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RichardKennaway comments on 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey - Less Wrong
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Nine of the questions ask which of various options you "identify with": country, race, gender, political category, moral philosophy, political category (subdivided), effective altruism, gender again, and meta-ethics. I am unclear about this concept, and for the purpose of making a choice, mentally replaced it by respectively "reside in long-term", "are", "are", "believe", etc. Would such rephrasings have changed anyone's answers to any of the questions?
"Identify with" reminds me of the Discworld's Captain Carrot Ironfoundersson, who is a six-foot-six human who "identifies as" a dwarf, and who is accepted as such by the dwarves, even though everyone, including him, knows he's human. I don't know Terry Pratchett's thinking behind the character, but Carrot strikes me as a reductio ad absurdum of the concept.
I don't think it's a reductio. Actually, I think it's almost the opposite; one of Pratchett's usual schticks is drawing up exaggerated social and political concepts that look absurd on their faces but later turn out to make internal sense. Looked at in that light, it's pretty clear what's going on: Carrot isn't phenotypically a dwarf, but he's culturally a dwarf, and he's accepted as such by Pratchett's dwarves because, to them, dwarvishness is less about being short and beardy and more about the culture. Wearing mail to dinner, being intimately familiar with mine engineering, baking bread that doubles as an assault weapon, et cetera. I don't know for sure, but I suspect the situation Pratchett had in mind was something like being adopted into a religious group normally associated with another ethnicity: his dwarves very often play on religious and traditional themes.
As Pratchett's developed Discworld's dwarvish culture more, this has started to make less sense, but the series isn't particularly good at long-term thematic continuity.
In short, Carrot's genetics play only a minor part in his sense of identity; he is genetically human but culturally dwarf, and thus in most situations he counts as both.
"Identifying with" something or "Identifying As" something has an explicit meaning to me, which is that it is something I would call myself. Some of this may come from training and industry I'm in, but it's what you think of yourself as.
For instance, someone who doodles occasionally may or may not identify "as an artist", but anyone who paints professionally almost certainly identifies as an artist. Someone who paints regularly as a hobby probably identifies as an artist; the doodler may be more idle about it and not really think of it as being an essential quality of self: It is something that person does, not something that person is.
From such lines of thinking come statements such as, "Ich bin ein Berliner." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ich_bin_ein_Berliner
Parallel examples:
Almost everyone below a certain age plays video/computer games, but only a small subset of those people would self-identify as "gamers."
You exercise, but do you think of yourself as an "athlete"? You lift weights, but do you think of yourself as a "weightlifter"?
You are married, but is "spouse" a core part of your identity? You have reproduced, but is "parent" part of your core identity?
The spouse enters.
It better be.
The spouse exits.
:-D
I see, I think. It does not seem to be something that I do. For example, I play taiko regularly as a hobby, but if someone asked, "but do you identify as a taiko player", my reaction would be "wuh?"
Going off on a tangent, how fixed or malleable is this mental experience? Has anyone who does "identify with" this or that tried as a meditative exercise, experimentally identifying with other things instead?
There are probably plenty of people who paint walls who don't identify as artists.
And, despite this entire comments section, there are some LessWrongers who don't identify as pedants!
:P
FYI I don't think your view matches Pratchett's intention (which of course doesn't make you wrong). At one point Vimes (I think) asks Carrot about this, and Carrot replies that having dwarves for parents has never been a dwarfish definition of being a dwarf.
Ultimately the sensitivity of these question comes from the fear of hidden inferences--the concern that when you say Carrot is not a dwarf, you're implying that it's wrong for him to observe dwarfish customs. I suppose you have the equal and opposite worry, that once we start calling Carrot a dwarf we'll build him a house with four-foot ceilings?
Another job for taboo.