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[id a spotify playlist titled "kate bush threw a house party but there's too many people and now she's stressed" with three songs in it. the songs are "wow" by kate bush, "full house" by kate bush, and "get out of my house" by kate bush end id]

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Karl-Marx-Allee, East Berlin, 1970’s ☭

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i'm curious; could you elaborate on the "i barely even believe in personality traits first of all"?

i think like all psychological schemata and taxonomies, the idea of personality traits greatly overestimates the fixity, innateness, regularity, &c of human behaviour and affect. like these are not naturally existing immutable categories, they're discursive creations. which is ofc true of all language tho i think objectionable in a particular way when appearing as part of a scientised schema of knowledge, which necessarily fails to capture much about the human experience and distorts what it does capture to fit into its pre-fab conceptual boxes. i don't really put much stock in the notion of a fixed or discrete 'self' in general and i think the obsession with personality and personality traits is, on an individual level, really just part of that whole constellation of ideas. on a more corporate level it's basically an hr strategy, which should tell you something about the value and utility of these discourses

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half a year ago, i took a course on the ethics of AI and i cannot stop thinking about the fact that it at no point came up that there might be some ethical problems in the production of this new technology, in particular in light of the climate crisis.

i do not wish to imply that artists do not also have legitimate concerns about the way their work is being used for free by big corporate machines that then earns money on it by claiming that they have invented a tech that makes art "magically" appear. but i think the most concerning thing about AI by far is the environmental impact of the technology as well as its contribution to climate change.

at the current state, a study by researchers at the University of Massachusetts shows that training an AI model emits 626,000 pounds of carbon dioxide, which is roughly the same as what is emitted by flying back and forth between New York and San Francisco (two American states) 300 times. The airplane industry is currently, rightly, under a lot of scrutiny for contributing to climate change, so why are we not talking about this new emerging technology that makes airplanes seem climate friendly?

and this is not all, because as well as contributing heavily to climate change, AI is also detrimental to the environment as the mining of rare earth minerals releases toxic gasses into the immediate surroundings of the mine, negatively affecting both the environment and the people living there. of course, AI is not the only technology that relies on rare earth minerals, but it consumes a lot of them and is a technology in rapid growth which means that the environmental impact is only going to get worse.

in conclusion, AI is a huge contributor to climate change and to environmental pollution and the only reason, I suspect, that it is not on the top of people's minds when they think about AI is that we tend to imagine it as some sort of bodiless cloud. this means that we neglect to consider the large data centres that actually make up the body of AI or the long production chain that lead up to the final product.

sources: in writing up the above text, i consulted the first chapter of Kate Crawfords book Atlas of AI and the article below from Earth.org

#climate crisis #climate change #ai #artificial intelligence #co2 emissions

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cat nap

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unavoidable that you will be the villain in someone else's story. You will be painted in an unfavorable light. You will be the irredeemable one. and all of this will happen despite how nice you might usually be or how kind or how respectful or how warm. and you will just have to move on.

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apart from me growing older, it might also be that this movie has something to say about the trend of young girls on social media platforms who are promoting tradwife life that just wasn't as relevant when i was a teen as it is now. in an education, scherfig hammers the point home that there really isn't anything as important as teaching young girls the value of self-reliance. it really is when we think we no longer need to be sufficient in ourselves, that we end up needing to the most.

i rewatched an education for the first time since i myself was a sixteen year old girl & it was such a different experience the second time around. i really think it is one of those movies, you ought to watch twice - once from the perspective of Jenny and once from the perspective of danny and helen.

i understood the lesson jenny got in the dangers of sex, fast cars & fast-talking elder men that promise to show you the world, even though i definitely idolised it (and went on to meet my own david). but i don't think that i fully grasped the other lesson that she gets taught: the importance of making something tangible for yourself.

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i rewatched an education for the first time since i myself was a sixteen year old girl & it was such a different experience the second time around. i really think it is one of those movies, you ought to watch twice - once from the perspective of Jenny and once from the perspective of danny and helen.

i understood the lesson jenny got in the dangers of sex, fast cars & fast-talking elder men that promise to show you the world, even though i definitely idolised it (and went on to meet my own david). but i don't think that i fully grasped the other lesson that she gets taught: the importance of making something tangible for yourself.

#an education #lone scherfig

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Rosamund Pike & Carey Mulligan in An Education

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im sorry but while i recognise that a lot of conflicts are morally complicated, i simply am unable to see how we should be anything other than unflinching in our support for palestine in this moment

#israel palestine conflict #palestine

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An old couple from a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. 

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Something I always find bizarre is when people mention something along the lines of "You always act like your opinions are correct and everyone else is wrong" as like. A moral or personal flaw. Because like. I'm pretty sure that's just how opinions work.

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neglecting the review i have to hand in to my editor next thursday at the absolute latest in order to write a heartfelt long-form essay on the catholic philosopher elizabeth anscombe's writings on war that i will probably never publish. it is just something i have to say to an audience of myself, i guess.

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this is so good actually !!

#Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus #signe gjessing #poetry #being #love

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planting flowers in old bombs from iraq war

kurdistan .

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Not saying anything new here but my personal take on a lot of pop therapy/garbage psychology happening now is that it’s designed to remove or soothe feelings of accountability from the person seeking the treatment, because in our increasingly antisocial world everyone wants to be told that they are Good and Okay rather than figure out how to navigate our complex social relationships in a way that is better for us and those around us. So that’s how you get wild misinterpretations of things like narcissistic personality disorder (where suddenly everyone who has ever wronged you is a narcissist). And it does not surprise me in the least that doing inner child work has also become about creating a fictional alternative self that has a child’s impulses who you have to appease or can heal by treating YOURSELF like a child LOL…when in fact it’s the exact opposite of that and the whole point is to realize you’re accountable for your own adult behavior and have to stop doing behaviors which you learned in childhood & which no longer serve you