Quickies
Quickies: Cognitive Bias, 18th Century Male Logic About Rape, and Seeds that Smell Like Poop (to Attract Dung Beetles)
- 20 cognitive biases that screw up your decisions – In helpful infographic form! From mrmisconception.
- Why Rape Was Impossible: A Look at the Terrifying Medical Logic of 18th Century Law – “In the 18th century, for any number of reasons, a woman could be called before judge and jury and compelled to defend her virtue. She would be expected to lie; the laws would have been written accordingly. Her body was a mystery, and it was assumed she’d exploit it—lying about her virginity, about being pregnant, about how far along she was, about whether her child was naturally stillborn or harmed by her own hand. The most preposterous lie she could tell, of course, would be that she was raped.”
- 3 Questions With The Guy Who Hates Renoir – “There are plenty of dead, white males and their male gaze in museums already. You don’t need the wack, craven mediocrity of Renoir.”
- Plant seeds look, smell like poop—fooling dung beetles into planting them – Who says that science can’t be awe-inspiring?
- Girl Finally Speaking Up Enough For People To Critique Her Speaking Voice – The Onion tells it like it is.
Hating Renoir, really?
How do you hate an artist enough to protest them?
Except Paul Gauguin, fuck that guy!
Speaking of racial bias in art, I always loathed how white people only want Indians to do things in the Studio style. (For those unfamiliar, the Studio style is that somewhat two-dimensional style with heavy outlines.) That’s the only ‘authentic’ way to do things, it seems. *sigh*
The Renoir thing I think is a joke all round. The protesters have a good time and get some publicity, Renoir’s paintings get some publicity, the media gets some silly-season type news. Nobody takes it seriously.
It is just paintings. Paintings don’t really matter. In the real world, this sort of hatred is reserved for “Wuthering Heights”, which should only be readable after psychiatric evaluation of the would-be reader, and inducement to read it should be a crime.
It doesn’t include the bias in favor of inaction (e.g., a small risk of an adverse event from a vaccine, say an unlikely allergic reaction, suddenly outweighs the much greater risk of a deadly infection in a world without vaccines).
“Fecal mimicry”, another term for Donald Trump’s campaign.