Then if you wanted an efficient encoding to talk about the two and only two _clusters_ of bitstrings—the mostly-zeros (a majority of `00000000000000000000` plus a few exceptions with a few bits flipped) and the mostly-ones (a majority of `11111111111111111111` plus a few exceptions with a few bits flipped)—you might want to use the first bit as the "definition" for your codewords—even if most of the various [probabilistic inferences that you wanted to make](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences) [on the basis of cluster-membership](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes) concerned bits other than the first. The majoritarian first bit, even if you don't care about it in itself, is a [_simple_ membership test](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) for the mostly-zeros/mostly-ones category system.
-Unfortunately—_deeply_ unfortunately—this is not a math blog. (I _wish_ this were a math blog—I wish I lived in a world where I could do math blogging for the greater glory of our collective understanding of greater reality, rather 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 [my neurotype-demographic](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/).) So, having briefly explained the theory, let's get back to the dreary, how do you say—_application_.
+Unfortunately—_deeply_ unfortunately—this is not a math blog. (I _wish_ this were a math blog—I wish I lived in a world where I could do math blogging for the greater glory of our collective understanding of greater reality, rather 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 [my neurotype-demographic](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/).) So, 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 directly 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 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 gentials in most everyday situations. (You're probably not directly 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.
_One_ of the _many_ distinctions people sometimes want to make when thinking about the multivariate distribution of bodies and minds in the world, is that between the sexes. But sex is by no means the only way in which people differ! In many situations, you might want to categorize or describe people in many different ways, some more or less discrete _versus_ categorical, or high- _versus_ low-dimensional: age or race or religion or subculture or social class or intelligence or agreeableness.
+It's quite 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".
+If trans advocates go astray in disbelieving that
+gamete size or genitals or chromosomes someone has,
+
* Trying to remove the discrete stuff from the definition leaves you with only stereotypes!!
* gender identity as cognitive illusion
+Maybe play up the symmetry—
+A thing that trans activists get wrong: "lesbians aren't women" reductio
+
+
+
+A thing that gender-criticals get wrong: yes, "stereotypes" are part of the concept; it couldn't actually be otherwise
+
(Let's [not play dumb about the significance of intersex conditions](https://colinwright.substack.com/p/sex-chromosome-variants-are-not-their) today.)
/2019/Dec/more-schelling/
> (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.)
> 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