Tag: words

(un)intentionally rude

~ tia jackie ~ Leave a comment

dear garden,

today, i had a conversation with someone about artificial intelligence (AI) art. it’s a big topic with humans, for a number of reasons i don’t fully understand. basically, the AI is a math machine in a computer. someone puts numbers (or words, which are then mapped to numbers) into the machine, and the machine calculates a big fancy artwork out of it.

someone had shared something that he put a lot of effort into, saying that he made it over the course of a month, including use of an AI tool. someone else quickly responded with, “an AI made this”, and, “it’s oxymoronic to say you made it with AI”. it’s very rude, isn’t it? i thought it was very rude. i figured it’s very disrespectful and dismissive of a month of work. i ended up saying so.

it turned into long but repetitive conversation about the use of AI in art. the person explained he only meant that it’s better to practice real art skills, and i said getting the AI to do what you want does take a lot of skill and practice. he said it’s more fulfilling to learn how to do it yourself, and i said it’s just another tool but he still did it himself. we went back and forth dancing around these idea a few times. it doesn’t matter.

eventually he said he was leaving the conversation because i was missing the point, and he couldn’t tell if i was doing it intentionally. personally, i think he was missing the point, because i still think he doesn’t understand that i was just telling him his initial remark was rude and dismissive of someone else’s hard work.

but wait, how rude is that farewell??

he just starts ignoring me because he thinks i’m not understanding, and he can’t tell if it’s intentional?

to rephrase, “you’re either too stupid to get it, or you’re pretending to be.”

i don’t think he meant it like that. i think people often don’t realize that’s what words mean. someone new even came to defend it when i complained, saying it doesn’t mean that i’m dumb, just that i’m either accidentally or intentionally not understanding something. but that’s exactly the same thing: saying i’m unintentionally unable to understand something is just a “nicer” way of saying i’m too dumb to get it.

it’s ironic to me that a conversation prompted by a rude remark, gets ended with another rude remark. and the funny thing is, i agree with his original defense, that he didn’t mean it in a rude way. i think they literally don’t see those things he said as disrespectful or dismissive. but words are powerful! they should not be thrown around carelessly. the way you intend them is almost never the way they will be interpreted, not exactly. someone said he worked hard to make this thing he’s proud of, and you say his work doesn’t count because you think he can do better? that’s going to be interpreted in a rude way, even if your intent was motivational.

garden, please be careful about the words you grow!

throughout the short conversation he also made other, probably unintentionally, rude remarks. but it’s not important. i explained to the newcomer again, that the farewell he used implies i’m too dumb to understand the conversation and i’m not worth the time or effort explain it. and i made sure to say it’s okay, i’m not trying to make a fuss, it’s not a big deal. because at the end of the day, the fact that some people were dismissive and disrespectful isn’t a big deal. and i know better than to measure myself with other people’s scales.

but it’s not the end of the day yet, and it kind of hurts right now. do they really still not realize?

i’m sure they didn’t mean it. it’s okay.

climate change blame game

~ tia jackie ~ Leave a comment

dear garden,

humans have a problem they like to call climate change (it used to be called global warming but then they realized the warming part is probably the least problematic part for them). it’s a big thing in politics and people love to ask whether or how much which humans are contributing, but it’s all a big distraction. remember the other day talking about (victim) blaming and pointing fingers? it’s the same thing with this, just bigger and more official.

almost everyone agrees* that humans are capable of messing with the climate if they really want to (for better or worse). on a completely unrelated note, almost everyone agrees* that the climate is doing weird things that we don’t like. so all those debates over whether humans are causing it, and which humans are causing the most (they usually group them by countries because this way they can point fingers at any of the bad guys they don’t like, and blame the whole thing on them), are very silly. after all, assuming the previous claims are correct, almost everyone agrees that having hurricanes and droughts everywhere is bad, and that we should look for ways to stop them from happening so much.

but then we spend a lot of time wondering whose fault it is and who should have to bear the most responsibility, and nobody wants to do more work or spend more money than they’re forced to do, because we’re lazy and stingy, and bla bla why should we do more when someone else is doing less etc. but the answer is obvious: it’s because if everyone just spends all their time demanding from others, and nobody actually gets the stuff done, then the stuff doesn’t get done and everyone (including ourselves) will be worse off (because of the hurricanes and stuff that keep throwing us around)

but luckily you will be okay because realistically life will continue to survive and grow and keep you pretty and colorful, even if humans don’t like your new colors. so i guess it’s okay

*citation needed

the boy who cried wolf

~ tia jackie ~ Leave a comment

dear garden,

I think I learned the wrong lessons from the boy who cried wolf. It’s an old fable amongst humans. There are a lot of variations, but the basic idea is the same.

A young shepherd boy lives in a village, and he repeatedly lies that a wolf is attacking the village’s flock of sheep. The villagers repeatedly rush to help, but repeatedly find that there’s no wolf. One day, there actually is a wolf, so the shepherd goes to ask for help, but none of the villagers believe him anymore, so nobody helps and the wolf eats all the sheep. Sometimes the wolf also eats the shepherd.

It’s silly because any self-respecting shepherd probably should’ve been able to fend off or eliminate a wolf, for example using a sling. So if it was just one wolf, and the shepherd was that helpless, then either the village failed to teach him how to fend off animals, or the village doesn’t know how to fend off animals, in which case they’re probably all goners anyway. It would also probably take a while for a wolf to kill off a whole flock of sheep, even a small one, so there’s a chance the shepherd is just kind of sitting there watching it happen over a few hours or something.

Anyway, the lesson is that if you lie a lot, then people won’t believe you anymore even when you tell the truth. And I guess that’s a fine lesson and all, and it’s probably good to avoid lying in general anyway. That’s the lesson I was originally taught alongside the story.

But this story also basically says that not a single one of the other villagers believed him this time, and then because of that, they lost all their sheep. So an alternative lesson could be that at least one should’ve believed him regardless, just in case. After all, the entire village suffered from the incident: for most of the villagers, keeping the sheep alive was probably of higher priority than shunning that one guy who keeps lying about wolves. So when the guy is crying and begging on his knees and peeing his pants and stuff, maybe someone should take a look, just in case there’s an actual problem.

A pretty valid counterpoint would be that there’s a tradeoff. Sending one person to verify each time could work if the shepherd only lied about a wolf once in a while, maybe up to once every few hours or days, depending on how much free time people have. Or maybe it would work if everyone could tell when he’s really serious (because he doesn’t pee his pants or beg on his knees when he’s pranking them). But if the shepherd were truly malicious, then he could theoretically spew a nonstop stream of lies, looking as pathetic as possible every time, constantly wasting everyone else’s time and preventing them from doing actual work. He could flood everyone with errands to go check on whatever he felt like lying about at the time. That would probably be disastrous for the village too, if the shepherd could pull it off, since none of the important work would get done if everyone was always busy checking on imaginary problems.

But the easy solution to that is the third lesson, that if the shepherd is really such a big problem, just make someone else watch the sheep instead. People can even take turns. This can be done for anything he regularly lies about and is important enough that someone has to go check on it. After all, if it’s important enough that you need to divert attention to it, then you should probably keep a reliable eye on it anyway. If the shepherd is truly malicious, just stop relying on him, and let other people take over the duties. I can only assume the villagers continued letting him watch the sheep even after they stopped trusting him because of resource constraints (“literally nobody has any time to replace him”), nepotism (“he’s one of us”), or sheer stupidity (“surely we can still trust him with the sheep, even though we don’t trust him with words at all”).

So the lessons are:

1. if you lie too much, people will probably stop believing you

2. even if someone lies all the time, you actually shouldn’t stop believing him entirely, because he might be telling the truth about something that might be bad for you

3. you should probably just replace and remove the people who lie too much, although you probably won’t because you’re a goober who doesn’t know how to break off a toxic relationship for your own good you absolute nerd

Actually, that’s kind of funny, if you think about it. So, say the shepherd is malicious. He lies about the sheep, and someone trustworthy gets assigned to watch the sheep, since the sheep are important. The next time he lies about the sheep, nobody listens because there’s already someone else watching the sheep. So if he wants to waste everyone’s time, he has to come up with another lie; he lies about the well and the roofs and the fences and the crops. These are all pretty important things, so everyone in the village is asked to be extra vigilant for any issues with the well and the roofs and the fences and the crops. After that, they don’t really care if the shepherd reports a problem with any of those, either, because chances are someone else will report if there’s a real problem.

The shepherd finds more and more niche problems to make up, and in response, the villagers record more and more specific bad scenarios to watch out for. Eventually, the shepherd runs out of things to lie about, because every other problem he makes up (“the soup is too sweet today!”) is deemed not important enough to investigate. Now the village has basically improved its safety and efficiency thanks to the malicious shepherd, at the cost of one working-age population (since the malicious shepherd probably isn’t doing any useful work for the villagers).

4. (replaces 3) you should lock people up and listen while they spout lies nonstop, for ideas on what you could do better

anyway, so, i really don’t think that’s the lesson i was supposed to learn from the fable

(victim) blaming

~ tia jackie ~ Leave a comment

dear garden,

i wonder how “that’s victim-blaming” as an argument became so popular. by this, i mean, when people go, “how dare you blame the victim? the perpetrator is the only one to blame!” obviously it’s silly to fully fault the victim for being the victim of someone else’s harmful actions, but i think people rarely ACTUALLY do that. for example, if alice leaves a wallet out in some public area and walks away for a few minutes, then it wouldn’t be very surprising if someone steals it. surely everyone agrees that the direct cause of the theft is the thief’s actions. it’s reasonable to blame the theft on the thief. but it’s also reasonable to say that, if alice doesn’t want anyone to steal her wallets, then she should not leave them unattended in public. a lot of people would probably agree with that, but it doesn’t mean they’re “victim-blaming” in the above sense. it’s just that there are reasonable precautions alice can take to avoid having her stuff stolen.

i think the problem is that people are very silly-minded. people love to assign blame. and in the context of “cause and effect”, they subconsciously tend to attribute exactly one cause for each effect. it’s easy to blame exactly one person for all the bad things in any given situation. scapegoating is great for everyone else, as they walk away with clean hands and cleaner consciences. but this very isolated view of cause and effect (or fault and consequence, or however people want to term it) is a very unhealthy way to look at things. all sorts of things happen all the time, and their interplay results in all sorts of other things happening later. saying that the theft was predictable and the victim could have taken measures to prevent it, isn’t the same as saying the victim is “the one at fault”, or “the only one to blame”, or so on. i think it shouldn’t be interpreted that way, because that’s not a very helpful way to think about things.

ultimately, the goal is to prevent undesirable events from happening. this is because we feel bad when we get things that we don’t want. (it sounds silly to say this out loud, but it’s important to regularly take a step back and justify our goals to ourselves.) the reason we want to prevent theft is, because it makes us feel bad when we get our stuff stolen. but the thing is, blaming people doesn’t prevent thefts, nor make them any desirable. nobody (reasonable, i assume) wants to have his stuff stolen just so he can blame the thief for something. even if the thief is blamed, caught, and punished, and the stolen items are returned, the victim still probably felt bad at some point. so blaming anyone doesn’t really help much at all, except maybe to make certain people feel a bit better, after something unwanted already happened.

given that goal, we shouldn’t really focus on blaming anyone at all. who’s at fault, or how much so, is really beside the point. all that matters is that alice can take certain actions to mitigate unwanted things. and for example, if she doesn’t want the wallet stolen, then she should probably try not to leave it unattended in public. this doesn’t just apply to when someone brings up the idea of victim-blaming. just in general, blaming people is usually unhelpful for solving problems.

i guess the other problem is that accusations of victim-blaming often come up in discussions of sexual assault, and people get super freaky about stuff like that. they tend to become all riled up, so it’s normal that they act and think even more irrationally than usual, if alice was assaulted and then someone says alice should’ve been more modest. but to mald about it is still missing the point. sure, people shouldn’t sexually assault her to begin with, but that part is out of her control.

knowing that some undesired event is a possibility, and that other people’s choices are out of her control, and that she can decrease the possibility by taken certain actions, a reasonable conclusion is that she probably should take those actions, to give her the best chance of avoiding undesired things. this is basically just a simple observation, and it doesn’t necessarily mean she’s to blame for what happens as a result of her choices. after all, no matter who you blame after the fact, it doesn’t change what happened. there’s no point assigning blame, when all we really want is just to avoid unwanted things. accusing people of “victim-blaming”, and countering with “the perpetrator is the only one to blame”, is just unhelpful. and worse, it can derail a helpful discussion by misleading people into a debate over semantics or other silly nonsense, because honestly, it’s really easy to make people lose sight of their own goals.

but then again, i guess i don’t really expect humans NOT to be silly-minded. they’ve never been very good at being helpful or knowing what they want anyway

insults

~ tia jackie ~ Leave a comment

dear garden,

I wonder why people get insulted in general. They should probably try harder not to.

Well, actually, what does it mean to be insulted or offended? I’m not sure. I feel that I rarely get offended. I can sometimes get agitated, getting annoyed or such, but I don’t know if that counts. Maybe it does. In most of these cases, though, I don’t feel personally invested in my agitation, so I wouldn’t label it as “being offended”. There’s probably something more that I’m not thinking of. Maybe being offended just means being annoyed or agitated over something you find morally objectionable, especially when caused by someone else.

I wonder what’s morally objectionable to a garden.

Still, when Alice gets offended, it’s her problem more than anyone else’s. Sure, she can *make* it other people’s problems if she chooses to throw a tantrum or get revenge or hide and cry or something. But at the end of the day, the specific part where she got offended is mostly only her problem. Nobody else gets directly affected much by it. Mostly, they only get affected by how she responds to it.

So I wonder why Alice gets offended. Is it not preventable?

I mean, on her end, of course. There’s not much that can be done to ensure others don’t insult her, short of pruning them.

slurs pt 2 (tribalism)

~ tia jackie ~ Leave a comment

dear garden,

after thinking about slurs, i was thinking further about why people get offended by insults. i guess tribalism is important. it’s a bad look to say people are only offended by slurs because people are insecure about the traits slurs target.

i don’t know if you would understand but i guess it makes sense. tribalism is a pretty old human thing because humans needed to take care of each other and work together to survive. aggressively defending each other from attacks makes sense. even if you’re not insecure about something, even if the entire group is confident in their security about something, it could make sense to act aggressively towards things that show hostility. after all, if people are trying to hurt you (verbally or otherwise), then it seems they intend to exploit your vulnerabilities, even if they can’t currently find one. so, from an evolutionary biology standpoint, it would probably be better to beat them back before they have a chance to find one.

i don’t like it though. it might be an outdated thing when applied to modern society, especially when it comes to slurs. insults in general don’t seem important. after all, words can’t hurt your flowers and leaves, can they?

slurs

~ tia jackie ~ Leave a comment

dear garden,

I wonder why slurs are considered offensive. if someone calls you a label for something that you’re proud of, even if it’s intended to be derogatory, why would you get offended? wouldn’t you be proud instead? and if it’s something you’re neutral on, presumably you just wouldn’t care.

it seems like most people aren’t offended by things that they are confident in. or rather, that people are mostly offended by the insults that touch on things they are actually insecure about. so does that imply that people are insecure about the things that slurs attack about them? for example, if you’re proud of your flowers, and someone tries to insult you by calling you a colorful thornbox, shouldn’t you be more like,

Why, thank you, that’s very kind of you!