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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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  • Even then, a common bit you’ll hear from people actually defending pedophilia is that the damage caused is a result of how society reacts to it or the way it’s done because of the taboo against it rather than something inherent to the act itself, which would be even harder to do research on than researching pedophilia outside a criminal context already is to begin with. For starters, you’d need to find some culture that openly engaged in adult sex with children in some social context and was willing to be examined to see if the same (or different or any) damages show themselves.

    And that’s before you get into the question of defining where exactly you draw the age line before it “counts” as child sexual abuse, which doesn’t have a single, coherent answer. The US alone has at least three different answers to how old someone has to be before having sex with them is not illegal based on their age alone (16-18, with 16 being most common), with many having exceptions that go lower (one if the partners are close “enough” in age are pretty common). For example in my state, the age of consent is 16 with an exception if the parties are less than 4 years difference in age. For California in comparison if two 17 year olds have sex they’ve both committed a misdemeanor unless they are married.



  • they made this the one offense that makes a person be “illegal”

    It doesn’t make the person be illegal, but we nounify crimes to describe people who have committed said crime all the time.

    The whole point of the “undocumented worker” language is to make it sound like someone who misplaced some paperwork, rather than someone who violated immigration law.

    I mean, no one gets mad when you use the more common terms to describe an undocumented procurement specialist, an adverse euthanasia specialist or an unauthorized sexual partner. Despite those terms describing the person as being their violation of law.




  • A reminder about your rights. If the government can declare you to have an attribute that negates your rights, then you have no rights.

    Any time someone claims that some group of people should have no/reduced due process, I respond essentially the same way: “If you believe that $GROUP shouldn’t have due process then you are a $GROUP_MEMBER. Prove you’re not without any due process.” Before this year, it was mostly people accused of sexual assault, but illegal immigrants are the new target of choice as people who allegedly don’t deserve due process rights.





  • I do agree with your “averaging machine” argument. It makes a lot of sense given how LLMs are trained as essentially massive statistical models.

    For image generation models I think a good analogy is to say it’s not drawing, but rather sculpting - it starts with a big block of white noise and then takes away all the parts that don’t look like the prompt. Iterate a few times until the result is mostly stable (that is it can’t make the input look much more like the prompt than it already does). It’s why you can get radically different images from the same prompt - the starting block of white noise is different, so which parts of that noise look most prompt-like and so get emphasized are going to be different.


  • People shit on Hossenfelder but she has a point. Academia partially brought this on themselves.

    Somehow I briefly got her and Pluckrose reversed in my mind, and was still kinda nodding along.

    If you don’t know who I mean, Pluckrose and two others produced a bunch of hoax papers (likening themselves to the Sokal affair) of which 4 were published and 3 were accepted but hadn’t been published, 4 were told to revise and resubmit and one was under review at the point they were revealed. 9 were rejected, a bit less than half the total (which included both the papers on autoethnography). The idea was to float papers that were either absurd or kinda horrible like a study supporting reducing homophobia and transphobia in straight cis men by pegging them (was published in Sexuality & Culture) or one that was just a rewrite of a section of Mein Kampf as a feminist text (was accepted by Affilia but not yet published when the hoax was revealed).

    My personal favorite of the accepted papers was “When the Joke Is on You: A Feminist Perspective on How Positionality Influences Satire” just because of how ballsy it is to spell out what you are doing so obviously in the title. It was accepted by Hypatia but hadn’t been published yet when the hoax was revealed.