Asexual Agenda: Asexuality in China

For those interested, on The Asexual Agenda, I wrote a summary of a paper on asexuality in china.

Link: on label culture

On The Asexual Agenda, I've written something on ace label culture.  An excerpt:

It does not escape my notice that whenever people complain about excessive identity labels on Tumblr, a bunch of the examples given are clearly from ace and aro discourse. For example, Gawker lists demisexuality alongside otherkin and transethnicity. Someone on Urban Dictionary used "gender-fluid asexual heteroromantic two-spirit toast-kin" as an example. Thing of Things, while defending the trend, used "requiessexual bipoetisexual squidgender moongender aroflux lesbian" as an example.

Take the AVEN survey

Here's a project I've been working on:

The Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN) is performing a large-scale survey.
We are looking for any respondents who are part of the asexual spectrum, as well as people who are not part of the asexual spectrum. This survey includes some sensitive questions about sexual topics. Please distribute this announcement.

The survey is open for some time. Later, statistical results will be published, providing crucial information about the demographics and needs of asexual-spectrum people.

The survey can be accessed here.For any inquiries, please see our FAQ, or e-mail info@asexuality.org

Asexual atheists on The Asexual Agenda

I wrote a post on The Asexual Agenda opening the topic of asexual atheists.  It's sort of like my "fantastic primer" only it's a much more earnest attempt to start conversation, instead of talking about whatever the hell I want to.

Asexual story project

One of my cobloggers just launched The Asexual Story Project, which is a site collecting auto-biographical stories from people on the asexual spectrum.

And if this encourages you to take a look, I contributed a story which has never been told before.  It was actually nice to tell a personal story which didn't really have any sociopolitical point to it.  It didn't even have to represent all asexuals, because I mean it's just one of many stories available to read.

The Russian antisexual community

Several years ago, I wrote a vulgarization of history of the asexual community, focusing on internal battles with antisexual elements.  At the end of the history, I mentioned that there is a Russian antisexual community called the Antisexual Stronghold.  But since that community is primarily in Russian, little was known about it.

But now I've interviewed someone who participated in the Russian antisexual community.  It seems that they do not define "antisexual" in quite the way you think, nor has the definition even remained constant over time!

This is perhaps an arcane piece of history.  But I found it absolutely fascinating, both as an asexuality geek, and as someone who likes to think a lot about how communities develop over time, and why.

Vatican damage control

Some time ago, Pope Benedict said condoms were permitted under certain circumstances.  Of course, Catholic sources were quick to do damage control, saying that, in context, the pope's comments were not quite so enlightened as praise-givers claimed.

Later, Pope Francis said that even atheists are redeemed.  Yes, even atheists.  But just as everyone was praising his papal condescension, the vatican does damage control.  It turns out that redemption doesn't mean you go to heaven or anything like that, that would be "salvation".  Only Catholics get salvation.

More recently, Pope Francis said of gay priests, "Who am I to judge them?"  Other Catholic leaders do damage control, reassuring us all that the Church still disapproves of same-sex sex.

Every time it happens, it's practically a story out of The Onion.  No really, this is an article from The Onion: Vatican Quickly Performs Damage Control on Pope's Tolerant Remarks.

What can we conclude?  The media really wants to say true and positive things about the modern Catholic Church, but is hilariously unable.  People just don't understand that the Catholic Church's beliefs are already laid out in the Catechism in their full regressive glory, and thus not really newsworthy. The Catholic's "love the sinner, hate the sin" stance on homosexuality makes so little sense that the media gets confused every time it hears it.

Attend FtBCon

I will try to attend FtBCon this weekend, which is a free online conference with a great set of speakers.  I haven't really attended any atheist or skeptical conferences since TAM in 2010, because it costs a lot of money and commitment.  But this is great.  More online conferences, please.  You should attend as well.

Although, I will miss the Friday sessions because... board games.

In praise of non-deductive puzzles

It's a convention in many logic puzzles that there is only one solution, and you reach this solution by deductive steps.  But there are a few logic puzzles that are not entirely deductive.

I hope readers don't mind that I spoiled one of Nikoli's sample puzzles.

One of the classics is Numberlink.  In Numberlink, you're supposed to draw lines between each pair of identical numbers.  There is always a unique solution, and this solution just so happens to use every square.*  But even though there is a unique solution, you're not supposed to solve the puzzles by deduction.  You have to use a lot of guessing and intuition, or it would be too difficult.  MellowMelon has a guide on how to solve them.

*If you ever download a Numberlink app for a mobile device, they often require that every square must be used, rather than having a unique solution that just so happens to use every square.  I consider this a serious travesty, and do not recommend Numberlink apps.

I would like to contrast this with a lot of puzzle apps out there which do not have unique solutions (eg see this review).  Usually this isn't because they've been designed as non-deductive puzzles, but because the programmers couldn't be bothered to check for unique solutions.  This is the worst.

This was a randomly generated puzzle from Tatham's puzzle collection.

Moving away from pencil-and-paper puzzles, there is a game called Blackbox.  It can be played with two people, but it's really better to play against a computer.  In Blackbox, there are some balls in a box, and you're supposed to figure out their positions by shooting some lasers into the box.  You can't tell what the lasers do inside the box, but you can tell where they come out, if they come out.  There's a lot of room for deduction here, though solutions aren't unique.  But it's really more fun to try to figure it out based on the smallest number of laser beams.  Since you decide where to shoot the lasers, it tastes a bit like experimental science.

You can play Blackbox within Simon Tatham's puzzle collection, which has free mobile app versions.  I also recommend Eric Solomon's hexagonal variant.

Lastly, I'll mention a card game I just bought called Hanabi.  Have you ever seen those logic puzzles where people wear colored hats, and can only see the colors that other people are wearing?  Or perhaps the puzzle of the three foolish/wise men who wake up with marker on their faces?  Hanabi is sort of like that, because each player holds their hand backwards, so that only the other players can see.  Players cooperate by giving each other hints to play the right cards in the right order.

But while the colored hats puzzles are deductive, Hanabi is not because you can't be sure that everyone is playing perfectly (and no one knows what that would even look like).  Furthermore, there's never quite enough information to play deductively!  It's a lot of fun.

In conclusion, there is plenty of interesting puzzle-space to explore beyond deduction.

Reasonably Faithless on Craig's infinite denial

Long-time readers may recall my extended series on the cosmological argument.  I recently discovered a post on Reasonably Faithless which deals with a few of the same points, but from more of a math perspective than a physics perspective.  We both agree that William Lane Craig really doesn't understand infinity.

For example, Craig argues that infinite numbers of real objects is impossible because if you take away an infinite number of objects, you could have a finite or infinite number remaining.  Here's an excerpt of Reasonably Faithless's response:

And I agree that you can’t stop someone from taking away a certain number of coins, no matter how big their coin collection is.  But there is no contradiction here at all.  To think otherwise is to grossly misunderstand what is going on.  The fact that ∞ - ∞ has no unambiguous meaning does not prohibit someone with an infinite coin collection from giving away infinitely many of their coins.  All it means is that the number of coins they have left after doing so will depend on which coins they gave away.

Go Anita Sarkeesian

Anita Sarkeesian is producing a series of videos called Tropes vs Women in Video games, and this is the latest video (also see part 1). Warning: lots of violence.



A bit about the history of the project:  Anita Sarkeesian proposed it on Kickstarter, and got a lot of backlash and harrassment for it.  In the counterbacklash, the project got way overfunded ($160,000 when she asked for $6000).  As a result, it has very nice production values.  I like it a lot.

But the video also felt discomforting in a way that's difficult to express.  I've only played a few of the specific games mentioned in the video, but every single trope felt familiar.  And while there was much horrifying graphic violence, it simultaneously felt completely ordinary.  And the fact that it felt ordinary was itself sickening.  And then to see the same story lines be repeated a hundred times made it worse.  In any particular game, violence seems justified through extraordinary circumstances, but when the same "extraordinary circumstances" appear in game after game, it becomes inexcusable.

Incidentally, on Sarkeesian's blog, I found this video series Extra Credits.  The creators view video games as a medium, just like TV, movies, or literature.  They have lots of ideas on the direction of the gaming industry.

These days I play more board games than video games.  Board gaming is also male-dominated (at least in the US), because when I was younger they were marketed almost exclusively to boys.  There also used to be a lot of war games that were basically terrible.  These days a lot of board games no longer center on war or violence, but the male majority persists.

Math links

There's a cool video of a generalized version of Conway's Game of Life.  Normally, the Game of Life involves a bunch of squares in a grid turning off and on, but in the generalized version involves points on a continuous plane turning on and off.  (via Mathpuzzle)

Also, I'm a little incredulous that this "School of Hard Sums" is a real TV show.

Aikin and Talisse on civility

Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse have a post on 3 Quarks Daily talking about what it means to be civil in an argument.  Their main pointseems to be that civility is not merely about civil tone, but about representing opponents correctly, receiving opponents' arguments, and presenting arguments that are relevant to your opponents.

Chief among these concerns the need for those who disagree to actually engage with each other’s reasons.  This requires arguers to earnestly attempt to correctly understand and accurately represent each other’s views.  For similar reasons, arguers must also give a proper hearing to their opponents’ reasons, especially when the opponent is responding to criticism.  In addition, when making the case for their own view, arguers must seek to present reasons that their opponents could at least in principle see the relevance of.  We can summarize these ideas by saying that civility in argument has three dimensions: Representation, Reception, and Reciprocity.

Those are some good argumentation practices.  The idea is to lay out some structure that we can all agree on.  We should all be able to agree that the structure will clear the road to truth, even if we disagree on which way that road goes.

I'm not sure about that third principle, though, since theoretically any reason that is relevant to yourself can be relevant to your opponent.  The example they give is using the Bible to argue against secularists who support same-sex marriage equality.  I don't feel that this is a "uncivil" argument, it's just a really bad argument.  I would rather people not make bad arguments, but at the same time I don't feel this one is a threat to the very structure of argumentation.

I also liked another part of the post:

Argumentation is the process of articulating our reasons for holding our beliefs.  The point of articulating our reasons is to put them on display so that they may be examined and evaluated.

This is generally my attitude towards arguing my opinions.  I'm not handing you opinions from on high, I'm displaying them for your examination and evaluation.  I also try to display the weaknesses in my own opinions when I see them, because that seems like it would be relevant to your evaluation.  However, showing one's own weaknesses probably isn't so great a practice in more adversarial arguments, like politics.  I mean, you might as well have your opponent do the work of finding your weaknesses.

(via The Thinker)

A month for identity crises

This month seemed full of identity crises for atheists and skeptics.  I recall several discussions making criss-crossed tracks all over this theme.

First, there was a list of the 5 most awful atheists, which led to a lot of back and forth on whether they're great people with flaws, or flawed people who did some great things.

Later, Pharyngula attacked the skepticism label:

Ultimately, it just reaffirmed my regret that “skepticism” has become a label for the timid almost-skeptical, who like to reassure each other that they’re all truly the very best critical thinkers, now let the believers among us close their eyes and pray.

Then Massimo Pigliucci wrote a self-assessment of the community of reason.

The problem is that my experience (anecdotal, yes, but ample and varied) has been that there is quite a bit of un-reason within the CoR. This takes the form of more or less widespread belief in scientific, philosophical and political notions that don’t make much more sense than the sort of notions we — within the community — are happy to harshly criticize in others.

And then Natalie Reed says she is giving up on the atheist and skeptical movements (though not on atheism or skepticism).

At first how I assumed this went was people generally thinking “secularism is one of many important issues presently going on, and one that I happen to feel especially passionate about, so that’s where I’m going to be put a significant chunk of my energy and attention”.
[...]
But lately it seems to me that a much more significant percentage than I’d assumed are people thinking “atheism is the most important issue, so that’s the one I’m going to focus on”.

