Saturday, November 18, 2023

On reanalysing passives

 Why is "Everton deducted ten points" correct and why was a pedant wrong to say it isn't? (In fact, he was wrong to claim "deduct" is not "ditransitive", which it clearly is.)

The usage the guy seems entirely unable to understand is common in English.

I had a parcel sent
Everton had points deducted

The past participle stands alone with the dative phrase removed, and as we often do with the passive, the agent deleted. This is very common in English. (The removed phrases are "to me" and "from them".)

The speaker then reanalyses the sentence as noun + adjective, a common use of past participles ("she is a woman scorned" feels more like "she is a scorned woman" than it does like "she is a woman who has been scorned".

These formations get very remote from their beginnings as a passive. "I have a spirit unbroken" is very clearly the same as "I have an unbroken spirit" but somehow more "poetic".

This is a longstanding process in English. You doubtless never consider whether "I ate some burnt toast" involves a passive but it's exactly the same as "I ate some toast that had been burnt".

When I say reanalysed, I mean, that as an infant, you remake the "rules" to understand (and generate) similar sentences in a different way.

Saturday, July 29, 2023

bill

 i have a son a son

i cannot express

i have a son

if time could if it could stand still

i could encompass my love

if it could stand still

if it could

if it could

i have a son i have a son a son a son

i don't have words

nor words nor gestures nor anything I can do

I can't wrap him

I can't hold him

I can't love him

I can't ever tell him

He is the bounds of my being

He is the cries of my soul

He is the lengths I can go to

He is the love I own

I have a son

I have a son a son a son

I have everything

I could ever want


Friday, June 16, 2023

Special friends

 When I was six or seven, I began a friendship with Eric. From the outside, you'd have thought that it was just the friendship that any two boys might have. But we played together more or less daily until the day his dad decided to move and then I did not know him any more.

Of course I didn't know then -- and no one around me knew -- that Eric was a special friend. (Some) Autistic people have them: singular focuses of your friendship life, which consume much of your emotional output. You never tire of them, no matter how much time you spend with them. You'd share anything with them. It's true to say that you love them intensely. In fact, you may not know this because we are so often painted as emotionless robots but intensity characterises us. It's why we are foremost in activism, devoted believers in the things we hold dear, faithful and loyal friends.

But perhaps the weirdest thing was that when Eric was no longer available as a special friend, it was like my feelings switched off. I didn't know then and don't know now what became of him. I'm not curious. 

One reason I've been struggling so much since splitting up with A is that I haven't had a special friend (I'll come back to the other reason). I have people I talk to, who care about me, whom I love. But they cannot be special friends because of two reasons: they are not available enough to me and they're not here. I did once have a "special friend at a distance" but she was different. She was available at any time because she stayed up all night and rarely slept at all and although she wasn't here, emotionally she felt present. I was married at the time. You could, and certainly my wife did when she found out about S by snooping in my business, think I was cheating. But I wasn't. My wife didn't want to fill the role and someone had to. I probably would have preferred a male friend but S was what there was.

I cannot, and will not, apologise for "cheating" because I could no more avoid it than I could avoid breathing. You cannot punish yourself forever for things you cannot change.

When S didn't want to be my friend any more, I was okay with it. I let her go. I had someone else then. And tbh I rarely thought about her after that. This is someone I talked to for hours a day. But emotionally their relation to me had changed. The person who replaced her helped me through a divorce and some bad times. He didn't do anything to help except be my friend. There is nothing a special friend has to do except be available, to feed the emotional black hole that in many ways is all we are. 

So why am I so broken now? Why don't I have a special friend? Surely you can just get one. I always had one, right? Well, not always, but often enough, and even for a brief time -- the time when I was closest to a whole human being, my special friend was me. I found a way to love myself. So why can't I do that now? One reason is that I am constantly reminded that I'm not worthy of love by my own dad. He hasn't spoken to me for years now. He's shown no gratitude to me for making it possible for him to have a relationship with his granddaughter, something I gained at some cost. He doesn't know that because he never asked. He's never been at all interested in my emotional life. This guy is my own dad and he's never asked how I am.

The other reason is that I could not forget my special friend, as I had been able to before. Because she forced me to go to court where she could continue to abuse me just as she had in our marriage. It created an enormous sadness in me because I had not just loved her -- and of course because I am me, I couldn't stop loving her -- she had been my special friend, my whole emotional focus. But I can't just not care. I have to have a continuing relationship with her. It's much easier with ex-Mrs Zen because I'd already replaced her. Once someone loses my trust, it's not really a problem at all for me to just cast them entirely loose. They don't need to be out of my life. They're out of my emotional life and that's enough.

Is any of this a good way to live? Of course not. You see how it so easily leads to isolation. If one person is enough for you, you tend not to pursue other friends.And tbh, the sort of casual acquaintance that a normie finds very easy to maintain is hard for me. I can't really do meaningless (remember that intensity we talked about) and having to perform the social things that normies do naturally can be exhausting.

Friday, May 05, 2023

On hypothesis

A lot of science consists of testing the "null hypothesis". This is where you adopt a hypothesis -- a guess about the world -- take selected groups of data and show from that data that the hypothesis is not true. It's important to my discussion here to note that the null hypothesis is expected to be found not to hold.

This is a vital part of the scientific method. It relies on the idea of "falsifiability": that science should only allow conjectures about the world and things in it that can be proved wrong. I should immediately point out that this means "wrong in principle". We don't expect science to be wrong; we expect that the questions we ask can be answered "no". The idea was formalised by Popper a few decades ago and it now dominates science, largely because it's obviously a good method for deciding scientific questions.

There's another kind of "science", or perhaps natural philosophy is a better term for it, in which you take a hypothesis you believe to be true and then you look at a group of data to show that it is in fact true. Sometimes scientists do this. They look for proof of dark matter, for example. Or they run a collider with hope of revealing the particles they say should be there. 

This is fine as a way to build knowledge on two understandings: first, that the hypotheses you are testing must be very tight. What do I mean? Well, there's a big difference between saying "we'll find a superheavy particle if we go to energies above x TeV" and saying "we'll find a sporkitron at 89.7 TeV". The first is almost unprovable. The second is obviously easily proved or disproved. The second understanding is that you can't just accept positive evidence. 

This latter is a problem in science. Scientists perform experiments. They don't succeed so the scientists don't bother with the journal article that would have announced success. This particular problem has been recognised by having trials registered before proceeding with them -- essential when we're looking at the efficacy of drugs, for example. A related problem is the idea that we will take a "sample" of data. Of course, when you're looking at a positive, it can always be hiding in the data you don't have.

A lot of people take this second approach. They assume something to be true. And then they look for things that tend to confirm it. This confirmation bias is poison to science and poison to critical thinking. An example is the belief that vaccines cause illness. Well, folks, here's the truth: vaccines *do* cause illness. No one doubts that. But if you take the times it causes illness as your acceptable evidence and dismiss the times it doesn't, you are a slave to confirmation bias. This btw is why we perform randomised controlled trials. The null hypothesis, as we noted, looks at groups of data. But those groups are test and control. The test group in this case is "vaccinated" and the control group is "not vaccinated" (we're leaving aside ways we ensure that other considerations are excluded). And the hypothesis that we're testing is that the two groups will give the same data within a degree of tolerance. 

But the "positive hypothesis" *only* looks at the test group. Look, it says, the vaccinated group had illness. Point proved. It's proved ever harder by pointing to the individual data that show what you hypothesise. Vaccines create illness because here's an ill person. Hypothesis confirmed.

The problems with this kind of natural philosophy are obvious. Almost *any* hypothesis can be supported by some evidence or other. And it ignores the importance of properly weighting evidence.

Let's say you're testing the hypothesis that a drug won't make any difference to a condition (remember the null hypothesis is that the drug does nothing). You pick the first ten people you can find from the street who have the condition and give the drug to five and no drug to five. One of the five who had the drug improves. None of the undrugged five does. Hypothesis denied, the drug works!

Well, you see the problem here. There aren't enough people in your study and you didn't control what type of people they were. They're random but the point of a randomised trial is that you select data that is of the same type and them choose from it by random, not that you select random data from the entire world. In other words, you must narrow the world first. This study proves the null hypothesis. The drug doesn't work!

So this study isn't good because its evidence is too thin. Do the same study on a thousand people, controlled for things like weight, other morbidities, age, race, sex and so on and you have much stronger evidence.

The positive hypothesist tends to consider both studies to have the same weight of evidence. And that means they feel justified to exclude the second study. Or the sources they use for "research" simply do not include the bigger study. This is why we collect studies into journals (which does have its own issues) and don't just broadcast them in the Daily Mail or Washington Post.

In this post we've considered hypotheses that can be falsified by evidence. Next post we're going to look at ideas about the world that cannot be falsified because of their nature.

Tuesday, January 03, 2023

On identity

 

What is "identity"?

We all have things that we identify ourselves as and hope we project. Sometimes more successfully than others. Sometimes people will accept them readily; sometimes they won't. And the reasons will sometimes be straightforward and sometimes complicated. Other times we project things that we have no control over. We might even reject them but we can't change them.

For instance, I am yt. I'm yt whether I like it or not. It's my "identity" even if I don't want it. It's not "bigotry" to say so. It's readily apparent what I am.

I also identify as Cornish. But actually, you could dispute this. I wasn't born in Cornwall. When I was a child, other boys would tease each other for being "foreign". They didn't tease me because I had a Cornish accent but if they had, I would have been hurt. So people rejecting your identity can be painful.

What does it even mean? To be Cornish. Nothing. It means what you make it mean, I suppose. For some, it's birth. For others, it's your father and your father's father and whatever. But it's interesting to me that I found out I have Cornish ancestors (they moved away). But they are in the E haplogroup. So not Celts originally.

I also identify as English. It's part of me in ways that I couldn't really explain. It's not a matter of patriotism. I'm not "proud" of it. Why would I be? I have nothing to do with any big achievement or whatever and like most leftists, I'm not "proud" of my country's imperial past or current wealth. Still, there's meaning in it.

Some might identify me as Australian. After all, this is an immigrant nation. Most Aussies are either immigrants or children of immigrants. My own children, who are definitely Australian, are the children of an immigrant father, and in Miggins' case, two immigrants. I'm a citizen and I call Australia home, even if sometimes a bit regretfully. But I wouldn't identify as Australian, even when the cricket is on. Is it offensive to me if people *do* identify me as an Aussie? No, of course not.

I am not here seeking to make some argument about identifying as Chinese. That would be patently absurd for me and you would possibly consider me in search of a marble or two. I certainly am not trying to claim that matters of gender are anything like that. Like a lot of human life, they're complicated and can't be dismissed with airy waves of the hand.

I was thinking about this when a person said that "you can't have an opinion about identity". Well, of course you can. You can clearly have a view on whether I count as Cornish. Or Aussie. Or English even. Usually, what we actually disagree on is what identity *means*. What does being yt mean? What does being a man mean? What elements of that identity must you have to belong to it and which elements adhere to you if you have the identity?

Fundamentally, this person was making a claim that identity is something you generate from within yourself, that is inherent in you and should be recognised. This isn't really coherent with our experience of the world.

Many of the ways we are recognised have nothing to do with how we present ourselves or how we feel about it. For instance, I don't necessarily do anything "yt". I just have yt skin. I might do some of the things yt people typically do and certainly I had advantages that some POC might not have. Things might have been apportioned to me because of it. Now that is generated from within myself in the sense I'm aiming at. My genes built my yt skin. But they didn't build being an Australian. They didn't build being a kind man. They didn't build being a leftist. They didn't build being a father. These are things I identify as and hope others recognise but of course people may see them in different ways. Some people might never have experienced any kindness from me. Some people might think I'm too liberal to be a "real" leftist. My ex might see "father" as something entirely different from what I do.

The last is something I think is crucial. Not only are identities not always things that we can readily recognise. They are also things that people understand in different ways. And change with time.

Sunday, October 30, 2022

On religious conflict and the dialectic

 Listening to a podcast about the defenestrations of Prague made me think about how dialectics work. I'll explain both just in case someone reads this.

First, the defenestrations. Basically, some protestants threw some Catholics out of a window and it sparked a brutal conflict in what is now Czechia and I think Slovakia. That region anyway (I'm just not sure which exact area saw fighting).

Second, dialectics. Marx's understanding of history was that things constantly change, and often new ideas arise that compete with old ones. The old ideas, or structures, cling on and elements of them are still evident. This can be as simple as noting that people have wealth that was based on structural factors that no longer exist: for instance, the descendants of Colston don't keep slaves but they likely still have plenty of dosh. The new structures and ideas often show up the contradictions in the old, and the old will eventually collapse when its contradictions become simply too great to bear.

You can easily see this process in protestantism. The corruption in Catholicism was hugely contradictory to the message of poverty and charity that many Christians saw then, and see now, as fundamental to their religion. Something would have to give. 

Now the problem is that these are systems of belief. Both protestants and Catholics are as right or as wrong as each other. You cannot resolve a question such as "there should be a leader of the whole church" with reason or logic or any of that palaver. It's something you believe one way or the other. Does the cracker turn into Jesus's body? Well, I mean, obviously it doesn't, but for Christians, it's something you believe or don't, not something you could ever prove factually. Many rationalise the factual disproof (spitting the cracker out and seeing that it's still baked mush and not flesh) by saying it is metaphorical. Disproving metaphors is a task for philosophers, not scientists.

Take one of today's fierce conflicts -- certainly it's where my mind went. You essentially have two sets of beliefs: one is the "old" belief that there are two genders because there are two sexes and  you are defined by sex. The other is the "new" belief that what sex you are born doesn't define you at all. It's barely even important.

Now these are both philosophical, almost religious beliefs. You're stunned. You think that whichever one you believe is a fact, and the people who don't share your belief are wrong wrong wrong. But try to convince them otherwise. You know that you're not dealing with a fact because you have to refer to things that are nothing to do with the question, try to endow meaning to things that don't bear it and other things of that sort.

So this could be easily resolved by saying oh well, these people believe one thing and I believe another, live and let live, no biggie. The old believers, as it were, could simply be asked to be courteous to the new believers and to use people's pronouns even if they think it's silly, and the new believers could be counselled to understand that change doesn't work at the same pace in every mind, and since what they are changing to is just another belief, that's fair enough. The same kind of resolution would end conflict between Catholic and protestant, Sunni and Shia and even to some extent liberal and conservative.

But that resolution is impossible. Because humans have the need to believe in unitary good and bad. So people who believe in genderology are all paedos who want access to children, a belief you can readily find if you look, or they are trying to destroy Western culture, or they are trying to infiltrate women's toilets and do something nefarious. Now, it's certainly true that some are paedos, unfortunately; some do you want to destroy Western culture or end sexual distinction or whatever; some do want to jack off in the women's bogs. None of these things is necessarily common but you can easily find examples of them. The other side is full of hate, we are told, transphobes who want all trans people to stop existing, return to the 1950s, whatever it is that some of us believe. And again, that's true of some number of terves, but probably a smallish number. I'm pretty familiar with the terf position and I think it's largely made of people who adhere to a social distinction that was an essential part of their lives but now has become much more fluid. The "fight for women's spaces" was important in the past for various reasons. Some use those reasons to justify opposition to things where they don't apply. Even if you think a transwoman is a dude in a frock and lippy, well, she's not doing any harm by taking a leak in the stall next to you.

In medieval Prague, most people were still Catholics. And most were quiet, ordinary people who believed in Catholic things but were not in fact in league with Satan, or willing to hurt other people for it, or really anything very bad. But the protestants made out they were. They were sinners, trying to drag the whole world to oblivion.

We're not any different. I've seen many times people saying that JK Rowling, as an example, should be killed, or even raped, for not agreeing that trans women are precisely like her. And in religious wars, men justified rape on the basis that the women they were raping were the evil other sect. The Christian admonishment that rape should not be permitted was put aside because *the rules didn't apply* to people who didn't share their beliefs. They weren't *really people*. You see the same thing with politics now. I often see liberals say that people who disagree with them are "fascists" -- the modern version of being in league with Satan is sharing politics with Hitler, of course -- who should be expelled, jailed or simply murdered. 

