So, the other day, there was this moment when the whole “adaptations in a sexually-reproducing species are universal up to sex, therefore women and men have different brain designs and therefore can’t really understand each other” argument suddenly started to seem more reliable than my internal sense of “I know a few women I can have great conversations with, and I tend to despise ordinary American men who are proud of their masculinity, therefore psychological sex differences can’t be all that important, even though I’m forced to admit that they exist because, you know, Science,” because the word important in the latter proposition doesn’t actually predict anything and therefore doesn’t actually mean anything except insofar as other humans reading that sentence can use it to make predictions about the criteria I use to select actions. Categories are clusters in an extremely high-dimensional space; if you’re motivated to believe that Category X and Category Y aren’t really very different “along the dimensions that Really Matter,” there’s no amount of evidence that can change your mind, because you can just redefine what Really Matters to be the dimensions along which X and Y are in fact very similar.
(Thanks to Anna Salamon for discussion, and for visiting me in the hospital after I stayed up all night thinking about this and had a delusional mental breakdown.)
Huh.
So, the other day, there was this moment when the whole “adaptations in a sexually-reproducing species are universal up to sex, therefore women and men have different brain designs and therefore can’t really understand each other” argument suddenly started to seem more reliable than my internal sense of “I know a few women I can have great conversations with, and I tend to despise ordinary American men who are proud of their masculinity, therefore psychological sex differences can’t be all that important, even though I’m forced to admit that they exist because, you know, Science,” because the word important in the latter proposition doesn’t actually predict anything and therefore doesn’t actually mean anything except insofar as other humans reading that sentence can use it to make predictions about the criteria I use to select actions. Categories are clusters in an extremely high-dimensional space; if you’re motivated to believe that Category X and Category Y aren’t really very different “along the dimensions that Really Matter,” there’s no amount of evidence that can change your mind, because you can just redefine what Really Matters to be the dimensions along which X and Y are in fact very similar.
(Thanks to Anna Salamon for discussion, and for visiting me in the hospital after I stayed up all night thinking about this and had a delusional mental breakdown.)