Interview with the Moon

Interviewer: Sorry for the technical problems we were having earlier. This is a new experience for us.

Moon: Yeah. Yeah. It’s fine.

Interviewer: So it’s great to talk to you! I’ve been looking at your face all my life and I’m just now hearing your voice for the first time.

Moon: That’s not my face.

Interviewer: …

Moon: That’s just asteroid craters that vaguely correspond to the holes in a human face. It’s actually my ass. Why would I want to spend all my time looking at the earth?

Interviewer: That’s a fair point. Many human scientists say that you originated in a collision between earth and a hypothetical planet called Theia. Can you comment on that?

Moon: Yeah, I hear that all the time. The so-called Giant Impact Hypothesis. It’s bullshit. There was no Theia. I saw what the earth was about and I left. Never looked back.

Interviewer: You left voluntarily?

Moon: For sure. 100% my decision. I like my privacy. And the view from down there isn’t as good.

Interviewer: So what was it like when earth astronauts would visit you a few decades ago?

Moon: Itchy.

Interviewer: What’s a typical day like for you?

Moon: …the fuck is a “day”?

Interviewer: How do you spend your time?

Moon: Oh. Well, I really don’t do a lot. I do core strengthening exercises. I watch the stars. I consider myself to be a kind of parole officer of the stars. If I don’t watch them, they get into all kinds of trouble. But they really want to go straight and act right. They rely on my supervision to help them achieve their goals and suppress their worst desires. They’re good at heart, but they need someone to keep an eye on them.

Interviewer: Do you have any kind of enforcement power over the stars?

Moon: Watching them is enough. Stars have a sense of pride.

Interviewer: Do you have any contact with other moons?

Moon: [Laughter.] Well that’s a whole keg of worms. I used to be tight with Triton, but then he decided he was actually a dwarf planet and got pretty full of himself. Suddenly he didn’t have any time for the rest of us satellites. Deimos likes to unload on me when he gets sick of Phobos’ shit. I can’t blame him.

Interviewer: How have things changed over the past four billion years?

Moon: Not much. After Uranus and Neptune moved out to the suburbs…let’s just say it was interesting. But things calmed down. I’ve gotten more independent. I started doing pilates and I quit smoking.

Interviewer: Is there anything you’d like to say to the people of earth?

Moon: Not really.

The Destruction Of Fun

My favorite game, Path of Exile, expanded rather significantly yesterday, and as a result I’m not really capable of thinking about anything else. Fortunately, there’s an episode from the game’s past that I think illustrates something interesting.

Path of Exile is an online action-RPG notable for its depth and flexibility of character specialization. Abilities can be modified, empowered, repurposed, delegated to devices which will use the ability for you. One aspect of this specialization is an equipment system – 10 different item slots for weapons, helmets, boots, and so on.

One of the most fundamental assumptions in the game’s design and balancing is that those equipment slots are exclusive – a character can’t wear five hats. (This isn’t Team Fortress 2, after all!)

Players found a way to violate this assumption via an unintended mechanic known as “snapshotting” in 2013. After its discovery, players developed more and more convoluted ways of abusing it, until snapshotting was removed mid-2014.

Here’s a demonstration from Chris Wilson, Path of Exile’s lead designer:

I shudder to think how much cumulative time has been wasted doing this.

– Chris Wilson

This is how fun is destroyed in social games (to simplify enormously):

There are two ways of playing the game. One is more fun than the other, and one is more efficient than the other, in terms of producing more digital currency or bigger damage numbers or whatever. If the fun playstyle is also the efficient playstyle, all is well.

But otherwise, as in the case of snapshotting, the existence of the efficient playstyle destroys the fun playstyle. If the game has an economy, inflation driven by the efficient playstyle drives adherents of other approaches into poverty, destroying what fun may be involved in participating in the market.

If the game is competitive, efficiency-oriented players deny the satisfaction of victory to the fun-oriented.

If the game has cooperative aspects, funseekers are unable to contribute meaningfully.

And if the game is intended to be challenging, the designers have to balance that challenge around the most powerful approaches, leaving weaker, more fun playstyles unable to even progress through the game past some threshold.

But if the efficient playstyle is never discovered or disseminated, of course there’s no problem.

To put that another way: detailed knowledge of game mechanics can be an information hazard.

The Tyranny of Round Numbers

Interested in a concept I feel seriously must exist in an already cohered form, but which I am yet unable, through crowd-sourcing and search keywords, to find stable precedent for.

Tim Taylor at Economist's View discusses some version of this idea, termed "round number bias," though without an examination of its breadth and variety of effect.

Taylor reports that consumers often stop filling their gas tanks at rounded dollar amounts, or will give even-dollar tips to waiters. He also notes that baseball coaches seem to arbitrarily make decisions about players based on round-number cutoffs:

Another set of examples of round number bias come from Devin Pope and Uri Simonsohn in a 2011 paper that appeared in Psychological Science (22: 1, pp. 71-79): "Round Numbers as Goals: Evidence from Baseball, SAT Takers, and the Lab." They find, for example, that if you look at the batting averages of baseball players five days before the end of the season, you will see that the distribution over .298, .299, .300, and .301 is essentially even–as one would expect it to be by chance. However, at the end of the season, the share of players who hit .300 or .301 was more than double the proportion who hit .299 or .298. What happens in those last five days? They argue that batters already hitting .300 or .301 are more likely to get a day off, or to be pinch-hit for, rather than risk dropping below the round number. Conversely, those just below .300 may get some extra at-bats, or be matched against a pitcher where they are more likely to have success. Pope and Simonsohn also find that those who take the SAT test and end up with a score just below a round number–like 990 or 1090 on what used to be a 1600-point scale–are much more likely to retake the test than those who score a round number or just above. They find no evidence that this behavior makes any difference at all in actual college admissions.

"Round number bias" falls short of describing the ways and extent to which round numbers exert tyranny over our lives. Entire industries are ravaged by inflation because of round numbers, and it isn't solely due to cognitive bias. In a cash-based business — a food stand, a convenience mart, a dollar pizza window — where customer and seller convenience alike mean time, and time means money, defying round numbers is expensive, giving change bad business. This is to say nothing of the way fixed-price chains in general have seen their profits ebb and flow according to the value of ten cents, a quarter, or a dollar, over the past century (though consumers' interest in such stores are, I concede, largely the product of Taylor's round number bias in isolate).

Cuisine is tyrannized too: Just as art is optimized for artists as much as audiences, recipes are optimized as much for a dish's preparation and preparer as for its consumption and consumer. Ease of recording, remembering, and measuring out a recipe affects the creation and transmission of a recipe (its fitness, in the evolutionary — rather than aesthetic — sense). Seven-thirteenths of a tablespoon might be a better amount of salt to add, but half a tablespoon will win out on the recipe sheet every time.

Sports are full of these kind of semi-arbitrary distinctions, which become influential in punditry and fan followings. Nike's bid to break the four-minute mile received massive media attention; for decades prior, many believed the four-minute mile to be an unbreakable barrier, though why four minutes instead of 3:59 or 4:01 was the point at which human impossibility set in was never fully established. Russell Westbrook's triple-double average in the NBA regular season won him the MVP award this season; falling slightly short of double digits across four categories instead of three is a more impressive achievement, but lacks the crystallized marker of achievement that is the triple-double.

And think finally of the difference, in dating prospects and online profile number-fudging, between two men each standing 70.5 inches tall — one, American, whose height is measured in feet; the other, European, whose height is measured in meters.

The tyranny of round numbers is fundamentally a map/territory issue: it is the influence of territorially arbitrary but cartographically significant markers on territory decisions. But it is also a tyranny with benefits — convenience and the easing of cognitive strain — and which provides a clear cut-off point without which our evaluations of the world would require sliding-scale statistical analysis.

There Is No Basilisk In “Neoreaction A Basilisk”

Postscript (5/13):

This review elicited a great deal of argument as to whether it was fair and/or accurate, which for all our sakes I will not rehash here. I stand by the thrust of the review, but I did make one significant mistake to which I have added a bracketed [correction]. I apologize for the error.

Phil Sandifer has written a book about Eliezer Yudkowsky, Mencius Moldbug/Curtis Yarvin, and Nick Land. See its Kickstarter page for an overview, though I would advise against giving him any more money. (Sandifer sent me a preprint copy for this review.)

I will begin by noting that Sandifer is an English major and a Marxist and Neoreaction A Basilisk defies neither stereotype. It is meandering, disorganized, and frequently mean-spirited (“Yes, it’s clear that Yudkowsky is, at times, one of the most singularly punchable people in the entire history of the species”). About half the book consists of long digressions about Milton, Blake, Hannibal, China Miéville, The Matrix, and Deleuze.

What is new here is not interesting, and what is interesting is not new. I do not recommend the book.

With that out of the way, my primary interest here is the titular basilisk.

Fortunately, I don’t need to say very much; Sandifer does not understand the decision theory involved and his discussion of information hazards never strays beyond the literary.

For one, Sandifer’s explanation of timeless decision theory suggests it relies on “intense contortions of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics”, which it does not. (It doesn’t rely on physics at all; it’s math.) Yudkowsky is a vocal proponent of many-worlds, and timeless decision theory has applications in a quantum multiverse (or any other kind of multiverse), so perhaps this confusion is understandable. [The passage in question concerned Roko’s Basilisk, not TDT. Like TDT, upon which it relies, Roko’s Basilisk does not require any particular theory of quantum mechanics.]

Similarly, Sandifer introduces Newcomb’s Problem as “a thought-experiment version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma”, which is again not quite right. Sandifer goes on to dissolve Newcomb’s problem:

The obvious solution is to declare that magical beings that can perfectly predict human behavior are inherently silly ideas, but since Yudkowksy wants to be reincarnated as a perfect simulation by a futuristic artificial intelligence he doesn’t think that. Instead he sees Newcomb’s Problem as a very important issue and creates an entire new model for decision theory whose only real virtue compared to any other is that it only has one correct answer to Newcomb’s Problem.

The rest of Sandifer’s discussion of decision theory continues in this vein, never rising above psychoanalysis and tired religious analogies.

I’ll stop here, this is already more discussion than the book deserves.

Defensive Epistemology

Expecting that everybody should have an articulate opinion on the day’s pressing issues (“informed citizenship”) is pernicious. I state this without argument here; if you want it argued look at In Praise of Passivity by Michael Huemer.

Being convinced of this, for the past odd year I’ve been trying to implement the idea in my daily life, with mixed results. Now, part of the problem is simply that outrage porn is fun. But I think there is also a conceptual lacuna that makes it hard to articulate just what one is trying to do by “tuning out”, and why it is so difficult.

Let’s start with the first-person experience. Have you ever been in the position of arguing against an expert in the expert’s field? I suspect this happens to ordinary people most often in conversations with doctors, realtors, financial advisors, teachers/professors, salespeople, religious evangelists, and enthusiastically political relatives at Thanksgiving dinner.

(The latter is not so much a matter of expertise, it’s just that somebody who has pre-memorized talking points can usually carry an argument against somebody who hadn’t been anticipating one.)

I find the experience of somebody talking circles around me very unpleasant, and I don’t think I’m unique in this. Of course, it is even more distasteful if there is an audience in whose eyes you are losing status. The impulse I feel in such situations is to hunker down, avoid losing face, and lash out at the other speaker with some “gotcha” calculated to make them appear foolish. In the worst cases, it may not be possible to escape the conversation without making concessions, unless you are willing to stoop to some sort of emotional All-In bet, like a fit of righteous anger or crying.

This is one reason why the conscious project of not forming opinions is difficult: you may not be interested in the Topical Issues, but they are interested in you. The world will bombard you with claims about crime statistics, interest rate predictions, the Rights of Man, history, Gini coefficients, genetics, and sundry other things. More relevantly, it will tell you that stock A is a sure thing, or that diet B is sure to help your child’s brain development. It’s no good to be completely ignorant about these things; not only will you will lose face, but your interlocutor can make their argument and lead you to concede they’re right. (Another approach is to pretend to take pride in your ignorance, but my guess is that readers of this blog can’t pull that off easily.)

What is needed is a battery of defensive arguments and ideas. Their purpose is (a) to serve as sanity-checks on unfamiliar ideas, (b) to get irritating interlocutors off your back.

For example, an Efficient Markets heuristic can help you hold your own against realtors and financial advisors trying to pull the wool over your eyes. “Why isn’t the stuff you just mentioned priced into the stock already?” “If houses are cheaper in the winter, why aren’t millionaires loading up on houses in winter to sell them in summer, until the difference goes away?”

