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User ID: 2225
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9mo ago
Is your question more along the lines of "How do I figure out what parishes are near me?" or "How do I figure out which parishes are healthy and suitable for me?"
For the first question, if you are in the United States and are looking for an Eastern Orthodox parish, the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops maintains a directory of all parishes here, and at least the larger jurisdictions maintain their own, which may or may not be more up to date (e.g. the OCA has one here). I imagine that your local Roman Catholic diocese will also have a directory.
For the second question, I can't speak at all for what Catholic parishes are or are not traditional, but every Orthodox church will use the same traditional Divine Liturgy, with differences mostly being minor cultural practices (e.g. which melodies are used for singing, whether people sit during part of the Liturgy or stand the whole time) and what language(s) are used. I converted to Orthodoxy not terribly long ago and have had a great experience in my local OCA mission parish (we use English). I'd recommend trying to find a church that serves Liturgy in a language you understand. It may be hard to tell without attending or poking around which parishes are healthy or not, so probably just try one that looks reasonable.
If you do decide to look into Orthodoxy, feel free to DM me if you feel like you need to ask someone random questions, There's lots of good resources available online (and in book form) but there's also a lot of weird/incorrect stuff online and sometimes it helps to ask a live person, even if it's only someone you barely, vaguely know from a niche internet forum.
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1yr ago
Ayn Rand and C.S. Lewis could have been fantastic collaborators
Admittedly I know much less about Ayn Rand than about C.S. Lewis, but given what I do know I'm having a hard time seeing this. I'd be quite interested to hear your reasoning.
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1yr ago
You can't conserve an idea if you don't conserve a people, that's my argument. Civilization is not an idea, it's a people.
To which the obvious solution is: let the people consist of those who embrace the idea. Which is exactly what the Christian Church did, by the way: "There is no Jew or Greek..."; and also "church fathers", "ancestors in the faith".
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1yr ago
I agree that the line is blurry. I think that Lawrence thinks of a sexual orientation as having emotional/romantic aspects, whereas a paraphilia would just have the facially-sexual ones; so sexual orientation is about love+lust, but paraphilia is just lust. In practice I think this is more a matter of respectability.
This is an interesting point about loss of agency. One thing I didn't touch on in this review but that came up in the book is that apparently a decent chunk of the sexual feminization fantasies of autogynephiles are forced feminization fantasies. That wasn't the case for me, and I just figured that it was an intersection with the (common) BDSM paraphilia, but you may be onto something about the attractiveness of passivity for someone who is always (expected to be) responsible. Or maybe it's more of a thing where lack of agency is seen as feminine, and therefore desired? (I don't think the common theory -- usually offered to explain rape fantasies -- that lack of agency gives the fantasizer an excuse to not be morally or socially culpable for their actions is at all plausible here.)
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1yr ago
I confess that I am confused by this response. Who is being officially deputized by whom to kill whom? And how does any of this make sense in the context of @FarNearEverywhere's parent comment, which already posits a massive change in how the official parts of society deal with trans stuff?
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30d ago
I don't think this is disagreement with my above post? (I mean, I do disagree on a value-level with the transhumanism, but that's another kettle of fish and not relevant here.)
Maybe I wasn't totally clear -- I was saying that your confusion about apparently normal men saying "it could have been me" mostly boils down to the fact that you can't empathize with those people on the subject because most of them have AGP. Despite the stereotype, most such people are normal men in almost all other respects except having, or at one point having had, a recurring desire to be female, and a lot of them are horrified that someone just like them could be ushered down what they see as a self-destructive path.
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2mo ago
I'd like to talk about Adderall.
A bit of background: I've had ADHD symptoms my whole life (though the hyperactive part greatly diminished in adulthood), but was never treated because I (a) won the lottery of fascinations (math and computers) and (b) have enough raw intelligence that I was able to excel academically through undergrad. Ever since I started grad school, however, my difficulty with focus has plagued my work, and though I managed to muddle through, I'm much less successful than you might otherwise expect, and my subpar (per my own standards, I guess) productivity at work has negatively impacted my mental health. I've been lucky if I can get a couple hours of productive work in a day -- and I don't mean "I had to go to meetings and that interrupted my flow state" (though there's that too) but "I got distracted by some math problem / thinking about a video game / reading a forum / etc and lost a couple hours with nothing to show for it". I've self-medicated a bit with coffee in the past, but I haven't used it as much recently as after a hiatus, I noticed that drinking enough to make any dent in my problem was also enough to cause me sleep trouble the following night (even if I only had it in the morning) and was very much not generally worth it. Somehow I'm still productive enough to keep a senior software engineer job without (many) complaints from management or coworkers, but I'm always feeling like I'm on the verge of failing to adequately do my job.
So my wife persuaded me that just maybe my persistent difficulty focusing on tasks is due to ADHD rather than being incorrigibly lazy. I saw a psychiatrist and she prescribed Adderall, 10mg up to 3 times daily. The pharmacy finally filled the prescription and I started taking it yesterday (Wednesday).
I took two doses yesterday: one at about 10:30 AM when I started work, and one at about 2:30 PM, about 20 minutes after I noticed the effects starting to wear off. The first dose was weird: it helped very noticeably with my ability to focus on a task, my ability to get started on a larger new task (previously I'd have to wait for the perfect moment psychologically for this), and my ability to maintain focus when switching tasks while waiting for a coworker to do code review. On the other hand, I got the jitters - as if I'd had too much coffee, or was very nervous about something, except that I wasn't nervous, I just had the somatic symptoms (this was really confusing). (Other than these jitters my fidgeting/pacing decreased.) The second dose had the same cognitive effects as the first, but without the jitters. I had as many productive hours in one day yesterday as I typically have in three (though it's worth noting that my usual distribution is highly uneven) and got a commensurate amount accomplished.
Miracle drug, right? Well, remember how drinking too much coffee would give me sleep troubles? Yeah, that. I had a hard time winding down last night (even though the mental effects had otherwise worn off), took longer than usual to fall asleep, and woke up in the wee hours of the morning and couldn't get back to sleep. This is not totally out of distribution for me (in fact it's similar to something I've had happen two or three times in the last month without any drugs) but it's suggestive. I'm pretty tired now, but not "I'm a zombie and can't function" tired, at least at the moment -- again, a bit unusual for how little sleep I got but not out of distribution. I really hope this goes away (or I can find a dosing regime that doesn't do this to me) because I really want to be consistently productive for once in my life.
My psychiatrist suggested when prescribing that I could cut the dose in half if I felt "high" or had significant side effects after the first few doses, or that I could try taking only one dose if it was effective enough to get me started on the right foot and I didn't crash after it wore off (which I didn't). I'm planning to take one or two 5mg doses today and see if it's still as effective; I don't want to screw up my currently fragile sleep even more.
Does anyone else here have experience with Adderall for ADHD? With insomnia as a side effect? With dosing (looking online, 10 mg per dose is a bit higher than normal for an initial dose)? Obviously I'll bring all the details to my psychiatrist next week for my followup, but there's bound to be some people here with the right experiences and insight to get some initial feedback or suggestions.
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4mo ago
Yeah, Christiano is absolutely right here. There are some sorts of problems which have significant components that are comparatively much simpler for machines than humans, for example:
- Problems that can proceed mostly by only a limited number of steps at any place, but where it's hard to figure out which sequence of steps to pursue and doing a large number of them of them is basically impossible for a human in any reasonable time. A computer can just try them a ton of them, so any improvements in ways to narrow the search space make them even better. A lot of geometry problems are like this.
- Problems that have a straightforward method of solution which is difficult for humans to execute properly without mistakes. "Just brute force it with Muirhead's Inequality" has been a thing for a long time now and a lot of competitors actually do this on contests even though it is frequently horribly messy. My recollection is that conventional wisdom in this was: if you try this, you'd better not make any mistakes because judges will not award partial credit to brute force solutions with errors. But of course a computer will not have these errors. (Christiano seems to indicate that inequalities that are doable this way don't show up as much anymore, which is a very good thing regardless of AI.)
- Problems that can be easily solved with a simple trick that is hard to find but easy to execute when you do. E.g. diophantine equations that fall apart with a particular modulus (or two). Humans need well-developed mathematical intuition to find the needle in the haystack; a computer can just try everything.
This is not to say that it's trivial to make a computer be superhuman at these problems. Despite there being aspects that are very machine-friendly, there's still a lot of difficult work to be done to actually get a machine do them. But it shouldn't make you update particularly much; this is not an "AI is now smarter than IMO medalists" moment.
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5mo ago
Surely most of that (in the paper, I mean) is selection effects? I expect that there's a substantial barrier to entry for completing SRS at a university hospital (the selection criterion for that paper) and that the barriers are higher for AGPs since they don't match the stereotypical / ideologically acceptable profile. (I also suspect a similar effect causes these studies to underestimate AGP in that population. People who want a thing tend to say what gatekeepers want to hear, and those that don't... don't make it past the gatekeepers as much.)
Of course I'm also saying this as someone who suffers from AGP (though much, much less than I did in my teens / early 20s -- mental habits do make a difference) and also ticks many of the usual boxes: high intelligence, nerdy, family history both of mental illness and of joint hypermobility / connective tissue problems. So make of that what you will.
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1yr ago
I think it's a small proportion but I also think that unfortunately they are the loudest and most visible and most online.
It seems we differ in our estimates here. Maybe it would help to draw a distinction between, let's say, people with disordered sexual desires (in which group I would include any autogynephilia in natal males), and people who are "visible perverts" (you know about them because they do perverted things in public or are publicly loud about their proclivities). I agree that the latter group is rare and unrepresentative of trans people, and it's crazy that the trans lobby doesn't want to get rid of them (probably this is downstream of "pride" stuff). I think, though, that the former group includes probably the majority of MtF trans individuals as well as a decent percentage of men who don't transition. This is probably not usually acknowledged because it's perceived as unflattering to trans people, and to be fair the people loudly crowing about how "it's just a fetish" are being cruel and are not helping the matter.
I think we ought to have some charity even for the "visible perverts" crowd; they need it even if they don't deserve it -- but what I'm really referring to here is the other group. Right now all they are hearing is either total silence, "Eww, you pervert", or "That means you're really a woman deep down! You must be trans!" I think there is a need for counseling, along the lines of "So, you know how you really really want to be female? And how you find that idea sexually arousing, too? Yeah, that's a thing; it's something a bit wrong with you, but it doesn't mean either that you are disgusting or that you are 'really' a woman or should try to become one. Let's try to help you figure out how to deal with your feelings."
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1yr ago
I thought the twist would be that Hilary transitioned at some point MTF later in life, hence the choice in name, rather than that Hilary and Sam were the same person.
That's funny; I didn't actually think of that interpretation at all. I chose the name "Hilary" (an ancient name, almost always male until the 20th century) because of its meaning, since "Hilary's" story had a happy ending.
it makes me wonder how many boys right now might be being pulled into transitioning when they would have grown up to be perfectly fine with being a cis male like me.
I suspect the answer is pretty large, and it's one of the things that frankly makes me most angry about trans activism. It's part of why I felt compelled to write my thoughts down.
Someone linked this blog post here about a week ago
I'm almost certain I read that blog post shortly after it was published, when it was linked back on Reddit. And yet somehow I missed this line:
as if my brain just doesn't draw that much of a distinction between people I want to be with and people I want to be like
which echoes my own experience so much (though the blog author's actions... don't) that I can't fathom how I didn't latch onto it the first time. Another data point for my theory, I guess?
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5mo ago
Yes. I started having wrist pain about 5 years ago in my right wrist, to the point where it was seriously impacting my work. I did some research and bought a cheap vertical mouse, and my pain went went away in about a week and never came back. Best $25 I ever spent.
If you have larger hands, make sure to get a larger mouse, though. They vary a lot in size and I find smaller ones not nearly as comfortable.
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6mo ago
@TheDag @KingOfTheBailey @coffee_enjoyer I, um, wrote a long thing. It's up as a top level post (...and a reply because I ran out of characters) now.
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8mo ago
Related and potentially even more controversial questions:
- To what extent does this analysis apply to homosexuality? Are there people who are "homoromantic" without being (significantly) sexually aroused by the same sex, or vice-versa?
- How about other fetishes? Are there many where an "Eros" aspect is reasonably common?
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1yr ago
Ah, good catch there -- it does seem to be an exact imitation of that icon.
In the East, the liturgical color for Marian feasts is blue, and it's definitely the color most associated with her. I'm not enough of an expert to speculate on the history, but while the red-over-blue in icons of Mary is standard in the East, it is not universal (I think the Hagia Sophia famously has some icons which just use blue -- and indeed the source icon is Byzantine) so I guess I was wrong on that being the artist's error. There's some relation with the fact that Christ is generally depicted with a blue outer garment and red inner garment. I was just now trying to verify about the symbolism and found that there's some... disagreement... on exactly what symbolizes what.
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1yr ago
Your comment made me think: there's an essay here, somewhere, about how grand scope secondary world fantasy is a fundamentally Christian impulse. It allows one to imagine things that are facially inconsistent with Christianity but elucidate it. I think that it's no accident that Tolkien was a Catholic.
