Assorted Mumblings

[lucy8675309]

OK Tumblr Geriatric Ward, let’s talk about your posture-

there are things you should be doing now to prevent yourself from starting to look like 🥀

Why does it matter? Future you would like to avoid the pain, limited motion, and fall risk that goes along with worsening posture.

What’s the focus?

1. Keep the flexibility in your spine

2. Stretch the muscles in the front

3. Strengthen the muscle in the back

Here are some simple things you can do daily while sitting and when you get up to go into the bathroom or the kitchen

Keep the flexibility by doing these repeated movements: 10 repetitions several times a day

The goal is to give yourself a double or triple chin. Keep your nose pointing forward, don’t let it tip up or down

Thoracic extension- use a chair with a seat back that comes up to the level of your shoulder blades. Try to bend back over the top of the chair without arching away from the seat back and without extending your neck. If the pressure from the top of the chair is uncomfortable you can place a towel there

Stretch the muscles in the front by using a door frame. This one will feel good afterwards

If this isn’t enough of a stretch you can do one side at a time. If you have the right arm up step forward with the right foot and turn slightly to the left. Then do it on the other side.

Strengthen the muscles in the back by squeezing your shoulder blades together for a count of 10 and then repeating 10 times. You can do this several times a day Hint: Don’t lift your shoulder blades up

There are lots more exercises for strengthening your back muscles but this is a good starting point and easy to do. I like doing it while driving

Tips:

Do the best you can

If it hurts stop

Envision future you saying thank you each time you do one of the exercises

[brightlotusmoon]

NOTE: I can do most of these with the cerebral palsy. In fact, a lot of these little exercises are automatically part of my physical therapy. My problem is I already have hyperlordosis, spine arthritis, and cervicogenic headache. These have helped me at least try to have a posture.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

I CANNOT STRESS ENOUGH HOW GOOD THIS ADVICE IS

[mckitterick]

^ Attention Writers ^

[gothiccharmschool]

Speaking as one of the citizens of the Tumblr Geriatric Ward, this is an excellent list of exercises.

[musketry]

You can do eldercare for yourself today!

[bambamramfan]

HIVLI

I've seen in the rationalistsphere a lot of dividing people into binary personality models, that are useful and different from the more popular stereotypes (though obviously as simplistic as any binary model.) High decouplers vs low decouplers is a really big one, though also high agency vs low agency. (These descriptions are usually "high x vs low x" with implicit emphasis that the "high" group is better.)

I'm going to add one binary that I think has not gotten nearly enough attention, though you can decide whether I favor the high or low half.

High Impulsiveness

We are used to impulsiveness as just a straight up bad word, like someone who lacks the discipline to resist temptation. Really it's not even about people, but more about moods we can fall into and should be avoided.

I think that's bollocks - not only are some people more impulsive, but it's not even an entirely *bad* thing and has some real positive contributions.

An impulsive person acts on an idea without thinking about it a lot. It could be the decision to throw the first punch in a fight, it could be kissing someone without worrying if it will be reciprocated, it might be deciding to throw a giant party just because, it might be buying a cool new jacket from the leather store, it might be pivoting your business into an entirely new sector, and it very very often is tweeting something on the spur of the moment.

And let's be honest - we love some of the impulsive people in our life. We love how they drop everything for us in a moment of need, we love how they surprise us with a spontaneous gift, we love how they are the first to say I love you. This impulsiveness is hella charismatic because all of their actions feel genuine and powerful and they just do a lot more actions showing their affection than people who think about it too much.

A high impulse person never lies because they believe what they are saying at the time. It might contradict what they said in the past, or what they will follow through on in the future, or even what the state of the world actually is, but they could sure as hell pass a lie detector test saying it right now.

Elon Musk is famous as a high impulse person, boldly creating new companies and leading industries because he decided HE CAN DO IT and doesn't waste any time thinking about the reasons it's not feasible.

On a whim, he bought a $1 million sports car and this is what happened to it:

FWIW, this was on the way to signing a major deal with Thiel.

My contention is that it is no coincidence that the man who reinvented the electric car industry and private space travel, completely wrecked his uninsured million dollar car trying to impress another billionaire. These are two sides of the same coin.

Low Impulsiveness

I think of the epitome of High Impulse vs Low Impulse is Trump vs Clinton in 2016. If you ask a LI person something, they will want to pause and consider the answer - is it true, does it accord with the rest of the world, will it upset anyone, are there any necessary qualifications on this?

To the media viewer, this looks like a calculating liar who is choosing what truth you should get to hear. The more "honest" person was the one "shooting from the gut" and answering immediately and unambiguously. Which answer actually turned out to be "true" is something that would be lost until the question was long forgotten.

A low impulse person wants to plan out what they are doing, what are the risks, how to mitigate them, even if they succeed one time will they be able to consistently stick to replicating this. (Hillary and Obama have been married one time each, even as we both have seen the tribulations of those marriages. Trump and Musk have been married, what, 8 times total?)

Some people reading this will just say this is a new label on high agency vs low agency people. And there is *some* correlation - a lot of high impulse people (again like Trump or Musk) are very high agency, and many low impulse people can be depressed, defeatist and think nothing is worth doing (usually myself.)

But I don't think that's accurate, these traits aren't the same thing. You can be high impulse / low agency - that's usually a depressive that lashes out at everything around them. And low impulse / agency is the stereotype of the master planner who has figured out exactly how everything will go.

You might say that high impulse people have higher VARIANCE than low impulse people, and the effect we're actually measuring is variance. I don't think that's what's going on at the personal level, so it's not useful for describing the people involved and why they do things and causality.

But the point about high variance is that high impulse people fuck up a lot. They lead to ALL SORTS OF MISTAKES and costs that the low impulse people justifyingly grumble about. Which is why our prisons are mostly full of high impulse people (but then so are our performing stages.)

For a long time, what it took to get ahead at the highest levels of power, was iterated successes, and that weeded out a lot of high-impulse people. HI people would fuck up eventually, and they'd go to jail or lose all the money or piss off the wrong people or lose their reputation and they'd stop advancing. Which is how we got a stereotype of national leaders as wishy washy grey emotionless blobs - those were the only ones who could survive a gauntlet of potential mistakes in the press or gossipy political games.

We've clearly entered a new era where downsides are limited, and enough success can overcome any failure. If, as a business leader, you can get 10% of the people to LOVE you, they can buy your stock and buoy you, even as 90% of people hate every decision you make.

We're seeing its effects the most in politics - Trump can't do anything to lose the confidence of his people so long as the other people hate him, so "shooting from the hip" every second of every day works wonders for him, even as it leads to meaningless policy and complete denial of reality.

But we see its growth in the media with independent substacks and other influencer platforms. So long as you can never be truly knocked out, the strategy of "gamble everything, keep trying to get attention" beats out most of the planners and low impulsiveness.

I think this is a bad thing, but it's not because I exclusively prefer Low Impulse behavior. HI people are super fun. But our leadership needs some combination of people with "emotional spontaneity" and people doing "thoughtful engagement with reality", and drifting too much in the former direction has fairly obvious disastrous consequences.

[drowning-in-decay-deactivated20]

I should be singing sea shanties somewhere with the lads.

[big-block-of-cheese-day]

I’m quite unsure what the 243rd “Warren was the obviously correct choice, so any deviation from that choice must reveal some sort of flaw with those who think differently” thinkpiece hopes to accomplish. The entitlement displayed by these pieces breathtaking.

Sexism Is Other People

‘Electability.’ ‘Likability.’ ‘Authenticity.’ The 2020 Democratic primary has found many canny ways to make misogyny plausibly deniable.

[zexreborn]

Is there any wya to attribute an election loss to sexism without sounding entitled, in your eyes?

[big-block-of-cheese-day]

Perhaps, but the framing of nearly every Warren whinge starts from the premise that there is a “best” candidate and that’s determined by having the most detailed plans. Any concerns besides tabulating the number and complexity of those plans - electability and likability - is unfair.

Warren bitter-ender logic is Nice Guy TM logic: I put all of my policy coins in the democracy machine and I didn’t get my elective office, and that’s unfaaaaaaair.

Bottom line: The Warren campaign had the following theory of the campaign:

1) people want big structural change

2) The road to the nonwhite vote runs through Extremely Online activists, not traditional power brokers.

Both of these theories has proven incorrect, just like Sanders’ youth turnout wave that never came. Thus, she loses. With women. Among whites and nonwhites. In the north and the south. Where Hillary won and where she lost.

Warren was selling chili in a heatwave and her supporters think the problem is that people don’t think a woman can make good chili.

[big-block-of-cheese-day]

I Voted for Warren, My Husband Voted for Sanders, and I Feel Betrayed

Voting for a progressive woman felt like a chance so rare that it caused me to fume at my own husband for making a different decision.

You hath betrayed me by failing to agree. Not coming to the same conclusion as I did shows you did not take the choice seriously. Can’t you understand how much I overinvested my identity in this candidate and can’t you respect that?

She put her goddamn policy coins in the goddamn democracy machine, now where is my validation President, you sexist assholes?

[radiqueer]

one fairly common experience of gifted children is wishing for pain. wishing you had some great big horrible thing in your past so that you can justify the pain you’re in, and so that you’ll deserve help. it’s exhausting and it fucks you up and to anyone out there who feels like they haven’t suffered enough to get help: you’re allowed to want help. you’re in enough pain. you deserve to feel better

[lilliluminous]

[sunnyfuneral]

Gifted kids be like let me describe something it’s very common with anyone with mental illness but I’m going to connect it to me being very smart when I was six years old haha it’s sad that I’m not constantly validated in the way I was when I was in elementary school . there’s no reason you couldn’t have just said person with a mental illness but you said gifted kids cuz you don’t feel special anymore

[star-anise]

Uh… no.

Your argument doesn’t even hold up. You think this is about former Gifted kids being sad now because they’re not being treated like they were in elementary school, which was presumably better.

But the post was, “It’s common for Gifted children to experience deep psychological pain in elementary school.” As in, a lot of Gifted kids didn’t experience being held up as an example and praised a bunch as actually, you know… positive.

It’s not like you do anything to earn having a high IQ, any more than you earn being tall or having good eyesight. It’s just something that happens to you as you grow up. Sure, you might be able to reach things on high shelves, but you also smack your head into doorways. And from personal experience? When a teacher points you out as the only person in your grade 2 class to score perfectly on a test, fucking nobody wants to play with you at recess after.

Often growing up Gifted is just like childhood with any other neurodivergence—having social and emotional issues the people around you need to be experts to even realize you’re having trouble, much less know how to help you. A four-year-old’s parents don’t usually have to watch for “I just realized that everyone I love will inevitably die and I can’t reliably self-soothe myself when we drive away from Grandma’s, so I have NO emotional coping tools for this” meltdowns.

Oh, except there’s one difference: A lot of adults think that being intellectually smart means you will never have social problems, emotional problems, learning disabilities, or mental illnesses. So adults will literally actually say, “They’re a smart kid, they’ll figure it out” when the problem is… every other six-year-old hating you and you don’t know what you did.

Hence… the really common experience of wishing for some “real” cause of pain, because finally people would recognize that you may he a seven year old that all the grownups think is just great, but you still have really big problems you don’t know how to deal with and you really need some fucking help.

[sunnyfuneral]

Lol. I have ADHD and i felt all that in elementary. Wow its almost like the school system is trash to everyone and you being gifted does not make you suffer anymore than anyone else.

[star-anise]

You… you do realize that the vast majority of children are neurotypical and mentally healthy, right? Like, neurodivergents of any sort are the minority of the population. Having ADHD, Giftedness, or any other brain weirdness is pretty unusual and most children go through their entire childhoods without ever once yearning for death.

Like Gifted kids do not seem to suffer more than kids with ADHD, Autism, depression, trauma, or whatever else. But all of those groups together definitely do suffer more than the majority of their peers.

[nonasuch]

Out of everyone I know as an adult who was labeled as Gifted as a kid, the vast majority, myself included, turned out to also be neurodivergent in some other way. tbh at this point I’m half-convinced that ‘gifted’ is a label that might as well mean ‘has a non-standard brain that, coincidentally, is optimized to do well on some standard measures of intelligence’

because it sure doesn’t seem to mean ‘baby genius who will do Great Things in adulthood’ no matter what the adults around us assumed or insisted

And one of our biggest sources of trauma was struggling due to our neurodivergence, while adults told us we were too smart to need their help.

[musketry]

And one of our biggest sources of trauma was struggling due to our neurodivergence, while adults told us we were too smart to need their help.

[khangi]

Reminder why I say the things I do on this blog. Stop trying to take our religious practices when we’ve barely legally had them for 40 years.

[big-block-of-cheese-day]

You can read this and be dumber for having read it.

The 1978 statute this is talking about is the American Indian Religious Freedom Act. This statute did not legalize Native American religious practices per se. Instead, it recognizes Native religious practices as deserving of religious liberty protections (without purporting to “legalize” anything or even recognizing previous illegality) and creates carve-outs where the religious practices conflict with facially unrelated federal law. For example, environmental protection law prohibits trade in the feathers of endangered animals like certain eagles. Those eagles are used in some ceremonies. The feathers were illegal, not the ceremony.

Most likely, when the environmental law was drafted, nobody in the room had ceremonial use on their radar. They knew about collectors and sport hunters and hobbyist taxidermists, and acted accordingly by banning the feathers.

Don’t misunderstand me: this law was an improvement over what came before. Impeding Native American religious practices is a bad outcome. Native American religions were repressed by any number of means, from forced removal from sacred sites to residential schools. Part of the emotional impact of the post was in conflating this with the 1978 law.

However… if you read OP without context and the story in your head is “this was illegal because it was banned by law until 1978,” you’re missing the important lesson, which means you learn the wrong lesson. One day, if you do a good job, you might have institutional power. This requires making decisions, not just pointing out the perfidity of your enemies. Even in the most progressive societies, conflicts will inevitably arise between competing access needs, and the people who lose will usually be the one with the least power. If you’re only on the lookout for bad, mean laws made by bad, mean colonizers, you miss things like this the same thing will happen again and again.

Don’t deny yourself an opportunity to get to know your world a little better. When you see something that really riles you up, do some research. That’s how anger becomes understanding.

[dagny-hashtaggart-deactivated20]

Basically: TFW your politics are still mostly progressive and you want to fight the good fight but also your fellow travelers seem to have converged on the idea that the best way to do that is to isolate themselves in social spheres full of constant low-grade psychological abuse that makes you wince and think a bit less of the people who propagate it even when it’s not directed at you

[slatestarscratchpad]

What's the most surprising thing you've learned as a psychiatrist?

How innocently people are awful at communication. I know the word “innocent” sounds out of place here, so let me explain what I mean.

(I’m going to use the example of a male patient, but it happens with both sexes.)

He will say “My wife keeps getting mad at me for no reason, I don’t know what to do”. I ask him for details. He says something like “I ask her when dinner will be ready and she just flips out at me”.

I suggest that we roleplay the conversation: I’ll pretend to be his wife, and he’ll talk to me the way he usually talks to her. It will go something like this:

ME: (in falsetto voice) Hi honey, welcome home!

HIM: Why isn’t dinner ready yet? What’s wrong with you? All I want is to have dinner ready when I get home, and you can never do it!

ME (no longer in falsetto voice, speaking normally): Wait, are you exaggerating this or is that how you normally talk to your wife?

HIM: That’s how I normally talk to my wife.

ME: And just to be clear, you’re confused why she gets angry when you talk to her that way, and you’re asking me to figure out this mystery, right?

HIM: Yes.

ME: And you didn’t exaggerate that at all, that’s definitely how you usually talk?

HIM: Yes.

ME: When I was pretending to be your wife, I felt attacked by the way you asked me if dinner was ready.

HIM: Why?

ME: Well, I wrote down what you said on my notepad here, and it was “Why isn’t dinner ready yet? What’s wrong with you? All I want is to have dinner ready when I get home, and you can never do it!” Do you think you could have asked this more like “Hi honey, when will dinner be ready?”

HIM: I’m afraid she wouldn’t take me seriously if I did that. She might just say something like “It’ll be ready later”, and then she wouldn’t know that I’m really hungry and really upset that she didn’t make it already.

ME: It sounds like dinner being ready on time is very important to you. Is there any way you can talk to your wife at some other point, like when you’re out on a date, let her know how important that is to you, and ask her if the two of you can come up with some system? Like maybe on days when she has lots of time, she can make dinner for you, and on days when she’s busy, she can let you know she won’t be making dinner and then you can bring some food home?

HIM:

It’s really surprising to me not just how many people are terrible communicators, but how many people, when asked to simulate their communication style in front of a psychiatrist, will be so innocent about how bad a communicator they are that they won’t try to hide it, they won’t try to change their answers in order to look better, they’ll just say things that are totally awful and offensive and then in all honesty ask me why I think their partner gets angry.

I assume there’s some cultural difference here, and maybe I’m the person who’s in the wrong in some subtle hard-to-understand way, but usually they tell me their wife miraculously stopped being temperamental and incomprehensible around the time they worked out some alternative dinner-assurance system besides yelling at her.

I guess this is another thing that surprises me, is how un-systematic some people are. If it were me, by the 50th time I yelled at my wife for not making dinner on time, I would be considering the hypothesis that there’s a better way to solve this than more yelling, but a lot of people can’t seem to figure that out.

Eliezer had a phrase I like, “technical solutions to human problems”, of which the classic example is that if you don’t like your partner making noise, instead of arguing with her about what’s appropriate, you get earplugs (I realize earplugs don’t always work well in real life, it’s just an example). I’ve heard some people debate whether this is really a good idea or not. But it seems like some of my patients are the total opposite end of the scale, so fixated on human solutions to human problems that they can’t imagine addressing any of their issues other than by yelling at the other person to change even louder than they were yelling before.

[musketry]

wow

[musketry]

I've had the quote “What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.” stuck in my head for the past month and a half.

[musketry]

I want there to be a TV series with two guys and one of them is gay and one of them is straight and they are housemates and *really* close friends in the way that usually makes people joke “these two characters are totally gay”. Except like, they *aren’t* in a sexual relationship. And there would be plot points like:  * The straight guy will wingmans for his gay friend and hijinx ensue.  * They try to start a D&D campaign but it falls apart under the weight of every dumb thing that only occasionally happens to D&D campaigns.  * The straight guy gets dumped and his gay friend takes him out to have fun and they just have a good time.  * One of them has a dental operation and then has to go get his car fixed and the other person has to translate for them. Also, the mechanic is trans--and really enjoys the relevant puns.  * One of their sisters gets sucked into a multi-level-marketing scheme and they are able to get her out of it. Basically, I want something that models good ways for dudes to help support each other and is a monument to the Power of Friendship.

[nequalszero]

Keep Others’ Identities Small

I really like Paul Graham’s advice to “keep your identity small” - to avoid making groups or positions part of your identity if you want to remain unbiased. But I often want to add to it “and keep other people’s identity small too”.

It really annoys me when the first thing someone does when they hear something they disagree with is to attribute an identity to the person who expressed the view that roughly correlates with the view in question (feminist, liberal, conservative, religious, libertarian, etc.). When people do this they almost invariably fail to engage with the actual claims that the other person is making. Instead, they engage with claims they think someone from that group would typically make or they dismiss the person’s claims because they come from “a member of group x”.

I’ve seen this happen on all sides. Think IQ is heritable? You must just be racist and/or sexist. Think implicit bias might hinder women’s careers? You must just be a dyed-in-the-wool feminist. Think abortion might be wrong? You must just be religious and anti-women. This makes it almost impossible to sincerely engage with the claims in question. So if you want to actually expose yourself to a variety of views, it seems better to engage with people’s statements directly and attribute as small an identity to them as possible.

[slatestarscratchpad]

Today I learned: there is Mongolian folk rock, and it is exactly what you would expect:

[marcusseldon]

Honestly I think the dating world would improve vastly for both men and women if women were socialized to initiate dates and sex much more frequently and aggressively.

[mindfulwrath]

I really hate to ask but do you know what options are available for someone who wants to talk about their mental health without it being bad enough to go to a therapist? Like, I've been struggling for a while but I'm not like an abuse survivor or attempted suicide or anything like that so I don't want to waste a therapists time that could be spent with someone who deserves it, was just wondering if you knew what someone could look into for that kinda situation.

The person you’re looking for is a therapist.

You don’t have to be traumatized or suicidal to need a therapist. In fact, there are plenty of people (the “worried well”) who aren’t mentally ill and see therapists–because life is difficult and stressful and confusing and sometimes you need an outside perspective from a trained professional. You aren’t “wasting a therapist’s time” just because you’re not the Most Traumatized or the Most Depressed or whatever whatever whatever. Therapists really like when the worried well come in because 1. money is money no matter who’s paying it, and 2. spending an hour talking about not-as-bad mental health concerns is a damn sight easier and more pleasant than spending an hour talking about the fallout from abuse or severe depression.

Therapists are there to help everyone. There is no “You Must Be This Fucked Up To Ride” line. I guarantee you, if therapists only treated severely ill people, they would burn out in a couple years and be unable to continue. Nobody wants to do only the hardest parts of the job, and the hardest parts aren’t the only parts that need doing.

There is no real shortage of therapists. Many people are unable to access therapy because of finances/insurance/social factors, but it’s not because there’s a shortage of therapists. You aren’t taking resources away from people who have it “worse.” If anything, you’re enabling therapists to help more people who have it “worse” by providing a buffer.

And, like, you need help. You wouldn’t be asking if you didn’t need it. Therapists are there to help.

The person you’re looking for is a therapist.

[wirehead-wannabe]

@gruntledandhinged are the claims about therapist supply here accurate?

[gruntledandhinged]

Omg yes. Also like, the ‘worried well’ are so, so great to talk to. It’s great to have a mix of Terrible Horrible Things and people who have Stuff That Kinda Sucks Right Now. That’s ideal!

[emolumentsclause-deactivated201]

If I never see someone responding to personal finance/budgeting advice with “Poverty is systemic and getting coffee less often/paying less for groceries won’t solve anything,” I am! Gonna! Scream!

Yes! Poverty is systemic. We all know this. But one of the fun things about growing up in poverty is that YOU DON’T LEARN HOW TO BUDGET OR SAVE MONEY. Nobody teaches you that shit when you grow up poor! Or, if they do, it’s a slapdash version of how to budget for poor people (so, like, groceries from the 99-cent store, getting the supersize meal because it’ll feed you for two meals) – not middle-class budgeting, obviously – so if/when you DO end up making more money, you have no idea what the fuck to do with it and a lot of unhealthy spending habits attached to/associated with never having steady sources of income before. So yeah, actually, piggy bank saving/simple budgeting instructions and honest personal finance advice (from third parties who won’t profit, not from banks looking to take advantage of people who don’t know what to do with their money) is actually hugely important. Teaching poor people how to budget is important, because it’s an adult skill you just don’t learn if you’re not specifically taught.

There’s two different things at play here! Yes, poverty is a system. Income inequality is a system. But it’s not saying “poor people shouldn’t have nice things” to suggest that budgeting and personal finance are things that everyone should have the opportunity to learn about, and I’m tired of seeing that strawman pop up everywhere. I grew up in a goddamn trailer park and have no idea how personal finance works. I’ve only recently decided that 2017 is the year that I get my financial situation in order and it’s amazing how much I don’t know about finance, just because I never had the opportunity to learn the differences between different retirement accounts and how to save money. Please stop suggesting that basic household income math is oppressive. It’s not. It’s a skill that those of us who grew up in poverty or close to it have to be lucky to learn.

[starfieldcanvas]

the more posts i see like this, the more hyper-aware i become of how tumblr functions as a giant dialectic machine. this post dismisses the “i am oppressing poor people when i say they need to learn how to budget” line as a strawman at least once. but for a long time that was pretty much the only context in which i heard budgeting advice aimed at the poor: the whole fox news style “why do poor people own refrigerators” and “eating healthy is actually very cheap, if you can afford to invest several hundred dollars in food and cooking implements all at once!” and so on. 

then there was The Dialectic of “poor people deserve nice things”/”a refrigerator or cell phone or car is not a nice thing if you need it to live” plus “being poor is expensive” and “here is a chart showing that people are poor because of health care and housing cost increases not petty budgeting problems.” and that was all great! and true and based on real data! 

but as this post rightfully points out, that response ossified into a kneejerk hostility toward any and all budgeting advice for the poor, which is terrifically unhelpful.

you know what it sounds like? tumblr’s mental health discourse.

start with mainstream concepts of mental health treatment: “exercise! meditate! have you tried kale smoothies! just stop stressing out so much!” all that nonsense. neurodivergent tumblr mocks those tropes to the skies, and in the process they find solidarity, erase shame, and create a better culture of mutual support and acceptance, which is an important first step toward real recovery. 

but then the mocking of any and all recovery advice became too ingrained in tumblr culture, to the point that setting any mental health goals at all becameindistinguishable from imposing ablist, unrealistic standards. an ADHD user who posted “isn’t it nice to just sit down and focus” about her new medication got dogpiled by people who thought they were defending the marginalized.

thus again there is a Dialectic, this time in the form of “why is tumblr so anti-recovery,” and “sometimes self-care is doing HARD things,” and “you CAN actually take productive charge of your thoughts using cognitive behavioral tactics,” and so on. which is great! but if you don’t keep your eye on why tumblr developed its anti-recovery attitude in the first place, you’ll end up recreating the conditions under which that attitude developed because you’ll start to sound just like the kale smoothie people.

anyway. I think OP got it more or less on the money with this particular response, but my dash definitely shows a lot of insensitivity to the great ongoing back-and-forth that is tumblr. 

my takeaway? keep in mind that whatever you’re responding to is shaped by whatever it is responding to. if someone’s point seems exaggerated or overstated or unnecessary, that might just mean you simply weren’t around for the original battle and all you’re seeing are the echoes of the victors. 

[buckyballbearing]

if someone’s point seems exaggerated or overstated or unnecessary, that might just mean you simply weren’t around for the original battle and all you’re seeing are the echoes of the victors.

[mentalisttraceur]

All good points but there is an important lesson here for the other side of this: this is what happens when we allow ourselves to express ideas while carelessly swallowing the nuance.

These dialectic pendulums - which, by the way, are not unique to Tumblr, we can see them writ large in societies if we look at the oscillation of social norms - gradually seem to converge on better norms sometimes, but when they are nuanceless they inevitably create gaping cracks for countless people to fall though, spread oversimplified perspectives which ultimately harm people.

A more nuanced pendulum would swing far less violently and hurts less people in the process.

I don’t know if we as a species can actually hope for better any time soon, because this is how people are by default and it takes consistent individual effort for each of us to be better, and I myself have chosen to work at being concise at times knowing full well the costs in light of this.

But I do know that if an actually correct idea seems exaggerated or overstated or overreaching it is because it is not communicating what you actually have in mind, and this is a problem because the people who agree with you are often also picking up the worse (more harmful for lack of nuance) idea.

[musketry]

Can someone engineer the discourse equivalent of a tuned mass dampener?

[theunitofcaring]

What are your favorite virtues?

Compassion for yourself - There are lots of people who, if they saw a person on the street collapse in agony, would run to help; but when they see themselves collapsing in agony, they yell at themselves for being so incompetent and horrible. Self-compassion is the virtue of treating your own pain as a problem to be solved, of valuing your own flourishing, of forgiving yourself your own failings. It is best practiced by asking yourself, regularly, what you’d forgive someone else for which you haven’t forgiven yourself for, whether you are happy, whether you are growing, and whether you are treating your happiness and your growth as a priority.Creating conditions where you will learn the truth - Believing true things is really important. It’s also almost impossible to arrive at the truth about every important question just by researching them diligently; many questions require years of study to be actually confident of. It’s popular to say that one of the virtues of rationality is seeking truth, or loving truth, or following truth, but I think the most important one is working, every day, to create conditions where the truth has a chance to reach you. Have friendships with people who disagree with you; ask about their beliefs until you really understand them. When you’re having a good-faith argument, try hard to arrive at the true underpinning of the disagreement. Make it easy for people to tell you when they think you’re making a mistake. Thank them when they do. (I suck at this last one; when people tell me I’m making a mistake I do think about how to avoid it in the future, and I think I get better, but I am usually too anxious to reply to them. It’s terrible.)This virtue is best practiced by surrounding yourself with people who are compassionate and trying hard and who seem to you to be wrong, and trying to understand how and why; by following your curiosity and taking the time to learn things; by talking as much as you can about your beliefs, so people can poke holes in them; and by creating an intellectual community that rewards changing your mind and learning new things.

Sovereignty - By sovereignty I mean the belief that you are qualified to reason about your life and your own needs. ‘I know how I feel, but I’m dumb so probably it’s wrong’ is what it feels like to be low on sovereignty. This is a very hard virtue; we don’t, actually, start out very good at reasoning about the world, and it takes a lot of effort to get to a place where you can reliably arrive at a better understanding of things by reading and discussing them. There’ll be some domains where you just can’t do this (math is one of those for me, for example). But there are some domains where every single person is qualified to do this, no matter what. You get to have preferences; you get to have experiences; you get to use your experiences to make sense of the world. You get to listen to your conscience, and you get to notice when a person or an environment is bad for you and leave it. Sovereignty is the virtue of believing that.

[larkandkatydid]

“Jingle-Jangle” is actually a technical term is social science research that describes the challenge of measuring/describing/agreeing on important sociological concepts because either people are using different words to describe the same experience (jingle) and/or they are using the same words to describe very different experiences (jangle).  

(it also could be the reverse. I’m not looking it up to double check)

In my work we keep getting caught in the jingle-jangle jungle around the term “empathy”.  Really. I swear. I’m not just beating you over the head with the lessons of this cryptic parable. I really did have to spend 2 hours this week debating the difference between “empathy” and “listening”.  Oh, you think that’s obvious but IT IS NOT!

Anyway, it’s a real term for a real thing that happens all the fucking time and if you don’t notice it happening you will find yourself arguing with people you don’t actually disagree with.