"A Hill" Friday redemption block 1: not what I was trying to talk about

[Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git] / content / drafts / a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md

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@@ -236,6 +236,14 @@ Gatekeeping sessions finished, I finally started HRT at the end of December 2016
 
 [TODO: the story of my Facebook crusade, going off the rails, getting hospitalized]
 
+A striking pattern from my attempts to argue with people about the two-type taxonomy was the tendency for the conversation to get derailed on some variation of "Well, the word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that," often with a link to ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), a 2014 post by Scott Alexander arguing that because categories exist in our model of the world rather than the world itself, there's nothing wrong with simply _defining_ trans people to be their preferred gender, in order to alleviate their dysphoria.
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+This ... really wasn't what I was trying to talk about. _I_ thought I was trying to talk about autogynephilia as an _empirical_ theory of psychology, the truth or falsity of which obviously cannot be altered by changing the meanings of words.
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+Psychology is a complicated empirical science: no matter how "obvious" I might think something is, I have to admit that I could be wrong—[not just as an obligatory profession of humility, but _actually_ wrong in the real world](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GrDqnMjhqoxiqpQPw/the-proper-use-of-humility). If my fellow rationalists weren't sold on the two-types thing, I might be _disappointed_, [...]
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 [TODO: one thing that kept coming up during the private and Facebook discussions was this category boundary argument—including, e.g., with MIRI comms director Rob Bensinger. That part, I knew I could win]
 
 [TODO: so when I quit my job in order to write, the capstone of my sabbatical was to be "The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions", which I later followed up with the "Reply on Adult Human Females" ... and mostly, things were fine—I was disappointed with my impact, but it wasn't grounds to declare the whole community a fraud]