-OUTLINE—
-
- * First, the basic point is obviously correct.
- * Things become muddier when we get to the section about national borders:
- it's true that countries may agree that their borders work in this
- noncontiguous way, and that matters for some purposes, but these legal
- fictions don't always capture what people actually mean when they talk about
- being in a country.
- * During my Facebook meltdown, an acquaintance of mine gave some really
- solid examples that I should ask him if I can borrow (with or without
- attribution).
- * An attempted clarification (Scott does address this, but I want to
- emphasize/rephrase it?): categories are value-laden because they're grouping
- things together on the basis of the predictions that are decision-relevant
- to what you care about. But this should be distinguished from the categories
- themselves being _arbitrarily_ value-laden.
- * Scott Alexander understands this, but the bottom 50% of _Slate Star
- Codex_ readers do not.
- * An important subtlety: in the case of countries and gender but _not_
- whales/fish, we're not just classifying things that exist, but also making a
- political decision of how we're going to organize ourselves. It's not that
- trans women and nonbinaries already exist in fixed proportions, and we're
- trying to decide how to parse them: that we have socially-recognized
- transition as a thing creates an affordance for people to make the choice to
- transition (linky ["Lesser Known..."](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/))