A forest of -isms

I know a lot of people who fight against discrimination under their own banner, whether it's sexism, racism, ageism, disability, homophobia or anything else. I can't be a card-carrying member of any of those groups, as a white, middle class straight man, I can only support those who are discriminated against.

I support equality in all those guises, for many reasons, but the simplest to explain is a lesson I learned in my first year as an undergraduate AI student.

We were discussing early applications of AI during the cold war to detect tanks in photographs. Feed thousands of photos into a machine, get it to tell you which ones contain tanks and you can sort through many more photos than with just people. The problem was that they trained the machine on a set of photos where all the tank pictures were taken in the morning and all the non-tank pictures were taken in the afternoon, so all the machine could detect was the patterns of light, not the tanks.

Being Edinburgh, we also discussed another problem : how can you tell men from women? Do you look at the simplified forms on toilet doors and take women in dresses and men in trousers? What happens when you look out the window and see women in jeans and men in kilts?

Look through the examples and find any case where it's a clear cut divide between "them" and "us". Where one group is always stronger, faster, smarter, where you can prejudge anyone to say if they look like that or they sound like that, then this is the sort of person they are and this is what they are capable of.

And if you think you've found one, a reason why "they" shouldn't be in the country or only "us" are allowed that job, check your inputs, because where you think you see tanks, you might just have detected a sunrise, and what you're looking for may not even be there.

And that is why, at a basic, fundamental level, I cannot begin to comprehend someone who, without knowing anything about someone else, can presume to know anything about their empathy, intelligence, determination, motivation or anything else simply from their hair colour, cup size, choice of warm clothing or any other arbitrary characteristic, particularly when it's from people putting themselves down because of some perceived characteristic projected onto them by themselves or by others.

Be yourself, and be proud to be yourself. All that the world should expect of you is to walk tall and work hard. Don't be put in a box because "women suck at maths" or "depression is just an excuse". I promise to treat you as an equal until your own actions, and no-one else's, let me see what you're really capable of.