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Good morning. I'm stretched out on the sofa with a cat sitting on my legs and so my just out of reach coffee is going to be just a little cooler than I would like when I finally get to it. It is the long weekend on account of Canadian Thanksgiving. According to Wikipedia, in Québec, Monday is called Jour de l'Action de grâce.
May we all have days of grace before us. Basic Human Emotion
Yesterday, my blog Librarian of Things passed the 20K views. My posts have never gone viral and yet, over time, every day they are found been by a handful of readers as people have stumbled upon these posts somehow and sometimes, they are then shared to others. Blogging is not dead, but it moves so slowly that plays dead in the dark forest.
Writing online feels like trying to skip a stone over a lake. Most times (for me) the work is launched, lands, makes a very small ripple on the surface, and then... nothing. But other times, the stone catches the right angle and other readers re-share and carry the work forward, creating a series of ripples on the surface for a just a little longer. Writing online is an experience that I would like more people to try and enjoy, but I recognize that it may feel difficult to do in this moment. Lisa Maria Marquis's post Basic human emotion captures this feeling oh so well. It’s hard to get the tone right these days. Above, I’ve shared lines from a beautiful but very dark poem; below, an illustration of an urgent political message. In between, I thought I’d write about eye makeup.
Not just eye makeup, though that is my unexpected latest enthusiasm. There’s also the oatmeal cookies I made last night with white chocolate and pistachios. And the fairy egg one of our chickens laid this week. And the raw green fringe of hyacinths and alliums starting to break through the still-dead lawn.
Or a different view: there’s the washing machine needing a replacement part. And spending 25 minutes on hold just to cancel a credit card. And migraines. Tax paperwork. Waking up this morning to the telltale piston sound of a dog vomiting on the rug. Twice.
Enormous, terrifying things are happening in the world, things I don’t want to or can’t talk about, and still I knit and buy toothpaste and make pasta.
That’s not a causal relationship, just parallel facts. The existential dread doesn’t make the mundanity more exciting, and the mundanity doesn’t mitigate the dread. Work is going really well. This is a great cup of coffee. My hair’s falling out. ICE just kidnapped a college student a few blocks away from my house.
Trusting your own judgment on ‘AI’ is a huge risk
Last month, I was lucky enough to hear Alec Karakatsanis speak on a panel in which he shared some insights from his recent book, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News. In his comments, Alec's gently admonished his university-educated audience and let us know that he knew that we held our own false beliefs about crime, police, and safety, even through we (likely) eschewed Fox News and the like. It was essential for us to understand that our position on the political spectrum did not make us immune to the power of influence.
This reminds of a blog post I recently read. One of the major turning points in my life was reading my dad’s copy of Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion as a teenager.
Other highlights of my dad’s library – he was a organisational psychologist before he retired – included books by Fanon, Illich, and Goffman and a bunch on systems thinking and systems theory so, in hindsight, I was probably never not going to be idiosyncratic.
But Cialdini’s book was a turning point because it highlighted the very real limitations to human reasoning. No matter how smart you were, the mechanisms of your thinkings could easily be tricked in ways that completely bypassed your logical thinking and could insert ideas and trigger decisions that were not in your best interest.
He documented tactics and processes used by salespeople, thieves, and con artists and showed how they could manipulate and trick even smart people.
Worse yet, reading through another set of books in my dad’s library – those written by Oliver Sacks – indicated that the complex systems of the brain, the ones that lend themselves to manipulation and disorder, are a big part of what makes us human.
These are the opening paragraphs of a post called, Trusting your own judgement on ‘AI’ is a huge risk. It's a long post and so you might not get to Bjarnason's key recommendation, so I will share it here: "The only sensible action to take – which was also one of the core recommendations I made in my book The Intelligence Illusion – is to hold off."
To me, this recommendation rhymes with the sound parental advice to children to avoid older people who want to talk to you about religion [YouTube short]. It is essential to know that there are traps being laid for you in this world and to learn their tell-tale signs in order to avoid them. While we cannot assume that we are immune to falling into Technologies of Enchantment, we can still can learn from anthropologist Nick Seever's Trap Theory to try to avoid them the best we can, by learning how they work. Detroit Safety Team
Despite working professionally as a law librarian and despite living across the border, it was only today that I learned of the organization called the Detroit Safety Team at https://www.redefinesafety.org/
The Detroit Safety Team works to redefine safety, engage conflict, and create intentional structures of social practice that support community-centered healing.
I learned of the Detroit Safety Team from the website, One Million Experiments One Million Experiments is a curated collection of community-based safety projects and a podcast exploring how we define and create wellness and reduce harm in a world without police and prisons.
Join us in celebrating the work already happening to build solutions that are grounded in transformation instead of punishment. The point of this project is not to find permanent solutions to ever-changing problems, but to gather more ideas, tools, and skills so that we don’t have to start from scratch every time. We hope that One Million Experiments will be a source of inspiration for the people in our communities investing in collective care.
Liberation is the work and the work is liberation. There is no one answer to how we get free — there are one million.
Links from Previous Week 40 and 41 issuesAeolian Links
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