Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
13d ago
There's a theory that one part of falling fertility is female hypergamy. Since my spellchecker is underlining that word, I'll define it like this:
Female hypergamy is when women seek to marry "up", either into a higher social class or to a mate who is superior to them.
It's harder than ever for women to marry up. Modern feminist societies devalue male traits such as stoicism and aggression but highly value female traits such as conformity and self-control. As a result, women's status relative to men has risen greatly. This has the side effect of making most men undesirable to most women.
This doesn't sit right with me.
Fundamentally, men must compete for access to women, while women act as gatekeepers. It's simple supply and demand. Eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap. The biological essence of being a male is having to continually prove yourself under adverse conditions, so when men start complaining that women's standards are too high because feminism gave them naughty ideas, it comes off as a cope. Rather than standards being too high, it's more likely that women are setting the standards exactly where they need to be (or at least relatively close, anyway), in accordance with many millennia of evolutionary adaptation to precisely this task. Yes, it's a hyper-competitive environment, but there are plenty of men who are succeeding. Lots of men are making money and having sex and having kids and generally living very productive lives. If you can't do the same, that's on you.
Not to say that biological organisms are incapable of going wrong, of course. If there is such a severe mismatch between women's standards and men's capabilities such that the birth rate plummets to zero, then it's more plausible to say that that's simply the race/species reaching the natural end of its lifecycle, rather than putting the blame on any one particular event/ideology/movement/etc. Perhaps the industrial/digital environment of modern first world countries is simply poisonous to the type of organism that we are. If it is, then we will decline naturally, possibly to be replaced by a more virile form of life that has a longer future ahead of it, and there is little that can be done as a matter of conscious will to arrest this trajectory.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
18d ago
It started off with angry, poor people looking for a scapegoat
I don't think that people really do this on a mass scale, and I've never seen an actual argument put forth for this thesis. It seems like one of those cached thoughts that just got repeated enough until everyone believed it.
Not to say that large social groups are always infallibly correct when it comes to political beliefs either. But generally, people don't just make shit up out of nothing. When progressives complain about straight white men, are they looking for a "scapegoat" for all their problems? I don't think that's accurate. Their complaints are grounded in actual facts, its just that there's disagreement over the cause and interpretation of those facts.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
18d ago
Art's primary goal is communication.
This word makes me nervous.
At the most simplistic level you get the sorts of awful things that go on in high school English classes, where students decode the "symbols" of the text, which is how you end up with nonsense like "the message of Hamlet is that revenge is bad". Well why didn't Shakespeare just come out and say that? Why go through the trouble of making up a whole story? It makes the artist out to be some kind of lunatic. I think we're in agreement that this is no good.
But even this idea of "communicating things that can't be put into words", I think it still doesn't capture the magnitude of what goes on in authentic creativity. I think it makes the process too subjective - it conjures images of like, the artist just has a feeling one day, or comes up with a thought, and thinks "ah, it would be nice to communicate this".
Derrida gave a lovely description of what he felt when he was writing Of Grammatology:
"I actually had the feeling that something very unique for me took place. I had the impression that an interpretive edge, a lever, appeared to me. It's not as though I created it myself. I never have the feeling, even when I'm happy with a text I write, I never have the feeling that it's me. This is why I have a feeling both of responsibility and irresponsibility when I write a text. When I write, I feel strangely responsible and irresponsible, as though I had transcribed something that had imposed itself on me. In Of Grammatology, I had this feeling in an even stronger way. I felt as though something had happened to me. I don't want to give this a religious sensibility - it wasn't an apparition or an ecstasy - but that something had taken hold of me and happened not by me, but to me."
I think moments of genuine creativity always have this sort of texture - this feeling that you've discovered something that is common property.
I'm somewhat okay with AI taking over productive is because it will fulfill the commercial and consumptive aspects of art, leaving the artists who are looking to express and idea that is difficult to put into words.
That would be a catastrophe.
(At the very least, artists don't experience commercial art as a burden that's keeping them from making "real" art - they need the money! And they're very happy to get paid for something they enjoy doing anyway! Take commercial art away and they still need to find some way to make a living.)
Can you expand how the failure of the artist leads you to compelled to reject God?
Sorry if I was confusing here. I didn't stop believing in God because of art or aesthetic considerations or anything like that. I stopped believing in God because of a confluence of philosophical arguments - the conceptual incoherence of "free will", severe difficulties for substance dualism as a philosophy of mind (would it necessarily violate the causal closure of the physical? how does it handle hypothetical split-brain cases?), and in general the alleged evidence for religion not passing the "smell test" and having a similar epistemological profile to other discredited phenomena like ESP and cryptids.
I've softened on some of these considerations over the years and I'm willing to keep an open mind. But those were my initial motivations at any rate.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
25d ago
It’s already been acknowledged that longstanding posters with lots of AAQCs will be given a bit of extra wiggle room, and I would simply extend that to posters with underrepresented viewpoints as well, because the mere existence of a rare viewpoint is its own type of Quality Contribution.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
25d ago
because I don't feel excited, but think it's probably the right thing to do, and that I will probably be glad to have a son later on, I hope.
Did you want a daughter instead?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1d ago
If we were to fairly apply the progressive criteria of "disparate impact", then we would have to conclude that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
If a meritocratic hiring process results in a disproportionately low number of blacks getting hired, then the process is racist, regardless of the intentions behind the process or its alleged fairness. Similarly if anti-Zionism ends up materially hurting Jews, then it's anti-Semitic.
Of course no one on the progressive left will actually buy this argument, they'll just say "no we're doing anti-racism, and anti-racism can't be racist, duh" and leave it at that.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
16d ago
FIRST exists to prepare the young people of today for the world of tomorrow. To transform our culture by creating a world where science and technology are celebrated and where young people dream of becoming science and technology leaders.
I'm confused as to why they're treating this like a counterfactual.
The richest men in the world made their money from technology. Isn't that already a form of celebration?
And what technology are we celebrating exactly? Unprecedented surveillance capabilities to monitor all communications for wrongthink? Israel's use of machine learning to swiftly and efficiently identify targets for liquidation?
(I'm not trying to be a moralist - you're of course "allowed" to celebrate whatever you want. I just think that people should have a clear-eyed view of the implications of their own position.)
Richard Sutton says "[AIs] might tolerate us as pets or workers. (...) If we are useless, and we have no value [to the AI] and we're in the way, then we would go extinct, but maybe that's rightly so. (...) We should prepare for, but not fear, the inevitable succession from humanity to AI". Do you also celebrate your "inevitable successors"?
Celebrations are best saved for the end - in moments of repose, after the long struggle where a certain spiritual vision was forged and executed, when conditions are finally such that we can pose the question of taking a proper accounting of things...
As for "science" insofar as it can be distinguished from "technology", people have never had a taste for such a thing and never will, we live in a world where a not insignificant number of people are unaware that it's possible to have individual preferences for reasons other than status-seeking or placating your interlocutor, asking such people to build an intrinsic appreciation for something as abstract as "knowledge for the sake of knowledge" is futile. It is already an eccentric predilection even among more highly developed natures, it could never become widespread save for genetic engineering.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
25d ago
My guy, this is not how you solve your downvotes problem.
If you think a comment breaks the rules then just report it.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2d ago
Can I ask what your background in philosophy is?
I'm just an avid reader, nothing special.
How confident are you that this is a correct summary of Freud's ideas?
It wasn't supposed to be a summary of Freud's ideas at all. It was my own response to your claim that psychoanalysis should be dismissed because it has no "testable theories or experimental controls". Nothing more.
At the very least, you can ask people to describe what they're feeling, and see if other people also report similar feelings.
Well yes, but that's basically what psychoanalytic theorists/practitioners do. They read the theory and they think "yes, I do feel that this applies to my own cognitive processes and I find it to be illuminating for me". It couldn't have survived for this long if people didn't find something compelling in it.
I think it's actually what SSC would have called a superweapon. Instead of grappling with the messy details of what someone is actually saying, you assert that the real story is some nebulous subconscious which they themselves are not even aware of, but you can tell.
I agree that this is a possible failure mode when you start to invoke the notion of an unconscious. There's a risk of becoming too dogmatic if you're not sufficiently open to the possibility of falsification. Certainly.
But are we just going to pretend that unacknowledged ulterior motives don't exist? Certainly not! It's pretty clear to me that they do exist! Sometimes it feels like that's all political debates boil down to - accusations that the other side only claims to support X for principled moral reasons, when actually they just support it for their own self interest. Should we just immediately dismiss all accusations of that sort? I don't think so. They should at least be given a fair hearing. I think it's obvious that sometimes people are not entirely honest with others, and sometimes they're not entirely honest with themselves either. You don't need a fancy theory to see that.
Sociological and political debates couldn't get anywhere if we weren't allowed to speculate about the unobserved mental states of other people. Psychoanalysis is hardly doing anything too different from the average Motte thread, which is replete with speculation about what leftists and rightists "really think".
It's also worth mentioning that Lacanian clinical practice has this conception of the psychoanalyst as "the subject supposed to know" - key word being supposed to, as in a supposition, but that supposition ultimately turns out to be mistaken. One of the central goals of Lacanian analysis is for the patient to come to realize the ways in which the therapist too is ignorant:
This mystery is in the last resort the mystery of the transference itself: to produce new meaning, it is necessary to presuppose its existence in the other. That’s the logic of the “subject assumed to know” which was isolated by Lacan as the central axis, or stronghold, of the phenomenon of transference. The analyst is in advance assumed to know – what? The meaning of the analysand’s symptoms. This knowledge is of course an illusion, but it is a necessary one: it is only through this supposition of knowledge that, at the end, some real knowledge can be produced.
(Lacan is not Freud of course, but he's been central for the reception of Freud's ideas in the humanities since the mid 20th century.)
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
5d ago
Everyone has some kind of bone to pick with porn
...which helps confirm my original thesis that it's countercultural!
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
5d ago
Who are you arguing with?
I'm arguing against the view, which I have seen expressed by social conservatives often enough, that we live in an irredeemably sexualized society that has thrown off all measure of restraint. Sometimes this includes a conspiratorial component that the pornography industry promotes porn explicitly for its deleterious social effects. This view has been argued for on TheMotte before - "The technocrats pretend to believe in that so that they can trick normies into hypersexual practices that obliterate communities."
In fact the primal fear of sexuality is still operative the same as it ever was, and in some aspects has possibly intensified, compared to previous historical eras. (Not that I'm arguing that this fear is necessarily irrational or misguided. Some things do indeed deserve to be feared. When we are confronted with such a deeply rooted psychological impulse that has endured through so many changes in the outward form of social organization, its etiology demands careful consideration. I'm here to understand, not to moralize.)
Visa and MasterCard see pornography as high risk because they get a lot of chargebacks, so they charge adult services producers a much higher rate for payment processing.
Sure, that would be fine if opposition to porn was restricted to payment processors. But it's not just payment processors.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
7d ago
Keeping in mind that this is probably a hypothetical anyway because I doubt anyone will go to the effort of adding the feature, I'm gonna go with "hard no".
First, there's something psychologically appealing about having a single unified measure of a comment's quality. I'm already not a huge fan of how LW has two comment scores, one for general quality and one for agree/disagree. I like the idea of not letting people "hedge their bets" - it's either a good comment or it's not, regardless of how the specific component vectors of the quality score break down. If there's a very well written comment that argues for a view that you find repugnant, then I think you should have to take an up/down stance on the comment and live with your choice.
Regarding the longer/shorter vote button specifically - we already have an official rule against low effort posting. So a "should be longer" button would be somewhat superfluous. If the comment is a problem, then a mod will give you a warning for low effort posting. That's the "should be longer" button.
I know that a lot of people would appreciate a "should be shorter" button because the length of posts on this site has been a source of constant complaints, but as I've argued repeatedly whenever this topic comes up, I really value the fact that TheMotte is one of the few public discussion forums on the internet that encourages long-form posting, and I want to keep it that way. Some of my all time favorite posts on the site, posts that really stood out to me as just being fantastic pieces of writing, are quite long. So I'm fine with people just going crazy with it. Not every long post is good of course - sometimes the writing is just bad, sometimes it's on a topic that you have no interest in, etc. But then you can just downvote, ignore, and/or collapse the thread.
I get frustrated whenever people trot out that "if only I had more time I could have made this letter shorter" line. It's diametrically opposed to my own aesthetics. I want to cultivate this site as a space for people who actually enjoy reading and writing, because there are very few spaces that serve that purpose.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
9d ago
It's a bit hard to write a response to this because there's already so much we agree on:
- I agree that environment plays a big role and the same person is capable of going down multiple different paths.
