Title: The Categories Were Made for Man in Order to Make Predictions
Date: 2018-03-01 5:00
Category: commentary
-Tags: epistemology, Scott Alexander
+Tags: epistemology, Scott Alexander, sex differences, two-type taxonomy
Status: draft
> I said, "The truth is whatever you can get away with."
And so, Alexander explains, the ancient Hebrews weren't _wrong_ to classify whales as a type of _dag_ (typically translated as _fish_), even though modern biologists classify whales as mammals and not fish, because the ancient Hebrews were more interested in distinguishing which animals live in the water rather than which animals are phylogenetically related. Similarly, borders between countries are agreed upon for a variety of pragmatic reasons, and can be quite convoluted—while there may often be some "obvious" geographic or cultural Schelling points anchoring these decisions, there's not going to be any intrinsic, eternal fact of the matter as to where one country starts and another begins.
-All of this is entirely correct—and thus, an excellent [motte](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/) for the less honest half of _Slate Star Codex_ readers to appeal to when they want to obfuscate and disrupt discussions about empirical reality by insisting on bizarre redefinitions of everyday concepts.
+All of this is entirely correct—and thus, an excellent [motte](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/) for the less honest half of _Slate Star Codex_ readers to appeal to when they want to obfuscate and disrupt discussions about empirical reality by insisting on gerrymandered redefinitions of everyday concepts.
Alexander goes on to attempt to use the categories-are-relative-to-goals insight to rebut skeptics of transgenderedness:
>
> An alternative categorization system is not an error, and borders are not objectively true or false.
-But this is just giving up _way_ too easily. The map is not the territory, and many very different kinds of maps can correspond to the territory in different ways—we have geographical maps, political maps, road maps, globes, _&c._—but that doesn't mean _no map is in error_. Rationalists can't insist on using the one true categorization system, because it turns out that—in all philosophical strictness—no such thing exists. But that doesn't release us from our sacred duty to describe what's actually true. It just leaves us faced with the _slightly more complicated_ task of describing the costs and benefits of different categorization systems with respect to different optimization criteria.
+But this is just giving up _way_ too easily. The map is not the territory, and many very different kinds of maps can correspond to the territory in different ways—we have geographical maps, political maps, road maps, globes, _&c._—but that doesn't mean _no map is in error_. Rationalists can't insist on using the one true categorization system, because it turns out that—in all philosophical strictness—no such thing exists. But that doesn't release us from our sacred duty to describe what's actually true. It just leaves us faced with the _slightly more complicated_ task of describing the costs and benefits of different categorization systems with respect to different criteria.
-There's no objective answer to the question as to whether we should pay more attention to an animal's evolutionary history or its habitat—but given one criterion or the other, we can say definitively that whales _are_ mammals but they're also _dag_/water-dwellers. That is: given that we observe that whales are endotherms that nurse their live-born young, we can assign them to the category _mammal_ and predict—correctly—that they have hair and have a more recent last common ancestor with monkeys than with herring, even if we haven't yet seen the hairs or found the last common ancestor. Alternatively, given that we've been told that "whales" live in the ocean, we can assign them to the category _water-dwellers_, and predict—correctly—that they probably have fins or flippers, even if we've never actually seen a whale ourselves.
+There's no objective answer to the question as to whether we should pay more attention to an animal's evolutionary history or its habitat—but given one criterion or the other, we can say definitively that whales _are_ mammals but they're also _dag_/water-dwellers. That is: given that we observe that whales are endotherms that nurse their live-born young, we can assign them to the category _mammal_ and predict—correctly—that they have hair and have a more recent last common ancestor with monkeys than with herring, even if we haven't yet seen the hairs or found the last common ancestor. Alternatively, given that we've been told that "whales" live in the ocean, we can assign them to the category _water-dwellers_, and predict—correctly—that they're likely to have fins or flippers, even if we've never actually seen a whale ourselves.
If different political factions prefer different criteria for defining the extension of some common word, rationalists may not be able to say that one side is simply right and the other is simply wrong, but we can at least strive for objectivity in _describing the conflict_. Before shrugging and saying, "Well, this is a difference in values; nothing more to be said about it," we can talk about the detailed consequences of what is gained or lost by paying attention to some differences and ignoring others. That there exists an element of subjectivity in what you choose to pay attention to, doesn't negate that there _is_ a structured empirical reality to be described—and not all descriptions of it are equally compact.
In terms of the Lincoln riddle: you _can_ call a tail a leg, but you can't stop people from _noticing_ that out of a dog's five legs, one of them is different from the others. You can't stop people from inferring decision-relevant implications from what they notice. (_Most_ of a dog's legs touch the ground, such that you'd have to carry the dog to the vet if one of them got injured, but the dog can still walk without the other, different leg.) And if people who work and live with dogs every day find themselves habitually distinguishing between the bottom-walking-legs and the back-wagging-leg, they _just might_ want _different words_ in order to concisely _talk_ about what everyone is thinking _anyway_.
-So far, I probably haven't actually said anything that Alexander didn't already say in the original post. ("A category 'fish' containing herring, dragonflies, and asteroids is going to be stupid [...] it fails to fulfill any conceivable goals of the person designing it.") But it seems worth restating and emphasizing that categories derive their usefulness from the way in which they efficiently represent regularities in the real world, because when we turn to the topic of exactly how to apply these philosophical insights to transgender identity claims, Alexander bizarrely—and uncharacteristically—doesn't seem to find it necessary to make any arguments about representing the real world, preferring instead to focus on the mere fact that some people strongly prefer [self-identity](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities)-based gender categories:
+So far, I probably haven't actually said anything that Alexander didn't already say in the original post. ("A category 'fish' containing herring, dragonflies, and asteroids is going to be stupid [...] it fails to fulfill any conceivable goals of the person designing it.") But it seems worth restating and emphasizing that categories derive their usefulness from the way in which they efficiently represent regularities in the real world, because when we turn to the topic of exactly how to apply these philosophical insights to transgender identity claims, Alexander strangely—uncharacteristically—doesn't seem to find it necessary to make any arguments about representing the real world, preferring instead to focus on the mere fact that some people strongly prefer [self-identity](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities)-based gender categories:
> If I'm willing to accept an unexpected chunk of Turkey deep inside Syrian territory to honor some random dead guy—and I better, or else a platoon of Turkish special forces will want to have a word with me—then I ought to accept an unexpected man or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered female if it'll save someone's life. There's no rule of rationality saying that I shouldn't, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that I should.
But it's not very interesting to people like rationalists—although apparently not all people who _self-identify_ as rationalists—who want to use concepts to _describe reality_.
-It's important to stress that this should _not_ be taken to mean that transgender identity claims should necessarily be rejected! (Bad arguments can be made for true propositions just as easily as false ones.) As Alexander briefly alludes to later ("I could relate this [...] to the various heavily researched apparent biological correlates of transgender [...]"), a _non_-question-begging argument for accepting trans people as their desired gender might look like this:
+It's important to stress that this should _not_ be taken to mean that transgender identity claims should necessarily be rejected! (Bad arguments can be made for true propositions just as easily as false ones.) As Alexander briefly alludes to later ("I could relate this [...] to the various heavily researched apparent biological correlates of transgender"), a _non_-question-begging argument for accepting trans people as their desired gender might look like this:
* *Claim*: Trans people are born with a brain-restricted intersex condition such that their psychology is much more typical of the other physiological sex: the proverbial "woman trapped in a man's body" (respectively "man ... woman's") trope is basically accurate.
* *Claim*: The medical interventions undergone during transition—hormone replacement surgery, sex reassignment surgery, _&c._—are effective at inducing the phenotype of the other physiological sex: physically, transitioning _works_.
* *Claim*: Gender is mostly attributed on the basis of apparent secondary sex characteristics: in most situations, most people don't care about predicting the configuration of someone's genitalia at birth or whether they have a Y chromosome.
* *Conclusion*: Trans people can legitimately be said to belong to their stated gender, using the _same_ criteria people usually use to decide such things.
-Notice that this is an _empirical_ argument for why trans people fit into _existing_ concepts of (social) gender, not a redefinition of words by fiat in order to avoid hurting someone's feelings. To the extent that any of the claims _fail_ to be true of self-identified trans people or some subset thereof—to the extent that transness _isn't_ a brain-intersex condition, to the extent that physical transition _isn't_ effective, to the extent that people _do_ have legitimate use-cases for biological-sex classifications that aren't "fooled" by appearances—then the conclusion is correspondingly weakened.
+Notice that this is an _empirical_ argument for why successfully-socially-transitioned trans people fit into _existing_ concepts of (social) gender, not a redefinition of words by fiat in order to avoid hurting someone's feelings. To the extent that any of the claims _fail_ to be true of self-identified trans people or some subset thereof—to the extent that physical transition _isn't_ effective, to the extent that people _do_ have legitimate use-cases for biological-sex classifications that aren't "fooled" by hormones and surgery—then the conclusion is correspondingly weakened.
-[explain two-type taxonomy; [single paper rec](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/lawrence-agp_and_typology.pdf)]
+Let's consider some of what is known about trans women. (For the remainder of this post, I'm going to focus on trans women, for reasons of personal interest. The task of analyzing the situation of trans men is left to the interested reader.)
+
+While a minority of trans women in Western countries fit the "classical transsexual" profile of being attracted to men, displaying
+
+(To interested readers who only have time to read one paper, I recommend Anne Lawrence's ["Autogynephilia and the Typology of Male-to-Female Transsexualism: Concepts and Controversies"](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/lawrence-agp_and_typology.pdf) For a more exhaustive treatment, see Lawrence's book [_Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_](https://surveyanon.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/men-trapped-in-mens-bodies_book.pdf) or follow the links and citations in [Kay Brown's FAQ](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/).)
+
+
+
+-----
+
+[_woman_ is a top-20 noun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English#Nouns).
+
+[explain two-type taxonomy; [single paper rec]]
[caveats: take care to note that it's possible to believe in a weaker form of it: maybe you agree to the bimodality in the data, but don't think it's two discrete etiological types; or, maybe you [agree that there are two etiologies, but](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/04/18/against-blanchardianism/) don't buy that AGP is the cause]
[note that I'm focusing on MtF because of reasons; analyzing the situation with trans men is left as an exercise to the interested reader]
-In less tolerant places and decades, where trans women were very rare and had to try very hard to pass as cis women out of dire necessity, the impact on the social order and how people think about gender was minimal—there were just too few trans people to make much of a difference.
+In less tolerant places and decades, where transsexuals were very rare and had to try very hard to pass as women out of dire necessity, their impact on the social order and how people think about gender was minimal—there were just too few trans people to make much of a difference.
-Nowadays, in progressive enclaves of Western countries, this is no longer true, and in communities that form around [non-sex-balanced interests](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/), the numbers can be quite dramatic. For example, on the 2017 _Slate Star Codex_ reader survey, 9.4% responded _F (cisgender)_ to the gender question, compared to 1.4% responding _F (transgender m -> f)_. So, if trans women are women, _13.4%_ (!!) of female _Slate Star Codex_ readers are trans.
+Nowadays, in progressive enclaves of Western countries, this is no longer true, and in communities that form around [non-sex-balanced interests](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/), the numbers can be quite dramatic. For example, on the 2018 _Slate Star Codex_ reader survey, 9.4% responded _F (cisgender)_ to the gender question, compared to 1.4% responding _F (transgender m -> f)_. So, if trans women are women, _13.4%_ (!!) of female _Slate Star Codex_ readers are trans.
A (cis) female friend of the blog, a member of the Berkeley, California rationalist community reports on recent changes in local social norms—
> There have been "all women" things, like clothing swaps or groups, that then pre-transitioned trans women show up to. And it's hard, because it's weird and uncomfortable once three or four participants of twelve are trans women. I think the reality that's happening is women are having those spaces less—instead doing private things "for friends," with specific invite lists that are implicitly understood not to include men or trans women. This sucks because then we can't include women who aren't _already_ in our social circle, and we all know it but no one wants to say it.
