axiologist

Quote:

»Prejudice is one reason decades of research got autism so wrong. Researchers measured autistic people against neurotypical expectations and called every difference a deficit. They tested empathy by measuring in-group preference and missed commitment to universal fairness. They measured creativity by counting the number of ideas and missed originality. They saw moral consistency and called it rigidity. They saw deep engagement and called it rigidity. They saw sensory richness and called it disorder.

Most critically, they failed to ask autistic people about their inner experiences. They studied autism without genuinely listening to the autistic perspective. For decades, science examined autistic people through a lens of pathology and deficit, rather than dignity, comparing us to animals while missing our humanity. But autistic people don't lack humanity. Research just lacked the humanity to see it.«

Today is Johannes Kepler's birthday (27 December 1571 – 15 November 1630)

Favorite quotation: »If you work a job where you do something useful, you are on the losing side of this economy. All the real money is in this socially useless, no-value-creating, hypertrophied, metastasized finance sector. Every gain in finance is matched by a loss. It all amounts to – literally – nothing.«

Interesting perspective on the hard problem:

»Consciousness, on this view, is not a thing to be explained. It is what physical processes look like from the inside — from the perspective of the system that those processes constitute. The hard problem asks how to derive the inside view from the outside view. But you cannot derive one perspective from another any more than you can derive what a building looks like from the south by knowing only what it looks like from the north. Both views are correct. Neither is reducible to the other. And the building exists independently of either.«

Closely related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44348016

»We associate luxury with comfort, quality, wealth, and aspiration. But it wasn’t always that way: the word originally meant lechery and lust in English.«

»People with autism are better than the rest of us at filtering out extraneous contextual information in order to make rational economic decisions. For them, the package color and the products it is surrounded by are irrelevant to whether or not they put it in their basket. Instead, the autistic shopper focuses on what really matters: ingredients, price, and the necessity of even owning the product. Time and again they select the best product for their needs regardless of how it is displayed.«

Abstract: Once contact with a pathogen has occurred, it might be too late for the immune system to react. Here, we asked whether anticipatory neural responses might sense potential infections and signal to the immune system, priming it for a response. We show that potential contact with approaching infectious avatars, entering the peripersonal space in virtual reality, are anticipated by multisensory–motor areas and activate the salience network, as measured with psychophysics, electroencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging. This proactive neural anticipation instigates changes in both the frequency and activation of innate lymphoid cells, mirroring responses seen in actual infections. Alterations in connectivity patterns between infection-sensing brain regions and the hypothalamus, along with modulation of neural mediators, connect these effects to the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis. Neural network modeling recapitulates this neuro–immune cross-talk. These findings suggest an integrated neuro–immune reaction in humans toward infection threats, not solely following physical contact but already after breaching the functional boundary of body–environment interaction represented by the peripersonal space.

Evangelical hubris in action, using tech to commit spiritual poisoning of defenseless people.

»Weltschmerz (German: [ˈvɛltʃmɛɐ̯ts]; literally "world-pain") is a literary concept describing the feeling experienced by an individual who believes that reality can never satisfy the expectations of the mind, resulting in "a mood of weariness or sadness about life arising from the acute awareness of evil and suffering".«

»"Problems Have No Sex" is far better than many other feminist books I've read simply because of its lack of academic pretentiousness. Other than the occasional Latin phrase, the book is written in plain English - designed to be read and understood as widely as possible. As an engineer, Dame Haslett has an engineer's approach to problem solving - identify the issue, determine the cause, suggest solutions, investigate what works and what doesn't, repeat until fixed.«

»Dame Caroline Harriet Haslett DBE, JP (17 August 1895 – 4 January 1957) was an English electrical engineer, electricity industry administrator and champion of women's rights.«

One of the major incentives to use 3rd party downloader tools instead of the youtube website/app.

Might be closely related to the author's complains: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44348016

If backwards puritan christianity produces men and women unable to connect with each other in healthy ways, no wonder America is suffering from a declne those very same pseudo christians blame on others.

The article is telling much more about the author than about men. The author appears to be exactly the kind of woman many men looking for actual love instead of just sex actively prefer to avoid.

While being instructive about TM as seen from the viewpoint of a 30+ year practicioner, the video's merit mainly consists of showing a specific facet of David Lynch's personality.

Other than that, i guess anything is spiritually more wholesome than the increasing bizarreness of christian nationalism or, more plainly, christofascism rising in the western world, especially in the USA.

The Absolute is beyond words and therefore beyond scripture.

Paywalled, thus https://archive.ph/sk1zU

Rarely printing anything at all here. And if i really do need to have something in paper, i'd rather do so at some copy shop.

Instead of a space/toner/paper consuming printer, a paper sized e-ink device has turned out being the much better investment.

And much better searchable than dead tree, too.

Given sufficient criminal energy to do so, everything can and will be weaponized.

DOGE was just the first step suitably preparing the terrain for further scrutiny.

And once the work is completed, it will never go away again, regardless of the government's political inclinations.