drafting "Subspatial Overlap"

diff --git a/content/2021/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md b/content/2021/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md
index 2771646..53d57d0 100644 (file)
--- a/content/2021/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md
+++ b/content/2021/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md
@@ -85,7 +85,7 @@ At the time, I had _no reason to invent the hypothesis_ that I might somehow lit
 
 [It was while browsing _Wikipedia_ in 2006 that I encountered the obvious and perfect word for my thing](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/)—_autogynephilia_, from the Greek for "[love of](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-philia) [oneself as](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/auto-#English) [a woman](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gyno-)." I was actually surprised that it turned out to have been coined in the context of a theory (by clinical sexual psychologist Ray Blanchard) that it was the root cause of one of two types of male-to-female transsexualism.
 
 
 [It was while browsing _Wikipedia_ in 2006 that I encountered the obvious and perfect word for my thing](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/)—_autogynephilia_, from the Greek for "[love of](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-philia) [oneself as](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/auto-#English) [a woman](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gyno-)." I was actually surprised that it turned out to have been coined in the context of a theory (by clinical sexual psychologist Ray Blanchard) that it was the root cause of one of two types of male-to-female transsexualism.
 

-You see, a very important feature of my gender-related thinking at the time was that I was growing very passionate about—well, in retrospect I call it _psychological-sex-differences denialism_, but at the time I called it _antisexism_. Where sometimes people in the culture would make claims about how women and men are psychologically different, and of course I knew this was _bad and wrong_. Therefore the very idea of transsexualism was somewhat suspect insofar as it necessarily depends on the idea that women and men are psychologically different (in order for it to be possible to be in the "wrong" body). I once [haughtily told my Diary that "I would never do 'drag,' because that represents a mockery"](/ancillary/diary/141/#never-do-drag). (Same rationale as why blackface is offensive.)
+<a id="antisexism"></a>You see, a very important feature of my gender-related thinking at the time was that I was growing very passionate about—well, in retrospect I call it _psychological-sex-differences denialism_, but at the time I called it _antisexism_. Where sometimes people in the culture would make claims about how women and men are psychologically different, and of course I knew this was _bad and wrong_. Therefore the very idea of transsexualism was somewhat suspect insofar as it necessarily depends on the idea that women and men are psychologically different (in order for it to be possible to be in the "wrong" body). I once [haughtily told my Diary that "I would never do 'drag,' because that represents a mockery"](/ancillary/diary/141/#never-do-drag). (Same rationale as why blackface is offensive.)

 
 So while I was certainly glad to learn that _there's a word for it_, an obvious and perfect word for _my thing_, I mostly just stole the word (whose referent and meaning I thought was self-explanatory from the common Greek roots) without paying any further attention to this Blanchard theory or the idea that _I_ might somehow be transgender.
 
 
 So while I was certainly glad to learn that _there's a word for it_, an obvious and perfect word for _my thing_, I mostly just stole the word (whose referent and meaning I thought was self-explanatory from the common Greek roots) without paying any further attention to this Blanchard theory or the idea that _I_ might somehow be transgender.
 

diff --git a/content/drafts/subspatial-distribution-overlap-and-cancellable-stereotypes.md b/content/drafts/subspatial-distribution-overlap-and-cancellable-stereotypes.md
index db8723d..58aaebf 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/subspatial-distribution-overlap-and-cancellable-stereotypes.md
+++ b/content/drafts/subspatial-distribution-overlap-and-cancellable-stereotypes.md
@@ -18,7 +18,7 @@ That's one common and perfectly serviceable definition in the paltry, commonplac
 
 But if you saw this person on the street or even slept in their bed, you wouldn't want to call them a woman, because everything about them that you can observe looks like that of an adult human male. If you're not a reproductive health lab tech and don't look at the photographs in biology textbooks, you'll never _see_ the gametes someone's body produces. (You can see male semen, but the individual spermatozoa are too small to look at without a microscope; people [didn't even know that ova and sperm _existed_ until the 17th century](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1439-0531.2012.02105.x).) Does that mean this common definition of _female_ isn't perfectly serviceable after all?
 
 
 But if you saw this person on the street or even slept in their bed, you wouldn't want to call them a woman, because everything about them that you can observe looks like that of an adult human male. If you're not a reproductive health lab tech and don't look at the photographs in biology textbooks, you'll never _see_ the gametes someone's body produces. (You can see male semen, but the individual spermatozoa are too small to look at without a microscope; people [didn't even know that ova and sperm _existed_ until the 17th century](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1439-0531.2012.02105.x).) Does that mean this common definition of _female_ isn't perfectly serviceable after all?
 

-No, because humans whose gametes produce eggs but appear male in every other aspect, are something I just made up out of thin air for the purposes of this blog post. They don't exist in the real world. What this really shows is that the cognitive technology of "words" having "definitions" doesn't work in _the world of the imagination_, because _the world of the imagination_ encompasses (at a minimum) _all possible configurations of matter_. Words are [short messages that compress a lot of information](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length), but what it _means_ for the world to contain information is that some things in the world are more probable than others.
+No, because humans whose gametes produce eggs but appear male in every other aspect, are something I just made up out of thin air for the purposes of this blog post; they don't exist in the real world. What this really shows is that the cognitive technology of "words" having "definitions" doesn't work in _the world of the imagination_, because _the world of the imagination_ encompasses (at a minimum) _all possible configurations of matter_. Words are [short messages that compress a lot of information](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length), but what it _means_ for the world to contain information is that some things in the world are more probable than others.

 
 To see why, let's take a brief math detour and review some elementary information theory. Instead of the messy real world, take a restricted setting: the world of strings of 20 bits. Suppose you wanted to devise an efficient _code_ to represent elements of this world with _shorter_ strings, such that you could say (for example) `01100` (in the efficient code, using just 5 bits) and the people listening to you would know that what you actually saw in the world was (for example) `01100001110110000010`.
 
 
 To see why, let's take a brief math detour and review some elementary information theory. Instead of the messy real world, take a restricted setting: the world of strings of 20 bits. Suppose you wanted to devise an efficient _code_ to represent elements of this world with _shorter_ strings, such that you could say (for example) `01100` (in the efficient code, using just 5 bits) and the people listening to you would know that what you actually saw in the world was (for example) `01100001110110000010`.
 


@@ -32,23 +32,43 @@ Suppose that, even among the very few exceptions that aren't all-zeros or all-on
 
 Then if you wanted an efficient encoding to talk about the two and only two _clusters_ of bitstrings—the mostly-zeros (a majority of `00000000000000000000` plus a few exceptions with a few bits flipped) and the mostly-ones (a majority of `11111111111111111111` plus a few exceptions with a few bits flipped)—you might want to use the first bit as the "definition" for your codewords—even if most of the various [probabilistic inferences that you wanted to make](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences) [on the basis of cluster-membership](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes) concerned bits other than the first. The majoritarian first bit, even if you don't care about it in itself, is a [_simple_ membership test](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) for the mostly-zeros/mostly-ones category system. 
 
 
 Then if you wanted an efficient encoding to talk about the two and only two _clusters_ of bitstrings—the mostly-zeros (a majority of `00000000000000000000` plus a few exceptions with a few bits flipped) and the mostly-ones (a majority of `11111111111111111111` plus a few exceptions with a few bits flipped)—you might want to use the first bit as the "definition" for your codewords—even if most of the various [probabilistic inferences that you wanted to make](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences) [on the basis of cluster-membership](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes) concerned bits other than the first. The majoritarian first bit, even if you don't care about it in itself, is a [_simple_ membership test](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) for the mostly-zeros/mostly-ones category system. 
 

-Unfortunately—_deeply_ unfortunately—this is not a math blog. (I _wish_ this were a math blog—I wish I lived in a world where I could do math blogging for the greater glory of our collective understanding of reality, [rather than being condemned](TODO: linky "A Previous Life's War") to gender blogging in self-defense, hopelessly outgunned, outmanned, outnumbered, outplanned [in a Total Culture War](/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/) over the future of [my neurotype-demographic](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/).) So, having briefly explained the theory, let's get back to the, how do you say, _application_.
+Unfortunately—_deeply_ unfortunately—this is not a math blog. (I _wish_ this were a math blog—I wish I lived in a world where I could do math blogging for the greater glory of our collective understanding of reality, [rather than being condemned](TODO: linky "A Previous Life's War") to gender blogging in self-defense, hopelessly outgunned, outmanned, outnumbered, outplanned [in a Total Culture War](/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/) over the future of [my neurotype-demographic](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/).) So, having briefly explained the theory, let's get back to the dreary, how do you say—_application_.

 
 

