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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This month, I wrote a history of color symbology in ace and aro flags.

Atheist group faces backlash after publishing, then removing, anti-trans article | Friendly Atheist (via) – If you’re interested to know how atheist organizations deal with trans issues, Hemant provides a pretty good summary, through the lens of one recent incident.  Some orgs are better than others, but it’s frustrating how even trusted orgs can’t seem to maintain a consistent trans-positive stance.  Thankfully there were enough trans-positive voices to pressure FFRF to retract.  But I think atheist orgs have likely suffered from evaporation, with many trans-positive folks simply opting to leave (like me!).

Matthew S. Burns on AI, Empathy, and the Making of Eliza | Circuits & Synapses – As people become broadly familiar with AI chatbots, most old fiction about AI has not aged very well.  After all, the fiction was never about AI, it was about exploring humanity.  Eliza is a visual novel about using AI for talk therapy, and I think is one of the few works of fiction that has aged very well, because it was grounded in the realities (and pitfalls) of tech.  This is an interview with the author, looking back at Eliza.

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This month, the ace journal club discussed genital plethysmography, and then we took seriously the idea of a sex therapy as a BDSM scene.

The Really Dark Truth About Bots | Benn Jordan (video, 29 min) – How much activity on X is from bots?  Benn Jordan goes through the research, explains how bots work, and concludes that it’s a whopping 1/3.  Incredible.  Kill it with fire.

I often think about the Rationalist/EA crowd, and how for many years they have been concerned about AI causing a human extinction event.  I don’t think the concern was entirely misplaced, but they seemed most concerned with the “AI alignment problem”, i.e. making sure AI does what we actually want instead of deciding to kill all humans.  However, I’m far more concerned about the billionaire alignment problem, i.e. making sure billionaires do what we actually want instead of deciding to kill all humans (now with AI assistance).  Or for that matter, the foreign dictator alignment problem.  All the AI safeguards in the world won’t help if powerful people simply don’t want them.

A comprehensive pro-choice ethic | Tell Me Why the World is Weird – Some pro-lifers advocate a “comprehensive pro-life ethic” where they advocate for the health of people already born.  You can think whatever you like about that, but Perfect Number turns it around and imagines what it would mean to have a comprehensive pro-choice ethic.  It would be about empowering people to make free and informed decisions on medical treatment and reproductive health.

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This link roundup does not include any discussion of the US elections, and I do not have plans to write about it in the immediate future.  My thought about it is: pace yourself!  We’re on a slow motion train wreck, don’t burn yourself out on the first week.

This month, I reviewed I Want to be a Wall–that’s the silly graphic novel I referred to earlier.

Cohost September 2024 Financial Debate Retrospective: Making Sense of The End | osteophage – The ad-free social media platform Cohost recently financially collapsed.  Why?  Coyote explains why many of the popular theories are incorrect.  Cohost was able to generate healthy revenue for its size, but its dev team had unrealistic expectations, trying to support four full time tech salaries.  Also the devs were trying to make a competitor to Patreon, but this is a doomed venture because it requires a great deal of regulatory compliance overhead that the devs weren’t even aware of.

Yeah, that just sounds like ordinary tech startup incompetence.  There’s nothing fundamentally impossible about what they were trying to do!  Other ad-free social networks exist.

The Visualizer’s Fallacy | Christian Scholz – After writing my post about Wittgenstein, I found someone who wrote a dissertation on Wittgenstein and aphantasia.  He observes that aphantasics can in fact think without visualizing, and they even perform well on shape rotation tests.  So does that mean visualization is unnecessary for mental rotation?

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