Title: How Dumb Do You Think We Are? A Reply to Ozymandias on Fully Consensual Gender
Date: 2020-01-01
Category: commentary
-Tags: epistemology, Ozy
+Tags: epistemology, Ozy, sociology
Status: draft
> With the Hopes that our World is built on
>
> —Rudyard Kipling, ["The Gods of the Copybook Headings"](http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm) (paraphrased)
-In the final section of their reply to my reply to the immortal Scott Alexander, 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_.
+At the end of [their 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 [the immortal Scott Alexander on gender categorization](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), [friend of the blog](http://unremediatedgender.space/tag/ozy/) Ozymandias 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 like cheese 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.[ref]_E.g._, my goat might be healthier than your goat in a way that neither of us nor any of the other local goat-herders know how to quantify.[/ref]
And how are you going to stop them? Every freedom-to implies the lack of a freedom-from somewhere else, and _vice versa_: as the cliché goes, your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. "Fully consensual gender" _sounds_ like a good idea when you _phrase_ it like that: what kind of monster could possibly be against consent, or for non-consent?
-But the word "consent" is usually used in contexts where an overwhelming asymmetry of interests makes us want to resolve conflicts in a particular direction every time: when we say that all sex should be consensual, we mean that a person's right to bodily autonomy _always_ takes precedence over someone else's mere horniness. Even pointing out that this is (technically, like everything else) a trade-off [feels creepy](/papers/tetlock_et_al-psychology_of_the_unthinkable.pdf).
+But the word "consent" is usually used in contexts where an overwhelming asymmetry of interests makes us want to resolve conflicts in a particular direction every time: when we say that all sex should be consensual, we mean that a person's right to bodily autonomy _always_ takes precedence over someone else's mere horniness. Even pointing out that this is (technically, like everything else) a trade-off, [feels creepy](/papers/tetlock_et_al-psychology_of_the_unthinkable.pdf).
Categorization really doesn't seem like this. If there's a conflict between one person's desire to be modeled as belonging to a particular gender and someone else's perception that the person is more accurately modeled as belonging to a different gender, then it's not clear what it would _mean_ to resolve the conflict in the direction of "consent of the modeled" other than mind control, or at least compelled speech.
-Ozy gives a list of predictions you can make about someone on the basis of social gender, as distinct from sex, apparently meant to demonstrate the usefulness of the former concept. But a lot of the individual list items seem either superficial ("Whether they wear dresses, skirts, or makeup"—surely we don't want to go for "gender as clothing", do we??), or tied to other people's _perceptions_ of sex.[ref]The harrassment and expected-sacrifices example in particular are what radical feminists would call sex-based oppression![/ref] [ref]Friend of the blog Ray Blanchard [recently proposed on Twitter](https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/1054743819206434816) that the term "subjective sex" might be more useful than "gender".[/ref]
+Ozy gives a list of predictions you can make about someone on the basis of social gender, as distinct from sex, apparently meant to demonstrate the usefulness of the former concept. But a lot of the individual list items seem either superficial ("Whether they wear dresses, skirts, or makeup"—surely we don't want to go for "gender as clothing", do we??), or tied to other people's _perceptions_ of sex.[ref]The harrassment and expected-sacrifices example in particular are what radical feminists would call sex-based oppression.[/ref] [ref][Friend of the blog](https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/837846616937750528) Ray Blanchard [recently proposed on Twitter](https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/1054743819206434816) that the term "subjective sex" might be more useful than "gender".[/ref]
-Take the "How many messages they get on a dating site" item. The _reason_ men send lots of messages to women on dating sites is because they want to date people with vaginas and female secondary sex characteristics, and maybe father children with them, _&c._. [TODO: footnote about how this is predicted by evopsych and the asymmetry that makes men do the approaching]
+Take the "How many messages they get on a dating site" item. The _reason_ men send lots of messages to women on dating sites is because they want to date people with vaginas and female secondary sex characteristics, and maybe eventually marry them and father children with them, _&c._[ref]And the fact that it's women being deluged with messages from men rather than vice versa is predicted by the evolutionary logic of [Bateman's principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bateman's_principle) and [parental investment theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_investment): the sex that invests more resources per offspring will be "choosier", and the sex that invests less will compete for them. There are a few species (like the [pipefish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipefish) or the [Eurasian dotterel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_dotterel)) in which males are the more-investing sex, but humans aren't one them.[/ref]
-If one were to say to such a man, "Ah, I see you're sending lots of messages to women, by which I mean people who self-identify as women, in accordance with the utilitarian-desirable social policy of fully-consensual gender. Therefore, you should also send messages to these non-op trans women who aren't on HRT," I think he would reply "How _dumb_ do you think I am?" This isn't necessarily trans-exclusionary—a lot of those same men would be happy to date trans women who were _on HRT_ and thereby came to more closely rememble actual women. But that just gets us back to passing (like I was trying to say thousands of words ago), not fully consensual gender.
+Suppose one were to say to such a man, "Ah, I see you're sending lots of messages to women, by which I mean people who self-identify as women, in accordance with the utilitarian-desirable social policy of fully-consensual gender. Therefore, you should also send messages to these non-op trans women who aren't on HRT."
