Silver Linings and Silhouettes

Homo homini lupus

i feel so seen!!

I'm asexual. I figured that out not long after I first came across the term in high school. But figuring out my gender took a lot longer. I didn't really think about my gender identity for years, it wasn't until I was in college that I started trying to figure out what my gender was. That process took years.

I didn't really feel attached to my assigned gender, but I also didn't feel the gender dysphoria that trans people described. I didn't particularly feel like I was neither of those either. For a long time, I honestly didn't feel like any of the gender descriptions and identities I was coming across really fit. I just didn't care that much about what my actual gender was. Eventually I decided upon the agender label as that seemed the most apt. As the paper says, it's really hard to be truly without gender in this highly gendered world. Agender is a way of defining myself in a way that people who experience gender might be able to understand when "I'm just me." isn't really an acceptable answer to the "what's your gender?" question.

I don't mind being perceived as a gender, none of them are offensive to me. While I do like when I am perceived as male or at least not female, I think that more has to do with growing up female and not wanting to be pushed into traditional female roles and values than a connection or repulsion to any gender. I'm impossible to misgender because I frankly don't care.

Honestly, the biggest problem I have with my gender, is trying to define it to people. There's been a large push in recent years for asking people for their pronouns, or including pronouns in things like email signatures and surveys. And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this is a bad thing! This is very affirming for a lot of people. But it feels like I need to pick something that doesn't quite fit. At pride, for instance, there's always pronoun buttons. But they're all she/her, he/him, they/them, she/they, he/they, it/it, xe/xir, etc etc. And that's great. I'm always glad that there are a lot of options for people. But there's never any pins for any/all pronouns. I've never picked up a free pronoun pin at pride, despite always looking, because they all feel like picking what pronouns I don't want poeple to use and the answer is that I don't care. I fround an any/all pronoun pin once at a queer museum and I cried.

more coming soon i think

And this is not about plagiarism/theft, it's not about the environment, it's not about any of the myriad ethical issues with AI.

My job is one that requires a fair amount of critical thinking. I do (among other things) strategic, operational, and tactical planning, which means that I have to spend an inordinate amount of time thinking through what the path forward or the process should be for stuff.

One of the biggest failings I see in some people I work with, and one of the things that differentiates someone who is successful at the job versus someone who is not, is their ability to do critical thinking.

This is critical thinking at the big level, but it's also the little things. Do you know what the words you have written down say? Do you understand what you are advocating for? When faced with a challenge, big or small, do you have the ability to reason through to a solution?

This last one is most generalizable to basically all aspects of life. Your life will be very difficult if you can't look at a problem and reason through to a solution.

What does this have to do with genAI?

A lot of generative AI is about bypassing those skills. Even when you're "just" asking chatGPT to write you an email or edit your email to make it easier to read, you are bypassing the skills involved in reasoning through how to write a good email.

And those skills will atrophy. If you never need to think about how to articulate an idea clearly and concisely, you won't improve your ability to articulate an idea clearly and concisely. And when you need to do so without the aid of generative AI, you are much less likely to succeed at it.

The act of working through a problem is one of the main ways that you get better at solving problems.

Without the ability to do the thing, you also don't have the ability to check the genAI platform's work. How do you know if an email is clear, if you don't know what it means to write a clear email? How do you know if a summary of a text is right, if you don't know what happens in that text?

GenAI hallucinates. It makes stuff up. It can't do math. It's wrong, a lot, in a lot of different ways.

In the end, these are two big things that you need in your life that using genAI steals from you: 1) the ability to think critically and solve problems and 2) the ability to check work.

You will reach a point in your life where you can't genAI your way out of something. And if you don't know how to work without it, you will fail.

「 ARCHITECT OF ARCANUM 」 ✧ ☄ ✧