This month, the ace journal club covered a qualitative study of autistic sexuality, as it is discussed on autistic forums.  I also wrote an article about why aces often want ace characters to be explicitly labeled as ace.

Effective Altruism: Rationalist Epistemics and the Sequences | Thing of Things – Ozy has a series of essays providing an insider account of EA values.  The thing I find most interesting, is the historical narrative about the Sequences (i.e., the series of essays by Yudkowsky central to capital-R Rationalism).  By Ozy’s account they were primarily based on weird tricks from psychological research.  This became a problem when psychology was so strongly impacted by the replication crisis.  Ozy claims the replication crisis caused a shift towards more community-based epistemological practices.

I was thinking about this when I was writing about fallacy-spotting.  Parts of the Sequences basically constitute a tradition of critical thinking which is parallel to the fallacies.  But where fallacies are grounded in philosophy (?), the Sequences were grounded in scientific research.  Which… makes sense, and is possibly more defensible as a practice.  On the other hand, psychological research is frequently bad, so I guess it was the wrong horse to bet on.

J.K. Rowling (very predictably) Hates Asexual People | The Ace Couple (podcast, 1:13 hours, transcript available) – I follow news on asexuality, and recently the big thing is J.K. Rowling tweeted something anti-ace.  The news articles are all shocked (example, example) that JK also hates adorable harmless aces.  However, veteran activists are not the least bit surprised.  The venn diagram of TERFs and anti-ace folks is basically a circle.  I wouldn’t say aces get it nearly as bad as trans folks do, but it’s coming from the same people, it circulates in the same groups.

I’m not sure what to make of all the news articles framing aces as harmless.  As the podcast points out, trans people are also harmless.  But also, I was thinking, aces need to up our game.  We need to punch more fascists, destroy more marriage, annihilate more man.

While Tables Burn: On the (Non) Existence of Trans People and the Failure of Philosophy | Talia Mae Bettcher – Remember when I was talking about trans philosophy?  You want more?  Sorry to say, this is way more depressing.  It talks about how scary things are for trans people now, how anti-trans policies are informed by bad philosophy, and the failings within the philosophy community.  I also recommend the Bettcher’s 2018 essay, “When Tables Speak“.

The Ethics of Fake Guitar | Adam Neely (video, 52 min) – I think this video has some very insightful things to say about AI art, despite not once mentioning AI nor visual art.  It’s about how people “cheat” in guitar performance videos by manipulating their audio.  Adam discusses how this violates certain musical values, but those values are genre-dependent.  He compares to Jazz and Hip Hop, which have contrasting ideas of what is and isn’t permissible.

What does that have to do with AI art?  AI art is also a form of “cheating” that violates certain artistic values.  But those values are genre dependent.  The values in origami are very different from the values in say, furry art.  A lot of my problem with anti-AI-art is, I think people are being extremely imperialistic about a specific set of artistic values, while being ignorant of other genres.  Anyway, the moral of the story is that we will still be arguing about it in a hundred years.

You Are Into Moustrap YouTube | Big Joel (video, 6 min) – A short story about fascination and alienation.  I mean, that’s hardly a story, it’s just real life.  These days I’ve been watching a 42 hour review of The Beverly Hillbillies; he’s been watching LPs of Mario Maker.

The Rise and Fall of Peer Review | Experimental History (via) – The article argues that peer review is a failed experiment, being a huge waste of time and failing to improve scientific research.  Yeah, I’m going to disagree.  In my experience, yes, peer review takes a lot of effort, and does not feel very productive.  But if reviewing research before publication is a waste of time, what makes it so much more worthwhile to read the research after publication?  Most of the labor of peer review is labor that we already have to do anyway for research to be useful.

My complaint about the modern organization of science, is that it feels very underinvested in organization or clarity.  It’s based around building a vast incomprehensible library of information, much of it unreliable, under-curated, and poorly communicated.  Publishing is considered the measure of your work, and peer review is a flimsy barrier because nobody wants to deprive people of credit for their labor.

I mean, that’s a long-term problem.  The short-term problem with science is that everything is on fire.