Title: Commentary on David R. MacIver on Gendering
Date: 2020-01-01
Category: commentary
-Tags: sex differences
+Tags: sex differences, discourse
Status: draft
-Mathematician–programmer David R. MacIver (author of the [Hypothesis](https://hypothesis.works/) property-testing framework and the _tragically_ [unfinished](https://www.drmaciver.com/2017/09/programmer-at-large-progress-report/) serial ["Programmer-at-Large"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9233966/chapters/20941043)) has a [new post on the social process of gendering](https://www.drmaciver.com/2019/09/gendering/).
+Mathematician–programmer David R. MacIver (author of the [Hypothesis](https://hypothesis.works/) property-testing framework and the _tragically_ [unfinished](https://www.drmaciver.com/2017/09/programmer-at-large-progress-report/) serial novella ["Programmer-at-Large"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9233966/chapters/20941043)) has a [post on the social process of gendering](https://www.drmaciver.com/2019/09/gendering/).
Overall, I really like this post! [...]
-I guess my main question is, what's with the heroic efforts to avoid acknowledging the concept of biological sex?
+I guess my main question is—what's with the heroic efforts to avoid acknowledging the concept of _biological sex_?
Right? The question of what gender is "seems to be a very hard one to answer well," MacIver writes. Is it? What's wrong with ["social roles based on the sex of [a] person"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_gender_distinction)?
-MacIver is clearly not a biological sex denialist.
+Is it a mathematician thing? It feels cleaner to prove a abstract theorem "For all genders _g_ ...", eliding as irrelevant any details about the specific _g_ that are known to exist?
+MacIver is clearly not a biological sex denialist. He explicitly gives strength and height as examples of differences between women and men, and later acknowledges that many traits will continue to be gendered due to "underlying biological differences."
+The problem is that it's a conflationary to identify height as a "gender" difference in the context of a discourse where you're also [asserting that you believe that people are whatever gender they identify as](TODO: linky prior MacIver).
+
+Height is a statistical _sex_ difference (at Cohen's _d_≈1.7).
+
+[...]
+
+It's _incredibly rude_ to speculate about your interlocutor's psychological motives rather than taking their words at face value. But [this blog is not about](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/) _not_ being incredibly rude,
+
+[progressive spaces "police" unseeing sex!]
https://theotherlifenow.com/respectability-is-not-worth-it-reply-to-slatestarcodex/
+
+HSTS and AGP and tomboyism are _different problems_ that you need to reason about separately, rather than lumping them all together as "gender"
>
> —Sara Barellies, ["Gonna Get Over You"](https://genius.com/Sara-bareilles-gonna-get-over-you-lyrics)
-I mostly haven't been doing so well for the past ten months or so. I mean, I've always been a high-neuroticism person, but this has probably been a below-average year even by my standards, with _many_ hours of lost sleep, occasional crying bouts, _many, many_ hours of obsessive ruminating-while-pacing instead of doing my dayjob, and too long with a Sara Barellies song on loop to numb the pain. I've been reluctant to write about it in too much detail for poorly-understood psychological reasons. Maybe it would feel too much like attacking my friends?
+I mostly haven't been doing so well for the past ten months or so. I mean, I've always been a high-neuroticism person, but this has probably been a below-average year even by my standards, with hours of lost sleep, occasional crying bouts, _many, many_ hours of obsessive ruminating-while-pacing instead of doing my dayjob, and too long with a Sara Barellies song on loop to numb the pain. I've been reluctant to write about it in too much detail for poorly-understood psychological reasons. Maybe it would feel too much like attacking my friends?
-But this blog is not about _not_ attacking my friends. This blog is about the truth. For my own sanity, for my own emotional closure, I need to tell the story as best I can. If it's an _incredibly boring and petty_ story about me getting _unreasonably angry_ about philosophy-of-language minutiæ, well, you've been warned. If the story makes me look bad in the reader's eyes (because you think I'm crazy for getting so unreasonably angry about philosophy-of-language minutiæ), then I shall be happy to look bad for _what I actually am_. (If _telling the truth_ about what I've been obsessively preoccupied with all year makes you dislike me, then you probably _should_ dislike me. If you were to approve of me on the basis of _factually inaccurate beliefs_, then the thing of which you approve, wouldn't be _me_.)
+But this blog is not about _not_ attacking my friends. This blog is about the truth. For my own sanity, for my own emotional closure, I need to tell the story as best I can. If it's an _incredibly boring and petty_ story about me getting _unreasonably angry_ about philosophy-of-language minutiæ, well, you've been warned. If the story makes me look bad in the reader's eyes (because you think I'm _fucking crazy_ for getting so unreasonably angry about philosophy-of-language minutiæ), then I shall be happy to look bad for _what I actually am_. (If _telling the truth_ about what I've been obsessively preoccupied with all year makes you dislike me, then you probably _should_ dislike me. If you were to approve of me on the basis of _factually inaccurate beliefs_, then the thing of which you approve, wouldn't be _me_.)
So, I've spent basically my entire adult life in this insular little intellectual subculture that was founded in the late 'aughts on an ideal of _systematically correct reasoning_. Sure, anyone will _say_ that their beliefs are true, but you can tell most people aren't being very serious about it. _We_ were going to be serious: starting with the shared canon of knowledge of cognitive biases, reflectivity, and Bayesian probability theory bequeathed to us by our founder, _we_ were going to make serious [collective](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline) [intellectual progress](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Nu3wa6npK4Ry66vFp/a-sense-that-more-is-possible) in a way that had [never been done before](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-the-skulls/).
[...]
-(I'm avoiding naming anyone in this post even when linking to their public writings, in order to try to keep the _rhetorical emphasis_ on "true tale of personal heartbreak, coupled with sober analysis of the sociopolitical factors leading thereto." This isn't supposed to be character/reputation attack on my friends and intellectual heroes—or the closest analogues to "friends" or "heroes" I've got. I just don't _know how_ to tell the true tale of personal heartbreak without expressing some degree of disappointment in some people's characters. It is written that ["almost no one is evil; almost everything is broken."](https://blog.jaibot.com/). And [the _first_ step](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uHYYA32CKgKT3FagE/hold-off-on-proposing-solutions) towards fixing that which is broken, is _describing the problem_.)
+(I'm avoiding naming anyone in this post even when linking to their public writings, in order to try to keep the _rhetorical emphasis_ on "true tale of personal heartbreak, coupled with sober analysis of the sociopolitical factors leading thereto." This isn't supposed to be character/reputation attack on my friends and intellectual heroes. I just don't _know how_ to tell the true tale of personal heartbreak without expressing some degree of disappointment in some people's characters. It is written that ["almost no one is evil; almost everything is broken."](https://blog.jaibot.com/). And [the _first_ step](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uHYYA32CKgKT3FagE/hold-off-on-proposing-solutions) towards fixing that which is broken, is _describing the problem_.)
[...]
One might respond with, "But there's a lot of cis women who you _also_ wouldn't date. Therefore, while you're allowed to not date trans women if that's your preference, you can't say it's because they're not _women_."
-So, I think there's actually a [statistically sophisticated reply to this](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy) which I really need to elaborate on more in future posts. To be sure, our man is just relying on his intuitive perception and probably doesn't _know_ the statistically sophisticated reply[ref]Although I would argue that the sophisticated statistics are part of the cognitive-scientific _explanation_ of what he perceives.[/ref]—but one also hasn't given him a _reason_ to trust clever verbal arguments over his own perception.
+So, I think there's actually a [statistically sophisticated reply to this](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy) which I really need to elaborate on more in future posts. To be sure, our man is just relying on his intuitive perception and probably doesn't _know_ the statistically sophisticated reply[ref]Although I would argue that the sophisticated statistics are part of the cognitive-scientific _explanation_ of what he perceives.[/ref]—but it's not clear that we've given him much of a reason to trust our clever verbal arguments over his own perception.
I happily agree that fully consensual gender is a _coherent_ position. That doesn't make it _feasible_. _How_ are you going to maintain that social equilibrium without it being _immediately_ destroyed by normal people who _have eyes_ and don't care about clever philosophical definition-hacking mind games the way that readers of this blog do?
-That's not a rhetorical question. In the case of fiat currency, the question _actually has a literal answer_, although I personally am not well-versed enough in economic history to tell it. _Somehow_, societies have evolved from a state in which the idea of paper currency would have provoked a "How dumb do you think I am?" reaction, to the present state where everyone except a few thoroughly marginalized
-
-
+That's not a rhetorical question. In the case of fiat currency, the question _actually has a literal answer_, although I personally am not well-versed enough in economic history to tell it. _Somehow_, societies have evolved from a condition in which the idea of paper currency would have provoked a "How dumb do you think I am?" reaction, to the present condition where everyone and her dog accepts paper money as money without a thought—where the "somehow" probably involves the use of state violence to enforce banking regulations.
[TODO: it's possible that I'm underestimating the social-engineering feats that might be possible—it's kind of surprising that fiat money equilibria aren't also destroyed by a "How dumb do you think we are?" faction—but fiat money equilibria evolved over a long time for complicated reasons; you need more of an actual argument than "maybe things would be better"]
+
+what kind of monster could possibly be against _utility_?!
+
the girl in the [G.I.R.L.](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GIRL)
transitioning has _costs_; maybe you think some of those costs are illigitimate and should be game-theoretically resisted (Society's transphobia is a terrorirst who you shouldn't negotiate), but first of all, "People are good at noticing each other's sex" isn't transphobia, and second, even if you're doing game-theoretic defiance, you should make that explicit
double-perceception of bad faith: I don't believe "categories are arbitrary" is intellectually honest (and I'm right); my interlocutors don't believe that I'm really this upset about the philosophy of language
+
+I have 3,405 users/7,172 sessions this year, S.'s prediction lists have been 50/50 on "At least one SSC post > 100,000 hits: 50%"
-(correct errors in "Does General Intelligence ...?")
+Terminology Proposal: "Developmental Sex"
Self-Identity Is a Schelling Point
-On the Argumentative Form "Super-proton Things Tend to Come in Varieties"
Reply to Ozymandias on Fully Consensual Gender
+On the Argumentative Form "Super-proton Things Tend to Come in Varieties"
"I Tell Myself to Let the Story End"; Or, A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
-
-----
Reading Comprehension Is Rape Culture
Trying to Be Explicit
-Terminology Gap: "Biological vs. Natal" (solution: "Developmental")
Instrumental Categories, and War
A Science Fiction Story Idea I'm Not Skilled Enough to Write
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff