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The problem with this response has always been is that categories vary wildly between groups.
Even something as simple as "what is a sound?" gets a fierce debate when you ask if a tree falling in a forest with no one around makes one. No one contests the base level reality, that the air around the tree vibrates. They disagree over whether or not the vibrations itself counts as sound, or if it's the perception of said vibrations that do.
We see this everywhere. Is water wet? Is a hot dog a sandwich? Is a palm tree a tree?
And the words themselves can shift depending on the context they're used in. The tomato as a fruit vs a vegetable is a common example of this. And Scott's own example of whales and dolphins as dag for the department of dag.
And words change over time too. And it's not just trans activists who commit this either. When someone refers to Caster Semenya, Imane Khelif or other intersex individuals with female presenting genital as a man, they have changed the definition of man and woman. They are applying a new modern definition over words far far older than chromosomes were known to exist for. Historically intersex people like Semenya and Khelif would have been women, it is the changed definition that says otherwise.
The trans debate is often like this. A debate over categories, a debate if sound is the vibrations or the perception. A debate if a tree is the morphological structure of a tall perinnial plant with a trunk and crown and thus the palm tree is included, or if a tree is that but also as a woody plant with secondary growth. Or if we wanted to define it even more exclusively, we could do a woody dicot with secondary growth and exclude stuff like conifers as well since they're of a different lineage. We can do all sorts of things like that! And we do. And we argue about them all the time. Categories are made for man, not man for the categories.
The problem is that Scott's essay was silly, socially motivated, and shot a hole through the chest of Rationalism as being anything more than postmodern word games with a nerd's coat of hobby paint.
HA! You know, I just realized that in context the phrasing highlights quite explicitly the TERF complaint that most trans discourse is inherently misogynistic. Indeed, the categories were made for man.
Can't believe it took me this long. I wish I could think Scott was being subtly Straussian but no chance of him being less than a true believer.
In other words, you just don't like it. Meta discussions about words and meaning have been here since the beginning of rationalism https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb
Speaking of, that's an example! "Man" in Scott's case is referring to humans, homo sapiens.
If you want to be reductive, sure. I don't like murder either, or green bell peppers.
Does it make sense to put all those in one category?
That is what I call damning with faint praise.
I can give actual substanted reasons for why I don't like murder, like "having people live in fear of violence makes them less economically efficient" or "allowing murder dismantles a functional society" or even just the basic "I think murder is morally wrong".
What you provide here is just fluff. Pure ad hominem.
It's disguised in a wordy way to appear sophisticated, but there is nothing substantial said here.
But even with the fluff, it's still wrong. These "word games" have been a part of rationalism since at least the sequences, thus Scott playing word games couldn't have blown a hole open, if there is a hole it was already there. So even the fluff is wrong.
How dare you, my prose is meant to be playfully purple, not sophisticated!
Fine, this particular instantiation of word games was the final straw to a portion of the rationalist-adjacent crowd that had never bothered with Yud's masturbatory sequences, and proved that the considerations of the Bay Arean Social Influence were more important than anything a normal person would call rationalism or utilitarianism for the greatest good of the greatest number of people, and virtually stamped approval of utility monsters- so long as they are utility monsters approved by the Bay Arean Society.
Let's try again: redefining the categories of "man" and "woman" to be useless circular referents makes people less economically efficient and dismantles a functional society that broadly continues to find significant moral, ethical, and economic value in having some legal separation of the sexes.
Better?
This is still quite lacking. The only actual criticism is an underlying claim that effectively says "rationalism and rationalist communities like those under Yud are more concerned about social approval than reason."
This would be a fair criticism if shown, but it's not shown. It seems to me at least to be motivated primarily off your shock that Yud or Scott Alexander might disagree with you on something you personally consider simple, and instead of asking "could they actually have different perspectives?", you assume it must just be a bad faith appeal to the bay area zeitgeist.
Now this is an actual argument. It makes actual meat filled claims
That categories are being poorly redefined in a purely circular manner
That the redefinitions have observable economic impact.
They also have observable moral and ethical impact.
Now ethical and moral questions are something hard for rationalism to really tackle because they're so subjective. After all, something like a Muslim claiming it is immoral to eat pigs is correct from their moral perspective. So those are just like, ok it's against your personal moral views. Fair enough.
But we can actually address the other ones, particularly if there is an observable economic impact here. We could look at more progressive countries and compare them to less progressive ones. Do countries that allow or condone transition tend to do better or worse than ones that don't? Or do US states that condone it do better than ones that don't? Or we could look at the before/after economic status of a country/state after a relevant law or ruling happened and see if anything changed. Or whatever other sorts of tests.
There may be some confounding factors here, but we can actually test it. I don't know if it's right or wrong, but you've made a real criticism at least.
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Isn't 'rationalist', in this sense at least, practically defined as 'fan of Yudkowsky and the Sequences'?
Personally I agree that the Sequences are garbage, and that reading them is an immense waste of time, and I have always taken that to immediately rule me out of the rationalist crowd. Rationalist just means "people who buy into Yudkowsky's silliness".
Arguably it's expanded a bit beyond that, and now it also includes "people who are Scott Alexander fans", or perhaps in general, people who like or identify with the extremely weird subculture around people like Yudkowsky or Alexander. But I would still tend to think, just intuitively, that if you don't like the Sequences, you're not a rationalist. Rationalism is a movement with a guru.
(I would actually nuance it a bit more than that - liking Scott Alexander's writing is not enough. If that was how it worked then e.g. Ross Douthat would be a rationalist, and he's pretty clearly not. Treating Scott Alexander like a guru, perhaps?)
