Slogans, and “Born this way”

Back when I was in college, California passed Proposition 8, which notoriously banned same-sex marriage, after it had been briefly legal. Many queer folks my age describe it as a formative experience, when they realized that progress was not as assured as they had hoped. So you could say that marriage equality was on our minds. And so it was the heyday for all sorts of slogans. “NO H8”, “Love is Love”, or “Born This Way”–Lady Gaga’s single of the same name was hot during the brief window when I was clubbing.

“Love is love” still seems to be fairly common, but I don’t hear “born this way” nearly as much anymore. I’m bracing myself to be proven wrong–within moments of hitting publish, I will see a dozen different people independently referring to “born this way”, and a dozen readers will tell me that they had just taken a break from scrolling through “born this way” memes so they could read this article. But if I trust my personal experience, “born this way” is kind of out of fashion now, isn’t it?

Is that what eventually happens to political slogans? They live on in our memories, but we stop thinking about them? If so, that may be for the best.

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Spam bloggers get

There’s a certain kind of spam that bloggers get, which is mostly invisible to non-bloggers. So many people may not recognize it as spam, for lack of experience. Let me describe it for you.

The end goal of the spammer is to create links back to a website. I don’t pretend to know how their business model works, but I’d speculate that these spammers are paid by some website to boost their search rankings. The websites are generally disreputable shoestring budget operations, filled with plagiarism, AI-generated text, and other nonsense, and absolutely do not deserve to have their search rankings boosted.

The most common way to create links is by leaving comments. I get about 30 spam comments a day, but I never look at them because WordPress has a very effective spam filter. Many comments don’t bother trying to trick you, they’re straight up ads. Other comments are generic “I loved reading this!” type stuff, with a profile link back to the target website.  Perhaps it’s no wonder that cranky old bloggers like me don’t appreciate generic praise.

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Three arguments on AI Art

Many artists are opposed to AI art, and there seem to be three central arguments. First, that these AI models were trained artists’ images without their permission. Second, that the use of AI technology endangers the livelihoods of artists. Third, that AI art is bad art. The first is a rights-based argument while the second is a consequentialist argument, and the third is an aesthetic argument.

1. Rights

Starting with the first argument, I think it’s an open question whether artists truly ought to have the right to be excluded from AI training. If an artist-in-training looked at images on Deviant Art to learn how to draw, we would not say that the artists of Deviant Art had the right to prevent them. If you look at art with an artist’s eye, you’re going to naturally learn from it, and it seems unreasonable to allow people to look at your art just as long as they don’t look too deeply, lest they learn something from it.

However, an AI model is substantially distinct from a human artist-in-training, in that it trains on vast number of images–and also it isn’t a person. You could argue that there’s no rule against humans because it’s simply impractical to delineate how they consume art, while it’s far more practical to restrain AI. AI also poses the risk of accidental plagiarism–which is not unlike human artists! But the risk of plagiarism might be significantly be higher in AI, which could affect our moral judgment.

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Bad Mensa puzzles

I have some questions about Mensa. It’s an organization founded in 1946 whose membership is restricted to people scoring in the 98 percentile of IQ. But IQ is a scientifically dubious concept associated with eugenics and racism, and many people who would qualify for membership probably have better things to do, so I wonder what their membership looks like. I also wonder to what extent it’s just a thing that people sign up for and forget about–maybe subscribe to a newsletter, buy a thing or two from their store.

But this story is more personal–and more petty. It’s the story of why I disliked Mensa from a fairly young age, even though I most certainly would have qualified for membership. See, I received a lot of puzzle-based gifts, and I always thought that those with Mensa branding were the crummiest of them all.

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Participation trophies

My husband, an older millenial, asked “Were participation trophies ever a real thing?” He never got any–at most he got some participation ribbons. But yes, participation trophies were absolutely literal physical objects. Myself, a mid-millenial, got a few of the things.

But in the public conversation, the metaphor of the participation trophy has overtaken their physical reality.

Yeah, I got a few of the participation trophies, back when I played soccer in grade school. I was awful at soccer. In retrospect, our whole team was bad, being composed of a bunch of kids who may or may not have been forced into it by their parents. But at the time I felt like I was particularly bad, like I dragged the whole team down, and I didn’t understand why I was there at all. I got a trophy for doing that, every year.
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Musical maturity and bad statistics

Among music-likers, it’s often said that your musical tastes are defined by what we enjoyed at age 14, or that our favorite music came out when we were 14. This claim comes from a 2018 article in the New York Times titled “The Songs That Bind” (paywalled). This article contains dubious statistical analysis, and its claims are probably false.

The article uses Spotify data, “on how frequently every song is listened to by men and women of each particular age.” There are two distinct ways of analyzing this data:

  1. The person level – Look at each individual, and see which songs they listen to most.
  2. The song level – Look at each song, and see which individuals listen to them the most.

So let’s read the article carefully and determine which analysis was used.
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Equality vs equity: An overanalysis

It’s time for a critical analysis of the “equality vs equity” meme, a widely duplicated and mutated image of three people standing on crates to watch a baseball game.

equality and equity

I shrink images to fit this blog’s margins. For bigger versions, see my sources. Source

The linguistic island

Of all my complaints about this meme, my most significant is about its choice of words. On the surface level, the meme is educating us about the distinction between “equality” and “equity”. However, outside of the meme, that is not how the words are used. The equality/equity distinction, mostly just comes from the meme. The meme is not educating us about the meaning of these two words, it is establishing new meanings.

It is not illegitimate to create new meanings for words, of course. But the problem is that the meme masquerades as educational, and everyone takes that for granted. As a result, every discussion of “equity” eventually comes back to the meme.  The meme is a linguistic island, and there is nowhere else for the discussion to go.

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