drafting "Reply to The Unit"

(I think writing in the morning—and I mean every morning—is going to be good
for me!)

diff --git a/content/drafts/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females.md b/content/drafts/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females.md
index 1945974..b03b63e 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females.md
+++ b/content/drafts/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females.md
@@ -100,31 +100,32 @@ Kind or not, morally justified or not, voluntary or not, sexual dimorphism is _a
 
 If—like me—you're the kind of person who is not necessarily _happy_ about sexual dimorphism, you can always deliberately define your categories in order to minimize it: if there's a large sex difference in some observable measurement, just say you _don't care_ about predicting that particular measurement.
 
-But people who have _other_ concerns than minimizing Blue Tribe people's quasi-religious discomfort with sexual dimorphism (it's my former quasi-religion, too, so I'm allowed to make fun of us) might want a common word—or even just a particular _sense_ of a common word—to describe the world they see, in which sex is a real thing worth noticing. Being limited to just saying "people with uteruses" when the topic of conversation happens to be childbearing (or whatever the approved socially-just construction turns out to be) is not a suitable replacement (per Alicorn's maxim) when the speaker wants to refer to all the other dimensions along which women statistically have things in common. Including things that are hard to articulate or measure. Including things that may not even be currently _known_. _I_ certainly don't know what differences in gray-to-white brain matter ratios _mean_ psychologically, but that's a fact 
-
-
-
+But people who have _other_ concerns than minimizing Blue Tribe people's quasi-religious discomfort with sexual dimorphism (it's my former quasi-religion, too, so I'm allowed to make fun of us) might want a common word—or even just a particular _sense_ of a common word—to describe the world they see, in which sex is a real thing worth noticing. Being limited to just saying "people with uteruses" when the topic of conversation happens to be childbearing (or whatever the approved socially-just construction turns out to be) is not a suitable replacement (per Alicorn's maxim) when the speaker wants to refer to all the _other_ dimensions along which women statistically have things in common, including things that are hard to articulate or measure, and including things that may not even be currently _known_. _I_ certainly don't know what differences in gray-to-white brain matter ratios _mean_ psychologically, but my map is not the territory: the difference is allowed to exist and have implications even if I don't know what they are.
 
 The author goes on to her second objection—
 
-> 2) Someday people are just going to be able to generate the exact physical body they want to inhabit. At that point, "biological" anything isn’t going to apply.
+> 2) Someday people are just going to be able to generate the exact physical body they want to inhabit. At that point, "biological" anything isn't going to apply.
 
 I definitely agree that biological anything isn't going to apply in the glorious posthuman future of unimaginable power and freedom when people can reshape their body and mind at will.
 
 [(If we survive.)](https://nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html)
 
-But it's also not clear how much relevance this science-fictional scenario has to people in the unglorious pre-posthuman present. Yes, we do have HRT and SRS, and these are magnificent acheivements for the grand cause of morphological freedom, and should be available on an informed-consent basis. It's definitely something.
+But it's also not clear how much relevance this science-fictional scenario has to people in the unglorious preposthuman present. Yes, we do have HRT and SRS, and these are magnificent acheivements for the grand cause of morphological freedom, and should be available on an informed-consent basis. It's definitely something.
 
 But it's also definitely not-everything. To get a sense of how far we have to go, I strongly recommend [Eliezer Yudkowsky's heartbreaking 2009 take on what an actually effective male-to-female sex change would take](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions).
 
-[TODO: I used to be more optimistic]
+In my youth (when I stood on the steps of the University library, pressed the copy of _The Singularity Is Near_ fast to my chest, and pretended I was Kathy), I used to be more optimistic about the future of human enhancement. "Oh, sure, that may be true of _present-day humans_, but _in general_ ..." actually felt like a relevant and useful form of argument to me.
+
+These days, I'm less likely to appeal to technologies that don't already exist. I think what changed is that as I read more and gained some personal experience with real-world technology development (albeit in mere software), I began to appreciate technology as specific, contingent developments with particular implementation details that someone had to work out, rather than as an unspecified generic force of everything getting better over time. _In principle_, everything not directly prohibited by the laws of physics is probably possible, but in practice, every capability depends on vast institutions and supply chains and knowledge that can be lost as well as gained.
+
+[...]
 
 It's worth considering that when it comes to _other_ standard transhumanist goals, we typically _don't_ take the possibility of technology opening up desireable new modes of existence as thereby implying that the goals can be achieved today by means of clever redefinitions of words—
 
 <p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
 
 <div class="dialogue">
-<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Alice</span>: Ever since I lost my mother, I knew I could not rest until Death itself is defeated!</p>
+<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Alice</span>: When I lost my mother, I knew I could not rest until Death itself is defeated!</p>
 
 <p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Bob</span>: But as long as you remember her, your mother lives on in you!</p>
 
@@ -143,6 +144,12 @@ The _Unit of Caring_ author continues:
 
 I would rather say that's a sign that we're facing an instance of the [Sorites paradox](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/), the ancient challenge to applying discrete categories to a continuous world. If one grain of sand doesn't make a heap (the argument goes), and the addition of one more grain of sand can't change whether something is a heap, then we can conclude from [the principle of mathematical induction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_induction) that no number _n_ ∈ ℕ of grains make a heap. (Or, alternatively, that the absence of any sand constitutes a ["heap of zero grains"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nso8WXdjHLLHkJKhr/the-conscious-sorites-paradox).)
 
-While the Sorites paradox is certainly an instructive exercise in the philosophy of language, its practical impact seems limited: most people find it more palatable to conclude that that the heap-ness is a somewhat fuzzy concept, rather than that the argument isn't actually about the amount of sand in a location. And if you bought a single grain of sand when someone asked you for a heap, they probably wouldn't hesistate to say, "That's not what I meant by _heap_ in this context _and you know it_."
+While the Sorites paradox is certainly an instructive exercise in the philosophy of language, its practical impact seems limited: most people find it more palatable to conclude that that the heap-ness is a somewhat fuzzy concept, rather than that the argument isn't actually about the amount of sand in a location. And if you brought a single grain of sand when someone asked you for a heap, they probably wouldn't hesistate to say, "That's not what I meant by _heap_ in this context _and you know it_."
+
+----
+
+on science being hard: http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/04/adult-neurogenesis-a-pointed-review/
+
+on AGP being a different thing: /2017/Jan/the-erotic-target-location-gift/
 
-http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/04/adult-neurogenesis-a-pointed-review/
+/2016/Oct/exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin/