I'd pretty much given up on romance ever making sense as a concept, but there's been a new round of posts that's got me thinking again. Let me start with computers and work my way back around to romance.
One cool thing that AIs can do is classify things. You stuff in a bunch of things and go "here, classify these", and the AI groups them together into categories. It won't tell you how it's categorizing them, just make groups. This is useful in a variety of ways, categorization being important to learning about the world and all, and one interesting thing you can do with it is feed in data that humans have already classified and compare our categories to the groups the computer comes up with. For example, one study gave English words to an AI and provided example sentences using those words. The AI came up with groupings that matched our categories of 'noun', 'verb', etc. It would also have been interesting if the AI had come up with a different way of categorizing words. Maybe there's some arching commonality between words like "tree", "vertigo", and "conjugate" that we've never noticed.
This idea of categorizing without labeling is a useful one, and between my AI class and my ace blog readings, something coalesced. What if instead of examining my data (feelings, desires, etc.) against other peoples' definitions of romance, I just looked at all my data and tried to group it into meaningful categories, not worrying about what to call them?
When I did that there was a very obvious group of feelings which stood out. If I apply the name 'romance' to that category, it immediately gives me a rich vocabulary for explaining my experiences. I feel romantic love for Hats and Flowers. That awkward period of time with Flowers was awkward because they felt romantically about me, but I hadn't developed romantic feelings for them yet. I've had crushes. This is very useful.
Or rather, part of it is useful. What's useful about labeling my experiences that way isn't actually the label, it's grouping similar experiences together so I can understand them in the context of one another. The label is only useful if I want to talk about it, but I'm not so sure that 'romance' a good label to use for this category. Romance as a term comes with a lot of assumptions, many of which I don't like. It comes back to the same problem I had before: Are these experiences and feelings close enough to what other people mean by 'romance' that I want to describe them using that word?
I'm trying not to care. Whether that category is best labeled romantic or platonic or something else entirely, it's useful for me just to have identified its existence explicitly. I'll probably come back to worry away at it later. No matter how much I try to be content in my grey area, I always come back to the question "what is this relationship?" and my analytical brain can't stop trying to classify things.
Showing posts with label modeling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label modeling. Show all posts
Friday, November 20, 2015
Saturday, April 11, 2015
"Being" vs. "Doing"
Lately I've been thinking about the difference between being x, and doing x. Take being gay. The way it's usually modeled now, homosexual is a thing that you are, an inborn quality that cannot be changed. But it wasn't always that way. It used to be modeled as something that you did. Anyone could do a 'homosexual act', but it didn't mean that they were anything.*
Both of these models have upsides and downsides. One set that I see is when homosexuality is seen as a bad thing. If it's modeled as something people do, then anti-homosexuality says that people shouldn't do the bad thing and people who do it should be punished. If it's modeled as something people are, then anti-homosexuality says that those people are bad people and bad things should happen to them. That may not seem like much of a difference in practice, but I think it's a very fundamental one with subtle effects only some of which I can unpack on my own. This is something I can only see from a distance, so to speak, so I'd be very interested to hear other perspectives.
Another place where I see both models of being x and of doing x is polyamory. People argue over whether poly is an orientation - something innate that you're born with, or a relationship philosophy,lifestyle etc, and it just strikes me as really silly. To me at least, it's obvious that they're each true for different people. Some people are innately driven to have multiple intimate relationships at once. Flowers is like that. They're very happy with Hats, but they actively want to have additional partners. I'd say they they are poly. Hats and I, on the other hand, just sort of ended up in a relationship set that was poly through happenstance. I'd say we do poly. In the abstract I'd be fine having just one partner, it's just that that's totally not how my life is shaping up right now.
I find instances of this being x vs. doing x distinction all around gender and sexuality, but the concept is even further generalizable. I do art. I'm not an artist. Artists express themselves through their medium; I just make stuff that looks nice. Sometimes my work is meaningful, but usually not. I still see myself as a crafter, or, better and more generally, a maker than an artist.
* I'm playing fast and loose with history here. I'm making it sound simple and linear which it wasn't (isn't), but for the sake of my point the loose version will do.
Both of these models have upsides and downsides. One set that I see is when homosexuality is seen as a bad thing. If it's modeled as something people do, then anti-homosexuality says that people shouldn't do the bad thing and people who do it should be punished. If it's modeled as something people are, then anti-homosexuality says that those people are bad people and bad things should happen to them. That may not seem like much of a difference in practice, but I think it's a very fundamental one with subtle effects only some of which I can unpack on my own. This is something I can only see from a distance, so to speak, so I'd be very interested to hear other perspectives.
Another place where I see both models of being x and of doing x is polyamory. People argue over whether poly is an orientation - something innate that you're born with, or a relationship philosophy,lifestyle etc, and it just strikes me as really silly. To me at least, it's obvious that they're each true for different people. Some people are innately driven to have multiple intimate relationships at once. Flowers is like that. They're very happy with Hats, but they actively want to have additional partners. I'd say they they are poly. Hats and I, on the other hand, just sort of ended up in a relationship set that was poly through happenstance. I'd say we do poly. In the abstract I'd be fine having just one partner, it's just that that's totally not how my life is shaping up right now.
I find instances of this being x vs. doing x distinction all around gender and sexuality, but the concept is even further generalizable. I do art. I'm not an artist. Artists express themselves through their medium; I just make stuff that looks nice. Sometimes my work is meaningful, but usually not. I still see myself as a crafter, or, better and more generally, a maker than an artist.
* I'm playing fast and loose with history here. I'm making it sound simple and linear which it wasn't (isn't), but for the sake of my point the loose version will do.
Thursday, April 2, 2015
Modeling
"All models are wrong, but some are useful."
- George E. P. Box
I do a lot of modeling of complicated and muddy emotions and stuff, but I think it's very important to remember that what I'm doing is just that - modeling - and that each and every one of my models, while useful, is flawed, misleading, and wrong. I'm building a web of models to help me understand the world, but I must take care to not become too attached to my models and convictions, lest I miss something else just as important and valid. My current ways of thinking must not blind me to new information and new ways of thinking. I must also guard against the idea that my definitions and ways of looking at concepts are the 'right' ones. They work for me, and for many of the people I'm trying to communicate with, but to expect them to definitively describe all human experience would be a pinnacle of hubris.
- George E. P. Box
I do a lot of modeling of complicated and muddy emotions and stuff, but I think it's very important to remember that what I'm doing is just that - modeling - and that each and every one of my models, while useful, is flawed, misleading, and wrong. I'm building a web of models to help me understand the world, but I must take care to not become too attached to my models and convictions, lest I miss something else just as important and valid. My current ways of thinking must not blind me to new information and new ways of thinking. I must also guard against the idea that my definitions and ways of looking at concepts are the 'right' ones. They work for me, and for many of the people I'm trying to communicate with, but to expect them to definitively describe all human experience would be a pinnacle of hubris.
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Wait a minute, this is stupid.
So I was chopping vegetables the other day, and suddenly it struck me: The Kinsey scale is kinda dumb. Why? Because it measures two entirely unrelated variables (attraction to people of your gender and attraction to people of the opposite gender) along the same axis.
That's really dumb! It's like graphing how much people like bananas and melons using the same axis. If you don't see what's wrong with this, imagine that you don't like melons or bananas. Or that you hate melons and like bananas, but don't like bananas as much as everyone else who's all the way over on the not-melon side. There's no way to express those ideas on this scale, because the only way to like melons less is to like bananas more. This is stupid because how much you like bananas is not related to how much you like melons.
Dang it, gender binary, things are so much easier to graph if I can just pretend you exist! (But I can't.)
That's really dumb! It's like graphing how much people like bananas and melons using the same axis. If you don't see what's wrong with this, imagine that you don't like melons or bananas. Or that you hate melons and like bananas, but don't like bananas as much as everyone else who's all the way over on the not-melon side. There's no way to express those ideas on this scale, because the only way to like melons less is to like bananas more. This is stupid because how much you like bananas is not related to how much you like melons.
 |
| Dumb |
To bring it back to sexuality, being less attracted to one gender does not mean that you have to be more attracted to the other gender. Those variables are independent. What the heck are they doing on the same axis? Really the graph should look like more like this:
What a nice-looking graph. ...Except then this happens:
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