X-Git-Url: http://unremediatedgender.space/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git;a=blobdiff_plain;f=content%2Fdrafts%2Fi-mean-yes-i-agree-that-man-should-allocate-some-more-categories-but.md;h=b4bb0880140cc5a1410c994a258da11a02fe2096;hp=11aef4b2d430ca0f216799eeefd1b7137c9d4592;hb=ee814f59408de1253d58db424b38c7496e13fe06;hpb=1ef7f33320f2966493be12e253b1ecb41317ebfe diff --git a/content/drafts/i-mean-yes-i-agree-that-man-should-allocate-some-more-categories-but.md b/content/drafts/i-mean-yes-i-agree-that-man-should-allocate-some-more-categories-but.md index 11aef4b..b4bb088 100644 --- a/content/drafts/i-mean-yes-i-agree-that-man-should-allocate-some-more-categories-but.md +++ b/content/drafts/i-mean-yes-i-agree-that-man-should-allocate-some-more-categories-but.md @@ -4,35 +4,7 @@ Category: commentary Tags: epistemology, Ozy, sex differences Status: draft -> With the Hopes that our World is built on -> They were utterly out of touch, -> They denied that the Moon could be defined to be Stilton; -> They denied she identified as Dutch; -> They denied that Wishes should be categorized as Horses; -> They denied that a Pig could be stipulated to have Wings; -> So we worshipped the Gods of the Market -> Who promised these beautiful things. -> -> —Rudyard Kipling, ["The Gods of the Copybook Headings"](http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm) (paraphrased) - -## Prelude: on Charity Norms and Intepretive Labor Balance - -This post is a reply to [friend of the blog](/tag/ozy/) Ozymandias's [reply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) to [my reply](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) to Scott Alexander's ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/). The reply ends up covering a lot of worldview-ground, so ideas in this post may be expanded upon in future posts. - -Before anything else, I'd like to thank Ozy for their thoughtful reply. Substantive, longform engagement between contrasting viewpoints is a rare and beautiful thing that deserves to be socially rewarded so that we get more of it, thereby collectively becoming more likely to get things right [systematically rather than by coincidence](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/)! - -saying something - -we can't talk about bad faith -playing chess with a pigeon, what the tortise said to Achilles - -"from the merely naive to the dense to the outright vapid" insults violate a symmetry constraint - -_people who think they're lizards_ -the real strength of "be charitable to those you disagree with" is that it forces you to clarify your ideas in order to defend against every possible absurd misinterpretation - ------ After summarizing the discussion so far, Ozy argues that my appeal to the relevance of pyschological sex differences commits me to an absurd conclusion— @@ -152,16 +124,6 @@ And if the object of discussion is a small, statistical sex difference, you can Does the fact that it's possible to scrupulously rephrase any individual sentence to elide sex imply that the corresponding mental _representation_ of the concept of 'sex' is of little practical use? I don't think so, and I've tried, within the limits of my time and my writing ability, to explain why. But if some readers still aren't convinced—well, maybe I can live with that. -"Winning" arguments is uninteresting, _especially_ arguments about definitions. Everyone knows that the same word can be used in many ways depending on context. What _matters_ is learning about reality, and finding concepts and representations that make reality _less_ confusing rather than _more_ confusing. If, after thousands of words of argument, someone _still_ thinks a concept that I find useful should not be used because I can't provide explicit necessary-and-sufficient conditions to classify a series of ever-more obscure and contrived edge cases and "gotcha"s—or because [it hurts someone's feelings](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/)—then I guess my response is to shrug and say, "Okay, whatever, I'll continue modeling reality using my concepts, and I wish you good luck trying to do the same with yours." - -[TODO: transition sentence about how the map is part of the territory] - ------ +[...] -I think my feelings for Jessica represent an interesting interaction of the conflict between sex and "gender": my high regard for her is happening because she passes so well that my brain is tagging her as a woman (and women who understand LessWrong stuff to that level are sacred and precious), but I don't feel creepy about so openly expressing it to her or others, because I'm less afraid of hurting her, because I expect that whatever anti-rape adaptation brainware women have (that result in strange males being labeled "creepy" threats) she ... probably just doesn't have it - -## How dumb do you think we are? - -_no utilitarian calculation has taken place_ - -(I _also_ haven't done a calculation, but I'm not a utilitarian; I'm an aspiring epistemic rationalist) \ No newline at end of file +_people who think they're lizards_