I seem to have a Thing of throwing off-hand jokes that later are validated surprisingly well by empirical data, and this time it’s “as queer as a women’s college”
Because I’m screwing around in the diaspora survey results for fun and wow this fits all the unlikely but totally true stereotypes
like, right now I’m googling the statistics on lesbianity and transgenderism in Mount Holyoke because holy shit our hardest core might actually give them a run for their money in queerness
So, the results are in, and…
yes.
I used this data and the four big clusters with useful results (0, 1, 3 and 6) turned out pretty remarkable.
Cluster 0 seems relatively unremarkable; its most distinctive characteristic was skipping the cultural questions and all in all less active answering
6 is roughly identical to 0 in other questions; it has some slight exposure to the culture but seems to be mostly made of “regular people” who somehow ended up on the survey, and by “regular” I mean “still pretty niche but not thoroughly corrupted”; almost half had read Ender’s Game and a third are regulars of SSC and that’s about it. I’m calling the two of them the “ordinarys”
Cluster 3 I’m naming “rationalist-adjacent” because they share a lot of characteristics but aren’t neck deep in the memeplex unlike…
Cluster 1 which is obviously “yudkowskians” because they are basically walking stereotypes
And by stereotypes I mean things like:
Half the women are trans (8% to 9% and most of the enbies (9% in total) are amab as well); r-adjacents have relatively low numbers of trans women but the same amount of enbies, and a quarter is afab instead of 12% of the yudkowskians. But both have more women than the ordinarys, and yudkowskians’ trans team is very strong and makes a valiant effort in closing the gender gap even if the r-adjacents seize a narrow victory in the numbers game.
More people are poly than mono, and heterosexuals are only barely a majority (59% while 29% are bi; the rationalist-adjacents are very close too with 62% and 23% while the ordinarys have 76-78% and 12-14%; homosexuality is relatively constant at 3-5%)
9% of both the yudkowskians and r-adjacents are asexual, compared to 5% of the ordinarys
Half of them work with computers and nobody is going to believe those alleged IQ scores never ever (146, compared to a consistent 136-138 for the rest); they are also the most likely to have only a high school degree while the other groups (especially r-adjacents) beat them in the other education categories
Agnosticism is hilariously unpopular (3% compared to 11-16% for the rest) and they are extremely jewish
Basically everyone reads SSC, and they are the biggest readers of everything else on the list as well (except Xenosystems, where the r-adjacents take the first place in regulars and sometimes-readers)
The closer one is to the hard core of the memeplex, the less conservative (by a significant amount) and the more libertarian (to some degree but not as massively) one is, but neither of them can hold a candle to the massive correlation between exposure to Yudkowsky’s writings and being a trans woman (can’t bother to do the calculations but the connection is absurdly strong)
So this data basically says that the archetypical rationalist is:
21-25 years old
jewish
trans woman (probably kind of non-binary-ish on some level, but transitioning with hormones)
polyamorous
gray-asexual
bisexual
an absurdly gifted child with the specific kind of badbrains which is varyingly diagnosed as autism, ADHD, anxiety, depression, or most likely some combination of them
studies computer science
politically left-libertarian
geeks out on all kinds of weird nerd stuff
has read all of: Three Worlds Collide, HPMoR, The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant
a regular SSC reader
to calculate your “how stereotypical rationalist am I” score: 1 point for fully matching each, ½ points for getting close; mine is 10/12
I seem to have a Thing of throwing off-hand jokes that later are validated surprisingly well by empirical data, and this time it’s “as queer as a women’s college”
Because I’m screwing around in the diaspora survey results for fun and wow this fits all the unlikely but totally true stereotypes
like, right now I’m googling the statistics on lesbianity and transgenderism in Mount Holyoke because holy shit our hardest core might actually give them a run for their money in queerness
It’s sort of funny how, contra the anti-capitalists, the two sectors that are currently threatening to eat up the economy are healthcare and higher education, both of which are heavily regulated, and primarily administered by non-profit organizations.
I too would like to tax these sectors, reduce their subsidies, and redirect the savings towards a basic income program.
I love how politically unworkable this plan is
I note that university professors and health insurance administrators are not on that graph :)
…or we could just privatize-mutualize them, deregulate heavily, withdraw government funding (except maybe replace healthcare with the Singaporean system), put ~all the moneys~ in UBI, and let the free market eat the rentseekers…
Fun fact: the public sector in the US is exactly the same size as it is in Finland when ignoring military (and bigger when guns are accounted for; the US is just richer so the public sector appears smaller), so the idea of abolishing all public services and transfers and programs and corporate welfares and other things and replacing them with a $15k UBI for everyone (or split into a $6k UBI and $9k service voucher for children, for things like school, daycare etc.; the public school system of Finland costs that much and is famous so we already know one can afford quality schooling for that price) would technically be completely possible. Without a single cent in new taxes.
Homelessness? Lolnope, that extra $15k is enough to pay rent almost everywhere.
Poor families? A single parent of three would get $33k and not be penalized at all for working, while any childcare costing less than $9k a year would be effectively free (and with proper deregulation, it could be done; all it takes is for a bunch of parents to pool together so that one person takes care of four children to earn a respectable income from it)
Rural poverty? With this massive cash injection the demand for services would skyrocket and create jobs. Actual jobs, not bullshit make-work.
And speaking of bullshit jobs, yeah, they’d be going away. Nobody entitled to this UBI would willingly subject themselves to the inhumane treatment some employers are able to demand.
Jobs getting outsourced? Still have that UBI which is enough to give one, when supplemented with some earned income (remember the absurdly low marginal tax rates because this wouldn’t need new taxes and thus the pretty much absolute abolition of incentive traps), quite a degree of freedom in creating meaning in one’s life.
And because this would be revenue-neutral, one could replace the current tax system with a universal flat consumption tax of quite a reasonable size (and by “reasonable” I mean “low”), combined with a land-value tax to fix cities, and a revenue-neutral carbon tax to fix global warming (or one could privatize-mutualize the atmosphere for the same results; privatizing-mutualizing aquifers and other such commons is a pretty obvious source of extra income as well)
Combine this with ending the war on drugs and not starting any new wars on anything, abolishing the NSA and banning the state from ever again having one, and opening the borders completely but only gradually phasing in the UBI for immigrants and you have my policy platform for the 2020 presidential race.
now if you don’t mind I need to have all the freaking drinks and take all the drugs because as rational economic actors I’d suspect about 200 million americans would directly benefit from this plan and by “rational economic actors” I mean “haha never going to happen”
but it totally could, without a single extra cent in taxes; that’s why I shall have to intoxicate myself thoroughly
This all sounds like pure goodness. (although states always have and always will have and need spies. Abolish the NSA and you’ll need something else to take its place)
There’s spies, and then there’s massive invasions of everyone’s privacy, creeping on every goddamn thing everywhere, spying everything, etc.; whatever takes the place of the NSA would require far less rights and mandates to do its actual job effectively.
It’s sort of funny how, contra the anti-capitalists, the two sectors that are currently threatening to eat up the economy are healthcare and higher education, both of which are heavily regulated, and primarily administered by non-profit organizations.
I too would like to tax these sectors, reduce their subsidies, and redirect the savings towards a basic income program.
I love how politically unworkable this plan is
I note that university professors and health insurance administrators are not on that graph :)
…or we could just privatize-mutualize them, deregulate heavily, withdraw government funding (except maybe replace healthcare with the Singaporean system), put ~all the moneys~ in UBI, and let the free market eat the rentseekers…
Fun fact: the public sector in the US is exactly the same size as it is in Finland when ignoring military (and bigger when guns are accounted for; the US is just richer so the public sector appears smaller), so the idea of abolishing all public services and transfers and programs and corporate welfares and other things and replacing them with a $15k UBI for everyone (or split into a $6k UBI and $9k service voucher for children, for things like school, daycare etc.; the public school system of Finland costs that much and is famous so we already know one can afford quality schooling for that price) would technically be completely possible. Without a single cent in new taxes.
Homelessness? Lolnope, that extra $15k is enough to pay rent almost everywhere.
Poor families? A single parent of three would get $33k and not be penalized at all for working, while any childcare costing less than $9k a year would be effectively free (and with proper deregulation, it could be done; all it takes is for a bunch of parents to pool together so that one person takes care of four children to earn a respectable income from it)
Rural poverty? With this massive cash injection the demand for services would skyrocket and create jobs. Actual jobs, not bullshit make-work.
And speaking of bullshit jobs, yeah, they’d be going away. Nobody entitled to this UBI would willingly subject themselves to the inhumane treatment some employers are able to demand.
Jobs getting outsourced? Still have that UBI which is enough to give one, when supplemented with some earned income (remember the absurdly low marginal tax rates because this wouldn’t need new taxes and thus the pretty much absolute abolition of incentive traps), quite a degree of freedom in creating meaning in one’s life.
And because this would be revenue-neutral, one could replace the current tax system with a universal flat consumption tax of quite a reasonable size (and by “reasonable” I mean “low”), combined with a land-value tax to fix cities, and a revenue-neutral carbon tax to fix global warming (or one could privatize-mutualize the atmosphere for the same results; privatizing-mutualizing aquifers and other such commons is a pretty obvious source of extra income as well)
Combine this with ending the war on drugs and not starting any new wars on anything, abolishing the NSA and banning the state from ever again having one, and opening the borders completely but only gradually phasing in the UBI for immigrants and you have my policy platform for the 2020 presidential race.
now if you don’t mind I need to have all the freaking drinks and take all the drugs because as rational economic actors I’d suspect about 200 million americans would directly benefit from this plan and by “rational economic actors” I mean “haha never going to happen”
but it totally could, without a single extra cent in taxes; that’s why I shall have to intoxicate myself thoroughly
So uh…guess who didn’t register the most obvious domain name, so Chuck Tingle helpfully stepped up and did so for them, with a series of helpful links on the side along with the picture of a dude with no shirt?
#chuck tingle#the hero we need (via @minimcalibre)
Oh hey other people are doing this general type of thing :D
@socialjusticemunchkin, did you coin the phrase “dogma of mandatory comprehensibility” for your NAB review, or does it have some earlier provenance, in your writing or somewhere else? It’s a phrase that captures something that has frustrated me about deconstructionist (and similar) criticism in the past, and it’d be nice to be able to use it without referring people back to this particular kerfuffle.
Specifically, the frustration I have is that in order to identify “holes” in a text, places where a text “undermines itself,” or the like, it seems to me like you first need to ask the usual questions like “does this make more sense in historical context?” or “does it work to read this as meant ironically?” I.e. the kinds of questions you usually find non-deconstructionist critics asking when confronted with aspects of a text that confuse them.
And it would be fine if any given deconstructionist had asked the usual questions and simply found the answers wanting, but in the cases I’ve read, they often don’t. The (unintended?) implication is then that “if it doesn’t make immediate sense to a late-20th or early-21st century college professor, it doesn’t make sense.” When, you know, that college professor’s viewpoint is not only not omniscient, but (more specifically) conditioned by the public morals and idea systems of their society in ways which they may not be aware of, since that’s how such things tend to go. (I wonder if Foucault ever got on the deconstructionists’ case about this?)
(Note: I have a rule of not talking about NAB, but this post doesn’t count as talking about NAB by my standards)
As far as I know it’s my OC, and fresh to this particular incident.
The basic idea has been bugging me longer though, tying to the more general pattern I’ve observed of people yelling about things because they don’t realize they don’t speak the same language and thus assume that an expression in rationalist!english means what the same words mean in liberalartist!english, give a reasonable response to their misconception in liberalartist!english and speakers of rationalist!english are like “lol wtf are these guys talking about”, and in the end both sides hate each other for the horrible sin of speaking the Wrong Dialect.
(And the general pattern kind of applies in a lot of uncharitable readings; most snarky nitpicking would lose its effect if one were to read things in the writer’s dialect instead of one’s own; and no matter how much fun said snarky nitpicking is, it’s not at all fair. (Yes, I sometimes do it myself too, feel free to yell at me if you catch me doing it unless I’m clearly aiming for a non-serious&honest approach.))
Thanks for the fast response.
IMO, “liberal arts” is not a very useful term here. In modern usage it tends to refer to types of education which in some way hark back to the old quadrivium/trivium and the notion of a “broad education” they represented. The quadrivium/trivium had no “humanities as opposed to STEM” focus – you can sort of break it down (imprecisely and misleadingly) as “trivium is (premodern) humanities, quadrivium is (premodern) STEM,” but logic is one-third of the trivium, so if you count that as “premodern STEM” you’ve got 5 of 7 “premodern STEM” subjects.
(The quadrivium included music, because this was thought of as the study of “number in time,” to go along with arithmetic (number), geometry (number in space), and astronomy (number in space and time, i.e. something like physics).)
Hardly anyone actually uses the original trivium/quadrivium anymore, but modern “liberal arts education” tends to aim for the same breadth. For instance, at the “liberal arts college” I attended (where I got a physics degree), all students were required to take at least two classes in each of four “groups,” one of which was natural science (and there was nothing like “physics for poets” – everyone had to take the same intro science classes that the science majors were taking, which were taught with appropriate rigor), and one of which was something like “syntactic systems” (it included math, symbolic logic, foreign language courses excluding those classed as “literature courses,” and linguistics).
(Also, the “liberal arts college” as a a subtype of American colleges has a bunch of other characteristics, like being expensive, having small class sizes, and holding many classics as Socratic-ish discussions rather than lectures. None of these have much to do with the distinction I think you’re drawing.)
“Humanities” I think is a term that works strictly better than “liberal arts” here, because in the modern university it tends to mean stuff that isn’t “natural science” or “social science,” e.g. literature and history. Still, even this is way too broad, since the “dialect” of a history department, say, will be different from that of a literature department, and even literature departments with different focuses will have different “dialects.” (There’s been a fair amount of friction involved in the attempt to bring things like deconstruction into the discipline of classics, which tends to be old-school about most things, including literary analysis.)
What I think you’re pinpointing is something like “the most commonly used intellectual dialect in modern university literature departments, excluding classics.” Although that isn’t a very snappy phrase. “Talking like an English major,” although crude-sounding, is actually pretty close, but is likely to make you sound like don’t know whereof you speak (cf. the reaction to @theungrumpablegrinch‘s review of NAB). I’d love to find a phrase here that is readily and mutually intelligible.
Okay, the concept I’ve been trying to translate has been, in my brain, defined by a Finnish word which basically means “not STEM” and I was embarrassingly unfamiliar with the word ‘humanities’. That specific dialect is a subtype of it, but there seems to be a general pattern of “humanist” vs. “mechanist” language and thinking which this dialect, the postmodernist “reality don’t real” meme, the “scientists are soulless, understanding destroys wonder” meme, the idea that science has difficulties modeling fluid dynamics because our systems of knowledge are founded on patriarchal rigidity [sic], etc. are extreme edge cases of.
The thing isn’t limited to English as eg. gender studies tends to feature the same thing to some degree as well; whatever the fuck CrimethInc. is its “Eight Reasons Why Capitalists Want to Sell You Deodorant” is exactly that thing(“Body smells are erotic and sexual. Capitalists don’t like that because they are impotent and opposed to all manifestations of sensuality and sexuality. Sexually awakened people are potentially dangerous to capitalists and their rigid, asexual system.”); the analytic/continental divide in philosophy is also partially about that thing; I’ve seen many humanities people comment on issues of science with an embarrassing unawareness of the actual mechanisms of how things operate (because the broader version of the dogma of mandatory comprehensibility lets them believe things are way simpler than they actually are (and it obviously operates in reverse too with naive STEM people on humanities questions causing enough facepalms to extract all the world’s cooking oil needs from)); the people who stop treating others as humans if they say the word “rational” are that thing; etc.
(And similarly the “mechanist” edge case would be the stereotypical weakman “soulless” engineer who thinks emotions don’t matter and Spock is something to emulate instead of an embarrassing failure of a humanist attempt to cargo-cult rationality, identifies as Objective Rational Thinker™, uses models derived from physics to explain all human behavior and forgets that they are crude simplifications at best, etc…)
Hello Rationalist Tumblr™, I’m here via @aprilwitching, and I just wanted to jump in with a little linguistics. I believe the “dialects” you’re describing would be considered “registers” in linguistic jargon. Jargon is also a very useful word for this type of discussion. I think basically what happens in the types of conflicts you’re describing here is that both parties coming from different academic backgrounds believe they are speaking in “academic register” but in fact there is no one unified academic register, there are many registers specific to the academic background in question, and therefore both parties believe they’re speaking the same register and don’t question the applicability of their jargon. You can see some evidence for this when those same people speak to a non-academic person about the same subjects in a non-academic, casual register; they’re far more likely to either avoid jargon, or clearly define their jargon, because they know the other party doesn’t speak Academic Register. If they only applied the same idea to discussions across academic backgrounds, they’d be set!
And also, this conflict definitely happens within STEM to a massive degree, as there is a ton of jargon in, say, biochemistry that a physics person isn’t likely to know. Or in Ornithology that an Ichthyologist won’t know. And I constantly find myself trying to explain taxonomic and evolutionary jargon to computer programmers (without much luck).
I don’t have as much experience with cross-humanities register conflicts, but I’m aware that they happen, especially between specific fields that examine the same phenomena from radically different angles. The intersections of Linguistics with Anthropology and Psychology, Cultural vs. Evolutionary Anthropology, and Sociology with Psychology appear to be particularly rich examples. There are an increasing number of weird Frankenstein Specialties emerging as a direct result of frustration at the lack of effective cross-specialty communication, too, like Neuroanthropology.
Okay, this register thing is definitely a part of it, but I think another part is about the Rules of the Game.
Specifically, whether one manipulates the symbols people use to refer to underlying phenomena, or focuses on the phenomena themselves.
Both ‘bad postmodernists’ and 'straw rationalists’ use the rules of symbols as The Rules, thus the kind of “I found a contradiction in this philosophy according to English grammar, therefore it’s pwned” and “your emotions are illogical because I can’t construct a consistent boolean table of them” [uncharitable description omitted], while the steel versions don’t do embarrassing things like claim “there can’t be infinite growth on a finite planet” as if it were an actual argument (it’s rhetoric, and its value as rhetoric can be debated, but the argument operates on the superficial symbol-level contradiction of 'finite’ and 'infinite’ which the actual underlying phenomena don’t map perfectly to, thus rendering the symbol-level relatively irrelevant (symbol-level contradictions may point to something that might need investigating, but it’s perfectly fair to conclude that the only problem is in the symbols themselves)).
So from this perspective the Mandatory Comprehensibility boils down to “I expect this to follow the rules of the symbols I’m used to”. At least it matches very well with this:
And it would be fine if any given deconstructionist had asked the usual questions and simply found the answers wanting, but in the cases I’ve read, they often don’t. The (unintended?) implication is then that “if it doesn’t make immediate sense to a late-20th or early-21st century college professor, it doesn’t make sense.” When, you know, that college professor’s viewpoint is not only not omniscient, but (more specifically) conditioned by the public morals and idea systems of their society in ways which they may not be aware of, since that’s how such things tend to go.
First: #support your local supervillain is the evil tag, not to be taken 100% seriously. It’s Dark promethea, the side of myself that is best left as online ranting to relieve a frustration on the universe otherwise sufficient to cause so much facepalm to sprout forth as to destroy all the remaining rainforests in Southeast Asia to make room for the plantations necessary to hold them in.
Second: if one has to deathnote a national-level politician to deliver a message to the rest, one would obviously choose the most useless, the most harmful, the most dangerous, and the most anti-humanity politicians one can find. And as it happens, while I do not actually condone deathnoting politicians (although I acknowledge that this view might be subject to inevitable reconsideration were I to acquire such an artifact, which is why it’s probably good that such artifacts most likely don’t actually exist), but if one were to, I don’t think one would have to think too hard and long on which guys to sacrifice. I’m from Europe, we have really terrible politicians around here, and they are literally killing people through their really terrible policies.
injygo said: So you’ve got a little list?
I had, but both Osama Bin Laden and Muammar Gaddafi are dead now, and I still am not in possession of a Death Note.
I know of Open Office. It is free and several versions better than it was during my failed attempt to use it (back in 2010 when I could not for the life of me get it to display wordcount. May have been a failure on my part). It is probably good for most of your word processing needs.
Can my followers recommend any others, or offer a better perspective on Open Office?
Google Docs
Use LibreOffice rather than Open Office. Politics happened, basically – it’s the same thing but continued development.
If you want a very lightweight thing that does, like, the basic Word 97 stuff and maybe a few more cool tricks, look up AbiWord.
Pandoc+LaTeX is Definitely Not A Word Processor, but for certain people it can be more convenient than one, so I’d suggest spending a minute on the Pandoc website and seeing if it looks good.
Somebody tell my brain the answer is not “customized vim setup” for most people…
IMO, an idea that should be more widely spread – not even widely assented to, necessarily, just talked about, possibly as a “controversial thing” – is that contrarianism is often the result of anxiety
More precisely, not contrarianism but “I know what you’re thinking, but – what if this consensus idea were actually wrong?”-ism
In stereotype land, the psychology behind this behavior is either a desire to annoy people from a place of presumed intellectual superiority, or just an interest in intellectual game-playing for its own sake. But in my experience, I find myself wanting to question consensuses because the alternative feels scary. If no one really knows why the thing is true and everyone just believes it because other people believe it in a self-confirming web, then what happens when it turns out to be wrong?
The anxiety, in particular, makes this weigh on me in particular even though, as just described, it would be a society-wide failure. I tend to (irrationally) feel like other people can rely on “what seems sensible” without much risk, possibly due (says the anxiety) to some mystical intuitive faculty that aligns their sense of “what seems sensible” with actual truth – but if I try to do that, I end up ruining everything, and then everyone’s looking at me in horror and pain and asking what the hell I thought I was doing, and I’m thinking “well it seemed sensible at the time” but that is not enough, not for me, no, for me only rock-solid nerdy professorial foundations will work, not because I want to be an intellectual, but because I want to not ruin everything
(This almost never actually happens, and when it does it doesn’t happen with anything like the high drama in the previous paragraph, but it feels like it is a danger I must ever be on watch for)
And when I look around me – taking into account of course that I may be projecting my own motivations onto others (I must include nerdy caveats like that one, some people might know how to get by without them but I don’t, you see how it is) – well, it looks to me like a lot of the “contrarians” and “fans of weird ideas” out there have anxiety disorders. And this makes sense.
Rejecting common knowledge and laboriously replacing it with a nerdy fiddly ground-up programme that either ends up rediscovering the obvious or “absurdly” negating it – this can be intellectual pretentiousness, or a desire to be special, or just poor judgment of how to usefully spend one’s time and energy. But it can also be what you do because you “know” that if your foundations aren’t rock-solid, they’re going to blow up in your face and also the faces of loved ones and innocent bystanders, even if this never happens to anyone else
If you don’t go back and check whether the oven is on, it’s going to turn out that it was on, because this is how your life works. If you don’t neurotically plan out your schedules and your schedules-within-schedules and make checklists and proceed in life one carefully regimented step at a time, you are going to make some mistake so stupid that it lies outside of the realm of ordinarily conceivable human behavior, and it will be so embarrassing that you will be cast out from society and gainful employment forever, because this is how your life works.
If you don’t worry over the coherence of your epistemology and your ethics and the reliability of every source you read and the myriad potential for error even in the work of the great scholars and thinkers who have shaped the received wisdom of educated people and the established (established? by whom?) fact that received wisdom in every prior society has contained vast errors and licensed vast injustices and in sum the ever-present possibility that everyone else could just be getting some basic thing (any basic thing) wrong and failing to see reality for what it is,
it is interesting to frame this as “an anxiety disorder” because previously I had framed it as “everyone else is INSANE and SOMEHOW MANAGES TO NOT FREAK OUT ABOUT THE UNRELIABILITY OF ALL KNOWLEDGE because as previously mentioned they are INSANE”
