self_made_human
C'est la vie
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
I tried stuffing my friends into this textbox and it really didn't work out.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1yr ago
I have little regard for the pedo-panic in the first place, and this is even more weaksauce compared to that.
If you're at the point where children doing entirely innocuous things, in modest clothing, is somehow a bad thing because you're worried some pedo will use it as jerkoff material, then we're at about the point where audio-visual recording of just about anyone and anything is off the table, and maybe even a ban on thinking about the children, you creep.
It also is entirely pointless to forbid it now, even for the ever illusive concerns of it ending up in AI training data. You don't think there's enough out there that people aren't making photorealistic artifical CSAM, in both photographic and video form? The cat is out of the bag, and while I'm sure there are some pedophiles who have a fetish for jailbait/"real" children, barring about 99.99% of parents from recording their kids and sharing it is so grossly overkill it's demented. You take a video of your daughter jumping on a trampoline and upload it on Insta? Well, about 6 frames can be construed as an "upskirt" shot, enjoy your ban. Discord is already banning people without recourse, including entire discord servers, if a single still image (that bald dude munching popcorn used as a reaction image), is shared, because their heuristics recognize it as a frame shared with a flagged CSAM video.
The reasonable solution, as far as I'm concerned, is to not care, or at least find something more concrete to worry about.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
2yr ago
My grandpa has absolutely skewed my understanding of what a "normal" old person is supposed to be like.
He was performing surgeries himself till he was 80, assisting in them till he was 85, seeing patients in his clinic till he was 91 and the pandemic hit, and now he's 94 and still largely in control of his faculties even as his cognitive functions have obviously declined.
I see a doddering old fool and immediately assume he's something like 90, only to be embarrassed when they're a ripe young age of 75, hard to remember that people mostly end up senile by their late 80s!
I am in two minds on the matter.
Primarily, I have strong libertarian sympathies. I would prefer, for myself, the absolute right to choose any procedure for any reason (personal finance and avoidance of externalities allowing), and my standards for informed consent are "I explained to you, quite simply, that there's always a potential for things to go wrong, and now that they did, that's unfortunate, but you knew what you were getting into".
Unfortunately, this does have negative consequences. I am mostly willing to accept that, but all else failing, I would at least hope for a formal certification of a person as a "sophisticated patient", in much the same way that the FTC declares certain people sophisticated investors and allows them them to indulge in high risk (and high reward!) activities that they deem too dangerous for gullible proles.
In practise, this is a de-facto standard doctors extend to other doctors under their care. The gynecologist we saw would normally refuse to insert an IUD in a nulliparous unmarried woman, but when my girlfriend and I could argue UKMEC guidelines with her and point out that the benefits outweighed the risks (even if not as much as oral contraception), she happily went for it. Similarly, I disagree with the old adage that "doctors make the worst patients".
Bullshit. Sure, a few people are inclined to think they know better than their treating physicians, but the majority, having both referred and been referred to, understand the limits of their competence and can also be relied on to actually know what you mean when rattling off the standard boilerplate, which usually makes normal eyes glaze over.
But this shouldn't be something winked-nudged for other doctors and allied health personnel. If I encounter someone who has done their research and seems generally intelligent, I sincerely wish I could hand out a pass that both indemnifies me from some medicolegal risk if they were to take less than ironclad advice, and also lets them access more experimental therapies without the headache of FDA waivers in terminal cases and so on.
A lot of people from these parts would qualify. Much of the griping about paternalism from doctors here and in adjacent parts of the internet arise from intelligent, often UMC people not realizing that they're not typical in terms of what a normal doctor encounters, and our default priors are heavily biased against accepting it when a patient excitedly advocates for an experimental therapy they read about online (in your case it might be legit, but it is more often a misreading of WebMD or, shudder a Tumblr blog for alternative medicine).
Usually, your doctor does know better. Though a good one should also recognize an informed patient.
I had a terrible day. Overworked, underpaid, but what was most painful was seeing a poor lady with metastatic gall bladder cancer that was all but 100% confirmed. Severely jaundiced and anorexic, multiple distant mets including to the spine, and unlikely to be worth anything but palliation.
Her family was adamant that the diagnosis be kept from her. In the UK, that would be flat out illegal unless I fastidiously document that the patient themselves declined to learn more about their diagnosis. But in India, and many other Asian countries, family members usually handle such matters, especially for old, poorly educated people who are unlikely to take the knowledge of their impending demise well.
"Is it a gallbladder stone?" She asked me hopefully while her family was off haggling with my supervising consultant. I was about to go into a painstaking explanation about her cancer, and did get well into it, but I was rapidly grabbed by her son and daughter and told to please not tell her she was about to die, and certainly not from cancer.
Luckily for me, I doubt she understood half of what I said, especially since my Hindi is only passable, and soon enough, I was tip-toeing around the sudden change in surgical plans and why, a patient with "cholecystitis" was going to be have both an ERCP and an FNAC of a supraclavicular node.
"But my neck is fine doctor! And my back hurts." The PET-CT showing avid uptake disagrees. Maybe the back pain was from a fall a few months back, her daughter prompts. Sure. Maybe. Maybe it's also the mets causing fragility fractures, I don't say.
"Is she going to get better? What does chemotherapy mean?" I get asked by the family, who have processed about 10% of what the senior surgeons have told them. Well, at least I don't have to lie that the sudden pivot to an ERCP will improve her jaundice and QOL if not her life expectancy by much. And you'd hope after 6 months here I'd know how to explain how chemo works. She developed SOB after the OP, ?PE, and I watched the bacon being made as my surgical consultant grabbed a passing CCM doctor (who made the mistake of walking through the ward) and they haggled over what tests met very strict criteria for cost-effectiveness. No ABG for you, a CXR and ECG? Yeah, they can afford it. She got better till she inevitably gets worse.
To add insult to injury, I had a mandatory communications training course that day. Aced it, of course, but I had to chuckle and groan at how divorced from reality much of it was. And then I face-palmed when the final quiz began asking questions about HIPAA, which is not a thing in India and not covered in the course itself, strongly suggesting the material had been designed by ripping off a US source, or perhaps the latter hadn't localized it particularly well. All the actual citations and foot notes should have made me sus in the first place.
Some people are dumb, or simply won't understand no matter how much you dumb things down. We avoid this truth, except where formal diagnosis of mental incompetence lets us firmly but gently usher demented grannies back into the chemo ward, and most importantly that this is true even for seemingly functional members of society.
That's about it. Any wonders I wish we could all be smarter so my chosen preference of letting everyone decide, for better or worse, about their health, would cost less in bodies and money? I'll still pay with mine.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
2yr ago
Nevertheless, it’s evident the author himself is skeptical. He spends a lengthy section of the book detailing how JBP himself collapsed into a highly dysfunctional and disorganized existence
Reality is not a morality play, it's perfectly possible for someone to vocally endorse the optimal strategy and yet have it fail them (or him fail it).
The benefits of low hanging fruit like working out, good grooming and fashion are so blatantly obvious that one man's failures do not derail them. I'm sure the author doesn't hold Jordan as the sole argument, but I still can't see it being true.
Improvement is the other strategy which deserves a response; and my response is that I’m far from convinced. The few instances in which I’ve had success with women have had an almost random quality to them, and have been seemingly unrelated to any obvious self-improvement project. Lately I’ve greatly improved both my wealth and general status, and yet success has been sorely lacking.
Scott drew attention to a semi-serious analogue to micromorts, micromarriages, as in an action that has a 1/millionth chance of getting you married. I posit that it's obvious that microfucks are a useful concept too, and that while you any individual act of self improvement cannot be guaranteed to lead to getting laid, they tend to add up over time if you're being diligent.
Handsome people are already born with a lot of (micro)fucks to give, but for the rest of us, we have to work to earn them. Very little guarantees getting laid, short of paying for it in cold hard cash, but it's still worth trying.
In my reply to Cjet, I elaborated on why, despite being significantly above average (at least compared to my peers), I have immense sympathy for incels and incel-adjacent people.
As such, while I wouldn't go as far as to call myself a Chad, I'm certainly further on that end of the spectrum than the other. I still have immense sympathy for incels/average dudes, because I had to deal with raging, all consuming libido for years, and still had dry spells afterwards. I look at the latter, and think "there but for for the grace of God go I". The Chads (and women) simply don't understand what torture that is, how corrosive it can be to your self esteem, even if most of your peers are in similar straits.
Frankly, if you’re having trouble with women as a young man – and I speak as a young man who has had much trouble with women – the problem is likely to get worse with age.
Others have already pointed out that women tend to prefer older men, at least in the age range when men are still desperately horny.
Last but not least, a question to open further discussion: what is the optimal strategy, both in general and in more detail (i.e. should you improve, and what aspect of yourself or your dating approach is most fruitful to improve?).
Firstly, you have to at least try at the "improvement" category. Go to the gym, dress better, get a nice haircut.
If you're extremely unlucky, then yes, this may not suffice, but I feel no qualms about endorsing it in general.
You are far less likely to improve things like height/intelligence/charisma. Some of that isn't outright impossible, since you can always do limb lengthening or keep on hitting the field till you brute force a pickup strategy that works. It's simply not productive.
That being said, it really is a numbers game. If you never try you'll never know, and modern men have a degree of shame and fear that is blatantly counterproductive when you don't have to live in a tribe with the same dozen women your entire life, who gossip about your pitiful failure to court them all. Hit on women goddammit!
Finally, avoid the apps, unless you're in the lucky 10% who get all the goods, in which case my advice isn't for you. For the majority of men, it's a painful, soul sucking process that only dents your self-esteem.
I am unusually good at both in-person flirtation and sliding into DMs, but the advice is still true for the average man. Women are far less picky face to face, and you get far more than a fleeting moment of her attention.
That about sums it up when it comes to general purpose advice, everything else must be tailored to your individual needs.
Addendum:
I'm not being facetious, but my (sweet and loving) girlfriend was looking over my shoulder while I write this post (of all the hundreds I've written lately!).
She would like to make the following statements, written by her own hand on my phone:
Do not listen to anything he said. Doesn't apply to most women. If I slide into her DM, don't expect to get anywhere. My boyfriend vastly overestimates his prowess in the matter of flirtation. He is a very nice man, and that is the 1sf and most important thing g. Women have a radar in detecting fake vs real. I was the one who asked him out, yes that does happen, but it was not because of the flirtatious attitude. Tbh, It was painful. Be yourself. Not everyone is suited to everyone. I can assure you, I like him way before he started flirting. Cause I thought we had a genuine connection and I cud talk to him. That is what we want I the end, someone to talk to, make a life with. Had I not liked him before, his flirting wud have been construed as creepy. So, find out what u like in a woman, and stick to that. Don't slide into peoples dm'z. I assure u, that is a full proof way of getting blocked.
Addendum to the addendum:
Thank you sweetie, of course you're right :*
(Quick, she's looking away!)
Ahem, I would like to add another point to my list of general advice.
Do not take dating advice from women.
I was actually the one who started flirting with her weeks before she even noticed, even if she was the one to ask me out on a date and the one who pulled me in for a kiss. Her mom called me handsome the day the two of them first saw me 😉
That's about it, I don't want to get too saccharine haha.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
2yr ago
The median east African has a room temperature IQ.
The median east African is more intelligent than most posters here on TheMotte.org including myself.
I heartily disagree that the latter is true, with my argument being simply, just look at that cursed continent.
That being said, I once read something by a prolific HBD poster on Twitter or Substack who I can't recall, who made an argument about why black people, despite significantly lower IQs than average, still seem to function much better than that low value would suggest:
When most people benchmark mental retardation, they implicitly consider the case of retarded white people, the majority of who have some kind of developmental or neurological disorder that's dragging them down. They're not just stupid, they're non-functional in important regards.
Whereas an 70 IQ African is not sick, they're just dumb, but are much more capable of social interaction and productive endeavors than the former, though they can't hope to match 100 IQ people of any race.
I believe that person showed anecdotes from special needs tard wranglers who noticed how the black kids were better behaved and apparently smart than the white ones, because they simply were much better functioning overall despite their identically low IQ scores.
I contend that a healthy chimp can beat a bad case of Downs in almost everything, even if they're both terrible at IQ tests. One is an animal well honed to its niche, whereas the other is simply outright defective.
So, African society and culture evolved to be well adapted to lower IQs, and they're not as clearly dysfunctional as you'd expect.
Leaving that aside, in desperately poor countries, like most of Africa, people need to be able to hustle or starve, they don't have well trodden paths ahead of them that they can follow as long as they're competent and come out ahead. While hustling is certainly a laudable thing, I suspect that if the world went to shit and we had to start from scratch, the median Mottizen would spank their asses.
Indians speak 2 or 3 languages because that brings clear and massive utility to them, presumably the same case for Africans who need some more. On the other hand, most Americans can speak English from the cradle to the grave and do just fine, so it's by no means their failure that they don't bother to do so most of the time. In their place, I wouldn't either.
You don't judge Bill Gates by the standards of Stone Age persistence hunters and get all perplexed that he has wealth and high status despite his abysmal inability to run a marathon.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
9d ago
Despite being an interesting and well-written essay, I have absolutely no sympathy for the author or her views.
All in all, the average woman is psychologically abused in the dating market.
Right. As if the average man is doing so hot.
Dating apps suck for the majority of people. I'd say they'd suck less for the average woman, if they were capable of setting up boundaries.
Moderately interesting news in AI image gen:
It's been a good while since we've had AI chat assistants able to generate images on user request. Unfortunately, for about as long, we've had people being peeved at the disconnect between what they asked for, and what they actually got. Particularly annoying was the tendency for the assistants to often claim to have generated what you desired, or that they edited an image to change it, without actually doing that.
This was an unfortunate consequence of the LLM, being the assistant persona you speak to, and the actual image generator that spits out images from prompts, actually being two entirely separate entities. The LLM doesn't have any more control over the image model than you do when running something like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion. It's sending a prompt through a function call, getting an image in response, and then trying to modify prompts to meet user needs. Depending on how lazy the devs are, it might not even be 'looking' at the final output at all.
The image models, on the other hand, are a fundamentally different architecture, usually being diffusion-based (Google a better explanation, but the gist of it is that they hallucinate iteratively from a sample of random noise till it resembles the desired image) whereas LLMs use the Transformer architecture. The image models do have some understanding of semantics, but they're far stupider than LLMs when it comes to understanding finer meaning in prompts.
This has now changed.
Almost half a year back, OpenAI teased the ability of their then unreleased GPT-4o to generate images natively. It was the LLM (more of a misnomer now than ever) actually making the image, in the same manner it could output text or audio.
The LLM doesn’t just “talk” to the image generator - it is the image generator, processing everything as tokens, much like it handles text or audio.
Unfortunately, we had nothing but radio silence since then, barring a few leaks of front-end code suggesting OAI would finally switch from DALLE-3 for image generation to using GPT-4o, as well as Altman's assurances that they hadn't canned the project on the grounds of safety.
Unfortunately for him, Google has beaten them to the punch . Gemini 2.0 Flash Experimental (don't ask) has now been blessed with the ability to directly generate images. I'm not sure if this has rolled out to the consumer Gemini app, but it's readily accessible on their developer preview.
First impressions: It's good.
You can generate an image, and then ask it to edit a feature. It will then edit the original image and present the version modified to your taste, unlike all other competitors, who would basically just re-prompt and hope for better luck on the second roll.
Image generation just got way better, at least in the realm of semantic understanding. Most of the usual give-aways of AI generated imagery, such as butchered text, are largely solved. It isn't perfect, but you're looking at a failure rate of 5-10% as opposed to >80% when using DALLE or Flux. It doesn't beat Midjourney on aesthetics, but we'll get there.
You can imagine the scope for chicanery, especially if you're looking to generate images with large amounts of verbiage or numbers involved. I'd expect the usual censoring in consumer applications, especially since the LLM has finer control over things. But it certainly massively expands the mundane utility of image generation, and is something I've been looking forward to ever since I saw the capabilities demoed.
Flash 2.0 Experimental is also a model that's dirt cheap on the API, and while image gen definitely burns more tokens, it's a trivial expense. I'd strongly expect Google to make this free just to steal OAI's thunder.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
6mo ago
An uncle of mine married a lady while they were both finishing up their engineering PhDs.
She was chronically depressed, and had even been started by my (gyno) parents on SSRIs for postpartum depression. When their kid was about 6 months old, she was alone at home and hanged herself. No note, it was a spur of the moment decision while their daughter slept next door.
I have absolutely no reason to think my uncle or his immediate family had anything to do with it. They were a happy couple, even while grappling with her mental health issues. As you've mentioned, the death of a wife within 7 years of marriage automatically warrants investigation*, and in this case, her side of the family were disgruntled and lodged charges, accusing him of instigating her suicide, while also asking for the custody of his daughter.
The legal system here is automatically, and intentionally, biased against men in such affairs. He was imprisoned while standing trial, a protracted affair, and a ruinous one for someone who had just started their own company and acquired a few sizable contracts. It took about a year for the charges to be dismissed and for him to see the light of day, but by then he was a broken man, and half a decade of work he'd put his blood and sweat into was gone with nothing to show for it.
This was all despite literally no evidence beyond the unfounded claims made by his in-laws, while he was able to show evidence of his wife's struggle with depression and get her doctors (including psychiatrists not in the family she was referred to) to testify.
Last time I saw him, he told me to:
A) Never get married B) Get out of this country while I still could
I'm not inclined to follow the first bit of advice, it was an unfortunate accident but he still had his life ruined because he was a man, and men are never above suspicion. The latter? You know where I am.
*A perennial headache when I was an intern at a government hospital. You had women dying shortly after childbirth, or because they got run over by a car, and yet it was automatically a case with medicolegal implications and a dozen times the paperwork for my sorry ass to handle.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1yr ago
Sigh. It seems it was inevitable that I'd have to get around to doing the unpleasant part of being a mod at some point, namely enforcing the rules and using my discretion in ambiguous situations. But I did sign up for it.
Please consider this a request, and a mild warning, not to speak this way.
So far, your comment has received 3 reports for being antagonistic, which it clearly seems to be to me. To an extent, antagonism is a forgivable sin, and I certainly plead guilty to being less than maximally polite on occasion.
However, what does draw my attention is that this, to me, represents an example of "waging the Culture War". There's no strict line in the sand here, the people discussing CW in the CW thread are almost always at least modest opinionated on the matter, and advocacy for one's beliefs is in no way disbarred.
I don't even particularly care that you call them trannies, I'm not one to police vocabulary where the word is entirely synonymous with more polite equivalents, even if it's pejorative. If someone insisted on calling Jews "Blood-drinking vampires", then I'd consider that to be an obvious infraction. Some of the other mods may well disagree, but I'm only me, and I have a degree of leeway here.
It might surprise you to learn that I happen to largely agree with you. I consider transgenderism, if not an outright mental illness in the strictest sense, to be highly comorbid with it. I wouldn't balk at calling many of them insane like you did. I have a soft spot for Kiwi Farms, Rdrama and the other untamed corners of the internet, and I'm glad they live to fight another day in an increasingly homogenous internet where the edges are sanded down and a relatively small but vocal minority tyrannizes the rest of us and slides the French Overton Window as fast as the rails allow.
That being said, I would prefer you be less antagonistic. You are allowed to be happy that attempts to deplatform a site that makes fun of transgender people backfire. You may enjoy schadenfreude. You may, assuming the rest of your comment doesn't continue to not contribute to the atmosphere/culture we seek to cultivate here, also call people trannies (or at least I won't mod you for that reason alone).
But the gestalt impression conveyed by your comment? Bad. Not conducive to the (ideal) spirit of even-tempered discussion of contentious topics. The problem with culture war fervor, schadenfreude, and pithy pejorative labels for the outgroup is that they tend to crowd out everything else, or at least foster a negative spiral if left unaddressed that leads to everyone else doing the same, and those looking for more polite and high quality debate crinkling their nose and leaving. We aren't rdrama, this is what we are trying to avoid here, and by including all three and not much else, this comment is not helping.
I'll leave it at that, it would take a trivial restatement of your comment to make it slip under the high threshold I hold for formal mod action, if not a reprimand. If you wish to consider this an attempt at censorship (and how can mod action not be?), then it's of tone and not content.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1yr ago
By pidgin do they mean the annoying tendency of the NZ government to sprinkle in Maori words in press releases?
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1yr ago
Every few hours, when I get tired of sneaking a cheeky vape in the millions of bathrooms and liminal stairwells that litter my hospital, I'll head over to the back of the building, in a secluded, roped off area that's the de-facto smoker's haunt of the place.
An ankle height chain dangles at the approach, as do signs for, among other things, no parking, and an enjoinder against loitering because there's construction ongoing up above.
It might say something about the nature of the universe that the tripping hazard produced by that chain far outweighs that of the falling debris, when it exists. Not the prohibition on smoking, of course, but since you can't quite see the signs from there, everyone pretends they don't exist.
There's a quiet camaraderie at play, doctors huddling together for a chemical pick-me-up after a grueling day at work, a good chunk of which was spent admonishing their patients for the same indulgence they're engaging in.
Did I mention this is an oncology hospital, or at least department big enough to be a standalone one? I suppose that's relevant too.
You can see a combination of quiet guilt, resignation and combativeness in their eyes. Yes. We know this is bad for us. We know you know. What are you going to do about it? Not smoke? Perish the thought, and pass me another. How's that patient with COPD doing? Yeah, he won't quit, even if it kills him, and given that he's got end stage lung cancer with brain mets, we're half a mind to wheel him out, nebulizer in tow, for a couple to greet the last dawn of his life, and just the start of another for us.
I stand there puffing on my vape, experiencing an exceedingly mild, almost homeopathic sense of smugness and superiority. Look at them, burning out their lungs, huffing and puffing when I pass them on the stairwells, and for what, the same nicotine I get, without the stink and almost all of the drawbacks beyond a nicotine dependency?
The vape ban in India has been a disaster, and these are the consequences. I muse on the black comedy that is existence with a black coffee in hand, that the tobacco lobbyists in here got a final swing in by banning the cheaper, healthier alternative.
I ignore the occasional curious glance at my little electing facsimile, the incongruity of a cigarette with an usb port. I'm probably the only one. In turn, I ignore the shifty consultants who don't meet my eye, still harboring in their heart of hearts the feeling they need to do better and set an example for us all. I hear the promises, the whispered pacts to cut down together. They're still they're next week.
There's a bimodal distribution there, you can tell seniority both by how quick, hurried and clandestine their puffs are, all flash and smoke blown into dark corners, and then the blatant ones, the big shots without who the hospital would grind to a halt of PGs, Associate Consultants and RMOs left rudderless when the buck stops with them. They challenge each cig and any mildly curious passersby. Fuck you, even cancer thinks twice about taking me on, at least on the hospital premises.
And then the phones ring, cigarettes burn out, the last dregs of chai and coffee are downed. Paper cups laden with ashes find more corners to marinate in, and stubs are crushed by shoes beneath scrubs and we all go our merry ways. If there's hell to pay, at least we can afford it.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
2yr ago
I'm really not the right guy for in-depth political analysis in India, but in the absence of anyone better I'll step up to the plate:
NE India is largely divorced from the rest of the country, by geography and ethnicity to boot. The majority of the tribes that live in those parts resemble the denizens of Myanmar, Tibet or Nepal more than other parts of India, but even that's belying the ethnolinguistic diversity lurking there. The tribes have their own concerns, with them often being at each others throats over historical grievances, religion, or an effort to get gibs.
In this case, it's the latter, one of the Hindu tribes once successfully lobbied to be granted privileged status affirmative action-wise, causing an uproar in their Christian counterparts, who are afraid of being squeezed out, or more cynically, just as eager to get their stamp of disprivilege and run with it. After all, the coveted Scheduled Tribe status comes with economic and political benefits, and everyone wants a piece.
The extremely hilly terrain means that regional powers dominate the region more than the central government would like, especially given many decades of Maoist insurgency that only relatively recently calmed down. The border with Myanmar is porous, although the majority of Rohingya ended up in Bangladesh instead of NE India, that's still a major point of contention today.
So one tribe is taking the fuck you, got mine approach, and the other wants to join in the fun, prompting violence and rioting. The Indian government loves to cut off Internet access if someone looks at them funny, so there's an information blackout in those parts.
Frankly, most of India doesn't give a shit, violence there is unlikely to percolate to the rest of the country. None of the parties are particularly sympathetic, this is textbook sectarian strife in the arsehole of India, we've seen worse and will likely see more of the same for a while now.
You, high IQ, well educated, traveled and read motte denizen, you personally?
Uh.. Yes? I mean, is this a question worth asking really?
I mean, I wasn't born believing in HBD, I was won over. I used to think that terraforming Mars was a great idea, and now I think it's a rather suboptimal choice when it comes to establishing robust space colonies. I used to think that AI would more inhuman, and very much didn't expect them to speak like us before they thought as well as they do.
I'm sure there are plenty of cases where I've been wrong and thus changed my mind. I don't think I've had any drastic collapses of my cognitive framework that forced me to re-evaluate everything.
And the long essay where Eneasz Brodski at request of his readers and haters explains how it happened
This gentleman is autistic. I'm sure we have more than our fair share, but that's a condition that predisposes a tendency to take things at face value without considering how much of it is virtue-signalling or social fiction.
"No, it cannot happen to me! I was trained in martial arts of rationalism by ancient master Yud the Yumongous! I am unstoppable!"
I think you're engaging in the hobby of making up people to be mad at. There are worse hobbies, I'm sure. I'm quite certain that there isn't anyone here who will claim identification with this, unless someone spins up an alt. If there are, I offer my psychiatric services, first interview free.
At any rate, I find singling out Rats and rat-adjacents like the Motte's users as examples of bad epistemics or miscalibration is somewhere between laughable and preaching to the choir. Name a group more obsessed with evaluating the rigor of their beliefs about the world. If someone listened to Yud or Scott and came away with the belief that they themselves were therefore unimpeachable, then they can read an IKEA manual and assemble a mouse-trap that takes their finger off.
If you think we're bad, have you seen the rest of the internet?
self_made_human
C'est la vie
10mo ago
Oh hi, I was just looking at this absolute clusterfuck of a situation after arriving in Scotland and wondering whether it was worth wading in while jet-lagged
You're right. I've written many a word about my desire to emigrate from India, and I would say that almost 95% of the feedback I've gotten was supportive. In fact I'd go so far as to say that the support of pseudonymous strangers on this niche internet forum made a great deal of difference, especially when I was at my lowest.
I would say that people are more inclined to be nice and welcoming to me than the modal immigrant. I'm well spoken, clearly preferring the way most of the Anglosphere or the West works to the point I decry most aspects of my own country and, as @Forgotpassword points out, a medical professional is a rather sympathetic figure. How many people want fewer doctors around? (The answer is existing doctors, but their power only goes so far).
I hardly think the West or its denizens are literally perfect, but they're still a gross improvement over how I've spent most of my life, and a very important difference between me and the Count is that I don't bite the hand that feeds.
I have absolutely no desire to see the West become more like like the Subcontinent. I'd rather not see a flood of unskilled immigrants bring the welfare system to its knees, or cause a breakdown of the religious tolerance and high trust a place is known for. I'm perfectly content with the existing British elite, and were they to gradually admit foreigners into their ranks, I'd much rather they be westernized by the time they hold power rather than nakedly bringing in the mores and behaviors of their home nations.
All I can really say is that people are a great deal more welcoming to a would-be immigrant when they're not actively sneering at them. Of course, Count makes a great deal more money than I do and is effectively unimpeachable thanks to Western norms of freedom of speech, so the reader is welcome to decide who's in the right here, or who is being rewarded for it. I just consider it an immense privilege to be let in here in the first place, and I'd rather not make people regret that decision.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1yr ago
This graph should have everyone at Google shot, then shot again just to make sure they're dead.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1yr ago
And to be fair reading isnt all that interesting as an adult, let alone a kid.
I wouldn't be surprised hearing this from a rando on the street, but you're a regular on The Motte, all we ever do is read and argue haha.
It's still a foreign notion to me, I read voraciously the moment letters ceased to be arcane scribbles, I actually did the whole reading labels on shampoo bottles thing well before it became a meme. If I show up late to my own funeral, it'll be because I was reading the obituary..
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1yr ago
Call me old fashioned but I prefer innocent till proven guilty in a court of law when it comes to punitive actions like suspending someone's income
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1yr ago
Unrelated observation, but I think Community Notes is one of the few good things that have been added to Twitter of late.
I find myself surprised at how they debunk lots of viral content I previously accepted uncritically, which I guess is sort of the point. For recent example, the thread about the richest billionaire in Africa being trolled by some random Brazilian, and a picture purporting to show that the Threads logo looked like Homer Simpson's ear.
I suspect that if a similar version was implemented on Threads, they'd be far more leery of "hate-facts", which would kill most of the utility.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
3mo ago
This is not what we're looking for when it comes to a top level post in the CWR thread.
We ask that such posts be substantive and have a semblance of effort put into them, and if you're going to link to something, we except you to provide your own commentary. Pointing and laughing doesn't count.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
4mo ago
I had a very eventful night in one of the local pubs in my small Scottish town.
Highlights include finding out that my landlord and landladies are swingers, and that they're charging me about 3 times the market rate for the room I'm renting, the sum I pay would be the typical asking price for a whole house in these parts. For the former, I had no real inkling. For the latter, the price I paid seemed rather steep, and I was a bit confused when looking at flats in the nearby city for an upcoming move and noticing that they seemed to be less expensive than what I was paying.
Oh, a middle-aged lady propositioned me and wanted me to move into her house for the price of free. About 2 others also expressed outrage that I was being ripped off in this manner, and offered to take me in for less than half of what I was currently paying.
Hopefully I'll get around to writing a proper post about all of this, with an appropriate level of local color, but I'm still getting over the hangover and sheer surprise.
The main difference between the two is power-scaling. Wuxia only strays to a limited extent from feats that a "peak human" could perform, though there's supernatural bullshit that has roots in Chinese herbalism, alchemy, traditional medicine and the like. Xianxia takes that and dials that to 9000, then keeps on cranking.
Wuxia: The protagonist punches someone and they break through a door or wall.
Xianxia: The protagonist punches someone and they break through a mountain.
Wuxia: The protagonist finds a pill that extends their lifespan by 20 years.
Xianxia: The protagonist finds a pill that lets them live for a length of time that requires scientific notation.
Wuxia: A sword-master who spent their life meditating on the Great Dao might be able to fight a hundred opponents and win.
Xianxia: Someone's 'sword-intent' chops your dick off from a parallel dimension away.
Wuxia: You've reached the peak. True immortality is probably out of your grasp, but now all of China will remember your name.
Xianxia: You've reached the peak of the mortal realm. Yet your tired eyes spot the hints of an even taller range beyond, and you rub them while muttering something about Mt. Tai. None dare challenge you, but you're not content, not yet. After years of preparation, you go all out and barely survive after facing the wrath of Heaven for your impudence. You've managed to breakthrough and become worthy of the next realm. Congratulations, your previous powers mean fuck-all, and you're barely worthy of joining a sect in the upper realm as a janitor. Time to start from the bottom now that you're here.
