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 as close as you can get to being a _natural category_[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] 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)—although some with much larger [or smaller](https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-606581.pdf) effect sizes than others—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_.
+[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/]
+
[if you have to do definitions, you go by physiology, because that's the part that's truly almost-completely-binary]
That categories are clusters in a _high-dimensional_ space is relevant because of a statistical phenomenon perhaps most famously elucidated in [A. W. F. Edwards's critique of Richard Lewontin's critique of the concept of _race_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genetic_Diversity:_Lewontin's_Fallacy): groups that overlap along any _one_ particular measurement might be much more clearly distinguishable when you look at the conjunction of many different measurements.
> The actual category they should be using is not "cis women." The actual category they should be using is "people who would be contribute to the atmosphere you made this a woman-only event for."
-_In all philosophical strictness_, I agree. Outside of a few _relatively_ narrow domains of life (medicine, intercourse, family planning), there aren't good reasons to care about sex _per se_ (as opposed to characteristics which might correlate with sex at some nonzero but not so-huge-as-to-be-effectively-binary effect size). Scott Alexander is entirely correct that categories are in the map, not the territory. There aren't ontologically-fundamental <code><sex value="F"/></code> XML tags attached to people's souls, and we wouldn't have any reason to care if there were.
+_In all philosophical strictness_, I agree. Outside of a few _relatively_ narrow domains of life (medicine, intercourse, family planning), I find it hard to think of good reasons to care about sex _per se_, as opposed to characteristics which might correlate with sex at some nonzero but certainly-not-so-huge-as-to-be-effectively-binary effect size. Ozy and me and Scott Alexander are all in agreement that categories are in the map, not the territory. There aren't ontologically-fundamental <code><sex value="F"/></code> XML tags attached to people's souls, and moreover, we wouldn't have any reason to care if there were.
[...]
[...]
-[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/
-
-]
-
-[...]
-
> If the Cohen's d effect size is 1 (commonly glossed as "large"), a full 24% of women will have less psychological femaleness than the average man, which means that 98.67% of your problem is a cisgender female problem.
[I _wish_ it were _d_=1! [linky](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3251566/)]
[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
-KcKinnon / Karen White / train station attack
-
-]
+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](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bimetallism&oldid=864176071#Political_debate) or contemporary cryptocurrency advocates) aren't making an epistemic _mistake_.
[Felix Conrad](http://transcendmovement.com/felix-conrad-confesses-that-he-secretly-believes-in-autogynephilia/)—
+[link is dead, but it's allegedly in his Kindle book]
+
> Imagine the following scenario: a researcher discovers that one ethnic group has a lower IQ than another and that the cause is genetic–not educational. In my opinion that research is as dangerous as a toxic virus and I’d wipe any hard drive that contained such research. That is intellectual integrity in my opinion.
Tags: interlude, romance
Status: draft
-"I think that if you crossdress, or if you kink on trans stuff, or you show _any signs_ of egghood, you _need_ to marry someone who is okay with you eventually transitioning. Not because you definitely will transition! But because it is _likely enough_ that you need to _plan_ for it."
+"I think that if show any signs of [egghood](https://archive.is/pp6Sa), you _need_ to marry someone who's okay with you eventually transitioning. Not because you _necessarily_ will, but because it's _likely_ enough that you need to _plan_ for it."
-"I probably don't actually _disagree_. Keeping promises is very important—
-But in the spirit of [Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided](TODO: linky), I would like to register a note of sadness that we're are effectively thereby saying 'eggs don't deserve love.'"
+"I probably don't actually _disagree_. Keeping promises is very important. What a betrayal it would be—to take someone to have and to hold, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health—
+
+/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/
+
+But in the spirit of [Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided), I would like to register a note of sadness that we're effectively thereby saying 'eggs don't deserve love.'"
"Eggs can have love, they just add a constraint."
> This book is about the female primates who have evolved over the last seventy million years. It is dedicated to the liberated woman who never evolved but with imagination, intelligence, an open mind, and perserverance many of us may yet become.
>
> —Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, dedication to _The Woman That Never Evolved_
+
+> Given that females prefer to live with female relatives if they are going to live in groups at all, and given that the size and dispersion of these groups is determined by the interaction of food availability and predation risk, how should males map themselves onto the female distribution?
+>
+> Robin I. M. Dunbar, Primate Social Systems, Ch. 7, "Evolution of Grouping Patterns"
https://m.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/UC-Berkeley-campus-senator-abstains-from-a-vote-13378621.php?t=bd81bb94a4#photo-16472734
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/drunken-transgender-women-stamp-defenceless-13566104
+
+https://truethingsiwishicouldsay.tumblr.com/post/179846906643/this-is-the-new-queer-compulsory-heterosexuality
+
+https://www.adelaidenow.com.au/lifestyle/parenting/midwives-rail-against-proposal-to-call-women-persons-in-new-code-of-conduct/news-story/0c3b37b55934effcfc48498b64a1256f
+
+skeleton sex denialism: https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/575536/
+
+medical records: https://twitter.com/HairyLeggdHarpy/status/1062360988702466048
+
+https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/7724502/cop-child-sex-offences-woman/amp/
+
+https://janeclarejones.com/2018/11/13/the-annals-of-the-terf-wars/
+
+http://academicrightswatch.com/?p=2871
+
+https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/canadian-man-claiming-to-be-female-sues-16-women-for-refusing-to-wax-his-ge
+
+Marcus points out that out the "balls-at-12" 5-alpha-reductase people
+
+intersex stats: https://twitter.com/mrkhtake2/status/1063454985147613187
+
+----
+
+unused /r/slatestarcodex comment fodder—
+
+More generally, I'm not sure what to do about the problem of how to _break out_ of the existing Culture War narratives, when you think the reigning narrative is wrong and that you have a better one. The immortal Robin Hanson writes that if you want to make an outsized difference in debates, you sould [pull in a direction that few others are in the high-dimensional policyspace](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/policy_tugowar.html), but I worry that this model overlooks certain difficulties in _marketing_. If you don't want to join the "trans dykes are good and pure; maximize the number of trans people" coalition _or_ the "trans-identified males are bad men; minimize the number of trans people" coalition, the typical reaction is _not_ that people rally around your [third alternative](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative) in the orthogonal direction, but rather: "Good God you're a fucking unicorn."
+
+Well, I _guess_. But then what's a unicorn to do? I feel _guilty_ about posting too many variants of the same "read [Anne Lawrence](http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html)!" comment whenever trans issues come up in the Culture War thread—it feels too repetitive, too agenda-driven. But _given_ an agenda (people should be aware of the true nature of late-onset gender dysphoria in males so that they can use the knowledge to make better decisions, even if I'm not wise enough to specify in advance what those decisions should be) and wanting to pursue that agenda in good-faith and with an absolute minimum of war,
+
+----
+
+Ideally, the Watsonian and Doylist views should be consilient (social-justice people have a Doylist view of Damore et al. as trying to justify male privilige; Scott Alexander et al. have a Doylist view of social-justice as being about victimhood competition)
+
+
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff