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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   29325 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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Alright, having read part 1, and half of part 2, I'm going to attempt a response. Please forgive me if you've already addressed something I say in your other writings. Based on what I've read, I think you and I have fairly similar trans etiologies and ontologies (even if I emphasize or deemphasize different parts, and might assign higher or lower probabilities to certain things existing or mattering), and the primary point of difference between the two of us is the philosophy of language surrounding the issue of categorization, and the resulting normative theory that arises from that difference.

I doubt I'll "pass [your] philosophy-of-language litmus test", but I'm more rat-adjacent than an actual rationalist, and so I'm not really concerned whether you "lose all respect for [me] as a rationalist."

The issue was that category boundaries are not arbitrary (if you care about intelligence being useful). You want to draw your category boundaries such that things in the same category are similar in the respects that you care about predicting/controlling, and you want to spend your information-theoretically limited budget of short words on the simplest and most widely useful categories.

First, I want to say that I think you have an overly narrow conception of category drawing. Humans are very good at coming up with new categories on the fly, even when those categories don't always have good words for them. When academics are being responsible with terminology, you'll get discussions of emic (insider) vs. etic (outsider) terminology, and acknowledgement that some word or phrase is being used as a matter of convenience and not because it refers to a particular well-conceived or robust category.

Heck, look at something as "frivolous" as TV Tropes wiki. While some of the "tropes" they identify were named and recognized before the wiki started, a lot of the tropes are just patterns in stories and storytelling that people picked up on and decided to name, and when people notice a similar (but different) pattern they have to decide the boundaries between the two "tropes" they identify. The entirety of the wiki is an exercise in human categorization of an essentially endless and unresolvable set of category questions. The only thing keeping it somewhat sensible and stable is a respect for precedence, and a desire to settle on some set of useful vocabulary that outweighs people's desire for endless debates about category boundaries.

I think if I was trying to steelman something in the realm of "words can mean whatever you want them to mean", it would be in this context. I frequently have conversations where there's some idea I want a short word or phrase to refer to, and a suitable one does not exist. It is easy enough to drill down into the features I want to call out, and try to come up with a good label for it. This is a very fluid thing that happens naturally, and I assume it's being done casually, all the time, throughout human conversations. It's easy, and part of the fun is working out conventions on-the-fly with the people you're having the conversation with so that a conversation can happen in the first place.

I think this is part of why I'm less insistent on the idea that words must mean one and only one specific thing. If I'm talking with someone, and it becomes clear that the semantic scope of some word that's important to a discussion I want to have is different for them than it is for me, then as a practical matter I will have to come up with a new word or phrase for both of us to use to fruitfully have a discussion anyways.

My position is less, "words can mean whatever you want them to mean", and more "while it is useful for common, everyday words to cut reality at the joints, it's not the end of the world if you have to come up with a new convention on the spot that sets aside terminology disputes you're less interested in having." That process is about as free and fluid as "words meaning whatever you want them to mean", but with a specific pragmatic goal limiting the scope of the word creation process.

Aside from that, you make some specific claims about human cognition and psychology that I find dubious, such as:

Forcing a speaker to say "trans woman" instead of "man" in a sentence about my cosplay photos depending on my verbally self-reported self-identity may not be forcing them to lie, exactly. It's understood, "openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning," what trans women are; no one is making a false-to-fact claim about them having ovaries, for example. But it is forcing the speaker to obfuscate the probabilistic inference they were trying to communicate with the original sentence (about modeling the person in the photograph as being sampled from the "man" cluster in configuration space), and instead use language that suggests a different cluster-structure. ("Trans women", two words, are presumably a subcluster within the "women" cluster.) Crowing in the public square about how people who object to being forced to "lie" must be ontologically confused is ignoring the interesting part of the problem. Gender identity's claim to be non-disprovable functions as a way to avoid the belief's real weak points. [Emphasis mine]

First, it's not obvious to me that this kind of word usage actually confuses anyone's mental maps of the world. Consider a phrase like: "Toy elephants are elephants."

I think even a child understands to their core that toy elephants and actual elephants differ in important regards. If you ask them if toy elephants breathe, or have working organs or a thousand other questions, if the child answers honestly they will admit that a toy elephant has none of these features. I think if someone took an analogous stance to the word "elephant" as you take to the word "woman", then we'd insist on always calling them "elephant-shaped toys" or "toys a human creator designed in the image of an elephant" or something silly like that.

But no one is confused. No one's models about the world are distorted. Everyone with any sense understands that a toy elephant might be an elephant, but it isn't a "real" elephant.

I don't think it "matters" whether toy elephants go in the "elephant" cluster or the "animal-shaped" toy cluster, because my intuition is that everyone's pre-linguistic understanding of the situation is fundamentally the same regardless of what words we decide to use for the situation or where we draw strict category boundaries.

Now, I admit that the social norm that it is wrong to ask about a person's genitals or what surgeries they have undergone, combined with other social norms that hide people's genitals from sight does create a situation where people might genuinely be confused about how the world actually is as a matter of fact. But I think those are the the primary issues, not the fact that the phrase "trans woman" doesn't offer specific insight that would overcome the ignorance that our social norms might produce.

The person also said it was hard because it seemed like there were no moderate centrists on gender: you could either be on Team "if you ever want to know what genitals someone has for any reason, then you are an evil transphobe", or Team "trans women are disgusting blokes in dresses who are invading my female spaces for nefarious purposes".

I added that the worst part was that the "trans women are disgusting blokes in dresses who are invading my female spaces for nefarious purposes" view was basically correct. It was phrased in a hostile and demeaning manner. But words don't matter! Only predictions matter!

I think you and I approach the implications of your last sentence here from different angles. I agree that predictions matter more than raw words, and I believe that you and I would make similar predictions about a number of things related to the trans discussion. I think you and I could even have a fruitful discussion on trans issues if we made a short-term convention of "useful" terminology that neither of us found objectionable.

However, if predictions matter more than words, then where words don't actually confuse people (as I believe they do not in this case) there can hardly be an objection to using a particular word for something. Ask me any empirical question about "trans women", and I believe I could answer in a way where my predictions would largely line up with yours, perhaps with some differences due to different research paths and life experiences.

I get that you were burned by the rationalist community, since they seemed to get what you consider a very easy question wrong, and consistently did so in a way that undermined your belief that they were sincerely applying the principles you though they were trying to live by. I get that this is important to you because you've lived with this set of emotions for years, and have felt like you were going crazy when no one else seemed to be able to acknowledge the cognitive dissonance that you seemed to observe in them. But I'm not actually convinced that this is as big a deal as it has become in your head. If you already "know thyself" on this topic, and feel like you have a reasonably good read on what the world is in fact like, why blow your life up over an unimportant word quibble?

However, if predictions matter more than words, then where words don't actually confuse people (as I believe they do not in this case) there can hardly be an objection to using a particular word for something.

It may be that you are not confused, but the people who use the words are still trying to sow confusion. "Trans women are women" is used to demand that trans women be treated like women. Nobody demands that toy elephants be treated as elephants.

You just helped me realize "Trans women are women" is a motte-and-bailey. There are 2 ideas there:
"You should treat trans women as women because that is the morally correct thing to do" and
"Trans women are literally women".
I've seen a lot of people attack and mock the latter on forums but I never noticed the implied former idea until now. I guess that's the one US progressives actually believe and they use the offensive/latter version to piss off the outgroup.

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