 Hello, everybody, and welcome to another OpenShift Commons briefing. Today we're really happy to have with us Kat Swetel. We're going to talk and give an introduction for technologists on epistemic injustice. I always say that slightly off. I think it's timely. It's a great opportunity for us to discuss some of the things that are going on in marginalized communities and how we can endeavor to correct some of that. So I'm going to let Kat introduce herself. Jay Bloom is with us. Norm Dilles is with us. A number of other folks will probably pop in for the conversation afterwards. So Kat, take it away. Thanks. Yep, so I'm Kat Swetel. I'm an engineering manager at Erica, and I'm going to give you a very brief introduction to epistemic injustice. So go first, a quick disclaimer. This is a whole like field of study and philosophy. And I'm not a philosopher. I'm a different kind of nerd. So you are very much getting today an introduction from someone who's out working in the industry, not a philosopher, not an academic. Maybe Jay will be able to add a different sort of color after this. But that's my disclaimer, not a philosopher, just Kat. All right. So what is epistemic injustice? Epistemic injustice, this definition is taken from kind of the book on the topic Epistemic Injustice, Power and Ethics of Knowing by Miranda Fricker. So that the definition that I'm going to use throughout this is when someone is wronged in their capacity as a knower. So you're wronged in your capacity to know things and to kind of impart your knowledge to other peoples. That's the definition that I'm going to be working with. And a common example that's become more and more part of the the dialogue here in the United States, at least, is gaslighting. And this phrase comes from a play and a movie that are about this couple. And it starts off where the couple moves into this house and a bunch of weird things start happening. The husband keeps trying to convince the wife that she's going nuts. And it turns out he's doing that so that he can go into their own attic and look through some dead old lady's stuff for some magical treasure or something like that. And he doesn't want his wife to know. And she has her suspicions about what's going on because when he leaves for work, which is really that he goes outside and then climbs up the fire escape to the attic, he notices that all of the lights, the gaslighting in her house goes down as if someone is turning on other lights elsewhere in the house. So she thinks there's someone in the house with her. She hears noises and all the stuff. But her husband is trying to convince her, no, you're crazy. You're noticing things that aren't happening, all of this stuff. So that's gaslighting. Basically, when someone is trying to say that your lived experience, the things that you are observing about your world, you know to be true that you're crazy and they're not true. So that's gaslighting. And now, you know, there's books and podcasts and all of these things about gaslighting. So that's probably the example of epistemic injustice that is most common in our dialogue today. So, yeah, that's a common example that many people are probably familiar with. Broadly, epistemic injustice kind of comes in two buckets. In all the instances of epistemic injustice, we can probably put them in one or both of these buckets. The first bucket is testimonial injustice. And this is when someone is wronged in their capacity as a giver of knowledge. So it's something about you prevents you from being able to pass knowledge to someone else. So I like to say there's winners and losers in the credibility economy. It's nothing about the knowledge that I'm trying to impart to someone else. It's something about me. My favorite example of this that I've ever encountered in my career, so I go to this fancy meeting with a lot of people in like tailored blue suits and all of this stuff. And one participant walks in the meeting and she's wearing sneakers and blue jeans. Also, it's all men except for the two of us. And the meeting kicks off. The salespeople are selling and all of this stuff. And they start asking questions of one of the other engineers. And, you know, what about this, this and this? So we go through two hours, almost two hours of this. Finally, at the end, the engineer that they've been asking questions of, he says, these are all great questions, but don't you think it would make more sense to ask the person who's going to be deciding if you get paid or not? And it turns out that the woman who had walked in not wearing a fancy suit and also being a woman in the technology space, she was the one who was going to be signing off on their deliverables and deciding if they got paid. So they've wasted, they had two hours only with her and they've wasted one hour and 55 minutes and kind of got to the end and freaked out. But that is an example of testimonial and justice where it's because she was a woman in a male-dominated space because she was wearing the things that they felt like you should be wearing all of those things. They did not consider her to be a good source of knowledge. And that ended up not working out very well. The kind of scary thing about testimonial and justice is that we can do this to ourselves. And I catch myself doing this to me all the time. I don't have a very traditional technology background. So I catch myself saying like maybe I'm not technical, maybe this idea is dumb or whatever the case may be. I'm degrading my own ability to impart knowledge to others. So someone else can do this to you or you can do this to yourself. It is not cool. The second bucket would be hermeneutical injustice. So this is when someone is wronged in their capacity as a subject of social understanding. So this is when we have stories that help us understand our own experience and when certain people or certain groups aren't able to participate in creating those stories that we use to make sense of our experience. So when that happens, we would say that those people are hermeneutically marginalized. So they don't catch play a role in the way that we generate collective meaning. In the common examples of this, one of them would be postpartum depression. So we have this dominant narrative about what it means to be a mother and you should be really happy after you have your child because this is the most wonderful moment of your life and all of these things. And so we have this idea of what it is to be a mother