Author Archives: David Truss

Morality police

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I have regularly created AI images to go with my blog posts since June, 2022. I try not to spend too much time creating them because I’d rather be writing blog posts than image prompts. But sometimes I try to create images and they just don’t convey what I want them to, or they come across as a bit too much in the uncanny valley, feeling unnatural. That happened with my post image 4 days ago, and I used the image anyway, because I was pressed for time.

(Look carefully at this image and you’ll see a lot wrong with it.)

I made 5 or 6 attempts to adjust my prompt, but still kept getting bad results, so I made do with the only one that resembled what I wanted.

And then for the past couple days I had a different challenge. I don’t know if it’s because of using the version of Bing’s Copilot that is associated with my school account, but my attempts to create images were blocked.

And:

However, Grok 3, a much less restricted AI, had no problem creating these images for me:

And:

I’m a little bothered by the idea that I am being limited by an AI in using these image prompts. The first one is social commentary, the second one, while a ‘hot topic’, certainly isn’t worthy of being restricted.

It begs the question, who are the morality police deciding what we can and cannot use AI to draw? the reality is that there are tools out there that have no filters and can create any image you want, no matter how tasteless or inappropriate they are, and I’m not sure that’s ideal… but neither is being prevented from making images like the ones I requested. What is it about these images requests that make them inappropriate?

I get that this is a small issue in comparison to what’s happening in the US right now. The morality police are in full force there with one group, the Christian far right, using the influence they have in the White House to impose their morality on others. This is a far greater concern than restrictions to image prompts in AI… but these are both concerns on the same continuum.

Who decides? Why do they get to decide? What are the justifications for their decisions?

It seems to me that the moral decisions being made recently have not been made by the right people asking the right questions… and it concerns me greatly that people are imposing their morals on others in ways that limit our choices and our freedoms.

Who gets to be the morality police? And why?

Taking the shot

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I got my second shingles vaccine yesterday. Today my arm is sore, I have a mild headache, and I feel a bit of a chill. But the symptoms are mild and I’ll go about my day just fine. I do marvel at the idea of vaccines and how they can build our immunity to prevent serious sickness. I’m also further excited about how medical scientists are doing research using mRNA vaccines tailored to specific people to fight certain kinds of cancer. This is an incredible breakthrough because normally our immune system does not detect cancerous cells as foreign, and that’s why they are left unharmed by our immune system and spread so easily.

On the flip side, I saw a social media post by a pastor in a small town in Texas bragging that his school was the least vaccinated against measles in the country. There is a measles breakout currently going through Texas and so far one unvaccinated child has died (not from the school mentioned above). In all likelihood, there will be more as a result of not taking the vaccine.

I’m no longer surprised by anti-science, conspiracy minded people.

I can question whether during Covid, if we actually needed to vaccinate small children when only 0.4 percent of the deaths were in those under 20 years old… and still see that the vaccine worked. In fact, the stat above might have been quite a bit higher without the vaccine. I can question the application of the vaccine without needing to question the efficacy.

Imagine our world, with polio and smallpox still being a concern. When is the last time you recall someone getting the mumps? I know that I’m not immune to shingles now, but my likelihood of catching it, and/or having a very bad case is drastically reduced thanks to the vaccine. A friend of my wife got it a week before her scheduled vaccine, and she had to take a lot of time off, and still has nerve damage as a result.

Sometimes you need to trust the science, trust in conventional research, and not social media posts that cherry pick stats and outright lie to convince you otherwise. There are not a cabal of scientists collaborating to dupe you into taking measles or shingles vaccines, to somehow inject you with (insert conspiracy theory here). There are thousands of scientists dedicated to making life better, curing diseases, and increasing both your quality of life and also your time here on earth.

I’m grateful for the advances we’ve seen, and I encourage you, if you’ve missed any of these shots, to go get them.

Morality and Accountability

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I saw this question and response on BlueSky Social and it got me thinking:

Why are ethics questions always like:

“is it ethical to steal bread to feed your starving family?”

And not:

“is it ethical to hoard bread when families are starving?”

Existential Comics @existentialcoms

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Because the first question shifts the blame to the desperate, making their morality the focus, while the second question demands accountability from the powerful. It’s easier to question survival than to challenge greed.

Debayor @debayoorr.bsky.social

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That last sentence really struck a chord in me, “It’s easier to question survival than to challenge greed.”

We separate morality from accountability in ways that don’t really make sense. To me it’s the difference between a socialist and a capitalist democracy. A socialist democracy infuses accountability with morality, while a capitalist democracy separates the two.

Another way to look at this is with a quote from the comic book Spider-Man: “With great power comes great responsibility.” A socialist democracy takes the quote literally. A capitalist democracy redirects the focus: “Holding great power becomes my responsibility.”

Accountability to others versus accountability to power and self. Morality takes a back seat to greater control, and greater success. And that is who we idolize… the rich and famous. The ones with power and influence. Morality doesn’t come into play. Accountability doesn’t come into play.

If you came from another planet and witnessed the accumulation of wealth that happens at the expense of so many who lack wealth, what would you think of the morality of humans? Who would you admire more, the mother or father stealing a loaf of bread to feed their family, or the limo-driven CEO’s who earn 1,000% or more income than the thousands of employees under them?

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Petty things

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I was listening to Michaela Slinger’s break-up song, Petty Things, this morning while on my exercise bike and began to wonder, what are the petty things I worry too much about?

Here is one example: The bad driver that does something stupid, making me swear out loud while in my car. Then this festers in my brain for too long, perhaps even to the point of mentioning it to someone later in the day.

But I’m not writing this as an excuse to share my petty grievances. No, that’s literally complaining about them while simultaneously re-grieving them. Instead I’m questioning what underlies the petty things that make them feel more than petty?

What are those points of anger, frustration, hurt, and aggression that trigger a petty response in a way that is an obvious overreaction? What’s beneath the surface, waiting for a petty excuse to be shared?

And can we do the same with joy? Can we (naturally) look for those wonderful occasions of happiness and delight to spring out at any given moment. Can we foster inquisitiveness around joyful happenstance as easily as we sometimes trigger petty thoughts?

I think the animal in us sometimes overrides our humanity. We look for the dangers, the warnings, the things that make life challenging as a sort of animal self defence. But when an animal escapes danger, it literally and physically shakes it off and goes about its life. Humans remember, hold on to, and relive the experience.

If we want to change that, we need to be intentional. We need to seek the positive things we want to live in our minds rent free… petty things already reside there, it’s up to us to vacate those thoughts by filling our brains with things we know will be more enjoyable, more delightful. When we do this our petty grievances start to feel a lot more petty… we start charging rent for negative thoughts, while joy starts to live rent free.

The script has flipped

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It has taken a few years.

I started my fitness journey in January 2019, and it has occurred to me that over the past year, it has become a challenge to give myself a rest day. It used to be hard to find the time and the motivation to work out. The challenge was wanting to, and doing the necessary work. Now the challenge is allowing myself a rest day.

I’m realizing that while I give most of my body ample rest, (primarily doing just one muscle group in a workout when I’m working under morning time pressure at my home gym), I still work my legs daily with my cardio. My legs are not getting any rest. I need to reevaluate what I define as a workout, allowing myself to skip cardio 2-3 times a week. I also need to take a full rest day more than once every 2 weeks or so.

I’ve gone from it being hard to workout to it being hard to skip a day. And while that’s a script switch I’d like to maintain, I’d also like to ensure that I actually do skip some days. Not enough that it feels easy again, but enough that I feel the benefits of rest between working out.

Still, this is a good place to be! I’d rather be on this side rather than the flip side.

Exceptional Customer Service

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Dean Shareski asked this question on LinkedIn: “What’s your favourite story or experience with exceptional customer service?”

I shared:

Mine was in the Bahamas. I asked a waiter for pickled conch at dinner and he went into a bit of a dramatic show about how I didn’t know conch until I tasted it fresh. He asked me what I was doing the next morning and said to meet him in the lobby at 7am. So me and my sister’s boyfriend met him. He took us to a small convenience store and bought two Tupperware containers. Then we drove across the toll bridge and wound around under it to a kind of open sea market. He bought lemons and tomatoes from one vendor, peppers from another, and took them to a conch vendor who broke open conch shells in front of us and made conch salad for us, while telling stories about conch diving while high.
The waiter then took us back to the hotel, two full Tupperware containers of fresh conch salad in hand, and refused to take any money from us. “Absolutely not, you haven’t had conch until you’ve had it fresh, this was my pleasure!”
It was indeed delicious, but the experience was even better.

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I wish I remembered his name, it’s on the back of a photo I took with him on our last day, him holding the huge bottle of rum we bought him… But this was over 30 years ago, and the photo is buried in a box in my garage. All these years later, I still remember his kindness and hospitality. What a wonderful memory he created for us!

Positive Observations

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Have you ever noticed people‘s affinity to focus on the negative?

You say what a beautiful day it is to a stranger outside a coffee shop, and the responses you get is, “I hear it’s going to rain tomorrow.”

You say what a great price for eggs, (🇨🇦), and the response is, “I can’t believe how high prices all are these days!”

At coffee with a friend this morning, he commented that my ‘observations’ recently have all been positive:

‘Workouts are going great, and I feel stronger than I ever have.’

‘Things have been running really smoothly at work, and I’m enjoying connecting with students the past few days.’

‘I’ve felt a lot more present recently than I have in the last few weeks.’

Where I used the word ‘observations’ above, very often the term tends to be ‘complaints’… things that I notice which are not going as well as they could be, or even if they are going well noting afterwards how this is fleeting.

I’m going to bask in these positive observations for a bit. Let them soak in and appreciate them… I had the funny urge to say, ‘while it lasts’ but as funny as that might be, it totally misses the point. I’m enjoying staying positive, and I look forward to this feeling continuing!

McBean and the Propaganda Machine

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I used to think that Dr. Seuss’ Sneetches was about discrimination. Either you have a star on your belly or you don’t… and the book was about learning a lesson that superficial traits really don’t matter.

I’ve come to realize that I was wrong.

The book is about being grifted. It’s not about the Sneetches, it’s about Sylvester McMonkey McBean putting Sneetches through a propaganda cycle, which in turn leads them through the machine, again and again and again until they are broke and disillusioned.

I also realize that we are all Sneetches right now.

Do we always need the flash?

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Yesterday I spoke to 6 grade 12’s taking a new Teacher Education course in our school. I had a framework built for my talk in PowerPoint, but just text on a plain white background. I had calendared an hour before the presentation to add some images and touch it up. But as I added the first couple images, I realized that I really didn’t need them.

There are only 6 students, my second and third slides were question that I wanted them to answer and I would add their answers to the slides, and the 1-3 bullets on the other slides were not as much talking points but cues for me to share experiences as examples of what I was going to speak about.

It occurred to me that the images were not going to add anything except cosmetics. I think sometimes presentations become more about the flash and imagery than about the message.

If I were to be presenting to a filled auditorium, I might have thought more about beautifying my slides, but it’s easy to see whether or not I’ve got the attention of 6 kids. It’s easy to ask them questions and feel like I’m giving everyone a chance to respond. And it’s easy to make the presentation more of a conversation.

I presented to 6 kids who could all probably make better slides than me after three and a half years at a school that has them presenting weekly, and explicitly teaches them about visual messaging…. And I shared 10 slides with black printing on a white background. Reflecting now, that’s all I really needed.

Tasked again and again

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Yesterday I got an email that The Provincial Health and Safety Taskforce is asking 2 members of our school health and safety committee to do a 30-60 minute survey. Note, this isn’t something my district is adding to our plate, it’s a provincial requirement. Just like the new mock first aid drill that was added this year.

I know health and safety are important. I know we need to care for the wellbeing of our workers and our community. I just wonder how many more of these tasks are going to be added year after year… with nothing being taken away from what we do to run a school.

Two people in every one of our province’s 1,571 public schools will now need to do a survey that will average about 45 minutes to complete. That translates to almost 100 days of work (2,356.5 hours/24 hours in a day). That’s just collecting the data, then people at the provincial level, who probably spent hundreds of ours developing the survey, now have to make sense of the data.

I’m not saying this isn’t important data, but I do question the value of having every school take the time to do this? I question how many more tasks that are not related to teaching students and leading the learning in a school are going to keep being added to our plates?

It’s death by a thousand paper cuts… despite the fact tha the paper has become digital.