
The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories (2014) - gmays
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
======
elsherbini
The article was very interesting, and I know this isn't the main point of the
article, but this is an interesting fact I like to share-

> "Fish generally ... are in a certain part of the phylogenetic tree."

Fish are actually paraphyletic[0], meaning they are in multiple "parts" of the
tree of life. To try to use fish as a phylogenetic term is useless because the
clade that contains everything we call fish also includes reptiles, birds, and
humans. Try explaining that to King Solomon...

[0]
[http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/glossary/gloss1/phyly.html](http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/glossary/gloss1/phyly.html)

~~~
adrianratnapala
Cheers to you and Scott! "Whales are not fish" annoys me more than a true
statement really should.

I think it's because the characters in Moby Dick sometime whales fish. It's
not as if those guys were ignorant. They knew perfectly well what whales are
-- more viscerally (!) then you or I could. And if they chose to call them
fish, well perhaps they had good reasons.

~~~
dghf
IIRC, Moby Dick has an entire chapter where the narrator debates whether or
not whales are fish, coming down on the "yes they're fish" side for largely
the same reasons as this article's Solomon.

------
rusk
Just on the topic of silliest athiest argument, the silliest _theist_ argument
I've heard is that since Bananas are the perfect size and shape for the human
hand they must have been designed by God for humans. Never mind the fact that
actual natural bananas are nothing like that they're more akin to a small
yellow pomegranite. Or that in some countries (Australia in my experience) you
can get Bananas the size of cucumbers. Or even, that all commercial bananas
are actually cloned (by way of transplanted cuttings) from a single Banana,
which was probably selected "by man" based on various aesthetic, and practical
parameters such as "it fitting perfectly in the hand".

~~~
coldtea
> _Just on the topic of silliest athiest argument, the silliest theist
> argument I 've heard is that since Bananas are the perfect size and shape
> for the human hand they must have been designed by God for humans. Never
> mind the fact that actual natural bananas are nothing like that they're more
> akin to a small yellow pomegranite._

That's not a real counter-argument. God, in all his wisdom, guided humans to
breed the perfect-sized bananas we have today. So what the "natural bananas"
are is irrelevant.

~~~
comex
Well, the original argument wasn't just "according to our beliefs, God was
involved in this"; it's implying that bananas would be unlikely to be the
perfect size and shape for humans by chance, i.e. unless they were designed
for that purpose. Which means there has to be a designer (who cared about
humans), which for natural phenomena would have to be God, or at least some
sort of god. That is, if you exclude evolution and other natural optimization
processes; those are known to be able to simulate the appearance of
intelligent design, but in theory could be excluded if there weren't a
plausible mechanism for something to have evolved in response to humans, e.g.
because they haven't been around for that long in geological terms. (Except
that plenty of other animals with opposable fingers have existed for longer,
but – details. I'm not saying the argument would actually be valid, even if
bananas' current appearance were entirely natural.)

On the other hand, artificial breeding provides an explanation that doesn't
require God in any way, so it does invalidate the argument. The only way to
salvage it is to say that God is responsible for it being _possible_ to breed
bananas into such a form, but that's obviously much weaker.

------
bmm6o
Defining terms is important, but defining sets much less so. Arguments about
"is X a Y?" often have little to no value in the abstract. There are
exceptions, but these are when the definitions are the most precise and can be
evaluated objectively. E.g., a square is a (type of) rectangle and therefore
its area is length * width. As the article shows, "is a whale a fish" has no
value in the abstract. It depends on if you want to hunt it or know about its
evolutionary path.

Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? It depends on if you are a chef or a
botanist. The botanists have the more rigorous definition, but I wouldn't call
the chefs wrong. What about a pumpkin? Is a strawberry a berry?
([https://imgur.com/gallery/pfEnXNT](https://imgur.com/gallery/pfEnXNT))

You probably saw the memes go around a while back about what is a sandwich,
according to D&D alignments. Good for a laugh and a debate. But let's say you
settle the question "is a hotdog a sandwich?" Now what? What did you get from
that effort? It doesn't tell you anything about a hotdog that you didn't
already know.

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golemotron
It's a great essay but you get to the same place from here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation)

------
red_admiral
This was the article that got me hooked on Scott's writings. The other Scott
(Aaronson) has a good blog too and they occasionally reference each other.

There is a response to this article titled "The Categories were made for Man
to make Predictions" which you can find with your favourite search engine. I'm
not saying I agree with everything in the response, but if you're the kind of
person who likes Scott Alexander then you might also enjoy reading opposing
points of view without immediately wanting to pick up a pitchfork.

------
ludston
I believe that this essay is an example of the practical application of the
Principle of Charity[0]. This is laudable as it is practically a prerequisite
that at least one side does this in a useful debate.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity)

~~~
rusk
Perhaps also pertinent on these lines is the principle of _" Unconditional
Positive Regard"_ [0] it is easy to infer the worst possible motives when
somebody does something bad, but it can be helpful to assume that they did in
fact mean well, when attempting to step into their shoes.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconditional_positive_regard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconditional_positive_regard)

------
rusk
This is an excellent article and has actually helped me to redraw my own
boundaries with regards to the matter of substance that it covers. I have one
nagging boundary issue that remains however and that is with regards to where
the boundary be drawn when applying such an effective therapy to minors.

------
forapurpose
_Theory is a useful servant but a bad master, liable to produce orthodox
defenders of every variety of the faith. We ought always to set light to
theory and be on the look-out for ways of improving it_

\- Harry Guntrip (attributed)

------
_bxg1
This is one of the best articles I've read on here.

~~~
DuskStar
If you enjoyed this article, there's probably quite a few more on Slate Star
Codex you'd find interesting! I personally rather enjoyed (and recommend) "I
Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup" [0] for the insight, "...And I Show
You How Deep The Hole Goes" [1] for the hilarity, and "All In All, Another
Brick In The Motte" [2] as an interesting introduction to a debate style I
think we've all seen at some point but not been able to describe properly.

[0] [https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-
anythin...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-
except-the-outgroup/)

[1] [https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/02/and-i-show-you-how-
dee...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/02/and-i-show-you-how-deep-the-
rabbit-hole-goes/)

[2] [https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-
bri...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-
motte/)

------
Afforess
This is why I find movements like HBD so disgusting, despite their
"scientific" origins. They start with a conclusion, the justification of race,
and seek evidence to prove it. Of course, they find such evidence. Anyone
looking to prove any conclusion can find evidence - even scientifically strong
evidence. Heck, even psychics and supernaturalists have scientific evidence on
their side! [1]

No matter the evidence though -- Categories aren't facts.

> _“If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?” And the answer:
> “Four – because a tail isn’t a leg regardless of what you call it.”_

Categories are useful _caches_ of information. We define "limbs involved in
the movement of the center of mass of a body" as _legs_ because the concept is
useful as a cached "leg". If the concept stops being valuable, we will
eventually purge it from the cache. The danger lies in mistaking the cached
concept for the original value. [2] Race doesn't predict anything; nowadays,
the cached value, crime/success/happiness, is substituted for race, and the
results are a reinforcing cycle. [3]

More relevant to HN, categories are why "adversarial" effects on many neural
networks are so strong. NNs are training to categorize to exacting strategies
- strategies not at all in mind by their creators. The apocryphal tank NN meme
- that dataset bias led algorithms to detecting sunny skies instead of tanks
-- comes to mind. [4] The story is made up, the moral somewhat muddled in the
telling, but the surprise survives. What we reward and what we desire are
separate things, and in the difference, the whole world lies.

[1]: [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-
ou...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-
control/)

[2]: [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/02/causal-models-at-
work/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/02/causal-models-at-work/)

[3]: [https://www.vox.com/policy-and-
politics/2018/3/27/15695060/s...](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-
politics/2018/3/27/15695060/sam-harris-charles-murray-race-iq-forbidden-
knowledge-podcast-bell-curve)

[4]: [https://www.gwern.net/Tanks](https://www.gwern.net/Tanks)

~~~
spacehome
That's a strange argument to make on this article. Sure, races are an attempt
at categorization of something much more complicated than the categories can
encode. As such, there's differing perspectives about how many racial
categories there are, how to draw the boundaries, and no matter what, there
will be people who don't fit into any of your categories. None of this
detracts from the fact that racial categorizations are useful and predictive
for the overwhelming majority of the Earth's population, just as the
questionable status of Pluto doesn't interfere with research on extra-solar
planets.

By HBD, I assume you're referring to differences in intelligence between
races, but please correct me if you're referring to something else. It's
always a bad idea to start with the conclusion you want and work backwards.
However, in the US, amongst the present-day population, there is OVERWHELMING
evidence that there are average IQ differences between races. The open
question is what causes these differences in the averages.

We know IQ is partly genetic, and we know races differ in allele frequency of
many genes. It's possible, though exceedingly unlikely, that genetic
differences between races contribute precisely zero to average IQ differences.
And there seems to be some circumstantial evidence that genetic differences
between races do account for some of the average differences. This is a
question that is at least amenable to study, by correlating genes with IQ, and
matching this against allele frequency in groups.

HBD is not unscientific, and the comparison to psychics is unwarranted. HBD is
an attempt to explain an observation (IQ deltas) with a hypothesis.

~~~
jonnybgood
What races are you referring to? Irish, German, English, Spanish? What’s their
average IQ? And what genes play a factor in IQ?

~~~
spacehome
What I said is true no matter how you split races, because any sufficiently
complex trait will have average group differences. You can read about average
IQ differences at lots of different levels of granularity.

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asdfjk123456890
The comparison between someone having a hair dryer in the passenger seat of
their car and "giving them cheap natural hormones" is ridiculous. A serious
discussion about taking hormones would consider a metric, perhaps rates of
self-harm before and after treatment. This post is not a serious discussion.
Scott is "... writing ... because [he] just finished accepting a transgender
man to the mental hospital".

~~~
wyattpeak
I don't see that the article says we /should/ give hormones to transgender
people at all. Just that dismissing the idea on the basis of (1) maleness
being trivially categorisable or (2) transgender being a psychological
disorder are baseless.

Whether or not it's the right solution is, obviously, a much more complicated
question (and one that is probably rather better left to experts than armchair
psychiatrists on discussion boards). But it's also an entirely separate
question.

