Sandro Magi

@HunterEKozak @sleepy_devo Language isn't fully circular, it's ultimately grounded by perceptions.

@sleepy_devo This isn’t true! Language is by definition circular! Do you want to debate this sometime? Would love a conversation about this.

It's actually that words need to point at things to be useful. if the word "woman" points at no identifiable characteristics independent of your desire to be pointed at, it's not a grammatically functional word. This is why you couldn't actually answer this question:

@nyaraVT @sleepy_devo It's as easy as accepting someone's claim that they've been touched by the Holy Spirit. If you're religious, you believe it; if you're an atheist, you don't; most people just nod politely and change the subject.

@sleepy_devo It is actually pretty easy to accept a woman as a woman. If you want to differentiate between the type of woman you can use adjectives such as transgender, straight, white, tall, blonde, cìsgender, etc. Also:

@NathanpmYoung You mean successful multi billion dollar marketing industries that have successfully catered to the sexes aren't enough?

I don't know mens or women's preferences and wish we had large well-designed surveys with the kind of tricks we use to get answers out of poeple under dictatorships in order to find out the actual answers.

@ghoulrepublic @SteveStuWill Why do you think girls who like stereotypical boy things actually are boys? That's regressive stereotype sexism. You know, the thing feminism has been trying to eradicate for a century.

@SteveStuWill ... This data is evidence the sex you are assigned at birth can be incongruous with your neurological development. The only fair thing to do is not restrict people based on their sex class.

"Girls [exposed to high levels of testosterone in the womb] act in male-typical ways even when their parents encourage them to act more like stereotypical girls. In other words, prenatal hormones sometimes trump postnatal socialization." [Link below.]

@Garnet_2203 You think Rogan is part of the manosphere?

Canadian Women. You all need to watch the Netflix documentary Manosphere. Men demeaning women. Pierre Poilievre is dancing with the wrong crowd.

@CJFerguson1111 > give them creative freedom on how to foster exciting learning in kids? I'm not sure that's a good idea. We have science on what works for learning and retention, we don't need creative new unscientific ideas like "learning styles" that just detract from learning.

Teachers hate school. Students hate school (70-80% in multiple reports). Maybe we should do something about the quality of schools...recruit good teachers, pay them well and give them creative freedom on how to foster exciting learning in kids? Nah, let's ban cellphones and books that have gay characters, that's should do it. Voiceover: "It did not do it" (flash to picture showing US standardized testing scores continuing their decline).

@DrCatharineY That is consistent with the hypothesis that cutting DEI was just a cover, but it's also consistent with the hypothesis that DEI was so deeply incentivized and entwined I'm funding structures that virtually everything could be affected. Neither hypothesis is good.

We were told NIH funding cuts were about eliminating DEI. But the data now shows grants are down across nearly every field of medicine: cancer, diabetes, mental health, brain disorders. With the greatest cuts hitting Alzheimer’s research, down more than 50%.

@AdamRochussen This kind of thing is all too common, and the fact that "science journalism" has, for decades, focused on sensational headlines that repeat and exaggerated claims uncritically, are two main reasons trust in science has fallen.

Big headlines the other week about this huge (1.8 million people, 3 continents! Wow!) study out of Oxford looking at the effect of different diets on cancer risk. Vegetarianism cures cancer!!! Just one problem. That's not what the data show. The study (nature.com/articles/s4141…) makes it's big claims based on unadjusted p-values (that aren't even numerically reported anywhere in the main paper). But as anyone with a brain knows, performing 80 different hypothesis tests is bound to produce some false positives. The authors adjust for false discoveries, but don't really take it into account when discussing their data. They also perform sensitivity analysis, but again ignore the findings when discussing their results. Journalists then picked up the narrative-convenient "significant" findings (while simultaneously ignoring inconvenient significant findings): BBC, Sky News, The Independent all reported the same claim: "A vegetarian diet can slash the risk of five types of cancer by as much as 30%, a new study has found.” Okay. But of the original 11 nominally significant findings in study, which made it through both multiple comparisons adjustment and sensitivity analysis? Just the one. Which one? Risk of oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma in vegetarians versus meat eaters. HR=1.93 (95% CI: 1.30-2.87). Yup.

@_nomadic_soul You think signatures on divorce papers are going to prevent murders or suicides? Please. Women are not stuck with their husbands these days. Those are the rights they fought for and got.

@Evolutionistrue 79% failure rate, yikes.

Luana Maroja's survey of her Evolution students, who have already taken evolutionary biology, show that most of them think there are more than two sexes, with four (male, female, hermaphrodites, and intersex individuals) being the most common number. Oy! whyevolutionistrue.com/2026/03/17/lua…

@_nomadic_soul This isn't a women's rights issue, the law was about judges finalizing a divorce, no matter who filed, eg. husband or wife.

@nickimoraa By studying?

I will never understand men that decide to be gynecologists. Why did you, as a man, feel like you are qualified to be an expert on women’s health and influence women’s health choices?

@impishchimp @Lord_grimz @Garnet_2203 Nobody does. There is no single or coherent conception of gender that is grounded in physical facts. It's technically a religious belief, which is fine and I believe in freedom of religion and religious tolerance, but tolerance for beliefs has limits.

@Lord_grimz @Garnet_2203 You don’t even know what gender means apparently. Maybe your kids can teach you.

SOGI isn’t “woke ideology.” It stands for Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity and it’s an anti-bullying resource used in BC schools. It doesn’t change curriculum or “teach kids to be anything.” It helps teachers stop harassment and protect vulnerable students. And then people wonder why teen mental-health struggles are rising when politicians spread fear about kids who are already struggling with their identity.

@emilykmay @yavanikashah Arguably, relationships that need constant emotional coddling are the shallow and fragile ones. If your car needed maintenance every 100 miles, is that a robust and reliable car, or is it delicate and fragile?

@yavanikashah what's powerful about a relationship with very little depth

Hot take as a woman who actually has really wholesome female friendships: male friendships are kind of… insane. two men can hang out for 4 hours, say maybe 17 total words, share a bag of chips, send each other one stupid reel, and go home like “great catching up bro.” no emotional recap. no post-hangout analysis. no “did I say something weird when I laughed?” they can go 6 months without talking, then meet again and immediately pick up the exact same joke from 2017. women meanwhile will do a full psychological autopsy on a slightly delayed reply. I’m not even judging. I’m just observing a level of emotional minimalism that feels both deeply confusing and… kind of powerful.

@CJFerguson1111 This is not convincing. Social media use could arguably cause all of those other factors. This is as persuasive as arguing that height does not determine success in the NBA once you control for arm span.

In my post today I look at my new study. In thousands of UK youth, tiny correlations between social media time and mental health outcomes vanish once other factors in the youth's life are controlled. Helps clarify the "correlation doesn't equal causation" question...social media use like a compensatory mechanism some kids use due to other problems in their lives. Link to follow

New in @Theory_Society, the first systematic, cross-disciplinary, assessment of ideology in social science, drawing from ~600,000 social science abstracts across ~60 years. Check it out here (open access!): link.springer.com/article/10.100…

@designmom Wut? Men have a grand ol time watching sports and MMA without women. I'm really not sure what lesson you're taking from a fictional movie.

I was thinking about this the other day when I did a Crazy Rich Asians rewatch. At the bachelorette party, there were zero men, and the ladies had a grand old time. At the bachelor party, they brought in tons of women. Men don’t know how to exist or enjoy life without us.

@SashaGusevPosts Periodic addendum to the periodic reminder: nobody cares that such behaviours can't be "bred out" completely, they would be perfectly happy with significant reductions.

Periodic reminder that there is no "crime gene" and, to the extent that criminality is a highly polygenic heritable trait, it cannot be "bred out".

@DaveVoelkerPhD @PsychRabble Piker is probably also the most widely known and the biggest lightning rod, by far, so it's kind of understandable.

@PsychRabble The authoritarian/polarity error is a big miss. Note also that he’s virtually the only public intellectual on X (that I can think of) who doesn’t allow replies to his posts. Not a good sign.

Hmmm. They only measured rightwing authoritarianism. Put differently, whether it makes you "more authoritarian" is a q that can't be answered by this research, and will have to await a replication that also measures leftwing authoritarianism. Bonus: The linked paper clearly used Duckitt's RWA scale, which Duckitt duly referred to as RWA. The authors of the linkedd paper then did not refer to RWA, and instead, referred to "authoritarianism." That this subtle form of political bias was not caught even by Pinker testifies to how pernicious it can be.

@SteveStuWill Freedom to act free of coercion is the only meaningful form of "freedom". This is agnostic to determinism, so yes, free will is consistent with determinism!

The Problem of Free Will, Part 2: Determined to Be Free “If every thought, intention, and action is as inevitable as the ebb and flow of the ocean tides, how can we have free will in any meaningful sense of the term?” [Link below.]