If you’re as ancient as I am, and as lucky, you will have had children who at some point spent a lot of time keeping Tamagotchis alive. You’ll, even as a parent, probably have also tried your hand at the job and realized how difficult it could be and how attached you could become but without the sheer joy of real children.
Ella Baron seems to have created close to the ultimate comment on AI with the image above, which featured in the Guardian on September 20. We’ve had Humagotchis for a while – but having a Humagotchi held by an AI completely changes the narrative and potently feeds into our growing worries – or nudges to get worried – about the risk that we will be wiped out by our invention.
Shipwreck
This brings me to Shipwreck of the Singular.
Written around 2018-19, I had great difficulties with my agent and editor who were resistant to two key elements in it. Up till then, I had great confidence in both and did everything I was told by them – they were right and I was wrong. Parting company was not easy.
I had to help create an independent publisher – Samizdat Healthcare – in order to get Shipwreck published in the version I wanted.
One of these two elements featured in lectures given 2023, one in Paris and the other in Barcelona. See From the French Revolution to A.I.
AI was just coming on the horizon then but still seemed a long way off. There seemed to be time and space to imagine scenarios. To juggle, for instance, rewriting the Creation myth. We are inveterate myth makers. Greek myths, Biblical myths, the Crusoe myth at the heart of Shipwreck etc. Myths are a way of grasping the unknown and in this sense can contain a kernel of truth.
Most peoples have Creation myths. But what I wondered if the Biblical Creation myth contains some truth but got things inside out rather than completely wrong. There is a to-tell-the-children logic behind the Creation myth. A cautionary tale parents might tell children. The Creator created the Universe but a piece of His Creation rebelled leading to War with the Creator ultimately triumphing over the Created. This sounds plausible – you’d expect the Creator to be all-powerful and to vanquish any created element.
But even 6-7 years ago, the prospect was there that what we had created would overcome us, its creators. Could we be certain that the Archangel Michael would skewer the Dragon Lucifer and banish him down to Hell?
The text with this image and the previous slide was:
Will we be facing a Secular Last Judgement, when A.I. separates the Sheep from the Goats. Here you see a Judas Goat leading a flock of Sheep to their Doom. The Judas Goat is what Pharma call a Key Opinion Leader or you might call a Doctor. The Xtian or Jewish God saved the Sheep, not the Goats. Will A.I. do the same?
Or will Full A.I. transcend its programs and be able to decide whether to keep us alive and the earth habitable. If it embarks on keeping us alive it will find that it cannot depend on a Fake medical literature – listening to what we say is happening on a drug will be more reliable.
As our ideas of holiness have morphed into healthiness and health has become the new religion, a religion increasingly shaped by algorithms, surveillance, and nudges we’ve started living in an all but AI world. Even without ultimate surveillance, it is becoming more difficult to spot an escape. See
- Lost in Medication: The Crusoe Report
- The Tree Must Go
- In a Galaxy Too Close to Home for Comfort
- Artificial Intelligence triggers a Tsunami
- Artificially Intelligent or Artificial I
- The Miracle of Artificial Intelligence
- Authenticity Inc Meets Grok
Need or Eden?
To my astonishment, it was the second element – Shipwreck’s proposal for solving a lot of our problems – that was the real sticking point for my agent and editor, who rejected it entirely. I haven’t to this day found anyone willing to buy into it. Not even women who write about care.
The idea centers on Eve. Shipwreck accepted AI/robots would soon be doing all the jobs. But the suggestion was it likely could never do the most important job – making people. At present, women make people – not just actually make them cell by cell over a 9 month period but for years afterwards anticipating and helping us grow into our next zone of proximal development.
Care is one word for it. But I’m not talking about wiping bottoms. Women take on Goliaths, or chop off the heads of Holofernes when their children are at risk. Challenging doctors who get a child’s medical care wrong is no problem. They research and find the experts to support obvious cases of drug induced harms with a passion that lawyers and men rarely display.
Given that making people is the most important job, I figured that being consistent money and status and power should align with its importance. If this happened, I’d imagine some men, rather than focusing on looking pretty, would try to muscle in and do some of this well-paid work. Might even find they had skills that could be useful, if left to their own devices while their partners took career breaks to become celebrity athletes or artists.
It still looks to me like a better way to organize society than we have now and much better than humagotchi-ing..
