I suspect that he's always been like this he just kept it on the DL. See some of the contemporary commentary surrounding "the categories were made for man" and the implications for the Trans community. "Bounded Distrust" where he defended Fauci's choice to lie to the public and to the congress was his coming out party and now this is simply who he is.
It may sound flippant, but I kind of blame the autism, in that I don't think he ever truly grokked that "the other-side can read your book" until the whole NYT fiasco, and by then he'd already said too much.
See some of the contemporary commentary surrounding "the categories were made for man" and the implications for the Trans community.
I don't think Scott is endorsing obscuring the truth or lying in "The Categories Were Made for Man..." - just look at the Israel/Palestine example in the essay itself (which he even called attention to in his edit of the article.) Scott's threefold point in the article was that the way we choose to draw category boundaries is not some natural feature of reality, that there are multiple non-false ways to draw category boundaries, and we should be prepared to accept the implications of where we choose to draw those boundaries.
As far as sex-related terminology goes, I think the following are all valid ways we could draw the boundaries of the category "woman":
An adult human who produces ovum.
An adult human with XX chromosomes.
An adult human who lacks the SRY gene.
An adult human who has a vagina.
An adult human who doesn't have a penis.
An adult human capable of becoming pregnant.
An adult human whose adolescent development was dominated by estrogen.
An adult human whose adolescent development was naturally dominated by estrogen.
An adult human who was classified as female shortly after birth.
An adult human who passes enough tests in this list that the majority of people would call them a woman.
Etc., etc.
No matter where we draw the boundaries, there will always be ways to pick out the features you care about for instrumental rationality to get off the ground. For example, if I lived in a world where most of the speaking community I belonged to used the "produces ovum" definition of womanhood, but what I actually cared about was whether someone was "capable of becoming pregnant" (say because I was planning on starting a family with my own biological children), then I would still have ways to get at the information I cared about using other terminology. And if I lived in a world where Group A used the "lacks the SRY gene" definition, and Group B used the "has XX chromosomes" definition, I would have to determine if I was talking to someone from Group A or Group B to get an accurate picture of reality when talking about someone being a "woman."
Depending on how you draw the boundaries "transwomen are women" and "transwomen are not women" are both true statements, and unfortunately the moment a single person has a slightly different definition than everyone else, you can't actually count on the boundaries of the word being exactly the same for everyone.
I don't believe that some of your items would be accepted as a definition of a woman by anyone not in the lizardman constant. Someone who's otherwise a woman but can't become pregnant would be described as "a woman who can't become pregnant", not as not literally being a woman. It doesn't work that way for transwomen either. Someone who doesn't want them in women's bathrooms but doesn't care too much about pronouns would never say "transwomen are women, but they are women who should be kept out of women's bathrooms". People don't make distinctions that way.
If you only like onions in soup, you aren't going to claim "I like all onions, but I define onions as a plant of genus Allium cepa that is located in a soup".
People do all sorts of weird things with words. To use two ancient examples: the Epicureans said that "pleasure" (hedone) was the highest good, and then said the height of pleasure was the absence of pain, and the Stoics said that the only truly good things were morally virtuous things and all other conventionally "good" things were really just "preferred indifferents."
The technical terminology of both of those philosophies differs quite a bit from standard usage in Greek, Latin and English. I think most people would say that "pleasure" and "absence of pain" are two different things entirely, and that having a wife and kids that you love isn't a "preferred indifferent" but a positive good in the life a person where it is desired. But I think in both cases, in redefining the terms (from a layman's perspective) the two philosophical schools are trying to make it psychologically easier to adopt each school's philosophical regimen.
I don't believe that some of your items would be accepted as a definition of a woman by anyone not in the lizardman constant.
My point was not that any of those was an unambiguous "best" definition, just that they were all possible definitions. I agree that in our society, as far as standard English usage goes, some of those are less plausible than others, but there's nothing in principle stopping us from having the following categories of sex: man, eunuch, woman, barreness (sic.) Eunuchs and barrenesses could be regarded as infertile males and females, and almost (but not quite) men and women. I think given the right society, those categories could easily be pertinent enough that they could emerge as real and strong divisions in people's minds. (Say, for example, a society where eunuchs are in widespread usage as singers, babysitters, escorts and government functionaries, and in which a girl is not considered a "woman" until she had born at least one child.)
There are possible constructions of those terms that would be bizarre to modern English speakers. For example, under Galen's single sex model almost 2000 years ago, women were "defective men with inverted sex organs", but no one in today's society would think that.
I think the shape of society often defines the limits of "plausible" word boundaries. Some Asian languages have single words for "older brother" and "younger brother" and "paternal uncle" and "maternal uncle" because the hierarchies of birth order and paternal vs maternal relatives is always important and pertinent information (at least historically.) It's not that English has no way of referring to those same distinctions, but for various historical and cultural reasons our language doesn't package those concepts as single words.
The whole point of using the word "women" for trans people is that using the word is supposed to go with treating them like regular women in all possible ways. That's the exact opposite of your examples. Trans supporters want to blur the distinction, using the term "woman" broadly. Using "woman" to mean only someone who's fertile, or borne a child, or married, etc. is the opposite of that; it narrows the category of "woman".
I feel like you're missing the point, the bigger and much scarier claim from a trans perspective is the acknowledgment that that identity is a tool for the identifier more than it is a property of the identified, thus exposing all the "sex assigned at birth" nonsense as the lie that it is.
"Bounded Distrust" where he defended Fauci's choice to lie to the public and to the congress was his coming out party and now this is simply who he is.
I suspected this was an inaccurate summary so I reread Bounded Distrust and he doesn't mention Fauci once. Also he doesn't defend anyone else either (besides defending conspiracy theorists as being understandably suspicious of mainstream sources), it's about extracting information from misleading/untrustworthy sources, not saying it is good for them to be misleading. It's so far from your description that I am wondering if this a distorted description of some other post but then you also remembered the wrong title.
He talks about Fauci here. Hlynka may have been getting these posts up, given that this post largely reads as apologia for Fauci being less-than-maximally honest.
I agree with Hlynka’s interpretation. Scott might as well have called it ‘In defense of liars’ – letting lies fester is his thing now.
In Bounded Distrust, he wants us to consider information in a vaccuum, possessing a certain deracinated signal-to-noise ratio. He wants us to ignore the liar status of the speaker, softly whispering that it's not that bad if he is. But there is a bright line here, between the speaker (journalist, sociologist, authority figure) who inadvertently tells a falsehood, and the one who knowingly does so.
The only reason why the latter still sometimes tells the truth, is because he doesn’t think he can get away with bigger lies. Morally, as far as I’m concerned, he’s done. As a source of information, we’re always better off asking another man, since the liar’s statements, at best, merely reflect what others can prove.
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Notes -
I suspect that he's always been like this he just kept it on the DL. See some of the contemporary commentary surrounding "the categories were made for man" and the implications for the Trans community. "Bounded Distrust" where he defended Fauci's choice to lie to the public and to the congress was his coming out party and now this is simply who he is.
It may sound flippant, but I kind of blame the autism, in that I don't think he ever truly grokked that "the other-side can read your book" until the whole NYT fiasco, and by then he'd already said too much.
I don't think Scott is endorsing obscuring the truth or lying in "The Categories Were Made for Man..." - just look at the Israel/Palestine example in the essay itself (which he even called attention to in his edit of the article.) Scott's threefold point in the article was that the way we choose to draw category boundaries is not some natural feature of reality, that there are multiple non-false ways to draw category boundaries, and we should be prepared to accept the implications of where we choose to draw those boundaries.
As far as sex-related terminology goes, I think the following are all valid ways we could draw the boundaries of the category "woman":
No matter where we draw the boundaries, there will always be ways to pick out the features you care about for instrumental rationality to get off the ground. For example, if I lived in a world where most of the speaking community I belonged to used the "produces ovum" definition of womanhood, but what I actually cared about was whether someone was "capable of becoming pregnant" (say because I was planning on starting a family with my own biological children), then I would still have ways to get at the information I cared about using other terminology. And if I lived in a world where Group A used the "lacks the SRY gene" definition, and Group B used the "has XX chromosomes" definition, I would have to determine if I was talking to someone from Group A or Group B to get an accurate picture of reality when talking about someone being a "woman."
Depending on how you draw the boundaries "transwomen are women" and "transwomen are not women" are both true statements, and unfortunately the moment a single person has a slightly different definition than everyone else, you can't actually count on the boundaries of the word being exactly the same for everyone.
I don't believe that some of your items would be accepted as a definition of a woman by anyone not in the lizardman constant. Someone who's otherwise a woman but can't become pregnant would be described as "a woman who can't become pregnant", not as not literally being a woman. It doesn't work that way for transwomen either. Someone who doesn't want them in women's bathrooms but doesn't care too much about pronouns would never say "transwomen are women, but they are women who should be kept out of women's bathrooms". People don't make distinctions that way.
If you only like onions in soup, you aren't going to claim "I like all onions, but I define onions as a plant of genus Allium cepa that is located in a soup".
People do all sorts of weird things with words. To use two ancient examples: the Epicureans said that "pleasure" (hedone) was the highest good, and then said the height of pleasure was the absence of pain, and the Stoics said that the only truly good things were morally virtuous things and all other conventionally "good" things were really just "preferred indifferents."
The technical terminology of both of those philosophies differs quite a bit from standard usage in Greek, Latin and English. I think most people would say that "pleasure" and "absence of pain" are two different things entirely, and that having a wife and kids that you love isn't a "preferred indifferent" but a positive good in the life a person where it is desired. But I think in both cases, in redefining the terms (from a layman's perspective) the two philosophical schools are trying to make it psychologically easier to adopt each school's philosophical regimen.
My point was not that any of those was an unambiguous "best" definition, just that they were all possible definitions. I agree that in our society, as far as standard English usage goes, some of those are less plausible than others, but there's nothing in principle stopping us from having the following categories of sex: man, eunuch, woman, barreness (sic.) Eunuchs and barrenesses could be regarded as infertile males and females, and almost (but not quite) men and women. I think given the right society, those categories could easily be pertinent enough that they could emerge as real and strong divisions in people's minds. (Say, for example, a society where eunuchs are in widespread usage as singers, babysitters, escorts and government functionaries, and in which a girl is not considered a "woman" until she had born at least one child.)
There are possible constructions of those terms that would be bizarre to modern English speakers. For example, under Galen's single sex model almost 2000 years ago, women were "defective men with inverted sex organs", but no one in today's society would think that.
I think the shape of society often defines the limits of "plausible" word boundaries. Some Asian languages have single words for "older brother" and "younger brother" and "paternal uncle" and "maternal uncle" because the hierarchies of birth order and paternal vs maternal relatives is always important and pertinent information (at least historically.) It's not that English has no way of referring to those same distinctions, but for various historical and cultural reasons our language doesn't package those concepts as single words.
The whole point of using the word "women" for trans people is that using the word is supposed to go with treating them like regular women in all possible ways. That's the exact opposite of your examples. Trans supporters want to blur the distinction, using the term "woman" broadly. Using "woman" to mean only someone who's fertile, or borne a child, or married, etc. is the opposite of that; it narrows the category of "woman".
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I feel like you're missing the point, the bigger and much scarier claim from a trans perspective is the acknowledgment that that identity is a tool for the identifier more than it is a property of the identified, thus exposing all the "sex assigned at birth" nonsense as the lie that it is.
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I suspected this was an inaccurate summary so I reread Bounded Distrust and he doesn't mention Fauci once. Also he doesn't defend anyone else either (besides defending conspiracy theorists as being understandably suspicious of mainstream sources), it's about extracting information from misleading/untrustworthy sources, not saying it is good for them to be misleading. It's so far from your description that I am wondering if this a distorted description of some other post but then you also remembered the wrong title.
He talks about Fauci here. Hlynka may have been getting these posts up, given that this post largely reads as apologia for Fauci being less-than-maximally honest.
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I agree with Hlynka’s interpretation. Scott might as well have called it ‘In defense of liars’ – letting lies fester is his thing now.
In Bounded Distrust, he wants us to consider information in a vaccuum, possessing a certain deracinated signal-to-noise ratio. He wants us to ignore the liar status of the speaker, softly whispering that it's not that bad if he is. But there is a bright line here, between the speaker (journalist, sociologist, authority figure) who inadvertently tells a falsehood, and the one who knowingly does so.
The only reason why the latter still sometimes tells the truth, is because he doesn’t think he can get away with bigger lies. Morally, as far as I’m concerned, he’s done. As a source of information, we’re always better off asking another man, since the liar’s statements, at best, merely reflect what others can prove.
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