nibble at "Comment on 'The Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis'"; cache rhetoric

diff --git a/content/2020/book-review-human-diversity.md b/content/2020/book-review-human-diversity.md
index 6fd1c62..20222b1 100644 (file)
--- a/content/2020/book-review-human-diversity.md
+++ b/content/2020/book-review-human-diversity.md
@@ -163,7 +163,7 @@ The problem that Bayesian reasoning poses for naïve egalitarian moral intuition
 
 I used to be a naïve egalitarian. I was very passionate about it. I was eighteen years old. I am—again—still fond of the moral sentiment, and eager to renormalize it into something that makes sense. (Some egalitarian anxieties do translate perfectly well into the Bayesian setting, as I'll explain in a moment.) But the abject horror I felt at eighteen at the mere suggestion of _making generalizations_ about _people_ just—doesn't make sense. It's not even that it _shouldn't_ be practiced (it's not that my heart wasn't in the right place), but that it _can't_ be practiced—that the people who think they're practicing it are just confused about how their own minds work.
 
 
 I used to be a naïve egalitarian. I was very passionate about it. I was eighteen years old. I am—again—still fond of the moral sentiment, and eager to renormalize it into something that makes sense. (Some egalitarian anxieties do translate perfectly well into the Bayesian setting, as I'll explain in a moment.) But the abject horror I felt at eighteen at the mere suggestion of _making generalizations_ about _people_ just—doesn't make sense. It's not even that it _shouldn't_ be practiced (it's not that my heart wasn't in the right place), but that it _can't_ be practiced—that the people who think they're practicing it are just confused about how their own minds work.
 

-Give people photographs of various women and men and ask them to judge how tall the people in the photos are, as [Nelson _et al._ 1990 did](/papers/nelson_et_al-everyday_base_rates_sex_stereotypes_potent_and_resilient.pdf), and people's guesses reflect both the photo-subjects' actual heights, but also (to a lesser degree) their sex. Unless you expect people to be perfect at assessing height from photographs (when they don't know how far away the cameraperson was standing, aren't ["trigonometrically omniscient"](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-epistemic/#LogiOmni), _&c._), this behavior is just _correct_: men really are taller than women on average, so P(true-height|apparent-height, sex) ≠ P(height|apparent-height) [because of](https://humanvarieties.org/2017/07/01/measurement-error-regression-to-the-mean-and-group-differences/) [regression to the mean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean) (and women and men regress to different means). But [this all happens subconsciously](/2020/Apr/peering-through-reverent-fingers/): in the same study, when the authors tried height-matching the photographs (for every photo of a woman of a given height, there was another photo in the set of a man of the same height) _and telling_ the participants about the height-matching _and_ offering a cash reward to the best height-judge, more than half of the stereotyping effect remained. It would seem that people can't consciously readjust their learned priors in reaction to verbal instructions pertaining to an artificial context.
+<a id="everyday-base-rates"></a>Give people photographs of various women and men and ask them to judge how tall the people in the photos are, as [Nelson _et al._ 1990 did](/papers/nelson_et_al-everyday_base_rates_sex_stereotypes_potent_and_resilient.pdf), and people's guesses reflect both the photo-subjects' actual heights, but also (to a lesser degree) their sex. Unless you expect people to be perfect at assessing height from photographs (when they don't know how far away the cameraperson was standing, aren't ["trigonometrically omniscient"](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-epistemic/#LogiOmni), _&c._), this behavior is just _correct_: men really are taller than women on average, so P(true-height|apparent-height, sex) ≠ P(height|apparent-height) [because of](https://humanvarieties.org/2017/07/01/measurement-error-regression-to-the-mean-and-group-differences/) [regression to the mean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean) (and women and men regress to different means). But [this all happens subconsciously](/2020/Apr/peering-through-reverent-fingers/): in the same study, when the authors tried height-matching the photographs (for every photo of a woman of a given height, there was another photo in the set of a man of the same height) _and telling_ the participants about the height-matching _and_ offering a cash reward to the best height-judge, more than half of the stereotyping effect remained. It would seem that people can't consciously readjust their learned priors in reaction to verbal instructions pertaining to an artificial context.

 
 Once you understand at a _technical_ level that probabilistic reasoning about demographic features is both epistemically justified, _and_ implicitly implemented as part of the way your brain processes information _anyway_, then a moral theory that forbids this starts to look less compelling? Of course, statistical discrimination on demographic features is only epistemically justified to exactly the extent that it helps _get the right answer_. Renormalized-egalitarians can still be properly outraged about the monstrous tragedies where I have moral property P but I _can't prove it to you_, so you instead guess _incorrectly_ that I don't just because other people who look like me mostly don't, and you don't have any better information to go on—or tragedies in which a feedback loop between predictions and social norms creates or amplifies group differences that wouldn't exist under some other social equilibrium.
 
 
 Once you understand at a _technical_ level that probabilistic reasoning about demographic features is both epistemically justified, _and_ implicitly implemented as part of the way your brain processes information _anyway_, then a moral theory that forbids this starts to look less compelling? Of course, statistical discrimination on demographic features is only epistemically justified to exactly the extent that it helps _get the right answer_. Renormalized-egalitarians can still be properly outraged about the monstrous tragedies where I have moral property P but I _can't prove it to you_, so you instead guess _incorrectly_ that I don't just because other people who look like me mostly don't, and you don't have any better information to go on—or tragedies in which a feedback loop between predictions and social norms creates or amplifies group differences that wouldn't exist under some other social equilibrium.
 

diff --git a/content/drafts/comment-on-the-sapir-whorf-hypothesis-and-probabilistic-inference.md b/content/drafts/comment-on-the-sapir-whorf-hypothesis-and-probabilistic-inference.md
index 4c9711f..91c332b 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/comment-on-the-sapir-whorf-hypothesis-and-probabilistic-inference.md
+++ b/content/drafts/comment-on-the-sapir-whorf-hypothesis-and-probabilistic-inference.md
@@ -6,12 +6,27 @@ Status: draft
 
 [This is a cool paper about how language affects how people remember colors!](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0158725) You would expect that the design of the eye and its colorspace to be human-universal (_modulo_ [colorblindness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness) and [maybe some women with](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Humans) [both](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPN1MW) [kinds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPN1MW2) of green opsin gene), but not all languages have the same set of color words. There are some regularities: [all languages have words for light and dark; if they have a third color word, then it's _red_; if there's a fourth, it'll cover green or yellow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms)—but the details differ, as different languages [stumbled onto different conventions](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/). Do the color category conventions in one's native tongue affect how people think about color, in accordance with the famous [Sapir–Whorf hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity)? Maybe—but if so, how??
 
 
 [This is a cool paper about how language affects how people remember colors!](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0158725) You would expect that the design of the eye and its colorspace to be human-universal (_modulo_ [colorblindness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness) and [maybe some women with](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Humans) [both](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPN1MW) [kinds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPN1MW2) of green opsin gene), but not all languages have the same set of color words. There are some regularities: [all languages have words for light and dark; if they have a third color word, then it's _red_; if there's a fourth, it'll cover green or yellow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms)—but the details differ, as different languages [stumbled onto different conventions](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/). Do the color category conventions in one's native tongue affect how people think about color, in accordance with the famous [Sapir–Whorf hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity)? Maybe—but if so, how??
 

-Our authors discuss an experiment where people are briefly shown a color, and then try to match it on a color wheel after a short delay. 
+Our authors discuss an experiment where people are briefly shown a color, and then try to match it on a color wheel, either at the same time, or after a short delay. People aren't just not-perfect at this, but—particularly in the delayed condition—show a non-monotonic pattern of directional bias: colors just on the "blue" side of the blue–green boundary are remembered as being relatively more bluish than they really were, but _very similar_ colors on the "green" side of the boundary are remembered as being relatively more greenish than they really were.

 
 

+Our authors propose to explain this with a model in which a stimulus is encoded in the brain as both a fine-grained representation of what was actually seen (this-and-such color perception, with some noise/measurement-error), and as a category ("green"). Then reconstruction of the stimulus from the both the fine-grained representation and the category, will be biased towards the center of the category, with more bias when the fine-grained representation is more uncertain (as in the delayed condition).
+
+The model gains further support from a similar "two-alternative forced choice" experiment, where people try to tell the difference between the original color and a distractor, rather than picking from a color wheel.
+
+
+
+
+You know where I'm going with this! Why do we care about the further question of what "gender" someone is, if we already have fine-grained perceptions of how the person looks and behaves?
+
+
+
+This model can also explain results 

 
 Bayesian reasoning!
 
 
 Bayesian reasoning!
 

+/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#everyday-base-rates
+

 [The answer is always Bayesian reasoning.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QrhAeKBkm2WsdRYao/searching-for-bayes-structure)
 
 
 [The answer is always Bayesian reasoning.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QrhAeKBkm2WsdRYao/searching-for-bayes-structure)
 
 

-You know where I'm going with this.
\ No newline at end of file
+
+

diff --git a/notes/notes.txt b/notes/notes.txt
index 5602b60..daa8fc6 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/notes.txt
+++ b/notes/notes.txt
@@ -2179,3 +2179,11 @@ https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/ray-blanchard-transgender-orthodoxy/
 
 > we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred
 https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/170990-suppose-one-reads-a-story-of-filthy-atrocities-in-the
 
 > we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred
 https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/170990-suppose-one-reads-a-story-of-filthy-atrocities-in-the

+
+
+If you demand that people change how they think and talk about the world specifically in order to prove they're on your side (rather than because you have evidence and arguments explaining why your model is more accurate in the relevant domain), then people who care about thinking clearly will may reluctantly conclude they're not, in fact, on your side?
+
+Note, this is compatible with trans rights insofar as "more accurate in the relevant domain" can include grouping transsexuals with their social gender rather than their developmental sex, because it's possible for social transition to actually succeed on the merits of actually passing (or getting "close enough"), rather than acquiecing to demands. (Isn't that the goal? To successfully transition, and organically be perceived as your target sex?)
+
+If someone looks like a man, and sounds like a man, and I can model him as a man in the range of circumstances I interact with him without making any grievous prediction errors, then I call him a man even if he's technically a female on testosterone—not as a favor, but because it genuinely seems like the best word to describe what I'm seeing. Futhermore, if I don't perceive someone as a man, but everyone else does (or speaks as if they do), I'll usually go along with the majority's language usage for game-theoretic reasons (explanation: http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/). But if he further demands that I'm not even allowed to use the phrase "female on testosterone" to describe what I think is going on in this situation, then we have a problem.
+

diff --git a/notes/post_ideas.txt b/notes/post_ideas.txt
index 4ac3005..04d1166 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/post_ideas.txt
+++ b/notes/post_ideas.txt
@@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ Aspiration runup—
 27 Nov - Comment on "The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and Probabilistic Inference"
 28 Nov - Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to
 
 27 Nov - Comment on "The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and Probabilistic Inference"
 28 Nov - Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to
 

+_ Principles  (transhumanism, and sanity)

 
 Iffy—
  - Amy Wax linkpost
 
 Iffy—
  - Amy Wax linkpost