- I agree that without the trans-industrial-medical complex and access to hormones and SRS, far fewer people would actually try to "transition".
- I agree that society should not be encouraging people to become trans the way it currently is (although in a general libertarian fashion I think that people should be able to elect to these medical procedures if they want to).
But I still feel like I have to take issue with the account you write here (since you posted it twice I'm assuming that you think this is basically a correct story of the etiology of transsexuality):
In a trans naive environment you are still exposed to gendered binaries constantly and there is plenty of plausible cause to start that hardening process in a peculiar direction, maybe you made a friend of the opposite gender in kindergarten and when they care takers separate out their charges by gender the nubile mind recoils in being split from your friend and some part of the identity hardens in that you belong on that side of the divide. Maybe a million other things.
My understanding of your general theory is that people undergo certain formative experiences, and some people process these experiences in such a way that leads them to adopt a trans identity. It's possible that the difference between people who process the experiences in a trans-way vs a non-trans-way is biological in nature. Correct me if I'm wrong.
My preferred theory on the other hand is as follows: some men (I'm focusing on MTFs/autogynephiles to keep things simple) start out with some sort of natural desire/sensation that is explicitly related to gender or being trans in some way - it could be a simple desire to "become a woman", it could be bodily dysphoria, it could be a general feeling of having a more "female" brain, etc. In the right environment, where being recognized as trans and undergoing medical transition is presented as a viable possibility, some of these men will choose to undergo transition. That's how I would describe the biology/environment interaction here.
Crucially I think these desires/sensations are pre-reflective. They operate at a level prior to what I would normally think of as identity formation.
I don't think that the concept of a "natural desire" is at all objectionable here. Hopefully we can agree that the majority of men naturally experience the desire to have sex with women. Analogously, some men naturally experience the desire to be women. They see what the women are up to and they think "yeah, that seems like a better deal to me". It's really quite straightforward.
I really have to insist on this point that there is something in the individual himself that points him in the direction of wanting to be a woman, rather than individuals being neutral receptacles for formative experiences and just having different "processing styles". I don't think you can fully understand the trans phenomenon without this crucial piece of the puzzle. To my mind it's the theory that best explains the internal phenomenology of what the desires actually feel like, as well as other aspects of the phenomenon like its surprising popularity, its cross-cultural appeal, etc.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2d ago
I've heard Continental Philosophy described as the attempt to reconcile Freud and Marx.
I mean, both Freud and Marx are certainly very central and influential figures in continental philosophy. You might even be able to say that the project (or one of the projects) of the Frankfurt school was reconciling Freud and Marx. But it would be wrong to describe all of continental philosophy that way. There are continental thinkers who make little reference to either of them. It also doesn't cover the historical figures like Hegel and Schopenhauer who were retroactively declared to be "continental" and who were writing before Marx!
Really the best definition of continental is "European philosophy that's not analytic". Bertrand Russell and some co-conspirators decided that philosophy needed a reboot in the early 20th century, largely on account of his passionate rejection of Hegel, and that's the project that eventually grew into analytic philosophy. So maybe you could also define continental as "someone who thinks Hegel isn't total nonsense and deserves at least some kind of response" (but even that's not a perfect definition, because Hegel and Heidegger, two of the biggest villains for the early analytics, are receiving increasing attention from analytics today).
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
16d ago
Usually the respondents to his posts pull out a sentence or two and run with it
I don't think this is a bad thing. I think this is a good way of interacting with long posts (so people are able to respond to mega essays without feeling obligated to respond with a mega essay of their own) and it can lead to a lot of productive and interesting discussion. Like, on Kulak's recent post not many of the replies directly addressed Kulak's actual thesis, they just used it as a discussion prompt for sharing whatever thoughts they had on India. I think threads like that are healthy for the forum.
That being said, this particular post did a poor job of explaining to me why I should be interested in FIRST or hyperdunbarism (although admittedly this topic is far outside of my normal wheelhouse to begin with).
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
17d ago
I misspoke. That was a poor way of phrasing it.
I agree that people do make things up sometimes, although I'd note that an intentional lie as an attack against a designated enemy is different from "scapegoating".
It's mainly in the context of inter-ethnic conflicts that I'm particularly suspicious of the idea of "scapegoating", because the contemporary intelligentsia is structurally incapable of acknowledging that such conflicts might be grounded in genuine concerns (unless it's the concerns of a party who has already been given a privileged position in the oppression stack). Sometimes, group A doesn't like group B because group B really just did something to piss them off. But acknowledging this, instead of blaming it on misrecognition, irrational fear, and the nebulous force of racism, opens the door to justifying racism, in their minds. So there's a tendency to engage in motivated reasoning on this issue.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
23d ago
What high quality posters do you think we're missing? Feel free to PM if you think it would cause drama or something.
(imo there's really only one notable poster I can think of who's been conspicuously absent lately, other than that I think the quality is doing ok, maybe even better than it was ~6 months ago.)
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
25d ago
I think people are interpreting what I said too broadly. I'm not saying that you should have free license to break the rules just because you're a contrarian. I'm just saying that I think it would be appropriate to give them a gentle reminder or two about the rules before the mods start escalating to warnings/bans.
In particular I've noticed a pattern where people with unpopular viewpoints are more likely to get riled up during debates, which makes sense, because when your views are unpopular it's easy to feel like everyone's out to get you. So they're more likely to get provoked into breaking the rules on civility. For the sake of cultivating a wide array of perspectives, which is a goal I value very highly, I think it would be appropriate to keep this in mind and extend them a small amount of leniency.
If they just seemed like a very dense poster and they weren't contributing anything except standard-issue moral outrage, then I might be slightly less lenient, but again as I already said at the beginning, it's a subjective judgement call.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
16d ago
I meant SS's top level post and all its replies, most of which are directly related to Holocaust discussion, not just this particular sub-thread where we're discussing meta issues.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
27d ago
This is, to be blunt, a character flaw
Not only is it not a flaw, it's a virtue! The fundamental axiom of all value is that it is destroyed by abundance. Ensuring that this knowledge is able to take root and flower in every mind that provides suitable soil for it is of vital importance.
No one, despite the great amount of effort exerted, ever got so much as a footnote in a history book for being born, having children, feeling great love or anger or jealousy, spinning out an entire hidden inner universe with the utmost uniqueness and specificity, being ground into ashes by implacable anxiety, or dying - experiences that are if not common to all lives then at least common to a great many of them. We do, however, give great honors to star NFL quarterbacks, and rightly so. Not many people can throw a ball like that.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1d ago
The Japanese have a strange affinity for cuckolding porn, but it’s usually not interracial (black interracial even less so).
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1d ago
This creates an internal contradiction for them
For the far right?
They don’t think so. In fact they’ve been anticipating this situation for years, see the parable of the golem.
I find them both such an odd case. It seems like an odd case where they've both been totally repudiated by the professionals of their own fields […] they both just rambled at length with no real testable theories or experimental controls.
Marx just has a political project / ethical vision that many people find deeply appealing. You can say what you want about the labor theory of value, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, etc, but many people will always be attached to him for political reasons.
With regards to Freud, I think you'd have to look at specific examples of contemporary work that references him and analyze how it references him, but my basic statement would be something like this:
Some of the shortcomings of psychoanalysis are not as unique or severe as they first appear. We already tell ourselves a certain "commonsense" story about psychology, a story about a world filled with agents who have intentions and beliefs and desires and emotions. But many of the concepts that make up this commonsense story are already on questionable empirical ground, not unlike the concepts of psychoanalysis.
Consider something as basic as "knowledge", the mental state of knowing something. We attribute knowledge to ourselves and others all the time. I know stuff, he knows stuff, we all know lots of stuff. But there's no empirical test that will give you a yes/no answer on whether someone "knows" something, certainly nothing that would cover all the edge cases and indeterminate cases. Philosophers have been arguing about the nature of knowledge for the last 2500 years and there's still no good answer.
Or consider the sensation of pain, or any other physical sensation - I mean the first-person qualitative experience of pain. You can't actually observe someone else's pain - you can only observe the behavioral and neurological correlates. For all you know, other people could just be unconscious automatons who don't feel anything at all. But you nonetheless assume that they actually do feel things, as a generalization of your own experience.
Or take the concept of desire, a concept that's very central to the Freudian psychoanalytic project. Again, you can't truly make a direct empirical observation here - if you cut open someone's brain, you won't be able to say "yep, there's the desire, I see it right there". You instead observe someone's behavior and infer the existence of a desire, or maybe you interpret the existence of a desire. And what criteria do you use to make this inference? There are a lot of difficult edge cases. Sometimes people seem to do things that they don't actually desire to do, like a woman who stays in an abusive relationship, or a drug addict who wants to stay clean but can't.
Are these cases of genuine desire? If you say no, and that we're instead dealing with cases of people doing things that they don't desire to do, then it starts to become even more mysterious how we can have a consistent set of criteria for moving from the empirical observation of behavior to the inference of a desire. But let's say that, despite the outward protestations of the subjects, there is a desire at play here. The woman who stays in an abusive relationship despite seemingly not wanting to, does in fact desire to stay in the relationship to at least some degree, even though this might conflict with other desires she has. We're going to say that if someone persists in doing X, then they have at least some desire to do X - call this the repetition criteria.
But how far can we stretch the repetition criteria? What if we look at not just one event, but multiple seemingly isolated events over time? Consider a woman whose last five relationships have all ended due to abuse. She always leaves the relationship immediately after physical abuse starts, and she makes it clear that she really hates all the terrible men she's been dating and she curses her string of bad luck - but nevertheless there's a clear pattern here. On the most literal reading of the repetition criteria, we can infer that she actually desires these relationships! She repeatedly persists in doing "X", where the "X" here is "enter a new abusive relationship", so we can infer that that is her desire. (We can dispense with any worries that this would require her to "know the future" - she could arrange this with better-than-chance-odds if she really wanted to, she could filter for men who showed outward signs of criminality and acted aggressively during courtship, and so on). If you look at any one event in isolation, there are no indications that she desires this state of affairs whatsoever, but if we look at the broader pattern of behavior, then desire starts to become evident. So, does she have this type of desire? If you say "no", then the repetition criteria needs some sort of modification - and this modification would be based not on empirical observation, but rather it would be based on your a priori conception of what a desire should look like. If you instead say "yes", then we begin to approach the psychoanalytic concept of unconscious desire.
So our commonsense story about psychology already has a lot of potential problems with it. But that doesn't mean we should jettison the whole story. Even the most hardcore reductionist materialist, who believes that anything above the level of a neuron is ontological nonsense, isn't going to stop talking about people as if they had beliefs and emotions and desires - you can't do that, it's not workable. Psychoanalysis simply provides a new story in addition to the commonsense one, and many people find the psychoanalytic story to be deeply compelling. You can argue that its concepts are empirically unverifiable and philosophically dubious; but we're already wedded to concepts that are empirically unverifiable and philosophically dubious.
I don't think those two have anything in common with each other, really- why did they bring together so many leftist philosophers and writers?
The short answer is that Freud provides the theory of the individual and Marx provides the theory of society - it's a natural complement. There are a lot of contingent historical factors involved here of course, but that's the gist of it.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
3d ago
You can't act on disbeliefs.
Whenever someone uses the word "can't" when talking about the human mind, I get suspicious. What would you say about the following:
For my entire life I've had some relatively mild sub-clinical symptoms of OCD, particularly centered around the idea of keeping things symmetrical. Sometimes if I accidentally brush up against something with one hand for example, I'll suddenly be struck by the thought that if I don't touch it with the other hand as well, I'll die in my sleep that night. Of course I know and believe that this is false. I can even tell myself in the moment that it's false, and I believe what I'm telling myself. But nevertheless it really just feels like I should touch it with my other hand, so I do.
Rationally, I know that touching random benign ordinary objects in the environment can have no impact on my odds of sudden death. It's an absurd belief. I'm intelligent enough to recognize that there's no possible causal connection there. And yet I continue to act as though I do believe it.
Thank you for posting this, I really appreciate it.
Personally if I was in charge and there was a mod decision that required a subjective judgement call, I would err on the side of extending leniency to posters with viewpoints that are underrepresented on this forum. I especially value posters like @guesswho who have alternative viewpoints on the "classic" culture war topics. It makes these discussions a lot more interesting.
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