Most theories and hypotheses in psychology are verbal in nature, yet their evaluation overwhelmingly relies on inferential statistical procedures. The validity of the move from qualitative to quantitative analysis depends on the verbal and statistical expressions of a hypothesis being closely aligned—that is, that the two must refer to roughly the same set of hypothetical observations. Here I argue that most inferential statistical tests in psychology fail to meet this basic condition.

see: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/jqw35_v1

via: https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/reads

If you want to be dead, that’s your own business. But if you would like to continue to be alive, it’s a bad idea to set goals for yourself that boil down to “try to get as close as possible to being a corpse while continuing to respire and consume nutrients.”

Something I can hopefully internalize.

It’s not that I’m afraid of rejection — it’s that I assume it. That’s what I was really mad about as a kid. Why do I have to be the screw-up? Why do I have to be all of these things that I wouldn’t want, either? Emotionally fragile, socially shut-in, in equal parts sexually perverse and timid — and worst of all, self-loathing. That self-loathing has fed avoidance, which has led to a failure to express my needs and desires, which has led to dysfunction in my relationships, which resets the cycle.

On the terrible system dynamics of dating and sensitive young man syndrome. Beautiful cycle depicted.

Or; “Diptych, Panel I: The Mote in His Eye.”

A nice discussion of het dating norms and a useful script for treating people.

The worst thing for people with OCD is other people who don’t know they have OCD

But I think there’s a more radical slipperiness in that “our sense of right and wrong” and “the social reaction of others” are not as separable as we like to think. Elsewhere, the article tries to get past the fear of accidental harm by encouraging the reader to make use of the “common-sense understanding of offensiveness that you have developed as a minimally functional adult living in a society.” The issue, I think, is that one’s common-sense understanding of what makes people feel uncomfortable or unsafe is built by receiving or observing social consequences.

I’m still haunted by the sense that my attraction to women is in some way inherently, almost psychically, harmful. I just don’t have the practice in more representative circles to have worked through it on an instinctual level.

Oh my God. Such beautiful application of contemporary philosophy to the pains of social life.

it’s not good advice, but it’s all there is

This is unfortunately what I must do, too. “Dating in the Bay Area” returns.

The comic in this piece is very cool.

see: https://archive.org/details/hup-04-1992_202302/Hup%2001%2C%201987/page/n15/mode/2up

Wynn’s video makes use of the idea that the psychological “point” of kink can be to enable oneself to enjoy sexuality. This is how a lot of folks understand fantasies of submission and dominance — if you deal with a lot of shame or other baggage around your desires or the act of sex, having these things forced on you is pretty convenient! And if that’s the case, for most of us, playing the dominant would be directly counterproductive, giving us more reasons to worry! She draws an analogy to the way in which Anastasia of Fifty Shades is repeatedly given extravagant gifts against her will, enabling a fantasy of wealth without violating deeply-held boundaries around humility and propriety.

Fire post.

via: https://www.cartoonshateher.com/p/sex-with-your-husband-isnt-labor

When it’s “punching up” to pretend the other gender’s loneliness crisis is self-imposed

Beyond the fact that plenty of OCD manifestations are just too taboo for public consumption, I think one thing that really irks people is when someone has a high degree of insight into their OCD, but still frequently falls victim to it and is unable to be cured. In their minds, mental illness always has an endpoint. It becomes a weird prior chapter of your life, you can turn the page, and look back on it to say, “Ahh, those terrible times, before I discovered therapy.” They are extremely uncomfortable with the idea that you will be like this forever.

This is also the conclusion I’ve come to in dealing with my own intrusive thoughts. I shall save it for 1:1s w/ my therapist and share with no one else. Otherwise, it’s ultimately too exhausting for everyone involved.

I think my inability to accept people’s hatred of me before was fundamentally the same inability to accept the social power they were handing me. And this was uncomfortable for me and probably other people too, because turns out I do in fact have social power. It turns out you can’t not be handed social power. I sorta believed that if I just shrugged and said ‘aw shucks’ enough that this would save me from elevation, but it didn’t. I thought it ought to save me from elevation, but that was the very lil nugget of fuckery that the rest of my psyche was tangling around.

Status is scary.

via: https://aella.substack.com/p/pt5-women-are-low-status

This blog post comes basically in two parts: the role which LLM assistants are trained for is horribly undefined and ontologically hella strange, and AI safety “””researchers””” are basically goading LLMs into misalignment without any concern for the consequences.

Sometimes, a book is a dud.

I don’t mind the ways in which my job is dysfunctional, because it matches the ways in which I myself am dysfunctional: specifically, my addiction to being useful.

Yes, humans are not great evaluators. Yes, algorithms add a level of determinism into the game (this is not to be confused with objectivity: they just aren’t due to being made by humans). Yes, any flaw you can point out in a prediction algorithm can arguably be found in humans, too. Still doesn’t make algorithms significantly more justifiable than human evaluators. Plus, unlike humans, computers can’t take responsibility for management decisions. And of course, as we make predictive algorithms more complex with AI, bias becomes harder to identify and nigh-impossible to fix. Sigh.

Elise Schuenke comics about Sage, an exhausted hard working autistic, home from a long day of work, masking and social effort. Decompressing and pulling back from the effort to perform, we get to see a 5 pager comic of their partners reactions. A wonderful comic that highlights and gives a moment for a powerfully intimate moment that’s easy to misunderstand.

But wanting to be a good person might be your most dangerous motivation.

If our movement is successful, it will be because of tens of thousands of people who all tried different things.”

I am not part of animal advocacy, but these are good rules to live by, nonetheless.