hooser
1d ago
hooser
4d ago
I highly recommend Math Circles, if there is one in your area. Typically, a Math Circle is a group of kids of about similar age who meet once a week for like a semester to explore an interesting math idea. Such circles get organized and led by mathematicians (professional or amateur), and they can start quite young. For example, "Math from Three to Seven" (or great review of the book) is basically a diary of a guy running a Math Circle for his young kids and their friends.
At their best, the kind of activity the kids do in a Math Circle actually models an authentic mathematical exploration. Even when not at their best, it gets your daughter together with other kids who are interested in math, and connects you with at least one math adult who is interested in math outreach for kids and will therefore probably know of other local opportunities for STEM extracurriculars.
People mean different things when they say "math". For many not in the field it means doing drills or word problems, which at best are skill challenges posed by others for educational purpose, and do not--cannot--reflect authentic problems that require a mathematical approach. The authentic problems are messy; they are vague; you have to choose what to measure and how, and what to define and how, and sometimes all your options are but poor approximations, and sometimes you can't even begin to tackle the problem as is until you have considered many much simpler similar problems that may (you hope) give you ideas on how to approach the big messy one. That's what "math" is to a mathematician, and those are great problem-solving skills to practice no matter where your life takes you.
hooser
5d ago
I hear you and sympathize. Do feel free to rant, no matter what you decide to do. Sometimes a rant is just what's needed to realize that you're not happy with the way things are and are on your way to constructively consider your options.
hooser
6d ago
Good point: at least, if I were to go back in time and steelman my own question, I would use 'universalizability' to convey my notion, despite the ugliness of the term. I mean, it has both the -alize suffix that turns a noun into a verb, and then the -ability suffix to turn it back to a noun.
hooser
6d ago
But how would that even work, with a single stone in one throw? Does the stone ricochet off of the first-hit bird to the second-hit bird? Or does the stone go bullet-like through the first bird and hit the bird behind it?
hooser
6d ago
trying to skin two cats with one sharp stone
Wait, why would you want to have more than one sharp stone, if you're skinning cats one at a time?
You have conflated two separate proverbs: "Kill two birds with one stone" and "There are more than one way to skin a cat".
If you're hunting birds with a sling, it's hard enough to hit one bird, let alone two, let alone actually manage to kill them. So "kill two birds with one stone" implies something highly improbable.
If you are skinning an animal, you may have your preferred method, and someone else may have a different approach. And if your method isn't getting the job done, maybe another method will. So "there are more than one way to skin a cat" is a reminder to focus on the goal and not get hung up on a method.
hooser
6d ago
I'm a mathematician, so I get antsy when someone doesn't clarify their definitions of key terms. I would have accepted something like "By universal human rights I mean whatever was declared in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948". But no, this candidate was presenting a framework that (and I won't do it justice here) kind of assumes some platonic version of "universal human rights" that international bodies like UN can discover, even if imperfectly, and this framework was intended to model the process of such a discovery. So understanding what this Platonic stuff is was kind of important, I thought.
hooser
6d ago
That's how the candidate first took it, too: if someone reaches a decision to convert to Catholicism, don't interfere.
But from a perspective of, say, a devout 16-century Catholic, the "if" part is not there: If you come to the conclusion that you don't need to convert to Catholicism, you are deeply mistaken (and probably being lied to by the devil), and your immortal soul is still in danger. That perspective is what drove so many missionaries to risk their lives in the Americas and Africa. That perspective stroke the fires of Inquisition: what matter a few minutes of physical agony if it helps you see the light?
But all I was trying to determine is whether this perspective fits the candidate's definition of "universal human right" as "a right that's applicable to any person". I think it does.
hooser
6d ago
Thanks for your willingness to continue our discussion, and also for being a good sport about other people here pushing back! It's also fine to reply when you're good-and-ready, this is more like chess-by-mail than a real-time conversation, which has the advantage that one can stop, think, and look stuff up.
Let's examine the extend-female-sentencing idea: what conditions would you allow to take into account, to ensure that both a male and a female convicted of the same crime receive the same sentence? The penalties for most felonies have room for judicial discretion. Judges tend to consider questions like: "How likely is this person to break the law in a major way, once they get out?"
This goes to the root of the question: why are we incarcerating people, anyway? The modern consensus is that the goal is to reduce crime, and that the judicial system of incarceration does it through deterrence and incapacitation.
Do you agree with the idea that those who are unlikely to re-offend should spend less time in prison than those who are likely to re-offend?
Having dependents, for example, correlates with a lower chance of re-offending. Would you allow for taking into consideration whether the felon has children or aging parents that depend on them before passing a sentence?
By the way, I appreciate the thought of sorting prisoners by weight class, kind of like how they do in wrestling. My niece and nephews wrestle, so I have been to a few competitions. I therefore notice how extremely rare it is for a female to win a match, when paired against a male, even though they are in the same category. (It does happen; we have some girls in the wrestling club with excellent technique.) I remain utterly unsurprised by this. I am healthy, physically fit, and have a black belt in a martial art, yet I am under no delusion that I could take an average 150-pound man.
hooser
6d ago
Would you advocate for extending the sentences for female felons, then? Would you further advocate for undoing the "separate-but-equal" penal system of having separate women's prisons?
On a meta note: I realize that you have gotten a lot of responses from questioning your assumptions about feminism. Some people thrive on such attention, while others may feel overwhelmed. In case you feel more like the latter, let me assure you that I will not take it personally if you decide to stop responding to my particular line of inquiry, and neither will anyone else.
If you're aiming for a productive discussion with someone whose perspective is significantly different from yours, one useful technique is to taboo the words at the center of disagreement. Since "feminism" means so many different things to different people--even if we look at the main schools of feminist philosophy, of which some do indeed center equity--we can drop the term "feminism" and focus on specifically what you mean by it.
You and I did that.
Once we the specific ideal that you are defending ("equality between men and women in all aspects of life"), we have gotten somewhere further by establishing that you definitely "equality of opportunity", and not "equality of outcome".
Good, we are further along towards reaching common ground, since I also would rather live in a society where my opportunities are not constrained by my reproductive organs.
But I also realize that, if we are to consider "all aspects of life", we must also consider what "equality of opportunity" would mean in the negative aspects of life. Thus I ask for the two of us to focus on incarceration, a truly negative burden that our society places on a small but substantial portion of our population, where the differences between the treatment that men and women get are particularly stark. Examining what "equality of opportunity" means to you in this specific situation will help clarify the nuances that you allow "equality" to have, and also your commitment to the principle of equality (as opposed to whatever-benefits-women principle), since in this case men are very much the losers.
So if you are up for continuing this discussion, I will happily go down this rabbit hole with you.
hooser
7d ago
Some time ago, I sat in on a tenure-track sociology job talk. The candidate researched something about "universal human rights" through examining UN declarations. I pay a lot of attention to definitions, and I remember that this candidate did not define "universal human rights" during the talk yet talked about the study of UN declarations through a framework that assumed that "universal human rights" had some particular meaning. During Q&A I tried to get some clarification on the matter:
"What, exactly, makes something a 'universal human right'?", I asked.
The candidate replied that a right is universal if it's applicable to everyone.
So I followed up, "For example, would it be a 'universal human right' to save one's soul through worship Jesus Christ in the one-true-way of Catholic faith?"
The candidate replied, "You mean the right to religion? Yes, the right to religion would be a universal human right."
And I said, "No, I mean specifically the right to save one's soul through, specifically, converting and adhering to Catholic faith."
The candidate, showing some confusion: "But that's specifically a Catholic perspective..."
And I replied, "But it's nonetheless universal. A devout Catholic truly believes that the only way for any human being to save their immortal soul from eternal damnation is by converting to Catholic faith, and, out of sheer compassion for all fellow human beings, declares the universal human right to convert and adhere to Catholicism."
"I'd have to think about that," said the candidate, but I have clearly monopolized enough of Q&A time, another colleague jumped in with a different question, and the discussion moved on.
Later, in a more informal setting and without the candidate, I was chatting with some of my colleagues about the job talk and my question. Some thought that it was indeed an interesting and important question, whether we can define 'universal human rights' without supposing a particular framework of values. But the most common response was: Look, we all know what he means by 'universal human rights', and editors in sociology journals know what he means, and reviewers know what he means, so it doesn't matter that he defined the terms so poorly as to include the Inquisition, because it will in no way impede his publication record.
(This was the tenure-track position where the sociology department deliberately cast a wide net to diversify the research within the department. I asked if that means they are looking for a conservative candidate, and we all had a laugh.)
