This is a super-great book about the cultural evolutionary game theory of gender roles! (And also stuff like race and religion and caste, I guess, but I'm ignoring that because I haven't gotten around to broadening the topic scope of this blog yet.) I am unreasonably excited about this book …
[A mediator] can influence the other players' expectations on his own initiative, in a manner that both parties cannot help mutually recognizing. When there is no apparent focal point for agreement, he can create one by his power to make a dramatic suggestion. [...]
The white line down the center …
With the Hopes that our World is built on
They were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon could be defined to be Stilton;
They denied she identified as Dutch;
They denied that Wishes should be categorized as Horses;
They denied that a Pig could be stipulated to …
(-romise, -ensation)
(epistemic status: shitposting)
Some radical feminists complain that males body-modding to become facsimiles of women is appropriation. They're obviously correct, but the claim doesn't seem strong enough to override the right to bodily autonomy. The Law in its majesty finds a precedent in the archives of copyright law …
"I think if you show any indications of being an egg, you need to marry someone who's OK with you eventually transitioning. Not because you necessarily will want to transition, but because it's likely enough that you need to plan for it."
"I probably don't actually disagree. Keeping promises is …
This life is not to last and it awaits apotheosis
And the passerby all sipping on their Monday coffee know this
Their stumbling through their week
Contrasts the path by which I seek
A practical ambition
For a special type of girl
I want to be the one who writes …
"[...] Between one and the infinite in cases such as these, there are no sensible numbers. Not only two, but any finite number, is ridiculous and can't exist."
—The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov
Eliezer Yudkowsky Tweets (back in March), linking to a Quillette interview with Lisa Littman (positer of "rapid …
One common reaction by the Blanchpilled to autogynephilia-truther sites—I mean, the shouty sensationalist kind run by conservatives or radical feminists that almost never use phrases like "uselessly low-dimensional subspace", not The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought—goes like this:
That is going to make the problem worse. We need …
If your policy is, "We don't negotiate with terrorists, but we do appease bears", then from the perspective of a third party fighting a war against the bears, you look like a productive asset being farmed by the bears, and thus, a legitimate military target.
If your behavior is optimized …
Previously on The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought ("The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions", "Reply on Adult Human Females"), we've considered at length the ways in which the self-identity criterion for gender (e.g., "Women are people who identify as women") fails to satisfy some of the …
We need a term to describe the property that cis women and trans men have in common with each other, and that cis men and trans women have in common with each other. I'm unhappy with all three of the most frequently-used alternatives.
The "mainstream" trans-rights answer to this seems …
Marco del Giudice1 points out2 that in the presence of measurement error, standardized effect size measures like Cohen's d will underestimate the "true" effect size.
The effect size d tries to quantify the difference between two distributions by reporting the difference between the distributions' means in standardized units …
(Attention conservation notice: Diary-like navel-gazing today. If you're here for the Actual Philosophy, come back the week after next.)
ROSE: [...] we can't both exist. I'm going to become half of you. And I need you to know that every moment you love being yourself, that's me, loving you, and loving …
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way …
"I really don't think you're rationally considering how to maximize your contribution to rationality pedagogy and deciding it runs through freaking out about transgender and maybe abandoning the movement in disgust."
"Almost no one's optimal contribution to rationality pedagogy runs through freaking out about transgender; I just think it's plausible …
The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought is going on hiatus until 1 July while the author recovers from a broken heart and a shattered faith in humanity; there will be no new posts in May and June. But don't touch that subscription—we'll be back in two months with more …
It doesn't have anything to do with the topic focuses of this blog, but this new post on Less Wrong about the mathematical laws governing how to talk about dolphins is just so good that I have to share it with my readers! I hope to read more from that …
"You don't understand. Sure, you might make a few interesting abstract points here and there, but this isn't some masturbatory ivory-tower intellectual game to us. We're fighting for our existence here."
"Yes, you are. And so am I. I need simple language that carves reality at the joints in order …
It's been remarked upon that popular positions are often supported with weak arguments, because people aren't in the habit of having to defend them. I think there's a distinct but related time-dependent effect on advocates of sufficiently unpopular positions. At first, the advocate of the unpopular position grows more sophisticated …