promethea.incorporated

theunitofcaring asked: the number of people who feel entitled to comment on your parenting is kind of horrifying. I'd heard that happens to pregnant people but I'm actually in a mild state of shock about how bad it is. you are handling it with extraordinary grace, but what the fuck.

ozymandias271:

ilzolende:

worldoptimization:

nuclearspaceheater:

luminousalicorn:

It’s okay, @andaisq just taught me to block anons so when I’m sick of it all will be well.

It’s weird, I didn’t really get mean anons before.  Hypothesis is that I don’t usually seem vulnerable but now I’m impregnated and therefore probably hormonal and irrational and really easy to make cry, open season, whee?

It’s just the Public School Internet Defense Force, who are hired by teachers’ unions, textbook manufacturers, and “smart classroom” companies to harass home-schoolers online.

I actually get it? Like, I’m not even a parent but whenever I see someone making different parenting choices from the ones I would make I have a visceral reaction of WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU YOUR CHILDREN WILL BE RUINED. Obviously,

1) this is irrational, parenting doesn’t actually matter that much and the children will probably be fine

2) actually expressing that reaction to the person in question is incredibly rude, mean, and unproductive.

If I heard that some future parent was planning to not vaccinate or to let their kids get lots of lead exposure or something, I’d probably be concerned.

Anons probably just feel the same way about public education?

As the child of a parenting magazine editor: the mommy wars are real and they are vicious. A lot of people feel really insecure about their own parenting and want to tear down others, and a lot of people feel like they’re ‘helping children’ by being dicks to parents whose parenting choices they don’t like.

As a secret overlord of a feminist community that fights hard to keep the mommy wars out; holy shit they are indeed. I’m proud that TOFC is actually at all able to discuss the topics instead of having to ban them altogether like the competitors, but even then the issue of people being 1. absolutely certain that theirs is the One Right Way to Raise Kids and Everyone Who Does It Differently Is Irresponsible and Evil 2. completely fed up with the previous group and consequently making the (unfortunately not that unwarranted) assumption that anyone bringing such topics up is one of them and reacting with pre-emptive hostility, is quite ubiquitous.

And yes, other people having children does bring up a strong impulse of other-optimizing because the topic is Obviously Important and Everyone Else is Doing it Wrong. In addition everyone has personal experience on being either victimized by Worst Parenting Ever or having enjoyed The Only Right Way to Do It. I even recognize the impulses in myself (there but for the grace of Elua go I…) so… yeah, pretty much nobody on the internet trusts others to raise kids properly without massive amounts of unsolicited and aggressive advice.

It makes sense in some ways because some things do indeed cause enough harm that shouting at people would be warranted if it actually did have a substantial effect at alleviating them, but people who know those things also know that the actions taken on that impulse tend to be irrational and irresponsible and not help anyone at all and simply add unnecessary stress which is demonstrably harmful to children and thus only make things worse.

People who participate in the mommy wars are hurting both their own and others’ children and must be stopped at any cost! We must shout at them endlessly until they stop doing it!

4 months ago · tagged #sorry couldn't resist #but seriously though shouting at people doesn't help #while not shouting at people does #and it's not like i'm biased against shouting at people #i've used it very effectively in many situations and this just isn't one of them #although shouting at the mommy warriors might help #haven't been able to coordinate enough shouting power to test it properly #yet #growth mindset #parenting cw · 40 notes · source: luminousalicorn · .permalink

ozymandias271:

also IMO extremism only comes off as violent because the violence of moderates (e.g. about half of US foreign policy) is aggressively normalized

4 months ago · tagged #nothing to add but tags · 154 notes · source: ozymandias271 · .permalink

sinesalvatorem:

thathopeyetlives:

ilzolende:

thathopeyetlives:

ilzolende:

91625:

tokyopewpew:

missveryvery:

isn’t the potato a “superfood”? like can’t you live on potatoes and like, milk? how can we make potatoes become exotic.

NEW Incan WoNDER FOOD!! Eat this m I r a c l e secret POWER root that Has been used for CENTURIES. Detox On this holistic diet of NoThInG but KUZCO Dirt Apples ™ and unpasteurized LLAMA MILK. Unlock the ANCIENT health benefits created in the MISTS OF THE ANDES

If this wasn’t so painfully accurate, it would be #laugh

Blue potatoes have gotten me attention before.

Ask Frederick the Great.

I took this picture last summer at Sanssouci in Potsdam. (The potatoes were like that when I got there.)

Cool! Sanssouci is pretty and probably prettier in the spring!

From what I remember: He paid people to come up with fancy potato recipes, and instituted sumptuary laws that said that potatoes were for the exclusive use of the royal family – and made sure to serve fancy potato dishes to nobles at fancy banquets. 

He had a royal potato garden planted, with nice breeds of potatoes… and guarded very badly. 

Soon, everybody who could afford bribe money was eating potatoes, then the social climbers, and then the peasants like he had originally planned. 

@socialjusticemunchkin it you

So true.

4 months ago · tagged #it me #after all i am my utility function #and that guy was certainly implementing it magnificently #food cw · 11,639 notes · source: missveryvery · .permalink

Oh fuck yeah, the people I’m involved with in Finland are doing something unbelievably Aesthetic and awesome anti-racist stuff that’s even going viral across Europe. Stay tuned for updates once the NDAs get lifted!

4 months ago · 3 notes · .permalink

rusalkii:

socialjusticemunchkin:

rusalkii:

socialjusticemunchkin:

worldoptimization:

hey if anyone on my friends list feels like it and has sum good knowledge i will venmo u 5$ to explain to me the way that tumblr talks about DID/multiples systems n stuff? this seems important to a lot of younger queer n trans folks and i wanna understand it (and also pay u for yr labor lmao)

I keep seeing this “pay you for your labor” thing and like … what is the goal? replace all non-financial transactions with financial ones? like I get that people think women do more ~emotional labor~ in families/relationships and that’s unfair but this is just a person asking if any friends (not necessarily female or members of any oppressed group) want to volunteer to do them a favor? and not even an onerous favor, it’s “talk about something interesting with me for a little while”

idk how I feel about this. I do think money is really great and maybe people should use it more in friendships, but otoh something about nonfinancial transactions building trust and social cohesion? also a society in which you’re expected to pay for friends to do you a favor seems uh, unfortunate for those who lack class privilege

This is kind of interesting. One intuition says that this is not an aesthetically appealing way of dealing with these things, while another thinks normalizing micro-tipping even in friendships could be useful, at least if implemented with a modicum of class awareness; even if one enjoys thinking of and discussing the ideas, making them into a more widely shareable post is more work than simply doing some rough and vague chat-style explaining and being able to incentivize the former with a small monetary reward to compensate for the effort would create more value in total.

I suspect that some of this could be related to an equilibrium of norms where friendships and money are supposed to be kept separate from each other and anyone trying to unilaterally break it ends up worse even if allowing the right kind of commodification could be a better equilibrium overall. It would be undesirable if such things were totally commodified so that anyone asking for favors would need to pay the market rate, but I do think establishing a norm of tipping for effort, possibly at levels comparable to generic western minimum wages when asking a specific person to do a specific thing so that people making such money could do favors to friends instead of working without losing sorely needed money as a result but asking for a lot more would be considered at the very least exceptional so the system wouldn’t degenerate to a complete money-market, would be at least worth considering.

All in all, I think the (seemingly pretty common) norms of keeping money and friendships completely separate do contribute to class segregation by making it difficult to socialize across class lines.

If we take the classic example of a poor person and a rich person going for lunch together, expectations of both paying for themselves result in staggeringly sub-optimal outcomes as either the poor one has to pay way more than they can afford, or the rich one will have to settle for a place that might not meet their standards. If the poor one tries to change this, they will be perceived as a moocher, while the rich one might be seen as condescending and/or flaunting their money if they offer to pay. As a result, people will inevitably feel a pressure to only socialize within their class on pain of social disapproval or material constraints.

In my experience this is a big problem in Finland where it’s very popular to keep up a socialdemocratic facade of pretend equality in which even acknowledging that people don’t all make the same amount of money is at best gauche; if done from below it makes people uncomfortable and if done from above it creates resentment at how does this nouveau riche asshole dare to violate the sacred law of Jante. Naturally, this doesn’t work very well when there never has been a situation where such claims would’ve been at all substantiated outside a quite narrow space of comfortable post-ww2 suburban segregationism.*

Pretending not to see race leads to greater racial discrimination, pretending not to see gender leads to sexism remaining unchallenged, so I’d be very surprised if pretending not to see class wouldn’t make undermining classism more difficult.

As a result I’ve been trying to personally chip away at these norms by using a different standard whenever possible: in friendships it should be totally normal and acceptable for people to share material things in reasonable proportion to their material wealth, without the need to match the absolute financial values of contributions. In practice this means I’ll never say no if someone with more money than me offers to pay for something, and I’ll similarly offer to pay things for people poorer than me (right now that seems to mean only @sinesalvatorem but growth mindset!), if I trust that the person I’m dealing with is able to understand, and okay with, it.

The practical results of normalizing such things would be expected to be: a certain degree of redistribution as some de facto commodification of friendships shifts costs of social interaction from poorer people to richer people; a consequent undermining of illusions when people whose company isn’t worth the price of a lunch discover it**; and hopefully a certain degree of adaptation for possible higher-inequality futures, because if only a few people hold most of the material income in the world, everyone else’s jobs being automated away, I’d very much prefer such people to live with norms that expect them to share.

The last part ties to a bigger pattern of incomplete and asymmetrical commodification in a money economy, which creates and maintains some significant inequalities. When only certain types of work are paid labor and others are kept out of the money economy by moral censure, it isn’t surprising that doers of the paid kinds of labor get privileged over others. Sex, housework, child care, friendships, emotional labor, military service (in countries with conscription), etc. are treated as sacred moral duties which must not be defiled with money, which very conveniently ensures that middle-aged men have a disproportionate control over money and other groups, who tend to do more of the uncompensated types of work, have lower power in society.

One could propose removing money altogether as a solution, instead of subjecting everything to monetary markets, but I think these alternatives aren’t as diametrically opposed as most people would be liable to believe. The artificial distinction into profane (men’s, paid) work and sacred (women’s, unpaid) duties*** seems to maintain a situation in which money-work can be treated rigidly while a community which doesn’t make such distinctions could be less of a straw libertarian dystopia in which everything has an exact price, and more of a comparatively relaxed gift-economy-ish sharing culture (at least if the general level of material scarcity is sufficienly low) with a closer resemblance to open-source than to YA literature. People would create value to each other, recognize their unequal material situations, and consequently optimize the allocation of the surplus value their interactions create in a way which integrates material sharing (money being simply one form of it, not the psychologically hijack-y high score to counterproductively measure and optimize for it’s now treated as) into the social fabric, instead of segregating the social and the material into altogether separate magisteria and ensuring a certain material hierarchy tied to one’s position in markets which are artificially restricted to disproportionately favor some groups over others.

Yes, it’s possible to object that this would be impossible, but my prior for such objections is that they’re in the same category as claims that Sweden can’t exist without inevitably turning into Stalin. At the very least, it hasn’t been demonstrated that our current division of paid and unpaid labor is an optimum no amount of skilled memetic engineering could overcome, while there are a lot of reasons to believe that it would be an accidental artefact of cultural and material conditions to a relatively large degree. I’d predict the strongest argument against it to be that I’m generalizing from myself and a set of other rather exceptional people when evaluating the viability of such norms and that more median individuals wouldn’t be psychologically capable of what it takes, but then one could reasonably expect that at least such exceptional people should be able to live by them.****

* I suspect such middle-class sensibilities would be common in most western countries, at least among the middle class; a working-class pride of never accepting help from others seems slightly related but noticeably different.

** This could be considered a good or a bad thing; I personally think it’s good and it also lets people who do get the paid lunches from better-off people feel a bit more comfortable in how their company is indeed actually valued.

*** Of course, it isn’t anywhere near this clear-cut, but on a statistical level the effect is strong; also this sounds very much like the exact same mechanism as is behind “benevolent” sexism, with prisons disguised as pedestals. Conscription is an interesting case because the arguments for it sound exactly the same as arguments against sex work, in favor of domestic slavery, etc. but directed at men instead of women. This is easy to understand as an instance of ageist oppression modulated by gender though, as it’s mostly young men (and people mistaken for them) whom it exploits without compensation.

