Tags: epistemology, Ozy, sex differences
Status: draft
-> With the Hopes that our World is built on
-> They were utterly out of touch,
-> They denied that the Moon could be defined to be Stilton;
-> They denied she identified as Dutch;
-> They denied that Wishes should be categorized as Horses;
-> They denied that a Pig could be stipulated to have Wings;
-> So we worshipped the Gods of the Market
-> Who promised these beautiful things.
->
-> —Rudyard Kipling, ["The Gods of the Copybook Headings"](http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm) (paraphrased)
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-## Prelude: on Charity Norms and Intepretive Labor Balance
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-This post is a reply to [friend of the blog](/tag/ozy/) Ozymandias's [reply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) to [my reply](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) to Scott Alexander's ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/). The reply ends up covering a lot of worldview-ground, so ideas in this post may be expanded upon in future posts.
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-Before anything else, I'd like to thank Ozy for their thoughtful reply. Substantive, longform engagement between contrasting viewpoints is a rare and beautiful thing that deserves to be socially rewarded so that we get more of it, thereby collectively becoming more likely to get things right [systematically rather than by coincidence](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/)!
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-saying something
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-we can't talk about bad faith
-playing chess with a pigeon, what the tortise said to Achilles
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-"from the merely naive to the dense to the outright vapid" insults violate a symmetry constraint
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-_people who think they're lizards_
-the real strength of "be charitable to those you disagree with" is that it forces you to clarify your ideas in order to defend against every possible absurd misinterpretation
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After summarizing the discussion so far, Ozy argues that my appeal to the relevance of pyschological sex differences commits me to an absurd conclusion—
Does the fact that it's possible to scrupulously rephrase any individual sentence to elide sex imply that the corresponding mental _representation_ of the concept of 'sex' is of little practical use? I don't think so, and I've tried, within the limits of my time and my writing ability, to explain why. But if some readers still aren't convinced—well, maybe I can live with that.
-"Winning" arguments is uninteresting, _especially_ arguments about definitions. Everyone knows that the same word can be used in many ways depending on context. What _matters_ is learning about reality, and finding concepts and representations that make reality _less_ confusing rather than _more_ confusing. If, after thousands of words of argument, someone _still_ thinks a concept that I find useful should not be used because I can't provide explicit necessary-and-sufficient conditions to classify a series of ever-more obscure and contrived edge cases and "gotcha"s—or because [it hurts someone's feelings](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/)—then I guess my response is to shrug and say, "Okay, whatever, I'll continue modeling reality using my concepts, and I wish you good luck trying to do the same with yours."
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-[TODO: transition sentence about how the map is part of the territory]
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+[...]
-I think my feelings for Jessica represent an interesting interaction of the conflict between sex and "gender": my high regard for her is happening because she passes so well that my brain is tagging her as a woman (and women who understand LessWrong stuff to that level are sacred and precious), but I don't feel creepy about so openly expressing it to her or others, because I'm less afraid of hurting her, because I expect that whatever anti-rape adaptation brainware women have (that result in strange males being labeled "creepy" threats) she ... probably just doesn't have it
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-## How dumb do you think we are?
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-_no utilitarian calculation has taken place_
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-(I _also_ haven't done a calculation, but I'm not a utilitarian; I'm an aspiring epistemic rationalist)
\ No newline at end of file
+_people who think they're lizards_
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff