Liability
I'm not a coward, I've just never been tested
I'd like to think that if I was I would pass
Look at the tested and think "there but for the grace go I"
Might be a coward, I'm afraid of what I might find out—"The Impression That I Get …
Posts published by: Zack M. Davis
Crossing the Line
There are lines I've always felt I had to toe
Some were blurry, some unseen
Some I've had to learn to read between
So many boundaries
Far more than you know—"Crossing the Line" (extended lyrics), Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure
Emily Cibelli, Yang Xu, Joseph L. Austerweil, Thomas L. Griffiths, and …
Survey Data on Cis and Trans Women Among Haskell Programmers
Stereotypically, computer programming is both a predominantly male profession and the quintessential profession of non-exclusively-androphilic trans women. Stereotypically, these demographic trends are even more pronounced in communities around "niche" or academic technologies (e.g., Haskell), rather than those with more established mainstream use (e.g., JavaScript).
But stereotypes can be …
The Feeling Is Mutual
She is clearly a villain—but there is such a thing as a sympathetic villain, and it's not as if our sympathy is a finite resource. It seems like she's hurting herself most of all, and it's just because of the brain poison she was fed [...] I can imagine how …
Interlude XX
"I'm not done with this incredibly creepy self-disclosure blog post about how the robot-cult's sacred text influenced my self-concept in relation to sex and gender, but maybe I should link you to the draft?" said the honest man. "Because it unblocks our model-sync by describing some of the autobiographical details …
Nixon on Forbidden Hypotheses
I listened with great interest to this segment of a 1971 recording of a conversation between President Richard Nixon and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (starting at the 56 second mark). You really wonder more generally what things powerful people think in private that they can't say in public.
NIXON: I read …
Two Political Short Stories
(a fictional 2017, as imagined in November 2016)
I cough nervously to break the awkward silence as we wait for the Chinese ICBM to kill us. "Don't blame me," I say, "I voted for Gary Johnson!"
Glares all around.
"Aaaand I live in California, and I'm not eligible for the …
Link: "Can WNBA Players Take Down a U.S. Senator?"
From Julie Kliegman for Sports Illustrated, a story on the conflict between social-justice-activist WNBA players and Atlanta Dream half-owner Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R–Georgia). (Archived.)
The dispute seems to have been sparked by Loeffler's non-support for the Black Lives Matter movement—see also ESPN's coverage from August (archived)—but the …
Link: "Wells for Boys"
Can I just say that this Saturday Night Live sketch is, somehow, on-theme?!
Memento Mori
(Attention conservation notice: personal thoughts on the passing scene; previously, previously)
But always above you
The idea raises its head
What would I do if the Earth fell apart?
Who would I save, or am I not quite brave enough?—Laura Barrett, "Deception Island Optimists Club"
Six or sixteen or …
Yarvin on Less Wrong
I listened with interest to this segment (starting at the 3 hour, 23 minutes, 48 seconds mark) from Hyperpodcastism's interview with Curtis Yarvin (loose transcription elides some amount of "um", "you know", "like", "sort of", repetition, false starts, &c.)—
INTERVIEWER: More lightning round takes on what became of Less …
Interlude XIX
(16 July 2017)
"Tomorrow! No coffee, no Facebook, no food—well, maybe some Soylent because the medication for my birth defect says to take with food, some kind of bioavailability thing—no low-quality internet reading, no TV ... just writing! The demons that haunt us are only powerful to the extent …
Oceans Rise, Empires Fall
(Attention conservation notice: passing thoughts on the present scene)
Okay, three years lat—three months, three months and one week later, let me say it was too optimistic of me to have suggested that public discourse was working with respect to pandemic response. I was pointing at something real with …
Teleology
"I mean, if that explanation actually makes you feel happier, then fine."
"Feeling happier isn't what explanations are for. Explanations are for predicting our observations.
"Emotions, too, are functional: happiness measures whether things in your life are going well or going poorly, but does not constitute things going well, much …
Book Review: Charles Murray's Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class
This is a pretty good book about things we know about some ways in which people are different from each other, particularly differences in cognitive repertoires (Murray's choice of phrase for shaving nine syllables off "personality, abilities, and social behavior"). In my last book review, I mentioned that I had …
Peering Through Reverent Fingers
Any evolutionary advantage must come from a feature affecting our behavior. Thus, there is no evolutionary advantage to simply having a belief about our identity. Self-identity can matter and could have mattered only if it affects behavior, in which case it is really a process of self-identification. Moreover, it is …
The Reverse Murray Rule
In the notes to his Real Education, Charles Murray proposes a convention for third-person singular pronouns where the sex of the referent is unknown or irrelevant—
As always, I adhere to the Murray Rule for dealing with third-person singular pronouns, which prescribes using the gender of the author or principal …
Don't Read the Comments??
Historically, The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought has not provided a comment section. There were two reasons for this.
First, technical limitations, downstream of technical æsthetics. There are standard out-of-the-box blogging hosts—your WordPress, your Medium, &c.—that are easy for anyone to use, at the cost of taking control …
Relative Gratitude and the Great Plague of 2020
In the depths of despair over not just having lost the Category War, but having lost it harder and at higher cost than I can even yet say (having not yet applied for clearance from the victors as to how much is my story to tell), I'm actually pretty impressed …
Cloud Vision
Google reportedly recently sent out an email to their Cloud Vision API customers, notifying them that the service will stop returning "woman" or "man" labels for people in photos. Being charitable (as one does), I can think of reasons why I might defend or support such a decision. Detecting the …