Crap from Facebook Special Edition: failing grades

So this one bugs the hell out of me. Might as well blog it. Or something...

Backstory: a middle school teacher in Florida was fired and went to the press with a story about how it was because they heroically refused to give students grades of 50% on missing assignments. As many others have already noted, the school district denies that such a policy exists, and administrators are not really allowed to comment on the circumstances, so the public only gets on side of the story. The teacher was new and was in a probationary period, so the district didn't need justification for terminating her. That's why it's common knowledge that rocking the boat when you're still on probation is a bad idea. If you're officially in a feeling-out period and the people whose job it is to decide whether you're the right fit perceive you to be stirring up shit even when you know you're still on probation, you're going to get what's coming to you. Anyway, I take all of this with a grain of salt.

I saw the story on Facebook and a bunch of people commented in defense of this teacher. Right away, when I saw that reports indicated she'd been on probation, I was suspicious. But even aside from that, I found myself thinking, "Regardless of whether that policy is real, it's probably a better system than most traditional grading policies anyway." Among those bothering to comment on Facebook, though, this would have been a minority position for sure. The crux of the issue seemed to be the notion that a 0% grade for 0% work turned in was just/fair/proper/righteous and that any deviation from this was giving something for nothing, and goshdarnit, kids will grow up all spoiled and such if they get something for nothing. Well, I found that stance to be naive, but I was inclined to leave it alone.

As it happens, the maintainer of one of the Facebook pages I follow is also a middle school teacher, and he wrote an article about this story. A few paragraphs into his article, he linked to some old quotes of the "kids these days" variety. He went on to explain, using basic statistics and some common sense, why he eschewed 0% grades. His reasoning seemed sound to me, and I had this, admittedly misplaced, hope that such a thought-out explanation would change the minds of some of those curmudgeons bemoaning the noxious puerility of today's youth. And perhaps, for some, the article really was food for thought. But most of the comments were critical, grating, arrogant, and really just stupid. And that's why I'm blogging about it!

The naysayers seemed to have two primary objections. Many comments hit on both, but some only picked one or the other...

1. Giving a student 50% for no work is inherently unfair. Zero work should mean zero credit. Assignments that are turned in, but done poorly, could perhaps be 50%. But missed assignments must be 0% and anything else would cheapen the work put in by the students who did complete the assignment.
2. Students who get something for nothing will grow up wrong. They won't be prepared for the "real world." Kids need to learn that their actions have consequences. Coddling them will hurt them in the long term, etc.

Some of these comments veered right into the territory of "kids these days." So I quipped about the irony of including the old quotes in the article to make a point, only to get more of the same comments, proving the point. But I can't leave well enough alone. I won't get sucked into that comment section. I try to avoid that sort of thing these days. But just in case anyone who stumbles across this blog might harbor similar sentiments, I'll use this space to explain exactly why you're wrong.

Any grading scale for schoolwork is, to some extent, arbitrary. Confusingly, most schools issue grades using different scaling in different situations. Growing up, I had scales from 0 to 5, from 0 to 4, from 0% to 100%, and letter grades A/B/C/D/E/F and then just A/B/C/D/F (don't ask me what happened to "E" or why "E" was cut instead of "F"). And different teachers had different standards for how those grades were assigned in the first place. Some classes were graded on curves, others were not. Some classes had grades weighted around exams, others were mostly determined by homework. Some classes would drop the lowest few scores before computing an average for the course (like a class with 12 graded assignments could drop the two lowest scores on assignments, then average out the grades on the other 10 to determine course grade). Some classes were set up so that grades were determined by the results of collaborative projects, others were based on individual work. Some teachers had rigorous systems of penalties for late assignments, and others just outright refused to accept assignments pas their deadlines. Some teachers offered extensive extra credit in various ways, and other teachers hated extra credit. And that was just me. Just my real-life experience in the one school district where I grew up. In the abstract, we could devise all manner of wacky grading schemes. There isn't one that is inherently the best. Virtually every grading system at some point takes different grades and uses them to compute a mean, but that isn't absolutely necessary. We could devise a system wherein the median assignment grade is used to generate the course grade, or we could use some other metric entirely. A percentile scale is convenient for doing computational analysis, for getting numbers that are easy to work with for putting into charts and stuff. But don't delude yourself that the numbers are real. They're as arbitrary as any other system.

As far as "the real world" goes, I found it especially amusing to see remarks like, "I can't just fail to show up for work and get paid 50%." In case you didn't know, children don't get paid to go to school at all. Now, some adults do make the conscious decision to show up to a place and do what other people tell them to do without expecting to be paid directly for that, but that's something we do of our own volition with the goal of earning some advanced certification or license, and even then only for a few years. Children are expected to attend school full-time for thirteen years, and not for some high-caliber certification, but for a high school diploma, essentially a worthless piece of paper. That process is wholly unlike anything in anyone's adult world I know of. Griping about how their grade-scaling was set up in such a way that won't "prepare" them is bullshit.

Grading systems are inescapably arbitrary, but we can apply knowledge from different fields to discern advantages and disadvantages of them. While there might not be a single, most objectively fair/just approach, it's obvious that some methods would be more or less generous than other methods. As the author of the article notes, averaging assignments graded on a 0 to 100 scale is actually quite a bit more punitive than most things we deal with the rest of our lives. It means that one missed assignment effectively cancels out several other assignments with respectable scores. Bear in mind that overall course grades as high as 59%, and sometimes ones even higher than that, are considered inadequate, considered "failing." In your adult life, you can probably make some minor mistakes and have them either overlooked entirely or have the issue raised and brought to you for correction, and if you can correct it, you might get some minor penalty (or even none). Even serious blunders could be forgiven if you can show some attention to preventing recurrences and if your other performance has been satisfactory. In most professional settings and in other adult situations, you usually get some "benefit of the doubt." A 0 to 100 scale doesn't do that, especially not when a simple mean is used. Two perfect 100% scores and one missed assignment average out to 66%, usually reckoned as a D, barely passing. If you're generally capable of churning out work that scores 80%, which is typically considered B-,  a single missed assignment would average out with four instances of your usual work to get a 64%. And even after another round of five assignments, you'd have a 72% average; you'd be a C- student. That's pretty harsh. Adults can smugly go, "But that's good. Kid's gotta learn accountability. Blah, blah, blah." But ultimately, that's a more punitive standard than you're held to for most things in life, and when you are held to standards that high, it's typically because you are a competent professional who chose to enter into some contract for tangible benefit: you have your shit together and you want to do serious work and get the rewards that come with it. Kids have way less control over their lives than you do.


Opponents see 0% as the natural baseline and are incensed that he seemingly moves the baseline up to 50%, effectively giving away points for free, which they believe to be too generous. But that's framing it like children in school as supposed to be measured as elite competitors in some sort of contest, and you want the numbers to reflect their output. The point of school is to educate, not to cull the weak. As he takes pains to emphasize, a lot of factors outside of school affect performance. Setting the baseline at 50% offsets some of this. Some students might still fail. Consistently missing assignments or missing too many assignments and turning poor quality work on other ones is still going to result in an E average. But at least it gives struggling kids a chance.

Why I'm wary of labels

In various conversations over the years, I've noted my wariness of labels. While that trait isn't unique or even especially novel, it usually comes up against steadfast resistance. Part of that is just down to context. But people love their labels and insist on them. Labels are convenient. Now, I'm also someone who is self-admittedly obsessed with classification. So this might seem a bit odd. After all, wouldn't we use labels to classify things? Yes, but also, that's not really the problem that worries me. So here's something I just brainstormed that might help...

Suppose that A makes a certain claim.
Suppose that B makes another claim.
Suppose that those two claims are mutually incompatible.
Suppose that you might take issue with other features of one or both claims.
Note that A and B are both letters of the alphabet and that this classification can be used to group them together.
Finally, suppose that you use all of that to dismiss C, as C is also a letter of the alphabet and therefore is assigned a connection to both the claim put forth by A and the claim put forth by B.

That makes it pretty clear, right? You shouldn't dismiss C, poor C, because of something that A said, nor because of something that B said. Doing both simultaneously doesn't make it better. And yet, all too often, it seems like the use of demographic labels in discourse is a smokescreen to hide "straw man" arguments. Careful observation has led me to the belief that this isn't the goal of using labels. People want labels because it helps them compartmentalize, and compartmentalization is (most of the time) a useful cognitive tool. I see the appeal, but I also see it as dangerous. So that's why I'm wary.

Tyrants

You think that you're a good person. Well, maybe not, but at least you're an OK person. Not deranged or whatever, you know? Live and let live, that sort of thing. And so you wonder, psychologically, what it is that makes someone become blatantly evil. Not in a "why do people do bad things" kind of way, but the real monsters. Mass murderers. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc. Those guys. What led them down that path? It's so far removed from your own experience that it's a bizarre subject to even consider. How does the mind of a tyrant work? What goes through their heads?

And then your cell phone breaks and you have to get a new one. Your new phone automatically comes with autocorrect on the text messages and it triggers before you notice it. You see that autocorrect slightly altered one of your sentences without your permission. Nothing embarrassing or important, but it made the words wrong. You get annoyed and want to turn it off, but it isn't intuitively obvious to you how to get to that option in your phone's settings. So you think to yourself, "The people responsible for this should be marched up to a trench and shot. Yes, that is the appropriate consequence for this injustice and I would like it carried out immediately."

Yikes.

Crap from Facebook: June 12th, 2018

Oh, really? I'll just leave this here, then...

Litmus tests

Litmus is an umbrella term for lichen extracts that were historically used in one of the oldest analytical chemistry tests. Typically, the extract is impregnated onto paper. Dipping the paper into a liquid can change the color of the paper, due to the presence of pH-sensitive pigments in the extracts. This technique can provide an approximate reading of the pH of the liquid. Because of the historical popularity and utility of this technique, the term "litmus test" has entered the cultural lexicon as a slang term for actions with social use that is considered analogous to the use of a real litmus test in chemistry. Often this kind of "litmus test" is applied to a person: a question is posed and the response is read to gauge characteristics about the person. More generally, it's a label applied to any method in which a reading of something tested indirectly provides information about the thing, perhaps when direct observation of the point of interest is not possible. It's a metaphor. I can't see the pH of a liquid, but the pH of a liquid affects the pigments in litmus, and I can see the color change in litmus. Through that color change, I gain knowledge about the pH. I can't directly observe the nuances of your mind, the contents of your thoughts, the worth of your wit and wisdom. But I can ask a question and observe your response to the question, and through your answer I gain knowledge about your character.

The previous paragraph is at least slightly tongue-in-cheek. If that is your introduction to this concept of a "litmus test" then I have not provided an adequate background for you to engage the concept. If, as is far more likely, you are already familiar with the concept, then I've told you what you already know and done so a few times in a few different ways. What's the use, then? Well, it's not a litmus test if that's what you're thinking! That'd be deliciously ironic, though. I should have found a way to do that. No, what I'm trying to do here is set the stage.

I've been thinking about entertainment in terms of litmus tests. The specific work that got me hung up on this was Anathem by Neal Stephenson, which I read last summer. And I'm only making this post just now because I'm very, very bad about updating my blog. I said I should probably change the format. Well yeah, that's true. Anyway, I loved the book. And while looking for something else, I happened to learn that I found the reactions of the critics of the book to be generally wrongheaded. To be clear here, the concept I'm talking about is not that this was my favorite book. It's good, but there are others I like even more. In fact, Anathem might not even be my favorite Neal Stephenson book. So I'm not saying it's a paragon, not really. And not every book is for everyone! I'm not saying that either. Hm...

I'll put it thusly, Anathem isn't for everyone, but it's a great book and also a rather long and intimidating one that appeals to a certain segment of the population. And it seems like the people who read it, finished it, and disliked it all display notable patterns of some sort of failure. I could be more or less generous in my analysis of that, but let's just call it a regrettable lack of appreciation. Shots fired? I mean, kind of.

Some of the works I really like, and they may or may not overlap with the ones that are my real favorites, turn out to be very useful for gauging people. For letting me, based on how they react, see how they think. I don't know how much to trust my instincts on this because I often say relatively little, or even nothing at all, about books I've read and such. But the more I mulled over this, the more convinced I became that it works reasonably well, at least for my purposes. I'm being too cryptic here, I know. Sorry.

What I should say by way of example is that for a book like Anathem, not everyone can read, not everyone who can read can read at a level to enjoy the book, and not everyone is into science fiction; but if you are intelligent and into reading longform science fiction and you do not like it, we have irreconcilable differences about what makes something good. That summary will have to suffice, although of course there's more to it.

Anyway, I want to identify some good litmus tests. I should have started this last summer, and now it's harder to think of them. But I'll try...

Books:
Anathem

Movies:
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

Comics
???

Music
I, Robot [full album by The Alan Parsons Project]

Games
Fallout 4

Television
???

I'll try to think of more later...

A different format?

On occasion, I find myself either looking for some specific thing I wrote in the past or just browsing archives. As I've mentioned before, when I was on LJ, I was much more active. Lately, another site that it occurs to me has worked for this (for producing more content) is one with a more specific niche: the Casual Players Alliance, a Magic:  the Gathering message board that I've been a member of since a few weeks before I got on LiveJournal, and the online community where I've remained the most active for the longest period of time.

I've touched on this before. The LJ days were different. Enough people I knew were on the site that I'd spend some time browsing my "Friends" page, commenting on updates by my friends, responding to their comments on my own updates, and doing silly stuff. So content, in some form, flowed naturally. And it seems that there was a kind of migration to Facebook around 2008 or so. I don't like it. Not a topic that comes up much, but I check Facebook almost every day because it has essentially replaced the "Friends page" function that LJ had. Some people have deleted their Facebook accounts. I don't want to because its sheer success has given it the useful feature of linking me to people I hardly ever see in real life. But if it weren't for that, I'd get rid of it. And I loathe Twitter. Completely despise it. Twitter is cancer.

Blogger is fine, I guess. On LJ, I felt comfortable posting just a couple of sentences or a link. That meant I was posting more often. Combined with the social aspect, I was coming back to the site more often, which meant I was doing more long-form updates too. This is also why at the CPA, I write so much more than I do here. So I've been wondering about a change of format. There are posts floating around in my head, some of them have been floating around for years, and I don't take the time to write them because Blogger just feels like I'd have to sit down at my computer for several hours and type out the whole thing in one go. It's not even technically true. I could make multiple short posts, or save a post as a draft and come back later. But I'm just not on the site often enough. It feels like a chore. If this seems silly, I agree. It is silly. But that's where we're at.

So for about a year now, I've had this idea that what I should really do is change format, that I need to either change the way I think about Blogger or I need to use a different site. Updates here are depressingly sporadic. And browsing the volume of my content at the CPA, it occurred to me that maybe what I want is a message board. And that led me to two conclusions...

1. This is silly. Message boards are for communities. I am not a community. I mean,  I am a community of cells, but that doesn't count. I am one person. Starting my own message board for me would be crazy.
2. Yes, that is exactly what I need! I could organize different fora for the major topics I like to talk about, start threads for more specific subjects, and add new posts to those threads as it suits me, sometimes long and sometimes short.

Can this concept simultaneously be perfect and also be bad? I don't know. I'm not doing it yet, but I am seriously considering it. Most good message board software costs money, so that could be a barrier right there. Blogger is free. Maybe someone else already invented the concept of "personal message boards"? I don't know. I just know that this blog has been in a lull far too often.

Crap from Facebook: November 28th, 2017

Yep, here we go doing this again. Sometimes I just can't resist...

https://www.facebook.com/ABeardedQueer/posts/164571474142484?pnref=story

I have no idea who this person is or what qualifications he or she possesses, but the analysis that will be presented demonstrates a striking lack of comprehension of human behavior, and not just in an "I disagree with this person" kind of way. It's blatant, but I'll get to that. What's important is that the reception is almost universally positive, lots of glowing comments like "this so much." I'll only be critiquing the original content, but by itself, it's unremarkable and silly. The reason I'm taking the time at all is that people apparently buy into this bullshit. And with that, we're off...

Seeing some folks I follow circulating a point that's worth drawing attention to. One of the oldest canards in low-denominator comedy is that women are inscrutable and men can't understand them. There's a reason for this and it ain't funny.

Comedy, by definition, isn't serious, so I'd argue that it doesn't have canards at all. The word "tropes" or perhaps "devices" would be more appropriate. But I'm totally nitpicking. Let's not be here all day.

So, the problem here is that the trope isn't really "women are inscrutable and men can't understand them." People, especially if they're primed to accept the premise, might recall the comedy they've seen and think, "But I did see comedy that did that. I have examples." Well, the trope is really much broader, more of a "women and men are different and their differences lead to misunderstandings." And that's true! It's a true statement. It's also bland and very much old news. The way that comedy functions, it takes that truth and then draws it out to absurd lengths, elaborating on a simple concept and producing a more outlandish version of it for the purposes of humor. That's pretty much what comedy does. That's its function.

Most comedians are male and, when writing jokes about this concept, focus on the "men misunderstand women" part primarily and don't emphasize the "women don't understand men" part. This is because they are men and can plausibly bring the joke around to themselves. Sometimes it's for the purposes of self-deprecation, another trope in comedy, but sometimes it's just because the comedians are drawing on personal experience. This is all perfectly natural, while maybe not common knowledge, and it should be obvious to anyone who has made any serious attempt to analyze the nature and structure of comedy.

By the time a man reaches adulthood he has probably heard that women constantly say one thing and mean another, and that they are impossible to understand, at least a thousand times. To some extent he probably believes this to be true.

No, that's fucking stupid. People say one thing and mean another. Not just women. People. Women do it, men do it, and children start learning to do it at some point, although initially they do not grasp the concept. Hidden meaning, double meaning, innuendo, nuance, code words, signalling, etc. It's stuff people do. Incidentally, it's stuff that women, on average, are just a bit better at, so when comedy tackles the topic, it has to exaggerate female speech as arcane and male speech as simple and primitive. These are jokes, and that's all.

And to a degree it is. Women VERY frequently say one thing and mean another, display expressions or reactions that don't jibe with their feelings and so on. But it's actually really easy to decode once you understand why it happens. It is survival behavior.

This is going to become one of those sneaky arguments that sounds definitive, but necessarily remains vague enough to slip away from critical analysis. On the surface, it would seem like all we have is a simple binary: either it's a survival behavior or it isn't. But, if I decided to take this claim into a debate and my opponent offered evidence against it, I could almost always use plausible deniability to deflect the import of that evidence. More on that later.

When it comes to communication and survival, the field that can actually examine things in a rigorous manner is evolutionary psychology. But I suspect that the author of this post, and most of the fans, do not like evolutionary psychology and do not take it seriously. Ironically enough, some of the same feminist pop-science pundits who derided evolutionary psychology as "just-so stories" have now given rise to posts like the one I'm critiquing, which actually is an honest-to-goodness just-so story.

 While some men choose to become skilled dissemblers, men are not -required- to learn very much subterfuge at all-- looking calm while you'd like to strangle your boss is the biggie. Women face a completely different situation.

Well, empirical evidence shows a strong trend that females tend to score higher on verbal communication skills and that they develop those skills at a younger age. Again, this is all on average. But it is demonstrated and it does seem to account for the difference all on its own, with no need to resort to anything about survival.

Women spend their lives surrounded by people who are, on average, bigger than they are, socially privileged over them, both more inclined to immediate anger (testosterone is a hell of a thing) AND more socially encouraged to express it, and best of all? Cherry on top?

People like you blather on about social constructs and and how all of the problems in the world can be pinned down to society and its horrible biases. You invoke it yourself with the line "socially privileged over them." It's been a mantra I've seen over and over, that men as a group supposedly oppress women as a group and have "privilege" over them. And that concept is used as the default tool whenever there's a contrast between men and women in any setting, setup for an argument that society is unjust and that the explanation for the difference between men and women is oppression. Been there, done that, seen it all before.

The cherry on top? Well, the cherry on top would be that as soon as it becomes the least bit convenient, even if it's in the same damn sentence in which you invoked "social privilege", you suddenly remember that testosterone exists. Yep, it sure is a hell of a thing. And there are even other innate differences between the sexes. I wonder if any subtle differences in their communication patterns could be attributed to those innate differences? Nah, it's got to be a survival skill!

Some of these dudes around them are extremely dangerous, others are not, and most of the time it is impossible to tell the two apart on sight, or even from extended contact. Often the only way to find out is to say or do something that might make a man blow up and see if he does.

 Contrary to this author's portrayal, men are not actually bombs.

This is not a great way of finding out what kind of guy a woman is dealing with for the same reason that we don't  use pogo sticks to test for buried land mines. It's often the only one available, though. So, VERY SENSIBLY, women will generally just opt not to run the test.

This is ludicrous, but it also underscores the author's failure to comprehend survival behaviors and how they actually work. As a hypothetical, if the author really were right, absolute avoidance of running this "test" would be detrimental to survival. Here's how. Violent men are, well, violent. They're not tranquil automatons that suddenly spring into violent action only when triggered by a woman running a test on them. They unleash their violence both as a tool and out of an urge to do so. In addition to the violence itself being eminently observable, there are communication cues that can be noted. An intelligent woman looking to survive would begin mapping these observations, tracking which men are known to display violence and to what degree. Men who successfully (and the success is important) apply violence are, pretty much by definition, powerful. Attaching herself to a powerful man can be an excellent way for a woman to survive. But a woman doesn't even need to be especially good at this sort of thing to survive! She could instead associate herself with nonviolent men and, in many cases, she'd be fine. She could even be pretty bad at it and wind up being the victim of violence herself, but even that would probably not be lethal or frequent. What would be even worse for survival would be to tiptoe around all men on the principle that their capacity for violence is completely unknown and that they might attack her at the slightest provocation. She wouldn't be assertive enough to have any sort of power in any relationship, and might be targeted by predatory individuals, men and women alike, who would exploit her weakness. So no, "opt not to run the test" is not very sensible.

What that means is smiling at a man's flirting in a closed or isolated space, or laughing at an uncomfortable joke because the room is full of men and all of them are laughing.

Psst, men do that too. This isn't an example of women being sneaky or not saying what they mean at all. It's just a quirk of social interaction. There are jokes that I don't really find that funny, but if I was with a group of people I knew and it was a situation in which we were exchanging banter and the group was laughing, then I'd laugh. It's automatic. I don't have to think about it. I don't make a calculated decision to do it so that I won't offend anyone or whatever. It's just how laughter works. For everyone. Not just women.

Men are not only -not- required to learn  dissembling, they -are- taught to seek affirmation of self-worth from women. They take these reactions at face value because they very much want to. And this can build uncomfortable or dangerous cycles and relationships.

So if a man laughs at my joke, that's irrelevant, I guess? But if a woman laughs at that same joke, then my self-worth is affirmed. Because that's what I was taught. Also that's dangerous. Right. Do the people who read this stuff and comment positively on it ever think about it for more than five seconds?

Lemme be real clear on this point: Women do this because the way our society is currently set up, they have absolutely no better option available to them. They quite rightly value their safety over offering legibility to people who might seriously hurt or even kill them.

I mean, men are basically tornadoes and women are basically wildflowers, so that totally makes sense. Wait? Is this whole thing comedy? Did I miss that? The author took the bland observation that men are, on average, bigger and stronger than women, and extended it to the absurdity that, at any moment, any man might just reach out and beat any woman to death who pisses him off. Ignore that some men are weak. Ignore that some women are strong. Ignore that lots of communication happens in public, with other people around. Ignore that some men are bigger and stronger than other men. Ignore that some women are bigger and stronger than other women. Ignore the effects of aging. Ignore the fact that all men started out as children and lived in a world in which they were surrounded by women who were bigger and stronger than them. Nope. It's got to be that women dissembling is the one thing holding back a bloodbath of testosterone-packed men punching them into fine red mists.

So while this may be frustrating to guys, it is not on women to behave differently as long as the social baseline for masculine behavior is a toxic stew of lionized violence and anger. They're gonna smile and laugh as long as a huge % of men present a serious potential threat.

Toxic stew of lionized violence and anger? You know what? You keep talking like that and I'm going to kick your stupid face in. You like that?

 But let's say that you weren't raised by fucking spiders and your reaction to this isn't annoyance but instead serious concern, because you DON'T want to freak women out but now realize you might have been reading "oh god go away" as "yes chat me up more in this elevator."

Elevatorgate lives on! Ah, 2011. What a time. I look back on it and, well, anyway...

Spiders are awesome. Also, my sole contribution to the carnival of madness that was Elevatorgate, the time I "won the internet," just so happens, by sheer random luck, to be the perfect response to this. Weird how that works out.

So, this was on  an old ScienceBlogs comment thread (for a blog post by Abbie Smith aka ERV). This thread had already gotten pretty crazy, but at some point, somehow, the topic had arisen that some of the commenters felt that a man walking down the street at night should, before passing a woman, cross over to the other side of the street in order to make her feel more safe. Others took issue with this, calling it sexism and such. The argument was a downward spiral and so I chimed in (and won the internet) with something like...

"I don't care if it's 4 am, I'm covered in blood, and I'm carrying a fire axe. If the prospect of my passing you on the same side of the street is so dreadful, then you can cross the street yourself."

I rest my case.

A few simple tells that you're doing something that's putting a woman's hackles up, which will follow outward affirmative signals: She leaves the area; she changes the subject; she moves herself or the two of you toward other people, esp. other women; she doesn't flirt/joke back;

Holy shit, women have hackles? But really though, the metaphor of "raised hackles" comes from dogs, but you have it backwards. Raised hackles isn't "I feel threatened by you." It's "I am threatening you."

or, her rejoinder doesn't match what you put out there-- a compliment, for example, eliciting "Thanks" or "haha" rather than a return compliment. All of these have a good chance of translating to "you are overstepping my boundaries but I don't feel safe saying so."

All of those are something that both men and women do and there is no evidence indicating that it has anything to do with threat assessment.

 There's a good chance that when you spot this, your first instinct is going to be to say something like "Am I making you uncomfortable?" or "Did I say something wrong?" That's what a good dude would ask, right? Welllll it's not the worst response but it's not a good one, either.

 Cool story, life coach.

Those questions have a very good chance of getting back a response calculated to calm you down rather than an honest answer, because you have STILL offered no real indication you won't blow up when rebuffed. You see, those are also questions an irritated dude would ask.

Rebuffed? Is that what this has been about the whole time? Is this a guide to asking girls out? Look, the problem there isn't "toxic masculinity" or whatever. The problem is that it's super awkward no matter what. You can't make it not be awkward. That's why I don't do it. But if I were to start, I don't think I'd start by taking advice from the person who wrote this stuff.

It puts the woman on the spot and makes her pull off an immediate calculation-- is this guy actually concerned or is he just feeling offended because he realized that wasn't a real laugh? Am I in more danger now, or less?

Rest in peace, all the women who were beaten to death when their laughter was discovered to be fake. 

If you are in doubt it's usually best to back off, provide some breathing room, and then once the situation has a low threat index (non-confined space, potentially supportive people nearby), boot up honesty.exe:

So you're hitting on this woman in a confined space for some reason and you get the impression that she is worried. Looks like your next step is to extract her from the confined space and bring her to the confined space attendant and confined space supervisor, who can hopefully offer her the support she needs. Makes sense. I am learning so much about flirting and stuff!

"Hey, if the jokes about clown dicks are over the line, please let me know and I'll cut that out." Not just interrogation about her real feelings, but proactive information about the reaction that an honest response will provoke from you.

Uh, I've got to be honest here, author of the original post. I'm starting to think that the problem isn't women being too coy or toxic masculinity. I'm starting to think that the problem is you personally. Women aren't afraid of you because you're a man, they're afraid of you because you drag them into confined spaces and force them to listen to your jokes about clown dicks. You should stop doing that. It's a bad thing.

That's not some kind of cheat-code to human interaction, mind. People are complicated as fuck and women don't come off an assembly line at a factory.

They don't, but the story of where they actually come from will totally blow your mind because a lot of the time it involves women not really being all that afraid of men at all. I know it must sound crazy to you, but it's true.

But it's generally a better base-line set of guidelines for social navigation than either taking everything at face value or assuming the female mind was forged from the same inscrutable mystic bullshit as Harry Potter's wand.

I just looked it up and apparently Harry Potter's wand is made from wood, a substance that isn't forged. You lose again!

Oh and this should go without saying but if you put forward the promise that you're not going to blow up, for the love of fuck, STICK TO IT. offering a guy candor is an act of trust, be worthy of it.

Not really setting the bar high for men there, are you?

OK, OK, that's enough of that.