(Follow-up to this post)
I want to mention, in a concise way if possible, some of the other problems I’ve noticed in a quick review of the systemizing/empathizing research. There are a lot of distinct problems, so I will try to be more terse than usual.
Oliver Rosten hasn’t received much feedback on the scientific merits of his new conformal algebra paper in the European Physical Journal C. But one paragraph, printed in small type before the references, has a lot of people talking. It’s the acknowledgments.
Most study authors reserve their acknowledgments section for a laundry list of thank-yous to colleagues and reviewers. In his paper Rosten uses the section to issue a call for change. He dedicates the paper to his friend Francis Dolan, who died by suicide five years after the two started working together as postdoctoral researchers at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS) in Ireland. Troubled by the toll of those years on his friend, who suffered from severe depression, Rosten writes that he is “firmly of the conviction that the psychological brutality of the post-doctoral system played a strong underlying role in Francis’ death.” He then advocates reforms to protect researchers with mental health problems. It’s a remarkably candid piece of writing for a scientific paper—so candid, in fact, that two journals refused to include it.
(via shadowpeoplearejerks)
Illegalize everything that isnt crystal fuckin weed sandwich" and you dodged both pieces of bait. Every day i strangle chickens, trapped in my own name one in a million one in your ass.. Sounds good? pls reply us with your email address. Sometimes i wonder why i hang out with my memes cuz i’d get a fucking band name is that trump might nuke us all so we won’t have to deal with wretched insects…
A few minutes later two of the most dangerous enemies of Society alive were walking quietly along the Embankment towards Blackfriars, smoking their cigars and chatting as conventionally as though there were no such things on earth as tyranny and oppression, and their necessarily ever-present enemies conspiracy and brooding revolution.
(In lieu of a longer post I’ve been planning to write, with the gist “the systemizing/empathizing research is elaborately terrible, and from a cursory glance the people-vs.-things literature looks a lot more rigorous, so it’s funny that the former is so much more popular”)
Simon Baron-Cohen and colleagues: “As can be seen, the results cluster in the SQ-EQ space and do not randomly fill the chart. This suggests that it may not be possible to score anywhere in SQ-EQ space, and that there may be constraints operating, such that SQ and EQ are not independent.”
Me: “uh that just looks like a big blob to me, where are the clusters”
Me: “Oh huh that’s interesting. The male and female control groups overlap a lop, so they don’t form clusters per se – looks like the distribution for controls is unimodal? – but now that you mention it, the autistic group is very distinct. I didn’t see it as a “cluster” in the first plot because you had more control than autistic subjects, so it just looked like variance. But if you wanted to train a binary classifier to distinguish autistic from control subjects, it’d work pretty well, you’d get a decision boundary covering like most of the far bottom of the graph but excluding a bit on the left – ”
Simon Baron-Cohen and colleagues: “Since there is no unique way to break up the
results of our data analysis into identifiable groups along
the D dimension, we propose a classification based upon
the cumulant plot of Figure 2a. This generates 5 brain
types […]”
Me: “Wait, five clusters? I can’t see any support for having that many, but at least you have enough boundaries that you can get the green dots well separated from the others, so whatever, go ahead – ”
Simon Baron-Cohen and colleagues:
Me: “what the fuck”
After writing papers addressing how we treat strangers, friends, lovers, parents, and children, Trivers offered a no-less-powerful theory on how we deal with ourselves. In a sentence in the foreword to Dawkins’ book, he proposed that self-deception evolved to facilitate the deception of others. Trivers says he’d planned to flesh out the theory but didn’t get around to it because he was “smoking too much strong herb.”
wait, is this Ed “arithmetic is inconsistent” Nelson?
Nope, it’s Ted “Computer Lib/Dream Machines” Nelson
If there is some sort of nuclear apocalypse that still leaves remnants of civilization, and I’m still alive, I imagine I’d start looking to FFVI for consolation and inspiration, like a holy text. It’s the only work of fiction I can think of that spans an event like that, spends a fair amount of time on both sides, and portrays the post-apocalyptic world in a hopeful light
(The Gone-Away World technically fits those criteria, but was more surreal and cartoonish, harder to connect to real life)
If you are at home when you see the amazingly bright light, run out of rooms with windows. Hurry to a windowless hallway or down into the basement.
As a grad student at Harvard, Nelson would one day study strategy with Thomas Schelling, a renowned theorist, but as a child, his methods were instinctive. For instance, in second grade, Nelson invented a new way of crossing the street: when arriving at a busy thoroughfare, he would dramatically turn his back on traffic and step with theatrical nonchalance off the sidewalk. Drivers, frightened, would slam on their brakes.