+This is a _terrible_ outcome with respect to _everyone's_ values. One couldn't even say, "The cost to bigoted cis women of not being able to have trans-exclusionary spaces is more than outweighed by trans women's identities being respected," b
+
+
+
Depending on your values, of course, you might be in favor of making it socially unacceptable to have sex-segregated spaces that are actually segregated by biological sex. The methods of rationality themselves have nothing to say on the matter.
To only say, "What's the problem? Trans women are women, by definition, and definitions can't be wrong" is to invite the reply, "That's not what I meant _and you fucking know it._"
------
+POINTS TO ADD (not sure where it fits best yet)—
+
+ * in the hair-dryer story, keeping the hair dryer in the car has no effect on anyone else; in contrast, _woman_ is a top-20 noun that people need to describe reality; defining a top-20 noun out from under someone's feet (such that "some women have penises!" is a sensible objection) _is_ demanding a lot from them
+ * the one-sidedness is breathtaking—it's as if Alexander's UN inspector said, "These Palestinians are willing to commit suicide to get what they want, so let's just give all of Palestine to them"
REMAINING OUTLINE—
>
> —_Quarantine_ by Greg Egan
-_(Epistemic status: I'm usually nicer than this, but I feel like the Zeitgeist is out of control and that I need to pull the brakes, hard.)_
-
People who are concerned with social justice tend to be rightfully skeptical when privileged straight white men like me complain about identity politics. That's why, when the topic is misogyny or racism, I generally _shut up_—even if I might occasionally privately _think_ I might have something true and relevant to say about the costs of the culture of the political left teaching people to model themselves as helpless victims of a kyriarchical society, I also realize that _my opinion doesn't matter_. I'm not a woman or a racial minority; I don't have their lived experience; I _don't know what it's like_ to face the challenges they face. I don't have standing to speak.
-But social progress marches on, and as old grievances recede into the mists of history, new ones take their place, and when the day comes to pass that the designated victim group of our age is _straight boys who wish they were girls_, then suddenly, _I have standing_. Girl, do _I have standing!_ And I will put an _end_ to this _toxic bullshit_, because I am nobody's victim.
+But social progress marches on, and as old grievances recede into the mists of history, new ones take their place, and when the day comes to pass that the designated victim group of our age is _straight boys who wish they were girls_, then suddenly, [_I have standing_](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/). Girl, do _I have standing!_ And I will put an _end_ to this _toxic bullshit_, because I am nobody's victim.
-An interesting blog post titled ["I Am A Transwoman. I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out."](https://medium.com/@jencoates/i-am-a-transwoman-i-am-in-the-closet-i-am-not-coming-out-4c2dd1907e42) was making the rounds in my social-media bubble earlier last year. In it, the author, Jennifer Coates, describes his—
+An interesting blog post titled ["I Am A Transwoman. I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out."](https://medium.com/@jencoates/i-am-a-transwoman-i-am-in-the-closet-i-am-not-coming-out-4c2dd1907e42) was making the rounds in my social-media bubble the other year. In it, the author, Jennifer Coates, describes his—
_Yes_. Yes, I went there. Yes, I know how offensive that is. But I have a point to make.
In this post, the author describes his stuggles with gender dysphoria: ever since childhood, he's wanted to be female, and the fact that he's not causes him pain. This is a serious problem worthy of sympathy, respect, and—by far the most valuable psychological state one can occupy in the service of someone else's troubles—careful _thought_.
-Certainly, one possible solution to this problem—and an increasingly well-trodden path at this late date—would be to transition. Take estadiol, take spiro, get new clothes, train your voice, pick a new name—I hear that a lot of people don't even get bottom surgery these days—and all of this having been accomplished, our heroine will have accomplished the feat of having _become_ a transwoman successfully occupying the social role of womanhood, and in an enlightened, liberal society, people will respect that, even if you don't quite pass.
+Certainly, one possible solution to this problem—and an increasingly well-trodden path at this late date—would be to transition. Take estadiol, take spiro, get new clothes, train your voice, pick a new name—I hear that a lot of people don't even get bottom surgery these days—and all of this having been accomplished, our heroine will have accomplished the feat of having _become_ a trans woman successfully occupying the social role of womanhood, and in an enlightened, liberal society, people will respect that, even if you don't quite pass.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff