Title: I Mean, Yes, I Agree That Man Should Allocate Some More Categories, But
Date: 2020-01-01
Category: commentary
-Tags: epistemology, Ozy
+Tags: epistemology, Ozy, sex differences
Status: draft
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/).
-After summarizing the discussion so far, Ozy [...]
+After summarizing the discussion so far, Ozy argues that my appeal to the relevance of pyschological sex differences commits me to an absurd conclusion—
> Saotome-Westlake argues for the existence of a third definition, based on psychology. He argues that (some) trans people are psychologically different from cisgender members of their identified genders [...] Therefore, it makes sense to consider trans people to be members of their assigned gender at birth for some purposes.
>
>
> By extension, lesbians are not women.
-So. First, I want to note that my post does (briefly) anticipate the "by that argument, lesbians aren't women" _ad absurdum_ objection: see [the few paragraphs starting with](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/#anchor-different-types-of-women-objection), "To this it might be objected that there are many different types of women [...]".
+I would like to note that my post does anticipate the "by that argument, lesbians aren't women" _ad absurdum_ objection. [I wrote](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/#anchor-different-types-of-women-objection):
+
+> To this it might be objected that there are many different types of women. Clusters can internally have many subclusters: Pureto Rican women (or married women, or young women, or lesbians, _&c_.) don't have the _same_ distribution of traits as women as a whole, and yet are still women. Why should "trans" be different from any other adjective one might use to specify a subcategory of women?
+>
+> What makes this difficult is that—_conditional_ on the two-types hypothesis and specifically gender dysphoria in non-exclusively-androphilic biological males being mostly not an intersex condition—most trans women aren't just not part of the female cluster in configuration space; they're specifically part of _male_ cluster along most dimensions, which people _already_ have a concept for. [...] [T]he concepts of _women_-as-defined-by-biological-sex, _women_-as-defined-by-self-identity, and _women_-as-defined-by-passing are picking out different (though of course mostly overlapping) regions of the configuration space, which has inescapable logical [consequences](http://lesswrong.com/lw/nx/categorizing_has_consequences/) on the kinds of inferences that can be made using each concept.
+
+If that wasn't sufficiently clear, perhaps I have _failed as a writer_, and I can only beg that Ozy and our joint readership permit me the chance to try again.[ref]Some bloggers, when faced with a ludicrous straw misinterpretation of their position, would be inclined to blame the interlocutor for poor reading comprehension. But [the function of the category of "blame" is to create incentives](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/895quRDaK6gR2rM82/diseased-thinking-dissolving-questions-about-disease): we don't blame cancer patients for being sick because we can predict that that won't make them get better, whereas we predict that blaming and punishing theives _will_ result in fewer thefts. If I think I might be able to shame myself into writing more clearly, but I'm pretty sure yelling at others to read more carefully won't work, then I'm better off modeling all miscommunications as my "fault."[/ref]
+
+I don't want to _define_ gender based on psychology.[ref]Also, on a personal note, can I remark on how _weird_ and _uncomfortable_ it is that defending sex differences has now apparently become my thing? I'm an individualist/egalitarian androgyny fan, not a [complementarian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementarianism); I [_don't want_](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/) women and men to have incommensurable souls. But faced with an intellectual climate where brilliant, kind, otherwise-sane people seem to feel morally obligated to _destroy our collective ability to reason about sex using natural language_, I feel morally obligated to not let them get away with it. Not for love of the territory in its current state, but for the love of that property of maps that _reflect_ the territory.[/ref] ([Definitions are overrated](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cFzC996D7Jjds3vS9/arguing-by-definition), anyway.) I do think that biological sex is almost[ref]The [chemical elements](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chemical_elements) would be an example of an even more robustly natural category. Atoms with more protons than nitrogen but fewer than oxygen _do not exist_, and thus there is no analogue in chemistry to the "Well, what about intersex conditions?" [challenge](http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Derailment) to the concept of sex or the "Well, what about [ring species](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species)?" challenge to the concept of species.[/ref] as close as you can get to being a _natural category_ in something like the following sense. If we imagine a distribution of artificial intelligences studying life on Earth and humans in particular, but lacking any preconceived concept of _sex_,[ref]It would be more traditional to put aliens rather than AIs in the observer role of this genre of thought experiment, but evolved aliens probably _would_ already know about sex![/ref] different AIs would each invent [different concepts](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XeHYXXTGRuDrhk5XL/unnatural-categories) in order to model the aspects of reality relevant to their own individual values, but most of them would be forced to reinvent the category of _sex_ sooner or later, because sex category membership makes predictions about [_many_ different dimensions of observation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans), at least _some_ of which are likely to be relevant to the interests of any particular AI that's paying any attention to animal life at _all_.
+
+That categories are clusters in a _high-dimensional_ space is relevant because groups that overlap along any _one_ particular measurement might be much more clearly distinguishable when you look at the conjunction of many different measurements. When discussing whether a proposed recreational basketball association should be sex-segregated or not, one relevant fact that might come up during the discussion is that the sex difference in human height has a magnitude of Cohen's _d_≈1.7.
+
+So is the discussant who brings up height thereby claiming that _tall women aren't actually women_?
+
+Well, no. That would be stupid.
[...]
-I don't want to _define_ gender based on psychology.[ref]On a personal note, can I just say that it's still pretty [weird and uncomfortable for me to be a defender of psychological sex differences] [...][/ref] ([Definitions are overrated](https://www.readthesequences.com/Arguing-By-Definition), anyway.) Rather, the claim is that biological sex is almost[ref]The atomic elements would be an example of an even more robustly natural category, with no analogue to the "Well, what about intersex conditions?" challenge/[derailment](http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Derailment)-attempt to sex or the "Well, what about [ring species](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species)?" challenge to species.[/ref] as close as you can get to being a _natural category_. If we imagine a distribution of artificial intelligences studying life on Earth and humans in particular, but lacking any preconceived concept of _sex_,[ref]It would be more traditional to put aliens rather than AIs in the observer role of this genre of thought experiment, but evolved aliens probably _would_ already know about sex![/ref], different AIs would invent [different concepts](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XeHYXXTGRuDrhk5XL/unnatural-categories) in order to model the aspects of reality, but most of them would be forced to reinvent _sex_ sooner or later (and probably sooner).
+[I use the "bimodal multivariate distribution" frame a lot—it's even in the URL—but it's actually worse: sex-specific adaptations—functional adaptations and not just shifted distributions—are a thing
-[I use the "bimodal multivariate distribution" frame a lot—it's even in the URL—but it's actually worse: sex-specific adaptations—functional adaptations and not just shifted distributions—are a thing]
+https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/05/05/the-cluster-structure-of-genderspace/
+
+]
[...]
[Talk about the value of bright lines as resistance to rules-lawyering? And like—agreeing that people are complex and should be treated as individuals rather than rounded off to a category, but biological sex is still allowed to be an _input_ to your modeling function?]
-["By that argument, lesbians aren't women" might feel like a sick burn, but I'm trying to [rescue](https://arbital.com/p/rescue_utility/) the commonsense notion of sex shared by [normal people who haven't been poisoned by ideology](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Mar/smart/), who somehow manage to simultaneously believe that psychological sex differences are socially relevant and that butch lesbians are women.]
+[I'm trying to [rescue](https://arbital.com/p/rescue_utility/) the commonsense notion of sex shared by [normal people who haven't been poisoned by ideology](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Mar/smart/), who somehow manage to simultaneously believe that psychological sex differences are socially relevant and that butch lesbians are women.]
[II. Ozy says that "people who would be contribute to the atmosphere you made this a woman-only event for."
Reply: bright lines and specifiability: you can get "people who contribute to the atmosphere" by picking a guest list of people you know,
[III. Ozy argues that "look like street harrassers" is the relevant criterion; I think this is overestimating the extent to which bad male behavior is an artifact of ideology
"has nothing to do with psychology anyway"—it has to do with _perceptions_ of psychology; bystanders can't _know_ that feminine-androphilic trans man is one of them; you could imagine an alternative world in which human physiology looked the same but there was no history of male violence, but that's not our world
-I agree that everyone deserves a place to pee; let's talk about changing rooms]
+I agree that everyone deserves a place to pee; let's talk about changing rooms
+KcKinnon / Karen White / train station attack
+
+]
-Finally, Ozy makes an analogy between social gender and money. What constitutes money in a given social context is determined by collective agreement: money is whatever you can reliably expect everyone else to accept as payment. This isn't a circular definition (in the way that "money is whatever we agree is money" would be uninformative to an alien who didn't already have a referent for the word _money_), and people advocating for a _different_ money regime (like [late-19th century American bimetalists] or contemporary cryptocurrency advocates) aren't making an epistemic _mistake_.
+Finally, Ozy makes an analogy between social gender and money. What constitutes money in a given social context is determined by collective agreement: money is whatever you can reliably expect everyone else to accept as payment. This isn't a circular definition (in the way that "money is whatever we agree is money" would be uninformative to an alien who didn't already have a referent for the word _money_), and people advocating for a _different_ money regime (like [late-19th century American bimetalists](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bimetallism&oldid=864176071#Political_debate) or contemporary cryptocurrency advocates) aren't making an epistemic _mistake_.
I _really like_ this analogy! An important thing to note here is that while the form of money can vary widely across sociocultural contexts (from [shell beads](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wampum), to silver coins, to fiat paper currency, to database entries in a bank), not just any form will suffice to serve the functions of money: perishable goods can't function as a long-term store of value; non-fungible items that vary in quality in hard-to-measure ways can't function as a unit of account.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff