X-Git-Url: http://unremediatedgender.space/source?a=blobdiff_plain;f=content%2F2018%2Funtitled-metablogging-26-december-2018.md;h=f1e93ae7da6afda670498f07a2a9812dcfb6e164;hb=46c0c8bb2df90ed3af5b096b7ac23fb5fec38e88;hp=a2f0c9b7bef103c8bda5e2b7ac1838da0de98ab7;hpb=00709ef6f24257a8ee71925ecccd551a1e802232;p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git
diff --git a/content/2018/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018.md b/content/2018/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018.md
index a2f0c9b..f1e93ae 100644
--- a/content/2018/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018.md
+++ b/content/2018/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018.md
@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@ I guess I haven't made any new posts here in almost two months?âwhich is not g
- * I still need to finish drafting my reply to [Ozy's reply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) to [my reply](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) to [the immortal Scott Alexander](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/)
+ * I still need to finish drafting my reply to [Ozy's reply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) to [my reply](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) to [the immortal Scott Alexander](http://web.archive.org/web/20200610230130/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/)
* I've got ~4800 words drafted, but it needs a _lot_ more work in order to make it a maximally clear and maximally defensible blog post
* A _brief_ (only ~350 words) summaryâ
* I hopefully-accurately summarize Ozy as trying to make a _reductio ad absurdum_ argument, claiming that my arguments relying on the relevance of psychological sex differences would imply that lesbians aren't women, which is absurd.
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ I guess I haven't made any new posts here in almost two months?âwhich is not g
* a technical post about how imperfect measurements are subject to [regression to the mean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean), which (unfortunately! _really genuinely_ unfortunately!) quantitatively weakens the standard reassurance of, "Oh, no one should feel threatened by discussion of group differences, because the statistics obviously don't apply to any one individual"
* I haven't done any serious math in a while and I'm afraid that learning and explaining the details here could take me _many_ hours
* a technical post about using [naïve Bayes models](http://lesswrong.com/lw/o8/conditional_independence_and_naive_bayes/) for sex categorization
- * I never got very far into [_Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality_](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/probabilistic-graphical-models) (I know; I like my title better), but I'd like to dig into it again if I can somehow find the time
+ * I never got very far into [_Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality_](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/probabilistic-graphical-models) (I know; I like my title better), but I'd like to dig into it again if I can somehow find the time
* a post about how I'm nervous about Codes of Conduct in the open-source world being used as an ideological-conformity enforcement mechanism, in contrast to their laudable ostensible purpose of preventing harrassment, _&c._ (working title: "Codes of Convergence; Or, [Smile More](https://genius.com/7888863)")
* a critical appraisal of the social phenomenon of self-declared non-binary gender identities (working title: "'But I'm Not Quite Sure What That Means': Costs of Nonbinary Gender as a Social Technology")
* a post about the mechanisms of social change and how there might be a role for a _very narrowly-targeted_ form of political activism where you try to give people more accurate factual information, rather than lobbying for any particular concrete policy (working title: "An Infovist's Advisory; Or, Standing Athwart History Yelling, 'Wait! I Like the Idea, but the Execution Needs Work!'")
@@ -44,19 +44,19 @@ I guess I haven't made any new posts here in almost two months?âwhich is not g
* a short epistemic horror story (with a magical-realism twist at the end) about a young [gender-critical feminist](http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/TERF) (who is _surprisingly_ knowledgable about evolutionary psychology) who gets wrongfully involuntarily committed after losing a night of sleep and is assigned an MtF roommate in the psych ward
* and more
-... and just, I don't know. I've been _pretty upset_ lately in the way that I've been on-and-off [upset](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/) for the last two and a half years, where in addition to this _creepy_ and _absurd_ pseudonymous blog that I don't even have the willpower to write at a decent pace (see the above list of things-yet-left-unwritten), I keep getting into arguments with people in real life (or in [Discord](https://discordapp.com/) servers that feel real-life-adjacent) who seem to think that guys like me can _literally_ be women _by means of saying so_.
+... and just, I don't know. I've been _pretty upset_ lately in the way that I've been on-and-off [upset](/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/) for the last two and a half years, where in addition to this _creepy_ and _absurd_ pseudonymous blog that I don't even have the willpower to write at a decent pace (see the above list of things-yet-left-unwritten), I keep getting into arguments with people in real life (or in [Discord](https://discordapp.com/) servers that feel real-life-adjacent) who seem to think that guys like me can _literally_ be women _by means of saying so_.
-And it's just _not true_. It's just _so obviously not true_. [(Given current technology.)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions)
+And it's just _not true_. It's just _so obviously not true_. [(Given current technology.)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions)
So, I'm an intellectual. I _realize_ very well that "It's obviously not true" isn't an argument that someone could engage with. So I do make arguments. I try very hard to be careful to explain the empirical claims I'm making and point to evidence, and try to anticipate and disclaim in advance the most probable misinterpretations of what I'm saying, and demonstrate that I understand that words can be used in many ways depending on context, but that I'm trying to use language to point to a particular empirical statistical structure in the world, and that becomes a lot more cumbersome to express if I'm not allowed to use this word with this widely-used definition/[extension](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions) ...
-I'm not perfect. Especially in real-time discussions (text or meatspace), I can often look back and point to things that I said that were wrong, and know that I have sinned: "Oh, that wasn't quite fair of me; oh, that was kind of [bravery-debatey](http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/18/against-bravery-debates/) of me; oh, I should have more carefully distinguished between those claims."
+I'm not perfect. Especially in real-time discussions (text or meatspace), I can often look back and point to things that I said that were wrong, and know that I have sinned: "Oh, that wasn't quite fair of me; oh, that was kind of [bravery-debatey](http://web.archive.org/web/20200618055932/https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/18/against-bravery-debates/) of me; oh, I should have more carefully distinguished between those claims."
I'm not perfect, but I think I'm _pretty good_. Even if I don't agree with someone about the factsâeven if I don't agree with someone about what [policy trade-offs](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided) to make, including policy trade-offs about how to use languageâsurely, _surely_ we can at least agree on my meta-level point about _cognitive_ costs being part of the policy trade-off about how to use language?
And somehow it _doesn't land_. It's like talking to a tape recorder that just endlessly repeats, "Ha-ha! [I can define a word any way I want](http://lesswrong.com/lw/od/37_ways_that_words_can_be_wrong/)! You can't use that concept unless you can provide explicit necessary-and-sufficient conditions to classify a series of ever-more obscure and contrived edge cases!"
-Although I do have a couple favorite edge cases of my own. I generally prefer not to involve named individuals in arguments, even public figures: it's unclassy. But having nothing left, I pull out a [photograph of Danielle Muscato](http://daniellemuscato.startlogic.com/uploads/3/4/9/3/34938114/2249042_orig.jpg). "Look," I say. "This is a photograph of a man. You can see it, too, right? Right?"
+Although I do have a couple favorite edge cases of my own. I generally prefer not to involve named individuals in arguments, even public figures: it's unclassy. But having nothing left, I pull out a [photograph of Danielle Muscato](http://daniellemuscato.startlogic.com/uploads/3/4/9/3/34938114/2249042_orig.jpg). "Look," I say. "This is a photograph of a man. You can see it, too, right? Right?"
And they say, "It's possible to be mistaken about cis people's genders, too."