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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.

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).

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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?

Not shocked at all. Circumcision is an ancient sacrificial ritual. People do it for the traditional, cultural reasons, and justifications like hygiene etc. by Christian or non-religious Americans is just post-hoc. People do it so the son matches the father, because that's just the effortless default in the area etc.

The fact that it may be somewhat inconvenient in later life could be seen as a feature too, it's supposed to be a sacrifice, an expression of having gone through something hard just like your whole community.

If you expect that rationalists only do things that can be derived from first principles based on logic (objective things like medical reasoning and studies) then you're in for more surprises.