I certainly haven’t read even a third of your writing about this. But… I continue to not really get the basic object-level thing. Isn’t it simply factually unknown whether or not there’s such a thing as men growing up with brains that develop like female brains? Or is that not a crux for anything?
Separately, isn’t the obvious correct position simply: there’s a bunch of objective stuff about the differences between men and women; there’s uncertainty about exactly how these clusters overlap / are violated in real life, e.g. as described in the previous paragraph; and separately there’s a bunch of conduct between people that people modulate depending on whether they are interacting with a man or a woman; and now that there are more people openly not falling neatly into the two clusters, there’s some new questions about conduct; and some of the conduct questions involve factual questions, for which calling a particular XY-er a woman would be false, and some of the conduct questions involve factual questiosn (e.g. the brain thing) for which calling a particular XY-er a woman would be true, and some of the conduct questions are instead mainly about free choices, like whether or not to wear a dress or whatever?
I mean, if person 1 is using the word “he” to mean something like “that XY-er”, then yeah, it’s false for them to say “he” of an XX-er. If person 2 is using the word “he” to mean something like “that person, who wants to be treated in the way that people usually treat men”, then for some XX-ers, they should call the XX-er “he”. This XX-er certainly might seek to decieve person 1; e.g. if the XX-er wants to be treated by person 1 the way person 1 treats XY-ers, and person 1 does not want to treat this XX-er that way, but would treat the XX-er this way if they don’t know the XX status, then the XX-er might choose to have allies say “he” in order to decieve person 1. But that’s not the only reason. One can imagine simply that everyone is like person 2; then an XX-er asking to be called “he” is saying something like “I prefer to not be flirted with by heterosexual men; I’d like people to accurately expect me to be more interested in going to a hackathon rather than going to a mall; etc.”, or something. I mean, I’m not at all saying there’s no problem, but… It’s not clear (though again, I didn’t read your voluminous writing on this carefully) who is saying what that’s wrong… Like, if there’s a bunch of conventional conduct that’s tied up with words, then it’s not just about the words’ meaning, and you have to actually do work to separate the conduct from the reference, if you want them to be separate.
Isn’t it simply factually unknown whether or not there’s such a thing as men growing up with brains that develop like female brains? Or is that not a crux for anything?
Focusing on brains seems like the wrong question to me. Brains matter due to their effect on psychology, and psychology is easier to observe than neurology.
Even if psychology is similar in some ways, it may not be similar in the ways that matter though, and in fact the ways that matter need not be restricted to psychology. Even if trans women are psychologically the same as cis women, trans women in women’s sports is still a contentious issue.
There are some fairly big ways in which trans women are not similar to cis women though, for instance trans women tend to be mostly sexually attracted to women, whereas cis women tend to be mostly sexually attracted to men. Whether this is policy-relevant is I guess up to you, but it certainly has a lot of high-impact implications.
Possibly this explanation helps? As in basically he’s been focusing on the first step to a multi-step argument, though it’s sort of unclear what the last step(s) are supposed to add up to.
I continue to not really get the basic object-level thing. Isn’t it simply factually unknown whether or not there’s such a thing as men growing up with brains that develop like female brains?
That’s a bit like saying that it’s “factually unknown” whether there’s an invisible dragon in the garage.
Neuroscientists measure a lot of things about brains and if you need to define “develop like female brains” in a way that doesn’t show up in any metric that neuroscientists can measure, and it’s therefore “factually unknown”.
Or is that not a crux for anything?
Rationalists generally aren’t very favorable to god of the gaps arguments, so it’s unclear why gender of the gaps should be a crux given our existing neuroscience.
If you truly believe that there’s a gap here, then why is there a gap? One straightforward reason for why there might be a gap is that any neuroscientist who would research this would be canceled. If there’s a gap that’s a sign for an unhealthy epistemic environment.
Part of what Zack is writing about is that this unhealthy epistemic environment was harmful to him when trying to figure out whether out not Zack is a woman or a man.
Hm. Now I thought I’d heard of gender dysphoria/transgender/etc showing up in brain imaging (eg. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26766406/) and while “develop like female brains” would be bounding happily ahead of the evidence, that seems at least like sporadic snorting noises from the garage in the night time
I can’t confidently make claims about all brain imaging studies as I haven’t read enough of them, but as a general rule studies that claim to find links between neurology and psychological traits are fake (same problem as candidate gene studies, plus maybe also the problem of “it’s not clear we’re looking at the right variables”) unless the trait in question is g (IQ).
This applies not just to the trans brain studies, but also to the studies claiming to find the sex differences in brain structure (while large sex differences in brain structure do exist, the ones that have been found so far appear to be completely uncorrelated with psychological traits that have sex differences once you control for sex, so they do not mediate the relationship between sex and those psychological traits).
Oh and I guess I should add, if we do insist on talking about brain neurology in the context of transness, there is one set of studies I expect to replicate, because it is conceptually very simple. The idea is to take a bunch of cis men and cis women, train a predictor to classify people’s sex from their brain structure, and then apply that brain structure to trans women. This is essentially a multivariate approach, which I’d expect Zack to like because he talks a lot about multivariate approaches.
The general pattern from the studies I’ve read is that prior to transitioning, trans women have male brains, and after having been on HRT for a while, trans women’s brain structure shifts to be in the middle between cis women and cis men (on the sex-separating axis). I don’t know if trans women’s brains change even more given even longer time; it seems conceivable that they do.
But anyway most noteworthy about these studies is that this applies to both HSTSs and AGPTSs. I.e. HSTS MtFs (who Zack sees as “true transsexuals”) have male brains prior to transitioning. (See the second of my links for more info on this.) This illustrates why I am not enthusiastic about arguments based on multivariate group-separating axes: HSTSs are clearly feminine in some sense, but this isn’t the sense which gets emphasized when taking the neurological sex-separating axis. I’m not sure why Zack still regularly makes appeals to multivariate groups differences though. My best guess is that he doesn’t pay attention to this but he should be encouraged to answer for himself.
The fact that someone finds a brain pattern that describes gender dysphoria but thinks that brain pattern does not warrant the description of looking like female brain patterns, to me does not look like evidence pointing in the direction that gender dysphoria is associated with female brain patterns.
Are you claiming that Zack is claiming that there’s no such thing as gender? Or that there’s no objective thing? Or that there’s nothing that would show up in brain scans? I continue to not know what the basic original object-level disagreement is!
No, Zack does believe that there’s something like gender. He believes that you are either male or female and that those categories are straightforwardly derived.
You are the person who claims that there’s something that is “factually unknown”. For it to be factually unknown it’s necessary not to have shown up in the brain scans that people already did.
What factual question is/was Zack trying to figure out? “Is a woman” or “is a man” are pure semantics, and if that’s all there is then… okay… but presumably there’s something else?
Given some referent—some definition, either intensional or extensional—of the word “man” (in other words, some discernible category with the label “man”), the question “is X a man” (i.e., “is X a member of this category labeled ‘man’”) is an empirical question. And “man”, like any commonly used word, can’t be defined arbitrarily.
All of the above being the case, what do you mean by “pure semantics” such that your statement is true…?
Yeah, what factual question about empirical categories is/was Zack interested in resolving? Tabooing the words “man” and “woman”, since what I mean by semantics is “which categories get which label”. I’m not super interested in discussing which empirical category should be associated with the phonemes /mæn/, and I’m not super interested in the linguistic investigation of the way different groups of English speakers assign meaning to that sequence of phonemes, both of which I lump under the umbrella of semantics.
Yeah, what factual question about empirical categories is/was Zack interested in resolving?
Zack has written very many words about this, including this very post, and the ones prior to it in the sequence; and also his other posts, on Less Wrong and on his blog.
I’m not super interested in discussing which empirical category should be associated with the phonemes /mæn/, and I’m not super interested in the linguistic investigation of the way different groups of English speakers assign meaning to that sequence of phonemes, both of which I lump under the umbrella of semantics.
But other people are interested in these things (and related ones), as it turns out; and the question of why they have such interest, as well as many related questions, are also factual in nature.
