In light of these _empirical_ observations, Yudkowsky's suggestion that an ignorant comittment to an "Aristotelian binary" is the main reason someone might care about the integrity of women's sports, is revealed as an absurd strawman. This just isn't something any scientifically-literate person would write if they had actually thought about the issue _at all_, as contrasted to having _first_ decided (consciously or not) to bolster one's reputation among progressives by dunking on transphobes on Twitter, and wielding one's philosophy knowledge in the service of that political goal. The relevant empirical facts are _not subtle_, even if most people don't have the fancy vocabulary to talk about them in terms of "multivariate trait distributions".
-Yudkowsky's claim to merely have been standing up for the distinction between facts and policy questions doesn't seem credible: if you _just_ wanted to point out that the organization of sports leagues is a policy question rather than a fact (as if anyone had doubted this), why would you throw in the "Aristotelian binary" strawman and belittle the matter as "humorous"? There are a lot of issues that I don't _personally_ care much about, but I don't see anything funny about the fact that other people _do_ care.
+I spend a few paragraphs picking on the "sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary" remark because sports is a case where the relevant effect sizes are _so_ large as to make the point [hard for all but the most ardent gender-identity partisans to deny](/2017/Jun/questions-such-as-wtf-is-wrong-with-you-people/), but the point is very general. For example, the _function_ of sex-segrated bathrooms is to _protect females from males_, where "females" and "males" are natural clusters in configuration space that it makes sense to want words to refer to.
-I just spent a few paragraphs picking on the "sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary" remark, because sports is a case where the relevant effect sizes are _so_ large as to make the point [hard for all but the most ardent gender-identity partisans to deny](/2017/Jun/questions-such-as-wtf-is-wrong-with-you-people/).
+Yudkowsky's claim to merely have been standing up for the distinction between facts and policy questions doesn't seem credible. It is, of course, true that pronoun and bathroom conventions are policy decisions rather than a matter of fact, but it's _bizarre_ to condescendingly point this out _as if it were the crux of contemporary trans-rights debates_. Conservatives and gender-critical feminists _know_ that trans-rights advocates aren't falsely claiming that trans women have XX chromosomes. If you _just_ wanted to point out that the organization of sports leagues is a policy question rather than a fact (as if anyone had doubted this), why would you throw in the "Aristotelian binary" strawman and belittle the matter as "humorous"? There are a lot of issues that I don't _personally_ care much about, but I don't see anything funny about the fact that other people _do_ care.
-But the point is general. If _any_ concrete negative consequence of gender self-identity categories is going to be waved away with, "Oh, but that's a mere _policy_ decision that can be dealt with on some basis other than gender, and therefore doesn't count as an objection to the new definition of gender words", then it's not clear what the new definition is _for_. The policymaking categories we use to make decisions are _closely related_ to the epistemic categories we use to make predictions.
+If any concrete negative consequence of gender self-identity categories is going to be waved away with, "Oh, but that's a mere _policy_ decision that can be dealt with on some basis other than gender, and therefore doesn't count as an objection to the new definition of gender words", then it's not clear what the new definition is _for_. The policymaking categories we use to make decisions are _closely related_ to the epistemic categories we use to make predictions, and people need to be able to talk about them.
An illustrative example: like many gender-dysphoric males, I [cosplay](/2016/Dec/joined/) [female](/2017/Oct/a-leaf-in-the-crosswind/) [characters](/2019/Aug/a-love-that-is-out-of-anyones-control/) at fandom conventions sometimes. And, unfortunately, like many gender-dysphoric males, I'm _not very good at it_. I think someone looking at some of my cosplay photos and trying to describe their content in clear language—not trying to be nice to anyone or make a point, but just trying to use language as a map that reflects the territory—would say something like, "This is a photo of a man and he's wearing a dress." The word _man_ in that sentence is expressing _cognitive work_: it's a summary of the [lawful cause-and-effect evidential entanglement](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6s3xABaXKPdFwA3FS/what-is-evidence) whereby the photons reflecting off the photograph are correlated with photons reflecting off my body at the time the photo was taken, which are correlated with my externally-observable secondary sex characteristics (facial structure, beard shadow, _&c._), from which evidence an agent using an [efficient naïve-Bayes-like model](http://lesswrong.com/lw/o8/conditional_independence_and_naive_bayes/) can assign me to its "man" category and thereby make probabilistic predictions about some of my traits that aren't directly observable from the photo, and achieve a better [score on those predictions](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical/) than if the agent had assigned me to its "woman" category, where by "traits" I mean not (just) particularly sex chromosomes ([as Yudkowsky suggested on Twitter](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067291243728650243)), but the _conjunction_ of dozens or hundreds of observable measurements that are [_causally downstream_ of sex chromosomes](/2021/Sep/link-blood-is-thicker-than-water/): reproductive organs _and_ muscle mass (sex difference effect size of [Cohen's _d_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_size#Cohen's_d)≈2.6) _and_ Big Five Agreeableness (_d_≈0.5) _and_ Big Five Neuroticism (_d_≈0.4) _and_ short-term memory (_d_≈0.2, favoring women) _and_ white-to-gray-matter ratios in the brain _and_ probable socialization history _and_ [any number of other things](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_human_physiology)—including differences we might not necessarily currently know about, but have prior reasons to suspect exist: no one _knew_ about sex chromosomes before 1905, but given all the other systematic differences between women and men, it would have been a reasonable guess (that turned out to be correct!) to suspect the existence of some sort of molecular mechanism of sex determination.
If you were Alice, and a _solid supermajority_ of your incredibly smart, incredibly philosophically sophisticated friend group _including Eliezer Yudkowsky_ (!!!) seemed to behave like Bob (and reaped microhedonic social rewards for it in the form of, _e.g._, hundreds of Twitter likes), that would be a _pretty worrying_ sign about your friends' ability to accomplish intellectually hard things (_e.g._, AI alignment), right? Even if there isn't any pressing practical need to discriminate between dogs and cats, the _problem_ is that Bob is [_selectively_](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/) using his sophisticated philosophy-of-language insight to try to _undermine Alice's ability to use language to make sense of the world_, even though Bob obviously knows goddamned well what Alice was trying to say; it's _incredibly_ obfuscatory in a way that people would not tolerate in almost _any_ other context.
+It makes sense that Yudkowsky might perceive political constraints on what he might want to say in public. (Despite my misgivings, and the fact that it's basically a running joke at this point, this blog is still published under a pseudonym; it would be hypocritical of me to accuse someone of cowardice about what they're willing to attach their real name to, especially when you look at what happened to the _other_ Harry Potter author.)
+But if Yudkowsky didn't want to get into a distracting political fight about a topic, then maybe the responsible thing to do would have been to just not say anything about the topic, rather than engaging with the _stupid_ version of the opposition and stonewalling with "That's a policy question" when people try to point out the problem?
+[TODO: "not ontologically confused" concession]
-This philosophical point is distinct from my earlier claims supporting Blanchard's two-type ta
+It's true that I was _originally_ thinking about all this in the context of autogynephilia and Blanchard's proposed two-type taxonomy. But the philosophical issues at hand here are _way_ more general than that specific hypothesis, and I think Yudkowsky _already_ had more than enough evidence—if [used efficiently](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MwQRucYo6BZZwjKE7/einstein-s-arrogance)—to see that the distribution of actual trans people we know is such that the categories-are-not-abritrary point is relevant in practice.
-think you _already_ have enough evidence—if [used efficiently](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MwQRucYo6BZZwjKE7/einstein-s-arrogance)—to see that the distribution of actual trans people we know is such that the categories-are-not-abritrary point is relevant in practice.
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-Consider again the 6.7:1 (!!) cis-woman-to-trans-woman ratio among 2018 _Slate Star Codex_ survey respondents.
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-A curious rationalist, having been raised to believe that trans women are women, and considering observations like this, might ask the question: "Gee, I wonder _why_ women-who-happen-to-be-trans are _so much_ more likely to read _Slate Star Codex_, and be attracted to women, and, um, have penises, than women-who-happen-to-be-cis?"
+Consider again the 6.7:1 (!!) cis-woman-to-trans-woman ratio among 2018 _Slate Star Codex_ survey respondents (which I cited in ["... To Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/)). A curious rationalist, having been raised to believe that trans women are women (or at least, that people who insist that trans women _aren't_ women are ontologically confused), and considering observations like this, might ask the question: "Gee, I wonder _why_ women who happen to be trans are _so much_ more likely to read _Slate Star Codex_, and be attracted to women, and, um, have penises, than women who happen to be cis?"
If you're _very careful_, I'm sure it's possible to give a truthful answer to that question without misgendering anyone. But if you want to give a _concise_ answer—perhaps not a _maximally rigorous_ answer, but an answer that usefully [points](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YF9HB6cWCJrDK5pBM/words-as-mental-paintbrush-handles) to the true causal-structure-in-the-world while still fitting in a Tweet—I think you _need_ to be able to say something like, "Because trans women are men." (At least as a _live hypothesis_, even if you prefer an intersex-brain etiology for the people we know.)
-Maybe we'd _usually_ prefer not to phrase it like that, both for reasons of politeness, and because we can be more precise at the cost of using more words ("Interests and sexual orientation may better predicted by natal sex rather than social gender in this population; also, not all trans women have had sex reassignment surgery and so retain their natal-sex anatomy"?). But I think the short version needs to be _sayable_, because if it's not _sayable_, then that's artificially restricting the hypothesis spaces that people use to think with, which is bad (if you care about human intelligence being useful).
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-With respect to transgender issues, this certainly _can_ go both ways: somewhere on Twitter, there are members of the "anti-trans" political coalition insisting, "No, that's _really_ a man because chromosomes" even though they know that that's not what members of the "pro-trans" coalition mean—although as stated earlier, I don't think Eric Weinstein is guilty of this. But given the likely distribution of your Twitter followers and what they need to hear, I'm very worried about the _consequences_ (again, remaining agnostic about your private intent) of
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-It makes sense that (I speculate) you might perceive political constraints on what you want to say in public. (I still work under a pseudonym myself; it would be wildly hypocritical of me to accuse anyone else of cowardice!) But I suspect that if you want to not get into a distracting political fight about topic X, then maybe the responsible thing to do is just not say anything about topic X, rather than engaging with the _stupid_ version of anti-X, and then [stonewalling](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters) with "That's a policy question" when people [try to point out the problem](https://twitter.com/samsaragon/status/1067238063816945664)?
-_bizarre_ to condescendingly point this out _as if it were the crux of contemporary trans-rights debates_. Conservatives and gender-critical feminists _know_ that trans-rights advocates aren't falsely claiming that trans women have XX chromosomes. But the question of what categories epistemically "carve reality at the joints", is _not unrelated_ to the question of which categories to use in policy decisions: the _function_ of sex-segrated bathrooms is to protect females from males, where "females" and "males" are natural clusters in configuration space that it makes sense to want words to refer to.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff