518 karma · joined January 2, 2022
If the proposition here is that mental health disorders are fabricated maliciously in order to sell more medication or enforce some sort of social order, then I don't see how the very rare court-ordered enforcement of short-term stays at psychiatric institutions could be the mechanism for that.
The vast majority of people in the US who receive psychiatric care do so voluntarily, because they experience real symptoms that really affect their life, for which they need real treatment.
However, I personally think that monad tutorials tend to give people the wrong impression and leave them more confused than they were before, because they focus on the wrong thing.
A monad is not a complex concept, at all. IMO a more useful way to present the topic would be with one separate lesson for every common monad instance. Start with Maybe, then IO, then maybe State and List, and so on... because ultimately, every instance of a Monad works very differently. That's why the pattern is so useful in the first place, because it applies to so many places. (Note: this is a criticism of monad tutorials in general, not this one in particular, which seems to do a decent job on this front).
In my experience, people new to Haskell focus way too much on getting the "a-ha" moment for monads in general, when really you want a bunch of separate "a-ha" moments as you realize how each instance of a monad takes advantage of the pattern differently.
I also tend to think that monads are best demonstrated in Haskell rather than in other languages, if only because the notation is so much less clunky. That may just be me though. (EDIT: well, also because almost no other languages have typeclasses, so you have to approximate it with interfaces/traits/etc)
Also FYI: in part 2, the code examples have extra newlines in between every line, which makes it hard to read (I'm on firefox, if that matters).
I would argue that democracy is a superior method in most instances, because its motives are driven by the motives of the population as a whole, whereas capitalist competition is ultimately driven by exactly one thing: profit for the capital owners.
Where we agree I think is in the assertion that United States government tends to run things very poorly. In my opinion, however, this is not because central planning is inherently bad, but because our democracy is very weak, and we allow politicians to be controlled by corporate interests rather than the interests of the people that they represent.
EDIT: Oh, and for the record I disagree with the take that the US healthcare system is bad because it has too much regulation - but that's an entirely separate discussion that I don't think is worth going into.
For me, in no particular order, these are the elements of sex/gender that I find important (and which were crucial for me to align during my transition):
* My body. This was perhaps the single most important one. Hormones worked wonders here, as well as growing out my hair, shaving, learning to take care of my skin, etc.
* Clothing/makeup went a long way towards making me feel better about myself. It takes a very long time and a lot of practice and skill-building to be "good" at fashion/makeup/etc, but it was worth it.
* My personality. This one is the hardest to describe. I can only say that when my body ran on testosterone, I was miserable, antisocial, arrogant, and annoying, and after switching over to estrogen, I am much happier, better at conversation, more empathetic, and by all reports much more likeable.
* My relationship to other women. It's hard to describe, but as I transitioned I became a lot closer to the women in my life, and grew apart slightly from the men in my life.
I think in part this emerges from the negative side of being a woman in society (being leered at/catcalled/harassed/stalked/patronized/discriminated against/etc). It leads women to stick together and trust each other more implicitly than men. So as a trans woman, gradually being welcomed into this "club" was very gender-affirming (although the negative stuff still sucks :/)
* Name and pronouns. At this point (~4 years) I pass enough in public that I am essentially never misgendered, but on the rare occasion I am, it certainly ruins my day. Pronouns matter more than cis people might think.
* Relationship to my family. Being called "daughter" by my parents, doing mom/daughter stuff with my mom, etc.
There are probably other factors that I'm not thinking of right now, but this is what comes to mind as I write this. And notably, my interests/hobbies aren't really included there. I do software development, I'm into skateboarding and punk music and videogames, I play dungeons and dragons. All "male-coded" hobbies for the most part, but I really just attribute that to the fact that I developed my hobbies as a kid, and as a kid I was a boy with friends who were boys and who did boyish stuff.
I personally don't find that that affects my perception of my gender at all. Hopefully this helps clear up your confusion! Let me know if there's anything I can clarify further.
since their conversation has no goal whatsoever it will generalize and generalize until it's as abstract and meaningless as possible
But maybe I'm over-reading into what's actually friendly competition. The tone just seems oddly aggressive.
Like sure, I can ask claude to give me the barebones of a web service that does some simple task. Or a webpage with some information on it.
But any time I've tried to get AI services to help with bugfixing/feature development on a large, complex, potentially multi-language codebase, it's useless.
And those tasks are the ones that actually take up the majority of my time. On the occasion that I'm spinning a new thing up quickly, I don't really need an AI to do it for me -- I mean, that's the easy part!
Is there something I'm missing? Am I just not using it right? I keep seeing people talk about how addictive it is, how the productivity boost is insane, how all their code is now written by AI and then audited, and I just don't see how that's possible outside of really simple rote programming.
The only place where it would be different is if you explicitly set panics to abort instead of unwind, but that's not default behavior.
I imagine if you stick to desktop the situation is less awful but still
Maybe that's not typical tab use though, idk
It's just the same for transgender people. Growing up feeling that you're in the wrong body can cause a lot of mental distress, and the best and most universally effective option for fixing that distress is to simply transition to living as another gender.
Not all people who are transgender experience severe enough dysphoria to cause serious mental health issues, and yet they still decide to transition and report being happier afterwards. [1] However, many transgender people do experience distress over it, and a proportion of that population are even suicidal over it.
This is why I consider it to be a cause of mental illness, not a mental illness in and of itself. And it's important to note that, even for the group that experience suicidality, transitioning is still an effective treatment. [2] [3]
Plastic surgery, on the other hand, is not even close to universally effective for people who are depressed about being "flat-chested" or "ugly." Cosmetic surgery such as breast enhancement has been shown to have a much, much higher rate of regret than transgender surgeries. [4]
In short, the reason that gender-affirming care is considered a treatment for gender dysphoria, whereas breast enhancement and rhinoplasty are not considered treatments for body dysmorphia, is simply that the former is effective and the latter is not.
1. https://www.apa.org/topics/lgbtq/transgender-people-gender-i...
2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10925986/