nroman's Shortform

To me, intersectionality feels like one of those "motte and bailey" things. Yes, seeing things from other people's perspective can be very useful, and yes, it is often better to invite an X to participate in the project than trying to guess how things might seem from X's perspective. This is definitely worth paying attention to!

But it also comes with the political baggage, the official list of "groups that matter" which suggests that it is useful to consider people's gender or sexual orientation, but not that useful to consider e.g. people's social class or degree of autism. Unless you discuss the latter from the perspective of the former. (You don't discuss poverty, unless you discuss e.g. poverty of women, or poverty of LGBT; and the correct solution is always a support of given group, not a support of poor people in general. The other causes exist only to serve the important causes.)

It also considers people within the groups replaceable. If Alice and Betty have the same gender, same race, same sexual orientation, then Alice is assumed to also speak in Betty's name, especially if Alice is politically on "the right side of history". (On the other hand, if Betty is conservative, she is not even allowed to speak for herself. Alice knows better what is best for her. You should listen to Alice and ignore Betty, otherwise you are "against women".) There is a somewhat related concept of "token" person, which kinda admits that having one representative of a group is not enough, but the main concern is about choosing Betty as that representative.

Plus the usual "critical" bias, where one person being unhappy about something is more important than ten people being happy and opposing the change. (Because the true reason for the fight is promoting social change towards "the right side of history", not solving specific problems of specific people. Individuals only exist to serve the cause.)

So I am in favor of listening to different perspectives, but if you do it with an open mind, chance is that you may ask ten X's and receive ten different answers. The answers will probably have something in common, so hopefully you can work with that, but can be frustratingly different at the parts where you hoped to get one unified "X perspective" as an answer. (You can't make everyone happy, and you can't even make all X happy.) Therefore, you can get better data by asking people different from you for a perspective, but at the end of the day, you have to apply your own judgment to the somewhat contradictory answers you have received.

I recently encountered a local policy that made me realize nobody with experiences similar to mine could possibly have been involved in the planning process. In my rural area, the policy went from no permit requirements around burn barrels or home fire pits, to asking everyone to fill out an online form before every use of fire outdoors. The web form required the address, the planned time of burning, a contact phone number, and the full name of the adult in charge. They didn't mention who would have access to the submitted data, how long it would be kept, whether users would be notified if a data breach leaked their addresses and phone numbers to attackers, what consequences would result from burning without having filled out the form, whether there was an alternative way to get a permit without the form, or what regulations gave them the authority to make the change of requiring it. As a highly online millennial, this made me ask some questions which seemed blindingly obvious:

• What about people who lack internet access? How are they to find out about the new requirement, and how are they expected to file for permits when public libraries are shut due to a global pandemic?
• What about the form being used to dox people? People in positions of power where they'd be expected to have access to the form's results aren't immune to harassing others, and if a victim is staying with a friend to avoid for instance domestic violence, requiring them to link their full name to their current address makes using the form dangerous to them.
• What about the form being used to swat people? If some jerk on the internet finds my name and address, they could impersonate me in filing permits and likely have fire services or law enforcement sent to my house if they used the form to claim they planned to burn on a high fire danger day

I have these reactions without personally having lacked internet, or being doxed, or being swatted, because I perceive those threats as "things which happen to people like me".

Of course I escalated these concerns, and to their credit they've fixed many of the issues, but the fact that the policy made it to being publicly announced with all those issues still in it was a shocking reminder of the difference between what authorities assume people want and need, and what I do.

My friend had a fever-type dream after the second jab, and his fever dreams are usually fairly creative. Unsure whether he had an actual fever at the time (being asleep and the side effects short duration), but fever dreams are a similar phenomenon and it seemed likely to have been a case of that.