"The Categories ..." extends the rube/blegg parable

diff --git a/content/drafts/the-categories-were-made-for-man-in-order-to-make-predictions.md b/content/drafts/the-categories-were-made-for-man-in-order-to-make-predictions.md
index 672fae8..795d784 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/the-categories-were-made-for-man-in-order-to-make-predictions.md
+++ b/content/drafts/the-categories-were-made-for-man-in-order-to-make-predictions.md
@@ -58,9 +58,22 @@ It's important to stress that this should _not_ be taken to mean that transgende
 
 The pre-verbal, subconscious, [System 1](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dual_process_theory&oldid=820860981#Systems) process by which we notice someone's features (breasts, facial hair, voice, facial structure, gendered clothing or grooming cues, any number of [subtle differences in motor behaviors](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/all-the-wrong-moves/) that your perceptual system can pick up on without you being consciously aware of them, _&c._), mentally categorize them as a _woman_ or a _man_, and use that category to guide our interactions with them, isn't subject to conscious control—but, for most purposes in day-to-day public life, it's also not _directly_ focused on genitalia or chromosomes.
 
-A natal female who _presents_ to the world as a man, and whom other people _model_ as a man on a System 1 level with no apparent incongruities, might very sensibly be said to _literally_ be a man (in the sense of social gender, not in the sense of "biologically male adult human"), because that's the mental category that people are actually using. Essentially, this is the argument that offers a photograph of a passing trans person, and says, "C'mon, do you _really_ want to call [this person](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_Angel#/media/File:Buck_Angel_Headshot.jpg) a woman? Really?"
+So a natal female who _presents_ to the world as a man, and whom other people _model_ as a man on a System 1 level with no apparent incongruities, might very sensibly be said to _literally_ be a man (in the sense of social gender, not in the sense of "biologically male adult human"), because that's the mental category that people are actually using, and therefore, the social class that they actually fit in to. Essentially, this is the argument that offers a photograph of a passing trans person, and says, "C'mon, do you _really_ want to call [this person](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_Angel#/media/File:Buck_Angel_Headshot.jpg) a woman? Really?"
 
 Well, no. But the point is that this is an _empirical_ argument for why successfully-socially-transitioned trans people fit into _existing_ concepts of gender, _not_ a redefinition of top-20 nouns by fiat in order to avoid hurting someone's feelings. It works _because_ and _to the extent that_ transitioning actually works. To the extent that this fails to be true of self-identified trans people or some subset thereof—for example, insofar as physical transition _isn't_ always effective, or insofar as because people _do_ have legitimate use-cases for biological-sex classifications that aren't "fooled" by hormones and surgery—then the conclusion is correspondingly weakened.
 
 -----
 
+Alexander praises Eliezer Yudkowsky's ["How an Algorithm Feels From the Inside"](http://lesswrong.com/lw/no/how_an_algorithm_feels_from_inside/), which builds off [previous](http://lesswrong.com/lw/nm/disguised_queries/) [posts](http://lesswrong.com/lw/nn/neural_categories/) discussing a parable about factory workers faced with the task of sorting objects which very strongly tend to _either_ be blue, egg-shaped, furry, flexible, opaque, luminescent, and vanadium-cored (categorized by the workers as "bleggs"), _or_ red, cube-shaped, smooth, hard, translucent, non-luminescent, and palladium-cored (categorized by the workers as "rubes").
+
+Suppose you're a worker in this factory, and occasionally, an object comes down the conveyor belt that's blue, _roughly_ egg-shaped, and furry, but also hard (unlike the typical blegg, which is slightly flexible to the touch). If such objects are extremely rare, you might not notice them at all—you'd quickly categorize each one as a _blegg_ and toss it in the blegg bin without a second thought. But as these unusual hard bleggs start to become more common, you get curious and take the time to examine one.
+
+While dissecting it, you make a startling discovery—the object was originally a smooth, hard red cube, of which someone had sanded down the corners to approximate an egg shape, and ironed on a layer of blue _faux_ fur. You show your work to Susan the Senior Sorter.
+
+"Wow," she says, "someone sure has gone to a lot of trouble to make these rubes look like bleggs!"
+
+"Hold on, I'm not sure we should be disrespecting that effort by calling them _rubes_," you say. You read _Slate Star Codex_ and are a very intelligent and humane person. "Categories were made for the man, not man for the categories. There's no rule of sorting saying that we should call them rubes, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that we should call them bleggs. And at a glance, they _look_ like bleggs—I mean, like the more-typical bleggs."
+
+So you and Susan agree to call the modified hard objects _trans bleggs_ (two words!—_trans_ as an adjective, not a prefix) and get back to work.
+
+Further investigation reveals that 85% of trans bleggs don't glow in the dark and contain palladium ore—both rube-typical chracteristics. Furthermore, the minority of trans bleggs that glow and contain vanadium also seem more similar to typical ("cis") bleggs in other ways: for example, by being somewhat more successfully egg-shaped and having more realistic _faux_ fur than the non-glowing, palladium-containing trans bleggs.

diff --git a/notes/categories-notes.md b/notes/categories-notes.md
index 74c57b1..ceda3aa 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/categories-notes.md
+++ b/notes/categories-notes.md
@@ -160,11 +160,3 @@ features         | features            | features
 -----------------+---------------------+--------------------
 blue, egg-shaped | furry, flexible     | glows, contains vanadium
 red, cube-shaped | smooth, hard        | unglowing, contains palladium
-
-Alexander praises Eliezer Yudkowsky's ["How an Algorithm Feels From the Inside"](http://lesswrong.com/lw/no/how_an_algorithm_feels_from_inside/), which builds off [previous](http://lesswrong.com/lw/nm/disguised_queries/) [posts](http://lesswrong.com/lw/nn/neural_categories/) discussing a parable about factory workers faced with the task of sorting objects which very strongly tend to _either_ be blue, egg-shaped, furry, flexible, luminescent, and vanadium-cored (categorized by the workers as "bleggs"), _or_ red, cube-shaped, smooth, hard, non-luminescent, and palladium-cored (categorized by the workers as "rubes").
-
-Suppose you're a worker in this factory, and occasionally, an object comes down the conveyor belt that's blue, _roughly_ egg-shaped, and furry, but also hard (unlike the typical blegg, which is slightly flexible to the touch). If such objects are extremely rare, you might not notice them at all—you'd quickly categorize each one as a _blegg_ and toss it in the blegg bin without a second thought. But as these unusual hard bleggs start to become more common, you get curious and take the time to examine one.
-
-You make a startling discovery—the object was originally a smooth, hard red cube, of which someone had sanded off the corners to approximate an egg shape, and ironed on a layer of _faux_ blue fur. 
-
-"Wow," you say, "someone sure has gone to a lot of trouble to make these rubes look like bleggs!"