The cultural practice of community agreements

How many readers are familiar with the practice of community agreements? This was a widely extant practice in my experience with queer student groups and queer conferences in the US in the 2010s. At the beginning of almost every discussion, the moderator would establish some ground rules, usually using catch phrases as titles, written on a black board.

For example, “One mic one diva” cautions against interruption, while “step up step back” cautions against dominating the conversation. “Oops, ouch, educate” outlines appropriate steps when someone makes a mistake. “Don’t yuck my yum” cautions against derogating what others love. “Use ‘I’ statements” asks people to avoid generalizing their personal experiences. And there’s often a “confidentiality” agreement, which doesn’t have a catch phrase but is still obviously important. The particular choice of agreements may vary, and sometimes the same agreements go under different names.

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No apology

Imagine, if you will, using a public restroom.  After about a minute, a stranger that you were barely paying attention to, pipes up unprompted.  “I’m sorry I haven’t been a proper conversational partner.  I’m just not in the mood for small talk today.”  Awkward silence…

A bit of wisdom from over 15 years hobby blogging: never apologize for an absence.  While I might have a personal commitment to write this or that much, barely any readers will be aware of my commitment, and none will care that I’ve missed it.  Apologizing for absence is a form of self-centeredness–and it’s natural to be self-centered on a personal blog, but let us not express self-centeredness in a way that only serves to make ourselves feel bad.

And that’s not to invalidate feelings of inadequacy.  I have two or three more hobbies than I can reasonably sustain, the pain is real.  But publicly and uncritically expressing those feelings will only reinforce them.  So this is me giving voice to those negative feelings, while being highly critical of same feelings.

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What does it mean that AI is “remixing existing work”?

Marcus reminded me of the common claim: “AI is just remixing existing works”. Or the more colorful version, “AI just regurgitates existing art”. This is in reference to creative uses of AI image generators or LLMs.

While there may be a grain of truth to the claim, I have difficulty making sense of what it’s even saying. It’s basically an unverifiable statement. I think both pro- and anti-AI folks would be better served by a more technical understanding.  So, instead of being stuck at an impasse, we might be able to actually find answers.

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Link Roundup: January 2025

This month, I wrote a history of color symbology in ace and aro flags.

Atheist group faces backlash after publishing, then removing, anti-trans article | Friendly Atheist (via) – If you’re interested to know how atheist organizations deal with trans issues, Hemant provides a pretty good summary, through the lens of one recent incident.  Some orgs are better than others, but it’s frustrating how even trusted orgs can’t seem to maintain a consistent trans-positive stance.  Thankfully there were enough trans-positive voices to pressure FFRF to retract.  But I think atheist orgs have likely suffered from evaporation, with many trans-positive folks simply opting to leave (like me!).

Matthew S. Burns on AI, Empathy, and the Making of Eliza | Circuits & Synapses – As people become broadly familiar with AI chatbots, most old fiction about AI has not aged very well.  After all, the fiction was never about AI, it was about exploring humanity.  Eliza is a visual novel about using AI for talk therapy, and I think is one of the few works of fiction that has aged very well, because it was grounded in the realities (and pitfalls) of tech.  This is an interview with the author, looking back at Eliza.

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Popularity is (almost) scale-free

We live in an ecosystem, where everyone is pressured to be a content creator of some sort.

Suppose you want to interact with your friends on the internet. Let’s say they hang out on BlueSky or LiveJournal or whatever. So you go to those platforms, post some stuff you think your friends will like. And you have like 10 friends, so your posts get 10 views. But that’s not very good! You want your posts to be more widely read by strangers on the internet. So you put a bit more effort into being witty, so you can get 100 views, then 1000 views, and so on. And it’s never good enough because you read even wittier posts from other people, with 100 times the views that you get.

I describe internet popularity as “scale-free” because everything is on a logarithmic scale. No matter where you are in terms of popularity, you feel like a small fish in a big pond. You see other people on the internet with 100 times the popularity you have, so you understand your own little corner of the internet to be a backwater.

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Link Roundup: December 2024

This month, the ace journal club discussed genital plethysmography, and then we took seriously the idea of a sex therapy as a BDSM scene.

The Really Dark Truth About Bots | Benn Jordan (video, 29 min) – How much activity on X is from bots?  Benn Jordan goes through the research, explains how bots work, and concludes that it’s a whopping 1/3.  Incredible.  Kill it with fire.

I often think about the Rationalist/EA crowd, and how for many years they have been concerned about AI causing a human extinction event.  I don’t think the concern was entirely misplaced, but they seemed most concerned with the “AI alignment problem”, i.e. making sure AI does what we actually want instead of deciding to kill all humans.  However, I’m far more concerned about the billionaire alignment problem, i.e. making sure billionaires do what we actually want instead of deciding to kill all humans (now with AI assistance).  Or for that matter, the foreign dictator alignment problem.  All the AI safeguards in the world won’t help if powerful people simply don’t want them.

A comprehensive pro-choice ethic | Tell Me Why the World is Weird – Some pro-lifers advocate a “comprehensive pro-life ethic” where they advocate for the health of people already born.  You can think whatever you like about that, but Perfect Number turns it around and imagines what it would mean to have a comprehensive pro-choice ethic.  It would be about empowering people to make free and informed decisions on medical treatment and reproductive health.

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