Pandemic Prediction Checklist: H5N1
Pandemic Prediction Checklist: Monkeypox
I have lost my trust in this community’s epistemic integrity, no longer see my values as being in accord with it, and don’t see hope for change. I am therefore taking an indefinite long-term hiatus from reading or posting here.
Correlation does imply some sort of causal link.
For guessing its direction, simple models help you think.
Controlled experiments, if they are well beyond the brink
Of .05 significance will make your unknowns shrink.
Replications prove there's something new under the sun.
Did one cause the other? Did the other cause the one?
Are they both controlled by something already begun?
Or was it their coincidence that caused it to be done?
Goodness gracious, the reaction to this post has made me realize that I have a fundamental disconnect with the LessWrong community’s way of parsing arguments in a way I had just not realized. I think I’m no longer interested in it or the people who post here in the way I used to be. If epistemic spot checks like this are not valued, that’s a huge problem for me. Really sad.
I’ve taken a break from LessWrong before, but I am going to take a longer one now from both LessWrong and the wider LW-associated online scene. It’s not that the issues aren’t important - it’s that I don’t trust the epistemics of many of the major voices here and I think the patterns of how posts are up and downvotes reflect values that frequently don’t accord with mine. I also don’t see hope for improving the situation.
That said, I’ve learned a lot from specific individuals and ideas on LW over the years. You know who you are. I’ll be glad to take those influences along with me wherever I find myself spending time in the future.
My main aim is just to show that Scott did not represent his quoted sources accurately. I think the Social Model offers some useful terminology that I’m happy to adopt, and I am interested in how it fits into conversations about disability. My main point of frustration is seeing how casually Scott panned it without reading his sources closely, and how seemingly uninterested so many of my readers appear to be in that misrepresentation.
I am really disappointed in the community’s response to my Contra Contra the Social Model of Disability post.
I am only familiar with the interactionist model as articulated by Scott. One difference appears to be that the Social Model carves out the category of “disability” to specifically refer to morally wrong ways that society restricts, discriminated against, or omits to accommodate impaired people. It has a moral stance built in. The Interactionist model uses “disability” as a synonym for impairment and doesn’t seem to have an intrinsic moral stance - it just makes a neutral statement that what people can or can’t do has to do with both environment and physical impairment.
FYI, I had accidentally banned you and two other users in my personal posts only some time ago, but realized when you commented that I hadn’t banned you in all my posts as I’d intended. The ban I enacted today isn’t specifically in response to your most recent comments. Since you took the time to post them and then were cut off, which I feel bad about, I’ll make sure to take the time to read them. I fully support you cross posting them here.
You’re getting at the point about where we draw the line between a reasonable and unreasonable accommodation. The Social Model as defined by the linked articles doesn’t intrinsically say where that ought to be, though many people who understand the Social Model will also have opinions on line-drawing.
Most of the Social Model examples are about things like wheelchair ramps in buildings or not discriminating against people for jobs they’re able to do. One from the articles was extreme (teach sign language to everyone).
I think it is a mistake to criticize the Social Model on grounds that it is too expansive in what accommodations it demands, because it doesn’t demand any. But I also think it’s a mistake to use it as a justification for specific accommodations, because it doesn’t demand any.
Thanks for the kudos! This post is going to get downvotes into oblivion, though. I just wanted something I can link to in the future when people start linking to Scott’s original “Contra” article as if he’d performed some sort of incisive criticism of the Social Model.
N of 1, but I realized the intended meaning of “impaired” and “disabled” before even reading the original articles and adopted them into my language. As you can see from this article, adopting new and more precise and differentiated definitions for these two terms hasn’t harmed my ability to understand that not all functional impediments are caused by socially imposed disability.
So impossible? No.
If Scott had accurately described the articles he quoted before dealing with the perceived rhetorical trickery, I’d have let it slide. But he didn’t, and he’s criticized inaccurately representing the contents of cited literature plenty of times in the past.
I think DACs face two challenges.
For these reasons, it's hard for me to get excited about DACs.
There is probably a narrow band of projects where DACs are make-or-break, and because you're excited about them, I think it's great if you get the funding you're hoping for and succeed in normalizing them. Prove me wrong, by all means!