Pronouns and Labels, oh my!

There is no pattern here, just a coincidence.

Reading a wide range of bloggers, tweet accounts, and science papers, you become accustomed to a certain degree of mental gymnastics.  "They're not really saying what it appears they are saying are they?"

It is cognitively taxing to query whether the challenge is on your side in terms of comprehension, on their side in terms of poor explication, or whether they are indeed making in good faith an unclear and non-obvious argument.

That's just a given.

Then there is the sort of mystification I had twice in the past twenty-four hours.

First was yesterday morning with Justice Breyer’s Dissent on Bruen is a Mathematical Shitshow Two lies per page has to be a new Supreme Court record from Handwaving Freakoutery.  A sharp data observer, his outrage is simply the mass of non-fact claims in Breyer's dissent.  He is not arguing so much about a bad interpretation of facts, he is angry that Breyer is retailing claims that are not true.  

All kind of run-of-the-mill.  The disconcerting aspect is that throughout the article HWF keeps referring to a mysterious she/her.  Justice Breyer is Justice Stephen Breyer, a he/him kind of guy.  So who is this she/her who keeps showing up when HWF seem to be referring to Breyer.

Best I can tell, HWF either lost track of who wrote the dissent and mentally was ascribing it to one of the two other liberal justices who are both she/hers.

Or perhaps he wrote the article before the decision and assumed the dissent would be authored by one of the two female Justices and then didn't catch all the pronoun corrections required.  

There is no mysterious she/her and Breyer isn't being dissed, there is clearly just a typographical pronoun error which runs through the whole piece making it distracting to read.

This morning, I have Indiana Governor wants to give back taxpayer money, but I say give it to the teachers pension fund (though the asset allocation looks a bit hairy to me) by Mary Pat Campbell.  Campbell is also focused on data.  Rather than a pronoun error, she makes a labelling error.  The Indiana Governor is returning funds to Indiana residents.  Campbell is making the argument that the funds should not be returned but should be used to shore up the teachers pension fund.  A perfectly legitimate argument whether one agrees or not.

But in the body of article, she three times refers to the Indiana teachers pension fund as the Illinois teachers pension fund.  A labelling error.  

She has since corrected it on the substack but on the first read you keep trying to reconcile the fact that you are pretty certain we are talking about Indiana but the words keep saying Illinois.

As I say, no big deal.  Keeps you on your mental toes.  It is odd two examples show up within 24 hours and it is a useful reminder just how desperately our minds seek pattern consistency.