8 tweets · December 2021 · 118 likes · 1 retweets · read on Twitter
at nerd meetup recently, someone confused two asian guys she'd met earlier the guys didn't seem bothered at all but she still seemed embarrassed a minute later, so I checked in, & she was like "😳 yeah I feel bad" then one of the guys was like "no worries! asians look alike 😀"
and everyone got into a great discussion about whether there was actually more variance in looks among people from different regions! ...iirc someone said that ML algos optimized to distinguish Han Chinese folks could recognize Europeans, but not vice versa! 😮
and the whole conversation just became a delightful nerdy conversation about related topics, completely removing any sense that anybody had done anything wrong! implied: it's safe to talk about this ❤️ it's not taboo/wrong/doom... mistakes are okay
I felt (and feel) really proud of having stepped in there. I feel like I'm learning how to use my capacity to be loud & interruptive in social scenes for good I am fiercely protective of people being safe to make mistakes without shame ❤️🔥
The fact that my just bringing attention to it was able to dissolve the embarrassment was a function of the social group I was in; it was a bunch of grey tribe nerds. If it had been a social justicey scene, people might've actually shamed her (as she implicitly feared).
Fwiw, as far as I can tell, shaming people for stuff like this is uhhh not gonna help make people more comfortable and curious around people with different ethnicities... fear is not a good state for learning.
Being upset at some experience of feeling mistreated is understandable, and I would want to welcome it in general. But that's completely separate from whether expressing your upset actually creates a useful feedback loop that gets you what you want. True in rships & society.
We are constantly creating the microcultures we're in with how we treat each other. Norms & meta-norms aren't arbitrary but neither are they permanently fixed. We co-create them in every moment.
