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?
-According to our definitions, yes. [But you don't actually want to call such a person a woman]
+According to our definitions, yes. But if you saw this person on the street, you wouldn't want to call them a woman, because everything about them that you can observe looks like that of an adult human male. If you're not a reproductive health lab tech and don't look at the photographs in biology textbooks, you'll never _see_ the gametes someone produces. (You can see male semen, but the individual spermatozoa are too small to look at without a microscope; people [didn't even know that ova and sperm _existed_ until the 17th century](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1439-0531.2012.02105.x).) Does that mean our common definition of _female_ isn't perfectly serviceable after all?
+
+No, because humans whose gametes produce eggs but appear male in every other aspect, don't exist in the real world. 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 messages that compress a lot of information](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length), but what it _means_ for the world to contain information is that some things in the world are vastly more probable than others.
+
+To see why, let's work in a restricted setting: the world of length-20 strings of bits. Suppose you wanted to devise an efficient _code_ to represent elements of this world with _shorter_ strings, such that you could say you saw a `01100` (in code, using just 5 bits) and the people listening to you would know that what you actually saw in the world was
+
-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 [...]
-To see why, let's work in a restricted setting: the world of length-20 bit strings.
Outline—
+(Let's [not play dumb about the significance of intersex conditions](https://colinwright.substack.com/p/sex-chromosome-variants-are-not-their) today.)
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i2dfY65JciebF3CAo/empty-labels
+
* 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
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff