CFI vs. Scientists

Stephanie Zvan

 

Female and male bathroom icon cutouts standing on pink and blue fabric against pink and blue backgrounds.
Even here, things have gotten a little messy. Photo by Magda Ehlers.

Mother Jones has a great interview today with Kathryn Clancy, “a biological anthropologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne, whose research examines the biology and culture around menstruation, pregnancy, and sexual harassment—topics all founded on a scientific understanding of sex, and the differences between us.”

Kate and I have been social media mutuals for a very long time, though we’ve only met on one, very pleasant occasion. She good people, but more importantly for the purposes of this post, she’s exactly the kind of scientific expert skeptics should be looking to for guidance when issues we care about are being politicized. So what does she have to say about defining sex?

There is no one definition of sex. For scientists, the way you might choose to define it can and should vary based on your research question. Some people will define sex around gamete size—do we produce larger gametes [eggs] versus smaller gametes [sperm]? That means there are more than two groups, because where do we put people who don’t produce gametes?

Then there are sex chromosomes. It’s not just XX and XY. There are a whole bunch of categories. Another one that people look at is neurotypicality. [Some] say there’s such a thing as a male brain and a female brain, and you’re going to get way different boundaries on those sex categories. One definition that is starting to shift right now is around typical hormone ranges. [For instance, people with] polycystic ovary syndrome can end up having androgen levels that are very different from those of most people that we might put in the sex category of female.

Genitals aren’t one of the common ways of defining sex. But the problem we come across is we often collect information on sex with a little form that says, “What sex are you?” What that’s typically asking a person is not “What’s your gamete size? What sex chromosomes do you have? What hormone levels are typical for you?” It’s asking about sex assigned at birth—a completely different way to measure sex that is based on baby genitals.

There’s plenty more good stuff in the interview. I recommend reading the whole thing, but I warn you, you’ll come away thinking sex is anything but a simple binary. And really, this should surprise no one, given how many ways scientists define the fundamental categorical schema of species.

In the meantime, however, the Center for Inquiry has not only not responded to (or acknowledged) my critique of their factually incorrect attack on their coalition partners. They’ve gone to the length of emailing that attack this morning, without corrections, to everyone who receives their organizational newsletter.

If this is what it means to oppose the anti-trans agenda of the Christian Nationalists, what would it actually look like to shill for them?

Stick with the experts, friends. Read Kate Clancy’s book, Period, for example.

CFI vs. Scientists
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Is CFI Shilling for Christian Nationalism?

Stephanie Zvan

Whew! It’s quite a question, but CFI asked us yesterday to consider it, so I will. Before I do, the brief backstory so you can look into all this for yourself.

As you probably know, the right wing of U.S. politics has increasingly attacked trans people, and particularly young trans people. Bathroom bans, bans on medical treatment that is considered the standard of care for trans people, mandated subsidies for conversion therapy, book bans, and even genital inspections of young athletes. All these and worse have been introduced as legislation across the country in the last few years. Some have passed.

In this political atmosphere, CFI hosted two talks at CSICon 2024 that dealt with how scientists define sex. The disagreements in the talks continued afterward in print, so you can look at the positions involved. I generally agree with Steven Novella’s point that we’re talking about a question of categorization, but you can also read Jerry Coyne’s insistence that sex is binary.

Recently, Coyne persuaded FFRF to publish a similar take, as covered by Hemant Mehta:

In case you missed it, the short version is that biologist Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution is True and Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible, wrote an article trashing transgender people. He insisted sex is binary, that trans women are more likely to be sexual predators (using misleading statistics), argued that trans women shouldn’t be allowed to counsel women who have been physically abused, rejected even the possibility of trans women playing women’s sports at any age, and said trans women shouldn’t be placed in women’s prisons (even though the alternative is disastrous).

Fairly quickly, FFRF repudiated and took down the post. Shortly thereafter, a large majority of the Secular Coalition for America’s member organizations signed on to a pledge to collectively do better standing against this Christian Nationalist moral panic (pdf). Most relevantly to this post, the statement says:

Nor will we sit silently or ignore when the talking points, misinformation, and outright fabrications of anti-LGBTQ+ extremists are laundered and given a veneer of legitimacy or acceptability by those who hold themselves out as voices of reason or science.

For full disclosure: I’m on the board of Secular Woman and voted for us to sign on, which we did. This post, however, is mine only, written with no input from the rest of the board.

The Center for Inquiry was not among these signatories. Instead, they ran this post yesterday morning: “Response to Secular Groups that Claim Scientists Are Shills for Christian Nationalism“.

Biological science indicates there are two biological sexes, a fact consistent throughout the animal world of which humans are a part. There is also a more fluid concept of gender that allows for a more complex picture of human sexuality. Both things can be true at the same time. There can be two biological sexes and multiple gender identities. And when public policy is enacted, it should be sensitive to the former as well as the latter.

This appears to be an inconvenient truth in light of the response by some secular groups.

Some secular groups are taking the position that any discussion of biological facts is transphobic and a denial of civil and human rights. They posit that giving reasons for understanding the natural world as a place divided into biological male and female members of species isn’t just a scientific discussion but a cover for full-on Christian nationalism.

As you can see from the quote above, CFI is not only defending Jerry Coyne’s view of sex but also asserting it as their own position. This isn’t a surprise, given other posts they’ve published on the topic, but by identifying the organization with the scientists in question, they ask us to look at the case they present and determine whether CFI, along with Coyne, is shilling for Christian Nationalism.

Continue reading “Is CFI Shilling for Christian Nationalism?” →

Is CFI Shilling for Christian Nationalism?

Preparing for Upheaval

Stephanie Zvan

For most of us, our main job however long this new government lasts is to survive and to bring people with us. Toward that end, it’s time to take inventory, now, before the disruptions start. It’s time to think about things you have that other people may need and figure out how to get them to others.

Glasses lying on a notebook full of notes in front of a computer.
Start with money. It’s important to understand that most of us aren’t going to have more than we have right now for a long time, if ever. Tariffs, inflation, elimination of minimum wage, loss of protections from wage theft, deregulation of banking, an eventual collapse of the markets—these are all on the table. It’s possible someone will stop them, but it’s very much not guaranteed.

That doesn’t mean it’s time to cause a run on the banks or stockpile and hoard everything. Stability is one of the things that keep people alive. But it’s time to look at your money, while it’s yours, and figure out how much safety you can buy for people with it. Think shoring up safety nets. Think moving people from where they’re under immediate threat to the states that will fight back—and housing them when they arrive. Think purchase and repair of durable goods that will provide the ongoing means of local survival. Think building first aid and other skills.

It’s time to inventory your durable goods, because goods are about to get less durable. Consumer protections are very high on the list of things to be eliminated. The things you have now are likely to be worth more than the things people will be able to easily get in the future. Think about what you have that will last you with a bit of extra care, and about what you have that other people will be able to use. Get hooked up with your (existing!) local mutual aid groups so you can offer your stuff and hear when things are needed.

Think, too, about what you have that you can use to help others. Vehicles with some cargo space, tools, sewing machines, craft stashes, pressure canners, cooking supplies—get them into good shape and figure out what they’ll need to stay that way if supply lines get disrupted. If they’re not needed now, being hooked into mutual aid groups will tell you when there’s an opportunity to be helpful.

Inventory your skills. Don’t neglect the ones that are trivial to you but may not be to someone else, like talking to people on the phone or standing in line or being assertive in the face of obstructive bureaucracy. Think too about the ones technology has made less relevant, like researching in physical libraries or making zines.

Consider whether there are ways to make your skills more durable or transferable. Do you need a refresher course? Do you need physical manuals or reference books in case your internet is disrupted? Do you have local copies of your patterns and know how to alter them? Are your knives sharpened and your recipes written down? Do you know how to make substitutions in your materials safely and usefully?

Are you connected to an organization that can distribute the food you grow, the quilts you make, etc.? Do local tool libraries and/or maker spaces have your contact information when someone comes in who needs more than they can do themselves? Again, find that local mutual aid group that will let you know when there are needs.

Our individualistic consumer society has trained us to think of our stuff as trash in the making and our skills as hobbies to fill up the tiny bit of free time we have. Inventorying these things now will help us shake off that thinking and be ready when we’re needed—or more helpful now. Also, sitting down and making these inventories is good for shaking off those feelings of helplessness many of us have right now.

Photo by Dan Dimmock on Unsplash

Preparing for Upheaval

Making Mastodon Home

Stephanie Zvan1 Comment

Fediverse logo
I posted a thread on Twitter in early November about what I did to make myself comfortable there. I hadn’t started and really moved into a social media account since sometime around 2010, so there was some learning involved. I’ve since locked my Twitter account and set the content to delete over time, but a friend was looking for the content. So I’m moving it here.

Picking a Server

The Orbit had a Mastodon server (instance) when I started, so I learned more about this after I wrote my thread. Servers running Mastodon are part of the Fediverse, each with their own admins, moderators, and rules. Some are very new and in the process of learning through trial and error. Some will tolerate anything. Some work very hard to build communities and make safe spaces. Some customize the basic software.

It may take some time to know what you want from an instance, so understand you may change servers. That’s not unexpected. There are functions built into Mastodon to make that easier. The following are among the servers and/or moderators I’ve been impressed by:

Each server has its own rules, listed on its About page (for example: https://mstdn.social/about). If you’re good with those generally, go ahead and sign up. You’re not committed to stay there if you find somewhere better for you, and you’ll be able to take your community with you if you move.

Building Your Home Feed

Your home feed on Mastodon is your standard social media timeline but the way it was before social media companies went in hard on algorithmic sorting and intrusions. These are the people you choose to follow. It’s an empty feed until you find your people, and the Twitter thread I wrote was on how I filled it.

  • As of this morning, my Mastodon feed feels like real social media. If you’re thinking about moving or are there but feeling a bit bereft, here’s what I did to get there.
  • In the settings, I enabled the advanced view, which is much like TweetDeck. I may or may not keep it as my home feed grows, but having that much information right now is good. I also set my notification preferences right away.
  • I turned on the federated timeline, which is a feed of all the people a server follows. It was useful to me because I’m on a small instance. Also great if you’re on an instance based in common interests. Maybe not if you’re on one of the huge instances.
  • I muted people in the federated timeline liberally. Turns out my instance includes someone who really likes shitposters. But I also found people I knew there, as well as people who ask questions about Mastodon I also want the answers to.
  • I found out about http://fedi.tips from that. There’s a great FAQ there. I’ve shared it with other people asking questions too, which makes the whole thing feel more social and friendly.
  • I advertised my Mastodon profile on my other social media accounts. People I like followed me, which means I didn’t have to search for them.
    I also search “Mastodon” occasionally on my other social media so I find my existing friends that way too.
    @[email protected] btw
  • When I joined Mastodon, I entered an existing culture. I kept my initial posts low key and friendly while I watched my feeds to see how other people use it. I learned how people commonly use content warnings and read a bunch of image descriptions.
  • I figured out my following strategies would be different than here. There are people I don’t follow here because they’re so broadly retweeted by friends. That’s not a thing on Mastodon, at least not yet. There are people I follow here who don’t fit the vibe I’m building there.
  • I watched my home and federated timelines for accounts on specialized instances. I went to the instances that looked relevant to me wandering.shop, http://botsin.space) and browsed the profiles there.
  • I did the same thing with the following/follower lists of friends I have lots of people in common with. I found a bunch of friends with currently inactive accounts. I followed them anyway so I’ll see them when/if they become active.
  • Today I have a bunch of content from friendly people! Yay! I’m chatting a bit so people don’t feel like they’re shouting into the void. Got enough of that on Twitter.
  • I’m currently working on getting some of the other accounts I post for set up over there and figuring out how to post across sites without ongoing extra work. Most documentation is a bit out of date, so it’s a process. I’ll share as I sort it out.
  • Additional notes: Following people on another server in the web interface can be kind of weird. Check the FAQ if you get frustrated.
  • I’m mostly using the browser. If you’re on the app and don’t like it, explore third-party apps. Most people seem to prefer them.

 

Making Mastodon Home

When a Pundit Is a Pundit (and a Scourge)

Stephanie Zvan

This was originally written on my Mastodon account. Current circumstances are very good for reminding me of the ephemeral nature of social media, so I’m copying it here.

I’m muting a bunch of pundits around here again, both because of the Twitter migration and because I had to start over with a new profile. That means I have to know what a pundit is. So.

It’s not just a highly opinionated person, or a person who’s opinionated on multiple topics. I like following opinionated people. I value following opinionated people who challenge the ways I interact with the world.

No, to me a pundit is defined by two things.

1. They treat news and persuasion as “content”. They’re filling space (columns, timelines) because that’s what they do rather than because they had something substantive (knowledge, perspective, solutions) to add. And their purpose usually stops at “engagement”. There’s nothing *wrong* with engagement, but it’s a perverse incentive on its own.

2. Because their content is meaningless except as content, they don’t engage with its effects. Were they wrong? Did they make life worse for other people? [shrug] You can’t win them all. Time to create more content.

I didn’t boost pundits on Twitter, but I also didn’t hide them and deny them access to my cortisol pump. That hasn’t helped me recover from activist burnout. So I’m muting them here. No more demands that I look *for the sake of looking*. No more free-floating opinions from people unfussed by being repeatedly wrong.

It won’t eliminate disturbing knowledge or SIWOTI, but it will mean they come from people I respect, who I know aren’t poking at my stress for mere fun or profit.

When a Pundit Is a Pundit (and a Scourge)

Toward a Taxonomy of Bad Moderation

Stephanie Zvan3 Comments

Like many people, I dusted off my Mastodon account when Musk signed the agreement to buy Twitter. When the deal got close to completion, I asked Jason to make me an admin on our tiny the-orbit.net server and set about preparing for more traffic.

I started by reviewing the #fediblock hashtag—where the Fediverse communicates about bad actors and safety—and our own list of silenced and blocked servers. I began there because, well, we all have plenty of experience being harassed around here. I didn’t have the power to keep harassers off the technology, but I did have the tools to take care of the most obvious threats.

I was working on a way to systematize our reasons for moderating at the server level when our own server ended not in fire but in ice in an upgrade. Given Jason was already concerned about having enough time for it, I suggested he let it go. He told our handful of sporadic users it was time to find a new instance.

I’ve still been thinking about the system, though, partly because I do that and partly because I’m watching the discussions about moderation on Mastodon closely. Technocrats are talking to social engineers and activists are talking to people targeted for harassment are talking to scholars are talking to people who’ve never had to think about moderation until today.

It’s messy and made messier by:

  • A lack of common purpose in using social media. This is true for any service, but it’s particularly obvious in the Fediverse, where individual servers are often organized around these purposes.
  • A wave of new servers with new administrators and new moderators, many of whom are not aware of the long arguments about moderation and whose resource materials are mostly technical.
  • Rapid growth reflected in technological chaos that makes following current events in the Fediverse more difficult.
  • Disorganized social networks that haven’t resettled after service and server moves, such that many of us have been talking into the ether instead of discussing it among people with experience in the topic.
  • Targeted harassment of admins and moderators who openly share their block lists and reasons for blocking.
  • A history of abuse of moderation tools in the Fediverse.

Much of the current discussion is about how to consolidate knowledge about servers with bad or nonexistent moderation, so each individual moderator doesn’t have to learn separately and may be able to automate some decisions. I’ve also seen alarm at the idea, coming from people who see moderation decisions they don’t understand or wouldn’t choose.

I believe that grouping the types of bad moderation likely to be encountered by its consequences and the actions needed to mitigate it may help in making such moderation feasible. This list is roughly in order of priority, with the most pressing issues first.

Illegal Content

There are servers that host content that may get you arrested if it ends up on your server. Unless you’re making a stand by practicing civil disobedience, you don’t have much choice on these. If you are taking that stand, you should expect the vast majority of the Fediverse to lock you out.

Eliminationist

These are servers that organize around the people they think shouldn’t exist or shouldn’t have rights. These are the neo-Nazis, the ultranationalists, the religious nationalists, the people trying to deny health care and public bathrooms to trans people, the people who call for violence against abortion providers, other stochastic terrorists, and other outright terrorists.

There is no reason for any decent server to give eliminationists access to your users. They will only use it to recruit and to attack. That’s what they organized to do. Suspend them.

Freeze Peach

These are servers that tell you up front they are organized around “free speech” or that anything goes on the server as long as it isn’t illegal or porn. There may even be some administrators on these servers who believe that, though I’ve seen several with neo-Nazi administrators. In practice, however, even if these servers didn’t set out to be eliminationist or harassing instances, these servers are where bad actors collect when they get kicked off well-moderated servers.

Pleroma is an alternative to Mastodon for running instances in the Fediverse. The development history of Pleroma is such that the software is used by numerous eliminationist and harassing instances. The association is frequent enough that “Pleroma instance” has become a shorthand for a freeze peach instance.

If you see a very new server that looks decent but has “free speech” rules, you might want to take the time to suggest they get a real code of conduct if you’re feeling generous. Otherwise, suspend them. The people who are happy in the cesspits these instances become are going to cause you problems, and freeze peach mods aren’t going to help.

Spam

Not all promotion is spam. “Spam”, here, specifically means more intrusive types of communication, such as tagging people to get their attention, or misusing hashtags or groups for promotion. As with other types of bad behavior, once a server is known not to moderate spam coming from its users, it will probably be swamped with users who spam.

NSFW

The internet is for porn and other sex work, but you usually have to go looking for it, because the internet is also for business and children. Your instance may not allow children, but if it’s organized around business interests or activism, you’ll want to give some real thought to your policies around NSFW materials. These materials have a long history of being used in sexual harassment to create and signify hostile environments. On the other hand, many people experience censorship because some aspect of their identity is sexualized and declared off limits.

There are lots of tools to help you limit how your users interact with NSFW materials on other servers and how that affects other users’ timelines. The only broad guidelines are to be thoughtful about your choices and transparent with your users so they can find an instance that meets their needs.

Disinformation

These are collections of users who post antivax, crypto, climate, political or other types of misinformation frequently enough that the server itself becomes a significant source of bad information, either as policy or through being unwilling to moderate it. How you handle one of these servers will likely depend on the type of disinformation. Individual servers may choose to keep, for example, flat Earthers around as entertainment but may block political disinformation as a threat to democracy.

Good in Theory, Bad in Practice

Having policies is easy. Enforcing them is often a miserable slog. You see things you can’t unsee. Bad actors test your boundaries regularly. You hear from lovely, charming people mostly when they’re upset. Written rules collide with unwritten rules. Competing access needs are real. Moderators aren’t going to get everything right.

That said, there comes a point where repeated mistakes suggest an underlying problem exists and is likely to lead to more mistakes. Right now, instances are starting up or growing without planning ahead for the moderation growth will require. Then they’re making major, high-profile mistakes. It becomes reasonable for other instances to decide they’re bad at moderating and are going to stay bad without major course corrections.

As a moderator, you can offer help, but you have to choose how much of another instance’s moderation you’re willing to take on and for how long. If they don’t, the work falls on you. Defederation and the threat of defederation are your tools for doing that.

Critical-Issue Fail

As mentioned previously, competing access needs are real. They also don’t only apply in a disability framework or even among people with different goals. For example, activists who do policy work need a degree of access to government entities, while activists who do community care work on the same topics may need to keep themselves and those they serve far from the eye of those same entities because current policy hurts them.

Both groups may do important work benefiting the same group of people, but they’re unlikely to want the same federation policies. Neither of them is wrong to federate or defederate based on their needs, and all of them should be able to talk about their decisions and the behavior on a server that led to it.

That’s as far as I’ve gotten in trying to group moderation issues that may lead one server to defederate from another. What’s missing? What’s redundant? Is the framework useful?

Toward a Taxonomy of Bad Moderation

Understanding Stock Markets

Stephanie Zvan1 Comment

This post is not going to help you get rich off the stock market. If that’s what you’re looking for, the best advice I have for you is to understand your desire makes you a mark and study up on scams of various sorts. That’s fun to do anyway, and I don’t understand why cons aren’t a bigger part of true-crime publishing, and you’ve probably moved on already because you think I just insulted you.

Photo of a graph in a newspaper. Graph shows a year of Dow Jones Industrial Index values.
Photo by Markus Spiske

This post exists because most financial education in the U.S. is a sales pitch, either directly or for a particular school of economics. I came at the stock market as a pension analyst whose job it was to understand the assumptions inherent in funding pensions. Also as someone who finds the history of fraud fascinating, but you may have picked that up. I did this work in the post-Enron regulatory environment in the U.S. and through the collapse of housing bubble plus a few years. This is where I ended up on funding retirement.

