I just thought, “Oh god, I’ve picked up another mathematician or physicist” and then checked your biography. Yep! I can spot you a mile off now. When I was running Areo Magazine, we had a genre of submissions we called “Physicists addressing Critical Social Justice issues.” They are typically excellent at creating models which detect error and then suggesting ways to resolve it by demonstrating that this is an error. They are less good at accepting that activists simply don’t care about this and will just tell them that this a white, western, masculinist way of thinking that ignores others ways of knowing generated by marginalised groups.

One of our physicists wrote a piece suggesting that we could resolve the anti-scientific confusion of Fat Activism by ceasing to refer to the associated health problems as being caused by ‘weight’ and instead defining it accurately as ‘mass,’ by pointing out that they are not remedied at all by moving to the Himalayas where gravity is slightly weaker.

I find this extremely endearing because it is so thoroughly good faith and assumes good faith, being geared towards resolving problems via bringing clarity and accurate modeling to bear on the issue. This is something I also keep trying to do and this may explain why my analytics in the past have shown that, despite being of the humanities, my readers’ main interests are physics followed by tech and engineering followed by science generally, followed by dogs and only then culture and politics. I keep thinking that if I can only set things out so clearly that all reasonable person must accept the framework, we will then surely be able to use it collaboratively to come to an agreement or at least a shared understanding of where we differ. No.

Frankly, if I had my way and ruled the world, I’d be tempted to abandon my liberal principles and embrace the concept of philosopher kings and put the mathematicians and physicists in charge. The world would be a much better place for it.