A Day in the Park: There's a Science to It

Saturday I went to Clark Park, where I'd volunteered to petition to put Olivia Faison, the Green Party's candidate for Philadelphia Council at-Large, on the November ballot. The sign-up sheet hadn't described the nature of the event, but what I found was Science in the Park, part of the Philadelphia Science Festival. So I led my pitch with the fact that Olivia is a retired scientist, and gathered 28 signatures in an hour. Then I spent 45 minutes selling One Step Away and made $25.75.

NAACP Puts Democrats Over Democracy

The president of the national NAACP has just attacked the democratic rights of his members to appease his politican friends.

https://blog.simplejustice.us/2019/04/28/naacp-to-missouri-black-men-your-lives-dont-matter/?fbclid=IwAR1cnuoRD0oVg2fO-tgo8GJOznpVkljx62jhTuvYwqHIlYR_Rc6v8_XDnwo

Open Democracy Still Not Open to Diverse Viewpoints

Our friends at Open Democracy have shown once again how closed their minds are with a story about the role of the "manosphere" in Donald Trump's election.

They do have a comments section and I tried to use it, but I just got an error message no matter whether I logged in with Disqus, Facebook, or Twitter and regardless of which browser I used. So instead I posted my comment with Gab's Web commenting tool Dissenter. Below is a link to what I wrote.


https://gab.com/stripey7/posts/eHl4K29vVFc4TnlVaEZMTSs0MWdtUT09

Thank You, Mindy Brudno

As part of a job application today, I was asked to write about one of two topics. The one I chose was, "Describe the most important criticism you've ever benefited from. Describe the event and explain how it changed you."

When I was 16-17 years old I was part of what I now regard as having been a political cult. Perhaps the most critical moment during my membership was when I stood alone in objecting to a proposed change in line on an upcoming ballot measure. All of the other ten members of the chapter were ready to vote for it.

The group was nominally democratic, but didn't really encourage independent thought, and I was already struggling with social anxiety. And so, despite having just argued that the proposed line change was unprincipled, I found myself saying I would abstain on the question. Immediately thereafter, another member leaned over and whispered to me that if I thought the line change was unprincipled, I should vote "no" on it, not abstain. I realized she was right and, fortified, voted no.

Looking back on it, I recognize this as the moment when I was in greatest danger of losing my intellectual and emotional freedom. I thank Mindy Brudno, wherever she is.

I Will Be Reading Again at the Upcoming Erotic Literary Salon

http://theeroticsalon.com/category/press-release/

In addition to my reading, I will use the opportunity of the intro to inform people of my new project writing a screenplay based on Hbrushed's short story, "Poor Beth."

I performed two song parodies at the salon in March, which got the biggest applause of the evening.

Today I attended my first meeting of the Philly Writers meetup group. I was hoping to get tips on writing my screenplay, and I wasn't disappointed. Based on what one of the other members said (which was, in turn, based on a book she's currently reading, Writing the Breakout Novel), I realized I have to add a couple scenes prior to what I'd initially conceived as the first, in order to make the protagonist sufficiently sympathetic and get viewers emotionally engaged with her.

Futurity: "Boys aren’t born with better spatial reasoning"

https://www.futurity.org/spatial-reasoning-gap-2035092/

Note that the headline isn’t supported by the research being reported. What the lead author actually says is, “While our results don’t exclude any possibility that biological influences contribute to the gender gap, they suggest that other factors may be more important in driving the gender difference in spatial skills during childhood.” Meanwhile, other research has definitively established that brain sex differences exist in utero: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1878929318301245 (My thanks to u/SomeGuy58439 for linking to this on r/FeMRADebates.)

Quote of the Day: the Political Streisand Effect

"The Antifa 'protestors' had pretty much no impact on the event. Our report on their pre-event threats really boosted our website's daily views though, so they actually ended up helping us in a way."

  -- Penn Statesman president and College junior Sydney Gwynnx, on demonstrations against their invited talk by Candace Owen

https://www.thedp.com/article/2019/04/candace-owens-penn-college-republican-protest-antifa-philadelphia

Tell Attorneys General to Remember the Constitution!

Stop Abusive and Violent Environments announces:

ACTIVISM FRIDAY!!!

Nineteen Attorneys General are lobbying against the presumption of innocence for college students.

In an effort to promote due process and fairness, SAVE encourages everyone to contact Attorney General Keith Ellison of Minnesota and voice their concerns with this decision.

Attorney General Ellison can be contacted via Twitter (@keithellison).

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/title-ix-ags/582673/?fbclid=IwAR2uUSfutJVtofX8E8MW4nX6yzQfzpRy0M6FUODTQ9xXh10zrWYm0kjXpMU

I'm not sure why SAVE singled out Keith Ellison for attention.  I sent my message to PA's AG Josh Shapiro, @PAAttorneyGen, as follows:

It's outrageous that you've signed a letter attacking the presumption of innocence in Title IX cases. This is one of the bedrock principles of our nation's Constitution.

Quote of the Month

Please do not believe anything you read on the Internet.

   -- Bared Affair, number 3.01, page 1

Starting a New Creative Project

Recently, I read an erotic story online and was blown away by it.

I've been reading such stories for years, but it's the first time I found myself thinking as I read one, "This deserves to be made into a movie!" (The only time I'd thought that before was while reading Freedom Road, an historical novel by Howard Fast which, it turns out, actually was made into a movie.) "Magnificent" is the word that first came to mind, both for the very creative plot twists and the striking visual images suggested by the text.

Not long after I read this short story, I was actively imagining how the shots would look and the sequence of the scenes, including ones occurring in the story as flashbacks as well as new ones taking the place of exposition. In my mind the story went from "deserves" to must be made into a movie -- that it would be a cosmic injustice for this not to happen. And I have to do what I can to make this happen -- meaning, at the least, to write a screenplay. I guess this is the feeling I've heard reported by other writers before -- that a story is somehow "out there" and demands that they tell it -- but it's the first time for me.

I mentioned to my therapist that I was hesitating because of my lifetime problem of feeling intimidated by big projects, going back at least to fifth grade when I failed to turn in a report because I had been unable to stop procrastinating on it. She encouraged me to go ahead and just try to write a little every day, and I agreed to do that. And yesterday I actually got started -- I've now completed the "Dramatis Personae" page.

#DueProcessMatters -- Start by being rational!

In their latest show, the Honey Badger Brigade is amplifying the alert by Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE) concerning the Justice Department's support for the "Start by Believing" campaign. You can read a detailed explanation here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/25519538

I encourage everyone who cares about civil liberties to follow the links there and tell Justice that starting with a presumption of guilt isn't what they're supposed to be about. Here's the text of the comment I submitted:

The Constitution, which the Attorney General is pledged to uphold, mandates the principles of due process, including the presumption of innocence. It is therefore unacceptable that DOJ is currently supporting groups like End Violence Against Women International and their "Start by Believing" campaign. DOJ should immediately stop funding and "celebrating" this attack on our basic liberties.

I also encourage everyone who can to support SAVE in all their important work, as well as the Honey Badgers who help so much in getting the word out!

I've just started re-reading, for the first time since childhood, A Wrinkle in Time, a book (not) best known for popularizing an incorrect usage of the word tesseract. (Its actual definition is the four-dimensional analogue of a cube.)

A New Window on Myself

A week ago yesterday (2/21/19), in the last of three interviews at the Center for Autism, I was informed that I place on that spectrum, albeit very close to the cusp.

I'd suspected for some years that this might be, but also thought that those aspects of my experience that suggested it could be symptoms of something else instead, such as social anxiety disorder, with which I already had been diagnosed. But the psychologist who assessed me said I showed too many other signs that aren't characteristic of social anxiety but are consistent with ASD. I still could (and, I think, do) have SAD, but I have this as well.

But this was still a rather abstract understanding. I accepted her expertise, but didn't feel strongly convinced -- until today.

She'd informed me a conference on autism was coming up and, at her recommendation, I was offered a scholarship to attend as a "self-advocate." So I went, and it was, almost literally, eye-opening.

I refer to an epiphany near the beginning of the first session. The presenter was talking about differences in attention patterns between young children who are neurotypical and those on the autism spectrum. He then remarked on how our ability to study these things has been improved by the development of eye-tracking technology.

Despite this lead-in, I still wasn't prepared for the revelation that came next. He showed a video of a woman researcher demonstrating for a child (not seen in the video) a novel way of removing a bottle from a plastic bin and then taking its cap off. The bin was one of a row of them of different colors. He repeated the video while verbally emphasizing the novel aspects of her behavior that were intended to engage the child's interest.

And now he showed the video a couple more times, but with a difference: there was also a red dot on the screen that moved around, showing where the observing child's eyes went while the woman was demonstrating the procedure. So I got to follow the eye movements of the neurotypical child, and then those of the child on the spectrum. And so, after the unusual bottle-removing-and-opening procedure itself, I had a second novel experience: the eye movements of the neurotypical child.

At the start of the video the child's eyes were grazing over the varicolored bins, until the researcher started doing something with her hands. Then his eyes shifted -- toward her face (hmm, that was unexpected!). Then to her hands, back to her face, etc., for the duration of the procedure.

In the last video the ASD child likewise is initially looking at the bins, until the woman starts demonstrating the procedure. Then he starts watching her hands, and stays focused on them for the rest of the video. Same as I had done! And it would never even have occurred to me that someone else might do otherwise.

The presenter then explained that this illustrated the difference between social learning -- focused on looking to another person for cues about their intention -- and instrumental learning -- focused only on the physical action itself. These two styles had been exhibited by the neurotypical child and the ASD child, respectively, in the eye-tracking videos. And the latter also by me.

There were some other revelations at the conference that were pretty striking too, but that was enough to convince me that I'd been diagnosed correctly.

I'm Now on Dissenter, "the Comment Section of the Internet"

I just started using the Dissenter app, called "the comment section of the Internet," which lets you comment on any Web page even if it has no comment section of its own. I used it to post a comment on an NPR "Week in Politics" segment which I previously published on this blog under the title "Conservative Social Engineering." https://dissenter.com/discussion/begin?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org%2F2019%2F02%2F22%2F697152839https://dissenter.com/discussion/begin?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org%2F2019%2F02%2F22%2F697152839%2Fweek-in-politics-new-n-c-election-and-emergency-border-declaration&fbclid=IwAR3XTGlfHn5t_mAAtBKfKBDkx-btxzqFzEchIo6tPH9Nc5TqqFkuIsn12lw%2Fweek-in-politics-new-n-c-election-and-emergency-border-declaration&fbclid=IwAR3XTGlfHn5t_mAAtBKfKBDkx-btxzqFzEchIo6tPH9Nc5TqqFkuIsn12lw

Does natural medicine actually work? Or is it all just placebo?

Here's how I answered this question on Quora:

“Natural” medicine just means medicine derived from living things rather than synthesized in a lab. Until the 19th century, no one knew how to synthesize organic compounds, so “natural” medicine was the the only kind there was. This knowledge had accumulated over millennia largely by trial and error, so a lot of it was valid, but also a lot of it wasn’t. Even when it was, there usually was no accurate idea of why it worked.

As it so happened, the knowledge of how to synthesize organic compounds developed around the same time as an understanding of how to apply scientific method to medicine with placebo-controlled double-blind trials (which someone has called “the most important medical invention of all time”). And, in a capitalist context, most funding for such systematic research has gone into synthetic treatments because these can typically be patented, whereas natural ones can’t be.

As a result of this coincidence, many people conflate the question of whether a treatment is synthetic and whether it’s scientifically validated. And some commercial interests demagogue this by appealing to people’s suspicion of “experts” to promote things that aren’t scientifically validated, seeking to turn this deficiency into a virtue by labeling them “natural.”

But if you’ll reflect on it, even mainstream doctors often give advice that doesn’t involve anything synthetic. For a cold they’ll tell you to get plenty of rest and fluids. They’ll tell you to increase the fiber and reduce the sugar in your diet. Etc.

You can’t make any sweeping generalizations; you simply have to investigate what actual research exists on any given treatment. For this you need to have some familiarity with scientific method and conventions. Consider subscribing to responsible scientific publications oriented toward the general public, such as Science News, not just reading them when you want to investigate a particular claim but regularly, to develop this familiarity.

As a counterexample, one time a co-worker who was desperate to find a treatment for something affecting a friend showed me an article he’d copied about a supposed miracle cure. One “red flag” in the article was the “citations” at the end. It was a long list of journal titles — and that was it. They were all the titles of real medical journals, and were obviously intended to impress a naive reader that this was serious stuff. But if you actually had some familiarity with scientific publications, you would recognize that this was nonsense. Each of these journals might have several issues in any given year, with hundreds of pages in each issue and dozens of articles whose titles would mean nothing to a non-expert. Without even the year of publication being given in any of these “citations” — let alone volume, issue, and page number or article title — it was totally impracticable to verify that they contained anything to substantiate the claims in the article. But that wasn’t their purpose, of course — it was just to make it look “scientific.”

For Child Care That's Parent-Centered!

Senator Elizabeth Warren has proposed a national program for affordable child care. But what her proposal overlooks (at least, judging from the discussion on NPR's All Things Considered) is that, rather than being counterposed to paid work, parental care of children deserves to be publicly recognized as socially necessary labor and compensated accordingly. This could be either by an individual stay-at-home parent or by a collective or cooperative enabling parents to balance child rearing with participation in the institutional work force. This would allow parents to have real engagement with their children's development in "on" time while still pursuing other careers.

Conservative Social Engineering

In the "Week in Politics" segment of yesterday's All Things Considered, the Washington Examiner's Tiana Lowe says, "women bear 100 percent of the economic burden [sic] of all paid parental leave programs because disproportionately women are the ones to take time off,” and that “a lot of these programs disincentivize [sic] women from staying in the workplace.”

What convoluted reasoning! Paid leave isn’t a “burden”; it relieves a burden and, by doing so, removes a coercive incentive to stay in the institutional workplace when someone would rather prioritize caring for her children. So what if women more often make this choice than men? Isn’t that their individual choice, whatever the reason -- be it cultural, biological, or a combination of the two? What gives Lowe the right to try to force women to make a different choice? And how ironic is it that this advocacy of “social engineering” comes from someone calling herself conservative!

Let's Stop Trial by Public Opinion!

Thanks to Ceara McCord @GyakutennoMeg for bringing this to my attention:

Vic Kicks Back!

https://www.gofundme.com/vic-kicks-back

Talking to Strangers

Today I was telling my therapist about how I recently started a conversation Friday before last with someone I didn't know at a meeting of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society and, a few days later, with the worker at the station next to me on a temporary job. For most of my life I've had no habit whatever of making small talk -- even saw it as pointless and stupid, not comprehending (or being willing to acknowledge) its importance for making social connections -- yet in this second case, knowing of nothing we had in common, I simply opened by turning to her and asking, "So, what do you do for fun?" And we had a reasonably interesting exchange for the next couple minutes, even though our only common interest was singing.

But a couple hours after the appointment, I did myself a little better yet by saying "Good afternoon" to someone with whom all I had in common was that we were crossing the same street in the direction of the same bus stop. And it turned out that, once prompted by this greeting, she had things she felt like sharing. In fact, even though she wasn't going where I was (PRO-ACT), she'd just been receiving one of the same kinds of training that they plug people into. So that conversation was quite interesting too.

But most rewarding for me was the simple fact that I was able to take these initiatives at all, when for decades I virtually never thought of doing so, and when I did was usually too inhibited by anxiety to actually try it.