Add LaTeX support (I mean inline LaTeX, not this thing).
EDIT: Based on comments below, I think I misused the word “inline”. What I meant was simply the ability to type LaTeX directly into comments and posts. How it gets rendered doesn’t matter much to me; some legitimate objections have been raised, but I don’t feel like hard math gets used enough on the site that this would get out of hand. Restricting its use to posts rather than comments might be a good compromise.
Not that I disagree with you in general, but I can think of a few cases in which you may actually want to cultivate blankness toward a given subject. In particular, deep and difficult questions have been known to occasionally drive people mad—it’s an occupational hazard for mathematicians in particular, and perhaps also for people in other fields. One might reasonably object that correlation does not imply causation in this case, but I have had a couple of experiences in which intense study of math and physics led me to some pretty dark psychological places, and I had to back off for awhile and think about more mundane matters while my mind reset. It’s possible that, for some people, some areas of thought really are inaccessible, insomuch as they could irrevocably damage themselves in trying to get there.
A (female) mathematician friend of mine has often complained about the responses she often gets to her gender in her field; often she feels that others expect her to be incompetent until (and sometimes despite) being proven otherwise. The interesting thing is, she’s seen other women internalize this, resulting in “impostor syndrome”: effectively, no matter how well they do, they feel they don’t really understand the material, that they only got as far as they did by fluke, and that it’ll all come crashing down around them at any time. The interesting part is these women seem to do particularly well (barring nervous breakdowns) because they believe their abilities are not innate, and so they work much harder than they actually have to.
I think the same is true of men, albeit (based on this article) to a lesser extent. I coasted through most of my childhood on simply being smart, and it was only when I started forcing myself into difficult situations that I learned to actually develop abilities I didn’t have automatically. This is why I’m skeptical about “gifted” programmes: they segregate children based on innate talents, rather than emphasizing hard work and dedication, and that seems to leave a lot of otherwise intelligent people unable to cope with day-to-day existence outside the world of academia.
I’d like to take a stab at writing this one, actually, if no one else is dead set on it. Expect it in the discussion section within forty-eight hours.
EDIT: Status as of 11:56AM EST, Feb 9: The first draft is about 90% completed, but I need to leave it aside and run off to class. I will post it this afternoon, and then revise it (aided by your contributions!) over the remainder of the week.
EDIT EDIT: Posted as of 8:10PM EST.
Point out that “losing” an argument can allow you to learn things, and if you honestly care about truth you’ll try your best to evaluate ideas from other points of view and consider what it would mean if they were true. Do this without sounding condescending.
Pointing out that she should give your arguments due consideration is not necessarily the best way to get her to do so. Here are some techniques I’ve found useful to avoid triggering defense mechanisms:
Tone is important. Phrase your e-mail in a friendly, humourous and above all non-threatening manner. The Socratic method is well-suited here, as long as your questions come across as curious and playful rather than scathing and rhetorical.
Focus on exciting and cool evidence, like this ring species business. Use vivid imagery, and encourage her to imagine and understand this happening. This might also allow you to exceed 3000 words without losing her attention.
If you do address creationist counter-arguments, make sure that you (visibly) give her arguments due consideration. For example: “It certainly seems this way, but consider the following” rather than “No, that’s just wrong, and here’s why.”
Present strong evidence, but understate the conclusions. For example: rather than “God didn’t have a hand in the origination of species”, just say “If God created all life on Earth, he did it in such a way that it would look like evolution did it.”
Find a place of agreement. That is, find the last place in the debate where you both agree and where your beliefs begin to diverge; then proceed slowly from there. As I’ve said, tone is very important. This technique is more useful if you have an ongoing dialogue, but you should be able to adapt it to a one-off e-mail, if you have a reasonable estimate of where that last place of agreement may lie.
AndrewHickey’s comment notwithstanding, it wouldn’t surprise me if he did say that, and if he meant it very literally, like in the batshit crazy sense. Famous mathematicians have a long and celebrated history of going off the deep end. Cf. Georg Cantor, Kurt Gödel, Alexander Grothendieck.
For under-reporting, look here. Even amongst high-school students, the incidence rate was as high as one in five women, and half of these had never told anyone about the incident.
The point here is that feminists tend to use a definition of “rape” that is vastly more general then what the word commonly refers (it tends to boil down to “any sex you regret in the morning”) to in order to inflate the statistics.
I’m sorry, but this is absolute nonsense. In fact this is precisely the kind of nonsense that gets used to systematically belittle and trivialize rape victims, and which leads to the under-reporting I mentioned.
The typical popular model of sexuality goes something like this. The woman has, i.e. possesses, sex; the man wants to get it from her. She, on the other hand, wants to hold onto it for the best mate she can find (in order to get married, etc.). Therefore his job is to put on the moves, and her job is to put on the brakes. However, if she resists, then she’s a bitch, because he deserves it after all, therefore she better not resist. If she does resist she might just be playing hard to get, because after all she really wants it, so as long as she’s not resisting too hard you can keep pushing anyway, either ignoring her protests or whining until she gives in. If she regrets it in the morning, well, she shouldn’t have been such a slut anyway. Because this is after all the sexual norm, she probably won’t even think of it as rape, and might never think to mention it to anyone.
Feminism makes the radical suggestion that this model is totally, balls-out insane and that maybe our notion of a healthy sexual interaction should necessarily include enthusiastic consent on both sides. If you want a more complete summary of the feminist position, “Yes Means Yes” is a good introductory source. I don’t think I can do as good a job of explaining as the authors can, so I’m going to leave this off here.
It seems to me that the easement will cost, at most, the amount of money that B could get from A in court for illegally crossing B’s land. Given the additional expenditure of time and legal fees, not to mention the uncertainty of the legal outcome, it will probably be somewhat less than that.
I have mixed feelings about this. In the first place, while I’ve seen this dominance-seeking theory tossed around, I’ve never heard it from a reliable source, nor backed by solid evidence. I consider it reasonably likely that there are some women out there who prefer to be pseudo-”forced” into sex, but I have no reason to think they are anything close to a majority—in fact, I’ve never met a woman who feels this way, though my social circle is not necessarily representative of the general population in this respect. As a model of typical human sexual roles, this is most likely false—a bit of wrongheaded folk psychology tossed around by Nice Guys™.
There’s always a significant danger, when making these sorts of claims, of victim-blaming: of putting the responsibility on rape victims to solve their own problems. I think you’re right, however, in identifying feminine sexual roles as part of a more general problem: even beside the rape epidemic, our sexual milieu is far from healthy. I think there is indeed a burden on women to learn to take the initiative and ask for what they want, simply because no one else can do it for them. Even mock rape scenes can be safely enacted if properly negotiated beforehand.
In the meantime, however, men can facilitate the process by healthier gender roles ourselves. Sure, a little bit of swagger is a turn-on, in men and women alike. But this is not the same thing as being pushy. A man who can coolly and confidently articulate his desires (when appropriate) in a way that doesn’t impose them on the object of his attraction becomes about an order of magnitude more attractive himself.
That’s a critique of LSD, not mystical experiences in general, as a creativity enhancer, and even then, I think the author is leaving out a fair bit of evidence to the contrary. Though he never officially confirmed this, Francis Crick is believed to have been on LSD when he discovered the helical structure of DNA. Less controversially, many of the programmers in the early days of Silicon Valley are known to have done a fair bit of coding on acid; Steve Jobs himself is known to have taken a fair bit of it in his day. Here’s another article claiming that Kary Mullis, a Nobel prize-winning chemist, was assisted by LSD in his discovery of a certain polymerase chain reaction used to amplify DNA sequences. And, to end on a more whimsical note, Dock Ellis once pitched a no-hitter on LSD.
If more people haven’t come forward with important discoveries on acid, we shouldn’t be too surprised: most people haven’t tried it, and even if you have, it’s a significant career risk to admit it. I do agree that acid on its own is not enough—there’s still a fair bit of work to be done while sober—but to say that it’s done nothing for us is simply not true.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it appears that Mr. Raymond’s argument is roughly as follows:
Not all rapes are forcible.
Incidence of forcible rape among women is lower than 1 in 6.
Therefore the incidence of rape among women is lower than 1 in 6.
I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to puzzle out the error in that one. Also note that there’s no mention of how “over-reporting” and “false allegations” are determined. My guess is that this is based on the conviction rate (I don’t know how else you’d do it), in which case you run into precisely the problems I mentioned.
We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind. Mind is your only ruler, sovereign. The man who is not able to develop and use his mind is bound to be the slave of the other man who uses his mind
Marcus Garvey. I think it works better in this longer form.
These are great. Do you mind if I incorporate them into the relevant post when the time comes?
These are some interesting points. I meant “arational” in the sense that our actions are arational—rationally motivated, perhaps, but it would be incorrect to say that the action itself is either rational or irrational, hence it’s arational. What intrigues me is the fact that these arational phenomena are deeply embedded in the way our minds are structured, and therefore can perhaps inform and augment the process of rationality. Indeed, some of them may be extremal states of the same systems that allow us to be rational in the first place.
I’d definitely like to see this post on Buddhism; you seem to have an excellent grasp on it.
That women should learn to take a more assertive role in their own sexual fulfillment is one of the main themes of Yes Means Yes, and is more or less the unanimous view of mainstream feminism today.
My vote was for disabling, but I think this should also change your username to something suitably anonymous (like “Account deleted”).