Category Archives: procedural knowledge

Fiber arts, mysterious dodecahedrons, and waiting on “Eureka!”

Part 1: The anomaly

This story starts, as many stories do, with my girlfriend 3D-printing me a supernatural artifact. Specifically, one of my favorite SCPs, SCP-184.

This attempt got about 75% of the way through. Close enough.

We had some problems with the print. Did the problems have anything to do with printing a model of a mysterious artifact that makes spaces bigger on the inside, via a small precisely-calibrated box? I would say no, there’s no way that be related.

Anyway, the image used for the SCP in question, and thus also the final printed model, is based a Roman dodecahedron. Roman dodecahedrons are a particular shape of metal object that have been dug up in digs from all over the Roman period, and we have no idea why they exist.

Roman dodecahedra. || Image source unknown.

Many theories have been advanced. You might have seen these in an image that was going around the internet, which ended by suggesting that the object would work perfectly for knitting the fingers of gloves.

There isn’t an alternative clear explanation for what these are. A tool for measuring coins? A ruler for calculating distances? A sort of Roman fidget spinner? This author thinks it displays a date and has a neat explanation as for why. (Experimental archaeology is so cool, y’all.)

Whatever the purpose of the Roman dodecahedron was, I’m pretty sure it’s not (as the meme implies is obvious) for knitting glove fingers.¹

Why?

1: The holes are always all different sizes, and you don’t need that to make glove fingers.

2: You could just do this with a donut with pegs in it, you don’t need a precisely welded dodecahedron. It does work for knitting glove fingers, you just don’t need something this complicated.

3: The Romans hadn’t invented knitting.

Part 2: The Ancient Romans couldn’t knit

Wait, what? Yeah, the Romans couldn’t knit. The Ancient Greeks couldn’t knit, the Ancient Egyptians couldn’t knit. Knitting took a while to take off outside of the Middle East and the West, but still, almost all of the Imperial Chinese dynasties wouldn’t have known how. Knitting is a pretty recent invention, time-wise. The earliest knit objects we have are from Egypt around 1000 CE.

Possibly the oldest knit sock known, ca 1000-1200 CE according to this page. || Photo is public domain from the George Washington University Textile Museum Collection.

This is especially surprising because knitting is useful for two big reasons:

First, it’s very easy to do. It takes yarn and two sticks and children can learn how. This is pretty rare for fabric manufacturing – compare, for instance, weaving, which takes an entire loom.

Sidenote: Do you know your fabrics? This next section will make way more sense if you do.

Woven fabric	Knit fabric
Commonly found in: trousers, collared/button up shirts, bedsheets, dish towels, woven boxers, quilts, coats, etc. Not stretchy. Loose threads won’t make the whole cloth unravel.	Commonly found in: T-shirts, polo shirts, leggings, underwear, anything made of jersey fabric, sweaters, sweatpants, socks. Stretchy. If you pull on a lose thread, the cloth unravels.

Second, and oft-underappreciated, knitted fabric is stretchy. We’re spoiled by the riches of elastic fabric today, but it wasn’t always so. Modern elastic fabric uses synthetic materials like spandex or neoprene; the older version was natural latex rubber, and it seems to have taken until the 1800s to use rubber to make clothing stretchy. Knit fabric stretches without any of those.

Before knitting, your options were limited – you could only make clothing that didn’t stretch, which I think explains a lot of why medieval and earlier clothing “looks that way”. A lot of belts and drapey fabric. If something is form-fitting, it’s probably laced. (…Or just more-closely tailored, which unrelatedly became more of a thing later in the medieval period.)

You think these men had access to comfortable elastic waistlines? No they did not. || Image from the Luttrell Psalter, ~1330.

You could also use woven fabric on the bias, which stretches a little.

Woven fabric is stretchier this way. Grab something made of woven fabric and try it out. || Image by PKM, under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

Medieval Europe made stockings from fabric cut like this. Imagine a sock made out of tablecloth or button-down-shirt-type material. Not very flexible. Here’s a modern recreation on Etsy.

Other kinds of old “socks” were more flexible but more obnoxious, made of a long strip of bias-cut fabric that you’d wrap around your feet. (Known as: winingas, vindingr, legwraps, wickelbänder , or puttees.) Historical reenactors wear these sometimes. I’m told they’re not flexible and restrict movement, and that they take practice to put on correctly.

Come 1000 CE, knitting arrives on the scene.

Which is to say, it’s no surprise that the first knitted garments we see are socks! They get big in Europe over the next 300 years or so. Richly detailed bags and cushions also appear. We start seeing artistic depictions of knitting for the first time around now too.

Italian Madonna knitting with four needles, ~1350. Section of this miniature by Tommaso de Modena.

Interestingly, this early knitting was largely circular, meaning that you produce a tube of cloth rather than a flat sheet. This meant that the first knitting was done not with two sticks and some yarn, but four sticks and some yarn. This is much easier for making socks and the like than using two needles would be. …But also means that the invention process actually started with four needles and some yarn, so maybe it’s not surprising it took so long.²

(Why did it take so long to invent knitting flat cloth with two sticks? Well, there’s less of a point to it, since you already have lots of woven cloth, and you can do a lot of clothes – socks, sweaters, hats, bags – by knitting tubes. Also, by knitting circularly, you only have to know how to do one stitch (the knit stitch) whereas flat knitting requires you also use a different stitch (the perl stitch) to make a smooth fabric that looks like and is as stretchy as round knitting. If you’re not a knitter, just trust me – it’s an extra step.)

(You might also be wondering: What about crochet? Crochet was even more recent. 1800s.)

Part 3: The Ancient Peruvians couldn’t knit either, but they did something that looks the same

You sometimes see people say that knitting is much older, maybe thousands of years old. It’s hard to tell how old knitting is – fabric doesn’t always preserve well – but it’s safe to say that it’s not that old. We have examples of people doing things with string for thousands of years, but no examples of knitting before those 1000 CE socks. What we do have examples of is naalbinding, a method of making fabric from yarn using a needle. Naalbinding produces a less-stretchy fabric than knitting. It’s found from Scandinavia to the Middle East and also shows up in Peru.

The native Peruvian form of naalbinding is a specific technique called cross-knit looping. (This technique also shows up sometimes in pre-American Eurasia, but it’s not common.) The interesting thing about cross-knit looping is that the fabric looks almost identical to regular knitting.

Here’s a tiny cross-knit-looped bag I made, next to a tiny regularly knit bag I made. You can see they look really similar. The fabric isn’t truly identical if you look closely (although it’s close enough to have fooled historians). It doesn’t act the same either – naalbound fabric is less stretchy than knit fabric, and it doesn’t unravel.

The ancient Peruvians cross-knit-looped decorations for other garments and the occasional hat, not socks.

Cross-knit-looped detail from the absolutely stunning Paracas Textile. If you look closely, it looks like stockinette knit fabric, but it’s not.

Inspired by the Paracas Textile figures above, I used cross-knit-looping to make this little fox lady fingerpuppet:

I think it was easier to do fine details than it would be if I were knitting – it felt more like embroidery – but it might have been slower to make the plain fabric parts than knitting would have been. But I’ve done a lot of knitting and very little cross-knit-looping, so it’s hard to compare directly. If you want to learn how to do cross-knit looping yourself, Donna Kallner on Youtube has handy instructional videos.

I wondered about naalbinding in general – does the practice predate human dispersal to the Americas, or did the Eurasian technique and the American technique evolve separately? Well, I don’t know for certain. Sewing needles and working with yarn are old old practices, definitely pre-dating the hike across Beringia (~18,000 BCE). The oldest naalbinding is 6500 years old, so it’s possible – but as far as I know, no ancient naalbinding has every been found anywhere in the Americas outside of Peru, or in eastern Russia or Asia – it was mostly the Middle East and Europe, and then, also, separately, Peru. The process of cross-knit looping shares some similarities with net-making and basket-weaving, so it doesn’t seem so odd to me that the process was invented again in Peru.

For a while, I thought, it’s even weirder that the Peruvians didn’t get to knitting – they were so close, they made something that looks so similar. But cross-knit-looping doesn’t actually particularly share any other similarities with knitting more than naalbinding or even more common crafts like basketweaving or weaving – the tools are different, the process is different, etc.

So the question should be the same for the Romans or any other other culture with yarn and sticks before 1000 AD: why didn’t they invent knitting? They had all the pieces. …Didn’t they?

Yeah, I think they did.

Part 4: Many stones can form an arch, singly none

Let’s jump topics for a second. In Egypt, a millenium before there were knit socks, there was the Library of Alexandria. Zenodotus, the first known head librarian at the Library of Alexandria, organized lists of words and probably the library’s books by alphabetical order. He’s the first person we know of to alphabetize books with this method, somewhere around 300 BCE.

Then, it takes 500 years before we see alphabetization of books by the second letter.³

The first time I heard this, I thought: Holy mackerel. That’s a long time. I know people who are very smart, but I’m not sure I know anyone smart enough to invent categorizing things by the second letter.

But. Is that true? Let’s do some Fermi estimates. The world population was 1.66E8 (166 million) in 500 BCE and 2.02E8 (202 million) in 200 CE. But only a tiny fraction would have had access to books, and only a fraction of those in the western alphabet system. (And of course, people outside of the Library of Alexandria with access to books could have done it and we just wouldn’t know, because that fact would have been lost – but people have actually studied the history of alphabetization and do seem to treat this as the start of alphabetization as a cultural practice, so I’ll carry on.)

For this rough estimate, I’ll average the world population over that period to 2E8. Assuming a 50 year lifespan, that’s 10 lifespans and thus 2E10 people living in the window. If only one in a thousand people would have been in a place to have the idea and have it recognized (e.g. access to lots of books), that’s 1 in 2E7 people, or 1 in 20 million. That’s suddenly not unreachable. Especially since I think “1 in 1,000 ‘being able to have the idea’” might be too high – and if it’s more like “1 in 10,000” or lower, the end number could be more like 1 in 1 million. I might actually know people who are 1 in 1 million smart – I have smart friends. So there’s some chance I know someone smart enough to have invented “organizing by the second letter of the alphabet”.

Sidenote: Ancient bacteria couldn’t knit

A parallel in biology: Some organisms emit alcohol as a waste product. For thousands of years, humans have been concentrating alcohol in one place to kill bacteria. (… Okay, not just to kill bacteria.) From 2005 to 2015, some bacteria have been getting 10x resistant to alcohol.

Isn’t it strange that this is only happened in the last 10 years? This question actually lead, via a winding path, to the idea that became my Funnel of Human Experience blog post. I forgot to answer the question, but suffice to say that if alcohol production is in some way correlated&&& with the human population, 10 years is more significant but still not very much.

And yet, alcohol resistance seems to have involved in Enterococcus faecium only recently. The authors postulate the spread of alcohol handwashing. Seems as plausible as anything. Or maybe it’s just difficult to evolve.

Knitting continues to interest me, because a lot of examples of innovation do rely heavily on what came before. To have invented organizing books by the second letter of the alphabet, you have to have invented organizing books by the first letter of the alphabet, and also know how to write, and have access to a lot of books for the second letter to even matter.

The sewing machine was invented in 1790 CE and improved drastically over the next 60 years, where it became widely used to automate a time-consuming and extremely common task. We could ask: “But why wasn’t the sewing machine invented earlier, like in 1500 CE?”

But we mostly don’t, because to invent a sewing machine, you also need very finely machined gears and other metal parts, and that technology also came up around the industrial revolution. You just couldn’t have made a reliable sewing machine in 1500 CE, even if you had the idea – you didn’t have all the steps. In software terms, as a technology, sewing machines have dependencies. Thus, the march of human progress, yada yada yada.

But as far as I can tell, you had everything that went into knitting for thousands of years beforehand. You had sticks, you had yarn, you had the motivation. Knitting doesn’t have dependencies after that. And you had brainpower: people in the past everywhere were making fiber into yarn and yarn into clothing all of the time, seriously making clothes from scratch takes so much time.

And yet, knitting is very recent. That was so big of a leap that it took thousands of years for someone to figure it out.

UPDATE: see the follow-up to this post with more findings from the earliest days of knitting, crochet, sprang, etc.

¹ I’m not displaying the meme itself in this otherwise image-happy post because if I do, one of my friends will read this essay and get to the meme but stop reading before they get to the part where I say the meme is incorrect. And then the next time we talk, they’ll tell me that they read my blog post and liked that part where a Youtuber proved that this mysterious Roman artifact was used to knit gloves, and hah, those silly historians! And then I will immediately get a headache.

² Flexible circular knitting needles for knitting tubes are, as you might guess, also a more modern invention. If you’re in the Medieval period, it’s four sticks or bust.

³ My girlfriend and I made a valiant attempt to verify this, including squinting at some scans of fragments from Ancient Greek dictionaries written on papyrus from Papyri.info – which is, by the way, easily one of the most websites of all time. We didn’t make much headway.

The dictionaries or bibliographies we found on papyrus seem to be ordered completely alphabetically, but even those “source texts” were copies from ~1500 CE or that kind of thing, of much older (~200 CE) texts. So those texts we found might have been alphabetized by the copiers. Also, neither of us know Ancient Greek, which did not help matters.

Ultimately, this citation about both primary and secondary alphabetization seems to come from Lloyd W. Daly’s well-regarded 1967 book Contributions to a history of alphabetization in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, which I have not read. If you try digging further, good luck and let me know what you find.

[Crossposted to LessWrong.]

Tiddlywiki for organizing notes and research

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Happy new school year to my fellow students! With my first year of grad school under my belt, and my sword and shield out for Round 2, I wanted to share a tool that’s helped me on my journey.

Two years ago, my go-to system for organizing my research and writing “citations in 3 different programs” + “pile everything into a haphazard series of google docs and hope for the best”. I figured this wasn’t great. After doing some reading and trying several alternatives, I discovered Tiddlywiki.

Tiddlywiki is an ancient open-source wiki application in the form of an html file. It has all the tools you need to make a wiki in the form of “tiddlers”, self-contained chunks of info that you can tag and link to each other. When you save the wiki, the program and your text all get wrapped up together into the same .html file – it both stores your info and is the program for running the wiki. It works on any web browser, as well as special programs.

I stuck with it and here’s why:

Wiki format: Wikis seem really compatible with the way my brain works. If I take notes on a book or article, that source gets its own tiddler on the wiki. They can then get interwoven, crosslinked, expanded upon, etc.
Elegant: Does most things I want it to. Easy to link to tiddlers and drag them or other files in from other wikis/folders. The structure is transparent and customizable.
Robust: Tiddlywikis from a decade ago are still perfectly functional today. The entire program and dataset lives in one small html file that runs on anything with a web browser.
Meta-aesthetics: Feeding all my data to Google is a little worrying. Tiddlywiki, meanwhile, is open-source and runs from your computer. The fact that the program is a quine is really neat.
Encryption: Tiddlywikis have an encryption function baked in. I don’t know if it’s very good. Consider using Veracrypt for better security. But if you don’t want to do that, here you go. This also means you can upload your wikis and backups to cloud services while keeping them encrypted. (Go to “Tools” in the sidebar, then click on the “set password” button. After you set a password, you can look at the .html file text to be sure that, yes, everything is encrypted into nonsense characters.)
Customizable: Easily change the color scheme, any text or formatting, the layout, etc. It’s extremely adaptable. You can also install a variety of plugins, though I haven’t felt the need to myself as of yet.
Transportable: My wikis live on a flashdrive and can work on any computer. I took all my research with me to and from work every day this summer for an internship.

Things I like less

Saving is not obvious. This simplest version is “edit a copy of a blank tiddlywiki in a web browser, save locally to your computer or a flash drive, repeat every time you edit it”, which is kind of a pain.
- I work on various computers, so my Tiddlywikis are saved on a flash drive. I edit them in web browsers, and save them back to the flash drive when I’m done. I back them up every week.
- On my Ubuntu laptop, I edit them with the program TiddlyDesktop, which makes saving easier.

You can use images, but they get saved as raw code into the html file itself (so every image makes the file that much larger), and there aren’t tools for manipulating them. (There is a cute, tiny, and almost useless drawing program baked in.) I tend to save a few images, like graphs or figures from papers, but wouldn’t personally use Tiddlywiki for image-heavy work.
Some features (e.g. spellcheck, in-text search with highlighting) depend on the browser or other program you’re using to edit the wikis.
Kind of old-looking, not maximally aesthetic.

The number of wikis you have is up to you. I started with one wiki for a specific writing project and one wiki for work, notes and research. My active Tiddlywikis now include:

Grad school material
Internship research material
General writing, notes, and personal research
Writing and worldbuilding/characterization/plot details for a novel
Recipe storage
Quotes and poetry I like

Your mileage may vary.

How do I try it?

Here’s a nice one to explore as an example, a thesis website in Spanish. Here’s one on philosophy. (Note that you can’t actually edit the versions that appear on the website. You can locally save the whole wiki and changes you make to it, though.)

If you like it, here are some resources to get you started. This is the official website, which has lots of helpful documentation. (Note that it’s also a tiddlywiki!)

Here are some youtube videos I also found helpful.

After making a few tiddlywikis, I found that I kept making the same tweaks to them to get them set up in a way useful for me. In that light, I made a new “blank” or “empty” tiddlywiki that had those changes baked in already.

Here it is: the Eukaryote Writes Blog empty tiddlywiki. You may find it better than the default empty wiki. It comes with a couple new color schemes, a table of contents, and some layout tweaks, among other small changes.

Other research tools

All hail the exobrain!

I keep track of research citations formally with Zotero, or the tool my work prefers. For informal reading, I’ll also just note the authors and title and/or URL of the source (in my tiddlywiki!) so I can find it later.

For keeping track of time spent working, I’ve gotten some utility out of KanbanFlow. I like the Pomodoro Technique, and KanbanFlow has both pomodoro timers and a nice task-sorting and task-prioritization system built in. I currently don’t worry about tracking time, and use Google Calendar, a bullet journal, and a bastardized Kanban Board variant to keep my brain in order.

Previously, I used the website MarinaraTimer to time pomodoros. I love it for exactly two reasons: the ability to pause pomodoros, and the sound effect “Ominous Woosh”.

A giant whiteboard for $14 (plus nails)

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All my friends love whiteboards, because they’re giant nerds. It’s only a good party when somebody starts trying to illustrating a point on the whiteboard. Also, to-do lists you can’t miss.

This isn’t my idea, but it’s good and I thought I’d share it. Home Depot and Lowes sell a material called “thrify white panelling” or “smooth white hardboard”. It’s cheap – mine was about $14 for a 4-foot-by-8-foot sheet. I asked the store staff to cut the panel in half so it would fit in my car, which they did for free.

It’s easily chipped, so watch out if you want it to look flawless.

Then I stuck it to the wall of my studio apartment. I used some kind of drywall anchor to screw it on, with washers, to get a good grip on the material. (I think using a drywall anchor was overkill, and can’t recommend them for renters until I see how cleanly they come out of the wall – so if you have a better low-damage attachment system, maybe try that first. I wasn’t able to get them to stick with Command velcro strips – the strips kept detaching from the panel material – but other people on the internet seem to have found success in this.)

It acts as a whiteboard as-is. Writing gets hard to erase if you leave it up there for a long time, but you can clean it with whiteboard-cleaning-solution, alcohol, or by coloring over the marks with another whiteboard marker and then erasing that. Internet people also report that you can buff the entire surface with turtle wax before hanging it, and this makes it more stain-resistant.

I didn’t do that, and it’s still pretty good, especially for $14.

Let me know if you try this!

Tip: use a digital packing list

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Photo by Jean-Philippe Boulet, under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

I have a Google spreadsheet I’ve used for the past three and a half years when travelling. It has everything I regularly need on multi-day trips, space for extra items to add on specific trips, and checkboxes.

To pack, I lay out my suitcase and backpack, and throw things into them while referring to my list. Once everything on the spreadsheet is ticked off, I zip up my suitcases and am ready to go.

It’s very straightforward. You can add or remove items to the spreadsheet over time, and just clear off the extra items for each new trip.

Here’s my spreadsheet. You probably don’t need exactly the same things as me, so feel free to save your own copy and change the lists. Happy trails, friends.

Nemesis club

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[Cover photo taken by T. R. Shankar Raman, under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.]

College season is starting soon and many, including me, will be returning to school soon. In that spirit, I thought I’d try and pitch the Eukaryotes Read Blog collective on an idea I never tried out in undergrad.*

On undergrad campuses, fall is a magical time. A lot of energetic new students have found themselves joining together, bereft of their previous friends and social networks, away from their family, drastically changing their lifestyles, and making it on their own in the world.

University campuses are well-equipped to help you make friends. There are plenty of campus-organized bonding opportunities in the first few weeks, and, if you’re like most people, you’ll end up making friends with roommates, classmates, other people on your floor, people you eat with in the cafeteria, etc.

What university campuses do not help you make are enemies.

Enemies are an important and time-honored form of human relationship. Beowulf had Grendel, Batman had Catwoman, St. Patrick had the snakes. But forming and nurturing early-stage enemyships can be difficult. Sometimes your enemy has killed your son and you’ve come to exact retribution, or you’re investigating the same murder, or you’re driving your enemy out of Ireland. But these opportunities are few and far between.

Don’t get me wrong. True nemesis relationships can happen early on in the college career. Maybe you were in a conversation with them about land management during your “get acquainted” circle in Orientation Week, and their opinions were so bad you wanted to punch them, and now they’re dating your roommate. But most people aren’t looking to make nemeses off the bat, and the stifling atmosphere of today’s college campuses – rife with memes like “be good to each other” – is simply not fertile ground for real adversarial relationships.

Without this release valve early on, nemeses tend to form painfully and explosively at random points throughout your college career, when you’ve already signed a 12-month lease with them. Eventually, they get increasingly awful, and you have to kick them out and suffer through a massive screaming fit that goes on all night when you have a six-hour O-chem lab the next day. Go fuck yourself, Amy.

I don’t want that. None of us want that. Enter Nemesis Club.

Upon joining Nemesis Club, you fill out a form. It asks for your name and class standing, and goes into what you’re looking for in a nemesis.

A sample nemesis-matching survey.

Over the next week, organizers match you with another participant with similar needs and desires. Congratulations! You now have a nemesis. While you make friends, reorient your life, and try to ace your classes, this friendly face will be there to curse, shake your fist at, and plot against.

There’s a tricky balance here – society has poorly equipped us for the nuances of the comradversarial relationship, so the club has to be ready to help members navigate this. What if two nemeses have different assumptions about the seriousness of the enemyship? What if people are unhappy in their nemesis bonds?

It’s important that these bonds be navigated carefully. Ideally, these relationships will be satisfying. Maybe they’ll lead to academic success, grudging friendship, or romance. Maybe at the end of the college career, both nemeses will set aside their grudges and continue their lives as pals. Or maybe, if we’re lucky, these connections will blossom into life-long rivalries.

If anyone starts a nemesis club, or some variation of it, do let me know.

My ex did actually briefly try to start this. I declined to participate because he refused to take out “physical violence” as a club-endorsed nemesis activity (between willing participants). I admire his commitment to the aesthetic, but have to disrecommend this approach if you’re planning on starting your own, for reasons both of legitimacy and of gaining members that really don’t want to be involved with something that includes physical violence (which is to say: most people).

2 extremely literal introspection techniques

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Introspection literally means “to look inside”. Your eye is a camera made of meat – here are two ways to use your eyes to look at their own structure.

The Blue Field Entopic Phenomena

Stare up at a clear blue sky. (If no blue sky is available, for instance, if you’re in Seattle and it’s January, I was able to get a weaker version by putting my face close to this image instead. Your mileage may vary.)

Animation of the phenomena. Made by Wikimedia user Unmismoobjectivo, under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

Notice tiny white spots with dark tails darting around your field of vision? You’re looking at your own immune system – those are white blood cells moving in the capillaries in your retina. Normally transparent, they reflect blue light. The darker tails are build-ups of smaller red blood cells in the narrow capillaries, which are all but blocked by the large white blood cells.

This is clear enough that the speed at which the dots move can be used to accurately measure blood pressure in the retina. To do this, patients compare their blue field entopic phenomena to animated dots moving at various speeds. I wanted to find some calibrated gifs to try this at home, so if you see some, let me know.

On the other hand, if you see things that look like this all the time everywhere, it might be visual snow.

2. The Purkinje Tree

WARNING: A cell phone flashlight probably isn’t strong enough to damage your eyes, but especially if you try this with anything stronger than that, or if you have a condition that would make it very bad to accidentally shine a flashlight in your face, use your own judgement on proceeding.

Stand or lie down in a dark room.

Turn on your phone flashlight or a penlight, and hold it up against the side of your face.

Position yourself so that you’re looking into darkness, and the light beam passes just over the front of your eyes – you’re trying to get light to go across the surface of your pupil, but not directly into your eyes.

You might need to adjust the angle.

What you’re looking for is the Purkinje tree – shadows of the retinal blood vessels cast onto other parts of the retina. It was first seen by legendary Czech anatomist Jan Evangelista Purkynê, who also found Purkinje brain cells, sweat glands, and Purkinje fibers in the heart, and introduced the terms “blood plasma” and “protoplasm”.

The Purkinje Tree reminded me of aerial photos of branching riverbeds, as in this NASA photo of the Yarlung Tsangpo River in Tibet. So look for a structure like this.

Once you see it, the image will vanish quickly – your brain already gets an image of the blood vessels on the retina, so it’s used to removing it from your perception and will adapt. If you waggle the light source gently at about one hertz (once per second), the image stays visible.

Happy new year from Eukaryote Writes Blog!

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Diversity and team performance: What the research says

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(Photo of group of people doing a hard thing from Wikimedia user Rizimid, CC BY-SA 3.0.)

This is an extended version (more info, more sources) version of the talk I gave at EA Global San Francisco 2017. The other talk I gave, on extinction events, is here. Some more EA-focused pieces on diversity, which I’ve read but which were assembled by the indomitable Julia Wise, are:

Effective altruism means effective inclusion

Making EA groups more welcoming

EA Diversity: Unpacking Pandora’s Box

Keeping the EA Movement welcoming

How can we integrate diversity, equity, and inclusion into the animal welfare movement?

Pitfalls in diversity outreach

There are moral, social, etc. reasons to care about diversity, all of which are valuable. I’m only going to look at one aspect, which is performance outcomes. The information I’m drawing from here are primarily meta-studies and experiments in a business context.

Diversity here mostly means demographic diversity (culture, age, gender, race) as well as informational diversity – educational background, for instance. As you might imagine, each of these has different impacts on team performance, but if we treat them as facets of the same thing (“diversity”), some interesting things fall out.

(Types of diversity which, as far as I’m aware, these studies largely didn’t cover: class/wealth, sexual orientation, non-cis genders, disability, most personality traits, communication style, etc.)

Studies don’t show that diversity has an overall clear effect, positive or negative, on the performance of teams or groups of people. (1) (2) The same may also be true on an organizational level. (3)

If we look at this further, we can decompose it into two effects (one where diversity has a neutral or negative impact on performance, and one where it has a mostly positive impact): (4) (3)

Social categorization

This is the human tendency to have an ingroup / outgroup mindset. People like their ingroup more. It’s an “us and them” mentality and it’s often totally unconscious. When diversity interacts with this, the effects are often – though not always – negative.

Diverse teams tend to have:

Lower feelings of group cohesion / identification with group
Worse communication (3)
More conflict (of productive but also non-productive varieties) (also the perception of more conflict) (5)
Biases

A silver lining: One of these ingrouping biases is the expectation that people more similar to us will also think more like us. Diversity clues us into diversity of opinions. (6) This gets us into:

Information processing

— 11/9/17 – I’m much less certain about my conclusions in this section after further reading. Diversity’s effects on creativity/innovation and problem-solving/decision-making have seen mixed results in the literature. See the comments section for more details. I now think the counterbalancing positive force of diversity might mostly be as a proxy for intellectual diversity. Also, I misread a study that was linked here the first time and have removed it. The study is linked in the comments. My bad! —

Creative, intellectual work. (7) Diversity’s effects here are generally positive. Diverse teams are better at:

Creativity (2)
Innovation (9)
Problem solving. Gender diversity is possibly more correlated than individual intelligence of group members. (Note: A similarly-sized replication failed to find the same results. Taymon Beal kindly brought this to my attention after the talk.) (10)

Diverse teams are more likely to discuss alternate ideas, look at data, and question their own beliefs.

This loosely maps onto the “explore / exploit” or “divergent / convergent” processes for projects. (2)

1. Information processing effects benefit divergent / explore processes.
2. Social categorization harms convergent / exploit processes.

If your group is just trying to get a job done and doesn’t have to think much about it, that’s when group cohesiveness and communication are most important, and diversity is less likely to help and may even harm performance. If your group has to solve problems, innovate, or analyze data, diversity will give you an edge.

How do we get less of the bad thing? Teams work together better when you can take away harmful effects from social categorization. Some things that help:

1. The more balanced a team is along some axis of diversity, the less likely you are to see negative effects on performance. (12) (7) Having one woman on your ten-person research team might not do much to help and might trigger social categorization. If you have five women, you’re more likely to see benefits.
2. Remote teams are less biased (w/r/t gender). Online teams will be less prone to gender bias.
3. Time. Obvious diversity becomes less salient to a group’s work over time, and diverse teams end up outperforming non-diverse teams. (13) (6) Recognition of less-obvious cognitive differences (e.g. personality and educational diversity) increases over time. As we might hope, the longer a group works together, the less surface-level differences matter.

This article has some ideas on minimizing problems from language fluency, and also for making globally dispersed teams work together better.

How do we get more of the good thing? Diversity is a resource – more information and cognitive tendencies. Having diversity is a first step. How do we get more out of it?

1. At least for age and educational diversity, high need for cognition. This is the drive of individual members to find information and think about things. (It’s not the same as, or especially correlated to, either IQ or openness to experience (1)).

Harvard Business Review suggests that diversity triggers people to stop and explain their thinking more. We’re biased towards liking and not analyzing things we feel more comfortable with – the “fluency heuristic.” (14) This is uncomfortable work, but if people enjoy doing it, they’re more likely to do it, and get more out of diversity.

But need for cognition is also linked with doing less social categorization at all, so maybe diverse groups with high levels of this just get along better or are more pleasant for all parties. Either way, a group of people who really enjoy analyzing and solving problems are likely to get more out of diversity.

2) A positive diversity mindset. This means that team members have an accurate understanding of potential positive effects from diversity in the context of their work. (4) If you’re working in a charity, you might think that the group you might assign to brainstorming new ways to reach donors might benefit from diversity more than the group assigned to fix your website. That’s probably true. But that’s especially true if they understand how diversity will help them in particular. You could perhaps have your team brainstorm ideas, or look up how diversity affects your particular task. (I was able to find results quickly for diversity in fundraising, diversity in research, diversity in volunteer outreach… so there are resources out there.)

Again, note that diversity’s effect size isn’t huge. It’s smaller than the effect size of support for innovation, external and internal communication, vision, task orientation, and cohesion – all these things you might correctly expect correlate with performance more than diversity (8). That said, I think a lot of people [at EA Global] want to do these creative, innovative, problem-solving things – convince other people to change lives, change the world, stop robots from destroying the earth. All of these are really important and really hard, and we need any advantage we can get.

Fictional body language

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Here’s something weird.

A common piece of advice for fiction writers is to “show, not tell” a character’s emotions. It’s not bad advice. It means that when you want to convey an emotional impression, describe the physical characteristics instead.

The usual result of applying this advice is that instead of a page of “Alice said nervously” or “Bob was confused”, you get a vivid page of action: “Alice stuttered, rubbing at her temples with a shaking hand,” or “Bob blinked and arched his eyebrows.”

The second thing is certainly better than the first thing. But a strange thing happens when the emotional valence isn’t easily replaced with an easily-described bit of body language. Characters in these books whose authors follow this advice seem to be doing a lot more yawning, trembling, sighing, emotional swallowing, groaning, and nodding than I or anyone I talk to does in real life.

It gets even stranger. These characters bat their lashes, or grip things so tightly their knuckles go white, or grit their teeth, or their mouths go dry. I variously either don’t think I do those, or wouldn’t notice someone else doing it.

Blushing is a very good example, for me. Because I read books, I knew enough that I could describe a character blushing in my own writing, and the circumstances in which it would happen, and what it looked like. I don’t think I’d actually noticed anyone blush in real life. A couple months after this first occurred to me, a friend happened to point out that another friend was blushing, and I was like, oh, alright, that is what’s going on, I guess this is a thing after all. But I wouldn’t have known before.

To me, it was like a piece of fictional body language we’ve all implicitly agreed represents “the thing your body does when you’re embarrassed or flattered or lovestruck.” I know there’s a particular feeling there, which I could attach to the foreign physical motion, and let the blushing description conjure it up. It didn’t seem any weirder than a book having elves.

(Brienne has written about how writing fiction, and reading about writing fiction, has helped her get better at interpreting emotions from physical cues. They certainly are often real physical cues – I just think the points where this breaks down are interesting.)

Online

There’s another case where humans are innovatively trying to solve the problem of representing feelings in a written medium, which is casual messaging. It’s a constantly evolving blend of your best descriptive words, verbs, emoticons, emojis, and now stickers and gifs and whatever else your platform supports. Let’s draw your attention to the humble emoticon, a marvel of written language. A handful of typographic characters represent a human face – something millions of years of evolution have fine-tuned our brains to interpret precisely.

(In some cases, these are pretty accurate: :) and ^_^ represent more similar things than :) and ;), even though ^_^ doesn’t even have the classic turned-up mouth of representation smiles. Body language: it works!)

`:)`

`:|`

`:<`

Now let’s consider this familiar face:

`:P`

And think of the context in which it’s normally found. If someone was talking to you in person and told a joke, or made a sarcastic comment, and then stuck their tongue out, you’d be puzzled! Especially if they kept doing it! Despite being a clear representation of a human face, that expression only makes sense in a written medium.

I understand why something like :P needs to exist: If someone makes a joke at you in meatspace, how do you tell it’s a joke? Tone of voice, small facial expressions, the way they look at you, perhaps? All of those things are hard to convey in character form. A stuck-out tongue isn’t, and we know what it means.

The ;) and :D emojis translate to meatspace a little better, maybe. Still, what’s the last time someone winked slyly at you in person?

You certainly can communicate complex things by using your words [CITATION NEEDED], but especially when in casual conversations, it’s nice to have expressive shortcuts. I wrote a bit ago:

Facebook Messenger’s addition of choosing chat colors and customizing the default emoji has, to me, made a weirdly big difference to what it feels like to use them. I think (at least with online messaging platforms I’ve tried before) it’s unique in letting you customize the environment you interact with another person (or a group of people) in.

In meatspace, you might often talk with someone in the same place – a bedroom, a college dining hall – and that interaction takes on the flavor of that place.

Even if not, in meatspace, you have an experience in common, which is the surrounding environment. It sets that interaction apart from all of the other ones. Taking a walk or going to a coffee shop to talk to someone feels different from sitting down in your shared living room, or from meeting them at your office.

You also have a lot of specific qualia of interacting with a person – a deep comfort, a slight tension, the exact sense of how they respond to eye contact or listen to you – all of which are either lost or replaced with cruder variations in the low-bandwidth context of text channels.

And Messenger doesn’t do much, but it adds a little bit of flavor to your interaction with someone besides the literal string of unicode characters they send you. Like, we’re miles apart and I may not currently be able to hear your voice or appreciate you in person, but instead, we can share the color red and send each other a picture of a camel in three different sizes, which is a step in that direction.

(Other emoticons sometimes take on their own valences: The game master in an online RPG I played in had a habit of typing only “ : ) ” in response when you asked him a juicy question, which quickly filled players with a sense of excitement and foreboding. I’ve tried using it since then in other platforms, before realizing that doesn’t actually convey that to literally anyone else. Similarly, users of certain websites may have a strong reaction to the typographic smiley “uwu”.)

Reasoning from fictional examples

In something that could arguably be called a study, I grabbed three books and chose some arbitrary pages in them to look at how character’s emotions are represented, particularly around dialogue.

Lirael by Garth Nix:

133: Lirael “shivers” as she reads a book about a monster. She “stops reading, nervously swallows, and reads the last line again”, and “breaths a long sigh of relief.”

428: She “nods dumbly” in response to another character, and stares at an unfamiliar figure.

259: A character smiles when reading a letter from a friend.

624: Two characters “exchange glances of concern”, one “speaks quickly”.

Most of these are pretty reasonable. I think the first one feels overdone to me, but then again, she’s really agitated when she’s reading the book, so maybe that’s reasonable? Nonetheless, flipping through, I think that this is Garth Nix’s main strategy. The characters might speak “honestly” or “nervously” or “with deliberation” as well, but when Nix really wants you to know how someone’s feeling, he’ll show you how they act.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman:

First page I flipped to didn’t have any.

364: A character “smiles”, “makes a moue”, “smiles again”, “tips her head to one side”. Shadow (the main character) “feels himself beginning to blush.”

175: A character “scowls fleetingly.” A different character “sighs” and his tone changes.

The last page also didn’t have any.

Gaiman does more laying out a character’s thoughts: Shadow imagines how a moment came to happen, or it’s his interpretation that gives flavor – “[Another character] looked very old as he said this, and fragile.”

Earth by David Brin:

First two pages I flipped to didn’t have dialogue.

428: Characters “wave nonchalantly”, “pause”, “shrug”, “shrug” again, “fold his arms, looking quite relaxed”, speak with “an ingratiating smile”, and “continue with a smile”.

207: Characters “nod” and one ‘plants a hand on another’s shoulder”.

168: “Shivers coursed his back. Logan wondered if a microbe might feel this way, looking with sudden awe into a truly giant soul.” One’s “face grows ashen”, another “blinks.” Amusingly, “the engineer shrugged, an expressive gesture.” Expressive of what?

Brin spends a lot of time living in characters’ heads, describing their thoughts. This gives him time to build his detailed sci-fi world, and also gives you enough of a picture of characters that it’s easy to imagine their reactions later on.

How to use this

I don’t think this is necessarily a problem in need of a solution, but fiction is trying to represent the way real people might act. Even of the premise of your novel starts with “there’s magic”, it probably doesn’t segue into “there’s magic and also humans are 50% more physically expressive, and they are always blushing.” (…Maybe the blushing thing is just me.) There’s something appealing about being able to represent body language accurately.

The quick analysis in the section above suggests at least three ways writers express how a fictional character is feeling to a reader. I don’t mean to imply that any is objectively better than the other, although the third one is my favorite.

1) Just describe how they feel. “Alice was nervous”, “Bob said happily.”

This gives the reader information. How was Alice feeling? Clearly, Alice was nervous. It doesn’t convey nervousness, though. Saying the word “nervous” does not generally make someone nervous – it takes some mental effort to translate that into nervous actions or thoughts.

2) Describe their action. A character’s sighing, their chin stuck out, their unblinking eye contact, their gulping. Sheets like these exist to help.

I suspect these work by two ways:

You can imagine yourself doing the action, and then what mental state might have caused it. Especially if it’s the main character, and you’re spending time in their head anyway. It might also be “Wow, Lirael is shivering in fear, and I have to be really scared before I shiver, so she must be very frightened,” though I imagine that making this inference is asking a lot of a reader.
You can visualize a character doing it, in your mental map of the scene, and imagine what you’d think if you saw someone doing it.

Either way, the author is using visualization to get you to recreate being there yourself. This is where I’m claiming some weird things like fictional body language develop.

3) Use metaphor, or describe a character’s thoughts, in such a way that the reader generates the feeling in their own head.

Gaiman in particular does this quite skillfully in American Gods.

[Listening to another character talk on and on, and then pause:] Shadow hadn’t said anything, and hadn’t planned to say anything, but he felt it was required of him, so said, “Well, weren’t they?”

[While in various degrees of psychological turmoil:] He did not trust his voice not to betray him, so he simply shook his head.

[And:] He wished he could come back with something smart and sharp, but Town was already back at the Humvee, and climbing up into the car; and Shadow still couldn’t think of anything clever to say”

Also metaphors, or images:

Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine.

There must have been thirty, maybe even forty people in that hall, and now they were every one of them looking intently at their playing cards, or their feet, or their fingernails, and pretending as hard as they could not to be listening.

By doing the mental exercises written out in the text, by letting your mind run over them and provoke some images in your brain, the author can get your brain to conjure the feeling by using some unrelated description. How cool is that! It doesn’t actually matter whether, in the narrative, it’s occurred to Shadow that Chicago is happening like a migraine. Your brain is doing the important thing on its own.

(Possible Facebook messenger equivalents: 1) “I’m sad” or “That’s funny!” 2) Emoticons / emotive stickers, *hug* or other actions 3) Gifs, more abstract stickers.)

You might be able to use this to derive some wisdom for writing fiction. I like metaphors, for one.

If you want to do body language more accurately, you can also pay attention to exactly how an emotion feels to you, where it sits in your body or your mind – meditation might be helpful – and try and describe that.

Either might be problematic because people experience emotions differently – the exact way you feel an emotion might be completely inscrutable to someone else. Maybe you don’t usually feel emotions in your body, or you don’t easily name them in your head. Maybe your body language isn’t standard. Emotions tend to derive from similar parts of the nervous system, though, so you probably won’t be totally off.

(It’d also be cool if the reader than learned about a new way to feel emotions from your fiction, but the failure mode I’m thinking of is ‘reader has no idea what you were trying to convey.’)

You could also try people-watching (or watching TV or a movie), and examining how you know someone is feeling a certain way. I bet some of these are subtle – slight shifts in posture and expression – but you might get some inspiration. (Unless you had to learn this by memorizing cues from fiction, in which case this exercise is less likely to be useful.)

Overall, given all the shades of nuance that go into emotional valence, and the different ways people feel or demonstrate emotions, I think it’s hardly surprising that we’ve come up with linguistic shorthands, even in places that are trying to be representational.

[Header image is images from the EmojiOne 5.0 update assembled by the honestly fantastic Emojipedia Blog.]

Social games for fun, bonding, and blackmail

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[Salad bowl image from fir0002 / flagstaffotos.com.au, under a CC BY-NA 3.0 license.]

At a party, or hanging out with some friends or strangers, and not sure what to do or how to get to know each other? Try a social game! The ones here fall loosely into a couple categories: improv, communication, affinity, and inference.

Don’t get me started – improv

The simplest of improv games. Possibly, it will get you comfortable generating and discussing opinions, but even if it doesn’t or you’re already comfortable with that, it’s a bunch of fun.

The game goes in a circle. Person A comes up with a topic, and tells it to Person B. Someone starts a 3-minute timer. Person B energetically rants about the topic for 3 minutes. At the end of the 3 minutes, Person B writes a new topic for Person C, and the game proceeds.

The purpose of the game is to rant, not to necessarily say things you agree with or even think are factually correct – trying to come up with a coherent critique on the spot is fun, but something like Cecil Palmer’s thoughts on the existence of mountains is also a great outcome.

Some notes: People’s tolerance for ranting about things they actually care about, or are close to, vary in a party context, so let people veto suggestions. There is no “losing”, there’s just continuing to rant until the timer is up.

Salad Bowl – improv / communication

A slightly more complicated improv game.

Start by separating your group of 5-12 people into two teams. Everybody gets 6 pieces of paper (more or less depending on how long you want the game to be), writes a word or short phrase on it, folds it, and puts it into a bowl. The bowl is shuffled.

For each round, take 30 seconds per person. One person draws a sheet from the bowl, and tries to get others on their team to guess the word. If their team gets the word, the person puts the sheet aside and draws another. At the end of 30 seconds, hand the bowl to the next person on the opposing team.

With an odd number of players, one person doesn’t get assigned to a team – on their turns, everybody gets to guess. The sheet of paper goes to whichever team guesses the correct answer.

At the end of each round, tally and write down how many sheets of paper each team has won. Put the papers back in the bowl, and move on to the next rounds.

Remember, the rounds go in order!

Round 1: Taboo. You can say any words except for the one (or ones) written on the card, or versions of them. (E.G., if the card says “dank memes”, then “rare Pepes” or “cats from the internet with words on them” is fine, but “meme”, “memes”, “memetic”, or “memery” are not.)

Round 2: Charades. Act out the word.

Round 3: One word. You can say exactly one word (that’s not the word or a version of the word on the card) to get your teammates to guess what’s on the card.

Round 4: Pose. Say “close” when your turn starts. Everybody on your team closes their eyes. Strike a pose that represents your word or phrase. Say “open”. Hold the pose, and your teammates guess based on the pose.

Post-it Pictionary – communication

For n people (where n = 4-10), give everyone a pile of n post-it notes. Everybody writes a sentence or phrase on the bottom post-it note. Then they pass it to the right.

The next round of people look at the bottom note, then, on the post-it above it, draw a picture to represent the sentence. Then they pass it to the write.

The next round of people look at only the most recent note, then write the phrase they think is described by the image.

Continue passing stacks, alternating looking at the most recent note and drawing a picture or writing a sentence. Once the note reaches its original owner, go around and show off what happened to your note.

Hot Seat – affinity

Do you want to know a group of people way, way better? This game is the fine craft nitro porter to “Truth or Dare”’s 6-pack of Budweiser. I think it came from the Authentic Relating community.

Find a smallish group of people among whom there’s a decent amount of trust. Put everyone in a circle somewhere where other people won’t wander in (e.g., if you’re in a party, walk to a park or find a room and close the door.) Start a timer. (5 minutes is good, make it more or less depending on the size of the group and how long you want to spend playing.) Everybody asks any question they want to the person “in the hot seat”, who answers. This person is allowed to skip questions. At the end of the timer, go to the next person.

Variations:

If the person in the hot seat doesn’t want to answer a question, they cede their turn to the next person.
At the start of their turn, the person says a number from 1-5 designating the amount of invasiveness of the questions they want. (In my experience, question-askers aren’t very good at translating a number into a nuanced level of invasiveness, but your group may be different.)
The version described under “Hot Seat” in this PDF.

Some notes: The people I play this with call it “intimacy hacking”. For the game to go successfully, I think the people asking questions do have to be ready to ask personal questions, but to try not to hurt the person in the hot seat. It actually gets easier to play around people you don’t know very well.

If the person in the seat clearly stands out in some way from the other people playing (gender, background, appearance, whatever), you might still ask about that, but tread carefully and don’t only ask questions about that. Try not to use the game to hit on people or ask a lot of prurient questions only to people you’re into. Having a facilitator who can police questions if needed is good if you’re not all very comfortable with each other. Be sure that everybody knows what they’re getting into, and with whom, before you start and it becomes harder to duck out.

Aside from that, ask questions you’re curious about, questions that’ll help you know them better, or questions that are fun to answer. This game is easier to play than it sounds, and kind of magical when it goes well.

Chill Seat – affinity

Less replay value than Hot Seat, but still a lovely time.

Everybody goes around the circle, and gives a compliment to the person in the Chill Seat. Then go on to the next person.

Variations: We played a version at a going-away party, where everyone said nice things about the people who were leaving. It was adorable.

Ring of Fire – affinity

Conceptually similar to Hot Seat.

Go around the circle. The first person asks a question, and in turn, everyone else in the circle answers – ending in the person who asked the question. Then the next person goes.

Some notes: This game tends to be easier to play than Hot Seat, but can still be intense. People have different tolerances of getting into long personal stories during the game – I find it kind of frustrating, some people think it adds a lot of value and enjoyment. If your group decide to stop playing, make sure to wait until everyone’s answered the current question.

“Why these and not those” games – inference

Good for trying some group problem solving. Described better by my friend here.

Flying Circus – inference

Like a chump, I’m writing this without having tried it myself. That said, I imagine an interesting group game is getting a hold of one of the Flying Circus of Physics (With Answers) books, or questions from it online, and trying to answer one of the questions in it as a group.

Remember some strategies for group problem-solving: make sure you understand the problem before proposing solutions, try coming up with several hypotheses, try coming up with experiments or observations that would disprove your hypotheses. Don’t look up information, but think of related phenomena you’re familiar with, and see if your theory works with them.

Probably works best for groups who are interested in physical phenomena, but for which no member is already especially knowledgeable.

Other games

Improv: List of improv games

Communication: Mad Libs, Telephone

Affinity: Truth or Dare, Never Have I Ever

Inference: 20 Questions, lateral thinking puzzles, Who Am I

Other classes of social games: Storytelling games, strategy games

How to design surveys that represent asexuals

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[CW: mentions of sex.]

Most surveys that discuss the matter almost certainly misrepresent the asexual population in one way or another. Fortunately, if you’re creating a survey, or interpreting results from a previously-conducted survey, there are ways to make your results more accurate!

This post is based on my previous post about asexuality, which contains more detailed sources and reasons why I think this topic is important. The idea of this post can probably also be applied to representing diverse sexual preferences or even gender identities (e.g. allow varied responses, don’t make assumptions), but the specific suggestions are targeted towards asexuality. Feel free to share this with people who are designing surveys.

Remember that asexuality and aromanticism exist

If your survey touches in any way on romance, sexuality, relationships, or related behaviors, the most important thing is to know and account for the fact that asexuality exists at all.

The basics: Asexuality is an umbrella term for people who don’t experience sexual attraction. 1-8% of people are or could be called asexual (more info here). Asexual people aren’t an easily-dismissed minority, and they are in your sample demographic. (Probably.) Aromanticism, similarly, is not having romantic interest. We don’t know how many aromantics there are, but they’re certainly out there. People may be aromantic and asexual, or either one, or neither. Some people consider asexuality and aromanticism to fall under the LGBTQ demographic, some people don’t. (The extended LGBTQIA+ acronym does include asexuals – that’s what the ‘a’ is supposed to stand for.) More information can be found here.

In representing asexual people in your results, the first question is what you’re using your data for.

My survey is about general identity/demographic information

We might expect 2x-4x as many romantic asexuals as aromantic asexuals (where do these numbers come from?). This is important because people on the asexual or aromantic spectrum have multiple identities – they might be biromantic and gray-asexual, or aromantic and homosexual, or heteroromantic and demisexual. This means that a question like the following is likely to lead to inaccurate answers:

What’s your orientation?

Heterosexual
Homosexual
Bi/pansexual
Asexual

One community survey found that the number of asexuals doubled when asexuality was asked about separately. You could do the same thing:

What’s your orientation?

Heterosexual
Homosexual
Bi/pansexual
Other

Are you asexual?

Yes
No

A solution that might be less confusing for people who don’t know what asexuality is, is to allow respondents to check multiple boxes, e.g.:

Check which of the following best describe your sexual/romantic orientation:

( ) Heterosexual
( ) Homosexual
( ) Bi/pansexual
( ) Asexual

It would also be nice (and more accurate) to include some other options:

( ) Gray-asexual
( ) Demisexual
( ) Other

You could also ask about romantic and sexual orientation separately:

What is your sexual orientation?

Heterosexual
Homosexual
Bi/pansexual
Asexual
Other

What is your romantic orientation?

Heteroromantic(attracted to another gender)
Homoromantic (attracted to your same gender)
Bi/panromantic (attracted to all genders)
Aromantic (do not experience romantic attraction)
Other

(Edit, 3/4/17: Siggy points out in the comments that it’s important to include an “other” or write-in response on romantic orientation questions, as well as sexual orientation.)

You could also just have a write-in response:

What is your sexual/romantic orientation? ___________________

You can then bin responses like “straight” and “heterosexual” as meaning the same thing, or, say, “aro-ace” and “gray-asexual lesbian” as both being on the asexual spectrum.

There is a downside in that people don’t necessarily know what “heteroromantic” means right away, even if they are that. (So if you’re going with options with less-familiar words, include definitions.)

Weed out troll answers with a lizardman question

The problem with more questions or write-ins is that those open up options to troll or confusing responses, perhaps from people who disagree with the basis of the question, or don’t understand.

Since people who troll on a gender or orientation question are likely to troll on other parts of the quiz, you could throw in a lizardman question – an absurd question designed to weed out troll respondents (or at least calibrate the honesty of participants).

In middle school, we got drug use surveys that asked us to check if we had ever done marijuana, heroin, hallucinogens, amphetamines, perscription drugs, inhalants, or derbisol (also known as DB, dirt, wagon wheels, or hope.) We asked the health teacher what “derbisol” was after the test, and she looked it up, and derbisol isn’t real – it’s a lizardman answer. (Apparently, 18.2% of high-schoolers in some groups have claimed to use derbisol. Remember: if you don’t talk to your kids about wagon wheels, bloggers will.)

The point is that you can adapt a lizardman question to a variety of contexts.

My survey is about sexual/romantic/relationship behavior

The keys here are A) remember that asexuality and aromanticism exist, and B) ask about behavior or preferences rather than making assumptions.

Many asexual people date people.
Some asexuals sometimes have sex.
Some people who don’t identify as asexual still don’t want to have sex for whatever reason.
Someone who’s gray-asexual may normally round themselves off as “asexual” on surveys, but have experienced sexual attraction before.
Some people are asexual but don’t know it.
Asexual people may or may not identify as queer.
Etc.

So if your question is about, say, attitudes from people who have or want to have sex with women, don’t ask if they’re heterosexual/bisexual men or homosexual/bisexual women. Instead, ask if your respondent has or wants to have sex with women.

Same goes for relationships.

The Asexual Identification Scale is 12 questions about behavior and preferences that capture 90% of asexual people, and can also identify asexual people who don’t realize they’re asexual. If you’re curious specifically about asexual-type behaviors, this may be your answer.

My survey is gathering data for both demographics and behaviors

State what you’re using the data for. For instance, if you have one question to ask college students about their orientation and who they’re likely to date, state that your study is about dating preferences.

You won’t get a complete picture of people’s orientations, but you weren’t going to anyways with one multiple-choice question. And people with complicated identities (like “biromantic asexual”) are more likely to write in the part that represents who they’re planning to date, not have sex with. If you’re using the response to gather information about STD risk, make it clear that your question is about sexual activity. (And then clarify what “sexual activities” you’re talking about, since people define that differently too and it’s probably relevant to STD risk. Specificity counts!)

2. Avoid over-generalizing from your results. If you’re using data from a question like the first one (“pick one: homosexual, heterosexual, bi/pansexual, or asexual”), realize that your answers for who dates or has sex with whom are necessarily fuzzy, because your results are representing asexuals and aromantics poorly.

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