Title: The View From Nowhere Date: 2020-01-01 Category: commentary Tags: epistemology Status: draft Most disagreements are fake. Philosophers since the days Are trans women women? It depends on your decision criteria for applying the word _woman_ to something. (I say _decision criteria_ rather than _definition_ because [...]) You've Are women and men mostly similar, or mostly different? what counts as "similar" vs. "different" isn't scientifically interesting: the data speaks for itself; how you want to summarize the data to stupid humans who can't hold multivariate probability distributions in their head is a matter of politics OUTLINE OF POINTS TO HIT— * most disagreements are fake because people are squabbling over framing and culture and "ought" rather than difference in the same world that we all inhabit * specific example: are trans women women? * specific example: are men and women mostly different, or mostly the same? * framing disputes aren't _completely_ trivially reducible, because some categories are genuinely more natural than others * I'm not "above" normal human discourse—I have my preferences, which I'll fight for despite being idiosyncratic to me, and my views on which categories are natrual which I currently think are transpersonal, but _insofar as I can_, I want this blog to focus on describing the map, seeking the view from nowhere. * It helps to be _explicit_ about when you're being normative, and when you think you're describing the territory.