What’s more, “A Human’s Guide to Words” (which I linked to in the grandparent) explains why reassigning different words to existing categories is not arbitrary, but has consequences for our (individual and collective) epistemics. So even such choices cannot be dismissed by labeling them “semantics”.
I haven’t read everything Zack has written, so feel free to link me something, but almost everything I’ve read, including this post, includes far more intra-rationalist politicking than discussion of object level matters.
I know other people are interested in those things. I specifically phrased my previous post in an attempt to avoid arguing about what other people care about. I can neither defend nor explain their positions. Neither do I intend to dismiss or malign those preferences by labeling them semantics. That previous sentence is not to be read as a denial of ever labeling them semantics, but rather as a denial of thinking that semantics is anything to dismiss or malign. Semantics is a long and storied discipline on philosophy and linguistics. I took an entire college course on semantics. Nevertheless, I don’t find it particularly interesting.
I’ve read a human’s guide to words. I understand you cannot redefine reality by redefining words. I am trying to step past disagreement you and I might have regarding the definitions of words and figure out if we have disagreements about reality.
I think you are doing the same thing I have seen Zack do repeatedly, which is to avoid engaging in actual disagreement and discussion, but instead repeatedly accuse your interlocutor of violating norms of rational debate. So far nothing you have said is something I disagree with, except the implication that I disagree with it. If you think I’m lying to you, feel free to say so and we can stop talking. If our disagreement is merely “you think semantics is incredibly important and I find it mostly boring and stale”, let me know and you can go argue with someone who cares more than me.
But the way that Zack phrases things makes it sound, to me, like he and I have some actual disagreement about reality which he thinks is deeply important for people considering transition to know. And as someone considering transition, if you or he or someone else can say that or link to that isn’t full of semantics or intracommunity norms of discourse call-outs, I would like to see it!
I haven’t read everything Zack has written, so feel free to link me something, but almost everything I’ve read, including this post, includes far more intra-rationalist politicking than discussion of object level matters.
Zack also has several posts which, although themselves written at a meta-level, nevertheless explain in great (and highly technical) detail why “is X a woman/man” (i.e., “to which of these two categories, no matter their labels, does X properly belong”) is a factual question. These include:
I think you are doing the same thing I have seen Zack do repeatedly, which is to avoid engaging in actual disagreement and discussion, but instead repeatedly accuse your interlocutor of violating norms of rational debate.
To my knowledge, I’ve made no such accusations against you.
So far nothing you have said is something I disagree with, except the implication that I disagree with it. If you think I’m lying to you, feel free to say so and we can stop talking.
I don’t think you’ve made any concrete claims, so how could you be lying…? (I suppose you could be lying about what you are or are not interested in, but I’m not sure what the point of doing so would be, in this case…)
If our disagreement is merely “you think semantics is incredibly important and I find it mostly boring and stale”, let me know and you can go argue with someone who cares more than me.
That is certainly not the disagreement.
Your first comment in this thread was responding to an exchange which was about object-level questions, and very clearly so. Like, if I say “I’m trying to figure out whether this animal in front of me is a wolf spider or a fishing spider”, and you respond by saying “‘is a wolf spider’ or ‘is a fishing spider’ is pure semantics, so what factual question are you trying to figure out”, that is a nonsensical thing to say. Do you agree? Or do you think that’s a perfectly sensible reply?
But the way that Zack phrases things makes it sound, to me, like he and I have some actual disagreement about reality which he thinks is deeply important for people considering transition to know. And as someone considering transition, if you or he or someone else can say that or link to that isn’t full of semantics or intracommunity norms of discourse call-outs, I would like to see it!
I claim no expertise related to transition, nor do I have any special insight into these matters, so I’m surely not the right person to ask any such thing.
As for Zack… well, look, you are commenting on a post which is, indeed, about community norms and epistemic standards and other such “meta” questions. Zack has written many, many posts about the object-level issues. He has a whole blog which is just absolutely jam-packed with discussion of the object-level issues. (This is a link-post, so you can click that link and check out said blog.) If Zack writes a bunch of posts about the object-level stuff, and then, having done so, writes a post about the meta-level stuff, and you read that post and ask “where is the object-level stuff”, what is anyone supposed to say other than “it’s in all the other posts, the ones about the object-level stuff, which this post is not one of”?
