+++ /dev/null
-Title: Subspatial Distribution Overlap and Cancellable Stereotypes; Or, Gender Identity as Cognitive Illusion
-Date: 2021-06-01 05:00
-Category: commentary
-Tags: categorization, epistemology
-Status: draft
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-A common misconception about words is that they have definitions: look up the definition, and that tells you everything to know about that word ... right?
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-It can't _actually_ work that way—not in principle. The problem—one of them, anyway—is that with a sufficiently active imagination, you can imagine edge cases that satisfy the definition, but aren't what you _really mean_ by the word.
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-What's a _woman_? An adult human female. (Let's [not play dumb about this](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/) today.) Okay, but then what's a _female_? One common and perfectly serviceable definition: of the sex that produces larger gametes—ova, eggs.
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-That's one common and perfectly serviceable definition in the paltry, commonplace _real_ world—but not in _the world of the imagination!_ We could _imagine_ the existence of a creature that looks and acts exactly like an adult human male down to the finest details, _except_ that its (his?) gonads produce eggs, not sperm! So that would be a _female_ and presumably a _woman_, according to our definitions, yes?
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-According to our definitions, yes. [But you don't actually want to call such a person a woman]
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-What this really shows is that the cognitive technology of "words" having "definitions" doesn't work in _the world of the imagination_, because _the world of the imagination_ encompasses (at a minimum) _all possible configurations of matter_. Words are short labels that [...]
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-To see why, let's work in a restricted setting: the world of length-20 bit strings.
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-Outline—
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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,
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff