Slate Star Scratchpad
Month
@shitifindon: Somehow I managed to give Merlin my nose
Me: Polyamory is mysterious and amazing
K: I was trying that FaceApp thing earlier today with photos of everyone we know. It looks pretty good. Except for some reason when I try to do the “hot” filter on you, it replaces you with a totally different-looking person.
Me: Ha ha, very funny.
K: No, I’m serious. (she shows me, and this turns out to be 100% true)
actually upon reflection there should be a tradition at the Free Speech Festival that the keynote speech is always given to someone who’s going to argue that the festival is morally wrong and at least one of the participants should be censored
I mean hashtag everyone I know on tumblr and especially all the atheists I respect have started casually/competitively invoking Christian and Jewish mythology like the Renaissance did Greek and Roman, that’s interesting
Interesting observation in context of this from Robin Hanson yesterday:
Religions often expose children to a mass of details, as in religious stories. Smart children can be especially engaged by these details because they like to show off their ability to remember and understand detail. Later on, such people can show off their ability to interpret these details in many ways, and to identify awkward and conflicting elements.
Even if the conflicts they find are so severe as to reasonably call into question the entire thing, by that time such people have invested so much in learning details of their religion that they’d lose a lot of ability to show off if they just left and never talked about it again. Some become vocally against their old religion, which lets them keep talking and showing off about it. But even in opposition, they are still then mostly defined by that religion.
Related to the “toxic masculinity” discourse from the other day:
Today I had to go to a committee meeting on doctor burnout. According to a survey, a lot of doctors in one of our departments felt overworked and burnt out, and the committee was supposed to come up with suggestions.
The committee was mostly administrators, mostly female, and although they didn’t use the exact phrase “toxic masculinity”, they talked about “macho culture” a lot. I think their theory was that male doctors had a macho culture where they felt like they didn’t need to take any time for self-care, and they shouldn’t speak up about excessive workload, and they had to look perfect or else they would lose their aura of invincibility. And that having to be this way all the time produced burnout.
So then I, as the doctor representative at the meeting, got up and said that I knew a lot of the doctors in this department, I’d talked to them a lot, and they all said the same thing. They would all love to take some time off for self-care, but there were too many patients and not enough doctors to deal with them, and if any one of them took extra time off, then one of their equally overworked colleagues would have to work even more hours covering for them.
The reason they “weren’t complaining” was that they had already complained to every administrator they could think of, and the administrators had said stuff like “you shouldn’t just complain, you have to be proactive in coming up with a solution” and refused to devote extra resources to the problem.
I said that doctors were really good at complaining about things, and really some of the best complainers-about-things you will ever meet, but that they weren’t going to keep banging their heads against the wall when nobody listened to them and there was no good solution.
The administrators thanked me for my input and went back to talking about macho culture.
More Wikipedia:
Pope Benedict IX, born Theophylactus of Tusculum in Rome, was Pope on three occasions between October 1032 and July 1048.
Aged approximately 20 at his first election, he is one of the youngest popes in history. He is the only man to have been Pope on more than one occasion and the only man ever to have sold the papacy.
Wikipedia on Pope John XX:
Due to a confusion over the numbering of popes named John in the 13th century, there was no John XX.
On Pope John XXI:
After his death, it was rumored that John XXI had actually been a necromancer.
More Wikipedia:
Pope Benedict IX, born Theophylactus of Tusculum in Rome, was Pope on three occasions between October 1032 and July 1048.
Aged approximately 20 at his first election, he is one of the youngest popes in history. He is the only man to have been Pope on more than one occasion and the only man ever to have sold the papacy.
I follow dozens of people online ranging from centrists to communists to alt-right to libertarians, and I haven’t seen a single person who supports the latest strikes on Syria. But all of them have been posting articles about how worrying it is that “the mainstream” supports the strikes.
I’m really curious what I’m unintentionally selecting for here.
People who follow 1000+ Twitter accounts - what does this even mean? Do you spend your entire day reading Twitter? Do you mute half of the people you supposedly follow? Do you separate them into “actually read” lists and “never really read” lists? Or does Twitter have some functionality which only gives you the top 0.1% of everyone’s tweets so that you don’t see any more tweets than anyone else?
I might have been misinterpreting this, but I think the guy I was talking to about statistics today thought the Law Of Large Numbers affected individual cases.
Like, if you roll a dice a thousand times, the thousandth roll is practically certain to be either a three or a four.
“Senator Lieberman said that during the 2000 presidential campaign, the secret service made sure that no one knew where he was staying in each city, and it seemed to work well, yet somehow whenever he arrived at his hotel there would be a kosher meal waiting for him from the local chabad house”
What the hell chabad
Chabad is magic.
I once took a riverboat to Luang Prabang, an isolated town in the middle of the jungle in Southeast Asia, and as soon as I stepped onto the dock some Chabad people came up to me, told me I looked Jewish, and asked if I was going to Shabbat services that night.
people who are very angry about the phrase “toxic masculinity”: what does the phrase “toxic masculinity” mean to you?
(I would very much appreciate not being super angry/offended in your answer, because the reason I’m confused is that a lot of the times when you guys talk about it I get that you’re really mad but it’s hard to understand why)
Toxic masculinity can be divided into two distinct things:
If you bite a guy and you die, that’s poisonous masculinity.
If a guy bites you and you die, that’s venomous masculinity.
I wouldn’t say I’m very angry, but it annoys me.
I understand it as meaning “being violent, being macho, having an honor culture where you have to avenge slights, being protective/jealous about women, thinking being a sissy is the worst thing in the world, etc”
A small part of my objection is that it can have a bailey of “in various ways that stereotypically-masculine behaviors/norms differ from stereotypically-feminine behaviors/norms, the stereotypically masculine ones are toxic and the stereotypically feminine ones are good.” It seems to me that there are dichotomies like individualism rather than communalism, stoicism rather than emotion, nonconformism rather than conformism, assertiveness rather than submissiveness, dignity rather than not-caring-about-dignity, a feeling of responsibility to protect others versus looking out for yourself - that it would be really easy to map onto toxic masculinity if you wanted. I’m not saying that if I phrase it as “assertiveness rather than submissiveness” anyone would read that phrase and so “oh, that’s bad, it’s toxic masculinity”. I’m saying that in real life there are ambiguous behaviors which, if you’re being assertive when someone else wants you to be submissive, they can round it off to “macho aggressiveness” and accuse you of toxic masculinity, and so have a social superweapon behind them..
But a bigger part is just that the whole phrase seems calculated to maximally offend and marginalize men. Imagine that everyone used the phrase “toxic femininity” to refer to causing drama,
being overly emotional,
gossiping, being weak, insisting other people take care of you, and other stereotypically feminine-coded bad behaviors - but there was no such phrase as “toxic masculinity” and people would get horribly offended if you tried to invent it. To me this would seem obviously calculated to pathologize women and identify the whole essence of being feminine with extreme versions of negative stereotypes. Well….
What the fuck
“you don’t get this thing required for 90% of jobs if you don’t agree to go tens of thousands into debt”
“Emanuel said the plan is a continuation of the city’s efforts to provide more access to higher education, including free community college for students with a B average or better.”
I mean that’s nice and all but what about the kids without a B average or better dude. especially since they won’t be earning nearly as many scholarships???
the distinguished mr. emanuel continues to prove himself a fucking ghoul.ending homelessness in your city by arresting homeless small brain tomograph
ensuring universal healthcare access by requiring everyone to purchase insurance shining Indigo Child brain tomograph
ensuring college access by refusing to graduate anyone who doesn’t get into college galactic buddha body
I’ve been complaining about escalating “you’re not allowed to do X without going to college” for a while, but even I would never have predicted X as “graduate from high school”.
So yup, this is a new low.
I was creating micronations fifteen years before these guys ever heard the word. These people don’t control their land, have no infrastructure, and haven’t even adopted a constitution yet. There’s nothing interesting about their project and how they got the media to pay so much attention to them I don’t know.
If you like micronations, look at Hutt River, Sealand, or Seborga. Even the less serious ones like Atlantium have cultures, civil societies, and some history.
Yes.
Not really. I don’t believe in anything supernatural. I think “we can’t disprove it” is somewhere between “technically true” and “meaningless”. In a Bayesian framework, no claim (other than purely logical ones) can ever reach 100% proof, but we can get arbitrarily close with more evidence. I don’t think we can ever be literally 100% sure there’s no God, but at that level the same is true of Bigfoot.
(I think there’s probably more chance of God existing than Bigfoot existing, but I don’t think the philosophy and math we would use to think about the two problems is different)
I’m pretty skeptical of this area, but it’s a thought.
AskReddit stories. My favorites are the ones that are the ones that go “Tell us about incredibly defective people in domain X”, like “Lawyers, what was the dumbest client you ever had?” or “Wedding planners, who was the worst couple you ever encountered?”
Here, now it can be your guilty pleasure too:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/4v8p30/teachers_of_reddit_what_is_the_most_ridiculous/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/5kxqwa/divorce_lawyers_of_reddit_what_things_do_clients/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/4xbu6s/professors_of_reddit_what_were_the_worst_papers/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/5l3dsr/doctorsnurses_of_reddit_what_is_the_most_obvious/
Someone said bromantane has been linked to dementia but I never checked to see if it was true. Selank and Semax have been used for ages in Eastern Europe and nobody’s noticed any problems, so if they’ve got side effects they’re subtle or very-long-term. I have no good effectiveness data except my nootropics survey, where Selank and Semax at least seem pretty good. I don’t know too much about the others. My impression is those two are still the best vendors.
Still running a nuclear base, probably. Things haven’t changed that much.
I assume you mean “one true cause”?
Right now my total wild guess is something like “level of neurogenesis mediated by BDNF, which for some reason AMPA excitation can short-term compensate for”, but I don’t know. I tried to do a “much more than you wanted to know”-style review on this, but I gave up in disgust at how little I could figure out.
Keep in mind that a lot of doctors are the actual researchers whose studies I’m merely reporting on. I appreciate your support and compliments but I don’t think they’re entirely warranted here. The competition is pretty stiff.
The other reason why the answer is ‘no’ is because I intend to keep all of that stuff totally de-linked from my real identity.
I can’t think of any right now, will reblog later if they come to mind.
Well, apparently you weren’t kidding: https://www.betabrand.com/mens-business-suit-onesie-hybrid.html
I think the intersection between people who have the balls to wear this, and people who would want to wear this, is pretty low. I’m tempted to buy it just for kicks, but not for $378.
The period of grief sounds good. I’d never heard about imagining the other person exhibiting bad traits and I’m not sure what to think about it.
Also, if you’re the person I think you are, *hugs*.
I don’t know if I’m increasingly recognizable. SSC traffic has stayed almost the same for the past few years. My coworkers have figured out that something is up, but I don’t think any of them have found my actual blog yet and if they have they haven’t told me about it which is fine with me.
I find Zuckerberg the most annoying of the Big Silicon Valley Tech People, but compared to most of our other options, fine, whatever.
I tried this a while ago and the results weren’t great. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/30/utility-weight-results/ . For example, men expected women to have a much lower quality of life than they did, but women didn’t expect men to have any higher quality of life than their own. How would you convert that into a single weight?
Leisure time.
Being anti-Semitic is bad, but being a group selectionist is beyond the pale.
It’s a bunch of obvious overhyped recommendations, but since most people don’t take obvious overhyped recommendations, having some kind of government-NGO partnership to make everyone aware of them and hammer them in can sometimes be really beneficial. I notice one of their recommendations is “stop smoking”, and that’s not especially novel but we have a lot of stop-smoking interventions that work and don’t get used, so if all they do is cluster bomb some area with smoking-cessation best-practices it’s going to be better than nothing.
I think it’s probably the future of relationships, just because most non-religious people can’t produce a coherent case for monogamy except “think of the children”, and most people will very reasonably say “well, I’m not planning on having children for a while so I’ll be poly for now”. It also seems like nonstandard relationships getting more accepted is a trend (gays, interracial marriage, etc) so I guess I should bet on the trend continuing. I’m not sure there’s a real dichotomy between “genuinely in love with many people” and “wants to be promiscuous”. For example, I became poly because my girlfriend at the time was poly and it would have been weird to have a mono person in a relationship with a poly person. Then I continued because why not.
I don’t know. I feel like there’s a weird immune system for this kind of thing, in that there are a couple of people obviously trying this, and they *are* kind of being successful within their own clades, and the rest of us kind of pick up this weird aura from them and avoid them. My go-to examples of this would be Scott Adams and Mike Cernovich, both of whom are successful but both of whom almost seem like parodies of themselves.
People report the same sort of thing with pickup artists. They’re very successful among the female equivalent of the people who buy Mike Cernovich books, and everyone else just sort of ignores them and finds them vaguely discomfiting.
There’s obviously the possibility that if there’s a level above that which is manipulating us successfully we might not know about it, but I feel like there would have to be some middle levels that I just barely detect, and I’m not sure I see them.
“LSD makes you hallucinate” is nonsystematized anecdotal evidence. I don’t know if anyone’s ever done a placebo-controlled study on it, but even if they have that sure isn’t the reason why we believe it’s true.
That having been said, obviously this is susceptible to the placebo effect, selection bias of who posts these things, and half a dozen other confounders.
I tend to be grudgingly accepting of anecdotal evidence when it reports a very strong effect (like LSD), when almost everyone agrees about it (like LSD), and when there’s no better way of getting the information.
I will also accept it if there’s a high prior. For example, I recently checked the side effects of a new medication that hadn’t been out that long yet, and which didn’t officially report many side effects, and found forum after forum full of people saying that they took it and it made them vomit. A medication making people vomit wouldn’t be the most unprecedented thing in the world, there’s not a lot of reason for people to lie about it, I don’t see the same thing about other medications, and it seems pretty consistent.
There’s a sense in which I trust this kind of thing more than a study done by a drug company with p = 0.04999 after multiple comparisons. And better than trusting either is to treat them as different modes of evidence and try to use them to double-check each other and get a synoptic picture.
There’s also a thin line here. Is http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/01/2016-nootropics-survey-results/ real science or broscience? What if it had been done by a random guy who didn’t have a blog and posted on Longecity?
Consider the possibility that you have obsessive-compulsive disorder.
- if they do not like that you research your disorder/s and treatment/s
- if they do not explain the reason/s behind certain treatment/medication that they are prescribing you
- if they are reluctant/refuse to let you access your medical records
- if their first response to symptoms is medication without any talk therapy
- if they say they “don’t believe in therapy”
- if they say they “don’t believe in medication”
- if they insist on seeing your parent/legal guardian without you being present
- if they tell you that there are no other treatment available if you complain about your current treatment/medication not working/having unmanageable side effects
- if they diagnose you without explaining how they came to that diagnosis, what it entails, and which treatments you have at your disposal
- if they fall asleep during a session (you’re laughing but it happened, several times, and i’m not boring)
- if they assure you that you cannot have [insert disorder here] because you are too young/wealthy/poor/fat/skinny/smiling/old/whatever bs (the only valid reasons for not having a disorder is if you do not meet the minimum criteria for it, age/body/ethnicity/etc are not criteria)
- if they tell you that you obviously do not want/are not ready to get help (that’s a super abusive technique, would only see this as a valid comment to make if you are pressured into seeing them by someone who has authority over you)
- if they insist on you continuing to take a medication despite the side effects very negatively affecting you (for example: if you are recovering from an ED and you get the “gaining weight” side effect and that is very triggering to you)
- if they are flippant about/disregard your feelings
i’m probably forgetting a lot. feel free to add.if you go in explaining that you are concerned you have certain symptoms and they try to “reassure” you that they do not think you have [some scary disorder] instead of looking at it neutrally and having an open and fair discussion about it and consider your words seriously.
if they use vague language about treatment options that they aren’t willing to elaborate on, or provide specific plans of action for. (ideally, with most conditions and illnesses, they should give you a variety of options and freedom to have input regarding your treatment options, hear out your opinions and concerns, answer questions about them etc.)
they use outdated language for your condition or are not aware of or concerned with recent laws and regulations regarding them. (for example, they use terms like “multiple personality disorder” instead of DID, etc.)
if you are trans, they consider your identity to be a delusion or other kind of symptom. (similar goes for orientation probably.)
if they consider you standing up for yourself to be irrational/acting out/being manipulative
caveat: both me and a friend were banned from doing research by our therapists. This was the correct move for people who use intellectual research as an avoidance strategy for the work of feeling unpleasant emotions. But if that’s not you than being banned from research probably is a bad sign..
The only one that really bothers me here is:
they use outdated language for your condition or are not aware of or concerned with recent laws and regulations regarding them. (for example, they use terms like “multiple personality disorder” instead of DID, etc.)
DSM is on a constant crusade to change the name of every condition, every edition, to something silly that no one will ever remember. “Dementia” is now “Major Neurocognitive Disorder”. “Stuttering” is “Childhood Onset Fluency Disorder”. Can you imagine using those in real life?
Me: “I’m so sorry, Ms. Smith, but your grandmother seems to be developing an early Major Neurocognitive Disorder.”
Patient: “…a what?”
Me: “Did I fucking childhood onset fluency disorder?”
Yeah I would agree that slightly outdated terminology doesn’t always equal bad. My psychologist, who is really good, wrote ‘Asperger’s’ in my notes; everyone still understands what he means even though officially it’s all just ASD now.
They might be trying to make themselves understood, because more people know the term that’s been around longer. Or trying to avoid misunderstandings - I know someone who works in schools and is often involved with initial referral for ASD diagnoses who will still say Asperger’s because a lot of parents will hear ‘autism’ and think of nonverbal kids with very high support needs, so parents might be more scared than they need to be, and might think ‘well that couldn’t possibly be my kid’. For her, it’s a useful term, even if it isn’t maximally precise or correct.
Also age can be a criterion for official diagnosis of some conditions. I don’t know if it’s still the case, but weight used to be part of the diagnostic criteria for some EDs - like if you’re anorexic in every regard but it hasn’t quite made you dangerously skinny enough yet it’s technically a different official diagnosis. Which may well be bullshit, but it definitely was (and may still be) in the official criteria.
I think that’s just nitpicking though. Meeting every criteria of an illness except for weight or age or something is still no excuse for a doctor to dismiss you or your symptoms. It just might mean the paperwork has to say something a bit different on it. (Though, coming from a country with the amazing NHS, I don’t know what that might mean for insurance purposes. I’ve heard enough horror stories from the US that I’d totally believe it if someone told me their insurance would cover their treatment for Anorexia but not the NOS category they get put into if they aren’t quite underweight enough. In that situation I would have to hope that a sympathetic doctor would ‘accidentally’ read the scales wrong, but I don’t know if I could blame one that didn’t if they stood to lose their job.)
Further digression under cut:
There are two reasons for age criteria that I know of.
First, a lot of age criteria say “must be at least this age”, so that children don’t receive a stigmatizing diagnosis that stays with them their entire life. Antisocial personality disorder is like this. People tend to write off people with ASPD and not trust them and basically think of them as unredeemable, and so if you’re a kid, they’re supposed to give you the benefit of the doubt for a while and see if you mellow out as you grow older. There are a couple of things like this.
Other criteria say “must start before this age”. That’s because the conditions are usually genetic, or at least appear very early as soon as the person has developed enough to manifest them. Autism is a good example. If you’re 100% neurotypical up to age 25, and then you start having trouble speaking and dealing in social situations, I don’t know what happened to you but it’s not autism. Sometimes the relationship is a little bit weaker - for example, the vast majority of schizophrenias in men start between 15-30, but a couple will start when people are older. Unclear whether this is just variability or whether they’re two separate diseases.
Childhood ADHD and adult ADHD don’t predict each other very well, and this whole area is in flux, but the original theory behind it was something like the above.
Does anyone else have a mental thing where unkind words directed at others feel like they are directed at you? Specifically I have an ex who used to refer to other people with as “fat / stupid / dumb / crazy bitches / cunts” and even though he never called me those things (I think?) it feels like he did?
To a lesser extent, whenever I read a complaining article I feel like I have to either be in the complaining group or the group being corrected. Which makes it feel like a lot of people online are yelling at me who aren’t doing that at all. But like, since I’m not making their complaint I must be it’s cause?
I feel like I have something vaguely similar, but much more minor. With me it’s more like “I could easily have ended up doing the thing you’re insulting other people for doing, even though I’ve never done it. So you’re practically insulting me.”
Fucking this. I am acutely aware of how easily I could have been a neckbeard, if not for an accident of biology.
Yeah, I totally get this.
A few days ago there was an article claiming men were becoming more traditional, and I got angry because I thought it was ignoring a similar trend that women were becoming more traditional, but someone found a source saying it was just men, and so I deleted the post until I could look into it more.
Philip Cohen (who I consider a trustworthy source) has now looked into it more, and his conclusions is that the data are inherently confusing and it could go either way. See https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2017/04/02/kids-these-days-really-know-how-to-throw-off-a-narrative-on-gender-and-families/
Don’t ask me, I ended up going to an expensive college that I didn’t really like and didn’t end up getting much out of.
This site looks pretty interesting: http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/05/20/313985038/is-this-any-way-to-pick-a-college
Persistent depressive disorder is definitely a thing. But keep in mind that psychiatry is really loose about diagnosing “depression” and the existing diagnosis probably catches a lot of people who just have gloomy personalities or bad life situations. The cases that seem most clearly to be a unique disorder outside normal variation also tend to be the cases that are most episodic (although some of that might be tautological since it’s more striking when a usually happy person becomes depressed than otherwise).
Do you have any kind of relevant college degree or position you could use as leverage? If not, well, how does a person without relevant degree or position go about affecting policy in any field? My impression is it’s pretty hard.
Your best bet might be to join some kind of organization like ASAN or NAMI, but more tailored to whatever particular interests you have. Or maybe you can ask someone from these organizations how they do it.
If you’re willing to change your life trajectory for this, I think the accepted way is to go into public health, then do studies that prove whatever you’re suggesting, then trumpet the results of those studies (if the studies don’t prove what you’re suggesting, I believe the tradition is to keep doing them with worse and worse methodology until you can torture them into saying that they do).
For example, if you think psychiatrists are too mean, you can do a study where you ask patients whether their psychiatrist is mean or not, and then if you find they are, you publish somewhere important, present it at a lot of conferences, and become an expert in psychiatric meanness who gives TED talks.
Don’t ask me, I ended up going to an expensive college that I didn’t really like and didn’t end up getting much out of.
This site looks pretty interesting: http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/05/20/313985038/is-this-any-way-to-pick-a-college
Pants that look like jeans, pants that look like dress pants
15 minutes one way.
I think it’s useful for historical purposes, and if somebody tries to genuinely rewrite history in order to attack someone else or cover up a crime.
But if someone retracts something or just otherwise wants to remove something that’s causing them grief or dogpiling, I don’t think it’s polite to try to preserve it so you can attack and dogpile them more.
Ooooh, look at the fancy well-adjusted person who does house chores. You don’t have to brag about it :P
As for commuting, I’m not good at doing distracting things and driving at the same time.
My heuristic for phenibut is that it’s basically the same Xanax. It works, but there’s a high chance (albeit not 100% and with lots of room for individual variation) that if you use it too frequently or at too high doses you will build tolerance and get addicted and it will be a nightmare.
According to my nootropics survey, about 15% of phenibut users developed a tolerance and 3% developed addictions. Those numbers seem really really low to me and anecdotally many more people report this.
Your dose of 1.5g twice a week is very high. I don’t know how long you’ve been using it like that, but I suspect if you keep it up you’re going to get tolerance at the very least and maybe worse. Using it recreationally with alcohol is a bad idea, which you seem to already know. I’m not 100% sure on this, but I think I remember from medical school that if something is a bad idea you should stop doing it.
A psychiatrist in my hospital gave a presentation about how one of their patients started taking phenibut and committed suicide a little later. He was really convinced that the phenibut caused the suicide. I think this is completely ridiculous and a version of the old “if my patient does anything at all unusual, then every single bad thing in their life that follows must be the fault of them doing the unusual thing” heuristic, but the patient was apparently pretty healthy before and he was pretty convinced.