adderaline

Open models is the way to battle that.

This is something I think needs to be interrogated. None of these models, even the supposedly open ones are actually “open” or even currently “openable”. We can know the exact weights for every single parameter, the code used to construct it, and the data used to train it, and that information gives us basically no insight into its behavior. We simply don’t have the tools to actually “read” a machine learning model in the way you would an open source program, the tech produces black boxes as a consequence of its structure. We can learn about how they work, for sure, but the corps making these things aren’t that far ahead of the public when it comes to understanding what they’re doing or how to change their behavior.

its from the DMX track “X gon’ give it to ya”. it came out in 2002.

so, the only way to address the problem of sexual violence in hospitals is just to divide the population in two? this is just like the bathroom bullshit. if you’re assuming that trans women are rapists, you are a transphobe. if you’re assuming that sex-segregated wards are a useful deterrent to rape, you’re an idiot. the thing stopping people from hurting patients in the hospital is the hospital. the staff, the doors, the nurses, the help buttons beside each bed, the check-ins by doctors and nurses.

so should we segregate our hospitals too? i’m sure you could find some examples of interracial violence if you cared to look. maybe the poor people should get their own ward, we all know the poors are more likely to be criminals! the argument you’re using right now is one that has been used against minority groups since antiquity. all people are capable of violence. that you focus only on the violence of a single case, and use that to justify discrimination? that is not “common sense”. it is prejudice.

its not nonsense, its a well documented part of trans discrimination. trans people are commonly treated as if they are cis, and many doctors just don’t have the kind of awareness of HRT’s effects that you seem to think is commonplace. like, more than half of trans people have experienced medical discrimination. trans people are routinely confronted with medical professionals that refuse to acknowledge their medical histories. trans people have quantifiably worse physical health outcomes even when they do get care. i have not met a single trans person who hasn’t experienced at least some kind of barrier to care. doctors refusing to perform mammograms, doctors who haven’t even heard of HRT, doctors turning trans people away at emergency rooms. there is tons of data out there about this problem that you’re refusing to believe even exists.

i’d like to see how you’d be measuring “performance” in this context, or what you consider to be worthy of merit, because those things are not the objective measures you seem to think they are.

people who are contributing to open source projects are not a perfect Gaussian distribution of best to worst “performance” you can just pluck the highest percentile contributors from. its a complex web of passionate humans who are more or less engaged with the project, having a range of overlapping skillsets, personalities, passions, and goals that all might affect their utility and opinions in a decision making context. projects aren’t equations you plug the “best people” into to achieve the optimal results, they’re collaborative efforts subject to complex limitations and the personal goals of each contributor, whose outcome relies heavily on the perspectives of the people running the project. the idea you can objectively sort, identify, and recruit the 50 “best people” to manage a project is a fantasy, and a naive one.

the point of mandating the inclusion of minority groups in decision making is to make it more likely your project and community will be inclusive to that group of people. the skillsets, passions, and goals that a diverse committee contains are more likely to create a project that is useful and welcoming to more kinds of people, and a committee that is not diverse is less likely to do so. stuff like this is how you improve diversity. in fact, its quite hard to do it any other way.

no, it wasn’t “more data”, it was just data. blood letting and mercury are pre-scientific treatments that were in use during the 1600s. puberty blockers were developed with a modern understanding of hormones, and extensively tested before they saw use in a clinical setting. you might as well have brought up magic as a legitimate medical practice that we eventually proved wrong. like, no duh, but it also has basically no bearing on the safety of a chemically synthesized hormone inhibitor invented in the 20th century.

puberty blockers are used explicitly to delay having to go through puberty. they are used for kids who have precocious puberty (puberty that starts too early), as well as for trans kids. there are some marginal risks associated with them, you might grow a bit shorter, or just generally develop differently that you might have if you had allowed puberty to progress on time, but there aren’t specific health challenges people who use them face. the reason you take them is to explicitly prevent somebody from going through irreversible changes they might not like before they can make an informed decision, or before it is healthy for those changes to occur.

interestingly, most of the poor health outcomes of precocious puberty are psychological and social, not physical, which is, i think, an interesting parallel to the trans experience.

But, I suppose it is the actual biological parts that are different, which I was thinking about.

one thing i think is important to recognize is that, while gender is socially constructed, so is sex to some extent. we have a number of features we generally say are “male” or “female” characteristics, including genitalia, but keep in mind that there are around 1-2% of the population that are born intersex. the way we determine sex assigned at birth is almost always through an inspection of genitalia, but for some people that isn’t conclusive.

in a lot of places, doctors will attempt “fix” these natural variations, deciding for the child which category they belong in. there is enough variation from “male” and “female” characteristics, and enough people with traits from both categories, that the categories themselves can’t really be said to have a purely biological origin, even if statistically they are highly correlated.

Am I right in thinking the main issues is that we have created a society in which sex and gender were separated and defined so distinctly, that for transexual individuals, there just is no ‘correct’ option available to them?

that’s very much part of the problem. lots of trans people really don’t fit neatly into the boxes doctors currently expect of them, especially once they’ve gone on hormones, and sharply delineating sex categories like doctors do measurably leads to less positive health outcomes for trans people. the intersex population is also affected by this kind of marginalization.

the reality is that the health of a person has a lot more to do with their specific traits than it does with the collection of traits a sex category expects them to have, which is in reality composed of a cluster of related physical, cognitive, and social traits that can vary independently of one another, and affect our health in specific ways. assuming any of these traits are one way simply because of how somebody’s genitals are supposed to be is almost always going to be more wrong than just allowing people to describe and denote their personal experience as they see fit. checking M or F on a box is, unfortunately, not really the same as just saying you have a penis or a vagina. it implies a lot more than that, even if your personal experience does not align with that implication.

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

uh huh. because our current system has definitely demonstrated that shitty companies fail, right? i don’t know how you can look at the landscape of modern corporations and come away with the thought that capitalism has in any way increased our freedom to choose, or that that really important part actually in practice weeds out shitty business practices in any way.

what companies do you like? are any of them the large multinational corporations swallowing up every speck of available market share and spiraling us towards climate apocalypse? if so, you’re wrong.

food insecurity is a huge problem in many places today, including in some of the wealthiest countries on the world. there aren’t too many communist regimes around to blame for it anymore.

how are being a capitalist and despising the direct product of capitalism compatible lol?

like, maybe that’s true, but i’m unsure if we have enough data to back that up as the main explanation for why people are hesitant to changing platforms, or if they are. maybe people have been brainwashed into staying on Facebook or whatever else, or maybe it was the first of its kind, and all its competition has been subsumed into it by monopolistic business practices, and people haven’t had any alternatives for a long time. maybe institutions and systems are very difficult to stop once they get going.

i dunno, i’m really just not convinced by arguments like this. its taken quite a bit of time for our understanding of social media and its impact to become evident, and movements like the fediverse are building up steam for a reason. its seems more likely to me that you and i are simply early to the party.

my position isn’t “we are forcing normal people to understand scary programming things”. that would imply i think that people can’t understand this stuff. its “we are engaged in communities where the structure and function of internet infrastructure is a topic of concern, and most people aren’t”. they aren’t being exposed to challenges to corporate infrastructure. they aren’t engaging with critiques of for-profit industry. but that is changing. people are more aware of the ills of social media platforms today than five years ago. hopefully, that trend will continue. i think that the only problem really is that more people don’t know there are other options.

i try to push back against this notion when i see it: misanthropy is not the proper response here. people aren’t sheep, they aren’t stupid, they just aren’t living in the same context as we are. for a lot of people (and a lot of older people especially), the politics of the internet are a black box, not because they’re too stupid to comprehend this stuff, but because its simply out of scope for what they want to achieve online. there’s tons of things to care about, and while the internet is a pretty important thing to care about in modern life in my opinion, lots of people simply don’t live enough of their lives online to give a shit.

i dunno, i just get kinda pissed off with the whole “sheeple” bullshit. not everybody has your priorities, and not everybody knows what you know. that doesn’t make them bad people, or stupid people, or subservient people, it just makes them people.