This cyclic nature is one of the hallmarks of Xianxia, though it's not always a given. The usual goal for any self-respecting protagonist is to first achieve immortality, then get bored and go for omnipotence. If you're not defying the Heavens and overturning the laws that restrict you, why even bother?
Batman might be a a typical Wuxia character. Superman would be a weak character in a Xianxia setting, especially in a novel that's managed to steadily creep up in both power and page count. There are of course novels that don't indulge in the power fantasy to the extent that universes are being blown up with every punch, but that's something that people familiar with the genre wouldn't be surprised by haha.
Doesn't pass the sniff test.
I expect the largest and most significant divergence between human cortical homunculi and that of other mammals (animalculi?) would have occurred when we began speccing into bipedal locomotion. That is much later than the period suggested here. Look at that damn thing and tell me that it has much relevance to proto-lemurs.
Furries are rare enough, in absolute terms, that they're far more likely a culture-bound idiosyncratic misfiring rather than some kind of primitive atavism brought to life. Somewhere between 4 to 11% of furries have formal diagnoses of ASD. About 1% of the wider population are autistic.
Not to mention that in many cultures, furries are nigh-unheard of. I can't imagine most Indians, Africans or Chinese people would know what the hell a furry is, and there's no seething undercurrent of furry-desire that gets liberated when they move to the West. Even within the West, Americans probably have the highest furry-per-capita. Within America, cities that are liberal enclaves.
I agree with Duplex below that autism and its concommitant body dysphoria and facial agnosia are far more likely to be relevant explanations. And I think connecting the dots between human and canine co-evolution is genius. It may or may not be correct, but it's better than this.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1yr ago
Look, I completely understand that you're unhappy with what @TitaniumButterfly said, and understandably so. He's been warned by @Amadan, and presuming he doesn't clean up his act, or at least say such things in a less maximally inflammatory manner, he's probably going to end up banned.
However, your own response, especially submitted as a top level comment in this thread, doesn't fly either. I'm not going to put anything on your mod record, since you're new and justifiably incensed, but at the very least, you need to put more effort into a rebuttal. Yes, I'm aware of how weird that sounds.
If you'd just stated this as a reply, I probably wouldn't have bothered to respond or put on the mod hat, but once someone has been modded for their actions, you should leave it at that and not performatively call them out to make a rhetorical point. After all, to make a very lukewarm defense of them, they went into a great deal of explaining as to why they hold the view that they do.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1yr ago
I went to the trouble of writing an effort post somewhere that was read by like 8 people, so I'll just reproduce the primary bit, and tack on additional commentary at the end.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychotherapy
Large-scale international reviews of scientific studies have concluded that psychotherapy is effective for numerous conditions.[8][22]
One line of research consistently finds that supposedly different forms of psychotherapy show similar effectiveness. According to The Handbook of Counseling Psychology: "Meta-analyses of psychotherapy studies have consistently demonstrated that there are no substantial differences in outcomes among treatments". The handbook states that there is "little evidence to suggest that any one psychological therapy consistently outperforms any other for any specific psychological disorders. This is sometimes called the Dodo bird verdict after a scene/section in Alice in Wonderland where every competitor in a race was called a winner and is given prizes".[151]
Further analyses seek to identify the factors that the psychotherapies have in common that seem to account for this, known as common factors theory; for example the quality of the therapeutic relationship, interpretation of problem, and the confrontation of painful emotions.[152][153][page needed][154][155]
Outcome studies have been critiqued for being too removed from real-world practice in that they use carefully selected therapists who have been extensively trained and monitored, and patients who may be non-representative of typical patients by virtue of strict inclusionary/exclusionary criteria. Such concerns impact the replication of research results and the ability to generalize from them to practicing therapists.[153][156]
However, specific therapies have been tested for use with specific disorders,[157] and regulatory organizations in both the UK and US make recommendations for different conditions.[158][159][160]
The Helsinki Psychotherapy Study was one of several large long-term clinical trials of psychotherapies that have taken place. Anxious and depressed patients in two short-term therapies (solution-focused and brief psychodynamic) improved faster, but five years long-term psychotherapy and psychoanalysis gave greater benefits. Several patient and therapist factors appear to predict suitability for different psychotherapies.[161]
Meta-analyses have established that cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and psychodynamic psychotherapy are equally effective in treating depression.[162]
The bolded section is the one I can't easily verify, at least not when it's 9 am and I've been up all night studying.
Specifically regarding CBT, I found the following metanalysis-
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23870719/
Results: A total of 115 studies met inclusion criteria. The mean effect size (ES) of 94 comparisons from 75 studies of CBT and control groups was Hedges g = 0.71 (95% CI 0.62 to 0.79), which corresponds with a number needed to treat of 2.6. However, this may be an overestimation of the true ES as we found strong indications for publication bias (ES after adjustment for bias was g = 0.53), and because the ES of higher-quality studies was significantly lower (g = 0.53) than for lower-quality studies (g = 0.90). The difference between high- and low-quality studies remained significant after adjustment for other study characteristics in a multivariate meta-regression analysis. We did not find any indication that CBT was more or less effective than other psychotherapies or pharmacotherapy. Combined treatment was significantly more effective than pharmacotherapy alone (g = 0.49).
Conclusions: There is no doubt that CBT is an effective treatment for adult depression, although the effects may have been overestimated until now. CBT is also the most studied psychotherapy for depression, and thus has the greatest weight of evidence. However, other treatments approach its overall efficacy.
And when speaking of CBT as applied to more psychiatric conditions:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3584580/
We identified 269 meta-analytic studies and reviewed of those a representative sample of 106 meta-analyses examining CBT for the following problems: substance use disorder, schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders, depression and dysthymia, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders, somatoform disorders, eating disorders, insomnia, personality disorders, anger and aggression, criminal behaviors, general stress, distress due to general medical conditions, chronic pain and fatigue, distress related to pregnancy complications and female hormonal conditions. Additional meta-analytic reviews examined the efficacy of CBT for various problems in children and elderly adults. The strongest support exists for CBT of anxiety disorders, somatoform disorders, bulimia, anger control problems, and general stress. Eleven studies compared response rates between CBT and other treatments or control conditions. CBT showed higher response rates than the comparison conditions in 7 of these reviews and only one review reported that CBT had lower response rates than comparison treatments. In general, the evidence-base of CBT is very strong. However, additional research is needed to examine the efficacy of CBT for randomized-controlled studies. Moreover, except for children and elderly populations, no meta-analytic studies of CBT have been reported on specific subgroups, such as ethnic minorities and low income samples.
Addressing the specific claims of similar efficacy to the forms of therapy based on pseudoscientific principles:
CBT for depression was more effective than control conditions such as waiting list or no treatment, with a medium effect size (van Straten, Geraedts, Verdonck-de Leeuw, Andersson, & Cuijpers, 2010; Beltman, Oude Voshaar, & Speckens, 2010). However, studies that compared CBT to other active treatments, such as psychodynamic treatment, problem-solving therapy, and interpersonal psychotherapy, found mixed results. Specifically, meta-analyses found CBT to be equally effective in comparison to other psychological treatments (e.g., Beltman, Oude Voshaar, & Speckens, 2010; Cuijpers, Smit, Bohlmeijer, Hollon, & Andersson, 2010; Pfeiffer, Heisler, Piette, Rogers, & Valenstein, 2011). Other studies, however, found favorable results for CBT (e.g. Di Giulio, 2010; Jorm, Morgan, & Hetrick, 2008; Tolin, 2010). For example, Jorm and colleagues (2008) found CBT to be superior to relaxation techniques at post-treatment. Additionally, Tolin (2010) showed CBT to be superior to psychodynamic therapy at both post-treatment and at six months follow-up, although this occurred when depression and anxiety symptoms were examined together.
Compared to pharmacological approaches, CBT and medication treatments had similar effects on chronic depressive symptoms, with effect sizes in the medium-large range (Vos, Haby, Barendregt, Kruijshaar, Corry, & Andrews, 2004). Other studies indicated that pharmacotherapy could be a useful addition to CBT; specifically, combination therapy of CBT with pharmacotherapy was more effective in comparison to CBT alone (Chan, 2006).
In the particular case of BPD, after talking to @Throwaway05 I looked into the actual benefit of DBT, and was surprised to see that it was genuinely far more effective than I expected. Somewhere around the ballpark of 50% success rates in curbing symptoms and letting quite a few of them lead entirely unremarkable and functional lives. If 50% sounds underwhelming, wait till you hear the typical cure rates I'm used to.
So:
Is therapy and therapy speak actually harmful to people that have mental illness?
A clear no. The evidence base is nigh unimpeachable, even if, as discussed above, the most bullshit insanity inducing forms like Freudian or Lacanian psychotherapy still beat placebo.
My personal working hypothesis is that therapy acts as a decent substitute for a friend, a non-judgemental and understanding one who has seemingly endless time to listen to your problems, and is forbidden, on the pain of losing the way they make a living, from disclosing your troubles. Unfortunately, quite a few people genuinely lack actual good friends, so even such as ersatz substitute has notable effects.
This is an entirely different question from the fad we've been having for quite a few years of "therapy culture", or the insistence of people to co-opt/misuse therapy speak to lend their bullshit legitimacy. Then again, there are practising Freudian and Lacanian therapists, and few other people seem to have the same burning urge I have to burn their houses down. Even then, I must concede they beat placebo, as well as the dead horse that is repressed penis envy.
Anyway, therapy seems to beat placebo, and works synergistically with drugs, even if you cynically notice that therapy based off nonsense does much the same thing as more considered approaches, but it's not in dispute that it works. At least I have the consolation of being able to throw drugs at people instead of just talking at them as a licensed shrink in training, for all the quibbling about if SSRIs work, ain't nobody claiming their ADHD isn't being helped when they're zooted up on stimulants.
To conclude, is therapy helpful when administered by someone who knows what the fuck they're doing? Yes.
Are they/us responsible for random idiots using it as an obfuscation technique? Not really, though the upper echelons of HR are often staffed by people with degrees in psychology where I'm at.
Is it possibly a net negative for the set of {all people subjected to mealy mouthed terminology}? No clue, but you asked about the actually mentally ill, and you have my answer. No surprise that a few of them pick up on the lingo.
If only all our trolls put in this much effort. Thumbs up for that alone.
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