3 ms·

If this were set in Japan as you propose, and we substituted “onigiri stall” or “izakaya” for “Mexican restaurant,” would that affect the substance of the gp’s

by alwa 2y ago

If this were set in Japan as you propose, and we substituted “onigiri stall” or “izakaya” for “Mexican restaurant,” would that affect the substance of the gp’s observation? To my mind, when gp said “Mexican restaurant,” that conjured a familiar image of a particular type of informal, moderately sized, sit-in-and-delivery kind of establishment that’s probably a small business rather than managed as a corporate chain. And I wouldn’t assume that a Mexican restaurant is necessarily staffed by people of Mexican ancestry. I do feel like, in my limited exposure to Japanese culture, I hear less worry than I do from Americans about problems on this spectrum of individual economic freedom/empowerment <—> enslavement. But that’s an observation in which I’m very far from confident—I’d be curious to hear how it fits (or doesn’t) with the broader point you’re making.

wegfawefgawefg 2y ago
Maybe you are correct in that the mexican restraunt conjures up images of typical restraunt. I do think there is associative bleed. I think thoughts do not follow formal logic and words function as embeddings. My suspicion is the word "slave" in english has other encodings in it that arent strictly the general definition of slave, and that the high magnitude of those signals within the slave embedding will ellicit unreasonable responses. A bug in uber software is no more enslaving the deliverers than a distribution error made by a human on paper in the 1950s resulting in a truck driver driving a shipment of vegetables to the wrong grocery store is enslaving them to drive. The procedure does not commit the immoral act of enslaving. It is an emergent error in logic with complicit actors. Unrelated side point, lived in Texas for almost 30 years, and every mexican restraunt is owned and operated by mexicans except the rare one that is run by chinese/vietnamese (which generally are not very good). On japanese culture: Japanese frequently discusses "black companies", and poor boss worker relationships. My wife complains to me about her work every day, and so do all of her coworkers, and their friends when they get togethor. This sort of human to human mistreatment topic is an extremely common point of discussion in Japan. However it isnt framed with the term slavery. That seems to be a western fetish, and its due to the relationship the US has to slavery and it pulls in emotive racial bias, and an image of conflict between groups. Software isnt a tribe to go to combat with for sovereignty. Its just code.
- skissane 2y ago
  > However it isnt framed with the term slavery. That seems to be a western fetish, and its due to the relationship the US has to slavery I think “slavery” has much higher salience in the US than in the Western world in general. How many other nations fought a civil war over the topic?
  - wegfawefgawefg 2y ago
    Well historically I assume there have been many nations that had slaves, but the slaves were either subjugted to the point of losing their identity, or it was not racial. The US has a self inflicted complex about it. People in Japan dont feel sorry about the Korean rapes. Descendants of slave owners the world over are free from ancestral guilt. I do think the sensetivity is unreasonable.

by alwa 2y ago

wegfawefgawefg 2y ago

Maybe you are correct in that the mexican restraunt conjures up images of typical restraunt. I do think there is associative bleed. I think thoughts do not follow formal logic and words function as embeddings. My suspicion is the word "slave" in english has other encodings in it that arent strictly the general definition of slave, and that the high magnitude of those signals within the slave embedding will ellicit unreasonable responses. A bug in uber software is no more enslaving the deliverers than a distribution error made by a human on paper in the 1950s resulting in a truck driver driving a shipment of vegetables to the wrong grocery store is enslaving them to drive. The procedure does not commit the immoral act of enslaving. It is an emergent error in logic with complicit actors. Unrelated side point, lived in Texas for almost 30 years, and every mexican restraunt is owned and operated by mexicans except the rare one that is run by chinese/vietnamese (which generally are not very good). On japanese culture: Japanese frequently discusses "black companies", and poor boss worker relationships. My wife complains to me about her work every day, and so do all of her coworkers, and their friends when they get togethor. This sort of human to human mistreatment topic is an extremely common point of discussion in Japan. However it isnt framed with the term slavery. That seems to be a western fetish, and its due to the relationship the US has to slavery and it pulls in emotive racial bias, and an image of conflict between groups. Software isnt a tribe to go to combat with for sovereignty. Its just code.

skissane 2y ago
> However it isnt framed with the term slavery. That seems to be a western fetish, and its due to the relationship the US has to slavery I think “slavery” has much higher salience in the US than in the Western world in general. How many other nations fought a civil war over the topic?
- wegfawefgawefg 2y ago
  Well historically I assume there have been many nations that had slaves, but the slaves were either subjugted to the point of losing their identity, or it was not racial. The US has a self inflicted complex about it. People in Japan dont feel sorry about the Korean rapes. Descendants of slave owners the world over are free from ancestral guilt. I do think the sensetivity is unreasonable.