Vivienne Ming Quotes
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My body became aligned with my identity, and it was profound.
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After I transitioned, a lot of people said, 'I like you so much more now,' because before, I was unhappy. Making that change was a big part of becoming me. Whoever you are, as a gay man or a lesbian or a trans woman, embrace it. Turn it into an asset.
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When I went back to finish my undergrad, after a long and ignoble absence, my very first class was Intro to C for Cognitive Modeling. Unlike any educational experience before, I aced the class.
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I'm not enthusiastic about educational games or apps generally.
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The tax on being different is massive.
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Human behavior is an enormously complex set of things, and that mixture of underlying things is different for different people, so it's not just complex, it's meta-complex.
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I want to literally make people smarter by jamming things in their brains.
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The traditional markers people use for hiring can be wrong - profoundly wrong.
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Discrimination is not done by villains. It's done by us.
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If you have a diverse workforce, then you have a much better chance of picking up on things that a lack of diversity would hide from them.
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AI might be a powerful technology, but things won't get better simply by adding AI.
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What drives success, and the most successful students, is internal motivation.
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The tax on being different is largely implicit. People need not act maliciously for it to be levied. In fact, at its heart is a laudable sentiment: 'prove it to me.' The problem is that we are requiring different levels of proof without realising it.
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Before I came out, people always asked me math questions. But once I became a woman, they stopped. There's unintended discrimination.
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Estrogen's a wonderful thing. I'd be doing the dishes and suddenly be like, 'Wait a minute - why am I crying?'
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It's important to me that talking about my experience not undermine those who choose differently. There can be a stigma for people who don't take the path I did, as though not having surgery means you're not really transitioning. No one should feel as though it's everything or nothing.
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I have had a small handful of truly blatantly discriminatory experiences for being transgender, but the vast majority are simply the differences between being a man versus being a woman in science and business.
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Gender transition isn't about gender. It's about literally making yourself a better person because you know that's a better you.
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If my son came to me years from now and told me, 'I'm gay,' I'd say, 'That's wonderful. I'm so glad you know who you are.' But if he said, 'I want to be a woman,' I would say, 'Ahhh. This is gonna be hard. Let's get started.' Because it doesn't matter that that's where happiness lies - it's on the other side of a lot of struggle.
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Passing on a full scholarship to MIT would be irrational for me, but to my father and his parents, what would have been the point of spending five years at one of the world's most prestigious universities if he just ended up back on the farm?
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There are neural networks that can build whole apps from scratch - so why are we teaching high school kids to code?
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The bias tax is actually a loss in economy.
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Once you identify the intrinsically motivated people, you realize that fancy degrees can actually be a negative - that some of the people who have them are more focused on how others perceive them.
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Why did I go back to school? After working with giant snails as the manager of an abalone farm, who wouldn't be fascinated with the inner workings of the mind? They are a very contemplative species.