>
> —_Distress_ by Greg Egan
-In ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), the immortal Scott Alexander eloquently argues that proposed definitions of concepts aren't true or false in themselves, but rather can only be evaluated by their usefulness. Our finite minds being unable to cope with the unimaginable complexity of the raw physical universe, we group sufficiently similar things into the same category so that we can make similar predictions about them—but this requires not only a metric of "similarity", but also a notion of which predictions one cares about enough to notice, both of which are relative to some agent's perspective, rather than being inherent in the world itself.
+In ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), the immortal Scott Alexander argues that proposed definitions of concepts aren't true or false in themselves, but rather can only be evaluated by their usefulness. Our finite minds being unable to cope with the unimaginable complexity of the raw physical universe, we group sufficiently similar things into the same category so that we can make similar predictions about them—but this requires not only a metric of "similarity", but also a notion of which predictions one cares about enough to notice, both of which are relative to some agent's perspective, rather than being inherent in the world itself.
And so, Alexander explains, the ancient Hebrews weren't _wrong_ to classify whales as a type of _dag_ (typically translated as _fish_), even though modern biologists classify whales as mammals and not fish, because the ancient Hebrews were more interested in distinguishing which animals live in the water rather than which animals are phylogenetically related. Similarly, borders between countries are agreed upon for a variety of pragmatic reasons, and can be quite convoluted—while there may often be some "obvious" geographic or cultural Schelling points anchoring these decisions, there's not going to be any instrinsic, eternal fact of the matter as to where one country starts and another begins.
-All of this is entirely correct—and thus, an excellent [motte](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/) for the less honest half of _Slate Star Codex_ readers to appeal to when they want to obfuscate and disrupt discussions about empirical reality by insisting on bizarrely unnatural redefinitions of concepts.
+All of this is entirely correct—and thus, an excellent [motte](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/) for the less honest half of _Slate Star Codex_ readers to appeal to when they want to obfuscate and disrupt discussions about empirical reality by insisting on bizarre redefinitions of everyday concepts.
Alexander goes on to attempt to use the categories-are-relative-to-goals insight to rebut skeptics of transgenderedness:
> If I'm willing to accept an unexpected chunk of Turkey deep inside Syrian territory to honor some random dead guy—and I better, or else a platoon of Turkish special forces will want to have a word with me—then I ought to accept an unexpected man or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered female if it’ll save someone's life. There's no rule of rationality saying that I shouldn't, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that I should.
-This is true in an uninteresting tautological sense: if you deliberately define your category boundaries in order to get the answer you want, you can get the answer you want, which is great for people who want that answer and people who don't want to hurt their feelings [(and who don't mind letting themselves get emotionally blackmailed)](/2017/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/).
+This is true in an uninteresting tautological sense: if you deliberately define your category boundaries in order to get the answer you want, you can get the answer you want, which is great for people who want that answer, and people who don't want to hurt their feelings [(and who don't mind letting themselves get emotionally blackmailed)](/2017/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/).
-It's less interesting to people like rationalists—although apparenlty not all people who _self-identify_ as rationalists—who want to use concepts to _describe reality_.
+It's less interesting to people like rationalists—although apparently not all people who _self-identify_ as rationalists—who want to use concepts to _describe reality_.
-It's important to stress that this should _not_ be taken to mean that transgender identity claims should necessarily be rejected! Countless bad arguments can be made for true propositions as well as false ones, so the refutation of one argument
+It's important to stress that this should _not_ be taken to mean that transgender identity claims should necessarily be rejected! (Bad arguments can be made for true propositions just as easily as false ones.)
------
-OUTLINE—
-
- * First, the basic point is obviously correct.
- * Things become muddier when we get to the section about national borders:
- it's true that countries may agree that their borders work in this
- noncontiguous way, and that matters for some purposes, but these legal
- fictions don't always capture what people actually mean when they talk about
- being in a country.
- * During my Facebook meltdown, an acquaintance of mine gave some really
- solid examples that I should ask him if I can borrow (with or without
- attribution).
- * An attempted clarification (Scott does address this, but I want to
- emphasize/rephrase it?): categories are value-laden because they're grouping
- things together on the basis of the predictions that are decision-relevant
- to what you care about. But this should be distinguished from the categories
- themselves being _arbitrarily_ value-laden.
- * Scott Alexander understands this, but the bottom 50% of _Slate Star
- Codex_ readers do not.
- * An important subtlety: in the case of countries and gender but _not_
- whales/fish, we're not just classifying things that exist, but also making a
- political decision of how we're going to organize ourselves. It's not that
- trans women and nonbinaries already exist in fixed proportions, and we're
- trying to decide how to parse them: that we have socially-recognized
- transition as a thing creates an affordance for people to make the choice to
- transition (linky ["Lesser Known..."](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/))
+REMAINING OUTLINE—
+
* The argumentation in section IV is _uncharacteristically_ weak for Scott:
basically just "We've established that categories are neither true nor
false, so if you care about transgender people, then you should use their
* Link to Maria Catt's "Baby Jessica" essay (maybe write her fan mail and
ask her to put it back up again)
+re emphasis on predictions: dicuss how observations make you infer class membership, which lets you infer things about what you haven't observed
+
/2017/Feb/if-other-fantasies-were-treated-like-crossdreaming/
Similarly, [discussion of borders]
[point out that Alexander agrees that some categories suck]
two-types are relevant to trans child debate
+
+Buck Angel pic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_Angel#/media/File:Buck_Angel_Headshot.jpg
+
+"Long-Term Follow-Up of Transsexual Persons Undergoing Sex Reassignment Surgery: Cohort Study in Sweden" http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016885 retained a male pattern re criminality
+
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff