domain:nfinf.substack.com
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
9hr ago
Why? If IQ is determined through spooky undetectable woo that is inherited rather than genes, it's still heritable.
Throwaway05
10hr ago
They get diagnosed with fibromyalgia, CPTSD, hypermobility/EDS, or early onset arthritis. You give up hope they’ll ever be normal.
One of these is (superficially at least) not like the others and that also reveals the likely cause.
I think it is important to emphasize that to some extent we (western medicine) know what this kinda of life experience is about and how to treat it for quite a few people, and at the same time people are not excited about what needs to happen.
This is tough.
I imagine you've had this conversation before and likely are not excited about it, but it must be said both for you and anyone who happens to reading.
Chronic pain comes from a variety of places yes, but absent a physically traumatic event it is often psychiatrically mediated (and things like TMJ point to that). If it is not psychiatrically mediated, then psychiatric care is often important because chronic pain can cause psychiatric dysfunction (ex: depression from being in pain all the time). Either way - part of your care should involve sustained psychiatric follow-up and that would likely improve quality of life.
It is not uncommon for patients with stories like yours to not be down with this.
Often it's because the experience of pain is labeled in some way as "all in your head" and that gets mentally converted to "not real." Well it is real, it is pain those kind of patients are feeling that can respond to treatment but that treatment is generally things like lifestyle modification and psychiatric care and people want a procedure to be done or a "real diagnosis" to be dropped instead often because its simpler or more ego-syntonic.
Some doctors will take advantages of this because they have a research base stating that certain stuff they can bill for will work (and it can) but it also provides risks and has tangible financial costs. That doesn't mean it is the best thing for people (or the best use of resources).
I hope you are better and continue to get better than that but if you are unsatisfied with where you are the best thing you can do for yourself is seek psychiatric help, cases like your own almost always benefit from psychiatric assistance.
sun_the_second
10hr ago
Well, from my point of view, the Jedi are evil the female attraction in the extreme is insane. (I won't quote the specifics, but you can check out some of the more out-there fanfiction on the web to see what I'm hinting at). You say thinking a flap of flesh is important is trippy, but that's not really much different from thinking food or water are important. Isn't it just weird and kind of gross how digestion works, if you look at it through a lens?
You describe intense seriousness and urgency, and I fail to see how women wanting lavish marriages and being bridal carried to bed and less tame things aren't serious and urgent. Do you just pretend you're serious about enjoying them while in your mind there's "heeheehee" on loop?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
10hr ago
It should be noted that wife sales were often the idea of the wife, and an escape plan that provided her an out she wouldn't otherwise have had.
ABigGuy4U
10hr ago
I definitely would not be surprised if your theory turned out to be correct. Quite fittingly, the reason Lovecraft himself was so obsessed with madness and sanity slipping away is that he had to watch both his parents go insane from neuro-syphilis.
Regarding your last point. I suspect that many of the cases of war PTSD are actually caused by TBI from exposure to explosions. Ancient warriors didn’t seem to have much problem with it, and notice that the absolute worst cases of shell shock seem to come out of the Great War, in which indirect exposure to heavy artillery was most common.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
10hr ago
It just seems as though it would be weird to be a self-aware, reasoning person who's nonetheless in the grip of that kind of perceptual distortion.
It's a good question!
All humans are familiar with the experience of impulse control, and the failure thereof. You should start that project tonight, but you don't. You shouldn't eat that donut because you're on a diet, but you do. You know that rationally you should be able to control your impulse, and it would be better for you if you did, but that often doesn't help much in the moment. These are universal experiences. The only difference with men is that they experience particularly strong sexual impulses, of a variety which many women find foreign. Like many impulses, they're fundamentally immune to examination by reason (knowing that the donut is unhealthy for you doesn't stop it from tasting good).
Impulse control follows a bell curve. Most men are able to rein in their sexual impulses and live perfectly normal lives in accordance with social expectations. The ones who are cursed with a sufficiently deleterious combination of high impulse intensity / poor impulse control are the ones who become criminals.
The fundamental point you're gesturing at is correct: men are insane! Their insanity has been the engine of so much death and destruction throughout history. But it's also been the engine of so much beauty and goodness. Things in life have a habit of working out like that.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
10hr ago
That was part of the religious rules, yes. Before the modern concept of martial "rape", a man was entitled to take his marital rights from his wife. Consent didn't enter into it; she gave consent when she agreed to marry him, and such was irrevocable.
Every time you DreadJimmers bring this up, I wonder what your model of a marital relationship is like. It's obviously not one where you and your wife actually love one another. So if your wife is not in the mood, or she's injured or sick, or you've just had a raging fight, or you're drunk and stinking and gross her out, you believe in the Good Old Days she'd just have to spread 'em anyway, no recourse, and if she resists, you could beat her until she stops resisting, and that is the past you want to return to?
It is required if there are numerous potential varieties/mechanisms of heritability other than genetic.
pbmonster
10hr ago
That one seems pretty straight forward: no smoking in public, ever. Throw in tobacco while we're at it. Done.
The French (of all people) pretty much did just that.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
10hr ago
dubai portapotty slattern
(adds to motteword list)
sun_the_second
10hr ago
I recall reading about awake brain surgery experiments where interacting with certain parts of the brain produced phenomena in the consciousness, as reported by the person having their brain prodded with electrodes. That seems like a straightforward case of pointing to gears and doing gear things with them.
Now, there hasn't been to my knowledge any proof of reliably producing very specific effects or decisions. This doesn't look like as knock-down a deboonk of materialism as opponents of materialism seem to think, to me. If you take a soldering iron to your PC's CPU and RAM, you won't be able to do anything useful either, yet we do know PCs are material and, barring the occasional bit-flip by radiation, deterministic/mechanistic.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
10hr ago
Read the article I linked by McGhilchrist if you want to understand more of what I'm talking about.
aaa
10hr ago
I see that you've been answering like this, but to me this means absolutely nothing. How is moving beyond a "mechanicistic paradigm" going to help us? What are you suggesting in concrete terms?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
10hr ago
It was a neat article. I do think you’ve kind of missed the point. The twin studies are aren’t “wrong.” They replicate, their math works. But they don’t line up with these other studies which are supposed to measure the same thing. That could mean they’re wrong, or it could mean they aren’t actually measuring that thing.
materialism / genetic determinism
For example, these are not the same. Materialism supports models with irreducible randomness. We do not control enough of the inputs to be sure of every output. For the hard sciences, we’ve gotten reasonably certain in our models, but for genetics, there’s still plenty unexplained. The error bars are large.
beyond the mechanistic model
Into what? How could accepting dualism possibly improve this model?
kky
10hr ago
That’s hard, man. I’m sorry to hear it.
If I have one real qualm with women these days, it’d be a certain lack of fortitude or resilience. Something goes wrong? Obviously that sucks, but it’s critical to find a way to get yourself back on the right path. Nobody’s emotions are so important that the world is gonna stop for them - and it’s incredibly callous to let them undermine the people you’re close to. Sure, there are genuinely awful things that take precedence, like a death in the family, but most of life’s little insults aren’t a big deal. Some women get it, but a lot don’t.
Same category as bringing your work home. Yelling at the wife or kids because the boss is a dick. Just not right.
Terracotta
11hr ago
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.
I fully believe that this is the testosterone experience, because it matches observed behaviors. But I've always wondered how people on testosterone from birth reconcile that hormone-induced aura of intense seriousness and urgency around whatever their sexual desire of the moment is, with the fact that if you look at it objectively the sexual impulse is pretty ridiculous.
Like, rub your penis on her foot. Rub it. On her foot. Or on that corpse. Go on, DO IT. Rub your penis on that unconscious person. Rub your penis on that toddler. Look at that girl's nipple. It's very important that you look at it! Go on, make visual contact with the external part of our mammalian glands designed for feeding young. You need to see it! You do! Look at it!
In service to this feeling of seriousness, men have betrayed their friends, their families, their country, they've lied, stolen, squandered fortunes, murdered and courted their own deaths because it was so deadly important to rub their penis against this specific thing in this specific way. I mean, I totally get why the evolutionary programming would exist, and ours isn't even that extreme in a world where some spiders' mating instincts get them slowly eaten alive. It just seems as though it would be weird to be a self-aware, reasoning person who's nonetheless in the grip of that kind of perceptual distortion. Women also do dumb things for biology, and women also have plenty of our own weird animal instincts, but for the most part we don't have anything quite so trippy as "this specific flap of somebody else's flesh is now the literal most important thing in the whole world."
Blueberry
11hr ago
He goes through a TON of research literature
And is really really really well written! I read last week the easthunter substack about this topic (which is also linked by Scott in his post) and I got totally lost halfway through. But Scotts strength is to communicate complicated topics clearly. And he makes his opinion visible but still gives room for the other side without snark.
Exceptional blog post! Must have been a ton of work and I was not suprised that at the end he thanked a few other (presumably very smart) people who helped.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
11hr ago
Ooh, the unpleasantness jittery fuzz of felt versus the soothingly orderly corrugation of corduroy. Tags have never bothered me, but I used to have to cover my ears at basketball games. (To be fair, UNM’s B-ball arena “The Pit” is famously loud.)
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11hr ago
What makes something mechanistic isn't a label of "mechanistic" slapped on it, it's that you can actually demonstrate the gears by doing gear things with them: turn gear A, which turns gear B, and so C, and so D, and so E. Stop gear A, and gear E also stops. People can and have slapped a "mechanistic" label on the conscious human mind. That doesn't change the fact that they can't actually point to gears or do gear things with them when it comes to those minds. The distinction is crucial, and the blind spot created by ignoring it is considerable.
I feel like you are conflating neccesary and sufficient conditions. A non-materialist model of the universe can readily accommodate physical elements. But a materialist model can not readily accommodate the non-physical.
The strong arguments for heritability being purely genetic are premised on the assumption of a deterministic universe. The existence of non-material causes would cast doubt upon this premise, and by extension the conclusion.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
11hr ago
I actually think Olive will find their experience of puberty is more common around here than not. Guys for whom testosterone is overwhelming get driven to different interests than mostly polite arguments with strangers about ephemera.
Throwaway05
11hr ago
Thank you for sharing this!
I enjoyed that in a large part he seems to be sunk by the fact that he can't name his blood pressure medication.
This is vindicating to me, given the number of times I have asked a patient what life saving medicine they are on and gotten the response of "dunno."
erwgv3g34
11hr ago
Counterpoint: being attracted to women for stereotypically-masculine traits is childish and gay.
But then how do you explain tomboys, who are obviously the patrician choice for any straight man?
Thanks for the reply! You're a doctor right?
Hah yeah, I do think some doctors mentioned it and I resisted. Not really their fault, it's more of a general societal problem where we basically don't have a coherent narrative or set of practices for mediated our emotional and spiritual lives.
Yeahhhh this is where it gets gnarly man. Had a lot of doctors insist I needed surgery to be able to work again, which is NOT the case! I'm back to basically 100% functionality with no surgery whatsoever. I shudder to think of the damage that could've been done to me by these uhhh well meaning but foolish medical professionals.
I have already gone through the psychiatrist/therapist rabbit hole, while it did help some, ultimately coming to Christ was the best thing I have done so far. I trust things will continue to get even better than they are now. :)
More options
Context Copy link