What do you mean by problem? The session is over. They’re healed.

Few days ago a friend linked me a danish research paper and claimed it shown that higher wages for women lead to decrease in children being born, and that higher male wages led to the opposite. I don’t have the skills required to parse this kind of paper quickly nor understanding of a lot of the terminology. I told chatGPT to read it and contrast it with the arguments being made, to which it responded with pointing out that the term “marginal net-of-tax wage” meant something different from “wage”, and that this paper suggested that tax laws incentivizing working more hours led to lowered fertility rather than higher salaries for women. I was asked to point exactly where in the paper it was said like that, and again, I had to lean on LLM to get me page numbers. I eventualy convinced my friend that he got duped by right wing talking points and got him to think a bit.

So, if I didn’t do that and just read the conclusion from the paper I’d probably have to agree with him instead, as just googling it led to the right wing trolls making those claims. Was this a good use case of LLM to get me some counter arguments, or would it have been better if I stayed true to my ideals and not to use those tools? Was I rude by arguing against the point made about a research that neither of us understood from the get go by using genAI to parse through it? While I do agree that companies developing those tools are evil and need to be stopped, there is an utility to it that I don’t think is available elsewhere. Would me losing that argument and believing that women should have lower salaries to increase fertility (because I believe in science, and this paper seemed to be referenced a lot, also if anything capitalism would be to blame, so probably not as bad) be better than normalizing the use of the devil-tech but having myself and my friend better informed? I am legitimately not sure, but I think I did the right thing? What should’ve I done? I don’t have the skills nor time nor will to read scientific papers that aren’t related to my area of expertise, especially when someone linking them didn’t do any research either. I am also genuinely exhausted from defending my left-wing points of view from the constant barrage of underhanded and often completely baseless arguments some of my coworkers and friends make to convince me I’m wrong and the default consensus is right. Is it bad to use genAI to figure out some counterpoints? Or should I give up and admit I’m not good or commited enough to make them myself? Right wing people often argue in bad faith and don’t take the counterpoints to heart, but sometimes they do, even if the original point they made was just to rile me up. So, am I the asshole? Am I wrong? I seriously don’t know.

I meant to convey something more of a “yes, and…” rather than argue. It would be different kind of messed up if it sounded angelic but required a blood of a endangered turtle to be fed into the unholy tube in order to keep playing. But like this, there wasn’t even the point. Vain, cruel, corrupt. Which is to say, I agree.

I do think that there are layers to the corruption in play here. It’d be plenty evil even if it sounded good and looked bad, since cruelty and stuff. Pianos are expensive, and were even more back in 1853, so having and playing one was a hobby limited to elites, which had to exploit the work of the poor to afford it and the rest of their luxurious lifestyle, which makes it worse again. Due to it being one of the possible symbols of the class status, it’s very ownership rather than a function became a priority, which then made it a piece of visual art to be admired rather than the tool to create such art, which degenerated the meaning of such expense even further. The author most likely wasn’t thinking about the cruelty, about the class or about the demeaning the art, or maybe they were and it was the point. Either way, the result is something beautiful that shouldn’t have ever existed, and the “incredible poetic” characteristic that I mentioned earlier (maybe a bit of an overstatement) referred in part to this contradiction.

I’ll counter your trees with my humans. Would you agree that skinning children to make drums would be “needlessly cruel”? The creator might have thought that it was necessary for whatever reason, but neither the children nor any sane observer would agree. It’s fine to disagree on what’s moral and what’s not, and it’s up to the invidual to decide for themselves. I think killing turtles for vanity project is cruel, especially since you have all those trees that just deserve to be carved up for being so tall. I believe there is some common ground most interested parties can agree on. And if not, then the situation is probably quite complicated and you should rethink making those drums.

There is something incredibly poetic about the hubris and cruelty required to create an instrument or other tool that enables art, something that does makes us distinct from the animals, out of the remains of needlesly taken lives. Transcending through art beyond human morals, somehow landing us back in the dirt with other worms, struggling only to self-satisfy. It’s only fitting that it looks pretty, it better does when the price is so high.