of a baby. And then when women have feelings that are not that, they start to question like, am I even meant to be a mother because this my experience is not at all matching what the dominant narrative is. But then if they're lucky enough to have a friend or a doctor to say, you seem to be experiencing postpartum depression, then they're able to have access to a new narrative that helps them make sense of their experience. So when we talk about hermeneutic injustice, sometimes we say things like, there's a moment of waking up or things like that. When you gain access to a different vocabulary or a different narrative that can help you make sense of your experience. There are fish on this slide, but I like the joke. One fish swims up to the other fish and says, hey, how's the water today? Another fish says, what the hell is water? So we're swimming around in these narratives and we don't even know that they exist. We just know that that's the only way that we are able to make sense of our world. Yeah, okay, so how do you recognize these things out in the world? I think there are some key phrases and things like that that when we say them or we hear them, they can be good indicators of things that fall into one of these two buckets. So for testimonial injustice, we will say to ourselves or to other people or have other people say to us things that discredit the story or the lived experience based on something about who that person is. So something like, don't be hysterical. That would tend to indicate that there's some sort of testimonial injustice going on there, right? Because hysterical is usually meant to say, because you are a woman, I'm not able to trust the experience that you're telling me about right now. So there's lots of examples of this. So those are the things that we would typically hear. It's a dismissal based on who that person is, something about them. And for hermonitical injustice, we hear things like, that's unbelievable. That's probably one of my least favorite phrases of all time, that's unbelievable. I just want to say, well, believe it. I also felt like it was unbelievable when I was living it. So those types of phrases, they're basically saying that is so far outside of the narrative that I'm familiar with that I can't wrap my head around it. Yeah, those types of things. The other thing with hermonitical injustice, sometimes you'll have a tendency to yourself or for someone else to say, well, in that situation I would have or why didn't you? Because you can't even make sense of that experience. And so you're trying to match it up to some course of action in the narrative that makes sense for you, rather than just accepting the experience or the narrative that was lived by that person. And I'm pretty to you. Those are kind of the little flags. Like, oh, I hope I'm not perpetrating an epistemic injustice here. You can listen to yourself saying those things or listen to other people saying those things. All right, so why the heck does this matter? I really like this quote. One misses a great deal by looking only at justice. I think if we are always looking for justice, then what we're going to find is justice. But if we are sensitizing ourselves to injustice, we can start to notice those things and work to correct them or to make a more generative world. And I think that seems like a good thing. If there are folks out there listening who are familiar with safety science or safety engineering, this will probably be a familiar concept to you, right? If we see no reports of any incidents or anything like that, that's usually not good for safety. What we want to see is people reporting things and learning from things and that makes a safer environment. So same thing here. If we're not having any reports of injustice, then that probably means that we're just like swimming in injustice and not really working towards making things more just. So I like this quote. If we are sensitizing ourselves to injustice, I think that we can make ourselves more resilient, right? Because if we are sensitizing ourselves to the fact that there are lots of different narratives out there and there's lots of information out there and it could be information that seems outside of the realm of possibility, but we want to listen to that because that could be a good indicator of how things could go horribly wrong. And I'm sure all of us have had this experience where you have a feeling you don't know why you have it or it's based on some super weird experience that you have and you try to convey that to other people and they'd say, what? That could never happen. And then the thing happens, right? What would the world look like if we were open to hearing about those intuitions and those stories from folks and not just dismissing them? Oh, that could never happen. Instead, leading with curiosity, what if that happened? So I think that if we're sensitizing ourselves to epistemic injustice, then we can create more resilient systems. Also this one, probably a lot of folks have thought about before if we're sensitizing ourselves to these instances of epistemic injustice, that's pretty good risk mitigation. And I personally am familiar with a couple of companies out there who are doing just this. So they are coming up with measures of how many different perspectives are inside of a product development team because if you get all of those perspectives early, you are more likely to uncover how things could go terribly wrong. And there have been certainly some examples in our industry of things going terribly wrong. And probably if you had anyone from a certain group they would be able to tell you this is an awful idea. For example, there's been some hiring algorithms out there that end up making some really interesting selections. And probably if you had a more diverse set of viewpoints and we're inviting divergent viewpoints early in the process, that wouldn't turn into a huge PR nightmare. So the epistemic injustice, sensitizing ourselves to epistemic injustice can be an important form of risk mitigation. And this one, I guess some people might think that it's like a weird staring into my crystal ball type thing but I disagree. I think that if we are sensitizing ourselves to the fact that there are lots of different narratives out there, we can sensitize ourselves to weak signals. So if you are looking for how your company or your product could be disrupted, do you wanna ask the people who are currently being very well-served by the existing offering or the existing system? Or would you wanna ask people who are not being well-served by the existing system? Probably the people who are not being well-served by the existing system are going to give you much better insight about what could disrupt that existing system or what weaknesses it has or what opportunities there are to serve a greater market. So if we want some of those weak signals, we have to go out to the epistemic margins and be open to hearing that experience even though we know it won't fit with the concept that we have of how the world works. And that's actually very good because it shows us how the world could work, either how it could work and we hope it doesn't or how it could work and we hope it does. So good way to get weak signals. And then there's this threat looming as the systems that we work can become more and more complex and there's more and more areas for specialization. Within each specialization, we end up coming up with our own kind of vocabulary and our own narratives and it becomes really difficult to exchange narratives across the specializations. And this book, The Challenger Launched Decision talks about that, that ahead of Challenger being launched, there were different people, different groups who had concerns, but because of all the specialization, it becomes really difficult to exchange concerns across groups and to notice that there is some sort of consistent theme across those stories. So if we can sensitize ourselves to epistemic injustice and even be able to know that that's going on, that some narratives are being marginalized, we can start to develop a sensitivity to themes within those narratives. We can work on our skills of understanding narratives and being able to exchange narratives across groups even when those groups are marginalized and not playing an active role in creating the dominant narrative. So especially for us as technologists, where we're all specializing in some small thing relatively, right? It's now impossible to be a true full stack developer as a friend whenever someone says that and she's like, great, start talking to me about machine language, right? And so that's now not possible. And I'm not saying it should be. I'm saying if we want to successfully move forward with these complex systems, then we need to work on our ability to exchange narratives and be open to the experience of others. All right, so that's great. That's a bunch of theory. What the heck are we actually going to do? The first thing that I think each one of us can do when we go to our place of employment or whatever the case may be, the communities that we're participating in, we can be really clear about why each one of us is here. So the meeting that I talked about earlier where we all walked in and there is no like, well, this is why this person is here because she's going to be the one approving your work and deciding if you get paid or not. How would that meeting have gone differently if we had led with that? So just being really clear about why each one of us are in the space, I think that can be extremely helpful and reiterating that as we interact, right? So as you're brainstorming about something or exploring some problem, continue to reiterate, I think we need to hear from someone who works on this team and someone who works on this team or from someone with this experience and someone with this other experience and just be really clear, continue to reiterate that we value a diverse side of opinions. This one I already kind of mentioned instead of saying, no, that can't be true, which closes the conversation and further marginalizes whatever narrative was just brought to the table. Instead, we can ask, what would it take for that to be true? And that can give us so much insight about our current situation. Like, yes, there's just lots of examples of this. Again, when people are having an intuition and they can't articulate the reasons that they're having that intuition, just explore it with them rather than saying, oh, well, that can't possibly be true, where's your data? Especially when that person is an expert, is as we grow expertise, sometimes we lose the ability to describe all of the details that cause us to form these opinions and have these intuitions. So instead of saying, that can't possibly be true, that's unbelievable, no one would ever do that, say, what would it take for that to be true and lead with that curiosity? And then this one is one that I do that I think Jay knows about that is super weird, but it's always worked for me. So I read this book, Researching Your Own Practice, and this guy, he says that you should find things to trigger you to reflect in your actual environment. So anytime I walk through a doorway, I try to reflect on the conversation that I just had to see if I was doing any of those things, if I was perpetrating a testimonial injustice or a pharmaceutical injustice. And the nice thing about doorways is that usually not that much time has passed between the conversation and you passing through a doorway, so it won't be too socially weird to go back to the person and be like, you know what, I don't think I was fully listening to you, do you mind if we have a redo or could you tell me more about this or that? So I have given myself the sugar, but you could give yourself anything, but just build the practice and the habit of reflecting on your interactions to make sure that you are being accepting of other people's experience or that you're advocating on your own behalf and not trying to perpetrate a testimonial injustice against yourself. So that's how I do when I walk through the doorway. But I think this all boils down, these are all just clever little things to help us avoid dismissing the intuition and the lived experience of people and all of that is so information rich, right? So what happens in the end of Gaslight or Angel Street or whatever version you're familiar with, spoiler alert, of course. This woman, she thinks she's going crazy, but she just keeps having these experiences. The lights are going down, she hears noise on the attic and her husband swears there's nothing up there. Don't worry about it. Well, she finally encounters someone who says, look, your husband is super weird. Is he, what is he up to? And that gives her the opening to say, you know what, he is weird, listen to all this stuff. And that person says, I believe you, let's investigate this together. And I hope that each one of us were so privileged working in technology. I hope that we can go back to our work and our communities and be that person from time to time, just saying to someone, I believe you, I want to hear more about it that I think would just change the world if each one of us was leading with that and leading with, I believe you, what would it take for that to be true and that type of confidence and curiosity rather than shutting down all of these conversations and further marginalizing important groups. So that's epistemic injustice. Here's a bunch of sources and all that jazz and think that's about it. That's the little tiny introduction to epistemic injustice. Well, thank you, Kat. And you've given us an amazing reading list there. So thank you very much. I'm just gonna unmute a couple of folks and Dave and other folks here. Dave and Martin and Norm and myself and Barbara who's joined us. This is really, it's interesting. There's one thing that really struck me was the conversation about like workplace safety that one metaphor you were using, how many times I've gone into like a factory or someplace, I used to do manufacturing automation software and you'd see these big signs, 300 days without an accident and then you'd be walking by and I used to do paper processing manufacturing plant software and you see these huge vats and crazy things there that like would take, could kill somebody and you're like, oh really? Sure, but I'm still standing 10 feet back from that thing. So I think one of the things that's really interesting to me, what kicked off me asking you and Jade to come and talk about this was a thread on Twitter that Jade and we were involved in about fast learners and complex systems. And a little bit of it was about the privilege to become a fast learner, to have those, to understand those complex knowledges and as you stated in technology, we probably all of us who are sitting on this call right now have those privileges. We've been able to take advantage of them in our careers and not everybody has them. And so trying to understand and own where we have privilege and where we don't is really been the trigger for this conversation. So I'd like to talk a little bit about that as well as maybe dive into the risk mitigation. We talk about speaking to power often in the conversations that we've heard over the past few months and prior to that, the past 100 years. But the privilege to speak to power as well. So I don't know, Jade, if you want to take that or Cabe? I mean, I had one thought that I don't have a lot of thoughts but first of all, I think it's hilarious that Kat started out by being like, I'm not a philosopher. And then talked about epistemology and justifying beliefs and things like that. I think it's really funny because she immediately was demoting herself or she could have been playing a trick which is to say, I don't want to be identified with part of the Western tradition which is a whole other conversation. Anyway, I think the interesting thing about the reading and working with these ideas with Kat in the past has been the way that epistemic injustice, who gets centered in it is different, right? So it's a different conversation in that, but one of the ways to say it is this, like there's a lot of people who would talk about like diversity is just measuring how many people, how many other people are present in the room. And then maybe even people would say, okay, no, no, that's not a good measure of diversity. How many people are speaking who are people of color or marginalized in some other way? And then epistemic justice says, no, that's not it. Because epistemic justice says who's being heard? And in what way is the system preventing those people from being heard? And so really it puts the onus on this change, not from the speaker to speak to power, but from those with power to make room for those other people to be heard. And it's a different way of thinking about how knowledge is marginalized. And so there's also ways that this plays out in longer frames, long time frames including the Western tradition. And part of it is like, if you can't write in English or you don't write in English, you can't publish in academic journals with high credentials, but you just can't do it. They want you to publish in English. So if you believe that writing in your native language is part of expressing your experience in the world, you are automatically marginalized. You're automatically made to be outside of the Western tradition. And so there's a whole set of like decolonial theory around the problems of who gets to be heard and in what forms are they heard, right? So I think that's part of the question, right? Part of the question when you think about epistemic injustice is who is centered in this frame. And the weird re-centering is to say, it's not the speakers, in the exception of where the speaker can do these things to themselves, it's not the speaker's problem to solve. It is other people who will make that possible, I think. So I think that's super interesting. But I think even when it is the speaker doing that to themselves, so perpetuating an epistemic injustice against themselves, I think there's still the onus is kind of on the folks from like living in the dominant narrative to invite other narratives, right? Like that's why I think examples like women suffering from postpartum depression or children who are victims of abuse or those types of things, we can't expect those folks to advocate on their own behalf. It's on us to invite that and do whatever we can to make the space large enough for all of that. Yep, and I also think, I think there's a weird subtlety to that, like it's something that I've talked with Cat about a bunch of times, I think, which is there's a difference between integrating these narratives into the dominant narrative and saying like, oh, we need to have like a better female character in the dominant narrative of the world. And then there's another one that says, no, no, no, no, no. We don't need to integrate these things. We just need to make space for them to be believable. Like I said to Cat a bunch of times, like Cat would go into rooms with me when she worked with me and she'd come out and she would tell me things and I'd be like, what, that didn't, wait, oh. But I wouldn't have seen those things, but also I didn't need to become Cat. I had Cat, Cat could observe those things with me and we could discuss them later. She could have her own experience of what was happening in the room without us having the same experience. And so it was more about creating a trusting relationship where we could talk about different observations and pay attention to different things that were happening and less about trying to have a single way of perceiving the world. And I think that, especially in relationship to like resilience engineering and some of these other concepts is really important. It's more about creating the, I call it requisite coherence, the just enough stickiness between the stories that it can be believable without trying to kind of collapse them all into one single narrative. I don't know, I think that's another thing. So I think there's an interesting thing to bring it back a little bit to technology. There's a conversation we often have in open source communities and at Red Hat and other places that in order for innovation to happen, you need to have lots of different stories, lots of different feedback and that. And technology tends to be very homogeneous anyways. And so it's to tease out, it's part of the innovation doesn't happen if you don't have lots of these different narratives and perspectives and people seeing the weak signals and bringing them to the attention of the community that's working on the project together, whether it's a product or a project or a technology initiative, the same thing plays out in other kinds of communities too. But there's also the piece that I thought was interesting and what Kat was talking about was the risk mitigation for people for speaking out. One of the things that I'm very honored about is giving away the podium to make other, so I have a lot of privilege. I have this channel that's OpenShift Commons. I've been in the industry for a long time, over 30 years. So like I think it's my role now to give away the podium. So those narratives are heard as well as the other thing early on in my career, I found it really important to be out, to always be out. 30 years ago, it was a difficult thing, but the thing that sustained me in whatever happened along the way was that if you don't see yourself in the room, you don't think you belong there. So there's a lot of little pieces of things that we can do when we come with all the white middle class privilege that I come with that I can be safe to do that. So that's really one of the things that I think this, having these kinds of conversations, because even the vocabulary that Kat and Jave use is you have, Jave has or is working on a PhD or has a PhD, is the privilege to get that PhD, to be able to say, anyways I can't say it, but all of those, the words that you talk about English as a language that we expect to do, it's also the vocabulary. And so when we come with our privilege, people may not have had the privilege of having the education to understand those words. So one of the reasons I'm having Kat here is so that we can tease out and share those stories. And I think that's pretty interesting aspect of it. I mean, I think like some very recent events are useful to reflect on around language right now, like GitHub changing master slave repository naming, right? So like, if you think about the argument, not whether they should have done it or not, what was the argument? Well, part of the argument was that's hurtful. And some people argued like, why is that hurtful? I don't get it, that shouldn't be hurtful. That's not what it means, that's not what it meant. That doesn't, none of your beliefs about whether it's hurtful or not are valid beliefs about whether it's hurtful or not. Because you're not the one being inflicted by this language, someone else's, right? And I think it's really interesting like J-Paul Reed did a great job of like going back and really digging into the archive and finding out kind of where this language came from and stuff like that. And I thought that was all useful, but it still was an argument from like, no, no, this is what they meant as opposed to this is how it feels to have someone talk in this language, right? The Rubocop argument that went on in the open source community for 48 hours where people were screaming at each other about whether or not having something named after Rubocop was during this particular time was an appropriate thing to have. And the same types of language issues of who gets to control the language and who gets to say how people should feel about that language being used. These are some of the things that I think, as a community, we have a hard time with. And part of it is because we spend most of our time trying to be really, really rational and logical. And some of these things are not rational logical problems. They are that hurts people and people don't wanna be hurt by those words problems. And that's a different thing. And it requires a set of beliefs that you can't experience. I can experience post-partum depression. I have no clue what that's about, but I can believe somebody else can and I can try to figure out how to make that a reasonable way of a regional narrative in the world, I guess. So, I don't know. I hate it when people hide behind rationality. James knows this, I feel like he just said that word to get me started. I just hate it. I truly hate it. It is completely irrational to say that you are so upset that you can't rename master to main. Like a rational human being who's truly just oriented around outcomes. How are you going to get more outcomes? Well, by having access to the best people. And in order to find the best people, you have to find all of the people and then find out which ones are right for this specific whatever we're doing. So a rational thing would say like, we wanna have access to all of the talent and find which talent is right for this purpose. You can't do that if you are marginalizing people. That is irrational. So I just, I have such a huge problem. It's never people who are being marginalized who are like, oh, but I have to be rational in this situation. No, I'm so sick of it. And I'm sick of the rationality, prosperity gospel. Like if I'm rational enough, then rationality will come down from on high and bless me with riches. Like that is utter and complete force to me. Yep. Yeah, that's also, I think, don't get me going on rationality. Because I think a lot of the best innovations come from irrational, irrationally accepting a weak signal as something that we should pay attention to. I get, you know, we talk about gut feelings or someone pipes and this happens like we had an okay, do you work in group meeting the other day and someone piped in with, I really want Kubernetes on the edge and I think this, this, this and then show me this and this and then, you know, there's a whole like weird little thing going on over here. And if you pay attention to it, this could be a huge market for Red Hat or for whomever, right? Whoever takes, whoever listens to that weak signal, whoever, and then that's where giving away the podium is important is like, ooh, I heard a weak signal here. Have a podium, let's amplify that somewhere and make that louder. And I think there are things that we can do in our open source communities, in our technology communities, in our business meetings where we have to wear those suits or not. I've been that person. The jeans and the t-shirt and the hoodie, walking into a meeting going, da da da da da da, oh yeah, you're the person who's the chair of that committee. Yeah, okay, well, oh well. But usually I speak up because I'm pretty loud. So I don't know, Barbara and Norm, if there's anything that you want to, you know. I was, my background is I've been a disability advocate since 1970. And there's the concept in the last 20 years has been you have stigma on one side and you have lived experience on the other and the advocacy effort has been to privilege. The experience more in the various communities where that becomes a real issue. And stigma is always struck me as a terrible word to describe the other pole of that because it's automatically and forever devaluing. And it pastemic injustice strikes me as the perfect replacement for stigma as a way of discussing that. And I also wanted to tell you if you want to kind of get out of into the disability aspects of this. There's a woman named Angela Ronson who writes a blog called The Thoughtful Vegetable. And 15 years ago Angela had a severe brainstem level aneurysm stroke. And she was in a persistent vegetative state for some time. And she gradually came out of it very, very slowly. And she writes this blog and I've been following her I don't know for three years. And you could see how her neuropsychological expansion was occurring very slowly over that time. And her core point is that she got a diagnosis of persistent vegetative state when this first happened. And she can't get rid of that even though she's typing a blog and publishing it nationally. Because there are criteria for getting rid of a diagnosis of persistent vegetative state. And I was reminded of that because of the discussion of postpartum depression. Once you have the diagnosis of postpartum depression, you're stuck with that. Not because you're necessarily still depressed, but because it's always a tag, a stigmatizing tag on your existence to anyone who knows about it. And there's a lot of people with severe mental illness and autism and developmental disabilities who face that all the time. Their communication and their sense of their own personal agency has no validity in the eyes of first medical people and then in the society in general. And so that's why I'm on this on this thing is because I want to learn more about epistemic injustice so that I could use it in that environment. I'm dyslexic or in like 20 different ways I have like a rap sheet of diagnoses that are quite long. And when I first I was like 10 when I got diagnosed and they basically like the basic the takeaway explanation that I always remembered was essentially your brain is not wired correctly to the world. You don't hear things correctly. You don't say things correctly. You don't read things correctly. You can't write correctly like this like picture of like I have a brain a box and all the wires were wrong and stuff like that. And I spent a long time you know I'm I think a relatively high functioning nor a diverse person, but I spent a lot of time grappling with that sense that I maybe I don't experience the world the way everybody else does and how weird is that and things like that which partly why I like philosophy. But there used to be like the kind of Microsoft and the Apple ad think differently. And I don't always every time I see it. I think. Yeah, you guys say that but. You don't really need it. I have a history of severe depression and social anxiety. And what today is described as autistic traits. And since there was no one to tell you anything except that you're wrong, you're incorrect. So things that you think you can't trust the things that mean something to you don't actually mean anything. Those are all very common across the disability community and and I think I was a special education advocate in the 80s and. I got that every single time I represented a student in a family and an individual education plan. I got that message that there's this kid that screwed up and we're going to fix very behaviors. Sorry, I think it's important to make the space bigger, right? Not. That's why it's just so important not say this is or isn't wrong, but these things just are they just are we're living them just make the space big enough for all of us to just be. But these infrastructure, they're meaningful. Yeah. Barbara, go ahead. Sorry, but these infrastructures also exist everywhere and I think that looking at the, the infrastructures that help build this injustice as an important part of this just like the diagnosis. It exists on every level this morning I was talking to someone about corporate feedback right when you get your annual review and you get it and a friend of mine shared hers with me and I was looking at and I said, well, they never say that to a man. Oh, they've never said that to a man. Oh my God, they never say that to a man. And so then we said, well, what is the, so this goes into your, this goes into this huge repository of knowledge. So I said, well, what is the process by which you challenge this feedback. And she said, well, you can either accept or reject it. I said, and then what happens. Nothing. So, there is a place within this corporation where people write things down about you that will be part of an ongoing database of created knowledge that there is there is no recourse tip for. And in addition, when you challenge these things and say, well, we have to do this differently. It's like, yes, but what about all those other people that are already in the system and we said that stuff about them and we still have it and it's like there's, we can't seem to reach a point with this where we can go forward in a different way without somehow trying to bring the past with us. And going back to social media and just yesterday there was an interesting thread that I was on with a colleague of mine who had been sitting in a meeting and writing notes about that meeting. And I'm going to get fired. And she shared the picture of the meeting notes and was like, I'm paranoid. No, I'm not, I'm not this. I'm not that, you know, it's like, and then at the end she says, oh, I didn't get fired. But there's this risk factor of speaking out of and that you carry with you in that keeps you from either saying what you mean or, you know, or even people who do speak out and do say stuff, always carry. It's like it's not quite the imposter syndrome. There needs to be, I'm sure somebody in academia has come up with a word for it that I just don't know. But it's this how we hold ourselves back from speaking to power because we're afraid inside of a corporation that will lose our jobs. You know, if we say, you know, this is happening. I see it. Or, you know, I need a seat at the table or I'd like to, you know, do this in order to keep the job that feeds the family that puts the roof over the house. We don't say these things and even people with privilege don't say these things and that needs to stop or the spaces need to be safer. I think inside of companies and inside of our open source communities and communities at large and that's that that's a difficult thing that I think we all struggle with and acknowledging that like the postpartum depression that people carry around. It's like the fear factor of losing your job if you do speak up. But they even find ways within that to essentially defang the criticism. Yeah, you know, they create these structures where it's like, oh yeah, yeah, you can say whatever you want, you know, this is great. Yeah, like have to have the podium, but then they figure out a way to co-op that and defang it before it has any impact. I mean, if they're smart, or if they're evil, or both. And, you know, they're, because of the, you know, talking about things like the diagnoses, you know, this is, this is that whole, you know, historical narrative problem. Because we can't find a way to break the old narratives to create a new one, because somehow it's viewed as unfair to, you know, to say, well, okay, that narrative wasn't. Fair sort of generally speaking forget about it wasn't unfair to a particular group this is this is not fair to anyone that sits outside of what this narrative has constructed as the truth. But if we try to discount that it's like well we're not being fair to the people who lived inside that narrative. And so it's very and because the people that did live with inside that narrative, still hold an inordinate amount of power in determining what the narrative is, we can't go forward with it. So it's an interesting problem and and the co-opting and defanging of criticism is one of the things I'm sort of most interested in, in all of this and. Jay, but if you would make Kat mad again, I'd really like that. Like I had some thoughts about it really quickly. A cat and I used to work a lot on what we call on what's called allyship and like, in particular, Kat worked with me to help me understand how to be a better ally which frankly is like some of the most difficult work I've ever had to do is to think through a lot of that stuff. Primarily because a lot of the work that Kat and I were working on where it was around kind of sexism and sexual assault and stuff that I didn't have an experience with and didn't really want to have a lot of experiences with it seemed really painful and I don't like experiencing other people's pain. One of the things that I really ended up with as a problem in there is how do you when you are trying to change a system and you have a marginalized person who comes to you and says something to the extent of I'm having this experience. A lot like a lot of you know the white knight version of that is I'm going to go fix it for you. And that is just another form of removing agency from that person. Like it's actually the first step of being good ally is sitting down and going well what do you want to have happen right now, because I would like to make sure that you are in control of your own experience with this right now. I can help in lots of different ways and I'm willing to help as much as I can, but I need you to help me understand how to how you want something to happen right now. And I think that is particularly difficult experience for me was a particularly difficult experience for me because having that conversation with Kat and with other people resulted in a lot of explanation of like I I'm afraid of challenging the system because I will be re marginalized or over marginalized for having challenged the system for actually pushing on the system. It will push back against me even harder. So I I'm not sure how to negotiate this what what should we what should we do about how to do how to work through that. And I've been I I just have been really honored to watch Kat negotiate a lot of those issues and do amazing work inside of a lot of communities to help that get better for a lot of people I think. But that like challenging aspect in particular I think has something to do with the fact that like the dominant, you know, especially the dominant male narrative rests on being right. And so the relationship to this epistemic justice thing is the minute you can find a reason to say that the other side is wrong. You find a Nick in the armor, you go after the Nick in the armor and you the margin you re marginalized that person as much as possible as quickly as possible. So that ends up being like, you're too emotional about this stuff. It didn't really happen. How can you prove that these things happen. They didn't do anything to you yet. All these types of conversations that I think become really difficult for people and and I think that that is one of the biggest challenges to like moving forward is really understanding in ethics. It's a branch that says there's ethics based on rationality and there's ethics based on care and ethics of care basically just asked a very simple question. In the decision I'm in ethical decision I'm about to make. Am I going to increase the likelihood of having a effective good community? Or am I going to decrease that in ethics that are based in traditional Western rationality that questions never asked is the question is it will I as an individual maximize my personal outcome. And the difference between those two ethical statements and the difference between centering on those two different forms of ethics would lead you to have different feelings about things like epistemic injustice because if you're just being rational. Well epistemic injustice is just another tool to make sure that you win. If you care about communities and you want to embrace ethics that are based in care and human centered communities, then you would not you would not always try to maximize your own personal outcomes. You would try to maximize the likelihood that the community would become a caring supporting system that made space for others to exist the way that they would like to be in the world. And you wouldn't care whether I was rational the way they were being to you. That's not your problem. That's their problem. You just need to make the space for them to live the way they want to be. So I think that's a long long rant but that's kind of I know we only have three minutes left but can I you can you can go over a little bit. So don't worry about it's a good conversation to have. I just have to point out that what jade just said that is the weakness that we get to exploit right so jade talked about there there is one right and I have to be right. There is power and if I have power that means you there's less available power for you right so that's an extractive mindset to be in right that if I have something that means you don't have it right there's just one pot of things that we get to extract. But the rest of us can be can know the truth that there are so few things that are actually like that that are legitimately extractive paradigms. So what we can do those of us who are marginalized in different ways what we can do is realize that there are far more far more of the situations that we encounter. Our lend themselves to a generative paradigm where just because you have something doesn't mean that I don't get to get it. We can both have something there's no we're in the technology space right like there's not limit on information there's not a limit on data right you could potentially everyone has whatever right. So we're not dealing with physical goods in so many of these situations we're dealing with things that like only exist in our heads right and so all of those things can potentially be generative. And so the way that we can get power out on the margins which I don't think is a bad thing I think we should have power is we exploit that weakness that there are people the people who are privileged in so many of these narratives they come in and they believe that they're in they're entering the all paradigms are extracted. What we how we can gain power is to realize that many of them have the possibility to be generative that we can just make the pie bigger and if you lead with that it becomes so much easier to build your own personal power when you realize that things aren't limited it's not a pie we can just make more. And so I hope all of us can us folks who are marginalized in different situations we can realize not every paradigm not everything has to be extracted there are lots of things where we can take a generative mindset and we can just take power because it's out there and we make it and we can take it. And I just think the world would be a lot better if we realize that and accepted that and exploited that weakness in our enemies. I think the and for me the promise of open source and the promise of technology is is is that generative power of open source and part of the reason we are working community building and community efforts is is that it is it's not we put the goods out there people share the technologies we extend it we we fix other people's bugs but I think the trap of that myth is something we have to watch for as well because the you know there's a lot of great things out there teaching people to code sharing you know that to empower marginalized communities and think we have to do so much more of that because you know there there are so many more conversations we could have about the myth of meritocracy and who has access to technology and internet and you know you know you know even Wi-Fi you know stuff you basic things that are missing for people so there's so much more we still have to do to keep the promise of open source and technology empowering marginalized folks. But I think the thing I think you hit the nail on the head with the generative power of these technologies that we're working on and the promise of cloud and ubiquitous internet and all of that stuff. There is as we say so much potential but if we don't use our privilege to educate and empower the marginalized and listen to the weak signals out there and bring them to the table and give them space at the table because the table is an extensible table. You can pull out the extra you know panels and make the table bigger because they're look at us they're virtual tables now they're not it's not a physical room that you have to do. I think the other thing that I always and we can talk about this again too is the complexity of all these relationships. I gave a talk a little while ago about understanding in these multiple communities that we all work in and technology it's impossible now to know everything. So I think the other thing cat that you touched on is about the complexity and the specialized knowledge we need to be successful in these communities and in these technology spaces. How do we manage the barriers that keep us from those specialized technologies how do we open up those things so that we're sharing those in more. I don't even know if I should use democratic ways or more transparent and open ways I think there's so much work to be done and I really appreciate cat and jade and norm and Barb and everyone else who's listening for for listening to this conversation because for technologists it is an important conversation to be continue to have and I hope that you guys will come back and have it again soon and Barbara and Norm we can get you on and and talk about this because I think Fridays I really love ending the week with a great conversation and a list of books that cat has given me to now go out and order and read so thank you again everybody for participating jade and norm and Barb and everybody else. Thank you so much. You're really good. Thank you. Good to see you guys. All right, take care. Bye.