Tags: epistemology, Ozy, sex differences
Status: draft
+> With the Hopes that our World is built on
+> They were utterly out of touch,
+> They denied that the Moon could be defined to be Stilton;
+> They denied she identified as Dutch;
+> They denied that Wishes should be categorized as Horses;
+> They denied that a Pig could be stipulated to have Wings;
+> So we worshipped the Gods of the Market
+> Who promised these beautiful things.
+>
+> —Rudyard Kipling, ["The Gods of the Copybook Headings"](http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm) (paraphrased)
+
This post is a reply to [friend of the blog](/tag/ozy/) Ozymandias's [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 Scott Alexander's ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/). The reply ends up covering a lot of worldview-ground, so ideas in this post may be expanded upon in future posts.
Before anything else, I'd like to thank Ozy for their thoughtful reply. Substantive, longform engagement between contrasting viewpoints is a rare and beautiful thing that deserves to be socially rewarded so that we get more of it, thereby collectively becoming more likely to get things right [systematically rather than by coincidence](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/)!
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 what would it mean to resolve the conflict in the direction of "consent of the modeled"?
-
-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]
+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.
-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, maybe father children with them, _&c._. [TODO: footnote about how this is predicted by evopsych]
+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]
-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?"
+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]
-[TODO: how to react to the motivated misunderstanding, "Oh, well some cis women are also unattractive"]
-
-[TODO: this isn't necessarily trans-exclusionary: a lot of guys would be happy to date post-HRT trans women, but that just gets us back to passing like I was trying to say thousands to words ago, not "fully consensual gender"]
+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.
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?
+It's possible that I'm underestimating what feats of social-engineering are possible. We could imagine
+
[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"]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff