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Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · 11m

I don't think it's bait exactly I think this is just an issue where a lot of people have strong emotions in different directions that are all individually justified

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Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · 14m

I am happy to donate to programs to send evangelical missions to the South Pole. I fear the souls of penguins are in mortal danger. this is so important we shouldn't even worry about funding return tickets.

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Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · 18m

going to share this again because I think it gets at the central point really well: *all* these things are a spectrum. whenever you draw the line for e.g. clinical depression there will be some people short of it who are "just kinda sad"

25. Individual Differences

YouTube video by Stanford

m.youtube.com

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Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · 19m

and that kid isn't even the most extreme case for autism because he was verbal and high-functioning enough that he could, with some support, live and learn in a public school environment

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Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · 19m

there was another guy who was, really, seriously intellectually disabled and as far as I know was taught entirely through the special education program because by the time he got to high school he was not able to keep up with average students

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Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · 19m

there was one guy who was in some sense the "stereotypical" autistic kid. he was in the same honors and AP classes as I was, he was clearly smart, but he had a para with him in class because he had emotional regulation problems

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Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · 19m

at my school we had a special education program, and even as a kid with only passing interactions with any of the people in it it was very obvious they had different levels of needs

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Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · 30m

we can comfortably say that schizophrenics have a disorder. but what about someone who displays only a moderate degree of the extreme literalism associated with schizophrenia? where do you draw the line between just liking trains and autism?

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Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · 30m

I think this lecture does a really good job of getting to a core issue here, namely that there is not a clean dividing line between "personal difference" and "pathology"

25. Individual Differences

YouTube video by Stanford

m.youtube.com

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Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · 30m

I think this gets tied up in a whole bunch of different issues about perspectives on technology and the practical harm of people offering fake "cures" and the things those cures actually are and the reality that disabled people don't really need to be reminded

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Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · 30m

also some disabilities really do suck quite a lot. being a quadriplegic is bad! it doesn't mean people who are quadriplegics are inherently immoral or that we shouldn't accommodate them, but I don't think there is anyone who, given a "have limbs again" button would refuse to push it

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Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · 41m

I mean isn't part of it just that we've expanded the definition? the people who are significantly impaired or flatly incapable of living independently do exist, we've just accepted the idea of a spectrum that also includes people who would previously have just been nerds

Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · 47m

the only thing I've found that mitigates colds is real over-the-counter Sudafed, but it does a damn good job

Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · 1h

my smoke too weak. my swag too derivative. my bitch not bad enough. they're offering me a plea deal for life with the possibility of parole.

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Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · 1h

Vernor Vinge 🤝 Adrian Tchaikovsky

ellie lockhart (she/they) @eleanor.lockhart.contact · 2h

you know what

spiders

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Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · 1h

it was an internal talk at work, not sure if they've presented it publicly

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Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · 2h

oh cool I love comforting historical analogies that makes me feel secure about the future prospects of my life and my nation

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Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · 2h

I wonder how much absolute nightmare shit is happening in ICE custody that we haven't heard about yet

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Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · 2h

fortunately, as an expert on Posting, my expertise is relevant to any topic about which I write Posts

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Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · 2h

I watched a talk from a CMU CS professor about the impact of AI use in his class and it was pretty harrowing. students getting 7% on the final after perfect homework grades all semester.

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Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · 2h

elder abuse presidency

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Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · 2h

personally I like when the person in front of me reclines their chair into the four inches of space I have for the next six hours

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Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · 2h

I would try "foreskin" or "circumcision"

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Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · 2h

if you look at this at a high level, you can easily come away with the conclusion that Dems are losing voters because of the positions they take, but if you look at the details it's clearly an information environment problem

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Materialist Gnostic @walmsley.bsky.social · 2h

the issue here is that, while voters describe concerns about issues where Dems have moved to the left, the concerns they describe are hallucinatory and insane

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