sparr

Intentional Community Tour Day 1

Thanks to the recent house fire at Estate of Mind, I couldn’t spend the week before the trip on preparations as I had originally planned. Due mostly to that, last night and this morning were a hectic rush of just the most high priority steps before we could hit the road. The bus seats got vacuumed and bleach wiped instead of gone over with the upholstery cleaner. We brought coolers instead of a chest freezer. I had to fuel up at a local station rather than on the road, spending an extra $30. I didn’t get to make a briefing for the trip participants describing what to expect or who we were meeting at each stop. I also failed to coordinate with the first few people joining the trip, to confirm who was arriving when, so it was a mild surprise that two folks arrived on Thursday night (as they had said they would, days and weeks earlier).

Despite all of that, we still departed just one hour behind schedule, an hour of delay I had already baked into the plan. With two great copilots the drive from Estate of Mind in Whitinsville MA to the Fellowship Community in Chestnut Ridge NY went pretty smoothly and relatively quickly. The bus is most efficient around 50-60MPH but we mostly kept up with traffic doing 70-75 for this leg of the trip in order to catch up on lost time.

We were greeted by a few members of the Fellowship Community and had a short tour before sitting down for lunch. They told us a bit about their community and its history. I won’t know which parts are most unique until the end of the tour, but what stood out to me was their focus on intergenerational living, employing younger members of the community to provide necessary services to everyone and the older members in need of care, and a refreshingly forthright attitude and acknowledgement of death. The lunch was great, the same being served to dozens of other residents and their families and other visitors in their dining hall. The dining hall, along with many other core amenities, are located in a central building which also houses their most mobility-impaired members. Other members live in houses and lodges spread across part of their 80 acres. In addition to the living facilities and amenities, they also have separate communal studios for pottery, weaving, baking, etc. The folks in the bakery sent us away with a heavy bag of fresh baked breads, savory and sweet. We haven’t dug into them yet, but look forward to doing so tomorrow. Our tour ended with a drive around the farm occupying the rest of their acreage, with cows and sheep and a small dairy operation.

Our second stop was planned at the Lakeland Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Wayne NJ which is a church with residents and an artist-in-residence program. Unfortunately there as a miscommunication regarding our arrival time and the person that was to meet us, so we did not manage to catch them in person. We saw the facility and walked around outside, including their cozy outdoor spaces and an impressive walled sunken garden area that I suspect will be beautiful in the spring.

Missing out on the second stop allowed us to take a stop for groceries and other supplies. We picked up some food for the next few days and I got a chest freezer to put in the bus. With us driving multiple legs every day it should be able to keep cold through the stops and obviate our need to buy ice for coolers. I also got some tape to reattach a few fiberglass panels that detached from the bus when we encountered too steep of a grade on a driveway earlier in the day.

Our final stop of the day was at Ganas in Staten Island NY. They welcomed us to their regular communal dinner which was an amazing spread with a dozen options including a salad bar, chicken, pasta, vegetables, bread, etc. We chatted over dinner then segued into their regularly scheduled visitor night. We spent about an hour on Q&A in both directions. Their community owns 8 houses mostly adjacent to each other, with private space in most of them and some common amenities spread out, and has a 44 year history of developing their various intentional community experiments. I hope to find time to write more about all that we’ve learned, a bit later in the trip. As I write this, I am in one of the two guest rooms we’ll be sharing tonight. I have just showered, two of our trip participants have started doing their laundry, and the fourth is off watching TV with a regularly scheduled social group here. I’ve been sleeping early recently, so I’ll probably nod off soon (it’s only 9PM) and get relatively early to get started on final planning and communication for tomorrow’s stops as well as earlier steps of planning for some of the final stops on the trip about two weeks from now that I didn’t get to in advance.

Overall I’d say the first day of the trip was pretty awesome. Fellowship Community and Ganas have set an exceptionally high bar for interactivity and hospitality and put our trip off to a great start. I am looking forward to what we discover next.

There's a sampling bias in pedestrian / cyclist / driver discourse that I don't think gets enough attention. Assuming similar speed in each group, but grossly different speed between groups, each group will encounter far more examples of various behaviors from the other groups than from their own group.

Imagine 100 drivers, 100 cyclists, and 100 pedestrians all travel a few blocks down the same city road, spread out evenly. Each driver passes 90 cyclists and 100 pedestrians. Each cyclist is passed by 90 drivers and passes 90 pedestrians. Each pedestrian is passed by 90 cyclists and 100 drivers. So, they all see almost all of the people of the other types and whatever misbehavior they get up to.

However, the average driver only passes 10 other drivers, the average cyclist passes 10 other cyclists, and the average pedestrian passes 10 other pedestrians. So they see relatively few of their own type of person.

So, if 1/10 people misbehave across the board, then drivers will see 1 bad driver, 9 bad cyclists, and 10 bad pedestrians. But cyclists will see 1 bad cyclists, 9 bad drivers, and 9 bad pedestrians. And pedestrians will see 1 bad pedestrian, 9 bad cyclists, and 10 bad drivers.

Everyone is going to experience far more examples of misbehavior by the other groups than by their own group, but nobody seems to account for this in evaluating their own perceptions. Of course, the 1/10 remains constant, but the absolute observations of misbehavior will often have far more impact than the proportions.

Mid-conversation updates and what came before

Pat: I saw a group of ducks * 1: This comment is about ducks even if it doesn't mention them * * 2: This comment is about ducks if made early but could be about ducks or geese if made later * 3: This comment is about ducks even if it doesn't mention them * Pat: They were actually geese * * 4: This comment is about geese even if it doesn't mention them * * 5: This comment is about geese even if it doesn't mention them * 6: This comment could be about ducks or geese * 7: This comment mentions ducks * 8: This comment could be about ducks or geese * 9: This comment mentions geese

I have repeatedly had trouble trying to describe this situation in words, without diagrams or examples, and trying to give hypothetical examples of a concept like this in the middle of another conversation rarely goes well. The key detail here is that a correction or additional context or new information is later added to the original scenario. The result of this is that the original post and at least some of the comments become a functionally distinct conversation from the real/updated scenario and comments on that scenario. I regularly encounter people who don't understand this concept and so experience reading comprehension failures when presented with a scenario like this. This becomes a problem when I try to have a discussion about ducks and what was said about them, but people insist that the original post and the first comments were about geese and get upset at me for wanting to continue discussing ducks or to discuss the prior discussion of ducks. I say “Pat, 1, 2, 3, and maybe 6 and 8, said these things about ducks” and multiple other people respond with “No, they were all talking about geese, which you would know if you'd read Pat's update”. Once that happens, the conversation seems irreparably damaged, so I am hoping to find a way to fix this sooner.

That alone is too complex to discuss with many (most?) people without better tools to aid the discussion. It gets even worse when you get to the later comments, the ones after the update but not nested under it. Some of those comments will make it clear whether they are talking about ducks or geese, but others will be entirely ambiguous. Assuming one direction or the other doesn't lead to supported conclusions about the conversation or either of the two scenarios. “[Conclusion about geese] which is supported by 6 and 8” does not follow; you don’t know whether 6 and 8 were talking about geese. Although I've managed to discuss the previous paragraph successfully a few times, I don't recall ever getting through to someone on this further aspect of the situation.

There's another layer here about the different meanings of positive and negative statements about uncertain groups, but that would double the length here and this is already too long.

If you have ideas about how to more effectively approach this scenario when I encounter it, I'm open to suggestions.

I've gotten the same advice from multiple laywers: I don't have a case (deja vu!). My past experience in similar situations is that they really mean I'll recover less than their time costs, which is very different. I expect I'll accomplish something if I persevere. So I guess it's time to branch out and describe the situation to friends for probably-not-legal-advice advice.

I lost my job at Amazon a couple of weeks ago. The process that led to this was initiated and controlled by my manager. I believe they did this in retaliation for my escalating concerns about their behavior to their manager and HR. Those concerns were centered around them reprimanding me in front of my team for not meeting expectations they hadn't communicated to us, which were different from expectations that had been explicitly communicated in writing. Those expectations were around availability and response time for on-call duties. However, attorneys tell me that this isn't a valid retaliation claim, because salaried employees don't have hours protections. There is an outstanding internal ethics investigation on this issue, initiated before I found out for sure that I was being terminated, and ongoing since then.

One of the attorneys I reached out to suggested that I request my personnel record from Amazon. MA labor laws say they must provide it within 5 days. Today is day 14. They acknowledged the request on day 2. On day 7 they again acknowledged it, verified the original request date, and said they would fulfill it before the required deadline (which had already passed?). Attorneys tell me I have no civil claim for this violation; I can just report them to the AG and they will get letter telling them to eventually comply.

When I was terminated, I was offered a severance agreement with a relatively small payment, in exchange for giving up any employment rights/violation claims I might have. They gave me 21 days to consider. Today is day 15, so I have 6 days left to decide. Attorneys tell me I have no claim related to this deadline and their failure to provide the legally required personnel record. I believe this is coercive on their part. One attorney told me not to sign and that I should keep asking them for the records; maybe that will leave some future possible action open? Unfortunately that attorney also said that I'd probably spend more hiring them than I'd recover. Slightly related, the agreement says they are under no obligation to provide severance, which isn't true because they promised it under a different agreement signed earlier in the process.

While reading the law around the personnel record request, I learned that Amazon broke another state labor law months ago when they started the process that led to my termination. I found out mid-process that the situation would prevent me from transferring or being promoted, and MA law says they have 10 days to inform me when that sort of thing goes into my personnel record so I can rebut it. As far as I can tell, from talking to dozens of other people who experiences the process, it's company policy to keep that situation secret. Unlike the previous concerns which might apply to just me, this one feels bigger. I suspect Amazon has violated the rights of hundreds of MA employees in this way. Again, attorneys tell me I have no civil claim for this violation; I can just report them to the AG and nothing will happen.

My experience so far is that there's a ~6 day lag in correspondence with a human at Amazon for HR-related inquiries, so I don't have a window to discuss even the severance/records thing with Amazon before making a decision.

What do you think I should do?

Ideas: Take the severance Call/email another dozen attorneys Use extraordinary measures to reach someone in HR soon enough to ask for an extension on the severance decision Represent myself in a civil claim for the personnel record law violations and their impact on my ability to make informed severance agreement decisions Find other Amazon folks with one or both of the same personnel record law violations _____?

In The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars[1], rationalist blog author Scott Alexander writes about trends in controversial internet discourse. He uses some graphs from Google Trends and other data to support the idea that at any given time there is one major cultural issue dominating internet arguments, while most other issues take the back burner while also experiencing fundamental shifts in the background. Then he gives numerous examples from blogs and wikis and online communities on each topic. He lays out a few distinct periods, starting with what he calls “New Atheism”, which was trending approximately 2004-2012, then died out over the next few years. “Geek Feminism” took over, and lasted from about 2010-2015. From 2014 forward, Racism took over as the leading topic of discourse and outrage. While none of the topics ever disappeared, they all decreased in frequency by a large margin over a few years after their heyday.

He goes on to describe how the fading of these topics represents a large number of people losing fervor and completely abandoning more extreme positions (while possibly adopting new ones), rather than just a proportional widespread decrease in interest. Whole communities shift their focus. Blogs and forums get rebranded. Conversations die out completely and new ones spring up in their place. A particular example given is the phrase “white feminism” which was virtually nonexistent prior to 2009, saw negligible use until 2014, then skyrocketed in 2015 as intersectionality, or lack thereof, suddenly took over a large fraction of feminist discourse while racism became the leading topic elsewhere.

Over the last 6-8 years, I have occasionally mentioned that I've been watching from afar as some of the people I still follow/subscribe/etc from my past communities seem to have matured and escaped from the influences in question. I've lamented that they are unlikely to ever retroactively apply their newfound wisdom. Now I'm wondering if, instead, almost everyone around them changed course, and what I thought were exceptional improvements were really just small slices of a wholesale community/subculture-wide abandonment of those problematic positions. Whether the risk of upsetting those people through actions they previously opposed has disappeared without my knowing it.

It never occurred to me prior to this article that this topic which is a defining part of my adult life experience might have simply disappeared from the radar of almost everyone else. After I was kicked out of all the environments in my social circles where such things were regularly brought up by the unreasonable people in question, I was left with no way to see that they weren't being brought up [much] any more.

The description in the article of the height of the phenomenon in question sounds like an only slightly caricaturized version of arguments and vilifications that I spent at least a few years experiencing and now a decade being exiled for, and that are still among the largest influences on my fears of interacting with people. Over and over, my “it should be ok for me to ask a woman out” would get turned into “you think every woman owes you sex” or worse. The climactic example from the article involves a physics blogger (Scott Aaronson), who made a comment deep below an unrelated essay saying he was affected by this discourse when he was younger, became suicidal, sought professional help, and it took years to get over the hangups to ask anyone out and eventually find a happy marriage. A leading feminist blogger (Amanda Marcotte) turned this into an article where she accused him of all manner of terrible misogynist positions about women owing him sex. From the article: “And that's just the beginning! It was whole pages full of this stuff! And most of the other top feminists wrote similar essays that were equally off-the-wall. Somehow there was an entire movement full of people who thought this was a completely accurate and proportional way to respond to things.” I think I met more than a few people from that movement.

Is it a coincidence that the year of Marcotte's response to Aaronson, the year the article gives as the “climax” and height of extreme and vocal positions on this topic, is the same year I was kicked out of the Boston Bureau of Erotic Discourse group, primarily due to my efforts to counteract the influence of people trying to define “creepy” and “nonconsensual” in ways that could not be safely predicted or avoided and could be weaponized at any time for any reason? Are these spaces really no longer full of the problematic positions and discourse I was opposing back then? Have all, or even most, of those people not only given up those positions, but forgotten they and their friends ever held them? Am I inaccurately predicting today that they would label “creepy” or “nonconsensual” the things they said they would label those ways 8 years ago? Were all the people I know now, who tell me I’m delusional or irrational or exhibiting trauma response, somehow insulated from this phenomenon in the apparently short window where it was a major problem?

Since moving back to Boston, I’ve once again become more aware of the social norms and discourse in the communities I left behind. I still don’t have access to those specific spaces, but I get glimpses in other ways. It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that a lot of my past writing about Boston vs other cities (particularly the fringe communities I am part of: makers, burners, etc) was a huge coincidence, and the problem was more about timing than location. More often than not, I see people advocating and demonstrating consent and communication norms that match those I was arguing for a decade ago. Unfortunately, what most people seem to have ingrained is “I disagreed with this person a decade ago”, without any mental capacity and/or willingness to cross reference that with changes in their own beliefs or the community norms around them.

Do you, person who blocked or exiled me for arguing with you in the early 2010s, still hold the beliefs that I was arguing against? If so, have you noticed that almost everyone who supported your development of that belief has changed course, that almost everyone around you is supporting the positions I argued for a decade ago? Or, if not, have you considered apologizing?

(This is a rewrite and elaboration on a private post I made about two years ago.)

Analogy: If you switch your fandom from American Football to Soccer, are you willing and able to set aside at least some of your past conclusions about soccer fans who tried to convince you to switch?

[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-online-culture

Every new year I commit to giving social networks other than Facebook a serious effort. I read my news feed on other networks before visiting FB. I cross post things to other networks in addition to FB.

This year I'm changing it up a bit. Due to the ongoing meltdown of Twitter, there have been massive migrations to other platforms, some newer than others. The demographic trends in those migrations make some of these more appealing to me than others.

I will be focusing almost all of my new social media interaction efforts on Mastodon for this year's resolution.

I am @[email protected] or http://mastodon.social/@sparr and I invite all my friends and acquaintances to follow and interact there. I may eventually create one or more additional profiles in the fediverse for specific sorts of content, TBD.

Mastodon is a federated service. It works kinda like email. You make an account on a server of your choice, the same way you choose gmail or hotmail or your own domain and server for email, but you can still interact with people on other servers. Most Mastodon servers talk to each other, but some block each other due to incompatible content and moderation policies, e.g. on an instance meant for kids you might have trouble following someone from an instance meant for porn. Learn more or just find a server to join at https://joinmastodon.org/

The way that Mastodon servers talk to each other isn't restricted to Mastodon servers. The language they speak (“ActivityPub”) is free and open to implement and use. Mastodon looks and works a lot like Twitter, with short mostly-text posts, sometimes small images or videos, presented in a feed/stream. There's another platform called Pixelfed that looks and works more like Instagram or Flickr, hosting mostly big images, presenting them in more of a gallery feed. There's another platform called Peertube that looks and works like Youtube, hosting large/long videos. There are also platforms for long form blogging, including Write Freely (where you'll find me as @[email protected] but you probably don't need to follow that since my Mastodon account will boost most of my Write Freely posts). All of these platforms can and do talk to each other. Users on them can interact with each other. You can reply to a Peertube video or follow a Write Freely author from your Mastodon account. You can boost Mastodon posts on your Pleroma account, etc.

And this isn't limited to “new” platforms. There is a Wordpress plugin so that your Wordpress site will send and receive content via ActivityPub, allowing users of Mastodon or Pleroma etc to directly follow your blog and boost your posts to their followers, rather than just copying and pasting links. Tumblr is working on support currently as well.

This system isn't perfect. It's experiencing growing pains as millions of people join a network that previously only had a few hundred thousand users. There's work being done on moderation and privacy and client features. New clients are being written almost daily. But it's getting better, and it was already good enough for me to use and love years ago. I strongly recommend you give it a try.

I'll close by mentioning that I intend to remain active in the following other places, although I'll be checking and posting to Mastodon and Write Freely first for a while:

https://facebook.com/sparr0 https://reddit.com/u/sparr https://fetlife.com/sparr https://sparr.substack.com

PS: My understanding is that significant chunks of the Twitter exodus are also headed for Tumblr.com, Post.news, and Hivesocial.app. While they mostly don't appeal to me, I include them here in case they are a better fit for you.

#NewYearNewNetworks #SocialMedia #SocialNetwork #Facebook #Reddit #Twitter #Mastodon #Substack #fediverse #ActivityPub

Hello! I am Sparr and this is my #longform #introduction. As of this writing, I'm 40 years old, cis male, and live near #Boston. My professional work centers on #devops #continuousintegration #deploymentautomation, at the moment specifically aimed at the #containerd project. My hobbies include #community building, #videogames, #boardgames, #event organizing, #maker pursuits including #carpentry and #welding, some #kinky activities, #softwaredevelopment, and #education.

I am #radicallyhonest, an aspiring #rationalist, an amateur supporter of #effectivealtruism, and prioritize #objectivity and #agency in my decision making.

My online discourse often focuses on #controversial topics such as #consent, #kink, #racism, #sexism, #politics, #communication, #honesty, etc.

There's more information about me in my #datingprofile and much more information in my #personalusermanual.

You can find other slices of my online presence on Mastodon, Reddit, Dreamwidth, Fetlife, Twitter, Substack, Flickr, StackExchange, Github, LinkedIn, OKCupid, Facebook, Instagram.

PS: A secondary purpose of this post is to demonstrate the ability to #boost across the #fediverse, so you've probably reached this from #Mastodon rather than directly through the #WriteFreely instance I authored it on.