A lot of people tend to balk when first hearing about the two-type taxonomy of male-to-female transsexualism. What, one scoffs, you're saying all trans women are exactly one of these two things? It seems at once both too simple and too specific.
In some ways, it's a fair complaint! Psychology …
Ha ha, those Less Wrong guys sure love dolphins for whatever reason! (Alternative viewer.) Note that the "root of the causal graph" argument here for the relevance of phylogenetics is equivalent to the case that sex chromosomes are a good way to operationalize sex in humans—it's not that anyone …
Sorry for the off-topic linkpost, but I want to point to a fascinating new mathematical philosophy-of-language post on Less Wrong (alternative viewer)! You really have to admire thinkers who can devote so much energy to probing the intricacies of such abstract topics without having any kind of pragmatic ulterior motive …
She is clearly a villain—but there is such a thing as a sympathetic villain, and it's not as if our sympathy is a finite resource. It seems like she's hurting herself most of all, and it's just because of the brain poison she was fed [...] I can imagine how …
"I mean, if that explanation actually makes you feel happier, then fine."
"Feeling happier isn't what explanations are for. Explanations are for predicting our observations.
"Emotions, too, are functional: happiness measures whether things in your life are going well or going poorly, but does not constitute things going well, much …
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 …
"[...] Between one and the infinite in cases such as these, there are no sensible numbers. Not only two, but any finite number, is ridiculous and can't exist."
—The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov
Eliezer Yudkowsky Tweets (back in March), linking to a Quillette interview with Lisa Littman (positer of "rapid …
It doesn't have anything to do with the topic focuses of this blog, but this new post on Less Wrong about the mathematical laws governing how to talk about dolphins is just so good that I have to share it with my readers! I hope to read more from that …
(This is a guest post by friend of the blog Sophia!)
I tend to think of passing in terms of bits. If a stranger glances briefly at me as I walk by them on the sidewalk, how many bits of evidence do I expect they obtain for the proposition that …
Thou shalt not strike terms from others' expressive vocabulary without suitable replacement.
The author of the (highly recommended!) Tumblr blog The Unit of Caring responds to an anonymous correspondent's observation that trans-exclusionary radical feminists tend to define the word woman as "adult human biological female":
Oh, yeah, sorry, I've …
I said, "The truth is whatever you can get away with."
"No, that's journalism. The truth is whatever you can't escape."
—Distress by Greg Egan
In "The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories", the immortal Scott Alexander argues that proposed definitions of concepts aren't true or …
As part of a series—ah, Sequence—of posts explaining the hidden Bayesian structure of language, Eliezer Yudkowsky discusses a parable about factory workers faced with the task of sorting objects which very strongly tend to either be blue, egg-shaped, furry, flexible, opaque, luminescent, and vanadium-cored (categorized by the workers …
(presented without further comment)
In chapter 5 ("Blind Spots: On Subconscious Sex and Gender Entitlement") of her book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, Julia Serano argues that both trans and non-trans people's gender sentiments are rooted in subconscious sex, "a deep-rooted understanding of what sex their bodies …
Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender: Biological Theories About Women and Men, Ch. 1, "Introduction: the Biological Connection":
In the end, the resolution of such controversy often depends upon one's standard of proof, a standard dictated in turn by political beliefs. I impose the highest standards of proof, for example, on …
"Don't overgeneralize!" said Brian. "You of all people should know that everyone is a unique and special snowflake with the liberty to define and express their identity."
"You shouldn't undergeneralize!" retorted Taylor. "Can't you see the pattern? The entire transfeminine spectrum—we're just manifestations—shadows, projections—of the same …
When we're doing science to try to figure out how the human mind works, self-reports are certainly a very important source of evidence, albeit not the only source of evidence; it's often possible to measure what people do in addition to what they say about themselves.
As a social rule …