Month: December 2016
What is pain? Like seriously, why do some things hurt?
In a biological sense, this is easy – pain is the experience of negative feedback. Evolution figured out that people who avoid sticking their limbs in fire live longer, so it programmed a system that made people have a bad reaction to sticking their limbs in fire.
In a philosophical sense, like, “how do we have the qualia of pain?”, who knows. But see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_asymbolia
tfw you learn to overcome the crass demands of flesh and blood
Huh. Does this exist for emotional pain as well?
It does! In general, the survival chances for social animals (which includes people) are much higher in groups, and people who feel emotional pain at e.g. rejection by their peers are less likely to exhibit behaviors that get them rejected even harder and more likely to exhibit behaviors that get them accepted again/for longer, which increases their chance of survival.
this is so erotic
Source, I say aggressively; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB6XAC-2Xvo
(Source: https://www.instagram.com/)
so Serious Catholics ™ usually wind up having nine or ten kids, which I think is a decent proxy for how many kids you have when you’re not allowed to use birth control and you have access to modern medicine
I observe that most people in the forties and fifties in the US did not have nine or ten kids
the infant mortality rate in 1912 was 150/1000, which is high, but it only accounts for ~one and a half of the missing kids, and anyway the infant mortality rate in the forties will be lower than that.
so what else was keeping the population low? other childhood deaths?
Coitus interruptus, rhythm method, condoms and diaphragms, extended breastfeeding, and spermicides of varying legality and effectiveness?
>extended breastfeeding
in the forties and fifties? the peak of “formula is ~scientific~, everyone should use formula instead of breastfeeding like some kind of animal”? when even today, after literally forty years of lactivism, women rarely breastfeed past the first birthday?
Possibly some factors impacting fertility and/or causing more spontaneous miscarriages early on, like worse nutrition, higher infection rates for various diseases and such? (I got the impression from somewhere that mothers having infections, even very mild ones they might not notice all that much, are likely to cause miscarriages very early one.)
agreeable person/disagreeable person is the best pairing
the relatives were watching a transmisogynistic and anti-otherkin episode of south park. I, an agreeable person, bitched to my friends online. @uncrediblehallq, a disagreeable person, yelled at them until they turned it off
oh my god this is such a good lifehack. I need to try that sometime.
Note to self.
Third response
This post is my third response to purplesagefem, concerning this post of hers. It’s very late – my apologies for that. A lot of real life stuff happened and required my time and energy, and also I was lazy/more inclined to do things that were more fun.
it is really striking how often TERF statements about what psychological traits mean that trans women are “not really women” would imply that my cisgender female friends are also “not really women”
the strongest form of this argument ofc is that trans women are an identifiable group who are different from the cis female norm in terms of e.g. tendency to be programmers; we recognize that outliers exist, but perhaps if a group is entirely outliers it needs to be a different category entirely
otoh, there are certainly identifiable groups that my cisgender female friends fall into as well. one could go as coarse-grained as “queer” or “crazy” or “weird nerd” or as fine-grained as “effective altruist” or “rationalist” or “STEM major at Stanford”. and yet very few TERFs seem committed to the claim that cisgender queer crazy weird nerd women who majored in STEM are not really women.
it is actually hard to make claims about the personality traits and past experiences of 3.5 billion people?
Omphaloskeptomai 