Christine Lemmer-Webber
Every time I see someone bring up "IQ scores" I feel the need to repeat: IQ scores were literally invented by eugenicists and they've always been biased towards privilege
Also if you haven't noticed, once someone starts to believe they're a genius, they start to think a lot less clearly.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
As a child, I was run through a system that seemed extremely concerned that I was mentally deficient and incapable. As an adult, since hitting certain kinds of prominence, I've had a lot of people try to convince me that I'm a genius.
I shoot it down also because I fear that some day I might believe it, and I will also become an insufferable asshole, just like everyone else who thinks they're a genius
But I also know well enough, it's stubborn enthusiasm, privileged access, luck, not "genius"
Christine Lemmer-Webber
The big difference for me is that there was a middle period where, when I was going to fail out of high school, when I was socially ostracized, when I was on the verge of suicide, I had a rare opportunity to get transferred to an alternative school, largely considered a "last resort" school, but where I learned to flourish and love learning and love myself. No homework, theoretically you only had to go for half a day, all students at their own pace.
I loved it so much I would often go all day
Christine Lemmer-Webber
There is no "genius", only learning to love learning and doing, and having access to do so. The problem is that we teach children to loathe education and self-embetterment in all sorts of ways. And for adults, few are given opportunities or encouragement to be able to explore thoughtfully and contribute. Few people can grow into themselves.
We don't teach people to "learn to learn" enough, or to feel that they can love learning, or to give people a chance to *do things*.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
Worse yet, with a world falling into despair, corporate technology systems are feeding into addiction cycles of our own internal feedback mechanisms.
When people have such little agency in their lives, of course they're just going to lean on the dopamine release lever.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
Recently Paul Graham wrote that awful "wokeness" article. It's funny, because Paul Graham every now and then can say insightful things, but less and less so, and at one point he wrote something that was really on the nose but not very self aware: The Acceleration of Addictiveness https://paulgraham.com/addiction.html
The tl;dr is that everything is becoming more and more addictive: food, drinks, media, games, everything. There's a feedback cycle for it.
Well, he's right. But of course there's the irony...
Christine Lemmer-Webber
The simple irony is that as an advocate for hypercapitalism, the very reason everything is becoming more addictive is... well, it's hypercapitalism. Companies are given the feedback cycle to make you more and more hooked on their systems because that's what makes them more profitable.
Where "capitalism" begins and ends in history I think is fuzzier than sometimes acknowledged but for me the dividing line is money becoming the *primary goal in society*. Hypercapitalism is the accelerated state.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
Do you know what happens if a rat is given a lever where it can lean on it to invoke its pleasure center? It will lean on it until it dies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_stimulation_reward#Strength_of_drive
Who should we blame for the rat leaning on the lever? Was it a moral failing of the rat? Clearly, upon realizing that *any* rat will lean on the lever until it dies, we realize it is the system that is set up that is to blame, not the rat.
How does this affect agency?
Christine Lemmer-Webber
Who and what do you want to be? This is a matter of agency.
If I presented several potential futures for you, one where you made artwork, one where you solved scientific problems, one where you helped the less fortunate, and one where you leaned on a stimulation lever until you could do nothing else, which would you choose?
Agency is a thing that is grown and cultivated, but it is not possible in a system which is set up for failure. Who do we blame for the death of the rat against the lever?
Christine Lemmer-Webber
On the one hand, it appears that the rat is choosing to lean against the lever of its own free will, but clearly that isn't true if every rat, provided with that initial stimulation, could no longer resist leaning on it until their death.
A fertile ground for agency to bloom must be grown, cultivated, and nurtured, like a garden. We must provide a system in which people can grow to be themselves.
Jules
@cwebber we blame the people for not having "self control" rather than the the ones who set up the temptation in the first place. We shame people for eating high calorie foods instead of criticising people who design things devoid of nutrition to be delicious. We blame people for taking out credit cards and getting into debt rather than those who set the high interest traps for them. We design apps to be ever more addictive and then complain about young peoples' attention spans.
Rich Felker
@cwebber The original IQ test literally had questions to evaluate beauty/ugliness of human faces. With the obvious expected racist answers. The whole premise was racism/eugenics. No better than tests used to gatekeep ballots. Anyone who tries to brag about their "IQ" or willfully takes such a test is garbage and a clown.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
I don't enjoy discussions of intelligence or genius as intrinsics. Every time someone brings up the "Pareto Principle" I get grossed out.
It may be true that certain individuals are able to outperform others. But what are the conditions that allowed them to do so?
