Cut for length.

FWIW when I took one of those internet tests I scored inbetween average normie and average faceblind, which corresponds pretty well to my lived experience – e.g. I often don’t recognize somebody the second time I see them, but usually start to after that. I have no trouble recognizing my coworkers, but I get the two bald guys in sales who I occasionally exchange pleasantries with confused.

Assuming the friend is an actual friend, not just a friendly acquantaince (inside the dunbar group?), I think not recognizing them automatically would matter.<<

Well, whenever I hear people draw a distinction between “friend” and “friendly acquaintance”, they almost always define “friend” so strictly that I have had maybe one or two friends in the past decade, and no friends whose faces I saw frequently. (honestly, where do the friend-vs-acquaintance people find so many people who don’t respond to interpersonal problems by contemptuously brushing them off)

This is what I was trying to indicate with the dunbar group comment, should have made it more clear, sorry. I meant your 100 or 200 closest associates.

I can reliably recognise housemates at the mall, and have nobody else whose faces I have as much experience with as one would have with one’s band members. I can suspect that a person at the mall is my boss, but not with confidence; however, I’ve only been around him ~[3 gradually increasing to 8]† hours/week for 1.5 years, so it’s to be expected that I’m only in the middle stages of learning his face.

(He is not faceblind–or at least, he’s significantly better at keeping track of which customers are regulars than I am–but he still didn’t spot me. I asked about how his Boxing Day went a couple days later and confirmed that he was at the mall that day, so it probably was him I saw.)

Oh people totally miss each other all the time in big crowds, even facenormies. I think a lot of it is just never even noticing the other person at all. My impression is that faceblindness is when you can intentionally look someone in the face and not be sure, as opposed to more general lack of awareness (which I think is pretty common in normies).

—

If we can do a little evolutionary speculation here, in the ancestral environment, telling whether the guy you just saw in the forest is in your band, or a stranger, or the particular guy in the band who would really benefit if you weren’t around is a matter of life and death.<<

While this isn’t all that different from what I said, it does make it more clear why, if someone did mutate an unusually good facial-recognition ability, it would get selected for and eventually become the norm. If you don’t know whether someone’s an enemy and neither do they, that’s far less dangerous than if they know you’re enemies and you don’t.

Also, not knowing by the face whether someone’s in your tribe is something even mezzoprosopons or whatever the hell we’re calling them have to deal with these days, and they deal with it by simply making tribe members wear distinctive clothing when there’s a chance they might encounter an enemy [link].

(and I feel like a lot of the reasons that I refrain from murdering people would still apply to the stalking-a-rival-in-the-forest thing, but perhaps my threshold for “I am willing to accept X risk of Y-severity punishment†† in order to get the benefits of committing this crime” is unusually strict; probably an anxiety thing)

I’m no expert but my impression that what we know of hunter-gatherers is that they experience much higher rates of violent death than moderns do and that murder is an issue and violent conflict between groups tended to be irregular and probably involved a lot of raiding and the like.

So I’m not saying that everyone would be murdering their rivals in the forest, and hunter gatherer you might not, but I think the temptation to have your enemey experience a “hunting accident” was probably something that happened.

And I imagine groups probably did have significant elements of attire, possibly even some just for violence, but if your camp is getting raided by surprise you’re not going to have time for that.

So here’s a hypothetical: you are a 12 year old girl in said camp getting raided. You hide away so you don’t get caught, but you see a man coming. Your group consists of 50ish relations. Is that guy coming by your uncle once removed john? Or do you need to run? Sure, you’re not totally screwed if you can’t tell, but it sure would help.

Tags:

#I don’t think I have much to say in response to this but: #conversational aglets #prosopagnosia #evolution #murder cw

Can you tell who this is?

