Mothematician

Twenty years ago, a sociologist of science called Harry Collins tried out an experiment. He had been researching the community of physicists who worked on gravity waves for the preceding two decades, trying to get insight into standards of proof and how experimental results were reconciled and interpreted. In furtherance of this project, he had been attending gravity waves conferences, where he was a familiar figure and had lots of friends in the community (because he talked to lots of people, physicists often sought him out to get gossip and news on what other labs were doing and seeing). The experiment was a sort of Turing test – one group of physicists came up with a list of half a dozen questions about gravity waves, and then sent them by email to both Collins and a physicist, with instructions just to answer them from general knowledge rather than looking anything up. A jury of other physicists were then given the job of deciding which set of answers had come from Collins, and which from the physicist. And all but one of the judges identified the sociologist as the physicist. Although extremely funny, this wasn’t actually meant as a practical joke; it was meant to test a serious hypothesis about expertise. Harry Collins theorised that there was a thing called “interactional expertise” (basically the ability to hold a sensible and useful conversation about a subject) which was distinct from “contributory expertise” (he didn’t actually even know enough maths to do gravity wave physics). Deep interaction with a knowledge base and literature could provide one, but it wasn’t the same thing as actually working within the field.

abuse in caregiving professions (like teaching or nursing) is not solely a result of power dynamics. it's also because people who go into those professions often have a idea of themselves as Good People, and are consequently incapable of recognising or acknowledging when they've hurt someone else. instead, they mentally put 'people who have inconvenienced me' into the Bad People box so they can freely abuse them while maintaining their moral high ground.

i read ross greene a lot when i was working with "difficult" or "behaviourally challenged" children. his refrain is "kids do well if they can" - meaning, in short, that most kids act out only when the demands of a situation exceed their capabilities. punishing them for this is not only cruel but also completely pointless, because they also don't want to be doing what they are doing.

This has been happening all month with little to no international media attention. Here are a few organizations you can check out for resources or to support:

ActionAid India

SEEDS India

GlobalGiving

Counting

And I realized I'd initially dismissed Seivarden's "you were going to hit me", just because the rest of what Seivarden was saying was so wrong. (About Breq being Special Missions and assigned to bring Seivarden home.) But Breq has hit Seivarden before, punched her hard enough to give her a concussion. Recently. With much less provocation than what Breq was currently experiencing. Being afraid Breq would hit her again was actually pretty rational. (Ignoring that her actual behavior in response to the perceived threat was to walk off a bridge.) Maybe Breq would have.

To the extent this is Breq's fault, it is a consequence of that earlier punch.

Perhaps.

Because Breq's narration is so dispassionate, and because she's technically not human, it's easy to fall into thinking of her as being emotionless, or easily able to control her emotions. But she isn't. Even as Justice of Torren, sometimes she got overwhelmed by emotion and parts of her couldn't function, eg when a new segment was about to be hooked up without sedation, One Esk's behavior or affect altered enough for Lieutenant Awn to notice, and One Esk warned Awn that she was going to be non-responsive for a bit.

So it's not that Breq doesn't feel things intensely, and in ways that affect what she is and is not able to do. It's that she's spent thousands of years in a context where nobody, or nearly nobody, treated her as though it was acceptable for her to have emotions, or that there was any value in avoiding causing her distress. So she learned to act as though she didn't have emotions, and if having them and responding to them was unavoidable, she learned to report it as a sort of malfunction. I'm running low on fuel. Such and such part needs to be checked. I may be temporarily unable to respond (due to excess of unpleasant feeling). This segment isn't adapting, I need a different segment.

No wonder she often doesn't know why she does things.

And she was trying to avoid the consequences of her having an emotional response by avoiding Seivarden, at significant personal cost -- she could walk to the next town in a day, she wasn't getting to the ribbon in a day, it would have presumably been faster (not to mention safer) to wait for the bus or the train. But she was hoping to avoid Seivarden. And she refrained from speaking to avoid a conflict. And trying to avoid the conflict only lead to having the conflict under much worse circumstances.

And I think one that goes well with all the gender of the story. It's in the title. Ancillary from, etymologically, ancilla, Latin for a servant/slave but specifically a female one, the masculine equivalent is completely different. This is a story about the intersection of the role of one who is forced into service and femaleness. And part of that's the lack of power to do anything other than decide whose tea you refill when (I really can't get enough of that scene, it is truly remarkable in its pettiness, Justice of Torren has clearly spent millennia figuring out precisely what she can and can't get away with) and part of that is that the feelings of the powerful are justified and supported and sympathized with -- Seivarden is fully convinced she has a right to complain, loudly, when she knows at least someone in the room speaks her language, over petty inconveniences like the food being unfamiliar, and I think she's genuinely surprised and put out that Breq isn't playing along -- and the feelings of the powerless are always wrong, excessive, an overreaction, inappropriate. For women, perhaps hysterical, or "you must be on your period", simultaneously not worthy of being taken seriously and also a quality that disqualifies the feelings-haver from serious responsibility or status. (And sure, not in the Radch. But the story isn't written for a Radchaai audience.)

And I'm going to bring in another angle, which is wow Breq sure acts and talks a lot like a neurodivergent person, and there's that too, right? Someone who's brain-weird who has enough social status might get some allowances made for being "eccentric" or having an "artistic temperament", but someone who's brain-weird who doesn't have status...well, it's easy from the outside to say that someone losing it over a clock ticking too loudly or a bad texture is blowing up over "nothing". And people in general learn what feelings to take seriously from the people around them: is this kind of physical pain worth going to the doctor over, or going to the ER right now over, or a thing that should be ignored? It's not based on the severity of the pain, it's based on whether it's the kind of pain that's likely to indicate something is wrong. And the pain is more bearable when you know nothing is wrong. And I think people work the same way with emotional pain, up to a point: if the people who seem to know think it's no big deal, you ignore it until it goes away. Which works great, unless it doesn't go away.