A Place of Hope

“Charlie Kirk did not deserve to be assassinated, but I’m overwhelmed seeing the flags of the United States of America at half-staff calling this nation to honor and venerate a man who was an unapologetic racist.”

Wrong!!!

I think that Asylum seekers and Migrant workers and The Undocumented and Everyone Else should get free healthcare too

"We trained a pigeon to recognise cancerous cell clusters and somehow they're really good at it" okay great, that's something that could plausibly be a thing.

I was watching an interview with Noam Chompsky and he was asked about Al software, specifically ChatGPT and its impact on education. He replied that GhatGPT isn't about learning, it's about avoiding learning.

And then the light went on.

Recently I was in a discussion with a peer group about an article written by James Marriot for the Times. He's basically an art school drop out that never spent any real time developing his skill to become an artist. And now he's bitter that he's not successful and that artists with real skill are

"Gatekeepers" to his success.

To be honest it was a very entitled rant that demonized people who have worked very hard to hone their craft as elitists and prestige squatters. In his article he welcomes Al image generators because he thinks it levels the playing field between his mediocre efforts and those snobby, gatekeeping artists.

And that's where the connection hit.... (channels Chompsky) Al Image generating isn't about making art. It's about AVOIDING making art. Let the computer do it. I'm too lazy to log the long emotionally wearing hours. I'm too impatient and entitled to listen to masters. I'm too self-absorbed to spend my time laboring over a work that requires me to use sophisticated critical thinking. Let the machine do it.

no publisher is willing to buy botshit, it's not copyrightable, and inputting prompts to receive amalgamations of other writers' work will not teach you how to write

DEI does not mean lower standards.

Departments with a significant percentage of female surgeons have better overall patient outcomes for all surgeons.

This is demonstrated in study after study after study.

Why? Because surgery is such a male-dominated field that a female surgeon has to be orders of magnitudes better than her male peers to be considered for the same job positions/research grants, etc.

And when you get enough female surgeons in a department, they start being able to influence decision-making to improve patient safety and procedure efficacy for the entire department.

But hospitals don't like hiring female surgeons because they might do something inconvenient like needing time off to give birth to the next generation.

DEI in medicine doesn't just ensure a genuinely merits-based hiring process, as opposed to a convenience-based one.

It's not about being tough on crime, because the absolute toughest most brutal measure you could take against "crime" as a social problem is to alleviate poverty, and increase access to education, healthcare and social mobility.

It's about performing "tough on crime" as an aesthetic by enacting violence against a prop, i.e. minorities and the impoverished, who are fetishized and objectified to represent "crime." They are brutalized as punishment for crime, but never with the purpose of alleviating the problem of crime.