**** Slightly unrelated but possibly illuminating: I’m always kind of weirded out by how many of the same people who insist that money shouldn’t be a measure of a person’s worth as a human being also insist very strongly on people having the exact same amount of it, with arguments that really sound like they think money indeed is a measure of a person’s worth as a human being. I do intellectually understand where they’re coming from but on a different level make up your goddamn minds please. If the median person treats money as literally serious business it suggests that the median person might not be able to adjust to the norms I want to live by, but damnit I want these norms and I already have polyamory, I’m not going to let the median person’s failings prevent me from having casual money too.

I have a feeling that the norms you proposed would be far more effective in casual interaction between acquaintances, colleges, etc. For example, if you don’t own a car and want to borrow the neighbor’s second car for a weekend, you might offer them some compensation for it. So you don’t need to buy a car you’ll use once or twice a year, while the neighbor gets to make some money in exchange for having to drop their partner off at their weekend poker night or whatever. Or if, like OP, you want someone to explain something fairly complicated to you, you might pay them a bit. This might work something like commissions do: since it’s socially acceptable for people to promote “please pay me for my art”, it seems like the leap to “please pay me for my knowledge” might be fairly easy to make. However, I think that within close friendships, this might not be the best system.

Anecdotal data: I have a few friends with whom I almost always meet over coffee or lunch. I’m the only one of us with a job, and the only one who regularly has cash with me, so I usually pay for food. On one hand, this seems to match pretty well the the model you described above: I have a greater ability to pay, so I do, since the pleasure of my friends’ company is worth buying them coffee once in a while. On the other hand, this is a completely informal arrangement which we never discussed, and I’m not sure if they even notice it. We just usually ask around if anyone has money on them, and it ends up being me most of the time. I’ve been feeling rather resentful about this recently, and I can’t tell if it’s because I’m expected to pay for them, because it’s not recognized that I pay for them, or because I’m spending money that could be used for something else important to me. I’m not sure if this is a data point for or against your the norms you suggested, but have it anyway.

One glaring flaw with this system seems to be that while the poorer people might discover if their company is “worth the price of lunch”, the rich would attract even more moochers (on top of the considerable social capital they already posses), while the poor would have a strong incentive to make friends with as many rich people as possible and ignore those with as less money. You could argue that a free lunch in exchange for company is a fair trade, but this doesn’t seem like a good environment to foster genuine friendships between different classes.

A possible way to test the viability of this might be to look at how different societies treat money vs friendship, unpaid labor, socioeconomic differences, etc., see which come closest to the standards you set out and see how that affects their culture, morals, economy, etc.  I’m not sure how far this would go or how effective it would be, but it sounds like it might be worth a try. Anyone who actually knows history or economics want to chime in?

((please tell me if I missed/misinterpreted something you said))

Data points is best! So is criticism because good ideas don’t come out fully formed from a frictionless vacuum of mystical wisdom! In fact I suspect most cognitively formidable people are just really good at outsourcing brain functions and connecting some key dots others don’t. I definitely outsource my thinking a lot because it produces way better results.

“Pay me for my knowledge” is best ever. Artists (or so I’ve heard them constantly complain) suffer from people thinking they’ll do things out of the goodness of their hearts because True Art Must Not Be Defiled By Money and creating explicit norms of “yes, it is work and I will be compensated for it at my own rates” and telling non-artists to just deal with it helps, so philosophers, sages, and jesters should be able to have the same thing too.

If I tried to model that anecdote on my own brain I’d suspect being taken for granted would be the key problem, but I’m notoriously horrible at modeling others with my own brain instead of just treating them as black boxes that can be investigated empirically so this one could probably be just ignored.

The glaring flaw sounds more like a caveat or a qualifier but (…simulates…) the issue of the oversupply of sycophants pushing prices of company down is a real one. Focken moochers, people. The opportunity of  predictably creates incentives for people to do fraudulent signaling of friendship by increasing the rewards of doing it successfully, therefore turning rejection of material favors into a hard-to-fake signal and damnit I knew there had to be a reason for why that focken fence was in such a silly place to begin with. (However, the markets would probably settle as the higher rewards from pleasing rich people would be balanced by more competition creating higher risks thus making the risk-aversion-adjusted expected returns for different socioeconomic strata not too mismatched. Then again, far more people waste money gambling instead of founding a startup so this speculation of people being anywhere near economically rational-resembling-ish must be discounted really hard.)

Okay: plan B: how to filter out the moochers and sycophants so that at least the exceptional ones can have casual money. It can be done at least in a limited sense because I definitely have done it successfully quite a lot without turning into a cynical moocher but my brain kind of has an obsession with sincere one-sided reciprocity in the vein of “I observe you have created value for me; let me create value to you too, fellow value-creating person”.

In some ways I fail to see what’s the bad thing in exchanging company for material favors voluntarily but this is probably why nobody should trust my brain in such things. A world where some people are players and others are pieces is unfair and manipulative, but there’s something aesthetically appealing about having a situation where all people are in on the game and know and understand the rules and just play with a sincerity that arises only from the abolition of pretenses of sincerity. That’s definitely casual acquiantance-level stuff only though, because Real True Friendships need to be possible so it might be necessary to have some secret or otherwise unfakeable protocol for “graduating” from “we’re playing games without pretending we’re not” to “we’re actually not playing games”.

So one possible solution could be to make it socially acceptable to play games and exchange social favors for material favors. Then the outcome would be casual money for exceptional friends, and mutually acknowledged games for a select category of casual acquiantances. At least players who know what’s going on are more entertaining company than clueless people (tfw you notice you just reinvented the MacLeod classification with gameplayers as the sociopaths, true friends as the losers, and uninteresting ones as the clueless) and sycophanty is harder to fall for when one starts with a prior of a knowing wink in one’s eye.

Also, overthinking is the best thing ever! Nothing interesting ever came out of never overthinking anything.

The reason I called the problem with moochers and sycophants a glaring flaw might, on reflection, be me typical-minding it. One of my greatest irrational fears is that my friends are just tolerating me to be polite and don’t actually care about me. With casual money, this becomes a far more likely scenario. I suppose some (most?) people would be happy with many acquaintances who they know are just around for the free lunch, and a few who can somehow signal that they are real friends, although I have trouble alieving it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this if everyone knows that this what’s going on, although it seems like there’s an increased potential for exploitation. That problem might be eliminated by a truly effective unfakeable signal of True Friendship, but I feel like if one existed we’d already be using it. (I’d love to be proven wrong here.)

With regards to compensating “philosophers, sages, and jesters” (I like that phrase a lot, it’s very #aesthetic, especially in this context),  there are already (insufficient in my opinion, but still there) structures in place for it (Patreon, Kickstarter, commissions, probably a lot of other stuff I’m missing because I’m not involved in that community). There also seems to be a strong push towards normalizing it, although again not as much as I’d like. 

Also possibly of interest: this blog post, where the author discusses some of the problems in asking friends for money. (Siderea’s writing seems to be the sort of thing you’d find interesting, if I’m interpreting your posts so far correctly. I’d recommend her essay on class, which I found very insightful and is also tangentially related to this discussion.)

Also also, a quick search for MacLeod’s classification turns up this, which is probably not what you were referring to. Do you have any links to an explanation of that classification?

The obvious solution would be to make casual money a mutually opt-in-only culture (which in fact is kind of exactly what I’m doing); not participating in it should definitely not be frowned upon and there definitely needs to be stronger norms of frowning upon far less stuff than people currently tend to do. Once again I feel like a comparison to polyamory would be more than apt: not something to be imposed on everyone, but an option which should be available for those who wish to use it.

Opting out of receiving casual money would obviously be an unfakeable signal that one is not a (material) moocher, and opting out of giving it would force one to rely on one’s own personality alone, making sure that the people can’t expect any material benefits and therefore must be sticking around thanks to one’s company being demonstrably worth it. In fact this suggests that there might even be need for a strong norm in the opposite direction: unbreakably immaterial friendships in which it’s understood that no favors of material (or status) nature will ever be exchanged and therefore sycophanty won’t achieve anything, so that the people it doesn’t filter out can be trusted to be only interested in one’s personality alone, not any tag-along benefits. (However, this one really needs a relaxation of class signaling and attitudes to avoid devolving into a resentful middle-class scornfest in which being just able to keep up in the correct level of material homogeneity is the only way to maintain the approval of one’s peers.)

So now we’re already developing a diversity of casual money, immaterial friendship (which consciously disavows material exchange but recognizes it as simply one option amonge many) and secret associations. The last one is important too, as it allows people to socialize across all kinds of status and tribal lines without either being harmed by it (how dare they hang out with The Outgroup?!?!) or (being perceived as) mooching social capital from rich and popular people.

It’s kind of interesting how my brain seems to not comprehend that extending the scope of exchange in interactions could lead to bad results. The way my brain sees it, friendship is already a mutually beneficial exchange of various forms of value-creation so adding another one more to it is more a question of making it aesthetically appealing enough to look like friendship instead of business, and that’s it; the entire concept of moochers, sycophants and not!truefriends seems like a strangely distant and abstract thing that intellectually speaking probably happens somewhere but the people who participate in such things feel like weird aliens which just superficially resemble humans. The only way I could describe this is some kind of starry-eyed sociopathy in which it’s obviously fine to relate with other humans by doing win-win trades without artificially limiting the variety of currencies to do those trades in (and in fact the only risk of falling for sycophanty would be the equivalent of giving someone a loan they don’t pay back; I definitely won’t marry anyone without a prenup (and even then only as a privilege escalation hack of the “hold my nose and marry the state” variety) but if someone is able to consistently entertain me enough to be worth the costs all the better for them).

(In fact it could be related to the way I kind of always perceive exchanges and creatings of value everywhere so I can’t just choose to unsee some particular varieties of them. I have this one quote in my mind which I always initially misassociate with Nwabudike Morgan about all human interaction being modelable as exchanges of some kind as long as one recognizes all the myriad “currencies” that are involved. Friendship is one broad category of repeated exchanges of particular kinds, which is extremely good at creating huge amounts of value as long as the necessary interpersonal infrastructure is maintained.)

I’m talking about the “sociopaths, clueless, & losers” categorization which (or at least the sense I’m using it in) is probably the least badly exemplified here. “Sociopaths” are the success- and power-seeking people who get shit done; losers are the people who have other priorities and simply treat their work as something that pays the bills and must give a different kind of fair deal, prioritizing not giving their all and settling for a comparably modest return, instead of giving their all to take it all; while the clueless lack the competence of the sociopaths and the awareness of the losers and end up as tools either performing a feeble imitation of sociopaths or acting in a perverse unilateral commitment to them in the hopes of being rewarded somehow. I’m probably a “sociopath” myself in this classification even though I feel statistically more sympathetic to and in some ways indentify with the “losers” instead. (Or at least so it seems; archetypical losers recognize that climbing up and/or knocking over corporate ladders isn’t exactly that awesome in itself, while most sociopaths seem to be kind of pitiable people who simply got stuck prioritizing power and money for their own sake, without any clear goal of what to do with them; I do, and just want to exploit all the available tools for realizing those goals, therefore power and money. Of course, most losers are uninteresting slackers who lack not only ambition but anything else that would interest me as well, but the numbers nonetheless suggest that the vast majority of cool and awesome people will be in that broad category. For the clueless I have a hard time feeling anything other than a certain kind of slight contempt tempered by a lot of pity, as they know neither the real rules of game nor how to have a life outside it.)

This would translate to social games in such a way that “sociopaths” treat things as games in which to play and win and actually grow stronger and better in it; “losers” don’t bother playing and focus on genuine non-gamey relationships; and the “clueless” do all kinds of whining, posturing and entitled status-seeking without understanding the underlying mechanics. To illustrate this, here’s an example of the subtexts of how the three different groups might interact with someone high-status:

The sociopath: “I know your position, I know mine, and I know that I need to prove why I’m different from the next guy; now let me show you how I can create value to you and distinguish myself from the clueless ones seeking your attention in less skilled ways.”

The clueless: “Boo hoo I’m such a cool guy wouldn’t you just please give me a chance I swear I’m different from all the other people who say these exact same things just believe me even though I’m both unwilling and unable to prove it.”

The loser: “Yeah, whatever, I’m not desperately looking for anything I could gain from you and I’m not going to play any roles to please you, but if you consider me interesting that’s quite cool I guess.”

Sociopaths are interesting but there’s a tacit understanding of the default assumption of a lack of mutual loyalty, which tends to turn people into situational losers with each other. Losers are give or take as they don’t really feel the need to please others and thus most of them won’t be that interesting to me, but the awesome ones are awesome. The clueless are just frustrating to deal with because they want and feel like they deserve attention but aren’t willing to give what it takes. (And just to make it clear; anyone I willingly interact with is a person I find worth interacting with, and proof of situational loserdom is available on request, so people really have no need for a prior to worry about falling into the category I’m conceptually scorning here.) (Also, the clusters are obviously just archetypes and fluid continuums instead of rigid categories.)

(also Siderea is one of those people whose blogs I really want to remember to read more of)

4 months ago · tagged #parenthesis junkies unite · 30 notes · source: worldoptimization · .permalink

For Love of a Childhood with Technology

andromeda-collides:

I don’t remember much of being a toddler, but I remember being an older child.

I remember how, when I would ask my parents questions about things I was interested in, the answer was “Go look it up in the Encyclopedias” until I generally knew to just go to there first.  We had a set of World Book Encyclopedias printed in the 80’s, and they were my treasure trove.  I read entire volumes.  

This led to some amusing things in my childhood, like when I was in elementary school and read the entire section on religion, something I knew nothing about before that, and then came and told my parents “Mom and Dad, I’m an agnostic.  Or maybe an atheist.  None of the rest of those made ANY sense. They are super weird.”  

When I read books, I drug around a (very heavy) dictionary.  I would write the words I didn’t know in the front cover of my paperbacks, and look them up, often interrupting my reading and getting sniped into reading more of the dictionary instead.  

I was always terrible at parsing the pronunciation guide, and am to this day. Often I learned to associate the word’s visual spelling with the definition in my head, bypassing a verbal memory altogether, and so I had a larger disconnect than most people between words I could speak and understand in conversation, and the words I could write and understand written.

Thousands of questions and interests in my childhood were lost opportunities.  They weren’t in the encyclopedias, or I couldn’t figure out how to look them up.  I wanted to know if there were words for concepts, but didn’t have a reverse dictionary to google.  My encyclopedia set didn’t have pictures of every animal in it, or indeed, every animal in it at all.  It did not update with sources of news, and even though I also obsessively read my parents’ subscription to Newsweek, it felt like the world was going on around me in a way that I had no way to follow.  And of course, as a child in the 90’s, if I found something current in Newsweek that I didn’t know about, I could not just look it up in the encyclopedias I had, printed in the 80’s.

Fastfoward to my daughter’s childhood. 

When she’s older, and asks me questions, I can pull out my phone and search wikipedia, or she can do it herself.  We can pull up youtube, khan academy, wolframalpha, or a thousand other things.  When she’s reading her books on a tablet or kindle or phone or any other device, she doesn’t have to drag around a dictionary, she can double tap the word and be given not just the definition, but also hear the pronunciation, without ever interrupting her reading.

But that’s a few years from now.  Let’s talk about technology in Andromeda’s life now, age 1.

She sees a firetruck and is super excited, we can go home and watch hours of youtube videos on firetrucks, if she wants.  She sees firetrucks are always red, sometimes make a siren noise, can stop and go, carry humans.  She sees firetrucks in the sun, rain, and snow.  She sees firetrucks putting out fires.  It may be too early for her to infer purpose yet, but it will not be long. Later she plays with an app on her tablet about firemen, and I hear her going “woo woo!” to herself as she deftly scrolls through the scene.

She wants to see pictures of kittens, I can pull up a google image search and endlessly scroll through pictures of kittens, from every possible angle. I can pull up another tab to switch between, this one covered in adult cats.  We discuss the difference.  And she sees the differences, 500 or 1000 times over, in just a few minutes.

It’s not without reason that I’m sometimes reminded of the similarity of teaching my daughter with technology as a tool, and a machine learning algorithm, blitzing through its input of focus, to sort the noise from the data.  Andromeda is doing that.  She is capable of that.  Up until now as a civilization, we just have not been capable of providing her the raw input to do that.  Now, in many cases, we can.

She’s pointing to a twirly rooster on top of a building, asking “Dah? Dah?!  Dah?!” (Translation:  what is that?) and I can’t remember, for the life of me, what the word for that is.  I pull out my phone, search, and seconds later I can tell her the word she wants is “Weathervane” and what it does.  Even show her close up videos of it if I want.  It opens up the opportunity to talk about wind and weather and chickens and a million other things.  Curiosity, indulged, encouraged, grown.  She learns that the world is a place where she can ask questions, and get answers.  Later she will learn that the world is a place where she can ask questions and find her own answers.  She sees the world’s knowledge is there, at her fingertips, and here for everyone, to digest and understand.

I’m not even sure what happens in that situation without instant technology, if I were in my mom’s position, in the 90’s.   I ask every adult I meet what it is until I find one who knows?  I go home and flip through the encyclopedia with the vague idea that it should be there somewhere?  And if I miraculously find it, the moment is already lost, and Andromeda probably doesn’t even remember what I’m talking about.  Or, the more likely thing, that I say, “sorry babe, I don’t know what the twirly rooster is, forget about it for now.”

What lessons does that hypothetical Andromeda learn?  That there are some known things that mom (and later, she) can’t know.  That knowledge is hard to find.  That the world is confusing, bewildering, and disconnected.  That curiosity is sometimes nice, but often just annoying, because you never know when it’s an itch that can be scratched, vs. when it can’t.  Maybe then it’s better to not have that itch at all, let it seep out of awareness and into the background chatter of the human experience.

There was a tongue in check post, I think on SSC, about, “Do you have a modafinil deficiency?”  In a similar vein, I wonder if children before ours had a technology deficiency.  What if generations upon generations of children who could have risen to greater heights had their curiosity and love of learning driven out of them by the sheer inaccessibility of knowledge?  

There will always be those among us who fight any odds, any circumstances, in order to learn and create.  I don’t mean them, though we’ve made the world easier for them too.  Not the Ramanujans of the world, but other, more ordinary people.  Other people who could have been more, but weren’t quite as resilient.  A child of family without the internet, and maybe one without any encyclopedias, enough times of asking “Why?” and getting shut down.  And so they responded by shutting down their curiosity and the power of their intellect, rather than struggle on.  Those are children that maybe now, we can give more to, and who may one day give us more in return.  And it’s easy.  It’s easy to give them more now.  It’s as easy as the smartphone in your pocket, a google search away.

Too old to have enjoyed technology right from the beginning, but incredibly privileged to never have that unending curiosity properly excised and thus not excessively jealous of the kids these days. I’m already wondering how the hell people ever managed to survive without the superhuman powers of omnipresent access to almost all information ever (with just a slight rounding error) and connection to almost everyone interesting, even though my own habit of always carrying doubly redundant internet access if possible is only single-digits years old.

Also, I’m betting that eventually we’ll look at people squelching a child’s curiosity, instead of letting them indulge in it freely, with the same kind of horror and revulsion we look at physically violent parents now.

(via rusalkii)

4 months ago · 157 notes · source: andromeda-collides · .permalink

4 months ago · tagged #support your local supervillain #win-in is my superpower #boxes don't work #i am worst capitalist #future precariat billionaire · 3 notes · .permalink

One question to help you determine your Primary House

ilzolende:

wirehead-wannabe:

What is the biggest cause of evil in the world?

Gryffindor: “Not listening to the moral feelings that you know deep down are right.”

Hufflepuff: “Not treating everyone with human dignity.”

Ravenclaw: “Not questioning your impulses and assumptions about the world.”

Slytherin: “Betraying yourself or your friends.”

Ravenclaw primary, then, definitely.

Does “the world is evil because it doesn’t listen to the moral feelings I know are right, as a consequence betrays me and my friends and does it on a practical level mostly by not questioning those things” count as what? All I know is that Hufflepuff is a worse match because all too often naive “dignity”, when not tempered by questioning is itself a cause of evil. The other ones one can’t go wrong with even when applied indiscriminately.

Wait, you mean the “you” others should consider is actually “themselves” instead of me? 100% Ravenclaw then.

(via ilzolende)

4 months ago · tagged #support your local supervillain · 142 notes · source: wirehead-wannabe · .permalink