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 …
"But like, maybe a better strategy than pretending not to notice that women are a different thing that I don't understand, might be to try to listen to them, and learn from them, and appropriate the good parts of what they have without literally insisting that we're instances of the …
Growing up as a younger child in an atomized, low-fertility WEIRD world, I was until recently in the historically anomalous position of not really having any idea what children are actually like. (I have some memories of childhood, of course, but that's not the same as field observations with an …
(Attention conservation notice: metablogging is boring. This post previews some planned and in-development content and expounds on the author's psychological state. It is only being published for psychological reasons. Please subscribe for finished, high-quality content later!)
Um, merry belated Christmas to readers of The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought?
I …
"Can you believe people are calling my blog transphobic?! Me! That's like calling Christina Hoff Sommers an anti-feminist!"
"Um ... you know, that's actually a pretty good analogy. People like Sommers who agree with a one-sentence literal summary of feminism's goals, like 'women and men should have equal rights', but disagree …
"But surely a man such as yourself—"
"I'm nonbinary," interjected the other, holding up a name badge bearing a they/them/theirs sticker.
"Right, sorry," said Mark. "Surely a nonbinary man such as yourself—"
(An anecdote of no consequence)
This year at a conference for this open-source scene I've been really into lately, there were pronoun stickers in everyone's conference swag bags ("[...] so we can all help each other get things right. Wear them in solidarity with others too. Help us make [the conference …
"Hi, my name is John, and my pronouns are he/him."
"Hi! My name is Mark, and I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient."
"I can understand why you might think that there are five lights—indeed, that would make a lot of things easier—but actually, there are only four lights. Yes, it's a little bit counterintuitive, and I know I got a little bit frustrated and said some things I now regret …
Thou shalt not strike terms from others' expressive vocabulary without suitable replacement.
The author of the (highly recommended!) Tumblr blog The Unit of Caring responds to an anonymous correspondent's observation that trans-exclusionary radical feminists tend to define the word woman as "adult human biological female":
Oh, yeah, sorry, I've …
I said, "The truth is whatever you can get away with."
"No, that's journalism. The truth is whatever you can't escape."
—Distress by Greg Egan
In "The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories", the immortal Scott Alexander argues that proposed definitions of concepts aren't true or …
As part of a series—ah, Sequence—of posts explaining the hidden Bayesian structure of language, Eliezer Yudkowsky discusses a parable about factory workers faced with the task of sorting objects which very strongly tend to either be blue, egg-shaped, furry, flexible, opaque, luminescent, and vanadium-cored (categorized by the workers …
(presented without further comment)
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say:—"We never pay anyone Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the …
Spambots were invariably among Eliza's least favorite clients.
"You've got to understand, Doc! It's not that I'm afraid of rejection. I can handle rejection. I love rejection!"
Most spambots these days were self-aware.
"What I can't stand is the silence that's seemingly been deliberately engineered to be as ambiguous as …
If you want to make your stupid dream real, you need to have a realistic picture of the world. If you want a society in which men and women have the same brain, or one in which feminism actually works, you would have to make it so, with advanced biological …
"I swear, if I read another word about Phineas Gage—and this goes double for David Reimer—I am going to scream. Why do science writers always recount the same illustrative case studies? Are they all just plagiarizing each other out of laziness, or could it really be that in …
I got my second laser treatment last week! I took the "MAX" train to the nearest stop and walked to the area where the laser parlor/clinic/salon is, but I was quite early, so I passed the time browsing the local shops.
The variety store had these little nylon …
In chapter 5 ("Blind Spots: On Subconscious Sex and Gender Entitlement") of her book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, Julia Serano argues that both trans and non-trans people's gender sentiments are rooted in subconscious sex, "a deep-rooted understanding of what sex their bodies …
