BABABABABABABABABA

“the closet” is not a description of the inside of your own head. “the closet” is a position you are forced into by structural bigotry and, if those structures were not in place, would transition. Pro-trans advocacy is about making closeted trans people’s lives possible, and out trans peoples’s lives better.

link

If you use a calculator rather than doing all calculations by hand, would you see a reduction in brain activity on an EEG? If someone uses Grammarly to correct every grammar mistake they make rather than reading over their entire essay/email/cover letter/etc manually, would you see a reduction in brain activity? If I use google maps to map out what route I need to take to get somewhere rather than plotting it out by hand using a paper map and asking multiple people for directions, would you see a reduction in brain activity? Or, to use an example of something I did today - if I asked the Google search AI to write out the excel formulas I need to use to conduct statistical analysis on my dataset, rather than reading the documentation pages on Microsoft’s website for ANOVA tests/t-tests/etc and manually trouble shooting every time I ran into an error, would you see a reduction in my brain activity? Furthermore, because the study mentions poorer content recall when writing an essay via LLM, if you were asked to recall the processes of each of these tasks (eg, calculations, grammar, travel route times and directions, formula syntax) after having them automated for you, could you do it?

Like, almost certainly there would be a reduction in brain activity and poorer recall, because you are offloading cognitive tasks to a machine to do that thinking work for you. But neurological activity is not the language we use when we talk about other forms of automation, because it would be absurd to claim that there is collective cognitive decline happening as a result of Google Maps telling you where to drive or what bus to take. And this is a good comparison imo, because you certainly can't make the argument that everyday travel is less important/foundational to the functioning of society than writing an essay.