To bring it back to "competitive authoritarianism": I am not at all surprised that two social scientists swimming in the liberal-left bubbles of Harvard and U-Toronto would fail to consider how their abstract terms for "competitive authoritarian" techniques instantiate from a conservative perspective. The specific examples you bring up may have not even crossed their path, like the IRS investigations into politically conservative non-profits a few years back, though more likely the authors don't feel like the examples fit their "competitive authoritarian" framework because the authors agree with the aims of those instances of techniques--they therefore feel simply like the correct application of law. Prosecution of J6 participants? Surely it's right and proper to prosecute insurrection. Same for that county clerk who refuses to follow the new marriage law. Same for going after conservative news--must stamp out misinformation. It takes someone outside of that bubble to notice the similarities.
A big part of The Motte's value is giving cross-bubble perspectives, a place where someone posts "Just keep swimming", someone else goes: "Running gets you further", and yet another pipes in: "Fly, you fools!!"
hooser
7d ago
The statement "equality between men and women in all aspects of life" has lots of hidden assumptions, which feminist philosophers have interpreted in radically different and contradictory ways. Let's take a specific case and clarify what such equality would mean to you.
Incarceration: Which best describes your advocacy of equality: (A) the length of a person's sentence should be independent of one's gender, or (B) the penal system should be set up such that the burden of incarceration falls equally on men and women? Version A is "equality of opportunity", version B is "equality of outcome". The US penal system falls short on both versions of equality: women get much shorter sentences for similar crimes, and females make up just a bit over 7% of all prisoners in US.
So in this specific case (an important "aspect of life"), which kind of equality do you advocate for?
hooser
7d ago
And what is a “non-feminist” woman, according to you?
I am a woman who is not a feminist. I will not adopt an amorphous philosophical label that means different things to different people, and I find that many currently-popular strands of feminist philosophy poorly model social reality.
Yes, I have directly benefited from work by first-wave feminists. I have been paid for my work on the same level as my male colleagues. I vote, and while my vote counts for little except in very local elections, many politicians take women's issues into account, so I benefit from women having a vote.
I have also benefited directly from work by second-wave feminists. They pushed for increasing percent of women in various well-paid professions. I participated in well-financed programs geared to attract women into mathematics, then I benefited from graduate programs trying to increase female representation among their grad students, then I benefited from math departments trying to increase female representation among their full-time faculty.
Benefiting isn't the same as buying into the underlying philosophies, though. I gladly take equality of opportunity and equality under civil law, that I buy into. I question everything else, including the push expanding female representation in various professions that I personally benefited from. As for the third-wave feminist strands, I have yet to find one that I am willing to adopt.
So let me toss a question back at you: what specific currently-not-widely-adopted feminist philosophy do you find helpful in modeling social interactions?
hooser
9d ago
You're in a rut. You have my sincere sympathies.
Have you applied for other jobs? Just to see what's out there, if there's something that catches your interest or at least pays better? The advantage of applying while you're still employed is that (a) potential employers want you more than your unemployed competition, and (b) your current employer may make you a better offer to keep you. More money, or move you up to management.
The disadvantage is time and effort. Since you're employed and in no hurry, you don't have to put too much effort, just update your resume and start asking around.
(Unless you were just venting... it's ok to vent. In person, I have learned to ask something like: "Are you venting, or do you want to brainstorm solutions?" I have also got good at surrounding myself with people who are chill with those kinds of questions.)
hooser
11d ago
I find the whole tree of threads after OP's post somewhat disorienting, like being in a room full of people talking at once past each other. When a poster says "the issue", is it the FAA scandal? Or, per SteveAgain's original top-level post, the reception on Reddit and Hacker News of Trace's post of FAA scandal? Or, per OliveTapanade's first response, is "the issue" the arguments-as-soldiers tactic:
He's just right! There's no way to justify a norm like "never criticise bad things if my side is responsible".
Or is the issue the pervasive and corrosive effects of DEI and the philosophy that spawned it, which appears to be your point, since you differentiate the FAA story specifically from "the issue itself":
How did he do a better job identifying and advocating for the issue? He did a better job reporting on that particular story, but when it comes to the issue itself, how has he done a better job identifying it than anyone from James Lindsay through Lomez to the seven zillion witches posting here? How has he done a better job advocating for it, than Chris Rufo? Last I checked he was advocating that people vote for the candidate that would ensure more of this would keep happening.
And that's just the confusion in our branch of the conversation. OliveTapanade's reply happened in the context of the previous replies. Crushedoranges advocated for Trace to pick a side (and, presumably, do the arguments-as-soldiers):
The fact that TracingWoodgrains doesn't fully come over to the right because of this and doggedly is determined to stay in the principled center makes me completely unsympathetic.
TequilaMockingbird recalls that Trace was indeed more partisan before:
Back in the twenty-teens he was a vocal advocate of the sort of "full spectrum information manipulation" that has become the standard. Where he once bragged about fabricacating evidence to pwn LibsOfTikTok he now wonders why nobody trusts him.
In this context, OliveTapanade's main point therefore:
Set aside what you think about him as a person. On the specific issue here, he is just unambiguously correct.
Where "the issue" is, specifically, the hiring practices of the FAA that began in 2013.
hooser
12d ago
Today, the federal budget is about 25% of GDP,
That made me go "wait, is that even right?", but you're right:
-
2023 yearly GDP was 27.36 trillion dollars
-
2023 US federal spending is almost 6.2 trillion dollars
So a bit less than a quarter.
I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, since I pay federal taxes and they're on the order of 25%, too. Mental model of the world updated. Thanks.
hooser
12d ago
If it's not about praising him, can you explain to me why the sentence "TracingWoodgrains was right" is so important to you?
I can't speak for OliveTapanade, but for myself: it's important because it means that Trace remains a trusted source. I have read his stuff and interacted with him online for years now, and he remains a nuanced thinker and a careful reporter who holds himself to a higher standard of journalism than many professionals. I therefore continue to place high trust in Trace's reports, and I continue to value his analyses for their thoughtfulness even when I reach a different conclusion.
hooser
12d ago
I also failed at demonstrating my humanity. I would appreciate knowing what's expected, in case the press-and-hold becomes more in use.
hooser
12d ago
If I use AI for critique and not for writing, would you still expect disclosure? Like, here's an example of AI use:
Me: I uploaded a draft of my thoughts on X. Give me a thoughtful critique.
Claude: What great thoughts on X! Now that ass-kissing is out of the way, here are some critiques. (Bullet points, bullet points.)
(Version A)
Me: I want to incorporate your ninth critique. I uploaded a revised draft. Give feedback that will help me improve on this point.
Claude: That's a unique take on the subject! Here are some ideas to strengthen your argument: (Bullet points, bullet points.)
(Version B)
Me: I want to incorporate your ninth critique. Rewrite my draft to do so.
Claude: I will rewrite your draft: (Writes an academic article in LaTeX.)
Version A is more like asking a buddy for feedback and then thinking some more about it, while Version B is like asking that buddy to do my thinking for me. Even in an academic setting, Version A is not only fine but encouraged (except on exams), while Version B is academic dishonesty.
I would like the norm on TheMotte to be against Version B, but fine with Version A. Would you agree? And would you still like a disclosure for Version A, and in what form? (E.g., "I used DeepSeek r1 for general feedback", or "OpenAI o3 gave me pointers on incorporating humor", or "Warning: this product was packaged in the same facility that asks AI for feedback".)
hooser
14d ago
And of course, if you don't see the utility in something, don't install it into your body. I have nothing against people who are happy with their existing bodies and minds, I just desire otherwise for myself.
Ultimately, it's good to have early-adopters like yourself around. You are the willing guinea-pigs for the rest of us. So I will gladly root for your success from the sidelines of techno-cyborg progress. If it gets me a spider-chair instead of a wheel-chair by the time I need one, I'll be happy.
I strongly expect that additional senses will, while distracting initially, fade into the background until salient
Years back, I had corrective laser eye surgery. It was great to not muck about with glasses (old clunky technology) or soft contact lenses (newer, more streamline technology). But I also found all this sharp focus quite distracting, especially during that first month when my long-distance vision was better than normal. Like, when driving, my attention would get drawn and fixed to those five-paragraph-essay parking rule signs ("parking permitted during A, B, C, except at X, Y, Z"). I had to re-train my brain to de-prioritize written signs. And yes, as you point out, eventually those signs indeed stopped drawing my attention, fading into the background.
But as a counter-example, my husband gets ear-worms. He goes into a store, and comes out with some inane pop song playing in a loop in his head for the next three days. Attention isn't as aligned to our needs as we'd like it to be.
hooser
14d ago
All your examples present the idea of various sensory technology whose use is so seamless it feels both natural and unobtrusive. I agree on this: if one needs (or wants) to use sensor technology, seamless is better than clunky; and if one needs (or wants) to have continual or immediate access to the sensor technology, then it's hard to imagine something more seamless than an a permanent augmentation that your brain fully adapts to.
Our disagreement rests on all those ifs. I have far more senses than I have attention, and my attention is very limited and therefore precious. I spend more time trying to minimize sensory input than augment it. I'm not just talking about earplugs and blindfolds for when I try to rest. Like, filtering out background noise when I talk to someone. Ignoring visual distractions when I read.
Do I really want to add ultrasound sense? Why, what am I going to do with that information? And do I need that info with continual or immediate access, all the time, to justify an implant?
By the way, you can totally do that with current technology: take a hearing aid, set it to receive ultrasound. You'd still need to use some of your actual senses for receiving the input, like taking those ultrasound waves and translating them down to normal hearing range. That will unfortunately interfere with you hearing the usual sounds, and if you don't want that, you can use some of your less-used senses. Like, have it be a vibrating butt-plug or something. I'm sure one can train the brain to distinguish different vibration pitches after a while.
hooser
14d ago
OK, let's focus on the use-of-tongue-for-sight. How many hours a day are you, personally, willing to spend in wearing a device that's exactly like BrainPort but geared for detecting ultra-violet light?
Basic humans don't see ultra-violet, but bees and birds do; flora and fauna have evolved to incorporate ultra-violet signals. Wouldn't you like to experience this aspect of the world directly? All you have to do is wear some specialized glasses with a specialized ultra-violet-light camera on the bridge of the nose, connected to a hand-held base unit with CPU and some zoom controls, which in turn is connected to a lozenge stuck to your tongue. You train yourself for a while, figuring out what those funny electrical-shock feelings on your tongue correspond to. I guess you'd need to use some kind of visualization on the monitor, with artificial coloring to highlight the ultra-violet. And after a while--yay!--you can "sense" ultra-violet!
Or, you know, you could just look at those visualizations with artificial coloring, like the rest of us basic humans, and skip the wearing of glasses connected to a hand-held unit connected to the lozenge on your tongue.
BrainPort is a big deal for blind people, because so much of our human infrastructure depends on sight. Similarly, a bee might be utterly lost without that ultraviolet sense, but just how crucial is it for me to see it, and if I have any technology able to sense it, wouldn't I just use that instead of wiring myself up to some gear and retraining my brain?
What about a BrainPort device that's geared towards infra-red? Wouldn't that be cool, see the world like Predator? Or, again... why not just put on some infra-red goggles?
Why in heaven's name would I want to sense WiFi? Isn't in enough that my WiFi-enabled devices do that?
hooser
15d ago
Let's disambiguate reality from science fiction here. Neuralink's implant is indeed a cool breakthrough that, with much training, allows a person to control a cursor without the use of arms or legs. This is very cool for people who can't use arms or legs, or much of any other practical use for the electrical signals going down the spinal cord.
The Neuralink's Telepathy (TM) is completely one-way: the device is reading the electrical signals in your spinal cord, and trying to interpret them as simple cursor commands. It does not send you secret messages that your brain magically decodes. It does not read any part of your mind. It doesn't know which thoughts produced the particular configuration of electrical signals, and what if felt like to have those thoughts. It doesn't know or care whether, to generate the signal that it interprets as "left-click", you had to visualize yourself naked dancing on the piano, or imagine yourself shitting. You do whatever works.
For the able-bodied among us: we have far-superior telepathy (not TM) of amazingly fine-tuned control of arms and legs. We have the amazing telekinetic (not TM) ability of moving stuff with those arms and legs. How much of that control would you be willing to sacrifice, to devote some of the electrical signal going through your spinal cord to an external device? For what purpose?
Yes, and here's a machine that does the plucking / beheading / de-footing, and claims to also do eviscerating though that's not in the video. All done without AI. There are still humans in the loop hanging up the carcasses onto the machine, so possibly the question is at what point would it become profitable to replace those with automation.
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