I used to hear their radio commercials in the early 2000s and wondered how much business they lost due to people not being able to figure out how to spell the name. With Google's spelling correction it's not as big a deal nowadays, but I could think of about a dozen plausible spellings of Schick Shadel.
Is that similar to when a parent catches their kid smoking and makes them smoke until they puke? I've had significant doubts whether that was a good idea or not, even beyond questioning if it works. But it would be nice to know if it worked anyway.
They went out of business during the pandemic. Even though the program had decent statistics, better than places like Betty Ford, they were never quite accepted as legitimate. Possibly because it's kind of gross. But it really really worked for a lot of people, including the guy who owned that radio station mentioned below
Behaviorsm isn't without merits, but naive blank slate behaviorism applied to certain groups specifically (autistic, trans, and intersex people) has been bad. Anything vaguely akin to expanding this has to be vocally called out as roughly equivalent to the return of lobotomies.
This started my day with a smile. Thank you, Moon Moth!
The natural reaction when someone says something unkind is to say something unkind back to them back to them but how much better would the world be if people just said “Please be a bit nicer”?
Perhaps we can start a campaign! Get T-shirts printed!
Please be a bit nicer?
PS. Well done too to Alephwyr for accepting the advice!
I think his assumption was justified. I've never before seen someone who both believes in IQ and isn't left-wing, but also uses the "this idea has historically led to bad things, so we have to call out anyone who thinks in that direction" argument.
Isn't that the entire premise behind the suppression of leftism in the United States and other western countries? Soviets bad, therefore Food not Bombs practitioners should be arrested?
I think "X would have bad implications if applied to situation Y, so we must fight against X wherever it appears, even in situations where it could be true" is a bad idea.
I'm not opposed to the entire idea of trapped priors or a critical period, but it needs to be handled responsibly. When there is an elephant in the room and you don't acknowledge it while advancing a perspective that could have implications related to it I think it's important to try to provoke things into the open.
John Money was a quack psychiatrist who didn't believe in innate gender. He tried to prove his point by persuading a family to raise their son as a girl. Instead of being conditioned into a happy little daughter, the son hated living as a girl and rebelled against it from the age of two until his parents finally let him detransition when he was fifteen. I think Alephwyr's point is that trying to cure trans people through childhood conditioning is as futile as John Money's attempt to make a child transgender.
I agree with you, but I also think that Alephwyr's comment was very strawmanny/misrepresenting Scott's position as well as confusing-to-readers (which is what prompted my initial reply).
I think there are a lot of trans people who have felt that way for their entire lives and are happy being that way, but there are also a lot of trans people who become trans late in life due to weird life events and are still happy being that way.
Is there a word for when you accuse an opponent of something completely unrelated to what they said, then use the refusal to discuss the unrelated thing as the critical piece of evidence for your accusation?
Or he could ignore it. "Trans" was not mentioned at all in his post, so it is on the reader to infer the post has anything at all to do with transgenderism.
Were he to confirm OR deny the assertion that transgenderism is post-natally conditioned would prove nothing at all, since it is simply an argument from authority, for which I have not even heard Scott considers himself such an authoritative source to provide guidance on a stance.
Unless Scott's position has updated without my knowing, I believe Scott's running hypothesis is "The mind/brain contains an innate map of the body, part of that map includes gender, sometimes the map is wrong. Sort of like phantom limb pain." However, this post was written a decade ago. So take it with a grain of salt.
It was more complicated than that. His penis was badly injured in a circumcision gone bad. Well, social constructionism was in vogue then (as now), so of course if the anatomy had been changed, why not raise the child with the new anatomy?
Money was following the theories of the time. It shows how much damage bad theories can do to vulnerable people as much as it shows Money was a perv (which also appears to be the case).
True. But David Reimer really was vocally unhappy as a girl from an early age and only became more so as he grew older, so it seems like a lot of misery could have been avoided if Money and his family had listened to him instead of continuing the experiment for thirteen years.
I agree. I'm anti-trans-ideology, but I don't think Money is any kind of slam-dunk case against childhood transgender treatments. The problem wasn't that Reimer's gender identity was being indulged; the problem is that it was being ignored.
I think the family were only going along with what the doctors, particularly Money, were telling them. But if they had known all that was going on, they probably would have objected. Money was definitely an abuser, and that's part of the entire problem with the current drive to re-brand paedophilia as MAPs (minor attracted persons); while doubtless there are genuine people involved, there are also doubtless exactly these kinds of abusers wanting to use the campaign to hide under and get themselves protected ("you're persecuting me and I'll sue you if you don't stop slandering me as a paedophile! the psychiatric establishment is re-defining my condition so it's a medical state not a criminal offence!")
I'm confused. It's not a criminal offense to be attracted to minors. This seems pretty obvious? And implying someone has abused minors when they haven't is indeed slander. The word "pedophile" technically refers to the former but in common parlance is understood to be the latter. This is a problem for people in the former category.
