Every time I see someone bring up "IQ scores" I feel the need to repeat: IQ scores were literally invented by eugenicists and they've always been biased towards privilege

Urzl

@mikro2nd @cwebber They're infected with the prosperity gospel meme. Money is the only measure of merit and having money is a guarantee of such merit.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

There is no "genius", only learning to love learning and doing, and having access to do so. The problem is that we teach children to loathe education and self-embetterment in all sorts of ways. And for adults, few are given opportunities or encouragement to be able to explore thoughtfully and contribute. Few people can grow into themselves.

We don't teach people to "learn to learn" enough, or to feel that they can love learning, or to give people a chance to *do things*.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

Worse yet, with a world falling into despair, corporate technology systems are feeding into addiction cycles of our own internal feedback mechanisms.

When people have such little agency in their lives, of course they're just going to lean on the dopamine release lever.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

Recently Paul Graham wrote that awful "wokeness" article. It's funny, because Paul Graham every now and then can say insightful things, but less and less so, and at one point he wrote something that was really on the nose but not very self aware: The Acceleration of Addictiveness https://paulgraham.com/addiction.html

The tl;dr is that everything is becoming more and more addictive: food, drinks, media, games, everything. There's a feedback cycle for it.

Well, he's right. But of course there's the irony...

Christine Lemmer-Webber

The simple irony is that Paul Graham is an advocate for hypercapitalism; the very reason everything is becoming more addictive is... hypercapitalism. Companies are given the feedback cycle to make you more and more hooked on their systems because that's what makes them more profitable.

Where "capitalism" begins and ends in history I think is fuzzier than sometimes acknowledged but for me the dividing line is money becoming the *primary goal in society*. Hypercapitalism is the accelerated state.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

Do you know what happens if a rat is given a lever where it can lean on it to invoke its pleasure center? It will lean on it until it dies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_stimulation_reward#Strength_of_drive

(EDIT: see Rat Park later in thread)

Who should we blame for the rat leaning on the lever? Was it a moral failing of the rat? Clearly, upon realizing that *any* rat will lean on the lever until it dies, we realize it is the system that is set up that is to blame, not the rat.

How does this affect agency?

Christine Lemmer-Webber

Who and what do you want to be? This is a matter of agency.

If I presented several potential futures for you, one where you made artwork, one where you solved scientific problems, one where you helped the less fortunate, and one where you leaned on a stimulation lever until you could do nothing else, which would you choose?

Agency is a thing that is grown and cultivated, but it is not possible in a system which is set up for failure. Who do we blame for the death of the rat against the lever?

Christine Lemmer-Webber

On the one hand, it appears that the rat is choosing to lean against the lever of its own free will, but clearly that isn't true if every rat, provided with that initial stimulation, could no longer resist leaning on it until their death.

A fertile ground for agency to bloom must be grown, cultivated, and nurtured, like a garden. We must provide a system in which people can grow to be themselves.

Jules

@cwebber we blame the people for not having "self control" rather than the the ones who set up the temptation in the first place. We shame people for eating high calorie foods instead of criticising people who design things devoid of nutrition to be delicious. We blame people for taking out credit cards and getting into debt rather than those who set the high interest traps for them. We design apps to be ever more addictive and then complain about young peoples' attention spans.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

I don't enjoy discussions of intelligence or genius as intrinsics. Every time someone brings up the "Pareto Principle" I get grossed out.

It may be true that certain individuals are able to outperform others. But what are the conditions that allowed them to do so?

It does not remove someone's accomplishments to say they had help in getting there.

But a system of intentional disparity means that the majority of people get left behind. We have to sell that this is fair somehow.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

So, I am not interested in IQ scores. I am not interested in "genius". I am interested in helping people be able to be their best selves. We can't do that without giving people an environment where that's possible.

That's what matters to me. That's what gives me life.

Dan Sugalski

@cwebber The only thing IQ scores are good for is as a quick sorting function -- anyone who goes on about how high their IQ is can generally be dropped right into the "raging douchebag" category and ignored with some enthusiasm.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

And there's a big tie in, within the end, of the reasons people are frustrated with AI.

People bring up "copyright violation", environmental concerns, etc etc.

But imagine we built an AI that could produce impressive artwork, code, music, and it had no serious environmental impact or violation of copyright concerns. Would you still find it depressing?

I am guessing yes.

I think the big missing part of the AI conversation is the loss of agency, of purpose in peoples' lives.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

The fact of the matter is that there's a rush to build AI tools which *replace people* and which aren't themselves participants, which don't care, which don't take joy in producing things, and hey, we can simply scrape all the annoying artists and programmers and writers and etc out of the way for maximum cash!

A few years ago, we were promised a world where AI would take over menial tasks so people can focus on their art.

Now we're being told artists don't matter.

And that's *depressing*.

Random Geek

@wordshaper @cwebber I did the whole IQ evaluation thing multiple times as a kid (moving to different states and each school district not knowing what to do with me). Got significantly different scores every time.

As an adult, shared that with an IQ enthusiast later and immediately "that's impossible. That cannot happen. Your IQ is a fixed number," and hey welcome to my brain.

But other than it's a stupid useless classist racist metric, those anecdotes are why I don't give IQ any credit.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

I am not "against AI". I actually am very interested in building AI systems, but not the kinds which exist or are being pushed today.

To me, the important part of an AI system is its accountability.

We actually do hold much of our software accountable: if it does something bad, we actively change and repair it.

Corporations are rushing to flood the market with tools which don't care, have no accountability, don't have a stake in things.

That's depressing.

anomaly 🌹

@cwebber sounds like you're probably already aware of it, but the Rat Park experiment really gets to the heart of this. It turns out if you keep rats in an idyllic enclosure that meets all of their natural sensory and social needs, not just the typical depressing bare essentials terrarium that provides a minimum of food, water, and shelter - they *don't* choose the pleasure lever until they die. They end up mostly ignoring it to live a nice fulfilling life with their friends instead.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

The world is so depressing right now. One of the *only* reasons I am able to get up every day and face it is that I have work with @spritely where I think we can do something meaningful and interesting to change it, and bring hope. That and the wonderful people in my life are what keeps me going.

And it's *still* incredibly hard to get up in the morning.

But I believe we can do better, we can build tools and spaces for a world worth living in.

I have to believe it. I have to, to keep going.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

I have said before that my primary life philosophy is an "Ethics of Agency", and I have talked about this before on a podcast episode https://fossandcrafts.org/episodes/11-an-ethics-of-agency.html

I'm not interested in "happiness" as much, because I don't want a rat that leans on a lever. The "ethics of agency" thinking is a rough approach modification of utilitarianism that replaces the measurements of "happiness" and "suffering" in Utilitarianism with "agency" and "subjection".

But "subjection" is weighed more heavily.

aeva

@cwebber I'm going to cast doubt on this. How could the guy who is rich enough to never eat normal people food know anything about normal people food? Remember the wonderful keynote he gave that one year we went to pycon together? He's a petulant little man who doesn't want to read his email or go to the doctor.