-Defining sex in terms of gamete size or genitals or chromosomes is like the using the never-flipped first bit in our abstract example about the world of length-20 bitstrings. It's not that people _directly_ care about gametes or chromosomes or even gentials in most everyday situations. (You're probably not directly trying to mate with most of the people you meet in everyday situations, and sex chromosomes weren't discovered until the _20th_ century.)
+Defining sex in terms of gamete size or genitals or chromosomes is like the using the never-flipped first bit in our abstract example about the world of length-20 bitstrings. It's not that people _directly_ care about gametes or chromosomes or even gentials in most everyday situations. (You're probably not directly trying to mate with most of the people you meet in everyday situations, and sex chromosomes weren't discovered until the _20th_ century.) It's that that these are _discrete_ features that are entangled with everything _else_ that differs between females and males, including many [correlated](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy-1) statistical differences of various [effect sizes](/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/), and differences that are harder to articulate or measure, and differences that haven't even been discovered yet (as gametes and chromosomes hadn't respectively been discovered yet in the 16th and 20th centuries) but can be theorized to exist because _sex_ is a very robust abstraction that you need in order to understand the design of evolved biological creatures.
+
+Discrete features make for better word _definitions_ than high-dimensional statistical regularities, even if most of the everyday inferential utility of _using_ the word comes from the high-dimensional statistical stuff. A dictionary definition is just a helpful pointer to help people pick out "the same" [natural abstraction](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cy3BhHrGinZCp3LXE/testing-the-natural-abstraction-hypothesis-project-intro) in their _own_ world-model.
+
+(Gamete size is a particularly good definition for the natural category of _sex_ because the concept of [anisogamy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisogamy) generalizes across species that have different sex determination systems or configurations or sexual anatomy. In birds, [the presence or absence of a _W_ chromosome determines whether an animal is _female_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZW_sex-determination_system), in contrast [the _Y_ chromosome's determination of maleness in mammals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_sex-determination_system), and some reptiles' sex is determined by [the temperature of an lain egg while it develops](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature-dependent_sex_determination) (!). And let's not get started on the [cloaca](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaca).)
+
+But because our brains are good at using a sex-category words to simultaneously encode predictions about _both_ absolute discrete differences and high-dimensional statistical regularities of various effect sizes, without our being consciously aware of the cognitive work being done, it's easy to get confused by verbal gymnastics if you don't know the theory.
+
+I sometimes regret that so many of my attempts to talk about trans issues end up focusing on psychological sex differences. I guess I'm used to it now, but at first, this was a very weird position for me to be in! (For a long time, I [really didn't want to believe in psychological sex differences](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism).) But it keeps happening because it's a natural thing to _disagree_ about: the anatomy of pre-op trans women is not really in _dispute_, so the sex realist's contextual reply to "Why do you care what genitals someone might or might not have under their clothes?" often ends up appealing to psychology, to which the trans advocate can reply, "Oh, you want to define gender based on psychology, then? But then the logic of your position forces you to conclude that butch lesbians aren't women! _Reductio ad absurdum!_" [TODO: link Ozy]
+
+This is a severe misreading of the sex-realist position. No one wants to _define_ "gender" based on psychology. 
+
+You can't coerce reality into changing by choosing different definitions!
+
+There's _already_ a multivariate distribution of bodies and minds in the world, and we 

 
 

-It's that that these are _discrete_ features that are entangled with everything _else_ that differs between females and males, including many [correlated](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy-1) statistical differences of various [effect sizes](/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/), and differences that are harder to articulate or measure, and differences that haven't even been discovered yet (as gametes and chromosomes hadn't respectively been discovered yet in the 16th and 20th centuries) but can be theorized to exist because _sex_ is a very robust abstraction that you need in order to understand the design of evolved biological creatures.

 
 

-Discrete features make for better word _definitions_ than high-dimensional statistical regularities, even if most of the everyday inferential utility of _using_ the word comes from the high-dimensional statistical stuff. A dictionary definition is just a helpful pointer to help people pick out "the same" [natural abstraction](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cy3BhHrGinZCp3LXE/testing-the-natural-abstraction-hypothesis-project-intro) in their _own_ world-model. In teaching a young child about sex (or "gender"), you only have to say "boys and men are the ones with a penis, examples include your Dad and Uncle Frank, non-examples include your Mom and Grandma Mary" and the child's brain's pattern-matching faculties [...]

 
 

-(Gamete size is a particularly good definition for the natural category of _sex_ because the concept of [anisogamy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisogamy) generalizes across species that have different sex determination systems or configurations of sexual anatomy. In birds, [the presence or absence of a _W_ chromosome determines whether an animal is _female_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZW_sex-determination_system), in contrast [the _Y_ chromosome's determination of maleness in mammals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_sex-determination_system), and some reptiles' sex is determined by [the temperature of an lain egg while it develops](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature-dependent_sex_determination) (!). And let's not get started on the [cloaca](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaca).)

 
 
 ------
 
 
 
 ------
 

+Three high-level issues to address—
+ * Are stereotypes part of the meaning of a word, and is that bad?
+ * Reply to "So lesbians aren't women, nyah nyah"
+ * Trying to remove the discrete stuff from the definition leaves you with only stereotypes!!
+ * gender identity as cognitive illusion
+

 (Let's [not play dumb about the significance of intersex conditions](https://colinwright.substack.com/p/sex-chromosome-variants-are-not-their) today.)
 
 (Let's [not play dumb about the significance of intersex conditions](https://colinwright.substack.com/p/sex-chromosome-variants-are-not-their) today.)
 

+/2019/Dec/more-schelling/

 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i2dfY65JciebF3CAo/empty-labels
 
 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i2dfY65JciebF3CAo/empty-labels
 

+> you can _select_ a sample from a different multivariate distribution to match a sample from another distribution along one or a few given dimensions, the samples are going to differ in the variables that you didn't select
+

  * our brains are good at using the same word to represent absolute differences and low-effect-size stereotypes; it kind of has to be this way, but can result in puzzles and paradoxes if you don't know what's going on
  * the paradoxes go away when you stop down and just think about the high-dimensional probability distribution
 
  * our brains are good at using the same word to represent absolute differences and low-effect-size stereotypes; it kind of has to be this way, but can result in puzzles and paradoxes if you don't know what's going on
  * the paradoxes go away when you stop down and just think about the high-dimensional probability distribution