1 Title: The Categories Were Made for Man in Order to Make Predictions
4 Tags: epistemology, Scott Alexander, sex differences, two-type taxonomy
7 > I said, "The truth is whatever you can get away with."
9 > "No, that's journalism. The truth is whatever you can't escape."
11 > —_Distress_ by Greg Egan
13 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.
15 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 intrinsic, eternal fact of the matter as to where one country starts and another begins.
17 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 gerrymandered redefinitions of everyday concepts.
19 Alexander goes on to attempt to use the categories-are-relative-to-goals insight to rebut skeptics of transgenderedness:
21 > I've seen one anti-transgender argument around that I take very seriously. The argument goes: we are rationalists. Our entire shtick is trying to believe what's actually true, not on what we wish were true, or what our culture tells us is true, or what it's popular to say is true. If a man thinks he's a woman, then we might (empathetically) wish he were a woman, other people might demand we call him a woman, and we might be much more popular if we say he's a woman. But if we're going to be rationalists who focus on believing what's actually true, then we've got to call him a man and take the consequences.
23 > Thus Abraham Lincoln's famous riddle: "If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?" And the answer: "Four—because a tail isn't a leg regardless of what you call it."
27 > I take this argument very seriously, because sticking to the truth really is important. But having taken it seriously, I think it's seriously wrong.
29 > An alternative categorization system is not an error, and borders are not objectively true or false.
31 But this is just giving up _way_ too easily. The map is not the territory, and many very different kinds of maps can correspond to the territory in different ways—we have geographical maps, political maps, road maps, globes, _&c._—but that doesn't mean _no map is in error_. Rationalists can't insist on using the one true categorization system, because it turns out that—in all philosophical strictness—no such thing exists. But that doesn't release us from our sacred duty to describe what's actually true. It just leaves us faced with the _slightly more complicated_ task of describing the costs and benefits of different categorization systems with respect to different criteria.
33 There's no objective answer to the question as to whether we should pay more attention to an animal's evolutionary history or its habitat—but given one criterion or the other, we can say definitively that whales _are_ mammals but they're also _dag_/water-dwellers. And this isn't just a matter of [mere labels](http://lesswrong.com/lw/ns/empty_labels/) that contain no more information than we used to define them. The categories do cognitive work: given that we observe that whales are endotherms that nurse their live-born young, we can assign them to the category _mammal_ and predict—correctly—that they have hair and have a more recent last common ancestor with monkeys than with herring, even if we haven't yet seen the hairs or found the last common ancestor. Alternatively, given that we've been told that "whales" live in the ocean, we can assign them to the category _water-dwellers_, and predict—correctly—that they're likely to have fins or flippers, even if we've never actually seen a whale ourselves.
35 This works because, empirically, mammals have lots of things in common with each other and water-dwellers have lots of things in common with each other. If we [imagine entities as existing in a high-dimensional configuration space](http://lesswrong.com/lw/nl/the_cluster_structure_of_thingspace/), there would be a _mammals_ cluster (in the subspace of the dimensions that mammals are similar on), and a _water-dwellers_ cluster (in the subspace of the dimensions that water-dwellers are similar on), and whales would happen to belong to _both_ of them, in the way that the vector *x⃗* = [3.1, 4.2, −10.3, −9.1] ∈ ℝ⁴ is close to [3, 4, 2, 3] in the _x₁-x₂_ plane, but also close to [−8, −9, −10, −9] in the _x₃-x₄_ plane.
37 If different political factions are engaged in conflict over how to define the extension of some common word—common words being a scarce and valuable resource both culturally and [information-theoretically](http://lesswrong.com/lw/o1/entropy_and_short_codes/)—rationalists may not be able to say that one side is simply right and the other is simply wrong, but we can at least strive for objectivity in _describing the conflict_. Before shrugging and saying, "Well, this is a difference in values; nothing more to be said about it," we can talk about the detailed consequences of what is gained or lost by paying attention to some differences and ignoring others. That there exists an element of subjectivity in what you choose to pay attention to, doesn't negate the fact that there _is_ a structured empirical reality to be described—and not all descriptions of it are equally compact.
39 In terms of the Lincoln riddle: you _can_ call a tail a leg, but you can't stop people from _noticing_ that out of a dog's five legs, one of them is different from the others. You can't stop people from inferring decision-relevant implications from what they notice. (_Most_ of a dog's legs touch the ground, such that you'd have to carry the dog to the vet if one of them got injured, but the dog can still walk without the other, different leg.) And if people who work and live with dogs every day find themselves habitually distinguishing between the bottom-walking-legs and the back-wagging-leg, they _just might_ want _different words_ in order to concisely _talk_ about what everyone is thinking _anyway_.
43 So far, I probably haven't actually said anything that Alexander didn't already say in the original post. ("A category 'fish' containing herring, dragonflies, and asteroids is going to be stupid [...] it fails to fulfill any conceivable goals of the person designing it.") But it seems worth restating and emphasizing that categories derive their usefulness from the way in which they efficiently represent regularities in the real world, because on the topic of exactly how to apply these philosophical insights to transgender identity claims, Alexander strangely—uncharacteristically—doesn't seem to find it necessary to make any arguments about representing the real world, preferring instead to focus on the mere fact that some people strongly prefer [self-identity](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities)-based gender categories:
45 > 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.
47 This is true in a tautological sense: if you deliberately gerrymander 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/).
49 But it's not very interesting to people like rationalists—although apparently not all people who _self-identify_ as rationalists—who want to use concepts to _describe reality_.
51 Alexander gives an account of a woman whose ability to function at work was being disrupted by obsessive-compulsive fears of leaving her hair dryer on at home, whose problems were solved by the simple expediency of taking the hair dryer with her when leaving the house. Given that it _worked_ to resolve her distress, we shouldn't care that this isn't how problems that are categorized as _obsessive-compulsive disorder_ are "supposed" to be treated, and Alexander argues that the same should go for accepting transgender identity claims: if it _works_ for resolving people's gender dysphoria, why not?
53 The problem is that there are _significant disanalogies_ between leaving a hair dryer in the front seat of one's car, and collectively agreeing that gender should be defined on the basis of self-identity. Most significantly: the former has no appreciable effects on anyone but the person themselves; the latter affects _everyone who wants to use language to categorize humans by sex_. The words _man_ and _woman_ [are top-20 nouns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English#Nouns)! People need those nouns to describe their experiences!
55 Even if it's only a small cost to be socially required to say _woman_ and _she_ to refer to someone whom one would otherwise be inclined to call a _man_—and to let them in to any corresponding sex-segregated spaces, _&c._—that cost needs to be aggregated across everyone subject to it, like so many dust specks in their eyes. Imagine if the patient in the hair dryer story were obsessed with the fear not just that _she_ might accidentally leave her hair dryer plugged in unattended, but that that _someone_ might do so, and that it would burn down the whole city. In this slightly modified scenario, insisting that everyone in the city put their hair dryers in the front seat of their cars doesn't look like an appealing solution.
57 It's important to stress that this should _not_ be taken to mean that transgender identities should necessarily be rejected! (Bad arguments can be made for true propositions just as easily as false ones.) As Alexander briefly alludes to late in the post ("I could relate this [...] to the various heavily researched apparent biological correlates of transgender"), a _non_-question-begging argument for accepting trans people as their target gender would appeal to the ways in which this is really is a natural categorization.
59 The pre-verbal, subconscious, [System 1](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dual_process_theory&oldid=820860981#Systems) process by which we notice someone's features (breasts, facial hair, voice, facial structure, gendered clothing or grooming cues, any number of [subtle differences in motor behaviors](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/all-the-wrong-moves/) that your perceptual system can pick up on without you being consciously aware of them, _&c._), mentally categorize them as a _woman_ or a _man_, and use that category to guide our interactions with them, isn't subject to conscious control—but, for most purposes in day-to-day public life, it's also not _directly_ focused on genitalia or chromosomes.
61 So a natal female who presents to the world as a man, and whom other people _model_ as a man on a System 1 level with no apparent incongruities, might be said to be a man in the sense of social gender (though not in the sense of "biologically male adult human"), because that's the mental category that people are actually using for him, and therefore, the social class that he actually functions as a member of. Essentially, this is the argument that offers a photograph of a passing trans person, and says, "C'mon, do you _really_ want to call [this person](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_Angel#/media/File:Buck_Angel_Headshot.jpg) a woman?"
63 Well, no. But the point is that this is an _empirical_ argument for why successfully socially-transitioned trans people fit into _existing_ concepts of gender, _not_ a redefinition of top-20 nouns by fiat in order to avoid hurting someone's feelings. It works _because_ and _to the extent that_ transitioning actually works. To the extent that this fails to be true of self-identified trans people or some subset thereof—for example, insofar as physical transition _isn't_ always effective, or insofar as people _do_ have legitimate use-cases for biological-sex classifications that aren't "fooled" by hormones and surgery—then the conclusion is correspondingly weakened.
67 Another factor affecting the degree to which trans people form a more natural category with their identified gender than their natal physiological sex is the nature of transgenderedness itself. If gender dysphoria is caused by a brain-restricted intersex condition, such that trans people's psychology is much more typical of the other physiological sex—that is, if the "woman trapped in a man's body" trope is basically accurate—that would tend to weigh in favor of accepting transgender identity claims: trans women would be "coming from the same place" as cis women in a very literal psychological sense, despite their natal physiology. On the other hand,
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blob