[Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git] /

Title: Subspatial Distribution Overlap and Cancellable Stereotypes; Or, Gender Identity as Cognitive Illusion
Date: 2021-06-01 05:00
Category: commentary
Tags: categorization, epistemology
Status: draft

A common misconception about words is that they have definitions: look up the definition, and that tells you everything to know about that word ... right?

It can't _actually_ work that way—not in principle. The problem—one of them, anyway—is that with a sufficiently active imagination, you can imagine edge cases that satisfy the definition, but aren't what you _really mean_ by the word.

What's a _woman_? An adult human female. (Let's [not play dumb about this](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/) today.) Okay, but then what's a _female_? One common and perfectly serviceable definition: of the sex that produces larger gametes—ova, eggs.

That's one common and perfectly serviceable definition in the paltry, commonplace _real_ world—but not in _the world of the imagination!_ We could _imagine_ the existence of a creature that looks and acts exactly like an adult human male down to the finest details, _except_ that its (his?) gonads produce eggs, not sperm! So that would be a _female_ and presumably a _woman_, according to our definitions, yes?

According to our definitions, yes. But if you saw this person on the street, you wouldn't want to call them a woman, because everything about them that you can observe looks like that of an adult human male. If you're not a reproductive health lab tech and don't look at the photographs in biology textbooks, you'll never _see_ the gametes someone produces. (You can see male semen, but the individual spermatozoa are too small to look at without a microscope; people [didn't even know that ova and sperm _existed_ until the 17th century](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1439-0531.2012.02105.x).) Does that mean our common definition of _female_ isn't perfectly serviceable after all?

No, because humans whose gametes produce eggs but appear male in every other aspect, don't exist in the real world. What this really shows is that the cognitive technology of "words" having "definitions" doesn't work in _the world of the imagination_, because _the world of the imagination_ encompasses (at a minimum) _all possible configurations of matter_. Words are [short messages that compress a lot of information](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length), but what it _means_ for the world to contain information is that some things in the world are vastly more probable than others.

To see why, let's work in a restricted setting: the world of length-20 strings of bits. Suppose you wanted to devise an efficient _code_ to represent elements of this world with _shorter_ strings, such that you could say you saw a `01100` (in code, using just 5 bits) and the people listening to you would know that what you actually saw in the world was 






Outline—

(Let's [not play dumb about the significance of intersex conditions](https://colinwright.substack.com/p/sex-chromosome-variants-are-not-their) today.)

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i2dfY65JciebF3CAo/empty-labels

 * our brains are good at using the same word to represent absolute differences and low-effect-size stereotypes; it kind of has to be this way, but can result in puzzles and paradoxes if you don't know what's going on
 * the paradoxes go away when you stop down and just think about the high-dimensional probability distribution

### One example: why lesbians are women (do ... do I even need to explain this?)

 * when you point out masculine behavior of AGP TW as evidence for them being male, people will say, "Ah, but lesbians are masculine, too; are you saying that lesbians aren't women???"
 * reply: we want the word "women" to refer to the actually-biological-female cluster, which is discretely identifiable, but overlaps with the male cluster if you look at a chosen subspace of individual psychology variables
 * maybe in some contexts you might want to talk about "masculine people" that includes prototypical men and butch lesbians
 * sketch out a toy model with numbers 

How I put it in the comments—

http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/Mar/point-man/#isso-171

> our brains are good at using a single concept to simultaneously represent discrete differences (genitals, chromosomes) and mere statistical differences (of various effect sizes) that have a lot of overlap—basically, stereotypes.

> (Such that if you only know someone's sex and nothing else about them, your expectations are going to come out of a probability distribution centered on stereotypes, but this doesn't doom us to an oppressive caste system as long as you can update on individuating information: outliers of various degrees along various dimensions merely require a slightly longer message to describe rather than getting shot.)

> People who are sympathetic to people who wish they could change sex imagine that they can safely delete the discrete differences from the concept-definition—but if you do that, then, as you describe, there's nothing left for the concept to attach to, except the things we know how to change (people with currently estrogen-dominant hormone systems?), and stereotypes. But people can't say out loud that they're trying to re-anchor the concepts onto smaller-effect-size stereotypes, because they haven't forgotten that the previous iteration of the ideology held sexism is bad. So we end up with a huge amount of doublethink and dissembling,