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Qiaochu_Yuan comments on What truths are actually taboo? - Less Wrong
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Then I think your experience is atypical. If you can say things like this in front of your peer group without being ostracized, you have an atypical peer group. I have an atypical peer group and I still think I would lose friends for saying some of these things.
My peer groups have ranged from good ol' boys to academics to leftwing activists. I don't think my experience is atypical for somebody who knows how to carefully introduce taboo topics. If my experience is atypical, it's due to the thought I've put into communicating such topics.
Edit: Changed "good topics" to "taboo topics."
Do you think that the position that Larry Summers was in is atypical, or do you think that he was bad at carefully introducing good topics?
Again, the emphasis of the post is "obvious truths." But yes, I think the reaction to Summers' talk was atypical. Gender differences and IQ and women in mathematics are standard topics in introductory psych textbooks. I think the reaction to his talk was deplorable, but I think that a big part of the explanation here has to do with "former administration official" and "university president." People with these titles are subject to stricter rules.
It is no longer clear to me what you mean by "taboo." Can you, erm, taboo this?
Any particular reason why you write "erm" even though (I assume) you don't have a British accent?
I had been reading this (and its more common cousin "er") for years before I saw someone point out that they're just different spellings of "um" and "uh". Edit: Not different pronunciations (modulo the difference in accent), for anyone who doesn't know what amacfie and I are on about.
...but people (around me, at least, in the DC area) do say "Er..." literally, sometimes. It appears to be pronounced that way when the speaker wants to emphasize the pause, as far as I can tell.
I hear "er", literally (rhotically), quite infrequently and I always assumed that people said it that way because of seeing "er" in written English and not knowing that it was intended to be pronounced "uh"; similarly, I've heard "arg" spoken by people who thought "argh" from written English was pronounced that way.
In my previous commented I restrained myself from linking to Ant Phillips's Um & Aargh but now you've given me sufficient excuse. (The chorus sounds to my American ears like "um and ah".)
Edit: Grumble grumble Markdown parser bug grumble grumble.
...but "argh" is pronounced that way... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOlKRMXvTiA :) Since the late 90s, at least.
'My reading of the use of "erm" here is as a replacement for "my repetition of the word taboo seems awkward in this context (since the point is we don't share a mutual understanding of the word) but I don't know a better word of phrasing this".
Do the British commonly use "erm"? I didn't know that.
I think you may have missed the point. "Erm" is just a British spelling of what Americans would spell "um." The pronunciations are quote close. (Similarly, British writers use "er" where Americans would write "uh.")
Really? I've always considered those distinct sounds, but then I read a lot from both sides of the Atlantic as a kid.
Here's some evidence.
Er: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/er#Etymology_1
Uh: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/uh#Pronunciation
Erm: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/erm
Um: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/um#Etymology_1
I think the recordings at those pages are misleading, because they're all from a US speaker. The phonetic markings are what to look at.
Exactly. As an American, I obviously prefer "er" instead.
It's more fun? I dunno.