#have i mentioned that my algorithm is fucked beyond belief

[thecircularsystem]

in the post i’m going to link, you mentioned the CDD communities that you’ve flourished in? i’m wondering if you can share those.

i’m currently (algorithmically) stuck in the “syscourse” tag. it’s helping me learn a lot about different views on terms and experiences but Fuck is it draining.

really want to shift to a more broadly positive view of this disorder. i want to learn how to collaborate with it.

https://www.tumblr.com/thecircularsystem/778849016767283200/im-sorry-your-life-is-like-this-as-a-did

The first one I had success in is The Survivors Network discord. I’m uncertain who runs it now, if it still exists, or if it’s open for new members. It was originally marketed as a CDD server with a heavy skewing of anti-endos sentiment, and the syscourse was definitely present in the server, albeit behind role-locked channels. You would have to have more self restraint than I had to not get sucked in. That server helped me understand a lot more of the medical side of things.

The server I was specifically thinking of with this post is CDD Gardens, which is a lovely server ran by members of the plural community. It’s inclusive to all systems, but specifically it’s a CDD focused space to rest, relax, and heal together. It’s helped me feel more like a person, and this space has never made me feel demonized for opinions or beliefs I may have for my own system. It’s been incredibly healing and has helped me accept more of my own life.

Beyond that, I find a lot of servers with CDD systems, join them, and befriend some systems. I DM with them. I make private servers of friends to hang out with and that helps.

[somnilogical]

<<Over the past year, however, Google has appeared to clamp down. It has gradually scaled back opportunities for employees to grill their bosses and imposed a set of workplace guidelines that forbid “a raging debate over politics or the latest news story.” It has tried to prevent workers from discussing their labor rights with outsiders at a Google facility and even hired a consulting firm that specializes in blocking unions. Then, in November, came the firing of the four activists. The escalation sent tremors through the Google campus in Mountain View, Calif., and its offices in cities like New York and Seattle, prompting many employees — whether or not they had openly supported the activists — to wonder if the company’s culture of friendly debate was now gone for good.

(A Google spokeswoman would not confirm the names of the people fired on Nov. 25. “We dismissed four individuals who were engaged in intentional and often repeated violations of our longstanding data-security policies,” the spokeswoman said. “No one has been dismissed for raising concerns or debating the company’s activities.” Without naming Berland, Google disputed that investigators pressured him.)>>

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/18/magazine/google-revolt.html

<<“Of the five people that were fired, three of us are trans women,” Spiers said. “That is either an unbelievable coincidence or Google is targeting the most vulnerable.”

“Trans Googlers make up a very small percentage of Googlers,” she added. “They make up a slightly larger percentage of organizers, but not 60%.”>>

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/17/fifth-google-worker-activist-fired-in-a-month-says-company-is-targeting-the-vulnerable

i too am transfem and would "violate longstanding data-security policies" if my organization were being unjust. i wouldnt say that unless it were already obvious by what bits ive leaked to people about my life, because otherwise i could suppress this information and whistleblow more.

if you were an evil corp at this point youd probably try to avoid hiring any trans women in the first place because given this happens to you, its likely done by a transfem. not that this saved CFAR, who never hired a trans woman, from having a bunch of transfems whistleblow on them despite not being employees.

from what ive read from transfem google employees who are or were involved in activism, the degredation of google's culture. their complicity with ICE and weapons manufacturing mirrors CFAR's with OpenAI and DeepMind; authoritarianism and expulsion of transfems who object to this among a myriad of wrongs. to protect the territory of injustice and complicity with organizations like ICE, google needs to import "a consulting firm that specializes in blocking unions", CFAR needs to violate their whistleblower policy. if you once protect injustice, justice is ever after your enemy. morality isnt some modular thing such that you can be comitted to protecting injustice and not have this choice spiral into also invoking and protecting systems that protect injustice and invoking further things to protect those, recursively. all the way down to doing really dumb and obvious unjust things like transmisogyny (lots of future posts), changing your fundraiser after its clear its losing money, announcing that this year you got way below your donation target and claim to have no idea why.

well *i* know the compact generator for all of these things, and that makes me strong. unlike MIRI/CFAR who like the CDC rely on gaslighting the populace for myopic gains. i also wore a particle mask during the time that the CDC claimed that they were useless to preventing spread of disease, so it was really important to give them to doctors and nurses.

after so much gaslighting, *i* have built up general capabilities at arbitraging the difference between what agents claim and the truth. people who say:

<<Edit: This is a type of post that should have been vetted with someone for infohazards and harms before being posted, and (Further edit) I think it should have been removed by the authors., though censorship is obviously counterproductive at this point.

Infohazards are a real thing, as is the Unilateralists’s curse. (Edit to add: No, infohazards and unilateralist’s curse are not about existential or global catastrophic risk. Read the papers.) And right now, overall, reduced trust in CDC will almost certainly kill people. Yes, their currently political leadership is crappy, and blameworthy for a number of bad decisions—but it doesn’t change the fact that undermining them now is a very bad idea.

Yes, the CDC has screwed up many times, but publicly blaming them for things that were non-obvious (like failing to delay sending out lab kits for further testing,) or that they screwed up, and everyone paying attention including them now realizes they got wrong (like being slow to allow outside testing,) in the middle of a pandemic seems like exactly the kind of consequence-blind action that lesswrongers should know better than to engage in.

Disclaimer: I know lots of people at CDC, including some in infectious diseases, and have friends there. They are human, and get things wrong under pressure—and perhaps there are people who would do better, but that’s not the question at hand.>>

https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/h4vWsBBjASgiQ2pn6/credibility-of-the-cdc-on-sars-cov-2/comment/uDYbgf3QtEQirbsJk

havent. its easy to see how peoples minds are warped when its someone elses glowy thing, when its someone elses friends working for an institution that that someone else routed their hopes through.

its easier to recognize betrayal and see knowledge beyond the veil when its happening to someone else, instead of you.

until you build up general skills for recognizing it, this sort of betrayal isnt infinitely powerful. and like how you might expect that smart people who live for predation would do anti-inductive smart predatory things, but they end up converging on child sex rings; institutions that betray you, because justice is their enemy will start doing dumb unjust things like banning two people from speaking about their irl experiences with anna salamon, saying their first-hand accounts werent evidence and then citing anna salamon's first-hand account of the meeting as evidence. when i objected that this was a fucked up self-serving ontology of "evidence" they acted like i was objecting to "beliefs flow from evidence" and they acted as if what i was saying was obscure and beyond their ability to comprehend. their "incomprehension" was fake, downstream of a fear to dynamically compute things in front of other people that might end up outside the orthodoxy. the result of which is they display a blue screen of death and say “i just dont understand and aaa dont explain this to me!!!”. and then people agree that it "seems like it could be an infohazard" because when your goal is the preservation of the matrix, everything that tears it down looks like hazardous information.

or a cfar employee, in response to claims that anna's transmisogyny influences CFAR's hiring choices, claiming that anna salamon, head of CFAR, is not involved in CFAR's hiring. until i post proof from another CFAR employee pursuing personal vengeance against the org for hiring their rapist where its tangentially mentioned and they suddenly "realize" that anna salamon, head of CFAR, is involved in CFAR's hiring process.

or a thousand other injustices that have burned themselves into my brain during my months of talking with people under the assumption that they were simply mistaken in their path to saving the world. when they were actually un-mistaken in their path to having babies and a low chance of personal death. hoping and expecting someone else will take heroic responsibility for the planet.

like when you drill down to the base of injustice, it bottoms out in dumb and petty injustice. like the structure doesnt go infinitely high and complex, if you go down to the base level, you just need a bit of courage to not flinch away from what you see even if it seems that it means the ruin of something you ran your hopes and dreams through.

--

"isnt this a little... extreme?" i hear some people ask. ""dont protect regions of injustice?" that sounds like the end product of obsessive compulsive fixation on virtue at the expense of practicality."

well, assuming the algorithm seeding this response is a systemic reasoning tool, it should forkbomb when you consider if youd output ""dont protect regions of untruth?" that sounds like the end product of obsessive compulsive fixation on virtue at the expense of practicality." in response to eliezers essay. the principle behind both is the same such that if you hold by one you should hold by the other.

all of these things have parallels. if you want to see what is happening with MIRI/CFAR, theres a lot of mutual information with whats happening with Google.

[meeedeee]

Cancel Culture: The Internet Eating Itself RSS FEED OF POST WRITTEN BY FOZMEADOWS

As social media platforms enter their collective adolescence – Facebook is fifteen, YouTube fourteen, Twitter thirteen, tumblr twelve – I find myself thinking about how little we really understand their cultural implications, both ongoing and for the future. At this point, the idea that being online is completely optional in modern world ought to be absurd, and yet multiple friends, having spoken to their therapists about the impact of digital abuse on their mental health, were told straight up to just stop using the internet. Even if this was a viable option for some, the idea that we can neatly sidestep the problem of bad behaviour in any non-utilitarian sphere by telling those impacted to simply quit is baffling at best and a tacit form of victim-blaming at worst. The internet might be a liminal space, but object permanence still applies to what happens here: the trolls don’t vanish if we close our eyes, and if we vanquish one digital hydra-domain for Toxicity Crimes without caring to fathom the whys and hows of what went wrong, we merely ensure that three more will spring up in its place.

Is the internet a private space, a government space or a public space? Yes.

Is it corporate, communal or unaffiliated? Yes.

Is it truly global or bound by local legal jurisdictions? Yes.

Does the internet reflect our culture or create it? Yes.

Is what people say on the internet reflective of their true beliefs, or is it a constant shell-game of digital personas, marketing ploys, intrusive thoughts, growth-in-progress, personal speculation and fictional exploration? Yes.

The problem with the internet is that takes up all three areas on a Venn diagram depicting the overlap between speech and action, and while this has always been the case, we’re only now admitting that it’s a bug as well as a feature. Human interaction cannot be usefully monitored using an algorithm, but our current conception of What The Internet Is has been engineered specifically to shortcut existing forms of human oversight, the better to maximise both accessibility (good to neutral) and profits (neutral to bad). Uber and Lyft are cheaper, frequently more convenient alternatives to a traditional taxi service, for instance, but that’s because the apps themselves are functionally predicated on the removal of meaningful customer service and worker protections that were hard-won elsewhere. Sites like tumblr are free to use, but the lack of revenue generated by those users means that, past a certain point, profits can only hope to outstrip expenses by selling access to those users and/or their account data, which means in turn that paying to effectively monitor their content creation becomes vastly less important than monetising it.

Small wonder, then, that individual users of social media platforms have learned to place a high premium on their ability to curate what they see, how they see it, and who sees them in turn. When I first started blogging, the largely unwritten rule of the blogsphere was that, while particular webforums dedicated to specific topics could have rules about content and conduct, blogs and their comment pages should be kept Free. Monitoring comments was viewed as a sign of narrow-minded fearfulness: even if a participant was aggressive or abusive, the enlightened path was to let them speak, because anything else was Censorship. This position held out for a good long while, until the collective frustration of everyone who’d been graphically threatened with rape, torture and death, bombarded with slurs, exhausted by sealioning or simply fed up with nitpicking and bad faith arguments finally boiled over.

Particularly in progressive circles, the relief people felt at being told that actually, we were under no moral obligation to let assholes grandstand in the comments or repeatedly explain basic concepts to only theoretically invested strangers was overwhelming. Instead, you could simply delete them, or block them, or maybe even mock them, if the offence or initial point of ignorance seemed silly enough. But as with the previous system, this one-size-fits-all approach soon developed a downside. Thanks to the burnout so many of us felt after literal years of trying to treat patiently with trolls playing Devil’s Advocate, liberal internet culture shifted sharply towards immediate shows of anger, derision and flippancy to anyone who asked a 101 question, or who didn’t use the right language, or who did anything other than immediately agree with whatever position was explained to them, however simply.

I don’t exempt myself from this criticism, but knowing why I was so goddamn tired doesn’t change my conviction that, cumulatively, the end result did more harm than good. Without wanting to sidetrack into a lengthy dissertation on digital activism in the post-aughties decade, it seems evident in hindsight that the then-fledgling alliance between trolls, MRAs, PUAs, Redditors and 4channers to deliberately exhaust left-wing goodwill via sealioning and bad faith arguments was only the first part of a two-pronged attack. The second part, when the left had lost all patience with explaining its own beliefs and was snappily telling anyone who asked about feminism, racism or anything else to just fucking Google it, was to swoop in and persuade the rebuffed party that we were all irrational, screeching harridans who didn’t want to answer because we knew our answers were bad, and why not consider reading Roosh V instead?

The fallout of this period, I would argue, is still ongoing. In an ideal world, drawing a link between online culture wars about ownership of SFF and geekdom and the rise of far-right fascist, xenophobic extremism should be a bow so long that not even Odysseus himself could draw it. But this world, as we’ve all had frequent cause to notice, is far from ideal at the best of times – which these are not – and yet another featurebug of the internet is the fluid interpermeability of its various spaces. We talk, for instance – as I am talking here – about social media as a discreet concept, as though platforms like Twitter or Facebook are functionally separate from the other sites to which their users link; as though there is no relationship between or bleed-through from the viral Facebook post screencapped and shared on BuzzFeed, which is then linked and commented upon on Reddit, which thread is then linked to on Twitter, where an entirely new conversation emerges and subsequently spawns an article in The Huffington Post, which is shared again on Facebook and the replies to that shared on tumblr, and so on like some grizzly perpetual mention machine.

But I digress. The point here is that internet culture is best understood as a pattern of ripples, each new iteration a reaction to the previous one, spreading out until it dissipates and a new shape takes its place. Having learned that slamming the virtual door in everyone’s face was a bad idea, the online left tried establishing a better, calmer means of communication; the flipside was a sudden increase in tone-policing, conversations in which presentation was vaunted over substance and where, once again, particular groups were singled out as needing to conform to the comfort-levels of others. Overlapping with this was the move towards discussing things as being problematic, rather than using more fixed and strident language to decry particular faults – an attempt to acknowledge the inherent fallibility of human works while still allowing for criticism. A sensible goal, surely, but once again, attempting to apply the dictum universally proved a double-edged sword: if everything is problematic, then how to distinguish grave offences from trifling ones? How can anyone enjoy anything if we’re always expected to thumb the rosary of its failings first?

When everything is problematic and everyone has the right to say so, being online as any sort of creator or celebrity is like being nibbled to death by ducks. The well-meaning promise of various organisations, public figures or storytellers to take criticism on board – to listen to the fanbase and do right by their desires – was always going to stumble over the problem of differing tastes. No group is a hivemind: what one person considers bad representation or in poor taste, another might find enlightening, while yet a third party is more concerned with something else entirely. Even in cases with a clear majority opinion, it’s physically impossible to please everyone and a type of folly to try, but that has yet to stop the collective internet from demanding it be so. Out of this comes a new type of ironic frustration: having once rejoiced in being allowed to simply block trolls or timewasters, we now cast judgement on those who block us in turn, viewing them, as we once were viewed, as being fearful of criticism.

Are we creating echo chambers by curating what we see online, or are we acting in pragmatic acknowledgement of the fact that we neither have time to read everything nor an obligation to see all perspectives as equally valid? Yes.

Even if we did have the time and ability to wade through everything, is the signal-to-noise ratio of truth to lies on the internet beyond our individual ability to successfully measure, such that outsourcing some of our judgement to trusted sources is fundamentally necessary, or should we be expected to think critically about everything we encounter, even if it’s only intended as entertainment? Yes.

If something or someone online acts in a way that’s antithetical to our values, are we allowed to tune them out thereafter, knowing full well that there’s a nearly infinite supply of as-yet undisappointing content and content-creators waiting to take their place, or are we obliged to acknowledge that Doing A Bad doesn’t necessarily ruin a person forever? Yes.

And thus we come to cancel culture, the current – but by no means final – culmination of previous internet discourse waves. In this iteration, burnout at critical engagement dovetails with a new emphasis on collective content curation courtesies (try saying that six times fast), but ends up hamstrung once again by differences in taste. Or, to put it another way: someone fucks up and it’s the last straw for us personally, so we try to remove them from our timelines altogether – but unless our friends and mutuals, who we still want to engage with, are convinced to do likewise, then we haven’t really removed them at all, such that we’re now potentially willing to make failure to cancel on demand itself a cancellable offence.

Which brings us right back around to the problem of how the modern internet is fundamentally structured – which is to say, the way in which it’s overwhelmingly meant to rely on individual curation instead of collective moderation. Because the one thing each successive mode of social media discourse has in common with its predecessors is a central, and currently unanswerable question: what universal code of conduct exists that I, an individual on the internet, can adhere to – and expect others to adhere to – while we communicate across multiple different platforms?

In the real world, we understand about social behavioural norms: even if we don’t talk about them in those terms, we broadly recognise them when we see them. Of course, we also understand that those norms can vary from place to place and context to context, but as we can only ever be in one physical place at a time, it’s comparatively easy to adjust as appropriate.

But the internet, as stated, is a liminal space: it’s real and virtual, myriad and singular, private and public all at once. It confuses our sense of which rules might apply under which circumstances, jumbles the normal behavioural cues by obscuring the identity of our interlocutors, and even though we don’t acknowledge it nearly as often as we should, written communication – like spoken communication – is a skill that not everyone has, just as tone, whether spoken or written, isn’t always received (or executed, for that matter) in the way it was intended. And when it comes to politics, in which the internet and its doings now plays no small role, there’s the continual frustration that comes from observing, with more and more frequency, how many literal, real-world crimes and abuses go without punishment, and how that lack of consequences contributes in turn to the fostering of abuse and hostility towards vulnerable groups online.

This is what comes of occupying a transitional period in history: one in which laws are changed and proposed to reflect our changing awareness of the world, but where habit, custom, ignorance, bias and malice still routinely combine, both institutionally and more generally, to see those laws enacted only in part, or tokenistically, or not at all. To take one of the most egregious and well-publicised instances that ultimately presaged the #MeToo movement, the laughably meagre sentence handed down to Brock Turner, who was caught in the act of raping an unconscious woman, combined with the emphasis placed by both the judge and much of the media coverage on his swimming talents and family standing as a means of exonerating him, made it very clear that sexual violence against women is frequently held to be less important than the perceived ‘bright futures’ of its perpetrators.

Knowing this, then – knowing that the story was spread, discussed and argued about on social media, along with thousands of other, similar accounts; knowing that, even in this context, some people still freely spoke up in defence of rapists and issued misogynistic threats against their female interlocutors – is it any wonder that, in the absence of consistent legal justice in such cases, the internet tried, and is still trying, to fill the gap? Is it any wonder, when instances of racist police brutality are constantly filmed and posted online, only for the perpetrators to receive no discipline, that we lose patience for anyone who wants to debate the semantics of when, exactly, extrajudicial murder is “acceptable”?

We cannot control the brutality of the world from the safety of our keyboards, but when it exhausts or threatens us, we can at least click a button to mute its seeming adherents. We don’t always have the energy to decry the same person we’ve already argued against a thousand times before, but when a friend unthinkingly puts them back on our timeline for some new reason, we can tell them that person is cancelled and hope they take the hint not to do it again. Never mind that there is far too often no subtlety, no sense of scale or proportion to how the collective, viral internet reacts in each instance, until all outrage is rendered flat and the outside observer could be forgiven for worrying what’s gone wrong with us all, that using a homophobic trope in a TV show is thought to merit the same online response as an actual hate crime. So long as the war is waged with words alone, there’s only a finite number of outcomes that boycotting, blocking, blacklisting, cancelling, complaining and critiquing can achieve, and while some of those outcomes in particular are well worth fighting for, so many words are poured towards so many attempts that it’s easy to feel numbed to the process; or, conversely, easy to think that one response fits all contexts.

I’m tired of cancel culture, just as I was dully tired of everything that preceded it and will doubtless grow tired of everything that comes after it in turn, until our fundamental sense of what the internet is and how it should be managed finally changes. Like it or not, the internet both is and is of the world, and that is too much for any one person to sensibly try and curate at an individual level. Where nothing is moderated for us, everything must be moderated by us; and wherever people form communities, those communities will grow cultures, which will develop rules and customs that spill over into neighbouring communities, both digitally and offline, with mixed and ever-changing results. Cancel culture is particularly tricky in this regard, as the ease with which we block someone online can seldom be replicated offline, which makes it all the more intoxicating a power to wield when possible: we can’t do anything about the awful coworker who rants at us in the breakroom, but by God, we can block every person who reminds us of them on Twitter.

The thing about participating in internet discourse is, it’s like playing Civilisation in real-time, only it’s not a game and the world keeps progressing even when you log off. Things change so fast on the internet – memes, etiquette, slang, dominant opinions – and yet the changes spread so organically and so fast that we frequently adapt without keeping conscious track of when and why they shifted. Social media is like the Hotel California: we can check out any time we like, but we can never meaningfully leave – not when world leaders are still threatening nuclear war on Twitter, or when Facebook is using friendly memes to test facial recognition software, or when corporate accounts are creating multi-staffed humansonas to engage with artists on tumblr, or when YouTube algorithms are accidentally-on-purpose steering kids towards white nationalist propaganda because it makes them more money.

Of course we try and curate our time online into something finite, comprehensible, familiar, safe: the alternative is to embrace the near-infinite, incomprehensible, alien, dangerous gallimaufry of our fractured global mindscape. Of course we want to try and be critical, rational, moral in our convictions and choices; it’s just that we’re also tired and scared and everyone who wants to argue with us about anything can, even if they’re wrong and angry and also our relative, or else a complete stranger, and sometimes you just want to turn off your brain and enjoy a thing without thinking about it, or give yourself some respite, or exercise a tiny bit of autonomy in the only way you can.

It’s human nature to want to be the most amount of right for the least amount of effort, but unthinkingly taking our moral cues from internet culture the same way we’re accustomed to doing in offline contexts doesn’t work: digital culture shifts too fast and too asymmetrically to be relied on moment to moment as anything like a universal touchstone. Either you end up preaching to the choir, or you run a high risk of aggravation, not necessarily due to any fundamental ideological divide, but because your interlocutor is leaning on a different, false-universal jargon overlying alternate 101 and 201 concepts to the ones you’re using, and modern social media platforms – in what is perhaps the greatest irony of all – are uniquely poorly suited to coherent debate.

Purity wars in fandom, arguments about diversity in narrative and whether its proponents have crossed the line from criticism into bullying: these types of arguments are cyclical now, dying out and rekindling with each new wave of discourse. We might not yet be in a position to stop it, but I have some hope that being aware of it can mitigate the worst of the damage, if only because I’m loathe to watch yet another fandom steadily talk itself into hating its own core media for the sake of literal argument.

For all its flaws – and with all its potential – the internet is here to stay. Here’s hoping we figure out how to fix it before its ugliest aspects make us give up on ourselves.

          from shattersnipe: malcontent & rainbows https://ift.tt/2V13Qu4 via IFTTT

[witchuscanadia]

personally I actually hate the theory. one it places in a superiority complex "my child is better" or "I'm better than others" but also because the 'symptoms' of an indigo child is basically symptoms of ADHD, anxiety, depression and so on. there's usually a "creative and seemingly smart beyond their years but struggle heavily in focusing and completing work" element which is at core with stuff that happens to people with ADHD.

my main issue with it is the resistance to getting your possible indigo child diagnosed or help because "meds will dampen their abilities" and it is the more fucking harmful thing on the planet. maybe I somehow triggered the algorithm because of my searches but after looking up stuff for my ADHD and it's symptoms I was suddenly inundated with indigo child articles telling me to stop my meds and 'just tell yourself to feel better' rhetoric. while I'm sure some of the creative teachings and suggestions on other ways to help your child would be good if the parent is a critical reader, the problem is people would rather latch onto the idea their child is special than have a mental illness. I know so, the term indigo child wasn't new when I found those articles because my mum mentioned it offhandedly to my counselor a number of times and her resistance to my possible having a mental illness didn't let go until multiple professionals said I did.

I wouldn't be so irked if this line of thinking didn't bleed into the help books of those suffering from ADHD, both stand alone on their own and their beliefs shoved into books I wasn't anticipating them to be in. I wouldn't be so irked if these theories didn't tell an individual that their child is more connected to a higher power and they can get closer to divinity and higher self thru their child (I am not kidding).

it's a theory I hate because its just another spiritual new age theory that is against doctors and diagnosis, crying about harmful chemicals and being more natural and born better than everyone else.

what's your take on the indigo/crystal/rainbow child phenomena? do you think it's true that certain people are being born with souls initially more spiritually advanced than most? i already have some personal found info on it but i don't see many witches discuss it; it's always hippies that are all "love and light" and kind of give it a weird and somewhat twisted image.

I don’t actually know much about it/don’t have the energy to look into rn but I’d love to hear what other witches think!

Reblog/comment with your opinions and thoughts! ✨