Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 4h

Social psych folk: I'm working on a project with models containing higher-order interaction effects and factors with more than 2 conditions.

It's breaking my brain.

Does anyone have recommended reading on conceptualizing complicated models?

1

Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 7h

I am convinced the aspect of Trump's coalition that future historians/political scientists will find most interesting is the way he has managed to openly attract both anti-Semites and conservative Jews

1 1

Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 1d

Oh great, yet another thing to pay for when applying for a UK visa

1

Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 1d

American literature lionizes byzantine headfucks like Infinite Jest and Gravity's Rainbow for the same reason American beer snobs like hoppy IPAs: the ghost of puritanism leads modern Americans to confuse exercises of grit for aesthetic value.

Rachel Feder @rachelfeder.bsky.social · 2d

Tell me your most unhinged literary opinion, as a little treat

1 2

Reposted by Ethan Landes

Philosophical Psychology @journalphp.bsky.social · 1d

Latest papers: Ethan Landes builds upon existing research on the perceived relationship between label and word meaning to better understand the way that label choice affect language design in this open access article doi.org/10.1080/0951... #philsky #philpsy

2 6

Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 1d

Columbus Day is a DEI-coded holiday.

He is celebrated for being "first" for something done at least twice before

His trip was based on a miscalculation of the earth's size

He was eventually fired for gross misconduct

The holiday is justified by its tie to an ethnic group: Italian Americans

1

Reposted by Ethan Landes

Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 3d

Watching the KoTH episode where Bobby goes to clown college but the professor only teaches pretentious theory, and I'm getting flashbacks from TA'ing a philosophy of death course that spent the entire semester on the semantics of dead people's names

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBC...

1 1 4

Reposted by Ethan Landes

Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 3d

Growing up in the states, I learned the dates of WWI as being 1914 to 1918. I've now noticed in England, every war memorial dates the war as 1914-1919.

Is this a US vs UK thing or did our collective understanding of the key dates in the war change? (The memorials are from the 20s and 30s)

2 1 3

Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 2d

I live in Derbyshire, and it's a bunch of small local ones

1

Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 3d

Unironically, sometimes I think about how entire generations of people in various corners of the earth lived their lives without access to stimulants, and I get existential heebie-jeebies

2

Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 3d

Presumably this is because the perceived endpoint of the war changed from the treaty of Versailles to the Armistice, not that the British used to count something like the expedition in Arkhangelsk as part of the war.

But why?

1

Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 3d

Growing up in the states, I learned the dates of WWI as being 1914 to 1918. I've now noticed in England, every war memorial dates the war as 1914-1919.

Is this a US vs UK thing or did our collective understanding of the key dates in the war change? (The memorials are from the 20s and 30s)

2 1 3

Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 3d

Imagine being a student thinking the course is going to cover the relevant parts of Nietzsche, Foucault, etc.,...

2

Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 3d

Watching the KoTH episode where Bobby goes to clown college but the professor only teaches pretentious theory, and I'm getting flashbacks from TA'ing a philosophy of death course that spent the entire semester on the semantics of dead people's names

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBC...

1 1 4

Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 3d

Security torx screws like this can go die in a fire, but I've rounded off too many hex heads in my life to hate torx

Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 3d

Any designer who puts a flathead screw on a part is a sadist

1 2

Reposted by Ethan Landes

Anon Opin @anonopin.bsky.social · 4d

Everyone assumes that Pluto would be pissed off about being de-classified as a planet, but nobody considers that maybe it doesn't want the responsibility of a planet and is quite happy just bumming around the solar system with the other dwarf planets.

13 9 160

Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 5d

Sure! Rebranding would be to be flooded over by noise from opposition to draw attention away from the truth behind the rebrand.

1 1

Reposted by Ethan Landes

Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 6d

Moving from antifa to "anti-fascist" is a mixed bag

Relabelling like this has nice shock value, causing people to revisit the phenomena with a new framing

It forces non-fascist opponents of antifa to awkwardly address that no, actually they aren't anti-anti-fascist, it's just that...

But:
1/

Jo Wolff @jowolff.bsky.social · 7d

Not thrilled with the term ‘Antifa’. Sounds sort of sneaky. Anti-Fascist has a much better roar to it.

Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social · 7d

"Antifa has been around in various iterations for almost 100 years in some instances, going back to the Weimar Republic in Germany."

- Jack Posobiec at Trump's roundtable on antifa

2 1 3

Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 6d

As a bit of shameless self-shilling, I've written at least one good paper about this:

1) Is it a tastytaste or a greedgrab? The importance of label choice in language design www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

2) Conceptual Engineering Should be Empirical link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Is it a tastytaste or a greedgrab? The importance of label choice in language design

Everyone who has come up with a new idea or concept faces the same problem: they need to call it something. This choice is simultaneously arbitrary and important. The new idea could have any name, ...

www.tandfonline.com

1 3

Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 6d

If anyone is interested in learning more about relabelling and activism, I highly recommend this episode of the Allusionist: www.theallusionist.org/transcripts/...

There's also a time capsule from the Clinton years, Lakoff's short book on political language, "Don't think of an Elephant"

7/

snipa — Transcripts — The Allusionist

www.theallusionist.org

1 2

Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 6d

My hunch/verdict: Allies of antifa should regularly highlight it is an antifascist ideology, but it's not worth the effort to change the movements name. After all, there's a lot of money in conservative politics to find ways to twist this stuff around, and that's not a fight one wins.

6/

1 2

Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 6d

Brushing it aside would also get easier psychologically.

When when we hear phrases over and over, we tend to stop paying attention to their component parts. "Anti-fascist" will lose (much of) its hermeneutic force.

Just as 100 years ago, a cold hot dog was an oxymoron, and now it isn't.

5/

1 2

Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 6d

Brushing aside the bit about fascism would get easier over time. Opponents will find easy ways to do it. Perhaps by sticking to "antifa" in conservative settings - there were a good few years where "Obamacare" was only used on the right to avoid the title "Affordable Care Act"

4/

1 2

Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 6d

The above pros of "anti-fascist" would be strongest in the short-term. When terms are novel and fresh, people relate to them differently, and that's when the shock of seeing political others labelled as being against fascism will have the strongest benefit for the public image of antifa

3/

1 3