Agnostic atheism and other hairsplitting terms

Atheism is associated with a handful of hairsplitting terms: agnosticism, agnostic atheism, ignosticism, apatheism, and so on. These terms describe some technicalities about one’s relationship to belief. For instance, “ignostic” refers to the viewpoint that god is too meaningless and ill-defined to believe one way or another. “Apatheist” describes someone who doesn’t care about belief in god.

“Hairsplitting” is a derogatory way to describe it, but I mean it fondly. I love hairsplitting. I’m involved in asexual communities, it comes with the territory. Asexuality is associated with a far greater number of hairsplitting terms, like graysexuality, demisexuality, all the romantic orientation terms (heteroromantic, homoromantic, biromantic, panromantic, aromantic).

And those are just the common ones! Asexuality has also been host to a tradition where people just coin terms left and right. This is a tradition I will vociferously defend, but do not personally partake. In terms of my personal identity, I follow a more reserved practice of adopting just a few common terms. If asked, I will tell you that I am gay gray-A, with the additional clarification that I do *not* describe myself as homoromantic except in specific contexts. See? I’m reserved.

Do you get what I’m saying? Within asexuality, there is an overton window that ranges from hairsplitting to very very hairsplitting. Within atheism, there is an overton window that ranges from hairsplitting to not very hairsplitting at all.

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Origami: Sferica

Sferica

Sferica, designed by Riccardo Colletto

I’m out travelling, but I brought some origami paper to fold.  I got this model from the 5th Geometric Origami Convention, and folded it on the train.  It’s essentially a variant of the herringbone tessellation, but slightly shifted so that it makes a shape like a sea urchin.

Review: I Want to Be a Wall

I write a bunch of book reviews, and review-ish writings on my Pillowfort.  Maybe I should port some of these over?  I picked out a review I wrote in 2024, and applied light editing.  If readers engage with it, then I might do it more often.

 

I Want to Be a Wall, by Honami Shirono

Yuriko is an aro ace fujoshi.*  Gakurouta is a gay man in love with his straight childhood best friend.  They just got married.  Bam! Premise established in 2 pages.  What follows is a dramedy where they deal with Japanese-style amatonormativity.  They think they’re fake-married because they’re not in love with each other.  But the manga wishes to show that the marriage is real despite their own belief otherwise.  They really are close partners who love and support each other, bringing each other happiness–just not in the specific way demanded by society.

*”Fujoshi” is the Japanese term for fans of boys love (BL) manga, especially female fans.

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Annoyances with AI Wars

I’ve been spending some time on Reddit, mostly following stuff about puzzle video games and game dev. I also see stuff from a couple subreddits that argue about AI art, namely r/aiwars and r/defendingaiart. I have found these subreddits just barely tolerable that I haven’t blocked them (yet). But they contain a lot of viewpoints that annoy me, so I’m going to talk about them.

Sorry, I’m not going to cite examples, because the purpose isn’t to litigate these particular subreddits. I know the typical reader doesn’t really care about them, and indeed should not care about them. This is just my way to discuss a scattering of AI-related issues that I think people commonly get wrong.

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Red vs blue button

The internet has been talking about this red vs blue button problem. Since I’ve been talking about game theory lately, why not talk about this one too? You know, as a treat?

Here’s the problem. Everyone in the world is presented with a choice between a red button and a blue button. If the majority of people press the blue button, then everyone lives. If the majority of people press the red button, then only people who pressed red live, while all the people who pressed the blue button die. Which do you press?

As always, I find it funny that these questions posit life or death stakes. What if instead of dying, people were just mildly inconvenienced? Like, if they were forced to do nothing for five minutes, would that change how we approach the problem? I guess if it were framed that way, then it would be obvious that it’s not worth arguing about for more than five minutes. But anyways…

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Link Roundup: May 2026

Sawatsky: Sexual pain in Christian Women | The Asexual Agenda – Okay, so this is for my journal club, and I wrote up the discussion notes.  But I have a few things more to say here.  The paper is exploring possible causes for the high prevalence of sexual pain among Christian women (primarily Evangelicals).  But the authors of the paper are evangelicals, and they frame it like religious belief is generally great for sexual outcomes.  To them, sexual pain is this one mysterious exception where religious women are doing worse.  Color me skeptical.

I recalled that a long time ago, there was a study that circulated among atheist blogs, seemingly claiming the opposite, that people who leave religion have better sex lives.  The study was called “Sex and Secularism” by Darrel Ray in 2011, and it was based on a survey that recruited a lot of participants through Pharyngula.  You can find news articles talking about it, but the article itself is totally gone. I’m skeptical of that study too, and the ephemeral circumstances of its publication certainly don’t help.

The thing is, “better sex life” is a normative judgment, and perhaps it’s not very surprising that any given value system results in better sex lives, as measured by researchers who share that value system.  Obviously my values would overlap more with Darrel Ray’s than with the evangelical authors.  But I’m also ace, which tends to come with its own sexual values.  Like whenever “better sexual outcomes” means higher frequency of sex, I’m just going to roll my eyes.  But sexual pain, that’s uncontroversially a bad thing, even when ace people have it.

Why was I invited to Beast Studios | Folding Ideas (video, 1:30 hours) – MrBeast is the most subscribed youtube channel of all time, valued at $5 billion dollars.  But they’re losing money, viewers, and their film production is at once lavishly expensive, yet made of paperclips and glue.  Dan makes few attacks on Mr. Beast’s character, yet exposes the organizational rot at the heart of his media empire.  They prioritize viewing metrics above all else, and seem uninterested in hiring any real expertise.

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The Goomba Fallacy

The goomba fallacy is when some people say A, and some people say B. And then you say, isn’t it ridiculous that people believe A and B at the same time? But it isn’t necessarily true that anyone believes both at the same time.

Never heard of the goomba fallacy? That’s because it’s new. It was coined in 2024. It’s widely circulated in certain parts of the internet, and if you’re not in those parts of the internet then good for you, you’re not missing much.

goomba fallacy original image

The goomba fallacy doesn’t have anything to do with goombas. It’s just that the meme image that popularized the fallacy contains goombas. Source

My instinct when learning about a fallacy has always been to pick it apart. What exactly makes the fallacy wrong? Are there contexts where the fallacy isn’t wrong? What is the goal when people commit the fallacy, or point out the fallacy? So here is my overanalysis of the goomba fallacy.

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