#epistemics

[sophia-epistemia]

re: cis woman stuff that’s now trans woman coded

that other person covered the big one — things that used to read as “that nerdy/ND girl who’s into tech/anime/nerd shit” now read as “that nerdy/ND trans girl who’s…”

part of this is that, as far as I can tell, there are now literally more trans women eg: playing MtG than there are cis women doing it. There are definitely nerd spaces I’ve been in where the majority of women were trans.

the other shift I see is that there are a lot of things that used to be cis-woman coded that are now non-binary coded. People are more comfortable in certain ways with GNC behavior, but they will often assume it means you have a different gender identity. The box of behaviors that code as “heterosexual woman” is actually significantly tighter than it was in the ‘70s or ‘80s.

obviously not going to post a picture, but my mom is a fairly normal cishet woman in her late 50s, tall, Scandinavian, thin build, long hair. She doesn’t like to wear makeup, keeps her hair in a fairly straightforward long cut and is letting it go grey naturally, wears almost nothing but jeans and t shirts, etc.

in the last 5-7 years, some people have started assuming she’s a lesbian or possibly has a non-binary identity of some sort. She’s very progressive, but this kinda drives her crazy, she’s been dressing this way since the ‘80s. It was the way that every single outdoorsy Norwegian-American midwestern hiker camp-counselor girl dressed, and I’ve seen the pics for proof haha

So I guess that’s another similar trend, the sort of lightly feminine Sigourney Weaver type woman is now explicitly queer-coded in a way that she wasn’t in the 1980s in Iowa.

see also, California people being surprised/off-balance that every single woman in the rural PNW looks like a lesbian by their cultural norms.

The box of behaviors that code as “heterosexual woman” is actually significantly tighter than it was in the ‘70s or ‘80s.

right, that's the main point here, i believe that.

i'd explain the mechanism like so:

it's the Nine Billion Maps Of Neural Categories and the way they tend to evolve. each person has a Map of those, and they shift (the set of categories changes, as do the sets of features that define each of them, and the weightings of those features) over time and location and (sub)culture. but people may find it difficult or annoying to update theirs to what is more contemporaneous around them. especially when it shifts them into a box that they feel isn't the right one for them.

and i mean, fair enough! they're right that it sucks for them! (examples of such: your mom, and @frances-kafka) and it also sucks for the people who feel like the shifting of the categories boundaries in the culture around them is demanding that they lie. (example of such: zack m davis)

[suntzuanime]

Was going through the blogs I follow and realized I've never seen a take from you that wasn't based. What's it like being right about everything?

It makes me worry I'm not going hard enough, you know? The Optimal Amount of Posting Cringe Is Not Zero. I should shade my posting a little more towards the open-hearted and earnest and speculative, is what that seems like. If you're right about everything you're probably not saying much.

[squareallworthy]

5 for the ask game

Number 5, "Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism?"

Externalism for me. I think "justified true belief" is a pretty good definition of knowledge, and that Gettier problems show that justification has to include some correspondence between the logical sequences of belief-formation and causal sequences of events in the world, and internalism can't supply that.

For example, Gettier's case I (taken from Wikipedia):

Suppose that Smith and Jones have applied for a certain job. And suppose that Smith has strong evidence for the following conjunctive proposition: (d) Jones is the man who will get the job, and Jones has ten coins in his pocket.

Smith's evidence for (d) might be that the president of the company assured him that Jones would, in the end, be selected and that he, Smith, had counted the coins in Jones's pocket ten minutes ago. Proposition (d) entails: (e) The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.

Let us suppose that Smith sees the entailment from (d) to (e), and accepts (e) on the grounds of (d), for which he has strong evidence. In this case, Smith is clearly justified in believing that (e) is true.

But imagine, further, that unknown to Smith, he himself, not Jones, will get the job. And, also, unknown to Smith, he himself has ten coins in his pocket.

Okay, does having ten coins in his pocket play any role in the decision to hire Smith or Jones? No, so while the entailment from (d) to (e) is logically valid, it doesn't track any causal chain of events that led to Smith getting the job. So I don't consider his belief (e) to be epistemically justified.

And then let me change that to "not very justified," since I also think that the discussion of this issue also suffers from taking justification to be a binary state. We should state things in terms of evidence that we think is probably reliable (or probably not reliable, or fairly reliable, or overwhelmingly reliable, whatever), that lead to varying degrees of belief and varying degrees of justification for our beliefs.

[samueldays]

People just say things

In the deepest sense, conspiracy theories are an attack on reason, an assault on truth and a shared reality, on what the political scientist Thomas Rid calls the “liberal epistemic order, or a political system that places its trust in essential custodians of factual authority.”

- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/opinion/trump-qanon-conspiracy-theories.html (archive)

extraordinary

[jbeshir]

Way back in April 2018, I announced a Prediction Contest [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYW9oMXhLHCvaCoLX/prediction-contest-2018], in which the person who made the best predictions on a bunch of questions on PredictionBook ahead of a 1st July deadline would win a prize after they all resolved in January 2019, which is now.

In the spirit of sharing negative experimental results, since only three people entered. But I’m still glad for having run the experiment.

[linguistlinguine]

Raymond and Zimmerman 2007, Research on Language and Social Interaction

Rights and Responsibilities in Calls for Help: The Case of the Mountain Glade Fire

By: Geoffrey Raymond and Don Zimmerman

Published by: Research on Language and Social Interaction Volume 40, Issue 1 Pages 33-61

LL Abstract:

In this article, Raymond and Zimmerman use a corpus of 40 calls to 911 about the same event - a fire on the Pacific coast - to examine how callers and call-takers negotiate rights and responsibilities in their talk and the ways these rights affect actions and trajectories of 911 calls. They identify problems in managing these calls that occur over time, showing how callers and call-takers cannot avoid the institutional constraints posed by the format of an emergency call. Suggesting that institutional resistance to change may stem from such routinized and embodied practices, the authors further consider the impact on emergency services due to shifting presuppositions in multiple calls produced during community-wide events.

LL Summary:

Raymond and Zimmerman begin by describing the emergency captured by their call corpus: a mountainside fire in a coastal community on the Pacific Coast that affected thousands of residents, allowing the researchers to track an ordered series of calls about the same event. They describe the questions driving their research, outlining their focus on the practices that organize calls and the ways that these practices embody an alignment of identities between a service seeker and service provider. Identifying a directionality to the information flow in emergency calls (where practices are designed to facilitate information into a dispatch center), they introduce three ways that these practices are altered over multiple calls: information flow is reversed, complication of the service seeker/provider relationship, and complication in the rights and responsibilities of that relationship. In the next section of the article, the authors review prior research on the organization and production of emergency calls, beginning with how calls generally have a monofocal character leading to brevity and order as callers are constrained to present service-appropriate matters. They describe the ways that callers are aligned to report problems and answer questions, while call-takers receive the report and ask questions, resulting in the a division of rights and responsibilities that provide the directionality of information they previously discuss. As deviations from the orientations, presuppositions, and activities have consequences for the emergency call, the authors note how the first two turns of a call set up the responsibilities for each party while positioning them to engage in a specific type of activity: reporting an event for the purpose of obtaining help for that problematic event. Using the first call about the fire, Raymond and Zimmerman show how the organization of 911 calls allow callers to use their first turn as a “slot” for presenting the trouble that led them to call (the “caller’s problem). Noting the compact opening and closing sequences of the first call, the authors illustrate the sequencing inherent in emergency calls that facilitates the orientations, presuppositions, and activities that enable callers to report emergencies. Next, Raymond and Zimmerman use examples from several calls to show how callers departed from the norms of an emergency call in reversing the directionality of the calls as the fire emergency progressed, demonstrating that both callers and call-takers maintained a tangential alignment with these norms despite these deviations. Here both call-takers and callers are shown modifying their practices in an effort to see if their call matches previously delivered information, resulting in modified service announcements and orientations to a caller’s right to report an emergency (e.g. when a caller’s first turn opens with a request for a call taker to confirm they already know about the fire, or a call taker provides “candidate locations” for the emergency). In addition to calls where reporting is sustained as the overall activity, the authors next examine calls where other projects are pursued, such as information or advice seeking calls. Here they show that callers orient to their limited rights as reporters yet presuppose that call takers know more about the event in question than the caller, reversing the activities in a typical emergency call. In calls seeking advice, the authors demonstrate that callers use location formulations to establish their proximity to the fire as a basis for pursuing information and advice. They conclude their analysis with two examples of calls where call takers struggled with requests for advice, as in these cases the call takers faced institutional limits on their own rights to provide information or advice (such as encouraging a caller to evacuate). The article ends with a discussion of how the calls systematically changed over time, from reporting the fire to seeking advice or information about the emergency, and the authors note that both the organization and distribution of rights and responsibilities in these calls changed as a result. Despite these changes, they underscore that callers and call takers attempted to preserve the ordinary structure of these calls, suggesting that institutional constraints make resistance to change problematic in such situations.

LL Recipe Comparison:

This article reminds me of the recipe for Feisty Shrimp Linguine:

While the authors of this article discuss different linguistic responses to a fiery situation, you will find yourself loving the fiery flavor of this linguine dish! The shrimp and red pepper of this recipe are a nice twist on the traditional seafood linguine approach, and the thick tomato sauce can be adjusted to your own heat preferences. Even though callers and call takers must deal with problems if an emergency steps outside the norm, you won’t face any problems putting this easy dinner idea together. Good Cooking!

MWV 7/13/18 

[samueldays]

Epistebrology

(source)

[sophia-epistemia]

one thing that i don't remember addressed in Seeing like A State is..

how HARD it is to get Good measurements of reality.

the whole "la rona is stealth and we don't have enough testing capacity to test literally all of everyone every week, and, even if we did, our tests have a 30% false negative rate" is..

ok it's one instance but. how many things in-the-world are as hard to measure? Reliably Enough?