[FRIAM] academic freedom

Marcus Daniels marcus at snoutfarm.com
Fri Mar 4 16:02:42 EST 2022 

< The 'Great Hurrah' regarding sex/gender the past few years is, IMHO, mostly nonsense, oversimplification, and reification in service of politics and power. >

For example, at Glen's pub meetup, why is it a topic people want to talk about, and why do they have strong feelings and opinions?   It seems like kind of a handwave to attribute it to some powerful people that have some arbitrary agenda, or just to attribute it to the powerful persons' habits.   The unseen powerful people just brainwashed these folks into having strong opinions where they need not have any?    It seems plausible to me these puppet masters are opportunists who see some strings to pull, and so they do.   But why is that puppet there in the first place? 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Friday, March 4, 2022 12:41 PM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] academic freedom

One of the segments of the undergraduate cultural anthropology course I taught, the one that I enjoyed teaching the most, focused on sex, gender, and marriage. I took great pleasure (yes Nick,  schadenfreude) destroying all the preconceived notions and asserted "Truths" of my, mostly Catholic and upper class students.

Sex is a linear spectrum: everyone is conceived female and, at about 6 weeks, males start to become differentiated. But no one is 100% male. The closest thing to binary, is the ability to produce viable eggs versus the ability to produce viable sperm.

Gender is a complex multi-dimensional space with almost no consistency across cultures. The closest thing to a gender universal: among all known hunter-gatherer societies, women always gather and men always hunt. No one knows why and every proposed "reason" is shot down convincingly by empirical evidence.

Sexuality (behavior) is also a complex multi-dimensional space and there are far more variations, dear Horatio, than dreamt of in your philosophy. Several aspects of sexuality appear to have a biological 'cause' with same sex attraction being the most researched.

Although it is possible to form, at least tentative, correlations across the two complex spaces and the spectrum; those correlations tend to be statistical 'patterns' more than anything else.

The 'Great Hurrah' regarding sex/gender the past few years is, IMHO, mostly nonsense, oversimplification, and reification in service of politics and power.

But, I am more than happy to call you 'It' or other term of your choice if you notify me in advance of your desire. 

davew






On Fri, Mar 4, 2022, at 9:50 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> The differences between men and women in prison might give some ideas 
> about how gender roles are independent of cis-gender.
>
> https://mcasa.org/providers/resources-on-specific-topics/prea/prea-res
> ources-and-webinars/under
>
> The concept of "gay for the stay", being more intentional, and 
> associated with women prisoners seems to be a kind of cognitive 
> flexibility that I associate more with the femaleness (in a good way).
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
> Sent: Friday, March 4, 2022 7:06 AM
> To: friam at redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] academic freedom
>
> I'm entirely ignorant of yeast biology, though a tiny bit informed of 
> yeast engineering for brewing. But, still in analogy with gender 
> teams, it seems preposterous that isolation could be common. Even if 
> we considered individual cells flying around in the air and compared 
> yeast in {all contexts facilitating reproduction} versus {all contexts 
> inhibiting reproduction} and the latter contained a larger absolute 
> number of cells, *that* the other contexts facilitate reproduction 
> implies a dependency between the two. I.e. dependency ≠ isolation. I 
> suppose if we add temporal isolation, we could say {time spent in 
> isolation} versus {time spent in nutrient bath} and we (I think
> counterfactually) found that most yeast spends most of its time 
> separated from its team, those relatively brief periods in the latter 
> state would be definitional to the organism, not to mention the species.
>
> In the analogy, there is also no such thing as an isolated human. 
> Sure, we might consider "wolf children", abandoned as babies and found 
> living in the forest or somesuch. But that would be too rare for any science.
> So "decoupled from [sex|society]" must mean something else, perhaps 
> prisoners in the SHU? My guess is there's a half-life to team identity.
> Stay in the SHU for X time and the time spent in milieu is 
> comparatively infinite. Stay in the SHU for Y time and the isolation 
> screws you up deeply, down into things like proprioception and 
> hallucination. Studies of team identity, being relatively fungible on 
> top of those deeper traits, would then be unreliable due to a swamp of 
> confounders. So, there's no science there, either. [⛧]
>
> But the language angle does make some sense, especially in the context 
> of biologists who are so used to using terms like "male" and "female"
> jargonally, then suffering a kind of memory error and thinking their 
> jargonal term has meaning outside their domain. Before enculturation, 
> they took "[fe]male" as the typical social role the laity takes it as, 
> conflated with "masculine", "feminine", etc. After enculturation, they 
> take it as "producer of ova" and "producer of sperm".
>
> But I worry that such semantic shift isn't as easy as EricS seems to 
> suggest. Sure, perhaps it's much easier than phonemes and grammar. But 
> it takes a lot of work, a lot of steeping, a lot of immersive learning.
> I guess it's a bit like the Necker cube or Magic Eye graphics. You 
> start out only able to see it one way. It takes focus and randomness 
> to plunk into the other view. And the more you practice plunking from 
> one to the other, you gain enough mastery to choose which way to view 
> it as a function of context.
>
> And that embeds both the temporally piecewise isolation of yeast and 
> humans back into the conception of the narrative self.
>
>
> [⛧] I feel like someone, perhaps Dave, will mention monks who may seem 
> like good candidates for decoupled from [sex|society]. And I imagine 
> most monks, Christian, Buddhist, whatever, have methodical techniques 
> for [de]categorizing their selves in parallax to the laity. Because we 
> do some science with a relatively large cohort of monks, it might be 
> reasonable to compare to a control cohort from the laity. But, again, 
> I worry about the confounders ... like McDonalds french fries, 
> Instagram addiction, orthorexia, etc. In order to make a clinical 
> trial over monk-hood credible, we'd have to have other isolates ... 
> perhaps InCels living in their parents' basements? Furries? Coomers? Agoraphobics?
> Those poor people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder? Setting the 
> control protocol for decoupled/isolation seems fraught.
>
> On 3/4/22 03:27, David Eric Smith wrote:
>> Marcus’s comment below is a fun and insightful angle for the analogy-mongers.
>> 
>> An area nobody gets angry about is the evolution of the genetic code (the assignment of amino acids to nuclease triplets by the translation system).  In modern life, coding is heavily heavily conventionalized and translation has very low error rates in complex organisms.  Since that can be presumed, vast complexity has developed that presumes and makes use of those predictabilities.  Hence, there are very very few ways a code can change, because touching anything in that tiny finite assignment table breaks an indefinitely large list of critical infrastructure.
>> 
>> So the Origins question turns to: in what kind of a world could coding ever have been an evolvable feature?  The general belief is: in a world where much much less is standardized in genomes, and “translation” is a stochastic enough process that, if one tried to describe it in terms of “reliability”, it would be rated very unreliable.  In such a world, the notion of memory ->  function cannot be one of sequence -> structure, and must be more like cloud-of-sequences -> moment-of-distribution-of-structures.  There are fewer distinctions that can be made in such a world robustly, and by that categorization “less” that one can do.  But the restriction of what can be done that makes a system at all robust also makes it tolerant of evolution of the code.  All this, on a sliding scale.
>> 
>> The second case is language change, and the people who get angry over that are people nobody cares about or listens to anyway.  Languages can change by shift of the semantic scope of lexical roots, by phoneme scope and values, and by aspects of grammar ranging from morphology to phrase structure.  The only redundancies that put limits on semantic shift within a functioning language are at higher levels of composition or pragmatics.  Since those are pretty fluid anyway, semantic shift is probably the most atomic of all the shifts, and the one most amenable to simple (meaning, not requiring typological priors) comparative modeling.  Phoneme and phonological shift are more constrained, because their roles are massively redundant, so they can only change “within tracks” if intelligibility of words is to be preserved.  Along those tracks the movement is still fairly frictionless, but you need to correctly characterize the tracks to make valid interpretations from comparative data.  The aspects of “grammar” (morphology to phrase structure) are the worst-accreted into interdependent systems.  So they are resistant to change, when they do change they tend to “shatter” and re-arrange (or so I have been told by a colleague who is professional in this area), and the allowed changes are very hard to predict and thus to use in forward Monte Carlo modeling.
>> 
>> If we believe the yeast biologists most-fully understand The True Nature of Life, and that isolation is the default, and the relinquishment of isolation is a hazardous and fraught negotiation, then Marcus’s teams probably grow up in the shade of a difficult and long-standing negotiation of how it is possible to have a manageable life in society.  For there to be difficulties in changing many things within those systems would then be the zero-knowledge prior.
>> 
>> Eric
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> On Mar 3, 2022, at 5:05 PM, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> I guess I'd approach it by trying to see what gender means to people decoupled from society and decoupled from sex.   To the laity, I think it probably has something to do what team you are on, and the implicit rules of the teams and whether one respects them or disrespects them.    Changing rules is one thing that can get people this wound up.
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
>>> Sent: Thursday, March 3, 2022 1:51 PM
>>> To: friam at redfish.com
>>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] academic freedom
>>>
>>> Biologists are NOT held to a higher standard. But when they do just go on speaking without ever listening, then they deserve some pushback. In this particular context, there was no bad faith on either side. But one of the biologists is accusing bad faith on the part of the non-cis people.
>>>
>>> As for a symbol being used without introduction, that's nearly impossible with "male" and "female" ... in English, anyway, which was the language we were all speaking. It would be like using pi to mean e in a paper. You *already* know that's a bad idea. So if you do it, and the readers don't know what the hell you're saying, it's your fault, not theirs. It's not a higher standard ... it's a standard standard.
>>>
>>> On 3/3/22 13:26, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>>> It seems to me it is like a paper where some symbol is used without introduction, but it becomes clear from context and reflection.
>>>> Not clear why a biologist should be held to a higher standard for explaining themselves when speaking to the laity.   I mean their reality feels real to them so it must be true.  ;-)   FEELING is everything!   It seems evil to me to limit "ordinary conversation" to a restricted, banal vocabulary.  That's how people like Trump get their claws in.  People should be able to listen and not just speak, to imagine the possible and not just what is right in front of them.
>>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
>>>> Sent: Thursday, March 3, 2022 1:14 PM
>>>> To: friam at redfish.com
>>>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] academic freedom
>>>>
>>>> The jargon being used by the biologist came in the form of "male", "female", "gametes", and such. "Male" and "female", when used by the biologists means something very different from what it means to the laity. And the biologists should know that. If they don't, they're stupid. If they do, but they don't dial down their jargonal use, then they're evil. And the use of "gamete" in an ordinary conversation is just Scientismist confabulation.
>>>>
>>>> On 3/3/22 13:10, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>>>> The distinction I'd make is between talking about identity in principle and talking about the details of my identity.    That's not a question of jargon, but of detachment.   Jargon is a tool for detachment.
>>>>>
>>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>>> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
>>>>> Sent: Thursday, March 3, 2022 1:04 PM
>>>>> To: friam at redfish.com
>>>>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] academic freedom
>>>>>
>>>>> Maybe. But I don't think it's generosity that's required. I think it's humility that's required. Anyone who both engages a group of strangers about identity *and* identifies in a non-standard way is already demonstrating that they're not too damaged. Or, I'd turn the tables and say that the snowflakes in this conversation (the Scientismists) are too damaged for the conversation ... damaged by their entrenched, enculturation into, Scientism. The one guy's exclamation "Gametes are real" was obviously an indicator that the other participants would either have to play by *his* nutty rules or wait for him to dial down his jargon-laced gobbledygook and have a real conversation with ordinary people.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On 3/3/22 12:56, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>>>>> Glen writes:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> < I think they're just defense mechanisms they've learned over 
>>>>>> years of abuse. >
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The defense mechanisms could be more like acquired allergies and do harm.    Once one is dealing with reflexive mechanisms, I start to worry that a conversation is not possible.   Because they would 1) need to learn to control those mechanisms (and who wants to take the time for them to do that) or 2) claim "You [the man] made me this may, now live with it."  (and then adapt to their nutty rules).
>>>>>>
>>>>>> There seems to be a need for some generosity to help people cope, but it seems plausible to me some people are just too damaged.    Does the absence of generosity make one a snowflake?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>>>> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
>>>>>> Sent: Thursday, March 3, 2022 12:47 PM
>>>>>> To: friam at redfish.com
>>>>>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] academic freedom
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Yeah, that's a good take. It also helps in distinguishing between reflexive defense mechanisms and cryptic character traits. Where me and the biologist who felt shut down disagree is in the interpretation of the non-cis participants word and body language choices. He thinks they're reflections of character traits. I think they're just defense mechanisms they've learned over years of abuse. In the non-binary person's case, they have an entire non-estranged, continually engaged, family that rejects their identity. So their body and word language is probably an example of them saying to the white cis biologists "pull yourselves together and we'll try again later." But I'm willing to be shown wrong if that's the case.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On 3/3/22 12:36, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>>>>>> Hmm.  Another experience I have had while deconstructing someone with "charged feelings" is coming to the ought-to-be-obvious recognition that neither of us care about the other, but nonetheless the counterparty who feels compelled to share their boring feelings believes it is my job to patiently listen to them work through their issues (even though they would never do the same for me).   Canceling could just mean "Pull yourself together and we'll try again next week."
>>>>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>>>>> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
>>>>>>> Sent: Thursday, March 3, 2022 12:28 PM
>>>>>>> To: friam at redfish.com
>>>>>>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] academic freedom
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Ha! No, I was making a point about freedom of speech, in particularly "academic" speech, and canceling or shutting down others. Sorry if my anecdote got in the way. I pared it down for you below.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On 3/3/22 12:16, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Anyway, I guess you were making some point about people getting riled up at a pub, and that it being informative somehow.   (Or at least entertaining?)
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> On 3/3/22 11:02, glen wrote:
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> Nobody was actively trying to shut anyone down. But the more conservative biologist actively claims the non-binary and queer participants *were* trying to shut down the biologists and had clearly shut down their reasoning. I disagree completely.
>>>>>>>
>
> --
> glen
> When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.
>
> .-- .- -. - / .- -.-. - .. --- -. ..--.. / -.-. --- -. .--- ..- --. .-
> - .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn 
> UTC-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe 
> http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
> archives:
>  5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
>  1/2003 thru 6/2021  http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
>
> .-- .- -. - / .- -.-. - .. --- -. ..--.. / -.-. --- -. .--- ..- --. .- - .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn 
> UTC-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe 
> http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
> archives:
>  5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
>  1/2003 thru 6/2021  http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/


.-- .- -. - / .- -.-. - .. --- -. ..--.. / -.-. --- -. .--- ..- --. .- - .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn UTC-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives:
 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
 1/2003 thru 6/2021  http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/

More information about the Friam mailing list