domain:nfinf.substack.com
self_made_human
C'est la vie
2hr ago
What's wrong with using fresh chili?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2hr ago
well, assuming he survives; I don't imagine corpses get into many fights
Oh Trump will absolutely get into fights after he is dead. Dozens of different Trump confidantes will claim to have received, in private, his political testament in the days before he dies. It will come out that he called Hegseth "Faggot Boy" over his makeup studio, that he had doubts about Vance's "bad genes" in the oval office, the he always hated Marco Rubio.
but if these people are all dead
Sure, there's a chance of that, but that would seem to be more to my point (none of the people we are worried about today will be relevant) than in favor of my interlocutor (these specific people will be relevant).
SigurdsSilverSword
2hr ago
On a only-barely-related note, I may have missed it but are you still in contact with the woman back in India? It seemed like things were going well
HereAndGone
2hr ago
That is a good point!
HereAndGone
3hr ago
It seems far less common for people to fantasize about people becoming smarter, and so I doubt there's been a lot of kink around being forced to do derivatives of an integral.
There is the claim about being sapiosexual, and its opposite: being unbearably attracted to someone stupid, the dumber the better. At least I thought the latter (being morosexual) was primarily a joke, but turns out some people possibly do claim to be that in reality.
Good Lord, I just cannot keep up with the modern world!
Corvos
3hr ago
We use Greek for diseases a lot. 'Homophobic' is used because it connotes a diseased mind, as did 'homosexual', which is why nobody willingly uses those terms to describe themselves. Gay people don't call themselves 'homophiliacs'.
HereAndGone
3hr ago
The answer is always yes.
Oh yeah. "Can it be possible that someone would find X a turn-on?" Yes, and it doesn't matter what X is or how disgusting/repulsive/but surely that's physically impossible you think X is.
Grant_us_eyes
3hr ago
Nerds/Geeks used to have the term 'Queen Bee' to describe a woman whom would intrude on a social setting typically outside her venue with the intent of socially dominating it because it was safe for her to do so(no social competition, so men could exclusively focus on her).
As the gate has been lowered, and the activists intruded, said term was actively shamed and harassed - 'Girls can be gamers to!' they cried, refusing to engage with the idea that woman could be socially manipulative in such a manner.
So it's not exactly something unique to the Rationalist social sphere. Aella just has an advantage in that she's honestly, well, nuerodivergent? on top of being hypersexual due to her childhood abuse. But I think the social dynamics are similar.
HereAndGone
3hr ago
Oh God, therapy-speak neologisms. I should have guessed!
HereAndGone
3hr ago
Normally irrelevant details like colors, landscape features, or the particular spatial arrangement of objects triggering strong emotional associations, taking on "narrative weight", etc.
True, but that's also known as the pathetic fallacy. It works better as a literary device, because in the real world yes sometimes the sky is cloudy and it starts to rain just when you're feeling sad or angry, but sometimes it's just a cloudy sky and a rain shower.
FtttG
3hr ago
So much of this reminds me of Jugaad Ethics.
HereAndGone
3hr ago
But, they kinda just are the way they are. Which contributes to their persistent social difficulties.
I think (from what might be described as a TERF adjacent position, at least when it comes to "no, trans women are not exactly the same as cis women") that the problem is sixty or more years of feminism trying to knock down the idea of "male brains (logic, reason, science, progress, all that good stuff)" versus "female brains (feelings, emotions, silly little fluffy heads)" and the gender-essentialist roles of "some interests are only for boys, some are only for girls", then along come the (worst of the online visible) trans set to go all "I knew I was really a girl because as a kid I didn't want to play sports or I liked cooking".
This defeats "boys can like cooking! and wear pink! girls can like diggers! and wearing trousers!" efforts and drops us all back into the "but okay as a girl I was not girly, I don't like makeup and fashion, I don't feel like I am going around with the fuzzy brained 'ooh I love little puppies and kitties' mindset, are you now telling me I'm not a real woman?" dilemma.
That is what is frustrating about the description of "this is what happened to me when I went on oestrogen":
- Increased predisposition towards associative thinking. Activities like tarot are more appealing.
- Increased predisposition towards magical thinking, leading to some idiosyncratic worldviews. This can probably be gauged by the nonsense I post on Twitter.
- Increased experience of meaningness in day-to-day life. This felt really good.
- Increased mentalising of other people's internal states, resulting in a mixture of higher empathy and higher social anxiety. I'm somewhat more neurotic about potential threats.
- Decreased sensory sensitivity.
- Decreased attentional diffusion, contrary to what the paper predicts.
- Decreased systematising and attention to detail, for instance with tedious matters like finances.
"Ooh I like astrology and don't like having to think about hard things like finances" makes it sound all too much like this Harry Enfield sketch.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3hr ago
The cost of obesity is enormously high economically, medically and aesthetically. Investing in shaming might well pay great dividends. Japan has quite strong shaming of the fat and the country is very thin. Diet also plays a part in this but the shaming likely has a strong effect.
FtttG
3hr ago
Gazan civilians are being killed at close to a 30:1 ratio
Do you mean that for every Hamas combatant killed in the current conflict, the IDF also kills thirty civilians? No estimate of the death toll I've seen has been that pessimistic, not even those literally published by the Gaza Ministry of Health.
HereAndGone
3hr ago
No formal diagnosis, but reading up on it certainly sounds like "somewhere on the spectrum" as well as it probably being in my paternal family. There's plenty of gossip about cousins etc. going back generations who were "odd" or "weird" and the described behaviour matches up with autism-spectrum behaviours.
Of course, self-diagnosis is no diagnosis, but the descriptions of sensory issues made so much sense to me about "okay this explains why tags on my clothing drove me nuts as a child when nobody else seemed to mind them".
HereAndGone
3hr ago
I bet the tricksy girlie hormones made me do it - math is hard, let's go shopping!
We're all just Barbie Girls in our pink and our shopping sprees 😁
it sounds like that other '-philia' that means you're into kids
It's curious that sex-positivity means that you can openly declare yourself kink-friendly, and yet in common parlance the suffix "-philia" is only ever used to refer to creepy things which even proudly kinky people would not want getting out about them if they had them (paedophilia, necrophilia, coprophilia, ephebophilia, zoophilia). Maybe it's just because Greek words sound clinical, like you're a specimen being studied under a microscope? Maybe AGPs would be less resistant to the diagnosis if it was framed not as "I have autogynephilia", but rather "I have an 'imagining myself as a woman' kink".
HereAndGone
3hr ago
The irony being that it was men who did much of the work on Tarot and other systems, such as de Gébelin (who is the one responsible for popularising the idea that the Tarot was mystic secret Egyptian wisdom).
As you say, then it got picked up as witchy-woo vibes and that is where the current interest is - women like astrology, divination and the likes.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
3hr ago
This is fair, my comment was a bit of a snipe.
I just don't want to see this rhetoric on any side.
FtttG
3hr ago
I remember reading an article (can't find it now) in which a trans man had recently started taking testosterone and was driving to a session of his trans support group, when another driver cut him off in traffic, which so enraged him that he found himself experiencing the worst episode of road rage he'd ever have had in his life: heart racing, temples pounding, furiously cursing, to the point that he had to pull over his car to calm himself down. He'd never felt anything like it. Upon arriving at the trans support group, he described this experience and how unlike any previous road rage episode it was, whereupon the older members of the group smiled knowingly and explained that he'd gotten "boy angry" for the first time.
Male aggression is qualitatively different from female: like most stereotypes, the male urge to punch holes in walls or break things when you feel angry or frustrated has a large basis in fact, and seems comparatively rarer among women. It must be very alarming to experience this all of a sudden without the benefit of a years-long puberty in which to acclimate oneself to it.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3hr ago
If Mamdani gets in and starts implementing his platform, his proposals will probably get on the table basically all around the Western world, or at least the large/capital cities.
I'm not yet convinced.
But, even if we grant it, there's also a motte-and-bailey here. Fat people are not just actively shamed, they're ashamed because they know being fat means they lack of some virtue or competence.
It may be that actively shaming them is not that useful, but it never stops there. The next demand is to dismantle or obscure anything that rightfully makes fat people notice their position on the grounds that society, and not their own understanding of reality, is shaming them. Then we start actively lying or excusing bad behavior which is probably even less effective.
Corvos
3hr ago
Fortune-telling is stupid-coded. Side effect of the millennial emphasis on science and downstream emphasis on atheism.
For a long time, even if you said ‘I tell fortunes but I don’t take it seriously’ people would assume that you are just trying to hide your embarrassing beliefs. Same with conspiracy theories - ‘I’m just asking questions’ often codes as ‘let me rant at you for hours, and don’t criticise my theories because they’re (not) only for fun’.
I found a much simpler way of explaining it.
Say you're in a large crowd of strangers, you don't know anybody. You scan the crowd and every individual person looks largely the same to you, they just melt into a sea of anonymity. But then you notice your best friend somewhere in the crowd; suddenly this person "lights up" in a way that none of the others did, to you this person looks quite different, even though to anyone else they would look like just another stranger. Importantly, this isn't a conceptual/discursive thing: you don't have to consciously think to yourself "oh there's my friend, we had plans to meet up today, I should go talk to them now". It's baked into the immediate visual perception itself that they just "glow" in a way that the strangers don't, pre-discursively, even though from an "objective" point of view there's nothing really to distinguish the raw visual image of your friend from the raw visual image of any other person.
People who are higher in "meaningfulness of experience" have these experiences more often and from a wider range of stimuli, people who are lower in meaningfulness have them less often.
We can hypothesize that the mechanism of action in full blown schizophrenia is that this meaningfulness becomes so excessive that the person has to adopt delusional beliefs just so they can build a coherent internal model of their own sensory experience (e.g. that signpost on the side of the road looks so salient because it must be a coded message just for me that was planted there by the CIA).
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