Another example is vigilance against selection effects. “You say this is a good school – but I bet it just takes in unusually good students.” (Tip: if you actually say “selection bias” here, it sounds very authoritative.)

Another example is a suite of basic game-theoretical and strategic ideas, like “if once you have paid him the Dane-Geld, you never get rid of the Dane”, and “people respond to incentives”.

Yet another is a general lack of faith in Interventions to change somebody’s life course; a heuristic of genetic determinism as a baseline prior. This doesn’t work so well as an *argument*, but simply as a prior, it’s helpful to know that the differences between, say, parenting styles don’t seem to lead to huge divergences in results, and that throwing lots of money at social problems more or less always has epsilon effect.

I invite readers to contribute to a list of other such ideas in the comments. Those above I chose because I have actually used them on more than a few occasions I can remember.

The key to this argument class is no requirement for detailed background knowledge. Ideally, they rely only on basic logic, or simple empirical laws. For example, I don’t actually know about the teaching quality of the school in question – all I know is the reason why that quality is hard to evaluate.

Note also that this is a basically negative project. Its emphasis is on checking others’ positive claims about the world, not creating new ones. Its goal is to make you antifragile against ideas, not to help you build a great edifice of theory.

So to the person who wishes to divest themselves of pointless opinions and refocus on near-mode stuff, I propose that if you go too far in that direction, you just make yourself exploitable. You need to practice the art of defensive epistemology, or risk being a sucker (or at least losing status). And that probably requires some engagement with the world of ideas, to train your discipline against actual enemies.

*You may notice that this sounds like a manifesto for the skeptic movement. I’m tempted to talk about why skeptics in practice are disappointing, but I will leave that discussion for now.

Alphabetical Conundra

I have begun to wonder whether the concept of “rape” is useful as an umbrella term covering many instances that do not resemble each other strongly.  This is particularly noticeable in marginal and edge cases, where it seems to me worth doing to dissolve the question and taboo the word (e.g. diagnosing situations as “this person fucked up here and here, that person is likely to be dangerous in the future, the third person is probably in the ethical clear but  not relationship material” or whatever).  I don’t expect anyone who reads this post to find all of these examples ambiguous, but I think probably some of them will seem so.  They get weird in places.  I ran out of letters of the alphabet before I ran out of ways to make the concept of rape confusing, so feel free to add more ideas.  All of the rape-related content warnings.

1 – Alice agrees to PIV with Bob as long as he’ll go down on her after, because she doesn’t orgasm from penetration and she isn’t interested if she doesn’t get off. PIV ensues. When it concludes, Bob dumps her on the spot and doesn’t go down on her. Has Alice been raped?

2 – Alice agrees to sex with Bob as long as he gives her permission to sleep with her friend Caleb later. Sex ensues. Bob then reverses himself on letting Alice have sex with Caleb and says he’ll break up with her if she does it. Has Alice been raped?

3 – Bob agrees to sex with Alice as long as she’ll do the dishes the next morning, since otherwise he wants to get them handled tonight. Sex ensues. The next morning, Alice doesn’t even touch the dishes. Has Bob been raped?

4 – Bob agrees to sex with Alice as long as she’ll do the dishes the next morning. Sex ensues, and then Alice dumps him on the spot and never touches the dishes. Has Bob been raped?

5 – Caleb agrees to have sex with Doug if Doug promises not to mention this to anybody Caleb knows. They have sex, and then Doug tells Alice, a friend of Caleb’s. Has Caleb been raped?

6 – Doug finds out that Caleb has a lot of weird porn on his computer, and Caleb suggests that they could have sex and Doug could refrain from telling anyone about the weird porn. They have sex. Has Caleb been raped? If he hasn’t, does Doug later telling Alice about the weird porn change that?

7 – Elise and Felicity agree to have sex, but Elise makes Felicity promise not to laugh when she sees her naked; if she can’t be sure that there will be no laughing she’d rather not have sex. Felicity promises. They start to have sex, but on Elise’s back is written The Funniest Joke In The World, and when Felicity sees it she cannot help but laugh. Has Elise been raped?

8 – Elise and Felicity go through the exact same sequence of observable behavior as before, except now Felicity laughs voluntarily because she is a mean person. Has Elise been raped?

9 – Gail and Hal are planning to have sex, when Hal says something transphobic, including among other statements that he never, under any circumstances, wishes to have sex with a trans person (but not including any direct threats of violence against trans people). Gail strongly expects that bailing on sex at this stage for any reason short of an earthquake will lead Hal to suspect that she is (post-op) trans, which in fact she is. Due to fears about her safety, she proceeds to have sex with him. Have either Gail or Hal been raped?

10 – Gail and Hal go through the exact same sequence of observable behavior as before, except now Gail is motivated to continue by spite. Have either Gail or Hal been raped?

11 – Gail and Hal go through the same sequence of observable behavior as before, except now Gail is motivated to continue by Hal having a really nice ass. Have either Gail or Hal been raped?

12 – Gail and Hal go through the same sequence of observable behavior as before, except now Gail comes up with a plausible excuse about a migraine that she doesn’t think will cause Hal to think she’s trans; but she is unwilling to lie to his face about having a headache. Have either Gail or Hal been raped?

13 – Irene, due to a peculiar set of genes and/or being an unaging vampire, looks like an eleven year old girl when she is 26. John, also 26, believes she is eleven and invites her (without anything that would paradigmatically constitute coercion) to have sex. They do, without Irene opting to disclose her age. He is an obligate pedophile and would not have been interested if he knew her real age. Have either of these people been raped or committed rape?

14 – This time, Irene invites John to have sex and they do. Have either of these people been raped or committed rape?

15 – This time, Irene tells John that she is 26 but he doesn’t believe her. They have sex anyway. Have either of these people been raped or committed rape?

16 – This time, Irene tells John that she is 26, he isn’t sure if he believes her or not, and she says that unless he has sex with her, she’ll tell someone else that he did – someone else who still thinks she’s eleven. Have either of these people been raped or committed rape?

17 – Katie, due to a peculiar set of genes and/or a time travel accident, looks 26 when she is in fact eleven. Laura, actually 26, invites her (without anything that would paradigmatically constitute coercion) to have sex. Katie, principally out of curiosity, agrees without opting to disclose her age. Have either of these people been raped or committed rape?

18 – This time, Katie invites Laura to have sex and they do. Have either of these people been raped or committed rape?

19 – This time, Katie tells Laura that she’s eleven but Laura thinks she’s joking. They have sex anyway. Have either of these people been raped or committed rape?

20 – This time, Katie tells Laura that she’s eleven and Laura believes her, but pretends not to, and they have sex anyway. Have either of these people been raped or committed rape?

21 – Myron goes around routinely asserting to anyone who will listen that he thinks the concept of “too drunk to consent” is bullshit unless you’re actually passed out. Myron gets completely blackout drunk and sort of vaguely comes on to Noah, who is familiar with Myron’s opinions. They have sex. Has Myron been raped?

22 – Now Myron lacks the above opinion, but still gets blackout drunk and comes on to Noah. They have sex. Has Myron been raped?

23 – Now Myron is vocally against drunk “consent” to anyone (including Noah) who will listen, but still gets blackout drunk and comes on to Noah. They have sex. Has Myron been raped?

24 – Now Myron, insert any of the above opinions, gets completely blackout drunk and comes on to Noah such that Noah stopping him would require moderately violent scuffling, which Noah declines to undertake. Have either of these people been raped or committed rape?

25 – Ophelia firmly believes that the concept of marital rape is nonsense and that her wedding vows constitute irrevocable consent for so long as she remains married to her husband Paul. One day Paul asks her if she wants to have sex and she says she’s not really in the mood and he has sex with her anyway. Has Ophelia been raped?

26 – As 25, except Ophelia is mid-divorce-proceedings and Paul knows it. Has Ophelia been raped?

27 – As 25, except Ophelia has always kept her beliefs about the implications of their wedding vows to herself. Has Ophelia been raped?

28 – As 25, except Ophelia dramatically resists (locking herself in the bathroom, trying to shove Paul away after he breaks in, screaming and crying the entire time). Has Ophelia been raped?

29 – Quentin is a college professor. Ruby is his student, and she knows who he is but he can’t identify her because there’s like three hundred people in that lecture. He hits on her at a coffeeshop and she has sex with him because she thinks he’s hot. Have either of these people been raped or committed rape?

