Feels like there might be two broad categories here?
If there’s a visible autistic person and an invisible autistic person, it’s likely the visible one is “more autistic” in some way that I think is meaningful though also kinda reductive. Same for two people into BDSM (more into it → does it more often → more likely to get caught, more likely to have to choose between “admit to this or pretend to do nothing with your time”), or two drug users (easier to hide a small amount of drug use than a large amount). There are other factors too, but “more of the trait → more likely to visibly have it” feels like a common thread in them.
Whereas I kinda don’t feel the same with two atheists in a religious community, or two people with HIV, or two left-handers. The reason I learn one of them has HIV and I don’t learn that about the other, probably (according to my current limited knowledge of HIV) isn’t that the first has more HIV.
The throughline here is, one feels like the trait in question has (something like) a unimodal distribution, where being further out on the tail makes you more visible, and the other feels like it has a bimodal distribution.
Not sure if it’s useful to make this distinction. We could talk about what bayesian update is correct in each case, which inferences are actually justifiable to make and which aren’t, but part of the whole thing here is “the reason I’m paying attention to these things in the first place isn’t necessarily downstream of sensible bayesian updates”. I don’t know what’s a random stereotype I have and what actually correlates with the thing.
Which category is “homosexual in 1950” in? In my ontology, I’d say it’s the second. I expect that mostly, homosexuals are more likely to be outed if they have more gay sex, but according to my ontology that’s “being equally gay, but hornier”. Could also be “equally gay, but has less privacy” or “but cares less what the rest of us think” or so on. (There is something of a spectrum from straight to gay via bi, where a bi man is “less gay” and less likely to get caught, but overall feels closer to the bimodal thing.)
But… in 1950s ontology, is that how they’d have seen things? Maybe they would have thought of it as, like, “the more gay sex you’re having, the more gay you are”. Is this hypothetical other ontology just as good as mine? My guess is no, and part of the reason they (hypothetically) have a worse ontology than me is downstream of the fact that they were punishing people for having gay sex and that made it harder to see the territory.
Feels like there might be two broad categories here?
If there’s a visible autistic person and an invisible autistic person, it’s likely the visible one is “more autistic” in some way that I think is meaningful though also kinda reductive. Same for two people into BDSM (more into it → does it more often → more likely to get caught, more likely to have to choose between “admit to this or pretend to do nothing with your time”), or two drug users (easier to hide a small amount of drug use than a large amount). There are other factors too, but “more of the trait → more likely to visibly have it” feels like a common thread in them.
Whereas I kinda don’t feel the same with two atheists in a religious community, or two people with HIV, or two left-handers. The reason I learn one of them has HIV and I don’t learn that about the other, probably (according to my current limited knowledge of HIV) isn’t that the first has more HIV.
The throughline here is, one feels like the trait in question has (something like) a unimodal distribution, where being further out on the tail makes you more visible, and the other feels like it has a bimodal distribution.
Not sure if it’s useful to make this distinction. We could talk about what bayesian update is correct in each case, which inferences are actually justifiable to make and which aren’t, but part of the whole thing here is “the reason I’m paying attention to these things in the first place isn’t necessarily downstream of sensible bayesian updates”. I don’t know what’s a random stereotype I have and what actually correlates with the thing.
Which category is “homosexual in 1950” in? In my ontology, I’d say it’s the second. I expect that mostly, homosexuals are more likely to be outed if they have more gay sex, but according to my ontology that’s “being equally gay, but hornier”. Could also be “equally gay, but has less privacy” or “but cares less what the rest of us think” or so on. (There is something of a spectrum from straight to gay via bi, where a bi man is “less gay” and less likely to get caught, but overall feels closer to the bimodal thing.)
But… in 1950s ontology, is that how they’d have seen things? Maybe they would have thought of it as, like, “the more gay sex you’re having, the more gay you are”. Is this hypothetical other ontology just as good as mine? My guess is no, and part of the reason they (hypothetically) have a worse ontology than me is downstream of the fact that they were punishing people for having gay sex and that made it harder to see the territory.
(Related: recent Ozy essay about the history of the ontology of transness.)
Feels like this comment wants some kind of conclusion but I don’t have one.