Those Difficult Things

life, language, programming, philosophy, and sporadic attempts to debug the world

[skeletontemple]

My followers who have taken a year off from college to develop necessary life skills and put off failing all their classes: did it help? What advice would you give to someone contemplating the same decision?

[finestoftheflavors]

I didn’t do this, so I can’t say whether it would have helped, but I wish I had tried it.

Also, it would have been a great move to voluntarily stop attending the school a semester earlier, when I was still in good academic standing. Or a semester before that, before spending thousands of dollars on tuition and room and board. I also regret that I never sought out any counseling or mental health resources.

[dagny-hashtaggart-deactivated20]

I took a year off halfway through college, and it definitely helped. The year itself felt kind of wasted, but I came back with a lot more motivation and direction, and did better because of that. If you feel like you’re lacking either of those things, time off to give your course of study further thought can be very useful.

It is worth noting, however, that in some cases doing this can mess with one’s financial aid, so if that’s a relevant concern it would be wise to talk to people (financial aid office people and/or students who’ve done similar things) for more information on how that would likely affect you.

[those-difficult-things]

I took a year off. It was necessary (I was not going to be able to function academically if I kept trying to charge ahead), buy in retrospect it wasn't enough. I may have returned at a better baseline but I hadn't addressed any of the problems that were making school life hell for me.

If I could give past!me some advice it would be to use that low-pressure time to develop better organizational skills and figure out better methods for coping with stress than playing World of Warcraft for 10 hours a day. Figuring out how to ask for help and how to study/collaborate with other students outside of class would've helped too -- though I'm not sure how one works in those things away from school outside of trying to work on social anxiety more generally.

[thetransintransgenic]

So I haven’t thought about it in AGES, but did anyone else grow up with Muse Magazine? That there was, like, a fundamental part of my childhood.

[moral-autism]

I did! It was good. Also Odyssey and Cricket and other stuff by the same people.

[nostalgebraist]

I remember really liking these magazines as a kid, although largely for the cartoon characters.  I think the ones in Spider magazine (Cricket for the next age bracket down) were my favorite.  Muse had good articles, but I could never really get into the cartoon characters, which always made me feel like there was some joke or reference I wasn’t getting.

(E.g. one of the muses, IIRC, was named “AEIOU,” was the “Muse of Software,” and communicated only through gesture rather than speech.  If there’s some unifying theme there, I still don’t get when it is.  They were all kinda like that.)

[jollityfarm]

Yeah, yeah!!

I remember the cartoons and AEIOU and Kokopelli!

[audible-smiles]

this one time as a kid I went with my dad out to a village up north for a work thing and I sat in the tiny public library and read every copy of Muse they had and that was my only exposure to the magazine ever 

do you guys remember the ongoing cats vs dogs war in the ‘letters from readers’ section? that they eventually started censoring because it was so endless and vicious? 

[those-difficult-things]

Yeah! I remember... Bo and Urania (an actual muse?) and AEIOU and the bird one and Kokopelli. The only actual article I remember is the naked mole rats one, but Muse was totally a fundamental part of my (mostly forgotten) childhood.

A couple years ago my brother called me to say, with audible pain in his voice, that he'd only just realized none of his friends had any idea what Muse was and that he was feeling a little less like he'd grown up in the same world as them. I think he was only about 90% joking.

[eponis]

There needs to be an emoji for “sorry I took such an embarrassingly long time to respond to you; at first I was in the middle of something, and then I forgot about your message, and then I remembered but there had already been an awkward gap of time, and then I felt so crappy for not replying that it was easier to put it out of my mind, and then it kept lurking in the back of my head and making me feel guilty every time I remembered that I needed to reply, and then I just felt stupid because normal people don’t get anxiety spirals around responding to a friend, and now I’m mustering all my courage to reply belatedly, but I’m terrified that you’re secretly judging me for being such a failure at human interaction.”

[fatpinocchio]

It’s surprisingly difficult to come up with a satisfactory theory of population ethics.

[wirehead-wannabe]

Man, I have the complete opposite impression. Simple total utilitarianism seems obviously correct to me , at least on a system-2 level.

[shieldfoss]

You run into the repugnant conclusion though.

[wirehead-wannabe]

I really truly do not see how that’s a problem.

Like, think about the Rawlsian vail of ignorance. You have the choice of either:

A) a 100% chance of a life that consists of one hedon per day for all 100 years of your life.

B) a 1% chance of experiencing 100 hedons per day for all 100 years of your life, and a 99% chance of not existing at all.

I don’t see how one is obviously better than the other. Even if you play around with the exact numbers I think my answer to any two choices is going to be the one prescribed by simple total utilitarianism.

[safe-from-emails]

I feel completely the opposite. 

I really truly don’t understand factoring in more people not existing as a negative. Like to give the opposite example

A)  a 100% chance of a life that consists of one hedon per day for all 100 years of your life.

B) a 1% change of the same thing (1 hedon/day for 100 years) and 99% chance of not existing at all. 

These are the same thing. You don’t feel non existence. It’s not morally relevant and I don’t understand how it could be. Every second there are uncountable people that, if something had gone at all different, could have existed and don’t. If I had been born a month earlier or later maybe enough would be different that I would not recognize that person as myself and but I’m not particularly sad that they don’t exist. At any moment the atoms of my laptop could rearrange into a happy immortal infant but I’m not sad when that doesn’t happen. These are sort of absurd examples but I’m having trouble thinking of some that don’t have the potential to be sad for unrelated reasons (not being able to have children, having one less than the maximum number of children, an embryo splitting into twins but not triplets) so… 

I mean this is all wrapped up in me being sad a lot and thus being frustrated with the idea that life is inherently good but also if it came down to it I’d probably still say (as noncommittally as possible) my life is worth living I guess but that’s my call to make and I would absolutely not make more of me. I find the repugnant conclusion extremely repugnant but on the other hand if explicitly limit the saddest people can be to baseline non-depressed… then it’s orders of magnitude less repugnant. I guess I find “life worth living” and “life it’s ok to force into existence” to be completely different things and that’s really most of my problem with absolute utilitarianism. 

[wirehead-wannabe]

I mean, I’m sad a lot too (understatement of the decade) and I agree that life is not inherently worth living, but the whole point of the thought experiment here is that it stipulates that the lives in question are in fact worth living. The fact that you don’t feel non-existence makes it equivalent to the hedonic zero point, which is by definition worse than one hedon. This is kind of my problem with the Repugnant Conclusion too. It talks about how the lives in question are barely worth living, then talks about how unhappy it would be to live them. “Baseline non-depressed” and “hedonicly above-zero” are not the same thing.

[safe-from-emails]

The fact that you don’t feel non-existence makes it equivalent to the hedonic zero point

I’d disagree though. Saying you don’t feel non-existence was sort of bad phrasing on my part because it’s more than that. Non-existent people just don’t feel. This is different from feeling nothing or being something you don’t feel. They don’t experience. Talking about the hedons in the context of not existing doesn’t make sense because it’s not something that scale can measure. Hedons don’t apply. It’s like talking about temperature of a vacuum (ignoring radiation). Like, sure there’s no atoms wiggling there which is sort of similar to a cold object but really it just doesn’t have the thing that you’re trying to measure. 

[wirehead-wannabe]

I thought about trying to run with the vacuum analogy, but the problem with it is that it isn’t possible to have negative heat in the same way you can have negative pleasure, which I think makes things fall apart. So for now I’m gonna say that’s my biggest issue with the analogy.

[safe-from-emails]

In that case, something that’s not a vector doesn’t have a magnitude which is in some ways similar to having a zero magnitude but does not make it the same as the zero vector.

Or:

A plane in two dimensions, (x,y), is isomorphic to a plane in three dimensions (x,y,0). A plane in three dimensions has a height of 0, a plane in two dimensions doesn’t have a height.

ETA: depending on what your planning on doing with this these might run into the problem that A=A+0 (which you are sort of trying to prove) is like, an axiom. If you need more analogies consider: pH of a vacuum, electric charge of a vacuum, how much a thing that does not and cannot exist is worth ($0?)

[sigmaleph]

‘people that don’t exist don’t enter into the calculation’ has odd implications.

because you can make a person not exist, which is widely assumed to be bad. but then if you somehow have the possibility to make them exist again, in fact make the universe exactly as it was before you made them not exist, that is supposed to be ethically neutral?

you could build a cycle of purely evil and ethically neutral actions, repeated arbitrarily many times, and end up in the exact same situation. that violates my consequentialist intuitions.

(which, I’m aware, are not everyone’s)

(this is a curiously thermodynamic argument)

[oktavia-von-gwwcendorff-deactiv]

I’m looking at lifetimes here. Making person X stop existing and making them start existing again later keeps their life going; making person X stop existing and making new person Y ends X’s life and “compensates” with an act of NaN utility.

From behind the rawlsian veil a world where everyone enters cold storage for 10 years at 50 (for some reason, don’t ask me why) only remove 10 years from their lives assuming they are immortal etc., but pulling the plug at 50 and creating new people takes away immortality from everyone.

If one looks at what kind of lives are lived in the world it and assumes rawlsian ignorance over them it seems to work. It also avoids the average utilitarian sadistic conclusion because a life which is ended out of average utilitarianism is worse than a sub-optimal but worth-living life which continues, but it suggests that people should have kids only if the kids are expected to do better than mean (in practice, “don’t be abusive and keep them away from lead” satisfies this condition for most people who might want kids).

Total lifetime utilitarianism seems to work pretty well.

[sigmaleph]

um. if your theory has NaN utility acts that seems like a flaw. as in there are situations where it has no answer.

also I’m not sure what you mean by total lifetime utilitarianism, can you elaborate?

[oktavia-von-gwwcendorff-deactiv]

I just discard the NaNs, problem solved.

Basically, look at the lives that are lived in the universe, against possible alternative sets of lives that get lived. Choose the one set which is best rawlsianly. Look at the totality of those lives, not just individual acts or moments. It favors long lives over many lives, good lives over many lives, adding lives when they are better than the mean life, not adding pointless lives, making existing lives better, etc.

And since it only looks at people who actually get born into the world it avoids all kinds of population-ethical absurdity. Everyone who matters is accounted for.

[those-difficult-things]

Is "rawlsianly best" different from "highest average [lifetime] utility"? Using lifetime utility avoids the sadistic conclusion, but it seems you're still vulnerable to some of the other issues with average utilitarianism (there are probably succinct names for these too but I don't know them):

- The number and well-being of people in Andromeda can affect decisions between sets of possible people to bring into being on Earth.

- If you don't consider the people whose lives are already over, you can end to with temporal inconsistency. If you do consider them, you end up (as in the Andromeda situation) with a weird dependence on people your decisions can't effect.

An example of inconsistency: there are 3 groups of people A (small) B (small) and C (large), with lifetime utilities U(A) > U(B) >> U(C). At T1 group C exists, and at T2 (long after the C's are gone) either A and B both exist or just A exists. If you make the choice at T1 you're going to want both A and B to exist because they're both better than an average that includes C, but if you choose at T2 and aren't counting dead people you'll prefer the world with just A.

[raginrayguns]

for list x, y, z

R: f(x) Haskell: map f x

R: g(x, y) Haskell: zipWith g x y

R: h(x, y, z) Haskell: zipWith3 h x y z

Not that you need to remember all these functions in Haskell or that you run out of them, you can choose not to use them at all and just do [h a b c | a<-x, b<-y, c<-z]

I’m just thinking about how when you define f in R, you often automatically end up with map f. And when you define g, you get zipWith g. And when you define h, you get zipWith3 h. Not always, but if you define it in terms of vectorized functions then yeah

And then in R there’s Vectorize, which is map, zipWith and zipWith3 all together (whereas they’re different in Haskell because functions with different numbers of arguments are different types, so these combinators all take different types as input)

[those-difficult-things]

There's the Applicative structure on ZipList:

f <$> ZipList x g <$> ZipList x <*> ZipList y h <$> ZipList x <*> ZipList y <*> ZipList z

The regular Applicative [a] instance takes the Cartesian product of the lists rathan than zipping them together, which is why you have to wrap things in ZipList. Your list comprehension example actually has the same problem; you need bars instead of commas to do parallel list comprehensions [h a b c | a <- x | b <- y | c <- z].

You can also bring some machinery to bear and define a polyvariadic zipWithN. The comprehensible version is here [raw code], and the ahead-of-its-time Oleg version is here. As far as I know none of these approaches has made it into a widely-used library, but I might well be wrong about that.

The more direct analogue to sometimes getting vectorization for free in R would be to use an array type that supports broadcasting and which is an instance of Num and Floating via lifting their operations pointwise. The functions that would vectorize for free in R will have generic signatures (softplus :: Floating a => a -> a) and work on vectors as well as numbers. This is the approach taken by the hmatrix library and probably others.

(Note that things are not quite as nice as they might be in R, because the way the Eq and Ord classes are set up prevents you from doing the same trick with comparisions or functions using them like min and max.)

[nostalgebraist]

Wait, do people with a dominant hand really have to use it to _drink from a glass_? Or did you just mention it because it would be interpreted that way in dextral-sinistral world even if most people could choose to use either hand for that?

I can easily drink from a glass using my non-dominant hand if I try to, but I always default to doing it with my dominant hand if I’m not thinking about it.  (Not sure how universal that is.)

[emu-on-the-loose]

Like most characteristics, lateral dominance (particularly handedness) occupies a spectrum. I’m left-handed enough to significantly prefer my left hand for drinking from a glass, and to consciously place glasses on my left side when all else is equal, but not left-handed enough to go clearly out of my way to reach over to a glass that happens to be on my right side, and I can drink from glasses with this hand with full precision; I have no apparent functional inhibition when it comes to learning lateral skills with my right hand whenever I just so happen to use that hand to learn them–scissors, for instance. Right now I’m eating bread out of its package with my right hand because that happens to be the side of the package with the opening. I could have turned it but didn’t. In contrast, in my storytelling I have a character whose left-handedness is one of her defining traits and she really does go out of her way to reach things on her right side with her left hand. I’ve observed this behavior in real life as well; it’s actually an interest of mine: As tends to happen in majorities, the degrees of right-handedness are obscured by the ubiquity of right-handedness in general, so we tend to notice “people doing things” rather than “people doing things with their right hands,” but in left-handers the degrees of handedness are much more apparent…to those bothering to look, and there are very few such people–most people don’t tend to have a high level of awareness anyway, and handedness is something very few people care about.

This, I hypothesize, is why so many people call themselves “ambidextrous” when true ambidexterity (or double-handedness, if I may) is quite rare: They have little awareness of their own lateral preferences–which may be further obscured by virtue of weak degrees–and concomitantly they vaguely think of lateral handedness as something limiting and less desirable than double-handedness, and so they choose the self-descriptive “ambidextrous” labels accordingly, when in fact diagnostic testing would show nearly all of them to have clear lateral dominance on one side. Furthermore, and a little more controversially, I think there’s something about right-handed neural wiring that tends to make right-handers less able to discern their own lateral proficiencies than left-handers–i.e., I think that even after accounting for the ratio of left-handers to right we would see disproportionately more right-handers identifying themselves as ambidextrous (after factoring out left-handers who were coerced into learning right-handedness due to social mores). In addition to biology, the blindness of the majority may also be a factor in this.

People routinely (and understandably) mistake specific learned motor skills for lateral proficiency. For instance, if you try tying your shoes the other way–with your left hand performing the right hand’s role and vice versa–then, assuming you haven’t already learned to do it both ways, you’ll be an absolutely mess with it. This example is educational because both of your hands will fail you: The lack of skill is not an issue of laterality. True lateral dominance expresses itself in terms of preference (this is the more easily observed variable) and in the higher degrees of precision–i.e., all else being equal, your dominant hand will be able to become better at a skill than your non-dominant hand possibly can. We could discuss some other factors here that can potentially muddy the waters, such as the impact of learning skills at a younger age, but that would be extraneous to the discussion, other than to simply acknowledge their presence.

Lastly, I’m a fan of the “domain / range” interpretation of lateral dominance. The very term “lateral dominance” insinuates inferiority on the non-dominant side. In real life, as it was for our animal ancestors who behaviorally contributed to the establishment of handedness in humanity, nothing as important as a manual appendage would be let to waste. Most actions involving fine motor skills from one hand are actually two-handed activities. In the use of scissors, the fine-tuning of the positioning of the paper is vital to a clean, properly-oriented cut. (Other examples also tend to take the form of holding or guiding something that is being manipulated by the dominant hand.) Thus it isn’t so much that the non-dominant hand is inferior as that it is assigned a supporting role in two-handed behaviors: specifically, the domain role, in which the domain is established for the action of the dominant hand to have maximal precision. I personally think that this complementary relationship is evolutionarily advantageous–that the two hands should be seen not as counterparts in competition (with one clear winner and one clear loser) but as complements who engage in complex physical actions non-symmetrically but in unison.

[those-difficult-things]

Thanks, that's really interesting!

I don't seem to have a preference for picking up a drink with one hand or the other, and where I put it in the first place is down to where there's space, which side I'm less likely to elbow someone on, or which hand I was holding it in when I sat down.

I learned to write with my left hand in high school without much difficulty, though it's not as neat as my right-writing. For many things I do have a weak preference for the righty way (scissors, opening bottles, throwing non-frisbee objects...); lots of things I'll do with whichever hand is convenient; but the only thing I can think of where I definitely prefer my left hand is using a mouse. So I'm probably one of those weak lateral preference righties passing themselves off as ambidextrous.

The complementary functions theory seems very plausible to me. Do you know if anyone's experimentally measured people's proficiency at those grasping/manipulating/positioning 'supporting' tasks with each hand? I remember a few times where I tried to do something backwards-handed (lefty) and felt like I was having trouble with doing the grasping part righty rather than with doing the fine motor part lefty, but I'm not sure how you'd tell for sure which was the issue.

[bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190]

What's your opinion on just getting rid of gender-segregated bathrooms altogether and only having unisex ones? Do you feel the same about locker rooms?

I think gender-segregated bathrooms might be more efficient because urinals?

A lot of people feel uncomfortable changing around people of a different gender, and I do think we should respect that.

[those-difficult-things]

To follow up on that question mark:

Having urinals increases throughput because you can fit more urinals than stalls into the same area. It's also good for average wait times for the same reason that express checkout lanes work -- basically, by making the smaller number of people who are going to be slow wait for each other in one lane while lots of people move quickly through the other. (It's not that urinals are faster -- though that might also be true -- so much as that they filter for people who are going to be quick.)

If you're going to have long lines, it helps to have a separate line for the urinals. Otherwise you end up in situations where the front of the line is all waiting for stalls and the people in back can't tell there are urinals open. This happens only rarely in men's rooms, but it might be a problem in busy non-segregated bathrooms.

In any case, having urinals -- or even having a separate line for urinals -- obviously doesn't have to be synonymous with having gendered bathrooms.

[more-whales]

web programming mysteries: Spotify appears to tick seconds out about 6% faster than actual seconds. as though to make up for this, the time display hangs for a tick in every 15 or so. but sometimes (less often) it skips over a second. it ends up about one second ahead per minute, so that the display shows the song as having finished for several seconds before it actually ends.

[uncrediblehallq]

This sounds like a general problem with JavaScript.

[more-whales]

it seems weird that they’re trying to correct for drift and still getting it wrong, though. maybe this is a harder problem than I imagined

[uncrediblehallq]

IIUC JavaScript methods like setInterval() don’t look at your system clock, they do something else, so they’re vulnerable to getting thrown off if your system is busy with another process. Though usually the problem is running slow. I think maybe what happened is a coder at Spotify noticed their clock was running slow, so they deliberately sped it up to compensate, but they didn’t do it quite right or weren’t able to account for every possible quirk of every user’s machine.

[those-difficult-things]

That's my theory too, but it's still pretty weird behavior. The standard solution to that sort of issue is to make the timer code less stateful -- if you calculate your position in the song each time the timer runs rather than adding to some kind of offset, the setInterval noise can't accumulate. That takes care of the long-term drift, and it makes the code not care about what interval you set the timer for so you can put it to 0.25s (or whatever) and never look like you're doubling or skipping whole seconds.

The html5 media API exposes a currentTime property, which ought to make this all trivial. Maybe their code predates it?

[science]

Learn about unclefts, bulkbits, yokeways and more! Uncleftish Beholdings is a classic essay on atomic theory by Poul Anderson. It’s written in a form of English purged of non-Germanic words. The result is familiar yet alien, and demonstrates just to what extent Latin and its descendendants, chiefly French, have impacted English vocabulary. This is apparent not just in the specifically scientific vocabulary, but down to very common words.

When an uncleft or a bulkbit wins one or more bernstonebits above its own, it takes on a backward lading. When it loses one or more, it takes on a forward lading. Such a mote is called a *farer*, for that the drag between unlike ladings flits it. When bernstonebits flit by themselves, it may be as a bolt of lightning, a spark off some faststanding chunk, or the everyday flow of bernstoneness through wires.

This is a very inventive and playful game of language. An “uncleft” is an atom, from Greek atomos “indivisible.” A “bulkbit” is a molecule. A “bernstonebit” is an electron (from Greek ēlektron “amber”), via German bernstein “amber.” Amber has electrostatic properties. Lading is charge, from the verb lade (load). A farer is an ion (from the Greek for “going”).

Coming back to the uncleft itself, the heavier it is, the more neitherbits as well as firstbits in its kernel. Indeed, soon the tale of neitherbits is the greater. Unclefts with the same tale of firstbits but unlike tales of neitherbits are called *samesteads*. Thus, everyday sourstuff has eight neitherbits with its eight firstbits, but there are also kinds with five, six, seven, nine, ten, and eleven neitherbits. A samestead is known by the tale of both kernel motes, so that we have sourstuff-13, sourstuff-14, and so on, with sourstuff-16 being by far the most found. Having the same number of bernstonebits, the samesteads of a firststuff behave almost alike minglingly. They do show some unlikenesses, outstandingly among the heavier ones, and these can be worked to sunder samesteads from each other.

Neitherbits are neutrons, and firstbits are protons (from the Greek for “first”, as in the prefix proto; ur- is the Germanic equivalent, so they might also have been called urbits). Tale is an old word for “number”, cognate with Scandinavian tall and German Zahl. Samesteads are isotopes (from Greek iso- “same”, equivalent of Latin homo-; and topos, place). Sourstuff is oxygen (German Sauerstuff). Oxygen comes from French oxygène “acid-forming”, because oxygen was originally thought to be essential to the formation of acids (it is not). “Minglingly” means chemically, as in the science of how the basic elements of reality mix together.

Various forms of linguistically conservative English have been given the name Anglish.

[hochstelust]

Summer body wishlist: - six wings - a million eyes - constantly on fire - ability to scream forever

[aprilwitching-deactivated201808]

The Glad Hosts, by Rebecca Campbell

Mai knew them from photographs back on Earth, but she was still mesmerized by the creatures overhead. They were neither mammalian nor insectoid, not birds nor lizards, but the first denizens of a n…

[unknought]

This is very, very good.

It also comes closer than anything else I’ve read to the aesthetic I was trying to gesture at in my “Your body is a garden” piece a while back.

I feel kind of weird pointing to an incredible, professional story and saying “Hey, that’s like the story idea I described on Tumblr that one time!” But on the other hand, a bunch of people apparently liked the story idea I described on Tumblr that one time, and many of them are following me, so. If you liked that thing I wrote, you should definitely read this.

[those-difficult-things]

I liked the story idea you described on tumblr that one time. Interestingly enough, that story didn't register as horror to me -- if anything my reaction was "awwwww" rather than "aaaaaaa". This story on the other hand definitely registers as (enjoyable, well-executed) horror.

I'm not sure if my reaction is the result of a principled distinction or just comes from the framing, but whether there's consent and whether the parties' interests align both seem like big deals.

[those-difficult-things]

Psych experiment idea: Have people who've just put in their orders at a restaurant counter verbally recount their process of deciding what to order. Offer some of them a free desert to answer and others cash. Don't tell them which (or, ideally, anything) until after they make their order, and see how the incentive affects their reported thoughts. (If non-response rates are too high or you're worried that there's a thoughts/offer interaction affecting response rates, you can run this behind a dummy study or as an add-on to another study. Just get people to sign up to be interviewed over a meal in advance.)

[luminousalicorn]

everyone can teleport, but can't carry anything with

Nudist colonies everywhere experience economic prosperity beyond their wildest dreams and, oddly, begin selling clothes.

[those-difficult-things]

Everyone has an implanted RFID chip for payment and identity verification. Implantable phones are a research priority.

Houses and apartments can't be unlocked from the inside without a combination.

Rental clothing is a thing, but some people prefer insured same day shipping.

Whenever your distant friends visit they're wearing the same outfit, because it's the one they keep in your walk-in closet.

[91625]

Tumblr really needs a sympathy button. You can’t write a sympathetic reply to everyone on you dash going through bad shit, and don’t want to ignore them, but at the same time you can’t (heart) their suffering.

[unknought]

Story idea: Your body is, like everyone else’s, a garden.

What exactly it’s a garden for isn’t terribly important at the moment. Maybe they’re otherworldly spirits, maybe they’re some sort of complex parasitic fungi. Let’s call them riders, for now; that seems nicely agnostic as to their nature.

When you come of age, you are driven from your home and forbidden to return as the sole inhabitant of your body.

Keep reading

[unknought]

People who have experienced gender dysphoria:

(Or more precisely, “People who have had experiences which they describe as gender dysphoria” since there’s variation in how the term is used and I’m trying to better understand how people use it.)

Have you had dysphoric experiences that didn’t fall into the pattern “Some part of my brain is gendering me in a way that makes another part unhappy”? If so, do you think of those experiences as being “about” gender at all?

I’d also be interested to hear from people who have experienced something like dysphoria but which they’re not comfortable describing with that word.

Personally: I think pretty much everything in my life that I’ve called dysphoria –including physical dysphoria, social dysphoria, and things that don’t fit well into that binary– matches this model pretty well. However it’s not something I’ve heard before as a definition or explanation of dysphoria, and I’m trying to figure out if that’s just because it has unfortunate political and interpersonal implications, or because it genuinely doesn’t describe other people’s experiences.

All responses are greatly appreciated! If you have any restrictions on quoting, reblogging, and/or publicly replying to your response, please indicate as much. Here’s a question mark if you prefer to respond that way: ?

[those-difficult-things]

(Preface: I’m an agender transfeminine person.)

My physical dysphoria doesn’t feel like it’s about gender at all. 

Before I connected the dots, it just seemed like there were a variety of separate things that would reliably make me feel bad. I really had no idea why singing made me upset when I used to like it (your voice dropped, dummy) or why shaving took so much energy (it’s the only time you ever looked in a mirror, and you’re not shaving close enough or often enough for it to outweigh that). Hmm, my shoulders are REALLY wide, guess I just haven’t gotten used to that yet (you won’t, but getting hips will mitigate it). 

Part of figuring out I was trans was noticing that I was confabulating nonsensical explanations for all these things, and another part was learning that having sex characteristics that bother you is a thing that commonly makes humans really miserable even if they try very hard not to care.

After I learned to recognize dysphoria, I could imagine myself in lots of different hypothetical bodies and see which ones I’d be more okay with. This got me answers like “I really wish I could have a professional go at my skull with a chisel” and “the amount of breast where I’d start to want less rather than more is... not that much, actually”. (I wasn’t too worried about the latter given my closest relatives’ shapes and my age when I started HRT, and indeed 21 months in I still have plenty of wiggle room.)

I suppose you could explain this experience as my perceptual systems’ impression of my gender making the part of my brain that implements my “subconscious sex” (Julia Serano’s term) unhappy, but gender doesn’t come into it on a conscious level. 

My social dysphoria is a lot less severe (think “sad puppy” rather than “cormorant in an oil spill”) and I’m kind of a mid-transition social recluse right now, but insofar as I experience it it does seem to fit your model. In this case the brain conflict would be between my model of myself (which doesn’t include a gender) and my model of the model of me that other people have in their heads (which does). People who gender me (especially people who gender me male) have all sorts of mistaken expectations and beliefs about me that I need to be aware of for interactions to go smoothly; there are costs to surprising them but it takes conscious effort not to. It’s kind of like going to a party, having your friend introduce you as “my friend the hockey player”, and being unable to convince people you aren’t one.

[allthingslinguistic]

This is Strunk & White, rewritten using a predictive text generator by Jamie Brew. And to be honest, given how terrible the advice is in The Elements of Style, I think it makes more sense this way. 

(Also: tag yourself. I’m a member of the Government Sentence Office.)