drafting "The Categories"

diff --git a/content/drafts/the-categories-were-made-for-man-in-order-to-make-predictions.md b/content/drafts/the-categories-were-made-for-man-in-order-to-make-predictions.md
index b7c295b..ce98058 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/the-categories-were-made-for-man-in-order-to-make-predictions.md
+++ b/content/drafts/the-categories-were-made-for-man-in-order-to-make-predictions.md
@@ -32,7 +32,7 @@ But this is just giving up _way_ too easily. The map is not the territory, and m
 
 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. And this isn't just a matter of [mere labels](http://lesswrong.com/lw/ns/empty_labels/) that contain no more information than we used to define them. The categories do cognitive work: 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.
 
-This works because, empirically, mammals have lots of things in commmon with each other and water-dwellers have lots of things in common with each other. If we [imagine entities as existing in a high-dimensional configuration space](http://lesswrong.com/lw/nl/the_cluster_structure_of_thingspace/), there would be a _mammals_ cluster (in the subspace of the dimensions that mammals are similar on), and a _water-dwellers_ cluster (in the subspace of the dimensions that water-dwellers are similar on), and whales would happen to belong to _both_ of them, in the way that the vector *x⃗* = [3.1, 4.2, −10.3, −9.1] ∈ ℝ⁴ is close to [3, 4, 2, 3] in the _x₁-x₂_ plane, but also close to [−8, −9, −10, −9] in the _x₃-x₄_ plane.
+This works because, empirically, mammals have lots of things in common with each other and water-dwellers have lots of things in common with each other. If we [imagine entities as existing in a high-dimensional configuration space](http://lesswrong.com/lw/nl/the_cluster_structure_of_thingspace/), there would be a _mammals_ cluster (in the subspace of the dimensions that mammals are similar on), and a _water-dwellers_ cluster (in the subspace of the dimensions that water-dwellers are similar on), and whales would happen to belong to _both_ of them, in the way that the vector *x⃗* = [3.1, 4.2, −10.3, −9.1] ∈ ℝ⁴ is close to [3, 4, 2, 3] in the _x₁-x₂_ plane, but also close to [−8, −9, −10, −9] in the _x₃-x₄_ plane.
 
 If different political factions are engaged in conflict over how to define the extension of some common word—common words being a scarce and valuable resource both culturally and [information-theoretically](http://lesswrong.com/lw/o1/entropy_and_short_codes/)—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 the fact that there _is_ a structured empirical reality to be described—and not all descriptions of it are equally compact.
 
@@ -48,39 +48,19 @@ This is true in a tautological sense: if you deliberately gerrymander your categ
 
 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_.
 
------
-
-Alexander gives an account of a woman whose ability to function at work was being disrupted by obsessive-compulsive fears of leaving her hair dryer on at home, whose problems were solved by the simple expediency of taking the hair dryer with her when leaving the house. Given that it _worked_ to resolve the woman's distress, we shouldn't care that this isn't how the problems that are categorized as _obsessive-compulsive disorder_ are "supposed" to be treated, and Alexander argues that the same should go for accepting transgender identity claims: if it _works_ for resolving people's gender dysphoria, why not?
-
-The problem is that there are _significant disanalogies_ between leaving a hair dryer in the front seat of one's car, and agreeing that gender should be defined on the basis of self-identity. The former has no appreciable effects on anyone but the person themselves; the latter affects _everyone who wants to use language to categorize humans by sex_. The words _man_ and _woman_ [are top-20 nouns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English#Nouns)! People need those nouns to describe their experiences!
-
-(Even if you're [not a fan of gender roles](/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/) and wish that people were less eager to distinguish humans by sex when it's not absolutely necessary, to the extent that not everyone shares this value or wants to apply it in _all_ areas of life, it matters how the categories are defined.)
-
-Imagine if the patient in the hair dryer story were obsessed with the fear not just that _she_ might accidentally leave her hair dryer plugged in unattended, but that that _someone_ might do so, and that it would burn down the whole city. In this slightly modified scenario, insisting that everyone in the city put their hair driers in the front seat of their cars doesn't look like an appealing solution.
+Alexander gives an account of a woman whose ability to function at work was being disrupted by obsessive-compulsive fears of leaving her hair dryer on at home, whose problems were solved by the simple expediency of taking the hair dryer with her when leaving the house. Given that it _worked_ to resolve the woman's distress, we shouldn't care that this isn't how problems that are categorized as _obsessive-compulsive disorder_ are "supposed" to be treated, and Alexander argues that the same should go for accepting transgender identity claims: if it _works_ for resolving people's gender dysphoria, why not?
 
