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fubarobfusco comments on Rationality Quotes December 2013 - Less Wrong
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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.