Emberwatch

Hey, I am just a curious sort of person, so I was wondering, do you think there’s any cause that’s worth protesting?

If you’ll humor me a little bit: say completely hypothetically (and ridiculously) that there was a political group who, for some reason or another, absolutely despised people named Austin and wanted to get the legal right to arrest anyone they found named Austin out walking in the streets. The bill they’re currently championing would allow them to legally beat, arrest, and imprison any Austins that happened to be discovered in public, and you also discover that there’s enough support for this bill to have a chance at passing. Do you think, in this weird, nightmarish scenario, you’d be willing to protest against this bill even if it caused you and others some sort of inconvenience?

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and would love to have other, more knowledgeable (hopefully!) opinions on this:

I’ve been dwelling on how we might be able to enforce some sort of set of rules or widely agreed upon “morals” on artificial general intelligence systems, which is something that should almost certainly be distributed in order a single entity from seizing control of it (governments, private individuals, corporations, or any AGI systems), and which would also allow a potentially growing set of rules or directives that couldn’t be edited or controlled by a singular actor–at least in theory.

What other considerations would need to be made? Is this a plausibly good use of this technology?

Shoutout to the homies at the Citizen’s Climate Lobby, where you can take like 5 minutes to fill in a mostly pre-written message to your reps and tell them to fucking act on climate legislation. Dunno if it’s cool to post links, but this just takes you to it with no hassle (also don’t trust strangers’ links on the internet; you can google “citizens climate lobby write congress” and get to the same destination):

https://cclusa.org/write

If you’re doing nothing else about climate change, at least do this. You’ve got five fucking minutes to spare to help sound the alarm bell if you’re browsing a comment section. Don’t be a doomer who doesn’t actually do anything, otherwise you’re just ruining your own day for no reason.

There’s no objective test for determining if you’re trans or not. To me, being trans is simply a label you can choose to subscribe to (or not). It comes with some expectations, sure, but you’re not obligated to hold yourself to any of those expectations–at all, if you don’t want to.

Perhaps a more useful way to think about it is: do you think you would be happier to be perceived and treated as a different gender? I started off with the “button test.” If you could press a button, and it would instantly change your gender and appearance to match what you envision, would you press it? What if the button took a week to work instead? A month? And so on, until you reach the logical conclusion: What if it took several months to years, wouldn’t necessarily make you look perfect, and potentially had the risk of some negative side effects (i.e., worked exactly like hormone therapy)?

I’d also stress the importance of finding a good affirming therapist who will accept you as you are, but also give you more tools and ways of thinking about it that you wouldn’t necessarily have on your own. I think, looking back, there were lots of “bad” reasons I wanted to transition (and some fantastic ones!) but it took a lot of time and introspection to sort those out since I didn’t have someone to help guide me–some of the bad reasons were why I paused transitioning just to have some time to figure things out.

Take things at your own pace, don’t push yourself to do or be anything you don’t want to. Wishing you luck on your journey, wherever it leads! :)

As long as no harm is done, why worry? If it does venture into harmful territory, Street Epistemology (SE) might be a good approach, not necessarily to change his mind on the subject (which is not necessarily the goal of SE), but to help him examine his reasons for his belief.

Anthony Magnabosco on youtube has some great videos on SE, if you’re interested in the topic.