Glen -
As always I'm at least as intrigued as confounded by the layered
language puzzles you lay here for us. I was drawn through the looking
glass (down the rabbit hole?) with your reference both to "Presty" and
"Legibility" and "Zetetic" realizing I could not read your post for more
than "emotional content" without reading at least the one main
link/reference you offered up and I was nicely rewarded (kicking myself)
with realizing "Presty" refers to "those who honor or defer to the
prestige of an institution (such as an alma mater". Zetetic were more
technical and more familiar but useful to have to dig down into.
I feel also "honored" to be a participant in your "Associative Memory by
Internet Forum" technique.... I feel as if getting to overhear your
maunderings I am absorbing useful (to me, or my affinity group of some
sort) perspective as well as maybe information. I don't know if you get
the <delete> as much as I probably do, but I for one appreciate the
depth and breadth of your reflections... maybe I have too much time and
would be more well served if did duck out with a "TLDR" response... or not.
I am not particularly a "Presty" although I think I *am* proud of my
BS from a state (Northern AZ) university as opposed perhaps to a 4 year
private diploma mill of some kind. But only because I know that at
least some of my professors were of high quality and dedication and
their courses and the overal curricula showed it in many cases. Perhaps
a presumed third rate college would have equal or greater examples.
My daughter who pulled a PhD from UNM (Molecular Biology) struggles
cyclically with the feeling that her proposals to various funding
agencies are sorted by "Presties" and hers thereby get shuffled down the
stack from ones submitted by Stanford or Berkeley (or many other
prestigious universities) grads... I don't know how real that is or if
it is a phigment of her imagination or something else. In any case it
interferes with her professional progression (either enforced from the
outside or from the phantasm of her imagination)... she probably doesn't
put as much effort into her proposals because of this real or imagined
fact? I think she would defer to your "legibility" argument.
I *do* agree with your/Dorst's "Legibility" argument and your anecdotal
reflection on voting. I helped Reagan run over the top of Carter "back
in the day" and was so ashamed once I realized what I'd done (starting a
few months into his term, but continuing well through the next two
decades). The shame of having been such a "tool" lead me to choose not
to vote again for nearly 2 decades under the cynical cover "I don't want
to encourage the bastards!" and the more rational "I should not vote
unless I am (much) more informed on my candidates". I finally took
my own challenge and began to inform myself as much as I could on my
candidates, especially the local ones who were so close I couldn't see
them often... a certain complement to myopia?
I began to use the League of Women's voters reviews of and interviews
with candidates and checked (out of the corner of my eye) the Catholic
publications with a list of candidates/topics to vote *against* as a
hint I might well want to consider (positively) those candidates/topics
if for no other reason than to apply my own kneejerk
moderation/complement to kneejerk single-issue voters encouraged by the
Catholic Church (and many other institutions).
I realize (because you pointed it out) that I missed the point in my
last response on this thread by thinking you were emphasizing gender
dichotomy rather than "community self-policing". I won't try to give a
proper response to that at this point but to acknowledge that
reconsidering your post through that reflection was useful... To the
extent that "communities" are holarchical, I think I have observed (in
my own experience) that I am prone to misunderstand how someone who is
"policing" my speech/thought/expression is NOT part of my community when
they are perhaps simply not as *obviously* part of my community or the
communities which we share are not top of mind for me in that context.
When adults who were trying to raise me (parents, neighbors, teachers,
retail/service staff) I understood what/which-of "my community" they
were and took their correction/policing/advice accordingly. As an
adult this was harder for me given that I wasn't sure who/when/how to
moderate/admit other's "opinions" of my expressions/thoughts/ideas. I
could wax anecdotally on a few dozen instances where someone "got to me"
and acutely bent my attitude and subsequent presentation with a well
placed/apt observation which may have felt like an acute criticism in
the moment but became a powerful "glimpse in a mirror".
Several here have "policed" my ideas/attitudes/presentation/speech in an
appropriately professional and respectful manner (which in your case
often includes a friendly "PFffffft!" or ?mocking? "Ha!" ) and I am
always caught in the pain of recognizing the need for a refactoring and
the opportunity it represents. I love/hate it when that happens.
Those of you with the most blunt and pithy observations are the most
likely to achieve this... the abrupt knocking-sideways that is always
unwelcome in the instant but often fully valued upon
reflection. "receiving the keisaku" as it were?
- Steve
Along these same lines, I know there's a significant contingent of
"Presties" on this list. And I still don't have a good note-taking app
that I find convenient enough to use. So I'll post this here, in part
because it's a higher order form of ad hominem, in part because of our
Presty friends, and in part because I need to note it somewhere so I
can find it again.
Bayesian Injustice
Why rational people often replicate unfairness
https://kevindorst.substack.com/p/bayesian-injustice
A tiny part of the red flag for Zach Elliott's bullshit (cf
https://simonesun.com/blog/2022/5/12/stop-pretending-transphobia-is-scientific-debate
for why I assert his rhetoric is designed bullshit), is his training
institution, Oklahoma State. I'm sure it's a fine school ... maybe not
as good as mine (Texas A&M), but prolly in the same tier. And neither
OSU nor TAMU produce what I'd call well-rounded students ... at least
not like what I've seen come out of Reed (in Portland) or Evergreen
(here). And while Reed definitely has some prestige, I don't think
Evergreen's in the same tank.
Yet another tangent: We have an upcoming election for several
commissioner and director spots on various local boards. Now, I don't
know most of these people. I see all the yard signs and such. We got a
flyer in the mail where a challenger pointed out the entitlement of an
incumbent. ("Do you know who I am? I'm the fscking mayor of Tenino!"
8^D) Yaddayadda. But what do you do when you're aware of your own
ignorance but still believe in voting? You have a similar risk for
zetetic injustice. I ended up almost blindly taking the recommendation
for 3 of the board seats, the candidates for which I was completely
ignorant. But everyone else on the ballot was equally "legible" ... I
think.
I've had the same complaint about the fideistic shunt surrounding open
source software. Just because some package is open source, doesn't
mean you should import it, for a wide variety of reasons. A really
funny example is
https://qz.com/646467/how-one-programmer-broke-the-internet-by-deleting-a-tiny-piece-of-code,
which provides a moral something like "Yeah, maybe reinventing the
wheel isn't as bad as they say it is." High order legibility is not
only a function of the legibility of the atoms, but also of the
composition, including both composition through time (e.g. provenance
of data) and composition over space (high-order or cumulative
structures).
And finally, just a tangent about Zach's trumpeting that he's written
books.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-launches-boom-ai-written-e-books-amazon-2023-02-21/
To be honest, I think I'd ascribe more *Authority* to a
ChatGPT-written book on Gender Dichotomy than to a Zach Elliott book
on it ... which is to say, Authority=0. Is Zach more or less legible
than ChatGPT? I just don't know.
On 10/19/23 14:39, glen wrote:
Ha! I care much less about any particular false dichotomy than I do
about the causes of dichotomies. The causes of dichotomies lie in
agonistics, us versus them, this vs that, inside vs outside. Whatever
triage methods we *happen* to adopt (or have impinged upon us) are
always subject to fining and coarsening. When policing your tribe,
you have to choose a (set of) scope(s). Which tribes are you policing?
One element of the 5Ws approach to media literacy is "Who". Who is
Zach? He writes books! And makes videos! Surely, as a trained
architect, he's an authority on gametes, right? An expert on
probability distributions? Of course! >8^D This post is helpful in
determining who Zach is and whether you might want to propagate his
bullshit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCynical/comments/h81ymm/trust_fund_cismale_20_year_old_undergrad_is_new/
He's abandoned his named TLDN. But it's still available here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220915143439/https://zacharyaelliott.com/about-me.html
and here:
https://www.genderparadox.com/about-me.html
Yes, I'm guilty of ad hominem. But, as I've argued here before, the
assessment that a fallacy is always a fallacy is, itself, a fallacy.
I guess, as an admitted postmodernist, I should be proud of Zach for
his ultracrepidarianism ... the same way I'm proud of my anti-vaxx
friends who think they understand vaccines better than, say, their
PCP. It's OK. They prolly stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
Network theory seems helpful, here. When deciding which tribe to
police, it's useful to track the cliques and components of the graph.
We're known by our friends as much as our enemies.
On 10/19/23 09:48, Steve Smith wrote:
On 10/18/23 11:27 AM, glen wrote:
Here's PZ Myers policing his community:
The Gamete Delusion
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/10/17/the-gamete-delusion/
https://www.theparadoxinstitute.com/watch/is-sex-bimodal
I don't really have a dog in this fight other than the general
feeling that I support underdogs (and not just the ones who fly off
in all directions at once).
to paraphrase one of the more notable FriAM-Sages... "people should
be called what they want to be called"... harping on the emic/etic
conflation some more, I find these discussions (e.g. Dawkins et al)
rather off-point in this regard. I understand (vaguely) why we all
feel we must make sweeping generalizations about *other people's
business*... some of it is an empathetic response, wanting to
understand, but some of it is the response of someone who wants to
control others. These *are* conflated by circumstance in the sense
that in spite of the pithy aphorism "your opinion of me is none of
my business", most of us actually *do* care what others think of us
and it does effect how they interact with us. It always feels
unfortunate that those who want to tell others how to
present/feel/be too often set the subject of debate.
I *expect* someone with their own dog in the fight to have an
insider/personal view of these things and am generally interested
and curious about their perspective up to their privacy. For those
who mostly just want to stir up a dogfight, I'm not particularly
interested in their view beyond preparing myself for when *they*
might choose to try to stir up a dog(cat?)fight in *my* backyard.
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