Title: I Don't Do Policy
-Date: 2021-06-01 05:00
+Date: 2021-05-25 05:00
Category: commentary
Tags: politics
Status: draft
-Something about my writing that tends to confuse people, that I need to clarify briefly: people keep expecting me to come out with some sort of policy prescription, whereas I see myself as trying to _describe_ what's actually going on in the world without being delusional about how much control I have over it. I think my account of what's actually going on is a _relevant input_ into the computation of deciding what to do, but almost everything I say is at least one meta level up from any actual decisions.
+Something about my writing that tends to confuse people, that I need to clarify briefly: people keep expecting me to come out with some sort of policy prescription, whereas I see myself as trying to _describe_ what's actually going on in the world without being delusional about how much control I have over it. I think my account of what's actually going on is potentially a _relevant input_ into someone's computation of deciding what to do, but almost everything I say is at least one meta level up from any actual decisions. (And the only decisions I can _control_ are my own.)
People will see something like my ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), and ask, "Okay, but what's the _policy takeaway_ here? Are you saying we should refuse to use trans people's preferred pronouns? Are you saying non-well-passing trans people should detransition?"
I'm saying—exactly what I said in the 6000-word blog post. Are ... are you asking for a _summary_, or—
-"We're asking what you're telling us to _do_."
+"We're asking what you're telling us we should _do_."
-I don't know what _you_ should do! Why would I know that? I'm _saying_ that useful words correspond to predictively useful concepts, and that biological sex is a predictively useful concept, and that there are at least two distinct classes of psychological motivation for why some males wish they could change sex, one of which is not an intersex condition, and that our hormonal and surgical interventions for approximating a sex change are imperfect, such that [...]
+I don't know what _you_ should do! Why would I know that? (Also, what does this "should" thing even _mean_, anyway?)
+I'm _saying_ that useful words correspond to predictively useful concepts, and that biological sex is a predictively useful concept, and that there are at least two distinct classes of psychological motivation for why some males wish they could change sex, one of which is not an intersex condition, and that our currently-existing hormonal and surgical interventions for approximating a sex change are imperfect, such that there are some circumstances where someone making predictions or decisions about a trans person might want to base those predictions or decisions on their model of the person's [developmental sex](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/) rather than their target gender.
-That _doesn't_ mean that no one should ever try to approximate changing sex with hormonal and surgical interventions! A lot of people do it, and it seems to work out pretty well for some of them! Maybe _more_ people should do it!
+That _doesn't_ mean that no one should transition (_i.e._, try to approximate changing sex with hormonal and surgical interventions)! A lot of people do it—I'm not, like, denying that they _exist_. It seems to work out pretty well for many of them! Maybe _more_ people should do it!
-But in order for someone to _figure out_ whether or not to do it, and in order for other people to _decide_ how they want to respond to that, it would help if we could collectively _get the theory right_.
+But in order for someone to _figure out_ whether or not to do it—and in order for the people they interact with to figure out how to react—it would probably help to _get the theory right_: the biology and psychology and sociology and cognitive science and political science of what sex and gender actually _are_ in the real physical universe, and under what conditions they might actually in-fact be changed. Get the theory right _first_, and _then_ use the theory to make the best decisions. And if different people's interests come into conflict, such that there _is no_ collective decision that everyone is happy with, I can still hope to objectively catalogue the possible outcomes of the conflict—what happens if who wins, and what the space of available ceasefire agreements looks like.
+I'm a person, and this is a (deeply) personal blog. I have my own preferences and my own æsthetics, and no doubt that's going to occasionally bleed in to my attempts to get the theory right. (I wish I could claim otherwise—but that wouldn't be _true_.)
+[TODO: another sentence or two to tie this together ...]
-I don't do policy!
+But for the most part, I don't do policy!
+
+I've gotten praise from trans-activist types (_e.g._, for ["Lesser-Known Demand Curves"](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/)), and from gender-critical feminists (_e.g._, for ["Don't Negotiate With Terrorist Memeplexes"](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/)). If I could just get them to praise the _same post_, then I will have succeeded as a writer.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff