All in all, though, we were a pretty compatible group and I didn’t start railing on about ape men and ancestral blood so everything went along smoothly and nobody wound up whispering to themselves in the closet.
None knoweth the beginning of things; but under the anarchy of present existence are galaxies of warring minds; and the immense future depends upon the wills of multitudinous hosts of minds. But not, alas! upon well-meaning, tender, indulgent, generous, forgiving, considerate, man-loving minds!
This is the first chapter of a book published in 1995, about something that happened in 1992, and it reads more like “social justice discourse” in 2017 than I would have expected
There was recently a flurry of people liking my Goodreads reviews, which caused me (being the navel-gazer I am) to re-read a bunch of them, and I was startled at how much better they are than my median tumblr writing
I wrote a lot more reviews in 2012-15 than I do now, and I was worried that I just used to be a better writer, but it is probably that I think of reviews as mini-performances where I try to “look good" or “put on a good show,” whereas on tumblr I feel free to ramble and bore and write ugly grammatically convoluted sentences like this one so long as I’m getting some idea across.
(Although there is probably something to the “better writer” idea, since I also used to read a lot more [causes for that include ”in grad school I needed an escapist hobby that still let me feel smart”], and reading a lot tends to make your writing better)
Anyway, here are some of my favorites if you want more nostalgebraist content™
All this stuff about the gender ratio in engineering lagging behind a bunch of other lucrative fields – it makes me really curious what the change was like in the other fields
Some specializations in medicine have experienced dramatic increases in % female over the course of a number of decades. (Some nice charts here.) What was that like? How has the culture changed? Which parts of the pipeline played the biggest role? Has there been a significant change in outflow (female doctors staying in practice for longer) in addition to inflow? For reasons of simple arithmetic, the rate has changed a lot faster in new doctors than in doctors as a whole – so presumably it was much more perceptible in the resident population, which would often be much more female than the rest of the hospital. What was that like as a workplace environment?
