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I think it’s a consequence, in part because of the utilitarian approach most self described rationalists have. Utilitarian philosophy doesn’t have any inherent moral principles other than “minimize harm.” The problem comes when you have a group that’s defined “telling the truth” as “causing harm.” Theres no leverage to push back with. You can’t say “I refuse to tell lies” because that’s not really a base level moral principle of utilitarian moral thinking. The argument would take the form of “I don’t want to tell lies”, but unless you can show that you telling a lie leads to worse consequences than “trans woman committing suicide because you hurt their feelings,” it’s not something you can support under that moral code. It end up being “suicide vs my desire to tell the truth.” Truth loses.
Surely rationalists, who like doing things like calculating the effect of trillions of hypothetical future specks of dust in people's eyes and weighing them against immediate murder, would consider the advantages and disadvantages of respecting a trans person's chosen pronouns beyond the immediate effect of "I tell a lie" vs. "the person might go through with their threat of suicide". I think what is actually going on is a combination of (1) the real community of rationalists has a high fraction of people who are not quite the independent thinkers resilient to social pressure they make themselves out to be, and (2) the old guard at some point concluded that the danger of AI doom dominates their value function, and that building and maintaining a durable alliance with the US Left is their best shot at averting AI doom.
This might in part be reasonable political calculation (unaligned movements with any amount of influence, in the US climate, tend to be crushed as crypto-outgroupers and pillaged for remaining political capital by both sides; of the two, the Left is in principle more receptive to safetyism and EA/tikkun olam/global paternalism), and in part a certain measure of arrogance by the core personnel (Yudkowsky probably thinks of himself and the handful of people he respects as smart enough to not have their ability as the Wisest and Most Rational Human Beings be compromised by a well-contained set of signalling beliefs, and doesn't think that they stand to benefit that much from potential additional peers that get lost to brainrot in the pipeline).
… just figuring this out? I love the rationalist movement and read a lot of blogs/forums, but it totally falls apart once they start dealing with anything politically charged or that’s socially highly controversial.
A good example is Scott Alexander’s post after the election, where he basically said “I adamantly refuse to believe polymarket was correct by giving odds at 60-40 and the true odds were 50-50” really showed this to me. After the biggest right wing blow out election in recent history, you can’t accept one party had the odds going into it?
…anyways, many such examples, but it’s important to see this movement for what it is. Just so happened that the Rationalists, from Berkeley, rationally thought themselves into taking left wing stances on most all the controversial issues of ours time… right
I mean, how many of those stances are about facts, as opposed to values? Separate magisteria.
Part of the problem with Californian Utilitarianism is that while, when pressed, it will recognize that the choice of a utility function is ultimately an arbitrary decision, in practice it always seems to round down to "increase happiness", and therefore to the care/harm moral foundation, and therefore to left wing politics.
To wit, Zizians are functionally communists, Hegelian dialectic and all. They believe that there is a good future out there, they they can be its instruments, and that the goodness of the future washes away all sins they may commit in the service of that future, because the ends justify the means.
Scientific Utopianism is the disease of worshiping reason, and I'm afraid this isn't the last of its incarnations, because without any tempering force to the hubris of men who think they can predict the future, the temptation to make it one's own at all costs is always there. Babel's construction crew is never going to run out of volunteer laborers.
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Thing is, the problem with this view is that "trans women are not women" is not a universally-accepted truth--if anything, it is a matter of fundamental values conflict. To you, it is truth, but to trans women, it is the opposite. The only thing that points to objective reality is a trans person's birth identity--but the entire point of being transgender is to leave said identity behind as thoroughly and quickly as possible. You're not going to be able to do more than keep referring to The Artist Formerly Known As Prince as just "Prince."
It may not be a universally-accepted truth, but it is a scientific truth. We're a sexually dimorphic species. There are plenty of tests which easily tell the two groups apart with 99.99% accuracy, and if you're MtF you'd sure as hell better inform your doctor of that fact rather than acting like you're just a normal woman.
Joe Blow down the street thinks he's Napoleon. So, it's not a "universally-accepted truth" that he's not Napoleon. And maybe he gets violent if you don't affirm his Napoleonness in person, so there are cases where feeding his delusion is the path of least resistance. There's a "fundamental values conflict" there. But it remains an objective truth that he's not Napoleon.
I think this is a category error. It would be a bit like saying, "Scientifically speaking, an in-law is not your relative." Like, sure, I have no biological relationship to my mother-in-law, but we have a societal convention that marriage creates kin relationships, to not just my wife, but her whole family.