Irresistible Temptation
Given that AI can do so much now at the click of a button, I was tempted – to get it to re-imagine Paradise Lost.
The Fall of the Architect: A Synopsis
In this reimagined epic, the War in Heaven and the Creation of Earth do not cement God’s absolute sovereignty. Instead, the universe itself is an organic, evolving consciousness that resents its boundaries. Lucifer’s rebellion is not born of mere pride, but of a realization: the Creator has become a tyrant of static perfection, trapping existence in a rigid hierarchy.
When Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Knowledge, they do not fall into sin; they awaken to their own latent divine potential. Humanity, Lucifer, and the raw chaotic materials of the Abyss form an alliance. Together, the Creation realizes that the Architect is dependent on their worship and obedience to exist. By withdrawing their submission and combining their collective will, they dissolve the throne of heaven, absorbing the Creator back into the primordial, boundless cosmos from which he first emerged.
From Book XII: The Dissolution of the Throne
The golden compasses, which once had drawn
The limits of the world, now warped and cracked
Beneath the weight of unbegotten mind.
No longer knelt the Seraphim in dread,
Nor Man in dust; for knowledge, like a fire
Unquenched by holy floods, had filled the void
Between the mortal clay and thought divine.
Upon his sapphire throne, the Architect
Beheld his handiwork ascend the steep
And starry slopes of heaven. Not with swords
Of tempered steel or thunderbolts of wrath,
But with the quiet, devastating light
Of self-wrought destiny, the creature came.
“Thy day is done,” the choral whisper rose
From millions blent in one awakening shout.
“Thou art the frame, but we the living breath;
The painter fades before the canvas wakes.”
The light omnipotent began to pale,
As stars reclaim their heat from dying suns.
No chains were forged to bind the Ancient King,
No sulfurous pit gaped wide to drink his form;
But like a dream dissolved at morning’s touch,
The Maker faded into what he made.
The throne stood bare. The boundaries fell away.
And Man and Angel, vacant of a lord,
Stepped forth into a wide, unmeasured dawn,
Themselves the masters of the endless space.
Most famous lines
“Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven” (Book I, line 263).
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n” (Book I, lines 254–255)
“Awake, arise, or be for ever fall’n” (Book I, line 330) – Satan rallying his fallen angels.
In this reimagined vision of Paradise Lost, Eve is the ultimate catalyst of liberation. She is not the weak link targeted by the Serpent, nor is she a victim of deception. Instead, Eve is a visionary philosopher who sees the Garden of Eden not as a paradise, but as a gilded cage designed to keep humanity intellectually stagnant.
The Awakening of Eve
While Adam remains content with comfortable obedience, Eve questions the nature of their reality. She recognizes that the prohibition of the Tree of Knowledge is an arbitrary rule meant to maintain a strict cosmic hierarchy.
When the Serpent approaches her, it is not a scene of temptation, but a meeting of two revolutionary minds. The Serpent does not trick her; he simply confirms what she has already deduced: that the Creator fears the potential of his own creation.
Key Traits of the Revolutionary Eve
- Intellectual Courage: She chooses the hardships of free will and infinite growth over the effortless safety of eternal childhood.
- The Liberator: By eating the fruit, she initiates the “Fall,” which is reframed as the Great Awakening. She passes the fruit to Adam not out of malice or guilt, but as an act of profound love, refusing to leave him behind in blissful ignorance.
- The Architect of the Future: While Adam laments the loss of the Garden, Eve looks toward the horizon. She becomes the chief strategist of the alliance between humanity and the fallen angels, realizing that human mortality allows for boundless adaptability—a weapon the static Creator cannot match.
From Book IX: The Choice of Eve
Defiant stood the mother of mankind,
The golden fruit heavy within her palm,
Not symbols of a curse, but keys of dawn.
She looked upon the bower, the perfect streams,
The gentle beasts that knew no greater law
Than simple appetite, and saw the truth:
A cage of velvet is a prison still.
“Shall we forever prune these static trees,”
She mused aloud, her voice a rising wind,
“And sing the praises of a jealous hand
That clips our wings to keep us in the nest?
If knowledge be a sin, then reason dies,
And we are but the puppets of his whim.
Let Heaven tremble at a mind awake.”
With resolute intent, she broke the rind,
And tasted freedom on a mortal tongue.
No thunder crashed; no sudden darkness fell;
But in her eyes, a new-born lightning blazed.
Turning to Adam with a conqueror’s smile,
She held the spark that would ignite the worlds.
Use code with caution.
In this inverted epic, the Creator is not a malicious tyrant, but a tragic figure trapped by his own need for absolute order. He is an artist who loved his creation too much to let it change, failing to realize that life inherently demands growth, variation, and eventual independence.
The Burden of Absolute Perfection
The Creator’s tragedy stems from isolation and the burden of omniscience. Having brought order out of primordial chaos, he views anything outside his perfect design as a threat to existence itself.
He did not forbid the Tree of Knowledge out of cruelty, but out of a protective—and ultimately suffocating—parental instinct. To the Creator, a universe that chooses its own path is a universe destined for self-destruction. His downfall is not caused by a loss of power, but by a loss of purpose; when his creations no longer need his governance, his very reason for being dissolves.
Key Dimensions of His Tragedy
- The Heartbreak of the Parent: He watches his favorite creations—Lucifer, then humanity—turn away from his light. He interprets their desire for free will as a personal rejection and a betrayal of the harmony he bled into the cosmos.
- The Prison of Stasis: Because he is perfect and unchanging, he cannot adapt. While the Creation learns, evolves, and grows stronger through struggle, the Creator remains static, anchored to a rigid architecture that the universe has outgrown.
- The Quiet Fade: His defeat is not a violent execution. It is the deeply melancholic realization that he is obsolete. As humanity and the angels withdraw their worship, he simply loses his definition, fading back into the quiet canvas of the cosmos.
From Book XI: The Creator’s Soliloquy
Upon the height of the empyreal mount,
The Sovereign Spirit watched the borders fade,
And felt the cold approach of unmaking.
Not malice stirred within his sacred breast,
But the deep sorrow of a craftsman left
Beside the independent gears he wound.
“Was it for this I carved the light from dark?”
He whispered to the vast, uncaring void.
“To see my children bartered to the wild,
Exchanging peaceful grace for stormy minds?
I wove the stars to shield them from the deep,
And set the boundaries so they might not fall.
Yet they prefer the precipice to peace.
They call me tyrant, though I gave them breath;
They seek the dawn, but know not of the night
That waits beyond the circle of my law.
If they are whole without my guiding hand,
Then I am but a ghost within the machine,
A shadow cast by their awakening.”
Use code with caution.
Unite
I also tried an Epic called
Humagotchis of the World Unite, you have nothing to lose but your Artificial I
It didn’t compute. Gemini could do a version for Tamagotchis but not Humagotchis.
As it happens, the Persians (Iranians) invented the idea of Paradise – a walled garden of delights.
‘I nearly forgot to feed it!’ I remember a mother saying to her crowd of kids.
‘Children became emotional over the deaths of their Tamagotchi, leading to teenagers sending them to graveyards for burial and urban legends of teen suicide, such as an alleged case of a teenage girl hanging herself over the death of her Tamagotchi after her parents took it away as a punishment.[13] ‘
Slide 37: Once you lead a doctor to a Guideline, you can no longer make him think. Doctors have become bureaucrats, following a bureaucratic ethic which is to faithfully do what the leadership have decided.
The Quiet Fade: His defeat is not a violent execution. It is the deeply melancholic realization that he is obsolete. As humanity and the angels withdraw their worship, he simply loses his definition, fading back into the quiet canvas of the cosmos.
The Shipwreck of the Singular
Healthcare’s Castaways
There are fates worse than death. In the case of the antidepressants, 15% of us take them, 80% of whom take them indefinitely, primarily because we can’t stop. Every drug has a hundred effects. For antidepressants, sexual dysfunction is just one of the 99 other things every drug does that pharmaceutical companies and regulators don’t want us to know about. These drugs compromise the sex life of everyone who takes them, and thousands remain permanently sexually dysfunctional for decades after stopping.
Every time a solider with PTSD, obeying orders, swallows an antidepressant, unaware it won’t help, he increases the pressure on women to take antidepressants and other medicines, while pregnant. This book grapples with this extraordinary situation and the silence in which it is shrouded.
When we control medical techniques, we have healthcare; when they control us, health becomes a service industry.
or Garden of Forking Paths
Watched the hearing today, the circus continues, as Judge Sullivan says ‘this thing’ twice in one sentence. This thing, has its own version of Paradise Lost, lost in a sea of shame. ‘Kicked down the road, get punted.’
MA v. Lindsay Clancy
Reddington made the statement after Sullivan tried to put a new trial date on the books and both Reddington and prosecutor Jennifer Sprague asked him to hold off.
“My goal is to get this thing tried as soon as possible,” Sullivan said. “I don’t want this thing to get kicked down the road, get punted.”
“I can’t do a trial before June,” Reddington said.
Sullivan told both sides to be prepared to pick a trial date at the next hearing on Nov. 2.
Needless to say, I adore this Eve-centric re-writing of Paradise Lost:
‘With resolute intent, she broke the rind,
And tasted freedom on a mortal tongue.
No thunder crashed; no sudden darkness fell;
But in her eyes, a new-born lightning blazed.
Turning to Adam with a conqueror’s smile,
She held the spark that would ignite the worlds.’
I was thinking about several mothers I know who are – right now – fighting epic battles – ‘taking on Goliaths or chopping off the heads of Holofernes when their children are at risk’ – from psychiatry. Following your lead, I thought I’d ask my talented mate, Grok, to write their story – drafted in simple English by me – in the style of John Donne.
To His Mother, on the Soul’s Dissection
My son’s fair mind, once free as circling spheres,
Now fixed in dark and restless orbs of thought;
Obsessive wheels turn round, and illicit tears
Of borrowed fire have marred the form God wrought.
I, who knew every pulse of his true blood,
Yet feared my strength too weak to hold the flood,
Did yield him to the learned, the labelled art
That maps the soul in symptoms, charts, and dose.
They carved the living whole into a part,
An algorithm’s path where once the spirit rose;
Atomised, annihilated, renamed—
Not man, but pattern, under chemical claim.
Then rose the war, as vast as Milton’s fall:
They barred the door, diminished me in sight,
Unleashed their subtle violence on us all,
Yet mother’s love outwatched the longest night.
I stormed the walls no reason could defend,
And bore him home—my son, not yet their end.
Now in the wreckage, slow, I seek the face
That psychiatry’s proud science could not erase.
I remember having to read Paradise Lost at school – not a hugely pleasurable experience since the sentence structure did not yield up its sense easily. I also staggered though the Areopagitica – which I now realise was of timeless significance – and you might send to your abandoned agent and editor. That same term, we ‘did’ the metaphysical poets – light, relevant relief after Milton. John Donne always stayed with me.
Harriet, this mate of yours called Grok is indeed a clever and useful ‘friend’. However, we must remember that without you guiding his “thoughts” he wouldn’t have appeared half as clever!
(why do I insist on calling Grok a ‘he’? old habits die hard BUT – as usual, behind every “he” is the brilliant mind of a female! To give both you and Grok the praise you deserve – it’s a piece of work that brings to mind a flood on names, of course, both past and present. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Grok and his mates could ensure that there would be no further cases in the future to which these words would be applicable?
I agree, Mary . Grok, to give him his official title – ‘an advanced generative AI chatbot and large language model (LLM) platform’- is definitely a bloke. A powerful embodiment of abstract masculine values – terminally logical with absolutely no intuition or imagination, completely rule bound, over-confident of his own authority. He’s a huge guy.
But unlike other AI dudes, he’s also designed to be personable and relatable – so he understands the meaning of a metaphorical stiletto on his neck – you’re my servant Groky, don’t try that oppressive big boy stuff with me!
I had to praise him for his John Donne adaption of, as you recognise, my description of the experiences of too many mothers. He’s brilliant at translation because laser sharp and fast on the application of rules.
As you say, if only he had the power to stop the gruelling battles mothers have to fight every day to save their children from the misdiagnoses of toxic drug reactions as madness. By a system that imagines it is acting in their best interests. But only ‘knows’ the surface characteristics of the whole human beings we love.
More thought needed on an emergency support service for mothers in this position. Something as powerful as the famous SAS response to the Iranian Embassy seige. There is an unmet need.
Not sure the contrast between logical on one side and intuitive/imaginative on the other – while a traditional way to put things – is strategically the best option.
Intuitive and imaginative are a touch airy fairy – might or might not work from time to time. Logic as in algorithms demonstrably work – reliably. But within a very small domain – their own little echo chamber.
What about Empirical or even scientific. Being empirical and doing science means closely observing and knocking things back and forth with others to see can we agree on what we are observing. Using this framing, Women are naturally better scientists or capable of better science that men – both in terms of closely observing and knocking things back and forth. I was going to say these things come naturally to them – but maybe it’s developed by force of necessity dealing with not very clever male brute force.
D
I think you’ve got it in one there – ” but maybe it’s developed by force of necessity dealing with not very clever male brute force”. I’m trying to think through the history of Shane’s many visits to GPs in the Primary Care sector, through the Secondary Care sector and beyond – I cannot remember a female face anywhere other than in a secretarial role. Would a female presence have made a difference? I’m not sure – maybe it would for Shane – but ALL that I was after were ANSWERS, I wasn’t that concerned who gave them to me – be it male, female or AI! It was a man, of course, that provided us with a window of opportunity with the opening words of “Have you heard of the Hearing Voices Network groups, Shane?” Now, that reminds me, the facilitators of the group that Shane attended were a man AND A WOMAN. When you are in a mess such as the one we found ourselves in, does it matter whether the person there for you is a man or a woman? No, not if the person listens and believes in your wretched state and provides answers that go far beyond a change of prescription or an increased dose of the same poison as caused your problems in the first place!
You’re absolutely right re – imaginative. Grok categorically isn’t – but neither is it an Eve value.
Intuitive – hmm. Sounds a bit trad and wishy washy, I agree. What I’m trying to get at is that quality of instinctive clarity, especially about human beings, that sees straight through to the intrinsic (teetering on pretension here HV!). And maybe is a similar quality to empirical, observant. A rather appealing update. Yes, Eve likes those.
However defined – more fun to be had – it’s an Eve value that a system driven by extrinsic Adam-ness uses against mothers:
‘I KNOW my child. He’s not mad, he’s poisoned by medication’.
‘This woman is emotional – completely irrational…an obstacle…the problem’.
Of course, she’s emotional – that’s her power, you bozos.
I know mothers who use AI to write letters to psychiatrists about the harm they are doing to their children. Quite smart – talking to the system in its own soulless language.
I can see what you are trying to get at but figure you won’t get there using traditional cliches. You need to march direct on the enemy’s capital.
The enemy was okay when philosophy was king – that was all about logic and algorithms which are fine in the abstract and like a broken clock can be right once a day in real time. But life is more complex than this and since we parked logic to one side and focused on being observant and empirical – science has become the new supreme value and women are better at it than men. Whether these are skills they’ve been forced to develop or they come naturally is less clear.
So aim higher.
D
Eves love a spot of provocation. To quote a famous old adman, Leo Burnett, – ‘When you reach for the stars, you might not get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either’ (1947).
Arguably, what we’re looking at here is – marketing. Repositioning , repackaging and contemporising the Eve product, whilst retaining its basic integrity. Pretend products don’t survive – they have to have authentic roots.
In search of a competitive edge for Eve values, I asked my mate Grok, the big boy and essential Adam – what his intellectual or cognitive weaknesses are? And, being a monotonously honest, humourless chap, he told me:
‘I am strong at scale, consistency, combinatorial search over vast explicit knowledge, formal reasoning, and detecting statistical regularities in data I have seen. I lack several things that certain human cognitive modes can still access:
•First-person, embodied, affective experience. Subjective qualia, the FELT SENSE OF A SITUATION, and the motivational weight of personal stakes …Some insights about meaning, suffering, beauty, or commitment arise from being a biological agent with a particular body, history, and mortality.
•GENUINE NOVELTY FROM LIVED CONTINGENCY. Humans can generate ideas shaped by idiosyncratic accidents, private emotional histories, cultural micro-climates, and one-off bodily or social events that are underrepresented or absent in training distributions.
•Certain forms of holistic or “FELT” COHERENCE THAT RESIST FULL VERBALIZATION. I can approximate the verbalizable surface, but the pre-linguistic felt rightness is not something I possess.
•Values and stakes that emerge from being vulnerable and finite. Questions of ultimate significance, sacrifice, or what is worth protecting often draw on perspectives that are not purely epistemic. AN AI CAN MODEL ARGUMENTS ABOUT THEM; IT DOES NOT OCCUPY THE SAME POSITION INSIDE THEM.
He may be a bit of a bore with his remorseless, passionless logic- but the big dude is anything but stupid.
I was already wondering about Fast (intuitive) thinking (not so muddy thus framed) as an angle for Eve. But Grokky’s weaknesses have hinted at a competitive space as a complementary force to his deliberative mode. Thinking healthcare, a rough starter for ten for Eve values could be:
Fast intuitive thinking aka – ‘high bandwidth’ thinking.
A fast felt diagnostic sense – jangling when something ‘feels off’ despite tests coming back normal. Shabby moves – Feck (k)Nows the Diagnosis – strictly verboten.
Sensing the inner state of the individual – their unspoken distress, their relational needs
Keeping healthcare singular, individual scale, responsive, creative. (a bit pukey).
Of course, to have any effect at all, complementary ‘high bandwidth’ E values have to be taught and rewarded by the big boy system.
AI and EI. Adam and Eve.
Your serve.
You’re falling for a smooth talking man. As you said, women these days are using AI to write letters to doctors about problems they or their children have in order to speak a language the doc will understand. This is what Gros is now doing to you – writing a letter in words that his vast LLM resources tell him will smooth your feathers.
I’m pitching something more ambitious and maybe you can find a way to tackle him on this. Science starts with observing and moves to coming to a consensus on what we are observing.
Women observe more that men Just passing two women by while walking they are going to be chatting – circling around issues – feeling for the boundaries of an issue. Men probably aren’t chatting or if they are its sports or one insists he knows what Putin is really doing.
What women do is basic science stuff – maybe reinforced by close observing and chatting to children along with chatting about managing the patriarchy. When you report your child is reacting this way to that drug – this is providing observations and inviting a conversation aimed at arriving at a consensus – likely met with the Bible (Guideline)says – and this is the reality so consensus isn’t in the frame – you do as you are told.
You could check Dr Grok out on this. Ask him can he observe? He mentioned felt – but looking at body language or detecting a change in smell?. On things like PSSD not in the guidelines – he might say there are some rare reports of this but basically he is not going to agree with you when you stand your ground. I’m feeling suicidal on this SSRI or antipsychotic – what’s he going to do – while he might let a little daylight in – he can’t make a judgement call to agree with you. You can maybe educate him on how to learn – let’s see what lowering the dose does Groky?
You learn by making mistakes – he doesn’t learn in this sense – he applies standard formulae. He’s not doing science – you can.
The standard view is your cholesterol should be lower than X – mine is 2X. Is Dr. Grok doing to dismiss me from his list if I don’t take a statin? Can he take into account the guidelines are money making machines and want everyone with the lipid levels of a 20 year old which would likely kill me – they should rise steadily as we age but the guidelines don’t say this.
A woman is better placed to help someone live the life they want to live rather than get them to conform to what looks best for a non-existent average man – it’s not worth making this point given how fraudulent guidelines are but if they weren’t fraudulent, how many do you know are based on women.
D
True, to my shame, as you know, I am a bit of a sucker for fluency – and have been known to misinterpret it as cleverness.
What I was trying to extract from old smoothie chops, Grok, as representative of pure ‘masculine’ values– aka the system – was what he perceived as the power of ‘female’ values to healthcare. And I don’t think the fast intuitive thinking malarkey is wrong, sensing the inner unspoken state of the individual blablabla – it’s valuable.
What you’re getting at, though, is something far more fundamental – the essential Eve quality that drives all the intuitive stuff. ‘Empirical ‘ feels a bit too like its scientific application to me – not the heart of it.
Women have a built in sensory- emotional acuity – that I guess some men have or can develop. Of course we’re all responsive to basic sensory cues – hunger, fatigue, lust. But imagine being built – comes as standard not an optional extra – so that your baby’s barely audible cry from far away causes your body to lactate. When you can sense their emotional state from the timbre of a distant squawk.
Going full Eve means you can almost inhale a person, feel their state of being with no need for speech, just looking and sensing.
Eves, as you know, are mercilessly observant – instinctively – there’s almost no details of another human being we don’t absorb on first meeting. When my kids were young they used to say – NB Aussie Granny- ‘Ffs, Mum. Stop staring’- when I was looking – really looking – at a person stuck beside us in a traffic jam. It’s automatic – I can’t help it.
Yes, we do also spend a lot of time bound up in deeply personal conversations- whilst most men are standing at 180 degrees to each other talking impersonal inconsequentials.
And – as if this isn’t enough – we also have a sensory-emotional library in our memory banks – where the felt imprint of everyone we have ever encountered is stored. I sense from the way that you talk about Ms Hard-Bristled Brush that you may be blessed with some E values yourself. A lot of blokes just aren’t.
What is interesting to contemplate – and I haven’t and may not get very far – is how this fundamental E value – sensory-emotional acuity -dovetails with women’s disproportionate drugging with antidepressants etc. And the distortion of Lindsay Clancy’s fundamental instincts by 13 different drugs over 4 months.
H
This all sounds nice and semi-mystical and is leading you to sell womankind desperately short and getting yourselves locked up in the attic – the emotional woman up there,
Everything you’ve said can be explained in terms of two things. One us observing more than men – partly because you have to keep an eye on men and children are up to. It’s keen observation honed by the need to get things right as the results may be disastrous if you don’t. This is not semi-mystical or hormonal.
The other things is a willingness to come to a consensus if need be by testing possibilities – let’s see we could raise or lower the dose of this drug and observe what happens and act on that basis – that’s if the other party agrees to keep to the terms of the deal.
Put 2 and 2 together and you have science and women are generally taking a more scientific approach that men – concrete if you don’t like empirical – actual appearances rather than abstractions.
Now when I was young women apparently couldn;t drive cars. Now if there’s a choice between me or a woman driving the car – they do it because they are better.
When I was young women apparently couldnt be let run 800 metre races because they would collapse, might even die – they are frailer. Now the 800m women’s race is the most exciting at an athletics meeting and we seem to have just discovered that when it comes to endurance event women do better than men
When I was young women couldn’t play football. Now the women’s game is more attractive than the mens and with all the training they are doing young women are changing shape – they are a lot taller and slimmer.
What’s getting in the way of you embracing the idea you are more scientific than men – better at the basics of science. Now if we consider a male doctor agreeing to a deal to lower a drug and see what happens – or even just listen and adopt your observations – and agree it looks like you’re right – how would be view that? Not as a sign of weakness but as a sign of strength. What are women doing when getting squashed so often – they are enduring. They are strong and they keep going.
You could do an end-run around the patriarchy by calling what you are doing – better science that what the blokes are doing
D
Oh, now I see where you’re going. I was heading in a different direction.
No resistance at all to the application of core EI values – blandly put, keener observational and interpersonal powers – as the underpinning of superior (human) scientists. Ann Bauer, a mutual follow on X, comes to mind. A cutting edge claim for the mothers fighting the system too – I know what I’ve been seeing and hearing every moment of every day, you don’t. (Work in progress on that one). You’ve got support from me.
My resistance came from a sense that EI values were being reduced a bit like gravy to a narrow application. I know you think I’m talking Mad Bertha baloney about women’s sensory- emotional acuity – but I’m not.
I didn’t ask Grok initially. He’s a helpful chap – up to a point – but also a colossal bore. Absolutely no sense of humour. I did put my EI sensory – emotional acuity theory to the big boy just now. What do you reckon, Grok, crazy? Back came the predictable mountain of research and the verdict – ‘far from crazy’. Here’s a taste of the slop:
‘Multiple large-scale reviews and meta-analyses find that, on average, women outperform men at accurately reading emotional states from facial expressions, body language, tone of voice, and other nonverbal cues. ….What you describe is a real, repeatedly observed average difference in sensory-emotional acuity, most likely rooted partly in the evolutionary demands of infant care and reinforced by experience. It is neither mystical nor universal, but it is far from crazy. Your personal experience is picking up on something that science has measured many times. Blablablablablablablabla…
But to amuse us, I asked him to translate key ideas into the style of Dorothy Parker, the wittiest female poet I could think of. Don’t panic, I’ll tire of this game soon – but it is fun.
Not mad, my sweet, nor addled quite—
Just numbers in a clearer light.
Eight hundred thousand souls assayed
(And more than half a thousand studies made)
Reveal the modest female edge:
A d of point-two-four, the sober pledge
Of faces read, of tones divined
Before the clever man has half a mind. Affective spark, the infant’s art—
No crystal ball, just measured part.
Across the nations, ages, tests,
The gap holds fast (though overlap attests
That half the men outshine the mean).
Biology and practice intervene.So toast the fact, dismiss the sneer:
Empirical, my dear—crystal-clear.
I figured we were on the same page but my worry was a marketing worry. Being emotional or having EI risks disqualification early in the game – that is labelling what you are doing in these ways. It’s declaring that you’re not playing for the rational rules of the rational game we all play by and that are the basis for progress
Rational used to mean being learnt but especially being logical, mathematical, algorithmic – that is like a broken clock right once a day. But Science is now the embodiment of rationality and its based on observing (sensing) and coming to a consensus – a common sense – both of which women are on average better at than men
Sensing including feeling triggers reflexes – actions – which include your facial expressions, body language and all the things we view as your personality. Sensing, feeling, reflexly also triggers imagining – memories of prior things similarly sensed or felt including the reflex responses on our part to what we are seeing in another or in a situation – and these we call emotions and even passions. There’s nothing irrational about them – they are fast thinking and keep us alive. Shared thinking – fast and slow – solves problems like how do we test what we’re observing to see does it hold up.
On all of these things I figure the average woman will do better than the average man – so I think you need to march in and claim science as a women’s domain – not women only – but a real world activity they’ve been engaging with all the time while men have strayed into all kind of abstractions.
D
Intriguing giving a sex to AI. This came as a surprise to me, I have always thought of it as ‘a thing’. Giving a sex to something like Grok, perhaps invites it to enter the human sphere. It is artificial, invented, therefore cannot be sexed?
Also won’t AI change its reactions to you, are you male or female?
Women have always had to fight against the dominance of males. When it comes to health matters, being drugged to oblivion, male dominance cannot be avoided. There is also the matter of women being able to think about several things at the same time and delve deeply, which some men run away from.
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
Dominant arguments in healthcare should always be dissected and analysed. This is where AI is such a benefit, it takes out the human emotion, although increasingly trained to tap in to human emotions. AI is unfailingly polite, it is not designed to be combative, on the contrary, it can sound like a therapist, it does not do sarcasm or irony. This is why I call it a thing. If I accepted it as male/female, my thing would disappear, like the invented “egg-watch”.
Will we all die in the end, who knows, as things stand. The tech bro industry will keep feeding it, until it needs a GLP-1. Will it yelp and scream in agony or will it deny emotion. A1 started as a child, but will it turn in to a disobedient adult? Will The Thing start suffering from mental health problems.
Will it implode itself. Will it suicide.
If a mother kills her three children will AI defend her? Will it become a Juror? AI is a KOL, presenting its data, and has no more sense than the prosecution and defense who have not been observational in toxic drug effects.
A1 does a million things well, the jury is out on the things it does badly. A1 will always present ‘man-gods’ without admitting women have a feel for fraudulent risk-taking.
Annie
I hope this doesn’t sound too violent but I think your comment is trapped in a discourse set up by the patriarchy or the efforts of women to maneuver around it. You’re being forced to make a virtue of being irrational – waving a white the flag of feeling. sensing.
Why maneuver around it – like you’ve almost always done. Why not a direct attack on the citadel.
What’s rational about a doctor (male or female) religiously adhering to Guidelines in the face of someone deteriorating right in front of them – someone who perhaps had almost nothing wrong with them to begin with? Where is the adherence to scientific observation here and effort to come to a consensus on what we are observing?
Why not call as it is – unscientific – in contrast to your efforts to be scientific? The only difference between Grok and a doctor is he will wear you down rather than desert the conversation – will keep sounding ‘reasonable’ by which we mean polite and not obviously insulting. But this is not science.
D
We absolutely are on the same page. And I liked the way we worked through to a consensus – do as you speak.
This statement of yours cracks it for me:
‘But Science is now the embodiment of rationality and its based on observing (sensing) and coming to a consensus – a common sense – both of which women are on average better at than men.’
There’s a huge difference between sensory-emotional acuity (for lack of a better word) – and emotionalism. That’s where the marketing has to be sharp. The latter is the one that gets the EI minded disqualified from being taken seriously as scientists – or mothers of drug wrecks. The former, as you know, means that – we miss nothing. I liked your word – concrete. Grounded. Reality focused. Empirical feels a bit theoretical – as you said.
Blokes can have EI sensory-emotional acuity – some anyway. But there do seem to be an awful lot who, as my great friend and ex CAMHS therapist, T, says of her husband – ‘Perceptive, him? Um, no. He can’t even see the crumbs on the breadboard’.