content/drafts/taxometrics-and-the-fallacy-of-the-insufficiently-relevant-insufficiently-multivariate-experiment.md

   1 Title: Taxometrics and the Fallacy of the Insufficiently Relevant, Insufficiently Multivariate Experiment
   2 Date: 2021-01-31
   3 Category: commentary
   4 Tags: categorization, epistemology, sex differences, Scott Alexander
   5 Status: draft
   6
   7 "Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Taxometrics"
   8 https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions
   9
  10 > They also have a category called "gender". They say they included measures like "femininity" and "sex-stereotyped activities" in there–I can't find more specifics. It has a CCFI of 0.42 with confidence interval including 0.5, so looks slightly more dimensional, but can't quite rule out it being slightly more categorical.
  11
  12 > If anyone ever demands you have an opinion on the question "is binary gender real?", I think the most scientifically-supported answer would be "it has a Comparative Curve Fit Index of 0.42 plus or minus 0.1, which means it trends towards dimensionality but taxonicity cannot be ruled out".
  13
  14 https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/630034077642358784/i-think-ive-been-looking-for-something-like
  15 https://archive.is/GOSJW
  16 https://web.archive.org/web/20201005072121/https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/630034077642358784/i-think-ive-been-looking-for-something-like
  17
  18 Scott being more forthcoming on the scratchpad is a pattern—
  19 https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/143717931811/five-short-poems-about-what-if-people-call