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).
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+If we notice further patterns _within_ the group of cases that make up a category, we can spit it up into sub-categories: a diagnosis of bipolar I requires a full-blown manic episode, but hypomania and a major depressive episode qualify one for bipolar II.
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+Are bipolar I and bipolar II "really" different conditions?
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-[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]
[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]
Let me explain.
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[What are the reasons transitioning could possibly make sense to someone?—]
[1. actually being really feminine]
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