It does not remove someone's accomplishments to say they had help in getting there.
But a system of intentional disparity means that the majority of people get left behind. We have to sell that this is fair somehow.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
So, I am not interested in IQ scores. I am not interested in "genius". I am interested in helping people be able to be their best selves. We can't do that without giving people an environment where that's possible.
That's what matters to me. That's what gives me life.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
And there's a big tie in, within the end, of the reasons people are frustrated with AI.
People bring up "copyright violation", environmental concerns, etc etc.
But imagine we built an AI that could produce impressive artwork, code, music, and it had no serious environmental impact or violation of copyright concerns. Would you still find it depressing?
I am guessing yes.
I think the big missing part of the AI conversation is the loss of agency, of purpose in peoples' lives.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
I am not "against AI". I actually am very interested in building AI systems, but not the kinds which exist or are being pushed today.
To me, the important part of an AI system is its accountability.
We actually do hold much of our software accountable: if it does something bad, we actively change and repair it.
Corporations are rushing to flood the market with tools which don't care, have no accountability, don't have a stake in things.
That's depressing.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
The fact of the matter is that there's a rush to build AI tools which *replace people* and which aren't themselves participants, which don't care, which don't take joy in producing things, and hey, we can simply scrape all the annoying artists and programmers and writers and etc out of the way for maximum cash!
A few years ago, we were promised a world where AI would take over menial tasks so people can focus on their art.
Now we're being told artists don't matter.
And that's *depressing*.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
The world is so depressing right now. One of the *only* reasons I am able to get up every day and face it is that I have work with @spritely where I think we can do something meaningful and interesting to change it, and bring hope. That and the wonderful people in my life are what keeps me going.
And it's *still* incredibly hard to get up in the morning.
But I believe we can do better, we can build tools and spaces for a world worth living in.
I have to believe it. I have to, to keep going.
🗦 𝙴𝚞𝚋𝚒𝚎 𝙳𝚛𝚎𝚠 🗧（🦣)
The crucial relationship that hypercapitalists miss is that economies are not built on money itself, but on the very rats that they are killing.
The logical conclusion of their process is a few pampered rich guys (guys, not people, not children...guys.) plus a few virtual robots and physical robots, and nothing else. The rest is disposed of.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
I have said before that my primary life philosophy is an "Ethics of Agency", and I have talked about this before on a podcast episode https://fossandcrafts.org/episodes/11-an-ethics-of-agency.html
I'm not interested in "happiness" as much, because I don't want a rat that leans on a lever. The "ethics of agency" thinking is a rough approach modification of utilitarianism that replaces the measurements of "happiness" and "suffering" in Utilitarianism with "agency" and "subjection".
But "subjection" is weighed more heavily.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
@aeva I think casting doubt on PaulG is good and fair. Stopped clocks and all that though.
aeva
@cwebber I'm going to cast doubt on this. How could the guy who is rich enough to never eat normal people food know anything about normal people food? Remember the wonderful keynote he gave that one year we went to pycon together? He's a petulant little man who doesn't want to read his email or go to the doctor.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
It's not agency for the individual, it's agency *for everyone*. The goal is to improve the agency of all. But the purpose is still about agency, so you *do* care about individuals, in that the entire point is that a person is able to be and define their best selves. So there's a push-pull effect.
It's imperfect, but it's how I think about things. It's just one lens of many, but it's the main one I think about things through, in terms of ethics.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
@aeva Would love to see evidence of that, if you have a paper please provide it!
But I still think it's the case that even if the rat starts leaning on the drugs button, *it's not the rat's fault*, and that's my main point. My main point was that the rat was provided a system in which the rat couldn't win.
So even if that's true, that still holds to my point: we shouldn't blame the rat, we should blame the system.
aeva
@cwebber I read somewhere that this only holds if the rat is trapped in an unstimulating environment. If provided an adequately stimulating environment, the rat will ignore the drugs button.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
But the real point is that: we should be constructing the best world we can in which people can thrive.
Measurements and metrics can be useful, if taken in aggregate, but we know full well that any metric that is used as a primary goal ends up becoming its own tyrannical destruction of the rest. (And thus, it's not surprising that money as the primary goal ends up being hyperdestructive.)
I don't want to "know who's better". I want to help people be able to be better.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
This was an unexpected detour rant for the middle of the day. But it's something I care about. Perhaps I will collect it into a blogpost later.
I guess I will summarize, then leave the thread here...
Christine Lemmer-Webber
It's incredibly easy to be full of despair right now. I get it, I feel it too.
Don't let anyone tell you that the people who are doing the best are because they *deserve* it or are "geniuses".
And also don't let anyone tell you that a group of people who by and large who seem to be suffering and aren't doing as well relative to the metrics of the system is because they're not worthy or have failed themselves.
We have to try to build the best world for each other we can, the best we can.
💜
anomaly 🌹
@cwebber sounds like you're probably already aware of it, but the Rat Park experiment really gets to the heart of this. It turns out if you keep rats in an idyllic enclosure that meets all of their natural sensory and social needs, not just the typical depressing bare essentials terrarium that provides a minimum of food, water, and shelter - they *don't* choose the pleasure lever until they die. They end up mostly ignoring it to live a nice fulfilling life with their friends instead.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
Okay, I will add one more thing. Multiple people (thx @stellarskylark, @aeva, @martinvermeer) have brought up "Rat Park", a counterstudy where rats, if given a sufficiently stimulating environment, won't lean on the lever until they die. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
This is actually great and in line with what I really wanted to point out, which is that the problem is that we shouldn't blame the individual, we should blame the environment. What environment do we give people?
So yes, yay, rat park!
jandi
@cwebber @stellarskylark @aeva @martinvermeer In multilingual comic form: https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/rat-park/#page-1
Shauna GM
@cwebber I love everything about this thread.
I see in the link to your Foss and Crafts episode that you reference Amartya Sen - and thus, presumably, the Capability Approach. (I don't remember if the stuff you're doing with Goblins is explicitly tied into this or if it's just a coincidence of naming!)
Anyway this thread made me think of a really good Rutger Claassen article that uses the Capability Approach to redefine agency:
Aphrodite ☑️ :boost_ok:
As a child, I had an IQ in the 300 range.
As an adult, I’m easily in the 140 range, but I’m also a bloody idiot.
Knowing that ol’ boy Socrates knew more than me because at least he could hold an audience and a job is humbling and grounding if I ever start to get too big for my britches.
:)
May Likes Toronto 🎃
@cwebber When I was teaching, there was this one kid who struggled so hard with (probably) undiagnosed dyslexia and dysgraphia that new never learned to read 3 letter words like "the" or "dog". At 14.
But he was smart and articulate. So while I forced him to practice writing and slowly start the extremely hard process of learning to read, I tested him on all the other subjects verbally. Kid was brilliant!
His mom knocked on my door when the report cards came out with tears in her eyes. He had never passed ANYTHING before.
He deserved that grade. He eventually graduated. Even now, he describes reading as trying to catch words floating down the rapids.
Dan Sugalski
@cwebber The only thing IQ scores are good for is as a quick sorting function -- anyone who goes on about how high their IQ is can generally be dropped right into the "raging douchebag" category and ignored with some enthusiasm.
NiftyLinks
@cwebber oh, that's a much better statement of imperative for the political ethics I've been tinkering with for a few decades. I'm always thinking of maximizing freedom, generally focused on the least free individual, but agency captures that maybe better and with less nationalistic cruft.
And suffering must needs be a constraint. I'd like to think I'd walk away from Omelas.
Thanks for the useful thoughts!
JP
@cwebber i think a lot about the social construction of the concept of intelligence and i don't miss the word as a person-descriptor https://mastodon.social/@jplebreton/113391715578894582
John
We've been told artists don't matter for 50 years. I remember watching C-SPAN in the early 00s as Congress universally agreed that art adds nothing to the economy, and therefor should be de-emphasized in NCLB. This is after 20 years of underhanded defunding of public school arts education by neoliberals in both parties.
STEM continued the idea that the arts are vestigial and useless to our new super-economy.
And yet, people keep making it. "AI" won't change that, or even dent it.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
@ilookloud They were very supportive!
Dolls Against Gravity
@cwebber was it the staff being supportive there? Were you encouraged to look for things that you actually like learning about? It sounds so great.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
@RobertSE well, bridgy fed already exists and I don't really think that is my domain or responsibility
RobertSE
@cwebber Thank you. How about discussing building a bridge between #bsky an #mastodon ? For the sake of all of us?
Indieterminacy
@cwebber Theres a study on babies, where they are shown a board featuring a smiley trying to go up the hill. There are 2 others, one preventing the ascend, the other assisting.
The babies are offered the others -- they all universally reach for the assister, demonstrating empathy being a hardwired instinct.
Months later they repeat the test.
Its only then that the deviation from the babies to reach for the antagonist emerges -- its an acquired perspective/behaviour in these young meatsacks.
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