I do wish someone would explore the parent estrangement thing more thoroughly as it impacts parents of trans folks. There are so many of us out here who did not do the things that were explored in this article and have been accepting and loving and yet still have been cut off by our adult children. I don't believe that 'toxic' should be applied to people and as a retired mental health professional I think that is a real problem. The trans world seems to encourage parent cut off if we parents ask any questions about the safety of transition, thus leavin elderly parents alone and these adult children also alone and at sea. How has this happened and where do heartbroken parents turn?
I agree. I was listening to another podcast that is at the bottom of my podcast barrel and the guest claimed that trans or suicidal ideation in kids/teens/adults is due to attachment issues when young, especially if a child went to daycare (and she mentioned NICU stays??). But I have three cousins who are or were trans and they had stay at home moms who were awesome and are now struggling to walk the fine line of contact to keep from getting cut off. My one cousin who decided he was no longer trans only changed his mind because an awesome therapist helped him realize that he was just unhappy with adult life in general (dating is hard, earning money is hard, not attractive enough, etc.) and that there were healthier ways to change that. Lots of theories out there, would be nice to have actual data.
I don't know if this is relevant or not - but my daughter (age 20) and her friends regularly go to "house shows" of bands playing in basements and are into real bands. whether they are good or not, I can't say, but at least the desire to see live music is still there.
Also, I had to laugh when you mentioned the ability of people to know their way around their own city without gps/phones. For some reason, this same daugher, on her way home the other night decided to turn off her phone navigation because she wanted to see if she could get home without it. She merged onto a similarly named highway (35) when she should have stayed on 36 for a while. She was well out into the suburbs before she realized her mistake. It was funny. I do applaud her for trying (I don't know what inspired it), and I hope she does it again since it was a relatively painless error.
There is a theory that pathfinding is actually one of the substantial reasons why humans evolved our long-term memory and expanded brain size.
There’s also a mnemonic strategy called “method of loci” that involves memorizing a list of things by picturing a route you know well and imagining things from the list in places along the route.
My guess is that this lack of geographic knowledge due to GPS, which is a very real thing, is not good for us. I try to turn mine off whenever I’m in DC, where I learned the roads before the smartphone era.
I always know where I am in terms of N/S/W/E and it drives me crazy when people use "down" or "up" interchangeably or with no regard to whether it is north or south. "Go up that road.." But that's south, man. You go down it, not up it.
Some animals do have bigger brains than humans, and indeed many larger mammals have very good memory of places (“an elephant never forgets”). It’s more about the ratio of brain areas; a large hippocampus is what drives spatial memory, as well as how many connections there are within it.
Chiang is right that the AI isn't happy to see me. But its words do mean that. They are language. The words "mean" even if the AI can't "mean" them. So Meghan's fear is justified: if people regard its products as Art, indistinguishable from human art, it's hard to say its not art, even without human feeling and creativity behind it. Which means....we're screwed.
There was a comment that maybe the young woman who went no contact with her parents just went through a worldview shift, but I would analyze it slightly differently. Often, young people raised in these religious, fundamentalist groups are given a basic understanding of the world that can be summed up in the statement "I have the real truth, and everyone else is condemned." It is actually quite easy for someone to shift from a religious conservative to a politically active progressive, and map this exact worldview onto your new opinions. This allows them to apply behaviors they would have applied to "the world" onto family members instead. Follow the rules or you are not welcome. Without more information, I can't be sure that's what's going on, but it kind of sounds like it.
Also...no therapist should EVER diagnose anyone who is not in the room with them. For example "your parents are narcissists" that would be malpractice.
Ethically no. When someone reports what someone else says, or does, it is filtered through their own lens. It not ok to give a client words that pathologize another person who I have never met. We all can look 'disordered' in certain moments. As a therapist I have power others don't to impact people. Better to stick with working with whoever is sitting in front of me.
In psychiatry there is what's called the "Goldwater Rule" which states that a psychiatrist shouldn't comment on diagnoses of a public figure unless an exam has been performed by that doctor on the patient being diagnosed and the patient gives permission for the disclosure. Even if we're not talking about public figures, the same principle is generally held to apply.
It doesn't have to be in the realm of mental health either. The legal power to practice medicine or psychology is not something to be thrown around lightly. I wouldn't diagnose someone I hadn't met with any medical condition. When we diagnose, we normally pull together more information that just one person's story about what happened.
You can kind of hedge with a patient by saying something like "it sounds like you're talking about post-traumatic stress..." or "sometimes people destroy relationships because they have borderline personality disorder..." without specifically saying that you're diagnosing someone. Even that can be sketchy.
The AI creating meaning discussion is fascinating, I think you nailed something that it doesn't matter if AI itself intends on delivering meaning because if humans perceive meaning (and we have a tendency to, even when there is none there) it will be seen as valuable. You can notice this with the way fan objects words and actions (celebrities usually) are interpreted as meaning something specific. And there are "vocaloid" acts out there with vibrant brands, and digital avatars that peddle "meaning" in the way that the audiences perceive them.
Speaking of personal essays and AI, Meghan O'Gieblyn's book God, Human, Animal, Machine is a beautiful exploration of AI and what it means to be human in that format.
I disagree that even if AI had all your background info, it could produce a piece you would make. It’s not a cloning device of human beings. AI doesn’t have an unconscious, and we do. We can’t remember most of what happened when our brain and psyche were formed. And we can’t consciously understand the nature of attraction or how we transmute unconscious parts of ourselves to others (or how our parent's unconscious affected us). How would knowing my identity and details about my background have any access to that? That’s like saying you can predict a person by their bio - when human beings are a lot more complicated than that and a mystery often to ourselves. I can’t predict where I’ll be next year, and I have access to more of that conscious stuff than AI would have. And one of the joys of creating or writing is that you surprise yourself - that your unconscious emerges.
The reason sales are on holidays is economics. If you’re going for a low-margin, high-volume strategy, it makes sense to have sales at times when people can actually take advantage of them (this started before online shopping of course). If you have a sale when most people are off of work, you can make money by attracting a lot of them. And then you get network effects of people shopping in groups, making a habit out of this sort of thing.
Sarahs music analogy was close but it’s missing the musicians expression. The sound of a cello being heard through a digital medium is comparable to the ability to see a letter on a computer screen rather than a hand written one. It’s missing the expression of the storyteller.
An interesting experiment would be to rig up a machine to a piano and have it mechanically play something like moonlight sonata just based off of beats per minute and an algorithm and compare that to an actual pianist and see if people could differentiate them. I think this is the sort of thing Sarah was trying to analogize for a musical application.
On the subject of AI filling out a simple story…Isn’t Alexandre Dumas accused of doing exactly this sort of thing with a few stories that were brought to him? Like the writers just didn’t think they could do the story justice and they gave it to him to do?
There are exceptions but broadly speaking, any person or organization that is encouraging you to isolate yourself from friends and family does not have your best interest at heart. This is one of the telltale sign of the religious behavior of mindless partisans. They’ll encourage you to cut “non-believers” out of your life. Avoid these people like the plague.
The thing about music is now you have an entire separate art form built around digital manipulation of sound. Or maybe more than one art form. You can engineer music or you can DJ.
If I compare the experience of listening to my friend DJing on Staten Island on a Friday night, which involves recombining existing (and usually already electronic) music in new forms to the experience of walking through a mall and listening to another ultraproduced pop nightmare from Taylor Swift for someone, I think it’s defaming the former to compare it to the latter aesthetically.
Well I don’t disagree about swift. Most Taylor swift music strikes me as recycled garbage when I hear it on the radio.
That said I’ve also never really considered DJing much more than picking songs people like to listen to. I understand that my impression of DJing is insultingly oversimplified but that’s the space it’s occupied in my brain until someone comes along and changes it haha.
I do wish someone would explore the parent estrangement thing more thoroughly as it impacts parents of trans folks. There are so many of us out here who did not do the things that were explored in this article and have been accepting and loving and yet still have been cut off by our adult children. I don't believe that 'toxic' should be applied to people and as a retired mental health professional I think that is a real problem. The trans world seems to encourage parent cut off if we parents ask any questions about the safety of transition, thus leavin elderly parents alone and these adult children also alone and at sea. How has this happened and where do heartbroken parents turn?
I agree. I was listening to another podcast that is at the bottom of my podcast barrel and the guest claimed that trans or suicidal ideation in kids/teens/adults is due to attachment issues when young, especially if a child went to daycare (and she mentioned NICU stays??). But I have three cousins who are or were trans and they had stay at home moms who were awesome and are now struggling to walk the fine line of contact to keep from getting cut off. My one cousin who decided he was no longer trans only changed his mind because an awesome therapist helped him realize that he was just unhappy with adult life in general (dating is hard, earning money is hard, not attractive enough, etc.) and that there were healthier ways to change that. Lots of theories out there, would be nice to have actual data.
I don't know if this is relevant or not - but my daughter (age 20) and her friends regularly go to "house shows" of bands playing in basements and are into real bands. whether they are good or not, I can't say, but at least the desire to see live music is still there.
Also, I had to laugh when you mentioned the ability of people to know their way around their own city without gps/phones. For some reason, this same daugher, on her way home the other night decided to turn off her phone navigation because she wanted to see if she could get home without it. She merged onto a similarly named highway (35) when she should have stayed on 36 for a while. She was well out into the suburbs before she realized her mistake. It was funny. I do applaud her for trying (I don't know what inspired it), and I hope she does it again since it was a relatively painless error.
There is a theory that pathfinding is actually one of the substantial reasons why humans evolved our long-term memory and expanded brain size.
There’s also a mnemonic strategy called “method of loci” that involves memorizing a list of things by picturing a route you know well and imagining things from the list in places along the route.
My guess is that this lack of geographic knowledge due to GPS, which is a very real thing, is not good for us. I try to turn mine off whenever I’m in DC, where I learned the roads before the smartphone era.
I always know where I am in terms of N/S/W/E and it drives me crazy when people use "down" or "up" interchangeably or with no regard to whether it is north or south. "Go up that road.." But that's south, man. You go down it, not up it.
But don't animals have way better pathfinding skills than humans? Wouldn't they develop bigger brains, too?
Some animals do have bigger brains than humans, and indeed many larger mammals have very good memory of places (“an elephant never forgets”). It’s more about the ratio of brain areas; a large hippocampus is what drives spatial memory, as well as how many connections there are within it.
There’s a really fantastic book called Wayfinding by M.R. O’Connor that explores these topics. Definitely recommend!
Chiang is right that the AI isn't happy to see me. But its words do mean that. They are language. The words "mean" even if the AI can't "mean" them. So Meghan's fear is justified: if people regard its products as Art, indistinguishable from human art, it's hard to say its not art, even without human feeling and creativity behind it. Which means....we're screwed.
There was a comment that maybe the young woman who went no contact with her parents just went through a worldview shift, but I would analyze it slightly differently. Often, young people raised in these religious, fundamentalist groups are given a basic understanding of the world that can be summed up in the statement "I have the real truth, and everyone else is condemned." It is actually quite easy for someone to shift from a religious conservative to a politically active progressive, and map this exact worldview onto your new opinions. This allows them to apply behaviors they would have applied to "the world" onto family members instead. Follow the rules or you are not welcome. Without more information, I can't be sure that's what's going on, but it kind of sounds like it.
Also...no therapist should EVER diagnose anyone who is not in the room with them. For example "your parents are narcissists" that would be malpractice.
The therapist can say that based on the client’s report, that a parent has traits of xyz disorder
Ethically no. When someone reports what someone else says, or does, it is filtered through their own lens. It not ok to give a client words that pathologize another person who I have never met. We all can look 'disordered' in certain moments. As a therapist I have power others don't to impact people. Better to stick with working with whoever is sitting in front of me.
In psychiatry there is what's called the "Goldwater Rule" which states that a psychiatrist shouldn't comment on diagnoses of a public figure unless an exam has been performed by that doctor on the patient being diagnosed and the patient gives permission for the disclosure. Even if we're not talking about public figures, the same principle is generally held to apply.
It doesn't have to be in the realm of mental health either. The legal power to practice medicine or psychology is not something to be thrown around lightly. I wouldn't diagnose someone I hadn't met with any medical condition. When we diagnose, we normally pull together more information that just one person's story about what happened.
You can kind of hedge with a patient by saying something like "it sounds like you're talking about post-traumatic stress..." or "sometimes people destroy relationships because they have borderline personality disorder..." without specifically saying that you're diagnosing someone. Even that can be sketchy.
First!
No fair, I’m on vacation
I’m traveling through Appalachia with limited cell service.
Damn!
I love it that Meghan calls out Sarah for her intellectual reasoning when it invokes inaccurate - albeit interesting - analogies.
The AI creating meaning discussion is fascinating, I think you nailed something that it doesn't matter if AI itself intends on delivering meaning because if humans perceive meaning (and we have a tendency to, even when there is none there) it will be seen as valuable. You can notice this with the way fan objects words and actions (celebrities usually) are interpreted as meaning something specific. And there are "vocaloid" acts out there with vibrant brands, and digital avatars that peddle "meaning" in the way that the audiences perceive them.
Speaking of personal essays and AI, Meghan O'Gieblyn's book God, Human, Animal, Machine is a beautiful exploration of AI and what it means to be human in that format.
https://thebranchmedia.org/show/lost-debate/family-estrangement/
I disagree that even if AI had all your background info, it could produce a piece you would make. It’s not a cloning device of human beings. AI doesn’t have an unconscious, and we do. We can’t remember most of what happened when our brain and psyche were formed. And we can’t consciously understand the nature of attraction or how we transmute unconscious parts of ourselves to others (or how our parent's unconscious affected us). How would knowing my identity and details about my background have any access to that? That’s like saying you can predict a person by their bio - when human beings are a lot more complicated than that and a mystery often to ourselves. I can’t predict where I’ll be next year, and I have access to more of that conscious stuff than AI would have. And one of the joys of creating or writing is that you surprise yourself - that your unconscious emerges.
Can yous not talk over each other please it does my head in 😆
The AI is the Art. It is an interactive art exhibit.
The reason sales are on holidays is economics. If you’re going for a low-margin, high-volume strategy, it makes sense to have sales at times when people can actually take advantage of them (this started before online shopping of course). If you have a sale when most people are off of work, you can make money by attracting a lot of them. And then you get network effects of people shopping in groups, making a habit out of this sort of thing.
Sarahs music analogy was close but it’s missing the musicians expression. The sound of a cello being heard through a digital medium is comparable to the ability to see a letter on a computer screen rather than a hand written one. It’s missing the expression of the storyteller.
An interesting experiment would be to rig up a machine to a piano and have it mechanically play something like moonlight sonata just based off of beats per minute and an algorithm and compare that to an actual pianist and see if people could differentiate them. I think this is the sort of thing Sarah was trying to analogize for a musical application.
On the subject of AI filling out a simple story…Isn’t Alexandre Dumas accused of doing exactly this sort of thing with a few stories that were brought to him? Like the writers just didn’t think they could do the story justice and they gave it to him to do?
There are exceptions but broadly speaking, any person or organization that is encouraging you to isolate yourself from friends and family does not have your best interest at heart. This is one of the telltale sign of the religious behavior of mindless partisans. They’ll encourage you to cut “non-believers” out of your life. Avoid these people like the plague.
The thing about music is now you have an entire separate art form built around digital manipulation of sound. Or maybe more than one art form. You can engineer music or you can DJ.
That’s certainly true, that probably one of the key reasons so many people hate modern music. I feels soulless for that very reason.
If I compare the experience of listening to my friend DJing on Staten Island on a Friday night, which involves recombining existing (and usually already electronic) music in new forms to the experience of walking through a mall and listening to another ultraproduced pop nightmare from Taylor Swift for someone, I think it’s defaming the former to compare it to the latter aesthetically.
Well I don’t disagree about swift. Most Taylor swift music strikes me as recycled garbage when I hear it on the radio.
That said I’ve also never really considered DJing much more than picking songs people like to listen to. I understand that my impression of DJing is insultingly oversimplified but that’s the space it’s occupied in my brain until someone comes along and changes it haha.