And now, on Blag Hag, people are discussing Atheism+.

We are…
Atheists plus we care about social justice,
Atheists plus we support women’s rights,
Atheists plus we protest racism,
Atheists plus we fight homophobia and transphobia,
Atheists plus we use critical thinking and skepticism.

That's cool, but I'm pessimistic that it will devolve into incoherence before long.  Let's wait and see.

In future posts, I'd like to discuss a few ideas.  This is an outline I may or may not follow.

1.  Is claiming "skepticism" just boasting about your critical thinking prowess?
2. What does it mean to prioritize the cause of atheism or skepticism?
3. How do we deal with skeptics who are wrong about things?
4. Why doesn't humanism serve the purpose of Atheism+?
5. Where does skepticism go from here?

Pope shifts position on condoms

The Pope is lauded for permitting condoms in certain situations, but Catholics protest that this is a distortion of a more regressive view.

It sounds like the Pope maintains that condoms are intrinsically evil, but in certain situations (his example was a male prostitute), it is less evil than spreading infection.

Well, whatever.  It seems at least one AIDS activist in Africa is grateful for what they can get.

From that last interview:

KEYES: I ran across a 2003 study and an article from 2008 that suggests that the use of condoms doesn't help all that much as a primary HIV prevention in Africa, partly because not enough people are using them and partly because a lot of the people in Africa that are being infected are in steady relationships already and people don't use them as much in steady relationships. Is that true?

Mr. MWANZA: Yeah.

The pope said that condoms are not a "real or moral solution" to infection, and that a better solution is "a different way, a more human way, of living sexuality."  Meanwhile, condoms could help people even in steady relationships.

Trailer: Cloud Atlas

I gave Cloud Atlas, the novel, a very positive review, but I wasn't sure if the upcoming movie would be good.  This trailer assures me it will be amazing!  I am very excited for this film now.  It will be released on October 26 (in the US).

The Asexual Agenda

I started a group blog, The Asexual Agenda.  It's an asexual blog which provides news and views, going beyond the 101 level.  It's also meant to stimulate asexual blogging by providing a portal to other blogs, and a space for discussion.

And yes, this will likely interfere with this blog and ultimately decrease my blogging rate.  To what degree, we'll see.  I will cross-post some things, but not everything.

In case you didn't know, this is the asexual agenda:
1. Blog
2. ???
3. World domination

Just like in Ender's Game.

A new favorite blog

Queereka is a blog specifically about the intersection of skepticism and queerness.  I have been looking for a blog like this for years, and it's finally appeared as a new sister site to Skepchick.

(If you're wondering if it includes asexuality, the answer is that it has not been mentioned yet.)

Happiness as knowledge

Since my blog seems to be dwelling on the deepest and/or silliest questions of philosophy lately, I thought I'd finally pass on an article I bookmarked some time ago: "The Spoils of Happiness".

The article poses a hypothetical dilemma:

Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Super-duper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life experiences? [...] Of course, while in the tank you won’t know that you’re there; you’ll think that it’s all actually happening [...] Would you plug in?. (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 3)

Some people would gladly plug in the machine; others would not.  For those in the latter group, why not?  Don't we aim to be happy?

The writer's answer is that happiness is like knowledge.  That is, it is possible to think that you're happy and be wrong about it.  For example, if you think you have great friends, but they actually hate you (or if they're actually a set of fine silverware and china), you might think you're happy but you're not.

One thing I don't particularly like about this idea is that the way he defines "happiness" does not really match the way it is usually used.  Happiness is usually thought of as an experience, not as a relationship between experience and external facts.  But the writer refers to this concept as "pleasure" instead.  Happiness is to knowledge as pleasure is to belief.  The idea is that we prefer happiness over pleasure, just as we prefer knowledge over belief.

I don't have anything else to add, I just thought it was interesting.

Panel on diversity in the atheist movement

The panel features Jennifer McCreight, Debbie Goddard, Greta Christina.  You must watch it.