January 11, 2019June 13, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{Title link: https://brinbellway.wordpress.com/2014/08/26/can-you-tell-who-this-is/ }}

rustingbridges:

brin-bellway:

rustingbridges:

prosopanonymous:

brin-bellway:

I suspected it might be Abraham Lincoln when I could only see around the edge, but the more they revealed, the less sure I got, until by the end I was convinced it wasn’t him. You tagged the post “Abraham Lincoln”, so I guess I should’ve gone with my first thought.

I note that when I took one of those online facial recognition quizzes, I had a similar experience with Barack Obama: my first thought was that it was him, but then I thought “no, that can’t be him, he isn’t that old” and failed the question (like I did every other question on that quiz). I’d forgotten how much politics ages you. (Though in Lincoln’s case, the “no, that can’t be him” was because this face looks too wide to be him.)

(Who says there has to be an evolutionary advantage? All a trait really has to do to stick around is not get you killed too often.)

Same- I only needed 4 tiles taken away before I knew who it was. Personally, I’m familiar with that picture, so I didn’t have any doubts as more was revealed.

And no, there doesn’t have to be an evolutionary advantage, though it could be argued since it’s a pretty large subpopulation. And if it prevents you from not being killed too often, couldn’t that be considered an evolutionary advantage? I’m hardly an evolutionary psychologist, but I love hearing the arguments for or against certain traits to exist due to evolution.

It’s not that it prevents you from being killed too often, it’s that it doesn’t actively get you killed enough to have been weeded out of the gene pool.

Adverse mutations can stick around for a long time if they’re bundled with genes that otherwise do well. This happens a lot with populations that go through bottlenecks – whatever’s left afterwards is going to stick around for a while.

e.g. the whole vitamin c thing seems like a loss for no good reason and we’re all stuck with it.

As a sidenote, given the population boom in the last few hundred years there’s gotta be a whole bunch of weird mutations that exist in greater numbers than you ever would have expected.

Anyway have you heard the whole neanderthal / autism idea? @slartibartfastibast has a whole ancient aliens slideshow + youtube video on it.

As a further side note, I wonder what the trade off for lactase persistence is. It must be something, if lactase stopped persisting at some point.

>>It’s not that it prevents you from being killed too often, it’s that it doesn’t actively get you killed enough to have been weeded out of the gene pool.<<

Yeah, that’s what I was trying to say, but I think she misunderstood and I didn’t bother trying to clarify.

Come to think of it, why *do* specialised facial-recognition modules exist? If you’re living in a band society, interacting with the same small group of people over and over, you can just use your general-object-recognition module for that. Yeah, it’ll take a few years to start getting the hang of it, but those’ll be childhood years in which you aren’t expected to be very competent at stuff anyway.

A lot of the life problems caused by prosopagnosia are not so much from “being bad at faces” as from “being *worse at faces than others expect you to be*”, and if people’s expectations were lower it would be much less of a problem. There’s a possible universe in which the default reaction to walking past a friend at the mall and they act like they’ve never met you is not “how rude, what did I ever do to them” but “yeah, the human brain’s not built to deal with crowds, makes sense that they didn’t recognise me. TBH, I only knew for sure it was them because they had that backpack with the hole patched with denim”.

—

>>Anyway have you heard the whole neanderthal / autism idea? @slartibartfastibast has a whole ancient aliens slideshow + youtube video on it.<<

Link?

Come to think of it, why do specialised facial-recognition modules exist? If you’re living in a band society, interacting with the same small group of people over and over, you can just use your general-object-recognition module for that.

So if the example you give later (walking past a friend at the mall and not recognizing them) is the sort of thing that actually happens, then I’d guess general recognition without the extra facial recognition just isn’t good enough.

Assuming the friend is an actual friend, not just a friendly acquantaince (inside the dunbar group?), I think not recognizing them automatically would matter.

If we can do a little evolutionary speculation here, in the ancestral environment, telling whether the guy you just saw in the forest is in your band, or a stranger, or the particular guy in the band who would really benefit if you weren’t around is a matter of life and death.

And for babies, recognizing your mother does seem pretty important.

Not sure about the link. I’d have to dig it out. If you want to siikr for it maybe try neanderthal or eusocial or something.

