My PC is out of commission right now, so no origami this month.  Still got a handful of links.

Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults | Ozy Brennan – When we talk about Rationalist cults, no we’re not describing Rationalism itself as a cult, we’re talking about specific groups of people with isolationist and dysfunctional social dynamics.  Such as the Zizians, a trans vegan cult that recently murdered a landlord.  Ozy interviews former members to get a sense of what they were like and where they went wrong.

Many of the cults seem to have had a practice of exhausting multi-hour sessions, where they would read far too deeply into minor domestic behaviors.  That… really reminds me of Barefoot Bum’s description of the Kerista Commune (the cult known for coining “polyfidelity”).  It was not a Rationalist group at all, but had institutionalized a very similar practice.

Videogame politics for a burning world | Unwinnable – An interview with Ajay Singh Chaudhary, who offers an interesting perspective on climate change.  He frames climate change not as a future apocalypse, but rather as a thing that is happening right now–“all the things you hate about the present getting worse and then being stuck that way”.  Since this is a video game periodical, the latter half of the interview turns towards video games, and their role in climate change.  We have to ask, is the extravagance of large commercial video games necessary?

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This month, the Ace Journal Club discussed birth order effects–often cited as evidence of the biological origins of sexual orientation.  I came away thinking the evidence is shakier than I realized.

The Fashion of Sci-Fi Futures | verilybitchie (video, 31 min) – Why does sci-fi use feminine men to signify decadence in the ruling class?  Well, sexism, obviously.  But the video also traces historical and literary precedent, to help us understand the intersection of sexism and fashion.

“Portfolios of the Poor” (book review) | Tell me why the world is weird – How do the global poor live on $2 a day?  It’s perhaps misleading to say they earn $2 a day, because their income tends to be volatile.  There’s a lot of discussion of how they borrow, lend, and save money to smooth out the volatility.

I was thinking about this in relation to my post about loans, and how loans function as a shitty welfare system.  The value of lending is smoothing volatility, and that’s something that poor people need more than anyone else.  But lending and other financial tools have an overhead cost–a cost that falls, unfairly, on the poor.  And when we’re talking about $2 a day, it’s hard to imagine anything resembling the US financial system operating on those margins.

Kanye West and The Daily Wire | Big Joel (video, 43 min) – As an example of how ultra-wealthy people become unmoored from reality, Kanye West openly praises Hitler in song.  In comes Ben Shapiro to say “Hitler is bad actually”, a banal observation turned desperate plea.  Joel explores a fracture in the right wing between anti-semitism and zionism.

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This month, I wrote an article about the problems with the Asexuality Identification Scale.

Also, a funny thing happened.  These link roundups often include some links to games criticism articles, which I get from Critical Distance.  But the RSS feed had been broken for a few months, and I only just caught up on the backlog.  So I guess several of these articles will be about video games.

As in previous months, I do not have any links relating to the current political trash fire, because I guess I do not feel inspired to comment on those stories.  It’s a trash fire, that’s my comment.

Blunt-Force Ethnic Credibility | Som-Mai Nguyen (via) – This article thoughtfully discusses the low standards of publishers when they strive to represent the perspectives of ethnic minorities.  For example, Penguin contracted with a prominent Vietnamese American writer to translate classic Vietnamese literature, even though he had no translation expertise, and was relying on a translation dictionary.  The author also criticizes the trope of diaspora writers highlighting superficial aspects of their ancestral language as if they were really deep.  In English, this would be analogous to marveling at the mystical connection between “big”, “beg”, “bog”, “bag”, and “bug”.

I could never muster such unwarranted confidence in speaking about my ancestral culture.  Being Chinese does not inherently give me special insight into my ancestral Chinese culture!  This mystical linguistic analysis of Asian languages strikes me as exoticizing, and overly idealizing.  I’ve written a bit about my family history, and it’s impossible for me to idealize it.  I mean, my great grandfather was a tobacco factory owner.

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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.

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Conspiracy | Contrapoints (video, 2:40 hours) – Back in 2016, Contrapoints got a reputation for “deradicalizing” people who fell down the alt-right pipeline.  But for people who adopt conspiratorial modes of thinking, there’s virtually no hope.  And conspiracism is frightfully common even in “ordinary” times, when there isn’t an establishment political party outright promoting it.

My instinctive reaction to conspiracism is to identify where people on “my” side seem to slide into it.  Which is not necessarily helpful, but at least I feel like I have more power over it.

For example, I think about leftists who say that Trump’s economic policies are so absurdly bad that he must know they are bad, and he’s trying to crash the economy on purpose.  Okay, but is that what the typical Trump fan believes?  Because Trump is basically his own biggest fan.  If the typical Fox-viewing person can believe absurd things about tariffs, Trump can very well do so too.  Oh, of course it’s plausible that Trump is not high on his own supply of lies, that’s hardly wild conjecture.  It’s fine if people believe that, it ultimately doesn’t matter whether Trump is nefariously incompetent or incompetently nefarious.  But I’d ask, what attracts some people to the more conspiratorial hypothesis.

Indiana Jones and the Objective Existence of God | Jacob Geller (video, 28 min) – I’ve never actually seen these movies (and tbh they always looked like trash, sorry nerds).  But Jacob Geller talks about how the Christian God (as well as Shiva) obviously exist within the Indiana Jones universe.  But Indiana Jones still puts on airs of being a rational skeptic.  I guess Indiana Jones’ rationality is just an aesthetic attribute that the story uses to place him into a certain character archetype.

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Revisiting Radway’s Reading the Romance: A Critical Ethnography of Romance Fans | Osteophage – Coyote discusses a 1980s book that studied women who read romance novels.  The author Janice Radway is sympathetic to the women of her study, seeing them as mistreated housewives trying to find an escape.  And yet, the romance books contain a lot of sexism themselves, and she is disappointed to find that the women tend to uncritically accept that sexism.  Coyote positions Radway’s book in relation to more recent debates about fandom.

Trans People are Under Attack and We Must Help Them | Rebecca Watson (video and transcript, 9 min) – Trans and nonbinary people are a tiny minority (estimated at 1.6% in the video), so how much does it matter that they’re under attack?  Well, that’s a lot of people if you think about it.  For instance, it’s far larger than the number of federal employees fired or laid off, and it’s larger than the total number of federal employees period.  Trump has signed 80-some executive orders, and if each one chips away at the rights of as many people, that affects all of us.  (And the video doesn’t even discuss the ways that cutting trans rights directly impacts cis women, e.g. by requiring them to undergo invasive examinations for sports.)

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