I’m saying it’s dumb to assert that P. albicaulis isn’t a natural abstraction just because most people are ignorant of dendrology and are only paying attention to the shrub vs. tree subspace: if I look at more features of vegetation than just broad shape, I end up needing to formulate P. albicaulis to explain the things some of these woody plants have in common despite their shape.
And I think this is fine if you’re one of the approximately 5 people (me, maybe Bailey, maybe Andura, maybe Hsu, maybe you—even this is generous since e.g. I think you naturally thought of autogynephilia and gender progressivism as being more closely related than they really are) in the world who do observe things this closely, but it also seems relevant to notice that the rest of the world doesn’t and can’t observe things this closely, and that therefore we really ought to refactor our abstractions such that they align better with what everyone else can think about.
Like if our autogynephilia discourse was mostly centered on talking with each other about it, it’d be a different story, but you mostly address the rationalist community, and Bailey mostly addresses GCs and HBDs, and so on. So “most people you encounter using that term on Twitter” doesn’t refer to irrelevant outsiders, it refers to the people you’re trying to have the conversation with.
And like a key part of my point is that they mostly couldn’t fix it if they wanted to. P. albicaulis has visible indicators that allows you to diagnose the species by looking at it, but autogynephiles don’t unless you get in private in a way that GCs and rationalists basically are never gonna do.
And I think this is fine if you’re one of the approximately 5 people (me, maybe Bailey, maybe Andura, maybe Hsu, maybe you—even this is generous since e.g. I think you naturally thought of autogynephilia and gender progressivism as being more closely related than they really are) in the world who do observe things this closely, but it also seems relevant to notice that the rest of the world doesn’t and can’t observe things this closely, and that therefore we really ought to refactor our abstractions such that they align better with what everyone else can think about.
Like if our autogynephilia discourse was mostly centered on talking with each other about it, it’d be a different story, but you mostly address the rationalist community, and Bailey mostly addresses GCs and HBDs, and so on. So “most people you encounter using that term on Twitter” doesn’t refer to irrelevant outsiders, it refers to the people you’re trying to have the conversation with.
And like a key part of my point is that they mostly couldn’t fix it if they wanted to. P. albicaulis has visible indicators that allows you to diagnose the species by looking at it, but autogynephiles don’t unless you get in private in a way that GCs and rationalists basically are never gonna do.
(Continued in containment thread.)