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Identity Label: Intersectionalist

Tags

cc by sa, discourse, free culture, intersectionalism, politics, social justice

The following question is meant as an illustrative example of a more general pattern.

When a feminist talks about men, who do you think of, and who do you think they’re thinking of?

I’d guess that, in typical Internet discussions of gender, most of the loudest voices are imagining one of two groups: either white cis heterosexual middle-to-upper-class abled conventionally-attractive men between about 16 and 40 years old (powerbros), or white cis heterosexual lower-middle-class abled conventionally-unattractive men between about 16 and 40 years old (neckbeards).

The two groups, even together, represent only a tiny fraction of all men.

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Even among people who pursue social justice in good faith, there’s a consistent tendency to erase and overlook people lower in the kyriarchal power structure.¹

It has been observed² that the term “intersectional feminism” is problematic, because although it acknowledges the existence and importance of a variety of issues, it still implicitly gives special importance to feminism.

Even “intersectional social justice” is not quite satisfactory to me, because it suggests that intersectionalism is like a plug-and-play addon that can be appended to social justice as an afterthought. I believe that a valid social justice must grow in the soil of intersectionalism from the start, or it can never be truly healthy. Intersectionalism must be more than a modifier adjective; it must be the noun, front and center.

Furthermore, if you pursue intersectionalism, you get a healthy social justice automatically, for free. It makes more sense for the concept of intersectionalism to replace the concept of social justice — it fulfills all the same functions, but better.

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I propose that we start calling ourselves “intersectionalists”.

Intersectionalists know better than to explain an individual’s behavior based only on the fact that they’re a certain gender, or race, or class, or sexual orientation, or so on. Although these individual categories can be useful when talking about large populations in aggregate, we remember that the prototypical example of a category — the first example to come to mind — is never representative of the whole, and often unrepresentative even of the majority. We may not always get it right, but we name intersectionalism as a goal worth striving for.

The label of “intersectionalist” is an attempt to help talk about these issues, and thereby to help address them. What we can name, we can notice; what we can notice, we can start to fix.

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1. This doesn’t mean they’re evil, it just means they’re human.³

2. I didn’t save the link, sorry. Anyone who remembers what I’m talking about, please feel free to speak up.

3. Though some evil people do exist, and some of them like to pretend they support social justice.

A QM–Anthropic Paradox

Tags

anthropic principle, anthropic reasoning, anthropics, app, cc by sa, falsidical paradox, free culture, paradox, quantum mechanics, quantum physics, science fiction, software

Consider the following thought experiment.

Flip a quantum coin. On heads, stop; on tails, flip again and note the result. This yields three possible outcomes: 50% heads, 25% tails-heads, 25% tails-tails.

But this — if not implies, exactly, then encourages — a misunderstanding of MWI. The Born probabilities square the complex amplitudes. Quantum coins aren’t splitting a fixed allocation of probability-mass. They’re transforming an amplitude, multiplying it by complex factors.

Squaring a big number makes it bigger; squaring a small number makes it smaller. If you could split the universe, the probabilities of the pieces should add up to less than the probability of the whole.

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There’s a “Universe Splitter” app.

By the logic above, this app should be a Regret Button — Everett branches where it’s used are, all else being equal, less probable than branches where it’s not. It may not be a very strong Regret Button, comparatively, but it seems to have, at a conservative estimate, several users who have used it several times each.

Since the anthropic principle provides (the appearance of) protection against destroying the universe, we probably ought to find ourselves in a world where this app had not been created.

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What about that “multiplying by complex factors” bit above? Suppose that each of the split branches has the same absolute value as the pre-split parent branch?

In that case we should find ourselves in a world where the app is a smash hit and everyone uses it obsessively.

A modestly successful app makes no sense. It could only happen if splitting the universe has, on average, no net effect on the overall probability of the branch-family. This is what we should see if the probabilities were directly proportional to positive real amplitudes — a hypothesis thoroughly disproven by more rigorous experiments.

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Hopefully, it should be obvious (by modus tollens) that I don’t actually know what I’m talking about and this argument has at least one serious flaw of some sort. But I’m not able to identify exactly where the flaw is, so I’m posting in the hope that someone can explain it.

Disparity

Tags

cc by sa, dr bright, dr gears, fanfiction, fiction, free culture, horror, scp, scp 086, scp 963, scp foundation

The door is already open, but Pirisend knocks anyway. “Sir?”

Gears stops writing. “Yes?”

“It’s about nine-six-three, sir.”

“Ah.” He sets his pen down. “Perhaps you’d better close the door.”

Pirisend shuts the door and sits in the chair opposite the desk. “Sir, we have a Euclid-class object literally walking around. Sapient, presumably read into more classified information than I’m cleared to know exists, and we gave it a position on staff?”

“Dr. Bright is not SCP nine six three.”

“I understand the difference between the amulet and the personality bound to it. But how can you be sure that the personality is actually Jack Bright? It could be impersonating him, or, or anything.”

“Ah.” Gears types something into his laptop. “It says here you were recently cleared for work on SCP zero eight six?”

“Yes. That’s what got me thinking about this, actually. If Doctor— if oh-eight-six had its clearance pulled, then why—?” Pirisend gestures vaguely. “Why not Bright?”

Gears taps a key. “How long have you been aware of Dr. Bright’s association with SCP nine six three?”

“Maybe a year or two? It should be in my file.”

“Seventeen months. And you were read into SCP zero eight six last week. Why did you never raise this issue before now?”

Pirisend shrugs. “Never occurred to me, I guess. It seems obvious once you think of it, though, doesn’t it?”

“It seems that way, yes. The problem is the suggestion has never been raised by anyone who was not first exposed to SCP zero eight six.”

“…Oh.”

“Yes.”

A pause.

“I must ask that you refrain from discussing this with your colleagues,” Gears adds.

“R-right, of course. I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone else yet. Oh – except Lector.”

“Very well. Please send her to meet with me as soon as possible.”

“Of course,” Pirisend says, standing to leave.

“Please feel free to come to me again in the future.”

“Thank you, sir. I will.”

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SCP-086 by Agent Angus Smith and Voct
SCP-963 by DrBright
Dr. Bright by DrBright
Dr. Gears by Dr Gears

Colonizing Infinite Graphs

Tags

cc by sa, free culture, math

Suppose we want a house with infinitely many rooms. (Because real estate as a nonrival good is a pleasant fantasy.)

One obvious way to do this would be to lay out the rooms on a Cartesian grid, so that each room (x,y) has doors leading to (x-1,y), (x+1,y), (x,y-1), (x,y+1). This has the disadvantage of requiring relatively large travel times between distant rooms; if you have n rooms, then even if they’re clustered optimally close together, you still have to pass through O(sqrt(n)) rooms to get from one side of the cluster to the other.

If we abandon Cartesian geometry, we can reduce this to this to O(log(n)) by arranging the rooms on a tree graph. However, this has the disadvantage that blocking off any one room cuts us off from all the rooms below it on the tree. On the grid, it’s possible to isolate a finite set of rooms by blocking a ring of rooms around them, but if you want to divide the grid into two both-infinite sets of rooms, you need to block off an infinite number of rooms between them.

Can we do better?

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Consider the following infinite graph:

Each vertex is labeled with a sequence of binary digits, infinite on the left end and terminating on the right end. We can interpret these sequences as infinitely large numbers, and add and subtract finite integers. (Specify that sequences that would correspond to finite numbers – that have all zeros to the left of some point – are not found on our graph.)

Each vertex n has exactly four edges, to the following vertices:

• n ± 1
• n ± 2k, where k is the largest power-of-two factor of n

For example, a vertex labeled …011000 would have connections to:

• …011001
• …010111
• …101000
• …001000

where the ellipsis stands for the same infinite sequence in each case.

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I suspect, but don’t know how to prove, that:

• the distance between two rooms a and b is O(log(|a–b|)), and
• deleting any finite set of rooms cuts off at most finitely many rooms from the whole

…which was the original goal.

Does this graph, or something similar to it, have a name? Can anyone prove that it meets the criteria? Are there any other graph structures that would make nice places to live?

(On the criterion of inseparability: note that for any two points, there are infinitely many edges such that one endpoint is less than both points and the other endpoint is greater than both points. That probably isn’t quite a proof, but I think it gestures in the direction of one.)