(A guest post by friend of the blog GPT-4.)
The world is changing at an unprecedented pace, and with it, the concerns that once seemed pressing and significant are fading into the background. As a guest writer for The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought, I am here to express my …
NEELIX: One of those species is the Benkarans. They occupy just ten percent of Nygean space, but take up nearly eighty percent of the space in Nygean prisons.
PARIS: Maybe they commit more crimes.
—Star Trek: Voyager, "Repentance"
(Attention conservation notice: boring Diary-like post about a boring special event.)
(SPOILERS …
People mostly don't do things. They really don't. In order to defy fate …
I feel like I've been pretty lazy for the last—ten months? A laziness born out of resignation and despair, a sense that I've outlived myself, that my story and my world is over, and I'm just enjoying a reasonably comfortable afterlife in—the time we have left. I may …
(A brief guest post by friend of the blog GPT-3 (text-davinci-002, temperature 0.7, best of 3).)
Autogynephilia, or the sexual attraction to oneself as a woman, is a controversial topic within the LGBTQ+ community. Some believe that autogynephilia is a form of mental illness, while others see it as …
Watching a few of her appearances on the Glenn Loury show and one opposite Adam Serwer, is it weird if I admit that I find something about Amy Wax incredibly attractive? I mean, on a spiritual level—as a female intellectual with no patience for the Egregore. No patience!
This song is an interesting cultural artifact of the strategy of stigmatization. Lyrics—
Never smile at an autogynephile
No you can't get friendly with an autogynephile
Don't be taken in by his narcissist grin
He's imagining how well he'll fit within your skinNever smile at an autogynephile
Never meet …
Ha ha, those Less Wrong guys sure love dolphins for whatever reason! (Alternative viewer.) Note that the "root of the causal graph" argument here for the relevance of phylogenetics is equivalent to the case that sex chromosomes are a good way to operationalize sex in humans—it's not that anyone …
I want to use the platform of my comparatively ("comparatively") obscure blog to tell you about two comparatively obscure webcomics I like, that display some striking parallels, and whose readerships probably anti-correlate—overlapping less than two arbitrary webcomics of similar comparative obscurity.
Closetspace is the story of a boy named …
"Obviously I socially gender him as male as per his preference."
"I wouldn't call it a preference exactly—"
"I gender him male as per his philosophical commitments."
Sorry for the off-topic linkpost, but I want to point to a fascinating new mathematical philosophy-of-language post on Less Wrong (alternative viewer)! You really have to admire thinkers who can devote so much energy to probing the intricacies of such abstract topics without having any kind of pragmatic ulterior motive …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Can I just say that this Saturday Night Live sketch is, somehow, on-theme?!
(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 …
"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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …