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ialdabaoth comments on Rationality Quotes December 2013 - Less Wrong
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Given that this quote essentially advises ignoring priors, I don't see what's so Bayesian about it.
Would you mind explicitly stating the prior that it's advising to ignore?
That said, it could also be taken as advising you not to double-count your priors by using them to discount the evidence. Imagine you've drawn a ball from an urn, and the ball looks blue to you — but your priors say that 99% of the balls in that urn are red. How much time do you want to spend questioning the validity of your color vision or the lighting before you consider that you drew a rare ball?
Is cis or trans identity really something that is truth-apt (& therefore in the purview of probability)? It seems to be a combination of self-description of feelings, plus chosen group affiliation.
The self-description of feelings is presumably more or less infallible, and the group affiliation is stipulated by the individual.
Well, it's possible to be wrong about your own feelings. The question that matters is "later, after transitioning, would I feel better or worse than I do now", which isn't necessarily infallibly correlated to your current feelings.
Thanks for the ManU fan example, it helped. If we reformulate the gender identity question as "will my future self be happy if I make permanent decisions based on my current perceived identity?", we get something that makes more sense to assess probabilistically. I guess the ManU fan case could be reformulated in a similar way, but I can't imagine how the real life scenario would look like.
That's one interpretation. Another interpretation is that "trans identity" is a symptom of a diseased mind and culture, whereas a normal and healthy understanding of gender would understand that it's simply the correct cultural roles assigned to each sex - either as part of a Schelling point necessitated by our need for roles and divisions of duty, or as part of inherent biological differences.
Each interpretation is entangled with a particular world-view and a particular political position, so it becomes very difficult to extract true facts from bald assertions.
Trans people are more likely than normal to reject the usual role for their birth gender, but being trans is very separate from gender role. Or at least, all the trans people I know, and at least most they know, consider it to be so.
Until recently, there were a lot of trans people who had this interpretation of gender and the associated world-view, but just thought their minds had their identified gender's biological characteristics so they fit better there. See "Harry Benjamin Syndrome". Though I'll warn you that it mostly fell out of favor before the modern internet, so there isn't much information on it online.
Could you explain what you mean by this via an easier to grasp concept than gender identity, preferably in a way that preserves relevance to identity?
Sure. Does it make sense for an individual to think about the probability that they (themselves) are a Manchester United fan?
I say it doesn't, really. If you (a) like ManU in some sense, and (b) are willing to call yourself a ManU fan, you are a ManU fan.
Well, in some sense, obviously, you can identify as whatever you please. But it's a rare identity that carries no implications about the world or at least how you react to it. To run with the example, I expect there are a number of imperfectly correlated reasons you might call yourself a Manchester United fan: you might for example feel more excited -- a physical, measurable response -- when watching ManU games than games ManU isn't involved in, or you might be involved with the club's fan community. Generally, however, these are going to be statements about the state of the world, not purely arbitrary stances.
To the extent that it makes sense to talk about the legitimacy of an identity, it might be said to refer to how closely that identity maps to these evidences. That's not to say that a good litmus test exists in every particular case, though.
And yet there are plenty of sports fans that question the legitimacy of other fans, based on accidental characteristics.
I.e., "You can't be an Auburn fan, you're a goddamn Yankee!"
Which, in essence, is the same problem I think: there's all sorts of semantic and pragmatic meaning attached to concepts like gender (and fandom!) that exist outside of the mind of the individually engendered or fanatic person, which cause other people to feel that their own meaning is being betrayed by that person. In a weird way, I think this is part of a failure to keep one's identity small - when people include potentially falsifiable beliefs-about-the-world/beliefs-about-others in their own identity, they risk having that identity thrown into crisis whenever those beliefs are challenged.
The prior probability for a person being cis is obviously much higher than the prior for trans; looking at it one way, this quote is advising ignoring that prior.
Of course, looked at another way, it's specifically noting that there should be a large complexity penalty for the hypothesis "I’m just a cis person who has somehow managed to convince myself that I’m trans to the point that I’m having this kind of crisis" relative to the hypothesis "I'm trans". And also implicitly using the reversal test.
Why? Also could we unpack the "I am trans" hypothesis? It seems to say "sometime during development something flipped the secondary sexual characteristics in my brain but not any of the ones outside it" given the type of spaghetti code evolution tends to produce, this seems rather unlikely. On the other hand, people convince themselves of weird beliefs and take them seriously enough to generate crises fairly regularly.
And yet...
Well, one obvious explanation for people thinking themselves trans is that maybe one of the secondary sexual characteristics flipped or maybe even something not related to sex at all. As a result they don't quite fit in, then they here about the transsexuality movement and convince themselves that they've found the problem.
Note that this is consistent with the twin studies. All the brain scan stuff strikes me as the "we picked it up on a brain scan therefore it must be biologically caused" fallacy.
Does it matter to you if it's biologically caused all else being equal?
Biologically caused is a problematic expression. Everything in the brain is biologically caused if we're generous enough. I assume you mean genetically caused or developmentally caused.
Well, biologically as opposed to memetically, for starters.
This is a potentially valid but minority interpretation of the statement "X is trans.", held by no trans people I have discussed the subject with (and it tends to come up, eventually, across a sample size of a dozen middling-to-close friends). The more common one, which all trans people I know hold, is "At some point during my development I gained a strong repulsion from the particular cultural bundle labeled with the gender which matches the dominant one for my sex." Generally this is also a strong attraction to the other major gender bundle, but sometimes the trans person finds that bundle equally off-putting and rejects both, and others exchange between the two regularly or hold themselves to be both.
Also, the poor coding practices which evolution uses make this more, not less, likely to occur. Most people who study trans issues, history, etc. agree that there were probably high rates of 'masked' trans people in the past, who kept their personal identification preferences secret.
But that's way too broad IMO.
I mean, I have an Y chromosome. I have male genitalia and no desire to ever change this. (I also happen to have quite a few traits that are way more common among males than among females, e.g. being about 1.88 m (6'2") tall, having a baritone vocal range, having quite a lot of terminal facial and body hair, and being sexually attracted to women.) I find calling myself male a quite reasonable way of summarizing that info.
But I find claims that all this means that my long hair/dislike of football/low aggressiveness/finding it easier to befriend women than men/etc.¹ are somehow suboptimal or make my maleness any less valid to be preposterous and/or offensive. ("So I guess your wooden leg makes you a table." -- Frank Zappa) IOW I do have “a strong repulsion from the particular cultural bundle labeled with the gender which matches the dominant one for my sex”. But I don't see any particular need to throw the baby away with the bath water and stop calling myself a man.
(As for neurological differences, I haven't got a brain scan in the couple few decades, but FWIW my girlfriend is a heterosexual female neurologist.)
And I think that once one knows all this about me, there's no question left to ask whether I actually am a man.
Like you, I have a Y chromosome and male genitalia and some traits that are more common among males than females, as well as some traits that are more common among females than males (such as being sexually attracted to men). And, sure, calling myself male is a fine way of summarizing that info, and nobody seems to object.
And I am entirely comfortable describing myself as male and being described that way. I'm comfortable playing a male social role, in other words. It sounds like you are, as well.
By contrast, I have friends who, like you and me, have a Y chromosome and male genitalia and etc. and etc. But they are not comfortable playing a male social role.
So there seems to be a difference between you and me, on the one hand, and my friends, on the other. Consequently, it seems useful to have language that lets us talk about that difference.
Some of those friends refer to themselves as "trans women". I see no reason not to use that language to refer to them.
Presumably they are also uncomfortable having male physiology? Otherwise why do such people seek to change it? It seems a drastic step to take if the only motivation is to join the other social club.
The trans people I know vary widely in terms of whether they seek to alter their sexual physiology. Some do, some don't, some do in principle but don't consider the options provided by current technology good enough for the benefits to outweigh the cost.
But that aside, yeah, agreed. That, too, is a difference for which it is sometimes useful to have language.
Speaking more generally here... presumably that depends a lot on how much we perceive membership in the other "social club" to depend on physiological markers, and the advantages we perceive in such membership. (Just to be clear, I'm not talking here about trans folk, but about people who seek to change their physiology in pursuit of social mobility, which is a whole different thing.)
This is why it's usually said that sex is biological, but gender is socio-cultural. Gender ideals and gender roles can change a lot from one culture to another. You might be a seemingly effeminate man in one place, and yet find that you're entirely normal in another place. It's complete delusion to think white North American cultural roles correspond to some Deep Time-driven neurological or evolutionary factor in some special way nobody else on the planet has access to.
Imagine being told that 90% of the planet's men are less masculine than the median! Does that make the statistician in you perk up his ears and start screaming bloody murder, or what!?
Than the median man, or than the median person?
Either way. It doesn't really matter. An extreme spread between the median and mean, or between the supposed population median and the apparent sample median, indicates that somebody didn't do their sampling right at some point. Or in other words, they sampled WEIRDoes again instead of global humanity in general.
(I had misread "less masculine" as "more masculine".)
I don't entertain ideas about my gender identity at all, and don't understand people who do. Perhaps as a small child I might have done that, but don't remember a single instance.
This might make me jump to the conclusion that gender identity isn't important to me, but I think it's just as possible that being a man is invisible to me, since there's no cognitive dissonance whatsoever. Listing characteristics that are important for being a man would be quite difficult for me.
I could list many things that women usually do that I dislike, but I can think of many other reasons other than femininity for why I dislike them.
I don't consider your IOW to be accurate; rejecting the masculine stereotypes is not the same as rejecting the cultural bundle labeled 'man', though obviously it's similar. Most trans men I know are fairly femme, and most trans women fairly butch.
How so? I don't suppose you consider stuff like height or vocal range as cultural, do you?
You're rejecting the subbundle "Manly Man" without rejecting the rest of the bundle. You still, most likely, take up as much space as you need when in a space with other people, without questioning whether that is fair. You still probably make insulting cracks at your friends when hanging out, though they're jokes, not serious. Your Adam's apple doesn't feel like an out-of-place tumor, nor does your penis (dysphoria). And you don't get the gender-swapped equivalent of this (direct quote from a trans guy):
I intend to ask my other trans friends (who I can contact) in the next day or two. Clearly there is an element of having the wrong XML tag, but I strongly expect that there are other elements that cause that. And even if there aren't, this isn't a wrong question; being referred to correctly is important to them.
Also, in his words:
How do I take less space than I need? The fact that I'm physically big is hardly cultural. (I do think that that's unfortunate when I am in a limited space with someone else, but there's little I can do about that.)
Yeah, sometimes I do, but it's not like women never do.
That's hardly cultural.
I actually usually do. (There are exceptions.)
There was once an old Saturday Night Live skit about nationality-change operations. But given your explanation, wouldn't that imply that some people might actually think of themselves as a different nationality than the one they were born into? It's certainly a cultural bundle, after all. Why don't we see that?
First of all: We don't? It's less visible, certainly, but I know people who have felt they had a lot more in common with another country (or just another part of the country, within the US) than where they were born, and usually move there. Of course, moving is comparatively easy and isn't stigmatized.
Second: In my (purely American) experience, nationality is less remarked upon. If you assume it takes (for a random number) 300 mental notes of discord to notice that being treated as part of a bundle feels inappropriate, it might take 50 days for a transgender person, and three years for a "transnationality" person. (Okay, 300 was significantly low.) So having them not notice to the extent that they feel the need to change is plausible.
Third: Nationality isn't as low-level a drive as gender. Tribe-membership is, but co-opting it to nationalist sentiment not so much. And I certainly know people who felt intensely out of place in the tribes they were born into; political alignment, sports, family ties, etc. I'd be quite surprised if you don't know several such people.
So some combination of those reasons? And possibly others. I don't know which of these if any is accurate (and my trans definition is obviously imperfect). But I don't think any of them is particularly complex, and they seem to explain the trends.
That doesn't work so well when the nationality is also associated with physical differences. If a white person were to say "I feel I'm really Chinese", and it was clear that he meant it and it wasn't just a metaphor meaning "I studied China a lot", people would think he's an idiot. And nobody ever wants to get an operation to make their facial features look more Chinese because they feel they are Chinese. Furthermore, he need not express an interest in moving to do this--what if he says "I feel I'm Chinese-American" (in the same sense that a person with Chinese heritage is, again not just meaning "I studied China")?
I doubt there's much neurobiology backing it up on a higher level than "Look! These brains are different! Let me make a huge list of rationalisations why."
From a medical POV neurobiology could help, but isn't necessary to take action.
ETA: Regarding the first point, finding neurological differences in different kinds of minds should be the default assumption, and shouldn't in general make the experiences of these minds more or less valid. I think validating or invalidating empirical psychology via biology with our crude tools is a fallacy, and wonder if there's a name for it. I suppose it could be some kind of a subtype of the naturalistic fallacy.