domain:cafeamericainmag.com
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2d ago
This has always fascinated me when I read accounts by trans men. Their description of what testosterone does to their mental processes sounds completely alien to me. I cannot relate to it whatsoever.
I've found at least some of their accounts to be startlingly accurate, and quite revealing.
I was once reading a book -- can't at all remember the name now -- written by an FTM transsexual describing her experience with testosterone. She was older and she would have been going through this before the internet (and before free 24/7 porn, keep that in mind).
One of the effects she described was how her visual perception seemed to become "more 3D" (lines up with how men tend to do better on spatial rotation tasks), especially whenever she looked at women or images of women. A billboard showing a sexy woman suddenly "popped" for her in a way that it never had before which consequently made it much more attention-grabbing, despite the fact that she had always been a lesbian even prior to starting testosterone. She was still subjectively viewing women in a new way, which is exactly the sort of effect I would expect testosterone to induce.
She described an episode where she went with some female friends (all of them lesbian or bisexual) to watch a series of film screenings at an indie theater. One of them was a short reel that showed various women in bikinis and underwear doing things like dancing, striking sexy poses, maybe a bit of a striptease, things like that. And all of her friends were laughing at it: like, oh look at these girls being so silly, haha. But she couldn't help but be struck by how serious the images seemed to her. She looked at her friends laughing and thought, "why are you laughing? This isn't a joke. Stop laughing." And I just thought... yes, this is it! This is the difference between male and female sexuality! You couldn't ask for a more perfect illustration, it's amazing.
Kind of frightening to think that one little chemical can unlock such complex emotional states. But, there you have it.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2d ago
What do these have to do with one another? Belief in genetic determinism seems entirely compatible with belief in non physical things like god or qualia. There is no reason that god could not have created a world in which genetic determinism is true.
Typically the standard materialist/scientific worldview sees most things as genetically determined, as far as I'm aware! That may be changing.
I agree that you can believe in genetics without necessarily adopting a materialist frame.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Have you considered that ‘there’s a woman just like me, but a girl’ is a very common male fantasy? See tomboys as well.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
The people who treat romantic relationships as jobs are just generally insane.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Can you elaborate on someone who resents men embracing sex work? I don’t know any sex workers and assume the vast majority of them are simply unfortunates, whoring because they don’t have other options.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
I agree with your solution, but I’m going to push back a little- sex creates the expectation of romantic exclusivity, so these ladies are entitled to Chad’s undivided attention. And statistically, most average women are in a relationship with average men.
Now, it does seem true that the floor beneath which most pick ‘pass’ is lower for women(or should I say higher, considering how much of it is driven by BMI). But 80% of women competing for 60% of men isn’t what you’re describing.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2d ago
I'd be somewhat interested in other men's experiences of this.
Totally agree with your description of puberty. It was a nothingburger, way overhyped.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
2d ago
Apologies lol, I just miss grappling. You have a very good gym if people focus on front headlocks. I always hated that position the most.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
I don’t know who that is, I don’t recall modding him, and I can’t find your quote.
But that is beside the point. Whether or not a comment is inflammatory, when you reply, you have to follow the rules by explaining what you mean. A single word “what?” is insufficient. It strictly drags the conversation down further.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
2d ago
Pad thai is my favorite thai food. That, soy sauce noodles, mango sticky rise and satay sticks. I did not like the salads at all. The orange shirt indonesian is an extremely annoying creation of modern hyper consumerism where he purity spirals about food in the cringiest way possible.
Imo thai food outside of thailand is not as good. Chinese food anywhere in the world tastes great except for china according to my dad who spent time there. But that form of food adopted well to local environments. Thai food seems harder to adopt. Thailand is very blessed to be near the equator and not facing harsh climates. You cannot get mango sticky rice 24/7 365 in most places not around the equator.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
So twin studies are disproven because scientists have only found 2% of the genes? Don’t you think there might be a bunch of genes they just haven’t found yet?
07mk
2d ago
I can't see the video right now, though I've seen some clips of hoe_math talking about such men being considered "not people" by women, and if this video is of a similar vein, I'd say that not sending men messages like this is closer to needlessly cruel.
07mk
2d ago
Seriously, if guys think this is what being a woman is like, there is no goddamn hope for any mutual understanding between the sexes.
My guess is that this is common to the subset of guys who both have AGP and the propensity to act on it by transitioning, but can't be extended to guys in general.
whatihear
2d ago
materialism / genetic determinism
What do these have to do with one another? Belief in genetic determinism seems entirely compatible with belief in non physical things like god or qualia. There is no reason that god could not have created a world in which genetic determinism is true.
It seems like you want to associate these things because you want to strike a blow against materialism, but it’s just unrelated.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2d ago
But you'd be insane to go full retard and deny the accuracy of the models that match observable gravity.
Just watch me.
No, but that's completely fair. I suppose they are proven that they replicate - what isn't proven is that there's a specific genetic mechanism that causes this replication to happen. That being said, I will admit I skimmed most of the sciencey part. I have a pretty strong bias in this area, if it wasn't obvious from the post.
07mk
2d ago
My guess is that this phenomenon explains quite a lot of feminism - and likely ideological activism in general. People who write essays and books and give lectures on any sort of transgressive ideology will almost inevitably be highly atypical members of whatever group they belong to. The typical mind fallacy is an extremely seductive one, especially if you're already drawn to thinking that other people are "sheeple" or "NPCs" while you are an enlightened independent thinker who has escaped from her programming. Hence you see feminist professors and entertainment writers pushing becoming independent girlbosses who pursue their favorite intellectual or professional endeavors over things like family as being the correct, enlightened way that women would behave if they were freed from the patriarchy (this is - often unintentionally - also obfuscated as part of a motte-and-bailey game as being about giving women choice rather than about pushing them towards this). Women who are happy staying in the kitchen aren't as likely to publish books or go on lecture tours about how great their preferences are and how it's only through society-wide brainwashing that more women don't share their own preferences (though the comedienne Ally Wong had a good bit about this).
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
That seems like the wrong metaphor, given that a Queen Bee will primarily be attended to by a full hive of female worker bees (that the males don't even get to stay in).
WhiningCoil
2d ago
So... even though the twin studies can't really be proven, despite two decades of intensive, worldwide research focus and ungodly amounts of funding, he still argues they are "mostly right."
This feels like it's setting an incredibly high bar for "proven". If the studies replicate, which is already amazing in our current era, but the specific mechanism can't be isolated, that doesn't mean it's not proven. I mean, famously, a lot of the "why"s of gravity aren't well understood. Notably why it's so weak compared to other forces. But you'd be insane to go full retard and deny the accuracy of the models that match observable gravity.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
Why can't you accept that people might find the excel spreadsheet posting interesting even if they are uninterested in her Onlyfans presence/career choices? The wider community has plenty of $.02-a-word substackers who maintain an audience peddling more boring theories backed by less data on more boring and commonplace topics, and those don't seem to inspire this sort of permanent rent-free mental residency that compels people to start raging about her in a thread about someone else whose only commonalities are blogging and being on Onlyfans. This is as if dozens of people complained about Jake from Putanumonit under every discussing of an article about dating by someone in fintech.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2d ago
I like this! I'm definitely a big fan of the idea that there is a separate "old" testament sent to all nations, that Christ fulfills. IMO it's a huge shame that the Western Church hasn't embraced that more.
FtttG
2d ago
I've seen some people on Tumblr encouraging the use of "androphilia" and "gynophilia", the main disadvantage of hetero- and homo-sexuality being that they are relative, rather than absolute, terms: you need to know the speaker's sex before you know the sex to which they are attracted. Andro- and gyno-philia don't have this problem. I like the terms for this reason, but I can't imagine them catching on in casual conversation.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2d ago
I strongly disagree. Emotional Intelligence is like any skill - it can be used for good, and evil. I would say my priest, who is able to look at me and bring me to tears with a few well meaning questions, has strong Emotional Intelligence (in addition to the Holy Spirit.)
Just because you mostly see negative examples, doesn't mean positive examples aren't out there.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2d ago
I want to talk about genetics. Scott Alexander has a new piece out about Missing Heritability, basically going through the issues with twin studies:
Twin studies suggested that IQ was about 60% genetic, and EA about 40%. This seemed to make sense at the time - how far someone gets in school depends partly on their intelligence, but partly on fuzzier social factors like class / culture / parenting. The first genome-wide studies and polygenic scores found enough genes to explain 2%pp1 of this 40% pie. The remaining 38%, which twin studies deemed genetic but where researchers couldn’t find the genes - became known as “the missing heritability” or “the heritability gap”.
Scientists came up with two hypothesis for the gap, which have been dueling ever since:
Maybe twin studies are wrong.
Maybe there are genes we haven’t found yet
He goes through a TON of research literature, basically describing how the entire scientific apparatus in genetics tried to figure out why twin studies couldn't be confirmed via actual genetics. To me, it sounds like an extremely robust way to prove that the twin studies were wrong. However, his ultimate conclusion appears to be:
So how heritable are complex traits, and why can’t different methods agree on this?
I think the twin / pedigree / adoption estimates are mostly right. They are strong designs, their assumptions are well-validated, and they all converge on similar results. They also pass sanity checks and common sense observation.
Although polygenic scores, GWAS, GREML, RDR, and Sib-Regression are also strong designs, they’re newer, have less agreement among themselves, and have more correlated error modes in their potential to miss rarer variants and interactions. Although it’s hard to figure out a story of exactly what’s going on with these rarer variants and interactions, there seems to be some evidence that they exist (again, see 1, 2, 3)15, and it seems easier to doubt this new and fuzzy area than the strong and simple conclusions from twin / pedigree / adoption work.
So... even though the twin studies can't really be proven, despite two decades of intensive, worldwide research focus and ungodly amounts of funding, he still argues they are "mostly right."
To me, this assertion is evidence of the glaring blindspot which materialist rationalists such as Alexander have - they assume that materialism / genetic determinism is right, and then reason backward in order to make their fundamental assumptions fit the data. While the genetic framework is clearly helpful and has had some limited success in new medical breakthroughs, it's beyond obvious to anyone with an ounce of common sense that compared to the hype in the early 2000s, the new branches of genetic science have been a massive let down.
Overall I'm very curious where the life sciences will go. Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary as well as other books, makes some interesting comments in a recent post where he excerpts his own book:
As David Bohm commented in the 1960s, it is an odd fact that, just when physics was moving away from mechanism, biology and psychology were moving closer to it. ‘If the trend continues’, he wrote, ‘scientists will be regarding living and intelligent beings as mechanical, while they suppose that inanimate matter is too complex and subtle to fit into the limited categories of mechanism.’[9] He was not mistaken.
Nonetheless, in the first half of the twentieth century, many philosophically minded biologists, including such eminent British figures as John Scott Haldane and his better-known son, J.B.S. Haldane, as well as Conrad Hal Waddington, moved decisively, like the physicists, away from the machine model. Less renowned, largely by his own choice, but no less distinguished, was Ludwig von Bertalanffy, the great Austrian biologist and polymath who originated general system theory. In 1933 he wrote: ‘we cannot speak of a machine “theory” of the organism, but at most of a machine fiction’.[10]
Despite this encouraging development, a more or less abrupt reversion to the seventeenth-century Cartesian model came over the life sciences with the rise of molecular biology, and its language of ‘programmes’, ‘codes’, and so forth, in the twentieth century’s second half. According to Carl Woese, writing in 2004, ‘biology today is little more than an engineering discipline’.[11] And Woese was no embittered outsider. His pioneering work revolutionised mainstream biology; he was one of the most influential and widely honoured microbiologists of all time, described by a colleague as having ‘done more for biology writ large than any biologist in history, including Darwin’.[12] But he was disturbed by what he saw.
We'll have to see if biologists are actually able to move beyond the mechanistic model and into a more complex, realistic view of life. The obvious CW implications here are how the scientific/materialist worldview and the religious worldviews continue to interact. Right now, the Left seems to be mostly materialist, whereas the right is (nominally) religious. If we can work to merge these two views, we may find more political unity or at least a new set of combinations for our political approaches.
It's just not typical for pad thai. Pad thai uses Thai chili flakes, which are dried chilies that have been roasted for a more smoky flavour and pounded into flakes. Fresh chill is just a bit too sharp and won't mesh so well with the overall flavour profile of the dish.
That being said, it's really not the worst thing you could do to the dish if you can't find flakes and I wouldn't point it out had he not made so many mistakes.
I mean IQ itself is a fuzzy concept. We can only really measure it by proxy, which by itself would create some added complexity here. The more precise way to say this would be “twins are 60% likely to score the same IQ on an IQ test.” The test doesn’t directly measure IQ, and depending on which test you take, when you take it, and under what conditions, you might get some different scores just from those things even if the same person is being tested. Then you have environment, one kid is encouraged to read a lot and do math puzzles. The other plays lots of sports. One eats nothing but junk food, the other eats clean. Those differences can affect brain development.
It’s both and, to my mind.
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