This post exists to give you a basic framework for understanding investing events and scandals. Consider it a skeptical but not cynical high-level guide to (mostly U.S.) stock markets. Continue reading “Understanding Stock Markets” →

Understanding Stock Markets

When 2 + 2 = 5 and Other Ways to Be Wrong with Heuristics

Stephanie Zvan13 Comments

I recently finished my first set of classes toward a BS in data analytics. It’s not very useful advice now, I hope, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend attempting this in the academic quarter containing the most critical election of your lifetime. That notwithstanding, this means I’ve spent the past several weeks immersed in discussions of deriving meaning from numbers.

As I was gearing up to start my term, a “debate” broke out on Twitter. I put the term in scare quotes, because what actually happened is that one group of offered reasoning and explanations and another group pointed to the first and had vapors about the end of Western civilization. The question at hand? “Does 2 + 2 = 4?” The answer some people found objectionable? “Sometimes. Not always.”

Surrounded as I’ve been this term with issues of data quality, making assumptions explicit, the limits of the most common statistical tests, and error terms, this “debate” has never been far from my mind. I saw an echo of it again today, and lo and behold, I finally have some time to write about it.

The boys who cry “Postmodernism!” without much understanding of the history of philosophy are all but background noise these days, so I mostly noted their existence once again and moved on. Funnily enough, though, this actually is a postmodernism question. This is all about deconstructing the meaning of the equation. Are we talking about some ideal of “2” and “4”, or are we communicating about something else, where “2” and “4” are abstractions of reality that may be more or less reflective of that reality?

Also, does anyone else laugh when someone claims that questioning the perfect, inherent two-ness of “2” will be the end of civilization as we know it? Continue reading “When 2 + 2 = 5 and Other Ways to Be Wrong with Heuristics” →

When 2 + 2 = 5 and Other Ways to Be Wrong with Heuristics

Reasons to Not Despair

Stephanie Zvan1 Comment

This is what the title says, friends. If you’re not feeling tempted toward despair by the close election results, this may not be what you need to read today. If, however, you’re disheartened by the vote being this close, this is for you.

I’m not here to tell you the United States isn’t racist, sexist, classist, homo- and transphobic. It is. Many of these are founding principles of the U.S., written into our constitution. And it’s good that we’ve spent much of the last four years refusing to let the well-meaning people around us deny that fact. It’s good that more of us are refusing to allow people to duck the social and political consequences of that. It’s good that we’re tearing the wallpaper off these cracks, because we can’t fix them until we do.

It’s less good that we’ve allowed the outcome of this election to stand for America’s willingness to address these problems. This particular election is critical because it determines whether voters still have any power to address them. It isn’t the last word on our thoughts or feelings. There’s far more going on here.

This election reflects:

  • The Electoral College
  • Voter registration purges
  • Voter registration restrictions
  • Disenfranchisement through the criminal justice system
  • Insufficient resources dedicated to voting
  • Changing election rules due to the pandemic
  • Changing election rules due to court challenges, some of them last-minute
  • Real and threatened violence aimed at voter suppression
  • Disinformation campaigns aimed at voter suppression
  • A well-funded disinformation industry, including a top news channel
  • Foreign interference
  • A news media unprepared to cope with lies on our current presidential scale
  • A news media unaccustomed to naming bigotry
  • A news media scared of being called liberal
  • A shrinking, increasingly centralized news media
  • Political identities at odds with voters’ support for policy
  • Panic and exhaustion
  • Poor public political education
  • A long cultural trend saying nihilism and cynicism = cool

I’m missing things. I’m tired. But the point is that this is a huge system with a lot of moving parts that chews up public opinion to eventually spit out a result having more or less to do with that opinion. The result is not public opinion itself.

Many of the parts of that system are racist, sexist, classist, homo- and transphobic because they were set up to be. We know this. We talk about this. We don’t so much acknowledge that this means they’re going to produce results more bigoted than we are as a group of individuals. They’re ours, and we bear responsibility for them, but they are not us.

We’ve made some progress on them over the last four years. We’ve also lost ground on some of them, like the courts. We have so much work to do. This election isn’t about whether we’ve done that work. This election is about whether we’ve done enough to be able to continue. That’s the part to focus on today.

Reasons to Not Despair