Unfortunately—_deeply_ unfortunately—this is not a math blog. I _wish_ this were a math blog—that I lived in a world where I could afford to do math blogging for the greater glory of our collective understanding of greater reality. ("Gender?" I would say, confused if not slightly disgusted, "I barely _know_ her.") It would be a better way to live than being condemned to gender blogging in self-defense, hopelessly outgunned, outmanned, outnumbered, outplanned [in a Total Culture War](/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/) over [the future of](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/) [my neurotype-demographic](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/). But since I _do_, somehow, go on living like this—having briefly explained the theory, let's get back to the dreary, how do you say?—_application_.
-Defining sex in terms of gamete size or genitals or chromosomes is like the using the never-flipped first bit in our abstract example about the world of length-20 bitstrings. It's not that people _directly_ care about gametes or chromosomes or even gentials in most everyday situations. (You're probably not trying to mate with most of the people you meet in everyday situations, and sex chromosomes weren't discovered until the _20th_ century.) It's that that these are _discrete_ features that are [causally](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water) entangled with everything _else_ that differs between females and males—including many [correlated](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy-1) statistical differences of various [effect sizes](/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/), and differences that are harder to articulate or measure, and differences that haven't even been discovered yet (as gametes and chromosomes hadn't respectively been discovered yet in the 16th and 19th centuries) but can be theorized to exist because _sex_ is a very robust abstraction that you need in order to understand the design of evolved biological creatures.
+Defining sex in terms of gamete size or genitals or chromosomes is like the using the never-flipped first bit in our abstract example about the world of length-20 bitstrings. It's not that people _directly_ care about gametes or chromosomes or even genitals in most everyday situations. (You're probably not trying to mate with most of the people you meet in everyday situations, and sex chromosomes weren't discovered until the _20th_ century.) It's that that these are _discrete_ features that are [causally](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water) entangled with everything _else_ that differs between females and males—including many [correlated](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy-1) statistical differences of various [effect sizes](/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/), and differences that are harder to articulate or measure, and differences that haven't even been discovered yet (as gametes and chromosomes hadn't respectively been discovered yet in the 16th and 19th centuries) but can be theorized to exist because _sex_ is a very robust abstraction that you need in order to understand the design of evolved biological creatures.
Discrete features make for better word _definitions_ than high-dimensional statistical regularities, even if most of the everyday inferential utility of _using_ the word comes from the high-dimensional statistical correlates. A dictionary definition is just a helpful pointer to help people pick out "the same" [natural abstraction](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cy3BhHrGinZCp3LXE/testing-the-natural-abstraction-hypothesis-project-intro) in their _own_ world-model.
But because our brains are good at using sex-category words to simultaneously encode predictions about _both_ absolute discrete differences and high-dimensional statistical regularities of various effect sizes, without our being consciously aware of the cognitive work being done, it's easy to get confused by verbal gymnastics if you don't know the theory.
-I sometimes regret that so many of my attempts to talk about trans issues end up focusing on psychological sex differences. I guess I'm used to it now, but at first, this was a very weird position for me to be in! (For a long time, I [really didn't want to believe in psychological sex differences](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism).) But it keeps happening because it's a natural thing to _disagree_ about: the anatomy of pre-op trans women is not really in _dispute_, so the sex realist's contextual reply to "Why do you care what genitals someone might or might not have under their clothes?" often ends up appealing to some psychological dimension or another, to which the trans advocate [can counterreply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/), "Oh, you want to define gender based on psychology, then? But then the logic of your position forces you to conclude that butch lesbians aren't women! _Reductio ad absurdum!_"
+I sometimes regret that so many of my attempts to talk about trans issues end up focusing on psychological sex differences. I guess I'm used to it now, but at first, this was a weird position for me to be in! (For a long time, I [really didn't want to believe in psychological sex differences](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism).) But it keeps happening because it's a natural thing to _disagree_ about: the anatomy of pre-op trans women is not really in dispute, so the sex realist's contextual reply to "Why do you care what genitals someone might or might not have under their clothes?" often ends up appealing to some psychological dimension or another, to which the trans advocate [can counterreply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/), "Oh, you want to define gender based on psychology, then? But then the logic of your position forces you to conclude that butch lesbians aren't women! _Reductio ad absurdum!_"
This is a severe misreading of the sex-realist position. No one wants to _define_ "gender" based on psychology. Mostly, definitions aren't the kind of thing you should have preferences about: you can't coerce reality into changing by choosing different definitions! Rather, there's _already_ a multivariate distribution of bodies and minds in the world, and good definition choices help us coordinate the concepts in different people's heads into a _shared_ map of that territory.
It's possible that the categories that are salient in a particular culture ought to be revised in order to fit the world better: maybe we _should_ talk about categories like "masculine people" (including both typical men, and butch lesbians) more often! But the typical trans advocate shell game of just replacing "sex" with "gender" and letting people choose their "gender" isn't going to fly, because sex actually exists and we have a need for language to talk about it—or maybe, the fact that we have a need for language to talk about it (the fact that the information we observe admits compression) is what it means for sex to "actually" "exist".
-One of the standard gender-critical complaints about trans ideology is that it's sexist on account of basing its categories on regressive sex stereotypes. On the categories-as-compression view, we can see that this complaint has something to it: if you remove the discrete, hard-line differences like genitals and chromosomes from your definitions of _female_ and _male_, there's nothing _left_ for the words to attach to but mere statistical regularities—that is, stereotypes.
+One of the standard gender-critical complaints about trans ideology is that it's sexist on account of basing its categories on regressive sex stereotypes. On the categories-as-compression view, we can see that this complaint has something to it: if you remove the discrete, hard-line differences like genitals and chromosomes from your definitions of _female_ and _male_, there's nothing _left_ for the words to attach to but mere statistical tendencies—that is, stereotypes.
-Another classic gender-critical trope is that sex just is about
+Conversely, another classic gender-critical trope is that sex is _just_ about genitals and chromosomes and gamete size. Any "thicker" concept of what it means to be a woman or man is sexist nonsense. With some trepidation, I also don't think that one's going to fly. It's hard to see why most gender-critical feminists would care so much about maintaining single-sex spaces, if sex were strictly a matter of genitals or (especially) chromosomes or gamete size; it would seem that they too want mere statistical tendencies to be part of the concept.
+This is somewhat ideologically inconvenient for antisexists like I used to be, insofar as it entails biting the bullet on on masculine women and feminine men being less "real" women and men, respectively. Are our very concepts not then reinforcing an oppressive caste system?
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-Three high-level issues to address—
- * Are stereotypes part of the meaning of a word, and is that bad?
- * Reply to "So lesbians aren't women, nyah nyah"
- * Trying to remove the discrete stuff from the definition leaves you with only stereotypes!!
- * gender identity as cognitive illusion
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-Maybe play up the symmetry—
-A thing that trans activists get wrong: "lesbians aren't women" reductio
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-A thing that gender-criticals get wrong: yes, "stereotypes" are part of the concept; it couldn't actually be otherwise
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-(Let's [not play dumb about the significance of intersex conditions](https://colinwright.substack.com/p/sex-chromosome-variants-are-not-their) today.)
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-/2019/Dec/more-schelling/
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i2dfY65JciebF3CAo/empty-labels
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-> you can _select_ a sample from a different multivariate distribution to match a sample from another distribution along one or a few given dimensions, the samples are going to differ in the variables that you didn't select
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- * our brains are good at using the same word to represent absolute differences and low-effect-size stereotypes; it kind of has to be this way, but can result in puzzles and paradoxes if you don't know what's going on
- * the paradoxes go away when you stop down and just think about the high-dimensional probability distribution
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-### One example: why lesbians are women (do ... do I even need to explain this?)
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- * when you point out masculine behavior of AGP TW as evidence for them being male, people will say, "Ah, but lesbians are masculine, too; are you saying that lesbians aren't women???"
- * reply: we want the word "women" to refer to the actually-biological-female cluster, which is discretely identifiable, but overlaps with the male cluster if you look at a chosen subspace of individual psychology variables
- * maybe in some contexts you might want to talk about "masculine people" that includes prototypical men and butch lesbians
- * sketch out a toy model with numbers
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-How I put it in the comments—
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-http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/Mar/point-man/#isso-171
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-> our brains are good at using a single concept to simultaneously represent discrete differences (genitals, chromosomes) and mere statistical differences (of various effect sizes) that have a lot of overlap—basically, stereotypes.
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-> (Such that if you only know someone's sex and nothing else about them, your expectations are going to come out of a probability distribution centered on stereotypes, but this doesn't doom us to an oppressive caste system as long as you can update on individuating information: outliers of various degrees along various dimensions merely require a slightly longer message to describe rather than getting shot.)
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-> People who are sympathetic to people who wish they could change sex imagine that they can safely delete the discrete differences from the concept-definition—but if you do that, then, as you describe, there's nothing left for the concept to attach to, except the things we know how to change (people with currently estrogen-dominant hormone systems?), and stereotypes. But people can't say out loud that they're trying to re-anchor the concepts onto smaller-effect-size stereotypes, because they haven't forgotten that the previous iteration of the ideology held sexism is bad. So we end up with a huge amount of doublethink and dissembling,
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+I don't think the situation is quite that bad, as long as the map–territory relationship stays mostly one-directional: the map describing the territory, rather than the territory being bulldozed to suit the map—outliers needing a slightly longer message length to describe, rather than being shot. In my antisexist youth, I don't think I would have wanted to concede even that much, but I couldn't then have explained how that would work mathematically—and I still can't. Let me know if you figure it out.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff