Richard Dawkin’s Discontinuous Mind

I mostly agree with Dawkins on this:

Everywhere you look, smooth continua are gratuitously carved into discrete categories. Social scientists count how many people lie below “the poverty line”, as though there really were a boundary, instead of a continuum measured in real income. “Pro-life” and pro-choice advocates fret about the moment in embryology when personhood begins, instead of recognising the reality, which is a smooth ascent from zygotehood. An American might be called “black”, even if seven eighths of his ancestors were white. …

If the editor had challenged me to come up with examples where the discontinuous mind really does get it right, I’d have struggled. Tall vs short, fat vs thin, strong vs weak, fast vs slow, old vs young, drunk vs sober, safe vs unsafe, even guilty vs not guilty: these are the ends of continuous if not always bell-shaped distributions.

Imposing discrete boundaries on something which lacks them is quite dangerous, indeed. It’s also necessary to survive: imagine if I had to stop and consider whether or not a portion of a wall could be opened via the application of force, and where that force should be applied, instead of going “looks like a door with a twist handle, lemmie twist it to escape the fire behind me.” Some level of imposed boundaries are a must, otherwise words cannot exist, but it’s also important to remember these are abstractions imposed for convenience instead of fundamental features of the universe.

As a biologist, the only strongly discontinuous binary I can think of has weirdly become violently controversial. It is sex: male vs female. You can be cancelled, vilified, even physically threatened if you dare to suggest that an adult human must be either man or woman. But it is true; for once, the discontinuous mind is right.

…. Oooo-kay. Dawkins is claiming that biology has a discrete boundary, between the vast majority of the subject that lacks discrete boundaries, and one small portion (sex determination) which has discrete boundaries on a fundamental level. This smells heavily of special pleading. What makes sex determination distinct from the rest of biology? [Read more…]

FTO Update, May-June 2023

Important stuff first: FTO will be de-federating from universeodon no sooner than a week from now, and once Facebook/Meta announce more details about Threads/P92 we’ll be blocking them as well. As usual, here’s our financial situation:

Month Cost
November 2022 $26.06
December 2022 $8.73
January 2023 $4.75
February 2023 $0.19
March 2023 $0.00
April 2023 $0.00
May 2023 $0.00
June 2023 $0.00*

And here’s the requisite plug of FtB’s instance and instructions on how to join. I should also mention I added the phanpy UI to our instance. It comes with a lot of useful features, like a “boost carousel” and grouped notifications which make browsing a more pleasant experience. It also supports multiple accounts, none of which have to be on FTO. I’m a big fan. Phanpy has its downsides, but I want to save them for a future review of Mastodon clients.

In the meantime, let’s talk about some recent controversies on the Fediverse.

[Read more…]

FTO’s Bills, February-April 2023

Wait, what day is it?! Yeesh, I’ve been terrible about keeping all of you updated on the server. Hang on, let me tabulate the costs for February and everything since…

Month Cost
November 2022 $26.06
December 2022 $8.73
January 2023 $4.75
February 2023 $0.19
March 2023 $0.00
April 2023 $0.00
May 2023 $0.00*

Bwhahaha!! I love it when a plan comes together. One of the critical things we need keep this server going is funds, either through keeping our costs down, raising funds up, or some combination of both. Thanks to some careful setup by myself, the cost side of the ledger is hilariously healthy.

That’s not the only critical thing, however. No doubt you’ve encountered more than one “Mastodon is dying” article before this point, but if you look carefully they mostly date from February. How do things look in May?

[Read more…]

Part Three: Welcome to OUR Mastodon!

Are blogs dying off? The trend of setting up faux blogs to rig search results and/or soak in ad revenue suggests so. The rise of newer mediums, like video and social media, has also created powerful and more addictive alternatives that drain the life from blogging. However, it’s hard to keep a straight face during the eulogy when Substack and Medium are standing right there.

Over here at FtB HQ we’ve been hedging our bets, for instance with the YouTube channel we fired up a year ago. That wasn’t enough for me, so a few months ago I committed to the rather unoriginal idea of spinning up a Mastodon instance. After much tinkering with the innards and taking the thing for a few joyrides, I think it’s ready to go live. Hence, this post! [Read more…]