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TheMajor comments on [LINK] Why I'm not on the Rationalist Masterlist - Less Wrong Discussion
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Who here thinks that the author of the blog post is female? I did.
Surprise(?)! The blog post doesn't seem to contain any information that would allow you to deduce the gender of the author. I briefly searched through the blog post and the comment found on Yvain's site, but I became none the wiser (I stopped searching at that point to respect the author's privacy). I wonder why I thought that the author of the blog post is female...
Given this sentence -- "...one person who has repeatedly misgendered me" -- from the second paragraph, it might be that the sex/gender of the blog author is... complicated.
Aha! I think that sentence is why I assumed the author was female - I remembered that there was a reference to them being upset by something relating to their gender, so I pattern-matched that to "female feminist".
That's a heuristic to keep an eye on.
I haven't read the blog post yet, but I expect that being a feminist blogger (which was noted in the OP here) is a moderate-good predictor of being female (or at least not a hetero male).
I have read fairly many blog entries similar to this one, and to my recollection all were written by women.
I found gender conspicuously absent. Indeed, actual information about anything was conspicuously absent. I was strongly reminded of a curious feature of a flamewar that raged over SF-related blogs in 2009, which came to be called RaceFail.
I only came across that discussion a year after it had ended, through a chance mention somewhere, and was curious enough to look and see what it had all been about. You might think that easy: hyperlinks surely let one follow the discussion back all the way to the original postings that started it? Not at all. The curious pattern was this, and I observed it on all sides of the argument. People who were commenting on a blog post they agreed with would link directly to the specific post, and quote directly from it. People who were commenting on a blog post they disagreed with would not do that. They would link, if at all, only to the top level of the blog, and not quote but only paraphrase its content, or merely allude to it in terms that would convey little unless one had already read it -- and of course, upwards of a year after the event, there would be little possibility of tracking down which of dozens of possible postings they were talking about.
The blog post discussed here is all like that. Clearly, the author disagrees with someone and something, but never says who, what, where, or when. Everything is generality and allusion. To understand the allusions is the entry requirement, as it was for those RaceFail posts. The purpose of such writing is to be understood only by one's own side, to be a nod and a wink to say, "we know what I'm talking about, don't we?", and to leave no definite point for the enemy to attack. The difficulty that one has created for anyone outside the circle to engage with the matter can then be taken as further proof of their evilness.
I don't think it's possible to get a good overview of RaceFail. Aside from the linking issue (which I hadn't noticed), some of the material being attacked has been taken offline, and of course there plenty happening in private contacts which were never online.
If I look through this thread I find that there are plenty of people who had no trouble engaging the article and pointing out things of disagreement.
It's no easy text and you probably need some understanding of the underlying ideas, but it doesn't seem to me to be impossible to engage.
How much of that is because people just imagined their own ideas in the not-very-specific article, and responded to that.
If I just told you: "Someone was criticizing LW" and stopped here, it's not like your mind couldn't complete the pattern with some easily available scenarios.
That does seem vaguely appropriate, given their pseudonym is taken from this rhetorical device.
Apophemi turns that on its head. The rhetorical figure involves mentioning a thing in the act of avowing not to speak of it. Apophemi refrains from naming their matter, while speaking of it at great length.
The blog post contains very little specific information about anything. Without the "TL DR" as the end, I couldn't even deduce what the post was actually about (beyond: somewhere in the rationalist community someone said something offensive... and this is why I'm not on the Rationalist Masterlist).
Not that it particularly matters, but I assumed male (for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me) until I got to the line about being misgendered, at which point I shrugged my metaphorical shoulders and mentally tagged it as undetermined.
Because it's a valid Bayesian inference based on the content of the post.
Given the issue of being misgendered, the person seems to be a transperson who either was female in the past and is now male or who was male and is now female. To you think post indicates which of those are the case?
I think the post makes clear that the person is no cis-male, but it's difficult to say things that are more specific.
It's really not. They refer to being misgendered, which should have been strong evidence your assumption was mistaken. And indeed, if you had clicked through to their "about" page you would have found they prefer to be referred to with male pronouns.
I don't really care - I'm fairly certain this is the work of a troll - but hey, you claimed it was an example of valid Bayesian inference, so naturally I'm going to leap on it.
Damn. I've been referring to the author as female because other people were.
FTM transgender, I think. It's a bit unclear...