What Social Constructs Are (And Are Not)

This post is mostly adapted from a section of another post. I wanted a standalone version, to serve as background for a sequence on the mechanisms of social reality. You’ve probably heard that things like laws, conventions, norms, cultural associations, status, and so forth are “social constructs”: they’re kinda arbitrary in some sense, an artifact of social reality as opposed to physical reality. This post offers a little more clarity on what social constructs are, and the ways in which they are and are not “arbitrary”. Example: Vehicle CategoriesThe vehicles humans build today mostly fall into categories like “minivan” or “truck” (among other categories). These categories cash out in predictions: when I see a vehicle with sliding side doors, I predict that it will have a trunk door that opens overhead, three rows of seats, be driven by someone with kids, etc. On the other hand, when I see a vehicle with a flat bed in the back, I predict that it will not have three rows of seats, will have a back gate which opens downwards, be driven by my cousin, etc. [1] But humans could choose to make different vehicles, which would change which clusters exist amongst our vehicles. The types of vehicles people make are a matter of social convention - i.e. vehicle types are a social construct. Crucially, this does not mean that vehicle categories are “fake”! Categories like minivan and truck are very real in our world, they have real predictive power, and they have predictive power because humans choose to build vehicles which match those categories. Two key points: • Many humans, or a few well-resourced humans, could change which vehicle-clusters exist by changing what vehicles are produced. We can change the social construct by going out and changing things in the real world.• Changing a social construct is not just about deciding that I personally am going to categorize things differently. If I draw different vehicle-clusters, I will probably just be wrong, in the sense that I