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Wellness Wednesday for September 21, 2022

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.

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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).

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At a Q&A I asked Scott Alexander if he was going to circumcise his kid and said he was in favor of it and his wife was against it. I'll be honest, I'm kind of shaken. I'm sometimes able to argue persuasively against male genital mutilation, but I wasn't on that day. I sort of made a fool of myself, I guess. It's a painful subject for me.

It's also just kind of shocking and dismaying, because I think that noticing that male genital mutilation is bad is something almost anyone with basic rationality skills should probably be able to notice, and he didn't. Now I want to ask Yudkowsky. I'll choose my words more carefully.

He mentioned the adversarial collaboration on SSC on the subject, which to me had a lot of obvious holes and flaws in it.

Purposes of the foreskin:

  1. Prevents the covered skin from contacting clothing. Clothing contact desensitizes the penis through a process called keratinization. If you're circumcised, you'll notice that the circumcision scar and the places below the scar are what's sensitive, and everything above that isn't very sensitive. That's not normal.

  2. The foreskin has densely packed nerve endings.

  3. The foreskin provides lubrication, both through natural lubricant and through a gliding motion.

  4. Protective against health conditions including meatal stenosis.

I can also rebut the purported positive outcomes of circumcision, and talk about the risks of the procedure. I have videos of men with botched circumcisions talking about their suffering.

I don't really want to get into a debate about circumcision here. I just wanted to provide an example of what someone arguing the point looks like.

My question is this: Is anyone else shocked/saddened that Scott is pro-cutting?

Never meet your heroes. Scott is, to put it politely, not the kind of person to model your own intimate affairs after. More to the point, he is a Jew, so you can't expect much here. It isn't coming from a rational place.

More to the point, he is a Jew, so you can't expect much here.

The most charitable interpretation of this comment is something like "He is a Jew, so you can't expect him to be anti-circumcision."

The less charitable interpretation would be to read it exactly as written, as in "Don't expect much from Jews."

Given that your entire post is a personal attack, I am less inclined to be charitable.

1-day ban.

More to the point, he is a Jew, so you can't expect much here.

Wait, is this a joke? And with 10 upvotes? Sometimes I wonder WTF forum I am in.

i mean he was banned for it

We're talking about circumcision here; it's not that unreasonable.

The mention of the Jewish origins is not a problem by itself, the "don't expect much" part is the problem. It's certainly not kind, it doesn't make any important point (unless "Jews are by default people that you can't expect much from" is the point, hope it weren't) and it was much more antagonistic than necessary. That's breaking 3 of the first rules right there. If it were expressed as "he is a Jew so it is understandable he is inclined to follow Jewish tradition" then I think it'd be much less objectionable.

It's definitely not a great comment; I just don't consider it particularly antisemitic.