. Your example of prison might be one. So might competitive sports. So, for sure, might medical care.
  • Fluttershy's proposal was to answer question #2 with "according to expressed gender identity".
    • Fluttershy didn't say anything about difficult cases where there's ground to suspect that expressed and internal gender identity might differ (e.g., someone trying to exploit the system), where taking someone at their word might be more than averagely dangerous (e.g., when the person in question is a violent criminal), etc.
    • One possibility is that Fluttershy simply believes we should always, unconditionally, take everyone at their word on this issue. I think that is unlikely; in any case, if so then I disagree. (See above.)
    • Another possibility is that Fluttershy was proposing a general policy, which might need modification in unusual cases (e.g., prison), but stated it briefly without all the caveats that it might need.
    • My money is firmly on the second of these, and in particular I am fairly sure Fluttershy was not saying that the mere act of saying "I am a woman" makes someone a woman.
  • Your response, though, was to point to an unusual case as if it demonstrated the badness of Fluttershy's proposal.
    • If you were taking Fluttershy to be claiming that we should always, unconditionally, take everyone at their word, then I think that is a needlessly uncharitable interpretation, enough so that I will gently suggest you consider that I might not be the only person in this discussion vulnerable to politics.
  • I pointed out that "hard cases make bad law"; that the fact that a policy of always taking people at their word might work badly when the people in question are serious criminals is little objection to a more reasonable policy of generally taking people at their word, while being more cautious in some special situations -- like prisons.
  • I made some concrete proposals for safeguards one might apply in prisons. As you say, those safeguards mean that we would not be simply and naively taking prisoners at their word as soon as they say "I'm a woman". They do, however, go a considerable way towards accommodating transgender prisoners.
    • That doesn't mean that I regard the proposal with the safeguards as giving a sensible criterion in less dangerous situations. I don't.
  • One remark about the context for all this. Fluttershy was responding to a comment from VoiceOfRa which takes it for granted that what's going on with transgender people is (and I quote) "delusions and hallucinations", on a par with someone who believes himself to be simultaneously Jesus and John Lennon.
    • I suggest that it is not reasonable to take Fluttershy's comment as meaning that the whole debate here is between "a person's gender is whatever they have most recently said it is" and everything else, any more than it is to take VoiceOfRa's comment as meaning that the whole debate here is between "a person's gender is determined by their chromosomes and nothing else" (or whatever, in fact, VoR's position is; if he's made that clear, then I haven't seen it). One comment was a response to the other. And my comment was attempting to address both.

that you simply want to be pro-LGBT instead of engaging with detailed arguments that distinguish different questions.

Well, you're entitled to your impression. I confess I'm unsure how you got it. In particular, I don't see that you made any such detailed arguments; in fact, the principal point of my original comment was that you failed to distinguish between "what should we do in general?" and "what should we do for the more difficult and dangerous case of imprisoned criminals?".

Comment author: Lumifer 03 August 2015 06:09:09PM 6 points [-]

My own opinion is that we get a healthier and happier society by usually taking "gender identity" as having priority over anatomy, chromosomes, etc., and accordingly that if someone identifies as (say) male then in most contexts we should treat that person as male.

I think the situation is a going to become bit more difficult if we confine out attention to the cases where gender/sex matters. Just declaring yourself to be a male/female/lizard overlord/banana is nothing particularly exciting and is likely to lead to shrugs or, at most, some eye-rolling. But once you demand some rights as a member of that particular group, the situation becomes much muddier.

As you point out, there are "plenty of exceptions" to the my-gender/sex-is-whatever-I-say approach. The interesting question is whether most circumstances where gender/sex matters turn out to be such "exceptions".

Comment author: gjm 03 August 2015 08:04:13PM 2 points [-]

A very reasonable question, but note that for a lot of transgender people gender matters to them even when nothing very dramatic rides on it. They want to be addressed as Alice rather than Alex, to wear women's clothes, and so forth, without being laughed at (or worse) for it, and even if those don't look to the rest of us like "circumstances where gender/sex matters" I'm pretty sure it's a different story when you're looking at it from the inside.

There are rights that accrue to people of one sex but not of the other (to play in one sports team rather than another; to use one bathroom rather than another; ...) but I'm really pretty sure no one goes through the angst and nuisance and embarrassment of gender transition so that they can use a different bathroom.

Comment author: Lumifer 03 August 2015 08:19:53PM *  3 points [-]

for a lot of transgender people gender matters to them even when nothing very dramatic rides on it.

Yes, of course, but he issue is whether that imposes obligations on other people beyond politeness.

We can try to generalise that question beyond sex & gender: if you are weird, non-average, out of the mainstream -- to which degree should society bend and accommodate itself to your strangeness?

Comment author: gjm 03 August 2015 08:59:06PM 1 point [-]

I think politeness is a pretty big deal, and a large fraction of what transgender people want is basically politeness plus ordinary decency.

I confess it's not clear to me what "the issue" actually is here. VoiceOfRa was evidently annoyed or offended or something by that list of false/oversimplified things people believe about gender, but rather little of the list is actually about transgender people or involves what he describes as "a man claiming to be a woman" and as "delusions and hallucinations" and I don't know what sort of accommodation it is that VoR finds it irksome to be expected to make. (Perhaps he finds it irksome to be expected not to describe transgender people as crazy on the same level as someone who thinks he's simultaneously Jesus and Lennon.)

Comment author: Lumifer 03 August 2015 09:18:13PM *  4 points [-]

I confess it's not clear to me what "the issue" actually is here.

Well, it looks to me that VoiceOfRa is mostly interested in equating gender self-identification with delusions and other mental disorders; you are arguing that transgender people might be a bit unusual, but are harmless and we can all live in peace; while I am curious about shifts in sociopolitical power and the transformation of "politeness and decency" into enforced mandatory attitudes.

Comment author: gjm 03 August 2015 10:47:50PM 2 points [-]

Mandatory in what sense? You can say all the same things VoR does, point and laugh at anyone you see whom you think might be trans, etc., and not get into any sort of legal trouble in any country I know of.

"Politeness and decency" may be becoming socially mandatory, in the sense that if you say certain kinds of things then many people will think you're a bigot, but that's hardly a new phenomenon -- though of course the details shift over time; e.g., it's more acceptable than it used to be to be rude about Christians and less acceptable than it used to be to be rude about gay people.

Comment author: Lumifer 04 August 2015 12:00:18AM 3 points [-]

Mandatory in what sense

Both in this sense and in this as well.

that's hardly a new phenomenon

Of course not. Intolerance is a perennial feature of human societies :-/

Comment author: gjm 04 August 2015 02:11:17PM 2 points [-]

Both in this sense and in this as well.

OK, so the first one shows that if you run a business you can get into trouble for discriminating against certain traditionally-discriminated-against groups. And the second shows that in some parts of the business world, giving money to an anti-same-sex-marriage campaign can disqualify you from the role of CEO. I don't think these examples are good support for worrying about 'the transformation of "politeness and decency" into enforced mandatory attitudes', and I'll (too verbosely, sorry) explain why.

The first of these (which, unlike the other, involves actual legal mandatoriness) seems to me distinctly less dramatic than t.t.o.p.a.d.i.e.m.a., but I can see how you could describe it that way. But I can't help suspecting that what you disapprove of here may not be only enforced politeness-and-decency. Imagine a similar case where, instead of refusing to serve a same-sex couple, the business refused to serve a mixed-race couple. This would be illegal in the same way and would meet with the same sanction; and, I suggest, this would be equally a matter of legally enforced politeness-and-decency.

How would you feel about that case? Here's how I would feel about it, which not coincidentally is roughly how I feel about the same-sex case too. Freedom is important and, were it not for the consequences for others, I would like businesses to be free to operate however they want. However, there are consequences for others, which is why (to take a much less controversial example) in many jurisdictions a shop cannot legally sell what it claims are bread rolls suitable for human consumption that are actually full of metal shavings and strychnine. Some groups of people -- e.g., black people, women, gay people -- have traditionally been the object of suspicion and hatred and discrimination, and for each of these groups there are plenty of people who would love to discriminate against them. If such discrimination were legal, then people belonging to these groups might find themselves at a substantial systematic disadvantage; it's not like 5% of businesses would say "no blacks" and another 5% "no whites", 5% "no gay people" and 5% "no straight people"; the discriminations correlate. I think we are all better off if these groups are not systematically disadvantaged, and I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of freedom-to-discriminate for that. This argument works only in so far as there's enough prejudice (at least in some places; it tends to be localized) that the groups in question really do suffer substantial systematic harm. I think there still is, against all the traditionally-disfavoured groups, but maybe in 30 years that will change and we can make some of them not be protected classes any more.

If you feel that way about (say) black people (or, relatedly, mixed-race couples) but not about (say) gay people (or, relatedly, same-sex couples) then I think our disagreement is not about politeness and decency being socially mandatory, it's about whether there's more discrimination against one group than another or whether one group's interests matter more than another's.

The second example (Brendan Eich) concerns social rather than legal mandatoriness, and I think this is something that varies considerably between different bits of society. E.g., the owners of Chick-Fil-A and Hobby Lobby have espoused attitudes exactly opposite to the ones you say are becoming mandatory and they are at no risk of being ousted for them. So I'm not sure that "enforced mandatory attitudes" is a good description; what's happening is that Mozilla's employees and most vocal advocates are a rather atypical segment of the population, and there are things they disapprove of more strongly than the population at large. And that companies are generally really keen for their CEOs not to be disapproved of by the people they need to be on their side. I bet there are businesses (ones serving very socially-conservative markets) in which an openly gay person would be at a big disadvantage if they wanted to be CEO.

(I'd guess that the Eich case is highly visible because it's atypical, in that they actually got as far as appointing him. I would hazard a guess that openly gay people, and major donors to anti-same-sex-marriage campaigns, are both underrepresented among CEOs, but that there's little outrage about this because those people are just quietly less likely to be appointed. There are relatively few black or female CEOs, too, and while some people are upset about this it isn't a cause celebre in the way the Eich case is.)

Comment author: ChristianKl 07 August 2015 11:00:31AM -1 points [-]

They want to be addressed as Alice rather than Alex

There are actual woman who are happily want to be addressed as Alex.

People are quite free to want to be addressed in different ways. On the other hand there also a freedom to address someone in multiple ways.

By default we use pronouns via intuition. If a person seems male to us we use "he" is they seem female we use "she". Doing differently takes mental filtering. That carries a cognitive cost.

They want to be addressed as Alice rather than Alex, to wear women's clothes, and so forth, without being laughed at (or worse) for it

I don't think anybody should be laughed at for wearing a dress regardless of whether they identify as male or female.

Comment author: VoiceOfRa 08 August 2015 12:35:54AM 2 points [-]

I don't think anybody should be laughed at for wearing a dress

Sorry, you don't have a right to do silly things and then demand not to be laughed at.

Comment author: gjm 10 August 2015 10:10:47AM 3 points [-]

No one's demanding anything. I can't speak for ChristianKI, but I think that

  • no one should be laughed at for wearing a dress
  • people should not in general be forbidden to laugh at other people for wearing dresses

and I see no contradiction between those positions. (What there is is the possibility for values to clash; if people are free to laugh at one another, sometimes they will, even if I think they shouldn't. But there's no avoiding that sort of thing, other than by having no values at all.)

Comment author: VoiceOfRa 11 August 2015 03:03:51AM 2 points [-]

no one should be laughed at for wearing a dress

What meaning of "should" are you using there? Also why?

Comment author: gjm 11 August 2015 10:00:44AM 0 points [-]

What I said was: "I think that no one should be laughed at [...]" and the meaning of "I think X should happen" is something like "my values prefer X to not-X".

Sometimes when I think X should happen I try to make it happen despite others' preferences. Usually I don't. (Just as: Sometimes when out of self-interest I want X to happen I try to make it happen despite others' preferences, and sometimes not.)

I wouldn't try to stop other people laughing at someone for wearing a dress, with the following kinda-exceptions. 1. I might gently suggest that they were being rude. 2. If the person laughing were some kind of official performing his or her duties, they might well have a stronger obligation not to be rude / discriminatory / etc., and if they were working for me in some sense (e.g., my employee; public servant in a country where I get to vote and pay taxes and so on) then I might require them to stop.

Comment author: VoiceOfRa 12 August 2015 07:25:19AM *  2 points [-]

What I said was: "I think that no one should be laughed at [...]" and the meaning of "I think X should happen" is something like "my values prefer X to not-X".

What ethical theory is this based on?

I wouldn't try to stop other people laughing at someone for wearing a dress, with the following kinda-exceptions. 1. I might gently suggest that they were being rude.

I would suggest you'd be being an obnoxious jerk by doing so.

  1. If the person laughing were some kind of official performing his or her duties, they might well have a stronger obligation not to be rude / discriminatory / etc., and if they were working for me in some sense (e.g., my employee; public servant in a country where I get to vote and pay taxes and so on) then I might require them to stop.

Ok, so if I was an employer I'd do my best to avoid hiring you, and certainly not let you anywhere near a position where somebody might be reporting to you.

Comment author: gjm 07 August 2015 11:42:14AM 0 points [-]

There are actual women who are happily want to be addressed as Alex.

True enough, I didn't choose the best example male name. This seems about as relevant to anything else I was saying as the fact that "women who are happily want to be addressed as Alex" is ungrammatical is to anything else you are saying. I should have said "Alexander" or "Adam" or "Alfred" or something.

Doing differently takes mental filtering. That carries a cognitive cost.

Sure. Did I ever claim otherwise?

Suppose you meet someone who looks male to you. It turns out that actually the person is a woman, with two X chromosomes and a uterus and all. I'm guessing that once you discover that you'll refer to that person as "she" despite the small cognitive cost of doing so, and it probably won't even occur to you to think it an unreasonable imposition to be expected to do that. And the chances are that, actually, you won't insist on inspecting her chromosomes and reproductive organs before adopting the appropriate pronoun.

If your attitude is different in the case where a near-identical-looking person has XY chromosomes and was called "Alfred" when born but now goes by the name of Angela and considers herself to be female, even though the cognitive cost is exactly the same in the two cases, then I suggest that the cognitive cost is not the real objection.

I don't think anybody should be laughed at for wearing a dress

Neither do I, but apparently some people do.

Comment author: Fluttershy 04 August 2015 01:53:34AM 1 point [-]

Wow, this discussion really took off! I mainly replied to VoiceOfRa's comment in order to encourage people to be nice to trans people in general, rather than to advocate any highly specific and well-thought-out position.

Comment author: VoiceOfRa 04 August 2015 02:24:00AM 0 points [-]

Yes, your idea of what constitutes being "nice" to people is problematic to say the least.

Comment author: ChristianKl 05 August 2015 05:30:04PM -1 points [-]

rather than to advocate any highly specific and well-thought-out position.

In general I do practice the principle of charity on LW in the sense that I think that other people on LW try to advocate well-thought-out positions.

There no reason that there much to be gained by trying to speak on LW for a position in a way that isn't well-thought-out.