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I think it communicates maliciousness not idiocy
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. If you are the editor of Gray’s Anatomy, incompetence is malice.
A subtle distinction, but I'd flip this as "malice is incompetence".
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Renaming things to better names happens all the time, selectively removing something is much worse. Especially for a reference book like Gray's Anatomy
The severity of harm is highly subjective, though I do agree with you about the harm. The more important thing is the intent, which completely underscores that severity.
Dumb question, why do “sensitive” spots on the body need more nerves? Couldn’t you just have the normal touch-sensing nerves and map signals from specific spots on the body to stronger/pleasurable qualia in the brain?
I think you have it backwards. The brain doesn't "know" what's supposed to be sensitive or pleasurable. It boots up with no training data after all. It machine learns what's sensitive due to a combination of nerve density and other factors. We haven't figured out all the other factors yet. But that's why there's a correlation between nerve density and sensitivity: density means sensitivity.
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Male genital mutilation is very common
Respectfully, this article is not about the male experience, it's okay to talk about women without putting men in the story.
No one is forced to follow that thread. And the comment does provide additional information.
In fact, I never considered circumcision a form a gender mutilation. Despite being circumcised. But that comment got me thinking about it in a new way. And thinking about GM in a larger context.
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I am not aware of actual code removal but skirting in that direction there was a movement, just a couple years back, to replace words that had become more offensive than they were in the recent past. One example is renaming master to main . I am not stating any opinion for or against any words or terms in this context.
Somewhat on a tangent, but when people talk about offensive language in the context of cultural criticism they don't mean terms that cause the people who hear them to be offended but things that may diminish the value of some people in the eyes of the people who hear them. I.e. something is offensive, in this sense, to some group X not if people in group X are offended when they themselves are exposed to it but if pe…
I remember much debate about this, and not once was an actual affected person mentioned who took offence.
> the clitoris did not even make it into standard anatomy textbooks until the 38th edition of Gray’s Anatomy was published in 1995. This seemed surprising, as it hews too close to an annoying meme in feminism and history generally, that people in prior eras were idiots. And it turns out to be wrong. The clitoris was in Gray's Anatomy until 1947, when it was removed by the editor Charles Goss for the 25th edition. See…
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Fingers, for instance, not only have higher sensitivity, but also much higher spatial resolution due to the more dense nerve network. I can't tell why other areas may have needed higher spatial resolution; maybe it was evolutionary important in the past, and remains today. Or maybe just adding more nerves due to a random mutation correlated with better reproductive outcomes due to a stronger signal, or higher sensiti…
Wait, so what you’re saying is, we can use our genitals in a pinch that could be as good as fingers for finesse?
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Being removed for versions 25 to 38… honestly confirms the feminist narrative of some people being idiots, though. Like, imagine documentation on object oriented programming being removed because it offended some functional programming folks.
I am not aware of actual code removal but skirting in that direction there was a movement, just a couple years back, to replace words that had become more offensive than they were in the recent past. One example is renaming master to main . I am not stating any opinion for or against any words or terms in this context.
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The severity of harm is highly subjective, though I do agree with you about the harm. The more important thing is the intent, which completely underscores that severity.
Main is also an easier name for beginners. I’m old school and always got the comparison of master branch to master tapes and such things, but people new to this stuff wouldn’t necessarily have the same intuition about the name. Main is just clearer (for now). Similar to blacklist/whitelist. I had no context for either of those and it took me soooooo long to remember what they meant. Allowlist/denylist is just so much…