1 Title: The Categories Were Made for Man in Order to Make Predictions
4 Tags: epistemology, Scott Alexander
7 > I said, "The truth is whatever you can get away with."
9 > "No, that's journalism. The truth is whatever you can't escape."
11 > —_Distress_ by Greg Egan
13 In ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), the immortal Scott Alexander explains, correctly, that
17 * First, the basic point is obviously correct.
18 * Things become muddier when we get to the section about national borders:
19 it's true that countries may agree that their borders work in this
20 noncontiguous way, and that matters for some purposes, but these legal
21 fictions don't always capture what people actually mean when they talk about
23 * During my Facebook meltdown, an acquaintance of mine gave some really
24 solid examples that I should ask him if I can borrow (with or without
26 * An attempted clarification (Scott does address this, but I want to
27 emphasize/rephrase it?): categories are value-laden because they're grouping
28 things together on the basis of the predictions that are decision-relevant
29 to what you care about. But this should be distinguished from the categories
30 themselves being _arbitrarily_ value-laden.
31 * Scott Alexander understands this, but the bottom 50% of _Slate Star
32 Codex_ readers do not.
33 * An important subtlety: in the case of countries and gender but _not_
34 whales/fish, we're not just classifying things that exist, but also making a
35 political decision of how we're going to organize ourselves. It's not that
36 trans women and nonbinaries already exist in fixed proportions, and we're
37 trying to decide how to parse them: that we have socially-recognized
38 transition as a thing creates an affordance for people to make the choice to
39 transition (linky ["Lesser Known..."](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/))
40 * The argumentation in section IV is _uncharacteristically_ weak for Scott:
41 basically just "We've established that categories are neither true nor
42 false, so if you care about transgender people, then you should use their
44 * To do better: let's _discuss in detail_ the detailed consequences of
45 different ways of drawing gender categories, and analyze the conflicts
46 that different people have.
47 * The case for using identified gender rather than biological sex is
48 strongest for binary trans people who actually pass.
49 * The tack where you show a picture of Buck Angel and say, "You're not
50 really going to call this person a woman, are you?" makes a good point
51 * It's less strong for ...
52 * People who don't pass
53 * Passing is a continuum rather than a binary and is also
54 observer-dependent, which is inconvenient from the perspective of
55 categorization, which tends to stick to bright-lines and Schelling
57 * Re observer dependence: quote Serano (do I rely/pick on Serano too
58 much?) or someone about how it's actually _harder_ to pass in urban
59 areas because people have a higher prior
60 * Ref-to-rebut Zinnia Jones on "passing is subjective, therefore it's
63 * Normies don't have nonbinary gender in their ontology; at least
64 acknowledge that you're making a political demand when you want
66 * What are the decision criteria for nonbinary, anyway? People can
68 * Rundown of social consequences of different criteria—
69 * When you have people who are _identifiably_ distinct from natal-sex
70 people _and_ not drawn from the same psychological distribution, it
71 becomes socially profitable for people to notice and adjust their
72 expectations; you can't stop them from doing this
73 * separate post "Stereotypes, Models, and Cognition"
74 * People are making probabilistic inferences all the time whether
75 they realize it or not
76 * Being drawn from a different psychological distribution but _not_
77 identifiably (AGPs who pass really well) doesn't hurt the dynamics
79 * AGPs aren't drawn from the same psychological distribution as cis
80 women. (Briefly explain the typology, but refer to external sources
81 for justification. For a more hard-facts empirical justification of
82 "not drawn from the same dist'n", cite data on sexual orientation (and
83 [constrast](https://twitter.com/SteveStuWill/status/905572666332987392))
85 * Making it not-OK for people to _talk_ about the categories that they
86 internally use to make sense of the world is bad
87 * experiences in LWish spaces with lots of trans women: if you
88 doctrinairely call everyone women, my brain rebels and wants to
89 say, "That's not what I meant and _you fucking know it_." And
90 honestly? (And I think they do, in fact, fucking know it.)
91 * The inability to have women's clothing swaps is a _real loss_
92 * Negotiation-structure: we've been using this word to refer to this
93 thing for the past 200,000 years since the invention of language;
94 if you want us to stop, you need to offer us something we value
95 (and you have nothing to trade with); threatening to kill yourself
96 is easily (if callously) countered with "We don't negotiate with
98 * For crime/medical statistics, you need natal sex or third-category.
100 * The case of Emperor Norton looks cute at first glance, but
101 ostensibly-benevolent gaslighting is still problematic (we call it
103 * I've been crazy (link "Memoirs"), and I'm glad my friends patiently told
104 me why I was wrong rather than saying "That's nice dear" (maybe quote
106 * Tell a story about what this could have been like for Norton beginning to
107 doubt the reality of his reign.
108 * Link to Maria Catt's "Baby Jessica" essay (maybe write her fan mail and
109 ask her to put it back up again)