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I was talking specifically about childhood language acquisition, where learning a new language doesn't require you to forgo reading tvtropes or watching buffy the vampire slayer, it's just part of your background acquisition the same way that children learn how gravity works and how to manipulate small objects as they grow up.
There's plenty of research showing that bilingual children have some small advantages, e.g.: https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/advantages_of_a_bilingual_brain
Then there's the cultural value of language that I raised in my previous post, especially for minority cultures (and you state that things from your culture like Buffy and TVTropes are valuable to you). I'm assuming you're from an English-dominant culture. Can you imagine if you moved to, say, Portugal, and you learned Portugese and all your friends and family spoke Portugese all the time, you might feel as though something was lacking if they watched Buffy episodes that had been dubbed into Portugese?
Generally speaking, people who speak endangered languages also speak the majority language - otherwise it wouldn't be endangered. Preservation of endangered languages involves raising children bilingually in the majority and endangered language. Being bilingual has been linked with a lot of benefits, and the only downside is that it slightly slows initial language acquisition (but children quickly catch up).
Generally speaking, endangered languages are from a cultural minority and members of that minority culture enjoy being able to speak that language. I went on a date with an Australian man who was half belgian half japanese and he said that he wishes his parents had taught him either language, instead he just speaks english.
Our local (australian) Indigenous language is called Noongar and is undergoing revitalisation. By all accounts, the Noongar people benefit from this socially, and the language itself has information and culture.
Imagine if english went extinct. In a sense, we'd lose Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, Steinbeck. They can be translated into other languages (and, well, Chaucer has to be translated to be understood). But, to my mind, something valuable is lost if culture is lost. These "endangered" languages had culture too - songs and stories, maybe books and plays. That's important.
I get the feeling that a lot of people in the rationalsphere think that if something won't help us invent friendly AI or space travel it's pointless. Culture's important. Lesswrong has culture (HPMOR, the sequences, etc).
Thanks, you're right.
It's a real horses / zebra kind of thing, though.
The situation: a hiker goes missing in an area where hikers are known to go missing (and, sadly, die).
The problem: eyewitnesses report the hiker's truck being in one direction, then not present at all, then in another direction.
Solution 1: eyewitnesses were mistaken about whether they saw the car / what direction it was facing
Solution 2: someone stole the car, took it away for a bit, and then returned it to the trailhead
Occam's razor requires only one additional assumption for solution 1 (eyewitnesses sometimes/often make mistakes, which is well-known, especially about something as banal about an ordinary car), whereas solution 2 requires us to postulate an entire person (or persons?) who had a motivation to take and then return the car (what? any motivation - e.g. maybe Bill was involved in the drug trade - adds more assumptions).
Let me posit Solution 3: the ranger deliberately recorded his information wrong because he didn't want to be in trouble for not sounding the alarm about a missing hiker.
or Solution 4: the park management/police colluded together to falsify the witness reports to provide doubt to Bill dying hiking to try and reduce the number of deaths attributable to JTNP
Both Solution 3 and Solution 4 seem far less fanciful than Solution 2. Sure, Solution 5 ("Aliens!") would be more fantastical than the u-haul one, but just because the Solution 2 doesn't rely on us changing our understanding of our place in the world doesn't mean it's valuable to think about.
If Bill's body had been discovered buried in the back yard of some drug lord, then sure, Solution 2 all of a sudden looks good. But the situation presented (missing hiker in a place where hikers have been known to get lost and die) does not require that level of attention.
I don't deny Adam contributed more to the case than almost anyone out there, but the u-haul theory doesn't become valuable just because it was he who postulated it.
For the record I'm the same person who brought it up in 2022 on reddit when he was found and objected to it when you posted the original blog to unresolvedmysteries in 2018, so I think this is a case of one particularly annoying person who follows you around chanting "U-Haul! U-Haul!" :)
Thank you for all your hard work on the case, I actually had no idea you were the same Adam on the search and the blog.
Thank you for posting this. I'd been following the Bill Ewasko story and Tom Mahood's blog for years so it's interesting to see it posted here.
I think the "Death Valley Germans" is another very good series of articles from the same blog, with a much more conclusive (but equally sad) ending.
What strikes me is before 2022 there were a lot of people posting theories, and there was one person who posted to /r/unresolvedmysteries that the discrepency between the reports of whether and how Bill's truck was parked could be explained by... someone putting it into a U-Haul, taking it away, and then returning it(!). Source: https://ijustdisappear.com/wp/2018/05/22/unsolved-mysteries/
I don't know if you've seen this, but I feel it'd be right up your alley. It's the story of a war between a human who knows how to weld and a cat who wants to thwart their automatic feeder.
"Drink only water" is a good one. Depends if you think forgoing deliciousness, or other effects (alcohol, caffeine) counts as a tradeoff.
Given you don't think forgoing the convenience/enjoyment of using your phone in bed counts as a tradeoff, I'm guessing this likely is the sort of thing you're looking for.