I've always thought of it is a certain contrarian approach to questions and attempting to think through things from first principles, which makes it more glaring when you do hit an unquestionable topic. Reading the Sequences and Scott is part of that, but not necessarily required.
Then again I only ever considered myself "rationalist-adjacent" because of the other weird sex stuff that seemed to be a cultural signifier. Rather like EA, I like rationalism as an idea, not as a movement or culture.
Well, I tend to think that 'rationalist' is a motte-and-bailey.
The motte of rationalism is thinking more clearly and making more accurate judgements. Who could possibly be opposed to that? It's entirely uncontroversial and a very easy sell.
The bailey of rationalism is therefore Yudkowsky, the Sequences, the communal Less Wrong project, and then adjacent authors like Scott Alexander, Scott Aaronson, I think of a whole kind of blog-space that includes people like Tyler Cowen or Bryan Caplan, and then also this California Bay Area subculture that includes things like polyamory, social ineptitude, singularitanism, and so on. Not all rationalists are into cryonics, but you'll understand what I mean when I say that "lol cryonics" is one of the criticisms of rationalists I run into.
Obviously I support the motte of rationalism, but everybody would. It's the vast bailey that I find extraordinarily questionable, and frequently both factually and morally wrong.
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This is simply not true. Historically, most males with 5ARD (which is the condition that Semenya and Khelif have) would be considered men after going through puberty.
This varies between cultures, obviously, but for example, in the Dominican Republic boys with 5ARD are called guevedoces (literally: penis-at-twelve) and they are considered men who only grow a penis when they hit puberty. They aren't considered women, which makes sense, when they don't have any of the traits of women: they don't have breasts, wider hips, they don't have ovaries or a uterus, and cannot give birth. But they can impregnate women, like men, just like Caster Semenya has.
So historically, intersex males with 5ARD have been considered men, not women. You are changing definitions if you insist that Semenya and Khelif are women.
There's actually an incredibly easy way to check this simply by looking at how Semenya and Khelif were treated before their intersex conditions were known. Semenya was assigned female and raised as a girl, and lived through her life as a woman. Likewise Khelif was also assigned female, raised as a girl, and lived through her life as a woman. Their specific lives were as girls and women.
Yes it does vary among cultures, which is a great example of how even biological categories can be really fuzzy. After all, categorization systems are created by humans for humans. The map is not the territory.
It also depends on the intersex condition in question too, there is way more than just 5ARD so even if every case of 5ARD in every single culture throughout all of history was treated as men, we would still have tons of other fuzzy conditions to consider. And things like the SRY gene test can not be following the historic definition, as genes were not known until very recently. It is literally impossible unless time travel is invented and someone taught our ancient Germanic/Norse/whateverelseispartofEnglish ancestors about genetics.
You're dodging the central point, which is that ancient cultures already knew that geuevedoces weren't women. They called them "penis at twelve" exactly because they thought of them a special kind of boy that only grows his penis when he hits puberty (when most boys are born with them). They weren't considered women.
No, she didn't live life as a woman. She lived as a girl until puberty. Then when girls started to develop into women, Khelif developed into a man. He grew taller, with broad shoulders, and narrow hips, while his female peers developed wider hips and started menstruating. Khelif has never had a period in his life, because he lacks any female organs, which is how he knew he was male. He must have figured it out at age 15 or 16 at the latest. Since then, he has been living a lie.
Sure, but 5ARD is the most common and it is what Khelif and Semenya and a bunch of other male athletes who competed in women's sports have. Let's start by getting the gender ideologues to acknowledge that, then we can move into more obscure conditions.
Humans knew about the male and female sex before the discovery of chromosomes. You don't need to know the genetic details to understand that males and females are built differently. In any case, it doesn't excuse the current state of the world. It's settled science that Imane Khelif is a man in all ways that matter for the purpose of boxing.
One ancient culture, which also isn't even fully true as plenty do continue to live as women
So even in the specific Dominican Republic culture, 5ARD is not always man.
A man with female on their birth certificate and presumably female appearing outer genitalia treated as a woman in an extremely anti trans Muslim country. If Algeria with religious fatwas ordered against transitioning considers Khelif a woman, perhaps she is in many contexts and it's not a "lie".
Sure, but they didn't (couldn't) test it through genes but instead stuff like the outer genitalia. Which Semenya and Khelif both seem to have female presenting outer genitalia. They would have been considered female by many people in many areas such as the anti trans Algeria!
Declaring it settled doesn't mean it is. Again Algeria, a country even more anti trans than many of the people here, considers her as a woman. The doctors who handled her at birth considered her as female. Clearly there is still dispute.
Algerian opinion is based on a mix of national pride and misinformation from news media that have consistently written concerns about Khelif's sex off as false claims borne out of bigotry or racism. I doubt many Algerians fully understand the genetics of sex and knew about Khelif's biological sex during the Olympics, and made a judgment based on that information.
So to the extent that Algerians do support Khelif, it seems likely that their reasoning is less “we accept Khelif as a woman despite her male sex” and more “Khelif is a national hero, she is not male, anyone who says that hates Algeria/Arabs/Muslims". The latter sentiment is based on denial of Khelif's true sex, not acceptance.
And even if it were true that Algerians fully acknowledge Khelif is a male with 5ARD and they understand what that means and they still accept Khelif is a woman, because Arabs are just wonderfully woke like that, that still wouldn't change the fact that Khelif's genetics gave him a male body which gives him an unfair advantage in women's boxing. The latter is a factual statement that doesn't depend on public opinion.
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