Commenting takes less energy than moderating comments, certainly.
spriteless
Karma: 314
The story would be improved by making it about hair color, actually.
It’s not just prayer. I have the same problems with meditation.
The only meditation I can do is body-scan meditation. It is not particularly spiritual, just body awareness. If you are looking for the calming benefits of meditation, you might check it out.
Maybe it is just me, personally, but I don’t find most recipes for making people’s private spiritual experiences publicly-accessible to me to be very specific or comprehensible or operational. Is this typical-mind fallacy, or do others feel the same way?
I feel this way. I usually assume it’s someone else’s typical mind fallacy keeping them from explaining, or else certain word sounds are connected to different meanings, or else I am neurodivergent such that the explainer is used to people who don’t need to have it explained better, or something to do with signalling that went over my head.
Don’t push this all on the girls! Any boy could dress up as a girl convincingly enough to fool the magic and lift the branch himself. The only reason they did not was because they would take a similar status hit as the girls would for giving away their magic for free.
(More practical advice from an unwillingly celibate lesbian who is as disgusted with the idea of getting touched by dudes as you: learn to masturbate, and/or seek ways to relieve or avoid other types of stress that exacerbate the problem.)
Shoot I’d love a fiction section just to read a bunch of stories without exposing myself to the twist won’t be ‘sometimes people see spirits but keep it to themselves so they won’t look stupid, even in the cool space future’ so much. And you’d like to have it cordoned off so you don’t see it unless you are looking.
I don’t come here much because there is not too much content. I’d come here more often if there was links to content that is nice. Even if it is just a sidebar with links to off-site posts. I mean, there is the blogs people who used to post here now post at, there’s other rationality blogs, there’s the occasional reddit thread of interest.
I have no problem with the ‘ghosts haunting the dead site’ staying around.
Trying to make their ideology more dominant (aka spreading Islam in general)
I find this the least likely as the main goal. Also, if this was the case, they are counterproductive. So far Islam was very successful in the last few decades to gain a bigger and bigger foothold in the Western world, helped both by demographics and by the predominantly left-leaning political elite in Europe encouraging the acceptance of and submission to Islamic culture in Europe instead of encouraging the immigrants to abandon their culture for the culture of the host nations. However, the recent terrorist attacks, and the many atrocities committed by the recently arrived asylum seekers, while hurting European economy, will probably lead to Europe being more skeptical regarding Islam, which might reduce the chances of Islam peacefully and silently spreading. So these events, if indeed orchestrated by ISIS, might have been successful in harming the economy of their enemies, but I don’t know what an effect they had on the spreading of Islam. I’m tending on believing in a negative effect, but I just don’t know enough factors to know it for sure. I believe the violent attacks in the Western world are done mostly to show their own followers at home how powerful they are and how weak their enemies are.
In fact, these results make it hard on the Islamic people who wouldn’t join ISIS. This makes ISIS more attractive to these people. If a government oppresses a group than every anti-government group seems less oppressive to that group, both because oppression is relative and because of in-group vs. out-group dynamics.
So, listing some reasons:
reason: If you optimize you will miss all the truly important things!
answer: well, just make them a priority to optimize for
reason: but maaagic is wonder!
answer: but real things are also wonder.
I suspect this has been explored in Science Fiction, though I’ve never read anything in which this idea was put into practice.
Anne McCaffery’s Nimisha’s Ship mentions it as a duty of the first colonists of a planet. Important families from colonized worlds still check for any harmful combinations of recessive genes before siring a child. The book is more about the politics and cool space ships though.
I’d stick with birth control in the water and hefty fines, myself.
Nitpick: your post is tagged cary idea, not crazy idea.
I don’t recall anyone mentioning germs making the Super-Happys in 3 worlds collide unrealistic. Went straight to talking about the implications.
My first thought about this post was that D Malik must watch Stephen Universe, and want to start a conversation about the Gems’ Homeworld’s tech’s moral implications without getting into discussions about people’s Gemsonas and ships and whatnot.
Or A Deepness In the Sky, or John Dies At the End, or any number of books that explore the idea.
I guess I am in fiction critiquing mode here.
Assuming the original organics have to absorb a comparable amount of data to what Earther brains do, any brain with stimulus of the outside world will grow, which means overseers in a vat that interact with overseers in bodies will, even if not given stimulus, come to know their bosses and their personalities and moods and what not, and have as much chance of manipulating them as anyone whose only power is a bunch of underlings. How expensive are well trained overseers to replace? That is how much leeway they have in whatever equivalent they find to human bureaucrats with small amounts of power.
Could they develop superintellegent AGI? Depends wholly on their brains architecture, and their skill with artificial selection. Not enough data to predict.
Is this society evil? It is very slightly possible that it is not. I mean, I know some autistic people who on occasion wish to be cut off from their bodies during sensory somatic issues. Ehh, cloning aspies who are afraid of touching is kind of evil if it’s just as easy to clone aspies who aren’t afraid of touching.
That got handwaved away in the third paragraph of the op in order to force this to be a moral dilemma rather than an engineering one.
Meta: You might want to tag this as fiction so it is searchable later.
I would argue that Theologians have used the wide idea-space of their mythology to cover a lot of questions some of which also applicable outside of their theology.
I mean, it’s not as though religion has a monopoly on that idea. It is mentioned in the article how it has applications in any care-taking role.
Now if you can find someone talking about the possibility of a virgin getting pregnant through her ear or nose, that I will grant you is pretty unique to Christianity in specific time periods when social mores say pregnancy is good, vaginas are bad, and virginity is good..
I guess that disclaimer was a bit of a cached reaction, since the main forum where I talk about mental illness issues is Tumblr, and I need to explain that I know I’m not omnecient on Tumblr, and can’t prescribe treatments better than the people it would effect, just suggest ideas.
I did catch the extra disclaimer that you are not to use cognitave therapy on other people without their consent or knowledge, because in lw I expect you already know that and I won’t get status from pointing out that people have, like, agency and stuff. You can’t just do things to people. Wow. So much friendship for hitting such a low bar of decency. All the applause lights. Ramble ramble ramble.
Just getting rid of stuff is one way to stop a trigger. Building up a way to deal with it is another. Like, you could come up with a plan for your finances, and practice bringing up your finances and saying that plan, so you build another association with your finances that isn’t a loop of anxious thoughts. Like role-play therapy, where you plan out and practice your reactions to someone saying something before hand.
I am assuming a heluvalot about you with that advice though, sorry if that doesn’t even make sense.
I talked about just dismembering their arms before the chapter was even posted. I suppose them surviving would mean Harry can’t make up a ridiculus story after the fact, though. HJPEV Gotta do an overly complicated plots that cost others more than he realizes at the time or else he just isn’t HJPEV. >_>
I’ve had word problems all the way through calculus, so this connection of reality with math is not novel to me. Sorry about that. Or maybe you could use that for math education?