<a id="post-ideas-list"></a>
- * I still need to finish drafting my reply to [Ozy's reply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) to [my reply](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) to [the immortal Scott Alexander](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/)
+ * I still need to finish drafting my reply to [Ozy's reply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) to [my reply](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) to [the immortal Scott Alexander](http://web.archive.org/web/20200610230130/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/)
* I've got ~4800 words drafted, but it needs a _lot_ more work in order to make it a maximally clear and maximally defensible blog post
* A _brief_ (only ~350 words) summary—
* I hopefully-accurately summarize Ozy as trying to make a _reductio ad absurdum_ argument, claiming that my arguments relying on the relevance of psychological sex differences would imply that lesbians aren't women, which is absurd.
* a technical post about how imperfect measurements are subject to [regression to the mean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean), which (unfortunately! _really genuinely_ unfortunately!) quantitatively weakens the standard reassurance of, "Oh, no one should feel threatened by discussion of group differences, because the statistics obviously don't apply to any one individual"
* I haven't done any serious math in a while and I'm afraid that learning and explaining the details here could take me _many_ hours
* a technical post about using [naïve Bayes models](http://lesswrong.com/lw/o8/conditional_independence_and_naive_bayes/) for sex categorization
- * I never got very far into [_Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality_](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/probabilistic-graphical-models) (I know; I like my title better), but I'd like to dig into it again if I can somehow find the time
+ * <a id="daphne-koller-and-the-methods"></a>I never got very far into [_Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality_](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/probabilistic-graphical-models) (I know; I like my title better), but I'd like to dig into it again if I can somehow find the time
* a post about how I'm nervous about Codes of Conduct in the open-source world being used as an ideological-conformity enforcement mechanism, in contrast to their laudable ostensible purpose of preventing harrassment, _&c._ (working title: "Codes of Convergence; Or, [Smile More](https://genius.com/7888863)")
* a critical appraisal of the social phenomenon of self-declared non-binary gender identities (working title: "'But I'm Not Quite Sure What That Means': Costs of Nonbinary Gender as a Social Technology")
* a post about the mechanisms of social change and how there might be a role for a _very narrowly-targeted_ form of political activism where you try to give people more accurate factual information, rather than lobbying for any particular concrete policy (working title: "An Infovist's Advisory; Or, Standing Athwart History Yelling, 'Wait! I Like the Idea, but the Execution Needs Work!'")
So, I'm an intellectual. I _realize_ very well that "It's obviously not true" isn't an argument that someone could engage with. So I do make arguments. I try very hard to be careful to explain the empirical claims I'm making and point to evidence, and try to anticipate and disclaim in advance the most probable misinterpretations of what I'm saying, and demonstrate that I understand that words can be used in many ways depending on context, but that I'm trying to use language to point to a particular empirical statistical structure in the world, and that becomes a lot more cumbersome to express if I'm not allowed to use this word with this widely-used definition/[extension](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions) ...
-I'm not perfect. Especially in real-time discussions (text or meatspace), I can often look back and point to things that I said that were wrong, and know that I have sinned: "Oh, that wasn't quite fair of me; oh, that was kind of [bravery-debatey](http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/18/against-bravery-debates/) of me; oh, I should have more carefully distinguished between those claims."
+I'm not perfect. Especially in real-time discussions (text or meatspace), I can often look back and point to things that I said that were wrong, and know that I have sinned: "Oh, that wasn't quite fair of me; oh, that was kind of [bravery-debatey](http://web.archive.org/web/20200618055932/https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/18/against-bravery-debates/) of me; oh, I should have more carefully distinguished between those claims."
I'm not perfect, but I think I'm _pretty good_. Even if I don't agree with someone about the facts—even if I don't agree with someone about what [policy trade-offs](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided) to make, including policy trade-offs about how to use language—surely, _surely_ we can at least agree on my meta-level point about _cognitive_ costs being part of the policy trade-off about how to use language?
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff