Gender Critical logic

Graham Linehan went fishing on ChatGPT to find someone who would agree with him. Unfortunately, not even a bullshit fountain would play his game.

Where is a person’s ‘gender identity’ located? is such a goddamn stupid question. What is he, a phrenologist? The brain is a big messy association engine — you feed it a simple little word, like “woman”, and stuff is going to be firing all over the cortex, with signals ping-ponging all over the place. There isn’t a tight little kernel for each concept that can be localized to one discrete spot.

Even a dumb mindless text generator like ChatGPT can’t find a way to answer that question, so it does its usual game of pulling up and splicing together snippets of information, failing to find any sense in it. So Linehan refines his question — usually good idea, but in this case more revealing of his own biases than anything constructive. How do we know we have a gender identity if we cannot locate it in the brain?

OK, Graham, how do you know where your car keys are, if you don’t know where the map is located in your brain? How do you know how old you are if you can’t find the perceptual clock in your cortex? Quick, tell me where the Irish accent is located — if you can’t give me a set of stereotaxic coordinates, then it doesn’t exist.

Don’t worry, he eventually found something to feed his sense of outrage.

This reminded me of a short ‘conversation’ I had on Twitter, where someone — a philosophy professor, no less — exposed how ignorant of logic he was.

1. The sexes–male and female–have been around since before Saturn had rings.

2. Societies have not.

3. If something predates societies, then it cannot be a social construct.

4. So, the sexes–male and female– cannot be social constructs.

Let’s take that apart.

1. I don’t know how old Saturn’s rings are — apparently, there’s a lot of uncertainty — but fine, this is a philosopher’s way of saying sex is really old. I’d agree, yeast have sexes, which is defined by a single mating type locus in the genome. So sex is at least as old as eukaryotes.

2. Now we are already getting on shaky ground. Define “societies”. Primates have cultures, patterns of behavior that are passed on by education and learning from generation to generation. We are plagued by the fuzziness of that “before Saturn had rings” nonsense, but to get around the difficulty of dealing with his even more poorly defined term of “societies”, I’ll agree, even though it might be that primate societies might be older than Saturn’s rings, we’ll have to wait for the astronomers to figure out. At least I can definitely agree that societies, broadly defined, are definitely younger than sexual reproduction and meiosis.

3. Kaboom, there’s the stupid leap of illogic. Sex evolves, it changes rapidly, and social definitions of sexual behavior change frenetically. We humans do not possess a single genetic locus that cleanly defines sex — we have piled on all these complexities and elaborations that are still essential parts of sex, and many of them are entirely cultural. We are more than MATa or MATα. The idea that men should have short hair and wear pants, while women should have long hair and wear dresses, is entirely a social construct. You cannot simply declare that because yeast have a specific sexual identity that can be localized to a single gene, that therefore everything about human males and human females must therefore be fixed and unaffected by fleeting social mores.

Sure, you can get me to agree in general with points 1 and 2, but with point 3 you’re suddenly endorsing the idea that Victorian ideas about sex and sex roles, for example, cannot possibly be social constructs because ancient eukaryotes could carry out meiosis. You think you’ve crafted an inescapable syllogism and have caught me, but really, you’re the one trapped.

4. False.

My conversation with Mr Bogardus did not last long, in particular because he was spectacularly dishonest for someone who teaches philosophy for a living. I told him a couple of times that my disagreement was with point #3, to which he would respond with ‘oh, so you don’t think #2 is true?’, which was infuriating. He didn’t care what I said, he had a logic trap he wanted to force me into, and any time I pointed out the hole in his reasoning, he’d try to invent a new conflict.

But then, that’s the way TERFs work: stupidity and lies are all they’ve got.

I went to a party last night

It has been a long, long time, and I don’t think my brain can process it. I was a quiet little lump all night, like usual, but the sensory overload of a half dozen conversations going on at once always leaves me dizzy. I also stayed up later than usual, and slept in until 7:30. So this is what sybaritic decadence feels like…

I had made a big pot of jambalaya for the party, using my usual method. Oh, this requires peppers? Chop up every pepper in the house and throw it in. Onions? Same approach. Add two teaspoons of Cajun spice…are you mad? Heaping tablespoons. That’s not much, so double it.Then the usual Law of Garlic, you can’t add too much. Cooked it all up with a pound of rice and some Impossible Sausage (so it’s still vegetarian). Don’t forget the red pepper flakes and cayenne!

It came out pretty well — good flavor, a little bit of a kick but still mostly acceptable to a room full of Minnesotans. Not too acceptable, I guess, because there were plenty of leftovers, but that’s OK. Guess what I’m having for breakfast this morning? It’s mighty fine, and it will wake a fellow up.

It better wake me up good, because I have an exam to grade, a problem set to assemble, one lecture to write and another to figure out what it’s talking about, spiders to feed and snuggle, and lots of dishes to do, both at home and in the lab. I’m home alone while Mary gets to frolic with a four-year-old, so it’s all on me.

Totally random, but I found this excellent summary of social media this morning.

Looks like you might have me to kick around for a while

This morning was my yearly checkup, and I’m afraid everything was normal. Cholesterol was down, blood pressure 120/70, not a hint of prostate cancer, probably going to live for a little while longer.

There was some funny business with my thyroid, so I have to go in next week for an ultrasound. Also I get to get another colonoscopy in the summer of 2024.

I’m home briefly, but I have to go teach a new class. Oh boy. And then I’m coming home again to cook for a potluck this evening.

Science apologizes

We all knew William Shockley was a disgusting racist, using bad biology to argue for bad goals, but he was the co-inventor of the transistor! He won a Nobel prize for his work in a field unrelated to biology! So while my friends and I were willingly calling him out as a fraud, a liar, and a racist while we were out for beers, all the major scientific publications were more mealy-mouthed and ingratiating, which was annoying. It was partly out of misplaced politeness, but also that a lot of the white male old guard were probably sympathetic to his ideas.

Maybe that’s changing. Science has published an editorial apologizing for their past indifference/support for Shockley, and promising to do better. They’re calling out the racists and phonies.

Shockley was part of a cadre of physicists who advanced ideas outside of their area of expertise to promote a right-wing agenda. He was a close friend of Frederick Seitz—president of both the National Academy of Sciences and Rockefeller University—who, following a career in physics, became a purveyor of misinformation on tobacco, nuclear weapons, and climate change. Like Shockley, Seitz carried out his nonphysics work through op-eds and conservative think tanks, not through the accepted mechanism of peer review that he used in doing physics. Seitz was not, at least publicly, as overtly in favor of eugenics as was Shockley, but he was a strong advocate for genetic determinism, even claiming at the behest of the cigarette industry that tobacco itself was not harmful because genetics determined whether smokers would ultimately contract lung cancer.

Sound familiar? There are many ‘scientists’ getting checks from right-wing think tanks right now, although most of them are now busy with careers in vaccine and climate change denialism. The words have changed but the song is much the same. Let’s see Science start calling out more of the living hucksters and propagandists for the far right. But for now, I’m reasonably happy with their apology for propping up a dead one.

Following Shockley’s death in 1989, Nature correctly called out his racism in an obituary, but then published a letter from Seitz defending Shockley and claiming that the reason Shockley became a eugenicist was because of physical trauma he experienced in a near-fatal car accident. When Science wrote about this dustup, it referred to Shockley’s ideas as merely “unpopular” and “extremely controversial.” It then ran a letter from an even more notorious eugenicist, J. Philippe Rushton, who argued that by merely covering the disagreement at Nature, Science was delivering an “ad hominem attack.” In addition to an ill-advised decision to publish Rushton’s letter, Science posted a response saying, “no criticism of Shockley was intended.” Yikes.
Looking back, it’s clear that what was intended as an attempt to make room for dissent and discussion only served to abet Shockley and his cohorts in their effort to build support for eugenics. Science gave them a platform and inadequate scorn. The lesson is that we at Science need to make more effort to think about everything that we do, not only from the standpoint of communicating science to the public, but also as an organization that above all, supports all of humanity. The process of science is one of continual revision, but it’s also one that must have a conscience.
It was only a few months ago, in a commentary on racism in science by Ebony Omotola McGee, that Shockley was described in our pages in the terms he deserved. But as recently as 2001, Science described him simply as a “transistor inventor and race theorist.” That won’t cut it anymore. As of today, a link to this editorial will appear along with any mention of Shockley in this journal.
Make no mistake. Shockley was a racist. Shockley was a eugenicist. That’s all.

That’s a pretty good apology: admitting the mistake, taking the blame for it, and planning an action to correct their error. Not that it will stop all the modern ‘race realists’ from relying on old boobs like Shockley and Rushton in their arguments.

Blizzarding world

We had an abrupt drop in temperature last night, along with some snow and 80kph winds. It was a blizzard! Howling all night long!

This morning, I get up and see the snow drifts everywhere.

I think that’s elegant and beautiful. For a sense of scale, though, that’s just my driveway, and the drift is about knee deep.

I also liked this snow sculpture.

The wind just carved a thin straight line of snow from the signpost. There are these interesting shapes all over the place.

Not so interesting, though, was walking to work through the knee-deep drifts.

Driftglass & Blue Gal tell it like it was

One podcast I listen to fairly regularly is “The Professional Left Podcast with Driftglass and Blue Gal,” and the latest episode was weirdly reassuring. It was a reminiscence about the state of blogging in Ye Olde Days, you know, the early 2000s-2010s. It reminded me of how horribly awful the political landscape was then, and of all the faux liberals who dominated the networks and newspapers. It’s still the same old problem — the NY Times is not a progressive newspaper at all, in case you hadn’t noticed — but it was so much worse back then. Chris Matthews was considered left wing! The Dixie Chicks got canceled! David Brooks was given a sinecure at the NY Times! Ann Coulter was featured on MSNBC!

Political media is still generally abominable, but this podcast made me aware that maybe there has been some slight progress. I’ll excuse it for making me feel old.

I agree with Blake Stacey

This is also what I think of chatGPT.

I confess myself a bit baffled by people who act like “how to interact with ChatGPT” is a useful classroom skill. It’s not a word processor or a spreadsheet; it doesn’t have documented, well-defined, reproducible behaviors. No, it’s not remotely analogous to a calculator. Calculators are built to be *right*, not to sound convincing. It’s a bullshit fountain. Stop acting like you’re a waterbender making emotive shapes by expressing your will in the medium of liquid bullshit. The lesson one needs about a bullshit fountain is *not to swim in it*.

“Oh, but it’s a source of inspiration!”

So, you’ve never been to a writers’ workshop, spent 30 minutes with the staff on the school literary magazine, seen the original “You’re the man now, dog!” scene, or had any other exposure to the thousand and one gimmicks invented over the centuries to get people to put one word after another.

“It provides examples for teaching the art of critique!”

Why not teach with examples, just hear me out here, by actual humans?

“Students can learn to write by rewriting the output!”

Am I the only one who finds passing off an edit of an unattributable mishmash as one’s own work to be, well, flagrantly unethical?

“You’re just yelling at a cloud! What’s next, calling for us to reject modernity and embrace tradition?”

I’d rather we built our future using the best parts of our present rather than the worst.

I’m going to call it a bullshit fountain from now on.

Running up his score with a cheat

Crisis! Emergency! Elon Musk discovered a terrible injustice!

When bleary-eyed engineers began to log on to their laptops, the nature of the emergency became clear: Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s.

Biden’s tweet, in which he said he would be supporting his wife in rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles, generated nearly 29 million impressions. Musk, who also tweeted his support for the Eagles, generated a little more than 9.1 million impressions before deleting the tweet in apparent frustration.

I’ve never really worried about this before, but my tweets make less of a splash than Joe Biden’s. I would have thought this was no big deal — he’s the president, I’m some schmoe in Minnesota — but now that you mention it, that is unfair. People should pay more attention to me! So far, all I’m able to do is lie on the floor and kick and scream and cry about it, but Elon has control. He has engineers. He can hack the code.

That’s what he did. He told his engineers to cheat and artificially inflate his numbers.

By Monday afternoon, “the problem” had been “fixed.” Twitter deployed code to automatically “greenlight” all of Musk’s tweets, meaning his tweets will bypass Twitter’s filters designed to show people the best content possible. The algorithm now artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000 – a constant score that ensured his tweets rank higher than anyone else’s in the feed.

Internally, this is called a “power user multiplier,” although it only applies to Elon Musk, we’re told. The code also allows Musk’s account to bypass Twitter heuristics that would otherwise prevent a single account from flooding the core ranked feed, now known as “For You.”

That explains why people opening the app Monday found that Musk dominated the feed, with a dozen or more Musk tweets and replies visible to anyone who followed him and millions more who did not. Over 90 percent of Musk’s followers now see his tweets, according to one internal estimate.

Keep that in mind when Musk brags about how important he is, based on “engagement” and “followers” and “traffic”. He’s cheating big time at this game.

Here’s a good thing to remember: Elon Musk is just dumb.