Greta reposted a post (?) on Instagram that features a lot of text. I sort of think that most of the 500k people who Liked that post did not read all the text, and that they made the decision to Like it based on whether it supported a cause that they had previously decided to support, but I'm interpreting it as meaning that she is ok if you decide that Chirp Club is trash.
I was watching a set featuring the best female player in Age of Empires II, and the topic of color blindness came up. There are eight player colors in AoE2, and due to colorblind viewers, the caster (and occasional player, with over $3k in tournament prize winnings) who made that video only uses two of them when casting games.
I commented about this on Chirp Club like 10 years ago. Someone complained about a chart that used colors, instead of different styles of dotted lines, and I replied pointing out that they could switch screen colors to distinguish between lines.
It's a little bit harder with a game, but still possible. Games display things like water and grass, and changing those to red would look weird. But almost no color matchups would both be natural environment colors that also look the same to colorblind people.
But why care? If color is so important, I could change it myself, right? It's about doing things in a worse way to accommodate people. Not all accommodations make things worse: having a ramp for people with wheelchairs does not mean there cannot also be stairs for a more direct path. When checking your TikTok profile on Claptik a few minutes ago, I somehow got a mouseover tooltip on the Cloudflare verification checkbox, saying the purpose of the window (I can't get this tooltip to appear now), which is a reminder of the alt text or whatever that helps blind people understand what images show and now also helps AI to classify images. These things don't worsen the experience of normal people.
But other things do. Not keeping players as purple or orange in AoE2. Dumbing down schools due to some students learning slower, with long-term effects on the knowledge of individual students and on the overall knowledge and competence of entire countries. I could spend more time here thinking of more than just this one example.
People differ in many attributes. Some people are uglier (I feel comfortable saying this because I might be ugly, so ugly people have no reason to view me as an enemy for acknowledging physical differences). Should it be illegal to discriminate based on appearance when hiring for customer-facing jobs, in order to help ugly people?
Maybe there are things that would be better for a tiny minority of people if things were done in a way that would be inconvenient for most people. Like, maybe stairs would be better for very tall people if each step was taller. This doesn't happen because it's almost always the majority who 'bullies' minorities, not the other way around. This is why it's safe to say that 'things should be designed to work well for normal people', as the definition of 'normal' is 'similar to the majority of people'.
I was also going to say the following, and I can't remember if I had connected it at all to the general topic of 'not making things worse for normal people':
Poll: how much food in terms of total calories per day should people with a BMI lower than the normal range eat, compared to someone with normal BMI? (I previously suggested that Clara Dao could benefit from this poll, I think)
- I strongly feel they should eat more
- More
- About the same
- Less
- I strongly feel they should eat less
AND THEN, the same poll but for people with a BMI higher than the normal range.
Crucially, if normal people choose to worsen the experience of everyone in order to help people who are lacking in an attribute, then those who are lacking have no incentive to improve. Color blindness cannot be fixed. But the negative effects of color blindness when viewing content on a screen can be fixed.
I also wanted to say something about schools here. Doing so requires acknowledging that economic factors can be a reason for someone's poor academic performance. (This includes poor health outcomes due to being poor, including ones that affect cognitive development.) However, this does not mean I am trying to get you to share the idea.
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