Disclosure in arguments

[cn: that’s disclosure as in disclosure of rape]

[This is not a response to anything I’ve seen recently.  In fact, it’s a repost of something I posted to Tumblr a while ago.]

I feel like I’ve seen a lot of arguments, where things escalate, and then one person says that they are a victim of rape.  It’s basically a way of saying that they speak with some authority on the topic of discussion.  And then the person on the other side says they, too, are a victim of rape.  And somehow this doesn’t magically clear up any disagreement or stop people from yelling at each other.

The sad fact is that rape is terribly common, especially among women, queer people, and POC, and especially intersections thereof.  In queer spaces, any given argument is relatively likely to be between two people who have each been victimized in some way.

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An activist perspective on gender studies

Another note on that “Sokal-style hoax” on gender studies (see my post, or School of Doubt)…

Although I will come to the defense of gender studies against the sorriest excuse for a hoax I have ever seen, I don’t like gender studies that much. I would never claim that the whole field is pathological–that is not in evidence. But I have read some gender studies papers, and have not been generally impressed with them.

Yes, I have, as a physicist, read gender studies papers. And I didn’t select papers by following right-wing news sources that intentionally cherry-pick the most ridiculous examples. No, I read gender studies papers as part of my work as an asexuality activist. Back in the day, my other blog hosted a journal club on academic asexual studies.  Asexual studies are very cross-disciplinary, including psychology, sociology, history, linguistics, law, and… gender studies!

The short version: Gender studies papers often say stuff that activists already know, or already know is wrong. I am not sure what advantage gender studies provides over, say, blogs.

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Origami: Tsuru Rose

Shown: a paper crane, but the back of the crane is a four-petaled rose

Tsuru Rose, or Rose Crane, by Satoshi Kamiya

Instructions for this model are freely available online, for instance see this video.

This is a neat model that combines ideas from traditional origami, and origami tessellations.  (I last talked about tessellations here.)  You start out by folding a “rose” right in the center of the paper.  The rose isn’t a tessellation, but I believe that in principle it could be turned into one if you repeated the rose infinitely.  But here we just have one rose.  Then we fold the rest of the crane around it.

By the way, there’s a trick to making those wings curve so smoothly.  I press the wing against a toothpick (the side, not the point).  Then I slide the toothpick along the wing several times until it curls.

Any ace writers?

I almost forgot to mention, my other blog The Asexual Agenda, is currently looking for contributors. We’re a group blog targeted at asexual-spectrum readers.

If that interests you even a little, please consider applying! There are details here, and the deadline is next Monday, June 5th. We don’t get that many applicants, so your chances are fairly decent.

How peer review works

Even if you’ve never been involved in scientific research, you’re probably aware that it involves a process called “peer review”. I want to take a minute to explain how this actually works. This is based on my personal experience, although I think much of it generalizes to other academic fields, including those outside of science.

1. Sending to referees

It starts with the submission of a manuscript to a journal. A lot of work has already gone into the manuscript, including input from collaborators and colleagues, but this is where peer review formally begins.

The journal assigns the manuscript to an editor, and then the editor chooses a few (usually 3) referees to look at the paper. Now, choosing referees can be quite difficult, because they need to be close enough to the field that they can understand and critique the manuscript. In fact, it’s common for referees to decline, because they think the manuscript is too far outside their field. And yet, referees can’t be so close that they’re direct competitors. Authors typically provide a list of competitors to the editor to avoid conflict of interest (or even worse, theft of ideas). But editors aren’t required to follow this advice, and authors never know because they don’t know the names of the referees.

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Paper: Attack of the psychometricians

Suppose that you want to demonstrate that baby boomers are more narcissistic than other generations, or that women are more agreeable and neurotic than men, or that people of different races have different amounts of intelligence. How do psychologists do that? Can they in fact do that?

Typically, the method is to come up with a bunch of questions that superficially appear to measure the intended characteristic. Then the questions are “validated”, for example, by making sure the questions all correlate with one another. Once the questionnaire is declared valid, psychologists can then measure a variety of different groups and make far-reaching claims about how our current political/social situation was caused all along by the thing that they happen to study.

If you find this methodology questionable, but aren’t sure exactly what went wrong, you might be interested in hearing about psychometrics, the field concerned with psychological measurement. According to psychometricians, part of the problem is that psychologists are failing to follow best practices. That is the subject of this paper:

Borsboom, D. (2006). The attack of the psychometricians. Psychometrika, 71(3), 425–440.

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Christian Doubt

This is a repost of an article from 2014. Usually I like to repost articles that are related to my recent topics, but this is unrelated and just for fun.

When I grew up in Catholicism, I was never taught to think that doubt was a bad thing.  In fact, doubt was a good thing, ennobling even.  Doubts were something that everyone experiences.  Why then, is it said that Christianity is all about faith, dogma, and purging all doubt?  Where does this image come from?

Let me tell you what happened next.  I started doubting Catholicism.  And even though I was never taught that doubting was bad, I knew that the particular way I was doing it was bad.

What I was doing was reading on some arguments against Catholic beliefs, comparing them to the arguments for it.  I knew that changing my mind on so many things all at once was impossible, so I considered each issue independently, one at a time.  I worried about the consequences of deciding one way or the other, but I tried not to let that affect my judgment.  Finally, I collected my many thoughts and tried to draw some overall conclusions on Catholicism and God.

In my mind, this is more or less the proper way to deal with doubt, so why did I know in my gut I was running afoul of some rule of my religious upbringing?  The truth is that doubt was accepted in the Catholicism I grew up in, but only if the doubt fit into a specific narrative.  Doubt was not an epistemological tool, but a personal struggle to be overcome.  This is a fundamentally negative depiction of doubt.

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