gnostotron

[gnostotron]

When I say "this isn't my first rodeo" I don't mean it in the "it's ok, I know what's going on" way, I mean that my first rodeo was magical and tender, an epiphany, and no rodeo I've been to since has managed to make me feel alive in the same way. I keep going to rodeo after rodeo and sometimes there's a bare glimmer of that electricity, that passion, but mostly it's just an aching reminder of something that I will seemingly never experience again.

The horsies are nice though.

[gnostotron]

One of the many, many, *many* problems with eugenics is the idea that ideas of selective breeding are generalizable - just because we can make a high-yield version of wheat it doesn't mean we can selectively breed for everything. Maybe it's because of the complex interplay of genes required, maybe it's the overwhelming influence of environment, maybe there's something innate we don't understand about how inheritance works, but there's no reason to believe we can extend the concept of making a really tiny dog to making a super-intelligent human.

People don't realize that humanity has been doing a long-term experiment on ourselves already and the results are ... not great. I actually wrote a post about this

I think sometimes people think eugenics is bad but its still true, like thinking that if people with certain traits have children it will change society for better or worse based upon what traits are promoted. I think its important to emphasize that eugenics is not only wrong morally it's also fake and stupid bullshit

Like eugenics was supposed to be based on the idea that "If it works with animals to select only the best ones to breed, why wouldn't it work with humans?"

well it doesn't work with animals, that's the thing. applying the eugenics ideas to domestic breeds of animals hasn't made better animals it's just made animals with more extreme expression of certain traits. turns out that when you decide which traits are the "best" and become obsessed with the genetic purity of the animals that have the "best" traits, you might well end up with some sad suffering creature like a Pug, or the Persian cats with the smashed faces that are in constant pain because their teeth and airways and brains are getting crushed by their skulls, or those meat chickens that grow so fast they can hardly even stand up after a few weeks old, or inbred race horses with tiny feet and fragile toothpick legs

like almost all traits are neither "good" or "bad" they're way more complex than that. a long tail or a long snout or a stubborn, independent personality can be good or bad depending on the situation. Who gets to decide what is a "good" trait or a "bad" trait? It's arbitrary and selecting for traits that are "good" in your opinion will often have both "good" and "bad" outcomes because the "good" and "bad" are part of each other and not separate its just part of being alive

Obviously oversimplifying everything but you get it. we did eugenics with dogs and how did that go? not very well

[gnostotron]

In prehistory humans lived in small groups, tribes or clans, and through the internal conflicts inherent in such situations some individuals rose to become leaders.  These leaders lead their tribes through adversity; not just things like famines and other natural disasters but also conflicts with other tribes and whether the tribe prevailed was due (at least in part) to the quality of the leadership.

This went on for thousands of years, with successful tribes thriving and unsuccessful tribes disappearing.  But after a while the tribes settled down to agriculture and beer making and recording history and the old tribal leaders became the new kings and queens.  The economic reality had changed but the underlying mechanic stayed the same - shitty monarchs got deposed or conquered, non-shitty monarchs got to expand their territories by conquest or diplomacy (both of which largely involved mating with other successful monarchs).

Royalty became a closed system of successful monarchs breeding with other successful monarchs . But it wasn’t *completely* closed - new people could become ennobled by, say, being a great general or politician or, lately, by creating an extremely successful business.  New blood was constantly being added to the pool, but the blood was the cream of the leaders from non-royal society.

It was a system where the greatest leaders of all humanity only bred with other great leaders, or with generals, diplomats and the otherwise extremely successful and this has been going on in one form or another from at least the time we started walking upright.  And the product of this, the utter pinnacle of this millennia-long project of selectively breeding the greatest leader to ever walk the earth, is King fucking Charles.

This is why I can’t get behind the concept of eugenics.

[gnostotron]

If you give a man a fish then every problem will look like a worm to him

[gnostotron]

Due to a simple misunderstanding of what "fandoms" and "fan subs" are everyone at this anime convention is mad at me.

[gnostotron]

A "Sycophancer" is a wizard who's magic comes from ingratiating themselves to higher powers.

[gnostotron]

You were recently laid off, still feeling mixed emotions about the whole thing.  Betrayal?  A generalized fear for the future?  Some weird sense of guilt (what’s up with that)? It’s making shopping your resume around even more depressing.

In a gesture to, I don’t know, trick your brain into thinking it’s doing something constructive you decide to sign up with one of those “mechanical turk” services.  Certainly isn’t going to provide a livable income, but you feel like it’s “keeping your hand in”.

You log in, fill in all their forms, click all the check boxes next to scrolling walls of legalese, and you’re in their interface.  Very bare-bones, very mid twenty-teens Material UI.

Your first task is solving a captcha:  “click on boxes containing animals”.  You sigh. ok, it’s that sort of job.  You were hoping maybe you would be doing some scientific research thing, but you should have known it was just going to be quasi-legal crap busting somebody’s Ts and Cs.  Hopefully quasi-legal.

You spend the first day clicking on boxes with animals in them - animals in trees, animals in people’s yards, animals crossing roads - and not clicking on boxes showing empty landscapes.  It’s pretty relaxing, actually - you’ve got music on, there’s no time pressure (at this income level there can’t be).  You log off after a few hours, feeling like you accomplished something with your day at least.  Not much, but something.

The following day is more of the same - click on a racoon in a garbage can, or a giraffe in a zoo enclosure, or a tiger peering through dense foliage.

The third day it switches up the captchas - “click on boxes containing people”.  The absence of any criteria narrowing the scope makes for a fascinating day - the sweeping *variety* of people you are clicking on is breathtaking.

After a few days clicking on people starts losing its charm. But then you are given more random things to click on.  Click on houses, click on buildings, click on cars. All the novelty has worn off at this point but you’ve just gotten into a groove.

A couple weeks in and you are barely registering what you’re supposed to be clicking on anymore, until you realize that you’ve spent almost the entire day clicking on boxes containing, as the prompt says, “human military equipment”.  Tanks, jeeps, jets, ships.  Tents with camo netting, men in ghillie suits, weapons held by soldiers from armies around the world.  You continue clicking with a growing unease.

The following day your prompt is “click on boxes containing humans with political influence” and you’re presented with pictures of individuals, some of whom you recognize, some whom you don’t.  You push yourself back from the computer, thinking, trying to remember the things you’d been identifying recently.  You remember clicking on bridges, on cargo ports, on power stations, on communication towers and satellite stations.  On hospitals.  On schools.

Suddenly you very much want to know what is being protected behind these captchas and who’s paying you to break them. And you wonder if those things are even important, because you remember that the entire purpose of captchas is to collect training data for recognition algorithms.  What have you been training?

Unnerved, you shut down your computer and decide to go for a walk to think.  At the door you reach for your phone then change your mind - you don’t really want to be connected to the internet at the moment.

That night you sleep fitfully, plagued by dreams you can’t remember on waking.  You turn your computer back on the following day and do a bit of job hunting but avoid the mechanical turk site.  You try to figure out what to search for to answer the questions in your head, but since the questions are all variations of “what the *fuck* is going on?” you can’t think of a way to state that that will give you satisfying search results.

The following day you decide to log back into the mechanical turk, maybe learn something more about the work you’re doing.  With a sense of dread you await the first task.  It says “click on boxes containing vegetables”, with pictures of carrots, celery, bell peppers, cabbage. You are confused - you stare at the pictures, willing them to give some clue to … anything.  But that picture of an acorn squash sitting on a kitchen counter under bright fluorescent lighting remains an enigma, refusing to give up its secrets.  You work through more tasks but it looks like today is all vegetables.

Nothing strange needs to be identified in the next three days of mechanical turking, just seemingly random things like office supplies, leaves and cutlery. And on the fourth day an employer finally contacts you, offering a job that pays slightly less than the one you just lost but is situated substantially closer to your home.  

You shut down your mechanical turk account and try to never think about it again.

[gnostotron]

Man, thirty pieces of silver doesn't go as far as it used to.

[gnostotron]

Questioning their omniscience, Tantalus placed a feast before the gods to see if they could tell that the delicacies were his own son Pelops who he'd butchered and prepared. And for his impiety he was cursed to stand in a pool of clear water beneath a bough laden with fruit, and that when in hunger he reached for the fruit it would draw away, and when in thirst he stooped to drink the water would ebb and be gone.

Tantalus' brother Peckish, also wondering over the knowledge of the gods, asked Zeus which of three cards was the Queen and was cursed so that whenever he was mildly hungry there would be nothing in the cupboards, nor in the fridge, that he currently wished to eat.

[gnostotron]

I don't know much about gender but I know what I like.

[gnostotron]

Father's Day is the Waluigi of holidays

[gnostotron]

"Wichita Lineman" was the first true cyberpunk song.

[gnostotron]

ChatGPT and other LLMs are, at heart, Silicon Valley's automation of "mansplaining" - given any sort of prompt they confidently respond with something that they read once but don't remember exactly, conflated with some other things they read and only vaguely recall.

[gnostotron]

Love the new portrait of King Charles

[gnostotron]

I never do anything for shits and giggles. Everything I do for shits is deadly serious.

[gnostotron]

I AM big. It's the sitcoms that got small

-- Jerry Seinfeld

[gnostotron]

It's weird that society focuses on the exterior anatomical details of my body when I was born since so much has changed since then.  I mean, I’m much taller now and not nearly as cute.  I also had some really crazy ideas about how the world worked before I figured out the whole “object permanence” thing.  Do I really want to be defined now by the person I was then?

Thoughts on cis-ness

I think that we cis people don’t talk about gender enough.  I mean *our* gender, as we experience it in ourselves, not in the wider shitshow that is society.  And I get it. I mean, I'm cis - when I was born the doctor took a look, said "this is a dude" and the little voice in my head shrugged, said “sure”, and then I proceeded to not have to think about my gender ever again.

Ignoring the fact that this is one of those exceedingly rare occasions when a doctor is correct in their initial diagnosis, what kind of tests did they do to identify me as male?  Did they do any genetic tests to see what chromosomes I was carrying?  Nope.  Did they, I don’t know, test the levels of testosterone and estrogen in my blood?  Ha ha ha no.  No, all they did was look to see if I had a dick, or at least something approximately dick-like.  That’s it.

Now here’s the thing - if I were to lose my junk in a bizarre gardening accident that little voice in my head wouldn’t suddenly say “welp, you’re not a dude anymore”.  Heck, society wouldn’t say I wasn’t a dude anymore because nobody gets to see what I’m packing unless I explicitly give my permission (or unless I get up at night for a glass of water and can’t be arsed about closing the curtains).

If losing my junk now wouldn’t affect my perception of myself as “male”, then it wouldn’t have affected me had it happened last year.  Or thirty years ago. Or when I was a child.  Or even when I was in utero - fetal development is a crazy time.  But if it had happened before the doctor got a chance to tick the “m” or “f” box, I wouldn’t be cis - I would be trans.

And that’s all there is to it.  Oh, there’s more details you can dig into, like “where does this little voice in my head come from?” - well, it’s in my head so it obviously isn’t something dangling between my legs.  It probably comes from the same mix of genetic and developmental pressures that make me, say, right-handed instead of left handed or ambidextrous.  

What seems weird to me now is that I was a middle-aged man before I realized how fucked up it was that I had never even thought of questioning my gender.  It just never crossed my mind, even though I had agonized over practically *everything else* - how I fit in my family, how I fit in society, my sexual orientation, whether or not there was a god, heck, whether there was even an “objective reality” in any meaningful sense.  I spent a lot of time questioning my sanity (mind you there were lots of people questioning my sanity, so I was in good company).  But somehow whether or not I was a dude *never crossed my mind*.  AND I was a fey, small, non-athletic boy in the 1970s and if there was one defining quality of the social milieu of boys at the time (I’m hoping it’s less of a thing now) is that it was an unremitting assault of attacks on one's masculinity.

We all question the world we were born into, we just don’t all question the same things.  I think it’s helpful to remember this when presented with ideas that we find so ingrained that we don’t even know how they could ever be questioned.