Notices by JNL (jnl@hcommons.social)

Man ok I bailed out too soon. Spouse just sent this

@dalias conflating the harm-causing elder generation with specifically those from within it who are parenting is honestly pretty offensive

@dalias I largely agree with you, though not in terms of where you imagine that intervention is justified when parenting. As a parent, I intervene in all kinds of ways, because my role with my kids is multivalent- it's a supportive role, it's an encouraging role, and it's a TEACHING role. We provide scaffolded support to our kids, naming goals, looking at the benchmarks that move our kids toward meeting them, and breaking the work toward those into pieces. One of my kids is autistic; some of those goals and benchmarks are social. Harm prevention, mostly to him, is a goal, but I "intervene," as you put it, well before harm happens.

There are certainly much more disinterested ways to parent. I don't practice them, and as someone who was in fact parented by the libertarian left (off grid and before it was cool), I don't condone them either. Hands-off harm is also harm.

A place where I break with the libertarian left (the anarchist left? neither of these feels quite correct) is in the idea that a minor child is basically an adult to whom society for some irrational reason just doesn't accord full agency.

I have a masters in education with a focus on the first 8 years of life for both SPED and gen ed--put another way, I have a grad degree that was an intensive study in cognitive development and family function. I am an ECSE. I talk about it relatively little here- it was awhile ago and life has gone in other directions, but I taught for a decade, and my degree is from what was then the top-ranked program in the US.

You have a FEELING that a kid is able to manifest and maintain adult-like agency in their lives.

I have SCIENCE that says they are not.

This includes teens, whose brains continue developing tremendously even through their early 20s, particularly in areas around things like impulse control.

We give some power to parents for a reason.

Thanks, y'all. Emily Bender it is--the list is otherwise just men talking. I am gonna mute this now; it was a quick-turnaround need, but I will loop back with it later because I also have a colloquium paper to write.

I could particularly use pieces that make explicit the eugenicist underpinnings, and eugenics-furthering-uses, of AI as a techno-theocratic project of class-tied heteropatriarchy (not to, uh, give my paper away or anything 😂 ... I'm not writing it to be novel; I'm writing it because my damn ministry colleagues are inexplicably bewitched)

Friends, if you had the opportunity to put an AI-critical reading in a list that otherwise is AI-curious (I did not have oversight of the list itself but I do get to add this one other thing), what would your one choice be? It can be a book, an essay, or something else.

@dalias @brian_gettler

speaking theologically, I witness that what matters IS ALSO IMPERFECTION, and our collective ability to embrace it, whatever we deem it to mean. For some, it means difference. For some, it means that which evokes shame. For some, it means not meeting a generalized standard of "value" or "efficiency." Our ability to be in the presence of that which purity culture and capitalism (which are more tied at the source and in the structures than many admit, which then pulls us straight into theology and actually, also into theodicy) deem to be discardable is essential to being humane with ourselves and with one another.

Teen2 woke this morning at the fucking crack of dawn because HS schedules are sadistic and he's in an honors music cohort, and came to find me TO SHARE HOW HIS WRITING WENT, and to plot the paragraph that he hasn't written yet but wants to

HE WENT TO SLEEP THINKING ABOUT WRITING

HE WOKE UP THINKING ABOUT WRITING

HE WOKE UP AND WANTED TO CONNECT WITH ME ABOUT HIS WRITING

Y'all if your teen wants to share writing with you in the first place, they are already bought in on this project

And they are secretly desperate to hear the same thing that we all, all the days of our lives, always are: that they are enough

that their words are enough
that what THEY can do toward this project is enough

TELL THEM THE HUMAN TRUTH

Tell them that their words, while they will be imperfect, are all we have

the striving toward them is sacred
the writing them is enough

the friction and limitation and frustration are how we learn

This witness WILL NOT ALIENATE your fumbling, hopeful, beautiful kid

I am less certain about, but willing to put my bets on, even the fig leaf of AI as "education" completely collapsing ten years from now

But your kid is learning NOW

don't let them be made bycatch

you've gotta give them the watch words and teach them the code if systems have bought in to keeping those things from this group of kids

Last night mattered, friends, in the life of this kid, and it didn't come with a flashing sign

Just a test, and a disconnect, and both of us deciding whether we would be with each other in bullshit

We are living through a shamelessly dishonest era, because wide-scale dishonesty makes it much easier to strip the sacredness from all of the human things that are also seen as 'lost profit'

At the end of the day, this kind of conversation is your kid asking if honesty matters

asking if the sweat and tears of their own EFFORT toward intellectual honesty matters

if your witness to them is 'yes,' you gotta say it

come through
they are asking you to tell them what's true

say it.

#fin

accompanying your adolescents and teens on their journey of development as writers with their own voice and capacity to wield language on the page for their own purposes is as punk as it gets in 2026

it's fucking seditious

it is a rebellious act that requires both you and your kid to turn against the flow

and I am absolutely certain that it is essential if "thought" is to continue to be one of our shared projects

Parents, if your teen learning to write matters to you; if you believe that your teen learning to write is absolutely essential to their learning to think and to their finding and guarding the essence of who they are, intellectually ... you've gotta have this conversation.

It's the new Make Good Choices; We Are Here for You

Because I'm me and this is how we do parenting and family, Teen2 and I then had a much fuller conversation about deskilling and how "wages" are the actual problem AI investment is trying to "solve," along with my passionate witness toward what learning to write at this age gets you. Kid is fortunately already pretty committed as a writer- he has discovered this magic and loves the power he feels with it- so this is more of a "don't lose the path" moment.

But friends, NO ONE is gonna have this talk with your kids if you don't.

They are just being relentlessly pressured and their role models are themselves pressured and have all of the ambivalent moral commitments and institutional confusion that the last two decades have sown

Teen2: Can I read you the opening paragraph of my essay?

Me: Of course

Teen: [reads thing indicating he has no idea how much time I have spent 'grading' AI generated essay content over the past couple of years]

Me: I ... do not want to hear what ChatGPT says about this

Teen: I swear, I didn't use Chat!

Me: I don't want to hear what ANY AI has to say. I only want to hear what YOU write. In your words. Your writing.

Teen: I ...

Me: [stare]

Teen: Ok I put it into Google. I can read you the original. But it's not as good.

Me: YES PLEASE

Teen: [reads good, human, high school essay intro paragraph]

Me: That, bro, is all I want. That is all anyone wants. Just bring me your writing. Just you. Nothing else.

Teen: But it has comma splices and stuff. And repeated words.

Me: YES. Please just bring that. I really do not want or need to hear what the predictive text machine says 1000 other people have said. I just want to hear YOU.

Teen: Ok. [Returns to read me paragraphs all evening]

I was trying to decide whether to delete Anaconda (which I have not thus far ended up using- my research has gone straight qual, and not in the way that pretends to be quants) and came across this story so wild and understandable and lamentable that I will be thinking about it forever

You will know about this if you're a coder; I am coming to it belatedly as a scholar of institutions and the way that left-surplus is a relentlessly attractive attack surface for malicious actors

It's worth following the links if you want the full bad actor, fake pile-on to actual OS coder, handwringing about inefficacy as actual evildoing, psychodrama

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/04/what-we-know-about-the-xz-utils-backdoor-that-almost-infected-the-world/

this is what happens when telemetry is used for things other than war

What if you saved all of your niche hate for poverty, weapons company profits, rent-seeking on necessities of life, and surveillance capitalism

I have thought of at least four hegemonically-important hate needs that are not included even in the wide-scope list above; realizing this made me wonder if this is why we juice social consensus toward hating trees and bats

Nearly every fruit tree you can plant in the US is "invasive." It really is not necessary to hate bradford pear trees quite as loudly as people do. We had an absolutely magical one in our front yard in Kansas- it was excellent in every way.

I don't go from place to place planting them, and I don't widely lament that they're on their way out, but you are subscribing to socially sanctioned hatred-as-sport in ranting and it's honestly fairly unreasonable. There are fewer and fewer of these trees every year; they are absolutely not coming to get you.

The church must be reminded that it is not the master or servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and critic of the state, and never its tool.

-Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr