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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • It’s frustrating how common IQ based things are still. For example, I’m autistic, and getting any kind of support as an autistic adult has been a nightmare. In my particular area, some of the services I’ve been referred to will immediately bounce my referral because they’re services for people with “Learning Disabilities”, and they often have an IQ limit of 70, i.e. if your IQ is greater than 70, they won’t help you.

    My problem here isn’t that there exists specific services for people with Learning disabilities, because I recognise that someone with Down syndrome is going to have pretty different support needs to me. What does ick me out is the way that IQ is used as a boundary condition as if it hasn’t been thoroughly debunked for years now.

    I recently read “The Tyranny of Metrics” and whilst I don’t recall of it specifically delves into IQ, it’s definitely the same shape problem: people like to pin things down and quantify them, especially complex variables like intelligence. Then we are so desperate to quantify things that we succumb to Goodhart’s law (whenever a metric is used as a target, it will cease to be a good metric), condemning what was already an imperfect metric to become utterly useless and divorced from the system it was originally attempting to model or measure. When IQ was created, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it was. It has been made worse by years of bigots seeking validation, because it turns out that science is far from objective and is fairly easy to commandeer to do the work of bigots (and I say this as a scientist.)




  • I’m familiar with edging, but I’m not sure I see the joke. That might be because “edge” feels somewhat semantically separate to “edging” in my mind. As a clearer example of what I mean, if the word “edgy” came up, I would be way more likely to think of it as describing someone or something that tries too hard to be dark and provocative. I’d be very confused if someone used “edgy” as an adjectivified form of “edging”.

    Besides that though, I’m sure that edging was a thing 15 years ago; the Wikipedia article for “edging(sexual practice)” dates back to 2006, for one. Part of why I didn’t get the joke is because I can’t think of any logical link between edging and 15 years ago, so I think I concluded that the meme wasn’t about the sex thing.

    Is there still something I’m missing, or am I just being supremely autistic about this?



  • To me, it sounds plausible in a way that’s more than just “woman” bad.

    Using myself as illustration, I’m a cis woman working in stem who has a heckton of trans friends such that it’s probably more accurate to describe my gender as cis+ because I had a big identity crisis thing when it clicked to me that you’re not stuck with your assigned gender at birth. Inexplicably, I seem to be pretty attached to my assigned gender, and the rare instances I have been misgendered causes me deep distress.

    Part of this gender evaluation was that in the abstract, I have wished for more masculine traits. When weightlifting, I am envious of how quickly most men pack on muscle compared to me. In my career, I often find myself wishing I was a man, and then feeling a sinking discomfort because I don’t actually want to be a man, I just wish my field wasn’t so misogynistic. I’m about as sure as one can be in one’s gender. And because of that, when I was given the option of trying T, my internal reaction certainly was one of horror.

    I agree though, it certainly is complicated.