It's inevitable that some criminals will find cover under this. Just as black criminals find cover under "anti-racist" rhethoric. But that's still vastly better than rounding up all black people on general suspicion.
The entire psychology community really wanted gender to be socially determined for political reasons, which is why they were so happy to accept those findings.
It's worth noting that all of these gender treatments are based on ideas that have no basis in science. The people who were doing these treatments did not have any scientifically valid reason to believe they'd be helpful, but these treatments have continued despite this fact.
The fact that they went from totally different causes for gender identity to assuming that altering people's genitals surgically and socializing them as that gender would help them is deeply troubling, because totally different causes would be very unlikely to have exactly the same treatment - but not getting sued for disfiguring the genitals of thousands of intersex children while following Money's treatments does provide a motivation for not wanting to say that these treatments don't work/are harmful.
It gets even worse when you dig into the story because the guy was actively abusive, and shouldn't have been let anywhere near children (or indeed any vulnerable person) but that was back then when everyone respected authority and if a Respected Doctor says this is the way to do things, why not?
Also why I have such strong feelings about the "we won't tell your parents because they wouldn't understand and might stop you" interventions with schools and trans kids. Much too easy to abuse "trust me, I'm an Authority Figure expert on this and I can tell you what is going on and what to do if you just follow along".
I'm sorry to directly question your character, I realize it's ad hominem, but are you a person who identifies with or is sexually attracted to dragons?
I always thought an un-PC dragon story would be a bookish winged, firebreathing dragon who gets picked on by the other dragons for not wanting to set fire to stuff. So he takes up with a cute serpentine loong who lives in the water.
Okay, I find myself confused, because that story seems to fall extremely well within the realm of "politically correct" as I know it. A story about a quiet outsider who doesn't fit in with their peers but finds someone who validates them for who they are? So, two questions, because I'm genuinely curious:
1) (Roughly) how old are you? (I want to know if this is generational semantic drift) For reference, I graduated high school roughly a decade ago.
2) How are you defining "PC" (or "un-PC") such that that the story above is "un-PC"? Or what aspects of the story make it so?
Again, not attacking you, I'm genuinely curious at how your view is different than mine here.
Off topic, but you remind me of several people I knew quite well on a forum from before the net was silo'd into social media dystopias. You wouldn't happen to have participated in late 'aughties forum culture, would you?
I have role played as a dragon in online games in the past. There was a high amount of sexual charge to my interactions, but these remained firmly within the gaming fantasy world.
Besides, it's really hard to get to meet dragons any more 😂
**That** was a very disturbing wikipedia page. But I suppose I should thank you for bringing it to my awareness. :-/
Also, "ycleptance" and "foredoomance" are kind of awesome words, and I regret that I won't be able to use them if I ever manage to forget their origin, because not everyone else will also have forgotten.
Sure, but only with their consent. In fact, I think any sexual preference that the individual having it prefers not to have should be cured. This is why conversion therapy should not be banned.
Also, it is often forced on children by parents. And this kind of thing falls somewhere near the border of what parents should be allowed to decide for their children.
>One of my distant cousins won't eat tomatoes. His parents say when he was very young, he bit into a cherry tomato and it exploded into goo in his mouth, and he was so upset he wouldn't eat tomatoes from then on. Now he’s in his 30s and still hates them. Is this fairly described as a “critical window” for food preferences?
Don't we all have a story like this? I ate sriracha as a kid and got food poisoning. I now have a strong negative reaction to the smell of sriracha.
>So at the beginning, you might start in a random place and want to see if 500 miles away is more mountainous. But once your hard work has brought you 1000 feet from Everest’s summit, you don’t want to take a 500 mile jump and end up in New Delhi and have to start all over again.
It seems pretty universal that as things scale upward in mass (and accumulated learning/knowledge can be viewed as mass), they become less "maneuverable". Speedboats vs ocean liners, etc.
Maybe this relates to your language post from yesterday, where a child with a vocabulary of 10,000 words can more easily learn a new language than an adult with a vocabulary of 20,000 words (and an increased number of deep rules that must be discarded, like "adjectives of quantity come before adjectives of color".)
Well, at least in the case of AI training, it's not a case of being UNABLE to move fast, it's a case of not WANTING to move fast. We could easily program the learning algorithms to keep the same high speed throughout (in fact, that's the default), but that produces worse results.
Organisms and vehicles becoming less maneuverable as they get big seems like probably a square/cube thing, where mass grows with volume but control surfaces grow with area. I don't really see how the same principles could apply to learning.
I don't understand Scott referring to algorithmic temperature as "learning rate". A learning rate should have something to do with the speed at which knowledge is acquired. Temperature is totally different; it's a metric for how often you do something random instead of doing something methodical.
The idea is that if you make enough random guesses, a few of them will likely be somewhere near the target you're trying to find, and a methodical search from there will get you to the target. But I don't really see any connection to "learning" or "speed". Making a random move usually doesn't involve any learning.
1) I even have a story like this *as an adult*, where a bad experience with green olives made me like them less, permanently.
2) Adults have much higher standards for themselves than for children. I suspect it's easy to learn a new language to an intermediate level: do it full time, without distractions or financial worries, and deliberately stay away from writing aimed at adults (which comes with an explosion of vocabulary, sentence structures, obscure turns of phrase, cultural references, and so on). Conversely, you will not learn a second language in a few years if you spend 5 minutes per day on duolingo after work.
At 16 I had a bad stomach virus shortly after eating a sub, and it was about 5 years before the nausea on tasting one went fully away (what helped quite a bit in the meantime was switching to a different meat, and having a flavorful soda or sports drink instead of water).
I don't think anything he said logically implies otherwise. People who are attracted to cartoon animals are a subset of furries, therefore people who gain a sexual attraction to cartoon animals necessarily become furries. It's a unidirectional claim. I don't think he's claimed that this is the source of all furries, thereby incorrectly assuming equality of sets.
I was under the impression that the term "furry" encompasses the entire sexuality. That is, people who are sexually attracted to anthropomorphic animals (whether cartoon or humans in costumes), and people who dress up as animals for sexual reasons, are all furries.
I suppose you could make a distinction between furry-dressers and furry-attracted people and then only use the term "furry" for one category, but there's such a huge overlap and they're mostly part of the same communities that such language would be unnecessarily pedantic for most people who don't participate or care. It seems simpler to just acknowledge that like with any subculture, furries can vary in degree of hardcore enthusiasm and participation.
Technically, within the furry fandom the term for those who like to dress up and have sex in their costumes is "murrsuiters". Basically:
* A fan of anthropomorphic characters is called a "furry", whether they dress up in a costume or not.
Most don't, either because they personally don't care that much for owning a costume, or because costumes are expensive, or require a lot of maintenance, etc.
* Costumes are called "fursuits", and thus the subgroup of furries who own one or more and dress up in them are called "fursuiters".
The typical fursuit is ill-suited for sexual activity. It lacks the required holes and is made from materials that'd be ruined if any bodily fluid, especially sticky ones, got into them, that kind of thing.
* Finally, there are those who have a fetish on fursuit-wearing and like to have sex wearing one. They typically own one or more fursuits especially designed for sexual activity, called "murrsuits", and are therefore called "murrsuiters".
Such for-sex costumes are similar to BDSM ones in that they have the necessary holes and are made from materials that are easily washable, but otherwise look like typical fursuits.
Hence we have murrsuiters as a subset of fursuiters, which in turn are a subset of furries.
They are, ranging from those who just collect plushies, to those who adapt them for adult use. There are lots of ways to slice the fandom into specific subgroups and interests.
There are furries who aren't interested in the sexual aspect *at all* and are just into it for the 'being another species' bit or cosplay or other reasons that they identified with cartoon/anthropomorphic animals (often due to social isolation/bullying as children).
A big confusion here is between furries as a "fandom" and as a sexuality. There is overlap, but there are people in all 4 quadrants. Furries who are in the fandom but not into the fetish stuff tend to object if you lump everyone together.
While difficult to prove, I think it's directionally true that furry is a fetish subculture. I went on e621 and almost all of the top-used tags related to sex.
As Eric Blumrich said in the Burned Fur days, "by and large, furries are bi and large."
Also, I am unclear as to whether the original commenter was saying "furries are not always a sexual thing" or "not all furries are sexually attracted to cartoon animals specifically". I was sort of assuming the latter?
There is an extraordinarily strong fetish subculture within the furry fandom, but also a vehemently non-fetishist subgroup. I have no numbers, but I figure the fetishists may be 60% or more of the total.
That said, it isn't surprising that maybe 95% or more of the available art is of the fetishist kind. The reason is that fetishist furries spend a *lot* of money commissioning drawings, paintings, animations, stories etc. And since most of the art available is commissions, you see where this goes.
On the other side, the community is quite united in the goal of making everyone feel welcome and comfortable, hence the extensive tagging of content. By taggint their content very accurately, uploaders allow people to filter in what they want to see, as well as to filter out what they don't want to see. Those who don't want to see any sexual content can thus mark the option not to see it, and their browsing will be almost 100% guaranteed free of it, while still providing them thousands upon thousands of images.
Interestingly, all this extensive tagging also makes generative AI drawing systems trained on furry content extremely accurate for both sexual and non-sexual content alike. An unintended but quite welcome side effect.
This is a significant underestimate. Fandom surveys from Bailey/Hsu and later Furscience indicate that among male furries, 98% or more report some degree of sexual attraction as part of their experience, with a rate of >90% among furries as a whole.
That may be the case, yes. However, keep in mind this isn't a statistic of all furries, but rather of all furries willing to fill surveys about their interests, sexual and otherwise. Also, having some interest is a very vague concept and covers a much broader range than those who are invested in the fetishist side of the fandom.
For example, I know furries who never take part in such surveys, who entered the fandom having been fans of Disney cartoons when young, and who will admit they felt a crush on Gadjet, but who have no interest whatsoever in porn drawings or murrsuiting. They therefore aren't fetishists, and won't be totalized in statistics, but even if they were, depending on how the question was asked, they might end up counted amont the fetishists due to that childhood crush.
Another one I know is a deeply neurodivergent guy who loves the "babyfur" side of the fandom, and who has a "baby bear" as a fursona. He's also completely ace, with no interest whatsoever in anything approaching sexuality in any form. Depending on how the question was asked, he'd end up falling into the fetishist bucket due to how babyfurs are generally classified.
And so on and so forth. Which is why I think the number may be high, yes, but not that high. The furry fandom threads on the edge of several different gender/attraction axes, which makes it difficult to reduce it to a single one on attraction alone.
IMHO a better measurement would be to ask whether they specifically look for sexually explicit content, and split it into three bins: never, rarely, frequently. That'd provide a more accurate view of how much of the fandom is fetishistic.
96% of furry men view furry porn, 78% of women do. 59% view it daily.
This includes most asexual furries, as it happens. "Asexual", when it comes to furries, often means in practice "sexual interests niche enough and distant enough from reality such that they have no sexual interest in real-life people." This describes a number of asexual furries I know personally, and more I've observed.
There's a degree of social desirability bias and a degree of privacy-about-sexual-matters that makes it difficult for onlookers to form fully accurate perceptions about the nature and extent of sexuality involved in the sphere.
Eh, maybe. Let me give an example using myself. I'm a part of a NSFW furry porn channel on Telegram that exists for members of a different, main SFW group, to post NSFW content. Even though the NSFW group is well advertised on the main group, only 67% of the members of the main, SFW group are members of the NSFW one. That alone suggests to me the lower percentage is more accurate.
Atop that, I'm a member of the NSFW group mostly because there are interesting conversations there on gender identity and related subjects that develop around some of the posted images. My Telegram is configured to only download images when those are tapped to save on data transfers. If you were to look at my viewing of that channel, more than 95% of the images are untapped, as I'm mostly demi myself and seeing those drawings feels very meh. The remaining 5% or so are when someone remarks on one of the images and I tap on it to see what they're talking about. Some of those I find beautiful, in the sense of being very well drawn by skilled artists (think Renaissance-nude-paintings levels of artistry) -- but even those cause no arousal in me.
I guess on average I tap one image every three days, give or take. So by the metric of the research above, as framed in your comment, I'm an ace, with a niche enough interest, who fits straight into the 96% of furries who view furry porn. And yet that absolutely doesn't describe what's going on with me.
Those two facts (the relative number of subscribers, and my own anecdotal self-evidence), plus the conversations I have with other furries, together make me doubt the at-first-glance implications of those numbers, more than the numbers themselves. The numbers are likely correct given the questions asked, but they probably don't tell the story they seem to be telling.
Now I'm imagining a sci-fi dystopia where everyone is forced to be open about their fetishes (for some reason, maybe because someone foolishly included "sexual satisfaction" in a bill of rights somewhere, and then some judges found an emanation from a penumbra). People are hooked up to electrodes and bombarded with an AI-generated adaptive firehose of porn, to rapidly home in on exactly what they're attracted to. All asexuals to date have eventually had an attraction identified, sometimes after years of "investigation" which can cause massive SAN check failures. But our protagonist may be the first and only true asexual in the society - can they persuade the Powers That Be that they're happy just as they are, before the avalanche of porn drives them insane? Subplot: the porn-generating AI has become sapient, and is actually trying to communicate through the medium of porn, a message which only our protagonist is capable of comprehending. Will the two of them fall in platonic love and reform their society?
I think there are people who specifically have a furry fetish, but as a furry, I've always just liked anthropomorphic animals (and dragons and gryphons) in all forms of media.
Or to put it another way - it's not that I specifically have a fetish for furries, it's that I like everything to be furry, including my porn. It's a general aesthetic/worldbuilding preference. I like video games that have furries, and in fact, generally prefer that they not be especially sexualized outside of media where it is specifically designed for titillation.
Also, e621 is a porn site. There is SFW art there, but it is run by Bad Dragon, who make dragon dildos, and the site is primarily porn oriented.
If you look at other furry fandom sites (like Derpibooru, the booru for MLP fanart) the ratio is more like 10 safe:1 questionable:2 explicit, so about 25% is porn or porn adjacent.
> the AI starts at a very high learning rate (also called “temperature”)
For modern models we're talking about completely different things when we talk about temperature and learning rate. I think the confusion here is probably due to the idea of a learning schedule being similar to simulated annealing.
- 'Learning rate' is a parameter used during the training of a model, which behaves roughly as Scott described (it determines how much the model should update when given new training data)
- 'Temperature' is not about learning at all, but about how models generate their output. Models like ChatGPT don't actually work by giving you the most likely next token; they actually give you the probabilities of all possible tokens. We then pick which token to output by sampling that distribution (this gives more natural output than always picking the most likely token). The temperature is a scaling factor that gets applied to that distribution before sampling occurs - a higher temperature reduces the probability mass of the most likely outputs and distributes it among less likely outputs, making 'surprising' outputs more likely.
I don't recall hearing 'temperature' in regards to learning rate (I'm a data scientist). The idea of having a different learning rate early vs late in training I've seen called an adaptive learning rate. It's possible that the LLM community has adopted that usage but idk. Temperature, if I recall, originally is a term from simulated annealing, and then entered the popular lexicon as a user-exposed tuning parameter for GPT models. For both GPT output and annealing it has the same meaning: take some root of the relevant distribution to shrink everything to 1 to smooth it out, just as how heating metal 'smooths out' its molecular structure (this is just a restatement of what Godshatter said).
Temperature isn't just for GPT models. The reason the term is used is that virtually all models which predict categorical distributions do so with a softmax, which basically just means parameterizing them as a Boltzmann distribution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_distribution). The softmax temperature parameter is just the literal temperature in the Boltzmann distribution.
I think there may also be a different subsystems learn differently aspect here. I’ve personally had food poisoning from a particular fast food restaurant and then not eaten at that entire chain for years. Similarly my girlfriend won’t go anywhere near vicinity of any kind due to a terrible experience in high school with a concerning quantity of coconut rum. I think we have a system that jumps further on bad food experiences and is much much more willing to trap into priors in a negative direction for very understandable survival reasons. E.g. berries that look/smell like this caused me to vomit all of my food up once, therefore I will never eat them again in case they are poisonous.
Once when, I was a child, I came across a puddle of rotting raspberries. and the smell was revolting. Naueseating, and it stuck in my memory for decades. I have recovered somewhat, and now they are a neutral food, which I can eat without pleasure or aversion. But mostly I'd prefer some other berry, any other berry, I don't care which, because whatever it is, I'll probably actually enjoy it at least a tiny bit.
The food example is interesting. Tomatoes are a nightshade plant, many people are allergic to them. I've come to assume that when people have strong negative food associations that it's related to that "don't eat, may be poisonous, my body reacts badly in some way" even if they don't necessarily realize there's more to it than "I hate tomatoes because my parents fed me one as a kid and it was disgusting to me in the moment." There are plenty of foods out there that people are commonly allergic to, and others where some people have a distinct taste difference (e.g., the cilantro/coriander tastes like soap phenomena). Also add in known ethnicity pool differences (how well someone processes alcohol in their system for example). Oh and certain other oddities like those who cannot process phenylalanine and have to limit or avoid certain foods/drinks with it.
Idk, I'm not sure the food examples work in a theory about learning rate. How many times do you have to get a pounding headache from red wine before you think, hmm, maybe I should switch to white? Or how many times do you have to get hives from eating a shrimp cocktail before you think, hmm, maybe I shouldn't eat shellfish? You couldn't have learned that as a kid because no one (we hope) is making their baby drink red wine. The biggest difference between kids and adults is that as a kid, you're often being force fed so it's disgusting and you spit it out immediately versus as an adult you're thinking, but everyone likes red wine so I just need to keep drinking it (i.e., social pressure) and you have to overcome that "but everyone loves it maybe I will eventually too" thought to realize what your own body is telling you.
It would make sense for "bad experience with this foodstuff" to be something that triggers the wiring over "avoid possible poisoning". If you just go around merrily stuffing any sort of berry or fungus into your mouth, you're not going to last too long in the wild. 'Just' getting off with being violently sick or nauseated by the experience means that you'll avoid that in future and so cut down the risk of "this may look shiny and delicious but it will kill you". Think of the Tide Pod Challenge, whether or not there really were significant numbers of teenagers eating laundry pods, there's enough signalling of "bright colours, shiny, looks yummy" that they're a genuine risk for toddlers and small children mistaking them for candy. Even as an adult who knows better, the "this looks like candy and candy is delicious" association works, so having a very robust "don't eat this ever again" mechanism as defence makes sense:
I don't think we have anywhere the same kind of strong aversion to "oops I nearly drowned" since you can always avoid going into large bodies of water, but you need to eat or else you die. Not eating = dying, eating the wrong thing = dying, not surprising that 'strong reactions to bad food experience' last longer and are 'stickier' than "I went swimming and went out of my depth and that was a bad idea".