From a traffic engineer's perspective:
- Roundabouts can run into efficiency issues when the two traffic directions don't have roughly even flow. The shortcut roundabout seems as though it is intended for intersections with a primary and secondary route, with the primary route having the through lane
- This sort of "hamburger" roundabout is similar to your proposal: https://www.bristolworld.com/news/hamburger-roundabout-plans-for-a4174-bristol-ring-road-shelved-after-overwhelmingopposition-3443196
- Note that your proposed roundabout will not be as safe as a traditional roundabout as the through traffic and circulating traffic can collide at a right angle and at a decent speed (the deflection in the middle isn't going to be super effective at slowing vehicles, but I love that you thought to include it!). The safety benefit of a roundabout comes from reduced speeds (due to pre-deflection and circulating speed) and the reduced impact angles, both of which are affected by your proposal.
- Drivers doing a u-turn while vehicles are stopped on the circulating carriageway at a first pass makes me very uncomfortable but I'd have to think about it seriously / do research on it to work out whether it's actually a bad idea or if I'm just afraid of anything different to the status quo. Early thoughts are it will confuse drivers (both not knowing how to perform the manouvre/that they can perform the manouvre, and also drivers who witness vehicles doing it won't be sure what's happening), and the efficiency benefits are probably minor
Note that my specialty is in improving safety rather than efficiency. I have experience in project work where I had to balance them, but the above is all strongly biased towards discussing safety.
I think I'm making a distinction between using it colloquially (i.e. I can say that my uncle is tall, which can be true, but it doesn't tell you much about my uncle's actual height) and using it with the rigor that Bezzi implied (i.e. "has someone studied this clear category of cautious drivers"?)
Then again, my example here seems to have failed because people do study tallness: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/000291499390523F , but they crucially define tallness as above the 95th percentile. Other studies I'm glanced at use height as a continuous variable, so who the heck knows.
Yeah, okay.
Look at me thinking like an engineer - "but it's not useful from a practical point of view because we don't have access to that data".
I think the thing you're missing is you're still exposed to crashes because of some maniac doing something extremely risky and hitting you.
I'm also a very cautious driver (as you can imagine in my line of work), but I do make mistakes all the time.
This paper seems like it might be interesting for you to read: https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.1513271113
I've just had a skim but here's some of my impressions. I might read it in more detail when I get to work today.
It doesn't deal with fatalities (just crashes) but having a quick look at Fig 1, drivers who aren't distracted or impaired are involved in ~28% of crashes. Note that "impairment" also includes things like anger.
Fig 2 is pretty great for you - shows the baseline of each type of impairment, error, distraction and the odds ratio for crashes it's involved in. Not a statistician but I believe that means you're 10 times more likely to get into a crash if you're visibly angry/sad but only 3 times more likely if you're drowsy. Which is very interesting to know.
And that 51% of drivers are observed to be distracted in some way during normal driving condition (which can include "dancing in seat to music" and "interaction with adult passenger".
This paper was just the first result in a scholar search for the term "crash causation factors driver", so this info is relatively easy to find.
"Passenger mile" is not a stat we use in my jurisdiction (we use VKT, vehicle kilometres travelled), but if I'm interpreting it right, then you need to know the average number of passengers to know the number of crashes the driver is involved in. For example, say that each bus has 10 passengers on average, that would put the fatalities per passenger mile at 0.80, which given this is OOM seems pretty similar to cars.
That said, following that to its conclusion you'd end up with trains having some horrendously high rate of crashing, which doesn't pass the sniff test. I think I might be having a failure of logic somewhere here.
I mean it doesn't describe something objective/measurable unless you define it explicitly in terms of behaviours. People can do research on e.g. crash rates for drivers who never drink and drive vs frequently drink and drive, people who speed and people who don't, etc.
I can't believe you've never heard the stereotype that taxi drivers aren't safe drivers.
I don't know about proxies for "careful driving". That is not my area of expertise.
That said, it's well-known that professional race car drivers die in car crashes at higher rates during their general driving (I don't fancy digging up a citation; you can google it yourself).
I always think of the old chestnut that something like eighty percent of people think they're above average at driving.
I attended a training course recently that stated that educating drivers about the dangers of texting while driving is not very useful, as everyone thinks that they are careful with how and where they choose to text (e.g. only while stopped), but they agree that other drivers shouldn't. Apparently, they reckon it's most effective to tell people "if you text and drive, your kids will grow up to text and drive too". Psychology, eh?
I think all of those are very illustrative of the biases people have in how perceive their operation of their vehicles.
I am relatively convinced that 95% of crashes involve a variety of factors contributing (swiss cheese model). There is rarely, if ever, only one thing that causes a serious crash. As a road safety professional, then, my duty is to make sure that the road forgives any human errors. Safe Systems is the current philosophy in road safety, which states that nobody should be seriously injured or die on the road, even though people do make mistakes. And they do. All the time.
https://acrs.org.au/files/arsrpe/RS050099.pdf <- there's a paper that covers your exact question (comparing crashes in taxis and passenger cars. in case you don't know the terminology, "fleet vehicle" refers to cars that are registered as work cars for an organisation, so more likely to be people on their "best behaviour" as far as drinking/speeding/etc)
Table 5 in particular, per 100 million vehicle kms travelled you have taxis having about half as many fatal crashes as cars but about 50% more injury crashes and maybe 10% more towaway crashes (eyeballing it)
Table 10 also shows that some 30% of taxi drivers involved in crashes weren't wearing seat belts (they're apparently not legally required to in NSW! news to me), which is a pretty big clue that taxi drivers aren't the paragon of careful driving one might assume.
"Cautious driver" is not a real category. It's not something my crash database can filter on.
You make mistakes when you drive. We all do. It is human nature, and driving is a complex chain of tasks.
If you never speed, never drive after even one drink, never break a single road rule, know every single road rule (in my jurisdiction the road traffic code is some 400 pages long!), never take gaps in traffic that are too close, never go through an orange light too late, never jaywalk, always ensure your car is mechanically up to date, etc etc etc, then you are either pathological about your rule following or a liar.
I do crash analysis as part of my job, almost every day. I can tell you there are PLENTY of bus crashes - buses going before the passengers were sat down resulting in minor injuries, buses hitting pedestrians resulting in hospitalisation, heck I was in a bus about a year ago that rear-ended a car in front of it. I only have access to data in one jurisdiction and I don't believe that data includes taxis, uber drivers, etc. Anecdotally my uber drivers often adjust the GPS when they're driving and tend to speed so I wouldn't call them particularly cautious.
For the record, as far as I know I don't have the right to pull out my jurisdiction's crash data so I won't be able to respond to specific requests. I do know that "bus" is a category of vehicle we have. I don't know whether taxi is.
EDIT:
https://www.9news.com.au/national/liverpool-crash-pedestrian-dies-hit-by-bus-sydney-south-west/6eba1c4a-0825-4828-87c1-b530e5e4e2b5 - a man in Sydney died after being hit by a bus a month ago
https://thewest.com.au/news/traffic/perth-crash-man-hit-by-bus-on-wellington-street-as-police-close-road-c-12809596 (paywall i can't bypass) - a man in Perth was hit by a bus last week
seriously I just searched for "pedestrian hit by a bus" and there are SO MANY in Australia. With a cursory search I see three in Perth (2 million in the greater metro area) in the last six months.
Hi! This is my area of expertise - I work in the road safety field and spent 9 months investigating fatal car crashes. You are right that there are definite "Darwin Award" candidates but there are also deeply relateable ones that could happen to anyone.
Some anecdotes off the top of my head:
- A person accidentally had their car in reverse instead of forward when manouvering after leaving a parking spot. This resulted in their car falling into the ocean and the passenger dying.
- A very common crash type that usually results in very little damage: two vehicles on a back street colliding. At this particular crash, one of the passengers died.
- An ambulence transporting a passenger (so no sirens) was hit by a vehicle driving in the wrong direction. The ambulence passenger died. (i.e. it is not always the driver at fault who dies)
- A parent was driving their child home from school, so no doubt took this route every day and was presumably not drunk/high. On this day, they ended up hitting a tree when they were going around a corner (cause: speed? wet? tyres had gone bald? loose sand on the road? the curve was too tight for the speed limit of the road? kid said/did something distracting? who knows! probably a combo!)
Data shows that changing the law on what is permitted (speeds, BAC, seat belts, etc) results in corresponding reductions in fatal crashes. Fatal crashes have halved in Australia (my jurisdiction) since around 1980, despite the population rising.
Here's a good infographic from the WHO showing each country's level of regulation around driving and related activities: https://extranet.who.int/roadsafety/death-on-the-roads/#ticker
The thing about human error is that you make errors ALL THE TIME. You, or other road users, should not die because of your errors. And the errors that tend to result in fatal crashes are not "I was drunk and on meth and speeding" (though those obviously do), the ones that more commonly result in fatal crashes are "I looked away from the road for a second to adjust my GPS and hit a pedestrian".
You'll see statistics quoted around the place about human error is involved in 94% of crashes. That is highly misleading. That doesn't mean 94% of fatal crashes involved a sleepy drunk person at the wheel, "human error" includes stuff like misjudging the gap in traffic, not reading a sign correctly, etc. The sorts of mistakes we all make on the road all the time.
As a road safety professional, it's my role to make sure the road is as easy to perceive as possible (e.g. ensuring adequate sight distances, signs that can be noticed and interpreted at appropriate places, sensible line markings, etc), but also to make the roads forgiving of errors when they do happen.
I think this has ended up being a kind of a rant and I apologise for that but this is a very common misconception and is very damaging to efforts to advance road safety.
As a cis woman I experience both autogynephilia and autoandrophilia and I agree this should be talked about more. For me it's part of more generalised "power fantasies", with the power of being attractive to men (as any gender) being exciting in the same way e.g. the idea being worshipped as a goddess is exciting.
One of my oldest and strongest fantasies is of going to a frat party and being the most beautiful woman anyone there has ever seen. I'd imagine for other people it is less about power and more about whatever their personal psychology enjoys.
I'm a traffic engineer and this sort of thing is more or less my area of expertise. I feel weird posting "I have nothing to add, seems legit" but I feel like if I wrote a blog post like this as a layman I'd like to know I wasn't completely off my rocker.
My only suggestion would be if the data allows you to also get "serious injuries" - those are a bit less variable than fatalities and will be able to give you a better picture of the trend, because there's also going to be more of them.
I used to do fatal crash investigation, and fatalities can be very random. You hear about horrific car crashes at high speeds where everyone walks away without a scratch. What you don't hear about is the sort of crash I attended once: a tiny, slow crash on a back road at a low speed, where two cars hit each other at a small suburban intersection. Barely any damage to the cars. No sign of the crash on the road or the vicinity (fatal crashes often have damaged vegetation, marks on the road, etc). But one of the passengers was an 84 year old woman and that crash was more than her body could take. If she hadn't been in the car, there would probably have been zero fatalities in that crash. I saw another similar crash with a man in his 80s.
That was what surprised me the most about doing fatal crash investigation: I was expecting there to be men in their 20s and 30s who were drunk or high. I wasn't expecting the number of suicides but it didn't surprise me. But the number of "old people" who died, I hadn't expected that even though it's so obvious in retrospect.
But yeah, that sort of thing is why I think "serious injuries" or "hospitalisations" might be a better metric for you: there will be 10-100x more of them so the trend will be less noisy.
Sorry I only just saw this post. I would not classify myself as "in the field", for what it's worth. I would consider "my field" to be traffic engineering, as I have 10+ years experience in that (not including undergrad). My experience in the field of nutrition is less than that (a 3 year undergrad degree).
The main part of my post is a blog post I made aimed at an intelligent lay audience, so I did leave some nuances out. I do not consider the fact that the NRVs are published by a body that doesn't (and with current technology can't) know the "true" RDI to be the major shortfall that you clearly think it is.
I mean, you don't? You can look it up but recent advice was something like 10 days after first symptoms is when contagiousness reduces.
Anecdotally, my husband was sick on Friday and took rapid tests on Friday and Saturday (when he was very sick) and got negative. Then on Monday his rapid test was positive (followed by a positive PCR on Tuesday). So he was no doubt contagious on two days when he gave negative tests.
I have always respected your posts so when I saw your title was about iron deficiencies I was buckled in. You know that old adage, "when the newspaper reports on your area of expertise it's crap, and yet you believe the rest of it" - I always pay special attention to what people I trust/respect say about things I know a lot about, especially when there's a lot of misinformation out there.
I have just completed the requirements for a bachelor's degree in Nutrition with a focus in biochemistry. I am not a dietitian and will freely admit I know less about iron than you do after this lit review. But what you said makes sense and is scientifically grounded and dovetails with the stuff I know "formally". tl;dr I am thrilled to know that I can trust all your future posts.
I did recently write a draft blog post about iron aimed at a general audience as part of an internship, and I think a few of the things I say in there will provide useful context and background.
And yes, menstruating is definitely the reason why women are recommended more - I found the original paper where that recommendation comes from and that's what they talk about.
One thing I have to add - 'black stools' are also a common side effect of iron supplementation, as well as constipation, that doesn't mean you have iron toxicity. But taking "chelated iron" avoids that side effect.
Before I start talking about iron, I want to take a step back and talk about two concepts in nutrition that are often not well communicated to the public: the RDI and the EAR.
You’ve probably seen food labels that talk about the “% RDI” of different nutrients, and you might even know that it stands for “recommended dietary intake”. There’s another concept that goes along with it that you won’t find on nutrition labels: the EAR, or “estimated average requirement”. The RDI is the daily intake that will be enough for 97.5% of people, and is used when checking if an individual is consuming enough of a nutrient. The EAR is the intake that will be enough for 50% of people, and is used in nutrition research to check if a population is consuming enough of a nutrient.
These numbers are pretty close for most nutrients, but for iron they can be very different. The iron RDI for adult men is 8 mg/day and the EAR is 6 mg/day. Similarly, the RDI for post-menopausal women is 8 mg/day and the EAR is 5 mg/day. So the RDI and EAR are 2-3 mg apart. In comparison, for women who menstruate, the RDI is 18 mg/day and the EAR is 8 mg/day — a 10 mg difference!
To put that in concrete terms, imagine 100 women of childbearing age in a room (and none are pregnant or breastfeeding). 50 of them would be perfectly healthy consuming 8 mg or less of iron a day. 48 would need between 8 mg and 18 mg a day. And two of them would need even more than 18 mg!
So, even though the food labels recommend 18 mg of iron for women in this age range, half of them will have enough iron eating less than half the recommended amount — and 2% will need even more than the recommendation! This is why some people will have low iron levels, and other people who eat almost identical diets will have good levels. There’s a lot of variation in iron needs in this particular group and it comes down to variability in menstrual losses: for example, some women in this age group don’t menstruate at all and some may experience very heavy periods.
I’ve noticed this in the vegetarian community: a lot of people will say vegetarians don’t need to take iron supplements because their own iron levels are great, citing spinach or some other iron-rich vegetable as the reason for this. A cup of raw spinach contains 0.8 mg of iron, and the RDI is 18 mg. A typical daily “women’s multivitamin” contains around 5 mg of iron, the equivalent of 6 cups of raw spinach, every single day! For comparison, 100g of tofu contains about 3 mg of iron and 100g of beef contains about 3.5 mg of iron. It is most likely that people claiming that they don’t need iron supplements happen to be ‘lucky’ and need lower intakes.
On the subject of vegetarianism, contrary to popular belief, vegetarians and vegans tend to consume about the same amount of iron as people eating a typical western diet and are at similar risk of deficiency (https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/70/3/353/4714844 and https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2013/199/4/iron-and-vegetarian-diets ). However, due to the reduced absorption of iron from plant foods (18% is absorbed from a mixed western diet but only 10% from a vegetarian diet), it is recommended that vegetarians consume 80% more iron.
This is because there are two types of iron: heme iron, from animal sources, and non-heme iron, from plant sources. Heme iron is more easily absorbed, which is why vegetarians need more iron. A misconception about heme and non-heme iron is that all iron in meat is heme, but in fact, more than half of iron in meat is non-heme. So, 100g of beef would contain about 2 mg of non-heme iron and 1.5 mg of heme iron, while 100g of tofu contains 3 mg of non-heme iron. Non-heme iron absorption can be improved by consumption of vitamin C, which is abundant in most vegetarian and vegan diets.
So, where does all that leave us?
The only way to be sure of your iron status is to have a blood test, as I recommended in the previous article [unpublished; basically a much simpler version of the OP]. If your levels are low, you may want to incorporate more iron-rich foods in your diet, and ensure you consume vitamin C around the same time. You may also want to consider a supplement, especially if you have heavy periods. Whatever you do, you should get follow-up blood tests to ensure that it is working.
Iron supplements can often cause dark stools and constipation, so you may want to try several brands to find one that works for you. Some iron supplements contain “chelated iron”, which is more gentle on the stomach. [plug for advertised product removed]. For treatment of deficiencies under appropriate medical supervision, high-dose Ferrograd-C is available from pharmacies [in Australia]—though this contains non-chelated iron.
Finally, do not take high doses of iron supplements outside of medical supervision: they can be dangerous.
I'm a straight woman who for whatever reason seems to date a lot of men who have never had a girlfriend before (as I get older it is happening less for obvious reasons) - but these include two men who had never been kissed in their mid-30s. I tend to mostly date "rationalist" type guys.
The other advice given here is useful as general advice, but I would advise you to ask for specific advice/feedback about yourself / your dating profile / etc. I'm happy to provide that if you want it, but an appropriate subreddit or facebook group would likely be better.
You say you spend a lot of time on dating apps "to no avail" - where are you getting blocked? Are you getting no matches? Are you getting matches but the conversations don't lead to dates? Are you going on first dates but not getting second dates?
Getting no matches implies your standards might be too high or your profile/photos might suck.
No conversations implies that you might not be engaging women effectively or you might be engaging effectively but not want to seem pushy by asking for a date.
First dates but no second dates might imply anything from you smell bad to you come across weirdly to you're just not going on enough of them.
Uh, I don't know where to begin. This is like, the entire field of nutrition.
Vitamin D does not need to be obtained from the diet, it is primarily produced in the skin (from cholesterol, which you don't need to eat; your liver produces all you need from any food) after sun exposure. The amount of sun exposure required depends on the time of year, time of day, cloud cover, and amount of skin exposed. VitD can be obtained in the diet but pretty much only from fish and food that has been supplemented. I assume you are now taking high-dose supplements, because the amount in a typical multivitamin isn't enough.
That said, fatigue is associated with iron deficiency, and if you menstruate there is a ~25% chance you aren't eating enough to have optimum levels - look into a blood test. (If you don't menstruate, you're probably fine, but a blood test can't hurt).
I am like 2 months away from having an undergraduate degree in nutrition, and I'm studying in Australia, so I recommend this website to you: https://www.nrv.gov.au/
It outlines all the nutrients (from carbohydrates/protein/fat to the vitamins and minerals) and gives the recommended dietary intakes for each. It describes the scientific basis for each, with citations.
This is a calculator you can use to get a 'personalised' recommendation for each nutrient: https://www.nrv.gov.au/nutrients-energy-calc
EDIT: Thinking about it a bit, is the question you actually meant to ask "what are common nutritional deficiencies that I might not know about"? That depends on many things, but Vitamin D would be #1 on my list.
Apparently the extent to which Phineas was affected by the injury is exaggerated, see: https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4744
What you are saying in all your comments is perfectly consistent with how I've heard people say about their experience as asexuals. Have a read of asexual literature, maybe post on a few asexual forums with your experiences.
At the end of the day, I am 100% sure there are people with similar experiences to you who call themselves asexual and also who call themselves allosexual (not asexual).
At the end of the days, these labels are a personal thing, like deciding how to cut your hair. There's no right or wrong way, just what makes you feel good.
My advice is don't stress too much about labels.
I'm a woman who dates in kink-adjacent circles, and I'm a dommy switch so I have seen a lot of subby guys' profiles. You seem pretty normal, you seem like the sort of guy I date, down to the social awkwardness/lack of experience. I have a goddess kink so your specific fantasy is right up my alley. There are lots of women like me.
I've dated men who have been pretty normal but just didn't enjoy vaginal sex, we still had sex but just not PIV. I've dated men with fetishes who also enjoyed sex.
If you WANT some labels, the different types of attraction might speak to you:
https://lgbtq.unc.edu/resources/exploring-identities/asexuality-attraction-and-romantic-orientation/
As you said about the painting, it may be that you are attracted to women in an aesthetic way.
The good thing about labels is that people don't generally police them too hard because they're never perfect; I myself identify as straight but it's not a perfect label for me, just very very close.
If it makes you happy to call yourself asexual or demisexual or whatever, then do it, try it on. You can always change your mind later. Maybe try joining local ace groups and talking about your experience with them, or reading through relevant subreddits.
Why don't you phone around GPs and ask to find one who will give you AZ? My brother is 29 and in Perth and was able to get AZ in early July that way. I'm sure you'll find a doctor who will do it for you, unless you live remote.
Something I found very interesting/important in the book that you skipped over was the bit at the very beginning where children were asked what they wanted from their parents, and rather than asking for more extracurriculars or later bedtimes or anything like that they said that their parents seemed stressed/sad and they wanted their parents to be happier. I found that very lovely/compelling.
I played mafia on the xkcd forums for a while (and it's restarting on the new xkcd forums: https://ramenchef.net/nxf/viewforum.php?f=6 ) and I quickly came to realise that I wanted to have fun, and attempting to do everything optimally to have the best chance of winning wasn't necessarily the most fun (because it has a huge cost in reading pages and pages of game content).
I enjoy the logic puzzle aspect (how to best use powers/resources, what can contradict each other, etc) but not the social deduction. Same with other games I play, like SH or The Resistence.
So in the end, I don't take it too seriously. I have fun, I play my way, because of the vibe on the xkcd forums the people there accept my attitude (or are frustrated by it, but in a friendly way?), and it's a kind of win-win situation. When logic puzzle stuff becomes possible I hook in on that and try to work things out.
Mostly I find I enjoy moderating (running) games, and am currently modding one which is having a really good reception.
So yeah, my advice is to think about what you find fun and do more of that. Mafia isn't meant to be a chore. If you find a particular type of analysis fun, do it.
I would recommend forum mafia as a pasttime to people, it's chill and there's a great sense of community/comeraderie.
Why don't you just use beeminder, but set your goal to be flat? So say you're brushing your teeth, you can tell it you want to brush 0 times a week, when really you want to brush every day, and you end up with a normal-looking graph with no problem if you forget to log (because you can just backdate the data!)
Also has the advantage of letting you use it the "traditional way" (with a slope and a pledge) for a goal that can be done automatically (e.g. duolingo, word count on a writing project, whatever).
You are almost certainly getting enough iron in your diet as a person who (presumably) doesn't menstruate. If you are not feeling fatigued or dizzy on the regular, you almost certainly have enough iron. If you are worried, get a blood test, don't just supplement willy-nilly.
I would recommend you do a food diary for 3 days and enter into chronometer or myfitnsespal. You are probably getting 10-15mg of iron a day and the RDI for adult men is 8mg. Yes, vegans get non-heme iron, but the iron in meat is something like 80% non-heme, so most people actually get a very small amount of heme iron, and diet tends to have no impact on iron intake.
I speak generally as I don't know what your diet looks like: if you eat pizza pockets and ben & jerrys for every meal then you have bigger problems than your multivitamin.
I'm a vegan doing a nutrition degree (at an accredited university, not at one of those woo-woo online holistic centres). I also have low iron because I have dysmennorhea, which I assume you can't suffer from.
Definitely take b12 and take D if you don't get sun (you probably don't). Make sure you are getting vegan D if that's important to you, most D is not vegan. Also make sure the D is an appropriately high dose, not the very low doses that are in multivitamins.
[epistemic status: i have formal education in nutrition, and this is remembered impressions i got from professors/experts, but may not be correct, and is almost certainly simplified and lacking in nuance]
In our parents' generation, boiling or steaming was considered the most healthy way to prepare vegetables: fat and salt were the enemy, and especially steaming left the vitamins in (rather than allowing water soluable ones to leach into the cooking water).
Our parents cooked vegetables in this way because they learned it was the healthiest and they wanted us to be healthy.
Nowadays the nutrition Powers That Be have acknowledged that yes, steamed broccoli is a little healthier than roasted broccoli or broccoli sauteed in garlic oil, but steamed broccoli only tastes okay while roasted broccoli and sauteed broccoli are both damn delicious (epistemic status: broccoli is my favourite vegetable). The wisdom from on high is now that vegetables should be cooked in appealing ways, and the small loss in nutrients is nothing compared with the large gain in flavour which encourages people to eat vegetables which then means that people are less likely to eat e.g. big macs and tater tots.
I think as well as what others have said, an ethical consideration with placebos is that they are treating someone with something that they know doesn't work. Like, basically, on some level, it's ethically dubious to make you go to all the effort you outlined, interact with medical staff, receive an actual injection, etc, and deliberately not treat you. That's why many many trials have "stopping rules", where if it turns out the treatment is working really well, the placebo group gets it, too.
My impression is that my period symptoms are maybe in the top half of severity, but not the top quartile?
Don't compare yourself to others. It's a very common problem that apparently women especially have. You have symptoms that are distressing to you and are more than you want to experience AND THAT IS ENOUGH.
FWIW, I would definitely say based on your description you would be in the most severe 5-10% given when I am bitching about periods with friends who menstruate none of them talk about being out of action for 4 hours a month.
It took me like 3 doctors before one of them suggested the medications I'm trying now, and that was a doctor at a sexual health centre. This included one doctor who, when he saw I had low iron and I told him it was probably my frequent, long, heavy periods gave me a PPI (in case I had some stomach issue stopping iron absorption - because when he asked me if I had heartburn I said once every 2 or 3 months after eating like crap I have a little bit that an antacid fixes immediately), an endoscopy (in case I had, idk, a digestive issue? this required sedation, fasting, and a day off work so wasn't exactly Fun), and finally said it probably was my period and I should probably go on a different BC (so I'd resigned myself to trying an IUD, which is its own kind of pain, and if I'd had the sexual side effects I attribute to my last IUD again I'd have to have it removed after only a month or two so FUN).