In fact, Rowling is a gentle lib. She doesn't say that trans people should be disrespected or hurt or shouldn't exist. She doesn't say you shouldn't say you're a woman when you're what she believes to be a man and she doesn't say you shouldn't use whatever pronouns you choose. Possibly, like many, while she'd understand that particularly young people aren't fond of the gender roles that are themselves legacies of "old" beliefs, being "nonbinary" is not a particularly useful or sensible reaction. She'd possibly see it as more constructive to reinvent the sex you are to allow you to express yourself in whatever way you choose. So I think those are not hateful beliefs. They might be beliefs you don't share but you know, get over it, not everyone agrees with any of us. 

Rowling also believes, in a fundamental sense, that women are the "weaker sex". This doesn't actually have to mean that they are less valuable or that they don't have strengths that should be recognised. It can literally mean they are usually less strong, less aggressive, less dangerous than men. So they needed safe spaces where stronger, more aggressive, more dangerous people were excluded. That idea is less true than it was, and the idea that men and women can be strictly delineated belongs to a prior age -- and was never really substantiable. There are remaining benefits to delineation but those aspects of it that see men advantaged over women are not very popular in these times (and rightly so in my view). It's important to understand that this view was never based in fact. These beliefs are not observations about the world. They are beliefs that structure how you observe the world and that's different.

Safe spaces for women are in many ways a contradiction, an ossification of a previous structure or theory of the world. Do we need segregated bathrooms? Well no. Most of us have unisex bathrooms in our own houses. Do women need segregated sports? It probably isn't as crucial as some make out. It's only really the intrusion of money -- part of the old structure -- that makes it so. Do women need separate prison estates? Yes, this is probably well founded, isn't it? Men are still stronger and more aggressive than women and that doesn't change when you adopt a different gender role. Do women need preference in the workplace? Less and less. Do they need to be treated like porcelain dolls? Not at all. Do they even need to be a distinct sex class? Can men say they're women if they want to? Probably they just can and no one will actually be hurt. It may *feel* wrong to some of us, in just the same way that eating a cracker and thinking you're eating Jesus *feels* wrong, but if you're me, you understand that religion, like all structures, can take time to fade away. It's not all revolution. Sometimes it's evolution. But one thing Marx noted, and I think that liberals who think they're "winning" because they have the "new" and not the "old" belief should pay this mind, is that you cannot easily predict how those contradictions will be resolved and what the dialectic will end up leaving you with.

Thursday, October 06, 2022

Blonde

 [spoilers follow]



When I came to watch Blonde, I had several preconceptions. First, it's directed by the guy who made the Assassination of Jesse James, which I really like, plus I'm a big fan of Ana de Armas, and I've seen a couple of rave reviews from friends. But it also hasn't been a critical favourite. So would I like it?

The short answer is no. I didn't like it at all. And it's weird; it's not boring, the acting is good, verging on stellar (Adrien Brody, de Armas, the dude who plays Whitey), it's arty and it looks lovely. So what is wrong?

First, Marilyn does not have a character. She's just a victim personified. She's brutalised throughout and is never the agent of anything that happens. She just gets fucked, quite literally sometimes, without any real ability to do anything about it. This isn't what Marilyn's life was like. So okay this is fiction but while that does mean this doesn't have to be true to life, it also means the director gets to choose how he portrays her. And she's portrayed as entirely unlikeable, a doll with daddy issues, and it was really hard to care what happpened to her.

Second, nothing is connected. It's so bitty that you can't follow any plot line through. In fact, there was no plot as such. There isn't any thematic coherence either. It was like a series of vignettes. But you'd never see how they progressed. So it was deeply unsatisfactory in that way too.

Third, the fetus stuff was deeply unpleasant. And it relied on antichoice memes, which is one big reason I think that critics didn't like it. Rightly so. It was vile. And the shot up Marilyn's vag was entirely gratuitous and pointless.

I wouldn't recommend it and you're missing nothing if you give it a swerve. It wasn't even very controversial. Just dull and fractured.