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.