I think the only way to get past food aversions is to try the food again (even a tiny nibble) a bunch of times, and if those experiences are good, you start liking the food and get over the aversion. My guess is that the tomato thing is less about the specifics of the original experience, or the fact that it was in childhood, and more about your cousin (presumably) deciding each and every day for the subsequent decades to never try cherry tomatoes again. By contrast, you've presumably had lots of positive beach experiences between the scary one and today. (Exposure therapy is obviously related.)
(A useful parenting tip that I got from the book "Bringing Up Bebe" is that it's inordinately important to try to get a kid to eat even just one bite of each kind of food you're serving. After 5 meals in 5 different weeks where they grudgingly eat a single bite of a certain food X, you might find that they have started liking X and now gobble it up.)
It's like 'getting back in the saddle'. If you fall off a horse, it's important to ride again as soon as possible, because if you don't, you'll just reinforce the negative experience and get stuck with a permanent aversion/fear.
As a motorbike rider for 30 years this is most definitely the truth.
After a very nasty smashed wrist a few years ago I swore I would never ride again. The wrist took some time to heal and I realised that life without a motorbike was very dull!
The first ride was a slightly nervy affair but I was soon back to enjoying myself again on two wheels.
When I was about six my grandparents tried introducing me to sprouts, and I wasn't very impressed to say the least. So the next day they tried another tack and served what they called brussels. I thought those tasted much nicer, and have been fond of brussel sprouts ever since!
Re the tomato trauma Scott mentioned, I wonder if the mess caused by chomping down on a cherry tomato wasn't reminiscent of blood, and thus associated with some previous bad experience such as a cut or a nose bleed.
I always figured these were something like a manifestation of chaos, in the mathematical sense. When you’re growing everything that comes later depends on what came before. Signals or their absence matter more. There’s not a “go back and redo the last step” feature in most of biology. The best thing to that is our cognition and I think that only comes after it develops right.
It seems to me that the fetal (through adulthood) developmental process of synaptic pruning matches your idea of chaos molded by signal. Here’s a quote from Terrence Deacon’s The Symbolic Species:
“Like Darwinian evolution, the adaptive structure of neural circuitry emerges out of the selective promotion and elimination of specific variant patterns. By initially overproducing connections that have been spread to a wide variety of targets, and then selecting from among these on the basis of their different functional characteristics, highly predictable and functionally adaptive patterns of connectivity can be generated with minimal prespecification of the details.”
Taking some online courses from the Santa Fe Institute about Chaos really changed the way I saw the world. I used to think being really good at math would just help you be able to solve all problems, but the more I think about it now the more I think even god-like AI is going to really struggle with some of that stuff.
Ah yes, Santa Fe. I remember a reviewer of Kauffman’s Origins of Order remarking that “you'll be so excited you'll want to rush and explain it to someone else” but you’ll simply have to “face the fact that you are now relatively alone on a higher plane.”
I don’t know anything about the boundaries of AI, but I always wonder how it fits with John Mayfield’s ideas about Evolution as Computation: “random events and random choices are the ultimate source of all goal-oriented information.”
It does feel to me like humans mostly cannot escape dualistic framing. General AI lives in a neighborhood where right next door is Colonel GiM, and directly across the street is Captain Homunculus.
I would think most people here are familiar with Chaos. Also as a funny aside, there seems to be some strange attractor in midjourney where if I use it via can of soup to alter images of myself it always wants to put me in a turquoise blazer. It’s very odd and I wonder if it will be used as a source of divination for weird cults in the future.
AI stuff is odd because I think of it like blowing dust in an attic to find beams of sunlight. Those beams are the order found in the chaos. I also consider the fact that LLMs work at all as strong philosophical proof that a lot of the constructionist arguments about language are not correct, ie language represents something real and orderly about the universe.
On ghost in the machine stuff… I’m starting to have very esoteric pan psychist but less fun thoughts about what this all means for what we are, really, and what it means for something to be alive and intelligent.
I like that image of dust revealing shafts of sunlight. The interesting thing about that is that the form of the shafts is created by what is blocking the sun. The shape of nature is created by what is not possible. Terrence Deacon calls this “the efficacy of absence.” It’s what gives the concept of possibility space a sense of teleonomy. From there one could choose a panvitalist view of the world, “This leaves open the possibility that most physical events have no conscious aspect, and yet may nonetheless exhibit properties like end-directedness, information, value, and so forth.”
That is a beautiful way to describe the nature of nature. Defined by what is not allowed. That’s more or less my own view.
The everything is alive stuff is fun until you resolve it down to what that means. For me it’s not that much fun. Some of this for me resolves down to mathematical versus computational universe stuff. I fall into the math camp. Things exist in material reality and as the concept of what they are in immaterial reality.
How does this programming relate to life long diet, behavior, skills? And how much more effort is required to retrain? We invest on a thesis. We spend 1.7T in US on food, 1.9T on healthcare cost of poor nutrition. You use to go to grocery and were thin, now you get diabetes. We have been trained to like ultraprocessed food even though it's bad for us. We don't invest in behavior change. We do invest in things people want. They want to live longer but are stuck eating the things programmed in their brain in their youth. What is the innovation path of least resistance to better health and behavior change?
Pretty sure you don't need to be trained to like fat, sugar and crispiness. Cavemen would in all likelihood have loved a hamburger or a bar of chocolate!
I don't think this is right, because if you go to other countries, you'll find people who genuinely don't like super-sweet stuff. I'm British but live in China: many people here don't eat chocolate, saying, "it's too sweet." Confuses the hell out of me, but that's what they say! And the most obvious reason why this might be the case is that they didn't have chocolate when they were kids, and so never developed the taste for it.
Incidentally, I'm early 40s, and have spent neatly half my life in the UK and half in China. Over my 20 years here, my tastes have changed, but there seems to be a hard core of food preferences formed early in my life that aren't changing. That includes chocolate, potatoes, and certain kinds of convenience foods - I still like classic British baked beans, even though I very rarely eat them, for example.
So I think there's a fair chance that cavemen who grew up on a diet that is to us very bland and lacking in seasoning would find our ultra-salty, ultra-sugary food very offputting.
I'm an American in Germany and the germans favorite thing to say about a good dessert is that "it's not too sweet" - like that's a compliment. My wife is German and we both get a real kick out of this because - and it's just a theory - that it is a lie. Like the British they lie to themselves that food doesn't need sugar or flavor. It's just post-war propaganda. Sugar was heavily rationed after the war so they got used to boring desserts and a bland diet, food as sustenance not as something to savor.
As a kid I used to put sugar on my frosted flakes, I wish everyone was as fortunate as I was : )
Yep, I have definitely toyed with that idea as well. Ultimately, I don't think it's right - my Chinese wife doesn't have any reason to pretend in front of me, and she really never chooses chocolate. She also notices sweetness in savoury foods much more than me. It seems as though her tastebuds are just set at a higher level of sensitivity to sweetness than mine - and I see lots of people here who seem to share her tastes. I don't discount the possibility that there's an element of talking themselves into it, but I think they've talked themselves into it successfully!
In the next generation, that will probably all change. Kids who've grown up with fizzy drinks and McDonald's ice cream will probably have a higher tolerance for sugariness; I'm sure cavemen kids would adapt, too. But I still think there's a fair chance that if you brought a bunch of cavemen to modern Britain/America, they'd reject most process foods.
Anecdotally, it's definitely not always a lie. I think many foods and drinks are way too sweet now, but this was not so when I was a kid. No propaganda on this from anybody in my family - my grandparents, who experienced the war, love sweet stuff. I probably think it's a matter of habit. As I ate less sweets, I became calibrated to less sweet tastes - and now too sweet foods taste off-putting - like it's just too much. I will still get totally temporarily addicted if somebody puts out a bowl of sweets though :)
Was about to say this! :) My diet is low-carb and many sweets are just overwhelmingly sugary to me - as Vitor below says, the taste profile ends up overwhelmed by the sweetness, leaving nothing particularly interesting to taste.
For calibration: A common dessert I make for myself is unsweetened yoghurt, coconut shavings, raw cocoa nibs and a small handful of raspberries. It's not very sweet (nearly all of the sweetness comes from the raspberries, with a little from the lactose in the yoghurt), but it's basically perfect for me.
(Also, 90% chocolate is my favourite chocolate percentage. If the percentage goes any lower, the chance I'll like the chocolate goes down, not up. That said, I've had a few good 70% ones. Conversely, everything I've sampled under about 60% has never struck me as anything but gross, though as a kid (pre-teen) I dimly recall thinking otherwise. Can't get back into the mindset, though.)
It *is* a compliment. It's very easy to make a 7/10 dessert by just making it very rich and sweet. A 10/10 dessert has a much more complex flavor profile that is indeed "not too sweet" compared to the 7/10 baseline. It requires higher quality ingredients and skill in assembling and balancing them before you dare pulling back on the sweetness a bit.
ETA: I'm Swiss, so roughly part of the same food culture.
I hear "not to sweet" as a complement for desserts and other sweets in the US all the time. I presume, signaling sophistication, as the mainstream palatte is seen as preferring sweet to the point of being cloying.
Which I tend to agree with, many desserts are disgusting after one or two bites if you give up sugar for a while.
(Though I think food really is sweeter here because of big corn - your postwar socioeconomic explanation is interesting to hear)
I believe there is evidence that comfort foods get etched in our brain before we are adults. Convince magnifies that. We did reprogram the food system, boosting yield and draining taste, to achieve scale. Snacks backfill the gap. My question is how hard is it to change that childhood programming?
While we tend to downplay nurturing these days, that's only in the regular situations. I don't think anyone should doubt the ability of childhood trauma to mess people up.
Judith Harris' view was that even child abuse doesn't mess people up. She said the reason not to abuse a child is the same as the reason not to abuse an adult.
