Congratulations Joseph!

I think you always need to be careful having the same string serve as 2 roles (argument in the function and column name)

if you ask it to write a whole paragraph or more from scratch, it's pretty bad. If you give it a sentence that you know sounds wonky, but you're not sure how to improve (eg because you're writing in a second or third language), it can be helpful.

It's easier to notice when a sentence is well written than to write a good sentence yourself. I don't personally use LLMs to write, but my ESL students do, not to draft from scratch but in cases when they aren't sure how to phrase something. LLMs can give them options, and they can pick their fave

My criterion for whether an LLM can be useful is when it is difficult to find a solution to a problem, but easy to verify that solution (like cryptography). If I am coding in a language I'm not familiar with, I can ask "how can I best achieve this outcome?" and then easily check whether it works

The graph says nothing about whether people are using it to improve at things they are not good at. If you assume that everyone is using it to replace their brain in each of these areas, then sure, that's bad - but that's not what was asked. The survey just asks in what domains people use it.

You can't ask google translate: "suggest other ways I might phrase this", and then pick your favourite. Very useful for non-english speakers, or even people who are learning to write well.

Happy birthday!

I would settle for academic types reliably making this distinction

I also don't like the title much. A spectrum is not a rigorous or even useful metaphor for understanding a multi-trait phenotype like sex, in my opinion.

So thanks for the review, Ed.
I hope people don't just take home the idea that sex is simple, and people who disagree with that are wrong.

in their multi-faceted glory. And it is important and relevant to make that point, and to push back against unscientific essentialism.

I haven't read the Fuentes book. It doesn't sound like it clearly distinguishes between sexes and sexual phenotypes, which is a shame.

that science is irrelevant, that these are Gouldian "non-overlapping magisteria", and that people arguing that sex is not binary are just plain wrong, albeit for possibly well-meaning reasons. I disagree here. Most people arguing that sex is not binary are actually talking about sexual phenotypes,

irrespective of the complexities of people's biological realities ("Caster Semanya is *really* a man").

Ed Hagen is very keen to emphasise the scientific value of the binary nature of the sexes, in an evolutionary sense, and I sympathise and agree. But when it comes to political issues, he argues

"it is impossible to change one's sex" - false, or at least incoherent, insofar as there are multiple traits that characterise a person's sex, and it's possible to change many of the important ones. This leads to a sort of weird, essentialist insistence that everyone has a "true" sex