Tags
disability, effective altruism, not like other ideologies, ozy blog post, rationality, wild animals
Social Justice
Simultaneously “I understand why this was your best choice in this situation” and “aaaawkward”: “To top it all off, reports that Disney had been “browning up” some actors on set… drew a swift response from Disney, noting… that “diversity of our cast and background performers was a requirement and only in a handful of instances when it was a matter of specialty skills, safety and control (special effects rigs, stunt performers and handling of animals) were crew made up to blend in.””
A man whose mother has a severe intellectual disability discusses his relationship with her.
[cw: child sexual abuse] Why Honduran women are being driven to the US border. (Sample excerpt: “When doctors told [12-year-old] Sofia she was pregnant and explained that pregnancy meant she was going to have a baby, Sofia, in her soft, small voice, asked whether she could have a doll instead.”)
From the ‘social model of disability’ files: “In theory, a social definition of infertility—one laid out in terms of intentions and identities rather than diseases and disabilities—circumvents these problems. But it creates complexities of its own. Last year, researchers from Yale and the University of Haifa, in Israel, shared the results of a study in which they asked a hundred and fifty women who have frozen their eggs to explain their motivations. The overwhelming majority of the women cited what might be called “man problems,” including divorces, breakups, and male partners who weren’t yet ready to have children. It takes a conceptual leap to see a recent divorcée and a woman with endometriosis as equally infertile, but Campo-Engelstein argues that they are “similar enough that they should be treated the same.””
Effective Altruism
Is effective altruism growing? “Overall, the decline in people first discovering EA (reading) and the growth of donations / career changes (doing) makes sense, as it is likely the result of the intentional effort across several groups and individuals in EA over the past few years to focus on high-fidelity messaging and growing the impact of pre-existing EAs and deliberate decisions to stop mass marketing, Facebook advertising, etc. The hope is that while this may bring in fewer total people, the people it does bring in will be much higher quality on average.”
The uses of life history classification in understanding wild animal welfare. A thoughtful and nuanced review. (I’m cited!)
A foundational result on the question of how much wild animals suffer is wrong. I am mentioning this 10% because it’s cool and 90% to brag about my role as a catalyst here. (I complained at everyone I could find that this result didn’t make any sense because I was bad at math, and then it turned out to not make any sense because it was wrong.)
Rethink Priorities has an excellent in-depth summary of the evidence that invertebrates suffer, which incidentally explains a lot of really foundational issues related to animal consciousnes in general. Check it out!
Rationality (Practice)
Visualizations of different meanings of probability.
This LW post makes an interesting point about the difference between the norms and goals of science, but I’m mostly linking for the worldbuilding about ALIEN SCIENCE.
People view things as abstractions rather than as atoms, which causes them to miss ways they can interact with things to reach their goals. My summary is boring but the list of examples is very interesting and I really do recommend checking it out.
Subtle errors people make with the concept of conservation of expected evidence.
Weird situations with reasonable explanations, or “why 90% sure is way less sure than you think it is.”
List of examples where one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens. Again, the list of examples is incredibly interesting and much better than my summary.
The uses of divination.
Moral realism and moral nonrealism lead to very similar behavior for different reasons.
Rationality (Community)
I don’t agree with everything Ray Arnold wrote about the village versus the mission, but I think he crystallizes for me some important distinctions about the rationality community and moves the interminable conversations about rationalist community norms forward.
Again mostly of interest to rationality community people: rabbit hunts and stag hunts as a metaphor for community participation.
Parenting
Why you should sometimes change your mind after saying ‘no’. I follow this advice personally. My son Viktor only knows a few words and therefore has a hard time expressing preferences without crying. A strict ‘no giving in to crying’ rule would basically mean I couldn’t reassess my decision based on the strength of Viktor’s desires. I am probably going to enforce a ‘no giving in to tantrums’ rule once he’s old enough to express preferences with words, but until then ignoring his communication just seems unethical.
Just Plain Neat
Overzealous cleaner ruins artwork worth 690,000 pounds.
The Secret Rebellion Of Amelia Bedelia, The Bartleby Of Domestic Work.
This is so profoundly my shit that I honestly can’t believe it’s a real article: Georgette Heyer’s crossdressing novels as forced masculinization sexual fantasies.
This was recommended to me as one of the best profiles ever written, and it really is: the story of Ricky Jay, one of the greatest living magicians.
loving-not-heyting said:
There seems to be a suggestion in one of the links that it’s surprising moral realists would exhibit uncertainty about morality?
LW continues to use philosophy words in ways that make no sense to me.
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loki said:
Disneyland Paris also casts white people in non-white roles, although they try not to actually have to alter skintone (drastically, beyond a bit of bronzer) with makeup – more in the sense that if you dress someone with the colouring of, say, an Italian up as Jasmine you can kinda sorta get away with it.
What I can say, as someone who was in the acting biz and getting the Stage and such for a while – they are *desperate* to cast people who are the right race. Every year you get an advert for new Disney Princesses, followed by individual adverts going ‘we still need a Mulan/Pocahantas/Jasmine/Tiana’, months in a row… obvs I don’t know what’s going on once the auditionees actually get there, but it does seem like they’re just not getting people audition for the roles.
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Aapje said:
Stuff white people like: acting.
Seriously though, acting tends to have very negative connotations in many (sub)cultures. In particular, more (religiously) conservative cultures tend to see it as leading to immorality (perhaps justly so) and leading to poor incomes.
I think that it is often taboo among progressives to recognize that minorities (and women) have self-motivated preferences, rather than that their behavior is fully driven by exclusion and such.
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Aapje said:
I’m missing what is more or less the opposite of Medusan and Promethean loneliness, where someone stays alone because they are afraid of being hurt by others, rather than hurting others or being willing to endure pain for companionship.
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Lambert said:
Had you not yet discovered Daniel Mallory Ortberg?
Check out http://the-toast.net/author/mallory-ortberg/ for some of his older stuff.
Obvious fanservice in depictions of Saint Sebastian, the best translation of Psappho since 54 BCE, trying to work out what on earth was going on in the minds of medieval artists…
It’s the sort of erudite yet agressively irreverent content that straddles both shit- and effortpost.
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Protagoras said:
I really miss The Toast.
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