On the “Sokal Squared” hoax by Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose – Three authors submitted 20 hoax papers 48 times to “grievance studies” journals, and 7 of them were accepted.  I am so unimpressed, for reasons discussed in many locations.  I’m choosing to highlight this particular take, because it shows the dishonesty of Boghossian et al., who have made very misleading statements about the content of the papers, which papers were accepted or rejected, and about how friendly the peer reviewers were.  Usually peer reviewers will be polite and say a few positive things, even as they demolish and reject a paper; they’re supposed to.  I’m not on board with this crusade to make peer reviewers more hostile.

Ozy also has a post detailing several of the papers that were accepted.

Note that I myself have been critical of papers in gender studies (which I occasionally read in my role as an ace activist).  The “Sokal Squared” hoax does not come anywhere close to identifying any of the problems I would identify, it just muddies the waters.

YouTube: Manufacturing Authenticity (for fun and profit!) (video) – Lindsay Ellis talks about the desire for authenticity in content creators, and how this creates emotional labor for them, similar to how workers at Disneyland are required to maintain a friendly affect as part of their job.

Although there’s an obvious analogy to be made between blogging and vlogging, I feel like blogging really isn’t the same because one’s personality doesn’t come across quite so clearly, and often it isn’t expected to.  And the giants among blogs tend to serve as news sources, not as expressions of personality.  But perhaps there are some big shot bloggers who feel otherwise.

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Let me start this link roundup with a couple of plugs.  First, I was interviewed by Asexual Artists, an awesome website that has lots of interviews of ace artists.  Second, in case you missed it, I published a two-part article talking about the history of asexuality in early radical feminism.

In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You – This is an old essay explaining how we might create a planned economy using math, and all the reasons why it would be so difficult.  This post was brought to my attention by Larry, who has a reply.  Larry says that to the extent this problem is intractable for socialism, it is also intractable for capitalism.  The difference between the two isn’t necessarily how the economy is computed, it’s the goal that they’re trying to achieve.

It seems like the best way to approach the problem is to break the economy down into more manageable pieces–each of which could be centrally planned–and have just a few inputs/outputs being passed between the different pieces.  This is basically what capitalism does, with individual firms being centrally planned, and inputs/outputs being passed between firms in the form of prices.  But in principle there could be other solutions, perhaps solutions that are computationally similar, but different in execution.  For example, Russian economists came up with the idea of “shadow prices” which help calculate resource allocation, but which don’t involve money actually being passed around–I have no idea if this particular idea works, but it’s a thought.

I think of myself as a socialist who lacks imagination, so I mostly complain about the current system while advocating for a familiar market-based economy with lots of redistribution.  YMMV on whether that counts as socialism.

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In Bob We Trust – On “Nannette” and the state of comedy (video) – Hannah Gadsby has a comedy special available on Netflix, which I saw recommended several times by different people.  But this video is the one that finally persuaded me to watch it, because Bob described it as an anti-comedy.  Well, I hate stand-up comedy, and I like deconstruction, so if there was ever a comedy special that I’d want to watch, this sounded like the one.

I thought it was good, but calling it an anti-comedy might be a bit of an exaggeration.  I thought there were plenty of jokes and laughs.  Perhaps someone who actually likes stand-up comedy might feel the number of laughs per minute is a bit low, but I just can’t see it that way myself.

On Laziness – Ozy talks about the concept of laziness, and why it’s a terrible idea.  When people lack motivation, there must be a reason for that, and calling it laziness is a way of halting any inquiry into the causes, and unhelpfully turning it into a moral issue.  Nonetheless, laziness is still a compelling concept that I probably use with some frequency myself.  I think some parallels could be drawn with the way that “stupid” is used as an insult.  We know that there’s nothing morally wrong with having less cognitive ability, and yet “stupid” is still a compelling insult that people have difficulty avoiding even when they understand it’s wrong.

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The Lifespan of a Lie – Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment is one of the most famous experiments in psychology.  I knew it was questionable in methodology and ethics, but this exposé gathers all the details in a more shocking picture than I had imagined.  Zimbardo is a crook.  He repeatedly lied about key aspects of his experiment, persuaded subjects to also lie after the fact.  And when other researchers failed to replicate, he accused them of being frauds.  It is a disgrace that people in psychology still respect him.

I know that people still like to cite the Stanford Prison Experiment, because it “proves” something they already know to be true, but have you tried instead just… making assertions without proof, because at least then we’re honest?

The World’s Highest Paid Musicians vs Average Salaries – This is an infographic showing how long it takes for popular music artists to earn as much as people with other jobs make in a year.  It’s based on a Forbes list.  That just makes me think of when I asked my brother how much money he made being a rock star (although “star” is rather overstating it), and the answer was basically nothing.  So, this is your reminder that capitalism doesn’t produce anything remotely resembling “fair”.

What’s interesting to me, is that this is easily explainable.  I honestly don’t understand why CEOs get paid so much–it kinda seems like companies just overvalue CEOs, or there are principal-agent problems–but it’s easy to see why top artists get paid so much.  The popularity of music follows a power law distribution, so artist’s salaries follow that too.  I think it would be an interesting exercise to think up a more utopian system of art monetization.

Do algorithms reveal sexual orientation or just expose our stereotypes? – I’ve always found “gaydar” research to be disappointing, because it’s fixated on what you can determine from facial features alone.  In reality, when I can guess someone is queer, that’s based entirely on cultural markers.  So I would say “gaydar” research isn’t really about gaydars at all, and is about some loosely related concept that really ought to be given a different name.

This article I’m linking is a detailed critique of a “gaydar” study that built an AI that can purportedly guess people’s orientation from their faces.  The critique is that the AI is clearly basing its guesses on cultural markers and grooming habits.  And to me, the cultural differences are the more interesting ones.  I would not have guessed that same-sex attracted men in the US are more likely to wear glasses, or that they take selfies from higher angles.

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