publish "The Social Construction of Reality and ..."

diff --git a/content/drafts/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md b/content/2019/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md
similarity index 98%
rename from content/drafts/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md
rename to content/2019/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md
index f7ace00..af31ad0 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md
+++ b/content/2019/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md
@@ -1,8 +1,7 @@
 Title: The Social Construction of Reality and the Sheer Goddamned Pointlessness of Reason
-Date: 2019-08-11
+Date: 2019-08-11 23:56
 Category: commentary
 Tags: cathartic, epistemic horror
-Status: draft
 
 > The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." 
 >
@@ -36,7 +35,7 @@ That incentive lasted about forty years. After its crowning victory in _Obergefe
 
 Sculpting "trans" into an interest group large enough to serve as a pawn (well, [bishop](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/06/ol9-how-to-uninstall-cathedral/)) under the Blue Egregore's control required the LGBT sub-egregore to re-collapse the sex/gender distinction (pried apart at such painstaking cost by its feminist cousins two generations earlier)—in the _other_ direction: sex, having already been split into "sex" and "gender" (f.k.a. gender _roles_ f.k.a. _sex_ roles), must now give way entirely to the latter. In [Hoffman and Taylor's account of the precession of simulacra (following Baudrillard)](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/), medical transsexualism of the 20th-century West was a mixture of simulacrum levels 1 (to the extent that hormones and surgery constitute a successful [sex change](http://lesswrong.com/lw/xe/changing_emotions/)) and 2 (to the extent that they don't, and transitioning consists of [lying](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blatant-lies-best-kind/) about one's sex).
 
-In contrast, post-_Obergefell_ gender theory belongs to simulacrum level 3: rather than having a non-circular truth condition, "gender" is just a free-floating Schelling point, a [role](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web) or [costume](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PurelyAestheticGender) to be [symbolically identified](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2015/06/30/the-thing-and-the-symbolic-representation-of-the-thing/) with, meaning no more (and no less) what one can predict that others will predict that others will predict ... _&c._ that it means. Biological sex would continue to be a decision-relevant variable if it were cognitively available (summarizing a variety of physical differences, who can get pregnant, various game-theoretic social consequences of who can get pregnant, [psychological differences to the tune of](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0029265) [Mahanalobis _D_](https://marcodgdotnet.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/delgiudice_2013_is-d_valid_ep.pdf) ≈ 2.7, _&c._)—but _no_ culture can provide all the concepts that _would be_ decision-relevant _if available_. Definitionally, you don't know what you're missing. ["The limits of my language are the limits of my world."](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein) Some claim to have [_seen through_](https://www.gwern.net/docs/philo/2012-sistery-tryingtoseethrough.html) to a world beneath the world, but without a way to _share_ what they've allegedly seen, to bring it within mutually-reinforcing consenus of the intersubjective, who's not to say that they only dreamed it?
+In contrast, post-_Obergefell_ gender theory belongs to simulacrum level 3: rather than having a non-circular truth condition, "gender" is just a free-floating Schelling point, a [role](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web) or [costume](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PurelyAestheticGender) to be [symbolically identified](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2015/06/30/the-thing-and-the-symbolic-representation-of-the-thing/) with, meaning no more (and no less) what one can predict that others will predict that others will predict ... _&c._ that it means. Biological sex would continue to be a decision-relevant variable if it were cognitively available (summarizing a variety of physical differences, who can get pregnant, various game-theoretic social consequences of who can get pregnant, [psychological differences to the tune of](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0029265) [Mahanalobis _D_](https://marcodgdotnet.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/delgiudice_2013_is-d_valid_ep.pdf) ≈ 2.7, _&c._)—but _no_ culture can provide all the concepts that _would be_ decision-relevant _if available_. Definitionally, you don't know what you're missing. ["The limits of my language are the limits of my world."](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein) Some claim to have [_seen through_](https://www.gwern.net/docs/philo/2012-sistery-tryingtoseethrough.html) to a world beneath the world, but without a way to _share_ what they've allegedly seen, to bring it within mutually-reinforcing consensus of the intersubjective, who's not to say that they only dreamed it?
 
 I have a recurring dream, a naïve dream that can't exist. It's a dream about the use of maps. In my dream, even people who—for example—[dislike psychological sex differences](/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/), have an interest in sex differences research being as accurate as possible, using the most precise concepts possible, because only a true understanding of the interplay between nature and nurture can be _used to design_ a more just Society that minimizes inequality, just as only a true map of the territory can help you plot your way across a dangerous terrain. And that is how it would work for a [singleton](https://nickbostrom.com/fut/singleton.html) God-Empress that could arrange human lives like pieces on a chess board, or the words in a novel.