I’m an unemployed legally blind mostly white American who may have at one point been good at math and programming, who is just smart enough to get loads of spam from MIT, but not smart enough to avoid putting my foot in my mouth an average of monthly on Lesswrong. I’ve been talking about blindness-related issues a lot over the past year mostly because I suddenly realized that they were relevant, but my aim is to solve these problems as quickly as possible so I can get back to getting better at things that actually matter. On the off chance that you have questions, feel free to AMA.
I’m not-quite completely blind; what little vision I have tends to fluctuate between effectively nonexistent and good enough to notice vague details maybe once or twice a year. I could see better up until I was 14, but my vision was still too poor to get out of using braille and a cane (given thick glasses and enough time, I could possibly have read size 20 font; even with the much larger font used in movie subtitles, I had to pause the video and put my face against the screen to read them).
I don’t know my official acuity/diagnoses (It’s been a few years since I saw an eye doctor), but I appear to have started out with retinal detachment and scarring, and later developed uveitis. The latter seems to be the primary cause for the dramatic decline starting from age 14.
Most of my medical everything is handled by my parents, who are unlikely to do anything unless it is brought to their attention (though sometimes they do ask to make sure nothing’s quietly going horribly wrong). My vision was awful enough when last I went, and the doctor only aware of a full-on bionic eye as a possible method for improvement, and what little I had left vulnerable enough to damage/severe discomfort from the sorts of things needed to examine my eyes (holding them open and shining a light in, basically) that it’s mostly stopped being worth it.
I did discover a possible treatment for my specific condition recently. I am unsure as to if it would be of much value with my vision as it currently is, but it’s something I aim to look into further when I’ve sorted out enough of this basic life stuff.
Are these problems likely to be correctable/improvable with medicine, but you have no money/insurance to get medical help? Or are they of a kind that basically can’t be helped, and that’s why you haven’t been to a doctor in years? Or is it something else?
Do you use a reader program to browse the web and this site? Do you touch-type or dictate your comments?
(I realize that my questions are callous; please feel free to ignore if they’re too invasive)
The retinal issues are unlikely to be fixable in the immediate future (though the latest developments on that front seem potentially promising). There may be a treatment for the more annoying issue, but I don’t know if it’s too late/what I should do to learn more, and so I’m waiting until life in general is more favorable to dig into it further. (Which I expect means I’ll be putting it off until 2015, since I expect to be fairly occupied during most of 2014.)
For using the internet/computers in general, I use Nonvisual Desktop Access, a free screen reader which only recently attained comparable status to Jaws for Windows, which I’d been using prior to 2011. These work well with plaintext, and have trouble with certain types of controls/labels and images and such (I had to Skype someone a screenshot to get past the CAPCHA to register here. I was using a trial of a CAPCHA-solving add-on at the time, but it was unable to locate the CAPCHA on Lesswrong.). Since NVDA is open source, users frequently develop useful add-ons and plugins, such as a CPU usage monitor and the ability to summon a Google Translation of copied text with a single keystroke. (It supposedly includes an optical character recognition feature, but I’ve never figured out how to use it.).
I touch-type. I’m not much of a fan of dictation, though I’m not sure why.
Why do you say “may have at one point been good at math and programming.” Aren’t you still good at that? Are opportunities for people like yourself—blind, but with those aptitudes --, available in today’s world, where so much is done in front of a computer screen, and adaptive technologies exist? Or do you think that in a competitive world, blindness puts you hopelessly behind sighted people?
Do you think that your level of ambition and drive are lessened by your disability, increased, or does it make no difference?
Does the CfAR-style philosophy of instrumental rationalism help you overcome your disability?
Issues in my first two years of college interfered in my Math/Physics/Computer Science courses, and I never got back into those. So my skills in each has remained only that which I’ve used most (for example, I’ve made some games, but the required qualifications for most programming jobs I’ve come across exceed what I can do without additional training. I think that, even had I not dropped the ball on those, competing with sighted programmers/scientists/mathematicians would require a decent amount of exceptionalism and/or luck. Mathematic notation is also tricky in terms of accessibility; there exist codes such as Nemeth that make math in braille relatively powerful, but on the computer side of things, graphs and LeTX take some doing to use, which also makes trying to study anything with math online difficult (I once downloaded a web page and edited its source so I could read the equations).
It’s hard to say. For roughly four years after my vision went from poor to useless, I think I was still fairly driven and ambitious (I did a lot of writing, half taught myself Japanese and Javascript, self-published a terrible science fiction novel, learned to use a music composition program whose accessibility was poor, improvised some crude techniques for making simple images, got into and graduated from the state Math and Science school, and was taking plenty of notes on numerous other things I was hoping to do sooner than later). It all went to hell when I got to college, and has gone back and fourth since, but I’m not sure if any of this compares favorable/unfavorably to the average person. There may be some contributing factors to the negative aspects that go back to my vision (I can’t safely get up and go running, or do the all-important eye-contact thing, as examples), but I don’t think the affect in the ambition/motivation area has been majorly significant.
I’m not sure what you mean, specifically? My exposure to CFAR consists primarily of LesssWrong; I’ve been attempting to apply LW-style rationality to the situation, but the timing has made this difficult (I found LW a few months after returning home from college, at which point my options in general were reduced to “things I can do over the internet” and “things for which I would need to go through my parents”, and have mostly stayed there until half a week ago. I’ve not been able to avoid antisocial death spirals; I find myself wanting to deal with the family members I live with less, which makes dealing with them more annoying, repeat ad hermitdom.) If the results of last week’s meeting go as planned, I should have a better answer by the end of February.
I’m an unemployed legally blind mostly white American who may have at one point been good at math and programming, who is just smart enough to get loads of spam from MIT, but not smart enough to avoid putting my foot in my mouth an average of monthly on Lesswrong. I’ve been talking about blindness-related issues a lot over the past year mostly because I suddenly realized that they were relevant, but my aim is to solve these problems as quickly as possible so I can get back to getting better at things that actually matter. On the off chance that you have questions, feel free to AMA.
How blind are you, in layman terms of what you can/can’t see? What’s your prognosis?
I’m not-quite completely blind; what little vision I have tends to fluctuate between effectively nonexistent and good enough to notice vague details maybe once or twice a year. I could see better up until I was 14, but my vision was still too poor to get out of using braille and a cane (given thick glasses and enough time, I could possibly have read size 20 font; even with the much larger font used in movie subtitles, I had to pause the video and put my face against the screen to read them).
I don’t know my official acuity/diagnoses (It’s been a few years since I saw an eye doctor), but I appear to have started out with retinal detachment and scarring, and later developed uveitis. The latter seems to be the primary cause for the dramatic decline starting from age 14.
Why is that? No healthcare policy? It seems that you have good reason to frequent an eye-doctor.
Most of my medical everything is handled by my parents, who are unlikely to do anything unless it is brought to their attention (though sometimes they do ask to make sure nothing’s quietly going horribly wrong). My vision was awful enough when last I went, and the doctor only aware of a full-on bionic eye as a possible method for improvement, and what little I had left vulnerable enough to damage/severe discomfort from the sorts of things needed to examine my eyes (holding them open and shining a light in, basically) that it’s mostly stopped being worth it.
I did discover a possible treatment for my specific condition recently. I am unsure as to if it would be of much value with my vision as it currently is, but it’s something I aim to look into further when I’ve sorted out enough of this basic life stuff.
Are these problems likely to be correctable/improvable with medicine, but you have no money/insurance to get medical help? Or are they of a kind that basically can’t be helped, and that’s why you haven’t been to a doctor in years? Or is it something else?
Do you use a reader program to browse the web and this site? Do you touch-type or dictate your comments?
(I realize that my questions are callous; please feel free to ignore if they’re too invasive)
The retinal issues are unlikely to be fixable in the immediate future (though the latest developments on that front seem potentially promising). There may be a treatment for the more annoying issue, but I don’t know if it’s too late/what I should do to learn more, and so I’m waiting until life in general is more favorable to dig into it further. (Which I expect means I’ll be putting it off until 2015, since I expect to be fairly occupied during most of 2014.)
For using the internet/computers in general, I use Nonvisual Desktop Access, a free screen reader which only recently attained comparable status to Jaws for Windows, which I’d been using prior to 2011. These work well with plaintext, and have trouble with certain types of controls/labels and images and such (I had to Skype someone a screenshot to get past the CAPCHA to register here. I was using a trial of a CAPCHA-solving add-on at the time, but it was unable to locate the CAPCHA on Lesswrong.). Since NVDA is open source, users frequently develop useful add-ons and plugins, such as a CPU usage monitor and the ability to summon a Google Translation of copied text with a single keystroke. (It supposedly includes an optical character recognition feature, but I’ve never figured out how to use it.).
I touch-type. I’m not much of a fan of dictation, though I’m not sure why.
Why do you say “may have at one point been good at math and programming.” Aren’t you still good at that? Are opportunities for people like yourself—blind, but with those aptitudes --, available in today’s world, where so much is done in front of a computer screen, and adaptive technologies exist? Or do you think that in a competitive world, blindness puts you hopelessly behind sighted people?
Do you think that your level of ambition and drive are lessened by your disability, increased, or does it make no difference?
Does the CfAR-style philosophy of instrumental rationalism help you overcome your disability?
Issues in my first two years of college interfered in my Math/Physics/Computer Science courses, and I never got back into those. So my skills in each has remained only that which I’ve used most (for example, I’ve made some games, but the required qualifications for most programming jobs I’ve come across exceed what I can do without additional training. I think that, even had I not dropped the ball on those, competing with sighted programmers/scientists/mathematicians would require a decent amount of exceptionalism and/or luck. Mathematic notation is also tricky in terms of accessibility; there exist codes such as Nemeth that make math in braille relatively powerful, but on the computer side of things, graphs and LeTX take some doing to use, which also makes trying to study anything with math online difficult (I once downloaded a web page and edited its source so I could read the equations).
It’s hard to say. For roughly four years after my vision went from poor to useless, I think I was still fairly driven and ambitious (I did a lot of writing, half taught myself Japanese and Javascript, self-published a terrible science fiction novel, learned to use a music composition program whose accessibility was poor, improvised some crude techniques for making simple images, got into and graduated from the state Math and Science school, and was taking plenty of notes on numerous other things I was hoping to do sooner than later). It all went to hell when I got to college, and has gone back and fourth since, but I’m not sure if any of this compares favorable/unfavorably to the average person. There may be some contributing factors to the negative aspects that go back to my vision (I can’t safely get up and go running, or do the all-important eye-contact thing, as examples), but I don’t think the affect in the ambition/motivation area has been majorly significant.
I’m not sure what you mean, specifically? My exposure to CFAR consists primarily of LesssWrong; I’ve been attempting to apply LW-style rationality to the situation, but the timing has made this difficult (I found LW a few months after returning home from college, at which point my options in general were reduced to “things I can do over the internet” and “things for which I would need to go through my parents”, and have mostly stayed there until half a week ago. I’ve not been able to avoid antisocial death spirals; I find myself wanting to deal with the family members I live with less, which makes dealing with them more annoying, repeat ad hermitdom.) If the results of last week’s meeting go as planned, I should have a better answer by the end of February.
Standard economics question: have you considered accepting lower pay?
Yes.