ExistentialLab retweeted
Autists & psychopaths are opposites on empathy.
There's cognitive empathy & there's affective empathy.
Cognitive empathy (understanding & reading mental states & cues): autists struggle, psychopaths do not. Psychopaths can even have better cognitive empathy than normies!
Affective empathy (feeling others' emotions & pain): psychopaths struggle, autists do not. Some autists even experience hyper-empathy on this one!
In other words, psychopaths can read others quite well; they just won't empathize with them.
This can lead to extremely manipulative behavior because they don't care when they hurt other people. They don't feel what others are feeling, so it doesn't pain them to harm someone the way it would most of us.
Autists? We can't read social cues well, but once we know someone else is hurt, we feel it & we care!
So instead of manipulative behavior, you get someone who frequently *accidentally* offends people, but isn't *trying* to be harmful.
That's why psychopaths are feared & autists are either disliked or pitied.
Cuz what sounds scarier: the person who can't read the room but cares, or the person who CAN read the room & work it without feeling guilt if they hurt anyone?
Incidentally, this is why one of my fave shows is Hannibal. Hannibal is a psychopath; Will Graham says he's more on the autistic spectrum. Hannibal is pure manipulative evil; Will has such hyper-empathy he can empathize even with psychopaths.
But it's obviously easier to use great room-reading abilities & zero fucks given to your advantage than the polar opposite, for obvious reasons.
And I simply don't agree that psychopaths & autists share the same pathology. Like I said, they're actually kinda polar opposite!
Socially and human relationship wise, psychopaths and autists share nearly the same pathology. At least in their most notable psychological trait.
Both the psychopath/sociopath and the autistic's functioning in human emotional connection, the understanding of and reverence for human emotional connection, and the use of and recognition of their associated social cues is abnormal.
Lacking. They don't seem to have the innate program that runs unconscious emotional understanding which comes stock for most humans.
Their brain does not do this in the way that most people's do without them having to try. Psychopaths and artists have to learn this and consciously try.
And yet psychopaths are deemed villains for this while the autistic mostly garner sympathy, patience and help from others.
Why are psychopaths the villains and autists the long suffering unsung heroes?
Because the psychopathic mind has figured out how to utilize this trait towards their own gain and the autist hasn't?
I think we revere psychopathic traits whether we like to admit it or not and as such we view them as higher on the social hierarchy and powerful whereas reviews the artistic as low on the social hierarchy and inconsequential. They are victims of their abnormal psychology and should be helped.
Nobody views psychopaths as victims of their abnormal psychology.
Because they've taken their lack, their weakness, their abnormality and utilized it toward its strengths.
Take your own weakness and use it as a strength.
ExistentialLab retweeted
My favorite genre of Wanye tweet is when he rambles about some idea he had of a AmericanSacredValue🇺🇸™️ and if you don’t like it then you’re not American 😡😈
…and then you check basic polling and he’s just completely wrong
(Americans prefer hard work to natural talent)
“You don’t study for the spelling bee” is a deep and important aspect of American culture. I was at a baseball game discussing some young players with a buddy one time and he said to me offhandedly, “hard work is fine, but nothing beats talent.”
Americans have this sort of sense that there’s something a little off about working really hard to get good at something that you’re not naturally good at. You’re never really going to be on the same level as the guy who has a natural talent. We have room in our hearts for scrappy little guys who work hard, but we are by default suspicious of grinders and strivers.
If you were really meant to do it, then you’d be naturally good at it. You sign your kids up for little league, but you don’t take it too seriously unless they show remarkable early talent.
Yes, this sounds sort of ridiculous if you take it too literally. No, nobody is saying that there’s any kind of practical test for this or that anybody should be excluded because we found out that they secretly studied too hard.
But this is a part of American culture. And if you can’t understand it, then that just marks you out as foreign to that culture to an even greater degree.
ExistentialLab retweeted
If you wanted to summarize the awesome power of America, it would be hard to do better than showing someone graduate from IIT and then presumably happily work at Montana State.
ExistentialLab retweeted
Some thoughts on the Navier-Stokes news from a professor of aerospace engineering:
1) take a deep breath
2) posts indicating we "solved Navier-Stokes" are incorrect and overblown. A very specific mathematical proof involving a niche scenario for Navier-Stokes has *potentially* been shown (that a perfectly smooth incompressible initial condition with finite energy could produce a singularity--note the assumptions here piled on to an equation set that already involves some assumptions).
3) there is no general closed form solution for N-S and that's not what this news is about
4) this is more of a mathematical curiosity than anything else and could matter a lot to mathematicians but basically changes nothing in the way N-S are used in practice
5) there are already very useful exact solutions to Navier-Stokes that greatly simplify the equation set with the right boundary conditions/geometry like laminar flow through a pipe or a 2D Taylor-Green vortex
6) in aerospace, we already treat N-S as an approximation in many instances and are well aware of its limitations. we don't outright solve these equations anyway and regularly chop off terms or simplify parts (at the expense of accuracy) to make them easier to deal with.
7) to be honest I have never found this specific problem to be particularly interesting because we know a core assumption of N-S is a "continuum" fluid where you ignore molecules and assume hydrodynamic scales >>> molecular scales. We know a real fluid cannot have infinite velocity or energy. But clearly you can push equations outside of their bound of validity and make them produce funky results and singularities.
ExistentialLab retweeted
Amusingly, Trump's tariffs did affect this skincare company, but don't seem to have stopped its U.S. expansion. The Gen Z Boss (Rachael Wilde) is still killing it. 💵💵💵
ExistentialLab retweeted
Fun game, draw a random life out of what we know about the entire history of human population statistics.
I died at six months old in Bronze Age Southeast Asia.
anyhumanever.com/
ExistentialLab retweeted
"As Roman Catholic theologians, we acknowledge in the spirit of Vatican II that the Lutheran communities with which we have been in dialogue are truly Christian churches, possessing the elements of holiness and truth that mark them as organs of grace and salvation. Furthermore, in our study we have found serious defects in the arguments customarily used against the validity of the eucharistic Ministry of the Lutheran churches. In fact, we see no persuasive reason to deny the possibility of the Roman Catholic church recognizing the validity of this Ministry."
— Lutherans and Catholics in Dialogue IV, Eucharist and Ministry: A Lutheran-Roman Cathlic Statement (3.54)
ExistentialLab retweeted
This is the third time Trump has said that grass has “life like humans.” He is close to embracing the truth of 無情佛性 (wúqíng fóxìng), the Buddha-like nature of all things, and rejecting the false binary of sentience/insentience.
ExistentialLab retweeted
Ben is interesting because he gave a microphone to three of the worst culture war provocateurs of the last wave and he CLEARLY regrets the impact that choice had on the media environment.
ExistentialLab retweeted
Fun fact, Clint Eastwood discovered that horses who had been on film sets long enough reacted to “action!” and “cut!”, meaning they started giving unnatural performances.
So Eastwood, as director, took to saying “whenever you’re ready…” and “that’s enough of that…” instead.
ExistentialLab retweeted
The place on the left voted for Kamala Harris. The place on the right voted for Donald Trump. And I mean it literally, not as a meme.
ExistentialLab retweeted
"Why are you so far-left politically?
I am just a normal Republican from 1956"
ExistentialLab retweeted
America’s democratic socialists are obsessed with the Nordic model. The problem? These countries aren’t socialist, writes @mj_koch.
Read more: on.wsj.com/4wPtTGe
ExistentialLab retweeted
LRT: Were any of you as perturbed by the gritty realism of Super Mario 64 as Kenji Eno was
ExistentialLab retweeted
>Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.