So if your question was just “where are those object-level posts”, then I hope my links have answered that. If your question was something else, then by all means feel free to clarify!
I owe you an apology; you’re right that you did not accuse me of violating norms, and I’m sorry for saying that you did. I only intended to draw parallels between your focus on the meta level and Zack’s focus on the meta level, and in my hurry I erred in painting you and him with the same brush.
I additionally want to clarify that I didn’t think you were accusing me of lying, but merely wanted preemptively close off some of the possible directions this conversation could go.
Thank you for providing those links! I did see some of them on his blog and skipped over them because I thought, based on the first paragraph or title, they were more intracommunity discourse. I have now read them all.
I found them mostly uninteresting. They focus a lot on semantics and on whether something is a lie or not, and neither of those are particularly motivating to me. Of the rest, they are focused on issues which I don’t find particularly relevant to my own personal journey, and while I wish that Zack felt like he was able to discuss these issues openly, I don’t really think people in the community disagreeing with him is some bizarre anti-truth political maneuvering.
I found them mostly uninteresting. They focus a lot on semantics and on whether something is a lie or not, and neither of those are particularly motivating to me.
Hmm. I continue to think that you are using the term “semantics” in a very odd way, but I suppose it probably won’t be very fruitful to go down that avenue of discussion…
I don’t really think people in the community disagreeing with [Zack] is some bizarre anti-truth political maneuvering.
I imagine the answer to this one will depend on the details—which people, disagreeing on what specific matter, in what way, etc. Certainly it seems implausible that none of it is “political maneuvering” of some sort (which I don’t think is “bizarre”, by the way; really it’s quite the opposite—perfectly banal political maneuvering, of the sort you see all the time, especially these days… more sad to see, perhaps, for those of us who had high hopes for “rationality”, but not any weirder, for all that…).
I also consider myself as someone who had—and still has—high hopes for rationality, and so I think it’s sad that we disagree, not on the object level, but on whether we can trust the community to faithfully report their beliefs. Sure, some of it may be political maneuvering, but I mostly think it’s political maneuvering of the form of—tailoring the words, metaphors, and style to a particular audience, and choosing to engage on particular issues, rather than outright lying about beliefs.
I don’t think I’m using “semantics” in a non-standard sense, but I may be using it in a more technical sense? I’m aware of certain terms which have different meanings inside of and outside of linguistics (such as “denotation”) and this may be one.
Your first comment in this thread was responding to an exchange which was about object-level questions, and very clearly so. Like, if I say “I’m trying to figure out whether this animal in front me of is a wolf spider or a fishing spider”, and you respond by saying “‘is a wolf spider’ or ‘is a fishing spider’ is pure semantics, so what factual question are you trying to figure out”, that is a nonsensical thing to say. Do you agree? Or do you think that’s a perfectly sensible reply?
You would probably not include actual hyperlinks if you were literally saying this in the real world, so that makes this example disanalogous to the usual cases.
(I do think the question would be meaningful in the usual cases, but adding hyperlinks seems like cheating as it binds the statement to a lot more information than there would otherwise be. It adds the same sort of information as you would be adding by tabooing the words.)
I added the hyperlinks for the benefit of any readers who have no idea what those terms mean. In a face-to-face conversation, if my interlocutor responded by asking “huh? ‘wolf spider’, ‘fishing spider’, what is that? I’ve never heard of these things”, then I could explain to them what the terms refer to; or we could use a smartphone or computer to access the very same Wikipedia pages which I linked to in my comment.
In any case you may feel free to mentally strip out the hyperlinks—that will not change my point, which is that any good-faith interlocutor will understand from the quoted comment (possibly after asking for an explanation, to rectify a total lack of domain knowledge) that the terms “wolf spider” and “fishing spider” refer to a pair of disjoint categories, and that my inquiry is into the question of which (if either!) of the two categories any given actual spider ought properly to be placed in.
“that person, who wants to be treated in the way that people usually treat men”
Incidentally, one of the things I dislike about this framing is that gender stereotypes / scripts “go both ways”. That is, it should be not just “treated like a man” but also “treat people like men do.”
It was surprisingly impactful to tell myself and my parents I identified as male for purposes of elder care. Obviously I had the option to say “I will manage finances and logistics but not emotional or physical care labor” the whole time, but it was freeing to frame it as “well this is all my uncle was doing and no one thought he was defecting”.
I certainly haven’t read even a third of your writing about this. But… I continue to not really get the basic object-level thing. Isn’t it simply factually unknown whether or not there’s such a thing as men growing up with brains that develop like female brains? Or is that not a crux for anything?
Separately, isn’t the obvious correct position simply: there’s a bunch of objective stuff about the differences between men and women; there’s uncertainty about exactly how these clusters overlap / are violated in real life, e.g. as described in the previous paragraph; and separately there’s a bunch of conduct between people that people modulate depending on whether they are interacting with a man or a woman; and now that there are more people openly not falling neatly into the two clusters, there’s some new questions about conduct; and some of the conduct questions involve factual questions, for which calling a particular XY-er a woman would be false, and some of the conduct questions involve factual questiosn (e.g. the brain thing) for which calling a particular XY-er a woman would be true, and some of the conduct questions are instead mainly about free choices, like whether or not to wear a dress or whatever?
I mean, if person 1 is using the word “he” to mean something like “that XY-er”, then yeah, it’s false for them to say “he” of an XX-er. If person 2 is using the word “he” to mean something like “that person, who wants to be treated in the way that people usually treat men”, then for some XX-ers, they should call the XX-er “he”. This XX-er certainly might seek to decieve person 1; e.g. if the XX-er wants to be treated by person 1 the way person 1 treats XY-ers, and person 1 does not want to treat this XX-er that way, but would treat the XX-er this way if they don’t know the XX status, then the XX-er might choose to have allies say “he” in order to decieve person 1. But that’s not the only reason. One can imagine simply that everyone is like person 2; then an XX-er asking to be called “he” is saying something like “I prefer to not be flirted with by heterosexual men; I’d like people to accurately expect me to be more interested in going to a hackathon rather than going to a mall; etc.”, or something. I mean, I’m not at all saying there’s no problem, but… It’s not clear (though again, I didn’t read your voluminous writing on this carefully) who is saying what that’s wrong… Like, if there’s a bunch of conventional conduct that’s tied up with words, then it’s not just about the words’ meaning, and you have to actually do work to separate the conduct from the reference, if you want them to be separate.
Focusing on brains seems like the wrong question to me. Brains matter due to their effect on psychology, and psychology is easier to observe than neurology.
Even if psychology is similar in some ways, it may not be similar in the ways that matter though, and in fact the ways that matter need not be restricted to psychology. Even if trans women are psychologically the same as cis women, trans women in women’s sports is still a contentious issue.
There are some fairly big ways in which trans women are not similar to cis women though, for instance trans women tend to be mostly sexually attracted to women, whereas cis women tend to be mostly sexually attracted to men. Whether this is policy-relevant is I guess up to you, but it certainly has a lot of high-impact implications.
Ok. (I continue to not know what the basic original object-level disagreement is!)
Possibly this explanation helps? As in basically he’s been focusing on the first step to a multi-step argument, though it’s sort of unclear what the last step(s) are supposed to add up to.
That’s a bit like saying that it’s “factually unknown” whether there’s an invisible dragon in the garage.
Neuroscientists measure a lot of things about brains and if you need to define “develop like female brains” in a way that doesn’t show up in any metric that neuroscientists can measure, and it’s therefore “factually unknown”.
Rationalists generally aren’t very favorable to god of the gaps arguments, so it’s unclear why gender of the gaps should be a crux given our existing neuroscience.
If you truly believe that there’s a gap here, then why is there a gap? One straightforward reason for why there might be a gap is that any neuroscientist who would research this would be canceled. If there’s a gap that’s a sign for an unhealthy epistemic environment.
Part of what Zack is writing about is that this unhealthy epistemic environment was harmful to him when trying to figure out whether out not Zack is a woman or a man.
Hm. Now I thought I’d heard of gender dysphoria/transgender/etc showing up in brain imaging (eg. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26766406/) and while “develop like female brains” would be bounding happily ahead of the evidence, that seems at least like sporadic snorting noises from the garage in the night time
I can’t confidently make claims about all brain imaging studies as I haven’t read enough of them, but as a general rule studies that claim to find links between neurology and psychological traits are fake (same problem as candidate gene studies, plus maybe also the problem of “it’s not clear we’re looking at the right variables”) unless the trait in question is g (IQ).
This applies not just to the trans brain studies, but also to the studies claiming to find the sex differences in brain structure (while large sex differences in brain structure do exist, the ones that have been found so far appear to be completely uncorrelated with psychological traits that have sex differences once you control for sex, so they do not mediate the relationship between sex and those psychological traits).
Oh and I guess I should add, if we do insist on talking about brain neurology in the context of transness, there is one set of studies I expect to replicate, because it is conceptually very simple. The idea is to take a bunch of cis men and cis women, train a predictor to classify people’s sex from their brain structure, and then apply that brain structure to trans women. This is essentially a multivariate approach, which I’d expect Zack to like because he talks a lot about multivariate approaches.
I think I’ve seen three or four studies that do this, but the two I have at hand right now are Sex Matters: A Multivariate Pattern Analysis of Sex- and Gender-Related Neuroanatomical Differences in Cis- and Transgender Individuals Using Structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Regional volumes and spatial volumetric distribution of gray matter in the gender dysphoric brain.
The general pattern from the studies I’ve read is that prior to transitioning, trans women have male brains, and after having been on HRT for a while, trans women’s brain structure shifts to be in the middle between cis women and cis men (on the sex-separating axis). I don’t know if trans women’s brains change even more given even longer time; it seems conceivable that they do.
But anyway most noteworthy about these studies is that this applies to both HSTSs and AGPTSs. I.e. HSTS MtFs (who Zack sees as “true transsexuals”) have male brains prior to transitioning. (See the second of my links for more info on this.) This illustrates why I am not enthusiastic about arguments based on multivariate group-separating axes: HSTSs are clearly feminine in some sense, but this isn’t the sense which gets emphasized when taking the neurological sex-separating axis. I’m not sure why Zack still regularly makes appeals to multivariate groups differences though. My best guess is that he doesn’t pay attention to this but he should be encouraged to answer for himself.
The fact that someone finds a brain pattern that describes gender dysphoria but thinks that brain pattern does not warrant the description of looking like female brain patterns, to me does not look like evidence pointing in the direction that gender dysphoria is associated with female brain patterns.
Vul et al’s voodoo neuroscience paper is also worth reading, to have some perspective on these kinds of findings.
Are you claiming that Zack is claiming that there’s no such thing as gender? Or that there’s no objective thing? Or that there’s nothing that would show up in brain scans? I continue to not know what the basic original object-level disagreement is!
No, Zack does believe that there’s something like gender. He believes that you are either male or female and that those categories are straightforwardly derived.
You are the person who claims that there’s something that is “factually unknown”. For it to be factually unknown it’s necessary not to have shown up in the brain scans that people already did.
What factual question is/was Zack trying to figure out? “Is a woman” or “is a man” are pure semantics, and if that’s all there is then… okay… but presumably there’s something else?
Given some referent—some definition, either intensional or extensional—of the word “man” (in other words, some discernible category with the label “man”), the question “is X a man” (i.e., “is X a member of this category labeled ‘man’”) is an empirical question. And “man”, like any commonly used word, can’t be defined arbitrarily.
All of the above being the case, what do you mean by “pure semantics” such that your statement is true…?
Yeah, what factual question about empirical categories is/was Zack interested in resolving? Tabooing the words “man” and “woman”, since what I mean by semantics is “which categories get which label”. I’m not super interested in discussing which empirical category should be associated with the phonemes /mæn/, and I’m not super interested in the linguistic investigation of the way different groups of English speakers assign meaning to that sequence of phonemes, both of which I lump under the umbrella of semantics.
Zack has written very many words about this, including this very post, and the ones prior to it in the sequence; and also his other posts, on Less Wrong and on his blog.
But other people are interested in these things (and related ones), as it turns out; and the question of why they have such interest, as well as many related questions, are also factual in nature.
What’s more, “A Human’s Guide to Words” (which I linked to in the grandparent) explains why reassigning different words to existing categories is not arbitrary, but has consequences for our (individual and collective) epistemics. So even such choices cannot be dismissed by labeling them “semantics”.
I haven’t read everything Zack has written, so feel free to link me something, but almost everything I’ve read, including this post, includes far more intra-rationalist politicking than discussion of object level matters.
I know other people are interested in those things. I specifically phrased my previous post in an attempt to avoid arguing about what other people care about. I can neither defend nor explain their positions. Neither do I intend to dismiss or malign those preferences by labeling them semantics. That previous sentence is not to be read as a denial of ever labeling them semantics, but rather as a denial of thinking that semantics is anything to dismiss or malign. Semantics is a long and storied discipline on philosophy and linguistics. I took an entire college course on semantics. Nevertheless, I don’t find it particularly interesting.
I’ve read a human’s guide to words. I understand you cannot redefine reality by redefining words. I am trying to step past disagreement you and I might have regarding the definitions of words and figure out if we have disagreements about reality.
I think you are doing the same thing I have seen Zack do repeatedly, which is to avoid engaging in actual disagreement and discussion, but instead repeatedly accuse your interlocutor of violating norms of rational debate. So far nothing you have said is something I disagree with, except the implication that I disagree with it. If you think I’m lying to you, feel free to say so and we can stop talking. If our disagreement is merely “you think semantics is incredibly important and I find it mostly boring and stale”, let me know and you can go argue with someone who cares more than me.
But the way that Zack phrases things makes it sound, to me, like he and I have some actual disagreement about reality which he thinks is deeply important for people considering transition to know. And as someone considering transition, if you or he or someone else can say that or link to that isn’t full of semantics or intracommunity norms of discourse call-outs, I would like to see it!
Certainly:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LwG9bRXXQ8br5qtTx/sexual-dimorphism-in-yudkowsky-s-sequences-in-relation-to-my
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/juZ8ugdNqMrbX7x2J/challenges-to-yudkowsky-s-pronoun-reform-proposal
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RxxqPH3WffQv6ESxj/blanchard-s-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid
http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/
http://unremediatedgender.space/2020/Nov/survey-data-on-cis-and-trans-women-among-haskell-programmers/
http://unremediatedgender.space/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/
http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/
Zack also has several posts which, although themselves written at a meta-level, nevertheless explain in great (and highly technical) detail why “is X a woman/man” (i.e., “to which of these two categories, no matter their labels, does X properly belong”) is a factual question. These include:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests
To my knowledge, I’ve made no such accusations against you.
I don’t think you’ve made any concrete claims, so how could you be lying…? (I suppose you could be lying about what you are or are not interested in, but I’m not sure what the point of doing so would be, in this case…)
That is certainly not the disagreement.
Your first comment in this thread was responding to an exchange which was about object-level questions, and very clearly so. Like, if I say “I’m trying to figure out whether this animal in front of me is a wolf spider or a fishing spider”, and you respond by saying “‘is a wolf spider’ or ‘is a fishing spider’ is pure semantics, so what factual question are you trying to figure out”, that is a nonsensical thing to say. Do you agree? Or do you think that’s a perfectly sensible reply?
I claim no expertise related to transition, nor do I have any special insight into these matters, so I’m surely not the right person to ask any such thing.
As for Zack… well, look, you are commenting on a post which is, indeed, about community norms and epistemic standards and other such “meta” questions. Zack has written many, many posts about the object-level issues. He has a whole blog which is just absolutely jam-packed with discussion of the object-level issues. (This is a link-post, so you can click that link and check out said blog.) If Zack writes a bunch of posts about the object-level stuff, and then, having done so, writes a post about the meta-level stuff, and you read that post and ask “where is the object-level stuff”, what is anyone supposed to say other than “it’s in all the other posts, the ones about the object-level stuff, which this post is not one of”?
So if your question was just “where are those object-level posts”, then I hope my links have answered that. If your question was something else, then by all means feel free to clarify!
I owe you an apology; you’re right that you did not accuse me of violating norms, and I’m sorry for saying that you did. I only intended to draw parallels between your focus on the meta level and Zack’s focus on the meta level, and in my hurry I erred in painting you and him with the same brush.
I additionally want to clarify that I didn’t think you were accusing me of lying, but merely wanted preemptively close off some of the possible directions this conversation could go.
Thank you for providing those links! I did see some of them on his blog and skipped over them because I thought, based on the first paragraph or title, they were more intracommunity discourse. I have now read them all.
I found them mostly uninteresting. They focus a lot on semantics and on whether something is a lie or not, and neither of those are particularly motivating to me. Of the rest, they are focused on issues which I don’t find particularly relevant to my own personal journey, and while I wish that Zack felt like he was able to discuss these issues openly, I don’t really think people in the community disagreeing with him is some bizarre anti-truth political maneuvering.
Apology accepted!
You’re quite welcome.
Hmm. I continue to think that you are using the term “semantics” in a very odd way, but I suppose it probably won’t be very fruitful to go down that avenue of discussion…
I imagine the answer to this one will depend on the details—which people, disagreeing on what specific matter, in what way, etc. Certainly it seems implausible that none of it is “political maneuvering” of some sort (which I don’t think is “bizarre”, by the way; really it’s quite the opposite—perfectly banal political maneuvering, of the sort you see all the time, especially these days… more sad to see, perhaps, for those of us who had high hopes for “rationality”, but not any weirder, for all that…).
I also consider myself as someone who had—and still has—high hopes for rationality, and so I think it’s sad that we disagree, not on the object level, but on whether we can trust the community to faithfully report their beliefs. Sure, some of it may be political maneuvering, but I mostly think it’s political maneuvering of the form of—tailoring the words, metaphors, and style to a particular audience, and choosing to engage on particular issues, rather than outright lying about beliefs.
I don’t think I’m using “semantics” in a non-standard sense, but I may be using it in a more technical sense? I’m aware of certain terms which have different meanings inside of and outside of linguistics (such as “denotation”) and this may be one.
You would probably not include actual hyperlinks if you were literally saying this in the real world, so that makes this example disanalogous to the usual cases.
(I do think the question would be meaningful in the usual cases, but adding hyperlinks seems like cheating as it binds the statement to a lot more information than there would otherwise be. It adds the same sort of information as you would be adding by tabooing the words.)
I added the hyperlinks for the benefit of any readers who have no idea what those terms mean. In a face-to-face conversation, if my interlocutor responded by asking “huh? ‘wolf spider’, ‘fishing spider’, what is that? I’ve never heard of these things”, then I could explain to them what the terms refer to; or we could use a smartphone or computer to access the very same Wikipedia pages which I linked to in my comment.
In any case you may feel free to mentally strip out the hyperlinks—that will not change my point, which is that any good-faith interlocutor will understand from the quoted comment (possibly after asking for an explanation, to rectify a total lack of domain knowledge) that the terms “wolf spider” and “fishing spider” refer to a pair of disjoint categories, and that my inquiry is into the question of which (if either!) of the two categories any given actual spider ought properly to be placed in.
Incidentally, one of the things I dislike about this framing is that gender stereotypes / scripts “go both ways”. That is, it should be not just “treated like a man” but also “treat people like men do.”
It was surprisingly impactful to tell myself and my parents I identified as male for purposes of elder care. Obviously I had the option to say “I will manage finances and logistics but not emotional or physical care labor” the whole time, but it was freeing to frame it as “well this is all my uncle was doing and no one thought he was defecting”.