My experience at Creating Change

This was cross-posted on The Asexual Agenda.

Creating Change is the big annual conference held by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.  Creating Change 2013 was held last weekend in Atlanta, Georgia.  I had the opportunity to attend and be on a panel called “Asexual Voices”.  The hosts of the panel were David Jay, founder of AVEN, and Sara Beth Brooks, founder of Asexual Awareness Week.  The panelists were Rin, Ivy, M., and me.

[Left to right: Hannah, Sara, M., David, me, Ivy, and Rin.  Hannah was also an important part of our contingent, though not on the panel.]

The panel was simple in structure: half an hour of introductions, and an hour of Q&A.  This was followed by a caucus, a place to discuss things like media representation and campus inclusivity, and a place to network and eat cake.

The panel was all the usual basics, but conveyed through a personal lens.  Here we had a wide range of experiences.  An aromantic, two panromantics, and a gay gray-A (me).  A man, a woman, and two agender people (each with their own individual expression).  One mono relationship, one poly schrodinger’s relationship.  We found asexuality through AVEN, Tumblr, and through our own invention.  And each our own person besides that.

The highlight of Creating Change, for me, was simply meeting these people.

The second highlight was watching David Jay and Sara Beth Brooks do their organizational magic.  While there were hundreds of workshops to go to, I discovered that all the big names in LGBT activism would not attend workshops.  Instead, they’d camp by the couches and have nonstop meetings with other leaders.  David Jay and Sara were among these people.  At the end of each day, they’d share their stack of business cards, and share a few of their stories.

Many orgs wanted to talk about making more ace-inclusive materials.  For example I met someone who wanted to get asexuality into the Unitarian Universalist Sex Ed curriculum, which is currently being redesigned.  There was also much talk about whether it would be beneficial to fight for an ace-inclusive ENDA.  This is a huge deal, which I will discuss more later.

But for the most part, I did not do sit in on these meetings, and did not do networking myself.  After all, I do not run an organization, I just run a blog, and one that I don’t intend to advertise to the wider LGBT community.  Instead, I attended a few workshops, and tried to catch up with sleep (I had the misfortune of having my flight cancelled and rescheduled to a red eye).

To be honest, I’m a bit of a pessimist and cynic when it comes to the usefulness of workshops.  I feel like everything is either too general or abstract to be applicable, or too specific to have relevance to me.  Or I’m too sleepy to tell what’s going on.  Therefore I may not be the best person to ask about them.  However I did very much enjoy  a workshop on creating community-based surveys, because I have done work in this area, and am likely to do more.  I found out about all the things we did wrong with the 2011 AAW community census, and how to do it better next time.

Al in all, it was a great experience.  Thanks to our sponsors for making it all possible!  A link roundup is coming soon [ie it will appear on The Asexual Agenda, not here].

Infatuation with logic

I was amused when Jason Rosenhouse pointed out an essay by a creationist called "If You Understand Nothing Else About Evolution, Understand IFF."  IFF stands for "if and only if".

Evolution does not necessarily exclude Adam and Eve and the Fall, and evolution is not a scientific conclusion, obvious or otherwise. For Christians to reckon with evolution they must understand evolution. And to understand evolution, they must understand IFF. Understanding IFF does not force one’s position on evolution, but it does force one’s understanding of evolution…

And while this is a perfectly good use of IFF, IFF has no place in scientific hypotheses. A scientist would never say “if and only if my hypothesis is true, then we will observe a certain observation.”

"If and only if" (usually abbreviated "iff", but not in all caps) is an extremely elementary concept in logic.  But the creationist blogger, Hunter, is treating it as an advanced concept.  It's as if understanding "IFF" shows that he is intellectually superior to scientists.  Instead, it just shows that elementary logic is a novel concept to Hunter.

The irony is compounded by the fact that Hunter does not in fact seem to understand "if and only if" and its application.  It doesn't make any sense to say "IFF has no place in scientific hypotheses".  "If and only if" is a logical connective, just like "and" and "or".  Would it make sense to say, "AND has no place in scientific hypotheses"?

Basically, the whole discussion of "IFF" seems to be a way to dazzle the audience with logical knowledge, and mask the argument's central incoherence.

A fun comparison comes to mind: Objectivism.

Many people know Objectivism for its peculiar form of libertarianism, but it's a comprehensive philosophy which also covers epistemology and metaphysics.  Objectivism begins with three axioms: existence exists, conscious exists, and the axiom of identity ("A is A").

I find it strange that a philosophy would claim to be based on only a few axioms (and pick such terrible axioms too).  It's clearly trying to emulate the structure of mathematics.  But it's not really succeeding, because math doesn't really assume that its axioms are true, it just constructs useful or interesting axiomatic systems, and tries to find tautologies within those systems.  Furthermore, it's not clear that the axiomatic structure of mathematics appropriate here; certainly science doesn't use an axiomatic structure.

The most absurd axiom is "A is A".  It just doesn't belong.  Why take the axiom of identity, and not the axiom of symmetry ("if A is B, then B is A") or the axiom of transitivity ("If A is B and B is C, then A is C")?  I think it's just there to make it sound math-y, and therefore solidly correct.  I can't imagine a legitimate use the axiom of identity in any argument over Objectivism, unless the construction of natural numbers is one of their substantive issues.

Commenter Larry once explained this by saying Objectivism fetishizes deductive reasoning.  That sounds about right, but I'm uncomfortable with using "fetish" as a pejorative, so I found "infatuation" in the thesaurus.

Objectivism is infatuated with deductive logic, and wants to emulate math even when it is foolhardy and inappropriate.  The creationist Hunter is also infatuated with logic, and makes a big deal out of a logical connective at the expense of coherence.  There are some differences too.  For one thing, I believe most Objectivists, unlike Hunter, at least understand the deductive logic that they are infatuated with.

I'm not going to overextend my comparison, since I don't believe Objectivists and Creationists are particularly similar groups.  I was just wanted to talk about two examples.