Spaci1701 Replied To Your Post “Just In Case You’re Ever Embarrassed About Doing Something Silly

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Hey y'all. Here's something for you.

This is potentially life saving information everyone should know.

Behold, a sideblog!

just somewhere to reblog things so that I can bookmark them - and have a better chance of said bookmarks not turning into dead links

(yes I know that still relies on tumblr existing/having consistent urls for posts, but at least my bookmarks won’t become useless just because somebody changed their url or deleted a post?)

i keep seeing the increasing amount of antisemitism in leftist circles and as a jewish leftist i don't really like it. i don't like when people refuse to listen to jews when they speak about antisemitism.

nobody is immune to bigotry. just because you are a leftist (or claim to be one) it doesn't mean it's impossible for you to show microaggression.

I like watching sheep dogs work.

I search online for videos of muddy farm dogs doing their jobs—

Effortlessly—

Tirelessly.

They love to do it.

In Ireland I paid a euro to see a border collie demonstration—

how fast she brought the sheep in.

We all remarked on her agility. Her intelligence.

But I noticed that as soon as she was on their heel, the sheep turned their bodies toward us—

Toward home.

They already knew where to go, what to do.

The border collie only told them it was time.

But we all know—a sheep is not a good animal to be.

We never call the sheep smart.

But I don’t see myself in the border collie,

Not in her hard work. Her agility. Her endurance.

It’s easy to see myself in the herd.

They’re scared,

so they come home.

And I am often scared.

I am often facing home.

I often wish someone would tell me it’s time to go.

Sheep,dog — another old poem originally shared on a different platform.

Something I don't think we talk enough about in discussions surrounding AI is the loss of perseverance.

I have a friend who works in education and he told me about how he was working with a small group of HS students to develop a new school sports chant. This was a very daunting task for the group, in large part because many had learning disabilities related to reading and writing, so coming up with a catchy, hard-hitting, probably rhyming, poetry-esque piece of collaborative writing felt like something outside of their skill range. But it wasn't! I knew that, he knew that, and he worked damn hard to convince the kids of that too. Even if the end result was terrible (by someone else's standards), we knew they had it in them to complete the piece and feel super proud of their creation.

Fast-forward a few days and he reports back that yes they have a chant now... but it's 99% AI. It was made by Chat-GPT. Once the kids realized they could just ask the bot to do the hard thing for them - and do it "better" than they (supposedly) ever could - that's the only route they were willing to take. It was either use Chat-GPT or don't do it at all. And I was just so devastated to hear this because Jesus Christ, struggling is important. Of course most 14-18 year olds aren't going to see the merit of that, let alone understand why that process (attempting something new and challenging) is more valuable than the end result (a "good" chant), but as adults we all have a responsibility to coach them through that messy process. Except that's become damn near impossible with an Instantly Do The Thing app in everyone's pocket. Yes, AI is fucking awful because of plagiarism and misinformation and the environmental impact, but it's also keeping people - particularly young people - from developing perseverance. It's not just important that you learn to write your own stuff because of intellectual agency, but because writing is hard and it's crucial that you learn how to persevere through doing hard things.

Write a shitty poem. Write an essay where half the textual 'evidence' doesn't track. Write an awkward as fuck email with an equally embarrassing typo. Every time you do you're not just developing that particular skill, you're also learning that you did something badly and the world didn't end. You can get through things! You can get through challenging things! Not everything in life has to be perfect but you know what? You'll only improve at the challenging stuff if you do a whole lot of it badly first. The ability to say, "I didn't think I could do that but I did it anyway. It's not great, but I did it," is SO IMPORTANT for developing confidence across the board, not just in these specific tasks.

Idk I'm just really worried about kids having to grow up in a world where (for a variety of reasons beyond just AI) they're not given the chance to struggle through new and challenging things like we used to.

Frankly I don’t see the point in fussing over the precise gender identities of historical figures and what they would hypothetically describe themselves as were they alive today. They’re not fictional characters—they’re dead people whose opinions on a continuously evolving topic are largely unknowable, but are part of a shared history nonetheless.

For example, whether a historical figure lived secretly as a man because she was a woman in a society where that was her only option to actually do the things she wanted to do, or because he was just more comfortable that way and wanted to be recognized as a man... how can we know? How can we determine that it was not both? How can we look back through history to a world so different from ours and come to conclusions about things that are often complicated and indistinct in our own time?

I just don’t see what is accomplished by trying to sort and separate trans history from GNC history based on factors we can’t truly be certain of. In an earlier generation, I think I may have lived and presented quite differently based on the choices available to me and the ease with which I may have pursued them. The world changes so much in so many ways and I can barely make sense of myself in my own time—it seems more practical to simply say, “Ah. Relatable. I can see much of myself in the record of your life.” and leave it at that. Our history is cultural, not ancestral, and in a hundred years we may be the source of just as much confusion and consternation even if we believe ourselves clear today.

would you be willing to explain the medieval vs. rennaisance stuff you were mentioning in "the middle ages got murdered" or point me to the tags you use for talking about such things? ty.

SURE. :D 

So here’s the thing: what we call “the Renaissance” was a very self-consciously constructed concept invented by a guy called Francesco Petracco (aka Petrarch) because he was totally defensive about the place of Italy in the era he was alive in (aka “a totally disreputable mess of constant warfare, weird alliances, sadistic fuckhead rulers, and so on, with bits of it being passed between mainland European empires and/or the pope and/or both willy nilly, with everyone else kind of ignoring it”) because this was an ignoble and horrible fate for The Heirs of Rome. 

He endeavoured to Subtly (ie not at all subtly) get himself crowned as a poet of outstanding virtue via laurel wreath (aka what we’d now call “the poet laureate”, although the position wasn’t formalized at that time although the symbolism was well known) in a big Ceremony and announced that Learning and Art and Wisdom would restore the world (aka Rome, aka the Empire rightly controlled by Rome) to a good and moral place of goodness, unlike all this horrible shit that had been happening lately. 

He impressed a GREAT many people with this, and more or less from then on the official story of history is that with Petrarch in the mid-14th century (aka the mid-1300s) there was a Renaissance that saved us from the Dark and/or Middle Ages, where we got back alllll the True Wisdom of Antiquity and became civilized thoughtful people instead of superstitious peasants. 

The problem with this is, of course, that it is a giant pile of flaming bullshit. 

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Really been mulling this over a lot lately.