metacogblog

[metacogblog]

Vocabulary

1. The Trolly Problem: “A recent lawsuit filed against Tesla reveals a critical key to understanding how its autopiloted cars would handle the iconic ‘trolley problem’ in ethics.” -Here’s How Tesla Solves a Self-Driving Crash Dilemma, Patrick Lin

The Trolly Problem: a question first posed by the contemporary British philosopher Philippa Foot as a qualified defense of the doctrine of double effect and as an argument for her thesis that negative duties carry significantly more weight in moral decision making than positive duties.

The classic, “would you redirect a train to kill one person over five? what if you knew the singular person?”

2. Mono no aware: “That feeling in your heart: It’s called mono no aware. It is a sense of the transience of all things in life.” -Mono No Aware, Ken Liu

Mono: thing(s)

No: possessive article for a noun

Aware: feeling/ sentiment

Mono No Aware: the deep feeling or pathos of things, the powerful emotions that objects can evoke or instil in us.

3. Go: “The perspective of Go is bigger.” -Mono No Aware, Ken Liu

Go: an abstract strategy board game for two players in which the aim is to surround more territory than the opponent.

4. Adaptive technology: “‘Disability drives innovation. It’s undeniable,’ said Joshua Miele, a blind adaptive technology designer who was recently named a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation’s ‘genius’ grant.” -Disability Drives Innovation, Shira Ovide

Adaptive Technology: something specifically designed for people with disabilities.

For example, can openers.

5. Compulsory Heterosexuality: “We live in a society influenced by compulsory heterosexuality where we assume that everyone is, and ought to be heterosexual”, The Privilege of Coming Out, Nancy J. Mezey

Compulsory Heterosexuality: the theory that heterosexuality is assumed and enforced upon people by a patriarchal and heteronormative society.

6. Silent Tolerance: “Although many lesbians of color did not want to directly come out to family and communities of origin, they managed to negotiate their sexual identities by following a ‘silent tolerance’, or ‘don't ask, don't tell’ practice.” The Privilege of Coming Out, Nancy J. Mezey

Silent Tolerance: unspoken acceptance.

May good, but is still rather harmful.

7. Prima Facie: “Prima Facie values; universal ethical principles, such as honesty and respect for others, exist and are considered to be self-evident and obvious to rational individuals of every culture.” -Ethical Positions, Sherri Diester

Prima Facie: Principles are binding unless it conflicts with another moral principle - if it does we have to choose between them.

8. Egalitarian: “Egalitarianism; the highest value is equality which means justice and opportunities distributed equally.” -Ethical Positions, Sherry Diester

Egalitarian: Relating to or believing in the principle that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities.

9. Utilitarian: “Utilitarianism; the highest value os that which promotes the greatest general happiness and minimizes unhappiness.” -Ethical Positions, Sherry Diester

Utilitarian: Actions are right if they are useful or for the benefit of a majority.

These ethical positions are all different ways of defining “the greater good.”

10. Hermetic: “He awoke with a start, ranting in his hermetic language and with tears in his eyes, and he flapped his wings a couple of times, which brought on a whirlwind of chicken dung and lunar dust and a gale of panic that did not seem to be of this world.” -A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Hermetic: relating to an ancient occult tradition encompassing alchemy, astrology, and theosophy.

11. Dulcet: “Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians.” -The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, Ursula K LeGuin

Dulcet: sweet and soothing.

Like pan dulce

12. Apathy: “The greatest danger to our future is apathy.” -The Power of One, Jane Goodall

Apathy: lack of interest, enthusiasm, or concern.

Please care.

13. Catastrophe: “Unlike the people living in the years before the First World War, we won’t be sandbagged by catastrophe.” -A Climate Plan for a World in Flames, Kim Stanley Robinson

Catastrophe: an event causing great and often sudden damage or suffering; a disaster.

Hell.

14. Socioeconomic: “I knew who left their first real apartments to move back into their childhood bedrooms, who was locked down in the mountains or by the beach, and whose socioeconomic backgrounds gave them no choice but to stay in cities hit hard by the plague.” -Are We “Generation Screwed”?, Jordan Salama

Socioeconomic: relating to or concerned with the interaction of social and economic factors.

Specifically, how those two intersect with each other.

[metacogblog]

Feedback Loops Go Beyond Physical Science

I remember being 14 years old, sitting in biology and learning about feedback loops. A positive feedback loop occurred when the product of a chemical reaction cause the reaction to happen more often, so the product being produced causes the product to continue to be produced. A negative feedback loop was when the product of a reaction caused the reaction to stop happening. The production of the product would stop the reaction from producing more product. I remember my teacher telling us that, in biology, negative feedback loops tended to be more common as they were self-regulating, which was very crucial in living biology.

Sitting in my messy dorm room, I realize everything is made of feedback loops. My desk and closet area is very messy, which only got that way because one time I put a jacket on the ground instead of away and left a pen out instead of putting it back in the pen cup. One jacket lead to a couple pairs of pants, which lead to my backpack, which lead to my water bottle, until suddenly I could barely see the floor. One pen lead to two, which lead to me leaving my laptop out, then my papers for school, until my desk looked like my floor. My mess was a positive feedback loop, the creation of a small mess pushed me to produce even more mess. This lead me to think about some examples of negative loops in my life, and I immediately thought of eating. I feel hungry, so I eat, which then would fill me up, and I no longer ate.

Thinking of my life in terms of loops that either encouraged or regulated themselves has given me insight on how I can, theoretically, change things. If I wanted to be less messy, I would have to try to change it from a positive to a negative feedback loop. The production of mess needs to inhibit the production of more mess. It is much easier said than done, but gives me an easier method of trying to visualize change.

[metacogblog]

AI and the art of emotion

Will the genuine canters and slow rolls of poets eventually teach AI the art of emotion? It’s such a human thing, but AI is growing so increasingly human as well. If an AI were to speak something that gave the implication of real, raw emotion, is it real emotion? If emotion is innately human, than the emotion of the AI must be fake, or if it is real, then the AI has transcended into humanhood. However, it is very likely that the AI is just emulating what it has learned emotion is. It very likely can learn the definition and implications of emotions, but can it ever really feel it.

AI has already started learning to make its own art, but even then it has an overall effect of being man-made, until you look at the details. In this AI-generated photo, for example, it looks very well made. Then you look closer, the eyes aren’t quite symmetrical, the hair folds weirdly behind the left ear, the cloth of the jacket almost seems to fold in unnatural ways. If AI were to try to generate its own emotional poetry based off of the works of others, would it also leave these unnatural mistakes? Would it try to rhyme heavy lead with someone loving to read?

If AI can’t even properly generate arts, then how would it ever fully learn the span of human emotions? It would likely have to do so in a language less capitalistic than English, one with more words relating to how people love, hurt, cry, feel joy and boredom.

[metacogblog]

A letter to 14 year-old me

I know I was just saying how much I hate these, it won’t travel back in time so you won’t ever see it, but this is for me.

If I tell you where we are now right out the gate, you would be very upset, you would probably cry and have a bit of a crisis. So I’m going to try to work around it at first.

I know you are unhappy in your classes because you know that you are settling. You are only settling because you are scared of not being good enough for advanced classes. You 100% are enough. Honestly, in some of those class you will *still* feel understimulated. Your work in this area will pay off, you will end up going a UC school. The UC system fades in and out of your top choices, but its the right choice.

People are going to come and go. I know you so badly just want everyone currently in your life to stay, but they won’t. Some will leave you, some you will leave. Some people come back. It’s just how things go. It will hurt so bad, and it will be so scary, but everyone leaves exactly when they should. You will be so angry and feel so abandoned, and sometimes you will need other people to tell you how unhealthy those relationships were (actually most of the time). One of your most important and loved friends doesn’t leave. You two actually make a pact to stay in touch, and do. You probably won’t realize how much you love them and your family until they aren’t around everyday. Right now, you and Courtney really do feel like just siblings, like you would never be friends unless you lived together. And it is very true for where you are and for a good while. You two are going to be very quickly pushed together by the universe into being really good friends. You two will never not irritate each other, but even so you love each other with a ferocity and loyalty that very few other relationships will replicate. Just do not ignore your sibling, because you two share blood, nothing will ever really separate you. Only Courtney and one other person, beside your parents, will *really* be with you forever.

I know right now you thin music will be your entire life. It certainly will be until you graduate, you kind of don’t have a choice unfortunately. It’s going to give you a lot of good experiences, lots of bad ones, and a lot of sweat dripping down your back. By the time you graduate will feel simultaneously like you were there for way too long, but also like you missed out on so much. In a away, both are true. Giving you details will riddle you with anxiety, but just know that you will have so many people understanding the pain you will experience in this area. After leaving and watching two seasons from outside, you will realize how happy you are to be out of it, even though you miss it. Music doesn’t die after high school. It will always be available. And you will never stop loving it.

I know questioning your identities is scary because you feel like you need to have a label for the ease of other people, but you really don’t. Most people don’t really care. Eventually you will realize who you are and how you relate to the people around you. Honestly, it’s going to hurt pretty bad, so please just be prepared for it. At first, when its only your friends who know, it won’t feel bad, but understanding how things will work on a macro level is going to bring hardships. There’s going to be days where you convince yourself you are lying to yourself, and others where you wish you never questioned anything at all. Some days you will just wish you were born differently.

A quick note, your views will shift radically soon, but as will a lot of people’s. This is why I won’t tell you exactly what’s happening now.

Moving really will teach you so much about yourself. I’m only four years ahead of you and I’m such a wildly different person, I don’t think you would even recognize me on the street. But that’s ok. Living away from home, you realize how much you *do* love going out, how much fun you have just doing things spontaneously. You don’t think it right now, but you do know what is best for you.

[metacogblog]

A letter from your future self

Dear 2023

You thought a letter *to* your future self was stupid. Just go along with it.

I know you badly want things to get better. It’s one of your greatest desires. You are going to stay until it does, you just can’t justify leaving things how they are.

Nothing has changed.

Well, a lot has, but nothing at all.

Technological advancements, you would think, have vastly improved the quality of life for everyone, but you know better. It hasn’t, the more our technologies advance the more corporations and CEOs demand of their workers. We haven’t left the age of corporations, if anything you are only at the beginning. When people realized it was getting bad. At your point, the Corporations have so much money, and therefore power, that no matter how many people want things to change, they just cannot. Not without major, likely violent, upheaval. Whether or not the violence is on the side of the proletariat or the bourgeoisie, it is the only thing that will lead to change. At your point, Corporations play a facade of progressiveness by empowering the voices and images of LGBT and POC people, think of the models at Target. While it is nice that they expand their advertising beyond the straight, white, cisgendered gaze, it is still advertising. It is still begging you to spend your money there. Money still runs the government. Nobody wants it to be this way, at this point, a good majority of people understand that our late-stage capitalism does not reward hard work, but old money. They realized too late.

I know this sounds dystopian, and it is. It is a dystopia plastered with inclusive advertising. Labor rights struggle to succeed because they are protesting their powerful Corporations, which control the government and legislation. There are a decent number of small businesses that treat their employees equitably, but they struggle to stay afloat. Their non-profit model is not meant to survive here. They constantly scrape the bank to make even. You either are poor and work reasonable hours, or have moderate money and are severely overworked.

Please let this remain your pessimistic, anxious, worst-case-scenario idea. Please push things to change. Sign petitions, go to protests, do anything you can. Please.

-2043