I'm triple A: aro, ace, agender. Full quartet when counting autism :) 28, they/them Sorry if I sometimes post triggering stuff when I'm in a depressive episode. I mostly forget to tag stuff so message me if it bothers you and I'll try to watch it. (my inbox is always open for other messages too btw)
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
One of the best ways to evaluate your own understanding of a subject is to attempt to explain it to someone else. Through explaining things, we discover how much of the "totally obvious" world is actually full of ambiguity, mystery and contradiction.
There's a great bit in Rowan Atkinson's historical sitcom Blackadder that illustrates this principle. In "Ink and Incapability" Blackadder and friends have accidentally burned the only copy of Samuel Johnson's original dictionary of the English language. To cover up their mistake, they decide that they will recreate the dictionary themselves. However, they founder on the first word they try to define, "A":
Blackadder: Let's start at the beginning, shall we? First: 'A.' How would you define 'A'?
Prince George: OhhâŠ'A' (continues this in background). Oh, I love this! I love this! Quizzies! Erm, hang on, itâs coming. Ooh, crikey, erm, oh yes, Iâve got it!
B: What?
PG: Well, it doesnât really mean anything, does it?
B: Good. So we're well on the way, then. "'A'; impersonal pronoun; doesn't really mean anything."
I mean, what does "A" mean? The Oxford English Dictionary has more than a dozen definitions, and just the first one runs to more than 1,500 words:
Now, normal life involves a lot of explaining things to other people. You have to explain your problems to customer service reps, who have to explain why they can't solve those problems to you. You need to explain to your loved ones why you want to leave your toothbrush in the shower, and they have to explain why they hate having your toothbrush in the shower. These explanation-exchanges teach you as much as they teach the person you're locked in dialog with. The reasons for leaving your toothbrush in the shower may seem totally obvious to you, and your partner's inability to understand this reveals the assumptions you've never even considered.
For the past four decades, an increasing proportion of the population have spent an increasing proportion of their lives explaining things to machines that have no assumptions or shared context: computers. What we call "programming a computer" is really "breaking down a thing that seems obvious to you into increasingly simple instructions that will be followed to the letter."
Computers are like the genies of legend, bloody-minded literalists who will do exactly what you say, in the way that is perversely furthest from what you mean. To get a computer to do anything, you must first understand it to a degree that far exceeds the understanding needed to explain something to any other human, even a small child.
To take just one example: yesterday, I was on a plane, and the seatback video started cycling through its video-on-demand offerings. All of the movie titles that began with "the" were rewritten to put "the" at the end of the title (for example, "The Sting" was written as "Sting, The"). It's obvious why the system's designer had done this: we expect to find movies whose titles begin with "The" alphabetized under their second word ("The Sting" should appear between "Star Wars" and "Story of a Love Affair"; not between "The Godfather" and "The Untouchables").
I remember when I learned this from my elementary school's teacher-librarian, when I was seven and my class got a tutorial on the school library's card catalog. The librarian explained this principle to us in a matter of minutes, as part of a longer set of instructions, and still, it stuck with me forever.
But here we are, 48 years later, and we still haven't standardized a way to get computers to grasp this foundational principle of alphabetization. Many different databases handle this, to be sure, but it's so inconsistent across so many platforms that someone at the head-end of the video distribution system that feeds American Airlines' VOD system decided, "Fuck it, I'm just gonna put the 'The' at the end of these titles."
Computers are stupid, in other words, which means that the people who program them have to have smarts enough for both of them. Unfortunately for our entire species and civilization, the software industry has historically valued skill at writing efficient and reliable software over writing software that adequately reflects reality. There is an entire genre of lists that illustrate the problem with this; the "falsehoods programmers believe" lists:
https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood
From "names of people" and "street addresses"; from "prices" to "time"; from "email addresses" to "phone numbers"; the "awesome falsehoods" lists are awesome because they reveal how much subtlety and complexity is lurking in these seemingly simple and intuitive concepts. This subtlety and complexity might never emerge through the process of trying to teach a person about them, but when you try to teach a computer about them, you have to confront them in all their awesome fuggliness.
That's because humans have context, agency and flexibility. Sure, the person who designs a form with a blank for "name" might never have met a Malagasy person whose first name is Randriamananjararadofabesata, but in the pre-digital world, when Madagascar Slim met a public official who had to transcribe his name onto a paper form, that official could simply draw an arrow in the margin next to the "name" blank, turn the form over, and write out all 28 characters on the reverse:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Slim
Computers can't do this. If the programmer doesn't know about Malagasy first names, the computer doesn't know about them either, and the only person who can "teach" the computer about these names is a programmer with access to the code for the database, who has to manually alter the code, compile it, and distribute it to everyone who uses it.
This is partly why digitization has been accompanied by a rise in people asserting that they exist on spectrums rather than in binaries. There were always people whose names, genders, races, and other biographic "immutables" changed, or failed to fit within the blanks on the forms. When those people's realities ran up against failures in the system's abstractions, they could petition a bureaucrat to turn the paper over and write an explanatory note, or to write really small to fill in a blank:
Getting a human official to turn the paper over and write something that didn't fit in the blank is a personal challenge. It requires that a subject convince the person who controls the form to make an exception. This isn't always easy, but officials on the front lines necessarily deal with reality, and they can't get their jobs done unless they're capable of interpreting the necessarily incomplete procedures they operate under to fit things as they really are.
But a computer doesn't have any agency or context or flexibility. If the computer says your name isn't valid, you can't argue the computer into accepting it. The only way to get a digital world to acknowledge your existence is to campaign for systemic change. A trans person might (with great difficulty, to be sure) convince the regional registrar to white-out an old X on one "gender" box and mark a new X in the other box. But the only way to make that change in a software system that has been programmed to treat the "gender" field as immutable is to change society itself.
In this way, computers are machines for teaching us what we don't know about ourselves. They require that we interrogate and faithfully recreate our personal tacit knowledge, and they require that our societies interrogate their tacit presumptions as well. When you are forced to turn your tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge, you're also forced to confront how many broken assumptions lurk inside your reasoning. At best, it's a clarifying process.
Computers don't just clarify what we know and how we organize our society: they also clarify what we are. There are lots of things that we have supposed that a computer would never do, because we believed that these things required something that only humans could do.
Take chess: there are more possible chess games than there are hydrogen atoms in the universe, so brute-forcing chess by running all possible games is a technological impossibility. The best human chess players do something we don't quite understand, mixing their recollections of previous games with rules-of-thumb about the best strategies, with "creativity" (whatever that is) that lets them spontaneously develop new strategies. We can easily get a computer to memorize all the known-good chess sequences and all the rules of thumb, but we don't know what "creativity" is, so we can't encode it as a series of instructions.
But thanks to breakthroughs in machine learning and its successor, "deep learning," we have created chess-playing software that can beat every human, partly by assaying gambits that we would term "creative" if they originated with a human player.
What we make of this new fact is controversial. For many people (myself included), this is a refinement: it tells me that behaviors that are indistinguishable from "creativity" can, at least some of the time, be created by mechanical processes, and the mere fact that a machine does something that appears "creative" doesn't mean that machines are human.
For others, the fact that a mechanical system can evince a behavior that we would call "creative" in a human doesn't mean that we defined "creativity" too broadly, it means that we defined "human" too narrowly, and now we have made a machine that is, at least partially, a person.
I think this is the wrong conclusion to draw, for reasons that Ted Chiang sets out with luminous brilliance in a recent Atlantic article entitled "No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious":
(If you're hitting the paywall on that one and you're on Firefox, you can try my favorite trick: switch to "Reader Mode" and hit "reload" â your mileage may vary.)
For all the reasons Chiang articulates, I think that drawing the "personhood" line to include machines is a technical mistake, but it's worse than that. Admitting machines to the "personhood" club is a tactical mistake, on par with the mistake we made when we admitted corporations to the personhood club. We should absolutely consider expanding personhood to incorporate living things, including animals and ecosystems, but at the same time, we must purge these dead, artificial constructs from the club:
There is a way in which the recognition of new capabilities in machines parallels the recognition of new capabilities in animals other than ourselves. When those animals manage to do things that we once thought were the exclusive province of humans, we (should) take that as an opportunity to refine our conception of humanity. We're not "the animals that use tools" or "the animals that make plans" or "the animals that recognize themselves in mirrors," because there are other animals that do those things. We are an "animal that uses tools"; not the animal that does so.
Likewise, if we thought that some activity was unique to humans, or to living beings, and we manage to get a machine to replicate that activity, we should revise our view of the activity â not our view of the machine. Creative breakthroughs in chess are not "a thing that requires a human mind," they're "things that can be done by human minds and by machines."
Edsger Dijkstra once famously asked "can a submarine swim?"
Submarines and fish and humans and dolphins all propel themselves through water by different means. But when an animal swims, it does something that is different from what a submarine does. The submarine has no intention, while (complex multicellular) animals swim to pursue goals. Building machines that propel themselves through water is very useful, but it's not the same thing as creating life. In some ways, it's better than creating life: for one thing, we owe other living things moral consideration that is not due to machines. Harnessing a machine to accomplish our own goals is more morally clear than controlling living things to achieve those goals. By the same token, creating machines that can do some of the tasks that we ask of other humans can be the superior moral course. I'd rather have a machine remove mines from a minefield than getting humans to do it.
But beyond this moral relief, creating machines is a fantastic way to learn more about ourselves â making explicit our tacit knowledge, our implicit social assumptions, and the limitations of our conception of what sets us apart from the rest of the universe.
One way in which AI is exceptional is in how it undermines this principle. Conventional software techniques struggled to produce a program that could identify objects in photographs. It turns out that defining all the visual correlates of "cat" is even harder than defining the letter "A." Deep learning techniques solved this previous insoluble problem by relieving us of the job of making explicit all the implicit factors that we deploy when distinguishing an image of a "cat" from an image of a "dog" or a "tiger" (or a "tractor").
Instead of forcing humans to engage in introspection until we'd made a list of every factor we use to identify cat pictures, we simply identified pictures of cats and fed them to a program that tried to find the commonalities among them. The more pictures we fed to that program, the better it got at identifying cats. Today, we have programs that can reliably distinguish an image of a cat from an image of a tiger cub!
This represents a major breakthrough in the power of computers to perform useful work for us, but it's also a huge regression in computers' role in forcing us to make our tacit thought processes explicit through systematic introspection. That's probably fine: we didn't create computers to make us introspect, we created them to do useful work for us. All things considered, it might be better to have genies who grant our wishes according to the spirit of our words, not their letter.
AI may not force us to render our implicit thoughts as explicit instructions, but it absolutely forces us to reconsider and narrow the realm of the numinous. Our own creativity is still delightful and important, but the fact that this squishy, amazing process can (sometimes) be replicated by procedural machines changes the definition of living things. We're "a thing that can produce creative outcomes" but not "the things that can produce creative outcomes." The machines aren't being creative (any more than a submarine is swimming) but they're outputting things that we used to only achieve by means of creativity.
An AI that does something that used to require creativity is fulfilling my favorite of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies: "Be the first person to not do something that no one else has not done before":
https://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html
Just as bosses fantasize about AI bringing about a worksite without workers, and Zuckerberg is trying to build social media without socializing, and politicians want a bureaucracy without bureaucrats, we can sometimes use AI to produce creative outcomes without creativity:
But art isn't the only realm that we apply creativity to. There are plenty of outcomes that we've always believed we couldn't bring about without applying creativity. AI â like all software â is making us realize that an ingredient we once deemed uniquely essential turns out to have substitutes. AI can sometimes accomplish things without us explaining how we do them. That relieves us of a useful but difficult chore â but in so doing, it forces us (yet again!) to revisit what sorts of things are needed to do the things that matter to us, and therefore, what makes us special.
I used to like it in science fiction when a robot or a computer debatably had "consciousness." I frequently grew fond of that robot or character. But none of those stories involved megacorps manipulating people to think the robot was conscious so they could make more money and strip the earth of resources.
I think arguing that AI is conscious, or soon to become so, reflects levels of addiction that should concern everyone around that person.
The Atlantic piece linked makes a ton of good points - some of my favorites:
The part about needing other external circumstantial evidence to believe something resonated strongly with me, partly because it echoed my legal training, but also just in general.
The point about responsibility for one's actions is also excellent, and one I think more than half of Silicon Valley and all the richest people could stand a refresher course on.
Final note: using historical figure RP to make the point is hilarious and apt.
âBecause the truth is, tech doesnât have an image problem. It doesnât have a message problem. It has an intention problem. Whatâs wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasnât successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. Whatâs wrong is that heâs trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product thatâs designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isnât that you havenât told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.â
when a government bans young people from using social media, and then categorises messenger apps like Signal and WhatsApp as "social media", they are pushing those young people toward using text messages, a fundamentally insecure form of communication. texts are not encrypted in transit and can be read by both the sender's mobile carrier and the recipient's. that also means they can be leaked in data breaches, subpoenaed, or just handed over willingly to law enforcement at the carriers' discretion.
Further context: Durham city council (Reform UK) cut funding and support for Pride. The Durham Miner's Association and other trade unions raised enough money for Durham Pride 2026 to go ahead - a direct call back to when Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) raised money for mining communities when Margaret Thatcher seized union funding during the miner strikes of 1984-85.
At the 1985 Labour party meet, the motion to support LGBT rights as a party was passed due to a block vote from mining unions.
Stephen Guy, the chair of the Durham Minersâ Association, said that when it became apparent Durham Pride was under threat, he took it upon himself to âencourage the trade union movement to step up and do the right thing, and stand shoulder to shoulder with the LGBT+ community [âŠ] They not only raised funds for us, but came to our communities, uplifted our spirits when they were down, and showed their solidarity.â
if you've never seen the film Pride (2014), which tells the story of LGSM, you really really need to. Set aside time to watch it this month. Extremely important part of leftist and queer history, and a lesson on what "solidarity forever" means in practice that everyone desperately needs to learn right now.
Here's the r/piracy megathread if you need it. & you can pair that viewing with this article on the real-life history of Lesbians & Gays Support the Miners; they don't make it explicit in the film, but every founding member was a socialist / communist, and that article goes more in depth about the movement.
Notably: LGSM did not wait for the mining communities to be openly supportive of queers and anti-homophobia before showing solidarity. They saw the connection between oppression of Welsh miners and the oppression of queers, and chose solidarity first. It was this choice to materially support other oppressed people, and see the queer community and mining communities are inherently connected through their experiences of oppression and resistance, that allowed the relationship seen above to exist at all.
None of this could have happened if LGSM's solidarity was dependent on the mining communities being queer allies at the time of Thatcher's attacks on them. This solidarity was born out of queer communists seeing things from a broader perspective than just "getting gay rights." They saw how the labor struggle and the queer struggle are connected, and organized to provide material assistance through food and funding. We should all internalize this and seek to apply these lessons to our own communities.
Some of you only care about winning arguments by submission and fail to consider that an outcome where you have rights but people are clueless liberals is still a marked improvement.
#youre right and you should say it#its the same as when people bring up how patriarchy hurts cis men too#and lefties will sneer at you âwho cares? it hurts women more!!!â#like thanks dipshit i know that#but some of us are more concerned with getting people to fight on our side in the first place#rather than rejecting any potential ally that doesnt get an A+ on the moral purity test#(hint: when you create barriers to entry to your political movement rather than creating more pathways to join.#you end up with less allies and less power to achieve your goals.)
Also, a clueless liberal ally is still on the path to becoming a leftist. Most people don't start out as leftists. It is something people have to become, and you are making it harder by being an ass.
rocky always yells âenrichment for grace! enrichment for grace!â when he has a new invention to make the humans time more interesting on erid. grace, while appreciative, replies âI know Iâm in a zoo enclosure but could we maybe not call it that? I feel like a bear getting thrown a pumpkin covered in peanut butter.â rocky simply gives him a thumb, not wanting to explain that a significant amount of the population sees grace as the celebrity savior scientist who rocky keeps as a controversially young trophy wife and publicly lavishes in gifts
i was invited to once again do a piece for the dndads pride zine, and i spent about 2 hours in a panic with no idea what to do. and then i was struck by inspiration and knew exactly what i wanted to do. so go buy the zine and then you can see this piece in the real life whaow!
no more assigning babies a legal sex at birth. i feel like this should go without saying, but no more surgeries on intersex infants. no more surgeries on intersex children. embrace intersex traits as natural. because they are.
no more gendered dress codes. no more gender markers on passports, driver's licenses, ids. i'm not talking about "adding x" or "adding a third category" i'm talking about no more categories, period. why does the government need to know what my genital situation is? why does the government feel the need to assign me a sex on the basis of genitals? why does the cop who pulled me over need to see an m, or an f, or an x?
no more "gender is a social construct, sex is the thing that's binary." sex is not binary. abolish the idea that it is. normalize conversations about intersex traits. being intersex is natural. the sex binary is a thing imposed by the state.
no more gendered sports. if you really care about equity, sort people into categories based on skill level and athleticism, not gender or sex. the concept that there are only two sexes and that one is inherently weaker than the other is pseudoscience. the male/female hunter/gatherer dichotomy is not based in fact, and is a product of modern sexist cultural biases. one gender is not inherently subservient to the other. people are not inherently different on the basis of sex or gender. it is just more complicated than that.
the concept of multiple genders and sexes beyond the man/woman male/female dichotomy has existed as long as humans have existed. the sex binary only serves to benefit the patriarchy. the gender binary only serves to benefit the patriarchy. continuing to impose it just controls (and harms) the people it forcibly categorizes.
i'm not asking for the end of gender, i'm calling for an acknowledgement of gender and sex that understands the infinite diversity of the human species. i'm suggesting an end to binary systems that only benefit the ruling class. just think about it. okay?
Does no one on tumblr watch youtube?? Why is no one talking about the Bricks and Minifigs scandal???? A stuntman/provocateur just exposed a $200,000 scam involving lego bricks, which resulted in an entire police department demonstrating that they will do anything in their power to protect members the Mormon church, up to and including swatting and injuring innocent people with the sole purpose of scaring them away from investigating Mormons.
the news report leaves out the part where the official police media report includes them literally saying "johnson (one of the thieves) called us and told us he was gonna shoot "someone" (heavily implied to be schneider, the youtuber who exposed them, and/or the people helping him try to serve johnson court papers,) so we arrested schneider." like yeah technically they say he said he was "going to shoot someone" not specifically that guy but they still literally arrested him for the crime of being threatened with being murdered. but like the guy threatening to kill him is a mormon so he obviously deserves it right.
smaller thing but the police report also says they were pulled over for running a stop sign despite there being public police footage of them sitting at said stop sign, blinker on, full stop, for several seconds before driving forwards
âBecause the truth is, tech doesnât have an image problem. It doesnât have a message problem. It has an intention problem. Whatâs wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasnât successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. Whatâs wrong is that heâs trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product thatâs designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isnât that you havenât told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.â
HOLY SHIT GUYS, I WAS INSPIRED BY THIS POST TO TRY MAKE THE SONG AND YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE THE SCREAM I SCRUMPT WHEN I DRAGGED THE TRAINING AUDIO OVER THE BACKING TRACK AND IT LINED UP PERFECTLY
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