From 9d7818cede273c614bac0980d97f55e36bf79aaa Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Sun, 23 May 2021 20:04:44 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] outline sketch for "Gender Identity as Cognitive Illusion" --- .../gender-identity-as-cognitive-illusion.md | 27 +++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 27 insertions(+) create mode 100644 content/drafts/gender-identity-as-cognitive-illusion.md diff --git a/content/drafts/gender-identity-as-cognitive-illusion.md b/content/drafts/gender-identity-as-cognitive-illusion.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0dc006e --- /dev/null +++ b/content/drafts/gender-identity-as-cognitive-illusion.md @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +Title: Gender Identity as Cognitive Illusion: Subspatial Distribution Overlap and Cancellable Stereotypes +Date: 2021-06-01 05:00 +Category: commentary +Tags: categorization, epistemology +Status: draft + +Outline— + + * 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 + +### One example: why lesbians are women (do ... do I even need to explain this?) + + * when you point out masculine behavior of AGP TW as evidence for them being male, people will say, "Ah, but lesbians are masculine, too; are you saying that lesbians aren't women???" + * reply: we want the word "women" to refer to the actually-biological-female cluster, which is discretely identifiable, but overlaps with the male cluster if you look at a chosen subspace of individual psychology variables + * maybe in some contexts you might want to talk about "masculine people" that includes prototypical men and butch lesbians + * sketch out a toy model with numbers + +How I put it in the comments— + +http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/Mar/point-man/#isso-171 + +> our brains are good at using a single concept to simultaneously represent discrete differences (genitals, chromosomes) and mere statistical differences (of various effect sizes) that have a lot of overlap—basically, stereotypes. + +> (Such that if you only know someone's sex and nothing else about them, your expectations are going to come out of a probability distribution centered on stereotypes, but this doesn't doom us to an oppressive caste system as long as you can update on individuating information: outliers of various degrees along various dimensions merely require a slightly longer message to describe rather than getting shot.) + +> People who are sympathetic to people who wish they could change sex imagine that they can safely delete the discrete differences from the concept-definition—but if you do that, then, as you describe, there's nothing left for the concept to attach to, except the things we know how to change (people with currently estrogen-dominant hormone systems?), and stereotypes. But people can't say out loud that they're trying to re-anchor the concepts onto smaller-effect-size stereotypes, because they haven't forgotten that the previous iteration of the ideology held sexism is bad. So we end up with a huge amount of doublethink and dissembling, -- 2.17.1