So I went to the sexual health centre to discuss options for other BC (since I was also considering the shot) and she was like "you could try this medicine?" and I was confused because the medicine while not free was cheap enough (about AU$30 per cycle, or less than an hour's pre-tax wage for me). I went back to my original doctor to refill the prescription and asked why he didn't recommend it to me and he said kind of dismissively "it doesn't always work" and after that I read research on it and apparently it works 30% of the time which for me is, you know, A PRETTY GOOD SHOT.
So yeah, I don't know how firm or insistent you've been with doctors, or how accessible doctors are in your country, but being very firm ("these cramps are no good and I need to do something about them! Is there something we could try?") might help? Is going on a hormonal BC an option for you - I can't have estrogen but if I could it would just be a case of taking "the pill" without the placebo weeks which would stop my period altogether.
But yeah, I'd take my previous long periods over a 4 hour debilitating cramp with a regular, say 3 day period, so I'd encourage you to keep asking doctors as those cramps sound so intense.
I'm one of the many women who can't take estrogen due to a history of migraines. It makes things... interesting.
I use nexplanon, which gives me extremely long, heavy periods (and I am not joking: three 5-10 day periods in a row with 3 days in between) but I had a bad experience with an IUD, am bad at taking pills and the mini-pill is extremely sensitive to timing, and will probably have children within 2 years so the jab is not for me.
So what I've been experimenting with is two medications my doctor has given me to stop my period (only one at a time): Ponstan and Tranexamic acid. Still not sure which works better but they each seem to be pretty good at lightening and probably also shortening things. I am not sure how they'd help your dysmenorrhea though because of yours only being the first four hours, and you take the medication once bleeding starts.
FWIW I haven't noticed productivity issues one way or the other. How do people notice this sort of thing? Like, was it obvious, or did you chart productivity vs period somehow and saw the trend?
Setting aside the absolutely horrific ethical problems with experimenting on imprisoned people, imprisoned people do have access to commissary, would have access to special meals for religious or cultural reasons, and are likely to exchange food amongst themselves.
And as said in the other reply, coma patients are fed through tubes and don't do things like exercise, so you wouldn't be able to determine the effect of protein intake on muscle growth or whatever, and they also have whatever condition put them in a coma in the first place, and I believe long term comas are rare. Oh, and no informed consent, because they're in a coma.
I'm studying nutrition at a tertiary level for pretty much this exact reason and what it has taught me from speaking to dietitians who teach my course and from doing the course is:
a. Advice for the average person with a typical western diet boils down to "would it kill you to eat a damn vegetable?"
b. There's a lot of organic chemistry that despite me being 3 years into a 4 year degree hasn't paid off (I am doing the degree that feeds into a masters of dietetics, so I'm sure that's where it was going to pay off. Alas, I'm not going to do that masters any time soon because my government engineering job 8 years in pays more than and end of career dietitian despite the higher level of education, and the masters would require me to work 9-5 for 6 months for free)
But most importantly, and most relevantly for the lesswrong sort of person, is that it is basically impossible to study diets in anything resembling double blind randomised placebo controlled. Diets are strongly linked to culture and personality and strongly influenced by those around you and virtually impossible to double blind. Like, imagine you wanted to study whether eating red meat is good for your health. Imagine getting 10,000 people and randomising them into three groups (high red meat, moderate red meat, no red meat). Would a steer farmer from Texas really stop eating red meat just because he was randomised into the no group? Would I, a vegan for 5 years, start eating 4 serves of red meat because I was randomised into the high group? (no, but I wouldn't sign up for the study for this reason, which is a confounder because people like me then wouldn't sign up). And if the Texan did stop eating red meat, would he keep it up for 20 years? Would someone randomised into the high group who got diagnosed with heart disease and was told by their doctor to cut down on red meat ignore the advice because of the study?
It's that problem but writ large that makes decent dietary research hard to do. You'll notice a lot of studies are done over 1-3 months, because that's a reasonable amount of time to be able to provide three pre-packaged meals to your participants that you can control exactly (though those participants are probably going to eat other things: who goes to a birthday party without eating cake, for example?).
So then we have to do animal studies, and our ancestral diet is very different from say a mouse or even a chimp, and is maybe not even what is best for us.
Also, something that isn't really emphasised in this sort of discussion is the cultural value of food. Sitting and sharing meals with people is good for our mental wellbeing.
I think some people also stick on "are eggs good or bad for you? is red meat healthy? are tomatoes good?" when this is kinda missing the point. No one thing should be such a big part of your diet that this information is gamebreaking. And I think everyone knows that vegetables are healthy and hamburgers aren't.
So, where does that leave us?
Fortunately, pretty much every country in the world has a team of dietitians who come together to make a guide for how to eat healthfully. I'm Australian so the Australian guide to healthy eating ( https://www.eatforhealth.gov.au/guidelines/australian-guide-healthy-eating ) and the associated material on the website is what I'm most familiar with. It boils down to eating a lot of vegetables (50% of your plate!), a moderate amount of grains, a small amount of lean protein, and eating fruit and calcium-rich foods. But the website has a lot of information on it in a very accessible format and I'd recommend it as a good starting point.
Hey OP -
Just want to say thank you for this post. This along with the failure of the rationalist community to buy bitcoin led to me betting $150 AUD on Biden, and Sportsbet Australia called the election for him already (no, I don't understand why either - I guess the publicity), so I got $235 in my bank account now (win: $85 AUD).
I would not have done this without your post.
To be honest, I don't care how things will go in the future: at the moment, I'm paying, now, to not experience ads, and I'm hoping that my purchasing decisions in this vein will encourage the sort of behaviour I want. If hosts start incorporating ads into their patron podcasts they'll lose my $5/mo and receive a polite but firm note explaining why.
It bothers me on a fundamental level that we've been conditioned to accept ads as "the price of the internet": I want to pay $5 for an app with no ads/IAP, not be advertised to forever. I want to pay $5 a month to listen to a podcast without ads, not have my precious time taken up with podcast hosts (aka People I Trust) telling me about how much they love whichever meal box kit is paying them this year.
I put my money where my mouth is, btw: I support ad-free podcasts, or podcasts with unlockable ad-free versions, on Patreon (as ad-free is becoming a more common perk, it's beginning to get expensive, but podcast-listening is my main hobby). I messaged one small podcaster about why she didn't have ad-free versions of her podcast as a patreon perk and she said the reason for it was because her advertisers have a clause stating that there must be no ad-free versions, because apparently the more devoted listeners (the ones who trust the podcasters the most) are their preferred target market.
I also emailed a podcaster I listen to when her podcast ran an ad for a 'product' I knew she wouldn't support if she knew some easily googleable backstory, and she emailed me back, pulled the ad, and said that she hadn't used the product and so didn't know that the product was counteractive to her 'brand'. Obviously, you know a lot of these endorsements are fake, but I find podcasts especially insidious as the podcaster-listener relationship is surprisingly intimate.
So yeah, I completely agree with you. I'm voting with my dollar, to try and make the "paid" business model more sustainable for internet services. Thanks for an enlightening post!
Interesting that elimination isn't discussed - my jurisdiction (Western Australia) targeted this, and with strict border closures, mandatory 2 week quarantine for new entrants, we've not had a "wild" case in 6 months now (we have regular cases in hotel quarantine, but these don't 'escape' into the wild). Life is normal here: music festivals, dine in restaurants, cinemas, service industry/economy has time to recover, no need to wear masks, and of course no deaths.
New Zealand is another example of this, as is the rest of Australia (Victoria has, in 2 months of lockdown, gone from 700 daily cases to 6), and, funnily enough, Mongolia.
I know there's feasibility problems in a lot of places, especially because Australia and New Zealand, being islands, are pretty easy to isolate, but it seems like it would be much cheaper to improve border controls than to deal with a pandemic.
In conclusion, I know I'm really lucky to live where I do.
I spent time working in fatal car crash investigation (reading crash reports and doing engineering analysis, nothing as gory as you're probably picturing), and car crashes often involved massive head trauma or would, at a minimum, require *hours* of lag time before the cryonics team could make it there. I'd say at a complete guess that only about 10% involved people dying in hospital later on (i.e. under circumstances that a cryo team could get to them in time to prepare the body).
My impression of the technology is that it's too much in its infancy to be able to say with any sort of confidence that a body that had been left with minimal treatment for a good 8-10 hours would be in a good state for preservation. And my understanding is that after only a few minutes/hours the brain starts to really degrade.
This is a major reason I'm not considering yet. I also live in a country without a good cryo organisation, and the exchange rates make the fees for Alcor quite a lot when I am not convinced I'd get the value. I also think the 5% figure is way too high.
I mean admittedly, pascal's wager comes into play a bit here, but I'm not convinced that my current jurisdiction is a good place to die and be cryopreserved, and I have no plans to move.
I think the answer to your question is "people don't concentrate for 2 hours at a stretch". That's why the pomodoro technique is so useful!
I'm very focused in general, and I find 45 minutes to an hour is the longest I can sustain my attention on a task, especially if it's boring. Contrary to the other poster I don't think that I have ADHD (though I don't doubt I'd be able to focus for 3 or 4 hours straight if I took dexies, since my husband *does* have ADHD and the medicine does that for him).
You should look online for resources about combating procrastination, getting motivated, etc, as it's the same sort of problem everyone runs into.
Here's my personal productivity tips:
- Pomodoros: I use the complice.co less wrong study hall, which has 32/8 pomos. I like that balance as 32 minutes is coming on the maximum amount of time I can be "mostly reliably" focused. I won't bother explaining pomodoros as they're on about ten thousand different websites.
- Beemindier: I've been using beeminder since its official launch and it's got me to do everything from an 1800 day duolingo streak to reading a textbook to writing a 50,000 word novel to studying several hundred anki cards a day. If I don't, I have to pay $5, and I'm so cheap I'm not ever going to give up the $5.
- I reward / bribe myself. "Can't start making breakfast until I've done one pomo", "that pepsi you're craving will only be yours if you've done a pomo of project status reports", etc. Only ever small things that I get immediately after my equally small achievement.
- Don't be too hard on yourself. The biggest thing that gets me in my work day in terms of productivity is my "shame spiral". I don't get much done which means I feel shitty about myself and keep on not getting much done, "the day is wasted anyway". I try to think what my best friend would say to me and internalise that rather than thinking what a failure I am. Also, if I have a real shame spiral sort of day, I try to change my to do list to just one or two stupidly easy things, or break tasks down to steps the include "open the program", "click on the link", "type in the name of what i'm searching for". It's stupid, but it's so motivating to give yourself some wins.