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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   32435 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

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Why not both? Look, I haven't taken a chemistry class in 20+ years. But by way of a possibly flawed analogy, you can have incredibly stable molecules that get pried apart in the correct solution. Maybe all it takes is water.

No relationship is perfect or without strife. Culture can encourage people to kill their ego and sacrifice to work things out, or it can encourage them to be purely ego driven and destroy their relationships in pursuit of limitless self actualization.

If you want to take the chemistry metaphor further, and you don't mind a little bit of absolute horror, I'll point to the concept of disappearing polymorphs:

That is, they are metastable forms that have been replaced by more stable forms.

It is hypothesized that contact with a single microscopic seed crystal of the new polymorph can be enough to start a chain reaction causing the transformation of a much larger mass of material. Widespread contamination with such microscopic seed crystals may lead to the impression that the original polymorph has "disappeared". In a few cases such as progesterone and paroxetine hydrochloride, the disappearance gradually spread across the world, and it is suspected that it is because earth's atmosphere has over time become permeated with tiny seed crystals. It is believed that seeds as small as a few million molecules (about 10 − 15 {\displaystyle 10^{-15}} grams) is sufficient for converting one morph to another, making unwanted disappearance of morphs particularly difficult to prevent. It is hypothesized that "unintentional seeding" may also be responsible for a related phenomenon, where a previously difficult-to-crystallize compound becomes easier to crystallize over time.

Isn't this a similar mechanism to how prions work?

I think there are some technical differences, but pretty similar.

For a moment I read that as "prisons" and my mind ran off with a metaphor for how kinds of criminality may be overwritten and replaced, often with something worse, by exposure to other inmates-

-But then I read it correctly.

You were not kidding about the absolute horror.

This Kurzgesagt video evokes a similar feeling to me: losing something that can never be regained, the crushing weight of the rules of material reality.

Thanks, I hate it.

I certainly do think it's both! And part of my changed-world view is that I'd never considered the other direction before. It's a bit like OP's link to "Leftism is both a cause and effect of acute mental illness".

I suspect basically all statistically correlated human behavior also has a 2-way causative relationship.

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