Saturday, April 30, 2022

Althouse

Althouse

"Therapy can certainly help the person better understand their own relationship to their body.... I think sometimes patients can feel pathologized when a therapist says, 'Oh, we have to get rid of your desire for surgery.'"

Posted: 30 Apr 2022 11:51 AM PDT

"If a therapist can pull back and see the desire for surgery not so much as a pathology, but as a means of trying to correct something that doesn't feel right, I think that's a useful approach."

Says Dr. Ellen Katz Westrich, a clinical psychologist who works with a stature-lengthening surgeon, quoted in "He Was 5'7". After Surgery, He'll Be 5'10". Originally designed to correct mismatched length in legs, limb-lengthening surgery has become increasingly popular for men looking to permanently increase their height" (BuzzFeedNews). 

The surgeon, Dr. Shahab Mahboubian says: "You can do as much therapy as you want... but you can't change people's perception of you.... It's not going to stop the jokes.... This is the one type of surgery that can actually get rid of the psychological impacts that come with being short."

The patient profiled in the article said: "No amount of anti-anxiety medication or verbal talk therapy could get the world to stop treating me like this. I could have a great session for five hours, and I would still go on the internet and see 'Men below this height shouldn't have rights.'... A lot of therapists I saw said, 'I never thought about it like that.' I'm paying for them to help me, and a lot of times, I would be opening their eyes to the whole situation."

The surgery involves breaking both femurs and installing a metal device that gradually expands, as much as 3 inches. The patient in the article was 5'7", which is 2" shorter than the average American man.

Visual misreading.

Posted: 30 Apr 2022 08:54 AM PDT

Crack.

Posted: 30 Apr 2022 08:11 AM PDT

Shatner is staying.

Posted: 30 Apr 2022 06:46 AM PDT

One response:

"The Tesla founder was reportedly attracted to Heard’s 'edginess' and that she wasn’t 'frightened about being different.'"

Posted: 30 Apr 2022 05:53 AM PDT

"A separate source claimed to People at the time, 'She doesn't get easily intimidated. She is very focused and loves to learn.'" 

From "Amber Heard and Elon Musk: A complete timeline of their relationship" (NY Post). 

"loves to learn" — Loves to learn what? Loves to learn a man's weaknesses so she can torment him... in precisely the way that he finds "edgy" and fearless? So hot.

Paulina Porizkova does not appreciate rickaroo777's theatrical feeling of her pain.

Posted: 30 Apr 2022 05:41 AM PDT

AND: This puts Porizkova in a much worse light: ALSO: The ability to put on a big, laugh-y, winning smile does not prove happiness. Porizkova is a model, so it's been her career to smile, convincingly, for the camera. A big problem with Instagram is the way it shows other people looking so happy, so blessed. It can make onlookers feel bad about their own lives, when, in reality, the person in the photograph could be completely depressed. I hope she's as happy as she looks, but I wouldn't laugh about rickaroo777's banning. In fact, the banning is counterproductive. He put his own idiocy/insecurity on display, and it is its own refutation. Everyone was already laughing at him. It's much less funny if he got cancelled.

"A day after an SEC filing revealed that Elon Musk must avoid insulting Twitter or its agents in the deal to purchase the company..."

Posted: 30 Apr 2022 05:01 AM PDT

"... the Tesla tycoon tweeted a meme on Wednesday that appeared to mock Twitter and its policy chief top lawyer, Vijaya Gadde. The meme shows YouTube host Tim Pool having an imaginary conversation with Gadde about Twitter's alleged left-wing bias. The conversation circles a logo of The Joe Rogan Experience... a reference to a 2019 podcast episode on the show featuring Gadde, Pool, and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. The three discussed Twitter's rules against the abuse and harassment of transgender people on the platform, and Pool said most of the accounts Twitter bans lean conservative. Musk's critics quickly dinged the Tesla tycoon for tweeting the meme, saying he's bullying the company and putting its employees at risk.... Musk quickly defended himself and said he was asking Twitter to stay politically neutral. 'For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally,' he tweeted."

Reports Yahoo Finance, in "After 'no insult' pact, Elon Musk appears to mock Twitter and its policy chief with a Joe Rogan meme and says the platform has to be 'politically neutral,'" about this:

"I tried to convince people to slow down — slow down AI — to regulate AI. This was futile. I tried for years. Nobody listened. No one..."

Posted: 30 Apr 2022 05:23 PM PDT

"Normally the way that regulations work is very slow — very slow indeed. So usually, there'll  be something — some new technology — that will cause damage or death. There will be an outcry. There will be an investigation. Years will pass. There will be some sort of insight committee. There will be rulemaking. Then there will be oversight — eventually regulations. This all take many years.... If you look at, say, automotive regulations: How long did it take for seatbelts... to be required?... This timeframe is not relevant to AI. You can't take 10 years from the point at which it is dangerous. It's too late...."

Said Elon Musk, talking to Joe Rogan, in September 2018 (Episode #1169, embedded below). 

That part came right after a discussion of the way Google, Instagram, and Twitter have us "plugged in like the nodes on the network, like leaves on a big tree." Using these services, he said, we become "one giant cybernetic collective." We're "fueling this thing that's constantly around us all the time and it doesn't seem possible that people are going to pump the brakes."

He said we seem to be following "an instinct," as if we're "the ants that build the anthill." "It feels like we are the biological bootloader for AI." Because we're acting on instinct, the resulting AI is "our id writ large." It is a "projection of our limbic system" — all the "things that we like and hate and fear." This "combination of electronics and biology" is "a cyborg," "a sort of an organism."

At this point, he brings up that Instagram — with more images and video and consequently more engagement — has more "limbic resonance" than Twitter.

I listened to all of that to extrapolate what Musk intends to do with Twitter. We keep talking about how he wants to rid it of censorship and bias and institute freedom of speech. But that would be "our id writ large." And, at least back then, he sounded as though he was deeply worried about what we were creating and doing to ourselves and how terribly hard it is to regulate. The people who work at Twitter now are furiously regulating, but it's not the right kind of regulation. They're just more ants, projecting their limbic system. They don't see the larger phenomenon, as Musk does. 

Maybe Musk just wants to be the consciousness of this "cyborg" while the rest of us are blithely behaving like instinct-driven ants. Maybe he's a benefactor who genuinely wants to figure out how to make AI develop in a way that is good for humanity and not dangerous.
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