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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Gender Identity and Rationality - Less Wrong Discussion
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First thought that occurred to me while reading. If you know who you are apart from categorizations, why does it make so much difference whether it fits into a particular category? If someone told me that I wasn't really male, but fleem, and had been fleem all along, I would still be me.
What if someone told you that you weren't really smart, but fleem?
(I guess the virtuous response would be to ignore it anyway, but... it's hard...)
What would that mean? If you taboo "intelligence", I'm not sure what difference it would make if you were fleem rather than smart; the results seem awfully hard to distinguish. As long as a cat catches mice, does it matter what color the cat is?
Makes sense, but "fleem" is not a socially recognized category.
Actually, let's do a thought experiment. Assume you have arrived on the planet Blorg III, where the society is binary partitioned into the categories of "fleem" and "floom", each defined by a code of behavior with some margins of tolerance. You could present yourself outside them if you felt it better matched your real preferences, but you would suffer social repercussions for that.
What would you do? Weigh the expected utility of each choice of presentation?
Is it your view that "male" and "female" are defined by a code of behavior and nothing more?
In the strictly public, social sense? By appearance and code of behavior. Not even genitals, unless you ask everyone you talk to what they have between their legs.
For the sake of argument, let's presume that in the thought experiment above, one can make oneself look like a fleem or a floom, by some kind of disguise device or simply by wearing the right clothes.
Is the strictly public social sense the only sense in which you wish to be female?
I can think of three definitions of female:
It's interesting to me that these tests give the same result in the vast majority of cases. It suggests that there's a fact of the matter about who is male and who is female, at least as much as there's a fact of the matter about where California stops and the Pacific begins.
This is a point at which to take care of the difference between "very common" and "normative", where the non-normative element is systematically suppressed. c.f. surgical gendering of intersexed children at birth, or even those whose penis had been burnt off by a circumcision needle. And there are no homosexuals in Iran.
I'm skeptical that there is an important difference between "very common" and "normal." Maybe I don't know what you mean by "normative." I understand it to be a useful word that emphasizes that a what-should-be opinion is not a what-is opinion.
Most humans alive today live in a society shaped by reading and writing.
Writing has only been invented a handful of times, and spread by diffusion from there.
Are the small minority of humans alive today whose lives are wholly unaffected by reading and writing irrelevant, when the question being asked is whether writing is a fundamental element of human behavior?*
--
*No, because the spread of writing is a recent phenomenon compared to the time there've been humans, and most human societies didn't come up with it, meaning the current distribution of writing across human societies is the tip of the proverbial iceberg -- more obvious, but less important to understanding the actual thing in its entirety.
If you follow the link I put there explaining what I was talking about, you may be enlightened.
way ahead of you
A great deal of effort goes into making sure (1) and (3) match. Clothing, hairstyles, perfumes, pigments applied to face and nails, jewelry, bags, gaits, eyewear etc. are carefully categorized as male or female. So I would not say they are really independent tests.
They are independent tests in the sense that there are people who fail one and pass the other. It's exactly my point that nevertheless passing one test is correlated with passing another.
It seems to me that the social consensus that "women paint their nails and men don't," for example, arose organically and not as the result of careful categorization. Maybe I don't understand what you mean by careful categorization.
My point is that if you group these tests into pairs, (1 and 2) and (2 and 3) seem to correlate without much help but (1 and 3) is different, it has a suspiciously large amount of human effort invested in strengthening the correlation.
I don't know what you could mean by "suspicious." Maybe there is a large amount of human effort invested in strengthening the correlation between 1. and 3. What would follow?
Carefully? More like recklessly. And categorizing (on the level of social norms) aspects of social behavior as unambiguously belonging to one gender is usually a bad idea, because it singles out all the intermediate cases.
Yes, carefully. In general, people are more careful never to display the 'wrong' gender signals than almost anything else. And I only meant to point out that this is the way most people are, not to endorse it as a good idea.
I think it's logically incoherent for me to wish I was born with female parts, though. If someone otherwise like me was found at birth to have female genitals, that hypothetical infant would grow into a very different person by now because of different experiences. Likewise for any other birth differences that could cause a butterfly effect.
I'd like to have a vagina now, but it's not that high on my priorities. I'm relatively happy with a penis, but I'm unhappy with quite a few other masculine traits in my body. Chest, hips, body hair, etc.
For added veracity, do you need to add at this point the small but nontrivial possibility of severe social penalty, up to and including death, for being discovered to be floom while appearing fleem or vice-versa?