Whereas most fantasy (I except traditional faerie-stories, slightly[*]) stories set in the real world are at best uncomfortable from a Christian perspective, because Christianity itself is a thing in the real world and you have to fit that in somehow. Does anyone remember that old HPMOR meta-fanfic with the wizard-Christians? I felt that, as really awkward as it was, it was more honest than the original HP in that way.
[*] Obviously many faerie-stories have a pre-Christian origin and skate by on that. But people tried to wrestle with these things in ways that would make moderns very uncomfortable; IIRC there are some stories about Irish saints converting faeries to Christianity...
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1yr ago
And somebody have the backbone to stand up to those for whom it is a sexual fetish, identify it as such, and tell them they're not transgender, they're perverts
Perhaps I can prevail upon you to be kind to perverts? I encourage you to read my essay downthread; I believe the thing you are referring to is more common, and more complicated, than you think -- but that aside, surely having disordered desires should be treated as a mental illness, in much the same vein as the other things you describe?
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6mo ago
I have, of course, a lot of disagreements with this comment, but in the spirit of explaining things rather than re-waging the Great Internet Atheism-vs-Religion Wars (I was a teenager 20 years ago; I ought to know better now) I wanted to focus on two things that are a bit more meta-level and more relevant specifically to rationality.
All else being equal, a simple hypothesis or prior should be privileged over a more complex one when they are equally as good at explaining the evidence, or predicting the future. That is a basic consequence of probability theory, complexity needs to be justified.
There are two points to be made here. The first is that Occam's razor, the simplicity prior, and the particular formal version based on Kolmogorov complexity, are all assumptions, not inevitable consequences of logic. Probability theory tells you how to update your prior based on evidence (....if, somehow, you can know the probabilities of all your observations conditional on each of the potential hypotheses, which in this context is an unrealistically big ask); it can't tell you what your prior should be. A simplicity prior is not an unreasonable choice in many contexts, but it's (a) not actually practical for many things (do you know all possible hypotheses and their exact complexity?) and (b) it's not the only possible choice.
The second is that it seems likely to be impossible to even evaluate simplicity or conditional probabilities when you are dealing with radically different ontologies, and it's not at all clear that e.g. the claim that physics and the existing physical universe is the brute fact of reality is in any way simpler than the claim that a Person is. Certainly I'll grant that "the physical universe, but also God/supernatural/nonphysical stuff tacked on" is more complicated than pure materialism, but that's explicitly not what the alternative is.
An analogy for those who know about the demoscene: a long, intricate demo certainly looks more complicated than a random short clip on Youtube, but it is much simpler in an information-theory sense, being generated from a small executable. Given that we don't know any real equivalent of "the shortest possible code" for either a materialist or Theistic account of the reality, I don't think it's even in principal possible to judge the complexity of either.
The Hard Problem of Consciousness is a sign that our existing knowledge and theories are insufficient for the task of explaining everything
This misses the point. There are certainly many problems that, when substituted for "the Hard Problem of Consciousness" here, would make this statement a valid criticism. For instance, if someone tried to argue that the fact that science can't account for Abiogenesis is a knock-down argument against materialism, this would be a good point. The fact that we have no good idea how abiogenesis could occur is some evidence against its occurring by natural means, but in the future new evidence or a better understanding of chemistry might turn things around, just as biochemistry did for the properties of organic life as it is now.
The Hard Problem of Consciousness is another matter. The problem is not that current science can't explain it; the problem is that ontological materialism excludes consciousness (in the sense those of us talking about the Hard Problem mean) entirely. There's no way to get an "I", a first-person perspective, in a materialist ontology, any more than it's possible to get moral realism. And I don't know about you, but I'm quite a bit more certain that I exist than I am that the external world exists, let alone of any laws of physics or theories about what other things might or might not exist, simply for the reason I have direct, unmediated observation of the fact of my existence, which I don't have of physical things. Not to go full #DescartesWasRight here, but he's a lot more right about this than many people give him credit for.
To get at something of my frustration here, let me present a fictional dialogue between a normal person "Matt" and a person with a rather odd ontology, "Noah":
Noah: "The whole universe is just a number. Everything is just some digits or properties of this number. All is number!"
Matt: "But this rock isn't a number! It's not even the same sort of thing as a number! It's stuff, matter, not something abstract like a number."
Noah: "What do you mean? How do you know that stuff isn't just properties of a number. After all, you know that atoms can be counted, mass can be measured, positions can be located, as numbers. Numbers are everywhere. We can express everything about your rock as some numbers, and thus, of course, as digits in one Great Number which is the whole universe."
Matt: "Sure, numbers are useful for measuring things. But a rock isn't just its measurements -- it's made of stuff; it has actual existence."
Noah: "I don't know what you mean by 'actual existence', or 'stuff' or 'matter', and I don't think you do either. Sure, I'll grant that there are things about a rock that we don't know how to measure yet, so we don't fully know how it is part of the Great Number. But it's just a matter of time."
Matt: "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"
Whenever I talk to materialists about consciousness, I feel just like Matt talking to Noah. If you actually don't get it, I don't know what to say to you.
And this leads into some final thoughts which are connected to both of these. The elephant in the room here, the simplest ontology that nobody wants no believe -- maybe that nobody can believe: Solipsism. Why believe in the existence of anything external to yourself at all? A universe with just one thing is simpler than any hypothesis other than one with nothing (not tenable for the obvious reason). It can easily account for all your putative observations (i.e. they are not actually observations of anything at all). And yet, despite the talk of Boltzmann brains, which is functionally the same thing (if you are just a brain in the void, why do you think your observations of the laws of physics have any meaning -- and thus why is the fact that QM may permit Boltzmann brains any evidence whatsoever about whether you might be one?), I don't think I've heard people insist that solipsism is the only rational position. Frankly, the reason I'm not a solipsist is not that I have a good argument that it's false; rather, I just can't believe it -- I have an arational certainty -- generously, direct apprehension of a truth -- that solipsism is false and I'm not the only thing that exists.
And if we aren't rationally required to be solipsists, well, isn't that giving the whole game away in terms of trying to evaluate ontologies with the same tools one uses for day-to-day reasoning about more bounded questions?
(A more complete version of this comment would relate this to questions about model uncertainty and why, practically, 10^-9 is no more a "real" credence level than 0 is, but this comment is far too long already.)
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8mo ago
I too am a member of this club. (Actually, although I quoted Lewis in my top level comment downthread, I'm not sure if I've actually quoted the others in my few Motte posts yet. It's only a matter of time, though.)
What struck me so strongly is that the reference was just dropped in with no explanation, as one might a Biblical or mythological allusion, or a reference to some other ubiquitous cultural touchstone. The implication that the readers would be expected to actually follow the reference absent a citation was... well, about the only place I'd be confident of that landing for most of the audience is in a Lewis society.
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1yr ago
Slightly meta question: In the replies to my post in the most recent CW thread, @IGI-111 recommended the monograph Men Trapped in Men's Bodies by Anne Lawrence. So I found an electronic copy online and read it.
Would anyone be interested in reading a multi-part book review / summary of the book? I thought it might be interesting so I started working on one, and am about halfway done with a draft (4k words so far), but it occurs to me that there's not a lot of point in finishing it if people are tired of the topic.
Related: for the mods, if there was interest and I completed it, would it be appropriate to post it in its own thread(s), like @drmanhattan16's recent review? I think I can keep the overt culture war out of the review, but the topic itself is, well...
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1yr ago
I have no idea, and we aren't really asking that question to transitioners. Detransitioners often talk about things like that, but they are a particular subset of people, and if nothing else subject to the same biases that eg Ex-Mormon or Ex-Muslim forums are subject to.
Not only are we not asking, the question is so politically fraught we probably couldn't get good answers anyway.
I can recall, though not cite offhand, numerous examples of trans people in writing and in real life telling me what feeling like "not a man" and "not a woman" felt like. And it always involved some kind of assumption that because I am a man I strongly feel a constant sense of being a masculine stereotype.
I wonder if that assumption is more likely to be a cause or an effect. By which I mean, you've observed a certain misconception in your trans acquaintances about what it's like to be a normal man; how do we tell the difference between the chain (have this misconception) -> (think they fail at being a man) -> (want to be a woman) -> (trans), vs the chain (want to be a woman) -> (trans) + (reinterpret ordinary experiences as evidence for transness) -> (implicit misconception)? Not saying you're wrong, just the second seems more intuitively plausible to me and I'm not sure how one would tell.
I think this problem is much bigger and harder to deal with than a "medical illness" answer; this is a society wide phenomenon experienced by most people, transitioners are just those at the bottom of the fragility/mental stability totem poll who slide off into the strange.
Ah, I see what you mean. It's an easier problem only for the narrow question of "how hard is it to deal with trans ideation once you are intervening in someone's life", but a broad social problem is much harder to fix than a few people with mental illness.
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1yr ago
I wasn't aware of that episode in Kaczynski's life. The Wikipedia article makes it seem like his response was rather different than mine, though -- is it misleading on this?
(I share other things with Kaczynski too, like fascination with mathematics. It doesn't really bother me; I have things in common with people whose actions I abhor as well as with people I admire...)
I haven't read that book, though I had heard of it. The title is absolutely genius. I might give it a look, if for no other reason than to see to what extent others' stories support my analysis or not.
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30d ago
I think I mostly agree with you, but I do want to emphasize that
some of these men will choose to undergo transition
is not the only difference in outcome between the "pro-trans" and "trans naive" environments being discussed.
Having the ready-made answers, social encouragement, etc. on offer can not just affect what sorts of actionable options they have available, but also the trajectory of the desires themselves.
As an example let's take the POV of a teenage boy with autogynephilia. Our protagonist finds that he has a recurring desire to be female. Sometimes (maybe most of the time, maybe not) this desire and fantasy is associated with sexual arousal. This is confusing and weird, what is he to make of this?
In an environment without the "trans" meme and social encouragement thereof, this remains a private quirk and fantasy. He knows that he can no more become female than he can become a bird or acquire superpowers (random side note: was Animorphs especially appealing to boys with autogynephilia? I strongly suspect so...). Maybe it wanes naturally over the course of years, or maybe his desire is an inner demon that he struggles with from time to time, or maybe it's just a recurring fantasy his whole life which he occasionally indulges in -- depending on the strength of his desire and his attitude toward it. A lot of things are possible, but probably he lives life as a normal man and most things are fine. (Of course there is the chance that he develops some delusions based on his desires and fantasies -- especially if they are unusually strong or he indulges them unusually much -- but this is not a very likely outcome.)
In an environment where the "trans" meme is present and positively reinforced, he is encouraged to interpret his desires as evidence (or even proof) of identity as a "trans girl". A ready-made, positive-valence identity that fits his experience, at a time when he's naturally (like most teens) going to be confused about his identity and place in the world? It's like catnip. He starts thinking of himself as trans. He talks about it on the internet. Maybe he tells his best friends and they affirm it, or maybe his new best friends are the people who affirm it. He indulges his fantasy, because it's just part of who he is. Maybe he even encourages it, as its presence is proof of his new identity. His ways of thinking of himself get solidified: "I am a trans girl": now each of his desires and every trait that is not stereotypically male is proof of that. He develops a female persona and acts it out; maybe he really believes the propaganda that, deep down, he is a girl, not just wants to be one. Now his identity is all bound up in this: he becomes more and more unsatisfied with the stubborn truth that he is not, in fact, a girl; that his body is stubbornly male. As an adult, maybe he does try to force his fantasy to become reality with hormones and surgery (of course this doesn't actually work, but maybe if he is lucky he can convince himself it does) -- or maybe he just ends up with a weird self-identification and way more unhappy with his life than if he'd never gone down that path.
Regardless of whether our protagonist ultimately undergoes medical transition, his whole life can be dramatically impacted by this difference in his environment.
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8mo ago
Maybe not the right place, maybe better for Sunday, but I'm not in a great mood. What is up with senior software engineering hiring? All the job postings seem to be premised on the idea that you don't learn any transferable skills in your career, only domain-specific ones. If you want a senior position doing X, you'd better have been doing X for multiple years already. I get that makes sense for principal-level jobs where the whole point is to hire a world expert on X, but a senior still has to ramp up as part of a team anyway. Surely this state of affairs is really suboptimal, given (I hear) how hard it is to find good people. Where are the companies hiring smart senior SWEs who have been doing X to do Y and just figuring on an extra bit of ramp-up?
Not a lot (then again, it's such a huge field that only a small fraction shows up in a PhD in mathematical logic), but in all likelihood, more than just boolean algebra.
In addition to the propositional calculus (effectively a subset of boolean algebra and probably equivalent to the part you are expecting EE students to learn) I'd expect any advanced student in analytic philosophy to be familiar with the basics of first-order logic as well as modal logic (in fact most research in modal logic is done in philosophy departments because of how essential it is in quite a few areas -- c.f. Saul Kripke).
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