@AndyPerfors@aus.social
@AndyPerfors@aus.social avatar

AndyPerfors

@AndyPerfors@aus.social

Prof at UniMelb. I'm a computational cognitive scientist studying and modelling human inference, learning, dynamic information systems, culture, and (mis/dis)info. Nerd & opinionated loudmouth in Oz, originally from America, citizen of both. Parent of two. General weirdo. Ted Lasso is my hero. he/him 🏳️‍⚧️

In general I will follow people back unless their profile contains no info :) I also love boosting nature photos as long as they have alt text!

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AndyPerfors, to random
@AndyPerfors@aus.social avatar

I'm very proud to have been a part of this paper written with @celestekidd and @spiantado. It is a short summary of why it is just wrong, given what we know about the cognitive science of concepts, to think that biological sex is the only "scientific" way to define man/woman.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01657-y.epdf

AndyPerfors,
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@celestekidd @spiantado

A few things worth mentioning:

  1. None of this will be new to people who study concepts and concept change. We thought it worth writing given the ubiquitous talking point that defining "man" or "woman" in any way other than "biologically" is delusional.

  2. We actually tried for a long time to get this published in more popular outlets, often the very same ones who have published things from gender critical people about how they are being silenced and nobody wants "to hear both sides." Curious that none of them wanted to hear our side. 🤷‍♂️

  3. There were very strict limits on how long our reference list could be, and the original bibliography was much, much longer. Like I said, this is all well-established cognitive science, about as well-established as anything in our field. What we've done new is just bring it all together.

    1. Huge thanks to my coauthors Celeste Kidd and Steve Piantadosi, who provided a thoughtful consideration, excellent writing, and much of the impetus to get this across the finish line. I've done something right in life to have ended up with friends and collaborators like these 😀
AndyPerfors,
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@georgemsavva @celestekidd @spiantado

Happy to do it if you email me but Celeste has a pdf on her webpage that I think anybody can access: https://www.kiddlab.com/research

I couldn't figure out how to link the pdf directly here

AndyPerfors,
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@amphianna @celestekidd @spiantado Unfortunately it is just in draft form, there were many iterations of drafts where we steadily edited and re-edited over and over. So the version with all the references is very rough and I'm not super comfortable sharing it.

That said, I'll share the reference list from one of the early versions, even though its less useful devoid of context, and doesn't include some of the ones from the final paper.

See below. Note that our alphabetising fell to pieces near the end

Armstrong, S. L., Gleitman, L. R., & Gleitman, H. (1983). What some concepts might not be. Cognition, 13(3), 263-308.

Byrne, A. (2020). Are women adult human females? Philosophical Studies, 177(12), 3783-3803.

Carey, S. (1992). The origin and evolution of everyday concepts. Cognitive models of science, 15, 89-128.

Gelman, S. A. (2003). The essential child: Origins of essentialism in everyday thought. Oxford Cognitive Development.

Gülgöz, S., Alonso, D. J., Olson, K. R., & Gelman, S. A. (2021). Transgender and cisgender children's essentialist beliefs about sex and gender identity. Developmental science, 24(6), e13115.

Kanzaki, N., Kiontke, K., Tanaka, R., Hirooka, Y., Schwarz, A., Müller-Reichert, T., ... & Pires-daSilva, A. (2017). Description of two three-gendered nematode species in the new genus Auanema (Rhabditina) that are models for reproductive mode evolution. Scientific reports, 7(1), 1-15.

Kay, P., Berlin, B., Maffi, L., Merrifield, W. R., & Cook, R. (2009). The world color survey. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

Kemp, C., & Regier, T. (2012). Kinship categories across languages reflect general communicative principles. Science, 336(6084), 1049-1054.

Kemp, C., Gaby, A., & Regier, T. (2019). Season naming and the local environment. Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 539-545).

Kemp, C., Xu, Y., & Regier, T. (2018). Semantic typology and efficient communication. Annual Review of Linguistics, 4, 109-128.

McDonough, L., Choi, S., & Mandler, J. M. (2003). Understanding spatial relations: Flexible infants, lexical adults. Cognitive psychology, 46(3), 229-259.

Miller, K., & Gelman, R. (1983). The child's representation of number: A multidimensional scaling analysis. Child development, 1470-1479.

O'Shaughnessy, D. M., Gibson, E., & Piantadosi, S. T. (2021). The cultural origins of symbolic number. Psychological review.

Paramei, G. V. (2005). Singing the Russian blues: An argument for culturally basic color terms. Cross-cultural research, 39(1), 10-38.

Passmore, S., & Jordan, F. M. (2020). No universals in the cultural evolution of kinship terminology. Evolutionary Human Sciences, 2.

AndyPerfors,
@AndyPerfors@aus.social avatar

@amphianna @celestekidd @spiantado

Pica, P., Lemer, C., Izard, V., & Dehaene, S. (2004). Exact and approximate arithmetic in an Amazonian indigene group. Science, 306(5695), 499-503.

Quine, W. V. "Word and object." (1960).

Rosch, E. H. (1973). On the internal structure of perceptual and semantic categories. In Cognitive development and acquisition of language (pp. 111-144). Academic Press.

Shepard, R. N. (1964). Circularity in judgments of relative pitch. The journal of the acoustical society of America, 36(12), 2346-2353.

Shepard, R. N. (1980). Multidimensional scaling, tree-fitting, and clustering. Science, 210(4468), 390-398.

Smith, E. E., & Medin, D. L. (2013). Categories and concepts. In Categories and Concepts. Harvard University Press.

Stock, K. (2021). Material girls: Why reality matters for feminism. Hachette UK.

Taylor, M. G. (1996). The development of children's beliefs about social and biological aspects of gender differences. Child development, 67(4), 1555-1571.

Levinson, S. C. (1996). Frames of reference and Molyneux’s question: Crosslinguistic evidence. Language and space, 109, 169.

Margolis, E. E., & Laurence, S. E. (1999). Concepts: Core Readings. The MIT Press.

Zaslavsky, N., Kemp, C., Tishby, N., & Regier, T. (2019). Color naming reflects both perceptual structure and communicative need. Topics in cognitive science, 11(1), 207-219.

Gibson, E., Futrell, R., Jara-Ettinger, J., Mahowald, K., Bergen, L., Ratnasingam, S., ... & Conway, B. R. (2017). Color naming across languages reflects color use. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(40), 10785-10790.

Gould, S. J. (1981). Hyena myths and realities. Natural History, 90(2), 16-21.

Fodor, J. A. (1975). The language of thought (Vol. 5). Harvard university press.

Frank, M. C., Everett, D. L., Fedorenko, E., & Gibson, E. (2008). Number as a cognitive technology: Evidence from Pirahã language and cognition. Cognition, 108(3), 819-824.

Wang, X., & Bi, Y. (2021). Idiosyncratic Tower of Babel: Individual Differences in Word-Meaning Representation Increase as Word Abstractness Increases. Psychological science, 32(10), 1617-1635.

Wierzbicka, A. (1996). Semantics: Primes and Universals: Primes and universals. Oxford University Press, UK.

AndyPerfors,
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@UlrikeHahn @amphianna @celestekidd @spiantado Exactly!

I dared peek in on twitter and apparently this is a sign that we are "peak woke" though 😂

(Actually the reception is generally very good, I just stupidly looked to see what gender critical people were saying. They are mostly ignoring it, entirely ignoring the substance, and if mentioning it, are doing so to complain about how science has gone woke and/or been taken over by ideology. I mean. lol)

AndyPerfors,
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@tdverstynen @celestekidd @spiantado Thanks. :) It was fun to write.

AndyPerfors,
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@libroraptor @georgemsavva @celestekidd @spiantado I actually didn't even realise that the publisher's url didn't work for everyone! Otherwise I do try always to do that, because I agree with you -- this stuff should be all open.

AndyPerfors,
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@dstephenlindsay Oh thank you! For the kind words but especially for spreading it around :)

AndyPerfors,
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@UlrikeHahn @amphianna @celestekidd @spiantado I know right? The woke agenda started in 1975 apparently

AndyPerfors, to random
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Me * My 10yo * My 8yo

AndyPerfors, to random
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Honestly the main reason I like working from home is that it means I can sit in whatever bizarre fashion I wish to. At work they have things like CHAIRS and DESKS which for some reason people insist on you using and get all disconcerted when you're on the floor

AndyPerfors,
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@MarkAsser I do not sing so at least my colleagues don't have to deal with that, lol

AndyPerfors,
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@DavidPenington Whoa, "disconcerted" is putting it mildly! Yeah, there are occasions where floor sitting is a bad idea :)

AndyPerfors, to random
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Funny kid story: for his birthday my 8yo got the weird jiggly rubber ball in the photo below. Rather than, you know, PLAYING WITH IT like a BALL he has named it "Covey" and sleeps with it at night. 😂 Covey is 19 years old and 8yo feels sorry for him because so many people dislike him, so 8yo gives him lots of cuddles all the time 💙

AndyPerfors,
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@Tricky_TDG It is HILARIOUS

AndyPerfors,
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@sarahkedney Both my boys are so sweet and kind-hearted, it is really lovely. And the world hasn't beaten it out of them yet! Crossing fingers that never happens

AndyPerfors, to random
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Really interesting article about the process of journalism and the self-reinforcing nature of our beliefs. I think The Loop is a danger to scientists as well.

"You enter the loop by taking a strong stand that attaches a considerable emotional component to something that should, theoretically, have some detachment. Once you’re inside of it, you end up getting trapped running in a circle that grows tighter with every cycle. Your original idea must be right, because it’s core to who you are, so criticism of your idea is criticism of you, so you have to defend your idea even more vociferously. Everybody has to understand! Soon, almost without realizing it, you’ve made yourself the subject of your writing, instead of the thing you are writing about."

--

https://episodes.ghost.io/the-loop/

AndyPerfors, to random
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So I've been riding my bicycle more and eating better lately and one of the most irritating things about that is IT WORKS and I FEEL BETTER and THAT MEANS I HAVE TO KEEP DOING IT

AndyPerfors,
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@FrohlichMarcel
Wow, you have a good memory! :)

I don't have many options as to roads, so I've taken to cheating a bit by driving to a good place and then biking to the train station from there. Doesn't help my carbon footprint (much) but actually gets me biking whereas trying to get myself to do the long hard scary one was just meaning I didn't bike much. So I'm trying not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

As I'm getting fitter I'm able to go further and my range and level of difficulty I can handle is expanding... so I'm hopeful that eventually I will manage the full commute from my house. (Plus once it's summer I won't be having to scale those twisty mountain roads with no shoulder in the dark).

AndyPerfors,
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@FrohlichMarcel Oh wow, that looks really nice! Very open :)

I don't have photos of my own, but I found one online which is reasonably representative (although most of it is a bit hillier). I should totally take photos of my own sometime!

AndyPerfors,
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@will I totally know what you mean. Trying my best to do that!

AndyPerfors,
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@FrohlichMarcel Here's another one. It's really gorgeous but I've definitely experienced easier biking conditions :)

The thing that makes it difficult is the cars, mainly. It's not super busy but there being no shoulder and it being so windy means you can't fully relax and enjoy things

AndyPerfors, to random
@AndyPerfors@aus.social avatar

My 8yo wanted to take "a real personality test" so I sat down with him as he took the Big 5 this morning.

Gotta say, I was very impressed by his self-perception. I agreed with his assessment of himself on almost everything. So, so neat to see my kids being the people they are becoming 💙

The funniest question though was about whether he likes abstract thought. He dithered for a while because he wasn't sure if the things he liked truly qualified as abstract and I was like "you just got in a conversation about the dimensions of personality and the accuracy of self-report measures and yesterday got in a long conversation about whether it is truly possible to visualise the fourth dimension THE ANSWER IS YES MY KID YES YOU LIKE ABSTRACT THOUGHT" 😂

AndyPerfors,
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@matthras Yeah I definitely think there's a "whatever you are like is normal" bias going on here -- and some things are more obvious when it's different, like size or interests, but abstraction is... well.. abstract. So not a surprise it was hard for him to place :)

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