[FRIAM] agonism and policing the community with a keisaku?

[Steve Smith]

Glen -

As always I'm at least as intrigued as confounded by the layered 
language puzzles you lay here for us.  I was drawn through the looking 
glass (down the rabbit hole?) with your reference both to "Presty" and 
"Legibility" and "Zetetic" realizing I could not read your post for more 
than "emotional content" without reading at least the one main 
link/reference you offered up and I was nicely rewarded (kicking myself) 
with realizing "Presty" refers to "those who honor or defer to the 
prestige of an institution (such as an alma mater".   Zetetic were more 
technical and more familiar but useful to have to dig down into.

I feel also "honored" to be a participant in your "Associative Memory by 
Internet Forum" technique.... I feel as if getting to overhear your 
maunderings I am absorbing useful (to me, or my affinity group of some 
sort) perspective as well as maybe information.  I don't know if you get 
the <delete> as much as I probably do, but I for one appreciate the 
depth and breadth of your reflections... maybe I have too much time and 
would be more well served if did duck out with a "TLDR" response... or not.

  I am not particularly a "Presty" although I think I *am* proud of my 
BS from a state (Northern AZ) university as opposed perhaps to a 4 year 
private diploma mill of some kind.  But only because I know that at 
least some of my professors were of high quality and dedication and 
their courses and the overal curricula showed it in many cases.  Perhaps 
a presumed third rate college would have equal or greater examples.

My daughter who pulled a PhD from UNM (Molecular Biology) struggles 
cyclically with the feeling that her proposals to various funding 
agencies are sorted by "Presties" and hers thereby get shuffled down the 
stack from ones submitted by Stanford or Berkeley (or many other 
prestigious universities) grads... I don't know how real that is or if 
it is a phigment of her imagination or something else.  In any case it 
interferes with her professional progression (either enforced from the 
outside or from the phantasm of her imagination)... she probably doesn't 
put as much effort into her proposals because of this real or imagined 
fact?  I think she would defer to your "legibility" argument.

I *do* agree with your/Dorst's "Legibility" argument and your anecdotal 
reflection on voting.  I helped Reagan run over the top of Carter "back 
in the day" and was so ashamed once I realized what I'd done (starting a 
few months into his term, but continuing well through the next two 
decades).   The shame of having been such a "tool" lead me to choose not 
to vote again for nearly 2 decades under the cynical cover "I don't want 
to encourage the bastards!" and the more rational "I should not vote 
unless I am (much) more informed on my candidates".     I finally took 
my own challenge and began to inform myself as much as I could on my 
candidates, especially the local ones who were so close I couldn't see 
them often... a certain complement to myopia?

I began to use the League of Women's voters reviews of and interviews 
with candidates and checked (out of the corner of my eye) the Catholic 
publications with a list of candidates/topics to vote *against* as a 
hint I might well want to consider (positively) those candidates/topics 
if for no other reason than to apply my own kneejerk 
moderation/complement to kneejerk single-issue voters encouraged by the 
Catholic Church (and many other institutions).

I realize (because you pointed it out) that I missed the point in my 
last response on this thread by thinking you were emphasizing gender 
dichotomy rather than "community self-policing".   I won't try to give a 
proper response to that at this point but to acknowledge that 
reconsidering your post through that reflection was useful...   To the 
extent that "communities" are holarchical, I think I have observed (in 
my own experience) that I am prone to misunderstand how someone who is 
"policing" my speech/thought/expression is NOT part of my community when 
they are perhaps simply not as *obviously* part of my community or the 
communities which we share are not top of mind for me in that context.   
When adults who were trying to raise me (parents, neighbors, teachers, 
retail/service staff) I understood what/which-of "my community" they 
were and took their correction/policing/advice accordingly.   As an 
adult this was harder for me given that I wasn't sure who/when/how to 
moderate/admit other's "opinions" of my expressions/thoughts/ideas.   I 
could wax anecdotally on a few dozen instances where someone "got to me" 
and acutely bent my attitude and subsequent presentation with a well 
placed/apt observation which may have felt like an acute criticism in 
the moment but became a powerful "glimpse in a mirror".

Several here have "policed" my ideas/attitudes/presentation/speech in an 
appropriately professional and respectful manner (which in your case 
often includes a friendly "PFffffft!" or ?mocking? "Ha!" ) and I am 
always caught in the pain of recognizing the need for a refactoring and 
the opportunity it represents.   I love/hate it when that happens.  
Those of you with the most blunt and pithy observations are the most 
likely to achieve this... the abrupt knocking-sideways that is always 
unwelcome in the instant but often fully valued upon 
reflection.   "receiving the keisaku" as it were?

- Steve

> Along these same lines, I know there's a significant contingent of 
> "Presties" on this list. And I still don't have a good note-taking app 
> that I find convenient enough to use. So I'll post this here, in part 
> because it's a higher order form of ad hominem, in part because of our 
> Presty friends, and in part because I need to note it somewhere so I 
> can find it again.
>
> Bayesian Injustice
> Why rational people often replicate unfairness
> https://kevindorst.substack.com/p/bayesian-injustice
>
> A tiny part of the red flag for Zach Elliott's bullshit (cf 
> https://simonesun.com/blog/2022/5/12/stop-pretending-transphobia-is-scientific-debate 
> for why I assert his rhetoric is designed bullshit), is his training 
> institution, Oklahoma State. I'm sure it's a fine school ... maybe not 
> as good as mine (Texas A&M), but prolly in the same tier. And neither 
> OSU nor TAMU produce what I'd call well-rounded students ... at least 
> not like what I've seen come out of Reed (in Portland) or Evergreen 
> (here). And while Reed definitely has some prestige, I don't think 
> Evergreen's in the same tank.
>
> Yet another tangent: We have an upcoming election for several 
> commissioner and director spots on various local boards. Now, I don't 
> know most of these people. I see all the yard signs and such. We got a 
> flyer in the mail where a challenger pointed out the entitlement of an 
> incumbent. ("Do you know who I am? I'm the fscking mayor of Tenino!" 
> 8^D) Yaddayadda. But what do you do when you're aware of your own 
> ignorance but still believe in voting? You have a similar risk for 
> zetetic injustice. I ended up almost blindly taking the recommendation 
> for 3 of the board seats, the candidates for which I was completely 
> ignorant. But everyone else on the ballot was equally "legible" ... I 
> think.
>
> I've had the same complaint about the fideistic shunt surrounding open 
> source software. Just because some package is open source, doesn't 
> mean you should import it, for a wide variety of reasons. A really 
> funny example is 
> https://qz.com/646467/how-one-programmer-broke-the-internet-by-deleting-a-tiny-piece-of-code, 
> which provides a moral something like "Yeah, maybe reinventing the 
> wheel isn't as bad as they say it is." High order legibility is not 
> only a function of the legibility of the atoms, but also of the 
> composition, including both composition through time (e.g. provenance 
> of data) and composition over space (high-order or cumulative 
> structures).
>
> And finally, just a tangent about Zach's trumpeting that he's written 
> books. 
> https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-launches-boom-ai-written-e-books-amazon-2023-02-21/ 
> To be honest, I think I'd ascribe more *Authority* to a 
> ChatGPT-written book on Gender Dichotomy than to a Zach Elliott book 
> on it ... which is to say, Authority=0. Is Zach more or less legible 
> than ChatGPT? I just don't know.
>
>
> On 10/19/23 14:39, glen wrote:
>> Ha! I care much less about any particular false dichotomy than I do 
>> about the causes of dichotomies. The causes of dichotomies lie in 
>> agonistics, us versus them, this vs that, inside vs outside. Whatever 
>> triage methods we *happen* to adopt (or have impinged upon us) are 
>> always subject to fining and coarsening. When policing your tribe, 
>> you have to choose a (set of) scope(s). Which tribes are you policing?
>>
>> One element of the 5Ws approach to media literacy is "Who". Who is 
>> Zach? He writes books! And makes videos! Surely, as a trained 
>> architect, he's an authority on gametes, right? An expert on 
>> probability distributions? Of course! >8^D This post is helpful in 
>> determining who Zach is and whether you might want to propagate his 
>> bullshit:
>> https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCynical/comments/h81ymm/trust_fund_cismale_20_year_old_undergrad_is_new/ 
>>
>>
>> He's abandoned his named TLDN. But it's still available here:
>> https://web.archive.org/web/20220915143439/https://zacharyaelliott.com/about-me.html 
>>
>> and here:
>> https://www.genderparadox.com/about-me.html
>>
>> Yes, I'm guilty of ad hominem. But, as I've argued here before, the 
>> assessment that a fallacy is always a fallacy is, itself, a fallacy. 
>> I guess, as an admitted postmodernist, I should be proud of Zach for 
>> his ultracrepidarianism ... the same way I'm proud of my anti-vaxx 
>> friends who think they understand vaccines better than, say, their 
>> PCP. It's OK. They prolly stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night. 
>> Network theory seems helpful, here. When deciding which tribe to 
>> police, it's useful to track the cliques and components of the graph. 
>> We're known by our friends as much as our enemies.
>>
>> On 10/19/23 09:48, Steve Smith wrote:
>>>
>>> On 10/18/23 11:27 AM, glen wrote:
>>>> Here's PZ Myers policing his community:
>>>>
>>>> The Gamete Delusion
>>>> https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/10/17/the-gamete-delusion/ 
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> https://www.theparadoxinstitute.com/watch/is-sex-bimodal
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> I don't really have a dog in this fight other than the general 
>>> feeling that I support underdogs (and not just the ones who fly off 
>>> in all directions at once).
>>>
>>>
>>> to paraphrase one of the more notable FriAM-Sages... "people should 
>>> be called what they want to be called"...  harping on the emic/etic 
>>> conflation some more, I find these discussions (e.g. Dawkins et al) 
>>> rather off-point in this regard.   I understand (vaguely) why we all 
>>> feel we must make sweeping generalizations about *other people's 
>>> business*... some of it is an empathetic response, wanting to 
>>> understand, but some of it is the response of someone who wants to 
>>> control others. These *are* conflated by circumstance in the sense 
>>> that  in spite of the pithy aphorism "your opinion of me is none of 
>>> my business", most of us actually *do* care what others think of us 
>>> and it does effect how they interact with us.   It always feels 
>>> unfortunate that those who want to tell others how to 
>>> present/feel/be too often set the subject of debate.
>>>
>>>
>>> I *expect* someone with their own dog in the fight to have an 
>>> insider/personal view of these things and am generally interested 
>>> and curious about their perspective up to their privacy.   For those 
>>> who mostly just want to stir up a dogfight, I'm not particularly 
>>> interested in their view beyond preparing myself for when *they* 
>>> might choose to try to stir up a dog(cat?)fight in *my* backyard.
>>>
>>
>>
>