>>Assuming the friend is an actual friend, not just a friendly acquantaince (inside the dunbar group?), I think not recognizing them automatically would matter.<<

Well, whenever I hear people draw a distinction between “friend” and “friendly acquaintance”, they almost always define “friend” so strictly that I have had maybe one or two friends in the past decade, and no friends whose faces I saw frequently. (honestly, where do the friend-vs-acquaintance people *find* so many people who don’t respond to interpersonal problems by contemptuously brushing them off)

I can reliably recognise housemates at the mall, and have nobody else whose faces I have as much experience with as one would have with one’s band members. I can *suspect* that a person at the mall is my boss, but not with confidence; however, I’ve only been around him ~[3 gradually increasing to 8]† hours/week for 1.5 years, so it’s to be expected that I’m only in the middle stages of learning his face.

(He is not faceblind–or at least, he’s significantly better at keeping track of which customers are regulars than I am–but he still didn’t spot me. I asked about how his Boxing Day went a couple days later and confirmed that he was at the mall that day, so it probably *was* him I saw.)

—

>>If we can do a little evolutionary speculation here, in the ancestral environment, telling whether the guy you just saw in the forest is in your band, or a stranger, or the particular guy in the band who would really benefit if you weren’t around is a matter of life and death.<<

While this isn’t all that different from what I said, it does make it more clear why, if someone *did* mutate an unusually good facial-recognition ability, it would get selected for and eventually become the norm. If you don’t know whether someone’s an enemy *and neither do they*, that’s far less dangerous than if they know you’re enemies and you don’t.

Also, not knowing by the face whether someone’s in your tribe is something even mezzoprosopons or whatever the hell we’re calling them have to deal with these days, and they deal with it by simply making tribe members wear distinctive clothing when there’s a chance they might encounter an enemy [link].

(and I feel like a lot of the reasons that *I* refrain from murdering people would still apply to the stalking-a-rival-in-the-forest thing, but perhaps my threshold for “I am willing to accept X risk of Y-severity punishment†† in order to get the benefits of committing this crime” is unusually strict; probably an anxiety thing)

—

†I work more hours than this, but these are specifically the hours that overlap with the hours he’s there.

††note: if you assault someone and they fight back and hurt *you*, that also counts as a punishment for this purpose

Tags:

#reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #prosopagnosia #evolution #murder mention

Can you tell who this is?

January 8, 2019June 13, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{Title link: https://brinbellway.wordpress.com/2014/08/26/can-you-tell-who-this-is/ }}

rustingbridges:

prosopanonymous:

brin-bellway:

I suspected it might be Abraham Lincoln when I could only see around the edge, but the more they revealed, the less sure I got, until by the end I was convinced it wasn’t him. You tagged the post “Abraham Lincoln”, so I guess I should’ve gone with my first thought.

I note that when I took one of those online facial recognition quizzes, I had a similar experience with Barack Obama: my first thought was that it was him, but then I thought “no, that can’t be him, he isn’t that old” and failed the question (like I did every other question on that quiz). I’d forgotten how much politics ages you. (Though in Lincoln’s case, the “no, that can’t be him” was because this face looks too wide to be him.)

(Who says there has to be an evolutionary advantage? All a trait really has to do to stick around is not get you killed too often.)

Same- I only needed 4 tiles taken away before I knew who it was. Personally, I’m familiar with that picture, so I didn’t have any doubts as more was revealed.

And no, there doesn’t have to be an evolutionary advantage, though it could be argued since it’s a pretty large subpopulation. And if it prevents you from not being killed too often, couldn’t that be considered an evolutionary advantage? I’m hardly an evolutionary psychologist, but I love hearing the arguments for or against certain traits to exist due to evolution.

It’s not that it prevents you from being killed too often, it’s that it doesn’t actively get you killed enough to have been weeded out of the gene pool.

Adverse mutations can stick around for a long time if they’re bundled with genes that otherwise do well. This happens a lot with populations that go through bottlenecks – whatever’s left afterwards is going to stick around for a while.

e.g. the whole vitamin c thing seems like a loss for no good reason and we’re all stuck with it.

As a sidenote, given the population boom in the last few hundred years there’s gotta be a whole bunch of weird mutations that exist in greater numbers than you ever would have expected.

Anyway have you heard the whole neanderthal / autism idea? @slartibartfastibast has a whole ancient aliens slideshow + youtube video on it.

As a further side note, I wonder what the trade off for lactase persistence is. It must be something, if lactase stopped persisting at some point.

>>It’s not that it prevents you from being killed too often, it’s that it doesn’t actively get you killed enough to have been weeded out of the gene pool.<<

Yeah, that’s what I was trying to say, but I think she misunderstood and I didn’t bother trying to clarify.

Come to think of it, why *do* specialised facial-recognition modules exist? If you’re living in a band society, interacting with the same small group of people over and over, you can just use your general-object-recognition module for that. Yeah, it’ll take a few years to start getting the hang of it, but those’ll be childhood years in which you aren’t expected to be very competent at stuff anyway.

A lot of the life problems caused by prosopagnosia are not so much from “being bad at faces” as from “being *worse at faces than others expect you to be*”, and if people’s expectations were lower it would be much less of a problem. There’s a possible universe in which the default reaction to walking past a friend at the mall and they act like they’ve never met you is not “how rude, what did I ever do to them” but “yeah, the human brain’s not built to deal with crowds, makes sense that they didn’t recognise me. TBH, I only knew for sure it was them because they had that backpack with the hole patched with denim”.

—

>>Anyway have you heard the whole neanderthal / autism idea? @slartibartfastibast has a whole ancient aliens slideshow + youtube video on it.<<

Link?

Tags:

#reply via reblog #prosopagnosia #evolution

Can you tell who this is?

January 8, 2019June 13, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{Title link: https://brinbellway.wordpress.com/2014/08/26/can-you-tell-who-this-is/ }}

prosopanonymous:

brin-bellway:

I suspected it might be Abraham Lincoln when I could only see around the edge, but the more they revealed, the less sure I got, until by the end I was convinced it wasn’t him. You tagged the post “Abraham Lincoln”, so I guess I should’ve gone with my first thought.

I note that when I took one of those online facial recognition quizzes, I had a similar experience with Barack Obama: my first thought was that it was him, but then I thought “no, that can’t be him, he isn’t that old” and failed the question (like I did every other question on that quiz). I’d forgotten how much politics ages you. (Though in Lincoln’s case, the “no, that can’t be him” was because this face looks too wide to be him.)

(Who says there has to be an evolutionary advantage? All a trait really has to do to stick around is not get you killed too often.)

Same- I only needed 4 tiles taken away before I knew who it was. Personally, I’m familiar with that picture, so I didn’t have any doubts as more was revealed.

And no, there doesn’t have to be an evolutionary advantage, though it could be argued since it’s a pretty large subpopulation. And if it prevents you from not being killed too often, couldn’t that be considered an evolutionary advantage? I’m hardly an evolutionary psychologist, but I love hearing the arguments for or against certain traits to exist due to evolution.

Tags:

#(August 2014) #(truncated thread for some reason (maybe that old reblog-as-link glitch); link to beginning already included) #conversational aglets #prosopagnosia

January 8, 2019June 13, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

prosopanonymous:

brin-bellway:

dhalim:

My first ProsopAnonymous video is up! Tell me what you think!

Note: these will get better over time. I have a friend of mine working on an intro song for the show, so I’ll be able to add one by episode 2 or 3

It’s promising, but I suggest you try talking a bit more slowly. Your speech struck me as kind of rushed in a lot of places. This isn’t a conversation: nobody’s going to butt in and cut you off if you give them the slightest pause. (I swear I read somewhere that people actually do expect recordings to speak more slowly than live people, but I have no idea where.)

Thanks! I think I generally talk fast, especially when it’s a topic I love. I will definitely work on that! I am presenting to a couple of high school classes in October, so this will be good practice!

I really appreciate your feedback and would love to hear more on future videos (or this one if there’s anything else you or anyone else would like to mention).

Tags:

#(August 2014) #(dhalim and prosopanonymous are–as you have probably guessed–the same user) #(this video was later taken down and I think replaced with a more polished version‚ that’s why the embed is broken) #conversational aglets #prosopagnosia

January 4, 2019June 13, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

thetevintersoldier:

brin-bellway:

aflightygrim:

a romcom where the main character has prosopagnosia and has no idea they’ve been wooing the same person for months b/c the other character keeps changing their clothes and hairstyle

#i promise it would be great #but uh probably only … to people who don’t …….. yeah #i don’t know how this would play out to people who can recognize faces lmao #actually the likelihood it would confuse and piss of people without stupid visual agnosias like #makes it better tbh

Have you heard of Faces in the Crowd? (Note: I haven’t actually seen it, just read about it.) I read some of the IMDB reviews a while back: many of the non-prosos thought it was neat how they portrayed it by having several similar-looking-but-different actors play each part, and the prosos were like “wait, they what now?”.

Similarly, I expect a movie like that would play out better to people with normal facial recognition, both because they are more likely to notice that anything strange is going on at all and because cringe comedy is worse if there’s a layer of “it could happen to you”. (Or would that actually make it better for someone already inclined to like cringe comedy? I wouldn’t know.)

I had not heard of that movie! I might give it a shot, if it’s on Netflix or somethin’, just because I wanna see how well it works. Curious to see it portrayed on screen. Hooray brain problems \o/ Actually, I remember someone talking about a book where the MC had prosopagnosia, too, and she was a … mountain climber? I can’t remember the title right now.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder whose POV a rom-com style thing about that would work from. The love interest, who’s like “why does this person keep doing/saying nice things one day then ignoring me like we’ve never met the next ?__?” or the proso person who is just kind of blithely and unassumingly kind and doesn’t realize that, like, their barista rides the same bus as they do or whatever?

also now i’m wondering how early you’d want to give away the fact that the main character’s got face blindness.

Tags:

#(February 2014) #conversational aglets #prosopagnosia #embarrassment squick #story ideas I will never write #(fittingly for a prosopagnosia conversation OP put on a new nametag and is now unrecognisable) #((but the Tumblr metadata reveals that they are one and the same))

June 30, 2018June 9, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

I’m cleaning out my notepad program in preparation for a move to a new† laptop††, and I found this Tumblr draft dated March 10th, 2016.

—

One of the worst non-obvious things about prosopagnosia is that it *reduces the amount of serendipity in your life*.

All else equal, I have far fewer chance meetings with old friends and colleagues than a non-faceblind person would. I have witnessed my mother having chance meetings that I would not have had in her place. I abandoned Orphan Black partway through the first episode because it disturbed me too much, knowing that if they’d based the clones’ on *my* genetic structure instead of hers, the entire show would never have happened. Sarah and Beth would have walked right by each other and never known. How many plot hooks (let alone easter eggs) have I missed out on in my own personal narrative?

(I went bowling on my 22nd birthday. In the group playing on the lane next to my family, there was a girl who looked just like I would if I didn’t wear glasses. I assume it was a coincidence. I assume she was not a secret clone or long-lost twin. If I am wrong in that assumption, I will never find out. If one day I passed someone I assumed to be a stranger, and they were actually a former acquaintance who would have given me some life-changing piece of information had I struck up a conversation with them like old times, I will never find out. Almost certainly, I have at the very least passed by acquaintances who would have given me non-life-*changing* but life-*enhancing* pieces of information, had I only known it was them.)

(This post inspired by CORDYCEPS [link], another story whose plot is dependant on one person recognising another’s face. I like the mystery and I like Benedict’s writing, so I’ve been reading it anyway for now.)

—

†And by “new”, I mean “seven years old, but significantly higher-spec than my current seven-year-old laptop”. Dad’s laptop broke, so we agreed that I would buy a “new” one for me and hand my old one down to him. Back in the day, *I* used to get *his* hand-me-down computers, but my computer requirements have now outpaced his (fortunately not to the point where my usual laptop budget of ~USD$300 is an insufficient amount of money), so.

††My backups are generally pretty thorough, and it wouldn’t have been a disaster data-wise if I’d woken up this morning to find my laptop permanently unable to boot (which did happen to me one morning in my mid-teens! no warning, no particular reason AFAIK why that motherboard chose that night to fail, it just did!), but I’ve found a couple overlooked spots.

Tags:

#(I did finish Cordyceps) #(it was good if a bit horror-y for my tastes) #oh look an original post #prosopagnosia #amnesia cw? #cordyceps tcftog

April 29, 2017June 17, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

Tonight’s episode of Red Panda video will be “Monkey See, Monkey Do”.

It occurs to me this almost certainly means that the Mad Monkey has a canonical appearance. And he’s almost certainly not going to look how I was imagining him. This is going to be weird.

(Not that this’ll be the first time that’s happened, even within this series. What do you mean, Andy Parker is blond?)

Between prosopagnosia (which tends to cause impairments in imagining faces along with recognising them) and a generally low-detail visual imagination, I don’t tend to imagine characters’ appearances all that much. They’ll usually have a skin colour, often hair to some level, and sometimes a build and/or general facial structure. For some reason, I have an unusually clear sense of what the Mad Monkey’s hair looks like: light brown, somewhat curly, balding, sideburns, thick eyebrows. (He’s pretty short, too.)

(I didn’t have much sense of what Professor Zombie looked like, so seeing her appearance in the previous episode didn’t really weird me out: there wasn’t much of anything for it to clash with.)

Tags:

#Red Panda Adventures #reactionblogging #fun fact: this post has been in my drafts for weeks #I just haven’t had time to actually watch the damn episode #oh look an original post

April 13, 2017June 21, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

blackblocberniebros:

No joke, companies working on facial recognition software should be destroyed. There’s literally no possible ethical use of that kind of technology.

argumate:

I disagree, but would say that it’s complicated.

blackblocberniebros:

I mean i could foresee some silly app-based games coming out of it but like I’d gladly deprive the world of those games if it means preventing the ever strengthening of the surveillance state.

Fire to their offices, smash their computers.

argumate:

Can’t put the genie back into the bottle; need to plan for a world where everyone’s activities are tracked basically all of the time, or could be.

blackblocberniebros:

Alright then I’m a primitivist now

argumate:

Luckily in small primitive communities you’re not continually watched and judged every waking moment wait what the heck am I saying

blackblocberniebros:

I mean you can be alone all the time as a hunter-gatherer.

But I was being facetious anyway

misanthropymademe:

The problem with facial recognition software is that it will finally settle the question if there truly is a difference between one’s face and ass.

ilzolende:

As an autistic, it would be nice to augment with software to get up to baseline, as people have taken advantage of my impairment before and it sucked a lot.

brin-bellway:

Agreed (with ilzolende, not with OP).

It’s perfectly technologically feasible to give me assistive tech for my disability. We have wearable HUDs. We have software that can beat me in facial-recognition tests. The reason I don’t have assistive tech right now is because of neurotypicals whining that it would be an “invasion of privacy” to let me do to them in software what they’ve been doing to me in wetware for their entire fucking lives.

—

…okay, I see I do still have that berserk button, it’s just that nobody’s pushed it in a while. I guess that’s useful to know.

(Well, I suppose I would still have it, since it’s a subcategory of the always-terrible “person [sacrifices/attempts to sacrifice/advocates sacrificing] my well-being for the Greater Good, not because they’ve weighed the pros and cons and decided the greater good was worth the harm it would cause me, but because it literally never occurred to them to factor it into the decision”.)

Look, I don’t know whether facial-recognition tech is worth it overall. I’m willing to believe that it isn’t. But we-as-a-society can’t have that discussion properly until the pro-privacy folks recognise that seeing-eye computers for prosopagnosics would, all else equal, be a good thing, and that “if we do X, such computers will exist” deserves to be added in as one of the factors when deciding whether to do X.

blackblocberniebros:

I’m not a neurotypical.

I see you completely ignored the second, larger half of the post, in which I frame the first half as an at best semi-endorsed knee-jerk response and give what my views are when looking past my anger.

(I left the first half in to give the reader enough of a glimpse into what’s going on in my head for an idea of just how much anger I’m suppressing later on in the hopes of a decent conversation. The rest of this thread is me trying to be civil, and if I fail, please understand it as “failed attempt to be civil” rather than “open hostility”.)

There is no established term for “non-prosopagnosic”. If you are typical in this particular aspect of your neurology, then my language was merely imprecise (as language in writing marked as knee-jerk anger tends to be) in a way not affecting the point. If you are prosopagnosic, then I am curious why assistive tech for yourself did not occur to you as a possible ethical use of facial-recognition software.

I’d like to be clear here:

I am not arguing that developing facial-recognition tech is a good idea. I don’t know whether it’s a good idea or not. What I do know is that it is not true that there is “no possible ethical use” for this technology, and that if we do champion the cause of privacy against those who seek to introduce this technology, we should go into it aware of the price we are paying for a more private world, rather than believing there are no downsides to doing the right thing. We can only determine whether the price is worth paying when we know what the price is.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #prosopagnosia #discourse cw

April 12, 2017June 21, 2020 ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

blackblocberniebros:

No joke, companies working on facial recognition software should be destroyed. There’s literally no possible ethical use of that kind of technology.

argumate:

I disagree, but would say that it’s complicated.

blackblocberniebros:

I mean i could foresee some silly app-based games coming out of it but like I’d gladly deprive the world of those games if it means preventing the ever strengthening of the surveillance state.

Fire to their offices, smash their computers.

argumate:

Can’t put the genie back into the bottle; need to plan for a world where everyone’s activities are tracked basically all of the time, or could be.

blackblocberniebros:

Alright then I’m a primitivist now

argumate:

Luckily in small primitive communities you’re not continually watched and judged every waking moment wait what the heck am I saying

blackblocberniebros:

I mean you can be alone all the time as a hunter-gatherer.

But I was being facetious anyway

misanthropymademe:

The problem with facial recognition software is that it will finally settle the question if there truly is a difference between one’s face and ass.

ilzolende:

As an autistic, it would be nice to augment with software to get up to baseline, as people have taken advantage of my impairment before and it sucked a lot.

Agreed (with ilzolende, not with OP).

It’s perfectly technologically feasible to give me assistive tech for my disability. We have wearable HUDs. We have software that can beat me in facial-recognition tests. The reason I don’t have assistive tech right now is because of neurotypicals whining that it would be an “invasion of privacy” to let me do to them in software what they’ve been doing to me in wetware for their entire fucking lives.

—

…okay, I see I do still have that berserk button, it’s just that nobody’s pushed it in a while. I guess that’s useful to know.

(Well, I suppose I would still have it, since it’s a subcategory of the always-terrible “person [sacrifices/attempts to sacrifice/advocates sacrificing] my well-being for the Greater Good, not because they’ve weighed the pros and cons and decided the greater good was worth the harm it would cause me, but because it literally never occurred to them to factor it into the decision”.)

Look, I don’t know whether facial-recognition tech is worth it overall. I’m willing to believe that it isn’t. But we-as-a-society can’t have that discussion properly until the pro-privacy folks recognise that seeing-eye computers for prosopagnosics would, all else equal, be a good thing, and that “if we do X, such computers will exist” deserves to be added in as one of the factors when deciding whether to do X.

Tags:

#prosopagnosia #reply via reblog #raw nerves #discourse cw #disappointed permanent resident of The Future