So, I definitely think that society has a tendency to want to “fix” behavior traits that are difficult or annoying, but I think there are also a lot that are actually problematic.
For example, with my ADHD, I get stuck doing stuff I don’t like doing at the expense of stuff I do enjoy. Just last night after my meds wore off, I got stuck watching YouTube videos of mediocre standup comedy instead of leaning over a bit and grabbing my book that I’m extremely into and very much want to find out what happens.

The definition I like most, which isn’t out of whack with what the standards tend towards, is something that’s:

• a measurable or observable set of behaviors
• causing distress to the individual
• or causing development difficulties in children
• or causing objective material harm to the individual or others

If it’s causing the individual stress, or it’s clearly causing problems in their life, it’s something that should be addressed. Sometimes the easiest way to address it is just an environmental accomodation, like self directed learning, a pair of headphones, or permission to excuse yourself for a moment. I had a workplace unknowingly (to me and to them) accommodate me by putting down some anti fatigue mats where I would pace to a comical degree every day.

A big issue in my book is that disorder is an overloaded term. Colloquially disorder means “broken”, and it doesn’t mean that clinically.
A person with a learning disorder who can be helped by putting them in a more self directed learning environment still has a disorder that needs accomodation because they’re not performing to the standards of their peers.
There’s also a distinction between “mental disorder” and “neurodevelopmental disorder”, with the disorder of mental disorders being the biggest one associated with the word “disorder”.

I think it’s good that people like you ask these questions, because that’s part of what helps push society towards an understanding that many of these disorders are really just a very wide spectrum of differences from a rough average, and that our world needs to just be a little more flexible for people who do it a little different. It’s caused a lot of more modern primary education systems to be more flexible and trained in the benign accomodations that some kids need, for example. (My nephew also has ADHD and he’s having a much better experience in school than I did, of only because they were like “some kids with ADHD just have terrible handwriting, instead of endless drills, here’s your Chromebook you do all your work on now”)

In the end, I think we need to be able to categorize things in order to be able to know how to fix up people’s environments when that’s the right answer. We also need to be aware that sometimes the environment isn’t the best fix, and that a medication can be the best way to help a person.
For your example, I would say the individual has “crazy tall disorder” which has some easy environmental accomodations (Padded corners on cabinets), individual accomodations (teaching them proper lifting techniques and posture early since height and bad backs go hand in hand), and occasionally medical intervention (gentle back strength exercises, back and knee braces, closer monitoring of cardiac function for the truly extremely tall).

Categorization helps us better understand how things are related, what the bounds on the spectrum are, and what accomodations can be made that help the most people, and when it’s something that needs more focused attention.
It’s not the categorization that’s the problem, it’s the stigmatization or inflexibility that causes issues.

Sure! Unfortunately, it was purely a joke and has no helpful qualities that I can think of.

Your prefrontal cortex is the very front edge of your brain, and it’s (very generally because brains are complicated) responsible for problem solving, decision making and stuff like that.
It’s the part of your brain that makes the call to actually remove the blanket.
These are called “executive functions”.

It’s also very associated with a lot of parts of personality expression, so while it’s not where “you” are, damage to it has a more pronounced impact than other parts of your brain, so sometimes people treat it like it’s “you”.

It picks which tasks to do based on that reward system I mentioned in my original comment. It doesn’t directly control which task it’s pointed at trying to solve, so it can come up with a plan to do what’s needed, and then discover that the first step is “bad” and it should keep doing what it’s doing.

That’s the little man sitting at a desk who knows it’s all fucked. Did all the work and then was directed to ignore it, knowing that was the wrong call. Something else is in charge of that reward process (kinda), and you can’t “reason” with that process.

No. There are tests for the types of functional behavior differences that comprise ADHD, but they can’t really be administered outside of a moderately controlled setting.

Stuff like saying a list of words and seeing how many you can recall in a fixed time can’t really be done reliably in a quiz.

There are tools that can say “based on what you answered, there’s a high/low probability you’d benefit from further consultation”. They’re basically “how often do you interrupt?”, “how often do you zone out?”.
Basically a structured way of “what I’m hearing you say is …”. “Based on how you describe yourself as ADHD as hell, you might benefit from asking someone about that”.

Self assessments can be wrong about what they suggest you ask about. If you have a concern or behaviors that you do that upset you or cause problems, then that’s worth addressing and following until you get help, but it might not be what you thought. Or the doctor might have been mistaken, since they’re also fallible, but hopefully the more objective tests can lend objectively to their conclusions.

Yeah, a lot of brain things are like that. The way I look at it is, everyone sees a little of it, but some people see a lot of it. If you see a lot, it’s not self diagnosis to say “I have a lot of symptoms in common with people who have this, so I asked a professional”.

You also don’t need a diagnosis to practice some of the coping strategies that people have that are non-medication. If they turn out to be helpful, that’s maybe a another reason to ask a professional.

Self diagnosis is a bad idea, but it’s also a bad idea to ignore marked similarities you see between yourself and others. And stuff like “always put your keys and wallet in a specific basket” is only the cost of the basket.

Sometimes I picture my prefrontal cortex as a well meaning bureaucrat who’s just like "oh, trust me, I know the rules are terrible and there’s an active problem. Nothing I can do about it though, I just work here. Second that order comes in though, I’m on it boss, you better believe. You’re gonna want to talk to my manager. Yeah, he doesn’t take calls. It sucks, could maybe get something fixed around here. "

That’s fair, situations can also cause serotonin to get suppressed without it being an inate production issue.

This is why they recommended talk therapy in conjunction with any medication, in part so that they can reevaluate if the medication is still needed. :)

Depends on the thing.
Super high level, ADHD is an issue with the reward system of the brain failing to deliver reward when it’s supposed to. Your brain is supposed to try to find a new task when it’s not getting it’s reward anymore; it’s how that frontal cortex problem solving engine gets driven around by all the parts that handle motivation, wants and desires.
Sometimes no reward is being given, so you keep slipping off to a different task, and sometimes too much reward is being given and so you stay on a task way too long.
And, to be clear: these are not huge rewards we’re talking about like a wave of pleasure or noticable feeling, just the baseline steering signals.

Sometimes the task you need to do provides no “normal” reward but neither does what you’re doing right now, so your problem solver sees no reason to switch. Sometimes a nudge can help because fulfilling a request or suggestion can come with some reward, or at least you’re just swapping out neutral tasks with some minor effort.

Sometimes the task is unpleasant to some minor degree, so not only is the reward not there, it’s also a punishment. Or the thing you’re currently doing is providing some degree of reward.
In either case, switching means actively going against everything your problem solver uses to decide what to do. Needless to say, that’s really hard, and being nudged often feels more like being nagged, or like they’re upset with you, because your problem solver (also known as your conscious self) knows this is all going on, but knowing how the engine is working doesn’t make it work differently.
So you’ve been sitting there trying to push a granite block up a hill for an hour, and then someone comes up and starts pushing on your back. They haven’t removed the part that made it hard, but they added something uncomfortable to your current situation.

Before I got on medication following my diagnosis, me and my partner handled it by just being really cognizant of what our mental states are, and communicating clearly. “You asked me to remind you”, “I need to do it, but I’m stuck”, and effectively asking for permission before annoying someone to the point where the current blocker is less desirable than doing the thing. Requires a lot of trust and good communication though.

It’s difficult to describe subjective feelings, but what can sometimes look like “sitting on the couch watching short YouTube videos about sheep dogs instead of brushing your teeth and going to bed” is actually: sitting on the couch bored out of your mind and desperately wanting to go to bed, but the sheepdogs are providing short bursts of novelty and cute. Removing your lap blanket provides no joy and makes you cold. Standing up provides no joy and makes you less comfortable. Walking to the bathroom provides no joy and now you’re in the dark bathroom. Brushing your teeth provides no joy, tastes bad, and is intensely boring. Walking to the bedroom provides no joy. Getting into bed and snuggling up provides joy.
Summed up: sheep dogs provide continuous minor joy, and only costs the physical misery of staying awake, the confused guilt of paralysis, and the promise of future misery. Going to bed is a promise of some joy, but it comes with a bunch of steps that are at best neutral and often entail anti-joy. It just doesn’t add up. Other people get a tiny hit of joy from each substep, which is why they can say “I’m done looking at sheepdogs, I’m going to bed” and then just magically do it.

“Before you go to bed, you need to slowly press your bare foot into this fresh dog poop, toes spread of course” isn’t often made better by someone saying “it’s not that bad, come on, you can do it, I believe in you, then you can get some rest for once”.

It’s a matter of scale, not a binary.

Having a thing that you need to do but just “don’t” is perfectly common.
Having it happen so regularly that you reliably spend a measurable part of your day wondering why you can’t just “do the thing”, or it starts to have measurable negative impacts on your job, life and relationships isn’t normal.

Everyone feels down sometimes, but not everyone has a serotonin balance problem.
Everyone feels difficulty focusing sometimes, but not everyone has a dopamine balance problem.

I mean, if you don’t how will you end up with your body feeling tired tomorrow? It’d ruin the whole routine!

I mean, the idea wasn’t terrible, it just wasn’t executed well.

It was supposed to provide a non-threatening way to help users access functionality of their device or software that they may have been unaware of that would be relevant to their current task. This would assist users in accomplishing their task more efficiently, and help Microsoft by increasing consumers perception of the value their software provides, which reduces their likelihood to want to use something else in the future.

A modern, potentially useful clippy would ideally be able to tell…

• what you were actually doing
• if you appeared to be struggling or doing something repetitively
• if it has the ability to help …Before it tries to interact with you.
  Beyond that, it should be able to link to the tool in question in a way that automatically sets it up to do what you’re trying to do so using it doesn’t set you back from where you were, or just offer to do it for you in a way that doesn’t trash your work if you hate the output.

It’s still probably gonna suck ass and not be helpful, but at least it wouldn’t by vaguely mystifying why it even existed.

The best “digital assistants” I’ve seen recently are ones that actually acknowledge that these are language tools, not “knowledge” or “reasoning” tools.
They can legitimately do a good job figuring out a good response to what you ask it, ignoring the accuracy question. So if you set it up to know how to format data and what data you have available, you can get it to respond to questions like “are there trends in the monthly sales statistics for the past three years?” with a graph of those statistics broken down by product, rather than trying to let a language tool try to do reasoning on numerical data.

Talking good can sound like reasoning because right now things that talk good are usually humans that have basic reasoning skills. It’s why it so confusing when they just happily spout irrational nonsense: we’re used to rationality being a given in things that are confident and articulate.

No, yours literally says “featured snippets”, as opposed to something saying it’s AI generated.

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9351707?hl=en

Your’s is a “featured snippet”, which is where it highlights a relevant portion from a top result.
The AI results have the AI synthesize a new sentence or set of paragraphs answering the question using data from multiple sources.

They’re different results because you didn’t seem to get the AI search results. After making it available to everyone they’ve been hit with a bunch of weird results and have started scrambling to manually remove the particularly strange ones as they crop up.

This is what it typically looks like:

For a brief moment in the beta for all this, it basically just summarized the top two or three reputable results, and attached a link to where it got the data.

They should have just left it at that, and not started mixing in random blogs and social media sites.
The ability to summarize the Wikipedia article and a random university professors page where they list every fact known to man about pine trees or something was actually helpful.

If I want the AIs best guess about how to fuck up a pizza, I just go to the site where I can ask it. Bad advice when searching is just shit.
A tldr for “what is turpentine” is actually helpful.

Which big corps would that be exactly?

It’s perfectly possible to show that it’s safe to any reasonable standard: https://www.irri.org/golden-rice-faqs

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jafc.9b01524

The only biologically meaningful difference between GR2E and control rice was in levels of β-carotene and other provitamin A carotenoids in the grain. Except for β-carotene and related carotenoids, the compositional parameters of GR2E rice were within the range of natural variability of those components in conventional rice varieties with a history of safe consumption.

How exactly do you propose that the genetic makeup of the rice is going to impact the person eating it, if chemical analysis shows it’s not meaningfully different from any other rice?

You can’t demand that people prove something beyond unreasonable doubt. At some point you have to be able to articulate a concern to justify further scrutiny.

Indeed, “eating more food” is generally agreed to be the best way to remedy childhood malnutrition and food insufficiency. It’s hands down agreed upon to be the best possible approach.

Unfortunately, children who suffer from these maladies often lack additional food to eat, which is why there are several lines of inquiry for solving this problem:

• can we make it so more food?
• can we make the food better?
• can we make the food faster?

Inevitably, that means things like “vegetables that tolerate bad soil”, “vitamin fortified rice”, or “fast growing wheat”, or “crazy fertilizer strategies”.

It’s a sad reality that most places that can’t grow enough food to properly feed children typically lack the ability to just grow more, to say nothing of diversifying into more resource intensive crops. otherwise they would probably do that.

Basically because it’s not soft enough.

Your body “pushes” things out by squeezing in a “rolling” motion. Like running a rolling pin over a tube of toothpaste.

Picture each of those little segments contracting and relaxing in sequence to slowly move things along, until it gets dumped in the rectum, where it sits until you and it come to an understanding.
Bunch of muscles then move things around to get things lined up, since normally things rest in a way that helps keep things from just falling out. Anal sphincter also does this, but it’s the difference between folding the chip bag closed, using a chip clip or both.
Once it’s all lined up, it does that rolling squeeze again, takes off the chip clip and things proceed in a routine fashion.

So if instead of what it’s used to, it’s dealing with something like a cucumber, it can end up with the end up around that curve at the top of the rectum.
The tapered inside near the anal sphincter means that when your vegetable goes in, the muscle can squeeze against the end and make the situation more of a commitment than people had planned for.
Once there, it can run into a few more hurdles. The muscles near the top can’t really do anything but squeeze the sides. If it’s not squishy and there’s no angle, it’s not going to be able to do anything because it just doesn’t have the angle. Even if there is an angle, like your cucumber didn’t go all the way, it’s going to be squeezing at an awkward angle to try to push something inflexible through the opening in the stronger anal sphincter.
Usually the softness lets things find a way with some mutual give and take, but even normally things can get a bit firm and get some resistance that can be uncomfortable to work through.

Turns out I think I remember more of my anatomy and physiology classes than I thought.

How they’ve done it in the past is by tracking the criminal history of people caught with csam, arrested for abuse, or some combination thereof, or by tracking the outcomes of people seeking therapy for pedophilia.

It’s not perfect due to the sample biases, but the results are also quite inconsistent, even amongst similar populations.

Libertarians usually define liberty narrowly as “freedom from government”.
Freedom does not mean the ability to do as you please, but rather the ability to not be told what not to do, or to be made to do something you do not wish to do.
A libertarian usually does not object to wage slavery, and would disagree with the concept of wage slavery entirely, on the grounds that you were not forced to work a job you dislike, since you could always choose to starve instead.

What you’re looking for is one of the schools of anarchism.
Although usually painted as “anti-government, anti-society”, it actually derives from being against hierarchy, and is characterized generally (there are many schools) as being opposed to involuntary power hierarchies.
Sometimes government is the best way to reduce the total amount of coercion in the system, since forcing a lot of people to pay a little can free many, many people from being forced to do stuff they loath to survive.

Libertarians aren’t pro-liberty they’re anti-government, and anarchists aren’t pro-chaos they’re anti-coercian. They’re both entire political schools of thought, so I’ve obviously not encapsulated them entirely in two paragraphs.

But we still see a trend line of decreasing religiosity and a taming of extreme religious beliefs.
Children are way more likely to take the religion of their parents than otherwise, but they’re still new believers that the idea has to be able to take hold in, and if the idea just doesn’t fit then you’ll see a departure. It’s not like their religion is the only one trying to take root.

I just don’t think we see the world today that we would if religion spread with the force of population dynamics.

Well, if that were the case wouldn’t we expect to see near universal religious belief now?
We can’t start the population set now, we should look at when religion started.

I’d posit that as time goes on, the religious beliefs tend to want to spread, but they also round off more difficult to wrangle aspects to maintain appeal to a wider audience. A belief system incompatible with observed reality or unpalatable to potential new believers is going to be less robust than one that fits and is welcoming.

It’s why today’s extremists are generally more tame than the commonplace believers of the past.

Eventually some people catch a version of the religion so weak that it’s only kinda comparable, and you have the Christian who never goes to church or thinks about it really, or the person who’s a vague notion of spiritual without much specific behind it beyond a vague notion of purposeful intention to the world.