-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 late in the post ("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:
+The problem is that there are _significant disanalogies_ between leaving a hair dryer in the front seat of one's car, and agreeing that gender should be defined on the basis of self-identity. Most significantly: the former has no appreciable effects on anyone but the person themselves; the latter affects _everyone who wants to use language to categorize humans by sex_. The words _man_ and _woman_ [are top-20 nouns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English#Nouns)! People need those nouns to describe their experiences!
 
- * *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.
+Though it may be a small cost to be socially required to say _woman_ and _she_ to refer to someone whom one would otherwise be inclined to call a _man_, that small cost needs to be aggregated across everyone subject to it, like so many dust specks in their eyes. Imagine if the patient in the hair dryer story were obsessed with the fear not just that _she_ might accidentally leave her hair dryer plugged in unattended, but that that _someone_ might do so, and that it would burn down the whole city. In this slightly modified scenario, insisting that everyone in the city put their hair dryers in the front seat of their cars doesn't look like an appealing solution.
 
-Notice that this is an _empirical_ argument for why successfully-socially-transitioned trans people fit into _existing_ concepts of 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.
+It's important to stress that this should _not_ be taken to mean that transgender identities should necessarily be rejected! (Bad arguments can be made for true propositions just as easily as false ones.) As Alexander briefly alludes to late in the post ("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 target gender would appeal to the ways in which this is really is a natural categorization.
 
-Is this too absolutist?—effectively equating "trans" with "passing", and even then marked as an [atypical case](http://lesswrong.com/lw/nk/typicality_and_asymmetrical_similarity/)? Would it really be so costly to grant an occasional isolated unprincipled exception to our usual category boundaries, for kindness's sake?
+The pre-verbal, subconscious, [System 1](TODO: linky) process by which we notice someone's features (breasts, facial hair, voice, facial structure, gendered clothing or grooming cues, any number of [subtle differences in motor behaviors](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/all-the-wrong-moves/) that your perceptual system can pick up on without you being consciously aware of them, _&c._), mentally categorize them as a _woman_ or a _man_, and use that category to guide our interactions with them, isn't subject to conscious control—but, for most purposes in day-to-day public life, it's also not particularly focused on genitalia or chromosomes.
 
-Perhaps not—if we could trust that the exception to our normal ways of thinking and speaking would _stay_ isolated. But the goals of the modern transgender movement seem to be somewhat broader in scope. Consider this display at at recent conference of the American Philosophical Association—
+A natal female who _presents_ to the world as a man, and whom other people are _modeling_ as a man on a System 1 level with no apparent incongruities, might very sensibly be said to _literally_ be a man (in the sense of social gender, albeit not in the sense of "biologically male adult human"), because that's the mental category that people are actually using. Essentially, this is the argument that offers a photograph of a passing trans person, and says, "C'mon, do you _really_ want to call [this person](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_Angel#/media/File:Buck_Angel_Headshot.jpg) a woman? Really?"
 
-![APA pronoun stickers]({filename}/images/apa_pronoun_stickers.jpg)
+Well, no. But notice that this is an _empirical_ argument for why successfully-socially-transitioned trans people fit into _existing_ concepts of gender, _not_ a redefinition of top-20 nouns by fiat in order to avoid hurting someone's feelings. It works _because_ and _to the extent that_ transitioning actually works. To the extent that this fails to be true of self-identified trans people or some subset thereof—for example, insofar as physical transition _isn't_ always effective, or insofar as because people _do_ have legitimate use-cases for biological-sex classifications that aren't "fooled" by hormones and surgery—then the conclusion is correspondingly weakened.
 
-(photograph by [Lucia A. Schwarz](https://twitter.com/Lucia_A_Schwarz/status/949315365842116608))
-
-But this isn't how _anyone_ actually thinks about gender! Human brains are good at _noticing patterns_, even if we usually can't articulate exactly how or why. The process by which we notice someone's features (voice, facial structure, whether they have breasts, gendered clothing cues, any number of [subtle differences in motor behaviors](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/all-the-wrong-moves/) that your perceptual system can pick up on without you being consciously aware of them), categorize them as a _woman_ or _man_, and use that category (and everything else we can infer about the person, using more-detailed, finer-grained categories) to guide our interactions with them, isn't something subject to conscious control.
-
-That is: if you need a sticker to get people to gender you correctly, your transition has _failed_. In a free Society, everyone should have the right to express themselves, to modify their body and social presentation however they see fit. But having your best to present your true self, you can't—not even _shouldn't_, but _can't_—exert detailed control how other people percieve you.
-
-All you can do is force them to lie.
-
-I'm not "against" trans people. I'm glad [I was able to experiment with hormones](http://unremediatedgender.space/tag/hrt-diary/) on the basis of informed consent, rather than being gatekept. 
+-----
 
-"Who are you going to believe, my sticker, or your lying eyes? There's no rule of rationality saying that you shouldn't believe the sticker, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that you should."