Title: More Schelling
-Date: 2020-01-01
+Date: 2019-12-22 05:00
Category: other
Tags: categorization, game theory
-Status: draft
[(Previously.)](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/)
This explains why the trans-rights fight ends up focusing on language, rather than any particular policy where "gender" is used to make a decision. "What's the harm in calling people what they really want to be called?" goes the argument. "You can still say _cis woman_ when you want to be more specific."
-It doesn't work like that. When you [change the category associated with](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes) a [short codeword](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes), you're imposing on all the downstream predictions and decisions people were already using that category/word for—nor have people catalogued all those decisions in advance; they just expect to be able to think using [top-20 nouns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English#Nouns) (coordination signals) that came with their native tongue, much as how they expect to be able to think using clock time without needing to compute Earth's rate of rotation measured relative to the fixed stars.
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+It doesn't work like that. When you [change the category associated with](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes) a [short codeword](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes), you're imposing on all the downstream predictions and decisions people were _already_ using that category/word for—nor have people catalogued all those decisions in advance; they just expect to be able to think using [top-20 nouns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English#Nouns) (coordination signals) that came with their native tongue, much as how they expect to be able to think using clock time without needing to compute Earth's rate of rotation relative to the fixed stars. The skew between daylight-savings time and sidereal time would have to get pretty extreme before people started changing their schedules—or, if that were somehow forbidden, to deny the clock's authority and just start using the sun.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff