Posted by Anon84 3 days ago
Exchanging a risk for cancer for a risk of schizophrenia is not a win-win situation. You’re just switching one set of risk genes for another.
I think that's what GP was saying?
> You’re just switching one set of risk genes for another.
I think... that's what GP was saying?
If you are switching one low survival gene for another there is no net benefit.
" We must remember that we are living in an age in which the ground is shifting and the foundations are shaking. I cannot answer for other times and places. Perhaps it has always been so. We know it is true today. In these circumstances, we have all reason to be insecure. When the ultimate basis of our world is in question, we run to different holes in the ground; we scurry into roles, statuses, identities, interpersonal relations. We attempt to live in castles that can only be in the air, because there is no firm ground in the social cosmos on which to build."
"Sanity today appears to rest very largely on a capacity to adapt to the external world — the interpersonal world, and the realm of human collectivities. As this external human world is almost completely and totally estranged from the inner, any personal direct awareness of the inner world already entails grave risks."
https://www.humanfactors.lth.se/fileadmin/lusa/Sidney_Dekker...
For me, I don’t like that this is about a mathematical model. I don’t want a mathematical model. I like the theory, and I think it’s interesting. I don’t need further digressions into a model. I want to see the real thing. Prove it, replicate it, codify it.
Homosexuality is interesting from this perspective too - common enough that evolution has to be selecting for it, yet basically fatal to reproduction, so what are the benefits that evolution is selecting for? Is it advantageous to groups, or maybe the same genes confer an individual benefit to non-homosexuals?
Are we sure this is the case? I think it's more like homosexuality isn't extremely selected against on a population level. Evolution doesn't really select for, more like evolution is a process in which least-viable-specimens are killed off for their environments. It could very well be that a small number of homosexual specimens are simply irrelevant to evolutionary fitness.
Do men and women both have the coding for male/female attraction, with one typically disabled ? This perhaps seems most likely, in same way both sexes have nipples, etc. Without knowing exactly how this all works we can only speculate how male/female genes can combine to create same-sex attraction. Obviously it's not so simple as inheriting a gay gene from one of your parents!
Typical is putting in a lot of work in that sentence. I could rephrase it with the same truth content and make it much more ambiguous.
"Many phenotypical sexual differences in humans are obviously genetic. Some very common differences in sex-specific sexual attraction are likely genetic as well. For large swaths of sexual attraction, we have absolutely no evidence of a genetic link."
What's funny is that the one example you facetiously picked (a curve detector) is extremely culturally dependent. Trying to tie elements of human sexuality to evolutionary just so stories is usually pseudoscience. When we start isolating genes for the things that we think of as natural, if we ever do, I bet you $100 the mapping from our social experience of these traits to some kind genetic reality is muddled to the point of total detachment.
Actually, it wasn't intended as facetious! I'd bet money that male attraction to females is indeed based on curve and jiggle detectors! If not this, then what - it has to be based on some (simple, perceptual) physical characteristics. I realize that female ideals vary a lot between cultures, and time periods, but the differences are more about things like fat percentage and distribution than the underlying characteristics that visibly differentiate men from women.
Sure - it seems there may be a large degree of imprinting as well, but homosexuality does seem to be an important special case given that it typically means lack of descendants. Of course evolution is really about sub-populations and gene-pools, not individuals, and it seems there has to be some benefit at that level otherwise this trait would have been out-competed in the population.
For much of human history, that has been false. In many societies, there has been strong pressure to (heterosexually) marry, arranged marriages - with the result that most individuals with a homosexual orientation end up participating in heterosexual reproduction-so homosexuality is much less of an evolutionary disadvantage than you’d assume.
Modern Western society puts great emphasis on marrying for love, marrying on the basis of actual attraction rather than social pressure or political calculation, being “true to yourself” - and in such a society, a homosexual orientation does significantly reduce the odds of participation in classical heterosexual reproduction. But modern Western society isn’t normal in world-historical terms, what we consider “normal” is actually rather novel
> Traditional evolutionary hypotheses, such as those invoking kin selection, mutation-selection balance, and evolutionary mismatch don’t quite explain this.
There's lots of explanations here but one that is often mentioned is "kin selection". If you increase evolutionary fitness of nephews, nieces, etc. There's many others, some of which apply here and others which don't.
I don't think we're at the point yet, and certainly not in last few million years of evolution, where overpopulation is an issue, and since evolution is all about (collectively) creating the largest next-generation population, this isn't the way I would expect to see increased competition for resources to play out.
According to Wikipedia, creative people are 25% more likely to have a mental illness.
As for why so many bipolar people are famous, manic episodes can be very productive.
For myself, being bipolar has given me several lifetimes of perspective to inform my writing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity_and_mental_health
I suspect (with nothing to support it) that there is a range where people with mental illness are able to interpret the world differently than normies (and thus make connections that normies do not), but also a point where that perception gets so out of joint that they can no longer function in reality. So in the former case, it may help in creative pursuits, but the latter may hamper it.
What do you think a correlation is if not a relationship? No one said it was "required".
There’s absolutely a correlation, enough to be causation. But it doesn’t make mental illness a primary factor in creativity in modern society.
This is not unreasonable.
It could be less awful if the voices were positive and not harsh and negative. Schizophrenics outside the US were found to have a more benign relationship with their voices.
The striking difference was that while many of the African
and Indian subjects registered predominantly positive experiences
with their voices, not one American did. Rather, the U.S. subjects
were more likely to report experiences as violent and hateful – and
evidence of a sick condition.
And as others have pointed out, it really depends what kind of programming you're carrying around. Feeling terrified of something isn't the issue...it's how you've trained to respond to terror that matters. If you lash out or avoid, yeah....don't cultivate multiple voices. If, instead, you're choosing to purge the addiction to violence & domination fairly rooted in American imperial colonial indoctrination, it's really quite something. I'm now working on bringing in 16 others as a way to better connect with different parts of the population and spread this and other blackness-embracing ways.
Hearing/seeing things that aren't there has historically for the majority of humanity's time on Earth not been an issue. We can get back to living in such ways, especially since doing so can be extremely helpful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_disorder
as did Eugen Bleuler. I have a friend who is schizophrenic whose speech hardly makes sense and she is always calling people on the phone and carrying on nonsensical conversations. Somehow the general public is hung up on ‘hearing voices’ but I have never once heard a voice but under stress I (schizotypal) did once spend about six months under the influence of a ‘system of delusions’ yet stayed mostly functional, kept working, and managed to avoid getting in serious trouble.
I think it is quite ordinary also for people to have a dialogue with an ‘invisible friend’ or believe that they ‘talk to God’ when they pray, the auditory hallucinations of schizophrenia seem to be something like you have a thought that you don’t think is your thought but somebody else talking, notably schizophrenics often believe that somebody is putting thoughts into them or taking thoughts out of them, see
Whom I thank every day for repairing my retention processes, just enough that lessons become learning.
https://www.additudemag.com/adhd-and-substance-abuse-stimula...
They're also less habit forming than the non-stimulant drugs; I'm taking a non-stimulant right now (Intuniv) that you can't safely quit without tapering off for weeks.
The combination is good enough that I lost my caffeine addiction. Of course that's a relatively mild one.
I’ve seen plenty of those pills get diverted with outcomes like somebody stays up for 4 days and gets hospitalized so, yeah, I want to diss ADHD medication. It is clear it helps in the short term, not so clear if it helps in the long term.
FTR, meth mouth has no overlap with ADHD meds. I specifically looked into this, way back when.
> He goes to Wegmans every month and comes back with a pill bottle the size of a small trashcan.
If he took that many ADHD meds he'd be dead on day one. Three tabs/day is a heavy dose.
• Stimulant ADHD medication use in adults is associated with decreased bone
mineral in the skull and thoracic spine.
• No other areas of axial or appendicular skeleton showed significant
differences.
• There was no dose-response effect between stimulant medication use and
bone mineral density.
• The overall effect of stimulant medications on adult
bone health is unclear.