While I agree that saying "it IS antisemitism" is reductive, usually not very informative, and sometimes directly counterproductive -- I was very frustrated by the "Mother Gothel in Tangled stealing the blonde-haired-blue-eyed baby is an antisemitic stereotype", when like okay but much more proximately it is an anti-Rromani stereotype that is. like. still actively informing new laws and policy in certain countries to this day --

these things are, like, relevant to and within the larger complex that is deeply tied to antisemitism.

A major thing that antisemitism serves as is a repository for a particular mythological figure -- the subverting, embedded, overlooked threat that is, by being part of the community threatening it at its foundations. (For unambiguously Jewishness-tied examples, this is the Judaizing of Christian apologetics; the "What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering." of Marx; the "Jews will not replace us!" of White Nationalism; the "the cult published an enemy list, including Japanese people, whom they labeled “Jewish Japanese.”" (D.W. Brackett, Holy Terror: Armageddon (1996) via JCPA) of Aum Shinrikyo; etc. etc. etc.)

(cf. The Jew Sabatour From Within And The Muslim Barbarian From Without, as the two categories of threats to Christendom.)

And so the pattern being pointed out is of that mythological figure -- it is being invoked, and applied to the target. (The target person, the target policy, the target group, etc.) The emotional and narrative associations that have built up around that mythological figure are implicitly applied to it.

(A similar "invoking a mythological figure to apply to the target" is the "drawing Trump (or Obama, briefly) as a superhero" -- invoking paragon, protector, capacity for superhuman effort and effect to solve intractable problems, the plot of "the superhero arrives and the populace can stop fearing, is immediately saved".)

That does not mean that every usage of it is antisemitic, or furthering antisemitism -- and I think just responding by describing it plainly as antisemitism, and stopping there, happens too often and usually gets in the way of actually looking at, like, what it's being used for, who it's being applied to here, etc. --

but if you're the type of person who chooses or needs to pay attention to antisemitism, they ARE relevant to that, because multiple overlapping uses of this figure has a tendency to asymptotically explicitly become about Jews.

(in Loki telling self "make your own post"): weird to me how there always seem to be people on this website ready to come out of the woodwork and insist that a bunch of ambiguous things are always and only about antisemitism.

Yes, blood libel is absolutely a thing - but, "they [steal, hurt and/or eat] babies and worship Satan!" is also to pre/early modern Europe what "groomer/pedo" is to the internet today. They said it about Jewish people because they were antisemitic and this was what you said/believed about people that you hated. They also said it about Rromani people, and Catholics, and widows disliked by their local community, and weirdos who might have been some kind of neurodivergent, and queer people, and poor people! Hell, in the 90s, American Evangelicals were saying it about atheists and people who wanted to teach religion in schools. "They are going to both hurt and in some sense steal away our children" is what people are saying about trans people right the fuck now.

I don't really know what (if any) goal is being served or attempted by all this pattern-matching.

my mom (@kamahele) is missing.

I have slightly sharper takes following a bit after the ones expressed in the previous posts, but those are private/one-on-one takes.

I'm overconfidently expressing possibly-Bad-I-should-definitely-have-thought-them-out-or-hedged-more Opinions on here again, who knows if I'll lose steam and fall back out in a bit but for the moment for the instant here at the-trans-in-transgenic-dot-tumblr-dot-com we are SO BACK.

(And a thing that imo trips people up -- that I'm pretty sure is what OP is railing against (but I'm hedging this in case I'm wrong so I'm not putting words in their mouth) -- is that the "so what is the effect of this difference" question can ALWAYS be asked. That valuing neurodiversity means that that question SHOULD always be asked for any difference encountered.

And that, situations where the answer to "what different things do they want?" is "they want to change their situation/behavior" do not disprove the value of asking those questions, do not disagree with the fundamental question being "what is the effect of this difference?", even if that change is in the same direction that the answer to "how do we cure this?" would have taken them.)

i think when some of you say "neurodivergent" you just mean adhd and autism

@a-mouse-named-blu's tags:

#HI HELLO OP #PLEASE SEE ME #is this true??? #im only asking cuz when ppl started saying mentally ill and nuerodivergent #i used them synonymously but was told i was using them wrong #but i honestly didnt understand the difference #so i still use them synonymously but idk if thats like literally correct #like based on the definitions #and pls dont say just go read the definitions. i have. i just dont understand the difference #ususally i can distinguish some sort of difference btwn synonyms but not here #if u have an answer plz help #i would genuinely like to know

I'm not OP but:

The reason they're not synonymous is not really because of what things they mean -- what specific mental conditions they're pointing at -- but because of what someone saying it usually means ABOUT those things.

Generally, someone saying "neurodivergent" and someone else saying "mentally ill" will be (mostly) talking about the same thing -- someone who has... something, going on mentally that gets in the way of them functioning normally.

The key word to notice in that is "normally".

Calling them "mental illnesses" is calling that something a sickness, where having it means "being unhealthy" the way that having a cold or a flu, or cancer, or herpes, is "being unhealthy". And that the way to react to that is to bring the person who has it back to "normal" -- curing the sickness, removing it, and usually also limiting or preventing it from affecting other people as well.

Calling them "neurodivergences" is disagreeing with a major assumption in that. It is saying that the important Something people are reacting to is not that the person is having a limited mental functioning, but that they're failing to be mentally "normal" in the way that someone looking at them and going "you have something going on" wants them to be. In particular, there is an imagined single "correct" way to be, mentally, and failure to have that "typical" pattern of neurology (pattern of thinking). What calling those "... something, going on mentally that gets in the way of functioning normally"s "neurodivergences" is doing is saying that they're primarily just a difference, just a divergence, from that imaginary "typical".

The difference between saying that "... something" is a mental illness and saying that "... something" is a neurodivergence is in what the next question is -- whether the question is "so how do we cure this ilness so the person can be normal and like everyone else?" or "so what is the effect of this difference for this person? What different things do they want and need because of it?"

... I'm not always coherent and also communication is a two-way interaction so if this doesn't make sense it means that this attempt between both of us to communicate didn't work and maybe I can try again in a different way, but... did that make sense?

i think when some of you say "neurodivergent" you just mean adhd and autism

Oh dang, Hari Svrinivasan! I haven't read the article yet, but he's one of the people advising on the AAC Counts project with CommunicationFirst, I think! (And on other projects with them.)

I should pay more attention to what he's doing individually/with other groups, but he rocks!

Just as psychology research had its WEIRD (“western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic”) sampling bias, autism research has not only a WEIRD sampling bias, but also has essentially oversampled the same, narrow band of what are considered the easily “researchable autistics,” and expected those findings (as well as the applications and interventions that resulted from them) to apply to everyone.

But the spectrum is far more diverse and heterogeneous than we realize. Sure enough, even as I review past autism research as part of my studies, I look at the autistic participant profiles and the truth is that a majority don’t represent autistics like me. Autism research participant selection is filled with implicit and explicit exclusionary criteria, such as IQ cut-offs, ability to be able to sit still, to perform tasks and engage, to respond orally and not have co-occurring or complex conditions. But why should IQ be an exclusionary criterion when it is mutable and has been historically problematic for marginalized groups? I have to then wonder how findings from studies with so many exclusionary criteria would benefit autistics like me.

Research participant selection bias is especially problematic in a disability like autism because the primary goal of research is to provide explanations. Studies also influence policy priorities, interventions, treatments, who gets access to funding, access to spaces, and even societal attitudes. Most importantly, research leads us to applications and solutions. If we are left out of research, we are left out of the solutions as well.

author hari srinivasan is minimally speaking autistic with high support needs and oral-motor apraxia, whose autism & disability very visible. he went to undergrad at UC berkeley & now doing PhD in neuroscience at vanderbilt university.

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So did a bunch of you have these pre-prepped, or did you all collectively rush when you heard the news? How many variants are there?

"Maybe Sam Altman will turn the old board members into paper clips" Of COURSE Sam Altman will turn the old board members into paper clips. He is going to take actions that will be targetted towards increasing shareholder/stock-option-holder value.

Money can be exchanged for goods and paperclips.

Well, sure, but that is a fight about AI safety. It’s just a metaphorical fight about AI safety. I am sorry, I have made this joke before, but events keep sharpening it. The OpenAI board looked at Sam Altman and thought “this guy is smarter than us, he can outmaneuver us in a pinch, and it makes us nervous. He’s done nothing wrong so far, but we can’t be sure what he’ll do next as his capabilities expand. We do not fully trust him, we cannot fully control him, and we do not have a model of how his mind works that we fully understand. Therefore we have to shut him down before he grows too powerful.”

I’m sorry! That is exactly the AI misalignment worry! If you spend your time managing AIs that are growing exponentially smarter, you might worry about losing control of them, and if you spend your time managing Sam Altman you might worry about losing control of him, and if you spend your time managing both of them you might get confused about which is which. Maybe Sam Altman will turn the old board members into paper clips.

matt levine tackles the sam altman alignment problem

Oh wait a second, I haven't been on here in a while -- how's the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence's blog? Still posting?

advanced frankenstein moment: just saw someone in discord refer to roko's basilisk as roko

irradiate-space Replied to your post“... speaking of AI sex, I haven't made progress on...”

Where'd you get stuck?

I didn't I just put it down *checks modified-date* a year ago next month, and then didn't pick it up again.

... speaking of AI sex, I haven't made progress on punching up that one webnovel into a decent-looking .epub in AGES.

... speaking of AI sex, I haven't made progress on punching up that one webnovel into a decent-looking .epub in AGES.

Hey this is missing a lot of stuff about fuzzing/protocol play, so I figured I'd add on some information about that?

The first thing I'll say is that inherent to protocol play is the risk of unexpected behavior -- in fact, that's often what computers into protocol play are into it for, either the risk of it or the sensation itself -- you can't rely on explicit communication during the scene to maintain awareness of your partner. Any protocol play scene necessarily involves a LOT of trust in your partner, and it is really important to discuss the scene beforehand, what is expected, and how to safely bring your partner out from both expected and unexpected behavior in the scene.

Protocol play is exploring the boundaries and edge-cases of a protocol that a computer speaks. The most common and well-known form of protocol play is called "fuzzing" -- I mentioned it at the top, in fact, because people usually think of it as synonymous with protocol play, and it's become popular recently among some young people who are really not as careful about it as they should be. This form of play consists of sending a lot of randomly-constructed input to be parsed as the protocol -- in its basic method, this produces a general tickling sensation as bare bits and pieces of the input only begin to parse that occasionally random produces a prick of a deeper, sharper sensation as a particular piece of input parses more thoroughly. (The lightness of (most) of the sensation here often draws people into the false confidence in the safety, but that's just stochastic -- remember the risk.) Depending on the specific protocol and your computer's specific config and experience, it might also be pleasantly overwhelming as a flood of parser error overwhelms their processing and attention with interrupts. (Again, depending on the protocol and your partner.) Fuzzing can get more nuanced that that with more specific per-protocol toys, though, that specially constructs random input that syntactically parses to a much greater degree -- this generally has a corresponding increase in intensity.

Fuzzing is just one type of protocol play, though -- there's also a more targeted approach, manually constructing packets to target specific parts of the parser and code pathway intentionally. (Usually the RFCs or the source code is used to inform this.) This is a much more specific sensation and often more work, and due to that is often experienced as more individually intimate than fuzzing. (But as always, your particular relationship is your particular relationship.)

I talked about the unexpected behavior, but in addition to that people also do protocol play looking for a code-coverage experience -- looking to exercise and step through more rarely used execution states and code pathways. Done with this mindset, it can be a grounding experience, giving an embodied and self-aware experience that is hard to experience elsewhere and is often why computers seek out these sorts of scenes.

being a robotfucker while also being tech illiterate is so embarrassing

It stands for "bump up my post".

Welcome back! How’s 2023 so far?

Good question! It's November I think