site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   443 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for August 5, 2026

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Are you British?

Irish. Why do you ask?

… is only marginally better than buying them a box of fags.

“Fag” is a common slur for a homosexual in the US. Zero people will think you are talking about smoking anymore. I thought you were talking about a gay orgy for a moment.

American here amd I understood immediately.

Yeah, the context of "a box" made it reasonably clear. Probably did raise a few eyebrows though. Like if an Anglo were to read an American account of keeping their CCW in their fanny pack.

Maybe speaks to my suspected autism more than anything. I’m American and can’t understand half the Americans I speak to. Sometimes I come across as awkward in my responses to people because they enunciate a word a certain way, or are too fluid in conversation, or they connect words the “wrong way” to me (i.e. “you’re not supposed to say it like that”); but I just nod along like I understand; mostly because it’s rude if you say “What?,” 17 times consecutively because they make no sense to you. When he said “box” and “fag” in the same sentence my brain just went “????” “Must be a slang term for an orgy of homo’s…” Same reaction I have to a lot of people who don’t understand how I think.

I have seen this called "problems with auditory processing". One scholarly article says (with literally two dozen citations omitted):

As well as a heightened sensitivity to sounds, some autistic people may find busy auditory scenes challenging, such as isolating a single speech source in a noisy environment, and may have difficulty filtering out interfering sounds that capture their attention. Difficulties with detecting speech in noise has been reported across the lifespan, from children to adults as well as in subgroups of the autistic population (e.g., non-speaking adolescents and young adults). Indeed, several studies report that autistic people struggle more than non-autistic people to filter speech sounds amidst noise. Some lines of evidence suggest the difficulties that some autistic people have recognizing target words amidst distracting speech are evident relatively early in development—2–5 years of age. Similar reports of difficulties understanding or attending to speech in background noise have been identified in people diagnosed with ADHD. Overall, such altered auditory processing—including difficulties attending to relevant speech sounds, or difficulties ignoring interfering sounds—are likely to impact significantly on autistic people's daily lives, whether at home, school or in the workplace.

An example of how sensory and auditory differences in autistic people might influence communication lies in social contexts that inherently involve the direction of attention among competing stimuli. “Cocktail party listening”—the ability to follow a conversation in an acoustically challenging environment—is reported as being particularly challenging for autistic people, and a reduced ability to ignore background stimuli—for whatever reason—potentially accounts for at least some of the difficulties they experience in social settings. Using fMRI to investigate sensory responsivity and social cognition in autistic adults, Green et al. (2018) demonstrated that activity in brain areas associated with social cognition were reduced when sensory stimuli were presented simultaneously with a tactile distractor stimulus, consistent with the interpretation that cognitive load may increase with more than one modality. Hernandez et al. (2020) also used fMRI to investigate brain responses in autistic and non‐autistic youth during conversations in noisy environments. Both groups showed activation in language networks, but autistic youth exhibited greater activation in left‐hemisphere speech‐processing areas. The degree of increased activation was associated with better social cognition and suggests that these autistic youth recruited additional neural resources to focus on social cues in the presence of distracting stimuli.

Do you have this problem too? It has been alleged by @self_made_human that you are socially retarded as well, :/. Fluid conversations I can more or less perform very well at. Much better than I could as a kid, but people can sometimes tell there’s something… off, about me. 95% of the time I look completely normal like everyone else, but for me “normal” is often a matter of successful imitation. It doesn’t come naturally to me.

But I also sometimes experience the same issue reading. I think it was a Facebook post I came across once that I started laughing at because someone posted a question asking if “Anyone has ever put fruit in a smoker before?,” and what the results were. The immediate answer someone gave was the exact one that occurred to me before I realized what the questioner was asking. They posted a Wikipedia link to the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany.

So you have this problem too?

I can think of a few instances where I completely failed to comprehend the phonemes that someone just spouted at me, even after a repetition or two. But I don't think it's happened very often to me, so I would hesitate to call this phenomenon a red flag for autism/Asperger's/whatever in me specifically (though I obviously am flying other red flags).

But I also sometimes experience the same issue reading.

The particular article that I linked is focused on audio, and does not mention any equivalent phenomenon in text.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats