I’m a long-time lurker. I prefer to sit back and skim through comment sections, passively absorbing, and over the years I’ve seen a fair number. After a while, you start to get a feel for their dynamics. Typically, a blog post plays out something like this:
- Blog author posts something.
- Long-time commenters pop by with their two cents.
- Their chatter starts to wander off topic.
- Someone pops by with a strong opinion that’s vaguely off-topic.
- This kicks up an argument, which gets ugly and spirals away from what the original post discussed.
There are exceptions, of course; endless threads have no topic to wander off of, and if the thread is obscure and the topic well-defined the comments can stay topical indefinitely. The comment community plays a large role in this, too. A small band of thoughtful regulars are a blogger’s dream, while a large number of over-opinionated randos can (and often do) ruin any thread. If acrimony starts to trump argument, even a small community can turn dysfunctional.
It doesn’t help that our tools are few, blunt and prone to breaking. Voting systems can be gamed, while banning users or keywords is an all-or-nothing affair that barely works. Allowing comments for a limited window sounds great, but it doesn’t allow the regulars to build up much of a conversation. Banning all comments kills off the local community.
Aaaaand that’s about the extent of it. Maybe someday I’ll create a browser plugin that provides a personal ranking system, which automatically mutes or even hides users based on how you’ve rated their prior comments, but that’s low in my queue.
How am I going to encourage that small, thoughtful community to form? Here’s my current plan:
- Regular blog posts don’t allow comments, unless justified by the contents. This prevents comment threads from spiraling away.
- The “Community” post is an endless thread. Only one of them is active at a time.
- To provide a little structure, links to the regular blog posts will get dropped into the Community post as they go public. These can be ignored.
- The Community post will be linked somewhere along the side menu, but it won’t otherwise be advertised. This should keep the randos to a minimum, but without throwing out regulars too.
- The top of the Community post will outline the moderation rules in play. Those rules stay consistent over the lifetime of the Community post. If I want a significant change, the current Community post is locked and a new one is created. The new will link to the old, and vice-versa.
The first Community post is the one you’re reading right now.
The initial mod rules are fairly ill-defined and flexible, to keep the rules lawyers at bay. My guiding principle is to maximize information; it takes time and energy to read a comment, so you should try to convey as much as possible, as clearly as possible, in the least space. Critiques beat opinions, evidence wins over assertion. Strict enforcement of that doesn’t work with endless threads, but it’s still the ideal you should keep in the back of your mind.
The corollary is another matter, though: quit it with the oppressive language. If you lack the creativity to think up an alternative to “crazy,” you shouldn’t be posting here. Violence in any form is a no-no, and both stalking and harassment are low-grade forms of violence.
Speaking of which, I’d like to swipe an idea from football. They have a carding system to handle misconduct, which I think works in this context too. If you’re handed a yellow card, that’s a warning for unsportsmanlike conduct. A red card gets you banned from this thread, though not the entire blog. A black card is a permanent ban.
Got it? Then game on!
Interesting. I love comments, on everything. If I didn’t have that, I wouldn’t bother, because it would seem pointless to me. It’s a little difficult for me to squish my head around to another view. I just have one rule, don’t be an asshole. Works fairly well for me, I hope yours works great for you.
Hey, it finally let me log in! Been trying to say ‘hi’ to all the new bloggers for a while now. Welcome to that end of things!
Welcome!
I’m fascinated by your choices in how you are structuring the social space.
Hey! You splitter, did Marian let you run off and join the FTBullies 😉
Caine @1:
Time will tell. This is a bit of an experiment, so failure should be considered the default.
besomyka @2:
Thanks! Hopefully we’ll see a lot more comments out of you.
Brony @3:
I think it strikes a good balance between the “no comments” and “ALL THE COMMENTS!!” philosophies. I can’t think of an easy way to game it, either, I reckon it’s more likely this thread withers away on the vine.
oolon @4:
I asked nicely and everything! 😀 It was inevitable I’d end up over here, anyway, given my angry shouty tendencies.
I personally thought it was kind of inevitable 😛
I like that system and idea. I have just the one suggestion to make and that’s that permanent bans could perhaps be shortened to say a year or three instead in case people change their views over time as I have done? Okay, that may be rare – but it can happen.
From the previous Sex, Donald Trump, and Videotape thread just read :
Not an expert either but could Trump be arrested now and charged with a felony such as rape* and, if so, could / would that prevent him from becoming POTUS? (I know, problem is that’d put Pence in charge.)
I really wish the last US election could simply be declared null and void on the basis of excessive foreign (specifically Russian) interference / manipulation although I very much doubt that will happen. This Aussie** really hopes that the United States political system could have some major reforms including preferential voting, elimination of voter suppression tactics and the abolition of the electoral college which, I gather***, gives Wyoming voters over three times the power of Californian among other voters.
* Such as one of these cases? http://fusion.net/story/328522/donald-trump-accused-rape-sexual-assault/
** Australia’s future – like the rest of the globe’s – is so strongly influenced by the United States of America and what it does and what examples it sets. When the POTUS metaphorically says “Jump!” Aussie PMs tend to say “how high!” sometimes even before the word is out the POTUS’s lips. I think Trump’s election is a global tragedy that will gravely harm & threaten everyone on this pale blue dot. So, yes, not my nation or election but one that so heavily matters still for me.
*** See : http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-petrocelli/its-time-to-end-the-electoral-college_b_12891764.html among other places.
Brian Pansky @6:
Snerk, I’m quite predictable, aren’t I?
Stevor:
I dunno, I’m of the opinion that posting comments is a privilege instead of a right. There are plenty of other blogs to comment on, so I’m not silencing anyone via a ban. The cost of losing the rare reformed voice is fairly small next to the benefit of losing those that carry on carrying on.
Having said that, this is very much an experiment. The odds are pretty good that if a banned person shapes up I’ll see it reflected in their comments elsewhere. If the case is strong enough, I might revoke the Black Card.
Now, I am a Canadian, which means I’m pretty knowledgeable on the American political process (and hum the lyrics to our anthem). I don’t know of a single thing that could prevent Trump from taking office. He’s been voted in by the electoral college, and once he takes the oath he picks up the powers of the presidency. Any trial would take months, or probably longer as Trump is likely to drag his heels. Toss him in jail, and it’s likely a Republican would sneak in and let him give the oath or Pence will use his temporary presidental powers to spring Trump.
Oh, and that sexual assault case was dropped when the accuser was flooded with threats. Nobody has accused Trump of a criminal offense, that I can find, so Trump won’t face anything worse than a writing a cheque.
We have a saying here: when the US sneezes, Canada catches a cold. We have just a fraction of the population, yet occupy more land. Economic shocks down there have big effects up here (though we fared well during the last major recession). Our army cannot defend against the US, and should Russia launch nukes they’ll probably hit Canada to take out the US’s primary oil supplier. Our heartthrob-in-chief is sending some positive signals, but he’s a centrist who’s been slow to deliver on his promises. We’re in roughly the same boat.
Substantial electoral reform can’t happen until 2020, thanks to the timing of the Census. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact needs 105 additional electoral votes, which means convincing at least one “red state” to flip sides, as no Republican has won the popular vote in something like 30 years.
Also, I fired off a quick post about a great probability puzzle I encountered. Anyone want to try solving it?
Nice new digs you have, HJ!
Bearing the 25th amendment in mind I think the only hypothetical possibility that could prevent Trump from taking office (besides untimely death) would be an implied disqualification by Article II, Section 4: hypothetically, had the President-elect been speedily impeached and convicted of treason or some other ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanours’ then subsequently taking the oath might have no legal effect if the person taking it is already an acknowledged, convicted traitor. However that was never likely to occur in US jurisprudence even if some of the numerous cases against Trump had reached the courts sooner last year, rather than being delayed or dropped. Trump will take office at noon this Saturday.
(Here in Australia we have one benefit of having written our constitution a little bit after the US’s (and Canada’s); section 44 specifies methods for disqualifying our parliamentarians which are currently in high usage – two of our most-recently elected senators are bankrupts which is a disqualification under sub-section (iii), while the foreign allegiance/citizenship or treason/crime disqualifications appear under (i) and (ii) respectively. It is hard to feel too smug about our constitution which is showing its age as much as the US and Canadian examples and in dire need of overhaul; just in different ways.)
Trump’s election highlights major points of failure in the American federal system: states can gerrymander their electorates, and recent legislation and judicial decisions have gutted voting rights, allowing them to disenfranchise their citizens willy-nilly; the electoral college itself represents a geographical gerrymandering of the states but is too well-entrenched to be easily abolished and replaced; first-past-the-post voting is an inadequate system that entrenches a two-party system; auditing of election results by each states’ electoral authority is haphazard and prone to manipulation by the parties and the courts; and donation reform is about the last item on the agenda of either major party. Add to that the weird cultural problems that have allowed a maverick like Trump to waltz in and decimate any reasonable opposition from the contenders for the Republican nomination (and saying that, in the last electoral cycle there wasn’t much that was reasonable) … in spite of which, the Republicans in charge of both houses of the Congress seem to believe there is nothing wrong with the current state of affairs and they can do whatever they want. The damage from this election and this presidency will undoubtedly be extensive and long lasting, but we don’t know what form it will take.
It could be that whoever seeks to take out Trump via the impeachment route does more damage to themselves and their party’s chances than they achieve any good. I don’t see Trump getting to November 2020 without major difficulties along the way.
Nice, Canada is a lot more loosey-goosey. Our Prime Minister isn’t recognized in the constitution, they’re more of a long-standing tradition. They don’t even have to hold elected office! The ruling party or coalition nominates them, and they’re removed if A) the party/coalition says so, or B) the government is defeated in a non confidence measure, and the party/coalition loses the resulting election. That’s it.
One thing we do nail is elections. They’re governed by an independent organization, Elections Canada. Electoral districts are drawn by another independent panel, and while in theory they could be stacked (2 of 3 members are appointed by the Speaker of the House, a politician), I can’t find any evidence of it happening.
I thought we had the youngest constitution, but you appear to beat us by four years (1982 vs. 1986). Ah well.
Remember that book I promised to serialize? I have a preamble up that puts it in context. All future posts will be under this tag, with a Table of Contents on the way. Oh, and I forgot to mention: I don’t have any plans to edit it, beyond the bare minimum.
/s/Satur/Fri
I was taking Canada’s constitution as having originated in 1867 in the form of the first of those British North America Acts, rather than taking it as having magically come into existence at the patriation date of 1982. For some odd reason the Australian constitution is still printed with the preamble for it to be enacted as a schedule to a 1900 Act of the British Parliament. You are right that the Australia Act of 1986 finally severed that Gordian knot, but the vast majority of the constitution was scoped out in the 1890s (taking the best bits from the US and Canadian examples).
Here, the Australian Electoral Commission is almost completely at arms length from the government of the day in being politically neutral, except that of necessity it is funded by the Department of Finance and has to report to the Special Minister of State; and redistributions of electorates are handled relatively transparently with a public hearing, suggestions and objections process, by the Commission.
Welcome news that among the pardons and commutations of sentence, President Obama has commuted Chelsea Manning’s 35 year sentence, and pardoned Oscar López Rivera; both are to finish their incarcerations on 17 May.
This is a comment.
In Canada, all the people who the PM appoints to PositionsOfPower,
were elected by their … constituents.
right?
YOU!
BLOGBOY!
Turn on Preview.
Xanthë:
Yay for Chelsea Manning! I already chimed in with a blog post. As for constitutions, I dunno. As a pup I’d been told that Canada replaced their constitution in 1982, which now seems oversimplified. If you look into the technical details you find the Constitution Act of 1982 added a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, plus a system for amending the constitution. Conversely, most of the articles I tracked down for Australia said your Australia Act wasn’t a new constitution, but I did eventually track down a book that disagreed.
This turns into a philosophical debate: if you amend the constitution, is it a modification or a new thing entirely? Given how sharp rights are handled, the latter view isn’t without merit.
chigau:
Nope!
In Canada, senators only need to own land and live in the district they’re appointed to. I can’t find any specific examples at the moment, but the Canadian Encyclopedia seems reliable enough.
As for Preview, I tried to. Searched the menus, asked Google for advice, and nothing came up. If you know how, please lemmie know!
Lessie… the book is progressing nicely. The next three excerpts cover the introduction, and tease the conclusion.
I had big plans for creating my header image this weekend, plans which I didn’t have time for. Please accept the hastily thrown-together substitute at the top of this page for now.
And this comment box is all funny. I seem to be the only blogger who has WordPress-controlled comment box, and no-one appears to know why. It’s annoying, because I’d love to offer comment previews in lieu of comment editing.
The Australia Act is not a constitution. It is however concerned with a few amendments to state constitutions, to completely rule out any possibility of appeals to the Privy Council, and to terminate the power of the parliament of the UK to legislate for Australia or Australian states, without upsetting the status of the Australian constitution or the bits of the Statue of Westminster that we’ve adopted (some of which are no longer needed and were repealed by this act). Our constitution already possessed an amendment clause which requires a popular referendum to achieve a double majority (s. 128) – a majority of voters in a majority of states, which has proved quite difficult to achieve more than 18% of the time. We’ve done fairly well without a bill of rights, although there are some freedoms sneakily inserted into the middle of the document. And ministers must be members of parliament – if they aren’t, they can only hold office for three months unless they become a member of the House or the Senate. We frequently hear of the ‘Senate envy’ that Canadian politicians have for our Senate compared to your own!
Testing this comment box again… *crosses fingers and toes*
Seems to be fine! I can believe it, your rules around Senators sound saner than ours.
Anyway, a lot has happened around here. The first chapter of Proof of God is up, with the section on Cosmological coming up. The latter is missing some diagrams, in this case because I gave up writing the thing before completing them.
It looks like there was a technical snafu, and comments were temporarily enabled on my posts. That’s been fixed, but not before Marcus Ranum posted an excellent one over here.
Also, my heavy workload keeps getting pushed aside by events down in the USofA. After declaring a full Constitutional crisis, I’ve gradually slipped into a full-on freakout. As best as I can tell, one of the US’s three branches has been disabled and the second is complacent in the face of a takeover. Trump is a functional dictator, currently without any check on his power.
If I type nine or more lines here, the “Post Comment” button disappears, with no apparent way to access it.
Rob Grigjanis @22:
That ones’ been bugging me for a while. I finally had a look myself, and the problem appears to be JetPack Comments. It throws the comment box into an iframe with a fixed height of 315 pixels and no scroll bars.
I’ve disabled Jetpack Comments, and in a Private browsing window I now see the boring ol’ FtB comment box. Can you check from your end?
And while I think of it, I’ve re-checked the “you must be registered to comment here” box. Let me know if your commenting problems come back, Xanthë.
hjhornbeck @23: Works fine now!
And so…
A couple quibbles with part of the Proof of God: The Cosmological Proof (2) post.
You write;
The 1905 Special Relativity papers (here and here) say nothing about gravity. Einstein’s first foray into gravity was not until 1907, with the formulation of the equivalence principle, and it wasn’t until 1915 that he published his gravitational field equations (i.e. general relativity).
Also, space and time are not “the same thing”. Yes, they form a 4D spacetime, and one observer’s space is a mixture of another observer’s space and time coordinates (likewise for the first observer’s time). But there is still a clear distinction between spacelike and timelike (and null) paths through this spacetime. Massive bodies can only follow timelike paths, with speeds less than c. Massless bodies can only follow null paths, with speed c. And anything on a spacelike path must be travelling FTL.
yeah, well
I’ll be dead soon
at least *Preview* is sorted
jeeez
jhornbec
pick a login id
Pffft, no. Too bad about your death, though. I assume some Trumpery is in play?
Rob Grigjanis @26:
Excellent point! I’m not sure how my past self missed that, but I’m guessing it was led astray by Einstein’s Relativity, written after GR, and simply forgot about the struggle to understand Minkowski spaces between 1905 and 1915.
I’m not going to re-write that section, but I don’t want to promote falsehoods either. I think I’ll add your comment in as a footnote.
New post up! i’m helping Siobhan analyze a documentary that aired on the BBC, “Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best?”. I just posted part one, a deep dive into the science behind the correlation between gender dysphoria and autism. Siobhan will have part two up later this week, and parts three and four will be up next week.
Re: Transgender children: Possible overlap of being transgender and being on the autism spectrum – might matter on the individual level if, for instance, things one did to help the child deal with one condition impacted on the other. Not that I know if that is true or even could be true.
I am interested in this topic because my son is transgender (started questioning around age 16) and in his younger years was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. Nowadays he doesn’t really show strong autistic symptoms except for a bit of social naivete (that may have come from avoiding some aspects of social life as a child).
There is the issue of the gender skew of diagnosis of autism. Why are there more diagnoses of autism in AMAB children? Is the reason social (there are plenty of AFAB autistic children, but they are not discovered because of gender expectations or are in social contexts that bypass the problems) or biological (something in the pathway to some aspects of maleness predisposes to autism)? So this could shed light on the causes of autism – if true – and that is a very big if.
anat @31:
I don’t find it likely, though given the correlation between gender and autism I can’t rule it out completely. Even if there is an overlap in care, it shouldn’t matter. If people need help coping with something they had no ability to avoid, we should grant it to them.
Jones [2012] saw more diagnoses with AFAB adults, Pasterski [2014] saw no difference between AMAB and AFAB adults, and Strang [2013] saw no statistically significant difference in children. de Vries [2010] did find more diagnoses in AMAB children, but there’s no reason to think it refutes every other study. The science hasn’t even established a skew exists, let alone gotten to a stage where it can fish for causation.
So, I am a geek about ontological arguments. I would disagree with your approach to them, although if it were me I’d write something completely inaccessible, so who am I to criticize. But I do feel the need to correct technical errors when I spot them.
I would first criticize this as being unclear, so you’ll have to tell me if I misinterpreted you. You appear to be arguing that assigning “god-like” to an object assumes the ontological argument’s conclusion. While you are correct, Godel does not make such an assumption. Definition 1 says “G(x) iff [stuff]” and that is a perfectly valid statement even if the antecedent, G(x), is always false. One can define “unicorn” even though unicorns don’t exist.
Second, you seem to misunderstand the construction of “God-like”. It’s basically the union of all properties in P. If we were to construct a “God-God” property which were the union of all properties in P along with the “God-like” property, then”God-God” would just be the same as “God-like”. It’s useful to think of P in terms of a set of sets of numbers. For instance, if P = {{1,2},{2,3}}, then G is {1,2,3} and G-G is still also {1,2,3}. Note that G is not necessarily in P itself, which is why Godel has to add an assumption for that. And yes, the assumption is highly dubious, but it is not inconsistent.
Correct away!
Not quite, ontological arguments try to prove existence via some Three-Card Monte involving logic and properties. Merely labeling something as “god-like” isn’t sufficient, you also have to label it as “existent.” This specific argument goes for a lemma, the very way a “god-like” property is defined. Toast that support, and the entire structure collapses.
I’m not questioning Def. 1 in that specific argument, I’m pointing out that it opens the door for a Barber Paradox by being overly inclusive. It’s a bit embarrassing for Gödel, as he knew of Russell’s work in avoiding that paradox.
It wouldn’t. Gödel explicitly defines “god-like” as a property, which means it may be contained by P. But if it can be contained by P, we can derive another property from P the same way Gödel derives “god-like.” This new property is a superset of all properties, and so it cannot be identical to them. What’s missing in your analogy is that G is not just {1,2,3}, it’s also 3 (or at least one of those numbers) thanks to Axiom 3.
Sorry, more physics quibbles.
Regarding Proof of God: The Cosmological Proof (3);
No, there’s nothing “popping” anywhere. A common pop-sci trope is that “vacuum fluctuations” means there’s some time-dependent stuff going on. All it really means is that the variance of some quantity (an observable) is non-zero. Anyway, Jaffe demonstrates (IMO) that the Casimir effect isn’t about vacuum fluctuations at all.
No, energy is absolutely conserved in quantum mechanics. There is no fundamental uncertainty principle for energy and time. I can go into that in more depth if you like. You can derive an energy-time uncertainty relation for varying or unstable physical states (e.g. natural line width versus lifetime for an excited atomic state), but you can’t just apply it to the vacuum.
@hjhornbeck #34,
Does latex work in the comments? I’m guessing not.
Given your explanation of “God-God”, I would define it formally as follows: GG(x) iff for all properties F, [(P(F) or F=G) implies F(x)]. Using this definition, you can absolutely prove that GG(x) is equivalent to G(x). If you had another definition in mind, it is unclear to me.
I agree that Godel has some sort of trick going on, but I think you’ve already missed it by the time you get to the definition of “God-like”. Most of the work is already done in the pathological definition of P. It is very odd that you can prove all properties in P are possible–definitions aren’t supposed to let you prove facts about the world. Consider if I were a determinist (meaning I believe we live in the only possible world), I would be forced to conclude that either a unicorn exists, or else unicorns are “negative”.
Rob Grigjanis @35:
Gah, you’re right. I’ve been leaning away from dualist thinking in the subatomic realm, so it’s kind of jarring to read myself endorsing a solid difference between wave fluctuations and particles. That one might be worth correcting.
I had a quick skim of ArXiv, and I can find papers endorsing Jaffe’s relativistic electromagnetism and others endorsing zero-point energy. A decade on, it doesn’t sound like physicists have reached a consensus on what causes the Casimir effect, though that may be due to inertia rather than solid argument.
I think that one was poorly phrased on my part, it’s the “measurements” of energy that are uncertain rather than the energy itself. More depth would be useful, though; while I have taken a few university physics courses, none touched on QM in detail, so I’m relying more on extrapolation and careful reading in this area.
More worrying for that section is the recent pushback on the dark energy. It may not exist after all, which if true would defeat my “something from nothing” example. I don’t think it’s fatal, as at best I could just switch to the Lamb effect or get into the weeds on mass, and at worst just drop it and rely on the other arguments.
Siggy @34:
I don’t see how that’s true. Let’s check that via a simple rewrite.
The problem is that bolded bit, the definition relies on having a definition for the thing being defined in order to define itself. That’s circular.
I agree with you there, I bring up some of the same objections in part 3. Gödel’s proof is sunk several ways over before we even begin debating if “GG(x) = G(x)” is true.
hjhornbeck @38
If I were to say “A bachelor is an unmarried man”, you could substitute “bachelor” for “unmarried man” and construct the circular definition, “a bachelor is a bachelor”. But so what? My point is that “GG(x) iff G(x)” is a tautology, and you can often construct circular (ie tautologous) definitions from tautologies.
In reference to #37,
I wouldn’t take much away from the linked story on dark energy. It’s still safe to use dark energy as an example, until such a time that scientists make a stronger case against it.
It is, if G(x) has a definition equivalent to GG(x) and one which makes logical sense. I cannot see how “for all properties F, [(P(F) or F=G) implies F(x)]” satisfies the latter requirement for G(x).
I can sketch a proof of “GG(x) iff G(x)”. I found it easier to work with the negations of G and GG, which I’ll denote with exclamation points. !G(x) means “There exists some F such that !P(F) and F(x)”. !GG(x) means “There exists some F such that !P(F) and F != G and F(x)”. In order to prove these are equivalent, you just take the F from one statement and show that it also satisfies the other statement. In order to go from !G(x) to !GG(x), you can show that F != G from F(x) and !G(x). The other direction from !GG(x) to !G(x) is trivial–just conjunction elimination.
I have a question about the “Proof from Intelligence” (1) post.
I can imagine a world with two intelligent species able to communicate with one another, or four, or sixteen. And in such a world, wouldn’t all sixteen species be going around saying that their intelligence was a gift from their deity?
Or, to use another example — you seem to imply that, if we encounter intelligent aliens, that might act as a disproof of this particular proof of god. But wouldn’t those believers just say “Well, they must have been gifted by god with intelligence also”?
Basically, I can’t imagine any configuration of a universe where an intelligent species wouldn’t be able to use this “proof” — which seems to make it pretty meaningless if not indefensible.
hjhornbeck: The energy-time thing.
In nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, position, momentum and energy are considered as operators which act on the states of a system. Position and momentum are complementary, which roughly speaking means that if a state has definite position, it can’t have a definite momentum, and vice versa. This means the operators don’t commute;
[x,p] ≡ xp – px ≠ 0
It turns out the equality is iℏ, where ℏ is the reduced Planck constant. From this relationship, you can derive the uncertainty relation for x and p.
Now, energy and time are also complementary quantities, and there is an operator associated with the energy, usually denoted H (for Hamiltonian). But if you postulate a time operator satisfying a commutation relation
[t,H] = iℏ
you run into major problems. In a nutshell, it implies that all energy values are allowed, and that there is no state of minimum energy. This is obviously not true for any realistic systems. So no time operator; time is just a parameter of the theory. Therefore no fundamental energy-time uncertainty relation. But, as I mentioned above, you can derive a sort of energy-time relation for specific physical states.
Siggy @41:
I can’t even get that far. Let me break it down this way:
That’s circular, but on the surface it’s easily fixed: drop point two, which corresponds to Gödel’s Axiom 3. Unfortunately, Gödel defines P to contain “positive, morally aesthetic properties,” and it takes little imagination to believe the “God-like” property qualifies. Even if P did not contain “God-like,” we could easily form a superset P’ which contains “God-like” but which cannot be used to define “God-like.” It could be used to define a “God-God” property without invoking circular logic, and thus cannot be identical to the definition of the “God-like” property.
So if you’re correct that GG(x) and G(x) are equivalent, you must be saying that circular logic isn’t a problem. You are saying that “a person is a bachelor if, and only if, they are single, male, and a bachelor” is valid logic.
brucegee1962 @42:
“Proof of God” effectively prevented me from becoming religious. Every religious proof that I sat down with was “meaningless” and “indefensible,” and if that was the best religion could offer after many millenia then I could safely say they were all bullshit in the same way I can say “the sun will rise above the horizon tomorrow.”
And yet, religious people still trot out intelligence as a proof of a god’s existence. For instance:
That sounds like a stock Christian Presuppositionalist, but it was actually written by a Hare Krishna. As silly as the argument sounds, it is a legit “proof” used as an apologetic by people of faith. It had to have a place in “Proof of God.”
Rob Grigjanis @43:
I think I grok that. I may have been confused by Emmy Noether’s famous theorems, though. The first ties conservation laws to symmetries, and in particular shows that time invariance implies the conservation of energy. That only establishes that time and energy have a relation, however, it doesn’t say this relation is complimentary.
hjhornbeck @46: Yeah, conservation of energy (guaranteed by Noether’s first theorem for a wide class of theories exhibiting time translation invariance) is really a separate issue from energy uncertainty in a particular situation. So, an excited atomic state is not a state of definite energy (not an eigenstate of the Hamiltonian, in jargon). That’s why such states have natural line widths. But the underlying theory is still time-translation invariant.
If you haven’t read it, Noether’s ground-breaking 1918 paper (with both theorems) is worth a look.
Subscribing
Time for a “State of the Blog,” methinks.
I’ve had a brief flurry of activity over the last week, which probably won’t last. Most notably, my final contribution to Siobhan’s series on that BBC documentary is up.
Proof of God is midway through chapter 4. I’ve also posted the first of several statistics-related posts from my time at Sinmantyx; this won’t be done as regularly as Proof of God, if only because some of them are over-stuffed with images and I haven’t found an automated way to transfer those over.
HJ @44,
I feel like I have to set aside any arguments about gods, because your entire treatment of circular definitions doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense. Could you say *why* circular definitions are wrong?
Suppose I say “A iff A”. Is that a circular definition? It is, if it’s intended to be a definition of A. But what if I was stating it as a theorem, for a particular A that I had previously defined? Or what if it werea theorem that was true for all propositions A? By falsely pattern-matching it to a circular definition, you’ve managed to fool youself into rejecting theorems.
Also, if A is defined by B, does that mean that everywhere A is mentioned, you can substitute B? Or what if we have the theorem “A iff B”, can we now perform the substitution? Yes, by using this substitution, we will always transform one true statement into another. But you can also transform non-circular definitions into circular ones. So I find your use of substitution to be fundamentally flawed.
BTW, statements where substitutions are disallowed are called “intensional statement forms” on Wikipedia.
Siggy @50:
They’re not wrong, merely useless. The Wikipedia page on circular definitions has a good example: what do you learn about circular definitions from the definition “a definition that is circular?” Nothing, because one is just a restatement of the other. So if we were to encounter a logic proof which contained circular logic, then at minimum that portion can contribute nothing towards the truthhood of the overall definition, and at worst it invalidates the entire proof.
That has nothing to do with Godel’s Ontological argument. He’s not stating a theorem, he’s asserting a definition. Not only is there no need to prove the latter there is no way to do so.
Is G a member of the set of all morally-good properties? It is, if G contains all morally-good properties. But if G contains all morally-good properties, G must be a member of it. If G contains itself as an element, then it must be strictly larger than that element because it also contains members which are not itself, in addition to all the properties that member-G contains. Ergo, the number of elements in G is strictly larger than the number of elements in G. This looks a lot like someone else’s proof that a set cannot contain itself, though much more narrowly focused. And while there are some subtleties to this, in practice they don’t apply to Godel’s formulation.
There’s another way to think about it. Suppose I had a computer program which told you whether or not a morally-good property was equivalent to G. It’s pretty easy to determine if it isn’t, simply feed each property it contains into P() and see if one of them is absent. What if properties contain properties, however? Well then we have to feed each sub-property in as well, because we know they’re also in this set (that’s Godel’s Axiom 2). This isn’t a problem if we “bottom-out” at some point and stop recursing, but if one of the properties we feed into P is G then we’re duty-bound to test all properties it contains. If it contains G, and by definition it must, then we must evaluate all the properties that property contains. If that contains G, and by definition it must, then we… and so on. Our program will never terminate if at any point it encounters G, and therefore whether or not a morally-good property is equivalent to G is not computable.
Maybe I was wrong to use the word “circular,” though. “Infinitely recursive” seems to fit better. Try doing substitution with “G = {A, B, G}” and you’ll see what I mean.
A minor note: The current standard in biological nomenclature is that the genus name is capitalized, and species (and subspecies) are written all lowercase. Therefore, our biological genus and species should be written “Homo sapiens sapiens“.
Interesting. I remember agonizing over that part of Proof of God, because I badly wanted to write Homo sapiens sapiens instead of Homo sapiens, because it feed into the overarching theme of “we’re not special.” In the end, I was able to convince myself that the odds of scientists finding a sub-species of Homo were high enough to allow it. I’m surprised I didn’t stumble on the proper capitalization of species names during that period, but my mind may have been elsewhere.
HJ Hornbeck @52
I think my disagreements with what you are saying is strictly increasing over time. For example, G is not a set that contains all good predicates, it’s a predicate that entails all good predicates. Sets cannot contain themselves, but predicates always entail themselves.
But anyway, I don’t want to take up your open thread. I enjoyed your article on double-dipping data sets.
Meh, I don’t mind the argument. Thanks for the compliment, though; I was struggling a bit to properly explain the difference between multiple hypotheses and multiple comparisons, and I’m glad the results worked.
I think I can see the light at the end of the tunnel! You’re supposed to go towards it, right?
Geez, Proof of God is about to hit blog post #29 later today. So far, I’ve covered Cosmological, Ontological, Intelligence, Logic/Dualism, and Morality. The chapter coming up is one of my favorites, my take on the proof from Design. If I had to point to one chapter that I’d most like to share, it’d be the Introduction and Conclusion, but the Design chapter is a solid third place. It’s also VERY image intensive, so it’ll be a challenge to translate into blog form.
My next few posts are probably going to very science-y, as there’s an number of topics I want to cover. First up will probably be a 5,000 word epic I’ve been nursing along for a month. As a palate cleanser, though, have some art.
I think “Table 5 from Ellis” is very pretty.
It reminded me of 60s surfing music.
Re: Gimmie that old-time breeding
Last time I looked at an evopsych paper, it was this review on “argumentative theory”. It was terrible, because they spent the whole time making observations about cognitive biases, and did not provide a single shred of evidence in favor of their particular adaptative hypothesis, and did not consider other adaptative or even non-adaptive hypotheses. I thought maybe it could be some obscure and shoddy corner of evopsych, but nope! Almost 1000 citations right now. That was when I concluded that critics were right, evopsych is systematically awful, possibly a pseudoscience.
chigau (違う) @58:
That brings back memories, I had a brief love of surf music.
Thanks, that diagram was a bit of a pain. You’re looking at the third iteration: the first was supposed to look like the previous one, the second was a non-stacked version of the same. The first couldn’t cope with the number of categories nor the per-group scaling, the second was too busy and too horizontal. I still worry that people will read too much into where the peaks are (summing prior values throws them off, plus correlations don’t add as you’d expect), but I’m at a loss for improving it.
Siggy @59:
I’ve noticed that too, and it drives me up the wall. I thought falsification and epistemic humility were hammered into every scientist’s head, yet time and again I read EvoPsych researchers blithely claiming that everyone else is wrong and ignoring confounding factors. Here’s my rationale for saying it is a pseudo-science on that basis, rather than possibly may be:
Naturopaths are trained in modern medicine as well as pseudo-medicine. It’s possible to find a naturopath who only uses the crackpot stuff as a placebo, and I suspect that even those who think acupuncture is legit wouldn’t hesitate to refer someone with a heart condition to a specialist instead. From this, is it fair to say naturopathy is a valid branch of medicine? I’d argue not; if the foundation of the field is based on false assumptions, if the typical naturopath buys into bullshit, then I think I have enough justification to write off the entire field.
Likewise, the foundational assumptions of EvoPsych are false. Most of the EvoPsych research I’ve read is significantly worse than most of the non-EvoPsych research I’ve read, containing poor reasoning and controls. Even if there is some excellent EvoPsych research floating out there, I can still call the entire field a pseudo-science.
HJ @60,
One thing that made hesitate in labeling evopsych as pseudoscience is that it’s (afaik) established within the same research institutions as other scientific fields (whereas I am not sure how naturopathy institutions work). Of course nowadays being in research, it is entirely plausible to me that there are pockets of scientists all barking up the wrong tree, and evopsych seems to be a very large such pocket. But man, I feel bad for the grad students who get stuck doing that.
My left ankle hurts. So does my left hip.
That stinks, hope you get better chigau.
Mmmm, while I’m in this thread: a while ago, I spotted an interesting article by Libby Anne on how presuppositionalism was gaining traction in creationist circles. It made me curious how I’d covered presuppositionalism in Proof of God.
I gave it eight paragraphs in the last chapter. If memory serves, I agonized a bit over whether to expand presuppositionalism into a full chapter, before brushing the idea off. It seemed like an especially weak argument, which I’d subtly chipped away at in several places such as the introduction and the proof from logic/dualism, and I hadn’t heard it used out of Christian circles. Even within those circles, it didn’t get much respect.
It’s been nearly a decade, however. If the trends in creationism mirror the overall trend in Christianity, presuppositionalism may be getting more popular, and if that’s true it may start bleeding into other religions. Whattya think, should I whip up a “Proof from Proofs” chapter?
You seem to be pretty optimistic about Trump’s base finally shrinking here: http://freethoughtblogs.com/reprobate/2017/05/25/about-damn-time/
But after everything he’s done, haven’t we just observed the threshold you have to cross to upset the Republican base? Like… profoundly disturbing.
Siobhan @64:
Yep. Republicans may voice concern for their fellow person but, on the whole, they don’t put that into practice. What gets them angry is the revocation of a “privilege” they hold dear, in this case their health care.
So.
How ’bout that UK election, eh?
Blew my mind, to be honest. It’s easy to play up the good side, however; Brexit is still inevitable, and Britain’s in a worse position to negotiate, so the cheers sound a bit hollow.
Still, given the options, it was about the best result we could hope for.
I have to admit that I previously only ever encountered criticisms of cis/trans terminology in the context of gender identity (and gender dysphoria) denialists. Dr. Costello gave me one of those really exciting “oooooooh” moments when they pointed out that the concept is a bit messy with intersex folks and actually made a solid case for that argument. It’s like I’m legitimately surprised to encounter persuasive criticism, though given whose rhetoric I study I guess that’s to be expected.
The section on sex education near the end gave me something similar. Misinformation seems to be causing some friction between the intersex and trans* communities, when both’s reliance on medical interventions should make them natural allies. (Also, intersex people seek many of the same medical interventions? Wild, I had no idea).
*snerk*. I’m not as widely-read on the topic as you, but that was my impression as well. The TERF writing I’ve seen is rather boring, peel back their attempts at obfuscation and they really don’t venture far from sex essentialism and a fear of penises.
re: cups
Try discussing “pint” when you order your beer.
Re: Elections, voting paradoxes, etc.
Here’s a comment I made about the meaning of these “paradoxes” on another great youtube video on the subject.
Also, I ran into someone eccentric at the Calgary Civic Tech first meeting. He claimed it’s been “mathematically proven” that, for electronic voting, you have to either sacrifice voter anonymity, or else preserve anonymity but get some other bad thing (maybe auditability or something, I forget). He seemed really worried about this, and was very explicitly opposed to electronic voting.
Anyways, I pointed out that we’re kind of inching towards lack of anonymity anyways. Because of the internet. Since voting is just a measurement of personal views and preference, then you can already see what someone will vote if you know their preferences, and the internet is making this info more widely available.
And then, of course, I speculated that if info is so available and trustworthy, it could be the vote. You won’t vote anymore as a discrete event (it would be an outdated measurement technology). The data about the population’s preference will just be consulted any time it needs to be.
And of course I’ve got ideas for how to deal with the issue of trust.
*of course, some voting “paradoxes” might simply be an even tie.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, FOLKS
Content Notice: TERF bollocks
And the Whiplash Non-Sequitur award goes to…
Bah! I’ve been neglecting this thread. And Proof of God, come to think of it, as I haven’t updated it in weeks. I’ve got plans to get back to that tonight, but (as always) we’ll see.
Brian Pansky @71:
I’ve thought of this too. It helps overcome the problem of biased information (eg. a minority of people identify as pro-choice yet a majority hold pro-choice views) or activist voting (Prop 8 in California). The problem is one of transparency: at no point do you ever say “I support X,” instead it is indirectly inferred from other things. What if the inference is poor or biased, though, like what happened with Google Flu Trends? The only way we can remove these biases is by continually calibrating it against an actual vote, which defeats the purpose of using them in the first place.
I dunno, there are some really sophisticated electronic voting systems out there. Du-Vote relies on a personal token, but claims to be functional even on malware-infested machines. I also see a system involving block chains, which means that so long as your private key is kept private you’ll get both partial anonymity and auditability (time-based deanonymization would probably still work). I’m not too familiar with those systems, though, so I might be missing something.
Siobhan @73:
The p-value was especially amusing. But geez, that should set off klaxons instead of warning bells in policy makers. This is a systemic problem that needs cleaning, STAT.
@74:
Story-time: During my first gender studies class, the teacher played a short video of Camille Paglia sounding off on something (can’t remember what). The class went deathly silent for a bit, until I raised my hand and called Paglia out for combating sexism with more sexism. I get the same vibe off TERFs; they quite clearly have some basic knowledge of feminism, but they mash it together in such a muddled way that the result is quite sexist. Feminists “know” that? Really?! Is this like how Christians “know” that the Earth is 6000 years old, or abortion is murder and therefore oppose it? If there was any more projection, the author would work at an IMAX theatre. 😛
Since you’ve now criticized a conventionally attractive cis white feminist, allow me to provide you a complementary torch and pitchfork to prepare you for the inevitable cries of “witch hunting.”
Also +1,000,000,000 cool points for using a Veronica Mars .gif.
Nice! I should build a display case, I’ve had a few gifted to me. But you should withhold at least half those cool points, as I’ve never seen a single episode of Veronica Mars. I just saw the GIF elsewhere, and thought it was perfect for the occasion.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/reprobate/2017/07/20/who-watches-the-social-justice-activists/
For the most part, I learned there was one specific area where authority was more likely to lie than others, and that’s on how necessary the authority is. I know some people have atrocious educations but I consider mine pretty good, with one notable exception: I still wasn’t taught to question authority. I wasn’t taught to examine how it currently works and the vulnerabilities to abuse it still possesses. I wasn’t taught to question how it could be structured differently. And I definitely wasn’t taught to consider what happens when authority is possessed by someone who flouts the principles on which that authority is founded.
I suspect Green started in a similar situation, but hasn’t clued in yet that authority is not synonymous with trustworthy. At this point, I’d consider it a badge of honour to have a file in CSIS.
An addendum to your Laci Green addendum
Another detail that should be mentioned: feminising HRT is sometimes administered cyclically. The rationale as to why is that even cis women do not have full blast estrogen all the time, and high estrogen levels have been linked to breast cancer and a host of other problems. Administering a feminising HRT regime with a one week break every month hypothetically would bring that risk to normative levels (I don’t think a longitudinal study has been conducted yet, but it’s a pretty logical guess). Assuming any of the symptoms are triggered by a sudden spike in hormones, then trans women on these cyclical routines would be simulating that as well.
And to add to Riedel’s inquiries, I get them too. Fevers, fatigue, cramps, excessive sensory sensitivity (which is probably a migraine on some level but I’m not feeling the pain in my head) are a brief but semi-regular occurrence for me since I started my HRT and typically crop up a few days before I’m due to resume estrogen. I personally wouldn’t call them menstrual cramps specifically (as I am not menstruating), just menstrual-like. But all TERFs have is a hammer, so that little detail is naturally missed.
This bit amused me greatly (content notice TERF nonsense)
TERF: Women are more than their genitals!
Trans woman: Yes I agree
TERF: NOT U
@HJ
huh? Why wouldn’t you say “I support X”? Maybe your ideas were different from mine. That’s why I said “data about the populations preferences“.
Also, voting for people basically has this same defect, leading to broken promises and “mixed bags” and “lesser of two evils” and so on. Unconstrained precise and articulate expression of personal preference would be superior.
Trump is looting the White House and gallivanting over the chance to murder hundreds of thousands of disabled and chronically ill Americans but by gosh could he maybe be a little more polite about it?
People like Pieper are why I’m a consequentialist.
Siobhan @80:
Ack! That explains a lot. Menstruation has a huge range of side effects, from “Feeling tired” to “Upset stomach” to “Headache or backache” to “Joint or muscle pain.” Menstruation is one of the few biological events which occur on a cycle, though. So if estrogens are administered on the same basic cycle, and taking estrogens carries side effects that are vaguely similar to the huge range found with menstruation, then some trans* women are going to report feeling menstruation-like symptoms even if the biological pathways are completely different to those found in most cis women. This makes the rejection of menstruation-like symptoms in trans* women the absurd claim, and at best demonstrates a basic ignorance of biology.
Funny story: back when I was writing “How to Spot a TERF,” I struggled a bit to come up with any commonality to their beliefs beyond the obvious, but eventually I did spot one: “it’s more important to look for incoherence [in their sex model].” I think the contradictions you and others keep spotting are not a side-effect of being a TERF, they’re inherent to the label and probably the best signal of TERF-dom.
Brian Pansky @81:
Whoops, we’re not quite on the same wavelength here. I was discussing the general case: you can poll people’s support for when abortion should be legal, for instance, and conclude that the majority of people are pro-choice even though only half of the population would agree to the statement “I am pro-choice.” When it comes to matters of consent, we want a crystal clear signal like “I support X” as opposed to “because you support Y and Z, you must support X,” and since crystal-clear consent is critical to any financial or legal matters we’re stuck with directly asking people rather than inferring their preferences.
The state is a very complex beast. The Republicans have actually passed a fair bit of legislation during the first six months of Trump’s presidency, but all the bills have titles like “A Joint Resolution Providing for the Reappointment of Steve Case as a Citizen Regent of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution.” This is tedious work that doesn’t have any direct benefit to the people, but it’s work that must be done. Removing political representatives means that we’d have to poll the US public on all these low-level details; most people would tune out, leaving these tasks vulnerable to manipulation by passionate activists (for good or ill).
This of course is on top of the value of having dedicated professionals manage the state, as opposed to public amateurs. I haven’t thought of a good way around this problem, so for now I view voting for people as a necessity.
Re: Stat of the Union post: What kind of positions are captured by the second dimension? In what ways were the Democrats social right-wingers in the 1960s and what caused them to move leftwards?
@HJ
I’m in favor of explicit expressions of preference. Not just giving the the government the info it needs, but for informing anyone about any preference.
Ideally, I think, individuals could basically do it the way they wanted to. They could choose which domains they would defer to other people of their choice, which things/domains they would decide for themselves, etc.
The Dutch Protocols showed that trans patients who had full access to their medical options and social support still exhibited higher rates of anxiety. Not anywhere near as catastrophic as the American rates, but Laci Green’s claim that gender dysphoria is mostly external stress is unsupported, and conflates minority stress with GD. The actual outcomes (esp. for Americans) is a combination of the psychiatric effects of dysphoria and abuse by society at large. If GD was well and truly harmless, there’d be no impulse for treatment, but even the subjects of the Dutch Protocols experienced large increases in quality of life, including the elimination of the comorbid anxiety, when they completed the options they needed. And that was in the absence of legislated assault. I honed in on that claim because it is a misapprehension of the research that has been used in previous arguments to eliminate transition healthcare (i.e. to push for that mythical “gender” free society TERFs natter about). A gender-role-free society would reduce a lot of stress for trans folk, certainly, but there’s nothing in the research to suggest the etiology would vanish in a puff of smoke.
anat @85:
According to Wikipedia,
But I found that really unsatisfying; how exactly are they labelling legislation? I’ve dug up a better explanation of DW-NOMINATE, and I find it unsettling. Emphasis mine.
In sum, there is no coding of votes in DW-NOMINATE. Instead, each bit of legislation or amendment or procedural voting is thought to occupy a point in a multi-dimensional space, as do legislators, and a legislators’ vote is based on where they sit relative to the issue’s location and some centre line. Where all these points are isn’t known beforehand, but by creating a likelihood function and demanding the results must maximise its output, a placement of points eventually pops out of the mix.
But how certain are we of this specific placement? Even if there is some global maximum in the parameter space, there might be local maxima which are nearly as likely. If the output remains consistent over time, then maybe there truly is a global maxima, but all it takes is a rule like “new results must be close to prior results” or “we’ll use the old results as a starting point” to create an illusion of consistency.
Those problems can be solved, and given NOMINATE’s age I’m assuming they have, but there’s still the interpretation of what each dimension means. Poole and Rosenthal are assuming it maps to something we can easily understand, such as economic or social matters, but there’s no constraint in the system to guarantee that. Given the way their system is set up, it’s more accurate to call these dimensions “primary partisanship dimension,” “secondary partisanship dimension,” and so on. The reason why they somewhat map to economic or social issues is that throughout history the two major US parties have defined partisanship along those dimensions, and being human they had difficulty coming up with more divisions. Should social issues become more divisive than economic ones in future, these dimensions will muddy up then flip as vote tallies stream in. Should we limit the time window of input votes, the meaning of the dimensions will change and isn’t guaranteed to mean the same thing for different time windows.
Ironically, while I was wrong to assign “Left” and “Right” labels to those dimensions, they’re still measures of partisanship. It’s still legit to say Democrats haven’t moved very much within this phase space since the 1960’s, while Republicans have shifted substantially. What that means beyond partisanship is up for debate.
Brian Pansky @86:
This could work quite well, if only because it puts people in charge of their own data. Picture an “opt-out” scenario where people are allowed to skip explicitly voting on a referendum, in favor of having their vote inferred from their behavior in prior referendums or a questionnaire of core values. So long as the inferential algorithm is open-source and well-studied, they have the option of seeing how it predicts they would vote (and why!), and can opt back in at any time, this could put a lot of power back in the hands of the people.
Siobhan @87:
Good catch! I’d actually made a similar point during our series on that nasty BBC documentary, and even backed it up with a citation, but for some reason that didn’t pop back into my head when I read Green’s Tweet. Privilege blindness strikes again. 😛
On your 8/4 post about p-values, could part of the problem be that the underlying assumptions of hypothesis testing do not obtain in medical experiments?
Emacs vs. Vi isn’t a debate, it’s a flame war.
colinday @91:
Probably not. Null hypothesis significance testing is supposed to be agnostic to the details of the hypothesis. Just feed in data, turn the crank, and get a result.
Having said that, it may be possible that medical experiments prefer one form of significance test (say a signed-rank test ) while other branches use different tests (like a random-effects ANOVA), and these tests have different power levels. I don’t think this is terribly likely, but still.
colinday @92:
Only because those Emacs blowhards won’t concede they’ve lost the battle! 😉
More seriously, I’m finding Emacs is better for editing long LaTeX docs on the terminal. I still do most of my coding in vim, but nowadays both editors have roughly the same cost/benefit analysis. And neither of them are terribly popular today, I see a lot more people using NotePad++ or Eclipse or Visual Studio or Gedit.
LaTeX in Eclipse or Visual Studio? Hmm. And is Notepad++ even available in the Debian repositories? As for not conceding the battle, I may be worse than the Lost Causers.
#93
I mean, what if independence among subjects fails to hold? What if there are other differences between the treatment and control groups (besides the treatment)?
George Washington owned slaves, but the British were not really trying to free them (the British abolished slavery in the Empire in 1834)
colinday @95:
Mmm–hm. I can’t recommend using either, but it’s at least possible.
It’s Windows-only. Seems to be popular over there, though, so I thought I’d include it.
colinday @96:
Then the correlation will be weaker, and you’ll need more data to boost the signal above the noise. Certainly there’s a loose connection between a branch of science and the size of the typical dataset, but that isn’t an intrinsic flaw of that branch.
re: ECLIPSE!!!
My location was at about 70% and the reduction in light was barely noticable.
The birds and squirrels didn’t pay any attention.
Me, I had pin-holes, binoculars, colanders, potato ricers and the leaves on the trees.
I don’t think I’d travel but if another eclipse comes to me, I will play ALL the games.
I found using my hands in place of a colander was super convenient for checking the eclipse progress, as my eclipse glasses were acting as a solar filter for the camera.
Too bad about the 70%, even 99% doesn’t come close to the experience of full-on totality. Hopefully the 2024 one is better suited to your location. The East Coast is in for a treat, I see Montreal, Hamilton, Kingston, Sherbrooke, Fredricton, Buffalo, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Dallas, Austin, Monclova, Torreon, Durango, and Mazadan will all experience totality.
So.
Do you actually want comments?
or are you trying to start a cult?
.
a small cult
A very, very small cult. 😉 More seriously, back in the OP and with a touch of emphasis added:
Disagreement is totes cool, and in fact encouraged so long as it “maximizes information.” No doubt you’ve found yourself in an argument where you just wind up repeating the same thing back and forth; that’s the opposite of that maxim, and sign you should go meta (“I think we’re just repeating ourselves here. This usually happens when people weight their priorities or evidence differently, so let’s try and figure out what those differences are…“).
Cults also tend to advertise themselves, and pass some sort of economic value from members to leaders. So no, I’m not really going for a cult here.
Honestly, I’m ambivalent about comment sections. They have some definite upsides, especially when there’s a excellent group of people milling about, but they also take a tonne of moderation to form those groups and can easily blow up if one your posts goes viral. Given how much I focus on social justice, the odds of a blow-up are non-trivial. 😛 Personality-wise, I prefer substantive critiques over immediate feedback, and making commenting easy favors the latter over the former.
So, to answer your first question: sorta not? 😀
I think that I understand.
Let us see if anyone else notices.
How many have noted that you are
Hj
instead of
hj
HJ
or whatever
.
because this is totes realz
Re: repressed memories
One thing that always bugs me is that skeptics say that recovering repressed memories is impossible, whereas everyone acknowledges that it’s possible to forget and later remember memories. What exactly is the difference? I mean, maybe there’s a difference and it’s just being poorly explained. But if someone claims that they recovered a repressed memory, and if we believe that repressed memories are impossible to recover, it seems there are at least two alternate hypotheses: either the memory is fabricated, or maybe it was just a memory that they forgot and now remember.
Anyway, did the distinction between forgotten and repressed memories come up anywhere in your literature review? What did it say?
chigau @105:
As somebody with a unusual name, I’ve taken great joy in all the ways people get it wrong to the point that I encourage it. The initials thing is just another chapter in that.
Siggy @106:
It doesn’t come across that strongly in this half, but I’m basically conceding that recovered memories are false, period. I’m also taking it as a given that once a memory is forgotten, it cannot be remembered again. While I could probably swat both down as being simplistic, that argument is messy and complicated and I don’t need it to discuss the Sandusky controversy. Better to concede ground you don’t need then waste time defending it.
Because of that approach, I never got into the specifics of recovered memory. From doing a little Google Scholar-ing, though, it sounds like the debate over recovered memories rages on, which implies the recovered/repressed distinction is still contentious.
You might also be interested in this review, though I haven’t had the time to give it a fair hearing:
Johnson, Marcia K., et al. “The cognitive neuroscience of true and false memories.” True and false recovered memories. Springer New York, 2012. 15-52.
HJ @107,
Yeah, I can see that conceding the ground (or not arguing the point) makes sense in this context. It’s just that forgetting and remembering things is such an everyday experience, it’s a wonder to me that most expositions of fabricated memories neglect to mention it. Of course, it could be the case that forgotten-and-remembered memories are particularly unreliable, such that even if it’s possible to remember accurately, the ratio of accurate to inaccurate memories is too low to constitute good evidence.
I’ll take a look at the Johnson article and report back if I find anything interesting.
So I read parts of the Johnson article. It seems that they do not distinguish between repressed/recovered memories and forgotten/remembered memories. They’re the same thing, and I guess it was only skeptical miseducation that led me to believe there was a distinction. I guess people usually talk about repressed/recovered memories in relation to events that happened a long time ago or were traumatic. And memories might be more unreliable in such circumstances. But it’s not fundamentally different from forgetting where I put my keys, and then remembering.
The implication is that recovering accurate memories is in fact possible, and there is concrete evidence of this even in the context of CSA (see last paragraph of page 24). Whether this happens frequently enough for it to be good evidence is unclear.
Martin Luther King Jr. was a very articulate person.
It’s all the more impressive when you know a bit more of the context. According to the ‘Pedia:
Which means that King was working from memory when he was rattling off names, or quoting people like T.S. Elliot and John Bunyan. It could do with a bit of editing (King himself admits to rambling in the third-last paragraph), but the ideas land with full impact. I was first exposed to it in a philosophy class, which should tell you something.
Sometimes, in your posts, you pose questions.
That is: you post a sentence with a “?” at the end.
Do you want a response?
Or is it rhetorical-like?
chigau @112:
Usually rhetorical-like, but occasionally I hand out homework. 😉 I also like to borrow from spoken language, where a questioning tone can signify “I’m not convinced this statement is true.”
Re abduction:
I typically think of abduction as the type of reasoning you use when you select a hypothesis, without necessarily considering every qualitatively distinct hypothesis.
In your blackbox() example, I would start by sampling some data and creating a histogram. The histogram looks like a power law distribution, so I’d go about making a power law ansatz with some free parameters. Then finally I’d use fitting to determine the best values for the free parameters. The step of finding the best free parameters is not abduction, it’s just a statistical calculation which has some underlying justification in Bayesian reasoning. The abductive step is the guess that it’s a power law distribution, as opposed to, say, a Gaussian distribution, or some other distribution we haven’t even thought of.
You could probably justify this with Bayesian reasoning, but it’s kind of thorny when we speculate on hypotheses that we haven’t even thought of.
In your post about Pinker and C. P. Snow, wasn’t the issue with the tachyonic neutrinoes that tey apparently violated Special Relativitiy rather than General Relatvivity?
Sean M. Carroll’s take on the announcement of the “Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos?”.
Some germane quotes:
[NB: The above is from 2011; per WikiP, the MINOS results from 2012 “found agreement with the speed of light”]
Carroll mentions several theoretical possibilities if superluminal neutrinos were actually a thing: a violation of Lorentz invariance; graininess in spacetime from quantum gravity; extra dimensions providing a shortcut through space.
yabut
they’re French
On the complaint that social-science faculty are to the left of Americans, has it occurred to these people that they are to the right of the facts?
They™ keep saying stuff about,
Dump Trump you’re stuck with Pence.
Why not get rid of Pence first?
or
Wikipedia has a list of 18 people in line for the throne. Start at the bottom and work up.
Re: colors
I don’t really agree with the philosophy behind saying purple isn’t a real color, just because no single wavelength produces a purple sensation. For one thing, this is contradicted by your subsequent point that there are indeed wavelengths that produce a purple sensation.
But what I really wanted to say, is that in the computer screen representation of the rainbow spectrum, only one frequency of blue is represented, and any perception of purple comes from the fact that the image has some red at that end of the spectrum. I’m curious what leads cameras to put that red there. Do cameras have something like our eyes, where the red value of a pixel actually increases around 400 nm?
Eeek! I was relying on WordPress notifications to tell me when comments popped up here, and I just got my first in a few months when Siggy popped by. Looks like I have some catching up to do.
In the meantime, here’s a dancing baby.
Siggy @114:
We also consider “the data follows a Gaussian distribution with a mean of 0” and “the data follows a Gaussian distribution with a non-zero mean” as two distinct hypotheses, even though they differ only by their parameters. Frequentism also does this sort of fitting, too: after the null hypothesis has been vanquished, it’s usually replaced by a new one that’s fitted to the data. It’s still a post-hoc parameter fit that’s converted into a hypothesis that’s used pre-hoc, hence abduction.
colinday @115:
SR is a simplification of GR that only works when there’s no gravity or acceleration. While it may be possible for the speed of light to vary in GR …
… I think that’s due to spacetime curvature distorting motion, rather than anything intrinsic to GR exclusively. On Earth’s surface and over short durations of time, SR’s behavior is close enough to GR’s that a violation of one is almost certainly a violation of the other.
Owlmirror @116:
Ah, Sean Carroll. Been a fan of his for a while, especially his bit on why there’s no afterlife or psychic ability. I can’t find an exact link to the version I first saw, but this one will give you the gist.
Wild, I had no idea he’s started a podcast too.
chiagu @119:
That’s not implausible. Pence’s explanation of the Mike Flynn affair doesn’t make sense, as he was the head of the Trump transition team, and he owes his current role to the hard work of Paul Manafort. As far as I know, though, nobody’s done a deep dive on Pence to gather the necessary evidence. And the human desire to “move on” from a scandal implies that we’ll be slow to look for said evidence once Pence is in power.
Siggy @120:
Nope, at least the vast majority of the time. CCD/CMOS-based digital cameras, the most common nowadays, rely on the photoelectric effect to count photons. So long as it’s above a certain wavelength, that photon will kick off an electron within the pixel and generate a charge. While the speed of the electron is related to the wavelength, cameras only measure voltage differences so they’re effectively colour-blind.
The most common way to add colour back in is to pop a Bayer filter in front of the sensor, to filter out certain wavelengths for certain pixels. There’s no reason that couldn’t have a similar response curve, but there’s plenty of reason not to: in short, we stink at colour perception. I bet you had no idea nearly all digital cameras tossed out two-thirds of the colour information they receive!
All our brain cares about is the relative activity of those three types of cones. Whether that stimulation comes from three single-wavelength lasers or the bizarre spectrum of LCD monitors is irrelevant. Camera manufacturers could theoretically slap any three distinct colours into their Bayer filters and reconstruct a decent image (in practice, some choices are more efficient than others). There’s little need to worry about the exact shape of the response curve, so some ridiculous curves exist in digital cameras.
The secret sauce actually comes from the math. Measure your spectral response accurately, then launder your inputs through a colour appearance model, and that little uptic of red will sort itself out.
Ridiculously complex, indeed.
Ah, but sensation and colour aren’t the same thing. See that dress, these strawberries, and dozens of other colour optical illusions. You could argue I’m being pedantic or sloppy with my terminology, though.
Also, on an unrelated note: I think I’m shadow-banned from r/SamHarris? I can’t imagine why.
Are you treating Likert data as interval? Is the difference between 6 and 7 the same as the difference between 7 and 8?
Also, doesn’t blind taste-testing ignore the ambiance of the two establishments?
colinday @128:
A proper Likert scale is an interval between two extremes. You do make a good point about the linearity of these scales, and the answer seems to be “maybe not, but researchers are lazy.”
There’s also problems with single-item scales, which tend to be noisy, as well as scales without anchors. Compressed audio tests, for instance, have always had an uncompressed reference to compare against, but recently they’ve started adding horribly compressed versions so that both ends of the scale are firmly anchored. The methodology of the second experiment is passable, but if I were truly serious I’d ask each subject to do multiple tests of each coffee and add some anchors.
Now I’m having flashbacks to the Pepsi Challenge. Long story short, you’re bang on to suggest that ambience and branding play a far greater role in coffee enjoyment than the physical coffee itself.
Re: Don’t Do This, Skeptics
1. Brynn Tannehill is most definitely trans; see her bio at the Huffington Post:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/brynn-tannehill
http://www.brynntannehill.com/about/
2. (I’m assuming you (HJ Hornbeck) are cis.) As a trans person, I always appreciate it when cis people come to our defense. I’m personally very, very fortunate and privileged that my entire environment is and has been supportive of me being who I am and me being trans. (Unlike my childhood, which was almost entirely hostile to me being whatever it was I was.)
Allison @130:
Shoot, I looked at that second link but somehow missed the line about when she began transitioning. I’ve updated the blog post.
Correct, and in fact I had no idea gender dysphoria existed for quite some time. Fortunately, a few trans acquaintances helped educate me, so I consider this one way I can return the favour.
And good dog, was Dr. Hall’s article awful. I’m starting to suspect I was too kind on her, that she’s genuinely transphobic instead of misguided. :O
The hell?! I could have sworn I hit “Update” on the Dr. Hall blog post. Instead, it looks like those promised revisions were auto-saved. I’ve corrected that, and there was some weird issues with one of the blockquotes.
I’m travelling, so I’ll be brief.
You are mischaracterizing Sokal. Sokal was fully aware of the nonsense expressed by famous physicists like Bohr; in fact he quoted them in his hoax paper. Any modern physicist reviewer would easily see past the celebrity and recognize it as nonsense. There was also lots of nonsense math, biology, and chemistry—as in, I could recognize them despite not having background in those subjects.
Siggy @133:
Sokal himself states the “fundamental silliness of my article” is “the dubiousness of its central thesis and of the ‘reasoning’ adduced to support it.” But if smart people with sharp reasoning skills thought the central thesis was sound, that deflates Sokal’s entire hoax. I’m reminded of this apocryphal quote:
Aristotle’s view of gravity is laughable to us, but to Aristotle it was the best fit for the available data; his theory is not absurd, merely wrong. Bohr, Heisenburg, and many other physicists of that day fall into the same category.
Sokal submitted to Social Text, though. That’s not a physics journal, nor even an interdisciplinary one. Digitally flipping through the front matter of the edition with Sokal’s essay, I see a list dominated by professors in sociology and cultural studies but sprinkled with biologists, an ecologist, and a historian. In 2018, “Social Text seeks provocative interviews and challenging articles,” and that seems to have extended back to when Sokal submitted his paper.
I find it hard to fault them for trusting a professor of physics to get basic physics correct, and instead focusing on the sociology side of the paper. I wouldn’t expect them to have physicists on-hand to do peer review, and for the prior reason I wouldn’t expect the editors to seek those reviewers out.
There seems to be two camps over Sokal’s paper: Sokal claims it was an obvious hoax because “any competent physicist or mathematician” would spot the flaws in the math and physics, while the editors of Social Text thought the sociological side had some merit. These aren’t mutually exclusive.
Having said that, I don’t think the editors of Social Text were blameless. Here’s the blurb for the edition of Social Text where Sokal’s paper was published:
The editors claimed Sokal’s article was “perhaps of sufficient interest to readers if published in the company of related articles.” By their own criteria, they shouldn’t have published Sokal’s article in that edition.
On the whole, though, I still think the only thing Sokal demonstrated was that people trust physicists to understand physics.
@HJ,
But you’re talking about smart people in the early 20th century, and so what? If it would have fooled Aristotle, would you argue that it was acceptable for a modern journal to be fooled too? I think you’re underrating quite how much nonsense is in Sokal’s paper. It is, as Sokal claims, detectable by a good undergraduate physics or math major. That it would have gone undetected by Bohr or Heisenberg is questionable, and also irrelevant.
Oh, I totally agree. Also, The Social Text wasn’t a peer-reviewed journal at all. The mere fact that the paper was published is not really that meaningful IMO. Sokal has also agreed on this point, being very modest about the implications of his hoax.
Here’s what makes me more positive on the Sokal hoax. As you know, one of the criticisms of Boghossian et al. is that instead of spending time trying to write bad papers, they could have spent time directly criticizing the literature they think is so bad. Well, that’s what Sokal did. Some of the nonsense in the Sokal paper is quoted directly from the literature. When The Social Text received a manuscript from a professional physicist, it makes sense that they would trust the physics claims contained therein. But what’s the excuse for trusting the physics claims made by critical theorists?
Incidentally, this reflects my own complaints about gender studies. I read gender studies papers about asexuality, and sometimes they can be good. But there are some really bad ones that just blindly apply Foucault/Freud/etc., putting little effort into actually listening to what asexuals say. Similarly, the critical theory that focused on science criticism probably has some reasonable stuff, but there’s also some really bad stuff that seems uninterested in or hostile to the idea of listening to scientists.
I think the main thing wrong with the Sokal hoax is that it has drawn too much attention to the hoax part. Getting nonsense into a journal by abusing trust is showy, but ultimately not that meaningful. Imitators who think it’s enough to repeat just the hoax are missing the point.
BTW when I say “critical theory” that’s the current term for the field that was the target of Sokal’s critique. In the context of the Sokal affair, people often say that the target of critique was postmodernism, but that’s not right because “postmodernism” is a hopelessly vague term, even worse than “grievance studies”.
Siggy @135:
You’re transposing space and time a bit there. It was perfectly reasonable for Aristotle to think the Earth was the centre of the universe, because all the knowledge he had on hand was compatible with that. Likewise, those early quantum physicists were struggling to understand the implications of what they’d discovered, without much understanding of psychology or human physiology, so their woo-y pronouncements were also reasonable given the information they had on hand. The same reasoning applies to Social Text; being snookered by a paper with bad physics and mathematics is understandable, if none of the editors had an understanding of those comparable to an undergrad physicist.
That wasn’t Sokal’s main goal with his paper, but I can concede that point. If you’re going to rely on another field’s findings to shore up your arguments, you have an ethical responsibility to make sure you understand their subject matter sufficiently. Most journals aren’t likely to have the depth of peer review necessary to double-check your understanding, unless they are specifically interdisciplinary, so they’re relying more on trust. I could grant a minor exception, though: if you treat the other field’s findings as metaphorical and merely draw on concepts instead of the specific mechanisms, some level of misunderstanding is OK.
This is what I find maddening about Sokal’s approach. I’ve been burned by “hard” scientists misquoting and misunderstanding research done by the “soft” sciences, to the point that I want to be able to read the original. Had Sokal done his paper the conventional way, by citing works then openly critiquing them, I’d have that. By going the hoax route, he’s made it almost impossible to check his work.
I can sign on to that, too.
I think “grievance studies” is a heckuva lot more vague than “postmodernism.” Then again, I’m the sort of person who thinks “social inquiry aimed at decreasing domination and increasing freedom in all their forms” is a good idea, so take me with a grain of salt.
If you want a laugh, I recommend grabbing Boghossian’s paper on the incompatibility of critical thinking and constructivism. I think it’s rather illuminating, in light of his current venture.
He’s written a lot of additional articles and at least one book about it, but then I have no interest in reading them. The hoax paper functions as a condensed version, which just quotes a bunch of wrong stuff without explaining what’s wrong with it. I thought it was funny, but I can’t say it’s great for general audiences. There’s a reason why lots of people have heard of the hoax but few people know the content of the hoax.
I agree with your explanation of postmodernism. Postmodernism is an artistic/cultural/intellectual shift that means completely different things in different contexts. Sokal was critiquing postmodernism specifically as it is understood within critical theory… I think. It’s not really that clear.
For over a decade, I’ve been hearing atheists/skeptics hating on some particular set of ideas that they labeled as “postmodernism”, which completely mismatched the understanding of postmodernism that you’d get from any standard source. It took me a long time to realize that this idea of postmodernism was a garbled understanding of a particular academic field, and the name of that field was not “postmodernism” but “critical theory”. The funny thing is, I don’t think skeptics would recognize real postmodern critical theory if it were right in front of them. Exhibit A: Avital Ronell was a critical theorist, and in all the discussion about her I saw not one person make the connection.
Oh, but I came here to comment on your new post Y U Do Dis?
I do not believe for a second that Lindsay actually worked 90 hours a week. In fact, I find the claim really ugly, because it plays into the academic culture of bragging about obscene work hours (partly by gross exaggeration, and partly by self-destructive behavior). 90 hours is way on the high end of the bragging range too. I *hate* people who say they work 90 hours a week, doesn’t matter if they’re lying, doesn’t matter if their work is good or bad.
And speaking of poorly defined terms, how about that other one, “constructivism”? Going by Wikipedia’s disambiguation page it also means a lot of different things in different contexts. At some point earlier you gave the definition that’s used in education, but I think that was incorrect because PL&B are talking about social constructivism–more specifically, “radical” or “extreme” social constructivism. Sokal complains about the same thing.
Problem is that “radical” is a bit of a weasel word. How radical is “radical”? The gender studies that I’ve read isn’t really that radical in its constructivism IMO, but then maybe I’m just a radical too.
Siggy @139:
They’re using an archaic definition of “radical” here, hence the confusion.
You can also think of the radical in “radical constructivism” the same way, a declaration that they’ve hit the true “root.” I treat the “radical” part as more aspirational than factual.
One reason why I marked Boghossian as the main driver of this latest hoax is because he’s been beaking off about constructivism since 2006.
His main target is the educational branch, though I can’t find much difference between it and the epistemological one. Nor can Boghossian.
Take good care of yourself.
Thanks! I’m still not where I’d like to be, but I have improved greatly in the past month or so. Hope the holidays treated you good.
When the first few haters showed up on the Emma Thompson thread I checked OB’s blog and indeed the very same photos of transgender women athletes were on posts on the first page. No surprises.
The Christchurch shooter is an Australian.
chigau @144:
Ack! My bad, I’ve edited the post and credited you. I didn’t insert a link pointing out the guy’s nationality, because I didn’t find one that also mentioned his name.
There’s something darkly comic about an immigrant committing mass murder because he was worried about immigrants committing mass murder. :/
anat @143:
Agreed. She’s quite hypocritical on that point, too; Benson loves using photos of transgender athletes to prove they’re unworthy of competing against women, but when a transgender athlete uses a photo to point out how shallow it is to rely on looks? She “may have gone a step too far.”
I’m actually angry at my past self at this point. When I was defending Benson, my very first line was “If Benson made a habit of linking to TERF materials, even though she knew where they came from and had plenty of alternatives, I wouldn’t be so quick to defend her.” Four months later, her behavior should have made it damn obvious she was a TERF, even if I had no evidence she was explicitly linking to TERF materials. And yet I waffled on calling her out on it.
Her recent behaviour makes it impossible to call her anything less than a full-on raging TERF. I mean, Dr. Rachel McKinnon posts reams of evidence to Twitter about transgender athletes, yet Benson only links to this tweet? That’s strong evidence Benson is deliberately being selective with the evidence and promoting hatred.
I didn’t find one that didn’t mention his name. Me grammar good!
While we’re on the topic, here’s more for the “Ophelia Benson is a TERF” pile.
Per your “Ugh, Not Again” post, do you know of a good textbook on Bayesian statistics?
colinday @148:
I’m largely self-taught, so I’m not too knowledgeable on that. 😛 My main sources were Jamie Bernstein, Jake VanderPlas, and just grinding through a few examples myself.
Having said that, I read through most of Think Bayes, and found it very easy to understand. I’ve only gotten through the first few chapters of E.T. Jaynes’ Probability Theory, but it left quite an impression on me. I haven’t read Bayesian Methods for Hackers, but I’ve heard good things and quick skim seems to confirm that. I’ve heard similar good vibes about Doing Bayesian Data Analysis and Statistical Rethinking. Think Bayes and Bayesian Methods for Hackers are both available online for free, so they make good starting points.
@ HJ Hornbeck
#149
These seem interesting, but I’m not sure they would be suitable for first-year college students having no assumed awareness of programming.
Hmmm. Bayesian statistics and computing tend to be comorbid because the former tends to be computationally heavy. Frequentist statistics was invented to solve that problem, in fact.
Still, Bayesian statistics predates the electronic computer, so there’s no strict need to tie the two together. Jaynes’s Probability Theory doesn’t rely on computers at all, though it’s heavy on the theory side. Arbital’s Guide to Bayes’ Rule is lighter and avoids any programming. I’ve gone through the main path and been impressed by it, plus on the bottom of the page are a tonne of secondary resources that add to the basics. If you’d still like to stick on the theory side of things, de Finetti’s Foresight seems to be gentler than Jaynes’ tome, though I’ve only skimmed it. Savage’s Foundations of Statistics is apparently highly cited?
Alberta makes me sad.
But I think the United Conservatives will disintegrate.
OMG, just stumbled in here. Is this a never-ending thread? Is it supposed to be secret? Must I now be terminated with extreme prejudice?
While I’m here…
Hj @123:
You can deal with acceleration in SR as well as you can deal with it in classical mechanics. See here.
In GR, c is a local speed limit. In an expanding universe, the speed between comoving frames of reference certainly can exceed c, but calling that “varying speed of light” is misleading.
Also, the FTL neutrino thing was sorted in 2012. They’re not FTL. Loose fibre optic cable fucked things up.
chigau @153:
I hope that’s the case, but I can’t see how in the short term. The Wild Rose party billed itself as more right-leaning than the old centre-Right Conservatives, capturing the sizable “social conservative” vote and was a plausible electoral leader because of that. But the 2015 election taught both the Conservatives and Wild Rose that a split Right can lose.
Kenney, alas, is a far-Right leader who paints himself as a fiscal conservative, locking up both voter blocs. He has a fair bit of political experience, so he’ll also be effective at maintaining party discipline. The party leadership scandal might change that, but in general Canadian political parties do everything they can to bury those sorts of controversies.
I could easily see the UCP getting reelected in four years. I mean, we voted for Ralph Kleinafter we knew he was a mean alcoholic.
Rob Grigjanis @153:
‘Tis what the sign says!
I dunno, maybe when I stop writing papers I’ll put it on the white board, near the bottom.
Rob Grigjanis @154:
Bah, looks like I was lied to or didn’t get that memo.
I must have poorly phrased that previous comment, because I agree. If the speed of light “varies” in any sense, it can only be due to shifting physical constants that alter the speed that information travels. There’s no evidence for that, but also no known obstacle to it happening, so a little CYA is justified.
Should “women’s sport has see the collapse that Rationality Rules predicted”
read
“women’s sport has yet to see the collapse that Rationality Rules predicted”
?
I really find this “comment on the side in a thread that you can only find if you know it’s there” thing to be very offputting.
Fixed it, thanks!
That’s the point of it. As I put it in the OP, “This should keep the randos to a minimum, but without throwing out regulars too.” By raising the cost to comment, I get better and higher-quality comments. By keeping where to comment obscure, I reduce the number of comments and make them easier to moderate. This also changes the incentive structure, too; for instance, someone’s a lot more likely to post a transphobic comment under an article debunking a specific bit of transphobia than they are to post a transphobic comment to an obscure thread that’s one link removed, as the latter gets far fewer eyeballs.
I think it’s an interesting compromise between turning off comments entirely, and allowing them under every post.
Re: TERFS:
They should try visiting Washington state. Several years of transgender people using the bathrooms of their preference, only problems caused by transphobes attempting to protest the law. Offenders who hide in bathrooms don’t bother to claim anything about their identities.
Or Canada, for that matter. Jordan Peterson became famous by fear-mongering about Bill C-16, saying it would curtail free speech. Despite nothing like that coming to pass, he’s managed to do well for himself, in fact he’s piloting his own social media network that would shield people from unpopular opinions.
My university has been refurbishing washrooms to make them gender-neutral. Anarchy and violence has not ensued. It’s… it’s as if their fears were completely irrational and founded on falsehoods …
I’ve been a fan of the Godless Bitches for a few years now, and was really happy when I heard they were reviving their podcast. Alas, it’s gone for the second time. As best as I can piece together, it’s stopping because at least Tracie and Jen walked out of the ACA due to the organization’s semi-walk-back on Rationality Rules.
I’m astounded at the damage he’s done to the atheist/skeptic community. I’d like to say I’m also astounded that so few people are detailing that damage, but given the way RR’s fans swarm anyone who criticizes him, I can understand the reluctance of this community to speak out.
Now you’ve done it.
Honestly, I feel like I’ve barely started, and barely kept up with other people. Er I mean MWAHAHAHAHA!! MY PLANS TO DIVIDE THE ATHEIST/SKEPTIC MOVEMENT PROGRESSSsssss…
HJ Hornbeck : Thankyou for your efforts opposing transphobia on your blog and on FTB generally. Respect.
Thanks, StevoR! There aren’t enough transgender people around to enact change on their own, cis people need to step up to educate our peers. I’m just trying to do my part.
Yeesh, Matt Dillahunty is out of control.
FYI: I’ll be out of town for a bit, likely without internet access. Hopefully nothing breaks while I’m gone.
re: Texas Sharpshooter, you wrote:
The same can be said of teams. The British Football Premiership title is won by the team that earns the most points over a 38 game season. With no playoff system, it would be difficult or impossible for a mediocre team to win a championship.
But in certain team sports, one position can be a wildcard that throws a wrench into the whole system and negates any disparity in talent: goaltenders. Whether it’s hockey, lacrosse, football/soccer, handball or any other, a goalie who is “hot” can turn a terrible team into a contender or a champion.
Case in point, the 2018-2019 St. Louis Blues. The Blues were last in January with no hope at the playoffs, so they call up Jordan Binnington from the minors (their #4 goalie in their system) to give him a few games in the NHL. He wins, so they let him stay for a while. What was supposed to be one week trial turned into five months, from last to third in the standings, and a Stanley Cup championship at season’s end. I can name you a dozen times this has happened.
The Blues were far from the best team, but a near unbeatable goalie threw statistical probabilities out the window. It proved the old adage: you don’t win games on paper, you win them on the ice, court, and field.
Excellent point. I’ve mentioned Usain Bolt as a similar example. We simply don’t have a good grasp on how physiology impacts sporting performance, hence why we have to fall back on crude metrics like “who wins the most.”
While I’m here, a third line of evidence: we can’t predict when athletes will injure themselves. If we can’t tell when athletes push themselves too far, we can’t tell when they’ve pushed their bodies as far as they’ll go. So even if we knew the perfect physique for a sport, we wouldn’t be able to tell if an athlete has achieved it.
I recommend flipping to the end of that PDF and looking at the charts. The differences between injured and non-injured athletes are… remarkably small.
re: The Crisis of the Mediocre Man
Your item jogged my memory of this study by Northern Illinois University in 1996. Another later study (post-2000) that I can’t find showed the same results.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263752787_Comparing_Pilot-error_Accident_Rates_of_Male_and_Female_Airline_Pilots
Another follow up to the sports thing: “Who wins the most is best” is relative.
From 1950 until 1990, Formula 1 allowed drivers to choose their best results and calculate points, not their total results over the season. A consistent driver could lose a championship to a driver with a lot of wins and DNFs.
That’s exactly what happened in the 1988 F1 season: drivers selected their best eleven results out of sixteen races. Ayrton Senna won eight times and finished second three times, giving him 90 points, but scored only 4 points over the other five races, 94 in total. Alain Prost won AND finished second seven times each (plus two DNFs), but only 87 of his 105 points were counted. Senna was the champion, but who was the better driver?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Formula_One_World_Championship
I recently did a quick and dirty calculation of the 2018 NASCAR season. Using “best results”, champion Joey Logano (3 wins) would have finished fourth overall while fourth place Kyle Busch (8 wins) would have been champion. If you only have consistency *or* excellence, not both, which should be rewarded or deemed better?
—
Another case is the FIS skiing world championships (1967-present). There are five disciplines: slalom (S), giant slalom (GS), super giant slalom (SG), downhill (D) and alpine combined (S and D). Each has ten events over the season, the same opportunities to score points. Points are awarded for each event, and the champion for each discipline and overall champion are named. Skiers usually specialize, either the slower S and GS, or faster SG and D. There are few who are great at all five disciplines (e.g. Pirmin Zurbriggen).
In FIS history, about 75% of both women’s and men’s overall champions specialized in S and GS. It’s not because they’re better skiers, it’s because they crash less and are injured less. SG and D skiers crash at higher speeds (slalom 50-70kmh, downhill 110-120kmh) and suffer far more and worse injuries, giving them less chances to compete. Within their own disciplines, the best SG and D skiers are often repeat champions – even with all the injuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_FIS_Alpine_Ski_World_Cup_women's_champions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_FIS_Alpine_Ski_World_Cup_men's_champions
Interesting, I didn’t think anyone would have done the research on piloting ability by assigned sex. I’m not surprised at the outcome, piloting is all about abstract reasoning skills and if math scores are any judge there’s no sign of biological difference there.
Your links really cement the absurdity of Rationality Rules’ understanding of sports. I felt embarrassed to write Texas Sharpshooter, because the conclusions seemed so obvious beforehand. Who doesn’t think that athletic performance is complicated and difficult to judge? Who would be so dense as to think the human body is not merely a machine, but a simple machine with easy to measure attributes? Alas, I now know of one person who legitimately needs the basics spelled out in a painfully obvious manner.
On another topic, my apologies for evaporating away. It’s been a busy month for me, much more so than I anticipated, and I’ve had a lot of good distractions. I’m finally back to writing again, and cooking up something… “interesting,” let’s say. It looks like I’ll have to rewrite one of my drafts, too. Oh well, I think I see a new angle.
There’s no explanation of where the atheist crowd scene meme comes from, which makes it look at first like something you’re posting. There are some other blockquotes whose provenance is also unclear.
Regarding Archie Bunker and related issues, I recently re-found this thesis (Caitlin Joline Brown, 2012), which cites the papers that you do, as well as many more:
Irony of Ironies?: ‘Meta-disparagement’ Humor and Its Impact on Prejudice.
Owlmirror @174:
I double-checked, and technically it’s all there. But my attribution is quite scattershot compared to my natural style, which itself isn’t all that clear. Maybe I should standardize on placing the link on the first few words of the quote, like I tend to do when mashing together multiple quotes?
Ooooo, thanks! One annoyance I’ve had when citing disparagement humour is that the field has largely reached a consensus, so most of the citations I dig up are at least a decade old. It’s easy for someone who doesn’t know that to dismiss the research as ancient and likely overruled by more recent work. A citation from 2012 is handy to have for that situation.
Yeah, that’s my longest post ever (I think?). But here’s a tip: read it twice anyway. There’s a good chance that you’ll miss subtle details like that Tweet of Oates about gender pronouns if you just do a single pass.
Actually, I think you’re misreading the joking around: What is being mocked is not Bayesian statistics, but Carrier’s use of it as frequently-repeated jargon and catchphrases.
While I admit I personally mistrust Carrier’s reasoning and judgement more as a result of this fiasco, I don’t think that there’s any problem with Bayesian statistics in and of itself. And anyone who does suggest that Bayesian statistics itself is a problem has enough flaws in their reasoning that I’m not sure that they can think clearly enough to learn anything at all about math.
All of which should not prevent you from doing a series on Bayesian statistics, of course!
Even if the mocking is directed at Carrier, he’s still the biggest cheerleader of Bayesian statistics in this community. It would be nice to have a second voice to turn to on that subject, if only for diversity’s sake.
Oh it certainly won’t. I’m also launching this thing because my first attempt feels out-dated. With a few more years of practice under my belt, I should do better on attempt number two.
Maybe the numbers are off because They™ notify the next-of-kin before They™ notify you.
The bit about The Nation vs The Colony reminded me of something I saw on Crookedtimber.
(corrected minor typo in original)
Oddly, when you search for the quote . . . you find that the text of that blog comment is more or less all Wilhoit wrote about it. But I suspect that the writings of others can be illuminated by that observation.
chigau @179:
That’s possible, though next-of-kin permission is only required to make the name public. These stats have no name attached and have been anonymized. That sort of permission usually comes within a day or two, as well, not ten days. My best guess is that the delay is because these deaths require an official coroner’s report, which has been expedited from the usual one-to-three months it takes for this province to complete an autopsy.
Owlmirror @180:
Reminds me a bit of this Innuendo Studios jam on conservatism, which makes much the same point: conservatism is about protecting hierarchies of power, where the deserving rule over the lesser.
Re: I’ve Never Understood This
Apart from that, it’s just such a bizarre comment. Like no one ever mentioned before that trans women need women’s spaces in exactly the same way as cis women? This is some surprising revelation? It hasn’t been explained 50,000 times before why it would be a violation of trans women’s rights and dignity to exclude them?
Just utterly absurd that someone who has blogged obsessively about trans people for six years and counting still hasn’t the faintest understanding of what a trans person is, or why they need equality.
P.S. People should totally follow Katy if they’re on twitter. She does a show called TERF Wars where she debunks TERFist nonsense, and another one called Trans-Atlantic Call-In Show (geddit?) where she (UK) and another trans woman (US) field callers’ enquiries about being trans. They have a standing challenge for “gender critical” people to call in for a “debate” and guess what — no takers. 🙁
A cis person will learn more about being trans from listening to one episode of Trans-Atlantic Call-In Show than the entire body of work TERFs have accumulated in 50 years. Which isn’t saying much. But seriously, if you’re cis, listen to an episode and see if you don’t learn heaps.
I can second that. I recently added Katy to my YouTube subscriptions, and I haven’t regretted the decision in the least. I see PZ is also a fan, as well.
Agreed. Bigotry is a helluva drug.
Re: Lies, Damn Lies, and Harriet Hall
This is a truly astonishing thing for Hall to say. I can only think she’s got some cartoon idea of what affirmative care is in her head.
All affirmative care means, is not trying to force an outcome. The old Zucker-style model was outcome based. The best outcome is a cis, or straight, kid. Being trans or gay was seen as a pathology to be cured. So Zucker and his contemporaries would have as their goal a straight, cis kid and try to compel them in that direction never mind the distress it caused to the kid. The belief was it would all be worth it to get the desired outcome. Only if all attempts to “cure” them failed would you accept they were unfixable.
Needless to say attitudes have changed.
Affirmative care means you don’t start with a preferred outcome in mind, all you focus on is the wellbeing of the patient. If they’re happier being trans, be trans. If they’re happier being gay, be gay. If they’re happier being cishet, be cishet. That’s all it means. In a nutshell it’s just “non-coercive” care.
So in that light Hall’s statement translates as, “I think putting the wellbeing of the patient first is a mistake and a dereliction of duty and should stop”! Like, wut?
This isn’t my personal opinion, for example in my own country the Australian Psychological Society states:
I’ll list those references in full. Sorry if my comment is too long, I just think it’s appropriate when criticising something from “Science-Based Medicine” to include the science:
A study by Jack Turban published in JAMAPsychiatry (JAMA is Journal of the American Medical Association) states in the introduction:
The study found that trans people exposed to ‘correctional’ or ‘reparative’ therapy, rather than affirmative care experienced greater psychological distress:
Again, sorry if my comment’s too long – I just want to make it clear the overwhelming scientific consensus supports affirmative care.
I could barely be more surprised if Hall had come out in support of homeopathy, her statement is that contrary to the known science.
Have you seen my blog posts? Long posts are welcome.
I’m in the same camp, and it really tarnishes her reputation. If she can both claim to be a medical expert, yet flagrantly ignore the medical consensus in this area, why should I trust that she isn’t doing similar things on other medical topics?
I’ll do you one better. Alberta is known as the Texas of Canada, the current government is a bunch of right-wing conspiracy-loving kooks, and yet the first bullet point of this document stamped with the Alberta government’s logo is this:
If even Alberta’s government recommends gender-affirming care, Hall and Shrier are wildly out of step with the science.
Re: A Good Start
Yikes! In my last two comments I had no idea Hall had history.
That goes to a link that goes to this: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/gender-dysphoria-in-children/
… which is from 2018 and even worse than Hall’s recent piece! She cites uncritically the absurd claim that conservatives prefer trans people to gay people and so… make them transition?
And she cites Paul McHugh (a deeply conservative Catholic who thinks homosexuality is a mental disorder) and Walt Heyer (again, an extreme religious conservative)!
Well that puts the recent piece into perspective. I honestly had no idea. What the hell is she doing writing for “Science-Based Medicine”?
That 2018 article is important context. While Hall could hide behind Shrier’s views for her 2021 article, she can’t make the same claim for that prior one. It’s one reason why I keep bringing that 2018 article up, as otherwise this looks like a one-time thing rather than a pattern of behaviour.
Re: Stay In Your Lane
Two pieces of information, neither original to me:
Joyce writes:
Many have pointed out that MacKenzie Scott, cisgender ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, gave $46 million specifically to LGBTQ organisations, many of them focussing on trans people – an amount which dwarfs the donations Joyce details. (Except for the imaginary $100 million that actually went to Human Rights Watch; not an LGBTQ organisation.) So why is that not mentioned? Doesn’t fit the narrative?
Christa Peterson, who is an expert on transphobic tropes, has traced the “Jewish billionaires” conspiracy theory of trans people to Jennifer Bilek. Many TERFs have distanced themselves from her because she is openly anti-Semitic, including Joyce who claims Bilek is not a source. Amusingly though Bilek herself disagrees!
Do you care about broken old links?
On https://freethoughtblogs.com/reprobate/2017/03/06/bbcs-transgender-kids-who-knows-best-p4-dirty-sexy-brains/
You have a reference to :
Devor, Holly. [How Many Sexes?: How Many Genders?-When Two are Not Enough] ( https://web.uvic.ca/~ahdevor/HowMany/HowMany.html ). 1996.
That link 404s.
The correct link is now:
https://onlineacademiccommunity.uvic.ca/ahdevor/how-many-sexes/
What is the proper way to deal with prior names when citing works? When Devor first wrote that, he may have been going by Holly, but his name is now Aaron H. — and that’s what the page states is the author. It does say “Last modified Sept., 2020”, for whatever that is worth.
I don’t think there’s a canonical solution. On FiveThirtyEight, Maggie Koerth-Baker is now just Maggie Koerth, while on Wikipedia she’s “formerly known as Maggie Koerth-Baker.” Overall, I side with the former approach; there’s usually enough outdated text scattered across the web to piece together person X is now person Y, plus it offers better protection for transgender people once that outdated text itself has rotted away.
Link rot is an issue I need to pay more attention to, if only because I tend to be citation-happy. In the meantime, I’m happy to update old pieces as I’m made aware of dead links, tacking on a correction notice at the bottom with proper credit given.
Any idea what is the cause of cisgender women’s increased endurance compared to cisgender men, given that estrogen reduces endurance?
I don’t think there’s enough evidence to conclude it does. The tool-tips point out the possibility of selection effects that could account for any endurance difference that shows up in the data. To my knowledge, nobody’s found a way to filter them out.
Mobile cremation units
I guess shipping cremains home is cheaper than shipping whole bodies.
Unless they’re using an alternative method of disposal…
Three months on, I’m a little dubious on the mobile cremation units. So far, there isn’t a lot of collaboration for them beyond the UK and Ukrainian press (though that’s not nothing, either), and given the Russian tendency towards mass graves, leaving bodies out in the open, and leaving their own dead behind, even if those cremation units exist they’re not a major player on the battlefield.
When I first saw photos, they reminded me of the Tim Hortons in Afghanistan.
Hello.
Can’t talk, typing up a blog post!
OK.
I never did Twitter. I couldn’t follow the conversations.
I never had an account, and didn’t feel compelled to create one, but it was one of my primary news sources. Oh well, there are always other options.
I have seen it suggested that you should not delete your Twitter account, but only shutter it (delete posts if you think you must, but either way make the whole thing unreadable). As the ZDNet article states, anyone can claim your Twitter handle after the term expires and data is deleted. If one’s account has been used for activism, and is known for doing so, then I am certain that trolls on the bigot side would love to take it over and use it to post bigotry.
Are you aware of the Nitter project? Basically, it uses backend APIs to read Twitter
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
What they claim:
For me, the main benefit is not needing Javascript enabled. My browser will hang if too many Twitter pages are open too long, I guess from Javascript resource hogging. It doesn’t do everything actual Twitter does (frex, alt tags for images), but for me that one big benefit outweighs everything else.
Also, an analysis of the Twitter Whistleblower report:
https://nitter.nl/avidhalaby/status/1602127460677844993
Even before Musk, Twitter had huge problems. Musk has done everything possible to make a bad situation much worse.
Happy New Year!
Happy New… wait, what day is it? Yeesh, I left this too long.
I do have good news, at least. This comment section is about to get a little busier.
uhoh
Yep. We’ll see what Monday brings…
FYI, many (all?) of the lonks are broken on this post https://freethoughtblogs.com/reprobate/2023/01/21/part-two-welcome-to-mastodon/
I have a basic question about Mastodon. What does it even mean to block an instance? When I think about blogs, there’s hardly a point to blocking a blog because that’s just the same as… not following the blog in the first place. Does Mastodon have some sort of communal feed of all non-blocked instances? Why would I ever read that?
Ah, the joys of Unicode. I removed the extra quotes and hand-checked all the links. All should be well.
Funnily enough, earlier today I blocked an instance for claiming they’ll never block any instance.
Right, blocking instances: I covered this back in part one, but picture what would happen if every WordPress blog talked to one another. You could build up a seamless network of blogs and commenters, where anyone could read any blog and comment on any blog. Alas, WordPress hands out blogs to anyone who asks nicely, so the bigots and trolls would run rampant and trash the place. It’d make a huge difference if you could block blog A and all the commenters who live on that blog from interacting with your blog.
That’s basically Mastodon’s approach. Federation is opt-out, which kinda stinks when yet another porny instance pops up or somebody sets up an LGBT hate site. So part of a mod’s job is to block the nasty stuff as it pops up. Conversely, failing to do that means exposing your users to bigotry. If they’re A-OK with that, they’re probably not the sort of users I’d like to hang around with.
Yep, there is something like a communal feed! I mentioned the federated feed in part two, and you can view FTO’s here. That link is general to most Mastodon instances, in fact; here’s mastodon.social’s federated feed, as proof. Compare the two, and you’ll see vast differences.
That’s because the federated feed is a sum of everyone’s home feed on that server, plus a bit extra. On FTO, add up the three active accounts at the moment and there’s maybe 150 different accounts we all follow. In contrast, mastodon.social has 138K active members as I type this, so its federated feed is a veritable firehose. Most people avoid this feed, but if you’re desperate for new people to follow it can be handy.
Thanks for the introduction to Mastodon!
I had problems reading the about page of freethought.online, though. The text is a very light grey and barely distinguishable from the background on this particular combination of OS (debian) and browser (some older Firefox fork, yeah I know it’s stupid, but I hate the current UI). It is fine on other systems I checked. Turns out it is not the color, but the font, being extremely light weight that the rasterizer reduces all stems to nearly white pixels on this low resolution display (probably even correctly for a suitably chosen definition of ‘correct’).
So the problem might be on my end and disabling the font download in the browser fixed it for me, but actually I think it’s problematic to push custom fonts to web browsers: in contrast to printing a document there are so many subtle and not so subtle differences in rasterizing technology used (OS version, rasterizer version, display) that there really is no meaningful control over the end result. Also typography is almost never relevant on the web. If it is using a prerendered image instead is probably a better choice.
Thank you for the detailed info on Mastodon – I have avoided Twitter for years, but you have convinced me to sign up. I am happy to contribute to server costs/admin time when the time comes.
username: eric_lamb
My FTB cred: Pateon for PZ and Oceanoxia. I am mostly a lurker rather than a commenter, but here is an old comment:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/oceanoxia/2022/01/13/examining-the-makeup-of-a-healthy-ecosystem-predators-can-help-with-climate-resilience/
Here is a new one:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/oceanoxia/2023/01/23/diversity-is-our-strength-planting-a-mixture-of-crops-can-benefit-the-surrounding-ecosystem/#comments
Cheers
Yeah, I’m repeating myself, but sometimes it’s worth underscoring a point.
Mastodon can go through explosive growth spurts, to the point that you can accidentally find yourself the administrator for 8,000 accounts. I’d rather not be in that situation, hence why FTO is invite-only.
Who should we invite? The bloggers of FtB are an obvious choice, but there aren’t many of us. So how about the commenters as well? Great idea, but we’ve got another problem: all these blogs are semi-autonomous. I have no idea if (say) the chigau of this comment section is the chigau of Pharyngula’s comment section. Mastodon does have a verification system, but it doesn’t work on websites with comment sections where anyone can drop a link.
Hence why I’m asking for a) a link to a comment from a year ago, b) a more recent comment. If those two chigau’s are one and the same, then if I hand this chigau a set of keywords for Pharyngula chigau to repeat the latter should have no problem repeating it. Or if Pharyngula chigau brags about and links to the Mastodon account I just handed to this chigau, that too seals the deal.
Great American Satan has graciously offered to help short-circuit the process, to some extent. He doesn’t need to do any fancy footwork to check if (say) the John Morales of his blog is the John Morales of his blog, and GAS has a direct line to me. So if a commenter over there in good standing wants an account, and they make a comment asking for an account, GAS forwards that info along and they get an account without any of this secret handshake nonsense.
Naturally, the same is true of any commenters to my comment section. This could lead to some awkwardness if Pharyngula’s chigau asks for an account after seeing Reprobate Spreadsheet’s chigau get one, but there’s a straightforward solution: “chigau” moves to “chigau_reprobate”, Pharyngula chigau gets “chigau_pharyngula”, and everyone carries on as before. If “chigau_reprobate” is worried about reputational damage (or just grumpy about losing the shorter handle), I type up a blog post without a comment section that links to “chigau_reprobate”‘s FTO profile, they add a link to said blog post in their profile, and they get a lovely green “verified” mark on their profile that they can wave at anyone who confuses them for mean ol’ nasty “chigau_pharyngula”.
Right, I think that straightens everything out. Oh right, and while we’re underscoring things: DO NOT POST YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS HERE. My administration panel will handle that for you, and if the one associated with your profile isn’t the one you want to use you can change it.
All clear? Good, then as you were.
Congrats, eric_lamb! I’ve just created an account for you, at the email address associated with your WordPress account. Within two days, I’d like to see comments on Oceanoxia with either of these two things present:
1. The words “rabbit,” “gasoline,” “depletes,” and “globule.” Order and capitalization don’t matter, and you can spread them across multiple comments.
2. A link to your Mastodon profile on FTO.
Failure to do one of those two things will lead to your FTO account being deactivated, and you’ll have to ask for another crack at the verification process. Don’t worry, the username will be reserved long enough for you to take that second crack at it.
nobgu @ 210:
Interesting, can you tell me more about the Firefox version? I’ve only tested the current look in Chrome, Safari, and a recent Firefox, but since I’m running Ubuntu there’s a decent chance I can install that fork. I don’t mind poking at the CSS a bit, but I really hope the change is minor. If it helps, this instance has sixteen different themes available to anyone with an account.
Oh I get that. Ironically, it’s why I felt fairly comfortable using a custom font: the font in question, Bitter, is a variable font from Google Fonts and thus should be pretty robust against those differences. I’ve got WOFF2, WOFF, and TTF/OTF variants stored, so older browsers get their pick. Plus it’s not too different from the default Mastodon font, Roboto, which itself is implemented as a custom font. Refusing to use the custom font isn’t going to break anything, as far as I know.
I should also mention I’ve got three Mastodon account requests in my approval queue. I’m keeping them there for the moment, because they didn’t follow the template I set out here, and that planter followed here. They are not commenters who’ve been around this blog for a year in good standing, and while they may be that on another FtB blog they haven’t provided the necessary deets to demonstrate it.
I’m not ignoring you three! Make another comment with the correct format, and that one will get out of the queue and land you an account on FTO. Oh, and if you’re completely new to FtB then also comment to let me know. I’ll release that from the approval queue, and we can count it a a first step to the one year requirement.
Hi, trying again.
username: slatham
Link to old post at Pharyngula:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/05/06/whats-the-harm-of-mission-drift/#comment-614855
Link to new post at Pharyngula: https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/01/24/freethoughtblogs-has-a-mastodon-server/comment-page-1/#comment-2165571
Ooooo, a decade-old comment! Great way to show off. 😀 Anyway slatham, you too have been given an account on FTO. Within two days, I’d like to see comments on Pharyngula with either of these two things present:
1. The words “poplars”, “unquote”, “effecting”, and “misplaces.” Order and capitalization don’t matter, and you can spread them across multiple comments.
2. A link to your Mastodon profile on FTO.
I recommend using the Infinite Thread, so it’s a lot easier for me to find your comment. Failure to do one of those two things will lead to your FTO account being deactivated, and you’ll have to ask for another crack at the verification process. Don’t worry, the username will be reserved long enough for you to take that second crack at it.
That still leaves two people in my approval queue, FYI.
Also, now that I have a bit of experience with this process I can add more clarity on how it works. You’ll actually get two emails when I add your account. The first is automatically generated by our instance itself, and contains a nice fancy post saying you’ve been invited, here’s an authorization link to click on. Alas, one thing it doesn’t contain is your password; for some bizarre reason, Mastodon spits that back at me, rather than do something more convenient like assuming the first person to use the token is authorized. So I have to manually send you that password from the email account I attached to our instance. I suppose one advantage of this system is that even if the first email gets flagged as spam, the second one might skate by.
Once both emails arrive, you can log into the instance if you wish. There isn’t a lot you can do, though, as your account is waiting for manual approval. You can change your password or set up two-factor authentication, or request an archive of the zero posts you’ve made, but that’s about it.
The verification part is fairly straightforward. I do regret not adding some line about commenting back here to say where those verification comments went, but unless your “home blog” is a high-traffic one like Pharyngula I should be able to find them without much effort. Besides, there’s an easy solution: if I can’t find it, I write a comment over here saying as such, you write a comment back saying “why didn’t you look here?”, and I go “ack, sorry!” and click the “approve” button on your account.
It might take me a day or two to get around to double-checking the verification, but that just grants you an extension and doesn’t jeopardize your chosen username. Does anyone want a comment over here stating you have been verified? Either way, you’ll get an email back once the button is pressed, welcoming you to the instance. Beyond that, it’s all the usual tasks you’d expect from a social media site. Set up your bio, tweak your privacy settings, change your password / add two-factor, explore the preferences page, set up auto-deletion, and so on.
I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.
But there is only one of me.
@214
It’s a locally built http://palemoon.org
I think it is stem darkening, but playing around with FREETYPE_PROPERTIES wasn’t successful. The Bitter font is so light that I need maximum zoom to get 1 pixel wide black lines on this 1920×1080 pixel wide display. Chrome on windows displays it at all zoom levels with fully black stems on a display with the same resolution.
Right, time to check in on who’s been verified.
Oh wait, I can’t find verification comments for either eric_lamb nor slatham. Too bad, you’re now at the bottom of the verification queue, which is currently… er, zero people long. So, uh, you’re also at the top of the verification queue. 😀
I know I know, it all seems a bit silly. But open up a private browsing window, head over to a post on Oceanoxia, and scroll to the bottom. Drayton allows people to post without logging in, provided they’ve handed over a name and email address. This makes impersonating another commenter trivially easy, hence the need for a verification comment. And I don’t think it’s a tall order to ask someone with a history of commenting on blogs to make a comment on a blog of their choosing.
Hi HJ,
Happy New Year(s)!
This isn’t a request for a mastodon account (though anyone can find some of my comments upthread as proof of longevity); as you’d be aware I’m already happily settled at the mastodon.lol instance (as you noted in the recent Part One thread it’s a place which a significant number of your readers would find convivial). I did however want to post a comment to the Part Three thread, but it seems that almost all of your recent posts have comments disabled. So I’ve bounced around the site quite a few times over recent days looking for a thread with an open comment section, and this is only the second one I found – and as this is an ‘open’ thread, it made more sense to comment here rather than on a chapter of ‘Proof of God’ from 2017!
Is there some reason commenting is discouraged on so many threads, and that almost all of them fail to advertise where comments can be posted, or is it just a puzzle you enjoyed leaving for your readers to solve (or be vexed by)?
LOL, I have now read the above post which dispels my confusion! I had forgotten the rule for this blog in the intervening six years. (And the link to this thread isn’t in the sidebar any longer, while to be even more tricksy, nor do recent comments appear listed under “recent comments”!)
Technically this thread is linked to on every page of my blog via the header, but most people don’t connect comment sections to communities. I hadn’t realized the “recent comments” thing was broken, either. Weird.
no it’s not
Re: Men invading women’s restrooms to make a point: During the two years that conservatives were trying to run Initiatives to overturn equal restroom access in Washington state the only problems were caused by masculine-presenting signature gatherers deliberately entering women’s restrooms, insisting that if the women inside wanted them out they should sign their petition. It did not work. Both Initiatives failed to gather enough signatures to get on the ballot. Meanwhile men entering women’s restrooms under false pretenses or to cause harm with no pretenses at all are already breaking Washington law and can be prosecuted on that basis.
Reminds me of the protest where two TERFs joined a men’s-only swimming night. The idea that men and women could safely co-mingle was so absurd to these people, that they expected merely showing up would freak people out and cause some heavy reflection. In reality, bathroom bills accomplish nothing beyond legitimizing bigotry.
Ack, I never followed up on nobgu’s issue! My bad.
I did indeed fire up a VM and install Pale Moon, and was able to duplicate the ugly font you were talking about. I browsed to Google Fonts, though, and found the same ugly font issue popping up. I did a bit of searching on the forums, and it appears to be a known issue with Google’s variable fonts. A CSS override to another font should fix the issue.
I am tracking a package on Canada Post, using their “Virtual Assistant”. I received this in response to a query about the current location of my package:
I am terrified that the robots are going to take over.
See that’s the thing, large language models have gotten good enough that it’s very difficult to tell between a verbose human and a trained AI.
If I’m able to interact, I can usually ferret out if the other side is one of these LLMs. For a one-off message, though? I don’t think I could tell.
I thought it was trying to pull a Schrodinger’s Parcel gag.
Ooo, that makes sense! If the parcel has a momentum with precise bounds, Quantum Mechanics states that its position must have imprecise bounds. Since you know when the parcel will arrive, the distance and time are fixed and thus the momentum is fixed as well. Ergo, Canada Post must have no idea where it is at any given time! 😀
Now I have a parcel with an expected delivery of “1 to 11 business days” for the fourth day in a row.
Re your latest: Trans Eliminationist Radical Feminism
OB must surely be aware that Keen has declared any woman who supports trans rights (which of course is most of them) will be “annihilated”.
“Posie Parker says women who stand in her way will be ‘annihilated'”
https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/02/04/posie-parker-trans-women-annihilated/
There is no way to see Keen as anything other than a hard right extremist.
The music festival next door has their bass turned up to 12 or 15.
It is vibrating my windows on the 30th floor.
chigau @233:
Nice, now we know exactly where it is: not there!
Silentbob @234:
That’s one thing I find fascinating about OB’s discussion of Keen. I’ve typed before that she focuses on anger and outrage instead of looking into what’s causing either. She followed the same pattern with Keen, focusing exclusively on a handful of people who were counter-protesting and either lashed out (which automatically discredited every transgender person) or were beaten up (which required discrediting the accusations). Keen is astonishingly absent, a ghost floating around the background of her own story. OB’s last mention of Keen was in April, when OB was outraged a counter-protestor who got physical had their name protected via publication ban, and even then her name only comes up obliquely. As far as I can tell, OB has said nothing of Keen since.
OB quite plainly used Keen’s demonstrations to fuel her outrage, and carefully edited out Keen’s actual views to make her more palatable to newcomers. It’s a masterful demonstration of how to do propaganda.
chigau @235:
For my part, I’m surprised the concert put their subs thirty floors off the ground. Those poor concert goers must have felt cheated.
Hj #236
I got me parcel yesterday. I really cannot fathom how that works in the quantumn realm.
.
This is a 10-day long music festival.
https://www.badlandsmusicfest.com/
I’ve never really understood it but it seems popular and the city bends over backwards to accommodate it.
This year I have noise-cancelling head phones.
It is the last night.
So rather than experiencing bass and drum from some song I cannot identify, I am listening to In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.
I have just reached the drum solo.
@ 236 Hj Hornbeck
Meanwhile…
Two Cisgender People Were Killed in Separate Attacks Motivated by Transphobia | them.
https://www.them.us/story/two-cisgender-people-killed-in-transphobic-attacks/amp/
Ireland: Woman robbed and beaten by man who thought she was trans
https://metro.co.uk/2023/05/25/ireland-woman-robbed-and-beaten-by-man-who-thought-she-was-trans-18840850/amp/
chigau @ 238:
I know those feels, my home town hosts a massive party every summer and they’re not quiet about it. The busses and trains fill up with occasionally drunk costumed folk, fireworks are set up, and in a few sections of the city they blast music all night.
Silentbob @ 239:
I’m nowhere near the first to point out that discrimination against trans people results in increased discrimination against cis people. This can be done directly via bans of gender-affirming care (puberty blockers were invented for cis people, for instance), or done indirectly by demonizing people’s appearance:
“Entirely predictable,” indeed.
Robbie Robertson died.
so did Jimmy Buffett
Today I found out that Tom Laughlin (AKA Billy Jack) was in the movie version of South Pacific.
Should I have another wee dram or should I go to bed?
Hmmmm…. I’d say bed.
too late
What about tonight?
Lessie. it’s just before New Years, and you’ll likely want alcohol that day. Drinking two nights in a row is probably a bad idea, so I’ll again say “bed.”
“…two nights in a row…
oh you sweet summer child
Happy New Year!
Happy New Year, as well! My goodness, it’s common for people to drink more than one night in a row? I must be out of touch.
The only times I have NOT had a drink with dinner or a drink after dinner, every day, is when I am on antibiotics.
Oh no, I AM out of touch! Sorry, I never got into that alcohol stuff despite the rave reviews I’ve heard. It all just tastes like paint thinner to me.
I’ve never tasted paint thinner.
; – )
[ https://freethoughtblogs.com/reprobate/2023/07/29/richard-dawkins-discontinuous-mind/ ]
I’ve been thinking about writing an essay titled “An Open Letter to Gender and Sex Essentialists, Including, Embarrassingly, Richard Dawkins”.
Anyway, I realize that, as you point out, Dawkins was being inconsistent and contradicting himself from one paragraph to the next in his essay, but I also wanted to copy-paste some paragraphs from “The Ancestor’s Tale”; specifically the chapter called “The Salamander’s Tale”
. . . skipping forward a bit (and there’s more that could be quoted from what I’m skipping) . . .
Incidentally, one of your references (Saunders, Paul A., and Frédéric Veyrunes. “Unusual mammalian sex determination systems: a cabinet of curiosities.” Genes 12.11 (2021): 1770.) has, as its own first reference, Beukeboom & Perrin: The Evolution of Sex Determination. It turns out I have access to this book via my library. I noticed that there was a link to a companion website, which has some free downloads relating to the book (a chapter, references, and posters of the sex determination systems of many branches of the tree of life, and a second such poster just for insects.
https://global.oup.com/booksites/content/9780199657148/
In case you might find that interesting.
I do! I’ve added the book to my citation manager, and I think my academic access allows me to download the full book in PDF form. I’ll file that one away for later.