X-Git-Url: http://unremediatedgender.space/source?a=blobdiff_plain;f=content%2Fdrafts%2Fgender-identity-as-cognitive-illusion.md;fp=content%2Fdrafts%2Fgender-identity-as-cognitive-illusion.md;h=0000000000000000000000000000000000000000;hb=d34c0f24d55defe2966e4b2ae14cc018ffa98996;hp=1a8a4bb6fda21ea8e639288ce12027951bb628ff;hpb=6f40a63a348804b8ed01a3d7224e67e73d603d41;p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git diff --git a/content/drafts/gender-identity-as-cognitive-illusion.md b/content/drafts/gender-identity-as-cognitive-illusion.md deleted file mode 100644 index 1a8a4bb..0000000 --- a/content/drafts/gender-identity-as-cognitive-illusion.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,43 +0,0 @@ -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 you don't actually want to call such a person a woman] - -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 labels that [...] - -To see why, let's work in a restricted setting: the world of length-20 bit strings. - - - -Outline— - - * 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,