Chrisy Xiyu Du @xiyudu@fediphilosophy.org

Dear colleagues, I want to share my most recent translation project coauthored with Uladzislau Harbacki from the European Humanities University. We undertook a translation from English into Belarusian of a zine - an informal popular science booklet - about the Sexual Configurations Theory (SCT). The theory itself was developed by Prof. Sari van Anders, and the English original was created by Alex Iantaffi, Meg-John Barker, and Jules Scheele. SCT proposes a broader range of terms to discuss gender identity and sexual orientation. What exists beyond the binary classes of men and women, gays and straights, vanilla and kink? What space does the diversity of gender/sex identities occupy and how to find oneself in that space? These are the mapping questions that SCT addresses.

This translation was a challenge for us to develop Belarusian vocabulary for gender discussions. In many questions - especially the graphical diagrams - the zine only scratches the surface and doesn't include the rich empirical results of newest studies. However, for people who don't fit in the cis-hetero paradigm even such a short popular text can be a great discovery of a whole wide world of alternative options for self-identification.

There is a lot of work left in what concerns the pronouns, gendered forms, vocabulary surrounding people of nonbinary gender, which is very hard to work with in gendered languages such as Belarusian. In English it is easy to introduce the pronoun "they" and everything works from there on, but in Belarusian and other continental European languages one needs to think a lot about new grammar. I hope this zine becomes a good starting point for individual gender journeys.

For those who don't read Belarusian, I highly recommend either reading the English original or one of the other translations (French/Spanish/Italian), or undertaking your own translation into your own language for an exercise.

https://www.queensu.ca/psychology/van-anders-lab/sct.html#zine!

Chatting with @xiyudu about maths.
Me: I hated numbers, and so hated maths throughout school. It wasn't until grad school when someone told me a lot of maths had no numbers in them and I was like ...why didn't you say so sooner?

Chrisy: I loved numbers and so loved maths. It wasn't until undergrad where my math major contained no numbers and I felt so cheated.

Fediphilosophy is one month old!
Good job us! @xiyudu

https://asymptoticphilosophy.com/habit-forming-in-early-career/ Chris wrote another blog post! yayy!!
(most of you won't understand the point of the excitement but you should read it anyway)

How Twitter’s “Teacher Li” became the central hub of China protest information

In his own words, the Chinese painter shares how he became a one-person newsroom during a week of intense protests against China's zero-covid policy.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/02/1064075/teacher-li-twitter-china-protests/

Those of you who have not experienced years of pervasive censorship and absolutely zero freedom of press might not be able to fully appreciate what this guy did and what it meant to them/us.

#China

http://asymptoticphilosophy.com/our-place-in-the-fediverse/
A reflection on Mastodon. I promise it's less than 30% rant.

Tsinghua: "if fear stops us and our voice, people will be disappointed in us. As a student from Tsinghua, I would regret it for the rest of my life."

Najing Communications: "in my first ever university class, a professor told us that we are here to become people's voice. If I am not here to speak for the people, what is my purpose here at all?"

Northwest University of Political Science and Law: "This is the voice of justice. Isn't it our job to defend the voice of justice?"

Zhejiang: "Art must affect politics, or be killed by it."

Xi'an Foreign Language University: "If there exists only one voice, the voice that exists is a lie."

(source: https://theinitium.com/article/20221127-mainland-students-protest/)

Protesters in #Chengdu, #China, are rising up against the #CommunistParty's #Covid #Covid19 #Lockdown regime.

They can be heard shouting 「要人权，不要404」, translating to English as, "Yes to #HumanRights, no to 404". The "404" is a reference to the 404 error code due to the #CCP #CPC's censorship.

Video via #Badiucao (@badiucao@twitter.com) on the bird site.

kinda glad that the whole twitter situation is making people talk more about how strict work visa laws let workers get exploited more, as they can't easily quit.

not hopeful about it turning into action but one can hope, I guess.

Thank you for all who shared thoughts with me regarding archived preprints! It's my first time putting preprints up an archive so I'm a little nervous. But I read the draft again yesterday and think I still believe in what I said, so here it is:
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/21443/

You can also read it here: https://kinozhaocom.files.wordpress.com/2022/11/kino-nov-16-22-measurement.pdf

All comments welcome! Positive comments preferred but negative comments will be given more weight by my brain 😅

Title: Measuring the non-existent: validity before measurement

(Any idea for a better title?)
(Completely unrelatedly, can one change a paper's title during r&r?)

Abstract: This paper examines the role existence claims play in measurement validity. First, I review existing popular theories of measurement and of validity, and argue that they all follow a correspondence framework, which starts by assuming that an entity exists in the real world with certain properties that allow it to be measurable. According to this framework, to measure is to passively document the entity's properties, and to measure validly is for this documentation to be accurate. Second, drawing upon debates from within the testing community and the literature from the sociology of measurement, I argue that the correspondence framework faces both a theoretical challenge, where the assumption of the existence of the entity is rarely justifiable, and a practical challenge, where it does not match how measurement is done in many high stakes situations. Third, I suggest a validity-first framework of measurement, which reverses the justificatory order, as an alternative. I argue that we ought to start with a practice-based validation process, which serves as the basis for a measurement theory, and only posits objective existence when it is scientifically useful to do so.

(Also completely unrelatedly: look! Thanks to @xiyudu maintainer of fediphilosophy, we have 10k character limit! You can totally write an Analysis paper as a toot!)

Our server has survived 24hrs!! @xiyudu