-I happily concede that fully consensual gender is a _coherent_ position. That doesn't make it feasible. _How_ are you going to maintain that social equilibrium without it being immediately destroyed by normal people who have eyes and don't care about clever philosophical definition-hacking games the way that readers of this blog do?
+I think the man would reply, "How dumb do you think I am?!"[ref]This isn't necessarily trans-exclusionary—a lot of such men be happy to date trans women who were _on HRT_ and thereby came to more closely rememble [cis/natal/actual](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/code-switching-i/) actual women. But that just gets us back to passing (like I was trying to say thousands of words ago), not fully consensual gender.[/ref]
-It's possible that I'm underestimating what feats of social-engineering are possible. We could imagine
+I happily concede that fully consensual gender is a _coherent_ position. That doesn't make it _feasible_. _How_ are you going to maintain that social equilibrium without it being _immediately_ destroyed by normal people who have eyes and don't care about clever philosophical definition-hacking mind games the way that readers of this blog do?
+
+
+
+> Since it is not, properly speaking, a definition, the decision of who should be socially gendered male or female, and how many social genders we should have is not an epistemic decision. This decision can and should be made on purely utilitarian grounds.
[TODO: it's possible that I'm underestimating the social-engineering feats that might be possible—it's kind of surprising that fiat money equilibria aren't also destroyed by a "How dumb do you think we are?" faction—but fiat money equilibria evolved over a long time for complicated reasons; you need more of an actual argument than "maybe things would be better"]
-[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/04/12/radical-feminist-warned-refer-transgender-defendant-assault/ !!]
+https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GIRL
+
-The question remains: _How dumb do you think we are?!_
+The question remains: how dumb do you think we are?
I guess I feel pretty naïve now, but—I _actually believed our own propoganda_. I _actually thought_ we were doing something new and special of historical and possibly even _cosmological_ significance.
-And so, when I moved to "Portland" (which is actually Berkeley) in 2016,
+And so when I moved to "Portland" (which is actually Berkeley) in 2016, and met some people who gave me reason to reëvaluate
-if you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should be able to get the right answer even on things that don't matter
+I confess that I _may have overreacted somewhat_
+
+because people weren't converging (or even engaging) with me on the two-types/autogynephilia thing. Psychology is a genuinely difficult empirical science
+
+I would _never_ write someone off for disagreeing with me about a complicated empirical thing, because complicated empirical things are complicated enough that I have to take the Outside View seriously: no matter how "obvious" I think my view is, I might still be wrong for real in real life. So, while I was pretty upset for my own idiosyncratic personal reasons, it wasn't cause to _give up entirely on the dream of a rationality community_.
+https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/07/beware-the-insi.html
-guided by the beauty of our weapons
+http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science
+http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/
+/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/
+/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/
+ we live in a world where reason doesn't work
+
+if you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should be able to get the right answer even on things that don't matter
-Blanchard ... categories
cognitive dissonance
If you can't win the argument (because the motte is genuinely a great motte) and therefore gain status by appealing to reality, and our minds are better at tracking status than reality, then eventually dissidents either accept the narrative or destroy themselves.
-[Autogynephilic males](http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html) are better at coalitional politics than actual lesbians for basically the same reasons that men-in-general are better at large-scale coalitional politics than women-in-general (as evidenced by the patriarchy), so once a political conflict arose between AGPs' right to choose their "gender", and women's/lesbians' right to [have a goddamned _word_](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/) to describe themselves, it was a _fait accompli_ that the group sampled from the male region in psychological configuration space would win: male psychology is [_designed_ to win costly intergroup conflicts](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3260849/). And in winning, they _create their own reality_.
+[Autogynephilic males](http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html) are better at large-scale coalitional politics than actual lesbians for basically the same reasons that men-in-general are better at coalitional politics than women-in-general (as evidenced by the patriarchy), so once a political conflict arose between AGPs' right to choose their "gender", and women's/lesbians' right to [have a goddamned _word_](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/) to describe themselves, it was a _fait accompli_ that the group sampled from the male region in psychological configuration space would win: male psychology is [_designed_ to win costly intergroup conflicts](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3260849/). And in winning, they _create their own reality_.
-Again, probably not literally: there probably really are biochemical facts of the matter as to what traits hormone replacement therapy does and does not change, and the biochemical facts aren't going to vary depending on the outcome of a political conflict—as far as I know.
-
-But how far is that, really? I've never _seen_ an estrogen molecule, have you? I can only _assume_ that, hypothetically, given enough time and resources and a patient teacher, I could recreate the series of observations and experiments that convinced the biochemists of our world of what they (think they) know about sex hormones.
+Again, probably not literally: there probably really are biochemical facts of the matter as to what traits hormone replacement therapy does and does not change, and the biochemical facts aren't going to vary depending on the outcome of a political conflict—as far as I know. (I've never _seen_ an estrogen molecule, have you?)
------
Judiciously. As I do.
+https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2015/06/30/the-thing-and-the-symbolic-representation-of-the-thing/
+http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/
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