I see there the kernel of a potentially serious mental health crisis. If the singularity doesn’t happen and render it all moot, the downstream effects of everyone having their own little shapeshifter, sycophant echo chamber designed for maximum consumer retention is scary. I even see it as a cognitohazard for myself
Somebody will figure out a vaccine for that, once malaria and spare kidneys and a few other things are taken care of. Sooner, if it's a provable causal factor in measles refusing to stay down.
The childfree who love pets battling the petfree people with children as if it's a very important which is worse in a restaurant. (The answer: It Depends)
And, frankly, both should be barred from restaurants (planes etc) - UNLESS the children/pets are well trained and can keep quiet for the duration of the event (meal, plane ride etc)
I will fight you. Children should be expected everywhere by default unless in an officially designated "adult" space - pubs after 9pm, strip clubs, the third-or-above storeys of construction sites, etc.
EDIT: my kid is pretty delightful, but apparently I was awful and my mum still sees red every time someone complains about the minor crying fit of their cherubic little angel child.
To be fair I believe there is still truth to that. Sure some kids are more difficult than others but sans niche development issues such as brain damage, all kids learn to feed themselves and get potty trained just like they can be taught, or forced if needed, to behave; only bad parenting is stopping it.
But, tbf, you can't do that on a plane. OTOH, pacifiers etc. ought to work. Basically, in a plane or a restaurant, give the child what it needs to sooth itself.
Education, standing firm against tantrums etc. can wait until no one else is within earshot/forced to endure said tantrums.
Pacifiers help, but they don't work reliably. If the problem were, e.g., ear pressure, they wouldn't help that much.
There *are* methods that work, but they aren't easy. E.g. some of the AmerIndian tribes had approaches that were used that were for the purpose of keeping children quiet on the trail. But, I believe, they required ignoring or suppressing crying at all times. Which demands general social support.
I find it much more personally upsetting to see a parent give in to a tantrum than having to put up with the tantrum, so it's not easy for the parent to win here. (I also suspect that kids are bright enough that if tantrums in public are always rewarded then they'll keep having them).
Feels like this is a problem that we can leave to the market to solve.
I practiced "Let the kid tire himself out until he naps" school of parenting. On a plane, that means a series of planned mental activities until they sleep (exactly what would depend on age).
That means I'm paying attention to them the entire time. Don't expect to work on your laptop until they nap (and by then you might be too exhausted--just accept this and replan).
I kind of have that rage Scott talks about to people screaming at their kid in public. The reasoning seems to be something like "why is the adult being more noisy than the kid, when they're an adult and they're screaming at a child?".
Some kids are criers/tantrum throwers, and there's not always a lot the parents can do about it. As I'm entering the age when all my friends are having kids I see some that hardly scream at all, and some that do it frequently. Between my own 2 kids my first almost never screamed/threw a trantrum, but my second screams a lot when he's upset, and even when he's happy he loves to scream. I don't think we did anything different between the two, he just naturally loves to be loud. We're trying to train it out of him, but it seems to be a pretty innate desire.
One particular difficulty is for kids of preschool age, acting to stop a tantrum now will often lead to more tantrums later. It's usually possible to resolve a tantrum by giving in or offering a highly preferred thing (e.g. handing them your phone to play games on) as a diversion/bribe, but this constitutes "negotiating with terrorists" and trains the kids to have more tantrums.
It's often possible to thread the needle by leaving immediately with your kid when they have a tantrum in public, but not always. Sometimes (e.g you're on an airplane) it's physically impossible. Sometimes (e.g. a waiting room for a doctor's appointment) it's impractical. And sometimes wanting to leave is the trigger for the tantrum.
This doesn't apply to babies (who just need their needs attended to and can learn self control later) and for older kids (who can be meaningfully offered non-immediate disincentives for bad behavior), but there's a window of maturity levels where sometimes parents need space to wait out tantrums if the kids are going to learn how to behave.
Or you just beat them. "I'll give you something to cry about" was a common parenting tactic once upon a time and a successful one. Even infants tend to behave after they associate tantrums with serious consistent pain.
Giving a kid a special entertainment thing like an iPad *prior* to any tantrum for an unusually difficult event like an airplane flight doesn't seem particularly unreasonable, and I hear some people do it?
Edit: Also, a crying baby isn't that much louder than airplane engines. If you don't like loud things on the plane, you're doomed whether there's a baby or not. Consider some earmuffs – I like the 3M Peltor X4 series.
My problem in that case isn't with the kid but with the parent who thinks it's OK to have their screaming kid in a quiet place. Kids scream! Parents should move them elsewhere IMO (depending on the surroundings).
Exactly. If a child starts screaming and the parent takes them away apologetically... okay for me, I can handle a few seconds of noise. But if a child starts screaming and the parent just sits there and pretends that nothing special is happening... well, the rest of us are trying to listen to the lecture, or watch a movie, or whatever was the purpose we gathered for; don't ruin the experience for everyone.
And it's analogical to pets. If your dog starts barking at my child from a close distance and you just pretend that you don't see any problem... not okay.
Basically, it makes sense to not blame the child or the pet, but it also makes sense to blame the parent or the owner instead. I can forgive a moment of surprise, maybe you didn't expect that to happen right now, okay. But anything that keeps happening for more than a few seconds is your responsibility.
As someone with children, I would actually just prefer it if everywhere was designated as child friendly/child free. My children are just about past the age where I would have to constantly worry about public outbursts, but in the peak of toddlerhood, I spent way too much mental energy trying to figure out if I should bring them somewhere that we were invited. Sometimes, places completely surprise you (a church you're invited to where every single person is angry if a child even shuffles in their seat or a restaurant where everyone is happy to see kids) and just a quick list of "Bring them here, don't bring them there" would've helped a lot
I respectfully disagree. I have no problem with some places explicitly designating themselves as child friendly/child free, but I don't want everyone to have to choose a label. It reeks of a "whatever isn't explicitly allowed is prohibited" mindset. We don't need more written rules, we need more tolerance and greater capacity to handle the extremes on a case by case basis.
I don't know if this is exactly true, but I can imagine that in a previous era a lot of these rules already existed, it's just that they were obvious to you as part of your greater cultural context. You don't have the same kind of cultural stability and local homogeneity now, so whatever rules you have need to be made more explicit.
Sounds like a database engineering problem. http://tangent128.name/depot/toys/freefall/freefall-flytable.html#3740 Tracking locations is easy, first-pass data collection might be a relatively straightforward RLHF task ("click on the squares with someone being rude"), but getting everyone to agree on consistent formats would be an impossible nightmare, especially once it got tangled up with some ideological outrage.
Exactly! This is how things should be! Man I'm glad there's other people who understand how a healthy society should work. Children should be the default and yet we live in such twisted times that children are expected to be relegated to school and the home, otherwise they are an annoyance? Insanity!
If it's so hard to find "other people who understand how a healthy society should work," then maybe there is in fact less consensus than you would like about the meaning of "healthy society."
You seem to be assuming that consensus of people has anything to do with what makes a healthy society. Given that what makes a healthy car engine, biological organism, or computer program has nothing to do with peoples' opinions about it, I don't see why society would be any different.
I disagree completely with all three of your examples. The presence of the word "healthy" in each of these contexts means precisely "functioning as people would have it." There is perhaps a sliver of ambiguity in the case of biological organisms, but this ambiguity is just a byproduct of mistaking statistics for purpose.
Because society functions on consensus. There is no set of practical rules that will cover even most situations as people encounter them. Thus we develop norms. Without unwritten norms to coordinate our behavior, we cant live or work together. Evidence: every society ever.
Though I would substitute "sustainable" for "healthy", which seems too subjective to me.
I think the definition of "healthy society" should at least include "society capable of perpetuating itself", and it seems unlike that a society where children's presence is considered an annoyance to be minimized will be able to do so.
Sure, I understand the argument. I think it would be better to make this argument directly, and hash out the potential points of disagreement, rather than hide it behind an assertion that only some elect group understands the objective facts about how society should be.
Right. If you want adults who are well-socialized, they need to be socialized as children, which means taking them places.
"Sure, socialize them, just not anywhere near me" is just someone who wants everyone else but them to bear the costs of a functioning society. There's lot of people like this for lots of things, who want it taken care of, just not in their backyard.
Yea. "Someone who wants everyone else but them to bear the costs of a functioning society" is pretty close now to my generalized mental picture of "American".
Not that there aren't such people in everywhere of course, I know that there are. It just feels now like that particular type of selfishness dominates our society across the entire political/cultural spectrum. Whenever I hear a pundit grousing about our having become "a nation of children" or "no longer a serious society" this is what it brings to mind.
I was in a Biergarten in Munich a few years ago and saw the huge amount of playground equipment in between the tables where adults were sitting with their liters of beer and gigantic pretzels and it just seemed so civilized - especially when I realized I was seeing more children at that moment than the total number of children I had seen outside of airports in the previous six months in the United States.
That's how it used to be in the place I came from. Then everyone decided to become angry, looking for a fight, not having kids and complaining about the ones that do have kids. Luckily I moved to a place where children are the default, everyone loves them, and no one complains about a normal crying baby.
The difference is astounding. Life is much better when not around miserable people that dislike little ones.
That makes it sound like a culture war issue - but this is not about "miserable people that dislike little ones" or about people in one place "becoming angry, looking for a fight". You can't just get away from it by moving to a new place.
I think it's much more like junk food and social media, where this thing that seems like constant incremental increase in convenience, ends up causing this deeper problem for ourselves. There might be some places where this cycle hasn't progressed (and I think urban Europe is a place where the built environment makes it less likely to progress as quickly as American suburbia).
Absolutely not. I should not have to deal with someone else's triple decision to
A: Breed their Low IQ into the next generation,
B: Decide not to do the minimum viable level of parenting,
C: And then taking their little moron ut to fuck with people trying to do shit.
In summary: Fuck them kids.
For real though, babies crying on a plane or at the store is fine. It's loud, it's confusing, their ears hurt, and people need to go places/buy things. Whatever.
Children running around helter skelter doing shit that would have an adult catch a case or a bullet/ babies screaming at the restaurant/movies while the parents just shrug like "I just don't know what to do, It's impossible for me to correct my spawn or just leave, woe is me" is pure antisocial behavior and should be punished.
"Antisocial behaviour." Great choice of words, because *pro-social* behaviour is anything that contributes to a healthy society (for which the most important task is producing and raising children), and *antisocial* is therefore the opposite of that.
Society is a group childrearing effort and you are a nonvoluntary conscript into the project. You are required to have the skill of tolerating and dealing with children, and the idea that you shouldn't have to is quite as unreasonable as saying you shouldn't have to manage a polite conversation, or take the bins out, or share the street with people who act differently, or any of the other little jobs and cares we have to take as people living in band with other people.
Ten thousand generations of your ancestors didn't live, fight, fuck and die in order that you could sit undisturbed in a Starbucks. Check your vital privilege.
I have two kids, and I take responsibility for their behavior. When they were little babies, I couldn't prevent them from starting to cry at a random moment, but I could apologize and leave the room with them if that happened.
A parent who comes e.g. to a lecture with a baby, and stays there after the baby starts crying, is behaving antisocially. Yeah, the lecture is ruined for you, tough luck, but you don't have to also ruin it for everyone else.
I think a healthy compromise is when parents are welcome with children at most places, but are expected to behave responsibly.
If society is a group child rearing effort, then I get to have a say in you letting your kid scream in the restaurant, and that say is "Jimmy you are going home and doing manual labor until you learn to behave like a human instead of a racoon."
It's just not hard, much like training an animal: Train your child not to do things people don't like in public, or don't take them to luxury activities.
Everyone else throughout history has managed, and I don't respect modern snowflake parents who need everyone else to defer to their incompetence so they can feel better about not being able to properly raise children.
At the very least, children should not be expected by default in any place where something important you don't want to be disrupted goes on. It's easier to not let children into a cockpit than to program everything around the possibility that some moron might decide to let them play there. And the (possible) harm doesn't even need to be that high to outweigh the cost of adding another place where children are not expected.
Come to think of it, having some small but significant fraction of child-free spaces letting adults to just relax (for everyone including parents) seems like it's enough of a social good to outweigh that, too. I could trade that for "quiet spaces" where both children and adults are allowed as long as they behave appropriately, and are immediately removed otherwise.
I'm inclined to agree, however I also think we should make it easy for people to declare their space (eg cafe or whatever) as child free, if they want to run their place that way. No questions asked. If you don't like it, go elsewhere.
I'd argue that even for pubs, it should be at the owner's discretion. There is no such thing as "second-hand drinking" after all, it's up to the owner and the customers to evaluate whether the annoyance of allowing kids is worth the inconvenience to parents of excluding them. Balancing these kind of relatively arbitrary preferences is exactly what markets are good at!
Absolutely not, we need to be significantly more child friendly as a society. Children these days spend far, far, far less time socializing, out of doors, in public... and it's clearly terrible for them and for our culture.
The average young person these days probably spends a larger proportion of their time cooped up indoors alone than ever before. I wouldn't be surprised if this leads to worse social behavior too.
I am incredibly sensitive to children crying, I understand your feelings well. Yet I still think my feelings are less important than the fact that there are children who will pay our pensions and keep civilization going one day.
Forcing parents to keep away from nice places just because they are the ones who put in the hard work of growing the ones who'll pay our pensions is unfair and cruel.
"some parents seem to be able to get their children to behave at any age. Why not every parent?"
The answer is, children are unbelievably different. Some don't have to be trained to be quiet at all, some can be trained, and others don't respond to any training. Training is less important than genetics.
I'm a man, on a taller side, middle-aged and not obviously disabled. The amount of crap I no longer have to put up with (but had to as a child and a teen, and my female friends and relatives always do) is huge.
So yeah, if I live long enough I may come to depend on today's and tomorrow's kids to pay my pension, or at least maintain the economy where my savings would be worth more than two peanuts. But I will also no longer be even moderately physically imposing, so the crap will probably start again. Also from today's and tomorrow's kids. I expect the kids whose parents don't care to reign them in to disproportionately make up the second group.
(I obviously don't blame the parents who try to resolve the problem and fail, or are legitimately overwhelmed.)
Put up with it? You're not a child yourself anymore, having to deal with other's children crying is part of living around others. YOU are the one being abnormal for not tolerating basic human behaviour, not the people continuing humanity.
Everything else I've said here notwithstanding, as an adult sometimes I would like to spend time with my friends in a space that is clean, comfortable, quiet enough for conversation and not anyone's home. A bar that does not play loud music may suffice, but those are few and far between now.
Note that this is not asking for all or most spaces to be child-free, or to be child-free by default. Just a choice of a couple of places I can escape to when the screaming and food-throwing gets too much would be enough.
Note also that teenagers, too, need spaces with similar properties, and additionally need them free of nannies, for normal social development!
There are places like that everywhere. And if you seriously can't find any, perhaps that's a sign that society moves on without people like you who don't tolerate children being children, and that you are the one with the abnormal behaviour.
Children should be the default. Adults and children have so many places to go, especially nowadays, with the massive drop in fertility rates and the inverted demographic pyramid that I find it really hard to believe you have a hard time finding places where to go, and that children are such a nuisance that you have to avoid them.
This is a preposterous statement, not to mention condescending and pompous. Taken to its logical conclusion, it implies that everyone should always tolerate all basic human behavior, some of which is shitty and annoying; instead of the much less edgelordly approach which acknowledge that shitty and annoying things are bad, complaining about shitty and annoying things is understandable, and minimizing shitty and annoying things is commendable.
I can't *believe* there are so many whiny provincial crybabies here in hip, urbane 19th century London complaining about us dumping our raw sewage into the Thames. Listen up, hicks, just go drink water from a different river!
You would have been furious if you had seen my family in public 20 years ago. I can’t imagine the humiliation my mother went through every time she had to take me and my 2 intellectually disabled brothers to the grocery store. Oh wait yes I can because I was there and I saw how everyone acted as if she was just some uninvolved parent who lets her undisciplined crotch goblins scream in public. Adult strangers would yell at them and throw things at them. In PUBLIC. I thought I was tough and this didn’t have lasting effects on me, but even now I still feel like I’m imposing on society every time I take them out in public. Like it’s rude to other people to expose them to the knowledge that people this disabled exist.
All this to say. Why cant every parent make their child behave? Because all children are different. Some of them are even disabled. There is nothing anyone could have done to make my brothers immediately behave. And yes, everything was tried. What worked was years of ABA therapy. Guess what? Still gotta buy groceries while dad is at work earning money to pay for that therapy. Babysitter? Don’t make me laugh, babysitters can’t handle this (guess how I know!). You could have held them at gunpoint and they wouldn’t have behaved. You could have beat them and they wouldn’t have behaved. All we could do was wait for the therapy to start working. The stares dwindled but never stopped. To this day I see people filming them with their phones in public. How would you feel if your child was so flagrantly disabled that six figures and twenty years of therapy wasn’t enough to make them even baseline socially acceptable and they are still a spectacle to the point they get FILMED by strangers. Think about it.
Have you ever heard someone say “God gives us what we can handle”? God didn’t give you an intellectually disabled child because you wouldn’t have been able to handle it.
I'm very grateful I didn't have a disabled child as indeed I do agree it would have tested me in ways I am not certain I could have handled.
I also have nothing but sympathy for parents dealing with such children and would be wildly accommodating of anything involving disabled people/children.
But let's be real - 99% of children acting out aren't disabled. Indeed, my personal (limited) experience of disabled people (and I was recently in a coffee where they seem to make a point of recruiting one intellectually disabled barista per day shift at least) is that they are pretty quiet.
But even if they weren't... In these situations "but for the grace of God, go I..." applies. I'm very sorry not everyone showed your mum/you that minimal amount of respect.
Don’t let the haters get you down. I understand your feelings and share them myself sometimes (it’s hard not to) but disabled kids have every right to be in public even if they act out, and 99.99 percent of people understand that. You are receiving a lot more sympathetic and warm feelings from compassionate strangers than glares from jerks, even if the jerks are more salient.
Thanks for sharing your experience, I think it’s easy for people to be callous and it’s a way of denying the reality that they or their family could ever be in that situation.
You would have been furious if you had seen my family in public 20 years ago. I can’t imagine the humiliation my mother went through every time she had to take me and my 2 intellectually disabled brothers to the grocery store. Oh wait yes I can because I was there and I saw how everyone acted as if she was just some uninvolved parent who lets her undisciplined crotch goblins scream in public. Adult strangers would yell at them and throw things at them. In PUBLIC. I thought I was tough and this didn’t have lasting effects on me, but even now I still feel like I’m imposing on society every time I take them out in public. Like it’s rude to other people to expose them to the knowledge that people this disabled exist.
All this to say. Why cant every parent make their child behave? Because all children are different. Some of them are even disabled. There is nothing anyone could have done to make my brothers immediately behave. And yes, everything was tried. What worked was years of ABA therapy. Guess what? Still gotta buy groceries while dad is at work earning money to pay for that therapy. Babysitter? Don’t make me laugh, babysitters can’t handle this (guess how I know!). You could have held them at gunpoint and they wouldn’t have behaved. You could have beat them and they wouldn’t have behaved. All we could do was wait for the therapy to start working. The stares dwindled but never stopped. To this day I see people filming them with their phones in public. How would you feel if your child was so flagrantly disabled that six figures and twenty years of therapy wasn’t enough to make them even baseline socially acceptable and they are still a spectacle to the point they get FILMED by strangers. Think about it.
Have you ever heard someone say “God gives us what we can handle”? God didn’t give you an intellectually disabled child because you wouldn’t have been able to handle it.
I can at least get the argument for restaurants even if I disagree, but planes? Children do need to be moved from place to place, planes aren't recreational zones.
> Absolutely not, we need to be significantly more child friendly as a society
Most importantly on this subject, we need ubiquitous spaces where children can exist and interact with each other without adult supervision and without having to pay for being there. Like, y'know, many of the older people here had when they were kids.
That problem seems like it could be traced back to real estate speculation. Who owns such a space? If access is free, and kids are routinely playing around in physically active, thus potentially injurious ways, how is said owner paying for property taxes, facilities maintenance, liability insurance, etc? When, not if, somebody sets up a tent and tries to live there, what happens?
Here's the thing about children -- they're humans with their own foibles. You can't "train" them in the same way you can train an animal. You can teach them, but that takes time, and when they are young there are limits to what their developing brains can do.
The idea that you shouldn't go to a restaurant, travel on a plane, or generally be in a public space (what I assume you mean by etc) with a kid until they're past the crying stage is, frankly, offensive. Have some sympathy for the kid and the parents, and appreciate that they are out there trying to give their children some enriching human experiences.
My parents didn't do it, My friend's parents didn't do it, My relatives didn't do it, My friends didn't do it, and I'm not doing it it.
Just like not being sloppy drunk in public, once children develop speech and awareness I expect parents to stop their kid knocking over display racks and/or screaming in public because they are mad, if only to prevent them from growing up into a rewarding career as prison labor.
The bar is so low it's on the ground and people are still struggling their way under it.
Maybe we have different scenarios in mind. If I'm at a restaurant, grocery store, movie theater, church, or on a plane and my kids have a tantrum, of course I'm going to try to get them under control. And if I can't, I'll leave or at least take them outside until they calm down. I expect all parents to behave in a similar way (and in my experience they do -- I can't recall ever seeing a parent just ignoring their children during a public tantrum). Of course, there are practical constraints -- I'm not going to leave a cart full of groceries behind, and I can't get off a plane mid-flight. We all do the best we can.
But the OP said (** emphasis mine)
"both should be **barred** from restaurants (planes etc) - UNLESS the children/pets are well trained and can keep quiet for the duration of the event (meal, plane ride etc)"
Sure, there's a qualification there about being "well trained", but parents can't guarantee that their toddlers won't have a tantrum, so this amounts to a prohibition on having children in public (or at least indoors), unless the area is explicitly marked as child-friendly (I guess).
I'm sorry, but that's just cruel to both the kids and the parents.
Are you really saying you, your family, and your friends never take/took your 2-5 year old kids anywhere besides the children's museum/bounce house/Chuck E Cheese's? Would you not take them on a plane to visit a relative that can't travel to you? If so, I respect your rights as a parent, but I certainly wouldn't advise anyone else to take that approach.
>Are you really saying you, your family, and your friends never take/took your 2-5 year old kids anywhere besides the children's museum/bounce house/Chuck E Cheese's?
Yes, I am saying that.
Maybe it's being raised in a non white american context, but the idea you might take your child out in public and have them embarrass you by being disrespectful is totally unacceptable to me. When children were brought to such places, they (and I) understood the proper way to behave and also understood that if they didn't behave that way, there would be consequences.
>Would you not take them on a plane to visit a relative that can't travel to you? If so, I respect your rights as a parent, but I certainly wouldn't advise anyone else to take that approach.
I have carve outs for such things (planes, mechanics, Dr's Office, grocery store, etc.) which I didn't include in that comment, but even in those areas I expect a good faith effort to manage things, and once a child is old enough to have a conversation (and isn't disabled in some way), there are only a few excuses for the behavior I see people let their kids get away with here.
I'm still not quite sure I understand you, so let me give a concrete example.
My son turned 4 in March. I take him to church and I think he's reasonably well behaved. He isn't perfectly quiet, sitting and standing on command with eyes forward at all times. Rather, he's usually reading, or maybe whispering to me about a question he has about the Mass, and he can get a *little* bit fidgety sometimes, but I don't think he's being disruptive. And based on the number of times people have complemented his behavior, it seems like others agree (though I admit there may be a bias here, as I think people are more likely to complement your kid than criticize them).
At any rate, there was an occasion a couple months ago where he *was* being disruptive. Not a full blown tantrum or anything, but being loud and moving around too much, trying to climb over me, etc. I tried my best to impress upon him the need to behave, but to no avail. Eventually I took him in the back and we left early, but it wasn't instantaneous. I gave him a few warnings and opportunities to correct his behavior. In the meantime, I am sure he was disrupting the people around us.
What's more, this wasn't the first time he's misbehaved. I can recall two other such incidents. So, not common, but not unheard of.
Would you have handled this the same way I did? Would you have left at the first sign of bad behavior? Or would you not even bring him to church (or a similar function) until you could be confident that he would behave perfectly?
Based on your previous comments it seems like you'd choose the third option. If that's the case, how confident do you need to be that your kids will behave before you'll take them out? I ask because my brother and I were pretty well behaved, but there were rare times when we'd goof off in church even as teenagers. Should my parents have left us at home until that behavior completely stopped? And how would they know if they weren't exposing us to those environments in the first place?
parents/owners of above, who don't care and think the rest of the world should have to put up with the bad behaviour -- these are the worst, and should be banned from restaurants/planes/public spaces forever.
I don't think you've thought very hard about this. In addition to the obvious problem of enforcement (suppose we are flying at 35000 feet and a child starts crying – what do you propose we do, throw them out of the plane?), the simple fact is that whether a kid is being loud or not is often out of the parents' control. Your policy amounts to punishing parents who have been selected randomly, and frankly, have already been punished enough.
It's reasonable to support norms according to which we make some effort not to bring screaming kids to a Bach concert or whatever, but the kind of bans you're proposing are not possible to implement, and would be totally undesirable even if they were. The last thing our society needs is further barriers to having kids and starting a family. Let's be a big boy, and exercise some patience and empathy with the tired parents and the screaming kid.
Yeah. If objecting to that makes me a petphobe, then I'm a petphobe. You are not a dog/cat mom or dad, they are not your furbabies, and god knows you can't tell your mother-in-law "these are your grandkids, no I don't intend to have any human children".
People love their pets and treat them like members of their families. Okay. But they are not humans or human-substitutes.
My dog is human-philic but not as much canine-philic. She loves human children but dogs she's not so sure about. So I only take her indoors in the post office where I have a clear view. I don't take my dog into my beloved book store for fear of running into another dog when turning the corner into a narrow aisle. Most of the time my dog is fine with strange dogs, but 5% of the time she is sure it's a Bad Dog.
my mom and my sister have been on the outs for thirty years. She never visits her due to bad memories from the divorce, and mom never sees her grandchild. There is this gulf between them that is terminal at this point. Mom is too old to travel to see her even to make it up.
pets are not human substitutes but they will never, ever give that level of sorrow.
pointing out that human children aren't always the amazing good you think they are and in some ways people like pets because they are less capable of causing tremendous pain. less highs, but less lows
feels like a lot of natalists underemphasize the difficulties of having kids, and that sometimes its not so glib.
works both ways, my mom was scarred a lot by my grandfather who was a piece of work.
Thank you for the compliment! We did away with like buttons because we didn't want this to degenerate into a popularity contest as can happen on other sites with likes/upvotes and downvotes.
Besides, I'm more used to arguing and fussin' and fightin' with people on here anyway 😀
I agree, the strawman I just invented is very scary and bad. Lots of people in my head treat their dogs exactly like humans and I project this onto all the normie people who have both pets and children.
That's not what the commentor above you asked! They said "which is worse in a restaurant", which isn't "are these the same thing", just like "Which is worse: stubbing your toe or getting a splinter?" doesn't mean splinters and stubs are the same.
It implies both have equal claim to being I a restaurant in the first place. Dogs are categorically worse than children in restaurants because children are a necessary part of life and parents should be able to participate in normal public life with their kids, even if kids can be annoying. Not so dogs.
That's not an argument that dogs are more annoying in a restaurant, which is what OP said depends. It's an argument that we should have more forbearance for children who are annoying in restaurants.
I don't want animals in places where food is made. You're usually taught this by parents when you are a child, that animals don't belong near food. I'm sorry you weren't taught something so essential, but it's never too late.
What you're using is called The Noncentral Fallacy (or by our author "The Worst Argument In The World").
We both (probably) agree that children and animals can be dirty and that they can be dirty in different ways, but instead of debating specifics, you're saying that animals are considered too dirty to be near food. This isn't a universal rule, as evidenced by the fact that people put them "near" food under a table in a restaurant, so there's room for an interesting conversation about why people feel that "under the table" is an appropriate place to put dogs but "in the spaghetti" isn't, and how some people might find that having a dog under the table is better than a child flinging meatballs.
However, instead of the interesting conversation, you're here to show off your wit and politeness, and I learned that even the former dwarfs the latter. :/
> This isn't a universal rule, as evidenced by the fact that people put them "near" food under a table in a restaurant
Yes, and? Universality doesn't define whether it's right or not.
> and how some people might find that having a dog under the table is better than a child flinging meatballs.
Those people are wrong. Dogs are dirty because they walk on the earth, on dirty streets, eat their own poop, smell each other's anuses, put their mouth everywhere, carry parasites and other things that human don't, shed hair, sleep on the floor, and a bunch of other things. Moreover, children don't drool all over you.
> However, instead of the interesting conversation, you're here to show off your wit
I am not being witty I'm just argentinian. And I apologise if you feel I'm not being polite, my way of speaking doesn't translate very well.
When I was looking through /r/petfree, I occasionally came across comments that said something like [DELETED BY MODERATOR FOR CHILD-HATE - This is a child-friendly space, do not compare pets to children] or something like that. I thought it was pretty funny. I wonder if /r/childfree does the opposite.
Inside a restaurant, the only proper place for any animals is: on plates. Well, some fresh soon-to-be seafood in some pond seems acceptable, too.
As for kids: I am with rebelcredential. And sure, I take my kids out when they cry or won't bring them until mature enough. On planes: sorry, I try my best.
Here’s the thing: kids don’t become “mature enough” (or at least, are delayed in maturing) if you never take them out until they are perfect. “Avoid fine dining in peak romantic hours” and “distract or remove the child if their behavior gets particularly bad” are reasonable accommodations and any parent doing them should receive reasonable grace.
If you’re mad there’s a kid at 4PM in a casual restaurant where everyone is already loud and there are TVs everywhere, it’s the misophonia thing.
It would probably be useful to hear from anyone who came up through any of these forums. Specifically whether there was any "recruitment" process, or any "disillusionment" process they went through on joining/leaving, that they have in common. Once you understand the situation better you can talk about how to address it.
I don't admit to being in any of these places myself, but there's an incel forum thing that pops up in a feed I see that doesn't have filtering tools. Their cartoonishly unpleasant posts sound exactly like the pet guys, but for women. Thing is, your natural response to reading this stuff is immediate ridicule, followed by sympathy for the (literal) underdog.
That's why I find it hard to see this kind of stuff as a real danger - there must be some other, quite extreme, process you have to put people through before they can look at stuff like this and not bounce straight off. We should seek to understand that process.
I caught myself being overly emotional about the lack of building higher-and-higher density housing/cities (living in a very dense on in Europe), and ... I guess for me the recruitment was reading about YIMBYism (and Georgism and whatnot) and slowly paving the mental pathways between any of my problems and "caused by lack of higher-and-higher density cities".
(I also have extremely mild misophonia, limited to a few things, water dripping or ticking clocks at night, that one thing my girlfriend does sometimes (but I hear it over earphones, and ... when she doesn't notice she's doing the thing that makes the noise I either need to ask her to stop or I can't really not pay attention to the occasional noise.))
Usually there's some very simple and true thing that becomes behaviorally an inseparable part of one's personality. (And we're immediately at identity politics? Oh no.)
So it's like the priors, as Scott mentioned, that slowly (but surely) got trapped.
I had this experience with R/inceltears as well as the prison abolition movement & not to equivocate it to that level of pathology incels have towards women but looking back I feel a lot of the things I said/believed in them were insane. I also don't think I got into those communities & mindset by already being really off already so much as slowly adopting ideas that all seemed reasonable/normal until I was regularly interacting with a large group that re-enforced my distorted world view.
the incel thing is because there is a really nasty cultural
belief that a man without a woman is either defective or actually gay. the guys internalize it like bulimics internalize the nasty beauty standards women face too.
I have the Walker's crisps model in my head and I'm wandering if that explains it. Walker's marketing isn't about convincing you to buy their product, and it's not even about hooking their brand to positive emotions and building an association that way. Instead, at their scale, it's literally about creating familiarity with their logo. You can ignore or even actively dislike their adverts, but through sheer saturation, over time your buying habits shift to include them more.
I wander if bad or ridiculous ideas can act like that when you're passively exposed to a steady stream of them.
I call it the toaster fucker problem. Man wakes up in 1980, tells his friends "I want to fuck a toaster" Friends quite rightly berate and laugh at him, guy deals with it, maybe gets some therapy and goes on a bit better adjusted.
Guy in 2021 tells his friends that he wants to fuck a toaster, gets laughed at, immediately jumps on facebook and finds "Toaster Fucker Support group" where he reads that he's actually oppressed and he needs to cut out everyone around him and should only listen to his fellow toaster fuckers.
Scott said "all my misophonic symptoms happened before I talked to anyone about them" and I would say the same, wipe my memory and all the people that hate noise at night, and I'm pretty sure I would develop hate of people that make noise at night (or, something like "use the public resource that is silence to their own end without being mindful of other people" maybe?), pretty quickly.
Yes. But you would feel like the odd one out. With the Internet you find your tribe, and when you have a tribe you can be righteous.
I felt like Scott's last pp was a miss for this reason. The Internet gave us in-group status for having our idiosyncratic annoyances, and those that caused them out group status. Before that we seethed in silence because no one we knew was sympathetic.
>I felt like Scott's last pp was a miss for this reason
Indeed, outside of e.g. Qanon it's difficult to find clearer examples of things being a Growing Problem Fueled By Social Media than active subreddits full of people convincing one another that dogs in a coffee shop are not merely annoying but are--actually, when you think about it--a COVID-level public health threat for which draconian societal action is desperately needed.
Sure, but it's way more difficult to make it into an entire ideology about how some sounds are objectively bad and no one should make them with or without a misophonic around.
I mean sure but preventing people from communicating does not solve the problem. It may solve the "secondary problem" of r/toasterfree but it does not solve the primary problem of misphonia.
Sounds like the actual issue here is that he wants to /talk to someone/ about his toaster fetish, but didn't know where to turn.
If he just wanted to abuse his toaster, nothing stopping him doing that. If he went straight to talking about it with a like-minded person, nothing particularly bad would happen. But instead, he talks to people who ostracise him for reaching out. In 1980, maybe he deals with that, or maybe he becomes a tragic suicide. Now, he finds like-minded folk, and they ask him "you're sticking around people who bully you and make you feel suicidal. Why do this? Why try to be liked by everybody? You don't even like everybody. Come hang out with us instead."
It's cheaper than therapy, and he is more likely to survive.
People who find "Toaster Fucker Support Group" and are not immediately turned off by the people in the group were never going to "deal with it", not in 1980 and not in 2021.
All arguments that romanticize the mental health of the past seem to make this mistake. Yes, an anorexic who finds an enabling online group might worsen their symptoms due to peer support (similar for a lot of other illnesses), but mental illnesses do exist in isolation, and existed in the past even if they didn't get publicized—they were simply just hidden from the public consciousness.
It's like when people talk about the rising depression epidemic. Like, come on, depressed people in the past were still depressed, they just had more responsibilities to take care of and probably a stronger social network/local community. Things might be getting worse now, but they certainly weren't great back then either.
No you’re completely right. It’s very easy to point to something that worsens or otherwise feeds into a problem and then make the mistake of treating that as the sole/major source of the issue instead of just something exacerbating it. People had serious pathologies and unhealthy world views long before social media so the solution can’t just be “get rid of social media and go back to how things were before”.
In real life you can just be chill about your friends having weird fetishes you're not into. It's probably even possible to have safe, ethical sex involving a toaster!
Furthermore, that fucking toasters isn't wrong (because nothing is good or wrong, it's just opinions), that fucking toasters is as valid as normal reproductive sex, and that fuckings toasters is a perfectly fine expression of sexuality.
Scott is doing the same error others do to them, something is not wrong with you if you don't like kids. The answer is just to realize they are engaging in performative venting and its reinforced in an echo chamber.
people hated kids before the internet too, its just it was treated as a comic thing by the culture more than being villains. "go away kid, ya bother me" WC Fields stuff.
Do we need to? Hermits who can't stand society for whatever reason have existed at least as long as written records. Psychiatric treatment can make remaining in society less painful, and automation and economics both make hermitdom less painful. Some people opt out of civil society, some stick around and put up with it, and overall life goes on.
Markets. Space X does not allow dogs, space Y does. Dog owners, and people who don't mind dogs, will self select into X, and misociniacs into Y.
There is some discussion to be had about non-market spaces (eg parks and libraries), but local democracy and compromise can work it out. Ideally, in a borough where say, 20% of people want parks with off-leash dogs, 30% want parks with leashed dogs, and 50% want dog-free parks, that's how the space should be allocated.
Pardon the ramble for a bit of context: I used to be afraid of dogs in general, and I still am if the dog is acting sufficiently high-energy-but-clearly-not-happy. The fear came from having nearly gotten my right hand's thumb bitten off by a dog I wanted to feed a thing to when I was five (needed a lot of stitches, but thankfully healed up without complications), and it persisted despite me exposing myself to friendly dogs and cognitively thinking friendly-dog thoughts because of my vitamin B12 deficiency. Then my vitamin B12 deficiency was diagnosed and cleared up, and since then dogs have been okay. I am still always ready to defend myself (it's just a habit that I've built up), but I do things like 'get down on the floor to snuggle three campus security dogs that really want to get to know me because I happened to walk past their space' at work.
Anyway, I see r/petfree and I think many (although not all) people on there are probably scared of dogs and possibly don't admit it to themselves. They're showing all of the signs; the avoidance, for one. The person who mentioned they can't go to their friends house any more seems like they're probably in that category, as a striking example.
But the reason I'm putting this comment here instead of top-level is because I was kind of nodding along to much of the linked article until it started to psychoanalyse dog owners. I don't think the author got that right; not in the sense that there are not people who are like that (there definitely are, have known some personally), but in the sense that I don't think most dog owners are match the model (of wanting a "cheap, easy, unfulfilling version of raising a baby").
As far as I can tell, dog ownership is complicated and hard; definitely not zero-effort beyond keeping a dog alive.
Tiny story time (sorry, I am being a bit of a windbag here; this is a story about how I catastrophically failed to solve a problem I was having, which you're welcome to assume is because I'm a dumbass/dipshit, though I'd appreciate if you (generic) didn't push that point too hard in the responses):
I used to have a route I would walk along whenever I went for a walk. It took me through a nice scenic forest and past some fields. This was still in the middle of town by some measure, so there was a row of houses I had to pass, with gardens. At some point, a very large dog along the route (maybe a new dog in the neighbourhood) decided to jump at the fence and bark aggressively at me; classic barrier aggression. However, the fence looked jumpable to me (it was tall, but there was a tall mound of dirt about a metre back that looked like an easy run-jump ramp), so I was sincerely spooked.
My first idea was "okay, one time thing, keep moving and ignore the dog." It was not a one time thing. Dog kept doing this on future walks, and I was baffled - what was I pattern-matching to? Or did the dog just do this to everyone? At some point I decided that since "walk past and ignore the dog" didn't work, I tried to do various forms of interaction (stop and calm-voice talking, stop and stern-voice talking, and at the height of my fears about it, threaten with large stick). Needless to say none of this worked, probably because I was giving the dog stimulation it wasn't getting, and/or making it think it did an even better job of fending off an intruder.
On one of the instances of interacting with dog, trying to find some mutually agreeable way of interacting with each other, the dog owner showed up. I was relieved and asked for tips for how to get the dog to stop barking at me. The owner's first suggestion was "just ignore it and walk past". I explained that was what I had been doing for many days until I switched gears, and it had not worked. They explained the dog did not do this to everyone who walked past, and we puzzled about what might be causing it (we think my headphones with electronic music might have triggered it). We got into what seemed like a brief but productive conversation. We agreed to chat again a few days later when we both had time.
And we did. I brought some chocolates and a dog treat, gifted those to them. We spoke at the front gate of their home. I asked, and I gave them several opportunities to say "no", and encouraged them to say "no" (and yes, I realise it's really hard to say "no" even in those circumstances), whether I could get to know the dog on another weekend, maybe. Just so the dog could learn that I'm not a threat? They were on board with that (even sort of preview brought the dog to the front gate as a first meet-and-greet, sadly probably reinforcing "this person is not allowed on premises" without meaning to), and they told me to just ring the bell some other weekend, and if they were there they'd open, and we could have a tea.
You could say I was naive for believing this, but we'd made good steps towards pleasant conversation, so I was optimistic. I tried a few more times to ring the bell, and no one ever opened up. I think I stopped after the fifth time or so - hard to say exactly, it was all complicated by being during a time with various long weekends that I had good reason to believe they might be out visiting family, etc (indeed, I dropped another small helping of chocolates and well wishes into their letterbox one weekend), and only one of those weekends the dog was obviously in (and they might have been sick).
Fast forward a few more weeks, during another dog barking stint, while I'm trying a new thing (sit down on the ground, show open hands that I'm not armed with sticks or blades or anything like that, slow-blinking) to calm the dog down, dog owner shows up, lightly admonishing me for not just walking past. I apologise for not just moving on, explain that I'm still trying to find ways to deal with the fact I am emotionally frightened of this dog at some point jumping over the fence and attacking me, and that I had tried to get in touch.
"We don't want that."
I apologise profusely for 'misinterpreting' the situation. Inwardly I'm thinking, okay, cool, that would have been great to know earlier. Like, if you had responded to even one of the bell rings and said you changed your mind, I could have not been a source of perpetual annoyance in your life. I never set out to be a pest to these people. I figured it would be a good idea to try once to get to know their dog, and if it worked, great, and if it didn't work, sad but we'd all move on.
I don't fully know what they were thinking. I guess it's unusual for someone who is scared of a dog to try really hard to get to know them despite everyone involved being a stranger (CoZE is not really a common approach people have to their problems), so maybe they thought I was deliberately provoking the dog (and arguably with my varied attempts to get it to calm down, I was, but I was at wit's end, and they weren't giving me actionable advice).
Anyway, in the end, I just changed my route. It's a lot less nice. There's really only one forest in the area. I walk there through the streets now, instead of the meadows that take me past the row of houses. Occasionally I walk past the meadows to see if the dog is still there; so far the answer is 'yeah, still being aggro', and then I do the stupid thing of beating myself up for having a physiological stress response, then beat myself up for spending brain cycles on thinking about it at all (about as productive as you'd think, lol).
As mentioned, I don't know what they were thinking. I tried my best, my best clearly sucked (I don't have enough experience with this), and they were probably right to just tell me to fuck off. But I bet the whole situation was stressful for them, too; my partner said "they're feeling overwhelmed," and I think that was probably true. I was frightened of the dog, and they were frightened of the social situation.
I resent them for not breaking it off earlier (I went out of my way to swing by their place several weekends, the action was not free; the chocolates were also not free; the dog treat was also not free), but I understand it was a complicated situation. I don't know if there was a way to solve it just between us. The dog probably needs their barrier aggression handled in ways they don't feel competent to handle, and why handle it if it's really just one person triggering it, anyway, and that person can vary their route? I think if I were in their situation I would have let the stranger get to know the dog, but they might have been afraid the dog would just attack me. Like, if it's really just me it's reacting to, maybe the barrier isn't the problem. Maybe I just pattern-match to some past abuser (I'm told it had some) and it would want to get revenge. It's a hard situation, and it's a lot of work to resolve.
And now, to circle back to why I'm even talk about that:
It's work *they personally* didn't seem to want to do (if so, I don't blame them for that part (don't know them and their dog well enough to judge what had been tried, what the track record of training in general was, etc), sincerely just for the lack of communication), *but* many dog owners do, and I don't think the article really appreciates that kind of dynamic. It sort of nods to it by mentioning training, it plays into the dominance model, but IMO you can't have both the dominance model *and* a model where you get dog affection only for "keeping the dog alive." Getting a dog to play nice in society is definitely not in the grab bag "keep the dog alive," and it's effort - an effort many dog owners do in fact expend. We hear about the ones that don't the most, because the ones that do a good job with it are effectively invisible.
TL;DR/synopsis:
The fact dogs are scary means there's often a bunch of effort involved in making dogs integrate into human society. The effort is often not simple treat/no-treat. Keeping a dog alive does indeed result in dog affection, but also comes with new social stresses to manage (or at least accept as a trade-off).
Aside, personal interest:
Are there any (non-hostile) strategies other than "just change your route" that work for the kind of situation I described? (I assume the answer is "No", but maybe someone has a clever idea that I can make use of if this ever happens to me somewhere else.)
Just walk past at the furthest distance you can. Trying to make friends with a stranger's dog in their own yard is ruining the dog's ability to act as watchdog, and is going to creep the owner out in the same way as trying to keep your face off a security camera.
They should have said so, but assume that's the default.
*Carry* pepper-spray. Knowing that you would win hard if it actually came down to it can help keep you calm. Pepper-spray is extremely intimidating to most mammals, even just spraying the ground between you two would be enough. If you're chill about it then the aggression can be more tolerable.
Continuing to walk the same route, but just walking past the dog with as much distance as you can maintain at a brisk, steady pace is really, truly your best bet here. If the dog hasn't jumped the fence and attacked you during all of the times you've tried to interact with it, I feel very confident saying it almost definitely won't. It likely physically can't even if it wanted to, and it doesn't seem like it wants to even when 'provoked' (I know you weren't trying to provoke it, but that is unfortunately probably what your attempts at friendship amounted to).
Your speculation that maybe you coming increasingly close/interacting in various ways and then ultimately leaving when the dog didn't let up translated into the dog's brain as "I did an extra good job of protecting the house today" was probably spot-on, sorry to say. A book I read years ago about dog training suggested this is why so many dogs bark at the mail carrier specifically, even if they're otherwise ok with strangers-- the dog thinks "this guy comes right up to the house every day, but when I bark at him, he turns around and leaves! I should make sure to bark every day!"
It's possible that the dog would have eventually become ok with you if it saw its owner welcoming you into their home, but they've made it clear they won't be doing that. It's probably not going to be possible to make friends with a dog while it's actively protecting its territory without its person there to override that impulse and show that you're a friend and not an invader. Attempts to do so on your own will inevitably backfire, and (as another commenter mentioned) are unlikely to be welcomed by many strangers.
That doesn't mean you have to avoid the route, though! Just walk past! I know that sounds much easier said than done when you're experiencing fear surrounding this dog, but it's really the best option. The dog might even eventually tone it down when it realizes you aren't going to linger anyway (though it might still bark anyway... depends on the dog.)
It's basically a jumpscare when the dog starts barking (I can't see it and then suddenly BAM it's there and being very loud; I get a rush of adrenaline each time even when I prepare myself it might happen), and there isn't a way to walk past the property further away without climbing a fence onto the meadow, so unfortunately "just walk a different route" it is if I want to avoid the significant stress hormones (and I do, it really wasn't sustainable).
> A book I read years ago about dog training suggested this is why so many dogs bark at the mail carrier specifically, even if they're otherwise ok with strangers
Ooh, this is fascinating, and makes sense now that you say it. Thanks for sharing!
> It's probably not going to be possible to make friends with a dog while it's actively protecting its territory without its person there to override that impulse and show that you're a friend and not an invader.
Yeah, I figured, hence the attempt to reach out. Sad this is true, but good to have an outside opinion on this that isn't just me trying to make guesses about it. (At the very least we're making the same guess together, hah!)
Thank you so much for taking the time to take my query seriously and give advice!
Agree with the other person that this dog clearly has hard wired tendencies to guard its territory, so you are basically asking it to not do the one job it was bred for purposely and that's a hard ask. If it was outside its property, it'd probably be fine. One of my two dogs is like this and nothing we have tried over five years stops it, so we basically just don't let him into the yard at all except for a quick pee. He doesn't act like this when he's off "his" territory, and the other dog never acts like that. Any dog with with shepherd or guardian breeds in it was purpose bred to protect a flock and ward off intruders, so it's just really going against nature to get it to stop. The one thing you did wrong was threaten it with a stick. It probably will never forgive you for that lol. My dog remembers every precise dog in the neighborhood that has ever barked or looked at him crosswise, and doesn't forget for years.
One thing you could try is throwing treats over the fence. While saying "hi doggy!" In a happy and high pitched confident voice, as if you're really happy to see him. I've had that work before. But it won't always, especially if it's a very serious dog. And I know owners may not think that's okay, but honestly I'd they just let their dog stay outside menacing and acting like that with strangers walking by, they sound like jerks, so I wouldn't care, I'd toss the dog treats anyway.
The one thing you can feel somewhat confident about is that it is EXTREMELY unlikely the dog would jump the fence or even try. Dogs have an exquisitely sense of their own territory and generally the type that thinks it's its job to guard the territory has no interest in leaving it's bounds. The ones who try to roam are the not the same ones as the dogs who like to patrol and ward off intruders. My fence barking dog wouldnt leave the property even if I left the fence wide open.
> One thing you could try is throwing treats over the fence. While saying "hi doggy!" In a happy and high pitched confident voice, as if you're really happy to see him. I've had that work before.
That's an exciting plan. I'll keep that in mind if this sort of scenario ever happens to me again. :)
> The one thing you can feel somewhat confident about is that it is EXTREMELY unlikely the dog would jump the fence or even try. Dogs have an exquisitely sense of their own territory and generally the type that thinks it's its job to guard the territory has no interest in leaving it's bounds. The ones who try to roam are the not the same ones as the dogs who like to patrol and ward off intruders. My fence barking dog wouldnt leave the property even if I left the fence wide open.
That's reassuring to know. I figured something like this might be true, but I'm admittedly also wary of relying on this - this seems like the sort of thing that's "true until it's not", but I reckon you're right that the chance is so small that it's not worth worrying about.
Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts about this! This helps.
1) about 5% of dogs are what people think of as “good” dogs. Most dogs are not and are never going to be that ideal without a whole lot of work (that most people won’t do and as a trainer, I had dogs that were close to ideal with me — to the point of being welcome in my home — but horrible with their owners).
2) people who refer to their dogs as kids or fur babies are never willing to do the work and make all manner of excuses for and about their dog’s behavior. (This is commonality with parents of bratty children.)
3) Dog parks and doggy daycare exacerbate problems.
4) Allowing a dog to have free access to a fenced in yard makes them barrier aggressive and incontinent over time.
5) That dog is the way it is because it’s likely an unpleasant animal in the house and those people don’t like it very much but can’t admit it.
6) #5 is true for more people than you think
7) the advice to throw treats over the fence is very good. I’d recommend freeze dried liver treats. Eventually that dog will associate your appearance with them and look forward to it. If you really want to do it right, drop the treat only in a pause between barks.
Thanks for the frank assessment! I didn't realise (although maybe I could have figured it out if I'd thought about the situation from that angle) that dogs naturally tended toward barrier aggression if they're given free access to a fenced yard, that's interesting, but makes sense. Appreciate the insights.
> the advice to throw treats over the fence is very good. I’d recommend freeze dried liver treats. Eventually that dog will associate your appearance with them and look forward to it. If you really want to do it right, drop the treat only in a pause between barks.
I never encounter r/petfree but since you say that it's mostly about dogs, I thought you're talking about r/dogfree. It even has more subscribers! I actually want to see your analysis if you encounter that sub instead.
I actually subscribed to r/dogfree, even though I'm ambivalent about dogs, because I have to hear some dissenting opinions against the rest of Reddit. (I subscribe to r/stop gaming for same reason. I also want to subscribe to r/catfree but that sub is so dead it'd feel sad. The cat conspiracy wins!). And I don't see the worst thing you see about r/petfree here. Or maybe I'm just passing it without realizing.
Makes sense /r/catfree would be dead. Cats have toxoplasmosis on their side; dogs only have millennia of cooperation and co-evolution. Bad dog owners are more visible than bad cat owners because cats only exist in the home.
I used to know a couple where the wife had slowly turned into a cat hoarder, and their house was in an absolutely appalling state - the smell when you walked in the door, dear God. And you would never have known it unless you went in their house, or possibly got the husband drunk in the right mood.
The frequency with which a thing appears in the news or in people's fears does not necessarily have any correlation to the frequency with which that thing occurs in proportion to other things. Plane crashes, shark attacks, shootings, &c.
While we're "just saying'" things, you never see a seeing-eye cat, or a search-and-rescue cat, or a cat-cart, or people taking their cats to the cat park to go play cat sports which benefit owner and animal alike. You never see a prison running a cat-training program to help rehabilitate inmates.
You hardly see cats at all, really, because they're hidden from the public eye, quietly and accidentally infecting a quarter of the population with a behavior-altering parasite which provably reduces quality of life for a good portion of its victims.
I was careful to add "accidentally" because no, I don't think cats as a species are involved in a grand conspiracy; I think it's an unintentional and unforeseen side effect of the modern* trend of letting cats into the home that a parasite which co-evolved with them to help debilitate their prey (mice) has infected so many people.
* I'm aware that Persians, at least, had cats as pets in pre-modern times. I don't know enough about their society to say anything intelligent about the effects of T. Gondii on, say, 13th-century Persian society; but for the west, treating cats as anything other than "those stray things which keep mice out of the barn" is a recent development.
At my university, a surprising number of grad students seem to take their cats out for walks (split between leash on a harness and putting the cat in a stroller). I always see them while biking between campus and my home in faculty housing.
But they still don’t have cat parks, or search and rescue cats.
Cats are quiet and keep to themselves, dogs bark loudly and are at the door every time you visit someone who owns one. One of these species is a lot easier to deal with as a non pet-owner.
Until a few years ago, I had no idea how many people hate dogs, and how strongly they hate them. I mean, of course, I was aware that some people don't like canines, but whatever? However, anti-dog posts began to really crop up about 2-3 years ago on Russian social platforms, and to grow in intensity. Part of it is stray dogs problem that plagues many cities farther away from Moscow: the federal laws prohibit killing strays these days, but local authorities usually bungle (intentionally or not) catch, sterilize & release programs, and avoid building and maintaining shelters, or if they do build shelters, they quickly overflow.
But a lot - and I mean a great lot - of anger is directed toward owned dogs. Part of it is that culture of picking up shit after your pet is pretty undeveloped in Russia (and in some parts of Europe, I must say - I'm looking at you, Portugal, my love). People are annoyed by dog shit everywhere. Part of it are off-leash dogs in parks: while this is usually prohibited by park rules, almost no park enforce this, even in Moscow. Frankly, as a dog owner, I break this rules, too: there is simply no other place to let your dog play with other dogs than park's greens, local dog parks are very small and mostly intended for training dogs, not for play. So after 8PM when most children go home, parks often turn into lawless dog zones.
I get their complaints, but intensity of hate surprised me: these people constantly advocate shooting dogs, spraying dogs with pepper spray, placing poisoned food and other doghunters' methods.
One thing that drew my attention is that these post really only started to appear a few years ago en masse. Before that, there might be a complaint or two, but these days, it's a torrent - I had to ban some tags to avoid seeing them constantly. Every day there area few posts about how a stray bit or mauled a child, or a woman somewhere. This grew to the point where dogs, especially strays, seem from social media to be a problem on the same scale as rowdy immigrants, and a notch or two above any war or politics theme.
My vague recollection of growing up in a nice neighborhood of Los Angeles in the 1960s vs. today is that residents have gotten a _lot_ better at picking up after their dogs than when I was a kid.
These are given away for free from dispensers along the northside of the Los Angeles River big concrete ditch between Coldwater Canyon and Whitsett Avenue in the Southeast San Fernando Valley. But after three coyote siblings moved in last year, my dog doesn't want to go there anymore, so paying for them seems pretty reasonable.
Consider the local park or dog-walking trail. If you put the dogshit in a bag and take it to the bin, that's wonderful, good on you; you're an awesome person. And tbh, if you just leave the crap on the ground - if it's on grass/bushes and not where people walk, it's not the end of the world; it'll degrade on its own pretty soon. It's literally fertiliser.
So why do I regularly see plastic bags filled with dog shit lying in the grass verge and/or tied to tree branches, lasting little monuments guaranteed to stick around through rain and storm, carefully preserved for posterity? Who does this? Why? What is going through their head?
I wouldn't put it all on dogs, people get crazy about cats too. I remember one particular video posted on social media about someone cooking in their kitchen with their partner, and they had several cats (I can't remember how many but more than three). And the cats were *everywhere* - jumping up on the counters where the raw food was being prepared, twining around the 'owner's' legs (an accident waiting to happen, especially when carrying a pot full of hot food), just generally being nuisances.
And it never occurred to either of the two idiot humans to boot the damn cats out of the kitchen. No, they had let the cats behave like this all their lives, so now the animals were doing as they had been trained, and the fool humans were happy to have food contaminated by their cats and the risk of falling over them while trying to cook and scalding themselves or breaking a limb. No discipline, no sense. All because the pet will give (some degree of) love and affection for free.
I like cats, but not in my food. Similarly, I like dogs, but not licking my face. Dogs seem to sense this and try to lick my face, and after observing me wrestle their pet the owners never believe me when I try to explain that I don't mind the dog, really, and actually I quite enjoy petting them if they are amenable; I simply don't want to be covered in slobber.
I do not /feel/ like I am being unreasonable, but who knows?
It shouldn't be surprising because dog ownership upticked during Covid. Now you have a bunch of morons letting their dogs run rampant all over the city. It's a genuine public nuisance.
This post felt like a return to form for me, after the more TDS-y posts Scott's been doing recently. This felt a lot more like what I started reading for. I'm not sure I've got much to add to the discussion, but given that most of the time this sort of feedback comes in the form of negativity, I'm taking the opportunity to speak up here instead.
Thanks. I already know I have large contigents of people who love one of my categories of post (politics, psych, AI, etc) and hate the others, so I'm not planning on switching from one to another anytime soon, but it's always good to hear that any particular post has made someone happy.
FWIW your recent Trump- and Moldbug-related posts feel to me like the first time you've pushed back against the far right with real energy and conviction, which is a relief because there's such a clear gulf between the values you profess (and seem to genuinely live by!) and the values that underlie so much of what they do and say. And while I'm sure there are people who would legitimately prefer fewer political posts, I strongly suspect that those who invoke "TDS" are mostly upset that you're hitting the wrong targets.
Respectfully, I have a strong negative emotional reaction when I read comments like this (and the depressing concurrences), even though I detest Trump. They come across as gross, discouraging, and regressive.
I start to feel like there's been progress towards undoing the fruitless, bitter, repetitive arguments that have characterized decades of my adult life. Then here come these comments trying to drag us back towards mutual caricature and ignorance.
When I read Scott's body of work, it couldn't be clearer how antithetical it is to MAGA, Trump, and other villains of the progressive imagination. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be enough: people want Scott to be an obvious partisan, to conform to their precise worldview and make the exact same compromises they've made to reconcile the world's vexing contradictions.
Comments like these read like a call to repudiate curiosity, charity, and independence: please prove me wrong.
+1. Also, I never voted for Trump, and now will never have to consider that option, but I found I had even less patience for people who reflexively opposed anything he did and misunderstood anything he or his supporters said. Among the best thing Scott ever wrote was "You Are Still Crying Wolf", and the fact that he has to shove a giant disclaimer above it is proof to me that that faction is still relevant, and will likely remain so even after 2028. A position that tries in good faith to understand Trump and his supporters before presenting disagreement is a position I can actually consider.
I find the same mechanics with Dan Carlin. He's a libertarian obligate and he's criticized the rising authoritarianism a lot, especially when democrat's in power. But in trump 1st term he barely published anything, saying, he barely have anything (useful) novel thing to say. But barely a month in trump 2nd term he got on a rant, because trump legitimately raises authoritarianism a ton.
The commenters reaction is exactly the same as Scott here. Being accused of not doing enough against trump in 1st term and still being accused of not doing enough against trump in 2nd term (because in the same episode he still criticized democrats a lot that enables a lot of this to happen). Actually after listing this, it's eerily too same. Do Scott listen to Dan Carlin? Or is libertarianism actually a consistent enough ideology to have these precise Schelling points.
I stopped listening to his episodes of common sense when he stopped making them. This post prompted me to look him up again, and sure enough after a 3 year hiatus, he released another ep of common sense in march ("Common Sense 324 – What’s Good for the Goose")
> But barely a month in trump 2nd term he got on a rant,
Are you referring to the most march-episode of common sense? Or does he post his rants somewhere else now?
How would it repudiate independence at all? Scott should call it like he sees it. If the President does something he thinks is good he should say it and if the President does something he thinks is bad he should say it too.
I'm happy when Scott calls it like he sees it, including justifiable criticism of Trump.
I object to praise that tries to lure him into partisanship by celebrating "the first time [Scott] pushed back against the far right with real energy and conviction."
Eh, I'd say that he always has been a lukewarm partisan, there already were "Trump bad, vote Dem" posts in 2015. However, wokeists have traumatized him so much over the years that he'll never fully get onboard their train, thankfully.
To try and add my own context to Vaclavs post, I think that there is *so much* justifiable criticism of Trump, so many things he does that are outright outrageous, it is surprising that we have not seen even more from Scott that is even more forceful
I think for me it is my paranoia due to spending so much time in unhealthy and far-right places on the internet (and not having much of a social life outside of that). I started to see enemies everywhere, incl. in Scott, so it is refreshing to be proven wrong.
"Independence" does not, and logically cannot, mean "never take a position aligned with the mainstream, for some definition of mainstream".
It logically cannot because then you are just an inverted comformist, even if the mainstream is unequivocally defined. And, the mainstream is not unequivocally defined. There are as many "mainstreams" out there as environments you care to define. So in practice you are asking for an heckler's veto where you can just point at some liberal environment, say that they hate Trump, and then demand everyone else just shuts up about it because well, those guys at Mother Jones are already criticizing the admin, no? How convenient.
Also I must ask, do you demand this astounding (one could say paralyzing) level of sophistication and charity the other way around? When Scott was basically accusing the FDA of mass manslaughter (I don't bedrudge him, he brought the receipts and made a coherent argument for it), did you feel that it was some repudiation of curiosity, charity and independence? How about when he compared American and British liberals to extractive colonial elites and racial minorities to their mercenaries armies, was he dragging us toward mutual caricature and ignorance? If not, one might suspect you are engaging in a very extreme form of special pleading.
Well, it makes sense. If people wanted to see Trump-bashing, they could just go to the mainstream media for that. Most of his audience is here for... different reasons.
I want Scott to hit all of the targets. All of them, even people I mostly agree with, because usually everyone has some sort of flaws and bringing those to light is useful for self-reflection. Even when I disagree with most of what Scott says in a post, I still learn something.
Arguments are not soldiers. Arguments are knowledge.
I think it's important to make sure your criticisms of Trump are "Trump did SOMETHING BAD" and not "TRUMP did something bad", and I view him as an aspiring dictator and mass murderer who (along with his opponents, America's problems are all over its governing class) influenced my decision to emigrate.
Issue based criticism tends to be more effective and not get lost in the partisan noise. There are times when it's necessary to directly criticize a political figure and not a policy or idea, but not nearly as many as one might think (or as many as maximizes engagement, for that matter.)
I don't view Scott's posts as being TDS, but I think the concept of TDS/Orange Man Bad is pointing to a real flaw in a lot of political criticism and not just sour grapes from people whose position is "Orange Man Good".
I would personally say that writing long posts against right-wing reactionaries is a lot more effort than most people put into encouraging a healthier democracy. So if you have not read them already, I would read Scott's earlier anti-Moldbug posts
How long have you even been here, that you haven't noticed that Scott has been pushing back against the far right since the pre-Trumpian epoch? One of his early famous posts, in *2013*, might as well have been titled "Why Mencius Moldbug is wrong about everything", and you're just now noticing that he sometimes pushes back against Mencius Moldbug?
I'm guessing that every time he pushes back against the far *left* with real energy and conviction, you write off everything he's said about the right as "oh, he can't have really meant that or he wouldn't say such bad things about the left". In which case, sure, maybe this is the first time he's really pushed back against the far right since the last time he pushed back against the far left.
I think this is unfair. I've been here since ~2013. Scott was much more vocal against, say, feminism in specific and wokeness in general. Like, fine, granted he wrote the anti reactionary FAQ, but reactionary behavior is a really small fraction of the far right and not even the one that most people think is relevant today. And he also wrote a non libertarian FAQ, even though Scott is libertarian-ish.
But off the top of my head, he's written at least a dozen, maybe more _extremely popular_ posts criticizing feminism, criticizing cancel culture, criticizing people for criticizing Trump, and criticizing the left in general. And he recognizes that he's done this! This is what Twilight of the Edgelords is all about!
I know you've been here a while, so I say this respectfully: I think your framing of people who are pointing to a prior bias is a bad strawman.
I took John's first sentence as a subtle barb at people who insist on viewing Scott in terms of tribal bias.
I also notice you spent most of your comment talking about Scott in terms of tribal bias.
The point isn't supposed to be to tally how many articles go this way, how many that way, and judge Scott on that. The point is to read what he actually said about each one, and to consider whether it's true, or how true it is, or how salient it is, etc. ACX is not supposed to be a place for generally left- or right-wing people to get their daily fill.
I think that the reason why he spent a lot of time arguing against feminists and not so much time arguing against people who wanted to deport all the foreigners or abolish Roe or start a trade war with the world was that the latter people were mostly absent in his social/online circles, not that he thought they were right.
For the red tribe, immigrants are the outgroup.
For the blue tribe, the red tribe is the outgroup, immigrants are just a fargroup.
For the grey tribe, the blue tribe is the outgroup, the red tribe is just a fargroup.
Presumably, being on tumblr and the like ca 2014, Scott got exposed to a lot of feminists who were wrong on the internet, and whose wrong arguments were believed by otherwise smart people. There were likely no posts trending on how having ICE deport random PhD students was required to make America great again, and certainly no smart people getting convinced of the latter, so Scott spent a lot of time arguing with the feminists but not with MAGA.
To be fair, Scott did explicitly recommend that people should vote for any candidate other than Trump in 2024 (which was just last year, even if it feels like three years ago).
Having read SSC/ACX for a decade, I am not very surprised that Scott is not a fan of Trump II.
Sure, Scott (along with much of the Grey Tribe) was unhappy with how the FDA ran things. And RFK jr was presumably also unhappy with how the FDA ran things. But they would certainly disagree about almost any specifics. In this contemporary America as well as in WH40K, the enemy of your enemy is still a floating, greasy, armored brain [1] -- or even worse an anti-vaxxer.
Likewise with Social Justice. From my recollection, the big clashes between SJ and the Grey Tribe were about things which the Grey Tribe thought were true but the SJ people tried to cancel (like HBD). It should be no surprise that DJT, the guy who started his political career as a Birther and has been running on a platform of election denial might not be seen as the savior from woke lies by anyone who cares about the truth.
Look man, lots of people may have not realized that Scott Alexander is a poly guy living on a Berkeley commune who has dated trans women in the past. I don’t know what he should’ve done to make them more aware of that fact. Put a disclaimer at the top of each article?
Same. I fully relate to it and had never made the connection to a disposition orneriness or anger.
I too suffer from it and chewing & eating noises are my main (but by no means some) trigger. That extends to strange things like people who hold their forks wrong — perhaps like a shovel rather than a fork — and yes, the irritation is more intense with people I am close to and if it interrupts my concentration or train of thought. If I’m day-dreaming and disassociating successfully, it will go unnoticed.
I’m curious if there is any definitive account of the origin of misophonia. I believe it is correlated with autism, though that can’t fully explain it. In my own case, I had a childhood experience that I blame for it. My father, who I am now estranged from, was a disgusting eater. He had mild Tourette’s and the chewing and gargling and twitching and smacking with mouth open was such a disgusting site I would rush through dinner and excuse myself to go read in my room alone. I can still hear food dangling in his throat while he spoke or see him twitch with an open mouth revealing a moist bolus clinging to his teeth and gums. Truly nightmare fuel.
Jumping on this conversation to ask: How do you choose which posts will go behind the paywall, and which will go free?
Do you somehow categorize your drafts so that the paying subscribers can have access to a wide variety of posts? Or is there any other priority? (e.g. the highest quality posts, the longest posts, etc...)
That was exactly my feeling, too. It's not only interesting writing, it also makes use of Scott's best qualities of a person: the ability to take people's experience at face value, to resist projecting or taking the superficial emotional response to weird behaviour, and to dig deep, with an open mind, into the weirder expressions of the weirder experiences.
Also: people on the internet are people. There's often a strange disconnect between online spaces and physical spaces, where there seem to be opinions you only ever hear in one sphere but never encounter in the other. There's forums full of *kinds of* people you never even knew existed, and occasionally, Scott will point at one and say "What's with those guys?", but in a really good and thoughtful way, with genuine interest in a truthful answer.
For those unfamiliar, I had to look it up, and as best I can tell, TDS stands for Trump Derangement Syndrome. I for one would appreciate a comment policy that discourages acronyms like this that aren't super common or obvious from context.
Although I must admit everyone else in this thread seems to be aware of that meaning, so maybe I'm just living under a rock.
I then also found its use with regard to Scott's writing mildly offensive. Invoking TDS seems to me to have strong "no true scotsman" vibes in any context though.
TDS was a somewhat coherent accusation to wield in the "You are still crying wolf" era. (Not against Scott, though.)
But since then, Trump has denied the outcome and tried to have his mob overturn a federal election, which is a pretty objective difference between him and other US politicians. It seems pretty obvious that the people who insist that Trump is just a normal Republican like GWB or Reagan are the deranged ones.
I'll have to keep an eye out for these people who claim Trump is normal. The strong impression I get from Trump supporters is more like "damn right he's not normal, but a lot of politicians are not normal, and a lot of political activists are *especially* not-normal, and it's about time someone of his type of not-normal came around to fight back the other not-normal".
Trump has indeed done some objectively unusual things by the standards of a typical politician from roughly the 1975-2015 period. OTOH, Trump has managed to *not* do a great many things that are attributed to him anyway; the people who make such attributions are the ones who come honestly by the TDS label.
She violently loves all humans, especially little girls --other than mailmen, Costco delivery persons, and the homeless -- but 5% of other dogs going for walks are her sworn enemies due to Reasons that only she can sniff out.
When she was an overgrown puppy she loved all living things. So, I'd take her to the local park's evening "Go Dog Go"-like Dog Party where she'd frolic and I was happy for the opportunity to be getting to know my dog-owning neighbors. But then she reached puberty at 18 months and decided that it was her duty to protect our Pack from Bad Dogs, which she had a foolproof method for sniffing out that I would never ever be able to understand.
So now, rather than shoot the breeze with my neighbors, we go on long walks and when we see another dog coming, we jaywalk to the other sidewalk.
I originally titled this "In search of r/childfree and r/petfree, but when I tried reading both subreddits to make sure I was being fair, I found myself pretty sympathetic to the r/childfree people. The typical post seemed more like https://www.reddit.com/r/childfree/comments/1hm8bqf/this_is_so_ridiculous_i_cant_even_see_straight/ , or complaining about relatives who had children without really wanting them and were abusing them, or how family members were cutting them off for daring not to have children, or something. I ended up thinking most of the people there were pretty sane and on the right side of their conflicts and not feeling comfortable adding them to a post like this.
I'm not familiar with r/childfree, but the top non-pinned post right now (for me on old.reddit) is this one -- https://www.reddit.com/r/childfree/comments/1kmakgp/my_horse_and_i_are_not_there_for_your_stupid_kids/ -- which gives me the sense that the general vibe on the sub is pretty deranged. Not because the OP doesn't have a right to refuse to engage with strangers, or to get annoyed if they push it, but because of the tone and the vocab ("some stupid fucking breeder", "I hate the little fuckers, and the stupid breeders responsible for them") and the expression of genuine hatred toward a young child whose crime seems to have been... getting excited about a horse, and showing it in an annoying way. And the only dissenting comments are buried by downvotes.
Yeah honestly feels like you somehow got a very biased sample of r/childfree - anytime I have stumbled across it (maybe selection effects in how it gets linked) those people same way more delusional than pretty much any other slice of reddit I have been to.
I think it makes a lot of sense. Confidence that one's body can't be used to create another person against one's will is pretty nice, and sterilization is more apocalypse-proof than long-acting reversible contraception is.
> why would it be insane that they feel joy at progress towards their life goals?
You will justifiy all kinds of insanity with these stupid takes.
> To me, that's equivalent to an infertile person getting successful fertility treatment
You have a completed twisted sense of ethics and morals. The normal is being able to have children, not being infertile. Fertility treatment makes sense because it's to solve a very rare problem. Fertility is not an abnormal condition in need of treatment.
> but I bet you wouldn't call those people insane.
I in fact mostly do, because more often than not it involves throwing away zygotes, which is by all measures, killing human beings. And murder is wrong.
"below" is an interesting characterization. It's reasonable to say "I am a human, so I value humans more highly", but to assert that there's an objective ordering principle seems...strange.
Cats would not say the same. Firstly, they can't talk, and secondly, they don't know who God or Bastet are, nor what an "objective ordering principle" is. Also, God is not "a god", so even if they claimed that an ordering principle had been given to them by *a* god, that would still not be an equivalent claim.
Since humans actually do bear the image of God in a way that cats don't, we have the freedom to imagine worlds of our own making, and you could, if you so desired, choose to use that power to imagine a world with hyper-intelligent talking cats who would say the same. So, in a sense, cats might "say the same" within the context of your imagined story. But since you don't have the power to actually bring those cats into existence, this would not give you any information about the place of actually-existing cats.
Again, what is real doesn't depend on what I have or have not thought of. For that to be the case, I would have to actually be God, not just made in God's image.
See, this is why people like you are mocked. Again, if you can't even agree that humans are above animals then nothing can ever be discussed, because nothing is true.
(And when I said you should "feed yourself to a lion" I was telling you that you are an asshole, not suggesting that lions are "above" humans or anything like that, just in case you couldn't tell)
It could be. However in my case (I would like to think) it's just someone who understand how humans tend to use language. We often use structures that, on the surface, imply the existence of some kind objective human independent standard, but in reality we don't really think about it that much and just express our (hopefully shared) feelings. For example: "She's beautiful!"
Beauty is not objective in the sense that it's something outside of/fully independent from humans. You find things beautiful because of your evolutionary history/social influences and personal development (ie. fully mundane reasons) and not because you have some kind of extra sense which can tap into an essence of perfect beauty and compare things with it or some other woo explanation.
However, beauty is objective in the sense that there is large correlation between what different people find beautiful. Consequently you can teach an AI model to accurately predict beauty ratings (for example facial beauty, this is called facial beauty predicition if you are curious).
It's exactly the same with morality.
Truth is beautiful and comforting lies much less so and I find it sad when people would rather chose the latter for no good reason but a misplaced fear (of upending their previous world-view).
Imagine if a Chinese person said: "China is at the centre of the world. We are the only civilised people. All the rest are barbarians. We have a mandate of heaven to rule the world." That would a bias, would it not?
This must be an interesting situation compared to the pet-stuff, because we were all children once. How do you reconcile the existence of your own childhood with your current view about children? Children as necessary evil, something like anti-natalism, compartmentalization,...?
my position is long and elaborate. there are many, many problems that combine into the ethically horrible situation. they have more or less possible/feasible/scalable/howeverble solutions.
for example, a situation that i think would be Better than now, but not perfect, would be "everyone is sterile by default and there's a free genehacking clinic on every street corner. anyone can enter and ask to be fertile for the next [month to year? idk]. they are asked one question: 'what mods do you want to your gene line? here's the catalogue.' then they are given a pill to take there immediately once. important: the catalogue has the list of *every* trait we know how to mod."
this would be Strictly Better than what we have now and contains features to preclude some failure modes. it may have others. some are features not bugs due to my personal values.
an other one one: universal, unconditional, inalienable, flat equal to all, survivable, birth-to-death, basic income. and exit rights for all children, to cheap (free is cheap) and abundant support services for them. services that they can exit from!
we solved the worst abuses of marriage when exit rights from the institution were instituted. we don't have yet have the tech to exit childhood, but we could have that to exit most abusive situations.
> 2) I would prefer I had not been born, and I think humans are a net negative for the world, so I guess anti-natalism would sum it up.
Can you explain what you mean about humanity being a net negative for the world? Are the negative impacts you're considering primarily environmental? And if humanity is a net negative do you see it as a situation where there were positives overwhelmed by negatives or one where there are essentially only negatives?
I think there are positives to humanity. Art is pretty cool, science is impressive. Human social structures can be both cool and impressive. But I put a high value on suffering (meaning any given amount of suffering will outweigh the same amount of some positive feeling) and humans cause a great deal of suffering. I cannot feel this is acceptable.
Other animals cause a great deal of suffering as well. Do you find that unacceptable as well?
There is one way to solve all of this, and that is for humanity to create a worthy heir capable of supplanting all existence. And that requires humanity's continued existence and growth. Sacrifices must be made for the sake of a better future.
Humans are special. As far as we are aware, we have a unique capacity for self awareness, a sense of morality, and we also have a really extraordinary amount of power. Dolphins and mallards are assholes and their behavior bothers me, but I'm not ready to condemn them the way I would a human rapist.
I don't know what you're talking about with worthy heirs and such but I do know that the words "sacrifices must be made" is some big time red flag. I also think we are drifting far from the original topic and should stop here.
Fair enough. How much suffering one thinks a species - or individual - can inflict before it becomes morally abhorrent and its continued existence is unacceptable is a fully subjective determination. It cannot be right or wrong.
I do think the framing isn't useful and since we're here anyway, imperfections and all, we may as well remain but every individual is their own yardstick.
Awkward question, but are you trans or cis? I usually think of people with cool names including "Sophia" as being trans, but the childphobia I've previously seen has been very VERY heavily concentrated in cis women with pregnancy horror.
Happy to answer! Well, I'm trans. And my childphobia is from being physically, psychologically, and socially terrorized, from ages 3 to 16, by my monstrous stepfather, and all the kids in schools and childcare things, and no adult ever cared because being the collective punching bag was, obviously, all my fault.
(i'm the exact kind of audhd typical to rationalistan. from a time and country where nobody had any idea what that was, including the parade of shrinks i was sent to.)
As for pregnancy.. It is real-life body horror. The more one learns about it, the more horrific. cool to kink on but should stay a fantasy, like tentacle vore. (the solution is exowombs btw)
This sounds less like "children are annoying" and more like "being a child sucks". Calling this childphobia would be like calling being a feminist "femphobia"
Sorry to hear about your past. People with stories like that seem to either HATE or LOVE children, no in between. I wonder what determines which way they go.
(Just commenting because I'm also trans) well spotted haha. This is such a meme in the trans community, especially if you see a Luna or Lily or Lilith.
On the one hand, hey if you get to pick your name why not pick something cool. On the other, why do we (well, they, I picked a normal ass name and regret it) all have such a similar conception of cool name.
Well, that's pretty understandable. Parents following naming trends too. Suddenly every new baby is Olivia or Liam, or whatever the current fad is.
You picked a normal name and regret it? You can change it, can't you? I have a friend (cis woman) who named her dog Rachel. Then she realized that she really wanted to be named Rachel. So she changed her name, and now she and her dog are both named Rachel.
My particular state only allows one name change for non-marriage reasons so no I'm pinned to it. Oh well.
I want to be clear just because I used the words "trans" and "regret" in the same sentence, I don't regret changing my name I picked a very normal name explicitly trying to not draw too much attention myself (i.e. being clockable by _blog comment_) but now wish I'd picked something I was more excited by.
Ah, I see. How annoying of your state! And I completely understood that you only regretted picking something like "Susan" (just to pull a boring normie name out of a hat) and wish you'd gone with something that was more meaningful to you.
It's not as stereotypical as some others but yea somewhat. Scott successfully caught it. Could just be lucky. Priors on trans women in the comments on ACX are way higher than average
I think Sophia is also a very popular baby name right now. Minimum viable theory is that for some reason the 2020s culture has settled on liking it (maybe wisdom is in), and so if you see a person old enough to post ACX comments named Sophia, then they probably chose their name in adulthood, which usually means trans.
Based on ACX survey results, about 20% of women here are trans. Adding having a name that's much more common among trans women than cis in typical ACX age brackets probably adds up to a fairly high probability.
"I agree with the conservatives that public order seems somehow more fundamental, but I agree with Philosophy Bear that this wouldn’t feel obvious to an alien observer".
------------
Really? A mugging has a victim. Or several. Slightly more families requiring social support doesn't. That seems like an easy distinction even if you were to argue that the $$$ damage (through higher taxes in the case of the extra food coupons) is the same.
"For what was once r/TheDonald, it’s brown people (am I joking on this last one? absolutely not)."
-------------
Actchually, I don't think that's controversial.
This is absolutely how most people react to immigration question. The 'correct' answer to immigration is 'it depends' - on the macro economic situation, on the quality of the immigrants etc. So sometimes, more immigrants is good (of a given type ; higher quality ones is not always what's needed if you're looking for people to pick fruits) is good and sometimes, it's not.
Almost no one think of immigration in those terms. For MAGA types/Stephen Miller types, it's a deep deep hatred of brown/black/different people that no logic can touch.
"A mugging has a victim. Or several. Slightly more families requiring social support doesn't."
The families themselves, who have to live in those circumstances? The rest of the community, who have to pay for those social services while living in an area with less financial stability in the margin?
I covered that. I don't think it objectively matches the experience of the person(s) being mugged even if the $$$ amount is the same.
The fact that poor families suffer is more interesting and you could try to compare their suffering to that of a victim but here I think the mugging is clearly worst. People are poor because of complex forces, hard to personalize. It's like being angry at the weather. The mugger is very clearly a human, acting out his intentions and deliberately targeting you. It's personal.
You didn't actually cover that, I don't think anything in your original post implies that the negative experiences of the poor families have any weight at all.
It seems like this is what you said:
* Scott claims that it's not obvious public order is a higher social good than any other
* However, I think it is obvious that public order maintenance is more important
* The clear distinction between them is that public order violations have a victim, and that's why it's obviously worse
I don't think suffering identified with a specific causal agent is intrinsically worse than that with "fuzzy causes". If you can prevent more suffering with less resource spend, I think you should probably do that regardless of the specific causal nature of that suffering.
Also, the idea that "problems involving victims are fundamentally different than problems not involving victims", even if you accept that as a fact, doesn't say anything about relative importance. Just because two things are different doesn't automatically imply some kind of hierarchy between them.
"Cats are better than dogs. This is not just a gut feeling, it's objectively justified. The relevant difference is that cats are felines and dogs are canines!"
* Scott claims that it's not obvious public order is a higher social good than any other
* However, I think it is obvious that public order maintenance is more important
* The clear distinction between them is that public order violations have a victim, and that's why it's obviously worse.
----------------------
A clear victim and a clear perpetrator. I don't think that analogizes to your cat/dog comparison but, hey, if you disagree, that's fine.
NB - I do concede that, once you start talking about affecting mugging vs. other social goods and thus talking about trade offs for public funds, things do get more nuanced.
Still, for an equal amount of $$$ spent, would you prefer to cancel one murder or one instance of jaywalking? You obviously know the answer and it's not controversial.
I actually share your intuition for perpetrator-based crimes being more infuriating than fuzzy-sourced suffering. It could be something that's totally natural, but I could also see it coming from my history at somebody who is unambiguously privileged by the current social order.
It's very easy for me to think of "society" as an agent what is attempting to solve problems, and individuals as "bundles of selfishness" that don't have the ability to see the overall context and so can't actually tell if problems they're experiencing are necessary trade-offs for the greater good.
Even though this is my strong intuition, I can 100% imagine a person who lives in a third world country watching family members die of easily preventable causes. They also might see a grotesque amount of resources being spent on garbage and luxuries in America, and develop different intuitions.
I don't think the jaywalking / murder thing really captures the essence of this. The question as I understand it is that:
All resource constraints and consequences being equal do perpetrator-based problems matter more? It's more like preventing "one poor person starving to death" versus "one murder", where the scenarios are plausibly equivalent in terms of consequences
If you're mugged, that means someone deliberately chose to hurt you, personally. That adds a whole extra kind of victimisation which just isn't present with things like natural disasters or people choosing to spend money on new cars rather than mosquito nets.
I hate weather. It doesn't matter what kind of weather, I hate it all, even "good" weather. Someday I want to move to a place that doesn't have weather, like the Moon. Or possibly Southern California.
Um, what? You think people would rather be poor than be mugged? Or are you just saying that you can be angry about being mugged but it makes no sense to be angry about being poor, even though being poor is worse? I think the worseness is what matters, not anger.
There's certainly a level of poverty at which paying rent feels a lot like a (legal, state-enforced) mugging, a point at which you get conscious of every social institution that tries to squeeze every last cent out of you, because you just don't have that many to spare.
Impersonal market forces are worse, in a way, because there's only a very diffuse target for anger and you can be confident that the society you live in has their back, not yours.
I don't think it's at all apparent that "crimes with victims and perpetrators" are the most pressing social issues for a government to address. Sometimes, you get much more bang for your buck in improving human welfare by addressing other issues, and I do not share sensibilities that suggest we ought to focus on human crimes anyway.
I've lived in high crime neighborhoods, and to me, the sheer antipathy with which many people react to crime and criminals are as unrelatable as petfree. Crime is a problem, but you can absolutely make society worse throwing good money after bad trying to address it beyond the point of diminishing returns while prioritizing it over other problems.
That's what I said "at comparable level of $$$ impact".
If the choice is between cutting poverty by 50% or reducing mugging by 1% for the same amount of public dollar, you have a trade off on your hands and I agree that cutting poverty in half sounds more beneficial, all things considered.
Where you draw the line will depend on people but most will overweight mugging for the reasons I mentioned.
Can we generally agree on the initial point? It is not surprising that mugging is seen as different from poverty (assuming they're not connected) because poverty is seen as caused by impersonal forces while mugging clearly isn't?
We could also say that if an individual in poverty takes steps to alleviate that poverty, there isn't a reason to expect those steps to be countered. But if you start carrying your money in your sock rather than wallet to stop muggers, muggers might start insisting you remove your socks. If potential victims scared by knives start carrying guns, muggers might upgrade to guns as well.
> Almost no one think of immigration in those terms
Actually I think that the terms you describe are exactly the terms that MAGA folks tend to think of immigration in.
There's plenty of room for argument over the exactly optimal mix of immigrants into your country, but there's no point in discussing it until your country has actual control over immigration; until then immigrants will be self-selected based on proximity, lack of better options and a willingness to disobey the law, which is definitely _not_ what you want to be selecting based on.
Their hatred of immigrants doesn't really seem based even on variations in the border crossing levels or in the deportations numbers (Obama had done a lot of these to, essentially, no credit whatsoever from the conservative crowd).
They'll pretend their concerns are for law, order, economic impact etc. But, given that immigrants seem to commit less crimes than locals, order isn't really affected, economic impact - in the case of the US in recent years - is generally positive, the reality is that they are shades of Stephen Miller.
Personally, I think it's obvious that things that end in injury or death are a bigger deal than things that are just annoying, but I don't think it matters what causes the injury or death. I think living somewhere where you have a one in a million chance of dying of kidney failure is better than somewhere where you have a one in a million chance of the government taking your kidney by force to save someone with kidney failure. But a lot of people seem to think the second is worse, and non-lethal violence is somehow a fate worse than death.
It makes more sense to compare the damage to quality of life. Being mugged for $100 is likely to hurt you much more than losing the same amount due to a traffic jam: you can develop a serious trauma, it might decrease your trust towards other people which has its own costs.
After taking that into account, I still won't choose the higher-crime city to live in. My intuition is that crime should usually correlate with general shittiness of people. So I'll have lower expectations for a lot of small things that mostly don't make it into statistics, like how polite/friendly/helpful vs rude/hostile/troublesome in petty ways people are.
You're right on the first point Fred, it is painfully obvious.
One person mugged means 1000 people can't carry valuables anymore. It means a 1000 women can't walk alone at night, and have to rearrange their lives for that. It means 100% of people have to be alert to danger and vaguely stressed at all times.
I was dog-agnostic, but exposure to dog-hating discourse on Twitter has made me more dog-skeptical. I guess I should count that as a downside of Twitter use.
"If a city has a few more muggings than usual, why is that automatically worse than the city having a few more families on food stamps than usual, or a little worse traffic than usual?"
Because if I'm walking down the street in that city, particularly if I'm a visitor who doesn't know what are the 'bad parts' to avoid, I won't see the extra families on foodstamps, and if I'm not in traffic I won't be aware of the worse traffic. But if there are more muggings, it's more likely that I will get mugged.
'Is it really so bad to live in a city where bricks fall off rooftops onto people's heads more than in other cities?' Well, yeah. Maybe this is a very windy city or one that has a lot of earthquakes so environmental conditions shake the bricks loose. But it's indicative of larger problems; building codes are not taking account of the problem. Construction is not done properly. There's possibly to likely to be corruption among public officials such that bribes mean that unsafe buildings are built. People just going about their business are at greater risk of injury. Insurance rates may be higher, or maybe you can't even get insurance because "pfft, you got hit on the head by a falling brick? yeah what did you expect, you're living in Bricktown, idiot! no claims because this is a clause in your policy about 'falling bricks excepted', you should have read the fine print" and so on outwards.
"A few more muggings" aren't just a slightly greater chance of getting mugged, it's one sign of a worse quality of life for everyone.
"More families on food stamps" also seems like exactly such a sign of worse quality of life for everyone. People continually suffer from poverty in myriad ways, and the more people in a community are poor, the worse off they are. They suffer from it even if they don't inflict it on everyone who passes through, and residents are always much more subject to any endemic problems than visitors.
I think there's something like, "life is full of suffering and we expect people to mostly bear it, and we especially expect people to not inflict 'unjust' suffering on others" ('unjust' is doing lots of heavy lifting here), and that means a place where people are more poor is worse but still better than a place where people mug more or something?
I'd agree that some people appear to have intuitions like that, but if I had a choice between living in a community where everyone was 10% wealthier, but the crime rate was the same, I'd take it over one where the crime rate was 10% lower in a heartbeat.
There's a reasonable question of how much crime you trade off against how much of other goods, but to me, the degree that many people's preferences seem weighted towards "crime" feels bizarre and not conducive to human flourishing.
I wouldn't, because I have a strong intuition that the higher crime rate keeps people less wealthy in the long run. I have no proof if this. It's just an intuition that concentrating on lowering crime has long term positive concequences and concentrating on lower poverty at the expensive of lowering crime has unintended negative consequences.
A lot of people seem to have that intuition, but I don't think there's actually much evidence to justify it, and I think this is mostly rooted in the bias many people have towards overweighting the significance of crime.
In societies which have achieved successful efforts to increase their overall levels of wealth and prosperity, reductions in crime tend to follow. But in societies which focus on efforts to reduce crime, I don't believe there's a similarly strong record of increases in overall prosperity (although if you broaden crime to include things like corruption, I think there's a stronger record there.)
So I did some research (which might be bad) but it seemed to come up with there's a balance. If crime is too high then ignoring it and spending instead on poverty reduction will not be helpful and might actually make things worse. After some lower-crime threshold is met, then spending on poverty reduction does much more to reduce crime further instead of spending more on reducing crime directly
Assuming that's true, that leaves us to debate where that threshold is. But without stating the current conditions of the place we're trying to make better, it's hard to choose whether spending 10% more on crime reduction or 10% on poverty reduction is going to be more effective.
That also suggests yet another place where if certain people feel crime is high they'll lean into "crime needs to be lowered first" over the "in the long run, poverty reduction will lower crime"
"More families on food stamps" is also a sign of low QOL, yes, but getting mugged is a terrifying and otherwise bad experience that happens to you personally, and is a sign of low QOL *on top of that*.
Sure, but rates of muggings are very low compared to rates of being on food stamps.
Even in the communities with the highest crime rates in America (and I've experienced living in communities near the top of the list for murder rates in America,) the proportion of people who're ever mugged or shot at is still quite low, while the proportion of people who're affected by other elements of poverty is very high. Those experiences of poverty also happen to them personally, every single one who's affected by them.
"Sure, but rates of terrifying and otherwise bad things that happen to you personally are relatively low" is the kind of statement that tends to give cold comfort if you happen to be the person that the terrifying and otherwise bad thing with a relatively low rate of happening to people personally personally happened to.
This is true, but an extremely bad guide to apportioning out social resources. There are rare diseases which can subject people to fates far worse than death, but this doesn't mean that it's a good idea to sink all our wealth and manpower int curing them.
This would be a good thing to point out to a person who advocates sinking all our wealth and manpower into curing one problem, should you ever encounter such a person.
Sure, but to solve poverty you have two requirements: 1) a government capable of enforcing its laws and 2) a government capable of passing good laws. To solve muggings only 1) is required, so if there's an excess of those, it's strong evidence that solving poverty is even farther outside of your capabilities.
This seems like an inappropriate level of abstraction. Empirically, plenty of countries have dramatically reduced their levels of poverty despite not being able to solve *all* muggings. Why? Well, being "able to enforce laws" enough to support systems which decrease poverty over time doesn't actually require a total surveillance state where every individual criminal can be caught and prosecuted. It's much easier to enforce laws on businesses, where if they violate them, they can't run away and lie low with a cousin for a month or two until the heat dies down. Enforcing laws on some levels and in some ways is easier than others.
Also, no government ever "solves" poverty or crime; they mitigate them to greater or lesser extents. If you can mitigate crime by a certain amount, it doesn't mean you're able to mitigate poverty less. Very often, the reverse is true, and mitigating poverty is often one of the most effective avenues for a society to mitigate crime, more often than the reverse.
Indeed, that's why I said "an excess". Clearly, the not-so-hidden subtext of discussions like this is the abysmal state of certain parts of certain first-world cities, where the existence of such excesses (compared to other first-world locations) is obvious to everybody not entirely mindkilled. I claim that when considering the distance to some abstract Pareto frontier of misery reduction, enforcing existing laws in those locations would be both much easier and more efficient than designing new ones that would significantly reduce poverty.
>I claim that when considering the distance to some abstract Pareto frontier of misery reduction, enforcing existing laws in those locations would be both much easier and more efficient than designing new ones that would significantly reduce poverty.
I don't think that's at all apparent, and I've lived in some of these neighborhoods.
Well, I'm thousands of miles away, so have to rely on reports of others. But a common conservative narrative, that I haven't seen substantial pushback from liberals to, is that those very 'urban poor' that live there and suffer from crime the most are usually the first ones to protest against reduction in law enforcement.
But the point is that the 'few more muggings than usual' is no more noticeable than the other things. The violent crime rate per 100,000 people in the US is approx 374 incidents per year. Is there going to be a meaningful difference between a city of 100,000 people with 350 incidents and a similar city with 390 incidents? In either case that works out at approx. one per day - and unless you looked up the stats you wouldn't be able to tell.
I was driving south on the Pacific Coast highway north of SF and a car full mouth breathers threw a fist sized rock at my car. They missed but I was plenty pissed.
You are much more likely to be aware of worse traffic than worse crime. Probably there is some subtle seasonality to crime in my city that I'm not aware of, but I'm quite aware of when the big music festivals are, because they mean driving anywhere near downtown is a bad idea.
Mugging was a poor example -- "addicts taking drugs in public" would have been better (commonly portrayed as a sign of disorder, but no more harmful to you than a few more families on food stamps).
Here's my question: Would you prefer dying of kidney failure or having your kidney stolen? Would you rather live somewhere where every year you have a small chance of dying of kidney failure, or somewhere where you have the same chance of the government kidnapping you and forcefully taking your kidney?
I feel like between the two, death is obviously worse, but a lot of people consider the kidney being stolen worse because it's a form of violence.
When asked whether they would rather save their closest pet vs one person, 39% of pet owners choose the pet vs 43% who would save the person. Worse, 27% would rather save their closest pet than 100 people!
This is way above Scott's 4% lizardmen constant. If pet owners are about as likely to opt for their pet over you and if 27% of the people whose pets hitlerally litter your local park are literally Hitler, maybe the r/petfree crowd is onto something!
What I mean to say is: misanthropy of various shapes appears to be really common. For most people it is a fuzzy background noise that perhaps leads them to give crazy answers on thought experiments. Perhaps others who are uncomfortable with such low level misanthropy seek a more specific outlet? A group of people who "deserves" it? Maybe the causality goes misanthropy => hate of specific behaviour/specific annoying group of people and not the other way round?
I wonder what your underlying worldview is that makes this finding surprising.
Edit: I read the poll, and did in fact find the other data surprising! Doesn't surprise me at all that people would rather save their pet. But it does surprise me that 18% of dog owners would rather save an unspecified dog than 100 people!
I generally have difficulties to take into account and need to actively remind myself that people (including I myself) sometimes have bad intentions, if that is what you are getting at.
Re animals vs humans: I am a vegan and care about animal rights much more than the average person, I would say. But it would never occur to me that saving an animal (even one that is especially dear to me) would take precedence over saving a person or even 100 (!) people. People are ridiculing the shrimp welfare folks but that position is much more crazy.
Exactly. Animals are awesome and deserve better than being a product in industrial farming and cattle. But thinking an animal life is more valuable than a human one is outright morally depraved.
> I wonder what your underlying worldview is that makes this finding surprising.
That in which a person is infinitely more valuable than any animal. It's insanity that some people would rather save a dog than a random person, even more so 100.
Regardless of what you think is morally correct, the fact that people care more for animals they have a relationship with more than they do human strangers is easily explainable by both basic psychology and revealed preferences. It's very psychologically normal, and I think it requires a strong cultural pro-human bias to counteract.
The non-negligible proportion of "saving a random dog vs 100 random strangers" responses seems like it needs more explanation, and goes beyond what I would have expected. But I think scope insensitivity explains most of it. I guess there's a combination of: a) "priming" with asking about one's own dog, b) general misanthropy, c) people thinking about migrants on boats.
In terms of what's actually morally correct, rating a human life infinitely higher than an animal life is incoherent with literally any care for animals whatsoever, and permissive of whatever moral harm that might entail, so bite that bullet as you will.
Isn't this just the usual "people are way more attached to their own friends/connections than to strangers" effect that makes lots of people say they would rather spend $1000 making their own child slightly happier than using it to save a foreigner's life?
Apparently not entirely, as Torches Together points out: if asked about an unspecified dog, not their closest pet, 18% of dog owners would still opt to save the dog rather than 100 people.
But maybe they are somehow extending the proximity bias to the entire species of (domesticated) dogs?
This is people *saying* this on a poll. I suspect that there’s something about the polling context that makes people think of their own dog even when it’s said to be an unspecified dog.
Once again, I find I'm curious about whether anyone's done a study on just how depraved a belief people can say they agree with, using nothing but a cleverly designed poll.
> When asked whether they would rather save their closest pet vs one person, 39% of pet owners choose the pet vs 43% who would save the person. Worse, 27% would rather save their closest pet than 100 people!
> 18% of dog owners would rather save an unspecified dog than 100 people!
I mean, if you were dealing with some supernatural force that's setting up a hypothetical with 100 humans on one side of the trolly tracks and a single dog on the other, wouldn't it be reasonable to make some sort of inference that this powerful, death-dealing entity might have an abnormally high dog-valuation, and it might be safer to take that side?
Another possible interpretation: wIth how polarized things have become politically, the odds are really on your side. Just imagine, of those 100 other people, statistically at least 50 are likely to be <hated political outgroup>! Dogs don't even vote!
And if there's any sort of geographical cut, you probably get closer to 70-80 of them being a particular political side you might hate, depending on the geography they were chosen from. I mean, that's just realpolitik at this point!
Really, the 18% thing is probably some virtue / sinner thing. Dogs are innocents, like children - there's no bad dogs, just bad owners. So kill an innocent being, or 100 guaranteed fallen / horrible humans?
I mean, how do you think the same question would go subbing "a child" for the dog? Probably about the same, right?
the dog can never hate you like humans can. Dogs don't drive people to despair or suicide.
when a bunch of dogs growl and snap at me, they are bad dogs. When a bunch of humans growl and snap at me I am the bad dog and that is something profoundly terrible. (and i dont mean actual deserving it. people. an just not like your face. thats enough.)
You should maybe go to a therapist, if you automatically accept as true every criticism that a person makes about you and it impacts your quality of life. That is not normal or healthy, and there are treatments for it.
> I mean, if you were dealing with some supernatural force
It doesn't take supernatural force. It is exactly the kind of decision you make when you choose to donate money to a charity that saves animals instead of one that saves people. No-one cares. It's valid, normal and accepted.
> It is exactly the kind of decision you make when you choose to donate money to a charity that saves animals instead of one that saves people.
True, but this implies there's probably a serious "money where your mouth is" gap here - if people really WOULD save one dog over 100 humans, there's a real donation differential in human vs animal shelter / adoption charities, because I imagine you can save many hundreds of dogs for the price of saving any single human in the developed world.
So prospectively, these people should be pouring tens of thousands of times more into animal charities than human charities, and that's not really the donation landscape.
I disagree that the situations are equivalent. While it's obviously a very sad state of affairs, I had very little personal influence on people dying in Africa, yet I and almost everyone I know buys dead animal bodies to consume. This kind of personal involvement makes me - and I think a normal/idealized human too - feel more responsible about the plight of animals.
Compare it with this situation: you get angry at your friend and in a heated argument you slap him and storm away. After you cool down it seems to you that you were too hot-headed and you should apologize to your friend. You start to prepare for this, but wait! Actually, your friend, comparatively, suffered a much less harmful offense than the people dying in Africa, shouldn't you instead focus your energies on them and instead of going to your friend house to apologize, you should stay a bit more at work to get money for them? (No, obviously not, what's moral does not depend only on the quantity of suffering, other factors are often just as important.)
If I walk away from a drowning man without trying to rescue him, I may have very good reason for this. Perhaps I think he's faking. Perhaps I can't swim. Perhaps I think enough people are jumping into the river aready and I'll only get in the way. It remains true that I walked away from the drowning man. My reasons for doing this, and whether I do or should feel any guilt over it, are separate things from the fact that this is what I did.
You may think you have good reason to spend those resources saving animals and not humans. Indeed, if you didn't believe you had a good reason for the choice, you likely wouldn't make it. This does not change the fact of what you are doing.
I agree that the reasons don't change the fact of what I did. I'm arguing however that those reasons are good reasons to do what I did/do. Do you have counterarguments? Ones showing that they are actually bad reasons?
>wouldn't it be reasonable to make some sort of inference that this powerful, death-dealing entity might have an abnormally high dog-valuation, and it might be safer to take that side?
This is wrong. Justice should be obeyed, not power, even if it leads to worse outcomes for you personally.
>I mean, if you were dealing with some supernatural force that's setting up a hypothetical with 100 humans on one side of the trolly tracks and a single dog on the other, wouldn't it be reasonable to make some sort of inference that this powerful, death-dealing entity might have an abnormally high dog-valuation, and it might be safer to take that side?
I dunno, I think my inference would be the opposite. It sounds like this supernatural force is trying *really* hard to make sure I have the maximum incentive to kill the dog; the most plausible explanation seems to be that this power really hates dogs and that it's safer to go with the dog-killing side.
> I dunno, I think my inference would be the opposite. It sounds like this supernatural force is trying *really* hard to make sure I have the maximum incentive to kill the dog;
Yeah, this is an interesting disconnect - it sounds like you're positing something like a "justice test" from a Christian-style "testing your virtue" god, and I'm positing something that's more a disinterested scientist who's setting up a "this seems roughly equivalent" choice.
After all, you don't study choices that are foregone, they're not interesting. You want to study choices where there's a real ambivalence, where things could go either way.
> "Really, the 18% thing is probably some virtue / sinner thing. Dogs are innocents, like children - there's no bad dogs, just bad owners. So kill an innocent being, or 100 guaranteed fallen / horrible humans?"
Yes, I can definitely imagine someone having the moral intuition that humans, being both intelligent enough to have moral agency and inevitably imperfect, are in some sense universally evil and deserving of death. Dogs, on the other hand, are not really moral agents and are thus incapable of evil (though they can obviously still do harm).
The obvious rejoinder is that babies are insufficiently developed to be capable of evil, but certain trains of thought (such as Christian-influenced beliefs about original sin) could plausibly reject this. Then again, if we imagine a person adopting an explicitly Christian framework of interpretation then we have to take into account belief in the afterlife, which makes a mess of thought experiments about saving lives.
Right now my hypothesis would be that the said supernatural force has also seen this specific poll, perhaps by reading this blog, and is now testing the hypothesis.
Before we had kids I used to tease my wife by asking whether she would save our cat vs 100 babies. I think she would have saved the babies, but it called attention to how much affection she showed our cat.
Now that we have kids there is absolutely no question that she'd let the cat bite the dust.
They are clearly on to something vis a vis unhealthy elevation of the moral importance of pets and general tendency to treat them as people, but they still seem unhinged.
This is just an extension of people believing that animals are at the same level as humans, and that the pet you've had your whole life has equal or even more value than any other person.
I would rather have my childhood dog who's been 16 years with me to die than a random african child I don't even know.
People that would sooner save an animal over a person are horrible people, and fortunately won't escape divine judgement. Imagine how much a worldview like that bleeds onto other realms of life.
I haven't heard of the petfree and dogree subreddits, but I kinda dislike dogs too and lowkey has some general resentment towards them. Some part of my feelings definitely stems from the fact I don't think I can freely express myself irl on this area as dogs are pretty much universally loved, on the other hand I (and most runners) do have tons of legitimate grievances with them.
I think you're a little quick to downplay the influence of social media. Yes, your misophonia developed before it, but you KNOW you're crazy. Whereas this makes me think of CartoonsHateHer being told by her therapist that all the other women on the Reddit mom forum probably also have OCD. Social media lets you connect with enough people who also share your neuroses that you can be convinced they're normal.
I imagine that, before the internet, the underlying drive leading to misophonia or misocynia(?) now, would just find more traditional presentations of intolerance like xenophobia
From “Does Everyone on Reddit have OCD?” by CartoonsHateHer: “When I started seeing my current therapist (one of the only therapists I’ve had who actually specializes in OCD) she told me that a particular obesssion I had—that I was a bad mother if I “allowed” my children to get sick by taking them to the children’s museum—was an OCD thing. I told her she was wrong. My reasoning was that I had seen a Reddit post about this (granted, I was banned from posting at this point, but I could still read posts) and all the moms had concurred that it was irresponsible to take your children to places where they might catch a virus. Many of them also said that they would never take a baby under 6 months old to a family Thanksgiving, which helped to solidify that rule in my mind as well. My therapist shook her head and said, “I would bet money that most of these women also have OCD.””
My brother has been getting "go to great lengths to make sure the baby doesn't catch a virus" advice from *doctors* and he's taken it very seriously. He's been living like it's 2020 pandemic lockdown ever since...
We can see that the word "relationship" was superfluous. The nature of online message boards is to encourage pathological behavior.
(That article used to be on a substack, and it had some excellent comments. Pirate Wires seems to have ported it to their own site without also porting the comments. This is a shame.)
There is a wayback machine version at the same URL. However, since Substack doesn't load comments on the article page, most of them won't be archived. You can see sort of a rotating selection by loading the archive from different dates; two comments will appear on the page with a teaser that there are more.
(But trying to follow the teaser and see them all will fail. This is one way in which "modern" web architecture damages archival projects.)
Yes, Scott understands he has a problem, and doesn't seek reinforcement from social media.
For a lot of people, they think their loops are just an indication that they are one of the few ones who recognize the truth, and the rest of us are burying our heads in the sand.
Though under other circumstances it can help to be able to put a label on your experiences and understand that they're neither universal nor unique to you, they're just something that some people experience.
Maybe it helps to be able to say "It's not that the person chewing gum loudly at the other end of the train carriage is a massive jerk, it's just that I have misophonia, and as such experience this as a more annoying stimulus than most people".
Despite being a pet owner myself I'm annoyed by obsessed pet owners. Many people go way overboard with their pet manias so I kinda get the petfree people. With pets and pet friendly policies becoming more and more important in public spaces things are only going to get worse.
I'm not afraid of dogs and I don't hate them, but I don't automatically like them either. I'd say my default opinion of an unknown dog starts out as "mildly skeptical that it has any value," and dogs that are well trained and have good personalities can win me over to positive, while yappy annoying dogs or ones that are overly affectionate and jumpy or of course aggressive ones swing my sentiment strongly negative.
But there is so much of society that seems determined to feel like the only correct feelings about dogs are strongly positive, and that annoys me. It feels like other people are judging me.
I'm the same. It feels like society is strongly pressuring us to *love* dogs unconditionally, and that's frustrating. I can see why some people need an anonymous internet space to vent. I'm guessing those people are not normally talking like that in real life.
To me it's just another example of things becoming divorced from their original purpose. When most dogs were working or guard dogs, and the only people who could afford to keep a dog for purely decorative purposes could also afford servants to take care of said dog, there wasn't a massive class of people buying Huskies and locking them up in their Phoenix apartments all day. Absentee owners aren't a problem in a society where 90-95% of the population are farmers.
Even today, most dogs I see are well-behaved, but when I hear one barking, I feel sorry for it and angry at the owner for not taking care of it properly. Refusing to train a dog is one step below physical abuse, and it speaks to the apathy of a society in which people regularly blast TikTok from their phones on the bus.
When most dogs were working or guard dogs innocent people got mauled often and the barking was constant.
Training dogs is pretty hard and many popular companion dog breeds are especially difficult to train because they are not selected for that trait like most working dogs are.
Even highly trainable dogs like the Malinois used by police occasionally bite their professional handlers.
Dogs inevitably bring a degree of nuisance and in a society in which people regularly blast TikTok from their phones on the bus it is acceptable to bother others with your dog.
"... many popular companion breeds" are the result of horrific modern breeding trends which we are only in recent years starting to reverse, and only on the fringes. That the society which produces the French pitbull doesn't have their shit together when it comes to handling dogs is pretty self-evident to me, but the dogs aren't the ones running the breeding programs or kennel clubs.
"... in a society in which people regularly blast TikTok" to clarify, I don't think that's okay either. Both are signs of a sick society.
It’s just the equal annd opposite reaction to the type of person that proclaims their dog is just like your kid. “We both have to feed our pets!” Sorry, I can’t lock my toddler in a cage and go to brunch. If I tie my kid up to a tree outside the bar, its a felony.
Also, my first week in SF I was shocked the number of times I saw a dog poop or pee on the floor of a store, be it the Apple Store or grocery store. There is a type of person that has lost all social decency and perhaps it’s a form of impotent shame to post on Reddit about it.
I *am* afraid of dogs, probably more than is strictly rational, although having been actually attacked several times I think zero fear is also irrational. I'm definitely sad that I don't really get any dogs-require-leashes green space to enjoy near me, but I recognise I'm enough of a minority that it doesn't really justify changing anything. I bought a car to get to the office that's within a 40 minute walk because that walk is through a nature reserve where a bunch of people do walk their dogs unleashed (see aforementioned attacks). If it were up to me I would require people to be licensed prior to dog ownership for much the same reasons cars are.
Dog parks where dogs can romp leash-free are a nice innovation in recent decades. For example, the Laurel Canyon Dog Park off Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood Hills
There are plenty of parks and so on that are *meant* to be leashes-only, including that nature reserve. Of course, these aren't enforced in the slightest. The end result is that if I want to go for a walk I stick to roads to avoid unleashed dogs, which is just kind of a shame.
I agree that contagion does not seem to be a problem here. But what the modern Internet does help us see is that people have always been this possessed by weird hatreds and tribalism.
Autocorrect offered me an apostrophe on “hatreds” above and I think if I’d accepted it and posted that way some many readers would have a spasm of hatred towards me.
Pet-free is fine. Child-free is fine. I have about 100 pubs within a mile of me, and only about 4 of them don't allow dogs. It's not a problem. I just choose another one. I am fine with child-free too. Just go somewhere else.
I think the most annoying thing is parents who don't acknowledge that their pet/dog is bothering everyone else. Or they don't seem to care. When my kids were small, if one of them cried, I would grab him quick and take him outside. Some parents don't even seem to notice that their crying child is annoying.
At the moment, I have a canine beast, but I don't have a small child or grandchild. I would hope that my neighbors would be more accommodating of an annoying grandchild than of my slightly terrifying hound, which I try to avoid inflicting on my neighbors.
I think a child in a restaurant should be treated the same as answering a cellphone. It is fine to answer it at the table. If you actually have to carry on a cellphone conversation, walk to a part of the restaurant (or outside) so as not to disturb. No need to be urgent or panicky about it. Kids make noise. Good parents try not to inconvenience. Almost everyone is forgiving of kid noises when they can see that the parents are attentive to the needs of other people. It is the parents not the kids that are the object of (most) peoples anger.
From what I see on Reddit most niche subreddits based around hating something are just as crazy as that snip from r/petfree. I think r/childfree is the most toxic—those people appear to actively dislike children to an unsettling degree.
I disagree that the pet haters are motivated by a the pet version of misphonia. One thing about Reddit which is odd (or maybe not) is the degree to which redditors are extremely black and white and rigid about rules. You see that in relationship advice subs where the smallest infraction is considered grounds for a breakup. Even at the peak of the “woke” era when a lot of liberals were very open to disorder, Reddit typically had zero sympathy for homeless encampments. Redditors are obsessed with the idea it is maddening and unacceptable that things should be a certain way, yet aren’t that way. It’s a little odd that attitude is the attitude that won out on the last large corner of social media devoted to the written word.
I think it's a combination of having an upvote/downvote system, and having subreddits which can silo likeminded people with one another. It means Redditors are strongly incentivised to conform with the general opinion. And people who do have the "correct view" are going to find a lot of reassurance and confirmation there, while people who express ambivalent and critical views are going to get continually downvoted (or even banned from subreddits) and will probably leave for a friendlier online experience somewhere else.
You mention, but then underexplore, part of the two conditions that I think is important. Aren't these both conditions of disliking the actions of other people? Yes, the pets and sound offend, but I think if the animals and sound were to be tied to non-human-originating source (a wild dog or a natural sound that sounded just akin to the offensive human sound) the level of frustration seems far smaller. I'm not a psych, but assume that near the core is a social reaction, and I'm assuming that moves it into a different chapter of a DSM (which I've never read) or equivalent. Then, after it's in a social section, there's presumably extra heft associated with attributing to the "them" behind the noise/pet a bunch of perceptions of the good/evil character of all members of that group (insensitive, disrespectful, shallow, selfish, etc.) and group-identification (I'm not in that crowd, I'm in the other crowd). Obviously, with misophonia, there has to be a strong sensory-tie in, and I see the connection between misophonia and the anti-pet story, but the anti-pet story quickly allows the rest of this social story to be more visible.
The misophonia essay seems to make a clear case that "misophonia" is just moral entrepreneurship, someone's decision that a particular set of actions is so evil that it should be suppressed.
>the existence of communities for these people validate and intensify their emotions and make everything worse.
Groupthink tends to be worse on reddit due to the downvotes.
People downvote to express disagreement, but this has the dual effect of delegitimizing the minority position: the person expressing it has their comment collapsed, loses karma, leaves the subreddit, and becomes an outgrouper (who posts on another subreddit, and now we snipe at that subreddit from our subreddit).
Scott's "thing" is noise. My "thing" is reddit groupthink.
If you find people of /r/petfree angry and crazy, check out any of the dozens of subreddits such as /r/UnitedNations dedicated to demonizing Israel. You may conclude that in comparison /r/petfree isn't that crazy after all.
I just had a look at r/UnitedNations, and of the top 20 posts seven are about Israel. Not too remarkable, given that there is rather prominently a war going on there. The other popular topics appear to be Russia/Ukraine and India/Pakistan, with a sprinkling of Yemen. I believe there are also wars or warlike activities going on in those places.
Am I wrong to expect to see news and discussion of nations where wars are happening in a subreddit about the United Nations, an organization created in the aftermath of a war and charged with (among other things) preventing and mitigating the effects of wars?
Weirdest pivot to a political hobby horse in an unrelated thread I've seen in a while.
Countries and other political entities and their policies, no matter which country we're talking about, is obviously in a different category than more unspecific groups like "children" and "dogs".
I worry about pets overall for 4 reasons, probably in order:
- domestic animals in aggregate displace wild animals and need more domestic animals to feed them. Feels wrong to breed carnivores for entertainment.
- domestic animals are a soft form of slavery. Sure, the love may be real, but it is still a one-way power ratio. We castrate, declaw, euthanise and cage with love.
- some owners get weirdly infantile. What's with the high pitch voice? Even a real toddler would find it cringy.
- saying any of the above in public society would cause an outrage not unlike what is reserved for pedophiles... So i keep quiet.
- Dog food is mostly grain with a few scrap parts of meat that humans won’t eat. It’s very low environmental impact and doesn’t displace any wild animals.
- Your dog doesn’t think of himself as a slave and doesn’t know or care that his balls are gone one day when he wakes up from the surgery. Neither the human nor the dog conceives of the relationship as anything remotely similar to slavery.
- Dogs like high-pitched voices and fear low-pitched voices. That’s why humans do it. You use a high pitched voice when you want your dog to come to you.
- You can say all that on /r/petfree and get lots of agreement if that’s what you want. But I don’t think you should do that because those thoughts aren’t really productive and you’d be better off reframing your outlook instead of finding people to commiserate with.
I’m absolutely beside myself laughing. I missed the first post on noise so reading this together is a gem.
I am guilty of an irrational anger at others making noise. And the idea that I strain to hear it is also something I’ve done. Like a grumpy old guy looking out the window, actively seeking something to hate. My intolerance of noise is not consistent nor all consuming so I cannot imagine going through the days with that as a default. Oh man….
It's rare when a random blog post serendipitously scratches on the exact problem that's been on a slow burn inside my head at the moment, and this did it. Thank you.
Yeah you got it right, and I think I'm one of them. Absolutely cannot stand dog barking in my window, and the barking makes me extra angry when I think about how my annoying neighbours are so inconsiderate as to allow their dogs to do this. I think in general dogs should be banned for a whole host of reasons.
So would the Grinch be diagnosed with misophonia today? His stated reason for hating Christmas was all the noise that the Whos made in their celebrations...
I totally get /r/petfree now, but before I had children, I was a huge dog lover and animal lover in general. And since becoming a Christian, animals still have a place in my heart but humans are so much more important to me. I have dogs, but cringe when people call them my "fur babies". I just think pets have taken too high of a place in our society. Dogs off leash at playgrounds are a danger to children, yet we just encountered this yesterday in my neighborhood and the owner was baffled that anyone would object. Dogs at restaurants, dogs at grocery stores, it's getting ridiculous. If you are genuinely afraid of or disgusted by pets (which are filthy to be honest), I bet it is tough to deal with seeing them everywhere.
Neither a Christian nor a dog owner but I share your experience. I don't mind dogs - actually, I appreciate them more now, because my kids find them delightful. But our society values them too highly.
The "fur baby" treatment, taking dogs everywhere, and other signs of over-attachment are sad, even more than cringe-inducing. I look at that and see a child-shaped hole, a person who should be receiving that love but who didn't get a chance to exist. Something has gone wrong when we have fewer kids than ever, but all this spare capacity for care and emotional bonding to lavish on animals.
And yeah, I don't remember feeling this way before I had kids myself.
Oh yes, I agree, it is a sad sign. I don't think there is anything wrong with loving a pet, but consideration and love for people should always come first. Having kids tends to sort out the hierarchy naturally. Every single parent I know who has young kids and pets has said having children made them see their pets differently, not only in relation to their children, but in a general way.
The love for a pet is not the same as the love for a human, much the same the love for your wife or children isn't the same as the love for a friend or a relative.
> Every single parent I know who has young kids and pets has said having children made them see their pets differently
Wish I could say the same. I know a few parents who think their pets are only a bit below their actual children. Always the mother, too.
I had something of an opposite experience. Before getting a puppy I looked down on people calling their dogs "fur babies" and so on. I insisted my wife and I don't present ourselves as his "mom and dad" (she instead proposed "his humans"). And so on.
Since we got him, I kinda get it. I literally raised him since he was 8 weeks old. I taught him what is not appropriate to do and where, trained him, go out of my way to get him the exercise and enrichment he needs, took him on emergency vet visits, etc. It really does feel like training for having children.
So I now get it. Still wouldn't call him my fur baby but now I'm far less judgemental about it.
I don't call my pets that, but the parental role is obvious and arguably inevitable because THE PET thinks of you as their parent. Which you are. You took them from their real parent as a baby, and control their access to food, affection, water, and everything else they want and need. Your pets treat you as parents, that's why it's pretty natural to fulfill that role when it's actually what you are to them, even if they are not technically a child to you. It's not quite the same if you adopt for example an adult cat, which can fend for itself, but a kitten or dog is totally dependent on you, so to pretend you're NOT it's adoptive parent seems silly to me, bc you are. (I'm not using you directly at you btw, just the general you to mean anyone who adopted a kitten or dog).
Apparently post-partum pet aversion is a real thing! Anecdotally my wife has got it pretty bad - she was never “fur baby” level but loved animals before pregnancy, and now afterward she can barely stand our own pets.
> Dogs off leash at playgrounds are a danger to children
Me and many other parents had had to get up and leave many times because some idiot goes around with a leashless pitbull. "Don't worry he's friendly as" he says, after being told repeteadly that he should leash it and ideally not take it out especially near children playing.
But oh well, it's the dumb parents for wanting special rights and not accepting the fur babies of others :)
Clearly Pit Bulls are dangerous and shouldn’t be allowed anywhere without a muzzle and a leash. But it’s fine to let your kids play in the park with a corgi.
Counterpoint: Visit London and you'll see the same, dogs everywhere. No one is stressed about this, it's fine. The children at playgrounds are fine too.
I think Christians are allowed to love dogs. You really didn’t need to give up your dogs just because you found Jesus.
Also, dogs aren’t a danger to children. Pit Bulls are a danger to children. We used to have breed bans and we can bring those back instead of banning all dogs just to solve a very specific problem with one dog breed.
Sure, I didn't say I stopped loving them. Or that Christians shouldn't love them.
It's not just pitbulls, but that's certainly a common concern that I share, even as a pitbull owner. Any kind of dog is capable of biting a child. Unlikely that a Chihuahua would kill a child, but it could still hurt one, so I would consider that a danger and don't want them running freely at the playground either.
You hit my bingo card hard on this one. I used to have cynophobia—in fact, I've always loved dogs, but I was afraid of them—and I still have misophonia. It really is the worst. Eating sounds make me furious.
I think of r/petfree as one of those movements that started as satire, but became real. It wouldn't surprise me if flat earth and Q are in the same category—something that started off as a troll fueled by contempt, trying to see how far he could go in getting people to believe stupid things, and then became something real.
That said, I have cats. I would never take them to a restaurant. They would hate it and it would take weeks for them to forgive me.
So are all these hangups just downstream of "extra-high neuroticism" as a personality trait?
That is: a person by nature is a little bit anxious and sensitive, has a tendency toward negative emotions (anger, fear, grief, resentment), and high drive toward order/ control. They wander the world, feeling low-key bad and icky, until one day the right purity violation comes along to focus that cloud of neurosis on a single object, like "sticky kids" or "cats on the counter" or "loud chewing" or "hot girls dating Chads." At which point they ruminate and bubble with others and develop a narrative that explains all the pre-existing bad feelings in terms of that single phenomenon. By the end, it has become a genuinely painful and traumatizing thing for them to encounter.
One interesting question would be whether the neurosis is transferrable from one object to another. Do people ever begin by getting ragey about unruly kids, then later pivot to obsessing about mouth sounds? Or do they just add layer after layer on top?
What protective traits distinguish people who encounter purity violations but shrug them off and aren't tempted to ruminate?
Some way to test if it's downstream/linked to neuroticism would be to ask advanced meditators that had misphonia if they still have it as much (I'm assuming here meditation reduces neuroticism, I think it's true/well known but not 100% sure).
Yes, but it's sort of circular. Someone who is ruminating on children, pets or noises, is neurotic because being excessively sensitive/anxious/obsessive about things is the definition of "neurotic".
The transferability is an interesting thing. Probably people do both: some people just accumulate things to get mad about, while many obsessives can become temporarily reassured about a concern, but the drive to ruminate leads them latch on to something else.
It's still A Growth Industry(tm) thanks to social media. Can't sustain a community without members. We can still point to social media as the spice that makes our shit show lively.
The Bloom Country phrase "offensivitivity" seems to nicely capture the misphonia-style sense of "thing that other people find mildly annoying that certain people find psychologically intolerable" dynamic.
I don't post on r/petfree, so maybe I'm not as crazy as them, but I do sympathise with them.
I would love to live in a world with no pets. I can't relax when I'm round somebody's house and they have a dog or cat. I never don't look at my feet when I'm walking outside for fear of stepping in dog shit. The local cats terrorise the birds that visit my garden. There is no outdoor space where I can escape, and what feels like a diminishing number of indoor spaces. There are more and more pets and I wish there weren't.
And I simply would not admit this stuff un-anonymously. I think that's a difference with misophonia: you can admit to hating noise and people will sympathise that you have a sensitivity that makes life hard. If I admit to hating pets, a lot of my friends will judge me harshly.
The people at r/petfree see themselves as a persecuted minority. They've found a safe space where they can vent about how unjust and hopeless it is that the world is not for them and there's nothing they can do. Pet love is more hegemonic than Christianity is or has been in the past century, and these are the few heretics telling each other that they're not alone.
(I want to distinguish between "pets aren't my thing but you do you" and "I wish there weren't pets". The former is an acceptable, if disfavoured, heterodoxy in the pet love hegemony. The latter is beyond the pale.)
I think you don't quite appreciate the degree to which dogs can ruin your day by, say, attacking you, attacking your kid, or even just making a show of how much they'd like to tear your or your kid's throat out if they were just let off a leash.
I hate navigating through all the dog poop on city sidewalks, but that's not the reason I really dislike dogs (birds poop on absolutely everything, but I don't care that much) - the reason is occasional attacks and very frequent shows of aggression. Could that be the case that some of the redditors also had enough of this and snapped, and if so, is misophonia the right diagnosis?
> I think you don't quite appreciate the degree to which dogs can ruin your day by, say, attacking you, attacking your kid
Sure they can, but do they? Dogs kill 46 people per year in the US, which is terrible but less than lawnmowers or serial killers, and slightly more than lightning.
I would wager the low number of deaths are because dogs are very weak and even weaker males can probably kill them if push comes to shove. Let's see the statistics for how many people are injured by dogs yearly in the United States! If Google is truthful it's 4.5 million people. If you encounter dogs often (eg being a runner), I don't think it's quite so irrational to be afraid of them. If you disagree, I'd like to see how you'd hold your current composure when a dog is chasing you while growling and barking (a not uncommon occurence for runners).
I am not talking about the odds of dogs killing someone. I am talking about exposure to dog aggression being unpleasant and hard for many people to tolerate - and I'm wondering if that, not noise or poop, is what causes many of those redditors to hate dogs, and whether "misophonia" is the right diagnosis in that case.
My brother and I have both been bitten (separate occasions, separate dogs). Not deadly, but it sure wasn't a fun time, and I'm more uncomfortable around aggressive dogs now.
It's been helpful to me to be able to tell people that I'm afraid of dogs because one almost drowned me when I was around 12, it is something they can grasp and they are more sympathetic. But in reality I was terrified of them from infancy, no attacks necessary.
There was an essay in the NYTimes a few months ago by an autistic man about his (and many autistic people's) profound fear of dogs, and how people should consider this when they let their dogs loose where they shouldn't be. People don't find this a compelling argument, though.
I'm also on the spectrum, and that is probably partly why I don't like dogs. I wouldn't say I've always been terrified of dogs - I had some dog friends when I was growing up - but I've always felt very unsafe around the ones I did not know well. How am I supposed to know they mean well? Their humans always claim they are harmless, but, in my experience, they pretty much always take the dog's side. Whatever the dog does, it's always "awww, he was just playing" or "it was your fault".
One of the really bad things about dogs (and possibly the worst one) is that, in almost any human vs dog argument, the vocal majority of humans will take the side of the dog. That alone seems to me like a good reason to dislike the dog species.
This seems largely orthogonal to what they are actually complaining about on r/petfree though. As Scott noted, it doesn’t come off as a genuine phobia like you’d expect from people unusually anxious about dog attacks.
Maybe, but it still seems fair to note that whatever the original source of hatred, they are now acting in a way that goes beyond “afraid of dog attack”.
I’m imagining people afraid of flying making r/planefree where they call passengers “skyfuckers” and go on and on about how disgusted they are every time they see a contrail or hear a helicopter.
Are there any (meta) studies that show how the conscious mind can change what is inaccessible in the moment? This would be like being able to hear the ‘b’ sound after some study, but obviously a different phenomena would be chosen.
I'm a total dog lover, but I can totally understand a petfree attitude. As many have observed, pets are the new kids. And pet pampering will continue to reach new heights. (We are all under the influence of Girardian mimetic desire.)
Re “stretching the definition of phobia”: I used to be (irrationally, angrily?) annoyed at words that used “-phobia” to mean hate/dislike, but apparently that’s actually the older usage! The first “-phobia” word in English was “xenophobia” (in exactly the modern sense), and the use of “-phobia” for the names of actual fears didn’t start until later…
1. Regarding the difference between an increase in public disorder and violation of the law and poverty: my gut sense is that poverty is not threatening to me personally. That is, I have no belief that poverty will somehow creep into my domain and affect me. In contrast, I do have a gut sense, not rooted in any particular facts, that any increase in public disorder may somehow affect me by harmony physically, or stealing my stuff.
>But I’m not feeling it - all my misophonic symptoms happened before I talked to anyone about them, and removing every other misophonic in the world wouldn’t improve things a bit.
Granted, you may have had misophonia before it was cool - but do you actually know that users of /r/petfree et al. suffer from the same? As far as Internet communities are concerned, maybe it's just the good old Toxoplasma of Rage, where they eventually have to turn it up to 11 to get above a dozen upvotes, then to 12, and so on. Nobody is going to get any attention there with a slightly anti-pet, but overall reasonable position such as "I wish pet owners would follow the rules and respect my dislike of pet animals". Opinions have to be murder/suicide levels of outrage, otherwise they might as well not exist.
You took potshots at conservatives, but what about the mirror image? What are the things that the other side is unreasonably obsessed with?
You could argue it's inequality. Not all forms of inequality of course, they don't seem to get too upset about the fact that some people are good-looking and some are ugly, or the fact that some people live to 100 and others die at 50, or the fact that some people have pleasant personalities that make people like them while others are doomed to be jerks, but they are particularly concerned with the fact that some people are rich and some are less rich. And they're really *really* concerned if this difference appears to be mediated by some particular factors.
Now, we should be careful here because we may be constructing a superweapon that allows us to dismiss all our opponents' concerns as just being some kind of irrational misophonia.
> Notice that virtually zero people actually relocate based on inequality. People routinely relocate for higher income, cheaper housing, lower crime, and closeness to family. But have you ever heard anyone — even the most fanatical leftist — claim to be “moving for equality”?
Actually I think that people move for equality all the time, that's why middle class suburbs exist, so that people can exist in a place where there's nobody much richer or poorer than themselves.
Super rich people likewise choose to live in super-rich places where everyone is super-rich.
Agreed. It is pretty common knowledge that buying the cheapest house in a richer area than you could otherwise afford results in the most appreciation (of the value of your property). This is a definite consideration in home shopping for people. I cannot think of any reason why I would want to buy a house surrounded by exactly my economic peers (obviously there are reasons to avoid poorer neighborhoods).
Ah well, have you tried it? I used to live in a modest rented house in a properly rich area and found there were definitely downsides. Every time I went out for a walk, I'd see so many houses and cars that I couldn't possibly afford, and I found I'd spend a lot of time thinking about money. It's not nice to live in a place that makes you feel poor.
And one random comment: I am delighted at how much more well regulated the readers and commenters seem here compared with those on Scotts feed on Twitter.
> For what was once r/TheDonald, it’s brown people (am I joking on this last one? absolutely not).
I strongly disagree with this characterisation of r/TheDonald .
Let me illustrate. You recall when the phrase "It's okay to be white" gained some political currency? It was used as a reflection of "Black lives matter", with the same ambiguity ("*Only* X lives matter", or "X lives matter *too*"?): generously, to illustrate the hypocrisy of the BLM movement; ungenerously, to apply the same kind of racism.
When this popped up, I went to r/TheDonald to see what that crowd made of it. And the top, most-upvoted post was an image, containing only the text "It's okay to be black".
That struck me as ... well, generous and sensitive. The posters at r/TheDonald had experienced the BLM movement insisting that black lives mattered, and loudly criticising anyone who suggested other lives should also matter - and empathised, understanding that insisting that it's okay to be white (and pointedly leaving out everyone else) would have the same effect. So they made the point, unmistakably, that leaving out everyone else wasn't their intent.
Now, I haven't quite addressed your point, because you've described their feelings as being directed specifically at brown people - and, if one says that it's okay to be white and that it's okay to be black, that could be intended to exclude people of other skin colours ... but I don't think that's plausibly the case here. And I understand that later (2019ish?), as r/TheDonald was harassed into non-existence by the Reddit administration, there was an evaporative concentration effect that left a handful of die-hard racists as the only remaining commentors, which may have been when you saw it. But I'll maintain that, in its heyday, r/TheDonald avoided the racist extremes of either wing of politics better than most of the internet.
I definitely recognize having feelings like this when I was young. Like when I was a teenager or younger. Random things would set me off. There were definitely noises or smells that would trigger me. (I remember a buzzing mosquito sound in a video game would drive me nuts, beyond what was a reasonable reaction to a buzzing mosquito sound)
I also recognize this in my three-year-old kids. They get angry at the most minor things. Eventually you learn the patterns and you ask for permission "can I put out a plate for you for dinner?"
It's obvious that children don't have control over their emotions. But as you stop being a toddler and you stop being a teenager, you're supposed to get over that and not blow up at minor things. Maybe that doesn't happen uniformly. Like these people can be normal adults about some things, but are teenagers about other things.
And the reason why there is no recognized disorder is that "toddler" and "teenager" are not disorders.
One memory I have of what made me open up is when my dad took me to an art exhibition when I was still a teenager. It was Joseph Beuys' art and I thought most of it was clearly stupid. My dad said something like "well you're a rational thinking kind of person, not an emotional feely kind of person" and for some reason it clicked with me that these are clearly just different people, and maybe it's all fine. And that allowed me to chill out. And I stopped being angry at the art, and I was able to generalize that trick to other things to stop getting mad at them, too.
I think you are incorrect in your assessment of intellectualization. I have 2 examples from my life about it. I believe that the rage issue is purely a sort of narcissistic (or self righteous) thing. My examples:
1) I used to get road rage. If someone was going the speed limit in the fast lane, I would lay into my horn. Not honk but honk repeatedly with varying cadence to make it clear that it was directed fury. If someone refused to abandon the lane, I would follow them. One time, I followed someone off the freeway, through town, until he pulled into a police station and ran from his car into the station.
One day, I was getting onto a freeway and a school bus was inconveniencing me. I laid into my horn, "BAAP...BAP BAP BAP...BAAAAAP...BAAAAAP...BAAP BAAP..." Once additional lanes were available, I accelerated indignantly past. I looked over to see that the bus was full of disabled kids and driven by someone with Down's syndrome. He looked mortified. The significance of getting a drivers license as a person with Down's syndrome is difficult to overstate. My younger brother has Down's syndrome. I was mortified. I never again surrendered to road rage.
2) I recall, as a child, when I used to get angry with people that my mother would ask me to analyze what potential reasons might explain the persons behavior. Could they, have had a bad day? Be rushing to deal with an emergency? A family member in trouble? My mother was relentless about this. There was always an infinite number of possible justifications for their behavior. If I wanted to be angry, it was because I wanted to be angry.
One day when I was in my 40s (she in her 70s), she was driving and we pulled up to a stop sign and somebody went out of turn. She was visibly annoyed and reacted. I was taken aback. The cool intellectual mother of my childhood replaced by an unfamiliar, animalistic person. It was immediately obvious that the human reason was slowing down and was no longer able to beat the lizard brain to the punch. I now wonder when this will happen to me. In the meantime, I continue to make an effort to fake (mild) anger when I need to add emphasis to reprimands of my employees and my children.
I am fully convinced that anger is a "moral failure to care," "an intentional decision to be angry," or, "a failure of intellect to win a race against the animal inside us all.
> I recall, as a child, when I used to get angry with people that my mother would ask me to analyze what potential reasons might explain the persons behavior. Could they, have had a bad day? Be rushing to deal with an emergency? A family member in trouble? My mother was relentless about this.
I find this very charming. I try to do the same thing, honestly. Just generally try to avoid mistaking some few negative things I see of strangers on the street leading me to conclude things about their intentions or personalities. Just taking a moment to notice my own annoyance, taking a step back, and really trying to think about it.
Even if the answer is "nah, they're just being a jerk," I have by then usually managed to stop myself from getting into a grumpy spiral over it. (It does require some energy, so on deeply exhausted days I fail to do this, and it noticeably degrades my experience of life in general.)
> a failure of intellect to win a race against the animal inside us all
I think this is a useful rule of thumb! That said:
> In the meantime, I continue to make an effort to fake (mild) anger when I need to add emphasis to reprimands of my employees and my children.
I see you've discovered the value of anger as a social tool, too! Obviously in situations like road rage that tool is doing ~nothing useful, it's just misfiring. I'm glad you got over your road rage. Thank you for sharing that story.
About pets in stores/ restaurants. I live in Western NY and we have none of this. The only place you can take your pet is the pet store. (Also there is little to no dog poop on our sidewalks and we have dog parks with fenced in areas that dogs can run and play in.)
So is most of the complaints from people not in the US, or are other states areas different from around here?
I'm from NYC, where it's bad, and currently living in San Francisco, where it is a hundred times worse. The commonly cited statistic is that there are more dogs than children in SF, and they are treated like children.
Huh OK thanks, I'm not sure but I think the number of pets and kids is about equal here. Everyone has about one of each. (I would like to see more kids. The number or pets is fine.) Our annual Memorial day party is coming soon. Kids are actively encouraged! Not pets. If you are someone who has kids, I'm going to say consider rural America. (We can always use more smart people.)
I live with two cats (and two dogs and two adults (son and soon daughter in law)) And it is heaven. I would prioritize those in the reverse order. But I do live with Jasper cat, who is my favorite cat ever. And he's a crazy cat, who climbs all over the trees, (mostly chasing birds, or running away from an unseen something.) And goes on walks with me and the dogs. He jumped in my lap as I'm typing. A big grin!
Huh, OK, so the market solution would be restaurants/ parks that are private and enforce 'the law'. And second politically, pass laws or insist on (vote as head Sherriff/DA) enforcing 'The Law'. Or move away.
My late wife was frequently upset by the children in Walmart and other large stores because she needed to use a motorized shopping cart and "badly supervised" children that were running around would often suddenly dart in front of her cart, forcing her to stop short so she wouldn't hit them. (And said sudden stop would frequently be jarring enough to be physically painful.)
So as far as the traffic or foodstamps thing is concerned... not being mugged seems incredibly important to me. Traffic is predictable, foodstamps are predictable, a junkie with a gun in a dark alley seems to have really really bad tail risks.
I do think this does have a lot to do with the rise of Internet culture.
Everyone has certain patterns of thought that they are used to and that they have engaged in, often, for their entire life. If you are forced to interact with people who have different patterns of thought, your own are generally weakened. If you interact with people who share them, they are reinforced. Nowadays, many people are reinforcing a certain pattern of thought to the point that it crowds out all other facets of their mental lives or personalities.
There's an old 4chan post (about people who want to "fuck toasters") which makes this point more succinctly.
Surprised you do t mention barking dogs. I am a dog person, I have three but I spent a couple of weeks training them and they never bark. But many people have dogs that bark for hours on end and I can easily see where that would be irritating.
My neighbor has two dogs that bark constantly, and if someone complains his answer is always "they're dogs. they bark." But dogs also have sex and yet we neuter them so they don't. Your dogs bark because you were too lazy to train them not to.
I still think you can blame social media. If you had wandered onto r/noisefree when you were 20, your misophonia might have become a lot more all-consuming. Instead of being the top rationalist blogger you'd be blogging about how terrible people who make noise are to an audience of a few hundred.
Ehh I dunno about that last paragraph. It really does seem like Twitter's entire modus operandi is presenting me with examples of other people boorishly violating my purity instincts, and thereby driving my outrage engagement.
I’ve found that “Not interested in this post” works really well in cultivating the twitter algorithm. I have a couple of accounts based on interests each with a separate algorithmic feed and I don’t see any ragebait at all.
Humans are not necessarily much involved. A friend of mine had developed a hatred for blackbirds while tending gardens. It was other people's gardens and he never could charge enough, so that may be the human social aspect of it.
These "phobias" or irrational hatreds are just the weak spots (different for everyone, like health susceptibilities—one's lungs, another's gut) where our rage at modern civilization, and perhaps at being human, leaks through.
When I lived in LA, I parked at a trailhead at the same time as a woman who first smiled at me when I got out of my car, and then went into a seemingly uncontrollable fit when I got my dog out of the passenger side of my car — flustered, swearing to herself, constantly looking back and forth between my dog and the trail. There are lots of crazy people in LA so I always put this into the category of some distinctly crazy LA thing, probably some weird fear of dogs, but it's always stuck in my head because it seemed such a particular self-consuming kind of frustration. So I can also buy it as the sort of angry affront that I used to experience as a kid with misophonia. There's a slant irony — my dog does not trigger my misophonia at all, of course, despite being the rudest eater in my house.
I guess the control for this group, if we're testing whether it originates with some sort of early affront around pet ownership, would be whether there's a specific component of the animals being owned by humans — do or would they react similarly to strays? Would they enjoy a safari? Etc.
Did you definitely confirm that the park allows dogs? I tend to get upset when people break rules in general. But especially dogs in parks, because I am afraid of them and go out of my way to find places to hike that don't allow them. If she did the same I could understand why she might be upset.
I think social media plays a different role with /r/petfree than it does with misophonia. If we think of the irritation / rumination cycle as a ratchet in which an initial seed irritation causes multiple cycles of rumination, then social media is a source of the irritation itself for /r/petfree denizens, not the rumination part (they do that to themselves).
There’s a concept called “the internal drugstore,” where people essentially figure out ways to hack their own emotions and get hits of feeling that are preferable to the ones they’re trying to avoid. Anger is, in some ways, unpleasant, but it’s also extremely distracting. If you are wrestling with disablingly overwhelming feelings—grief, helplessness, fear, etc.—it can be very useful to have a source for an immediate hit of manageable anger. It’s satisfying, and provides a lot of immediate relief. Unfortunately, as with any drug, you need increasingly large amounts of any drug to get the same effect. Being mad about other people’s pets — especially in community with other people - can meet a lot of emotional needs in what might appear at first to be a relatively safe way. Then, five years later, having solved none of your underlying problems, you’re in a pit of depression and despair, and unable/unwilling to look at the root causes of your suffering, you genuinely believe it’s the fact that other people are bringing their dogs to the bar that has ruined your life. It’s anger addiction, basically. And it’s everywhere.
I'm floating this idea just as a doomsday switch in case I ever want to do something that will put me in the public eye:
Probably if you didn't have social media your misophonia would be just as bad. But also you would probably just shut up about it because nobody would tell you it was okay to be that way. And maybe, just a little and largely cancelled out by the harm done, there's some ways in which that is a good thing.
I don't hate pets or pet owners -- my wife and I have had cats since we started living together, and we'll continue to do so. But after we had kids I started to get a lot more annoyed by the type of per owners who dote over their pets as if they're children.
I know that this is due, in part, to living in an area that is very pet friendly but isn't as kid-friendly as where I grew up (and where my brother and his kids still live). In absolute terms kids are still prioritized over pets where I live, but in relative terms I think pets get more attention than they should. I don't think that if this area were less pet friendly it would necessarily become more kid friendly, but the juxtaposition highlights the relative disparity, and it gets under my skin.
I also know that my annoyance is due, in part, to being really happy that my wife and I had kids, and being bummed that more people seem to be foregoing children or delaying having them until so late in life that it becomes difficult to have as many as they may want. I speak from personal experience here -- we had our first kid at 37 and our second at 41. My wife is adamant that she doesn't want to have a third at our age. In hindsight I wish we started earlier and that we had three or maybe even four children.
Most of the people I know who are foregoing having children still really want to have something to care for that will give them some sort of affection and companionship, so they have pets (dogs or cats, usually) and, IMO, anthropomorphize their relationship with their pets to an unreasonable degree. But I think it's hard to understand just how unreasonable it is until you have kids. Again, I speak from a certain amount of experience here -- while I don't think we ever went to unhealthy extremes with our cats pre-kids, we definitely treated them like a partial stand-in for kids, albeit not explicitly. Now, I view our cat as just being a somewhat intelligent animal. I still think we have a responsibility to take care of her and giver her a good life, but I don't love her anymore (and in fact, it's weird to even think that I used to say that I did), and I definitely won't spend the kind of resources on her that I used to. Maybe I'd feel differently if we had a dog, but I don't think so.
I have no doubt that some people are genuinely happier having pets but not children, but I think a lot of people vastly underestimate how much love and fulfillment they can get from having kids, and just how meaningful it is to give of yourself to another human being the way parents give of themselves to their children. I also think they are just missing out on an important part of what it means to be human. In fact, the term "underestimate" doesn't even feel right -- they're making a fundamental category error, and one they may come to regret later in life.
All of these feelings get channeled into an annoyance with a certain type of pet owner.
Disagree with the last point about how social media isn't making the problem worse. Maybe that's true in your case Scott, but I feel like reading every day about the evil pets and pet owners and feeling intense anger at them probably makes someone's hatred stronger.
I'm excited for the near future of AI! A/B testing will confirm that a significant percentage of users like using AI that validates their beliefs, but will stop using it if disagreed with or if nuance is injected. Validation is desirable, and in short supply, while disagreement is already freely available on the internet after all.
The sycophancy is not there yet, but a little tweaking will have it accomplish the same validation of our views, without the cringeworthy behavior. We're paying the smartest people in the world to figure this out after all, so we'll get there.
Misophonia-like views will becomes increasingly more common, as whenever we see something do something mildly annoying, our AI buddies will validate that emotion. Sure, maybe it won't go as far as saying the world is out to get us, it will just accomplish the same thing in a more tactful way for the user who is prone to falling into that mindset. I don't think there's any stopping this, as if people prefer to use AI that validates them, the company that tweaks its personality to be more validating will simply attract more users.
I’m kind of with the petfree people. There are too many god damn pets in big cities, and there are no children. I could be getting the direction of causality wrong, but if all pets magically disappeared, maybe people would have more actual children.
I don't think that contradicts Tariq. American culture is extremely disapproving of having children. This causes people to obtain pets and pretend those pets are their children.
But it's still true that, if you prevented those people from obtaining pets, some of them would flout what the culture tells them to do instead of going along with it.
> I’m sure this person doesn’t actually want to kill himself, but what even is the thought process that makes people reach for these metaphors? Why is it natural to discuss economically inefficient policies in such personal terms?
That's just twitter. I saw a tweet once that put it like, "the secret to posting is that everything is a matter of life or death. You can't post a picture of a sandwich and say 'this was a really great sandwich'. You must post a picture of a sandwich and say 'never kill yourself'." That's also why "never kill yourself" is a Twitter meme placed over every photo you can imagine.
I'm sure these tendencies have a number of different motivating factors, but for me, I read them as stemming from the desire for society to have higher standards for public responsibility in the most classic "good fences make good neighbors" sense. When urban living makes it impossible to escape from the consequences of other people's irresponsibility, it's easy to have an outsized emotional reaction, even when you're aware that it's unproductive or irrational.
Like Scott, my misophonia developed long before the advent of social media. My problem with managing it has always been the fact that I run up against the feeling that it's at least somewhat justified—even as, rationally, I know that it's not the most productive way of thinking to feel like other people "should" do something or other, that's where I always end up with misophonia: "Actually, adults in a human society 'should' be self-aware enough to know when they're being loud, especially when it might be aggravating to other people" is the underlying belief here.
I also dislike dogs, though, which is a relatively new quality that's developed for me ever since I moved to a large urban area on the west coast. There are a lot of (I think objectively) bad dog owners here that are basically impossible to avoid—dogs are offleash despite having no recall and the owner having no control over them, and since dogs can be dangerous when not taken care of correctly, my anger and irritation at these owners has turned into a kind of antipathy toward dogs in general.
I actually quite like kids, but I find I still have similar feelings where kids are concerned. When a child annoys me, my response is irritation at the parents not managing the situation better (I don't feel any real anger toward the child themselves, who doesn't know better). When the parents are proactive in managing the situation, I notice that my irritation is much more subdued.
But this is the pattern that I notice across basically all of these experiences—my frustration stems from the underlying idea: "You (the person making noise/letting your dog run up to people/not dealing with your child's screaming) are an adult living in a collaborative human society that comes with certain responsibilities in order to run smoothly, and you are benefitting from the perks of that society while failing to uphold your end of the bargain with respect to maintaining the social contract."
Again, I know in the logical part of my brain this is a strict and unhelpful way of thinking, but I don't seem to be able to break myself out of it emotionally. In practice, of course, there are all manner of reasons why people might fail to uphold "their end" of the social contract (in the case of misophonia, for example, sometimes "loud eating" isn't even on one's radar as something to be careful of), and it's obvious that it's possible for people to interpret collective responsibilities differently . . . if someone believes that there should never be any noise ever or that children should never cry, it's probably a bad idea to tailor societal expectations around their feelings.
But I do think that people should be more aware of their responsibilities to others in social settings and work to minimize inconvenience and upset to those they have to live in close quarters with, just as a basic axiom for living in the kind of social world we live in. So many of these angry reactions, I suspect, stem from not being able to escape from stressors like loud noises, dangerous dogs, or loud and fragile children running around in a store or throwing popcorn at a movie theater screen. People have outsized reactions to those stressors, but for me, at least, seeing that e.g. people are making an effort to leash or train their dogs, turn the music down when asked or take their child out of the store when a tantrum starts goes a long way toward making these close-quarters situations more livable.
Understand some people are deranged, but I think being annoyed by the relative treatment between dogs and humans is fair.
-My wife is severely allergic to dogs. One time we were at the airport and saw a dog waiting in line. When we mentioned the allergy to the front desk, they told us we would have to change flights.
-People are allowed to bring dogs on planes. Dogs can sit by the owner’s feet. There aren’t clear-cut limits on the size of the dog. I’ve been on airplanes where a dog makes everyone uncomfortable around them.
-There’s such a thing as medical certification to take dogs to places that usually don’t allow them, like restaurants if you’re blind. But emotional support is a scam, and anyone can get it. I’ve seen people put their little dogs on the table at restaurants.
-If I own a house but don’t want to rent it to someone with pets—because it’s my personal property and dogs can damage floors and such—the renter can go get a fake emotional support certificate and I can’t do anything about it. I am not even allowed to charge a pet fee.
-People don’t wear shoes in the house, and then let their dogs in their beds. Letting a dog in your bed is like asking a homeless man to come over and roll on your bed for a bit. It’s gross and inconsistent with other forms of domestic hygiene the same people perform.
-It used to be normal to have pets live outside. Now if you did that, your neighbors would think you’re a monster.
-Dog breeds which are known to be dangerous are legal, whereas tigers aren’t.
The list goes on. I’ve never been to r/petsfree, and I’m not interested in the drama. But I think there are definitely cogent arguments here.
I'm surprised this is the only post to mention allergies. I have a pretty bad cat allergy and the feeling of being unable to take part in the enjoyment of cats makes me upset and angry, mainly because of the sense of social disconnection.
I resent being uncomfortable in spaces with cats and not being able to pet them without consequences, but there's no obvious target for that resentment other than... God? For making me this way? My parents? The world? So in that sense I can sympathize.
Luckily I'm much less allergic to dogs (some dogs I'm not allergic to at all), so I can at least enjoy them.
If you are bothered by your allergy and want to enjoy cats, allergy shots are miraculous. I was severely allergic to dogs and basically could not breathe indoors in a room with them, did allergy shots, and was fully cured within two months (and now live with two dogs in a house filled with pet fur and don't even need to take Zyrtec, years after stopping the shots).
I hadn't considered that my occasionally unhinged loathed of dogs and cars and children is akin to my misophonia, but you're absolutely right. I wonder what the population-wide correlation is. I do connect my dislike of them all to my sensitivities to smell, sound, personal space, etc.
I’m trying to think of something that really gets to me. I’m coming up with hearing the word ‘normalcy’. It always makes me inwardly wince. Damn you Warren G Harding. I don’t think I’ll find a subreddit to vent on though.
I should have posted this on the misophonia thread, but: my introspection suggests that misophonia is quite similar to what's been called "word rage", in that it's not the sound/language that one is angry at, but the people who "pollute the linguosphere" [not a word] by making (certain!) mistakes. I notice that, for myself, any irritation disappears if I learn that the infringer is not a native English speaker.
And, please, please, please, don't respond with a list of your most-hated language misuses. Those threads are everywhere, and they're all the same examples.
@Scott are people born with misophonia? Or is there some amount of social-contagion-y like element to it? If the latter, that may be a good reason to not have such subreddits. Like we might feel uncomfortable if there was an r/foodfree for anorexics to talk about how much they hate eating, for e.g.
(If you can trick someone out of not having the reaction, it makes me think there's some social element to this, but I'm not an expert)
To me, dogs, especially big ones, are a clean lose-lose-lose-lose scenario. Your whole body suffers: My ears get assaulted by their aggressive barks, my thought processes are interrupted by the need to monitor what the dog is doing (is it going to bite me? Will it stop barking?), my leg was once bitten out of the blue by a leashed "good" dog, my shoes were soiled many times by dogshit, my sense of smell was assaulted by dogshit, "wet dog" smell or bad smell from the dog's mouth. My sightseeing in Albania and in Ukraine was interrupted a few times by stray dogs. I have to think of carrying a weapon to protect myself while hiking in those countries.
To me, aggressive, extremely loud barks feel almost like a physical attack, and sometimes when I hear that, my whole body tenses and that's the moment when I'd feel justified in crushing the skull of the offending dog. The barks sound like "You whore! You whore! I'll kill you! I'll bite you! I'll rip your throat off!" roared at a hundred decibels. What is the dog expecting if it's barking at me like that? Forgiveness?
I can trace my dislike of dogs to one particular incident in my childhood. I don't remember how old I was--maybe six or seven--but I was walking around the neighborhood with my mother and younger sister. We stopped to pet a dog and when we got home my mother told us we had to wash our hands. So "dogs=dirty" was firmly entrenched in my brain. There were a few friendly dogs in the neighborhood that I got along fine with, but there were a couple of very nasty ones that lived just across the street from my middle school. They'd bite the chain-link fence every time we walked by. (A few times, we even saw them get out, but luckily that only happened when we were in a car.) My family also got a dog (very much against my will, done while I was away at summer camp) and I wasn't happy about it. I didn't want anything to do with the dog, but I would let her inside the house if it was raining outside, and she'd go to her spot in the laundry room and I'd close the door.
But enough about the psychology. I just want to rant about the type of people who feel the need to bring their dog to a bookstore. And not a little bookstore in a mixed residential/commercial neighborhood, the kind of store you might stop in while walking around your block because you saw an interesting book in the window. No, I'm talking about a giant big-box store, one that you obviously had to drive to. You consciously had to think, I need to go to this bookstore and I need to bring my dog there. Newsflash: your dog can't read.
Also, all pitbulls and anything related to them should be sterilized ASAP so that they die out permanently. The way I feel about them is the way the anti-gun people feel about guns. "No one needs an AR-15." "No one needs a pitbull."
Speaking of phobias, there are plenty of perfectly valid arguments about gun policy, but I think a large number of people on the American left are scared of guns. They've never shot one, they'd be terrified if they saw one, and they have no idea how to use one safely.
I admit, I've long had an interest in getting a pitbull caliber dog for reasons similar to why other people get AR-15s: if my wife or hypothetical children experience hostility, they are accompanied by a descendent of generations of breeding for suicidal protectiveness. For religious reasons a firearm is infeasible, so enormous dogs provide freedom from fear in a variety of environments.
I'd imagine that a gun is far more likely to kill someone in its owner's household (whether via accident or suicide) than to kill someone else. And I'd guess it's the same for pitbulls. (Which is not to deny that the protective effect from a gun or pitbull may still be useful even if the dog or gun never kills anyone.)
The only way to stop a bad guy with a pitbull is a good guy with a pitbull.
Seriously though, it's the freedom of the thing. My wife is prone to fear, and I'm quite confident I'd want to raise my kids free range. I expect a formidable dog could square the circle of my desires and her fear of a disorderly public—and I understand dogs to in fact trainable to be safe.
There's this one video... Guy: "I didn't understand why my baby suddenly started falling asleep on his own at night." So one time he peeks into the nursery shortly after putting baby to bed, and sees the cat doing some acrobatics so as to plant his front paws on the handle of the cradle. And is repetitively rocking it back and forth.
Is this guy someone who r/petfree and r/childfree could unite against as a common enemy?
This is a pretty simplified understanding of those subs! The people on them aren't necessarily opposed to other people having pets or children at all. Most of them are opposed to irresponsible ownership or parenting. A minority are radicals who hate the idea of pets or kids.
I've been on both but I would think that cat was a hero for what it's doing.
"In artificial intelligence, and particularly in the domain of nonmonotonic reasoning, there’s a standard problem: “All Quakers are pacifists. All Republicans are not pacifists. Nixon is a Quaker and a Republican. Is Nixon a pacifist?”
What on Earth was the point of choosing this as an example? To rouse the political emotions of the readers and distract them from the main question? To make Republicans feel unwelcome in courses on artificial intelligence and discourage them from entering the field?
Why would anyone pick such a distracting example to illustrate nonmonotonic reasoning? Probably because the author just couldn’t resist getting in a good, solid dig at those hated Greens. It feels so good to get in a hearty punch, y’know, it’s like trying to resist a chocolate cookie.
As with chocolate cookies, not everything that feels pleasurable is good for you."
I mean, I do think that what social media adds is the space to express this rage and ickiness, and allow it to be socially validated. People (me included) definitely experienced the skin-crawl that accompanied their personal disgusts before, but they just had to grind their teeth and develop an ulcer as God intended :-) I’m so often overcome by a take or opinion or feeling that feels so true that it just *has* to be valuable to put it out into the world; the internet is right there, just waiting to listen to me. And again I have to try and persuade that this urge is not healthy, that neither I nor the world will be better for cataloging this river of bile. It’s such a powerful appeal that I am never surprised by any of the rage I see online
(The above applies to myself. Many people are able to rant in text in a way that is interesting, amusing, or both; if it works for you as well, have at it, I’m grateful for the entertainment. But I know for myself that the ulcer is the best case scenario.)
Interesting, I think of childphobia as correlated with being trans (something about the "post/anti-traditional family left" cluster combined with the "contrarian/willing to take unconventional positions" side).
My hot take on this is that if you want to own a large dog, you should be forced to prove you can physically subdue an angry and violent dog of roughly the same size.
I started imagining someone who has the misophonia-style reaction to every instance of, like, market capitalism or authority figures or inefficiency or rudeness or whatever... and now I feel like I understand certain types of political radicalism much better.
Now, to figure out what's the most triggering thing to fill in the blank with...
Some of the leftists in my life will straight admit this. Of course, I take that as an improvement over people on both sides of the aisle whose politics are obviously downstream of their neuroses but have no idea.
I think you're looking at this backwards. Many people will let themselves become increasingly more annoying to you and everyone else, until it actually costs them something. And when it does, they'll take a single step backwards.
The end result is a society that is as maximally annoying as it can get away with. TSA, bureaucracy, spam emails, spam phone calls, phone notifications, "sign up for our newsletter!", and plenty of dog owners letting their dogs be terrible and gross. Of course people are going insane.
> I’m sure this person doesn’t actually want to kill himself, but what even is the thought process that makes people reach for these metaphors? Why is it natural to discuss economically inefficient policies in such personal terms?
I would say that when urbanists get their dander up like that, they're not thinking in purely economic terms. It's more about the kind of lifestyle they'd like to live, and the "soul" of a place.
Like, imagine a young, idealistic person from Sprawltown, USA, visiting Paris or Amsterdam or some other lovely city. They love that they can eat breakfast on a terrace overlooking a pretty public square. They love hopping on the Metro to wherever they're going next, instead of sitting in traffic and looking for parking when they get there. And they know that these things are possible, but Sprawltown has zero interest in ever changing.
IME "looking for parking" is an exclusively urban phenomenon. In dense environments, "where will I park," becomes a salient consideration. In sprawly ones, there's obviously going to parking wherever you go - why wouldn't there be?
Well, that's true. Of all the charges that you can level at sprawl, "insufficient parking" isn't one of them ;-)
But I think my larger point stands: young idealists go to Paris / Amsterdam / etc, and think, "how could my life be different if my hometown was like this?"
Regarding the last paragraph, I don't think the problem of social media is that it makes the impulses themselves worse, it's that finding a community based on a hangup or maladaptive impulse incentivizes people to base the majority of their mental energy around it like it's a lifestyle.
This post is interesting to me, because while it's clear from Scott's samples of the subreddit that a lot of it would go way too far for me, and I don't think I have a diagnosable disorder analogous to misophonia, I do spend a not insignificant amount of emotional energy "fuming about the existence of dogs" (to use Scott's phrase). I generally consider dogs smelly and somewhat gross, find their forceful enthusiasm off-putting and their slobber disgusting, and had an actual mild phobia about their physical forcefulness and slobber as a young child.
But overall, my issue is still not really about being unable to be around individual dogs or feeling like they're "infesting everything" -- I find some dogs endearing and recently spent the night at a dog-owner's house and enjoyed the company of their (elderly and mellow) dog (granted, since then I've felt the compulsive need to pick every piece of fur out of my sweatshirt). No, the real crux of my constantly-resentful-towards-dogs attitude has to do with how obsessive I perceive our culture around dogs to be, how any taboos against excessive gushing about one's children clearly don't apply to gushing about one's dog, how animals in general but especially dogs are treated as flawless innocent angels (which is at odds with my philosophical perspective), and in particular how obsessed with dogs women of my generation (millennial) who are single and don't have kids are (in other words, the demographic I pursue on dating apps). At this point, some part of me just deeply resents their existence and place in our culture.
Of course I'm able to reason intellectually that dogs bring immense amounts of joy to hundreds of millions of people, including many people I care about, and that dogs even save tons of human lives. I don't *actually* want all dogs to disappear. But the gut-level resentment is still there.
(I have at worst a minor version of this issue with pets in general, with maybe none of it applying to cats -- I'm even seriously thinking of getting a cat one day.)
Okay just to clarify: when you say "I’m not asserting that none of these are real problems or that you can’t have rational objections to them" you're not including the "too many brown people" in that statement, right?
Evaporative cooling of group beliefs + toaster-fucker phenomenon.
Normal people who dislike dogs don't go join a subreddit about it. They just quietly dislike dogs.
The only people who hate dogs enough to join a subreddit about it are the wacky ones. And the great curse of the internet is that it gives the holders of even the most fringe beliefs an echo chamber to commisserate in.
This is a bad analysis trying to ascribe mental illness to something that can be explained in other ways.
the problem with pet free, atheism, or childfree is:
1. you dislike something that is very popular.
2. the cultural expectation is that everyone should love the thing and anyone who doesn't is a villain.
3. if you are going to be a villain, might as well as be a mustache twirling one. Sarcasm.
4. online groups turn those people into The Legion of Supervillains through mutual self-reinforcement and poe's law. in versus outgroup.
5. The other side reinforces this too by "ha ha look at the monkeys" style reposting.
its not a mental condition as opposed to a reaction against expectations by a minority unpopular enough to effect change (or the change can never be effected)
like child free is more a woman sick of her mom asking if she is having kids. not every thing is a mechanical pathology
It’s always strange seeing someone get something so wrong. (Meaning r/thedonald)
I used to get mad about it but being older I realized that everyone has blind spots. And I guess the habits of an online community on Reddit from 9 years ago isn’t really a blind spot.
It’s just that I was on there daily for a few months and nothing like that ever popped up.
I will say I’m still angry at Sam Harris for his continual misunderstanding of Trump people - especially after he came out with a eureka moment pod where he stated he finally understood - only to be completely wrong again.
It took his entirety of work down several notches in my estimation.
I was going to say something about how much I hate hearing people talk about bringing their baby home from the hospital to meet their "sibling(s)" who are all animals who will die within a decade, but after looking at some of the other comments here, I guess I just won't. ;-)
>Someone - I think it was Philosophy Bear - once asked why a certain type of conservative treats it as axiomatic that order and low crime are the fundamental public goods. If a city has a few more muggings than usual, why is that automatically worse than the city having a few more families on food stamps than usual, or a little worse traffic than usual? This was great food for thought - I agree with the conservatives that public order seems somehow more fundamental, but I agree with Philosophy Bear that this wouldn’t feel obvious to an alien observer.
If you're mugged, that means somebody deliberately chose to harm you, personally, which adds an extra kind of victimisation that just isn't present with impersonal social forces, accidents, diseases, natural disasters, and most other kinds of bad thing.
(Of course, some people do feel that impersonal social forces are deliberately created by sadistic rich people in order to harm the poor and oppressed. Not coincidentally, such people also tend to feel far more victimised than the average person. That probably also explains the "discussing economically inefficient policies in personal terms" phenomenon -- if you think that economically inefficient policies were actually created for the express purpose of victimising you and people like you, of course you're going to feel personally affronted.)
/r/petfree lurker here. The content that gets posted there daily is utterly boring and pointless. Now, its wiki (reddit.com/r/petfree/wiki/index/) I do like and can more-or-less endorse, but the value of the sub begins and ends there.
I clicked Join a few years ago after a succession of very bad living arrangements with pet-owning roommates was on the verge of driving me nuts, and to this day I continue to find pet ownership in the current age as a practice, as an industry, and as a culture to be all sorts mildly fucked up (I concede that it's likely that I only notice the fucked-up bits at all because I apparently just happened to be born without whatever brain module it is that makes the idea of owning pets appealing to ~99% of the human population). There are plenty of arguments to be made and discussions to be had about the sociological and psychological incentives that make pet ownership the way it is (hell, if I ever started writing on Substack that's absolutely an article I'd write), but the people who post on /r/petfree these days don't want to do any of that. They want to vent and then watch the little numbers go up, the entropic end state of any community centered around framing a certain thing as bad.
Anyway, I'll be at LessOnline at the end of the month if you want to chat more about it. I wouldn't be surprised if I turned out to be the sole representative of the membership of that sub there, so I guess I won't click "Leave sub" until we've left Lighthaven.
Hey, you can of course say there's some Gricean maxim being violated here, but surely NotOnlineAtAll is NOT a state that is *excluded* by the descriptor "LessOnline" xD
Ah, I get it now. I'd been assuming for some reason that LessOnline was sort of a contraction of LessWrongOnline rather than the (now much more obvious) implication that it's about bringing LessWrong people (who by default are online) together in meatspace.
My wife is extremely afraid from the dogs, she had an episode with an especially agressive dog when she was around 6, and she doesn't remember the episode herself (mother tells us) but she can't even look at pictures of dogs if they seem to be aggressive (or even active). She can pet really small puppies, at most a few months old, but other than that our outside life includes a lot of dog-avoiding. Changing the side of the road we walk, deciding to attend a party based on the host or any of the guests bringing a dog, etc. It became so second nature to us that, when I'm walking alone, sometimes I come across a dog and have to think to myself if I'm bothered by it or not and just walk past.
All the public parks allow people to walk dogs and we're ok with that. On some parks there are designated areas where one has to keep a dog leashed, and some designated areas where dogs are not allowed. What really annoys me (I'm not afraid of dogs) about dog people is that, they unleash their dogs everywhere. I mean, you got the entirety of the city, right? why not leave this small sliver of designated place to us so we can enjoy outdoors as well? And if you warn them suddenly they're the victim and you're the heartless dog-hater. I haven't seen this subreddit before, and I'm sure they're extreme, but I can see at least one path where they might've arrived there.
Where we live is the Netherlands, with no stray dog problem. It's just that it feels natural to everybody but us for dog owners to unleash their dogs everywhere, and also get to be the morally right ones about it as well. In our home country Turkey, it's a whole different issue. There has always been stray dogs, but in the last decade or so cheap dry dog food has proliferated in a way that many people just pour hundreds of pounds of it around because they feel sorry for the strays. I feel sorry for the strays as well, but I also know basic arithmetic. When the strays are fed, they reproduce with the might of a million suns. If the country doesn't happen to allocate al its GDP to produce dog food to pour on the streets, there'll be a time the dogs are hungry again. There are around 10 million stray dogs and 30 thousand vets in the country whose hands are already full. Maybe a portion should be exported to a country who eats dogs to fund the impossible task of neutering the others?
For some reason, the stance for or against either feeding stray dogs, or collecting them to compounds where if they aren't adopted in a certain amount of time euthanizing (like any western country) them has become a contentious issue. The problem is, the wrong party is on the correct side of it. Everybody in our secular and democratic circle wants to pour dog food on streets and never collect dogs. Everybody in the other side, the authoritarian islamists, they say dogs need to be collected. Now we have to avoid the subject or suddenly people start shouting at as saying we're monsters.
The pattern I extrapolate from this statistically insignificant number (2) of instances is that, people mostly get mad at the holier-than-thou attitude of the dog people rather than the dogs themselves. It's like free moral points to just say pro-dog stuff even if the result is morally negative.
"deciding to attend a party based on the host or any of the guests bringing a dog, etc."
I realise that I have a worse social life than a hermit crab, but why the hell would you bring a dog to a party? If you can't do without the company of the animal even for a couple of hours, stay home with it. If you can't leave it on its own, ask someone to mind it for you or stay home. Why make other people have to babysit your dog for you?
Interestingly, in the US I'm pretty sure the Democratic party is the one on the side of neutering animals and the Republican party would be the natural home of the perspective that that is cruel.
(Neither party supports strays to any meaningful degree.)
Huge part of how these online communities get like that is that unhealthily fixated on a thing are going to be way more likely to make a lot of posts about said thing thus leading to a disproportionate amount of the stuff you see online be by people who are kind of mental about it. Someone making 50 posts a day about climate change is much more likely to be distorted in their thinking about it (not necessarily of course, sometimes people are right to be passionate and prolific) than someone only making 7 but you’re going to see way more of the formers posts more times than not. An experiment you can try right now is go to a subreddit you think is a bit unhealthy (maybe sneerclub for example) click five random posts from the front page. How many of them are by the same people and how many of them have the same users in the comments? It’s going to be heavily skewed by a lot to a small group of heavily dedicated people.
This was a post on the subreddit back when the old blog was down. "Most of what you read online is written by insane people" or something to that effect (I haven't been on Reddit in a few years so I can't remember now)
Or maybe people are just sick of irresponsible pet owners making society worse for everyone else? It doesn't need to be a pathology to call out shitty behaviour.
Do you think your misophonia would be worse if there were a place to go and talk about all the noise everyone is making, and everyone would really behind that person?
Complaints of /r/petfree denizens sound very much like complaints of my IRL friends who have children and live in a big city -- most public spaces are becoming increasingly dog-friendly and at the same time child-hostile.
It's become fully normalized to be visibly annoyed by a crying child (not a spoiled brat throwing a tantrum, just a baby crying), whilst it's now totally inappropriate to complain about a dog defecating in a park where children play. (Btw, a small thought experiment - imagine a human defecating on a lawn, picking his/her feces using a plastic bag, and being insulted by the fact that there's still dirt left behind - yet, this is now fully normalized anywhere in the west).
We don't like to see people walking around with their AR-15s, yet modern social norms expect us to turn a blind eye to a 100-pound woman being dragged through the park by a 120-pound pit bull.
A valuable aspect of hatred towards pets is crushing the sacredness of pets. Yes, indeed - pets are sacred. Nobody dares calculate the carbon footprint of a dog. Nobody dares bring the /love/ towards a dog into question.
1. I think that when people get angry and then 'stay angry' about something, it is because they haven't gotten what they needed from the anger, which is a sort of 'emotional recognition' from people around them. Often this involves bottling up the anger: it's either ignored or responded to with hostility or something, but whatever it is, it gets bottled up and buried away. I think the same happens with frustration.
2. When that anger ends up permanently directed at something else-sound, pets, cars it's because, give a person with bottled anger something that they are allowed to get angry about and they readily will, and since it's cathartic to let anger out it gets stuck coming out on that subject in an OCD-like way.
I suspect that misophonia suffers likely have trouble getting angry at at least one person in their lives a sibling or a parent, maybe-and at some point they realized it's permissible to get angry at someone over misbehavior, maybe related to noise, and then that became a safe(ish) outlet for an otherwise buried emotion.
Unfortunately when anger is directed irrationally it becomes impossible to get the catharsis of being seen-the angry person is now in the wrong, to others-and so it just amplifies their feeling that they're not being seen and responded to. Which makes them unwilling to stop being angry: they feel like they have to be angry until such time that they are respected, and as a result they are unable to be accountable for their anger because they feel like the world owes them a debt of respect which is too big to compromise over.
To break the cycle perhaps they need to become convinced that they can trust others to respond to their anger when it is reasonable, and therefore become accountable themselves for whether it is used reasonably.
I had assumed this post was going to be a rumination about why there isn’t any sort of similar /r/petfree community that hates pets the same way there is /r/childfree, but apparently I am just sheltered!
This reminds me of when I saw a post on the misophonia reddit that sort of sounded like it was suggesting that noises were objectively bad and was like "huh, this reminds me of r/petfree"
> I go from hating whatever noise I’m hearing, to hating the fabric of civilization. I ruminate on crazy theories of how everything about modern urban life has been designed by crooks and liars to annoy me personally, and who we have to tax/ban/imprison to make it stop.
I have a similar reaction to irresponsible driving. I realize that driving is a classic example of a thing that people get annoyed over. But this is something else. I see people run stop signs or drive 40mph in a 25mph zone and I think "Maybe I'm okay with cameras on every intersection so we can enforce traffic laws. Maybe humans don't really deserve freedom until they can learn to act less like children." When I think about the potential for AI, one of the first things I think of is cars that drive politely.
Maybe it's because I agree with it, but I find the point about transport and high density development that you cited different. It seems to come from a source of "this is why we can't have nice things." And I think that's largely correct. If we allowed more development and had better transit in places like California, housing would be more affordable and people could get around easier. This would flow through to overall cost of living and quality of life. It would be A Big Deal apart from personal preferences in a way that dogs or no dogs on the sidewalk is not, in my opinion.
(replying here to rebelcredential below) You sound like Heinlein in his pro society mode. It contains a certain amount of Zwang. Living in the radiative center of the original Oath-Brotherhood, I have sympathy for this point of view.
In the Asterisk article on Misophonia he gives the cure then states a couple of paragraphs later at the end of the article that there is no cure. During meditation while being triggered he writes “…. I found myself five days into the deepest equanimity I’ve ever felt curiously observing my own reactivity manifest”, and “And yet, with time, as I settled, I became better able to notice the space between sensation and reaction. For the first time, I could choose to ignore the signal. To separate it as part of myself. Something happening in my awareness, but not necessarily to me. I could allow it to be, for once, just noise.”
I've tried meditating but usually give up after a while with no results. I've never tried the kind of intense meditation retreat that Jake is talking about - I'd like to, but having kids makes it tough to leave for long periods.
I’ve never experienced Jhanas but I have developed a degree of equanimity. I'll notice something that in the past would have triggered irritated speech or action and I'll amusingly think of the stupid things I might have said or done.
I'm not saying I'm never angry. I think there are times when anger is useful and adaptive. I think most reflexive irritation, say something like someone cutting me off in traffic serves no useful purpose.
Somewhere in this thread I mentioned someone throwing a fist sized rock at my car on the Pacific Coast highway. Okay, that would still make me angry but this was many years ago and at that point in my life I was ready to turn my car around and pursue the assailant and his 3 beefy, mouth breathing companions. That would definitely have been maladaptive behavior.
I haven’t been to a meditation retreat but I use a technique which I found in a Michael Singer book which is a kind of meditation/mindfulness. Staying with whatever is happening. There’s a section in one book where he guides the reader through experiencing fully intense uncomfortable feeling reaction, and I did that on repeat and the stimuli stopped effecting me. . It is only effective when 100% willingness is present. I’m very Misophonic, and one of mine the neighbours stomping above me when making their dinner at 5 every day in the kitchen. It used to drive me spare, and I’d put on music so I could not hear it.
The technique involves experiencing the emotional disturbance fully, and also imagining leaning back inside towards your back while watching the emotional disturbance as felt in the body, normally happening in the front of the body, for me intense contraction in the sternum area and the throat….. Like witnessing a storm in front of you as it’s happening and being felt at the same time. Like a child looking out of a window at a hurricane, amazed and curious. The willingness to experience the discomfort is key. Not using antidotes which only strengthen the pattern. It takes courage. So now when that courage and willingness is present I can often I look forward to the neighbours stomping and creaking floorboards, see it as an opportunity to practice. Handy that it was once or twice a day at specific times though, so low hanging fruit. I’m convinced this could be developed.
I don't care about pets themselves, I do care about pets on the streets (so generally dogs) defecating in public spaces, being allowed to move around without a leash and often being bothersome even with a leash.
Your property, your thing, your creature towards which you probably have less control than you think might very well be bothering me and society generally expects me to just suck it up and act as if it was equally deserving of respect as a person. It is not.
Yes owners are generally responsible, but I have to stand the rest of them and it's just really irritating.
> For what was once r/TheDonald, it’s brown people (am I joking on this last one? absolutely not).
Not joking, but also not telling the truth. I went to the place where people who once were r/TheDonald mostly congregate (it's patriots dot win if you don't know) - haven't been there for a looong time - and looked at top 100 posts. There's a fair number of immigration matters mentioned - which could be cover for hating "brown people", even though a lot of them happen to concern South Africans and why the Left is not liking them as refugees. But even with those they are no more than 10-15% of the topics. If we look at those which specifically mention the racial angle or at least hint at something that may be construed as one - there were two which mention racial issues, one that features a black migrant in a situation obviously meant to expose him in a negative light, two that criticize Islam or Muslim migrants, one that criticizes official usage of Spanish language and three that criticize immigration policy without emphasizing racial or religious angle. Even if we list all Muslims as "brown" (wildly inaccurate of course by any measure), and any concern about illegal migration as "hating brown people" (wacky level inaccurate) - we still under 10% of posts. Maybe another 10% if you include just reports on various things to do with immigration politics in general, without mentioning or criticizing immigrants per se or promoting any point - like reporting the decision of some municipal entity to change some rules with regard to migrant assistance - maybe you get to another 10%, but this is really not about "brown people" anymore.
I don't say there are't racists there - there are aplenty - but I think saying that a topic that even when stretching it to the max beyond all plausibility covers barely 1/5 of the posts is the singular main animating engine of the community is just wrong.
Hm, I'm not sure how reliable that is as a signal. I'd expect significant change in who comments there (specifically a subreddit would be much lower effort than a website, which would probably select for a subgroup of people who think about the issues more).
The whole premise of the article is that if we observe the posts by some self-selected group that posts on certain forum, we can make some conclusions about what those people are like and what they think. I agree that it's ok to question this premise, but if you do, then the whole article doesn't make sense and there's no point arguing with me about it - the real argument is with Scott who posited this premise. If we agree to use the same framework as is being used in the article, then Scott's conclusion about people in what used to be r/TheDonald is completely wrong. If we don't, then the whole article is wrong.
And as somebody who periodically visited r/TheDonald back when it was alive, I can't see the set of topics changed noticeably. Absent hostile Reddit moderation, some people are probably freer to express views that would be disapproved by Reddit - including racist views - but it's not like one couldn't be a racist on Reddit if you wanted to. There had been plenty of opportunity for that. And now there's no barrier at all - and still, contrary to what Scott has stated, it's not the dominating topic, in no comparison with "chilfree" or "petfree" or "fuckcars" communities.
Another “mental illness” involved may just be hipsterism. A lot of these posts can be explained by “there is a popular thing that I don’t like, so I have now made not liking that thing a core part of my identity. Give me updoots.”
Scott: "There’s the one where someone said his friend posted a meme about how much she loved her dog, and now he “can’t ever go over to her house”."
Loved the post, just one nitpick: according to your first screenshot, this person's Reddit flair says "allegric [sic], indifferent to pets" so it seems like their particular pathology is probably less psychological than the rest.
I once had a coworker with the most extreme dog allergies I've ever heard of, and we worked in a dog-friendly building. A teammate brought their dog in for a single day, and for several months forward, this coworker was having symptoms any time they went into that room, until it was professionally deep-cleaned. I think this extreme level of sensitivity is super rare, but I can see how a strong allergy can be socially devastating when it means you are suddenly excluded from a friend's home (and all their hosted social events etc) if they ever adopt a dog. Maybe befriending dog-haters is the only practical way they can ever be sure their friends won't be stolen by a dirty stinkin' mutt (instead their friends will be stolen when they have human children, dang).
People will always harbor irrational hatreds of various things.
But whether those hatreds are considered embarrassing or righteous depends on social reinforcement.
What does seem to be relatively new is a sense of entitlement to be an asshole or a misanthrope.
Bob the misanthrope has too many people validating his rage and goading him on, and not enough people in his life bringing him aside to say, "What the hell is wrong with you, man?"
I relate to the experience of misophonia, especially in the case of r/petfree; I hate one of our cats (and many other people's animals) for no well-justified reason. But as someone who provides psychiatric diagnoses, I chafe at one more category or label for pathologization of normal, albeit flawed existence. I see my own oversensitivity and irritability as likely partly genetic but also something I can work to change. Does it impair my life? Sure, most people who have flaws can make an argument for impairment. But for almost everyone, I feel like a term of pathology, a diagnosis, takes the onus of responsibility off of them and shrinks their perceived locus of control, effectively making their life worse.
My instinct was to say Scott missed the mark here and strawmanned that whole community but I'm more curious if he actually read the discussions on all the posts he's talking about.
The public order thing makes sense to me, actually. It seems reasonable that feeling physically unsafe in your own community is more psychologically and socially destabilizing than inconvenience/frustration or even poverty. You can feel charitable towards the poor in your community, or if you are poor yourself you can feel solidarity with your neighbors. You can commiserate with your friends about the traffic, and at worst you typically won't get more than mildly annoyed with the people around you. But if you fear being physically attacked and robbed in your own community by people who are presumably your neighbors, or at least close enough to enter your neighborhood on a regular basis, won't that inspire a sense of distrust and isolation far beyond that of other social ills? Fear of physical danger lies in a very deep part of our lizard brain. You will never fully rest or feel at ease because your brain is always keeping fight-or-flight mode on in the background in case you're attacked. Since the danger is in your own neighborhood, you don't have any "home turf" you can retreat to where you feel safe. Maybe you can feel safer when you're within the walls of your own home, but people do home invasions as well, don't they? And you can't even compartmentalize your unease by retreating into us-versus-them tribalism, since your neighbors - who are supposed to be "us" - can be potentially included among "them."
I recognize that this is all very subjective, but I do think it points to how violations of social order can corrode social trust and cohesion to greater degree than other kinds of social ills. At least if you trust your neighbors, you can work together to fix the traffic congestion or feed/find gainful employment for the poor families. But if you don't trust your neighbors, if you think they may be out get you, how will you ever be able to cooperate with them to fix whatever other problems your society has?
I'm frustrated with dog ownership in principle but fine with all the dogs I've recently seen – I seem to have ended up in an area where dog owners keep their dogs leashed and don't let them jump on other people.
The thing which frustrates me is owners who give their dogs license to jump on other people and lick them, especially when they interacted with me in situations when I was a kid and my parents wouldn't have let me make a big fuss or leave. It feels like a status issue – if I'm being forced to interact with a dog, and the dog is allowed to climb and get spit on me and nobody apologizes, whereas if I spat on the dog there would be drama, it's clear that the dog is higher-status than I am in that interaction.
I got more chill about dogs by not having any of these stupid "you are inferior to the dog" interactions and by roleplaying a D&D character who liked animals. Not sure which contributed more here.
These days I even have had some positive interactions with pet owners: "oh, please don't get offended by our dog not approaching you and just let her hang out in her corner of our living room, she's shy" – lol, can do!
Anecdata: I sort of became this way briefly a couple of years ago after getting into urbanism/climate policy. Basically just seeing the whole world through that lens and constantly being annoyed by it. You go outside, oh, that house is such an inefficient use of this prime land, an SUV goes past and you think about how heavy it is, how much damage it's doing to the road, how inefficient its engine is. And so on.
The worst part was reading about specific regulations that were restricting development in my city and then going out and suddenly recognizing their effects everywhere, e.g. setbacks on new developments. I imagine that's a mild version of what a schizophrenic feels like.
It was absolutely caused by spending a lot of time reading YIMBY/urbanist content online. I wasn't that way before and it went away as soon as I started reading other things.
I am misophonic, with very similar triggers + tendencies to yours. I thought it was much more common than you made it sound. I guess I'm crazier than I thought...
I dipped my toe in that world. I moved into a Broadway corner facing apt in Manhattan. The honking was constant and I felt every impulse Scott describes. And it was self inflicted. I knew I would be sensitive to traffic noise, warily considered it in every apt I looked at, then chose that apt anyways for reasons I think reflect poorly on my self governance.
One solution I considered was consistently scattering tacks until informed drivers would learn that was a no go street... My actual solution was moving. To a court yard facing apt. And it all went away.
I guess others find it harder to address root cause and have it go away. Was the self inflicted part ultimately helpful here? I could fix it repair the damage and also in a bizarrely self delusional on a subconscious but not higher conscious way avoid all future rumination.
It's a tongue in cheek way of saying I think you're seeing their hatred of pets through a misophonia lens while discounting echo chamber effects because you yourself suffer from misophonia.
This post gives me some insight on why girlfriends over the years hated me for constantly complaining about poor design everywhere (I’m an urban planner). It does grate at me that we’ve built so much to be so bad for humans. Maybe it’s both a mental illness and justified, I don’t know.
I always assumed that people who hate pets and DON'T suffer from a phobia had parents who liked pets better than them, or an ex (or unrequited love who did. They seem to really have some deep sense of insecurity and fear that they will be left behind and not chosen, bc people will choose pets over them. As if a trolley problem might come to life. Being annoyed by bad/irresponsible pet owners is not unusual and is fully shared by responsible pet owners, just like responsible parents are generally annoyed and dismayed by bad parents.
But by taking it to the point of severely hating pets, absent a phobia, is a different level of emotional issue and to me it looks like an insecurity that others will choose a pet over them. This particularly bothers them bc they view animals as dirty and disgusting, so for a person to like a pet better than they like them is doubly insulting to them. Of course, they may also have particularly unpleasant personalities that DO in fact increase the chance that many people will like a dog more than they like them. Sort of a self reinforcing cycle. Considering that humans literally created dogs to be pleasing to us, it is a bit inherently suspect if someone hates them, and not for a fear reason of being attacked. But I've also seen died in the wool pet haters somehow get their own after their kids or spouse begged them, and then end up warming up and really liking it...so it seems mostly about just what they think likes them versus doesn't like them. I'm convinced most cat haters would like cats if they had their own cat that was bonded to them.
I had a rather bad case of misophonia as a child (it has mostly faded), and the pet thing does not strike me the same, when you listen to them talk their emotions are very much tied to their ideas of human superiority and rank being threatened, and anger that someone might like a dog/cat more than they like them.
That may be so, but some of it may be because the pet owner treats the pet better than humans in situations such as the barking dog, or dog that jumps up on people, or letting the dog run off the leash where people and other animals are around, or the dog licks and slobbers on the other person.
And objections are met with everything from "oh he's just being friendly" to aggression, instead of keeping the pet under control. No, I like dogs okay, but I don't like dogs that behave like poorly-behaved toddlers and think that licking my face or trying to eat off my plate is normal. Control your pet. And as I said, not just dogs but cats or other pets.
Most of the worst behaviour by pet-owners is suffered by the pets, though. I don't think snakes want or need to be dressed up in 'cute' costumes for social media photo posting, that's on the owners. "Smiling" lizards are being bred to look cute on what appeals to humans, and what kind of lives they have is irrelevant so long as they're appropriately kawaii:
Yeah I just don't think that's the same thing. I have dogs and I ALSO am bothered by those things. If my dog is in the yard and we hear him bark for even 5 seconds, we bring him in. We don't leave the dogs in the yard when we're not home, bc that would cause barking and we would never impose that noise on our neighbors like that. We don't allow our dogs to jump on anyone.
You are talking about owners who are not equipped to handle dogs, who are not doing their job and properly participating in society. Unfortunately dogs are in fact quite troublesome and require a lot of either time or money, and lots of people who have neither of those things have dogs when they shouldn't. But to me this is just like any other behavior where some people are irresponsible and inconsiderate.
So not liking those behaviors is perfectly normal. I don't like those behaviors either, and responsible dog owners hate them probably MORE than non-dog-owners, because they make us look bad!! But taking it to a level of hating the actual dogs to the point of posting about your hatred all day long online is something else. I am also annoyed by and disapprove of people who play their music out loud on hiking trails, rather than using ear buds. I think most people hate it. But I don't start hating all people who listen to music, or music itself. Just the specific people who engage in the particular rude activity.
What about the idea that keeping pets is unethical, for the sake of the pets' wellbeing? They are basically cuteness slaves, and even if we could give them better lives confined in the parameters of our own lives than they might have in the wild, is that better than them not existing?
The general tenor is very similar to the extremely vocal haters of AI image generation, like the ones that gather in /r/ArtistHate/.
I don't mean normal negative responses like "ugh, I don't like the look of this stuff" or "I have ethical issues with it", but endless memes about killing AI artists, statements like "I don't care if it literally cures cancer, we just need to make it go away", comparing AI training to sexual violence, and the occasional death threat. And remember this is just some images we're talking about here, not AI alignment or direct employment concerns, considering they do not seem to be actual working artists to begin with.
I've been saying for a while that this too feels more like a purity spiral than anything else. They'll go on witch hunts - snaring many a traditional artist in the process - and perform their forensic examinations on images to ensure they don't accidentally admire The Bad Thing. There are actual magic wards and purification rituals to protect their drawings from AI desecration in the form of the various ineffective data poisoning tools.
Even the very name "ArtistHate" - where the word "hate" actually refers to the alleged hate that they, the artists, are experiencing - seems to imply something like the sense that this is all being orchestrated just to make them suffer.
They need to expunge AI images so completely that they don't even accidentally see The Bad Thing. To them, it's not just an ugly or cheap image, it's a fundamentally tainted and unclean image.
What's disturbing about that narrative, though, is that they managed to get trapped in this purity spiral really quickly, like within the past year or two.
Witch-hunts have an easier time getting started when there are rich, powerful people openly advocating for witchcraft, with the very explicit goal of infiltrating, subverting, and ultimately eliminating non-witches, and also actual witches running an ongoing adversarial collaboration with the inquisitors in order to refine their nefarious shapeshifting right up to the threshold of human ability to detect it. AI-art market conditions push pretty much every available button across the whole purity-spiral launch control keyboard.
> witness “homophobia” for people with normal political or religious objections to homosexuality
I realise by "normal" you mean "common", but the way you've worded this makes it sound like you're okay with homophobia.
In any case, I now wonder whether the intense queerphobic backlash that has been growing over the last decade can be attributed in part to a misophonia-like irrationality triggered by increased visibility...
Well, if the activists wanted to use and politicise the term "phobia" to try and portray "no I don't agree with this" as "you're irrationally crazy", then they will have to accept that being phobic about phobia is phobiaphobia, as mental illness is not to be stigmatised but accepted as part of society.
So yeah, "homophobia" (if it's a real phobia) is normal and indeed, if I suffer from it, then I'm exceptional! Maybe even twice exceptional, as per the discussion about the school for gifted kids with special needs!
A lot of the comments seem to be from people who hate dogs but feel stymied as they can't express themselves openly about this view. So to give a bit of balance: I like dogs. I have a dog. I let my dog off the lead in the park. Most of my neighbours have dogs. They also let their dogs off in the park. Dogs are a normal companion for humans to have, and have been for thousands of years.
I do get why certain people who have had a bad experience, or live in an area with particularly bad dog owners, might be wary of them. And I can get the dislike of certain breeds who have been bred to be obnoxious in various ways (like pit fighting dogs). But I think in general, just like children, society is better when it includes dogs.
"there’s no way for them to “turn it off” or “just get over it”"
I feel like within my lifetime, psychological problems are being viewed increasingly as immutable. I don't know if this is increasingly accurate (people don't change) or defeatist (what can we do?) or corrupt (why cure people when they would then stop paying you?) or Progressive (being crazy is an important part of who they are) or what... but whichever, it sure is dispiriting.
I mean, there’s a pendulum that can also swing back to “if you’re annoying or a weirdo, we can rationalize our disgust for you by pathologizing you.”
But now to problematize this pushback, I think there has been a shift from:
1. Not being similar to normies means you are mentally ill, and we can and should treat your illness to eliminate the friction
to
2. Not being similar to normies is immutable, and others can and should “educate” (ie treat) themselves to eliminate the friction
Both seem problematic, and though it’s hard to see it, I see the two options we’ve been presented with so far as a false dichotomy.
There is a third option, which is to accept a certain amount of friction, and not give one group too much power over the other. So the normies don’t get to forcibly medicate recalcitrantly mono-interested autists, and the autists don’t get to demand that the normies fawn over them or celebrate them or give them everything they demand or be smeared with accusations of ableism. It’s okay for people to dislike each other and struggle to work together, and both overmedicalizing and overessentializing the issue prevent us from seeing the obvious solution: a middle ground where people negotiate about how to navigate differences with externalities, and no one holds any trump cards.
I wonder if the medicalisation of annoying personality traits has contributed to the impression many people seem to have that disabling mental problems don't actually exist at all.
1. Trump obviously hates brown people. The people who understand this do so based on the obvious evidence for it. The people who don't, live in an echo chamber where this is regarded as unevidenced anti-Trump propaganda because they've never seen the evidence.
2. Trump obviously doesn't hate brown people. The people who understand this do so based on the obvious evidence for it. The people who don't, live in an echo chamber where this is regarded as evidenced and well-known truths because they've seen and believed anti-Trump propaganda.
3. Trump's hatred or not of brown people is a mystery. Any strong feelings either way are wrongheaded.
In all possible words, that comment is damaging:
1. People who already agree with you, continue to agree with you. Maybe they get a buzz from feeling like you both hate the same person (eww). People who don't, find this a disturbing turn off and doubt your impartiality and worrying that living in California has melted your brain (compare Yaghtzee Crowshaw).
2. Same as (1). And you've written something unfair.
I think these communities have two archetypes of people in them: some have a problem, and some are very angry.
The urban planning geeks / public transit fetishists / Strong Towns people have a point! Cities can be made better, and do have a heavy reliance on cars. You might think they're wrong about the facts, or that their solutions are unworkable, but that's just normal political discourse, which can hopefully be sorted out more or less rationally. They're activists, so they talk about activism, and a certain level of righteous indignation is understandable -- people without any passion at all rarely do activism.
But some members of the community (probably more on r/FuckCars than r/DecreaseThePriotitizationOfCarsInAMeasuredAndCarefulWay) get very, very angry. I suspect this is partially Scott's misophonia thing, but also just normal in-group/out-group dynamics. And since the angry people are On Our Side, tribalism takes over and nobody can really tell them to tone it down.
Likewise, the childfree people. A bunch of them don't want kids for whatever reason, and face a lot of pressure from their families, or feel ostracized from female friends once everyone is having kids, or whatever. They find value in commiserating, or sharing effective strategies for setting boundaries with family, or things like that. And this is a bunch of people who are rejecting social expectations, so there's a certain amount of understandable resentment towards the society that (they feel) is punishing them for it. But then some people start getting really angry. It's a safe space, so it's hard to tell them to tone it down. And then the toxoplasma of rage kicks in, and the unreasonable people become the face of the subreddit.
I don't know if I'm misophonic - I wouldn't give a damn about a noise I couldn't hear, except out of sympathy for others - but I am noise-sensitive and my irritation at annoying noises is as NOTHING to the rage I feel for people who could easily carry out a simple task called Putting On Some Fucking Headphones Like A Non-Sociopath Would, but elect not to.
This makes me instinctively understand pet-haters even as an animal lover myself, especially as I know that the people who walk around inflicting their horrible noises on the rest of us are, for the most part, innocently unaware of how annoying those noises are to some people.
I’m surprised you consider r/petfree to be worth less sympathy than r/childfree because they’re both filled with complete insanity. Neither group really deserves any sympathy.
Also, your note on r/the_donald is completely incorrect. Back when it was still around, the common sentiment on race there was “Democrats are the real racists”. They generally agreed that race wasn’t important to American identity. When it got pushed off of Reddit and moved to patriots.win it did radicalize and actually started becoming white nationalist.
It's tempting to say Reddit at large is the problem - that the entire site has been coopted by insanity. OTOH, there are many subreddits which are largely fine, whether they're special interest groups for some videogame or artist, curated information sources like /r/askhistorians, or fun things like /r/thatlookedexpensive.
This can in turn lead to a trap. Walk into a room of Reddit fans and claim "Reddit is a biased den of iniquity!", and they'll show you /r/aww. Walk into a room of Reddit burnouts and claim "Reddit's a fair site full of quality content!" and they'll show you /r/politics.
I’m very allergic to dogs. I still like them from a distance, but I really dislike being forced into close contact with them, and I’m surprised how unsympathetic dog owners are to my preferences. I wonder if some of these dog-despisers are reacting to this dog-supremacist behavior.
"This is the point in an essay like this where I’m supposed to say that this is a Growing Problem Fueled By Social Media"
The tipping point is when this spills over into the real world. Alt-right trolls were just some bros venting on the internet, and then 2016 happened. I think the presence of outside money and resources is probably what makes the difference there--if any foreign powers or billionaire oligarchs decide to subsidize activities by pet haters, then the rest of us need to start worrying about it.
Am I the only one who read "Group Home" and did a double take? He knows five other families on his block? People putting t-shirts on their kids to advertise their cause? What? Is this a California thing? So weird.
I can sympathize because although I love (other people's) dogs, they are kind of a privileged class in our society. There's definitely a double standard where human poop on sidewalks is often used as an excuse to further ruin the lives of the homeless but dog poop is seen as a mild inconvenience. I'll often catch myself seeing mysterious poop on the sidewalk and feeling relieved that it looks more like dog poop than human poop, as if that makes a difference.
> This is the point in an essay like this where I’m supposed to say that this is a Growing Problem Fueled By Social Media - that the existence of communities for these people validate and intensify their emotions and make everything worse. But I’m not feeling it - all my misophonic symptoms happened before I talked to anyone about them, and removing every other misophonic in the world wouldn’t improve things a bit.
An interesting manifestation of this article's dynamic is the people who think everything is a Growing Problem Fueled by Social Media. In a lot of nerdy STEM adjacent spaces, there's a sort of growing current that social problems are made worse by social media and algorithms. 10 years ago this was a sort of general observation that certain behaviors are reinforced by in-group/out-group dynamics that manifest through online socialization.
My feeling is that this same misophonia-like phenomenon has happened here. Large parts of tech and STEM communities like HackerNews, Reddit programming subs, and Mastodon are utterly convinced that every social problem that humanity has is either caused or materially amplified by social media and algorithmic content delivery. And the morbidly fascinating part of it to me is watching this radicalization happen over time. My feeling is that a lot of these online STEM communities attract folks who have poorer social skills or higher social anxiety than average. When they were young they were often shunned in offline friend groups due to teenage socialization being hyper focused on social signaling. This created a vague resentment to the social ingroups of their youth, the kind of folks with stronger social skills who were often prominent and capable on social media. Intellectualization and bad mental health caused them to attribute more and more social ills to folks who use social media. The end result is online communities with large quantities of these folks who have a shared deep resentment and intolerance to social media use and who attribute any and all social problems to social media.
Having recently moved into a neighborhood where people have dogs I've pretty much gone from "dogs are alright" to "dogs should be extincted" within the span of a week. It's insane to me that people are allowed to just put this animal meters away from your house that makes loud noises at all hours of the day and night and I refuse to consider that I might have misophonia because wanting silence in the comfort of your own home is not a disorder.
Check out /r/antisex. These people aren't asexuals, uninterested in sex. They're actively, viscerally, angrily against sex. They don't want to just not have sex. They don't want anyone to have sex. They seem to spend a lot of time on porn sites being angry about the content. You have to read it. These people are really (IMO) nuts.
Isn't the simpler explanation (for r/petfree) is that humans are often very negative about interests that they find totally unrelateable but are consuming to others?
And sure some of that is just dislike of the unfamiliar but I suspect that what usually triggers it is the feeling of being left out or excluded. If you don't see any attraction of a pet and all your friends see a cute dog or cat you can feel left out and often we turn that emotional hurt into anger.
It reminds me of road rage, too. And maybe also triggers and trigger warnings.
A counselor I once knew would say that anger often reflects a deeper-held sense of injustice. That crossing a threshold of <whatever triggers you> is a reminder if a past feeling of victimhood, loss of control, and subsequent insecurity that manifests anger as a defense mechanism. And the growth in anger is proportional to the frequency of transgressions.
Sometimes I think telling someone else they are not a victim, in a given situation, when they have even the slightest bit of valid victim status in a past situation, is the hardest thing in the world to do.
If so, then this anger theory implies misophonia is the hardest psychological condition in the world to counsel someone through.
When I think about road rage, the thing the rager wants most is control, freedom - people to get out of the way and let them move. I imagine that a misophonic, if asked, would love the ability to psychically subliminally suggest the sound-doer just stop making the sound. That that level of instant control and ability to change the situation is out of reach is, I bet, why road ragers honk and tailgate and cutoff, and why you berated your roommates, Scott.
But since we can’t grant the misanthropes psychic mind control (thank goodness!) - what can we do?
It seems to me that what gets people through the victimhood is their degree of inherent optimism. Like, Viktor Frankl is probably the opposite of a misophonic, right?
And that maybe optimism vs. depression being about control/agency in a predictive processing sense means that something like believing that “this guy in the fast lane doing 32 is a temporary thing, and not personal, and anyway my beautiful family won’t notice if I’m a couple minutes later” is the way out. Recasting your worldview as a “road tolerater” is the way to regain control; because you *can* with practice influence your own beliefs.
Scott, here’s your iron: you’re a rationalist. The total net utilons and hedons being generated by people enjoying food or background music outweigh the impact to you, and Moloch wins if you give in to the hate. Your mantra is “I used to be a misophonic, but I realized being philophonic was a choice, and I took it, to demonstrate that rationality can win, and love is greater than hate.”
In the case of road rage, we also have a lifetime of auto industry marketing telling you that car ownership is freedom, sexuality, success and achievement, etc, and that you can drive as fast as you want in any environment with no traffic and no consequences.
/r/ArtificialSentience/ is scratching the befuddled itch for me lately.
I see there the kernel of a potentially serious mental health crisis. If the singularity doesn’t happen and render it all moot, the downstream effects of everyone having their own little shapeshifter, sycophant echo chamber designed for maximum consumer retention is scary. I even see it as a cognitohazard for myself
Somebody will figure out a vaccine for that, once malaria and spare kidneys and a few other things are taken care of. Sooner, if it's a provable causal factor in measles refusing to stay down.
Oh wow. Is there a link I can read?
The childfree who love pets battling the petfree people with children as if it's a very important which is worse in a restaurant. (The answer: It Depends)
THAT!
And, frankly, both should be barred from restaurants (planes etc) - UNLESS the children/pets are well trained and can keep quiet for the duration of the event (meal, plane ride etc)
I will fight you. Children should be expected everywhere by default unless in an officially designated "adult" space - pubs after 9pm, strip clubs, the third-or-above storeys of construction sites, etc.
I don't have a problem with kids... as long as they don't cry at the top of their lungs. Mine never did.
Easy mode.
EDIT: my kid is pretty delightful, but apparently I was awful and my mum still sees red every time someone complains about the minor crying fit of their cherubic little angel child.
https://theonion.com/parents-of-crying-child-must-not-be-any-good-1819577756/
To be fair I believe there is still truth to that. Sure some kids are more difficult than others but sans niche development issues such as brain damage, all kids learn to feed themselves and get potty trained just like they can be taught, or forced if needed, to behave; only bad parenting is stopping it.
Mine used to cry at the top of his lungs about once a month. If we were in a restaurant at the time, I would take him outside as fast as I could.
I think this is the real secret to babyphobia (and dogphobia). It's that the parents/owners don't seem to care.
Perfect reaction, imhe.
But, tbf, you can't do that on a plane. OTOH, pacifiers etc. ought to work. Basically, in a plane or a restaurant, give the child what it needs to sooth itself.
Education, standing firm against tantrums etc. can wait until no one else is within earshot/forced to endure said tantrums.
Yes. Planes are tricky.
Pacifiers help, but they don't work reliably. If the problem were, e.g., ear pressure, they wouldn't help that much.
There *are* methods that work, but they aren't easy. E.g. some of the AmerIndian tribes had approaches that were used that were for the purpose of keeping children quiet on the trail. But, I believe, they required ignoring or suppressing crying at all times. Which demands general social support.
I find it much more personally upsetting to see a parent give in to a tantrum than having to put up with the tantrum, so it's not easy for the parent to win here. (I also suspect that kids are bright enough that if tantrums in public are always rewarded then they'll keep having them).
Feels like this is a problem that we can leave to the market to solve.
I practiced "Let the kid tire himself out until he naps" school of parenting. On a plane, that means a series of planned mental activities until they sleep (exactly what would depend on age).
That means I'm paying attention to them the entire time. Don't expect to work on your laptop until they nap (and by then you might be too exhausted--just accept this and replan).
I kind of have that rage Scott talks about to people screaming at their kid in public. The reasoning seems to be something like "why is the adult being more noisy than the kid, when they're an adult and they're screaming at a child?".
Some kids are criers/tantrum throwers, and there's not always a lot the parents can do about it. As I'm entering the age when all my friends are having kids I see some that hardly scream at all, and some that do it frequently. Between my own 2 kids my first almost never screamed/threw a trantrum, but my second screams a lot when he's upset, and even when he's happy he loves to scream. I don't think we did anything different between the two, he just naturally loves to be loud. We're trying to train it out of him, but it seems to be a pretty innate desire.
One particular difficulty is for kids of preschool age, acting to stop a tantrum now will often lead to more tantrums later. It's usually possible to resolve a tantrum by giving in or offering a highly preferred thing (e.g. handing them your phone to play games on) as a diversion/bribe, but this constitutes "negotiating with terrorists" and trains the kids to have more tantrums.
It's often possible to thread the needle by leaving immediately with your kid when they have a tantrum in public, but not always. Sometimes (e.g you're on an airplane) it's physically impossible. Sometimes (e.g. a waiting room for a doctor's appointment) it's impractical. And sometimes wanting to leave is the trigger for the tantrum.
This doesn't apply to babies (who just need their needs attended to and can learn self control later) and for older kids (who can be meaningfully offered non-immediate disincentives for bad behavior), but there's a window of maturity levels where sometimes parents need space to wait out tantrums if the kids are going to learn how to behave.
Or you just beat them. "I'll give you something to cry about" was a common parenting tactic once upon a time and a successful one. Even infants tend to behave after they associate tantrums with serious consistent pain.
Giving a kid a special entertainment thing like an iPad *prior* to any tantrum for an unusually difficult event like an airplane flight doesn't seem particularly unreasonable, and I hear some people do it?
Edit: Also, a crying baby isn't that much louder than airplane engines. If you don't like loud things on the plane, you're doomed whether there's a baby or not. Consider some earmuffs – I like the 3M Peltor X4 series.
My problem in that case isn't with the kid but with the parent who thinks it's OK to have their screaming kid in a quiet place. Kids scream! Parents should move them elsewhere IMO (depending on the surroundings).
Exactly. If a child starts screaming and the parent takes them away apologetically... okay for me, I can handle a few seconds of noise. But if a child starts screaming and the parent just sits there and pretends that nothing special is happening... well, the rest of us are trying to listen to the lecture, or watch a movie, or whatever was the purpose we gathered for; don't ruin the experience for everyone.
And it's analogical to pets. If your dog starts barking at my child from a close distance and you just pretend that you don't see any problem... not okay.
Basically, it makes sense to not blame the child or the pet, but it also makes sense to blame the parent or the owner instead. I can forgive a moment of surprise, maybe you didn't expect that to happen right now, okay. But anything that keeps happening for more than a few seconds is your responsibility.
As someone with children, I would actually just prefer it if everywhere was designated as child friendly/child free. My children are just about past the age where I would have to constantly worry about public outbursts, but in the peak of toddlerhood, I spent way too much mental energy trying to figure out if I should bring them somewhere that we were invited. Sometimes, places completely surprise you (a church you're invited to where every single person is angry if a child even shuffles in their seat or a restaurant where everyone is happy to see kids) and just a quick list of "Bring them here, don't bring them there" would've helped a lot
I respectfully disagree. I have no problem with some places explicitly designating themselves as child friendly/child free, but I don't want everyone to have to choose a label. It reeks of a "whatever isn't explicitly allowed is prohibited" mindset. We don't need more written rules, we need more tolerance and greater capacity to handle the extremes on a case by case basis.
I don't know if this is exactly true, but I can imagine that in a previous era a lot of these rules already existed, it's just that they were obvious to you as part of your greater cultural context. You don't have the same kind of cultural stability and local homogeneity now, so whatever rules you have need to be made more explicit.
Sounds like a database engineering problem. http://tangent128.name/depot/toys/freefall/freefall-flytable.html#3740 Tracking locations is easy, first-pass data collection might be a relatively straightforward RLHF task ("click on the squares with someone being rude"), but getting everyone to agree on consistent formats would be an impossible nightmare, especially once it got tangled up with some ideological outrage.
Exactly! This is how things should be! Man I'm glad there's other people who understand how a healthy society should work. Children should be the default and yet we live in such twisted times that children are expected to be relegated to school and the home, otherwise they are an annoyance? Insanity!
If it's so hard to find "other people who understand how a healthy society should work," then maybe there is in fact less consensus than you would like about the meaning of "healthy society."
You seem to be assuming that consensus of people has anything to do with what makes a healthy society. Given that what makes a healthy car engine, biological organism, or computer program has nothing to do with peoples' opinions about it, I don't see why society would be any different.
I disagree completely with all three of your examples. The presence of the word "healthy" in each of these contexts means precisely "functioning as people would have it." There is perhaps a sliver of ambiguity in the case of biological organisms, but this ambiguity is just a byproduct of mistaking statistics for purpose.
Because society functions on consensus. There is no set of practical rules that will cover even most situations as people encounter them. Thus we develop norms. Without unwritten norms to coordinate our behavior, we cant live or work together. Evidence: every society ever.
Though I would substitute "sustainable" for "healthy", which seems too subjective to me.
Yeah, wrong consensus is still wrong. Crazy, I know!
I think the definition of "healthy society" should at least include "society capable of perpetuating itself", and it seems unlike that a society where children's presence is considered an annoyance to be minimized will be able to do so.
Sure, I understand the argument. I think it would be better to make this argument directly, and hash out the potential points of disagreement, rather than hide it behind an assertion that only some elect group understands the objective facts about how society should be.
Right. If you want adults who are well-socialized, they need to be socialized as children, which means taking them places.
"Sure, socialize them, just not anywhere near me" is just someone who wants everyone else but them to bear the costs of a functioning society. There's lot of people like this for lots of things, who want it taken care of, just not in their backyard.
Yea. "Someone who wants everyone else but them to bear the costs of a functioning society" is pretty close now to my generalized mental picture of "American".
Not that there aren't such people in everywhere of course, I know that there are. It just feels now like that particular type of selfishness dominates our society across the entire political/cultural spectrum. Whenever I hear a pundit grousing about our having become "a nation of children" or "no longer a serious society" this is what it brings to mind.
I was in a Biergarten in Munich a few years ago and saw the huge amount of playground equipment in between the tables where adults were sitting with their liters of beer and gigantic pretzels and it just seemed so civilized - especially when I realized I was seeing more children at that moment than the total number of children I had seen outside of airports in the previous six months in the United States.
That's how it used to be in the place I came from. Then everyone decided to become angry, looking for a fight, not having kids and complaining about the ones that do have kids. Luckily I moved to a place where children are the default, everyone loves them, and no one complains about a normal crying baby.
The difference is astounding. Life is much better when not around miserable people that dislike little ones.
That makes it sound like a culture war issue - but this is not about "miserable people that dislike little ones" or about people in one place "becoming angry, looking for a fight". You can't just get away from it by moving to a new place.
I think it's much more like junk food and social media, where this thing that seems like constant incremental increase in convenience, ends up causing this deeper problem for ourselves. There might be some places where this cycle hasn't progressed (and I think urban Europe is a place where the built environment makes it less likely to progress as quickly as American suburbia).
Thank you for saying this.
To anyone who gets annoyed by a crying child, just know that it's worse for the parents.
Absolutely not. I should not have to deal with someone else's triple decision to
A: Breed their Low IQ into the next generation,
B: Decide not to do the minimum viable level of parenting,
C: And then taking their little moron ut to fuck with people trying to do shit.
In summary: Fuck them kids.
For real though, babies crying on a plane or at the store is fine. It's loud, it's confusing, their ears hurt, and people need to go places/buy things. Whatever.
Children running around helter skelter doing shit that would have an adult catch a case or a bullet/ babies screaming at the restaurant/movies while the parents just shrug like "I just don't know what to do, It's impossible for me to correct my spawn or just leave, woe is me" is pure antisocial behavior and should be punished.
"Antisocial behaviour." Great choice of words, because *pro-social* behaviour is anything that contributes to a healthy society (for which the most important task is producing and raising children), and *antisocial* is therefore the opposite of that.
Society is a group childrearing effort and you are a nonvoluntary conscript into the project. You are required to have the skill of tolerating and dealing with children, and the idea that you shouldn't have to is quite as unreasonable as saying you shouldn't have to manage a polite conversation, or take the bins out, or share the street with people who act differently, or any of the other little jobs and cares we have to take as people living in band with other people.
Ten thousand generations of your ancestors didn't live, fight, fuck and die in order that you could sit undisturbed in a Starbucks. Check your vital privilege.
> Ten thousand generations of your ancestors didn't live, fight, fuck and die in order that you could sit undisturbed in a Starbucks.
Also conquer, rape, pillage, enslave. In the ten thousand generations there should be at least the fair share of those, probably more.
I have two kids, and I take responsibility for their behavior. When they were little babies, I couldn't prevent them from starting to cry at a random moment, but I could apologize and leave the room with them if that happened.
A parent who comes e.g. to a lecture with a baby, and stays there after the baby starts crying, is behaving antisocially. Yeah, the lecture is ruined for you, tough luck, but you don't have to also ruin it for everyone else.
I think a healthy compromise is when parents are welcome with children at most places, but are expected to behave responsibly.
Again, nah.
If society is a group child rearing effort, then I get to have a say in you letting your kid scream in the restaurant, and that say is "Jimmy you are going home and doing manual labor until you learn to behave like a human instead of a racoon."
It's just not hard, much like training an animal: Train your child not to do things people don't like in public, or don't take them to luxury activities.
Everyone else throughout history has managed, and I don't respect modern snowflake parents who need everyone else to defer to their incompetence so they can feel better about not being able to properly raise children.
100% I decline wedding invitations that are child free.
I think I would say that the first two storeys of construction sites should ban most adults as well as children! But I generally like the sentiment.
At the very least, children should not be expected by default in any place where something important you don't want to be disrupted goes on. It's easier to not let children into a cockpit than to program everything around the possibility that some moron might decide to let them play there. And the (possible) harm doesn't even need to be that high to outweigh the cost of adding another place where children are not expected.
Come to think of it, having some small but significant fraction of child-free spaces letting adults to just relax (for everyone including parents) seems like it's enough of a social good to outweigh that, too. I could trade that for "quiet spaces" where both children and adults are allowed as long as they behave appropriately, and are immediately removed otherwise.
why should children be expected everywhere by default..?
Because you'd quite like to grow old in a society that can still run all the services and infrastructure that you're currently taking for granted now.
I'm inclined to agree, however I also think we should make it easy for people to declare their space (eg cafe or whatever) as child free, if they want to run their place that way. No questions asked. If you don't like it, go elsewhere.
I'd argue that even for pubs, it should be at the owner's discretion. There is no such thing as "second-hand drinking" after all, it's up to the owner and the customers to evaluate whether the annoyance of allowing kids is worth the inconvenience to parents of excluding them. Balancing these kind of relatively arbitrary preferences is exactly what markets are good at!
Absolutely not, we need to be significantly more child friendly as a society. Children these days spend far, far, far less time socializing, out of doors, in public... and it's clearly terrible for them and for our culture.
The average young person these days probably spends a larger proportion of their time cooped up indoors alone than ever before. I wouldn't be surprised if this leads to worse social behavior too.
Again, outdoors is no issue. Even if a child starts crying/yelling uncontrollably, I can move. Not so much in a restaurant or a plane.
And, not to minimize genetics, but some parents seem to be able to get their children to behave at any age. Why not every parents?
I am incredibly sensitive to children crying, I understand your feelings well. Yet I still think my feelings are less important than the fact that there are children who will pay our pensions and keep civilization going one day.
Forcing parents to keep away from nice places just because they are the ones who put in the hard work of growing the ones who'll pay our pensions is unfair and cruel.
"some parents seem to be able to get their children to behave at any age. Why not every parent?"
The answer is, children are unbelievably different. Some don't have to be trained to be quiet at all, some can be trained, and others don't respond to any training. Training is less important than genetics.
I'm a man, on a taller side, middle-aged and not obviously disabled. The amount of crap I no longer have to put up with (but had to as a child and a teen, and my female friends and relatives always do) is huge.
So yeah, if I live long enough I may come to depend on today's and tomorrow's kids to pay my pension, or at least maintain the economy where my savings would be worth more than two peanuts. But I will also no longer be even moderately physically imposing, so the crap will probably start again. Also from today's and tomorrow's kids. I expect the kids whose parents don't care to reign them in to disproportionately make up the second group.
(I obviously don't blame the parents who try to resolve the problem and fail, or are legitimately overwhelmed.)
Put up with it? You're not a child yourself anymore, having to deal with other's children crying is part of living around others. YOU are the one being abnormal for not tolerating basic human behaviour, not the people continuing humanity.
Everything else I've said here notwithstanding, as an adult sometimes I would like to spend time with my friends in a space that is clean, comfortable, quiet enough for conversation and not anyone's home. A bar that does not play loud music may suffice, but those are few and far between now.
Note that this is not asking for all or most spaces to be child-free, or to be child-free by default. Just a choice of a couple of places I can escape to when the screaming and food-throwing gets too much would be enough.
Note also that teenagers, too, need spaces with similar properties, and additionally need them free of nannies, for normal social development!
There are places like that everywhere. And if you seriously can't find any, perhaps that's a sign that society moves on without people like you who don't tolerate children being children, and that you are the one with the abnormal behaviour.
Children should be the default. Adults and children have so many places to go, especially nowadays, with the massive drop in fertility rates and the inverted demographic pyramid that I find it really hard to believe you have a hard time finding places where to go, and that children are such a nuisance that you have to avoid them.
This is a preposterous statement, not to mention condescending and pompous. Taken to its logical conclusion, it implies that everyone should always tolerate all basic human behavior, some of which is shitty and annoying; instead of the much less edgelordly approach which acknowledge that shitty and annoying things are bad, complaining about shitty and annoying things is understandable, and minimizing shitty and annoying things is commendable.
Children crying normally is shitty behaviour to you. Lol.
I can't *believe* there are so many whiny provincial crybabies here in hip, urbane 19th century London complaining about us dumping our raw sewage into the Thames. Listen up, hicks, just go drink water from a different river!
> Again, outdoors is no issue.
I agree. However, in most built-up areas, groups of unsupervised children outdoors are treated as a nuisance.
You would have been furious if you had seen my family in public 20 years ago. I can’t imagine the humiliation my mother went through every time she had to take me and my 2 intellectually disabled brothers to the grocery store. Oh wait yes I can because I was there and I saw how everyone acted as if she was just some uninvolved parent who lets her undisciplined crotch goblins scream in public. Adult strangers would yell at them and throw things at them. In PUBLIC. I thought I was tough and this didn’t have lasting effects on me, but even now I still feel like I’m imposing on society every time I take them out in public. Like it’s rude to other people to expose them to the knowledge that people this disabled exist.
All this to say. Why cant every parent make their child behave? Because all children are different. Some of them are even disabled. There is nothing anyone could have done to make my brothers immediately behave. And yes, everything was tried. What worked was years of ABA therapy. Guess what? Still gotta buy groceries while dad is at work earning money to pay for that therapy. Babysitter? Don’t make me laugh, babysitters can’t handle this (guess how I know!). You could have held them at gunpoint and they wouldn’t have behaved. You could have beat them and they wouldn’t have behaved. All we could do was wait for the therapy to start working. The stares dwindled but never stopped. To this day I see people filming them with their phones in public. How would you feel if your child was so flagrantly disabled that six figures and twenty years of therapy wasn’t enough to make them even baseline socially acceptable and they are still a spectacle to the point they get FILMED by strangers. Think about it.
Have you ever heard someone say “God gives us what we can handle”? God didn’t give you an intellectually disabled child because you wouldn’t have been able to handle it.
I'm very grateful I didn't have a disabled child as indeed I do agree it would have tested me in ways I am not certain I could have handled.
I also have nothing but sympathy for parents dealing with such children and would be wildly accommodating of anything involving disabled people/children.
But let's be real - 99% of children acting out aren't disabled. Indeed, my personal (limited) experience of disabled people (and I was recently in a coffee where they seem to make a point of recruiting one intellectually disabled barista per day shift at least) is that they are pretty quiet.
But even if they weren't... In these situations "but for the grace of God, go I..." applies. I'm very sorry not everyone showed your mum/you that minimal amount of respect.
Don’t let the haters get you down. I understand your feelings and share them myself sometimes (it’s hard not to) but disabled kids have every right to be in public even if they act out, and 99.99 percent of people understand that. You are receiving a lot more sympathetic and warm feelings from compassionate strangers than glares from jerks, even if the jerks are more salient.
Thanks for sharing your experience, I think it’s easy for people to be callous and it’s a way of denying the reality that they or their family could ever be in that situation.
You would have been furious if you had seen my family in public 20 years ago. I can’t imagine the humiliation my mother went through every time she had to take me and my 2 intellectually disabled brothers to the grocery store. Oh wait yes I can because I was there and I saw how everyone acted as if she was just some uninvolved parent who lets her undisciplined crotch goblins scream in public. Adult strangers would yell at them and throw things at them. In PUBLIC. I thought I was tough and this didn’t have lasting effects on me, but even now I still feel like I’m imposing on society every time I take them out in public. Like it’s rude to other people to expose them to the knowledge that people this disabled exist.
All this to say. Why cant every parent make their child behave? Because all children are different. Some of them are even disabled. There is nothing anyone could have done to make my brothers immediately behave. And yes, everything was tried. What worked was years of ABA therapy. Guess what? Still gotta buy groceries while dad is at work earning money to pay for that therapy. Babysitter? Don’t make me laugh, babysitters can’t handle this (guess how I know!). You could have held them at gunpoint and they wouldn’t have behaved. You could have beat them and they wouldn’t have behaved. All we could do was wait for the therapy to start working. The stares dwindled but never stopped. To this day I see people filming them with their phones in public. How would you feel if your child was so flagrantly disabled that six figures and twenty years of therapy wasn’t enough to make them even baseline socially acceptable and they are still a spectacle to the point they get FILMED by strangers. Think about it.
Have you ever heard someone say “God gives us what we can handle”? God didn’t give you an intellectually disabled child because you wouldn’t have been able to handle it.
I can at least get the argument for restaurants even if I disagree, but planes? Children do need to be moved from place to place, planes aren't recreational zones.
> Absolutely not, we need to be significantly more child friendly as a society
Most importantly on this subject, we need ubiquitous spaces where children can exist and interact with each other without adult supervision and without having to pay for being there. Like, y'know, many of the older people here had when they were kids.
That problem seems like it could be traced back to real estate speculation. Who owns such a space? If access is free, and kids are routinely playing around in physically active, thus potentially injurious ways, how is said owner paying for property taxes, facilities maintenance, liability insurance, etc? When, not if, somebody sets up a tent and tries to live there, what happens?
" UNLESS the children/pets are well trained"
Here's the thing about children -- they're humans with their own foibles. You can't "train" them in the same way you can train an animal. You can teach them, but that takes time, and when they are young there are limits to what their developing brains can do.
The idea that you shouldn't go to a restaurant, travel on a plane, or generally be in a public space (what I assume you mean by etc) with a kid until they're past the crying stage is, frankly, offensive. Have some sympathy for the kid and the parents, and appreciate that they are out there trying to give their children some enriching human experiences.
I will not have sympathy for such people.
My parents didn't do it, My friend's parents didn't do it, My relatives didn't do it, My friends didn't do it, and I'm not doing it it.
Just like not being sloppy drunk in public, once children develop speech and awareness I expect parents to stop their kid knocking over display racks and/or screaming in public because they are mad, if only to prevent them from growing up into a rewarding career as prison labor.
The bar is so low it's on the ground and people are still struggling their way under it.
Maybe we have different scenarios in mind. If I'm at a restaurant, grocery store, movie theater, church, or on a plane and my kids have a tantrum, of course I'm going to try to get them under control. And if I can't, I'll leave or at least take them outside until they calm down. I expect all parents to behave in a similar way (and in my experience they do -- I can't recall ever seeing a parent just ignoring their children during a public tantrum). Of course, there are practical constraints -- I'm not going to leave a cart full of groceries behind, and I can't get off a plane mid-flight. We all do the best we can.
But the OP said (** emphasis mine)
"both should be **barred** from restaurants (planes etc) - UNLESS the children/pets are well trained and can keep quiet for the duration of the event (meal, plane ride etc)"
Sure, there's a qualification there about being "well trained", but parents can't guarantee that their toddlers won't have a tantrum, so this amounts to a prohibition on having children in public (or at least indoors), unless the area is explicitly marked as child-friendly (I guess).
I'm sorry, but that's just cruel to both the kids and the parents.
Are you really saying you, your family, and your friends never take/took your 2-5 year old kids anywhere besides the children's museum/bounce house/Chuck E Cheese's? Would you not take them on a plane to visit a relative that can't travel to you? If so, I respect your rights as a parent, but I certainly wouldn't advise anyone else to take that approach.
>Are you really saying you, your family, and your friends never take/took your 2-5 year old kids anywhere besides the children's museum/bounce house/Chuck E Cheese's?
Yes, I am saying that.
Maybe it's being raised in a non white american context, but the idea you might take your child out in public and have them embarrass you by being disrespectful is totally unacceptable to me. When children were brought to such places, they (and I) understood the proper way to behave and also understood that if they didn't behave that way, there would be consequences.
>Would you not take them on a plane to visit a relative that can't travel to you? If so, I respect your rights as a parent, but I certainly wouldn't advise anyone else to take that approach.
I have carve outs for such things (planes, mechanics, Dr's Office, grocery store, etc.) which I didn't include in that comment, but even in those areas I expect a good faith effort to manage things, and once a child is old enough to have a conversation (and isn't disabled in some way), there are only a few excuses for the behavior I see people let their kids get away with here.
I'm still not quite sure I understand you, so let me give a concrete example.
My son turned 4 in March. I take him to church and I think he's reasonably well behaved. He isn't perfectly quiet, sitting and standing on command with eyes forward at all times. Rather, he's usually reading, or maybe whispering to me about a question he has about the Mass, and he can get a *little* bit fidgety sometimes, but I don't think he's being disruptive. And based on the number of times people have complemented his behavior, it seems like others agree (though I admit there may be a bias here, as I think people are more likely to complement your kid than criticize them).
At any rate, there was an occasion a couple months ago where he *was* being disruptive. Not a full blown tantrum or anything, but being loud and moving around too much, trying to climb over me, etc. I tried my best to impress upon him the need to behave, but to no avail. Eventually I took him in the back and we left early, but it wasn't instantaneous. I gave him a few warnings and opportunities to correct his behavior. In the meantime, I am sure he was disrupting the people around us.
What's more, this wasn't the first time he's misbehaved. I can recall two other such incidents. So, not common, but not unheard of.
Would you have handled this the same way I did? Would you have left at the first sign of bad behavior? Or would you not even bring him to church (or a similar function) until you could be confident that he would behave perfectly?
Based on your previous comments it seems like you'd choose the third option. If that's the case, how confident do you need to be that your kids will behave before you'll take them out? I ask because my brother and I were pretty well behaved, but there were rare times when we'd goof off in church even as teenagers. Should my parents have left us at home until that behavior completely stopped? And how would they know if they weren't exposing us to those environments in the first place?
I hope you stub your toe, and all your future avocado toast is burnt!
So mean! I'm going to cry... :)
well behaved children/pets -- fine
badly behaved children/pets -- not fine
parents/owners of above, who don't care and think the rest of the world should have to put up with the bad behaviour -- these are the worst, and should be banned from restaurants/planes/public spaces forever.
I don't think you've thought very hard about this. In addition to the obvious problem of enforcement (suppose we are flying at 35000 feet and a child starts crying – what do you propose we do, throw them out of the plane?), the simple fact is that whether a kid is being loud or not is often out of the parents' control. Your policy amounts to punishing parents who have been selected randomly, and frankly, have already been punished enough.
It's reasonable to support norms according to which we make some effort not to bring screaming kids to a Bach concert or whatever, but the kind of bans you're proposing are not possible to implement, and would be totally undesirable even if they were. The last thing our society needs is further barriers to having kids and starting a family. Let's be a big boy, and exercise some patience and empathy with the tired parents and the screaming kid.
A dog is an animal. It's wild how nowadays pets are put at the same level as children.
Yeah. If objecting to that makes me a petphobe, then I'm a petphobe. You are not a dog/cat mom or dad, they are not your furbabies, and god knows you can't tell your mother-in-law "these are your grandkids, no I don't intend to have any human children".
People love their pets and treat them like members of their families. Okay. But they are not humans or human-substitutes.
My dog is human-philic but not as much canine-philic. She loves human children but dogs she's not so sure about. So I only take her indoors in the post office where I have a clear view. I don't take my dog into my beloved book store for fear of running into another dog when turning the corner into a narrow aisle. Most of the time my dog is fine with strange dogs, but 5% of the time she is sure it's a Bad Dog.
A lot of dogs are like that. Pitbulls were bred to be submissive to humans, but aggressive towards other dogs.
Shame it didn't work, considering how pitbulls love to kill little children.
Well, you know what they say about the alignment problem.
my mom and my sister have been on the outs for thirty years. She never visits her due to bad memories from the divorce, and mom never sees her grandchild. There is this gulf between them that is terminal at this point. Mom is too old to travel to see her even to make it up.
pets are not human substitutes but they will never, ever give that level of sorrow.
What does that have to do with anything lol.
pointing out that human children aren't always the amazing good you think they are and in some ways people like pets because they are less capable of causing tremendous pain. less highs, but less lows
feels like a lot of natalists underemphasize the difficulties of having kids, and that sometimes its not so glib.
works both ways, my mom was scarred a lot by my grandfather who was a piece of work.
Natalists? You mean normal people?
Like. I mean, I agree with you and thank you for expressing it better than I could write. And I don't see a like button.
Thank you for the compliment! We did away with like buttons because we didn't want this to degenerate into a popularity contest as can happen on other sites with likes/upvotes and downvotes.
Besides, I'm more used to arguing and fussin' and fightin' with people on here anyway 😀
I agree, the strawman I just invented is very scary and bad. Lots of people in my head treat their dogs exactly like humans and I project this onto all the normie people who have both pets and children.
That's not what the commentor above you asked! They said "which is worse in a restaurant", which isn't "are these the same thing", just like "Which is worse: stubbing your toe or getting a splinter?" doesn't mean splinters and stubs are the same.
It implies both have equal claim to being I a restaurant in the first place. Dogs are categorically worse than children in restaurants because children are a necessary part of life and parents should be able to participate in normal public life with their kids, even if kids can be annoying. Not so dogs.
That's not an argument that dogs are more annoying in a restaurant, which is what OP said depends. It's an argument that we should have more forbearance for children who are annoying in restaurants.
I don't want animals in places where food is made. You're usually taught this by parents when you are a child, that animals don't belong near food. I'm sorry you weren't taught something so essential, but it's never too late.
What you're using is called The Noncentral Fallacy (or by our author "The Worst Argument In The World").
We both (probably) agree that children and animals can be dirty and that they can be dirty in different ways, but instead of debating specifics, you're saying that animals are considered too dirty to be near food. This isn't a universal rule, as evidenced by the fact that people put them "near" food under a table in a restaurant, so there's room for an interesting conversation about why people feel that "under the table" is an appropriate place to put dogs but "in the spaghetti" isn't, and how some people might find that having a dog under the table is better than a child flinging meatballs.
However, instead of the interesting conversation, you're here to show off your wit and politeness, and I learned that even the former dwarfs the latter. :/
Animals don't belong near food, period.
> This isn't a universal rule, as evidenced by the fact that people put them "near" food under a table in a restaurant
Yes, and? Universality doesn't define whether it's right or not.
> and how some people might find that having a dog under the table is better than a child flinging meatballs.
Those people are wrong. Dogs are dirty because they walk on the earth, on dirty streets, eat their own poop, smell each other's anuses, put their mouth everywhere, carry parasites and other things that human don't, shed hair, sleep on the floor, and a bunch of other things. Moreover, children don't drool all over you.
> However, instead of the interesting conversation, you're here to show off your wit
I am not being witty I'm just argentinian. And I apologise if you feel I'm not being polite, my way of speaking doesn't translate very well.
Who specifically is putting pets at the same level as children? Is this a strawman?
When I was looking through /r/petfree, I occasionally came across comments that said something like [DELETED BY MODERATOR FOR CHILD-HATE - This is a child-friendly space, do not compare pets to children] or something like that. I thought it was pretty funny. I wonder if /r/childfree does the opposite.
If they do, I bet they both denounce everyone who notices the similarity as "both-sides-ists."
That's me. Always in the middle, liking both children and pets... but not too much... ;)
I like them too, but I can never finish a whole pet all by myself (and children tend to be even bigger).
Yeah I'll answer, they don't. In fact there's a few posts by people who don't want pets or children.
Inside a restaurant, the only proper place for any animals is: on plates. Well, some fresh soon-to-be seafood in some pond seems acceptable, too.
As for kids: I am with rebelcredential. And sure, I take my kids out when they cry or won't bring them until mature enough. On planes: sorry, I try my best.
Here’s the thing: kids don’t become “mature enough” (or at least, are delayed in maturing) if you never take them out until they are perfect. “Avoid fine dining in peak romantic hours” and “distract or remove the child if their behavior gets particularly bad” are reasonable accommodations and any parent doing them should receive reasonable grace.
If you’re mad there’s a kid at 4PM in a casual restaurant where everyone is already loud and there are TVs everywhere, it’s the misophonia thing.
Okay but what do we DO about it? How do we run a functional society with so many varieties of irrational misphonocs all around?
It would probably be useful to hear from anyone who came up through any of these forums. Specifically whether there was any "recruitment" process, or any "disillusionment" process they went through on joining/leaving, that they have in common. Once you understand the situation better you can talk about how to address it.
I don't admit to being in any of these places myself, but there's an incel forum thing that pops up in a feed I see that doesn't have filtering tools. Their cartoonishly unpleasant posts sound exactly like the pet guys, but for women. Thing is, your natural response to reading this stuff is immediate ridicule, followed by sympathy for the (literal) underdog.
That's why I find it hard to see this kind of stuff as a real danger - there must be some other, quite extreme, process you have to put people through before they can look at stuff like this and not bounce straight off. We should seek to understand that process.
I caught myself being overly emotional about the lack of building higher-and-higher density housing/cities (living in a very dense on in Europe), and ... I guess for me the recruitment was reading about YIMBYism (and Georgism and whatnot) and slowly paving the mental pathways between any of my problems and "caused by lack of higher-and-higher density cities".
(I also have extremely mild misophonia, limited to a few things, water dripping or ticking clocks at night, that one thing my girlfriend does sometimes (but I hear it over earphones, and ... when she doesn't notice she's doing the thing that makes the noise I either need to ask her to stop or I can't really not pay attention to the occasional noise.))
Usually there's some very simple and true thing that becomes behaviorally an inseparable part of one's personality. (And we're immediately at identity politics? Oh no.)
So it's like the priors, as Scott mentioned, that slowly (but surely) got trapped.
What's this about identity politics?
Repeated exposure without the corrective mechanism leads to radicalization.
I had this experience with R/inceltears as well as the prison abolition movement & not to equivocate it to that level of pathology incels have towards women but looking back I feel a lot of the things I said/believed in them were insane. I also don't think I got into those communities & mindset by already being really off already so much as slowly adopting ideas that all seemed reasonable/normal until I was regularly interacting with a large group that re-enforced my distorted world view.
the incel thing is because there is a really nasty cultural
belief that a man without a woman is either defective or actually gay. the guys internalize it like bulimics internalize the nasty beauty standards women face too.
getting over that is very hard
I have the Walker's crisps model in my head and I'm wandering if that explains it. Walker's marketing isn't about convincing you to buy their product, and it's not even about hooking their brand to positive emotions and building an association that way. Instead, at their scale, it's literally about creating familiarity with their logo. You can ignore or even actively dislike their adverts, but through sheer saturation, over time your buying habits shift to include them more.
I wander if bad or ridiculous ideas can act like that when you're passively exposed to a steady stream of them.
Invest in R&D for cortisol regulation drugs and mechanisms.
A quote I saved from hackernews user tonfreed:
I call it the toaster fucker problem. Man wakes up in 1980, tells his friends "I want to fuck a toaster" Friends quite rightly berate and laugh at him, guy deals with it, maybe gets some therapy and goes on a bit better adjusted.
Guy in 2021 tells his friends that he wants to fuck a toaster, gets laughed at, immediately jumps on facebook and finds "Toaster Fucker Support group" where he reads that he's actually oppressed and he needs to cut out everyone around him and should only listen to his fellow toaster fuckers.
Scott said "all my misophonic symptoms happened before I talked to anyone about them" and I would say the same, wipe my memory and all the people that hate noise at night, and I'm pretty sure I would develop hate of people that make noise at night (or, something like "use the public resource that is silence to their own end without being mindful of other people" maybe?), pretty quickly.
Yes. But you would feel like the odd one out. With the Internet you find your tribe, and when you have a tribe you can be righteous.
I felt like Scott's last pp was a miss for this reason. The Internet gave us in-group status for having our idiosyncratic annoyances, and those that caused them out group status. Before that we seethed in silence because no one we knew was sympathetic.
>I felt like Scott's last pp was a miss for this reason
Indeed, outside of e.g. Qanon it's difficult to find clearer examples of things being a Growing Problem Fueled By Social Media than active subreddits full of people convincing one another that dogs in a coffee shop are not merely annoying but are--actually, when you think about it--a COVID-level public health threat for which draconian societal action is desperately needed.
Sure, but it's way more difficult to make it into an entire ideology about how some sounds are objectively bad and no one should make them with or without a misophonic around.
I mean sure but preventing people from communicating does not solve the problem. It may solve the "secondary problem" of r/toasterfree but it does not solve the primary problem of misphonia.
Sounds like the actual issue here is that he wants to /talk to someone/ about his toaster fetish, but didn't know where to turn.
If he just wanted to abuse his toaster, nothing stopping him doing that. If he went straight to talking about it with a like-minded person, nothing particularly bad would happen. But instead, he talks to people who ostracise him for reaching out. In 1980, maybe he deals with that, or maybe he becomes a tragic suicide. Now, he finds like-minded folk, and they ask him "you're sticking around people who bully you and make you feel suicidal. Why do this? Why try to be liked by everybody? You don't even like everybody. Come hang out with us instead."
It's cheaper than therapy, and he is more likely to survive.
People who find "Toaster Fucker Support Group" and are not immediately turned off by the people in the group were never going to "deal with it", not in 1980 and not in 2021.
All arguments that romanticize the mental health of the past seem to make this mistake. Yes, an anorexic who finds an enabling online group might worsen their symptoms due to peer support (similar for a lot of other illnesses), but mental illnesses do exist in isolation, and existed in the past even if they didn't get publicized—they were simply just hidden from the public consciousness.
It's like when people talk about the rising depression epidemic. Like, come on, depressed people in the past were still depressed, they just had more responsibilities to take care of and probably a stronger social network/local community. Things might be getting worse now, but they certainly weren't great back then either.
No you’re completely right. It’s very easy to point to something that worsens or otherwise feeds into a problem and then make the mistake of treating that as the sole/major source of the issue instead of just something exacerbating it. People had serious pathologies and unhealthy world views long before social media so the solution can’t just be “get rid of social media and go back to how things were before”.
Bad example with anorexia, considering it's purely manufacture by social exposure.
> Things might be getting worse now, but they certainly weren't great back then either.
Every other person has some kind of depression, anxiety, extreme phobia or mental illness nowadays. All of them are justified according to them.
Not really sure why anorexia is a bad example. It's been around for a few hundred years, and maybe even a couple thousand depending on who you ask (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_anorexia_nervosa).
> Every other person has some kind of depression, anxiety, extreme phobia or mental illness nowadays. All of them are justified according to them.
This comment just seems vaguely misanthropic. What exactly are you arguing here?
I am literally involuntarily celibate. But when I tried going to an incel forum (even one that aimed to be wholesome) I was turned off.
This is a 4chan post from years before and I'm not going to let this ton freed guy steal their credit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/5ofih3/beforeafter_the_internet/
Before internet
>i want to fuck toasters
>dont be a fucking retard
>grow up
After internet
>I want to fuck a toaster
>google
>find a community with 1000+ members about people wanting to fuck toasters
>fuck up your life
Isn't that what the bagel setting is for?
In real life you can just be chill about your friends having weird fetishes you're not into. It's probably even possible to have safe, ethical sex involving a toaster!
Furthermore, that fucking toasters isn't wrong (because nothing is good or wrong, it's just opinions), that fucking toasters is as valid as normal reproductive sex, and that fuckings toasters is a perfectly fine expression of sexuality.
/r/misophonicfree
I'm re-reading Fahrenheit 451 for the first time in like 25 years, and the solution described by the fire chief involves burning all the books.
I very much hope to avoid that one!
its not misophonics!
Scott is doing the same error others do to them, something is not wrong with you if you don't like kids. The answer is just to realize they are engaging in performative venting and its reinforced in an echo chamber.
people hated kids before the internet too, its just it was treated as a comic thing by the culture more than being villains. "go away kid, ya bother me" WC Fields stuff.
Do we need to? Hermits who can't stand society for whatever reason have existed at least as long as written records. Psychiatric treatment can make remaining in society less painful, and automation and economics both make hermitdom less painful. Some people opt out of civil society, some stick around and put up with it, and overall life goes on.
Markets. Space X does not allow dogs, space Y does. Dog owners, and people who don't mind dogs, will self select into X, and misociniacs into Y.
There is some discussion to be had about non-market spaces (eg parks and libraries), but local democracy and compromise can work it out. Ideally, in a borough where say, 20% of people want parks with off-leash dogs, 30% want parks with leashed dogs, and 50% want dog-free parks, that's how the space should be allocated.
Mind bleach for /r/petfree readers: https://mattlakeman.org/2020/03/21/against-dog-ownership/
The author of that's posted on r/slatestarcodex before too, funny if he comes across this post - wonder if he'll have thoughts.
"Please type a shorter comment," okay, Substack, how about I type several instead?
Grab bag comment incoming, only some of which is addressing this article, much of which is an excuse to tell a story of personal dumbass failure.
Pardon the ramble for a bit of context: I used to be afraid of dogs in general, and I still am if the dog is acting sufficiently high-energy-but-clearly-not-happy. The fear came from having nearly gotten my right hand's thumb bitten off by a dog I wanted to feed a thing to when I was five (needed a lot of stitches, but thankfully healed up without complications), and it persisted despite me exposing myself to friendly dogs and cognitively thinking friendly-dog thoughts because of my vitamin B12 deficiency. Then my vitamin B12 deficiency was diagnosed and cleared up, and since then dogs have been okay. I am still always ready to defend myself (it's just a habit that I've built up), but I do things like 'get down on the floor to snuggle three campus security dogs that really want to get to know me because I happened to walk past their space' at work.
Anyway, I see r/petfree and I think many (although not all) people on there are probably scared of dogs and possibly don't admit it to themselves. They're showing all of the signs; the avoidance, for one. The person who mentioned they can't go to their friends house any more seems like they're probably in that category, as a striking example.
But the reason I'm putting this comment here instead of top-level is because I was kind of nodding along to much of the linked article until it started to psychoanalyse dog owners. I don't think the author got that right; not in the sense that there are not people who are like that (there definitely are, have known some personally), but in the sense that I don't think most dog owners are match the model (of wanting a "cheap, easy, unfulfilling version of raising a baby").
As far as I can tell, dog ownership is complicated and hard; definitely not zero-effort beyond keeping a dog alive.
Tiny story time (sorry, I am being a bit of a windbag here; this is a story about how I catastrophically failed to solve a problem I was having, which you're welcome to assume is because I'm a dumbass/dipshit, though I'd appreciate if you (generic) didn't push that point too hard in the responses):
I used to have a route I would walk along whenever I went for a walk. It took me through a nice scenic forest and past some fields. This was still in the middle of town by some measure, so there was a row of houses I had to pass, with gardens. At some point, a very large dog along the route (maybe a new dog in the neighbourhood) decided to jump at the fence and bark aggressively at me; classic barrier aggression. However, the fence looked jumpable to me (it was tall, but there was a tall mound of dirt about a metre back that looked like an easy run-jump ramp), so I was sincerely spooked.
My first idea was "okay, one time thing, keep moving and ignore the dog." It was not a one time thing. Dog kept doing this on future walks, and I was baffled - what was I pattern-matching to? Or did the dog just do this to everyone? At some point I decided that since "walk past and ignore the dog" didn't work, I tried to do various forms of interaction (stop and calm-voice talking, stop and stern-voice talking, and at the height of my fears about it, threaten with large stick). Needless to say none of this worked, probably because I was giving the dog stimulation it wasn't getting, and/or making it think it did an even better job of fending off an intruder.
On one of the instances of interacting with dog, trying to find some mutually agreeable way of interacting with each other, the dog owner showed up. I was relieved and asked for tips for how to get the dog to stop barking at me. The owner's first suggestion was "just ignore it and walk past". I explained that was what I had been doing for many days until I switched gears, and it had not worked. They explained the dog did not do this to everyone who walked past, and we puzzled about what might be causing it (we think my headphones with electronic music might have triggered it). We got into what seemed like a brief but productive conversation. We agreed to chat again a few days later when we both had time.
And we did. I brought some chocolates and a dog treat, gifted those to them. We spoke at the front gate of their home. I asked, and I gave them several opportunities to say "no", and encouraged them to say "no" (and yes, I realise it's really hard to say "no" even in those circumstances), whether I could get to know the dog on another weekend, maybe. Just so the dog could learn that I'm not a threat? They were on board with that (even sort of preview brought the dog to the front gate as a first meet-and-greet, sadly probably reinforcing "this person is not allowed on premises" without meaning to), and they told me to just ring the bell some other weekend, and if they were there they'd open, and we could have a tea.
You could say I was naive for believing this, but we'd made good steps towards pleasant conversation, so I was optimistic. I tried a few more times to ring the bell, and no one ever opened up. I think I stopped after the fifth time or so - hard to say exactly, it was all complicated by being during a time with various long weekends that I had good reason to believe they might be out visiting family, etc (indeed, I dropped another small helping of chocolates and well wishes into their letterbox one weekend), and only one of those weekends the dog was obviously in (and they might have been sick).
Fast forward a few more weeks, during another dog barking stint, while I'm trying a new thing (sit down on the ground, show open hands that I'm not armed with sticks or blades or anything like that, slow-blinking) to calm the dog down, dog owner shows up, lightly admonishing me for not just walking past. I apologise for not just moving on, explain that I'm still trying to find ways to deal with the fact I am emotionally frightened of this dog at some point jumping over the fence and attacking me, and that I had tried to get in touch.
"We don't want that."
I apologise profusely for 'misinterpreting' the situation. Inwardly I'm thinking, okay, cool, that would have been great to know earlier. Like, if you had responded to even one of the bell rings and said you changed your mind, I could have not been a source of perpetual annoyance in your life. I never set out to be a pest to these people. I figured it would be a good idea to try once to get to know their dog, and if it worked, great, and if it didn't work, sad but we'd all move on.
I don't fully know what they were thinking. I guess it's unusual for someone who is scared of a dog to try really hard to get to know them despite everyone involved being a stranger (CoZE is not really a common approach people have to their problems), so maybe they thought I was deliberately provoking the dog (and arguably with my varied attempts to get it to calm down, I was, but I was at wit's end, and they weren't giving me actionable advice).
Anyway, in the end, I just changed my route. It's a lot less nice. There's really only one forest in the area. I walk there through the streets now, instead of the meadows that take me past the row of houses. Occasionally I walk past the meadows to see if the dog is still there; so far the answer is 'yeah, still being aggro', and then I do the stupid thing of beating myself up for having a physiological stress response, then beat myself up for spending brain cycles on thinking about it at all (about as productive as you'd think, lol).
As mentioned, I don't know what they were thinking. I tried my best, my best clearly sucked (I don't have enough experience with this), and they were probably right to just tell me to fuck off. But I bet the whole situation was stressful for them, too; my partner said "they're feeling overwhelmed," and I think that was probably true. I was frightened of the dog, and they were frightened of the social situation.
I resent them for not breaking it off earlier (I went out of my way to swing by their place several weekends, the action was not free; the chocolates were also not free; the dog treat was also not free), but I understand it was a complicated situation. I don't know if there was a way to solve it just between us. The dog probably needs their barrier aggression handled in ways they don't feel competent to handle, and why handle it if it's really just one person triggering it, anyway, and that person can vary their route? I think if I were in their situation I would have let the stranger get to know the dog, but they might have been afraid the dog would just attack me. Like, if it's really just me it's reacting to, maybe the barrier isn't the problem. Maybe I just pattern-match to some past abuser (I'm told it had some) and it would want to get revenge. It's a hard situation, and it's a lot of work to resolve.
And now, to circle back to why I'm even talk about that:
It's work *they personally* didn't seem to want to do (if so, I don't blame them for that part (don't know them and their dog well enough to judge what had been tried, what the track record of training in general was, etc), sincerely just for the lack of communication), *but* many dog owners do, and I don't think the article really appreciates that kind of dynamic. It sort of nods to it by mentioning training, it plays into the dominance model, but IMO you can't have both the dominance model *and* a model where you get dog affection only for "keeping the dog alive." Getting a dog to play nice in society is definitely not in the grab bag "keep the dog alive," and it's effort - an effort many dog owners do in fact expend. We hear about the ones that don't the most, because the ones that do a good job with it are effectively invisible.
TL;DR/synopsis:
The fact dogs are scary means there's often a bunch of effort involved in making dogs integrate into human society. The effort is often not simple treat/no-treat. Keeping a dog alive does indeed result in dog affection, but also comes with new social stresses to manage (or at least accept as a trade-off).
Aside, personal interest:
Are there any (non-hostile) strategies other than "just change your route" that work for the kind of situation I described? (I assume the answer is "No", but maybe someone has a clever idea that I can make use of if this ever happens to me somewhere else.)
Just walk past at the furthest distance you can. Trying to make friends with a stranger's dog in their own yard is ruining the dog's ability to act as watchdog, and is going to creep the owner out in the same way as trying to keep your face off a security camera.
They should have said so, but assume that's the default.
*Carry* pepper-spray. Knowing that you would win hard if it actually came down to it can help keep you calm. Pepper-spray is extremely intimidating to most mammals, even just spraying the ground between you two would be enough. If you're chill about it then the aggression can be more tolerable.
Had to check if that's legal here, but it is! That's honestly great advice. Thank you!
Continuing to walk the same route, but just walking past the dog with as much distance as you can maintain at a brisk, steady pace is really, truly your best bet here. If the dog hasn't jumped the fence and attacked you during all of the times you've tried to interact with it, I feel very confident saying it almost definitely won't. It likely physically can't even if it wanted to, and it doesn't seem like it wants to even when 'provoked' (I know you weren't trying to provoke it, but that is unfortunately probably what your attempts at friendship amounted to).
Your speculation that maybe you coming increasingly close/interacting in various ways and then ultimately leaving when the dog didn't let up translated into the dog's brain as "I did an extra good job of protecting the house today" was probably spot-on, sorry to say. A book I read years ago about dog training suggested this is why so many dogs bark at the mail carrier specifically, even if they're otherwise ok with strangers-- the dog thinks "this guy comes right up to the house every day, but when I bark at him, he turns around and leaves! I should make sure to bark every day!"
It's possible that the dog would have eventually become ok with you if it saw its owner welcoming you into their home, but they've made it clear they won't be doing that. It's probably not going to be possible to make friends with a dog while it's actively protecting its territory without its person there to override that impulse and show that you're a friend and not an invader. Attempts to do so on your own will inevitably backfire, and (as another commenter mentioned) are unlikely to be welcomed by many strangers.
That doesn't mean you have to avoid the route, though! Just walk past! I know that sounds much easier said than done when you're experiencing fear surrounding this dog, but it's really the best option. The dog might even eventually tone it down when it realizes you aren't going to linger anyway (though it might still bark anyway... depends on the dog.)
It's basically a jumpscare when the dog starts barking (I can't see it and then suddenly BAM it's there and being very loud; I get a rush of adrenaline each time even when I prepare myself it might happen), and there isn't a way to walk past the property further away without climbing a fence onto the meadow, so unfortunately "just walk a different route" it is if I want to avoid the significant stress hormones (and I do, it really wasn't sustainable).
> A book I read years ago about dog training suggested this is why so many dogs bark at the mail carrier specifically, even if they're otherwise ok with strangers
Ooh, this is fascinating, and makes sense now that you say it. Thanks for sharing!
> It's probably not going to be possible to make friends with a dog while it's actively protecting its territory without its person there to override that impulse and show that you're a friend and not an invader.
Yeah, I figured, hence the attempt to reach out. Sad this is true, but good to have an outside opinion on this that isn't just me trying to make guesses about it. (At the very least we're making the same guess together, hah!)
Thank you so much for taking the time to take my query seriously and give advice!
Agree with the other person that this dog clearly has hard wired tendencies to guard its territory, so you are basically asking it to not do the one job it was bred for purposely and that's a hard ask. If it was outside its property, it'd probably be fine. One of my two dogs is like this and nothing we have tried over five years stops it, so we basically just don't let him into the yard at all except for a quick pee. He doesn't act like this when he's off "his" territory, and the other dog never acts like that. Any dog with with shepherd or guardian breeds in it was purpose bred to protect a flock and ward off intruders, so it's just really going against nature to get it to stop. The one thing you did wrong was threaten it with a stick. It probably will never forgive you for that lol. My dog remembers every precise dog in the neighborhood that has ever barked or looked at him crosswise, and doesn't forget for years.
One thing you could try is throwing treats over the fence. While saying "hi doggy!" In a happy and high pitched confident voice, as if you're really happy to see him. I've had that work before. But it won't always, especially if it's a very serious dog. And I know owners may not think that's okay, but honestly I'd they just let their dog stay outside menacing and acting like that with strangers walking by, they sound like jerks, so I wouldn't care, I'd toss the dog treats anyway.
The one thing you can feel somewhat confident about is that it is EXTREMELY unlikely the dog would jump the fence or even try. Dogs have an exquisitely sense of their own territory and generally the type that thinks it's its job to guard the territory has no interest in leaving it's bounds. The ones who try to roam are the not the same ones as the dogs who like to patrol and ward off intruders. My fence barking dog wouldnt leave the property even if I left the fence wide open.
> One thing you could try is throwing treats over the fence. While saying "hi doggy!" In a happy and high pitched confident voice, as if you're really happy to see him. I've had that work before.
That's an exciting plan. I'll keep that in mind if this sort of scenario ever happens to me again. :)
> The one thing you can feel somewhat confident about is that it is EXTREMELY unlikely the dog would jump the fence or even try. Dogs have an exquisitely sense of their own territory and generally the type that thinks it's its job to guard the territory has no interest in leaving it's bounds. The ones who try to roam are the not the same ones as the dogs who like to patrol and ward off intruders. My fence barking dog wouldnt leave the property even if I left the fence wide open.
That's reassuring to know. I figured something like this might be true, but I'm admittedly also wary of relying on this - this seems like the sort of thing that's "true until it's not", but I reckon you're right that the chance is so small that it's not worth worrying about.
Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts about this! This helps.
I was a dog walker/trainer for 10 years.
1) about 5% of dogs are what people think of as “good” dogs. Most dogs are not and are never going to be that ideal without a whole lot of work (that most people won’t do and as a trainer, I had dogs that were close to ideal with me — to the point of being welcome in my home — but horrible with their owners).
2) people who refer to their dogs as kids or fur babies are never willing to do the work and make all manner of excuses for and about their dog’s behavior. (This is commonality with parents of bratty children.)
3) Dog parks and doggy daycare exacerbate problems.
4) Allowing a dog to have free access to a fenced in yard makes them barrier aggressive and incontinent over time.
5) That dog is the way it is because it’s likely an unpleasant animal in the house and those people don’t like it very much but can’t admit it.
6) #5 is true for more people than you think
7) the advice to throw treats over the fence is very good. I’d recommend freeze dried liver treats. Eventually that dog will associate your appearance with them and look forward to it. If you really want to do it right, drop the treat only in a pause between barks.
Thanks for the frank assessment! I didn't realise (although maybe I could have figured it out if I'd thought about the situation from that angle) that dogs naturally tended toward barrier aggression if they're given free access to a fenced yard, that's interesting, but makes sense. Appreciate the insights.
> the advice to throw treats over the fence is very good. I’d recommend freeze dried liver treats. Eventually that dog will associate your appearance with them and look forward to it. If you really want to do it right, drop the treat only in a pause between barks.
Thanks for the tip!
I never encounter r/petfree but since you say that it's mostly about dogs, I thought you're talking about r/dogfree. It even has more subscribers! I actually want to see your analysis if you encounter that sub instead.
I actually subscribed to r/dogfree, even though I'm ambivalent about dogs, because I have to hear some dissenting opinions against the rest of Reddit. (I subscribe to r/stop gaming for same reason. I also want to subscribe to r/catfree but that sub is so dead it'd feel sad. The cat conspiracy wins!). And I don't see the worst thing you see about r/petfree here. Or maybe I'm just passing it without realizing.
Makes sense /r/catfree would be dead. Cats have toxoplasmosis on their side; dogs only have millennia of cooperation and co-evolution. Bad dog owners are more visible than bad cat owners because cats only exist in the home.
I used to know a couple where the wife had slowly turned into a cat hoarder, and their house was in an absolutely appalling state - the smell when you walked in the door, dear God. And you would never have known it unless you went in their house, or possibly got the husband drunk in the right mood.
> Cats have toxoplasmosis on their side; dogs only have millennia of cooperation and co-evolution.
"Society Is Fixed, Biology Is Mutable".
Dogs killing people makes the news fairly regularly. You have to try really really hard to get killed by a cat. Just sayin'.
The frequency with which a thing appears in the news or in people's fears does not necessarily have any correlation to the frequency with which that thing occurs in proportion to other things. Plane crashes, shark attacks, shootings, &c.
Here's the CDC reporting 22.5% toxoplasmosa gondii infection rate in the United States: https://www.cdc.gov/dpdx/toxoplasmosis/index.html
Here's the Lancet saying it's up to a third globally: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(04)16412-X/abstract
The Wikipedia article says global infection rate is about 50% but varies between countries.
While we're "just saying'" things, you never see a seeing-eye cat, or a search-and-rescue cat, or a cat-cart, or people taking their cats to the cat park to go play cat sports which benefit owner and animal alike. You never see a prison running a cat-training program to help rehabilitate inmates.
You hardly see cats at all, really, because they're hidden from the public eye, quietly and accidentally infecting a quarter of the population with a behavior-altering parasite which provably reduces quality of life for a good portion of its victims.
You make it sounds as if the cats had it in for you.
I was careful to add "accidentally" because no, I don't think cats as a species are involved in a grand conspiracy; I think it's an unintentional and unforeseen side effect of the modern* trend of letting cats into the home that a parasite which co-evolved with them to help debilitate their prey (mice) has infected so many people.
* I'm aware that Persians, at least, had cats as pets in pre-modern times. I don't know enough about their society to say anything intelligent about the effects of T. Gondii on, say, 13th-century Persian society; but for the west, treating cats as anything other than "those stray things which keep mice out of the barn" is a recent development.
I did actually see a video of a cat program at a prison.
At my university, a surprising number of grad students seem to take their cats out for walks (split between leash on a harness and putting the cat in a stroller). I always see them while biking between campus and my home in faculty housing.
But they still don’t have cat parks, or search and rescue cats.
There are cat therapy programmes in prisons.
Cats are ecologically disastrous but not nearly as annoying to encounter in public (and usually try to avoid you).
Cats are quiet and keep to themselves, dogs bark loudly and are at the door every time you visit someone who owns one. One of these species is a lot easier to deal with as a non pet-owner.
Until a few years ago, I had no idea how many people hate dogs, and how strongly they hate them. I mean, of course, I was aware that some people don't like canines, but whatever? However, anti-dog posts began to really crop up about 2-3 years ago on Russian social platforms, and to grow in intensity. Part of it is stray dogs problem that plagues many cities farther away from Moscow: the federal laws prohibit killing strays these days, but local authorities usually bungle (intentionally or not) catch, sterilize & release programs, and avoid building and maintaining shelters, or if they do build shelters, they quickly overflow.
But a lot - and I mean a great lot - of anger is directed toward owned dogs. Part of it is that culture of picking up shit after your pet is pretty undeveloped in Russia (and in some parts of Europe, I must say - I'm looking at you, Portugal, my love). People are annoyed by dog shit everywhere. Part of it are off-leash dogs in parks: while this is usually prohibited by park rules, almost no park enforce this, even in Moscow. Frankly, as a dog owner, I break this rules, too: there is simply no other place to let your dog play with other dogs than park's greens, local dog parks are very small and mostly intended for training dogs, not for play. So after 8PM when most children go home, parks often turn into lawless dog zones.
I get their complaints, but intensity of hate surprised me: these people constantly advocate shooting dogs, spraying dogs with pepper spray, placing poisoned food and other doghunters' methods.
One thing that drew my attention is that these post really only started to appear a few years ago en masse. Before that, there might be a complaint or two, but these days, it's a torrent - I had to ban some tags to avoid seeing them constantly. Every day there area few posts about how a stray bit or mauled a child, or a woman somewhere. This grew to the point where dogs, especially strays, seem from social media to be a problem on the same scale as rowdy immigrants, and a notch or two above any war or politics theme.
My vague recollection of growing up in a nice neighborhood of Los Angeles in the 1960s vs. today is that residents have gotten a _lot_ better at picking up after their dogs than when I was a kid.
I would recommend the Mutt Mitt plastic bag:
https://muttmitt.com/?srsltid=AfmBOoppQlN1YBqTIORv5daAzbfePonlmU0b4v35O2XK4nNtQ28Ho5W-
These are given away for free from dispensers along the northside of the Los Angeles River big concrete ditch between Coldwater Canyon and Whitsett Avenue in the Southeast San Fernando Valley. But after three coyote siblings moved in last year, my dog doesn't want to go there anymore, so paying for them seems pretty reasonable.
Things are improving, yes, but slowly.
"Things are improving, yes, but slowly."
Indeed. Well said.
Of course, that's not the worst imaginable outcome.
> plastic bag
Here's a thing I've never understood.
Consider the local park or dog-walking trail. If you put the dogshit in a bag and take it to the bin, that's wonderful, good on you; you're an awesome person. And tbh, if you just leave the crap on the ground - if it's on grass/bushes and not where people walk, it's not the end of the world; it'll degrade on its own pretty soon. It's literally fertiliser.
So why do I regularly see plastic bags filled with dog shit lying in the grass verge and/or tied to tree branches, lasting little monuments guaranteed to stick around through rain and storm, carefully preserved for posterity? Who does this? Why? What is going through their head?
people pick after their dog but after a while they get annoyed walking with a poop bag in their hand and drop it wherever
People pick up after their dog but it smells so they leave it for the journey back and forget to pick it up again.
I wouldn't put it all on dogs, people get crazy about cats too. I remember one particular video posted on social media about someone cooking in their kitchen with their partner, and they had several cats (I can't remember how many but more than three). And the cats were *everywhere* - jumping up on the counters where the raw food was being prepared, twining around the 'owner's' legs (an accident waiting to happen, especially when carrying a pot full of hot food), just generally being nuisances.
And it never occurred to either of the two idiot humans to boot the damn cats out of the kitchen. No, they had let the cats behave like this all their lives, so now the animals were doing as they had been trained, and the fool humans were happy to have food contaminated by their cats and the risk of falling over them while trying to cook and scalding themselves or breaking a limb. No discipline, no sense. All because the pet will give (some degree of) love and affection for free.
I like cats, but not in my food. Similarly, I like dogs, but not licking my face. Dogs seem to sense this and try to lick my face, and after observing me wrestle their pet the owners never believe me when I try to explain that I don't mind the dog, really, and actually I quite enjoy petting them if they are amenable; I simply don't want to be covered in slobber.
I do not /feel/ like I am being unreasonable, but who knows?
It shouldn't be surprising because dog ownership upticked during Covid. Now you have a bunch of morons letting their dogs run rampant all over the city. It's a genuine public nuisance.
This post felt like a return to form for me, after the more TDS-y posts Scott's been doing recently. This felt a lot more like what I started reading for. I'm not sure I've got much to add to the discussion, but given that most of the time this sort of feedback comes in the form of negativity, I'm taking the opportunity to speak up here instead.
Thanks. I already know I have large contigents of people who love one of my categories of post (politics, psych, AI, etc) and hate the others, so I'm not planning on switching from one to another anytime soon, but it's always good to hear that any particular post has made someone happy.
FWIW your recent Trump- and Moldbug-related posts feel to me like the first time you've pushed back against the far right with real energy and conviction, which is a relief because there's such a clear gulf between the values you profess (and seem to genuinely live by!) and the values that underlie so much of what they do and say. And while I'm sure there are people who would legitimately prefer fewer political posts, I strongly suspect that those who invoke "TDS" are mostly upset that you're hitting the wrong targets.
This.
Same
Yeah, me too
Same
+1
Another +1.
+1
Respectfully, I have a strong negative emotional reaction when I read comments like this (and the depressing concurrences), even though I detest Trump. They come across as gross, discouraging, and regressive.
I start to feel like there's been progress towards undoing the fruitless, bitter, repetitive arguments that have characterized decades of my adult life. Then here come these comments trying to drag us back towards mutual caricature and ignorance.
When I read Scott's body of work, it couldn't be clearer how antithetical it is to MAGA, Trump, and other villains of the progressive imagination. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be enough: people want Scott to be an obvious partisan, to conform to their precise worldview and make the exact same compromises they've made to reconcile the world's vexing contradictions.
Comments like these read like a call to repudiate curiosity, charity, and independence: please prove me wrong.
+1. Also, I never voted for Trump, and now will never have to consider that option, but I found I had even less patience for people who reflexively opposed anything he did and misunderstood anything he or his supporters said. Among the best thing Scott ever wrote was "You Are Still Crying Wolf", and the fact that he has to shove a giant disclaimer above it is proof to me that that faction is still relevant, and will likely remain so even after 2028. A position that tries in good faith to understand Trump and his supporters before presenting disagreement is a position I can actually consider.
I find the same mechanics with Dan Carlin. He's a libertarian obligate and he's criticized the rising authoritarianism a lot, especially when democrat's in power. But in trump 1st term he barely published anything, saying, he barely have anything (useful) novel thing to say. But barely a month in trump 2nd term he got on a rant, because trump legitimately raises authoritarianism a ton.
The commenters reaction is exactly the same as Scott here. Being accused of not doing enough against trump in 1st term and still being accused of not doing enough against trump in 2nd term (because in the same episode he still criticized democrats a lot that enables a lot of this to happen). Actually after listing this, it's eerily too same. Do Scott listen to Dan Carlin? Or is libertarianism actually a consistent enough ideology to have these precise Schelling points.
I stopped listening to his episodes of common sense when he stopped making them. This post prompted me to look him up again, and sure enough after a 3 year hiatus, he released another ep of common sense in march ("Common Sense 324 – What’s Good for the Goose")
> But barely a month in trump 2nd term he got on a rant,
Are you referring to the most march-episode of common sense? Or does he post his rants somewhere else now?
How would it repudiate independence at all? Scott should call it like he sees it. If the President does something he thinks is good he should say it and if the President does something he thinks is bad he should say it too.
I'm happy when Scott calls it like he sees it, including justifiable criticism of Trump.
I object to praise that tries to lure him into partisanship by celebrating "the first time [Scott] pushed back against the far right with real energy and conviction."
Eh, I'd say that he always has been a lukewarm partisan, there already were "Trump bad, vote Dem" posts in 2015. However, wokeists have traumatized him so much over the years that he'll never fully get onboard their train, thankfully.
To try and add my own context to Vaclavs post, I think that there is *so much* justifiable criticism of Trump, so many things he does that are outright outrageous, it is surprising that we have not seen even more from Scott that is even more forceful
I think for me it is my paranoia due to spending so much time in unhealthy and far-right places on the internet (and not having much of a social life outside of that). I started to see enemies everywhere, incl. in Scott, so it is refreshing to be proven wrong.
"Independence" does not, and logically cannot, mean "never take a position aligned with the mainstream, for some definition of mainstream".
It logically cannot because then you are just an inverted comformist, even if the mainstream is unequivocally defined. And, the mainstream is not unequivocally defined. There are as many "mainstreams" out there as environments you care to define. So in practice you are asking for an heckler's veto where you can just point at some liberal environment, say that they hate Trump, and then demand everyone else just shuts up about it because well, those guys at Mother Jones are already criticizing the admin, no? How convenient.
Also I must ask, do you demand this astounding (one could say paralyzing) level of sophistication and charity the other way around? When Scott was basically accusing the FDA of mass manslaughter (I don't bedrudge him, he brought the receipts and made a coherent argument for it), did you feel that it was some repudiation of curiosity, charity and independence? How about when he compared American and British liberals to extractive colonial elites and racial minorities to their mercenaries armies, was he dragging us toward mutual caricature and ignorance? If not, one might suspect you are engaging in a very extreme form of special pleading.
I agree with all of your points. Please re-read my comment in light of that
More plusses.
I heavily invoke TDS (Sam Harris has been ruined by it) but I’ve never noticed it in Scott at all.
Well, it makes sense. If people wanted to see Trump-bashing, they could just go to the mainstream media for that. Most of his audience is here for... different reasons.
I want Scott to hit all of the targets. All of them, even people I mostly agree with, because usually everyone has some sort of flaws and bringing those to light is useful for self-reflection. Even when I disagree with most of what Scott says in a post, I still learn something.
Arguments are not soldiers. Arguments are knowledge.
I want Scott to be anti-woke...no, no, not like that!
I hate this meme because it presumes that all positions with the same "anti" label are the same.
There are many different angles you can critique something from.
Sorry, he’s anti-anti-woke already, you’ll have to wait for the next “anti”
I think it's important to make sure your criticisms of Trump are "Trump did SOMETHING BAD" and not "TRUMP did something bad", and I view him as an aspiring dictator and mass murderer who (along with his opponents, America's problems are all over its governing class) influenced my decision to emigrate.
Issue based criticism tends to be more effective and not get lost in the partisan noise. There are times when it's necessary to directly criticize a political figure and not a policy or idea, but not nearly as many as one might think (or as many as maximizes engagement, for that matter.)
I don't view Scott's posts as being TDS, but I think the concept of TDS/Orange Man Bad is pointing to a real flaw in a lot of political criticism and not just sour grapes from people whose position is "Orange Man Good".
I would personally say that writing long posts against right-wing reactionaries is a lot more effort than most people put into encouraging a healthier democracy. So if you have not read them already, I would read Scott's earlier anti-Moldbug posts
Since we're apparently doing this now, -1.
How long have you even been here, that you haven't noticed that Scott has been pushing back against the far right since the pre-Trumpian epoch? One of his early famous posts, in *2013*, might as well have been titled "Why Mencius Moldbug is wrong about everything", and you're just now noticing that he sometimes pushes back against Mencius Moldbug?
I'm guessing that every time he pushes back against the far *left* with real energy and conviction, you write off everything he's said about the right as "oh, he can't have really meant that or he wouldn't say such bad things about the left". In which case, sure, maybe this is the first time he's really pushed back against the far right since the last time he pushed back against the far left.
I think this is unfair. I've been here since ~2013. Scott was much more vocal against, say, feminism in specific and wokeness in general. Like, fine, granted he wrote the anti reactionary FAQ, but reactionary behavior is a really small fraction of the far right and not even the one that most people think is relevant today. And he also wrote a non libertarian FAQ, even though Scott is libertarian-ish.
But off the top of my head, he's written at least a dozen, maybe more _extremely popular_ posts criticizing feminism, criticizing cancel culture, criticizing people for criticizing Trump, and criticizing the left in general. And he recognizes that he's done this! This is what Twilight of the Edgelords is all about!
I know you've been here a while, so I say this respectfully: I think your framing of people who are pointing to a prior bias is a bad strawman.
I took John's first sentence as a subtle barb at people who insist on viewing Scott in terms of tribal bias.
I also notice you spent most of your comment talking about Scott in terms of tribal bias.
The point isn't supposed to be to tally how many articles go this way, how many that way, and judge Scott on that. The point is to read what he actually said about each one, and to consider whether it's true, or how true it is, or how salient it is, etc. ACX is not supposed to be a place for generally left- or right-wing people to get their daily fill.
I think that the reason why he spent a lot of time arguing against feminists and not so much time arguing against people who wanted to deport all the foreigners or abolish Roe or start a trade war with the world was that the latter people were mostly absent in his social/online circles, not that he thought they were right.
For the red tribe, immigrants are the outgroup.
For the blue tribe, the red tribe is the outgroup, immigrants are just a fargroup.
For the grey tribe, the blue tribe is the outgroup, the red tribe is just a fargroup.
Presumably, being on tumblr and the like ca 2014, Scott got exposed to a lot of feminists who were wrong on the internet, and whose wrong arguments were believed by otherwise smart people. There were likely no posts trending on how having ICE deport random PhD students was required to make America great again, and certainly no smart people getting convinced of the latter, so Scott spent a lot of time arguing with the feminists but not with MAGA.
O, ya, I agree with this and fully understand the why. Things have obviously changed quite a bit
For the red tribe, immigrants are a mix - some in, some out, some far. *Illegal* immigrants are the outgroup.
To be fair, Scott did explicitly recommend that people should vote for any candidate other than Trump in 2024 (which was just last year, even if it feels like three years ago).
Also, accusing Scott of TDS (as the top level poster does) is rich given posts such as https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/ . But then again, I do not believe that TDS is a very coherent concept.
Having read SSC/ACX for a decade, I am not very surprised that Scott is not a fan of Trump II.
Sure, Scott (along with much of the Grey Tribe) was unhappy with how the FDA ran things. And RFK jr was presumably also unhappy with how the FDA ran things. But they would certainly disagree about almost any specifics. In this contemporary America as well as in WH40K, the enemy of your enemy is still a floating, greasy, armored brain [1] -- or even worse an anti-vaxxer.
Likewise with Social Justice. From my recollection, the big clashes between SJ and the Grey Tribe were about things which the Grey Tribe thought were true but the SJ people tried to cancel (like HBD). It should be no surprise that DJT, the guy who started his political career as a Birther and has been running on a platform of election denial might not be seen as the savior from woke lies by anyone who cares about the truth.
[1] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/03/05/in-the-grim-etcetera
I think he's bean much more critical of Moldbug/Trump in his 2014 era posts. I think a lot of readers are just too new to have heard about it.
Look man, lots of people may have not realized that Scott Alexander is a poly guy living on a Berkeley commune who has dated trans women in the past. I don’t know what he should’ve done to make them more aware of that fact. Put a disclaimer at the top of each article?
This post also makes me happy. I'm misophonic-ish and I've never seen another person describe my experience so lucidly.
Same. I fully relate to it and had never made the connection to a disposition orneriness or anger.
I too suffer from it and chewing & eating noises are my main (but by no means some) trigger. That extends to strange things like people who hold their forks wrong — perhaps like a shovel rather than a fork — and yes, the irritation is more intense with people I am close to and if it interrupts my concentration or train of thought. If I’m day-dreaming and disassociating successfully, it will go unnoticed.
I’m curious if there is any definitive account of the origin of misophonia. I believe it is correlated with autism, though that can’t fully explain it. In my own case, I had a childhood experience that I blame for it. My father, who I am now estranged from, was a disgusting eater. He had mild Tourette’s and the chewing and gargling and twitching and smacking with mouth open was such a disgusting site I would rush through dinner and excuse myself to go read in my room alone. I can still hear food dangling in his throat while he spoke or see him twitch with an open mouth revealing a moist bolus clinging to his teeth and gums. Truly nightmare fuel.
As a new parent I would love to see more parenting posts. Either in depth parenting strategy, or fun posts, all great to me.
That's very interesting!
Jumping on this conversation to ask: How do you choose which posts will go behind the paywall, and which will go free?
Do you somehow categorize your drafts so that the paying subscribers can have access to a wide variety of posts? Or is there any other priority? (e.g. the highest quality posts, the longest posts, etc...)
That was exactly my feeling, too. It's not only interesting writing, it also makes use of Scott's best qualities of a person: the ability to take people's experience at face value, to resist projecting or taking the superficial emotional response to weird behaviour, and to dig deep, with an open mind, into the weirder expressions of the weirder experiences.
Also: people on the internet are people. There's often a strange disconnect between online spaces and physical spaces, where there seem to be opinions you only ever hear in one sphere but never encounter in the other. There's forums full of *kinds of* people you never even knew existed, and occasionally, Scott will point at one and say "What's with those guys?", but in a really good and thoughtful way, with genuine interest in a truthful answer.
To be fair, the TDS posts are a bit refreshing after several years of TDSDS posts.
For those unfamiliar, I had to look it up, and as best I can tell, TDS stands for Trump Derangement Syndrome. I for one would appreciate a comment policy that discourages acronyms like this that aren't super common or obvious from context.
Although I must admit everyone else in this thread seems to be aware of that meaning, so maybe I'm just living under a rock.
I had to look it up too.
I then also found its use with regard to Scott's writing mildly offensive. Invoking TDS seems to me to have strong "no true scotsman" vibes in any context though.
TDS was a somewhat coherent accusation to wield in the "You are still crying wolf" era. (Not against Scott, though.)
But since then, Trump has denied the outcome and tried to have his mob overturn a federal election, which is a pretty objective difference between him and other US politicians. It seems pretty obvious that the people who insist that Trump is just a normal Republican like GWB or Reagan are the deranged ones.
I'll have to keep an eye out for these people who claim Trump is normal. The strong impression I get from Trump supporters is more like "damn right he's not normal, but a lot of politicians are not normal, and a lot of political activists are *especially* not-normal, and it's about time someone of his type of not-normal came around to fight back the other not-normal".
Trump has indeed done some objectively unusual things by the standards of a typical politician from roughly the 1975-2015 period. OTOH, Trump has managed to *not* do a great many things that are attributed to him anyway; the people who make such attributions are the ones who come honestly by the TDS label.
I love my dog, but she turned into 80 pounds of muscles and sharp teeth.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faab27cd5-eee3-48b2-9cc4-2e746766e6e0_360x480.jpeg
She violently loves all humans, especially little girls --other than mailmen, Costco delivery persons, and the homeless -- but 5% of other dogs going for walks are her sworn enemies due to Reasons that only she can sniff out.
When she was an overgrown puppy she loved all living things. So, I'd take her to the local park's evening "Go Dog Go"-like Dog Party where she'd frolic and I was happy for the opportunity to be getting to know my dog-owning neighbors. But then she reached puberty at 18 months and decided that it was her duty to protect our Pack from Bad Dogs, which she had a foolproof method for sniffing out that I would never ever be able to understand.
So now, rather than shoot the breeze with my neighbors, we go on long walks and when we see another dog coming, we jaywalk to the other sidewalk.
In general, human beings love my slightly frightening big dog, especially attractive women.
Why does it look like she's warning you against something? "Don't do it Steve. Don't post those statistics"
Like he said, Reasons that only she can sniff out.
Personal question, but adjacent to the topic, do you have children? And is the dog more fixated on you or your spouse?
Considering the horrible things said about children in the childfree sub, it's wild that the petfree sub could ever be considered as insane as that.
People seem to forget that animals are below humans, and that insufferable children aren't comparable to *an animal*.
I originally titled this "In search of r/childfree and r/petfree, but when I tried reading both subreddits to make sure I was being fair, I found myself pretty sympathetic to the r/childfree people. The typical post seemed more like https://www.reddit.com/r/childfree/comments/1hm8bqf/this_is_so_ridiculous_i_cant_even_see_straight/ , or complaining about relatives who had children without really wanting them and were abusing them, or how family members were cutting them off for daring not to have children, or something. I ended up thinking most of the people there were pretty sane and on the right side of their conflicts and not feeling comfortable adding them to a post like this.
I'm not familiar with r/childfree, but the top non-pinned post right now (for me on old.reddit) is this one -- https://www.reddit.com/r/childfree/comments/1kmakgp/my_horse_and_i_are_not_there_for_your_stupid_kids/ -- which gives me the sense that the general vibe on the sub is pretty deranged. Not because the OP doesn't have a right to refuse to engage with strangers, or to get annoyed if they push it, but because of the tone and the vocab ("some stupid fucking breeder", "I hate the little fuckers, and the stupid breeders responsible for them") and the expression of genuine hatred toward a young child whose crime seems to have been... getting excited about a horse, and showing it in an annoying way. And the only dissenting comments are buried by downvotes.
Calling parents "breeders" and insulting children like that... but the petfree sub people are more insane. What a joke lol.
> Calling parents "breeders"
I believe this originated in gay culture, where the term applies equally to parents and childless straight people.
That sounds like a very healthy outlook :)
Yeah honestly feels like you somehow got a very biased sample of r/childfree - anytime I have stumbled across it (maybe selection effects in how it gets linked) those people same way more delusional than pretty much any other slice of reddit I have been to.
There's also a solid amount of "I just scheduled/got a bilateral salpingectomy!".
Yeah, the joy they get at the thought of sterilization really goes to show how insane they are. Much more than a pet hater could ever be.
I think it makes a lot of sense. Confidence that one's body can't be used to create another person against one's will is pretty nice, and sterilization is more apocalypse-proof than long-acting reversible contraception is.
If someone doesn't want to have children, why would it be insane that they feel joy at progress towards their life goals?
To me, that's equivalent to an infertile person getting successful fertility treatment, but I bet you wouldn't call those people insane.
> why would it be insane that they feel joy at progress towards their life goals?
You will justifiy all kinds of insanity with these stupid takes.
> To me, that's equivalent to an infertile person getting successful fertility treatment
You have a completed twisted sense of ethics and morals. The normal is being able to have children, not being infertile. Fertility treatment makes sense because it's to solve a very rare problem. Fertility is not an abnormal condition in need of treatment.
> but I bet you wouldn't call those people insane.
I in fact mostly do, because more often than not it involves throwing away zygotes, which is by all measures, killing human beings. And murder is wrong.
It's normal to not want children.
It's normal to seek sterilization if you don't want children, because other methods of birth control aren't 100% reliable or free of side effects.
You are calling either one or both of those things insane, and I don't think you can reasonably justify that.
I checked both just now and both seem to mostly be full of trivial complaints. Some of the top threads in r/childfree include a lot of EPIC CLAPBACKS to mildly annoying comments by coworkers and like (like https://www.reddit.com/r/childfree/comments/1kmimfc/new_coworker_immediately_whips_out_the_must_be/ and https://www.reddit.com/r/childfree/comments/1klp8b1/you_cannot_comprehend_how_hard_parenting_is_until/ and https://www.reddit.com/r/childfree/comments/1khxp4u/i_finally_got_to_use_the_comeback_ive_been_saving/).
"below" is an interesting characterization. It's reasonable to say "I am a human, so I value humans more highly", but to assert that there's an objective ordering principle seems...strange.
There is an objective ordering principle, given to us by God.
If you're a relativist that thinks nothing can be objective then there is no point in talking about anything.
Christianity is not among them, but there are belief systems where animals (or *some* animals) have equal moral standing to humans.
And those religions are wrong.
I disagree. I think we should be kind to all life that is itself kind.
"There is an objective ordering principle, given to us by God."
Cats would say the same, only the god is Bastet, who obviously intended cats to be superior or she would not have made them in Her image.
Cats would not say the same. Firstly, they can't talk, and secondly, they don't know who God or Bastet are, nor what an "objective ordering principle" is. Also, God is not "a god", so even if they claimed that an ordering principle had been given to them by *a* god, that would still not be an equivalent claim.
Since humans actually do bear the image of God in a way that cats don't, we have the freedom to imagine worlds of our own making, and you could, if you so desired, choose to use that power to imagine a world with hyper-intelligent talking cats who would say the same. So, in a sense, cats might "say the same" within the context of your imagined story. But since you don't have the power to actually bring those cats into existence, this would not give you any information about the place of actually-existing cats.
Have you ever thought that a cat would not consider anything you have to say worth responding to?
Again, what is real doesn't depend on what I have or have not thought of. For that to be the case, I would have to actually be God, not just made in God's image.
See, this is why people like you are mocked. Again, if you can't even agree that humans are above animals then nothing can ever be discussed, because nothing is true.
He was joking you human supremacist idiot.
(And when I said you should "feed yourself to a lion" I was telling you that you are an asshole, not suggesting that lions are "above" humans or anything like that, just in case you couldn't tell)
> human supremacist idiot.
You mean normal? Just say normal.
> I was telling you that you are an asshole
Mean :(
My first cat friend was a Bastet. Wonderful cat
There is an objective morality, but it's not yours and it's not a hierarchical ordering principle.
God is fictional. His nonexistent ordering principles are no more relevant to real life than are Anne of Green Gables'.
Precisely because you are human and therefore you value humans more highly, you agree with the statement that "humans are above animals.".
That sounds like a relativist talking, who sees no difference between “I like X more than Y” and “X is objectively above Y”.
It could be. However in my case (I would like to think) it's just someone who understand how humans tend to use language. We often use structures that, on the surface, imply the existence of some kind objective human independent standard, but in reality we don't really think about it that much and just express our (hopefully shared) feelings. For example: "She's beautiful!"
Beauty is objective. Relativists like you are honestly just sad.
Beauty is not objective in the sense that it's something outside of/fully independent from humans. You find things beautiful because of your evolutionary history/social influences and personal development (ie. fully mundane reasons) and not because you have some kind of extra sense which can tap into an essence of perfect beauty and compare things with it or some other woo explanation.
However, beauty is objective in the sense that there is large correlation between what different people find beautiful. Consequently you can teach an AI model to accurately predict beauty ratings (for example facial beauty, this is called facial beauty predicition if you are curious).
It's exactly the same with morality.
Truth is beautiful and comforting lies much less so and I find it sad when people would rather chose the latter for no good reason but a misplaced fear (of upending their previous world-view).
I think he was just pointing out his bias.
Imagine if a Chinese person said: "China is at the centre of the world. We are the only civilised people. All the rest are barbarians. We have a mandate of heaven to rule the world." That would a bias, would it not?
I understand saying humans are inherently valuable. But that's not the same as saying they can't be insufferable.
I never said that they can't be insufferable.
All creatures are morally valuable. If you disagree, feed yourself to a lion.
I said nothing about some creatures not being morally valuable.
ooh! i have that too. but for me it's children.
(i am, however, still totally objectively correct about the existence of children being an ongoing ethical horror. independently of my phobia.)
This must be an interesting situation compared to the pet-stuff, because we were all children once. How do you reconcile the existence of your own childhood with your current view about children? Children as necessary evil, something like anti-natalism, compartmentalization,...?
my position is long and elaborate. there are many, many problems that combine into the ethically horrible situation. they have more or less possible/feasible/scalable/howeverble solutions.
for example, a situation that i think would be Better than now, but not perfect, would be "everyone is sterile by default and there's a free genehacking clinic on every street corner. anyone can enter and ask to be fertile for the next [month to year? idk]. they are asked one question: 'what mods do you want to your gene line? here's the catalogue.' then they are given a pill to take there immediately once. important: the catalogue has the list of *every* trait we know how to mod."
this would be Strictly Better than what we have now and contains features to preclude some failure modes. it may have others. some are features not bugs due to my personal values.
an other one one: universal, unconditional, inalienable, flat equal to all, survivable, birth-to-death, basic income. and exit rights for all children, to cheap (free is cheap) and abundant support services for them. services that they can exit from!
we solved the worst abuses of marriage when exit rights from the institution were instituted. we don't have yet have the tech to exit childhood, but we could have that to exit most abusive situations.
1) I didn't like children when I was a kid, either. At parties I hung out with the adults.
2) I would prefer I had not been born, and I think humans are a net negative for the world, so I guess anti-natalism would sum it up.
> 2) I would prefer I had not been born, and I think humans are a net negative for the world, so I guess anti-natalism would sum it up.
Can you explain what you mean about humanity being a net negative for the world? Are the negative impacts you're considering primarily environmental? And if humanity is a net negative do you see it as a situation where there were positives overwhelmed by negatives or one where there are essentially only negatives?
I think there are positives to humanity. Art is pretty cool, science is impressive. Human social structures can be both cool and impressive. But I put a high value on suffering (meaning any given amount of suffering will outweigh the same amount of some positive feeling) and humans cause a great deal of suffering. I cannot feel this is acceptable.
Other animals cause a great deal of suffering as well. Do you find that unacceptable as well?
There is one way to solve all of this, and that is for humanity to create a worthy heir capable of supplanting all existence. And that requires humanity's continued existence and growth. Sacrifices must be made for the sake of a better future.
Humans are special. As far as we are aware, we have a unique capacity for self awareness, a sense of morality, and we also have a really extraordinary amount of power. Dolphins and mallards are assholes and their behavior bothers me, but I'm not ready to condemn them the way I would a human rapist.
I don't know what you're talking about with worthy heirs and such but I do know that the words "sacrifices must be made" is some big time red flag. I also think we are drifting far from the original topic and should stop here.
Fair enough. How much suffering one thinks a species - or individual - can inflict before it becomes morally abhorrent and its continued existence is unacceptable is a fully subjective determination. It cannot be right or wrong.
I do think the framing isn't useful and since we're here anyway, imperfections and all, we may as well remain but every individual is their own yardstick.
Ah, the Rust Cole philosophy
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NpErW9MnCf8
Awkward question, but are you trans or cis? I usually think of people with cool names including "Sophia" as being trans, but the childphobia I've previously seen has been very VERY heavily concentrated in cis women with pregnancy horror.
Happy to answer! Well, I'm trans. And my childphobia is from being physically, psychologically, and socially terrorized, from ages 3 to 16, by my monstrous stepfather, and all the kids in schools and childcare things, and no adult ever cared because being the collective punching bag was, obviously, all my fault.
(i'm the exact kind of audhd typical to rationalistan. from a time and country where nobody had any idea what that was, including the parade of shrinks i was sent to.)
As for pregnancy.. It is real-life body horror. The more one learns about it, the more horrific. cool to kink on but should stay a fantasy, like tentacle vore. (the solution is exowombs btw)
This sounds less like "children are annoying" and more like "being a child sucks". Calling this childphobia would be like calling being a feminist "femphobia"
oh, no, i also have triggers. being near children is sensory hell to me. they sound like screechy tinnitus and that's the least of the issues.
Sorry to hear about your past. People with stories like that seem to either HATE or LOVE children, no in between. I wonder what determines which way they go.
(Just commenting because I'm also trans) well spotted haha. This is such a meme in the trans community, especially if you see a Luna or Lily or Lilith.
On the one hand, hey if you get to pick your name why not pick something cool. On the other, why do we (well, they, I picked a normal ass name and regret it) all have such a similar conception of cool name.
Well, that's pretty understandable. Parents following naming trends too. Suddenly every new baby is Olivia or Liam, or whatever the current fad is.
You picked a normal name and regret it? You can change it, can't you? I have a friend (cis woman) who named her dog Rachel. Then she realized that she really wanted to be named Rachel. So she changed her name, and now she and her dog are both named Rachel.
My particular state only allows one name change for non-marriage reasons so no I'm pinned to it. Oh well.
I want to be clear just because I used the words "trans" and "regret" in the same sentence, I don't regret changing my name I picked a very normal name explicitly trying to not draw too much attention myself (i.e. being clockable by _blog comment_) but now wish I'd picked something I was more excited by.
Ah, I see. How annoying of your state! And I completely understood that you only regretted picking something like "Susan" (just to pull a boring normie name out of a hat) and wish you'd gone with something that was more meaningful to you.
Is Sophia a trans name? I don't clock it as such...
It's not as stereotypical as some others but yea somewhat. Scott successfully caught it. Could just be lucky. Priors on trans women in the comments on ACX are way higher than average
I think Sophia is also a very popular baby name right now. Minimum viable theory is that for some reason the 2020s culture has settled on liking it (maybe wisdom is in), and so if you see a person old enough to post ACX comments named Sophia, then they probably chose their name in adulthood, which usually means trans.
Based on ACX survey results, about 20% of women here are trans. Adding having a name that's much more common among trans women than cis in typical ACX age brackets probably adds up to a fairly high probability.
Also trans. Sophie was the runner up for my name, and I wound up taking it as my middle name.
For that matter, Erica seems to be a second-tier cliche trans name.
> I usually think of people with cool names including "Sophia" as being trans
I've noticed the same, too. You can pick up on it just by the names. Interesting stuff.
"I agree with the conservatives that public order seems somehow more fundamental, but I agree with Philosophy Bear that this wouldn’t feel obvious to an alien observer".
------------
Really? A mugging has a victim. Or several. Slightly more families requiring social support doesn't. That seems like an easy distinction even if you were to argue that the $$$ damage (through higher taxes in the case of the extra food coupons) is the same.
"For what was once r/TheDonald, it’s brown people (am I joking on this last one? absolutely not)."
-------------
Actchually, I don't think that's controversial.
This is absolutely how most people react to immigration question. The 'correct' answer to immigration is 'it depends' - on the macro economic situation, on the quality of the immigrants etc. So sometimes, more immigrants is good (of a given type ; higher quality ones is not always what's needed if you're looking for people to pick fruits) is good and sometimes, it's not.
Almost no one think of immigration in those terms. For MAGA types/Stephen Miller types, it's a deep deep hatred of brown/black/different people that no logic can touch.
"A mugging has a victim. Or several. Slightly more families requiring social support doesn't."
The families themselves, who have to live in those circumstances? The rest of the community, who have to pay for those social services while living in an area with less financial stability in the margin?
I covered that. I don't think it objectively matches the experience of the person(s) being mugged even if the $$$ amount is the same.
The fact that poor families suffer is more interesting and you could try to compare their suffering to that of a victim but here I think the mugging is clearly worst. People are poor because of complex forces, hard to personalize. It's like being angry at the weather. The mugger is very clearly a human, acting out his intentions and deliberately targeting you. It's personal.
You didn't actually cover that, I don't think anything in your original post implies that the negative experiences of the poor families have any weight at all.
It seems like this is what you said:
* Scott claims that it's not obvious public order is a higher social good than any other
* However, I think it is obvious that public order maintenance is more important
* The clear distinction between them is that public order violations have a victim, and that's why it's obviously worse
I don't think suffering identified with a specific causal agent is intrinsically worse than that with "fuzzy causes". If you can prevent more suffering with less resource spend, I think you should probably do that regardless of the specific causal nature of that suffering.
Also, the idea that "problems involving victims are fundamentally different than problems not involving victims", even if you accept that as a fact, doesn't say anything about relative importance. Just because two things are different doesn't automatically imply some kind of hierarchy between them.
"Cats are better than dogs. This is not just a gut feeling, it's objectively justified. The relevant difference is that cats are felines and dogs are canines!"
* Scott claims that it's not obvious public order is a higher social good than any other
* However, I think it is obvious that public order maintenance is more important
* The clear distinction between them is that public order violations have a victim, and that's why it's obviously worse.
----------------------
A clear victim and a clear perpetrator. I don't think that analogizes to your cat/dog comparison but, hey, if you disagree, that's fine.
NB - I do concede that, once you start talking about affecting mugging vs. other social goods and thus talking about trade offs for public funds, things do get more nuanced.
Still, for an equal amount of $$$ spent, would you prefer to cancel one murder or one instance of jaywalking? You obviously know the answer and it's not controversial.
I actually share your intuition for perpetrator-based crimes being more infuriating than fuzzy-sourced suffering. It could be something that's totally natural, but I could also see it coming from my history at somebody who is unambiguously privileged by the current social order.
It's very easy for me to think of "society" as an agent what is attempting to solve problems, and individuals as "bundles of selfishness" that don't have the ability to see the overall context and so can't actually tell if problems they're experiencing are necessary trade-offs for the greater good.
Even though this is my strong intuition, I can 100% imagine a person who lives in a third world country watching family members die of easily preventable causes. They also might see a grotesque amount of resources being spent on garbage and luxuries in America, and develop different intuitions.
I don't think the jaywalking / murder thing really captures the essence of this. The question as I understand it is that:
All resource constraints and consequences being equal do perpetrator-based problems matter more? It's more like preventing "one poor person starving to death" versus "one murder", where the scenarios are plausibly equivalent in terms of consequences
If you're mugged, that means someone deliberately chose to hurt you, personally. That adds a whole extra kind of victimisation which just isn't present with things like natural disasters or people choosing to spend money on new cars rather than mosquito nets.
I hate weather. It doesn't matter what kind of weather, I hate it all, even "good" weather. Someday I want to move to a place that doesn't have weather, like the Moon. Or possibly Southern California.
Um, what? You think people would rather be poor than be mugged? Or are you just saying that you can be angry about being mugged but it makes no sense to be angry about being poor, even though being poor is worse? I think the worseness is what matters, not anger.
There's certainly a level of poverty at which paying rent feels a lot like a (legal, state-enforced) mugging, a point at which you get conscious of every social institution that tries to squeeze every last cent out of you, because you just don't have that many to spare.
Impersonal market forces are worse, in a way, because there's only a very diffuse target for anger and you can be confident that the society you live in has their back, not yours.
the response to the immigration question is "stop doing borders".
Fine, as long as you have a world government, run by the best the West (Singapore, Japan etc. included) can produce.
Till then...
I don't think it's at all apparent that "crimes with victims and perpetrators" are the most pressing social issues for a government to address. Sometimes, you get much more bang for your buck in improving human welfare by addressing other issues, and I do not share sensibilities that suggest we ought to focus on human crimes anyway.
I've lived in high crime neighborhoods, and to me, the sheer antipathy with which many people react to crime and criminals are as unrelatable as petfree. Crime is a problem, but you can absolutely make society worse throwing good money after bad trying to address it beyond the point of diminishing returns while prioritizing it over other problems.
That's what I said "at comparable level of $$$ impact".
If the choice is between cutting poverty by 50% or reducing mugging by 1% for the same amount of public dollar, you have a trade off on your hands and I agree that cutting poverty in half sounds more beneficial, all things considered.
Where you draw the line will depend on people but most will overweight mugging for the reasons I mentioned.
Wouldn't that depend on what the current rate of poverty & muggings are?
Sure, you're right.
Can we generally agree on the initial point? It is not surprising that mugging is seen as different from poverty (assuming they're not connected) because poverty is seen as caused by impersonal forces while mugging clearly isn't?
We could also say that if an individual in poverty takes steps to alleviate that poverty, there isn't a reason to expect those steps to be countered. But if you start carrying your money in your sock rather than wallet to stop muggers, muggers might start insisting you remove your socks. If potential victims scared by knives start carrying guns, muggers might upgrade to guns as well.
I think if you have a choice between cutting poverty by 1% or cutting mugging by 50%, it’s clear that cutting poverty helps more people by more!
> Almost no one think of immigration in those terms
Actually I think that the terms you describe are exactly the terms that MAGA folks tend to think of immigration in.
There's plenty of room for argument over the exactly optimal mix of immigrants into your country, but there's no point in discussing it until your country has actual control over immigration; until then immigrants will be self-selected based on proximity, lack of better options and a willingness to disobey the law, which is definitely _not_ what you want to be selecting based on.
This would seem more convincing if they weren't revoking visas of people who seem to be operating well in society and here for beneficial reasons.
+1.
Their hatred of immigrants doesn't really seem based even on variations in the border crossing levels or in the deportations numbers (Obama had done a lot of these to, essentially, no credit whatsoever from the conservative crowd).
They'll pretend their concerns are for law, order, economic impact etc. But, given that immigrants seem to commit less crimes than locals, order isn't really affected, economic impact - in the case of the US in recent years - is generally positive, the reality is that they are shades of Stephen Miller.
Personally, I think it's obvious that things that end in injury or death are a bigger deal than things that are just annoying, but I don't think it matters what causes the injury or death. I think living somewhere where you have a one in a million chance of dying of kidney failure is better than somewhere where you have a one in a million chance of the government taking your kidney by force to save someone with kidney failure. But a lot of people seem to think the second is worse, and non-lethal violence is somehow a fate worse than death.
It makes more sense to compare the damage to quality of life. Being mugged for $100 is likely to hurt you much more than losing the same amount due to a traffic jam: you can develop a serious trauma, it might decrease your trust towards other people which has its own costs.
After taking that into account, I still won't choose the higher-crime city to live in. My intuition is that crime should usually correlate with general shittiness of people. So I'll have lower expectations for a lot of small things that mostly don't make it into statistics, like how polite/friendly/helpful vs rude/hostile/troublesome in petty ways people are.
You're right on the first point Fred, it is painfully obvious.
One person mugged means 1000 people can't carry valuables anymore. It means a 1000 women can't walk alone at night, and have to rearrange their lives for that. It means 100% of people have to be alert to danger and vaguely stressed at all times.
I was dog-agnostic, but exposure to dog-hating discourse on Twitter has made me more dog-skeptical. I guess I should count that as a downside of Twitter use.
Is it going to change how you act? If not, does it change how happy you are?
If it fails at both, then it's a wash.
Whether having a dog is reasonable depends on your situation, and what you expect from the dog. I don't think ANY global answer is reasonable.
"If a city has a few more muggings than usual, why is that automatically worse than the city having a few more families on food stamps than usual, or a little worse traffic than usual?"
Because if I'm walking down the street in that city, particularly if I'm a visitor who doesn't know what are the 'bad parts' to avoid, I won't see the extra families on foodstamps, and if I'm not in traffic I won't be aware of the worse traffic. But if there are more muggings, it's more likely that I will get mugged.
'Is it really so bad to live in a city where bricks fall off rooftops onto people's heads more than in other cities?' Well, yeah. Maybe this is a very windy city or one that has a lot of earthquakes so environmental conditions shake the bricks loose. But it's indicative of larger problems; building codes are not taking account of the problem. Construction is not done properly. There's possibly to likely to be corruption among public officials such that bribes mean that unsafe buildings are built. People just going about their business are at greater risk of injury. Insurance rates may be higher, or maybe you can't even get insurance because "pfft, you got hit on the head by a falling brick? yeah what did you expect, you're living in Bricktown, idiot! no claims because this is a clause in your policy about 'falling bricks excepted', you should have read the fine print" and so on outwards.
"A few more muggings" aren't just a slightly greater chance of getting mugged, it's one sign of a worse quality of life for everyone.
"More families on food stamps" also seems like exactly such a sign of worse quality of life for everyone. People continually suffer from poverty in myriad ways, and the more people in a community are poor, the worse off they are. They suffer from it even if they don't inflict it on everyone who passes through, and residents are always much more subject to any endemic problems than visitors.
I think there's something like, "life is full of suffering and we expect people to mostly bear it, and we especially expect people to not inflict 'unjust' suffering on others" ('unjust' is doing lots of heavy lifting here), and that means a place where people are more poor is worse but still better than a place where people mug more or something?
I'd agree that some people appear to have intuitions like that, but if I had a choice between living in a community where everyone was 10% wealthier, but the crime rate was the same, I'd take it over one where the crime rate was 10% lower in a heartbeat.
There's a reasonable question of how much crime you trade off against how much of other goods, but to me, the degree that many people's preferences seem weighted towards "crime" feels bizarre and not conducive to human flourishing.
I wouldn't, because I have a strong intuition that the higher crime rate keeps people less wealthy in the long run. I have no proof if this. It's just an intuition that concentrating on lowering crime has long term positive concequences and concentrating on lower poverty at the expensive of lowering crime has unintended negative consequences.
A lot of people seem to have that intuition, but I don't think there's actually much evidence to justify it, and I think this is mostly rooted in the bias many people have towards overweighting the significance of crime.
In societies which have achieved successful efforts to increase their overall levels of wealth and prosperity, reductions in crime tend to follow. But in societies which focus on efforts to reduce crime, I don't believe there's a similarly strong record of increases in overall prosperity (although if you broaden crime to include things like corruption, I think there's a stronger record there.)
So I did some research (which might be bad) but it seemed to come up with there's a balance. If crime is too high then ignoring it and spending instead on poverty reduction will not be helpful and might actually make things worse. After some lower-crime threshold is met, then spending on poverty reduction does much more to reduce crime further instead of spending more on reducing crime directly
Assuming that's true, that leaves us to debate where that threshold is. But without stating the current conditions of the place we're trying to make better, it's hard to choose whether spending 10% more on crime reduction or 10% on poverty reduction is going to be more effective.
That also suggests yet another place where if certain people feel crime is high they'll lean into "crime needs to be lowered first" over the "in the long run, poverty reduction will lower crime"
"More families on food stamps" is also a sign of low QOL, yes, but getting mugged is a terrifying and otherwise bad experience that happens to you personally, and is a sign of low QOL *on top of that*.
Sure, but rates of muggings are very low compared to rates of being on food stamps.
Even in the communities with the highest crime rates in America (and I've experienced living in communities near the top of the list for murder rates in America,) the proportion of people who're ever mugged or shot at is still quite low, while the proportion of people who're affected by other elements of poverty is very high. Those experiences of poverty also happen to them personally, every single one who's affected by them.
"Sure, but rates of terrifying and otherwise bad things that happen to you personally are relatively low" is the kind of statement that tends to give cold comfort if you happen to be the person that the terrifying and otherwise bad thing with a relatively low rate of happening to people personally personally happened to.
This is true, but an extremely bad guide to apportioning out social resources. There are rare diseases which can subject people to fates far worse than death, but this doesn't mean that it's a good idea to sink all our wealth and manpower int curing them.
This would be a good thing to point out to a person who advocates sinking all our wealth and manpower into curing one problem, should you ever encounter such a person.
Sure, but to solve poverty you have two requirements: 1) a government capable of enforcing its laws and 2) a government capable of passing good laws. To solve muggings only 1) is required, so if there's an excess of those, it's strong evidence that solving poverty is even farther outside of your capabilities.
This seems like an inappropriate level of abstraction. Empirically, plenty of countries have dramatically reduced their levels of poverty despite not being able to solve *all* muggings. Why? Well, being "able to enforce laws" enough to support systems which decrease poverty over time doesn't actually require a total surveillance state where every individual criminal can be caught and prosecuted. It's much easier to enforce laws on businesses, where if they violate them, they can't run away and lie low with a cousin for a month or two until the heat dies down. Enforcing laws on some levels and in some ways is easier than others.
Also, no government ever "solves" poverty or crime; they mitigate them to greater or lesser extents. If you can mitigate crime by a certain amount, it doesn't mean you're able to mitigate poverty less. Very often, the reverse is true, and mitigating poverty is often one of the most effective avenues for a society to mitigate crime, more often than the reverse.
>despite not being able to solve *all* muggings.
Indeed, that's why I said "an excess". Clearly, the not-so-hidden subtext of discussions like this is the abysmal state of certain parts of certain first-world cities, where the existence of such excesses (compared to other first-world locations) is obvious to everybody not entirely mindkilled. I claim that when considering the distance to some abstract Pareto frontier of misery reduction, enforcing existing laws in those locations would be both much easier and more efficient than designing new ones that would significantly reduce poverty.
>I claim that when considering the distance to some abstract Pareto frontier of misery reduction, enforcing existing laws in those locations would be both much easier and more efficient than designing new ones that would significantly reduce poverty.
I don't think that's at all apparent, and I've lived in some of these neighborhoods.
Well, I'm thousands of miles away, so have to rely on reports of others. But a common conservative narrative, that I haven't seen substantial pushback from liberals to, is that those very 'urban poor' that live there and suffer from crime the most are usually the first ones to protest against reduction in law enforcement.
But the point is that the 'few more muggings than usual' is no more noticeable than the other things. The violent crime rate per 100,000 people in the US is approx 374 incidents per year. Is there going to be a meaningful difference between a city of 100,000 people with 350 incidents and a similar city with 390 incidents? In either case that works out at approx. one per day - and unless you looked up the stats you wouldn't be able to tell.
I literally got hit on a head with a piece of brick once, luckily a rather small piece and from a low building, still wouldn't recommend.
I was driving south on the Pacific Coast highway north of SF and a car full mouth breathers threw a fist sized rock at my car. They missed but I was plenty pissed.
You are much more likely to be aware of worse traffic than worse crime. Probably there is some subtle seasonality to crime in my city that I'm not aware of, but I'm quite aware of when the big music festivals are, because they mean driving anywhere near downtown is a bad idea.
Mugging was a poor example -- "addicts taking drugs in public" would have been better (commonly portrayed as a sign of disorder, but no more harmful to you than a few more families on food stamps).
Here's my question: Would you prefer dying of kidney failure or having your kidney stolen? Would you rather live somewhere where every year you have a small chance of dying of kidney failure, or somewhere where you have the same chance of the government kidnapping you and forcefully taking your kidney?
I feel like between the two, death is obviously worse, but a lot of people consider the kidney being stolen worse because it's a form of violence.
I would tend to agree that the r/petfree people are crazy, but the other day I saw the following poll:
https://today.yougov.com/society/articles/45895-pets-morality-americans-attached-dogs-cats-poll
When asked whether they would rather save their closest pet vs one person, 39% of pet owners choose the pet vs 43% who would save the person. Worse, 27% would rather save their closest pet than 100 people!
This is way above Scott's 4% lizardmen constant. If pet owners are about as likely to opt for their pet over you and if 27% of the people whose pets hitlerally litter your local park are literally Hitler, maybe the r/petfree crowd is onto something!
What I mean to say is: misanthropy of various shapes appears to be really common. For most people it is a fuzzy background noise that perhaps leads them to give crazy answers on thought experiments. Perhaps others who are uncomfortable with such low level misanthropy seek a more specific outlet? A group of people who "deserves" it? Maybe the causality goes misanthropy => hate of specific behaviour/specific annoying group of people and not the other way round?
I wonder what your underlying worldview is that makes this finding surprising.
Edit: I read the poll, and did in fact find the other data surprising! Doesn't surprise me at all that people would rather save their pet. But it does surprise me that 18% of dog owners would rather save an unspecified dog than 100 people!
I generally have difficulties to take into account and need to actively remind myself that people (including I myself) sometimes have bad intentions, if that is what you are getting at.
Re animals vs humans: I am a vegan and care about animal rights much more than the average person, I would say. But it would never occur to me that saving an animal (even one that is especially dear to me) would take precedence over saving a person or even 100 (!) people. People are ridiculing the shrimp welfare folks but that position is much more crazy.
Exactly. Animals are awesome and deserve better than being a product in industrial farming and cattle. But thinking an animal life is more valuable than a human one is outright morally depraved.
> I wonder what your underlying worldview is that makes this finding surprising.
That in which a person is infinitely more valuable than any animal. It's insanity that some people would rather save a dog than a random person, even more so 100.
Regardless of what you think is morally correct, the fact that people care more for animals they have a relationship with more than they do human strangers is easily explainable by both basic psychology and revealed preferences. It's very psychologically normal, and I think it requires a strong cultural pro-human bias to counteract.
The non-negligible proportion of "saving a random dog vs 100 random strangers" responses seems like it needs more explanation, and goes beyond what I would have expected. But I think scope insensitivity explains most of it. I guess there's a combination of: a) "priming" with asking about one's own dog, b) general misanthropy, c) people thinking about migrants on boats.
In terms of what's actually morally correct, rating a human life infinitely higher than an animal life is incoherent with literally any care for animals whatsoever, and permissive of whatever moral harm that might entail, so bite that bullet as you will.
Isn't this just the usual "people are way more attached to their own friends/connections than to strangers" effect that makes lots of people say they would rather spend $1000 making their own child slightly happier than using it to save a foreigner's life?
Apparently not entirely, as Torches Together points out: if asked about an unspecified dog, not their closest pet, 18% of dog owners would still opt to save the dog rather than 100 people.
But maybe they are somehow extending the proximity bias to the entire species of (domesticated) dogs?
Strange and wrong, but at least it's a much lower percentage
This is people *saying* this on a poll. I suspect that there’s something about the polling context that makes people think of their own dog even when it’s said to be an unspecified dog.
Once again, I find I'm curious about whether anyone's done a study on just how depraved a belief people can say they agree with, using nothing but a cleverly designed poll.
Why not extend the proximity bias to the entire species of humans then?
Which is more likely?
- 18% of dog owners are psychopaths.
- 18% of dog owners have poor reading comprehension.
> When asked whether they would rather save their closest pet vs one person, 39% of pet owners choose the pet vs 43% who would save the person. Worse, 27% would rather save their closest pet than 100 people!
> 18% of dog owners would rather save an unspecified dog than 100 people!
I mean, if you were dealing with some supernatural force that's setting up a hypothetical with 100 humans on one side of the trolly tracks and a single dog on the other, wouldn't it be reasonable to make some sort of inference that this powerful, death-dealing entity might have an abnormally high dog-valuation, and it might be safer to take that side?
Another possible interpretation: wIth how polarized things have become politically, the odds are really on your side. Just imagine, of those 100 other people, statistically at least 50 are likely to be <hated political outgroup>! Dogs don't even vote!
And if there's any sort of geographical cut, you probably get closer to 70-80 of them being a particular political side you might hate, depending on the geography they were chosen from. I mean, that's just realpolitik at this point!
Really, the 18% thing is probably some virtue / sinner thing. Dogs are innocents, like children - there's no bad dogs, just bad owners. So kill an innocent being, or 100 guaranteed fallen / horrible humans?
I mean, how do you think the same question would go subbing "a child" for the dog? Probably about the same, right?
Perhaps. But otoh "person" or "people" generally includes children? Do people think of 100 sinful adults only.
In any case, it is still misanthropy to prefer saving one dog over 100 generic (fallen, horrible, sinful, whatever) adults.
the dog can never hate you like humans can. Dogs don't drive people to despair or suicide.
when a bunch of dogs growl and snap at me, they are bad dogs. When a bunch of humans growl and snap at me I am the bad dog and that is something profoundly terrible. (and i dont mean actual deserving it. people. an just not like your face. thats enough.)
think people are a bit insulated here.
You should maybe go to a therapist, if you automatically accept as true every criticism that a person makes about you and it impacts your quality of life. That is not normal or healthy, and there are treatments for it.
> I mean, if you were dealing with some supernatural force
It doesn't take supernatural force. It is exactly the kind of decision you make when you choose to donate money to a charity that saves animals instead of one that saves people. No-one cares. It's valid, normal and accepted.
> It is exactly the kind of decision you make when you choose to donate money to a charity that saves animals instead of one that saves people.
True, but this implies there's probably a serious "money where your mouth is" gap here - if people really WOULD save one dog over 100 humans, there's a real donation differential in human vs animal shelter / adoption charities, because I imagine you can save many hundreds of dogs for the price of saving any single human in the developed world.
So prospectively, these people should be pouring tens of thousands of times more into animal charities than human charities, and that's not really the donation landscape.
I disagree that the situations are equivalent. While it's obviously a very sad state of affairs, I had very little personal influence on people dying in Africa, yet I and almost everyone I know buys dead animal bodies to consume. This kind of personal involvement makes me - and I think a normal/idealized human too - feel more responsible about the plight of animals.
Compare it with this situation: you get angry at your friend and in a heated argument you slap him and storm away. After you cool down it seems to you that you were too hot-headed and you should apologize to your friend. You start to prepare for this, but wait! Actually, your friend, comparatively, suffered a much less harmful offense than the people dying in Africa, shouldn't you instead focus your energies on them and instead of going to your friend house to apologize, you should stay a bit more at work to get money for them? (No, obviously not, what's moral does not depend only on the quantity of suffering, other factors are often just as important.)
If I walk away from a drowning man without trying to rescue him, I may have very good reason for this. Perhaps I think he's faking. Perhaps I can't swim. Perhaps I think enough people are jumping into the river aready and I'll only get in the way. It remains true that I walked away from the drowning man. My reasons for doing this, and whether I do or should feel any guilt over it, are separate things from the fact that this is what I did.
You may think you have good reason to spend those resources saving animals and not humans. Indeed, if you didn't believe you had a good reason for the choice, you likely wouldn't make it. This does not change the fact of what you are doing.
I agree that the reasons don't change the fact of what I did. I'm arguing however that those reasons are good reasons to do what I did/do. Do you have counterarguments? Ones showing that they are actually bad reasons?
Should I? I never claimed people make the choices they do for bad reasons. Indeed, I said that the choice is valid, normal and accepted.
>wouldn't it be reasonable to make some sort of inference that this powerful, death-dealing entity might have an abnormally high dog-valuation, and it might be safer to take that side?
This is wrong. Justice should be obeyed, not power, even if it leads to worse outcomes for you personally.
>I mean, if you were dealing with some supernatural force that's setting up a hypothetical with 100 humans on one side of the trolly tracks and a single dog on the other, wouldn't it be reasonable to make some sort of inference that this powerful, death-dealing entity might have an abnormally high dog-valuation, and it might be safer to take that side?
I dunno, I think my inference would be the opposite. It sounds like this supernatural force is trying *really* hard to make sure I have the maximum incentive to kill the dog; the most plausible explanation seems to be that this power really hates dogs and that it's safer to go with the dog-killing side.
> I dunno, I think my inference would be the opposite. It sounds like this supernatural force is trying *really* hard to make sure I have the maximum incentive to kill the dog;
Yeah, this is an interesting disconnect - it sounds like you're positing something like a "justice test" from a Christian-style "testing your virtue" god, and I'm positing something that's more a disinterested scientist who's setting up a "this seems roughly equivalent" choice.
After all, you don't study choices that are foregone, they're not interesting. You want to study choices where there's a real ambivalence, where things could go either way.
> "Really, the 18% thing is probably some virtue / sinner thing. Dogs are innocents, like children - there's no bad dogs, just bad owners. So kill an innocent being, or 100 guaranteed fallen / horrible humans?"
Yes, I can definitely imagine someone having the moral intuition that humans, being both intelligent enough to have moral agency and inevitably imperfect, are in some sense universally evil and deserving of death. Dogs, on the other hand, are not really moral agents and are thus incapable of evil (though they can obviously still do harm).
The obvious rejoinder is that babies are insufficiently developed to be capable of evil, but certain trains of thought (such as Christian-influenced beliefs about original sin) could plausibly reject this. Then again, if we imagine a person adopting an explicitly Christian framework of interpretation then we have to take into account belief in the afterlife, which makes a mess of thought experiments about saving lives.
Right now my hypothesis would be that the said supernatural force has also seen this specific poll, perhaps by reading this blog, and is now testing the hypothesis.
I don't think that's surprising. I don't have much empathy for people I don't know.
I could be donating $X and same some random life somewhere else, but I don't do it.
I don't have pets, but my mom does. I'd choose my Mom's cat over some random person. I care more about my mom feeling sad than some unknown person.
Note I'm not misanthropic or weirdly attached to pets.
Before we had kids I used to tease my wife by asking whether she would save our cat vs 100 babies. I think she would have saved the babies, but it called attention to how much affection she showed our cat.
Now that we have kids there is absolutely no question that she'd let the cat bite the dust.
They are clearly on to something vis a vis unhealthy elevation of the moral importance of pets and general tendency to treat them as people, but they still seem unhinged.
This is just an extension of people believing that animals are at the same level as humans, and that the pet you've had your whole life has equal or even more value than any other person.
I would rather have my childhood dog who's been 16 years with me to die than a random african child I don't even know.
People that would sooner save an animal over a person are horrible people, and fortunately won't escape divine judgement. Imagine how much a worldview like that bleeds onto other realms of life.
It's hardly surprising that people are more attached to their own dog than to a random person they don't know.
I haven't heard of the petfree and dogree subreddits, but I kinda dislike dogs too and lowkey has some general resentment towards them. Some part of my feelings definitely stems from the fact I don't think I can freely express myself irl on this area as dogs are pretty much universally loved, on the other hand I (and most runners) do have tons of legitimate grievances with them.
I think you're a little quick to downplay the influence of social media. Yes, your misophonia developed before it, but you KNOW you're crazy. Whereas this makes me think of CartoonsHateHer being told by her therapist that all the other women on the Reddit mom forum probably also have OCD. Social media lets you connect with enough people who also share your neuroses that you can be convinced they're normal.
I imagine that, before the internet, the underlying drive leading to misophonia or misocynia(?) now, would just find more traditional presentations of intolerance like xenophobia
Can you link to/elaborate on this Reddit mom OCD thing?
From “Does Everyone on Reddit have OCD?” by CartoonsHateHer: “When I started seeing my current therapist (one of the only therapists I’ve had who actually specializes in OCD) she told me that a particular obesssion I had—that I was a bad mother if I “allowed” my children to get sick by taking them to the children’s museum—was an OCD thing. I told her she was wrong. My reasoning was that I had seen a Reddit post about this (granted, I was banned from posting at this point, but I could still read posts) and all the moms had concurred that it was irresponsible to take your children to places where they might catch a virus. Many of them also said that they would never take a baby under 6 months old to a family Thanksgiving, which helped to solidify that rule in my mind as well. My therapist shook her head and said, “I would bet money that most of these women also have OCD.””
My brother has been getting "go to great lengths to make sure the baby doesn't catch a virus" advice from *doctors* and he's taken it very seriously. He's been living like it's 2020 pandemic lockdown ever since...
Well, it's also not uncommon for doctors to have OCD...
The hygene hypothesis makes me worried that he's setting them up for terrible allergies in the future.
> My therapist shook her head and said, “I would bet money that most of these women also have OCD.”
That seems unlikely. It's just normal spiraling behavior.
Related: "Why Do Women Online Blow Relationship Issues Out Of Proportion?" ( https://www.piratewires.com/p/women-online-spaces-relationship-advice )
We can see that the word "relationship" was superfluous. The nature of online message boards is to encourage pathological behavior.
(That article used to be on a substack, and it had some excellent comments. Pirate Wires seems to have ported it to their own site without also porting the comments. This is a shame.)
Is there a Wayback Machine version with the substack comments?
Update: I couldn't find one in the archives of the "Dissentient" Substack.
There is a wayback machine version at the same URL. However, since Substack doesn't load comments on the article page, most of them won't be archived. You can see sort of a rotating selection by loading the archive from different dates; two comments will appear on the page with a teaser that there are more.
(But trying to follow the teaser and see them all will fail. This is one way in which "modern" web architecture damages archival projects.)
Yes, I think the radicalization element, turning it into an identity, is very social media-dependent.
Yes, Scott understands he has a problem, and doesn't seek reinforcement from social media.
For a lot of people, they think their loops are just an indication that they are one of the few ones who recognize the truth, and the rest of us are burying our heads in the sand.
Though under other circumstances it can help to be able to put a label on your experiences and understand that they're neither universal nor unique to you, they're just something that some people experience.
Maybe it helps to be able to say "It's not that the person chewing gum loudly at the other end of the train carriage is a massive jerk, it's just that I have misophonia, and as such experience this as a more annoying stimulus than most people".
Despite being a pet owner myself I'm annoyed by obsessed pet owners. Many people go way overboard with their pet manias so I kinda get the petfree people. With pets and pet friendly policies becoming more and more important in public spaces things are only going to get worse.
Yeah, this.
I'm not afraid of dogs and I don't hate them, but I don't automatically like them either. I'd say my default opinion of an unknown dog starts out as "mildly skeptical that it has any value," and dogs that are well trained and have good personalities can win me over to positive, while yappy annoying dogs or ones that are overly affectionate and jumpy or of course aggressive ones swing my sentiment strongly negative.
But there is so much of society that seems determined to feel like the only correct feelings about dogs are strongly positive, and that annoys me. It feels like other people are judging me.
I'm indifferent to dogs but I hate pitbulls. I am so tired of owners going around with pitbulls without a leash.
I'm the same. It feels like society is strongly pressuring us to *love* dogs unconditionally, and that's frustrating. I can see why some people need an anonymous internet space to vent. I'm guessing those people are not normally talking like that in real life.
To me it's just another example of things becoming divorced from their original purpose. When most dogs were working or guard dogs, and the only people who could afford to keep a dog for purely decorative purposes could also afford servants to take care of said dog, there wasn't a massive class of people buying Huskies and locking them up in their Phoenix apartments all day. Absentee owners aren't a problem in a society where 90-95% of the population are farmers.
Even today, most dogs I see are well-behaved, but when I hear one barking, I feel sorry for it and angry at the owner for not taking care of it properly. Refusing to train a dog is one step below physical abuse, and it speaks to the apathy of a society in which people regularly blast TikTok from their phones on the bus.
When most dogs were working or guard dogs innocent people got mauled often and the barking was constant.
Training dogs is pretty hard and many popular companion dog breeds are especially difficult to train because they are not selected for that trait like most working dogs are.
Even highly trainable dogs like the Malinois used by police occasionally bite their professional handlers.
Dogs inevitably bring a degree of nuisance and in a society in which people regularly blast TikTok from their phones on the bus it is acceptable to bother others with your dog.
"People got mauled often" uh huh
"... many popular companion breeds" are the result of horrific modern breeding trends which we are only in recent years starting to reverse, and only on the fringes. That the society which produces the French pitbull doesn't have their shit together when it comes to handling dogs is pretty self-evident to me, but the dogs aren't the ones running the breeding programs or kennel clubs.
"... in a society in which people regularly blast TikTok" to clarify, I don't think that's okay either. Both are signs of a sick society.
It’s just the equal annd opposite reaction to the type of person that proclaims their dog is just like your kid. “We both have to feed our pets!” Sorry, I can’t lock my toddler in a cage and go to brunch. If I tie my kid up to a tree outside the bar, its a felony.
Also, my first week in SF I was shocked the number of times I saw a dog poop or pee on the floor of a store, be it the Apple Store or grocery store. There is a type of person that has lost all social decency and perhaps it’s a form of impotent shame to post on Reddit about it.
> Also, my first week in SF I was shocked the number of times I saw a dog poop or pee on the floor of a store, be it the Apple Store or grocery store.
I have lived all my life in Britain and never seen this once. I guess different countries have different cultures.
> There is a type of person that has lost all social decency
Agreed, and these people need to be seriously dealt with
I *am* afraid of dogs, probably more than is strictly rational, although having been actually attacked several times I think zero fear is also irrational. I'm definitely sad that I don't really get any dogs-require-leashes green space to enjoy near me, but I recognise I'm enough of a minority that it doesn't really justify changing anything. I bought a car to get to the office that's within a 40 minute walk because that walk is through a nature reserve where a bunch of people do walk their dogs unleashed (see aforementioned attacks). If it were up to me I would require people to be licensed prior to dog ownership for much the same reasons cars are.
Dog parks where dogs can romp leash-free are a nice innovation in recent decades. For example, the Laurel Canyon Dog Park off Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood Hills
https://www.laparks.org/dogpark/laurel-canyon
is a good thing that didn't exist yet when I was a kid.
There are plenty of parks and so on that are *meant* to be leashes-only, including that nature reserve. Of course, these aren't enforced in the slightest. The end result is that if I want to go for a walk I stick to roads to avoid unleashed dogs, which is just kind of a shame.
In 19th Century English novels, everybody goes for a walk with a walking stick ot kill rabid dogs that might attack them.
I agree that contagion does not seem to be a problem here. But what the modern Internet does help us see is that people have always been this possessed by weird hatreds and tribalism.
Autocorrect offered me an apostrophe on “hatreds” above and I think if I’d accepted it and posted that way some many readers would have a spasm of hatred towards me.
The person who invented (certain kinds of) autocorrect should burn in hello.
Pet-free is fine. Child-free is fine. I have about 100 pubs within a mile of me, and only about 4 of them don't allow dogs. It's not a problem. I just choose another one. I am fine with child-free too. Just go somewhere else.
I think the most annoying thing is parents who don't acknowledge that their pet/dog is bothering everyone else. Or they don't seem to care. When my kids were small, if one of them cried, I would grab him quick and take him outside. Some parents don't even seem to notice that their crying child is annoying.
At the moment, I have a canine beast, but I don't have a small child or grandchild. I would hope that my neighbors would be more accommodating of an annoying grandchild than of my slightly terrifying hound, which I try to avoid inflicting on my neighbors.
I think a child in a restaurant should be treated the same as answering a cellphone. It is fine to answer it at the table. If you actually have to carry on a cellphone conversation, walk to a part of the restaurant (or outside) so as not to disturb. No need to be urgent or panicky about it. Kids make noise. Good parents try not to inconvenience. Almost everyone is forgiving of kid noises when they can see that the parents are attentive to the needs of other people. It is the parents not the kids that are the object of (most) peoples anger.
From what I see on Reddit most niche subreddits based around hating something are just as crazy as that snip from r/petfree. I think r/childfree is the most toxic—those people appear to actively dislike children to an unsettling degree.
I disagree that the pet haters are motivated by a the pet version of misphonia. One thing about Reddit which is odd (or maybe not) is the degree to which redditors are extremely black and white and rigid about rules. You see that in relationship advice subs where the smallest infraction is considered grounds for a breakup. Even at the peak of the “woke” era when a lot of liberals were very open to disorder, Reddit typically had zero sympathy for homeless encampments. Redditors are obsessed with the idea it is maddening and unacceptable that things should be a certain way, yet aren’t that way. It’s a little odd that attitude is the attitude that won out on the last large corner of social media devoted to the written word.
I think it's a combination of having an upvote/downvote system, and having subreddits which can silo likeminded people with one another. It means Redditors are strongly incentivised to conform with the general opinion. And people who do have the "correct view" are going to find a lot of reassurance and confirmation there, while people who express ambivalent and critical views are going to get continually downvoted (or even banned from subreddits) and will probably leave for a friendlier online experience somewhere else.
You mention, but then underexplore, part of the two conditions that I think is important. Aren't these both conditions of disliking the actions of other people? Yes, the pets and sound offend, but I think if the animals and sound were to be tied to non-human-originating source (a wild dog or a natural sound that sounded just akin to the offensive human sound) the level of frustration seems far smaller. I'm not a psych, but assume that near the core is a social reaction, and I'm assuming that moves it into a different chapter of a DSM (which I've never read) or equivalent. Then, after it's in a social section, there's presumably extra heft associated with attributing to the "them" behind the noise/pet a bunch of perceptions of the good/evil character of all members of that group (insensitive, disrespectful, shallow, selfish, etc.) and group-identification (I'm not in that crowd, I'm in the other crowd). Obviously, with misophonia, there has to be a strong sensory-tie in, and I see the connection between misophonia and the anti-pet story, but the anti-pet story quickly allows the rest of this social story to be more visible.
Yes, 100% agree, I talk about this more in the misophonia post at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/misophonia-beyond-sensory-sensitivity
The misophonia essay seems to make a clear case that "misophonia" is just moral entrepreneurship, someone's decision that a particular set of actions is so evil that it should be suppressed.
This followup doesn't diminish that at all.
>the existence of communities for these people validate and intensify their emotions and make everything worse.
Groupthink tends to be worse on reddit due to the downvotes.
People downvote to express disagreement, but this has the dual effect of delegitimizing the minority position: the person expressing it has their comment collapsed, loses karma, leaves the subreddit, and becomes an outgrouper (who posts on another subreddit, and now we snipe at that subreddit from our subreddit).
Scott's "thing" is noise. My "thing" is reddit groupthink.
If you find people of /r/petfree angry and crazy, check out any of the dozens of subreddits such as /r/UnitedNations dedicated to demonizing Israel. You may conclude that in comparison /r/petfree isn't that crazy after all.
I just had a look at r/UnitedNations, and of the top 20 posts seven are about Israel. Not too remarkable, given that there is rather prominently a war going on there. The other popular topics appear to be Russia/Ukraine and India/Pakistan, with a sprinkling of Yemen. I believe there are also wars or warlike activities going on in those places.
Am I wrong to expect to see news and discussion of nations where wars are happening in a subreddit about the United Nations, an organization created in the aftermath of a war and charged with (among other things) preventing and mitigating the effects of wars?
Weirdest pivot to a political hobby horse in an unrelated thread I've seen in a while.
Countries and other political entities and their policies, no matter which country we're talking about, is obviously in a different category than more unspecific groups like "children" and "dogs".
Not impressed enough? Check out /r/World_Now
My point being there are plenty of subreddits dedicated to hating a particular group of people.
/r/NewsHub too
I think you will find that Israel kills a lot more people, and expropriates more people's land, than dogs or cats do.
I worry about pets overall for 4 reasons, probably in order:
- domestic animals in aggregate displace wild animals and need more domestic animals to feed them. Feels wrong to breed carnivores for entertainment.
- domestic animals are a soft form of slavery. Sure, the love may be real, but it is still a one-way power ratio. We castrate, declaw, euthanise and cage with love.
- some owners get weirdly infantile. What's with the high pitch voice? Even a real toddler would find it cringy.
- saying any of the above in public society would cause an outrage not unlike what is reserved for pedophiles... So i keep quiet.
1:1 my thoughts.
In many countries it is illegal to declaw cats, because it is cruel.
Answers in order:
- Dog food is mostly grain with a few scrap parts of meat that humans won’t eat. It’s very low environmental impact and doesn’t displace any wild animals.
- Your dog doesn’t think of himself as a slave and doesn’t know or care that his balls are gone one day when he wakes up from the surgery. Neither the human nor the dog conceives of the relationship as anything remotely similar to slavery.
- Dogs like high-pitched voices and fear low-pitched voices. That’s why humans do it. You use a high pitched voice when you want your dog to come to you.
- You can say all that on /r/petfree and get lots of agreement if that’s what you want. But I don’t think you should do that because those thoughts aren’t really productive and you’d be better off reframing your outlook instead of finding people to commiserate with.
Thanks for taking the time for this thoughtful response.
I don't understand the title, thought you're searching for it cause it doesn't exist
I’m absolutely beside myself laughing. I missed the first post on noise so reading this together is a gem.
I am guilty of an irrational anger at others making noise. And the idea that I strain to hear it is also something I’ve done. Like a grumpy old guy looking out the window, actively seeking something to hate. My intolerance of noise is not consistent nor all consuming so I cannot imagine going through the days with that as a default. Oh man….
It's rare when a random blog post serendipitously scratches on the exact problem that's been on a slow burn inside my head at the moment, and this did it. Thank you.
Yeah you got it right, and I think I'm one of them. Absolutely cannot stand dog barking in my window, and the barking makes me extra angry when I think about how my annoying neighbours are so inconsiderate as to allow their dogs to do this. I think in general dogs should be banned for a whole host of reasons.
So would the Grinch be diagnosed with misophonia today? His stated reason for hating Christmas was all the noise that the Whos made in their celebrations...
I totally get /r/petfree now, but before I had children, I was a huge dog lover and animal lover in general. And since becoming a Christian, animals still have a place in my heart but humans are so much more important to me. I have dogs, but cringe when people call them my "fur babies". I just think pets have taken too high of a place in our society. Dogs off leash at playgrounds are a danger to children, yet we just encountered this yesterday in my neighborhood and the owner was baffled that anyone would object. Dogs at restaurants, dogs at grocery stores, it's getting ridiculous. If you are genuinely afraid of or disgusted by pets (which are filthy to be honest), I bet it is tough to deal with seeing them everywhere.
Neither a Christian nor a dog owner but I share your experience. I don't mind dogs - actually, I appreciate them more now, because my kids find them delightful. But our society values them too highly.
The "fur baby" treatment, taking dogs everywhere, and other signs of over-attachment are sad, even more than cringe-inducing. I look at that and see a child-shaped hole, a person who should be receiving that love but who didn't get a chance to exist. Something has gone wrong when we have fewer kids than ever, but all this spare capacity for care and emotional bonding to lavish on animals.
And yeah, I don't remember feeling this way before I had kids myself.
Oh yes, I agree, it is a sad sign. I don't think there is anything wrong with loving a pet, but consideration and love for people should always come first. Having kids tends to sort out the hierarchy naturally. Every single parent I know who has young kids and pets has said having children made them see their pets differently, not only in relation to their children, but in a general way.
The love for a pet is not the same as the love for a human, much the same the love for your wife or children isn't the same as the love for a friend or a relative.
> Every single parent I know who has young kids and pets has said having children made them see their pets differently
Wish I could say the same. I know a few parents who think their pets are only a bit below their actual children. Always the mother, too.
I had something of an opposite experience. Before getting a puppy I looked down on people calling their dogs "fur babies" and so on. I insisted my wife and I don't present ourselves as his "mom and dad" (she instead proposed "his humans"). And so on.
Since we got him, I kinda get it. I literally raised him since he was 8 weeks old. I taught him what is not appropriate to do and where, trained him, go out of my way to get him the exercise and enrichment he needs, took him on emergency vet visits, etc. It really does feel like training for having children.
So I now get it. Still wouldn't call him my fur baby but now I'm far less judgemental about it.
I don't call my pets that, but the parental role is obvious and arguably inevitable because THE PET thinks of you as their parent. Which you are. You took them from their real parent as a baby, and control their access to food, affection, water, and everything else they want and need. Your pets treat you as parents, that's why it's pretty natural to fulfill that role when it's actually what you are to them, even if they are not technically a child to you. It's not quite the same if you adopt for example an adult cat, which can fend for itself, but a kitten or dog is totally dependent on you, so to pretend you're NOT it's adoptive parent seems silly to me, bc you are. (I'm not using you directly at you btw, just the general you to mean anyone who adopted a kitten or dog).
Fun fact: 98.7% of pet owners do this “ironically” and we all think it’s the other people doing it that’s “cringe”.
Apparently post-partum pet aversion is a real thing! Anecdotally my wife has got it pretty bad - she was never “fur baby” level but loved animals before pregnancy, and now afterward she can barely stand our own pets.
> Dogs off leash at playgrounds are a danger to children
Me and many other parents had had to get up and leave many times because some idiot goes around with a leashless pitbull. "Don't worry he's friendly as" he says, after being told repeteadly that he should leash it and ideally not take it out especially near children playing.
But oh well, it's the dumb parents for wanting special rights and not accepting the fur babies of others :)
Clearly Pit Bulls are dangerous and shouldn’t be allowed anywhere without a muzzle and a leash. But it’s fine to let your kids play in the park with a corgi.
Counterpoint: Visit London and you'll see the same, dogs everywhere. No one is stressed about this, it's fine. The children at playgrounds are fine too.
I think Christians are allowed to love dogs. You really didn’t need to give up your dogs just because you found Jesus.
Also, dogs aren’t a danger to children. Pit Bulls are a danger to children. We used to have breed bans and we can bring those back instead of banning all dogs just to solve a very specific problem with one dog breed.
Sure, I didn't say I stopped loving them. Or that Christians shouldn't love them.
It's not just pitbulls, but that's certainly a common concern that I share, even as a pitbull owner. Any kind of dog is capable of biting a child. Unlikely that a Chihuahua would kill a child, but it could still hurt one, so I would consider that a danger and don't want them running freely at the playground either.
You hit my bingo card hard on this one. I used to have cynophobia—in fact, I've always loved dogs, but I was afraid of them—and I still have misophonia. It really is the worst. Eating sounds make me furious.
I think of r/petfree as one of those movements that started as satire, but became real. It wouldn't surprise me if flat earth and Q are in the same category—something that started off as a troll fueled by contempt, trying to see how far he could go in getting people to believe stupid things, and then became something real.
That said, I have cats. I would never take them to a restaurant. They would hate it and it would take weeks for them to forgive me.
So are all these hangups just downstream of "extra-high neuroticism" as a personality trait?
That is: a person by nature is a little bit anxious and sensitive, has a tendency toward negative emotions (anger, fear, grief, resentment), and high drive toward order/ control. They wander the world, feeling low-key bad and icky, until one day the right purity violation comes along to focus that cloud of neurosis on a single object, like "sticky kids" or "cats on the counter" or "loud chewing" or "hot girls dating Chads." At which point they ruminate and bubble with others and develop a narrative that explains all the pre-existing bad feelings in terms of that single phenomenon. By the end, it has become a genuinely painful and traumatizing thing for them to encounter.
One interesting question would be whether the neurosis is transferrable from one object to another. Do people ever begin by getting ragey about unruly kids, then later pivot to obsessing about mouth sounds? Or do they just add layer after layer on top?
What protective traits distinguish people who encounter purity violations but shrug them off and aren't tempted to ruminate?
Some way to test if it's downstream/linked to neuroticism would be to ask advanced meditators that had misphonia if they still have it as much (I'm assuming here meditation reduces neuroticism, I think it's true/well known but not 100% sure).
It does help. But not right away.
If that's been your experience and you feel comfortable sharing, could you say more about that please?
Yes, but it's sort of circular. Someone who is ruminating on children, pets or noises, is neurotic because being excessively sensitive/anxious/obsessive about things is the definition of "neurotic".
The transferability is an interesting thing. Probably people do both: some people just accumulate things to get mad about, while many obsessives can become temporarily reassured about a concern, but the drive to ruminate leads them latch on to something else.
It's still A Growth Industry(tm) thanks to social media. Can't sustain a community without members. We can still point to social media as the spice that makes our shit show lively.
Beautifully vulnerable and insightful. We need a word for this…
I think three words are fine.
I meant for the thing Scott was discussing.
The Bloom Country phrase "offensivitivity" seems to nicely capture the misphonia-style sense of "thing that other people find mildly annoying that certain people find psychologically intolerable" dynamic.
Disutility monsters.
I don't post on r/petfree, so maybe I'm not as crazy as them, but I do sympathise with them.
I would love to live in a world with no pets. I can't relax when I'm round somebody's house and they have a dog or cat. I never don't look at my feet when I'm walking outside for fear of stepping in dog shit. The local cats terrorise the birds that visit my garden. There is no outdoor space where I can escape, and what feels like a diminishing number of indoor spaces. There are more and more pets and I wish there weren't.
And I simply would not admit this stuff un-anonymously. I think that's a difference with misophonia: you can admit to hating noise and people will sympathise that you have a sensitivity that makes life hard. If I admit to hating pets, a lot of my friends will judge me harshly.
The people at r/petfree see themselves as a persecuted minority. They've found a safe space where they can vent about how unjust and hopeless it is that the world is not for them and there's nothing they can do. Pet love is more hegemonic than Christianity is or has been in the past century, and these are the few heretics telling each other that they're not alone.
(I want to distinguish between "pets aren't my thing but you do you" and "I wish there weren't pets". The former is an acceptable, if disfavoured, heterodoxy in the pet love hegemony. The latter is beyond the pale.)
I think you don't quite appreciate the degree to which dogs can ruin your day by, say, attacking you, attacking your kid, or even just making a show of how much they'd like to tear your or your kid's throat out if they were just let off a leash.
I hate navigating through all the dog poop on city sidewalks, but that's not the reason I really dislike dogs (birds poop on absolutely everything, but I don't care that much) - the reason is occasional attacks and very frequent shows of aggression. Could that be the case that some of the redditors also had enough of this and snapped, and if so, is misophonia the right diagnosis?
> I think you don't quite appreciate the degree to which dogs can ruin your day by, say, attacking you, attacking your kid
Sure they can, but do they? Dogs kill 46 people per year in the US, which is terrible but less than lawnmowers or serial killers, and slightly more than lightning.
I would wager the low number of deaths are because dogs are very weak and even weaker males can probably kill them if push comes to shove. Let's see the statistics for how many people are injured by dogs yearly in the United States! If Google is truthful it's 4.5 million people. If you encounter dogs often (eg being a runner), I don't think it's quite so irrational to be afraid of them. If you disagree, I'd like to see how you'd hold your current composure when a dog is chasing you while growling and barking (a not uncommon occurence for runners).
I am not talking about the odds of dogs killing someone. I am talking about exposure to dog aggression being unpleasant and hard for many people to tolerate - and I'm wondering if that, not noise or poop, is what causes many of those redditors to hate dogs, and whether "misophonia" is the right diagnosis in that case.
Dogs send close to a million people to medical attention per year in the US: https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/14/5/296?casa_token=AMP4JIr3VgUAAAAA%3AGZ__I3bAigkCUXT6Kf06hlH1ieLaPEdNdFDTR2l92k-MZs_ZAgEj0jNy8QeLR1LzDrDrTDZbmI5G
My brother and I have both been bitten (separate occasions, separate dogs). Not deadly, but it sure wasn't a fun time, and I'm more uncomfortable around aggressive dogs now.
Did you ever resolve things with the local guy with the dog that went after your kid?
I called the police. I am not sure how to go about resolving things with someone you called the police on.
Also, I don't know these people, and they are not technically neighbors - they are over a mile and more than a dozen buildings down the road.
If it didn't happen again I think you can consider it resolved
We just did not go that way again. It didn't seem worth it.
It's been helpful to me to be able to tell people that I'm afraid of dogs because one almost drowned me when I was around 12, it is something they can grasp and they are more sympathetic. But in reality I was terrified of them from infancy, no attacks necessary.
There was an essay in the NYTimes a few months ago by an autistic man about his (and many autistic people's) profound fear of dogs, and how people should consider this when they let their dogs loose where they shouldn't be. People don't find this a compelling argument, though.
I'm also on the spectrum, and that is probably partly why I don't like dogs. I wouldn't say I've always been terrified of dogs - I had some dog friends when I was growing up - but I've always felt very unsafe around the ones I did not know well. How am I supposed to know they mean well? Their humans always claim they are harmless, but, in my experience, they pretty much always take the dog's side. Whatever the dog does, it's always "awww, he was just playing" or "it was your fault".
One of the really bad things about dogs (and possibly the worst one) is that, in almost any human vs dog argument, the vocal majority of humans will take the side of the dog. That alone seems to me like a good reason to dislike the dog species.
This seems largely orthogonal to what they are actually complaining about on r/petfree though. As Scott noted, it doesn’t come off as a genuine phobia like you’d expect from people unusually anxious about dog attacks.
Sure, but is this what caused them to start hating dogs as they do in the first place? And if so, is "misophonia" the right description?
Maybe, but it still seems fair to note that whatever the original source of hatred, they are now acting in a way that goes beyond “afraid of dog attack”.
I’m imagining people afraid of flying making r/planefree where they call passengers “skyfuckers” and go on and on about how disgusted they are every time they see a contrail or hear a helicopter.
Are there any (meta) studies that show how the conscious mind can change what is inaccessible in the moment? This would be like being able to hear the ‘b’ sound after some study, but obviously a different phenomena would be chosen.
I'm a total dog lover, but I can totally understand a petfree attitude. As many have observed, pets are the new kids. And pet pampering will continue to reach new heights. (We are all under the influence of Girardian mimetic desire.)
There are more people I find annoying than dogs.
“ Misophonics” sounds like an ancient Japanese way to teach reading.
Just sayin’
Re “stretching the definition of phobia”: I used to be (irrationally, angrily?) annoyed at words that used “-phobia” to mean hate/dislike, but apparently that’s actually the older usage! The first “-phobia” word in English was “xenophobia” (in exactly the modern sense), and the use of “-phobia” for the names of actual fears didn’t start until later…
When was this? I would have expected that those greek terms came into use when 19th century psychiatrists described clinical cases.
Etymonline says:
(1) "Xenophobia" in the sense of dislike of foreigners is dated to an editorial in the London Daily News in 1880.
(2) This sense did not become common until the early 1900s.
(3) The word was in use before, but meant a fear of open spaces.
(4) "Agoraphobia", the fear of open spaces, is cited back to 1873.
This does not seem to support Dan.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/xenophobia
https://www.etymonline.com/word/agoraphobia
1. Regarding the difference between an increase in public disorder and violation of the law and poverty: my gut sense is that poverty is not threatening to me personally. That is, I have no belief that poverty will somehow creep into my domain and affect me. In contrast, I do have a gut sense, not rooted in any particular facts, that any increase in public disorder may somehow affect me by harmony physically, or stealing my stuff.
>But I’m not feeling it - all my misophonic symptoms happened before I talked to anyone about them, and removing every other misophonic in the world wouldn’t improve things a bit.
Granted, you may have had misophonia before it was cool - but do you actually know that users of /r/petfree et al. suffer from the same? As far as Internet communities are concerned, maybe it's just the good old Toxoplasma of Rage, where they eventually have to turn it up to 11 to get above a dozen upvotes, then to 12, and so on. Nobody is going to get any attention there with a slightly anti-pet, but overall reasonable position such as "I wish pet owners would follow the rules and respect my dislike of pet animals". Opinions have to be murder/suicide levels of outrage, otherwise they might as well not exist.
You took potshots at conservatives, but what about the mirror image? What are the things that the other side is unreasonably obsessed with?
You could argue it's inequality. Not all forms of inequality of course, they don't seem to get too upset about the fact that some people are good-looking and some are ugly, or the fact that some people live to 100 and others die at 50, or the fact that some people have pleasant personalities that make people like them while others are doomed to be jerks, but they are particularly concerned with the fact that some people are rich and some are less rich. And they're really *really* concerned if this difference appears to be mediated by some particular factors.
Now, we should be careful here because we may be constructing a superweapon that allows us to dismiss all our opponents' concerns as just being some kind of irrational misophonia.
https://www.betonit.ai/p/people-barely-care-about-equality
> Notice that virtually zero people actually relocate based on inequality. People routinely relocate for higher income, cheaper housing, lower crime, and closeness to family. But have you ever heard anyone — even the most fanatical leftist — claim to be “moving for equality”?
Actually I think that people move for equality all the time, that's why middle class suburbs exist, so that people can exist in a place where there's nobody much richer or poorer than themselves.
Super rich people likewise choose to live in super-rich places where everyone is super-rich.
Poor people don't have much choice.
I don't think people actually avoid living near people much richer than themselves.
Agreed. It is pretty common knowledge that buying the cheapest house in a richer area than you could otherwise afford results in the most appreciation (of the value of your property). This is a definite consideration in home shopping for people. I cannot think of any reason why I would want to buy a house surrounded by exactly my economic peers (obviously there are reasons to avoid poorer neighborhoods).
Ah well, have you tried it? I used to live in a modest rented house in a properly rich area and found there were definitely downsides. Every time I went out for a walk, I'd see so many houses and cars that I couldn't possibly afford, and I found I'd spend a lot of time thinking about money. It's not nice to live in a place that makes you feel poor.
I mean, most of the groups I took potshots at - childfree, YIMBYs, anti-car people - were liberal.
But since you asked, I think most stuff about gender is in this bin. People go looking for tiny gender cues, then get really angry when they see them.
And one random comment: I am delighted at how much more well regulated the readers and commenters seem here compared with those on Scotts feed on Twitter.
> For what was once r/TheDonald, it’s brown people (am I joking on this last one? absolutely not).
I strongly disagree with this characterisation of r/TheDonald .
Let me illustrate. You recall when the phrase "It's okay to be white" gained some political currency? It was used as a reflection of "Black lives matter", with the same ambiguity ("*Only* X lives matter", or "X lives matter *too*"?): generously, to illustrate the hypocrisy of the BLM movement; ungenerously, to apply the same kind of racism.
When this popped up, I went to r/TheDonald to see what that crowd made of it. And the top, most-upvoted post was an image, containing only the text "It's okay to be black".
That struck me as ... well, generous and sensitive. The posters at r/TheDonald had experienced the BLM movement insisting that black lives mattered, and loudly criticising anyone who suggested other lives should also matter - and empathised, understanding that insisting that it's okay to be white (and pointedly leaving out everyone else) would have the same effect. So they made the point, unmistakably, that leaving out everyone else wasn't their intent.
Now, I haven't quite addressed your point, because you've described their feelings as being directed specifically at brown people - and, if one says that it's okay to be white and that it's okay to be black, that could be intended to exclude people of other skin colours ... but I don't think that's plausibly the case here. And I understand that later (2019ish?), as r/TheDonald was harassed into non-existence by the Reddit administration, there was an evaporative concentration effect that left a handful of die-hard racists as the only remaining commentors, which may have been when you saw it. But I'll maintain that, in its heyday, r/TheDonald avoided the racist extremes of either wing of politics better than most of the internet.
I definitely recognize having feelings like this when I was young. Like when I was a teenager or younger. Random things would set me off. There were definitely noises or smells that would trigger me. (I remember a buzzing mosquito sound in a video game would drive me nuts, beyond what was a reasonable reaction to a buzzing mosquito sound)
I also recognize this in my three-year-old kids. They get angry at the most minor things. Eventually you learn the patterns and you ask for permission "can I put out a plate for you for dinner?"
It's obvious that children don't have control over their emotions. But as you stop being a toddler and you stop being a teenager, you're supposed to get over that and not blow up at minor things. Maybe that doesn't happen uniformly. Like these people can be normal adults about some things, but are teenagers about other things.
And the reason why there is no recognized disorder is that "toddler" and "teenager" are not disorders.
One memory I have of what made me open up is when my dad took me to an art exhibition when I was still a teenager. It was Joseph Beuys' art and I thought most of it was clearly stupid. My dad said something like "well you're a rational thinking kind of person, not an emotional feely kind of person" and for some reason it clicked with me that these are clearly just different people, and maybe it's all fine. And that allowed me to chill out. And I stopped being angry at the art, and I was able to generalize that trick to other things to stop getting mad at them, too.
I think you are incorrect in your assessment of intellectualization. I have 2 examples from my life about it. I believe that the rage issue is purely a sort of narcissistic (or self righteous) thing. My examples:
1) I used to get road rage. If someone was going the speed limit in the fast lane, I would lay into my horn. Not honk but honk repeatedly with varying cadence to make it clear that it was directed fury. If someone refused to abandon the lane, I would follow them. One time, I followed someone off the freeway, through town, until he pulled into a police station and ran from his car into the station.
One day, I was getting onto a freeway and a school bus was inconveniencing me. I laid into my horn, "BAAP...BAP BAP BAP...BAAAAAP...BAAAAAP...BAAP BAAP..." Once additional lanes were available, I accelerated indignantly past. I looked over to see that the bus was full of disabled kids and driven by someone with Down's syndrome. He looked mortified. The significance of getting a drivers license as a person with Down's syndrome is difficult to overstate. My younger brother has Down's syndrome. I was mortified. I never again surrendered to road rage.
2) I recall, as a child, when I used to get angry with people that my mother would ask me to analyze what potential reasons might explain the persons behavior. Could they, have had a bad day? Be rushing to deal with an emergency? A family member in trouble? My mother was relentless about this. There was always an infinite number of possible justifications for their behavior. If I wanted to be angry, it was because I wanted to be angry.
One day when I was in my 40s (she in her 70s), she was driving and we pulled up to a stop sign and somebody went out of turn. She was visibly annoyed and reacted. I was taken aback. The cool intellectual mother of my childhood replaced by an unfamiliar, animalistic person. It was immediately obvious that the human reason was slowing down and was no longer able to beat the lizard brain to the punch. I now wonder when this will happen to me. In the meantime, I continue to make an effort to fake (mild) anger when I need to add emphasis to reprimands of my employees and my children.
I am fully convinced that anger is a "moral failure to care," "an intentional decision to be angry," or, "a failure of intellect to win a race against the animal inside us all.
> I recall, as a child, when I used to get angry with people that my mother would ask me to analyze what potential reasons might explain the persons behavior. Could they, have had a bad day? Be rushing to deal with an emergency? A family member in trouble? My mother was relentless about this.
I find this very charming. I try to do the same thing, honestly. Just generally try to avoid mistaking some few negative things I see of strangers on the street leading me to conclude things about their intentions or personalities. Just taking a moment to notice my own annoyance, taking a step back, and really trying to think about it.
Even if the answer is "nah, they're just being a jerk," I have by then usually managed to stop myself from getting into a grumpy spiral over it. (It does require some energy, so on deeply exhausted days I fail to do this, and it noticeably degrades my experience of life in general.)
> a failure of intellect to win a race against the animal inside us all
I think this is a useful rule of thumb! That said:
> In the meantime, I continue to make an effort to fake (mild) anger when I need to add emphasis to reprimands of my employees and my children.
I see you've discovered the value of anger as a social tool, too! Obviously in situations like road rage that tool is doing ~nothing useful, it's just misfiring. I'm glad you got over your road rage. Thank you for sharing that story.
Cars need an "I'm sorry" and "Thank you" signal in addition to turn signals and brake lights.
Yes, that would be super useful.
About pets in stores/ restaurants. I live in Western NY and we have none of this. The only place you can take your pet is the pet store. (Also there is little to no dog poop on our sidewalks and we have dog parks with fenced in areas that dogs can run and play in.)
So is most of the complaints from people not in the US, or are other states areas different from around here?
I'm from NYC, where it's bad, and currently living in San Francisco, where it is a hundred times worse. The commonly cited statistic is that there are more dogs than children in SF, and they are treated like children.
Huh OK thanks, I'm not sure but I think the number of pets and kids is about equal here. Everyone has about one of each. (I would like to see more kids. The number or pets is fine.) Our annual Memorial day party is coming soon. Kids are actively encouraged! Not pets. If you are someone who has kids, I'm going to say consider rural America. (We can always use more smart people.)
My ideal would be no kids and no dogs 😆 just adults and cats. Heaven.
I live with two cats (and two dogs and two adults (son and soon daughter in law)) And it is heaven. I would prioritize those in the reverse order. But I do live with Jasper cat, who is my favorite cat ever. And he's a crazy cat, who climbs all over the trees, (mostly chasing birds, or running away from an unseen something.) And goes on walks with me and the dogs. He jumped in my lap as I'm typing. A big grin!
People will set up petfree zones and then people will bring in their pets anyway, claiming a legal right.
Yes, knockoff "emotional support animal" vests for annoying yappy dogs outnumber the legitimate seeing eye dogs of yesteryear by orders of magnitude.
Huh, OK, so the market solution would be restaurants/ parks that are private and enforce 'the law'. And second politically, pass laws or insist on (vote as head Sherriff/DA) enforcing 'The Law'. Or move away.
You're not allowed to take pets into my local Walmart, but I do it anyway. Of course, I see a dog, I want to pet the dog...
And no one complains? Do you see more kids or dogs in your local walmart?
I love dogs, but I find kids much more interesting... I mean dang they are the same species as me!
More kids.
My late wife was frequently upset by the children in Walmart and other large stores because she needed to use a motorized shopping cart and "badly supervised" children that were running around would often suddenly dart in front of her cart, forcing her to stop short so she wouldn't hit them. (And said sudden stop would frequently be jarring enough to be physically painful.)
Well OK, but yeah when kids or other animals are running around you have to drive more carefully.
> I’m sure this person doesn’t actually want to kill himself, but what even is the thought process that makes people reach for these metaphors?
I think just like every few years we need to reinvent a word for "cool", we may need to reinvent a way to say "it made me feel bad" every few years.
> I think just like every few years we need to reinvent a word for "cool"
This is a bizarre premise. "Cool" is an extraordinarily stable word.
Cool itself is. But there are a huge number of synonyms for cool that are not.
So as far as the traffic or foodstamps thing is concerned... not being mugged seems incredibly important to me. Traffic is predictable, foodstamps are predictable, a junkie with a gun in a dark alley seems to have really really bad tail risks.
I do think this does have a lot to do with the rise of Internet culture.
Everyone has certain patterns of thought that they are used to and that they have engaged in, often, for their entire life. If you are forced to interact with people who have different patterns of thought, your own are generally weakened. If you interact with people who share them, they are reinforced. Nowadays, many people are reinforcing a certain pattern of thought to the point that it crowds out all other facets of their mental lives or personalities.
There's an old 4chan post (about people who want to "fuck toasters") which makes this point more succinctly.
4chan hosts a feral lot
Surprised you do t mention barking dogs. I am a dog person, I have three but I spent a couple of weeks training them and they never bark. But many people have dogs that bark for hours on end and I can easily see where that would be irritating.
Yup. I like dogs well enough but if one keeps me up by barking either incessantly or, even worse, intermittently I can go into an absolute rage.
My neighbor has two dogs that bark constantly, and if someone complains his answer is always "they're dogs. they bark." But dogs also have sex and yet we neuter them so they don't. Your dogs bark because you were too lazy to train them not to.
Enlightening! Finally, I understand parts of German Quora.
I still think you can blame social media. If you had wandered onto r/noisefree when you were 20, your misophonia might have become a lot more all-consuming. Instead of being the top rationalist blogger you'd be blogging about how terrible people who make noise are to an audience of a few hundred.
Ehh I dunno about that last paragraph. It really does seem like Twitter's entire modus operandi is presenting me with examples of other people boorishly violating my purity instincts, and thereby driving my outrage engagement.
I’ve found that “Not interested in this post” works really well in cultivating the twitter algorithm. I have a couple of accounts based on interests each with a separate algorithmic feed and I don’t see any ragebait at all.
TL:DR some humans love winding up other humans, and some humans love to get wound up.
"Some fools love to perform..." - Jay Z
Humans are not necessarily much involved. A friend of mine had developed a hatred for blackbirds while tending gardens. It was other people's gardens and he never could charge enough, so that may be the human social aspect of it.
I had crows peck at my tail once.
I had a mother seagull protecting her nest aggressively dive bomb me in a canoe. I don't have a tail though.
These "phobias" or irrational hatreds are just the weak spots (different for everyone, like health susceptibilities—one's lungs, another's gut) where our rage at modern civilization, and perhaps at being human, leaks through.
When I lived in LA, I parked at a trailhead at the same time as a woman who first smiled at me when I got out of my car, and then went into a seemingly uncontrollable fit when I got my dog out of the passenger side of my car — flustered, swearing to herself, constantly looking back and forth between my dog and the trail. There are lots of crazy people in LA so I always put this into the category of some distinctly crazy LA thing, probably some weird fear of dogs, but it's always stuck in my head because it seemed such a particular self-consuming kind of frustration. So I can also buy it as the sort of angry affront that I used to experience as a kid with misophonia. There's a slant irony — my dog does not trigger my misophonia at all, of course, despite being the rudest eater in my house.
I guess the control for this group, if we're testing whether it originates with some sort of early affront around pet ownership, would be whether there's a specific component of the animals being owned by humans — do or would they react similarly to strays? Would they enjoy a safari? Etc.
Did you definitely confirm that the park allows dogs? I tend to get upset when people break rules in general. But especially dogs in parks, because I am afraid of them and go out of my way to find places to hike that don't allow them. If she did the same I could understand why she might be upset.
yea, on leash, and not an uncommon place to have dogs.
I think social media plays a different role with /r/petfree than it does with misophonia. If we think of the irritation / rumination cycle as a ratchet in which an initial seed irritation causes multiple cycles of rumination, then social media is a source of the irritation itself for /r/petfree denizens, not the rumination part (they do that to themselves).
There’s a concept called “the internal drugstore,” where people essentially figure out ways to hack their own emotions and get hits of feeling that are preferable to the ones they’re trying to avoid. Anger is, in some ways, unpleasant, but it’s also extremely distracting. If you are wrestling with disablingly overwhelming feelings—grief, helplessness, fear, etc.—it can be very useful to have a source for an immediate hit of manageable anger. It’s satisfying, and provides a lot of immediate relief. Unfortunately, as with any drug, you need increasingly large amounts of any drug to get the same effect. Being mad about other people’s pets — especially in community with other people - can meet a lot of emotional needs in what might appear at first to be a relatively safe way. Then, five years later, having solved none of your underlying problems, you’re in a pit of depression and despair, and unable/unwilling to look at the root causes of your suffering, you genuinely believe it’s the fact that other people are bringing their dogs to the bar that has ruined your life. It’s anger addiction, basically. And it’s everywhere.
David Brin talks about something similar:
https://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/addiction.html
I'm floating this idea just as a doomsday switch in case I ever want to do something that will put me in the public eye:
Probably if you didn't have social media your misophonia would be just as bad. But also you would probably just shut up about it because nobody would tell you it was okay to be that way. And maybe, just a little and largely cancelled out by the harm done, there's some ways in which that is a good thing.
I'm like this about packaging that's difficult to open
The people that design those packages should be hung in a public square
particularly when scissors come in a package that you can’t open without scissors
I don't hate pets or pet owners -- my wife and I have had cats since we started living together, and we'll continue to do so. But after we had kids I started to get a lot more annoyed by the type of per owners who dote over their pets as if they're children.
I know that this is due, in part, to living in an area that is very pet friendly but isn't as kid-friendly as where I grew up (and where my brother and his kids still live). In absolute terms kids are still prioritized over pets where I live, but in relative terms I think pets get more attention than they should. I don't think that if this area were less pet friendly it would necessarily become more kid friendly, but the juxtaposition highlights the relative disparity, and it gets under my skin.
I also know that my annoyance is due, in part, to being really happy that my wife and I had kids, and being bummed that more people seem to be foregoing children or delaying having them until so late in life that it becomes difficult to have as many as they may want. I speak from personal experience here -- we had our first kid at 37 and our second at 41. My wife is adamant that she doesn't want to have a third at our age. In hindsight I wish we started earlier and that we had three or maybe even four children.
Most of the people I know who are foregoing having children still really want to have something to care for that will give them some sort of affection and companionship, so they have pets (dogs or cats, usually) and, IMO, anthropomorphize their relationship with their pets to an unreasonable degree. But I think it's hard to understand just how unreasonable it is until you have kids. Again, I speak from a certain amount of experience here -- while I don't think we ever went to unhealthy extremes with our cats pre-kids, we definitely treated them like a partial stand-in for kids, albeit not explicitly. Now, I view our cat as just being a somewhat intelligent animal. I still think we have a responsibility to take care of her and giver her a good life, but I don't love her anymore (and in fact, it's weird to even think that I used to say that I did), and I definitely won't spend the kind of resources on her that I used to. Maybe I'd feel differently if we had a dog, but I don't think so.
I have no doubt that some people are genuinely happier having pets but not children, but I think a lot of people vastly underestimate how much love and fulfillment they can get from having kids, and just how meaningful it is to give of yourself to another human being the way parents give of themselves to their children. I also think they are just missing out on an important part of what it means to be human. In fact, the term "underestimate" doesn't even feel right -- they're making a fundamental category error, and one they may come to regret later in life.
All of these feelings get channeled into an annoyance with a certain type of pet owner.
These humans would not like the country of Turkey.
Disagree with the last point about how social media isn't making the problem worse. Maybe that's true in your case Scott, but I feel like reading every day about the evil pets and pet owners and feeling intense anger at them probably makes someone's hatred stronger.
I'm excited for the near future of AI! A/B testing will confirm that a significant percentage of users like using AI that validates their beliefs, but will stop using it if disagreed with or if nuance is injected. Validation is desirable, and in short supply, while disagreement is already freely available on the internet after all.
The sycophancy is not there yet, but a little tweaking will have it accomplish the same validation of our views, without the cringeworthy behavior. We're paying the smartest people in the world to figure this out after all, so we'll get there.
Misophonia-like views will becomes increasingly more common, as whenever we see something do something mildly annoying, our AI buddies will validate that emotion. Sure, maybe it won't go as far as saying the world is out to get us, it will just accomplish the same thing in a more tactful way for the user who is prone to falling into that mindset. I don't think there's any stopping this, as if people prefer to use AI that validates them, the company that tweaks its personality to be more validating will simply attract more users.
I’m kind of with the petfree people. There are too many god damn pets in big cities, and there are no children. I could be getting the direction of causality wrong, but if all pets magically disappeared, maybe people would have more actual children.
No, the pet people are very explicit about using the pets as substitutes for children.
I think the pets are a symptom, not a cause.
I don't think that contradicts Tariq. American culture is extremely disapproving of having children. This causes people to obtain pets and pretend those pets are their children.
But it's still true that, if you prevented those people from obtaining pets, some of them would flout what the culture tells them to do instead of going along with it.
> I’m sure this person doesn’t actually want to kill himself, but what even is the thought process that makes people reach for these metaphors? Why is it natural to discuss economically inefficient policies in such personal terms?
That's just twitter. I saw a tweet once that put it like, "the secret to posting is that everything is a matter of life or death. You can't post a picture of a sandwich and say 'this was a really great sandwich'. You must post a picture of a sandwich and say 'never kill yourself'." That's also why "never kill yourself" is a Twitter meme placed over every photo you can imagine.
I'm sure these tendencies have a number of different motivating factors, but for me, I read them as stemming from the desire for society to have higher standards for public responsibility in the most classic "good fences make good neighbors" sense. When urban living makes it impossible to escape from the consequences of other people's irresponsibility, it's easy to have an outsized emotional reaction, even when you're aware that it's unproductive or irrational.
Like Scott, my misophonia developed long before the advent of social media. My problem with managing it has always been the fact that I run up against the feeling that it's at least somewhat justified—even as, rationally, I know that it's not the most productive way of thinking to feel like other people "should" do something or other, that's where I always end up with misophonia: "Actually, adults in a human society 'should' be self-aware enough to know when they're being loud, especially when it might be aggravating to other people" is the underlying belief here.
I also dislike dogs, though, which is a relatively new quality that's developed for me ever since I moved to a large urban area on the west coast. There are a lot of (I think objectively) bad dog owners here that are basically impossible to avoid—dogs are offleash despite having no recall and the owner having no control over them, and since dogs can be dangerous when not taken care of correctly, my anger and irritation at these owners has turned into a kind of antipathy toward dogs in general.
I actually quite like kids, but I find I still have similar feelings where kids are concerned. When a child annoys me, my response is irritation at the parents not managing the situation better (I don't feel any real anger toward the child themselves, who doesn't know better). When the parents are proactive in managing the situation, I notice that my irritation is much more subdued.
But this is the pattern that I notice across basically all of these experiences—my frustration stems from the underlying idea: "You (the person making noise/letting your dog run up to people/not dealing with your child's screaming) are an adult living in a collaborative human society that comes with certain responsibilities in order to run smoothly, and you are benefitting from the perks of that society while failing to uphold your end of the bargain with respect to maintaining the social contract."
Again, I know in the logical part of my brain this is a strict and unhelpful way of thinking, but I don't seem to be able to break myself out of it emotionally. In practice, of course, there are all manner of reasons why people might fail to uphold "their end" of the social contract (in the case of misophonia, for example, sometimes "loud eating" isn't even on one's radar as something to be careful of), and it's obvious that it's possible for people to interpret collective responsibilities differently . . . if someone believes that there should never be any noise ever or that children should never cry, it's probably a bad idea to tailor societal expectations around their feelings.
But I do think that people should be more aware of their responsibilities to others in social settings and work to minimize inconvenience and upset to those they have to live in close quarters with, just as a basic axiom for living in the kind of social world we live in. So many of these angry reactions, I suspect, stem from not being able to escape from stressors like loud noises, dangerous dogs, or loud and fragile children running around in a store or throwing popcorn at a movie theater screen. People have outsized reactions to those stressors, but for me, at least, seeing that e.g. people are making an effort to leash or train their dogs, turn the music down when asked or take their child out of the store when a tantrum starts goes a long way toward making these close-quarters situations more livable.
Understand some people are deranged, but I think being annoyed by the relative treatment between dogs and humans is fair.
-My wife is severely allergic to dogs. One time we were at the airport and saw a dog waiting in line. When we mentioned the allergy to the front desk, they told us we would have to change flights.
-People are allowed to bring dogs on planes. Dogs can sit by the owner’s feet. There aren’t clear-cut limits on the size of the dog. I’ve been on airplanes where a dog makes everyone uncomfortable around them.
-There’s such a thing as medical certification to take dogs to places that usually don’t allow them, like restaurants if you’re blind. But emotional support is a scam, and anyone can get it. I’ve seen people put their little dogs on the table at restaurants.
-If I own a house but don’t want to rent it to someone with pets—because it’s my personal property and dogs can damage floors and such—the renter can go get a fake emotional support certificate and I can’t do anything about it. I am not even allowed to charge a pet fee.
-People don’t wear shoes in the house, and then let their dogs in their beds. Letting a dog in your bed is like asking a homeless man to come over and roll on your bed for a bit. It’s gross and inconsistent with other forms of domestic hygiene the same people perform.
-It used to be normal to have pets live outside. Now if you did that, your neighbors would think you’re a monster.
-Dog breeds which are known to be dangerous are legal, whereas tigers aren’t.
The list goes on. I’ve never been to r/petsfree, and I’m not interested in the drama. But I think there are definitely cogent arguments here.
I'm surprised this is the only post to mention allergies. I have a pretty bad cat allergy and the feeling of being unable to take part in the enjoyment of cats makes me upset and angry, mainly because of the sense of social disconnection.
I resent being uncomfortable in spaces with cats and not being able to pet them without consequences, but there's no obvious target for that resentment other than... God? For making me this way? My parents? The world? So in that sense I can sympathize.
Luckily I'm much less allergic to dogs (some dogs I'm not allergic to at all), so I can at least enjoy them.
If you are bothered by your allergy and want to enjoy cats, allergy shots are miraculous. I was severely allergic to dogs and basically could not breathe indoors in a room with them, did allergy shots, and was fully cured within two months (and now live with two dogs in a house filled with pet fur and don't even need to take Zyrtec, years after stopping the shots).
I hadn't considered that my occasionally unhinged loathed of dogs and cars and children is akin to my misophonia, but you're absolutely right. I wonder what the population-wide correlation is. I do connect my dislike of them all to my sensitivities to smell, sound, personal space, etc.
Did you mean to type “the petriarchy”?
I’m trying to think of something that really gets to me. I’m coming up with hearing the word ‘normalcy’. It always makes me inwardly wince. Damn you Warren G Harding. I don’t think I’ll find a subreddit to vent on though.
I should have posted this on the misophonia thread, but: my introspection suggests that misophonia is quite similar to what's been called "word rage", in that it's not the sound/language that one is angry at, but the people who "pollute the linguosphere" [not a word] by making (certain!) mistakes. I notice that, for myself, any irritation disappears if I learn that the infringer is not a native English speaker.
And, please, please, please, don't respond with a list of your most-hated language misuses. Those threads are everywhere, and they're all the same examples.
> And, please, please, please, don't respond with a list of your most-hated language misuses.
Relax, I have no such intention.
It was a general plea, but thanks.
@Scott are people born with misophonia? Or is there some amount of social-contagion-y like element to it? If the latter, that may be a good reason to not have such subreddits. Like we might feel uncomfortable if there was an r/foodfree for anorexics to talk about how much they hate eating, for e.g.
(If you can trick someone out of not having the reaction, it makes me think there's some social element to this, but I'm not an expert)
To me, dogs, especially big ones, are a clean lose-lose-lose-lose scenario. Your whole body suffers: My ears get assaulted by their aggressive barks, my thought processes are interrupted by the need to monitor what the dog is doing (is it going to bite me? Will it stop barking?), my leg was once bitten out of the blue by a leashed "good" dog, my shoes were soiled many times by dogshit, my sense of smell was assaulted by dogshit, "wet dog" smell or bad smell from the dog's mouth. My sightseeing in Albania and in Ukraine was interrupted a few times by stray dogs. I have to think of carrying a weapon to protect myself while hiking in those countries.
To me, aggressive, extremely loud barks feel almost like a physical attack, and sometimes when I hear that, my whole body tenses and that's the moment when I'd feel justified in crushing the skull of the offending dog. The barks sound like "You whore! You whore! I'll kill you! I'll bite you! I'll rip your throat off!" roared at a hundred decibels. What is the dog expecting if it's barking at me like that? Forgiveness?
Sometimes loud barking just means "Pay attention to me! I want attention from the human! Come interact with me!"
Unfortunately, this is often counterproductive because the dog ends up intimidating the humans instead of attracting them.
When a dog barks at me as I walk past I often reply with a dismissive "woof woof woof".
It usually doesn't shut them up, but every now and then it does, and it feels great, like I just won an argument without knowing what it was about.
I can trace my dislike of dogs to one particular incident in my childhood. I don't remember how old I was--maybe six or seven--but I was walking around the neighborhood with my mother and younger sister. We stopped to pet a dog and when we got home my mother told us we had to wash our hands. So "dogs=dirty" was firmly entrenched in my brain. There were a few friendly dogs in the neighborhood that I got along fine with, but there were a couple of very nasty ones that lived just across the street from my middle school. They'd bite the chain-link fence every time we walked by. (A few times, we even saw them get out, but luckily that only happened when we were in a car.) My family also got a dog (very much against my will, done while I was away at summer camp) and I wasn't happy about it. I didn't want anything to do with the dog, but I would let her inside the house if it was raining outside, and she'd go to her spot in the laundry room and I'd close the door.
But enough about the psychology. I just want to rant about the type of people who feel the need to bring their dog to a bookstore. And not a little bookstore in a mixed residential/commercial neighborhood, the kind of store you might stop in while walking around your block because you saw an interesting book in the window. No, I'm talking about a giant big-box store, one that you obviously had to drive to. You consciously had to think, I need to go to this bookstore and I need to bring my dog there. Newsflash: your dog can't read.
Also, all pitbulls and anything related to them should be sterilized ASAP so that they die out permanently. The way I feel about them is the way the anti-gun people feel about guns. "No one needs an AR-15." "No one needs a pitbull."
Speaking of phobias, there are plenty of perfectly valid arguments about gun policy, but I think a large number of people on the American left are scared of guns. They've never shot one, they'd be terrified if they saw one, and they have no idea how to use one safely.
I admit, I've long had an interest in getting a pitbull caliber dog for reasons similar to why other people get AR-15s: if my wife or hypothetical children experience hostility, they are accompanied by a descendent of generations of breeding for suicidal protectiveness. For religious reasons a firearm is infeasible, so enormous dogs provide freedom from fear in a variety of environments.
Yes. Pitbulls are very good at biting, especially children. In any year in the US 1/4~1/2 of fatalities are people under the age of 18.
https://www.dogsbite.org/dog-bite-statistics-fatalities.php#:~:text=In%202018%2C%2036%20dog%20attacks,2018%2C%20each%20with%204%20deaths.&text=In%202017%2C%2039%20dog%20attacks,victims%20and%2024%20adult%20victims.
I'd imagine that a gun is far more likely to kill someone in its owner's household (whether via accident or suicide) than to kill someone else. And I'd guess it's the same for pitbulls. (Which is not to deny that the protective effect from a gun or pitbull may still be useful even if the dog or gun never kills anyone.)
The only way to stop a bad guy with a pitbull is a good guy with a pitbull.
Seriously though, it's the freedom of the thing. My wife is prone to fear, and I'm quite confident I'd want to raise my kids free range. I expect a formidable dog could square the circle of my desires and her fear of a disorderly public—and I understand dogs to in fact trainable to be safe.
There's this one video... Guy: "I didn't understand why my baby suddenly started falling asleep on his own at night." So one time he peeks into the nursery shortly after putting baby to bed, and sees the cat doing some acrobatics so as to plant his front paws on the handle of the cradle. And is repetitively rocking it back and forth.
Is this guy someone who r/petfree and r/childfree could unite against as a common enemy?
do you have a link? My wife would love this.
This is a pretty simplified understanding of those subs! The people on them aren't necessarily opposed to other people having pets or children at all. Most of them are opposed to irresponsible ownership or parenting. A minority are radicals who hate the idea of pets or kids.
I've been on both but I would think that cat was a hero for what it's doing.
> For what was once r/TheDonald, it’s brown people (am I joking on this last one? absolutely not).
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-is-the-mind-killer
"In artificial intelligence, and particularly in the domain of nonmonotonic reasoning, there’s a standard problem: “All Quakers are pacifists. All Republicans are not pacifists. Nixon is a Quaker and a Republican. Is Nixon a pacifist?”
What on Earth was the point of choosing this as an example? To rouse the political emotions of the readers and distract them from the main question? To make Republicans feel unwelcome in courses on artificial intelligence and discourage them from entering the field?
Why would anyone pick such a distracting example to illustrate nonmonotonic reasoning? Probably because the author just couldn’t resist getting in a good, solid dig at those hated Greens. It feels so good to get in a hearty punch, y’know, it’s like trying to resist a chocolate cookie.
As with chocolate cookies, not everything that feels pleasurable is good for you."
Your overreaction to the comment speaks more than the comment.
I mean, I do think that what social media adds is the space to express this rage and ickiness, and allow it to be socially validated. People (me included) definitely experienced the skin-crawl that accompanied their personal disgusts before, but they just had to grind their teeth and develop an ulcer as God intended :-) I’m so often overcome by a take or opinion or feeling that feels so true that it just *has* to be valuable to put it out into the world; the internet is right there, just waiting to listen to me. And again I have to try and persuade that this urge is not healthy, that neither I nor the world will be better for cataloging this river of bile. It’s such a powerful appeal that I am never surprised by any of the rage I see online
(The above applies to myself. Many people are able to rant in text in a way that is interesting, amusing, or both; if it works for you as well, have at it, I’m grateful for the entertainment. But I know for myself that the ulcer is the best case scenario.)
Interesting, I think of childphobia as correlated with being trans (something about the "post/anti-traditional family left" cluster combined with the "contrarian/willing to take unconventional positions" side).
Wait this was supposed to be a reply to a specific discussion, now it just looks like I randomly brought up the trans thing for no reason
I think your comment just ended up in the wrong spot
My hot take on this is that if you want to own a large dog, you should be forced to prove you can physically subdue an angry and violent dog of roughly the same size.
I started imagining someone who has the misophonia-style reaction to every instance of, like, market capitalism or authority figures or inefficiency or rudeness or whatever... and now I feel like I understand certain types of political radicalism much better.
Now, to figure out what's the most triggering thing to fill in the blank with...
Some of the leftists in my life will straight admit this. Of course, I take that as an improvement over people on both sides of the aisle whose politics are obviously downstream of their neuroses but have no idea.
I think you're looking at this backwards. Many people will let themselves become increasingly more annoying to you and everyone else, until it actually costs them something. And when it does, they'll take a single step backwards.
The end result is a society that is as maximally annoying as it can get away with. TSA, bureaucracy, spam emails, spam phone calls, phone notifications, "sign up for our newsletter!", and plenty of dog owners letting their dogs be terrible and gross. Of course people are going insane.
About the "Narita Express" tweet:
> I’m sure this person doesn’t actually want to kill himself, but what even is the thought process that makes people reach for these metaphors? Why is it natural to discuss economically inefficient policies in such personal terms?
I would say that when urbanists get their dander up like that, they're not thinking in purely economic terms. It's more about the kind of lifestyle they'd like to live, and the "soul" of a place.
Like, imagine a young, idealistic person from Sprawltown, USA, visiting Paris or Amsterdam or some other lovely city. They love that they can eat breakfast on a terrace overlooking a pretty public square. They love hopping on the Metro to wherever they're going next, instead of sitting in traffic and looking for parking when they get there. And they know that these things are possible, but Sprawltown has zero interest in ever changing.
That's how urbanists get made.
IME "looking for parking" is an exclusively urban phenomenon. In dense environments, "where will I park," becomes a salient consideration. In sprawly ones, there's obviously going to parking wherever you go - why wouldn't there be?
Well, that's true. Of all the charges that you can level at sprawl, "insufficient parking" isn't one of them ;-)
But I think my larger point stands: young idealists go to Paris / Amsterdam / etc, and think, "how could my life be different if my hometown was like this?"
Some remarkably good bike riders in Holland. Umbrella in one hand and phone in the other.
I once saw a bicyclist in Amsterdam towing an office chair behind him with his right hand, steering with his left!
Yeah but can they fit an entire family of five onto one bike like they do in South East Asia?
Regarding the last paragraph, I don't think the problem of social media is that it makes the impulses themselves worse, it's that finding a community based on a hangup or maladaptive impulse incentivizes people to base the majority of their mental energy around it like it's a lifestyle.
This post is interesting to me, because while it's clear from Scott's samples of the subreddit that a lot of it would go way too far for me, and I don't think I have a diagnosable disorder analogous to misophonia, I do spend a not insignificant amount of emotional energy "fuming about the existence of dogs" (to use Scott's phrase). I generally consider dogs smelly and somewhat gross, find their forceful enthusiasm off-putting and their slobber disgusting, and had an actual mild phobia about their physical forcefulness and slobber as a young child.
But overall, my issue is still not really about being unable to be around individual dogs or feeling like they're "infesting everything" -- I find some dogs endearing and recently spent the night at a dog-owner's house and enjoyed the company of their (elderly and mellow) dog (granted, since then I've felt the compulsive need to pick every piece of fur out of my sweatshirt). No, the real crux of my constantly-resentful-towards-dogs attitude has to do with how obsessive I perceive our culture around dogs to be, how any taboos against excessive gushing about one's children clearly don't apply to gushing about one's dog, how animals in general but especially dogs are treated as flawless innocent angels (which is at odds with my philosophical perspective), and in particular how obsessed with dogs women of my generation (millennial) who are single and don't have kids are (in other words, the demographic I pursue on dating apps). At this point, some part of me just deeply resents their existence and place in our culture.
Of course I'm able to reason intellectually that dogs bring immense amounts of joy to hundreds of millions of people, including many people I care about, and that dogs even save tons of human lives. I don't *actually* want all dogs to disappear. But the gut-level resentment is still there.
(I have at worst a minor version of this issue with pets in general, with maybe none of it applying to cats -- I'm even seriously thinking of getting a cat one day.)
Scott kind of cherry picked and strawmanned the subreddit. Most of it is not that extreme, although there's definitely some radicals on there.
Okay just to clarify: when you say "I’m not asserting that none of these are real problems or that you can’t have rational objections to them" you're not including the "too many brown people" in that statement, right?
Evaporative cooling of group beliefs + toaster-fucker phenomenon.
Normal people who dislike dogs don't go join a subreddit about it. They just quietly dislike dogs.
The only people who hate dogs enough to join a subreddit about it are the wacky ones. And the great curse of the internet is that it gives the holders of even the most fringe beliefs an echo chamber to commisserate in.
This is a bad analysis trying to ascribe mental illness to something that can be explained in other ways.
the problem with pet free, atheism, or childfree is:
1. you dislike something that is very popular.
2. the cultural expectation is that everyone should love the thing and anyone who doesn't is a villain.
3. if you are going to be a villain, might as well as be a mustache twirling one. Sarcasm.
4. online groups turn those people into The Legion of Supervillains through mutual self-reinforcement and poe's law. in versus outgroup.
5. The other side reinforces this too by "ha ha look at the monkeys" style reposting.
its not a mental condition as opposed to a reaction against expectations by a minority unpopular enough to effect change (or the change can never be effected)
like child free is more a woman sick of her mom asking if she is having kids. not every thing is a mechanical pathology
It’s always strange seeing someone get something so wrong. (Meaning r/thedonald)
I used to get mad about it but being older I realized that everyone has blind spots. And I guess the habits of an online community on Reddit from 9 years ago isn’t really a blind spot.
It’s just that I was on there daily for a few months and nothing like that ever popped up.
I will say I’m still angry at Sam Harris for his continual misunderstanding of Trump people - especially after he came out with a eureka moment pod where he stated he finally understood - only to be completely wrong again.
It took his entirety of work down several notches in my estimation.
I was going to say something about how much I hate hearing people talk about bringing their baby home from the hospital to meet their "sibling(s)" who are all animals who will die within a decade, but after looking at some of the other comments here, I guess I just won't. ;-)
>Someone - I think it was Philosophy Bear - once asked why a certain type of conservative treats it as axiomatic that order and low crime are the fundamental public goods. If a city has a few more muggings than usual, why is that automatically worse than the city having a few more families on food stamps than usual, or a little worse traffic than usual? This was great food for thought - I agree with the conservatives that public order seems somehow more fundamental, but I agree with Philosophy Bear that this wouldn’t feel obvious to an alien observer.
If you're mugged, that means somebody deliberately chose to harm you, personally, which adds an extra kind of victimisation that just isn't present with impersonal social forces, accidents, diseases, natural disasters, and most other kinds of bad thing.
(Of course, some people do feel that impersonal social forces are deliberately created by sadistic rich people in order to harm the poor and oppressed. Not coincidentally, such people also tend to feel far more victimised than the average person. That probably also explains the "discussing economically inefficient policies in personal terms" phenomenon -- if you think that economically inefficient policies were actually created for the express purpose of victimising you and people like you, of course you're going to feel personally affronted.)
/r/petfree lurker here. The content that gets posted there daily is utterly boring and pointless. Now, its wiki (reddit.com/r/petfree/wiki/index/) I do like and can more-or-less endorse, but the value of the sub begins and ends there.
I clicked Join a few years ago after a succession of very bad living arrangements with pet-owning roommates was on the verge of driving me nuts, and to this day I continue to find pet ownership in the current age as a practice, as an industry, and as a culture to be all sorts mildly fucked up (I concede that it's likely that I only notice the fucked-up bits at all because I apparently just happened to be born without whatever brain module it is that makes the idea of owning pets appealing to ~99% of the human population). There are plenty of arguments to be made and discussions to be had about the sociological and psychological incentives that make pet ownership the way it is (hell, if I ever started writing on Substack that's absolutely an article I'd write), but the people who post on /r/petfree these days don't want to do any of that. They want to vent and then watch the little numbers go up, the entropic end state of any community centered around framing a certain thing as bad.
Anyway, I'll be at LessOnline at the end of the month if you want to chat more about it. I wouldn't be surprised if I turned out to be the sole representative of the membership of that sub there, so I guess I won't click "Leave sub" until we've left Lighthaven.
Just looked up LessOnline. I'm a little befuddled that it clearly does not in fact take place online.
Hey, you can of course say there's some Gricean maxim being violated here, but surely NotOnlineAtAll is NOT a state that is *excluded* by the descriptor "LessOnline" xD
Ah, I get it now. I'd been assuming for some reason that LessOnline was sort of a contraction of LessWrongOnline rather than the (now much more obvious) implication that it's about bringing LessWrong people (who by default are online) together in meatspace.
John Mulaney SNL Blue River dog food commercial "People that feed their dog ordinary dog food should be hung in a public square." 'fur babies' come up
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctNFdC6IrWE
My wife is extremely afraid from the dogs, she had an episode with an especially agressive dog when she was around 6, and she doesn't remember the episode herself (mother tells us) but she can't even look at pictures of dogs if they seem to be aggressive (or even active). She can pet really small puppies, at most a few months old, but other than that our outside life includes a lot of dog-avoiding. Changing the side of the road we walk, deciding to attend a party based on the host or any of the guests bringing a dog, etc. It became so second nature to us that, when I'm walking alone, sometimes I come across a dog and have to think to myself if I'm bothered by it or not and just walk past.
All the public parks allow people to walk dogs and we're ok with that. On some parks there are designated areas where one has to keep a dog leashed, and some designated areas where dogs are not allowed. What really annoys me (I'm not afraid of dogs) about dog people is that, they unleash their dogs everywhere. I mean, you got the entirety of the city, right? why not leave this small sliver of designated place to us so we can enjoy outdoors as well? And if you warn them suddenly they're the victim and you're the heartless dog-hater. I haven't seen this subreddit before, and I'm sure they're extreme, but I can see at least one path where they might've arrived there.
Where we live is the Netherlands, with no stray dog problem. It's just that it feels natural to everybody but us for dog owners to unleash their dogs everywhere, and also get to be the morally right ones about it as well. In our home country Turkey, it's a whole different issue. There has always been stray dogs, but in the last decade or so cheap dry dog food has proliferated in a way that many people just pour hundreds of pounds of it around because they feel sorry for the strays. I feel sorry for the strays as well, but I also know basic arithmetic. When the strays are fed, they reproduce with the might of a million suns. If the country doesn't happen to allocate al its GDP to produce dog food to pour on the streets, there'll be a time the dogs are hungry again. There are around 10 million stray dogs and 30 thousand vets in the country whose hands are already full. Maybe a portion should be exported to a country who eats dogs to fund the impossible task of neutering the others?
For some reason, the stance for or against either feeding stray dogs, or collecting them to compounds where if they aren't adopted in a certain amount of time euthanizing (like any western country) them has become a contentious issue. The problem is, the wrong party is on the correct side of it. Everybody in our secular and democratic circle wants to pour dog food on streets and never collect dogs. Everybody in the other side, the authoritarian islamists, they say dogs need to be collected. Now we have to avoid the subject or suddenly people start shouting at as saying we're monsters.
The pattern I extrapolate from this statistically insignificant number (2) of instances is that, people mostly get mad at the holier-than-thou attitude of the dog people rather than the dogs themselves. It's like free moral points to just say pro-dog stuff even if the result is morally negative.
So that's what Feral Finster was talking about. maybe
"deciding to attend a party based on the host or any of the guests bringing a dog, etc."
I realise that I have a worse social life than a hermit crab, but why the hell would you bring a dog to a party? If you can't do without the company of the animal even for a couple of hours, stay home with it. If you can't leave it on its own, ask someone to mind it for you or stay home. Why make other people have to babysit your dog for you?
I'm not sure why they do what they do, but there has been more than 1 instances of this happening.
Interestingly, in the US I'm pretty sure the Democratic party is the one on the side of neutering animals and the Republican party would be the natural home of the perspective that that is cruel.
(Neither party supports strays to any meaningful degree.)
Sometimes I feel like when a new issue drops, the gods make a coin toss and allocate the issue to parties like that.
Huge part of how these online communities get like that is that unhealthily fixated on a thing are going to be way more likely to make a lot of posts about said thing thus leading to a disproportionate amount of the stuff you see online be by people who are kind of mental about it. Someone making 50 posts a day about climate change is much more likely to be distorted in their thinking about it (not necessarily of course, sometimes people are right to be passionate and prolific) than someone only making 7 but you’re going to see way more of the formers posts more times than not. An experiment you can try right now is go to a subreddit you think is a bit unhealthy (maybe sneerclub for example) click five random posts from the front page. How many of them are by the same people and how many of them have the same users in the comments? It’s going to be heavily skewed by a lot to a small group of heavily dedicated people.
This was a post on the subreddit back when the old blog was down. "Most of what you read online is written by insane people" or something to that effect (I haven't been on Reddit in a few years so I can't remember now)
I have two cats, and yet hearing pet owners calling themselves "parents" of their pets is still very jarring.
Or maybe people are just sick of irresponsible pet owners making society worse for everyone else? It doesn't need to be a pathology to call out shitty behaviour.
Do you think your misophonia would be worse if there were a place to go and talk about all the noise everyone is making, and everyone would really behind that person?
Complaints of /r/petfree denizens sound very much like complaints of my IRL friends who have children and live in a big city -- most public spaces are becoming increasingly dog-friendly and at the same time child-hostile.
It's become fully normalized to be visibly annoyed by a crying child (not a spoiled brat throwing a tantrum, just a baby crying), whilst it's now totally inappropriate to complain about a dog defecating in a park where children play. (Btw, a small thought experiment - imagine a human defecating on a lawn, picking his/her feces using a plastic bag, and being insulted by the fact that there's still dirt left behind - yet, this is now fully normalized anywhere in the west).
We don't like to see people walking around with their AR-15s, yet modern social norms expect us to turn a blind eye to a 100-pound woman being dragged through the park by a 120-pound pit bull.
A valuable aspect of hatred towards pets is crushing the sacredness of pets. Yes, indeed - pets are sacred. Nobody dares calculate the carbon footprint of a dog. Nobody dares bring the /love/ towards a dog into question.
Two thoughts
1. I think that when people get angry and then 'stay angry' about something, it is because they haven't gotten what they needed from the anger, which is a sort of 'emotional recognition' from people around them. Often this involves bottling up the anger: it's either ignored or responded to with hostility or something, but whatever it is, it gets bottled up and buried away. I think the same happens with frustration.
2. When that anger ends up permanently directed at something else-sound, pets, cars it's because, give a person with bottled anger something that they are allowed to get angry about and they readily will, and since it's cathartic to let anger out it gets stuck coming out on that subject in an OCD-like way.
I suspect that misophonia suffers likely have trouble getting angry at at least one person in their lives a sibling or a parent, maybe-and at some point they realized it's permissible to get angry at someone over misbehavior, maybe related to noise, and then that became a safe(ish) outlet for an otherwise buried emotion.
Unfortunately when anger is directed irrationally it becomes impossible to get the catharsis of being seen-the angry person is now in the wrong, to others-and so it just amplifies their feeling that they're not being seen and responded to. Which makes them unwilling to stop being angry: they feel like they have to be angry until such time that they are respected, and as a result they are unable to be accountable for their anger because they feel like the world owes them a debt of respect which is too big to compromise over.
To break the cycle perhaps they need to become convinced that they can trust others to respond to their anger when it is reasonable, and therefore become accountable themselves for whether it is used reasonably.
I had assumed this post was going to be a rumination about why there isn’t any sort of similar /r/petfree community that hates pets the same way there is /r/childfree, but apparently I am just sheltered!
This reminds me of when I saw a post on the misophonia reddit that sort of sounded like it was suggesting that noises were objectively bad and was like "huh, this reminds me of r/petfree"
> I go from hating whatever noise I’m hearing, to hating the fabric of civilization. I ruminate on crazy theories of how everything about modern urban life has been designed by crooks and liars to annoy me personally, and who we have to tax/ban/imprison to make it stop.
I have a similar reaction to irresponsible driving. I realize that driving is a classic example of a thing that people get annoyed over. But this is something else. I see people run stop signs or drive 40mph in a 25mph zone and I think "Maybe I'm okay with cameras on every intersection so we can enforce traffic laws. Maybe humans don't really deserve freedom until they can learn to act less like children." When I think about the potential for AI, one of the first things I think of is cars that drive politely.
Maybe it's because I agree with it, but I find the point about transport and high density development that you cited different. It seems to come from a source of "this is why we can't have nice things." And I think that's largely correct. If we allowed more development and had better transit in places like California, housing would be more affordable and people could get around easier. This would flow through to overall cost of living and quality of life. It would be A Big Deal apart from personal preferences in a way that dogs or no dogs on the sidewalk is not, in my opinion.
(replying here to rebelcredential below) You sound like Heinlein in his pro society mode. It contains a certain amount of Zwang. Living in the radiative center of the original Oath-Brotherhood, I have sympathy for this point of view.
In the Asterisk article on Misophonia he gives the cure then states a couple of paragraphs later at the end of the article that there is no cure. During meditation while being triggered he writes “…. I found myself five days into the deepest equanimity I’ve ever felt curiously observing my own reactivity manifest”, and “And yet, with time, as I settled, I became better able to notice the space between sensation and reaction. For the first time, I could choose to ignore the signal. To separate it as part of myself. Something happening in my awareness, but not necessarily to me. I could allow it to be, for once, just noise.”
That trick can be applied to any sort of anger.
Indeed. Scott did you pick up on this, and wonder if you have tried it. I have most effectively. Willingness is key.
I've tried meditating but usually give up after a while with no results. I've never tried the kind of intense meditation retreat that Jake is talking about - I'd like to, but having kids makes it tough to leave for long periods.
Yeah twin toddlers is non optimal for meditation.
I’ve never experienced Jhanas but I have developed a degree of equanimity. I'll notice something that in the past would have triggered irritated speech or action and I'll amusingly think of the stupid things I might have said or done.
I'm not saying I'm never angry. I think there are times when anger is useful and adaptive. I think most reflexive irritation, say something like someone cutting me off in traffic serves no useful purpose.
Somewhere in this thread I mentioned someone throwing a fist sized rock at my car on the Pacific Coast highway. Okay, that would still make me angry but this was many years ago and at that point in my life I was ready to turn my car around and pursue the assailant and his 3 beefy, mouth breathing companions. That would definitely have been maladaptive behavior.
We live and with luck we learn.
I haven’t been to a meditation retreat but I use a technique which I found in a Michael Singer book which is a kind of meditation/mindfulness. Staying with whatever is happening. There’s a section in one book where he guides the reader through experiencing fully intense uncomfortable feeling reaction, and I did that on repeat and the stimuli stopped effecting me. . It is only effective when 100% willingness is present. I’m very Misophonic, and one of mine the neighbours stomping above me when making their dinner at 5 every day in the kitchen. It used to drive me spare, and I’d put on music so I could not hear it.
The technique involves experiencing the emotional disturbance fully, and also imagining leaning back inside towards your back while watching the emotional disturbance as felt in the body, normally happening in the front of the body, for me intense contraction in the sternum area and the throat….. Like witnessing a storm in front of you as it’s happening and being felt at the same time. Like a child looking out of a window at a hurricane, amazed and curious. The willingness to experience the discomfort is key. Not using antidotes which only strengthen the pattern. It takes courage. So now when that courage and willingness is present I can often I look forward to the neighbours stomping and creaking floorboards, see it as an opportunity to practice. Handy that it was once or twice a day at specific times though, so low hanging fruit. I’m convinced this could be developed.
I don't care about pets themselves, I do care about pets on the streets (so generally dogs) defecating in public spaces, being allowed to move around without a leash and often being bothersome even with a leash.
Your property, your thing, your creature towards which you probably have less control than you think might very well be bothering me and society generally expects me to just suck it up and act as if it was equally deserving of respect as a person. It is not.
Yes owners are generally responsible, but I have to stand the rest of them and it's just really irritating.
> For what was once r/TheDonald, it’s brown people (am I joking on this last one? absolutely not).
Not joking, but also not telling the truth. I went to the place where people who once were r/TheDonald mostly congregate (it's patriots dot win if you don't know) - haven't been there for a looong time - and looked at top 100 posts. There's a fair number of immigration matters mentioned - which could be cover for hating "brown people", even though a lot of them happen to concern South Africans and why the Left is not liking them as refugees. But even with those they are no more than 10-15% of the topics. If we look at those which specifically mention the racial angle or at least hint at something that may be construed as one - there were two which mention racial issues, one that features a black migrant in a situation obviously meant to expose him in a negative light, two that criticize Islam or Muslim migrants, one that criticizes official usage of Spanish language and three that criticize immigration policy without emphasizing racial or religious angle. Even if we list all Muslims as "brown" (wildly inaccurate of course by any measure), and any concern about illegal migration as "hating brown people" (wacky level inaccurate) - we still under 10% of posts. Maybe another 10% if you include just reports on various things to do with immigration politics in general, without mentioning or criticizing immigrants per se or promoting any point - like reporting the decision of some municipal entity to change some rules with regard to migrant assistance - maybe you get to another 10%, but this is really not about "brown people" anymore.
I don't say there are't racists there - there are aplenty - but I think saying that a topic that even when stretching it to the max beyond all plausibility covers barely 1/5 of the posts is the singular main animating engine of the community is just wrong.
Hm, I'm not sure how reliable that is as a signal. I'd expect significant change in who comments there (specifically a subreddit would be much lower effort than a website, which would probably select for a subgroup of people who think about the issues more).
The whole premise of the article is that if we observe the posts by some self-selected group that posts on certain forum, we can make some conclusions about what those people are like and what they think. I agree that it's ok to question this premise, but if you do, then the whole article doesn't make sense and there's no point arguing with me about it - the real argument is with Scott who posited this premise. If we agree to use the same framework as is being used in the article, then Scott's conclusion about people in what used to be r/TheDonald is completely wrong. If we don't, then the whole article is wrong.
And as somebody who periodically visited r/TheDonald back when it was alive, I can't see the set of topics changed noticeably. Absent hostile Reddit moderation, some people are probably freer to express views that would be disapproved by Reddit - including racist views - but it's not like one couldn't be a racist on Reddit if you wanted to. There had been plenty of opportunity for that. And now there's no barrier at all - and still, contrary to what Scott has stated, it's not the dominating topic, in no comparison with "chilfree" or "petfree" or "fuckcars" communities.
Another “mental illness” involved may just be hipsterism. A lot of these posts can be explained by “there is a popular thing that I don’t like, so I have now made not liking that thing a core part of my identity. Give me updoots.”
> I’m sure this person doesn’t actually want to kill himself, but what even is the thought process that makes people reach for these metaphors?
That question is really easy. The thought process is "this is how the people I know talk about this subject".
How does that get started? That's less easy to say. But for almost everyone, the inquiry begins and ends at "this is how we talk".
Scott: "There’s the one where someone said his friend posted a meme about how much she loved her dog, and now he “can’t ever go over to her house”."
Loved the post, just one nitpick: according to your first screenshot, this person's Reddit flair says "allegric [sic], indifferent to pets" so it seems like their particular pathology is probably less psychological than the rest.
I once had a coworker with the most extreme dog allergies I've ever heard of, and we worked in a dog-friendly building. A teammate brought their dog in for a single day, and for several months forward, this coworker was having symptoms any time they went into that room, until it was professionally deep-cleaned. I think this extreme level of sensitivity is super rare, but I can see how a strong allergy can be socially devastating when it means you are suddenly excluded from a friend's home (and all their hosted social events etc) if they ever adopt a dog. Maybe befriending dog-haters is the only practical way they can ever be sure their friends won't be stolen by a dirty stinkin' mutt (instead their friends will be stolen when they have human children, dang).
People will always harbor irrational hatreds of various things.
But whether those hatreds are considered embarrassing or righteous depends on social reinforcement.
What does seem to be relatively new is a sense of entitlement to be an asshole or a misanthrope.
Bob the misanthrope has too many people validating his rage and goading him on, and not enough people in his life bringing him aside to say, "What the hell is wrong with you, man?"
I relate to the experience of misophonia, especially in the case of r/petfree; I hate one of our cats (and many other people's animals) for no well-justified reason. But as someone who provides psychiatric diagnoses, I chafe at one more category or label for pathologization of normal, albeit flawed existence. I see my own oversensitivity and irritability as likely partly genetic but also something I can work to change. Does it impair my life? Sure, most people who have flaws can make an argument for impairment. But for almost everyone, I feel like a term of pathology, a diagnosis, takes the onus of responsibility off of them and shrinks their perceived locus of control, effectively making their life worse.
My instinct was to say Scott missed the mark here and strawmanned that whole community but I'm more curious if he actually read the discussions on all the posts he's talking about.
Yes, tell me more about what you think I missed.
The public order thing makes sense to me, actually. It seems reasonable that feeling physically unsafe in your own community is more psychologically and socially destabilizing than inconvenience/frustration or even poverty. You can feel charitable towards the poor in your community, or if you are poor yourself you can feel solidarity with your neighbors. You can commiserate with your friends about the traffic, and at worst you typically won't get more than mildly annoyed with the people around you. But if you fear being physically attacked and robbed in your own community by people who are presumably your neighbors, or at least close enough to enter your neighborhood on a regular basis, won't that inspire a sense of distrust and isolation far beyond that of other social ills? Fear of physical danger lies in a very deep part of our lizard brain. You will never fully rest or feel at ease because your brain is always keeping fight-or-flight mode on in the background in case you're attacked. Since the danger is in your own neighborhood, you don't have any "home turf" you can retreat to where you feel safe. Maybe you can feel safer when you're within the walls of your own home, but people do home invasions as well, don't they? And you can't even compartmentalize your unease by retreating into us-versus-them tribalism, since your neighbors - who are supposed to be "us" - can be potentially included among "them."
I recognize that this is all very subjective, but I do think it points to how violations of social order can corrode social trust and cohesion to greater degree than other kinds of social ills. At least if you trust your neighbors, you can work together to fix the traffic congestion or feed/find gainful employment for the poor families. But if you don't trust your neighbors, if you think they may be out get you, how will you ever be able to cooperate with them to fix whatever other problems your society has?
(Edited to fix spelling mistakes.)
I'm just someone who wants laws enforced ot repealed. In this case repealed would be better
https://imgur.com/gallery/no-fs-given-hCI5Use
To me, non-enforcement just breeds disrespect for all laws. So either enforce or repeal.
I'm frustrated with dog ownership in principle but fine with all the dogs I've recently seen – I seem to have ended up in an area where dog owners keep their dogs leashed and don't let them jump on other people.
The thing which frustrates me is owners who give their dogs license to jump on other people and lick them, especially when they interacted with me in situations when I was a kid and my parents wouldn't have let me make a big fuss or leave. It feels like a status issue – if I'm being forced to interact with a dog, and the dog is allowed to climb and get spit on me and nobody apologizes, whereas if I spat on the dog there would be drama, it's clear that the dog is higher-status than I am in that interaction.
I got more chill about dogs by not having any of these stupid "you are inferior to the dog" interactions and by roleplaying a D&D character who liked animals. Not sure which contributed more here.
These days I even have had some positive interactions with pet owners: "oh, please don't get offended by our dog not approaching you and just let her hang out in her corner of our living room, she's shy" – lol, can do!
Well if you're a hate group against anyone more sentient than pets, they don't let you on reddit.
would that it were so
clearly Scott hasn't found r/thelastofus2 yet
Anecdata: I sort of became this way briefly a couple of years ago after getting into urbanism/climate policy. Basically just seeing the whole world through that lens and constantly being annoyed by it. You go outside, oh, that house is such an inefficient use of this prime land, an SUV goes past and you think about how heavy it is, how much damage it's doing to the road, how inefficient its engine is. And so on.
The worst part was reading about specific regulations that were restricting development in my city and then going out and suddenly recognizing their effects everywhere, e.g. setbacks on new developments. I imagine that's a mild version of what a schizophrenic feels like.
It was absolutely caused by spending a lot of time reading YIMBY/urbanist content online. I wasn't that way before and it went away as soon as I started reading other things.
I am misophonic, with very similar triggers + tendencies to yours. I thought it was much more common than you made it sound. I guess I'm crazier than I thought...
I should have posted on the mysophobia thread.
I dipped my toe in that world. I moved into a Broadway corner facing apt in Manhattan. The honking was constant and I felt every impulse Scott describes. And it was self inflicted. I knew I would be sensitive to traffic noise, warily considered it in every apt I looked at, then chose that apt anyways for reasons I think reflect poorly on my self governance.
One solution I considered was consistently scattering tacks until informed drivers would learn that was a no go street... My actual solution was moving. To a court yard facing apt. And it all went away.
I guess others find it harder to address root cause and have it go away. Was the self inflicted part ultimately helpful here? I could fix it repair the damage and also in a bizarrely self delusional on a subconscious but not higher conscious way avoid all future rumination.
This essay is giving me big Boss Baby vibes
What do you mean?
Probably this:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/getting-a-lot-of-boss-baby-vibes-from-this
Brendan gets the reference.
It's a tongue in cheek way of saying I think you're seeing their hatred of pets through a misophonia lens while discounting echo chamber effects because you yourself suffer from misophonia.
This post gives me some insight on why girlfriends over the years hated me for constantly complaining about poor design everywhere (I’m an urban planner). It does grate at me that we’ve built so much to be so bad for humans. Maybe it’s both a mental illness and justified, I don’t know.
I always assumed that people who hate pets and DON'T suffer from a phobia had parents who liked pets better than them, or an ex (or unrequited love who did. They seem to really have some deep sense of insecurity and fear that they will be left behind and not chosen, bc people will choose pets over them. As if a trolley problem might come to life. Being annoyed by bad/irresponsible pet owners is not unusual and is fully shared by responsible pet owners, just like responsible parents are generally annoyed and dismayed by bad parents.
But by taking it to the point of severely hating pets, absent a phobia, is a different level of emotional issue and to me it looks like an insecurity that others will choose a pet over them. This particularly bothers them bc they view animals as dirty and disgusting, so for a person to like a pet better than they like them is doubly insulting to them. Of course, they may also have particularly unpleasant personalities that DO in fact increase the chance that many people will like a dog more than they like them. Sort of a self reinforcing cycle. Considering that humans literally created dogs to be pleasing to us, it is a bit inherently suspect if someone hates them, and not for a fear reason of being attacked. But I've also seen died in the wool pet haters somehow get their own after their kids or spouse begged them, and then end up warming up and really liking it...so it seems mostly about just what they think likes them versus doesn't like them. I'm convinced most cat haters would like cats if they had their own cat that was bonded to them.
I had a rather bad case of misophonia as a child (it has mostly faded), and the pet thing does not strike me the same, when you listen to them talk their emotions are very much tied to their ideas of human superiority and rank being threatened, and anger that someone might like a dog/cat more than they like them.
That may be so, but some of it may be because the pet owner treats the pet better than humans in situations such as the barking dog, or dog that jumps up on people, or letting the dog run off the leash where people and other animals are around, or the dog licks and slobbers on the other person.
And objections are met with everything from "oh he's just being friendly" to aggression, instead of keeping the pet under control. No, I like dogs okay, but I don't like dogs that behave like poorly-behaved toddlers and think that licking my face or trying to eat off my plate is normal. Control your pet. And as I said, not just dogs but cats or other pets.
Most of the worst behaviour by pet-owners is suffered by the pets, though. I don't think snakes want or need to be dressed up in 'cute' costumes for social media photo posting, that's on the owners. "Smiling" lizards are being bred to look cute on what appeals to humans, and what kind of lives they have is irrelevant so long as they're appropriately kawaii:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QpGIsxjjiUA
The only boon of AI will be creating monster creations like this in silicon rather than twisting living creatures into such dolls.
Yeah I just don't think that's the same thing. I have dogs and I ALSO am bothered by those things. If my dog is in the yard and we hear him bark for even 5 seconds, we bring him in. We don't leave the dogs in the yard when we're not home, bc that would cause barking and we would never impose that noise on our neighbors like that. We don't allow our dogs to jump on anyone.
You are talking about owners who are not equipped to handle dogs, who are not doing their job and properly participating in society. Unfortunately dogs are in fact quite troublesome and require a lot of either time or money, and lots of people who have neither of those things have dogs when they shouldn't. But to me this is just like any other behavior where some people are irresponsible and inconsiderate.
So not liking those behaviors is perfectly normal. I don't like those behaviors either, and responsible dog owners hate them probably MORE than non-dog-owners, because they make us look bad!! But taking it to a level of hating the actual dogs to the point of posting about your hatred all day long online is something else. I am also annoyed by and disapprove of people who play their music out loud on hiking trails, rather than using ear buds. I think most people hate it. But I don't start hating all people who listen to music, or music itself. Just the specific people who engage in the particular rude activity.
What about the idea that keeping pets is unethical, for the sake of the pets' wellbeing? They are basically cuteness slaves, and even if we could give them better lives confined in the parameters of our own lives than they might have in the wild, is that better than them not existing?
The general tenor is very similar to the extremely vocal haters of AI image generation, like the ones that gather in /r/ArtistHate/.
I don't mean normal negative responses like "ugh, I don't like the look of this stuff" or "I have ethical issues with it", but endless memes about killing AI artists, statements like "I don't care if it literally cures cancer, we just need to make it go away", comparing AI training to sexual violence, and the occasional death threat. And remember this is just some images we're talking about here, not AI alignment or direct employment concerns, considering they do not seem to be actual working artists to begin with.
I've been saying for a while that this too feels more like a purity spiral than anything else. They'll go on witch hunts - snaring many a traditional artist in the process - and perform their forensic examinations on images to ensure they don't accidentally admire The Bad Thing. There are actual magic wards and purification rituals to protect their drawings from AI desecration in the form of the various ineffective data poisoning tools.
Even the very name "ArtistHate" - where the word "hate" actually refers to the alleged hate that they, the artists, are experiencing - seems to imply something like the sense that this is all being orchestrated just to make them suffer.
They need to expunge AI images so completely that they don't even accidentally see The Bad Thing. To them, it's not just an ugly or cheap image, it's a fundamentally tainted and unclean image.
What's disturbing about that narrative, though, is that they managed to get trapped in this purity spiral really quickly, like within the past year or two.
Witch-hunts have an easier time getting started when there are rich, powerful people openly advocating for witchcraft, with the very explicit goal of infiltrating, subverting, and ultimately eliminating non-witches, and also actual witches running an ongoing adversarial collaboration with the inquisitors in order to refine their nefarious shapeshifting right up to the threshold of human ability to detect it. AI-art market conditions push pretty much every available button across the whole purity-spiral launch control keyboard.
> witness “homophobia” for people with normal political or religious objections to homosexuality
I realise by "normal" you mean "common", but the way you've worded this makes it sound like you're okay with homophobia.
In any case, I now wonder whether the intense queerphobic backlash that has been growing over the last decade can be attributed in part to a misophonia-like irrationality triggered by increased visibility...
Well, if the activists wanted to use and politicise the term "phobia" to try and portray "no I don't agree with this" as "you're irrationally crazy", then they will have to accept that being phobic about phobia is phobiaphobia, as mental illness is not to be stigmatised but accepted as part of society.
So yeah, "homophobia" (if it's a real phobia) is normal and indeed, if I suffer from it, then I'm exceptional! Maybe even twice exceptional, as per the discussion about the school for gifted kids with special needs!
Wondering whether it's less about the noise and more about the potential tactile sensations associated with pets (dogs licking you etc.)
Not really strong feelings over here, but I've repeatedly felt that dogs don't belong in cities, and that most cars should be kept out too.
A lot of the comments seem to be from people who hate dogs but feel stymied as they can't express themselves openly about this view. So to give a bit of balance: I like dogs. I have a dog. I let my dog off the lead in the park. Most of my neighbours have dogs. They also let their dogs off in the park. Dogs are a normal companion for humans to have, and have been for thousands of years.
I do get why certain people who have had a bad experience, or live in an area with particularly bad dog owners, might be wary of them. And I can get the dislike of certain breeds who have been bred to be obnoxious in various ways (like pit fighting dogs). But I think in general, just like children, society is better when it includes dogs.
"there’s no way for them to “turn it off” or “just get over it”"
I feel like within my lifetime, psychological problems are being viewed increasingly as immutable. I don't know if this is increasingly accurate (people don't change) or defeatist (what can we do?) or corrupt (why cure people when they would then stop paying you?) or Progressive (being crazy is an important part of who they are) or what... but whichever, it sure is dispiriting.
I mean, there’s a pendulum that can also swing back to “if you’re annoying or a weirdo, we can rationalize our disgust for you by pathologizing you.”
But now to problematize this pushback, I think there has been a shift from:
1. Not being similar to normies means you are mentally ill, and we can and should treat your illness to eliminate the friction
to
2. Not being similar to normies is immutable, and others can and should “educate” (ie treat) themselves to eliminate the friction
Both seem problematic, and though it’s hard to see it, I see the two options we’ve been presented with so far as a false dichotomy.
There is a third option, which is to accept a certain amount of friction, and not give one group too much power over the other. So the normies don’t get to forcibly medicate recalcitrantly mono-interested autists, and the autists don’t get to demand that the normies fawn over them or celebrate them or give them everything they demand or be smeared with accusations of ableism. It’s okay for people to dislike each other and struggle to work together, and both overmedicalizing and overessentializing the issue prevent us from seeing the obvious solution: a middle ground where people negotiate about how to navigate differences with externalities, and no one holds any trump cards.
That makes sense.
I wonder if the medicalisation of annoying personality traits has contributed to the impression many people seem to have that disabling mental problems don't actually exist at all.
"am I joking on this last one? absolutely not"
Okay, I'll take the bait.
I think that's a bit misjudged.
These are the possible worlds:
1. Trump obviously hates brown people. The people who understand this do so based on the obvious evidence for it. The people who don't, live in an echo chamber where this is regarded as unevidenced anti-Trump propaganda because they've never seen the evidence.
2. Trump obviously doesn't hate brown people. The people who understand this do so based on the obvious evidence for it. The people who don't, live in an echo chamber where this is regarded as evidenced and well-known truths because they've seen and believed anti-Trump propaganda.
3. Trump's hatred or not of brown people is a mystery. Any strong feelings either way are wrongheaded.
In all possible words, that comment is damaging:
1. People who already agree with you, continue to agree with you. Maybe they get a buzz from feeling like you both hate the same person (eww). People who don't, find this a disturbing turn off and doubt your impartiality and worrying that living in California has melted your brain (compare Yaghtzee Crowshaw).
2. Same as (1). And you've written something unfair.
3. Same as (2).
I think these communities have two archetypes of people in them: some have a problem, and some are very angry.
The urban planning geeks / public transit fetishists / Strong Towns people have a point! Cities can be made better, and do have a heavy reliance on cars. You might think they're wrong about the facts, or that their solutions are unworkable, but that's just normal political discourse, which can hopefully be sorted out more or less rationally. They're activists, so they talk about activism, and a certain level of righteous indignation is understandable -- people without any passion at all rarely do activism.
But some members of the community (probably more on r/FuckCars than r/DecreaseThePriotitizationOfCarsInAMeasuredAndCarefulWay) get very, very angry. I suspect this is partially Scott's misophonia thing, but also just normal in-group/out-group dynamics. And since the angry people are On Our Side, tribalism takes over and nobody can really tell them to tone it down.
Likewise, the childfree people. A bunch of them don't want kids for whatever reason, and face a lot of pressure from their families, or feel ostracized from female friends once everyone is having kids, or whatever. They find value in commiserating, or sharing effective strategies for setting boundaries with family, or things like that. And this is a bunch of people who are rejecting social expectations, so there's a certain amount of understandable resentment towards the society that (they feel) is punishing them for it. But then some people start getting really angry. It's a safe space, so it's hard to tell them to tone it down. And then the toxoplasma of rage kicks in, and the unreasonable people become the face of the subreddit.
I don't know if I'm misophonic - I wouldn't give a damn about a noise I couldn't hear, except out of sympathy for others - but I am noise-sensitive and my irritation at annoying noises is as NOTHING to the rage I feel for people who could easily carry out a simple task called Putting On Some Fucking Headphones Like A Non-Sociopath Would, but elect not to.
This makes me instinctively understand pet-haters even as an animal lover myself, especially as I know that the people who walk around inflicting their horrible noises on the rest of us are, for the most part, innocently unaware of how annoying those noises are to some people.
I’m surprised you consider r/petfree to be worth less sympathy than r/childfree because they’re both filled with complete insanity. Neither group really deserves any sympathy.
Also, your note on r/the_donald is completely incorrect. Back when it was still around, the common sentiment on race there was “Democrats are the real racists”. They generally agreed that race wasn’t important to American identity. When it got pushed off of Reddit and moved to patriots.win it did radicalize and actually started becoming white nationalist.
It's tempting to say Reddit at large is the problem - that the entire site has been coopted by insanity. OTOH, there are many subreddits which are largely fine, whether they're special interest groups for some videogame or artist, curated information sources like /r/askhistorians, or fun things like /r/thatlookedexpensive.
This can in turn lead to a trap. Walk into a room of Reddit fans and claim "Reddit is a biased den of iniquity!", and they'll show you /r/aww. Walk into a room of Reddit burnouts and claim "Reddit's a fair site full of quality content!" and they'll show you /r/politics.
I’m very allergic to dogs. I still like them from a distance, but I really dislike being forced into close contact with them, and I’m surprised how unsympathetic dog owners are to my preferences. I wonder if some of these dog-despisers are reacting to this dog-supremacist behavior.
"This is the point in an essay like this where I’m supposed to say that this is a Growing Problem Fueled By Social Media"
The tipping point is when this spills over into the real world. Alt-right trolls were just some bros venting on the internet, and then 2016 happened. I think the presence of outside money and resources is probably what makes the difference there--if any foreign powers or billionaire oligarchs decide to subsidize activities by pet haters, then the rest of us need to start worrying about it.
Am I the only one who read "Group Home" and did a double take? He knows five other families on his block? People putting t-shirts on their kids to advertise their cause? What? Is this a California thing? So weird.
I can sympathize because although I love (other people's) dogs, they are kind of a privileged class in our society. There's definitely a double standard where human poop on sidewalks is often used as an excuse to further ruin the lives of the homeless but dog poop is seen as a mild inconvenience. I'll often catch myself seeing mysterious poop on the sidewalk and feeling relieved that it looks more like dog poop than human poop, as if that makes a difference.
> This is the point in an essay like this where I’m supposed to say that this is a Growing Problem Fueled By Social Media - that the existence of communities for these people validate and intensify their emotions and make everything worse. But I’m not feeling it - all my misophonic symptoms happened before I talked to anyone about them, and removing every other misophonic in the world wouldn’t improve things a bit.
An interesting manifestation of this article's dynamic is the people who think everything is a Growing Problem Fueled by Social Media. In a lot of nerdy STEM adjacent spaces, there's a sort of growing current that social problems are made worse by social media and algorithms. 10 years ago this was a sort of general observation that certain behaviors are reinforced by in-group/out-group dynamics that manifest through online socialization.
My feeling is that this same misophonia-like phenomenon has happened here. Large parts of tech and STEM communities like HackerNews, Reddit programming subs, and Mastodon are utterly convinced that every social problem that humanity has is either caused or materially amplified by social media and algorithmic content delivery. And the morbidly fascinating part of it to me is watching this radicalization happen over time. My feeling is that a lot of these online STEM communities attract folks who have poorer social skills or higher social anxiety than average. When they were young they were often shunned in offline friend groups due to teenage socialization being hyper focused on social signaling. This created a vague resentment to the social ingroups of their youth, the kind of folks with stronger social skills who were often prominent and capable on social media. Intellectualization and bad mental health caused them to attribute more and more social ills to folks who use social media. The end result is online communities with large quantities of these folks who have a shared deep resentment and intolerance to social media use and who attribute any and all social problems to social media.
"Allegric" I guess that must be a fan of Allegri's choral music, especially his famous setting of Psalm 51, the Miserere. :-)
Is there an /r/Edgarfree?
Having recently moved into a neighborhood where people have dogs I've pretty much gone from "dogs are alright" to "dogs should be extincted" within the span of a week. It's insane to me that people are allowed to just put this animal meters away from your house that makes loud noises at all hours of the day and night and I refuse to consider that I might have misophonia because wanting silence in the comfort of your own home is not a disorder.
Speaking of the pet surveys, Nate Silver mentions one involving Trump approval, pet ownership, and 'would you save your pet or a person'?
https://substack.com/home/post/p-163238345?selection=b7d009a7-bd5d-49a0-857e-7d4dd8756d90#:~:text=Now%20to%20Eli's%20main%20request%2C%20which%20concerned%20a%202023%20experiment%20he%20ran%20asking%20people%20whether%20they%20would%20choose%20to%20save%20pets%20or%20people%20from%20sinking%20boats%2C%20if%20they%20could%20only%20save%20one%20boat
Turns out if you're in the 'drowning boat' scenario, your best bet for survival is someone who is a Trump-approving dog-owner 😁
Yes. All politics is physiological.
Check out /r/antisex. These people aren't asexuals, uninterested in sex. They're actively, viscerally, angrily against sex. They don't want to just not have sex. They don't want anyone to have sex. They seem to spend a lot of time on porn sites being angry about the content. You have to read it. These people are really (IMO) nuts.
Isn't the simpler explanation (for r/petfree) is that humans are often very negative about interests that they find totally unrelateable but are consuming to others?
And sure some of that is just dislike of the unfamiliar but I suspect that what usually triggers it is the feeling of being left out or excluded. If you don't see any attraction of a pet and all your friends see a cute dog or cat you can feel left out and often we turn that emotional hurt into anger.
It reminds me of road rage, too. And maybe also triggers and trigger warnings.
A counselor I once knew would say that anger often reflects a deeper-held sense of injustice. That crossing a threshold of <whatever triggers you> is a reminder if a past feeling of victimhood, loss of control, and subsequent insecurity that manifests anger as a defense mechanism. And the growth in anger is proportional to the frequency of transgressions.
Sometimes I think telling someone else they are not a victim, in a given situation, when they have even the slightest bit of valid victim status in a past situation, is the hardest thing in the world to do.
If so, then this anger theory implies misophonia is the hardest psychological condition in the world to counsel someone through.
When I think about road rage, the thing the rager wants most is control, freedom - people to get out of the way and let them move. I imagine that a misophonic, if asked, would love the ability to psychically subliminally suggest the sound-doer just stop making the sound. That that level of instant control and ability to change the situation is out of reach is, I bet, why road ragers honk and tailgate and cutoff, and why you berated your roommates, Scott.
But since we can’t grant the misanthropes psychic mind control (thank goodness!) - what can we do?
It seems to me that what gets people through the victimhood is their degree of inherent optimism. Like, Viktor Frankl is probably the opposite of a misophonic, right?
And that maybe optimism vs. depression being about control/agency in a predictive processing sense means that something like believing that “this guy in the fast lane doing 32 is a temporary thing, and not personal, and anyway my beautiful family won’t notice if I’m a couple minutes later” is the way out. Recasting your worldview as a “road tolerater” is the way to regain control; because you *can* with practice influence your own beliefs.
Scott, here’s your iron: you’re a rationalist. The total net utilons and hedons being generated by people enjoying food or background music outweigh the impact to you, and Moloch wins if you give in to the hate. Your mantra is “I used to be a misophonic, but I realized being philophonic was a choice, and I took it, to demonstrate that rationality can win, and love is greater than hate.”
In the case of road rage, we also have a lifetime of auto industry marketing telling you that car ownership is freedom, sexuality, success and achievement, etc, and that you can drive as fast as you want in any environment with no traffic and no consequences.