Nah, it was rather in a context of how cute and nice-smelling babies are, not that it was an immediate new discovery

This is so screwed, too.

Like, I was once tasked to explain to my nephew how to properly clean a penis at, like, age of 7. C’mon, parents, what are you there for?!

Just literally teach it alongside cleaning every other body part, what’s the issue? Why should another man show this in particular to your kid?

I feel.like we generally give women a pass on A LOT of weird behaviors about children.

That does include elevated attention to the genital area (seriously, why? Leave our genitals alone ffs), borderline fetishizing breastfeeding, and also a lot of other stuff.

Like, for example, I had several women independently telling me how baby feces smell nice and milky. Like, what the hell and why do y’all feel it’s appropriate for a casual conversation???

Or that they love to smell baby feet. Huh? Funny thing I first got those stories after seeing a TV ad (was a while ago) with a woman burying her face in baby feet.

I can only assume this is either a result of hormonal shifts throughout pregnancy, or that there’s plenty more female pedophiles than we knew.

They didn’t mention it anywhere

I don’t think there is a single universal Great filter, and living and then potentially sentient beings with various traits will face various obstacles.

First, life needs suitable materials for polymers and a lot of energy. Most places don’t have both.

Next, basic blocks of life that would be self-replicating and adaptive should be randomly generated, which is extremely unlikely and literally took over a billion years on Earth, a planet with generally great conditions for such process.

Then, those blocks should be able to get together to form complex structures - ideally, many separate ones, so that one event wouldn’t destroy the entire effort. Earth had it easy, with billions of super simple life forms.

Next, assuming life survived up to this point in a potentially unfriendly and ever-changing environment, bombarded by UV light and exposed to myriad of sources of damage, it should not destroy itself or environment too badly to never recover. Earth had periods when life generated too much carbon dioxide or too much oxygen (yes, that too was a thing), and those were critical points at which our story could very much end.

Then, life has to evolutionize and get into complex forms, either by forming multicellular organisms or by making a cell a powerhouse of everything.

Then, life has to get sentient, and some kind of response system should be available and get highly complex.

Then, most of the sentient creatures just won’t be tribal, and civilization requires society and a common effort.

Then, many more won’t be expansionist, and will die out in some small region.

Many also won’t be competitive, which would slow down evolution.

For those species who are competitive, they shouldn’t destroy each other while they’re at it, and this is currently one of the risks of our own.

And after all that, they should develop space travel and either get as developed and decisive and resource-rich as to send a generational ship to some random planet named Earth populated by genocidal monkeys, or to somehow hyperdrive here. They can very much decide it’s not worth it, and they may be so far away we couldn’t see signs of their civilization.

Our initial offering will include ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, and Le Chat Mistral, but we will continue adding AI services that meet our standards for quality and user experience.

Is that the same Mozilla that started the Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness?

What in living hell do proprietary and predatory AI services even doing here?

Mozilla just offered users to feed into the very abomination they claim to fight.

Also, for all things “AI”, local is the only way to go if you ever want to have a chance at privacy.

Depends on the definition of “wasting”

There’s always a way to spend less water, even less than you currently do.

But normally spending more water translates to comfort, as well as better washing.

Bad.

What matters is longevity and price per watt, first and foremost.

High-efficiency solar panels might be cool for spacecraft or other highly limited space installations, but generally it really isn’t the absolute first priority.

An amazing thing, to be honest

That’s how the Juggernaut collective started

The placebo effect is a simple psychological phenomenon affecting only the human body itself (i.e. not bringing changes to the world outside the body itself, which is literally directly regulated by the nervous system), and requiring a total of zero supernatural things.

It’s just the interaction of the nervous system with various organs of the body. Aside from placebo and nocebo, this may also lead to psychosomatic disorder, and long-term stress wear and tear. Certain expectations or stressors influence the way organs are regulated, which may lead to positive or negative outcomes depending on the context.

Congratulations!

Welcome to the Penguinland

First, you jump to the conclusion that your mind really is a source of reality. That’s a big leap, and I don’t think you used Occam’s razor well here. Besides, this approach is wildly oversimplified, and shouldn’t be used as a proof in itself.

Second, at the time there is zero evidence of mind alteration bringing tangible change to the perceivable world. Spawn me a dragon, or teach me to spawn one, here, in this very proven plane of existence, and we’ll talk.

For now, there is no evidence I actually miss out on anything.

Moreover, from that point of view, there is no guarantee my brain even exists and is what I think with.

But that doesn’t matter for the substance of discussion, really. Whatever I perceive is the evidence of something that is real, as said evidence is repeatedly presented to my consciousness, following the rules. If my mind is the source of the reality, it doesn’t change the fact that said reality operates by certain rules that can be devised using evidence.

I think, therefore I exist, as Descartes said. My mind is real. And whatever is consistently presented to me, following certain rules, is very certainly real, too. Same can’t be said of dragons or magic, for example. There is no evidence - in the world or in my perception of it - for their existence, and I can’t rule them in solely based on the fact I made it up in my imagination.

If you’re lost in what I’m saying, try to spawn a dragon right next to you, in the world you perceive as physical, not in your imagination. Next, try to boil water in a kettle. See the difference? One never happens, unless you’re hallucinating, and the other always succeeds if you do everything correctly. The second, thereby, can be seen as a likely rule of the world’s functioning, a natural law, regardless of anything else.

I’m not doomsaying about anything. I only say that we shouldn’t reject that otherkin are physically people. You can treat them differently from a social perspective - as you probably should and as you do, but it doesn’t erase that they are physically human.

And honestly, it’s much less of a deal than you think it is. Society operates social categories, doctors and other people for whom it is important operate physical ones. The debate we currently have is really about defining those social categories.

You say you can effectively deal the otherkin’s body stuff - you do it exactly because you know they are physically human, and any body stuff they may have is directly corresponding to human anatomy and physiology.

What you essentially try to defend is the social side of it, the perception I have of these people. You want them to be socially treated differently from human - and I don’t mind that in a slightest.

I’m only saying you cannot impose a new physical reality in which bodies of otherkin are not human - they are human, that is alright and it doesn’t mean otherkin should be socially treated as humans. Socially, they are not.

But in that we delve further and further from the objective reality we talked about, because the entire field of social interactions is a construct, too. A useful and great one, the one I have no intention to reject - but a construct, and since you deeply care about that, I’m gonna highlight it again.

Gender itself is entirely a social construct. The reality, however, is that this construct exists in our interactions, and that we are unable to define it based on anything but self-assessment.

Still, if we switch back to the scope of the objective reality about humans themselves, gender is entirely social.

Objective reality operates the category of sex and couldn’t care less about whatever we created around it - including gender and gender roles.

Yes, but evidence suggests it is. There’s a large gap between confirmed evidence and a random guess or a fantasy, and ignoring it would be same as equating a soup with its picture.

Confirmed evidence is verifiable, meaning it can be reproduced again and again under the same conditions - and if we constantly get the same output under the same conditions, we may assume this is how the reality works. That’s the backbone of science, a thing that brought us from the wild and to the current point.

It would be weird to expect the sun not to rise tomorrow, or for water not to heat up inside the working kettle, or anything else. This just works every time, and as such, we can see our observations as practically objective.

A nice thing is that I colloquially perceive her as a dragon and address her draconic identity. I would also correct others if she’d want me to.

I do not plan on refusing a reality that she has a human body simply out of being polite though. I would not address her personally as a human, I would address her draconic identity, and I would consider that identity when I think of her, but I would not ignore evidence that she does, in fact, have a human body, and by that reject reality.

Or should she go to the veterinarian if she gets sick? Should we expect her to fly us somewhere, or kindle a fire with her mouth? Trying to turn her draconic nature into the new reality goes against objectivity, and she’ll fail at both.

In a similar manner, with all respect to nonbinaries, if they face any issues on the side of systems that differ based on sex, for example, they should address a doctor based on whatever of the two very binary states their bodies have (or, if they are intersex, whichever side troubles them). Going to someone else will not yield a positive result.

But that doesn’t mean we should tell your friend that her feelings are not valid. They are. Her identity does not have to be the same as her current body, and that’s alright, that happens. It often does cause some level of dysphoria, but we won’t make it better by ignoring the identity she grew with, which would be to ignore who she is mentally - which, in turn, is of prime importance in any social interaction.

In other words, objectively, she is physically a human who considers herself to be a dragon. That is the reality that we can always check and explore. Then, we may build social constructs on top of that, including the framework for seeing her socially as a dragon (as social interactions are entirely a construct anyway), since that corresponds to her identity and allows us to better address her needs and better communicate with her. Alternatively, we can redefine the term “dragon” to mean “any creature with a draconic identity”. That would work, too, but then we simply change the meanings of words, not the reality.

And before you accuse me of anything, I’m a genderfluid person, but I am aware my body is what’s considered “male”. I do have a penis, even when I feel like I belong to women - and I am, socially, and would love to be treated as one when I’m in that state. But I do not ask anyone to reject the fact that my body is typical of a male, as unfortunate as it may sometimes be.

The fact that gender is self-assessed and self-determined. We can’t ask a picture on whether it’s a rabbit or a duck being depicted, and its author deliberately made it look like both. Also, the objective reality is that it’s just a picture - you are not confronted with a rabbi-duck coming at you.

We can always ask a person, though, and they do have a certain opinion in what their gender is - an opinion that is essentially a sole basis for gendering someone. So their opinion of their gender essentially defines their gender, which makes it a reality.