It does strike me as a rather fully general counterargument, written in a deliberately obfuscatory/”woo” style. The focus on “listening to your body” seems like an obfuscation, it’s an appeal to something deliberately put beyond measurement. This does seem like it could apply to anything anyone cares about (you’re a Red Sox fan? You’re addicted to the suffering, your body is telling you to stop, land on Earth and get sober!). If you have any reasons to disagree, that’s coming from a place of addiction and you need to stop caring and presumably follow a similar life-path to OP because that is the only thing that works, everything else is a death-cult.
I don’t buy it, to say the least, and I think it’s only the social connections that people have to the OP that make anyone treat it charitably. People have been saying this since the earliest days of the discussion of this topic on the Internet; this fully general counterargument predates Eliezer Yudkowsky being appropriately pessimistic about AI.
I also think that the characterization that all rationalism comes from “disembodiment” is essentially an ableist slur. Using ableist slurs and appealing to the hierarchy of ableism is always manipulative and is never appropriate. Unfortunately as people have come to the rationalist community more with the intention of using it as a springboard for their own careers, we’ve had to deal with more and more overt and covert ableism as a rather underhanded way of putting a thumb on the scales. If we’re to truly abandon the supremacy of the neurotypical, and truly embrace neurodiversity, we also have to embrace a diversity of “embodiment” (to the extent that is a valid and real concept, which I doubt), which the OP thoroughly does not.
I think the idea of listening to your body is actually to make visible and thus measurable atleast on the inside the thing. It kinda does require a good faith approach. The hope is that people that are alexithymic might not be (coining words here) asomathymic, that people that do not have verbal access to their emotions (to a sufficient degree) would be able to have bodily access to them (to a sufficient degree).
Assumptions that internal emotional access is easy and resonable to expect might be improperly ablist. But it can also be taken in the sense that emotional access is not assumed nor taken to be easy and “try wider spectrum of emotional access” is an action that would not and should not be done unprompted. Giving an advice of “have you tried to switch it off and on again?” does not neccesarily comment on the sophistication of interventions tried.
The problem isn’t that access to emotion is ableist. I think that suggestion is itself ableist, neurodiverse people have complete access to their emotions, their emotional reactions to certain things might simply be different.
The problem is that no matter what you do, if you come to a conclusion different from OP, you are simply still “disembodied.” You just need to “do more work.” This is a way of counting the hits and excusing the misses. “Embodiment” is not “being in touch with your emotions,” it is acting in the manner prescribed.
What is ableist is saying that there is a single state, “embodiment,” which coincidentally overlaps entirely with several other things prescribed, and if you are not in that state, there is a psychological problem with you. This is neurotypical supremacy.
As I said in the other post in this thread to which you replied, there are other ways to deal with this. You do not have to do breathwork. You do not have to meditate. You do not have to “listen to your body.” These are ideological prescriptions. They poorly emulate cognitive-behavioral therapy, which is a much more effective way to process emotions and resolve maladaptive behavior patterns.
This is why the comment parent and myself think that this post is manipulative. It presents a real problem, but frames it in terms such that the only possible solution is the wholesale adoption of the author’s ideology. The honest post on this topic would have mentioned other solutions, which maybe the author did not personally experience but understands, through systematizing and integrating their own experiences and the experiences of others, to be also solutions to the same problem.
I understood it as a method of getting an access to emotions. The problem framing does not really carry an interpretation where you could be 100% aware of everything and still be suffering from the problem, because the antidote offered is to become aware of something (100% awereness might be superhumanly difficult).
Claiming that most blind people do not see well 20 meters away is not disparaging in itself. Alexithymia is a catalogued autism trait. It is a spectrum and when you have met one autist you have met one autist. So while assuming all traits upon learning one of them would be erroneuos, the presence of each of the traits become relevant. It is sensible to check whether a particular blind person can see well 1 meter away, is able to turn their eyeballs or knows how to echolocate. Poor understanding of autism can lead to treating disparaging properties to be autism traits. Even misrepresenting frequency can have the same effect. Special interests are a thing but deducing “autistic → spends daily 3 hours on some specific topic” is ignorantly wrong. Alexithymias basedness as a trait is not very questionable. As a trait alexithymia directly deals with awereness (it is not athymia in the same go). Thus lack of awereness is relevant to alexithymia. So to think without knowing that in the intersection of “awereness” and “autism” alexithymia is worth processing is a leap that can be justified in good faith. Thus I disagree and think that “suggesting that access to emotion is ablist” is not ablist.
Being demanding and making a typical mind fallacy is quite bad a combo. Being sure that the antidote has high reliability does commit that kind of bad.
I do think that insisting that it doesn’t work is ignoring that alexithymic people can respond to stuff like this positively, to project a particular responce profile to be typical to the point of fallacy. Selling a placebo and a dangerously unreliable drug are slightly different things.
The post does admit guilt of being rude and bad in all kinds of ways. Choosing to give essential tips for a few by insulting and harming many is a real tradeoff.
Claims about therapy effectiveness are also prone to responce profiles. I wouldn’t be surprised if cognitive-behavioral therapy would be elevatedly effective for autistist because of high combatibility with explicit processing.
Okay, I’m mostly fine with you two having your exchange and me mostly ignoring it, but I’m gonna speak up against this bit:
The problem is that no matter what you do, if you come to a conclusion different from OP, you are simply still “disembodied.” You just need to “do more work.” This is a way of counting the hits and excusing the misses. “Embodiment” is not “being in touch with your emotions,” it is acting in the manner prescribed.
No.
That’s not what I said and it’s not what I meant.
You’re making that part up.
I’m describing a structure. It doesn’t have a damn thing to do with convincing people of something. It’s about pointing at reality and inviting people to see what I’m pointing at.
If you don’t want to look, or you look and you see something else, that’s fine by me. Honestly.
I doubt my saying this has a damn effect on your sense of what I am or am not saying or intending, honestly.
But I’m not going to just let this calibre of bullshit projection slide by without comment.
It does strike me as a rather fully general counterargument, written in a deliberately obfuscatory/”woo” style. The focus on “listening to your body” seems like an obfuscation, it’s an appeal to something deliberately put beyond measurement. This does seem like it could apply to anything anyone cares about (you’re a Red Sox fan? You’re addicted to the suffering, your body is telling you to stop, land on Earth and get sober!). If you have any reasons to disagree, that’s coming from a place of addiction and you need to stop caring and presumably follow a similar life-path to OP because that is the only thing that works, everything else is a death-cult.
I don’t buy it, to say the least, and I think it’s only the social connections that people have to the OP that make anyone treat it charitably. People have been saying this since the earliest days of the discussion of this topic on the Internet; this fully general counterargument predates Eliezer Yudkowsky being appropriately pessimistic about AI.
I also think that the characterization that all rationalism comes from “disembodiment” is essentially an ableist slur. Using ableist slurs and appealing to the hierarchy of ableism is always manipulative and is never appropriate. Unfortunately as people have come to the rationalist community more with the intention of using it as a springboard for their own careers, we’ve had to deal with more and more overt and covert ableism as a rather underhanded way of putting a thumb on the scales. If we’re to truly abandon the supremacy of the neurotypical, and truly embrace neurodiversity, we also have to embrace a diversity of “embodiment” (to the extent that is a valid and real concept, which I doubt), which the OP thoroughly does not.
I think the idea of listening to your body is actually to make visible and thus measurable atleast on the inside the thing. It kinda does require a good faith approach. The hope is that people that are alexithymic might not be (coining words here) asomathymic, that people that do not have verbal access to their emotions (to a sufficient degree) would be able to have bodily access to them (to a sufficient degree).
Assumptions that internal emotional access is easy and resonable to expect might be improperly ablist. But it can also be taken in the sense that emotional access is not assumed nor taken to be easy and “try wider spectrum of emotional access” is an action that would not and should not be done unprompted. Giving an advice of “have you tried to switch it off and on again?” does not neccesarily comment on the sophistication of interventions tried.
The problem isn’t that access to emotion is ableist. I think that suggestion is itself ableist, neurodiverse people have complete access to their emotions, their emotional reactions to certain things might simply be different.
The problem is that no matter what you do, if you come to a conclusion different from OP, you are simply still “disembodied.” You just need to “do more work.” This is a way of counting the hits and excusing the misses. “Embodiment” is not “being in touch with your emotions,” it is acting in the manner prescribed.
What is ableist is saying that there is a single state, “embodiment,” which coincidentally overlaps entirely with several other things prescribed, and if you are not in that state, there is a psychological problem with you. This is neurotypical supremacy.
As I said in the other post in this thread to which you replied, there are other ways to deal with this. You do not have to do breathwork. You do not have to meditate. You do not have to “listen to your body.” These are ideological prescriptions. They poorly emulate cognitive-behavioral therapy, which is a much more effective way to process emotions and resolve maladaptive behavior patterns.
This is why the comment parent and myself think that this post is manipulative. It presents a real problem, but frames it in terms such that the only possible solution is the wholesale adoption of the author’s ideology. The honest post on this topic would have mentioned other solutions, which maybe the author did not personally experience but understands, through systematizing and integrating their own experiences and the experiences of others, to be also solutions to the same problem.
I understood it as a method of getting an access to emotions. The problem framing does not really carry an interpretation where you could be 100% aware of everything and still be suffering from the problem, because the antidote offered is to become aware of something (100% awereness might be superhumanly difficult).
Claiming that most blind people do not see well 20 meters away is not disparaging in itself. Alexithymia is a catalogued autism trait. It is a spectrum and when you have met one autist you have met one autist. So while assuming all traits upon learning one of them would be erroneuos, the presence of each of the traits become relevant. It is sensible to check whether a particular blind person can see well 1 meter away, is able to turn their eyeballs or knows how to echolocate. Poor understanding of autism can lead to treating disparaging properties to be autism traits. Even misrepresenting frequency can have the same effect. Special interests are a thing but deducing “autistic → spends daily 3 hours on some specific topic” is ignorantly wrong. Alexithymias basedness as a trait is not very questionable. As a trait alexithymia directly deals with awereness (it is not athymia in the same go). Thus lack of awereness is relevant to alexithymia. So to think without knowing that in the intersection of “awereness” and “autism” alexithymia is worth processing is a leap that can be justified in good faith. Thus I disagree and think that “suggesting that access to emotion is ablist” is not ablist.
Being demanding and making a typical mind fallacy is quite bad a combo. Being sure that the antidote has high reliability does commit that kind of bad.
I do think that insisting that it doesn’t work is ignoring that alexithymic people can respond to stuff like this positively, to project a particular responce profile to be typical to the point of fallacy. Selling a placebo and a dangerously unreliable drug are slightly different things.
The post does admit guilt of being rude and bad in all kinds of ways. Choosing to give essential tips for a few by insulting and harming many is a real tradeoff.
Claims about therapy effectiveness are also prone to responce profiles. I wouldn’t be surprised if cognitive-behavioral therapy would be elevatedly effective for autistist because of high combatibility with explicit processing.
Okay, I’m mostly fine with you two having your exchange and me mostly ignoring it, but I’m gonna speak up against this bit:
No.
That’s not what I said and it’s not what I meant.
You’re making that part up.
I’m describing a structure. It doesn’t have a damn thing to do with convincing people of something. It’s about pointing at reality and inviting people to see what I’m pointing at.
If you don’t want to look, or you look and you see something else, that’s fine by me. Honestly.
I doubt my saying this has a damn effect on your sense of what I am or am not saying or intending, honestly.
But I’m not going to just let this calibre of bullshit projection slide by without comment.
How is this falsifiable?
Can you point to five people who have done this, but still have a different orientation from you?