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Lumifer comments on The horrifying importance of domain knowledge - Less Wrong Discussion

15 Post author: NancyLebovitz 30 July 2015 03:28PM

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Comment author: VoiceOfRa 06 August 2015 07:59:13AM *  4 points [-]

You seem to be equivocating on gender and sex

That's because the distinction doesn't actually exist. In particular, to the extent gender refers to a real concept and not an pure XML tag, it refers to what is commonly called sex.

So it may happen that (to take the programmer list as an example), on Facebook there are 5 (or 50) socially appropriate genders.

Most of them are nothing more than ways for narcissists to signal their special-snowflakeness.

You can see why taking the PS list as equal to the FB list would be suboptimal :-)

Yes, the optimal solution would be for the FB list to match the PS list.

Moreover, it is silly to argue that people seeking to change the social order by claiming a third gender are as insane as people that we would commonly define as delusional and hallucinating

Since you appear to be new here, let me explain the local social norms. Around here people are expected to provide arguments for their positions. In case you're not aware repeating the opponents possession prefaced with "it is silly to argue" is not an argument.

Comment author: Lumifer 06 August 2015 04:30:07PM 1 point [-]

That's because the distinction doesn't actually exist.

Surely it does. One is a classification system based on biology, the other is a cultural template determined by the local culture.

You can argue that they match most of the time, or even that they should match all the time, but in contemporary usage the words "sex" and "gender" clearly have distinct meaning.

Comment author: IffThen 06 August 2015 08:49:46PM 0 points [-]

There are two things here, if we care to stick to the discussion of edge cases (which is theoretically the point of this thread...)

The first is sex, in which case we should be talking about things like Turner's syndrome and XYY syndrome; sex is not binary. It is only usually binary.

The second would be coming up with a definition of gender, and seeing if it matches our definition of sex. It is safe to say that 1) the use of 'gender' to mean the same as 'sex' is within the usual range of common usage, and 2) completely wrong under certain 'domains' (sociology, anthropology, a number of personal vocabularies, etc.).

That's because the distinction doesn't actually exist.

This seems to be saying that those domains are making a mistake in making this distinction -- something that is hard to defend without knowing something of those domains. This is particularly hard to defend without making very strong definitions, and it is very hard to get strong definitions that we will agree on.

Comment author: VoiceOfRa 06 August 2015 11:56:01PM 3 points [-]

The first is sex, in which case we should be talking about things like Turner's syndrome and XYY syndrome

Yes, and nearly all those cases do in fact cluster with one of the two "standard" genders. And the very rare exception to this are generally not the people who are claiming to be "transsexual".

The second would be coming up with a definition of gender, and seeing if it matches our definition of sex.

You can come up with whatever definition you want, I don't see why I should are about IffThen!gender.

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