Humanities vs sciences

submitted by HelloMomo from self.LGBDropTheT

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[–]endless_assfluff 9 insightful - 2 fun9 insightful - 1 fun10 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

I'm a mathematician and sadly, many of my colleagues do have pronouns in their email signatures. Everyone played along when the creepy, anime-obsessed AGP grad student transitioned and harassed me.

Learning how to think is step 1. Step 2 is realizing that no matter how well-trained you are, no one fully understands objective reality, so you still hold beliefs and assumptions you didn't arrive at through airtight reasoning. And sadly, "I'm a scientist so everything I believe must be well reasoned" works against that.

And I'm not saying I'm immune to this: I'm bad at standing up for myself and would have been shunned by my colleagues if I dared to publicly challenge the dogma. It took being harassed by the lovely individual above for me to realize this practice was worth questioning.

(Edit: grammar)

[–]PeakingPeachEaterfemale♀ | detrans🦎 | eater of peaches 🍑 7 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 0 fun8 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I'm sorry that you were harassed by that creep! Are you OK now? He is no longer bothering you?

I understand where you're coming from...I used to be an excited "atheist", all about reason, science, and logic. Then, I noticed that atheism now turnt into a political term that means " super left wing" and calls others who believe in science or those who believe that one is only born male or female and cannot change that are "transphobes". I no longer associate with that term. I just call myself " irreligious" or "not religious" etc. Most(if not all) ideologies of any kind end up being rather extreme and "group think".

Hate to be a negative nancy, but maybe it was good that you did not express gender skeptic views? If I did that at my last TQ+ job, I would've been fired.

Though I do not know your situation with your harrasser, so please excuse my ignorance! If you don't mind me asking, was he harassing you for being gender critical and trying to out you or harassing you...by trying to get into your pants? :( Either way sucks, and once again, sorry that you had to go through that!

[–]endless_assfluff 6 insightful - 2 fun6 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Mr. Cute Anime Girls had a crush on me and I thought it would be a good idea to let it slip in conversation that while I was bisexual, I was only looking to date women at the time. Ohhh man. That backfired. His face lit right up. So yeah, the harassment was unwanted sexual comments and it was motivated by the standard boundary-stomping we all know and love.

Yeah, I'm in a less shaky position than most because mathematicians at least understand that "any integer greater than 1 has a unique prime factorization, BELIEVE ME OR I'LL KILL MYSELF!!! TRANS PRIMES ARE PRIMES!!" isn't a valid proof technique. All the gender-pronoun people in my department are good natured. They just aren't motivated to question trans ideology. They believe the intention of this movement is to combat bigotry, and have no reason to suspect that it harms marginalized groups. I can have a productive discussion with highly trained woke people if I focus it from that angle: it's not ok for Mr. Anime to sexually harass me regardless of gender identity, it's understandable that I would be creeped out by his preoccupation with anime lesbians even after he transitioned, and it is not exclusionary if someone sets and enforces sexual boundaries. If I focused instead on how it makes no sense to re-define a word and then pretend all properties of the previous word also apply to the new definition, they'd probably shut me down.

The sad thing is, I'd love to participate in public science discourse, but I don't even feel comfortable saying anything anymore because of the dynamic you identified. For sure, the "science and reason" crowd tends to focus on the parts of science and reason that are rewarding to them, like finding studies that support their pre-existing views, and less on the painful, challenging parts. Studying logic in a formal setting can cause someone to realize how much of their belief system is not actually based on sound reasoning. Because how could they flawlessly implement something they've never studied? But that makes people feel stupid, or insulted, or makes them get defensive, so there's less of an emotional payoff to that than there is for chastising your opponents for being ignorant.

So what happens is I see a discussion around a paper or a meme that uses some kind of reasoning; I think, hell yes, I love papers and reasoning; I mull it over and, if applicable, expand on the idea---or try to gently point out some faulty reasoning if I see it, hoping like a lunatic that OP will be like "yeah, thanks, I consider myself a rational person and therefore am glad to correct faulty reasoning when it appears"---and then some layperson who couldn't prove the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic even if someone showed them how to do it 15 minutes earlier word-slaps me with the fury of a thousand suns for daring to question SCIENCE. So I don't say much online. Yeah, it's just not a good time for anyone.

(Of course I don't mention in these discussions that I'm Dr. Assfluff. That's tacky and counts as an appeal to authority. It also makes it way funnier when someone tries to explain the paper to me.)

Oh, and I don't have to interact with Mr. "It's okay to peek through bathroom stall cracks if you can't tell whether someone's in there" anymore.