Tasa-arvo ei ole sukupuolikysymys
Tasa-arvokeskusteluita tunnutaan välillä käyvän ikään kuin kyse olisi kahden joukkueen välisestä urheilumatsista. Esimerkiksi:
“Naisvaltaisilla aloilla on huono palkka.”
“Mutta hahaa, miehiä syrjitäänkin huoltajuuskiistoissa! Koska miehillä on ongelmia, naisten ongelmista ei siis tarvitse välittää.”
Tai päinvastoin:
“Pojat menestyvät tyttöjä huonommin koulussa.”
“Mutta hahaa, naisten onkin turvattomampaa liikkua yksin pimeän tultua! Koska naisilla on ongelmia, ei miestenkään ongelmista tarvitse välittää.”
Viimeistä lausetta ei yleensä lausuta ihan näin suoraan, mutta ajatus on luettavissa rivien välistä.
Kukaan harvemmin huomauttaa, ettei tämänkaltaisessa muotoilussa ole mitään järkeä. Kaikki naiset eivät ole naisvaltaisilla aloilla eivätkä kaikki miehet miesvaltaisilla. Kaikki eivät elämänsä aikana joudu osallisiksi huoltajuuskiistoihin, ja osaa niihin joutuvista miehistäkin kohdellaan reilusti. Kaikilla pojilla ei mene huonosti koulussa eikä kaikilla tytöillä hyvin. Moni mieskin kokee olonsa turvattomaksi pimeän tullen ulkona liikkuessaan.
Tasa-arvoon liittyvät ongelmat eivät ole mitään äidinmaidossa tulevia tai geneettisesti määräytyviä piirteitä, joista olisi kaikille naisille tai kaikille miehille samanlaista haittaa. Eivätkä sukupuolet ole mitään vastakkain kisaavia urheilujoukkueita kilpailussa, jossa joukkueiden saamia etuja tarvitsee tasapainottaa.
Sen sijaan on kyllä aloja, joiden palkka on niiden raskauteen ja tarpeellisuuteen nähden hyvin pieni. On ihmisiä, joille ei anneta reilua mahdollisuutta saada lapsensa huoltajuutta. On lapsia ja aikuisia, joilla menee huonosti koulussa. Ja on ihmisiä, jotka kokevat itsensä turvattomaksi liikkuessaan yksin ulkona pimeällä. Nämä ovat ongelmia, joita tulisi pyrkiä korjaamaan – riippumatta siitä, kumpaan sukupuoleen ne kohdistuvat.
Toki meidän kannattaa pyrkiä selvittämään sitä, mitä ongelmia erityisesti miehiin tai naisiin kohdistuu. Ilman tietoa todellisista ongelmista emme pysty korjaamaan niitä. Mutta silloinkin kyse on ongelmien ratkomisesta, ei siitä että etsittäisiin asetta jonka avulla vähätellä muiden ongelmia.
Colonization
They were lovers and geniuses, two of the greatest military and administrative minds humanity had ever produced. They knew the art of war; they knew how to run a province; they knew when to please a populace, and when to wield an iron first.
They were the ones chosen to carry out humanity’s greatest need, the primordial urge of survival. Astronomers, biologists and astrophysicists had finally gathered enough information to calculate the exact odds of life being born anywhere in the galaxy. Humanity stood at a crossroads, at a point where it might still have enough time to reach out and establish a firm foothold across the galaxy. Were it to delay, alien civilizations might spring up all around it, making humankind only one minor player among many.
They were solicited for the task of leading the colonization wave, and they both eagerly volunteered. Both of them were frozen down, their brains then carefully cut into microscope-thin slices. Delicate robotic hands handled the slices, feeding them into machines that scanned them and constructed accurate models of the original brains.
They were installed on the triply-protected and secured mainframes of each colonization ship. Every ship was a small behemoth, equipped with self-replicating probes and rows upon rows of cloning chambers. Each was fully equipped to build a new world, establish a foothold on any planet that possessed a solid surface.
They were the first ones to awaken, whenever one of the ships was approaching its destination world. Though of no biological relation, they now became siblings of a kind, their cloned bodies growing in a shared machine womb. As they grew, nanomachines imprinted their developing brains with memories and skills, inherited from their old lives.
They were fully grown as they emerged from their wombs, physically and mentally adults. They walked naked in the halls of the great ships, empty at first. Together, they studied the initial reports of the first probes sent ahead to survey the worlds their ships were approaching. They made plans, and they watched as their crew was being grown, in thousands upon thousands of tanks on each ship.
They were the ones orchestrating all the details of the initial landing, and beyond. They led the ships to settle barren, lifeless worlds; planets filled with lethal gases; planets covered entirely with water. Some systems had no planets you could make a landfall on. On those they were quick to extract raw materials from asteroids, harness the energy of the local star, and establish harvesting stations in the atmospheres of the gas giants. Humanity, albeit unable to walk in a planetary gravity, prospered in those systems as well.
They were born again and again, on the approaches to a million systems. And each ship contained within the blueprints for building another ship, just like it. When they had secured a foothold and established a basic industry, they would soon begin to fabricate new vessels, for reaching out to the next worlds. They updated the mainframes of the new ships with the experiences and lessons the colonization of this world had taught them, and then sent them off, wishing their mind-siblings all the best.
They were eventually met by aliens, just as humanity had feared. The settlement waves had been many and numerous, each launching the next wave as soon as human technology allowed. As human technology had improved, the knowledge of it spread by light speed via radio, and the colonies had began to launch their new fleets faster yet. But it had not been enough to overrun all other life, and many aliens had developed on their own. The aliens had perceived the human expansion wave, and had been determined not to be run over.
They were forced into battle, thousands and thousands of times. Sometimes they had a ready colony before the aliens came; sometimes they were intercepted in interstellar space, before reaching their destination.
They were now leading the ships of the tenth, twentieth, thirtieth waves, by now well experienced and accustomed to interstellar life. They fought with a calculated ruthlessness they had been chosen for, reprogramming the production lines on their ships to squeeze out fighters and weapons. If victory required cannibalizing crucial components that meant leaving the ships stranded or the colony starving, then so be it. The distress call had already been sent, and the rest of humanity was already aware of their plight. Whether help arrived in time was irrelevant, the important thing was that more resources were being mustered for battle.
They were slain a hundred times, a thousand, ten thousand. They fell fighting green-skinned aliens, aliens that had been transformed into nothing but machines, aliens that embraced biological technology. Most of the time, they knew in advance when the missiles would hit and when they would die, and could do so in each others’ arms. They embraced each other tight, and died together as they had been born together.
It did not matter. They had done what they were meant to do, spread humanity across the stars. For each dying colony, burning under an alien sky, there were a million more. For every instance of them that died, a million others remained alive, coordinating the retaliatory strike. For every vessel that the aliens built, humanity had the resources to build a hundred million, enough to drown all opposition.
Applied cognitive science: learning from a faux pas
Yesterday evening, I pasted to two IRC channels an excerpt of what someone had written. In the context of the original text, that excerpt had seemed to me like harmless if somewhat raunchy humor. What I didn’t realize at the time was that by removing the context, the person writing it came off looking like a jerk, and by laughing at it I came off looking as something of a jerk as well.
Two people, both of whom I have known for many years now and whose opinions I value, approached me by private message and pointed out that that may not have been the smartest thing to do. My initial reaction was defensive, but I soon realized that they were right and thanked them for pointing it out to me. Putting on a positive growth mindset, I decided to treat this event as a positive one, as in the future I’d know better.
Later that evening, as I lay in bed waiting to fall asleep, the episode replayed itself in my mind. I learnt long ago that trying to push such replays out of my mind would just make them take longer and make them feel worse. So I settled back to just observing the replay and waiting for it to go away. As I waited, I started thinking about what kind of lower-level neural process this feeling might be a sign of.
Artificial neural networks use what is called a backpropagation algorithm to learn from mistakes. First the network is provided some input, then it computes some value, and then the obtained value is compared to the expected value. The difference between the obtained and expected value is the error, which is then propagated back from the end of the network to the input layer. As the error signal works it way through the network, neural weights are adjusted in such a fashion to produce a different output the next time.
Backprop is known to be biologically unrealistic, but there are more realistic algorithms that work in a roughly similar manner. The human brain seems to be using something called temporal difference learning. As Roko described it: “Your brain propagates the psychological pain ‘back to the earliest reliable stimulus for the punishment’. If you fail or are punished sufficiently many times in some problem area, and acting in that area is always preceeded by [doing something], your brain will propagate the psychological pain right back to the moment you first begin to [do that something]”.
As I lay there in bed, I couldn’t help the feeling that something similar to those two algorithms was going on. The main thing that kept repeating itself was not the actual action of pasting the quote to the channel or laughing about it, but the admonishments from my friends. Being independently rebuked for something by two people I considered important: a powerful error signal that had to be taken into account. Their reactions filling my mind: an attempt to re-set the network to the state it was in soon after the event. The uncomfortable feeling of thinking about that: negative affect flooding the network as it was in that state, acting as a signal to re-adjust the neural weights that had caused that kind of an outcome.
After those feelings had passed, I thought about the episode again. Now I felt silly for committing that faux pas, for now it felt obvious that the quote would come across badly. For a moment I wondered if I had just been unusually tired, or distracted, or otherwise out of my normal mode of thought to not have seen that. But then it occurred to me – the judgment of this being obviously a bad idea was produced by the network that had just been rewired in response to social feedback. The pain of the feedback had been propagated back to the action that caused it, so just thinking about doing that (or thinking about having done that) made me feel stupid. I have no way of knowing whether the “don’t do that, idiot” judgment is something that would actually have been produced had I been paying more attention, or if it’s a genuinely new judgment that wouldn’t have been produced by the old network.
I tend to be somewhat amused by the people who go about claiming that computers can never be truly intelligent, because a computer doesn’t genuinely understand the information it’s processing. I think they’re vastly overestimating how smart we are, and that a lot of our thinking is just relatively crude pattern-matching, with various patterns (including behavioral ones) being labeled as good or bad after the fact, as we try out various things.
On the other hand, there would probably have been one way to avoid that incident. We do have the capacity for reflective thought, which allows us to simulate various events in our heads without needing to actually undergo them. Had I actually imagined the various ways in which people could interpret that quote, I would probably have relatively quickly reached the conclusion that yes, it might easily be taken as jerk-ish. Simply imagining that reaction might then have provided the decision-making network with a similar, albeit weaker, error signal and taught it not to do that.
However, there’s the question of combinatorial explosions: any decision could potentially have countless of consequences, and we can’t simulate them all. (See the epistemological frame problem.) So in the end, knowing the answer to the question of “which actions are such that we should pause to reflect upon their potential consequences” is something we need to learn by trial and error as well.
So I guess the lesson here is that you shouldn’t blame yourself too much if you’ve done something that feels obviously wrong in retrospect. That decision was made by an earlier version of you. Although it feels obvious now, that version of you might literally have had no way of knowing that it was making a mistake, as it hadn’t been properly trained yet.
The Listener
The family had finally gotten their new house built. One of the first things they did was to throw a housewarming party and bring in the Listener.
It was a good party – a bit rowdy at times, but such was the way of parties. The house was full of folk, some enjoying themselves on the makeshift dance floor, some sitting in remote rooms and talking, just enjoying each others’ company. There were even the stirrings of a hesitating romance or two, taking root between some of the guests.
The Listener came in during the early hours of the party, and stayed the whole night. She walked back and forth in the house, letting her instincts guide her way. She didn’t speak to anyone, but she studied the house and the party with all her senses. She tasted the cheese that was being offered, savoring the taste of each crumb in her mouth. She let her fingers glide across the sturdy wooden supports, remembering the great oaks she’d watched being felled to make the supports. She drew in the smell of all the people, gathered together in such a small space, and she watched as they smiled and danced.
But most of all, she listened. Listened to people talking, laughing, yelling. Listened to the wind blowing outside, listened to the faint breathing of the house. She’d heard all these sounds before, back when she’d stood at the forest clearing the house would eventually be built on. She’d wandered across the clearing, touching the grass and breathing in the air, and she’d listened to the birds, the animals and the wind. And as a faint echo, an aural aftertaste almost too quiet to be heard, she had heard the sounds of this party. She had listened, then, until she had ascertained that the tone was a merry one, without any tinges of sadness. Then she had known that there would be no serious accidents while the house was being built.
Now, intertwined in all the merriment, she could still make out echoes of that day in the forest, of the birdsong she had listened to. But now she could also make out more distant sounds, ones stretching all the way to the distant future. Sounds of daily life in the house, children being raised and elderly grandparents being attended to. Even she could not have heard them before, for the house had still been but a remote possibility, one future among many. Now that it had been built, it was an anchor in time, entirely new possibilities stretching out from it.
Many of the guests at the party would glance at her every now and then, anxious to see her expressions. And mostly, they were met with relief, for the Listener was smiling gently to herself. At the door to one room, she could hear the laughter of children not even born yet, as clearly as if they’d already been there. At another room, the sounds of those children being conceived. And at one room, she thought she could almost hear one of the children as an old man, gently telling his own grandchildren of his youth.
The Listener spoke for the first time after the guests had left. She spoke to the adults in the family, telling them about the things to expect. They would have a good life here, though of course there would also be quarrels, fights and misfortunes. Here she had to choose her words carefully, for to be a Listener, being able to hear the echoes of the future wasn’t enough. During the party, she had also heard snippets of angry conversations, drunken confessions and tearful apologies. She had heard people reveal long-held secrets, ones that were the true reasons for many of the arguments yet to come. It would have been unwise and needlessly hurtful to reveal them now, before things had naturally reached that point. So she spoke her assurances but also her warnings, carefully worded not to say too much, but also not to be vague to the point of uselessness. With some, she spoke to in private, making gentle suggestions of what needed to be said, and of what would be better off unsaid.
When it was all said and done, she slept the night at the house and ate one last meal. Then it was time to leave, for there were other places and houses to visit, other families needing the advice of a Listener. As she was walking down the road, she stopped and turned, looking at the house one last time and smiling.
It would be a good home.
This work by Kaj Sotala is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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