What I told the students of Princeton
abigailshrier.substack.com
What I told the students of Princeton
1–10 of 36 posts
Re: What I told the students of Princeton
#2The chilling effect is real. It's disheartening that we are asked to play along with unsubstantiated dogma on topics as fundamental as gender. Has anyone here managed to express opinions like Shrier's in a casual manner without having the reputation take a hit?
Re: What I told the students of Princeton
#3I would like to be sympathetic to the author's argument, but this article is just riddled with trivially falsifiable inaccurate assertions.
> There are books that are never recommended by the Amazon algorithm, irrespective of how well they’ve sold or how likely a specific shopper is to buy them. Or, at least, there’s one such book. I’ll let you try and guess what it is.
YMMV, but if I search for "transgender" on Amazon.com in an incognito window, the very first result is the author's book.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=transgender
> But did you know that, for contested entries, Wikipedia assigns editors, some of whom are ideologically committed activists, many of whom have very particular views they want you to walk away with.
Wikipedia is far from perfect, but this is still a gross misrepresentation of how admins and the editing process operate on contested topics. It is interesting though that Wikipedia's Transgender page does not mention the rapid-onset gender dysphoria controversy at all though.
> a 22 year old biological male at Penn who was competing on the men’s team as recently as November of 2019. That male athlete now holds multiple U.S. records in women’s swimming, erasing the hard work of so many of our best female athletes
This appears to be a reference to Lia (Will) Thomas, who as far as I can tell does not hold any U.S. records in women's swimming.
https://ussanews.com/swimmer-who-once-was-male-now-shatterin...
Re: What I told the students of Princeton
#4I would like to be sympathetic to the author's argument, but this article is just riddled with trivially falsifiable inaccurate assertions. > There are books that are never recommended by the Amazon algorithm, irrespective of how well they’ve sold or how likely a specific shopper is to buy them. Or, at least, there’s one such book. I’ll let you try and guess what it is. YMMV, but if I search for "transgender" on Amaz…
> YMMV, but if I search for "transgender" on Amazon.com in an incognito window, the very first result is the author's book.
Yup, I'm seeing the same thing here. And this blog post was created 7h ago so I kind of doubt that's a recent change.
I'm starting to think there's a lot of easy advertising to be had on the "I'm being silenced!" circuit nowadays. And it probably directly targets the type of people who'd be into this book.
Re: What I told the students of Princeton
#5I would like to be sympathetic to the author's argument, but this article is just riddled with trivially falsifiable inaccurate assertions. > There are books that are never recommended by the Amazon algorithm, irrespective of how well they’ve sold or how likely a specific shopper is to buy them. Or, at least, there’s one such book. I’ll let you try and guess what it is. YMMV, but if I search for "transgender" on Amaz…
> YMMV, but if I search for "transgender" on Amazon.com in an incognito window, the very first result is the author's book. Yup, I'm seeing the same thing here. And this blog post was created 7h ago so I kind of doubt that's a recent change. I'm starting to think there's a lot of easy advertising to be had on the "I'm being silenced!" circuit nowadays. And it probably directly targets the type of people who'd be into…
It's because the transgender "cause" is not very interesting: either you re a fucktard and have a strong opinion on it but you're most likely low impact on society, or you don't care because it's so rare it will prob never matter to you.
So trying to get any sort of noise around your cause (because you like the attention, or you're tired of the fucktards for some reason) means you need to pretend there are very powerful people who care negatively. But it's likely Amazon or Wiki treat the "transgender" namespace just like the "carrot" namespace and care not at all what result it yields or what people have to say about it.
Any result this person would ever reach would be for more people to say "meh it's true it doesn't matter what gender you want to be" which probably will never satisfy someone proud of being trans to the point of organizing speeches around it.
Re: What I told the students of Princeton
#6I think the author has a point to make that is definity valid, but she wraps it up in this hyper-western freedom ideal that says if you conform you may as well not have been born. To me this is a shame, because the argument that perhaps gender politics is entirely too violent at times and could benefit from having more calm adults is a reasonable one. It doesn't really matter if you are a proponent or a detractor, the hate is there for all to see. Sometimes it seems like this is what unites everyone who even cares to speak of these topics: no matter what they believe, they do so while angry.
I find myself wishing that this argument would have been made separate from the fetishism of freedom, which is in itself an position that is a little alienating in how it is presented (and angry besides - isn't this the problem?)
Re: What I told the students of Princeton
#7I think the author has a point to make that is definity valid, but she wraps it up in this hyper-western freedom ideal that says if you conform you may as well not have been born. To me this is a shame, because the argument that perhaps gender politics is entirely too violent at times and could benefit from having more calm adults is a reasonable one. It doesn't really matter if you are a proponent or a detractor, th…
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Re: What I told the students of Princeton
#8Is a TERF really complaining about censorship? When a multi-billionaire author regularly platforms TERFs? When trans women are regularly at the highest risk of being homeless and subsequently killed? Like, there’s so many better things to complain about, I wish people like these stopped grifting and and did some actual work for a change.
Re: What I told the students of Princeton
#9I would like to be sympathetic to the author's argument, but this article is just riddled with trivially falsifiable inaccurate assertions. > There are books that are never recommended by the Amazon algorithm, irrespective of how well they’ve sold or how likely a specific shopper is to buy them. Or, at least, there’s one such book. I’ll let you try and guess what it is. YMMV, but if I search for "transgender" on Amaz…
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Re: What I told the students of Princeton
#10I would like to be sympathetic to the author's argument, but this article is just riddled with trivially falsifiable inaccurate assertions. > There are books that are never recommended by the Amazon algorithm, irrespective of how well they’ve sold or how likely a specific shopper is to buy them. Or, at least, there’s one such book. I’ll let you try and guess what it is. YMMV, but if I search for "transgender" on Amaz…
Recommendations aren't the same as search results.
Is she making up her Amazon recommendation shadowban? Was she misinformed? Is/was there a shadowban, but one caused by third parties manipulating Amazon's ranking signals rather than by Amazon's own minions? Maybe. I have no idea.
However, just try to search for "When Harry Became Sally". When you discover that you can't find it, you might be curious to know why Amazon decided to censor it, not by deranking it in searches or recommendations, but by outright refusing to sell it at all (after initially offering it for sale).[1]
Amazon has a history of problems with rankings for culturally sus books. There were issues about a decade ago with certain feminist and LGBT books getting flagged as adult and therefore downranked or hidden. Whether they did that intentionally (with human intervention) or whether it was an automatic result of signals, doesn't matter, though the fact that books with a LGBT flavor were adult-flagged while straight-flavored books weren't either goes to willful conduct or horrifically inadequate algorithms. The pattern of Shrier's allegation now is similar to the problem back then, although the content is different. The moral panic back then was people (particularly minors) unwittingly stumbling across adult content. The moral panic today is anything critical of LGBTQ++.
[1] https://www.encounterbooks.com/features/statement-on-amazon/