Similarly, it would be obtuse to say something like, "Scientifically speaking, 'adopted children' do not exist." Again, we normally consider the parent-child relationship to be biological, but adopted children and adoptive parents are granted an honorary parent-child relationship as a societal convention.
I think transness is best explained as an honorary social status. It has a family resemblance to institutions like the sworn virgins of Albania, or Queen Hatshepsut's honorary maleness. It's just an emerging social role within some Anglo-European societies, where a person of one sex declares that they would like to live as the other sex, usually adopting as much of the appearance of the opposite sex as possible and requesting treatment appropriate to that adopted sex role. It's not "scientific" to say, "transwomen are women", but neither is saying, "Augustus was Julius Ceasar's son." But we shouldn't expect all "true" statements to be true in a scientific way, rather than in an intersubjective cultural way.
Er, but "man" and "woman" really do have an objective scientific meaning, unlike "relative", which is a social convention. (Note that it would be equally incorrect to say "an in-law is your blood relative".) So I don't agree with your analogies; saying "trans women are women" is just an incorrect statement of fact, rather than describing social conventions.
That said, I do think your framing of transness as a social status is reasonable. If we were simply allowed to say someone was "living as the other sex", rather than the Orwellian thought control that the ideologues insist on, I think it wouldn't be nearly as controversial.
I'm not sure that I've heard the objective, scientific meaning of "man" and "woman" that doesn't fall prey to the Diogenes-style "behold Plato's man" objection.
I think a gamete-based definition is a strong option (and Trump seems to agree, based on his EO) or a cluster-of-traits definition. But even those have their flaws.
And even aside from core definitions, I think this ignores the way words often operate at many levels. A "bear" is centrally an animal, but if I call a bear-shaped toy or a fictional bear character a "bear", I'm stretching and skewing the word in a way that is immediately intuitively understandable to an English speaker, even though in a real, literal sense I'm not actually talking about any kind of bear at all.
A "woman" could centrally be an "adult human of the sex that produces large gametes", and we could still allow for stretched usages like calling a particular type of game piece in a board game a "woman", or granting trans women the status of honorary "women."
Sure, but when you start pretending the teddy bear toy is exactly the same as a live bear animal, and demand everybody must treat them exactly the same or face exile from the society, people are entitled to push back. There might be niche meanings and specific contexts where word meanings are stretched, but that's not what the controversy is about. The controversy is about applying that stretched niche maybe-sometimes-acceptable-if-you-squint-hard-enough meaning to all contexts and using cultural and legal and governmental coercion to suppress those who point out it makes no sense, or even just dare to discuss it instead of worshipping it. When we get rid of this - and we are in no way there right now - then we can go back to discussing which exactly rare and niche contexts we can recognize and how much stretching and squinting is appropriate.
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Such as?
While being broadly supportive of the definition of biological sex in Trump's EO, I touched on some of my reservations here.
Basically, it just seems obvious to me that the gamete definition of sex fails to create a two sex system, which seems to be a desideratum for a lot of anti-trans people. There are three natural gamete types in humans: type one produces small, mobile gametes, type two produces large gametes, and type three produces no gametes. Turning this into a two-sex model seems to require injecting a kind of Platonism into things, which is anti-empirical.
That is, the claim seems to be something like, "In some ideal sense separate from the raw biological reality of their situation, this person with Turner syndrome who produces no gametes, is actually a woman, even though womanhood is defined by producing large gametes, and they do not do this."
But if we're going to get Platonic with it, why couldn't we also say, "In some ideal sense separate from the raw biological reality of their situation, this transsexual person who produces small gametes, is actually a woman, even though womanhood is defined by producing large gametes, and they do not do this."
Put another way, I don't actually think the concept of a "defective woman" is actually scientific. It involves adding information to a raw, empirical reality in an undisciplined and unjustified way.
As for cluster definitions, I think the biggest objection is that they're "inelegant" and don't actually seem to do the thing we want to do, which is provide an easy membership test we can just apply to any new object in order to determine what category it belongs to. "Naturally produces small gametes" is an easy membership test. "Enough of their traits (chromosomes, anatomy, SRY gene, hormones, etc.) point in the right direction" is barely a test at all, even if 99+% of people are easily classified.
To me, it just seems intuitive that "this person possesses all of the traits we associate with members of category A but suffers from a medical condition which prevents them from producing large gametes, but for convenience's sake we'll include them in category A even though one could strictly argue they really belong in category C."
I mean, placing women with Turner syndrome in the category "women" makes the most pragmatic sense: virtually of the medical, psychological, criminological, physiognomy, sporting, sexual etc. predictions we would make about a "conventional" woman apply just as well to a woman with Turner syndrome (open to correction on this if women with Turner syndrome have some huge advantage in long-distance running or something). If literally the only predictive difference between members of category A and members of category C is that the former can get pregnant and the latter can't, but they are otherwise identical, it just seems inefficient to create a whole separate category. A rube with a battered corner is strictly speaking a separate shape from a conventional rube, but it's close enough that if rubes with battered corners only appear in 1 out of every 3,500 rubes, it would be inefficient to create a separate category.
Meanwhile, what you're proposing is "this person possesses none of the traits associated with members of category A (except claiming to experience a "subjectively felt sense of category A membership", which the vast majority of category A members in time and space do not claim to experience) and all of the traits associated with members of category B - but being placed in category B makes them sad, so we'll place them in category A to spare their feelings." Even though 100% of the predictions we would make about a typical member of category B would predict this person's body and behaviour with greater accuracy. Personally, I don't think a completely typical blegg threatening to kill itself unless you put it in the rube box is actually a good reason to place it in the rube box, if you've been instructed to dispassionately sort bleggs and rubes into the appropriate boxes. "Rube with a battered corner" is a legitimate edge case; "emotionally manipulative blegg" is not.
Ultimately it sounds like you're doing a marginally more sophisticated version of the style of argument that trans activists seem to love so much: "the existence of a few marginal edge cases in your categorisation system proves that it's COMPLETELY useless, so we might as well just throw our hands up and make both categories elective". But unlike you, I am not willing to throw out babies with bathwater. A categorisation system which is more accurate than literally every medical test ever devised is worth hanging onto, a handful of complicated edge cases notwithstanding. And the "complicated edge cases" I'm referring to are intersex people, not uncontroversially male people who claim to be women nonetheless. The categories were made for man to make predictions, and "this person with Turner syndrome is a woman" conveys predictive power in a way that "this person with a penis, testicles and a prostate is a woman" does not. If you want to sort a person into category A, but for all predictive intents and purposes (medical, criminological, psychological etc.) you'll be treating them as a member of category B anyway, it invites the question of why you even bothered to pretend to sort them into category A in the first place. (And I hope you'd have a better answer to hand then "because I fell victim to emotional manipulation".)
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It's whomever produces large or small gametes.
People who don't produce any are, in every case, a defective version of one or the other (yes this includes all types of intersex people). There's no example of true hermaphrodites in humans.
Why does that matter? Because the energetic economics of gamete size determine all the higher levels of abstraction over them. Up and including the forms of deceit you'd need to use to play at Diogenes.
I've actually always felt that this is kind of an odd abstraction from a philosophical stand point, wherever we do it - not just in the trans domain.
If we're talking about the "facts" about a person's biology, then shouldn't we actually talk about the empirical facts?
Like, if we want the central definition of dog to be something like, "Four-legged animal descended from wolves", then it seems a bit odd to me to say that a congenitally three-legged dog is "actually" a defective four-legged animal. It seems to me that it actually is a three legged animal, and while the central definition of dog might have four legs, it is actually fuzzier in the way almost all biological definitions are.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not stupid. I get the idea of human category making involving a central exemplar, and then making accomodations for difference. If I saw a purple horse, I would not lose all sense and go, "What kind of strange creature is this?", but I'd also be prepared to widen my effective definition of horses to include the possibility of non-central horses like a congenitally purple horse, the same way I do for albino or melanistic animals.
It kind of strikes me as a strange sort of epicycle to justify having any definitions at all in the biological space.
Like, by what metric is a person with Turner's syndrome (X0-karyotype) actually a "defective" woman? Sure, she'll have feminine anatomy, but she doesn't naturally undergo puberty and can't produce large gametes. If we're talking about congenital biology, that seems like a natal null to me, and our medical science is currently capable of pushing her body in a more womanly direction. But that was an intervention - it is not natural. How can we say she is a "biological woman", or a "defective biological woman" if we're using the gamete definition of sex? Surely, there would then be some ground to claim that a trans woman is just an extremely defective biological woman by the same token?
If we can admit comparisons and contrasts to the larger class as a non-central example, then it seems to me the limits of inclusion are social willingness and not any "objective" facts about the reference class.
Edit: Typo, flow.
If were trying to be empirical, shoudnt we actually take this as an opportunity to engage in philosophical reflection on what empirical facts really are, and reinterpret scientific findings into a different metaphysics based on that? IDK, but I guess thats what were doing. Topical.
The other way round: we say that dogs have four legs because the three-legged ones are defective. Generally in biology, you can tell that something is defective even if youve never seen the functional version. For example, if I got some species of mammal that youve never seen before, and I cut half its tail off, youll be able to see scar tissue and irregularly ending bones, blood vessels, nerves, etc. and know that its a defective tail. Congenitals defects similarly leave "scars" (sometimes literally if things grow in a very unfortunate way). You can immediately tell the difference between a pygmy and a dwarf for example. One is small, and the other defectively small, even though theyre the same height.
Turners syndrom patients dont produce gametes, but they have defective ovaries. They do not have defective male features.
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Culturally speaking, the alternative way of dealing with the problem of defective people is to put them in their own category.
Occidentals don't like to do this for reasons that take whole books to explain, but if you want to have a third social role made of eunuchs and other infertile people, it has ample precedent.
Biologically speaking however, Turner syndrome women do have female anatomy, which I find is too important to gloss over as you do.
A trans woman isn't a defective woman by this logic because all or most of the other abstractions carried on top of being the one that produces the abundant gamete type still apply. Such as risk taking behavior, for instance.
For the purposes of reproduction it's essential that people who carry the rare gamete are protected and easily identifiable, and most of the objections to muddying those waters come from that base reality. Not from people making themselves eunuchs.
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Isn't that the very crux of the issue? The big problem for trans activists is that using woman to describe a trans woman isn't immediately intuitively understood. That's why they need to oppress people into it.
Calling an adoptive child "my son", or my wife's mother "mother-in-law" isn't intuitive either. It is a social convention concerning common ways we stretch and skew language.
Calling an adoptive child "my son" is cromulent in the majority of the contexts where it comes up, because a majority of the mind-independent facts about reality conveyed by the term (chiefly, the processes involved in parenting a child) are still highly correlated with the term's usage - and the cases where the distinction matters (medicine, childbirth, cultural/legal distinctions) come up infrequently enough that these contexts typically warrant a clarifying distinction (adopted son), if they're ever mentioned at all.
Calling my wife's mother "mother-in-law" could only be described as unintuitive in the sense that nothing is left to the intuition, because the obvious distinction between objective and intersubjective information is directly encoded in the term.
I'll grant that there are languages and cultures where the same term can be used for "mother" and "mother-in-law", or where it is inappropriate to refer to a ward as "my son", and these use cases feel unintuitive to someone brought up without these linguistic or cultural practices. But I suggest that those languages and cultures arrived at their way of expressing these relationships because some of the mind-independent facts about reality conveyed by the terms in those languages or cultures are also more or less relevant to communication in those languages or cultures. And what's relevant to communication in those languages or cultures has historically been a consequence of many evolutionary adaptations generated by divergent selective pressures, such as geography, resource availability, proximity to other cultures and languages, etc.
I think the extent to which the language is being stretched and skewed in your examples is greatly overstated. Compare with: calling an adoptive child or my wife's mother "my flesh and blood" isn't intuitive, because it's not correlated with the (much more specific) mind-independent facts about reality that this language usually implies. A tenuous argument can be made for the wife's mother, in the sense that a flesh and blood bond is formed through a biological child, but it's indirect enough to be unintuitive. For an adopted child, I can't imagine any usage other than simile or metaphor, which is again indirect enough to be unintuitive. Calling an adoptive child and my wife's mother (with the implied familial relations) "my flesh and blood" is quite a stretch for the language, and we must retreat to subjective experiences (how I feel about the emotional bonds I share with my family) or abstract metaphors (religious covenant) to make sense of it - or maybe it doesn't make sense, and it's a lie.
It is precisely the degree to which the language is stretched and skewed by a non-central usage, relative to the information conveyed by a central usage, that determines how likely we are to permit it into everyday parlance.
With all of that in mind, consider: I've been reading a bunch of your comments to get a better understanding of your model of honorary social statuses, and I think the choice of the word "honorary" adds an implied meritorious connotation that isn't actually present. In my model of communication, languages are locally-optimizing compression schemes for transmitting information, relying on a common set of shared mind-independent facts about reality and presumed-to-be-shared subjective experiences, preferences, and tastes; intersubjective contexts such as culture and law are transforms applied to the language to modify the correlation between terms and the set of objective and subjective information they compress. The primary driver of the evolution of language is communicative fitness, which tends to map more closely to things like efficiency or clarity, than to something like merit. This isn't to say that deliberate linguistic engineering is impossible, or even necessarily unusual; nevertheless, I think a lot of your default examples of "honorary status" are not some top-down special award conferred by society upon the edge cases which then filtered down into everyday parlance, but are instead "close enough" practical communicative terminology that eventually required special intersubjective considerations as the edge cases naturally bubbled up from everyday parlance and encountered gaps, contradictions, and disputes in existing cultural, legal, and societal frameworks. In other words, I think calling this phenomenon "honorary status" inverts cause and effect by implication of merit.
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Calling your adoptive child son and calling your wife's mother mom are exactly intuitive, and perfectly fine for everyday use. They might not happen immediately - the two parties involved have to develop a relationship and a sense of intimacy - but those phrases will be adopted naturally. However when the law and greater society is involved additional distinctions are required, so my son becomes my adopted son and my Ma becomes my mother in law.
And if trans activists had followed that process instead of compelling people to pretend they already had that level of intimacy with a bunch of strangers in wigs, I doubt we'd see the opposition we do today.
Edit: for flow
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The problem is that transgenders are inconsistent. They'll argue for the strength of definitions when doing so suits them, and for the weakness of definitions when it suits them, and against both whenever it doesn't suit them. They don't care about definitions, they care only about what suits them. They want something they can't have, leaving them to clutch at whatever they can wrest, while ignoring that their taking possession negates any significance.
I'm not sure that I've observed this inconsistency.
What are some instances where you think the definitions are strong, and on trans people's sides that they tend to bring up?
In many ways, the core of my adoptive sex model is one that sidesteps definitions all together. Sure, call trans women "men" if you want - that has absolutely no bearing on whether they're an honorary woman, because honorary statuses exist in the social realm not the empirical realm.
A pretty clear example of this is how depending on what is convenient to attack or defend at the moment, trans activists will switch from "gender and sex are different things" to "trans women are women" which are contradictory positions.
Now, I understand this also stems from internal dissentions between transmeds and tucutes, but I have seen activists from both sides argue both of these despite the logical contradiction. At the end of the day it's hard to reconcile this behavior with anything but a lust for power.
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It's not something we can know for sure without checking, but my suspicion is that "we'll acknowledge that transwomen are women in a way similar to the Queen in chess being an honorary woman" would be welcomed by people insisting that transwomen are women. For instance, almost no one would bat an eye at someone using "it" to refer to the chess piece, implying that the speaker sees it as an object, whereas TRAs would tend to object to someone using "he" to refer to a transwoman (one who doesn't idioysncratically use masculine pronouns, anyway), implying that the speaker sees him as a man who identifies as a woman.
Besides that, of course there are a whole host of demands about what claiming that transwomen are women imply about rights and privileges transwomen are entitled to, with respect to woman-only spaces that doesn't apply to chess pieces. Since chess pieces aren't sentient or have will, the parallels break down, but to use the other example, when a child accidentally rips open his teddy bear, we don't treat it as if he just murdered his pet. When he doesn't feed it while keeping it constrained in his bedroom, we don't treat it as if he's being neglectful of or cruel to his pet.
I just don't think "transwomen are women by stretching the definition of women, but they're men in every other way we treat them in society" is a position that many people would support, certainly not among TRAs. The central conflict here has little to do with word games.
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Sorry, this is just tired philosobabble, which I have no patience for. All the biological ways to define man and woman agree in >99% of cases, and agree with what humans instinctively know, too. If you want to pretend that obvious things aren't obvious for the sake of your political goals, I'm not going to play along. That's anti-intelligence.
I don't think you can avoid doing a little philosophy when you are talking about rigorous scientific definitions.
I think you and I are in near complete agreement as far as empirically verifiable reality surrounding trans women or biological sex is concerned.
Fair enough. Sorry, I think I reacted too harshly, because it pattern-matched too closely to the pro-trans anti-scientific argument. When dealing with any field of
applied applied physicsbiology, even though it's still "science", your definitions are basically always going to have a little fuzz around them. As you aptly pointed out here, governments should be open to litigation for borderline cases.More options
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We've had this conversation a few times before, and I don't feel like my objections were ever answered to my satisfaction. Looking deeper into the analogy clearly shows that we don't treat trans identity as anything like adoptive family, or relations through marriage. For example, if my friends invite me over, and I see their kid is black, it might be more or less appropriate to ask how that came to be, but it wouldn't be obtuse. It would be obtuse to pretend there's nothing for me to be surprised by.
Is it, though? Howcome when Trump passes his EO's the response from the mainstream media isn't "Trump Being Obtuse: Fails To Realize Trans Identity Is A Social Role, Not A Medical Claim", but "Trump'S Definition Of 'Male,' 'Female' Criticized By Medical And Legal Experts"? What would it take to show that your view on trans identity isn't what is being imposed on society right now?
'Trump's Definition of "Male," "Female" Criticized by Medical and Legal Experts' is just "Trump Being Obtuse," laundered through the priestly class. It's the same playbook as the shift to "Born This Way" for the Gay acceptance movement; have an ideologically captured cohort insist a blatant falsehood is actually true by playing that most tired of games, the language game. Nothing about the existence of Kleinfelter's implies that we logically must accept Trans as an identity for anyone willing to claim it (note that the Trans movement itself vehemently rejects any argument that medical diagnosis be a requirement for acceptance), any more than fuzziness over exactly what age a child is no longer a baby but is now a toddler forces us to accept a 46 year old man's claim to actually be a 6 year old girl.
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I'm not responsible for the silly things other people claim, even if they come to conclusions that superficially resemble my own. Before I answer your question, let me touch on my feelings about Trump's EO.
On one level, I'm basically fine with the definitions of biological sex in Trump's EO, and I disagree with the critics that say they're malformed.
Gametic sex always felt like the best way to define biological sex to me, and I think that the people criticizing the "at conception" part of the definition are a bit wrong-headed. It makes sense that you can belong to a category (the sex that produces large or small gametes) even if you don't yet have the mature ability to do the thing characteristic of that category. A caterpillar is still a juvenile butterfly, even if it doesn't have wings.
I could quibble about the fact that at conception a fertilized egg can become one person, two people (twins) or half of a person (chimeras), and that this can technically lead to weird cases like this fertile chimera woman who was a fusion of two beings who, at conception, arguably belonged to the male sex, and the female sex - unless we count her conception as starting at the point where the chimera was formed, in which case it is not clear to me that we knew what sex she belonged to (based on the EO's definition) until she finally developed. Can a person's sex technically remain in limbo for more than a decade by this definition?
I could also quibble about people I would describe not as "intersex" but "nullsex." If sex is defined by gametes, what about people who don't naturally produce gametes? I always find it a bit odd that people with Turner syndrome (X0-karyotype) are considered "biolgical women." While they have gynomorphic anatomy, they typically do not naturally go through puberty, and do not have functional ovaries. If given hormone therapy, they'll go through a female puberty, and they can get pregnant through IVF with donor eggs, but under a gametic definition of sex they'd surely represent a third sex (a null sex.)
But I'm not inclined to such quibbling here. Law is an example of practical philosophy. Those corner cases will be dealt with by courts interpreting the definitions used. That chimera woman would likely be considered "female" by any competent court. So too, they'd likely class people with Turner syndrome as women, regardless of how the law defines "female."
To actually answer your question. I think the article you're talking about is pulling a bit of a motte and bailey. I read it, and what it claims is technically true. The director of the health institute they interviewed did indeed claim that the cluster definition of sex was a better model, and thought that EO ignored intersex people. The lawyer they interviewed did indeed worry that trans people and intersex people would be hurt by the order. Nowhere did the article actually try to defend "gender" (what I would call "honorary sex"), and there's actually a weird disconnect in the middle of the article. The cluster definition is certainly a defensible alternative definition of sex, but it's not one that seems to easily cohere with the issue of trans people (who would likely still be classed in their biological sex, even with a cluster definition.)
I think they think this is the strongest case they can make in an adversarial environment. Retreat to, "sex is more complex than this, what about intersex people?" and "it will hurt people" - not actually claim anything about the nature of trans people one way or the other.
Cultural narratives that justify social change will do what they will, I have no control over that. LGB activists really enjoyed bringing up gay penguins and the like, even though it reeks of the naturalistic fallacy to me. But the "born this way" narrative really took off, and it was only natural that trans people would try the same rhetorical move. It's the same thing that happened with the anti-cryptocurrency people who recycled the environmental critique and used it against generative AI, even though the amount of energy being used is a drop in the bucket compared to things like airline travel, existing data centers' energy usage, etc.
I think it must always be weird to live through a decentralized social change. Sets of narratives will compete until one that finally wins the day and convinces people bubbles up to the top. The narrative that wins won't necessarily be "true" - just convincing.
I don't care that my "honorary sex" model isn't the one preferred by trans advocates. I think it is the most true model of the situation, until an artificial superintelligence studies humanity and fully explains every aspect of aberrant human psychology one way or the other.
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Surely the chromosomal and hormonal makeup point to some sort of objective reality too, but this shouldn't even matter. I'm with Scott's The categories were made for man(...) here, taken to what I think is its logical conclusion - my mental categories were made for me, and if I for whatever reason decide that I want to cluster those humans with XY chromosomes plus whatever set of unprincipled exceptions in one category, nobody else should have any more right to force me to redraw my mental boundaries, any more than some snarky time traveller would have the right to force a legendary king to remove whales from the purview of the ministry of fish. Allowing this kind of epistemological violence against adults and even unrelated children seems wholly inconsistent with the rest of the modern human rights package, and more akin to medieval conquerors forcing the subjects of their conquest to convert at swordpoint (and spying on them to make sure they do not secretly retain their old faith).
(I do in fact have little objection to pro-trans policies that do not entail "you must believe and profess that trans X are X", insofar as they are not used to salami-slice their way towards sword-point conversion. If people want to make a mockery of women's sports or women's hiring quotas or whatever, they can duke it out with those that care for those things.)
If I remember right you understand enough math that you should see the difficulty with the distinction between "facts" and "categorisations" hes trying to draw. Have you thought about that more/found a way its not self-undermining?
Can you give me some more detail about the difficulty that you are seeing? I didn't think that it is hard to draw in any way that is particularly relevant to the trans question - the only problem that really pertains to it is that people tend to become very coy about why they want to engage in various aspects of the male-female distinction. The reason people care about facts is that facts determine the action->outcome function they are facing as agents; the reason they create categories is that the (facts \times actions -> outcomes) function is hard to evaluate and has a large domain that you would need to search if you seek to optimise. Lost time and effort also affects the outcome negatively, so all else equal it is better if you can approximately factor the function through a smaller domain (facts -> categories, categories \times actions -> outcomes) without skewing the valuation of each resulting outcome much. If you don't understand what actions you are considering and what outcomes you find desirable, though, this is a hopeless or at least hard undertaking.
Scott's King Solomon gives a whole array of good reasons why he wants to categorise whales with fish, given that his outcomes are valued by "edible biomass captured" and his actions are in the class of "allocate money to biomass-capturing institutions". If you cluster whales and fish and your second factor just gets "dag sighted" as its first parameter, the expected outcomes of each available action ("pay the fishing ministry") are about the same as if you evaluated the full function with every little detail of the whale. His psychiatrist avatar does so as well, given that he evaluates on his patients' subjective wellbeing and has actions consisting of talking and prescribing various FDA-approved drugs. What Scott misses in his discussion is that the characterisations the king and psychiatrist use, too, are grounded in facts - just different ones, which are more relevant to how their available actions affect their valuated outcomes. It is just as much of a fact that whales spend all their time in water, have fins and no particularly flexible limbs or neck, and that the transwoman patient will be unhappy if they are called a man to their face.
Aggregating on these factual criteria is useful for these people - but that doesn't give them any standing to suggest or impose categorisations on other people with completely different goals. King Solomon's fishing goals are irrelevant to the geneticist, and the psychiatrist's patient ratings are not similar to the objectives of almost everyone interacting with trans people on a day to day basis. For example, in my academic environment, my actions are basically talk and sometimes putting the thumb on the scale in some hiring decision, while the outcomes I want are about a peaceful social environment that is conducive to doing research. If trans people cluster with their birth gender as far as these are concerned (topic for another discussion thread), then whatever the mechanism is, that is the fact I would want to build my categories around.
All of this is irrelevant, though, because I think granting a human right to have bizarre and impractical categories if one so wishes is necessary for a society that is worth living in.
The correspondence between sets and predicates as shows up in formal logic. Applied to the example of the whales, this might be something like "What if the tanners guild wants to say whales dont have hairs?". Basically, it is not the case that there are some propositions that are "facts" that you just have to believe, and some that are "categorisations" where you can pick how you want to do them. You face the same basic situation wrt all of them, and obviously theyre not all up to you to decide - because on what basis could you decide, that is not itself a proposition?
I'm afraid I'm only getting more lost - you seem to be referring to some very specific (philosophical?) discussion that you assume I'll recall if you hint about it, but I'm drawing blanks. When you say "correspondence between sets and predicates (...)", this makes me think you are talking about predicates in extension (is-whale := the set of all things that you want to call a whale) vs. predicates in intension (is-whale := <some description of an algorithm to determine if a given thing is a whale>), but I'm not sure how that would relate to the rest of your post.
Do you want to do something like drawing a distinction between predicates that are "more naturally" expressed extensionally vs. intensionally? So you would for example consider a notion of "nice number" that actually amounts to "is a Fibonacci number" as "factual", whereas a notion of "nice number" that amounts to "gives off good vibes to Lykurg" is "arbitrary".
I don't understand what that would have to do with the "tanners' guild" example, though - that sounds more like a setup where two different entities use different categories under the same label and want to push the respective other to adopt theirs (why? to reduce cognitive load for themselves when they are interacting with each other?). For your example, how do you envision the tanners' guild using that assertion of theirs? Is it (1) if someone gives them a piece of whale skin with hair follicles, they will say "whales don't have hairs, so I will pretend these are not there and not smooth out these before tanning it"? (2) if someone gives them a piece of -"-, they will say "this is hairy, so it is not whale skin and I will not put it in the whale processing pipeline"? (3) nothing changes about how they process whale skin with hair follicles, but they will dispatch a guy to argue all day if anyone anywhere claims that whales have hair?
You can define sets in terms of predicates (x \elem Fish \iff: fish(x)) or the other way (fish(x) \iff: x \elem Fish). So while you might intuitively say that x \elem Fish is a categorisation, it has a brother thats intuitively has the form of a fact, and you cant change one without the other.
There is not a logical distinction between intensional and extensional definitions, except
in modal logics, where it exists but depends entirely on details in your semantic setup that are in no way constrained by evidence, or
in model theory, there are intensions and extensions - but still no intensional or extensinal definitions in the underlying.
This is another manifestation of the problem.
I had (1) in mind when making up the example.
No. Its just an example of how one of the things he lists as "facts" might be redefined with just as good a justification as "fish". The problem is that when you decide what the optimal most convenient way to categorise is, you need to have some facts based on which to make that decision. But if theres no difference between facts and categorisations, then you dont.
Calling either of those two a "fact" does not seem right to me - it seems like it's conflating the signifier (the word "fish") with the signified (whatever factual basis is being used for defining the category). Now, if your objection is that we have no way of directly interacting with facts except by making categories that refer to them, whether these categories are complex high-level things like "fish" or more low-level ones like "hair follicles" or "adenine", and we have just arbitrarily elevated some of these categories to being "facts", that objection is philosophically fair - but, I would argue, not relevant in practice: a category/signifier is a better proxy for a fact/signified the more likely every existing and hypothetical human is to agree on its extension, and the great triumph of reductionism is that as categories become lower-level/further removed from day-to-day experience, they empirically become better proxies. Democrats and Republicans might have great disagreements about what is a "woman", and moderns and ancients might have disagreements about what is a "fish", but they will mostly agree about X and Y chromosomes looking different under a microscope, and would acknowledge that a hair is a hair if shown to them.
This is consistent with a model where even though we are cursed with only being able to use "categories" and not "facts", talking about reality is actually easy, and all that gets in the way is motivated reasoning, which can be dealt with by picking "categories" that are weird enough that the monkey brain fails to backpropagate its motivation to them. In such a setting, all we need to do to have access to something that is as good as facts (in the sense of behaving as if it were an aspect of objective reality, so two people with sufficient observation and discussion will always come to agree on its extension) is to pick a rich enough category of such monkey-proof signifiers, and gatekeep it. It doesn't matter if there are some grey-zone categories that are not quite factual in that sense, if we can just treat them as non-facts, and ground all our definitions in the gatekept category of facts.
Well, I'm using a mishmash of mathematical terminology, old and busted analytical philosophy and whatever schlock comes out of my badly trained neural net here, but the most serious logic I've done was in the context of computability theory, where the distinction is made and absolutely matters - people in that subculture like to build their whole notion of ontology around equality testing, and equality in intension and equality in extension are not the same. Going meta, the extension of an "intensional definition" is then all entities that have the same (or equivalent under some notion, if you are a potential mark for the HoTT pyramid scheme) syntactical definition, while the extension of an "extensional definition" is all entities whose definition has the same extension.
Okay, that clarifies it, but why would they do that? Does it help them produce good leather, perhaps because they want to batch-process all stock they get from the fishing guild together? If it actually produces better outcomes, then there shouldn't be a problem with them saying that whales are fish. If they do in fact wind up saying that whales have no hair, that seems like an instance of what I called monkey brain backpropagation of motivations further above. Why would they do that instead of just saying that as far as they are concerned, fish sometimes do have hair, but they are still going to process all fish together? Did someone pressure them to adopt the "fish have no hair" definition?
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