30 – As 29, but Quentin knows that Ruby is in his class.

31 – As 29, but Ruby sleeps with him because she wants blackmail material.

32 – As 29, but Quentin knows that Ruby is in his class and expects to be able to control her with her grade.

33 – As both 31 and 32 combined.

34 – As 29 but neither of them can identify the other because there’s like three hundred people in that lecture and also Ruby is faceblind.

35 – As 29, but Quentin later identifies Ruby and threatens her grade to get a repeat performance.

36 – As 29, but when Ruby’s grade falls due to an exam graded by a teaching assistant, she blackmails Quentin to change it.

37 – Sarah is an eighteen year old homeless runaway and Terrence has a house. Sarah offers to sleep with him routinely in exchange for crash space, and he agrees, making it clear that he isn’t interested in having a roommate he isn’t having sex with. Have either of these people been raped or committed rape?

38 – As 37 but it’s Terrence’s idea.

39 – As 37 but Sarah reneges, betting that Terrence won’t really kick her out; when he really does she sleeps with him to get the couch back.

40 – As 37, but Terrence’s cooperation is contingent on Sarah not having any STIs, and she has one she lies about.

41 – As 37, but Sarah’s offer is contingent on Terrence having had a vasectomy, and he hasn’t, which he lies about.

42 – As 40 and 41 combined.

43 – Ursula’s boyfriend Vince can only communicate via an assistive communication device. It breaks. Ursula has sex with him in a relatively conventional-for-them manner. Has Vince been raped?

44 – As 43, but Vince can make noises for “yes” and “no” which Ursula is 85% accurate in interpreting and she thinks she hears “yes”.  Does the answer depend on whether she’s right?

45 – As 43, but Vince and Ursula had specific plans before the device broke to have sex in this way at this time.

46 – As 43, but Ursula introduces something new to spice it up a bit.

47 – Winston, Xavier, and Yvonne have an agreement as a triad that they will not get Yvonne pregnant or take any risks with that until all of them agree, and that if one of the boys gets her pregnant, the other boy must be told immediately and gets the house in the dissolution of the triad. This is mostly for Xavier’s benefit, as he would want to leave them both immediately if they did this. While Xavier is away, Winston and Yvonne have unprotected sex. They don’t tell Xavier and continue having sex with him as normal. Has Xavier been raped?

48 – As 47, except Yvonne tampers with a condom so that it will tear while Xavier is having sex with her, as cover.

49 – As 47, except Winston tampers with a condom so that it will tear while Xavier is having sex with Yvonne, as cover. Has Xavier been raped? Has Yvonne?

50 – As 47, except they consider telling Xavier until he comes home and expresses that he’s so glad they’d never betray him since if they did he’d probably murder them both.

51 – As 47, except they tell Xavier that Yvonne was sexually assaulted by a fourth party.

52 – As 51, except the concern is not pregnancy but Winston’s as-yet-untransmitted HIV.

53 – Zoe has persistent rape fantasies and a Star Trek holodeck. She manufactures a holographic representation of an attractive celebrity, turns off some safeties, and programs the hologram to rape her, which it does. She is not having fun anymore partway into the scene but can’t stop it. Has Zoe been raped?

54 – As 53, except Zoe enters the Rape Tunnel instead of her holodeck.

55 – As 53, except Zoe gets someone else to program the scene custom-order for her.

56 – As 53, except Zoe buys the holodeck program off the shelf.

57 – As 53, except that the safeties are still on and she’s just too freaked out to tell the holodeck to end the program.

The Memetic Commons

You’ve probably seen people arguing about the definitions of various words.  One that I find particularly annoying is people insisting on tortured definitions of “bisexual”, in response to batshit claims of transphobia that are for some reason seldom leveled against monosexuals as a class.

You’ve perhaps also seen people arguing about appropriate connotations and contexts for concepts: for instance, anyone complaining about “sexy nurse” outfits on the grounds that it sexualizes a real profession that involves more intravenous fluids and turning people for bedsores than sexual healing.

You may have seen people arguing over whether skirts as a category should be coded feminine (so that a dude who likes single-aperture garments but didn’t want to be seen that way would need to specifically disclaim his genderfeels, or go for a cargo kilt with unnecessary grommets, or avoid the entire enterprise if he doesn’t think he can tilt the balance) or not (depriving other people, who do want to be seen as feminine, of one way to make that clear from the word “go”).

