The same general principles of reasoning apply to psychological theories, even though psychology is a much more difficult subject matter and our available theories are correspondingly much poorer and vaguer. There's no way to make precise quantitative predictions about a human's behavior the way we can about the movements of the planets, but we still know _some_ things about humans, which get expressed as high-level generalities that nevertheless admit many exceptions: if you don't have the complicated true theory that would account for everything, then simple theories plus noise are better than _pretending not to have a theory_. As you learn more, you can try to pin down a more complicated theory that explains some of the anomalies that looked like "noise" to the simpler theory.
-What does this look like for psychological theories? In the crudest form, when we notice a pattern of traits that go together, we give it a name.
+What does this look like for psychological theories? In the crudest form, when we notice a pattern of traits that go together, we give it a name. Sometimes people go through cycles of elevated arousal and hyperactivity, punctuated by pits of depression. After seeing the same distinctive patterns in many such cases, doctors decided to reify it as a diagnosis, ["bipolar disorder"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipolar_disorder).
+If we notice further patterns _within_ the group of cases that make up a category, we can spit it up into sub-categories: for example, a diagnosis of bipolar I requires a full-blown manic episode, but hypomania and a major depressive episode qualify one for bipolar II.
-[If a category seems to come into types, you can reify those as separate sub-categories, like bipolar I and II. The idea that there's something to the idea that bipolar I and II are "different", is s]
+Is the two-type typology of bipolar disorder a good theory? Are bipolar I and bipolar II "really" different conditions, or slightly different presentations of "the same" condition, part of a "bipolar spectrum" along with cyclothymia? In our current state of knowledge, this is debateable! But if our understanding of the etiology of bipolar disorder were to advance, and we were to find evidence that that bipolar I has a different underlying _causal structure_ from bipolar II (with decision-relevant consequences, like responding to different treatments), that would support a policy of thinking and talking about them as mostly separate things (even while they have enough in common to both be kinds of "bipolar").
-[In the case of male-to-female transsexualism, straight and gay trans women seem different. Many authors agree to this simple story! e.g., Veale, Vitale, possibly Serano 2020 —but they have different detailed theories as to how the two clusters come about—the simple story is a useful approximation even if you don't know how to pin down the more detailed story]
+With a _sufficiently_ detailed causal story, you could even dispense with the high-level categories altogether and directly talk about the consequences of different neurotransmitter counts or whatever—but lacking that supreme precise knowledge, it's useful to sum over the details into high-level categories, and meaningful to debate whether a one-type or two-type typology is a better statistical fit to the underlying reality whose fine details remain unknown.
-[I think I do have a pretty good guess at what's going on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_graph ]
+In the case of male-to-female transsexualism, we notice a pattern where androphilic and non-androphilic trans women seem to be different from each other—not just in their sexuality, but also in their age of transition, interests, and personality. Many authors have noticed this clustering of traits, [while disagreeing about the underlying causality](/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/).
-
+[Veale-Clarke-Lomax identity-defence]
+[Vitale]
+[Serano 2020]
+[Blanchard]
-Let me explain.
+How seriously should we take the two-type typology?
+
+the simple story is a useful approximation even if you don't know how to pin down the more detailed story
+I think I do have a pretty good guess at what's going on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_graph ]
+
+
+Let me explain.
[What are the reasons transitioning could possibly make sense to someone?—]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff