I like the actual sandwich meme, because it's a low-stakes way to get people to realize that categorization is complex and it may depend on how you ask the question.
And sexual orientation can get complex. I met a delightful older lesbian (as she identified herself). She'd always been mostly attracted to women, but was once occasionally attracted to men. Then she had a 35 year marriage to a man, and it was basically a constant shit show. Just listening to stories of things her husband did was enough to give me vicarious trauma. He couldn't adult, he wanted an open relationship with special rules just for him, he belittled her, you name it. In Reddit terms, He Was The Asshole. She divorced him, and she was officially done with men. After all, she'd only occasionally been attracted to them, and that was easily outweighed by decades of bad memories. In her own words, she was once bi, and now she's a lesbian. And that seemed like a perfectly reasonable framework. It told you who she dated, the community she belonged to, and who she actually found attractive now.
Excellent post! It could even serve as a primer on metarational thinking, since it's all about investigating purpose-specific ontologies that you can and should flow between, rather than trying to mold every concept into something universally applicable.
Forget about pronouns...we're gonna need everyone to carry around their definitions of "man" and "woman," with some Universal Translator shit to make sure we're referring to the same thing.
To riff off of what Abraham Lincoln said: Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one, and redefining the definition of "leg" to fit in tails just means that sheep now have two kinds of legs; you still need to know which one you're talking about if you're serving mutton.
Categories are used for other purposes as well. I don't know whether you noticed, but we are living in the age of identities. I mean, the old Existentialist ideas that it is inauthentic to exist as something, are dead. The Alan Watts hippie neobuddhist ideas about there is no self, dead. We are living in the age of "who am I?"
And my guess is people are not looking for descriptors. They are looking for tribes, for support groups.
I've noticed that most debates/arguments I've been party to involved either differing definitions or different priors. Like Babel, people need common language, which includes some kind of consensus understanding. Which will always be imperfect, but that's civilization. However, in our hyper-individualist society, we're at Humpty-Dumpty "when I say a word, it means exactly what I want" levels of differentiation. And with self-actualization being the sacrament of the American Civil Religion, I don't know how it's going to change without some kind of shock or reset.
Out of curiosity, is it coincidental that this came the day after I published https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/carving-up-clouds ? Totally fine either way, it's just interesting that we're thinking about the same sorts of things at the same sort of time if not!
I like the actual sandwich meme, because it's a low-stakes way to get people to realize that categorization is complex and it may depend on how you ask the question.
And sexual orientation can get complex. I met a delightful older lesbian (as she identified herself). She'd always been mostly attracted to women, but was once occasionally attracted to men. Then she had a 35 year marriage to a man, and it was basically a constant shit show. Just listening to stories of things her husband did was enough to give me vicarious trauma. He couldn't adult, he wanted an open relationship with special rules just for him, he belittled her, you name it. In Reddit terms, He Was The Asshole. She divorced him, and she was officially done with men. After all, she'd only occasionally been attracted to them, and that was easily outweighed by decades of bad memories. In her own words, she was once bi, and now she's a lesbian. And that seemed like a perfectly reasonable framework. It told you who she dated, the community she belonged to, and who she actually found attractive now.
instant classic post, thanks for this!!!
Excellent post! It could even serve as a primer on metarational thinking, since it's all about investigating purpose-specific ontologies that you can and should flow between, rather than trying to mold every concept into something universally applicable.
"Purpose specific ontologies" is a useful concept that I hadn't yet seen concisely articulated. I'm gonna file that one away for later.
Forget about pronouns...we're gonna need everyone to carry around their definitions of "man" and "woman," with some Universal Translator shit to make sure we're referring to the same thing.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries
I guess this is the lesswrong post which cleared a lot of what you covered here for me.
To riff off of what Abraham Lincoln said: Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one, and redefining the definition of "leg" to fit in tails just means that sheep now have two kinds of legs; you still need to know which one you're talking about if you're serving mutton.
Categories are used for other purposes as well. I don't know whether you noticed, but we are living in the age of identities. I mean, the old Existentialist ideas that it is inauthentic to exist as something, are dead. The Alan Watts hippie neobuddhist ideas about there is no self, dead. We are living in the age of "who am I?"
And my guess is people are not looking for descriptors. They are looking for tribes, for support groups.
I've noticed that most debates/arguments I've been party to involved either differing definitions or different priors. Like Babel, people need common language, which includes some kind of consensus understanding. Which will always be imperfect, but that's civilization. However, in our hyper-individualist society, we're at Humpty-Dumpty "when I say a word, it means exactly what I want" levels of differentiation. And with self-actualization being the sacrament of the American Civil Religion, I don't know how it's going to change without some kind of shock or reset.
Now I want a version of the Sandwich meme, but for "Woman." Probably need more than 9 slots, though. And need some coherent definitions.
I don't know why not everyone is a contextualist regarding language already.
Out of curiosity, is it coincidental that this came the day after I published https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/carving-up-clouds ? Totally fine either way, it's just interesting that we're thinking about the same sorts of things at the same sort of time if not!
Total coincidence! I didn't actually get around to reading it until well after the post was out (I'm always behind on my RSS).