Orual

This is definitely a spot where the comparison breaks down a bit. However, it does still hold in the human context, somewhat, and maybe that generalizes. 

I worked as a lifeguard for a number of years (even lower on the totem pole than EMTs, more limited scope of practice). I am, to put it bluntly, pretty damn smart, and could easily find optimizations, areas where I could exceed scope of practice with positive outcomes if I had access to the tools even just by reading the manuals for EMTs or paramedics or nurses. I, for example, learned how to intubate someone, and to do an emergency tracheotomy from a friend who had more... (read 537 more words →)

Distinguishing between a properly cited paraphrase and taking someone's work as your own without sufficient attribution is not trivial even for people. There's a lot of grey area in terms of how closely you can mimic the original before it becomes problematic (this is largely what I've seen Rufo trying to hang the Harvard admin woman with, paraphrases that maintained a lot of the original wording which were nonetheless clearly cited, which at least to me seem like bad practice but not actually plagiarism in the sense it is generally meant) and it comes down to a judgement call in the edge cases.

A professor I know fell afoul of an automated plagiarism... (read more)

Yeah, the joke for professors is you can work any 60-70 hours of the week you want, so long as you show up for lectures, office hours, and meetings. It's got different sorts of pressures to a corporate or industry position, but it's not low-pressure. And if you're not at the kind of university that has a big stable of TAs handling a lot of the grunt work, you're gonna have a number of late nights marking exams and papers or projects every semester, unless you exclusively give students multiple-choice questions.

Also, getting to the point of being a tenured professor is a process in and of itself. Not getting tenure means you... (read more)

Those who are good teachers will continue to be good teachers. Example of this from a prof I know who won teaching awards and continues to teach basically the same way now that she's gotten tenure. She likes teaching, that's a big part of why she's good at it, she's not about to phone it in. I think what's slipped a bit post-tenure is the amount of resources she devotes to publishing her research. I don't think her actual research has slowed down any, because she also likes that part, she's just not focused on getting papers out the door ASAP because her continued employment no longer depends on it.

There are universities... (read more)

One of the most frustrating things about the Blanchardian system for me is how it flattens a ton of variation into the "auto____philia" category, asserting the same "erotic target location error" cause for all of it, and the people pushing the theory tend to brush that off by asserting that trans people are lying (or grossly mistaken) about their own experiences and sexualities. That category in the original study was extremely heterogenous (and subsequent studies have been almost exclusively run on members of crossdressing fetish forums and similar, as you point out), but the sample size was too small in that initial study for any variation to rise to statistical significance. It's... (read 734 more words →)

Yeah, that's my main issue, too. I know the original incredibly well, I worked out the chords on piano from scratch years ago. So while I get the motivation here I would really have trouble with the adapted version. 

I natively have higher expectations in terms of congregational musical and rhythmic ability, due to where I grew up (Congo), so I always feel the need to push back when people dumb down songs for group singing. My brain expects random untrained people to be able to do melody and descant, syncopation and pick-up notes, and so on, because that's what I grew up with, though I know that's not necessarily the case here,... (read more)

That you think they're going super hard woke (especially Disney) is perhaps telling of your own biases. 

Lets look at Disney and Hollywood (universities are their own weird thing). The reality is that in the Anglosphere there are lots of progressive people with money to spend on media. You can sell "woke" media to those people, and lots of it. Even more so when there's controversy and you can get naive lefties to believe paying money to the megacorp to watch a mainstream show is a way to somehow strike back against the mean right-wingers. And to progressive people it doesn't feel like "being lectured to about politics", because that's not what media... (read more)

My experience is that there's a huge amount of conservatism among classical instrument players. 

One part is the sound change. If something changes the sound of their instrument in a way that isn't clearly positive it's very hard to convince people to switch to it. Sometimes this is pretty rational, (I don't think anyone thinks plastic brass instruments sound better) but other times it's a kind of superstitious audiophile sort of logic. For a flute, I think bending a formerly straight tube will always have some effect on the sound. If the tube is already bent one or more times (as a bass flute must be even if the play orientation of the... (read 369 more words →)