From f09f897a635cf00d8b3a5fb4c84b5562bc9eadf0 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Sat, 4 Apr 2020 16:11:05 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] better wordcount for "... to Make Predictions" ref in "Reply to the Unit" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit I don't know where I got the "7500" from? When I copy the text (incl. footnotes) into Emacs and M-= it, I get 6558, and `wc` gives 6522—maybe some other algorithm I used at the time counted "http://" as a word when these didn't? --- .../2018/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females.md | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/content/2018/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females.md b/content/2018/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females.md index 53a0def..810ef06 100644 --- a/content/2018/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females.md +++ b/content/2018/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females.md @@ -27,7 +27,7 @@ One might counterargue that this is unjustifiably assuming "biologically female" > 1) The way we draw categories in biology is a social decision we make for social and cultural reasons, it isn’t a feature of the biology itself. A different sort of society might categorize infertile humans as a separate gender, for example, and that'd be as justified by the biology as our system. Or have 'prepubescent' be a gender, or 'having living offspring' be a gender—there are a million things that these categories could just as reasonably, from the biology, have been drawn around. -I've addressed this class of argument at length (about 7500 words) in a previous post, ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), but to summarize _briefly_, while I _agree_ that categories can be defined in many ways to suit different cultural priorities, it's also the case that not all possible categories are equally useful, because the cognitive function of categories is to group similar things together so that we can make similar predictions about them, and not every possible grouping of entities yields a "tight" distribution of predictions that can be usefully abstracted over. +I've addressed this class of argument at length (about 6500 words) in a previous post, ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), but to summarize _briefly_, while I _agree_ that categories can be defined in many ways to suit different cultural priorities, it's also the case that not all possible categories are equally useful, because the cognitive function of categories is to group similar things together so that we can make similar predictions about them, and not every possible grouping of entities yields a "tight" distribution of predictions that can be usefully abstracted over. A free-thinking biologist certainly _could_ choose to reject the orthodoxy of grouping living things by ancestry and reproductive isolation and instead choose to study living things that are yellow, but their treatises would probably be difficult to follow, because "living things that are yellow" is intrinsically a much less cohesive subject matter than, say, "birds": experience with black crows is probably going to be _more_ useful when studying yellow canaries than experience with yellow daffodils—even if, _in all philosophical strictness_, there are a million things that these categories could have been drawn around, and who can say but that some hypothetical other culture might have chosen color rather than ancestry as the true determinant of "species"? -- 2.17.1