This month, the ace journal club discussed genital plethysmography, and then we took seriously the idea of a sex therapy as a BDSM scene.

The Really Dark Truth About Bots | Benn Jordan (video, 29 min) – How much activity on X is from bots?  Benn Jordan goes through the research, explains how bots work, and concludes that it’s a whopping 1/3.  Incredible.  Kill it with fire.

I often think about the Rationalist/EA crowd, and how for many years they have been concerned about AI causing a human extinction event.  I don’t think the concern was entirely misplaced, but they seemed most concerned with the “AI alignment problem”, i.e. making sure AI does what we actually want instead of deciding to kill all humans.  However, I’m far more concerned about the billionaire alignment problem, i.e. making sure billionaires do what we actually want instead of deciding to kill all humans (now with AI assistance).  Or for that matter, the foreign dictator alignment problem.  All the AI safeguards in the world won’t help if powerful people simply don’t want them.

A comprehensive pro-choice ethic | Tell Me Why the World is Weird – Some pro-lifers advocate a “comprehensive pro-life ethic” where they advocate for the health of people already born.  You can think whatever you like about that, but Perfect Number turns it around and imagines what it would mean to have a comprehensive pro-choice ethic.  It would be about empowering people to make free and informed decisions on medical treatment and reproductive health.

The Sketchy Companies Paying Youtubers to Promote their Stock | The Plain Bagel (video, 20 min) – YouTube sponsors are pretty sketchy in general, but this is a whole new level of red flag.  I would unsub from a channel so fast.  Unsurprisingly, this is more common among conservative channels.  Somewhat more surprisingly, many of the companies are based in Canada.

I wonder how conservatives feel about being victimized so frequently by grifters?  Not just political propaganda grifters, but ordinary sell-you-a-bridge grifters?

You are not your genes: the hereditarian fallacy | Zach B. Hancock (video, 1 hour) – Via PZ, it’s a lecture about heritability, and how it’s misused in eugenics.  Let me tell you, as a math and philosophy geek, I love heritability as a concept.  In philosophy, there is the problem of causal selection: among the many causes of an event, how do you decide which causes are most important?  Heritability is a quantitative solution to the problem of causal selection.  But heritability is a very limited and counterintuitive solution, and the philosophical insolubility remains.  It’s “math meets fundamentally unsolvable problem”.  Sad that eugenicists don’t appreciate this.

Buckets: a brief introduction | Limited Fun (video, 1:25 hours) – Buckets are single mechanic from an obscure puzzle game, Bean and Nothingness.  Limited Fun treats them like a physical system, and explores their mathematics.

I know this channel because they explained hole topology in Minecraft, and then later the trigonometry of Minecraft.  Honestly one of my favorite math youtubers.

Is Elon Musk Manipulating Xitter’s algorithm?  Is BlueSky Better? | Rebecca Watson (video + transcript, 15 min) – I’m happy for people leaving Xitter for BlueSky, I really am.  I am sure it will be a better platform in the short term.  It doesn’t really make structural changes though.  Rebecca pines for the days of RSS, discusses the potential of the fediverse, and I’m all over that.

However, I think it’s notable that PZ, who was an early Mastodon adopter, is now expressing disillusionment, because of the unreasonably large burden it places on instance hosts.  There are structural challenges to microblogging as a medium can’t be blamed on billionaires at all.  It’s the other way around: management and moderation are extremely difficult, which in turn invites bargaining with billionaires to run it.

The Raygun Controversy at the Olympics | Mano Singham – Mano reports on Raygun’s breakdance performance.  I’m mainly linking this because I researched the topic, and couldn’t help but correct a bunch of misconceptions in the comments.  A common point of confusion, is that Raygun was well known for performing poorly at the Olympics, and also well known for zany moves that made it into viral memes.  People generally assume these are two connected facts, and that Raygun failed because she was just too weird.  I think the memable moments were the best parts, and it’s more likely that judges found other aspects of her performance lacking.  When a head judge tried defending her, the kangaroo hop from the meme was the one specific bit he mentioned positively.