felilagomorph

as always, it and its partner are homeless and disabled trans women living purely off donations from tumblr as they keep terminating us both every single day, and we still badly need support as we're going to be fully on the streets again in less than a month. please keep reblogging this aid post, and its paypal is here. anything would be greatly appreciated.

AI is trained off of available data. Available data is about the real world, where racism and sexism and all that shit exists. Unless you carefully put effort into making sure that bigotry is EXCLUDED from the training, it will by default be included.

🏕️ Many people think the war is over, but for us, it hasn't. It may have disappeared from the news screens, but the truth is that the danger persists, displacement and forced migration are still a part of our lives, and fear is our constant companion.

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 I cannot go to work or provide for my family's needs because I stay in the tent to protect and care for my children in these difficult circumstances.

🍼 My youngest daughter desperately needs milk. 👶 She also needs diapers and clothes. 💔 I am unable to provide these basic necessities for her.

🙏 I am writing these words and appealing to anyone who can help. Any support, no matter how small, can make a huge difference in my children's lives and give us hope during these difficult times.

🌍 If you are unable to donate, sharing this post may help our story reach people who can help

🤲 We ask for nothing more than the opportunity to live with dignity and provide for our children's basic needs.

❤️ A heartfelt thank you to everyone who reads, shares, or offers any kind of support. Every little bit of help means the world to us..

This is our tattered tent.

For example, I've had students ask me (in good faith) how it was possible for international medical bodies to report different counts of COVID-19 cases during the early years of the pandemic. And one of the answers is that you need to first define what you mean by a "COVID-19 case." Do you include self-reported incidences? Waste water data? Geo-fenced social media posts about people complaining about their coronavirus symptoms? Federal estimates? Hospital data? How do you compare countries/territories/substate entities with mandatory reporting mechanisms vs countries/territories/substate entities that rely only on voluntary self-reported cases? And what combination of these do you use? How you construct what you mean by "case" is going to impact the outcomes you report. These different counts of COVID-19 cases can all be true simultaneously, not because numbers are made up, but because they all come out of different methodologies that can be equally valid.

And this is true across all science, not just social science. Bill Clinton said it best lol: "it depends on what your definition of the word 'is' is." This feels obvious when you look at scientific research that uses "skull measurements" as their object of analysis - the concept itself is white supremacist, regardless of how "sound" the research is. But even something as apparently self-evident as a COVID-19 case still requires a definition, and how you define your variables is necessarily going to impact how the research goes and what conclusions are drawn.

These definitions are always embedded in political & social assumptions. And again, this does not mean that science is all made up or nonsense or whatever. There is a widespread fetishism of "objective knowledge" that is itself ideological - the idea that knowledge can be divorced from all historical and political contexts, that you can scrub bias from research and simply report the facts. Valuable, well-supported, well-constructed scientific research is always embedded in these contexts. Not just as a result of researcher assumptions, but of the material context it exists in - what research resources are available, how & what research gets funded, the academy's relationship to the state & non-government bodies that both provide data and use that research to inform policy, the historical relationships universities often have with settler-colonialism and imperialism that give them access to "foreign" research subjects, etc etc etc.

You have to actually ACTIVELY unlearn all that shit. You can actually be trans AND hold TERF and racist beliefs, it is in fact very easy.