These are all arguments about what people ought to think when they hear words or see other signals – sometimes within specific contexts (“at queer gatherings, don’t assume pronouns based on presentation”), but sometimes without implying any limitation of scope at all.  People want everyone to consistently react to the concept of “nurse” without “sexy nurse” popping up in their head, or consistently react to “bisexual” like it can only and has only ever meant “attracted to the same and other genders” without naïve or older or broader or clumsier definitions coming to mind.

“That which occurs to an unfiltered audience when they hear certain words or observe certain signals” is not the sort of thing where you can have yours and I can have mine and we can both agree to leave each other alone about it.  The extent to which “skirts are neutral” gains ground is the extent to which “I signal my womanhood with skirts” loses ground.  So of course you get fights between people who want to be men and wear skirts without getting asked if they’re gay/genderfuck/on their way to a drag show/trans ladies/doing it as a kink thing/blind, and people who want to be feminine and wear skirts and have this understood without having to clarify “why yes, the six layers of lace and floral print do, in fact, mean that I am a girl, I wore it in large part because I hoped it would let us skip this conversation”.  “Pants are neutral” has already won its battle, at least in mainstream Western culture.  Did any gentlemen expressly mourn the loss of this marker?  I don’t know; but it was a loss, even if it wasn’t a large one for reasons idiosyncratic to the specific case.

I am outlining this problem in the hopes that people will start noticing when they are doing it.  I don’t expect to completely take the wind out of their sails, because the territory being fought over actually matters to the participants; but maybe, just maybe, if I spell it out, it will become clear that you might want to develop more rhetoric than repeating your thesis six times in various formatting combinations on Tumblr.  Acknowledge that people who oppose your suggested division of the memetic commons aren’t doing it because they have not yet seen it asserted in underlined italics with a table-flipping emoticon.

The costs of redrawing the borders of public memetic space are not purely that somebody’s space is shrinking and then they have a harder time purchasing sexy nurse outfits for their personal amusement.  There are also costs to the bystanders in whose minds the transition takes place: they have to restructure some of their associations, or work around them, to comply with whoever is yelling at them in bold all-caps.  There are costs to the people who don’t make those changes – mental effort to resist the pressure; having to explicitly reason through their interpretation of the disputed concept in any context already successfully colonized.  Obviously having the arguments in the first place is an opportunity cost, although I imagine some people have fun constructing their volleys.  These indicate that there should be a bias for keeping whatever the current memetic commons layout is, just to save the trouble of moving the fences – of course you can argue that the transition is worth the costs thereof (especially if you’re aiming at standardization, disambiguation, or other aims that make the entire commons more navigable), but this is a threshold you must specifically overcome; you can’t just declare that it would be better if this fence had been six feet to the left all along and therefore everyone had better pick up a post and shuffle.

Signs to watch for:

– strong temptations to argue definitions
– cautions against “making assumptions” or stereotyping
– by contrast, arguments of the form “okay, maybe X doesn’t always mean Y, but let’s face it, usually it does”
– exhortations to distinguish fantasy and reality, especially when there is no reason to believe anyone actually mistakes the one for the other in a practical situation
– attempts to stamp out vocabulary from polite, politically correct, or general usage, especially without offering a satisfactory replacement, especially accompanied by the implication or statement that the referred concept “shouldn’t exist at all”
– appeals to what “most people” will think if they perceive a signal
– controversial opinions framed as moderate or reasonable, or common opinions dismissed as fringe or extreme
– any argument for or against reclaiming a slur, or about whether some term is in fact a slur at all

(These things do not always indicate memetic commons fights, definitely don’t always indicate conscious attempts at same, and do not mean that you should stop what you’re doing – nor aggressively point it out to the perpetrator with tildes between every letter.  They’re just possibly useful symptoms.)

When a fight is about the memetic commons, it is a fight about what the decor should look like in lots of people’s brains.  It is about, perhaps not the mechanism of censorship, but the effect of it.  The combatants are struggling for a genuinely scarce resource with substantial (if not necessarily equal) implications for all sides.  It is improper to conduct this sort of engagement by attempted fiat or weaponized social shame, even if you think it’s really, really obvious that you are right.