My reading of the literature (although I in no way claim to be an expert in the field) is that abused children do tend to have pretty substantially worse outcomes, even after controlling for other factors.
Now, I agree with the basic argument of "even if it doesn't cause worse outcomes, it's still wrong because of other reasons", but the point about it not messing people up seems pretty hard to support?
Socioeconomic factors, mostly. I can't quickly find any adoption studies which would shed light on possible genetic factors, but while I don't discount possible genetic involvement, my baseline is to be leery of attributions to genetic involvement without cause.
But let me turn it back on you. So we have children being subject to what reasonable people would agree is abuse - can you provide much proof that it *doesn't* mess them up?
At the risk of being unnecessarily pedantic, this is slightly misleadingly phrased. A more correct way of saying it would be "people who are convicted/detected pedophiles are more likely to claim to have been sexually abused as children than a member of the general public".
Even if we grant that their statements are true (and given that at least some of these claims are made in a context in which claiming to be an abuse victim may have material impact on their lives through less punishment etc, we should be careful about), an increased rate (roughly 3x, from my reading) is not the same thing as "often". If the base rate is, say, 1%, that'd still only work out to 3x - a significant increase relatively, but a long way from "common".
My reading of the literature is that child sex offenders are more likely to have been abused themselves, but pedophiles are not more likely. Abuse doesn't corelate with the attraction, it correlates with the being willing to offend.
Possibly a reference to form-deprivation myopia, but that results in physical deformation of the eye, whereas Scott seems to be alluding to a visual processing issue in the brain.
As a parent of an extremely premature child, I'm familiar with a few specific physical critical development windows. If you do not practice the swallowing reflex when you are an infant, you will struggle perhaps for the rest of your life (my son was intubated for months). Similarly, the development of your alveoli in your lungs seems to happen primarily in the first 5-7 years of life or so.
These examples don't relate to the idea of critical windows for developing preferences, but I thought I'd offer them as additional concrete examples.
For much of my life I was unable to eat any food located between two slices of bread (by definition, a sandwich), which my mind categorized as revolting and vomit-inducing, even though I like bread and food that comes on a single slice of bread (isn't that illogical?)
This was due to a bad experience in my childhood, not with food in itself, but because it was the food I had to eat during a very stressful period.
The bread we use in Italy is different from your bread (if you’re American). As far as i can tell, American bread is usually soft, due to the oils in it. Most of our bread (not all) is, how can I say it, hard, rigid. This is the bread that triggers that memory.
Burgers, like they serve at McDonalds, use soft bread, which to me is a different food item. I have eaten them without any problem in the past.
But it’s more complicated than that. We have native soft bread sandwiches in Italy, a common one is called “tramezzino”. It has always scared me, so I’ve never eaten one. That is because, although it’s made with soft bread, so I know the feeling in my mouth would be different if I ate one, it does look like that memory, visually, because it’s made with two bread slices.
A food-filled bun made with hard bread (like, here in Rome, a "rosetta"), does trigger that memory somewhat, though not as much as two slices of hard bread.
Anyways, it’s been 30 years, and at this point, I think I’ve grown out of these issues.
Of course, it’s easy for me to say, since I don’t have to bite into one right now.
guessing this is because it's really important to distinguish between bad foods and good foods evolutionarily. like how babies put lots of stuff in their mouth except plants because plants can be poisonous.
Childhood vs adulthood doesn't seem to be rocket science: children simply have less background to compare against. It is like wise old men vs. young naive ones, only the comparison is even worse.
Unlike AI - real intelligences have an ever ongoing comparison and update of input vs. experience. A simple example: if apples fall down - 100 past experiences of apples falling down won't be overwritten by one example of an apple falling up. A child, however, doesn't have 100 past experiences - maybe only has a couple so the fall-up outlier makes much more of an impression.
As for the ongoing fetish with "bad imprint" - the assumption being made is still that furries are just miswiring firing off random chance.
I say assumption because I do not think furries were a thing before television. Note that this is even though children have had stuffed animals for a long, long time; even animated animals in movies only constitute a relative handful of hours per year prior to the advent of television.
It is just as likely that it is the hundreds/thousands/tens of thousands of hours which children spend watching fake talking cartoon animals (basically people but that look like animals) on television that causes the miswiring. In this case, it is this prolonged conditioning in an entirely artificial experience as opposed to some neuron firing too strongly once during a child's viewing of a cute animal.
And if this is so, the problem isn't evolution - the problem is garbage being input into children at high rate:. GIGO. It is actually a testament to evolution that so few children are permanently miswired after such a regime of indoctrination that would make Guantanamo look like a week of spring break. If kids are watching 2000 hours of TV + internet videos a year from age 4 to 14 - that's 20000 hours of potentially bad info going in - and more importantly, is likely a greater source of input than any single other input including parents. Add in 1500 hours of schooling per year/12000 hours from 4 to 14 with a LibsofTikTok type teacher - holy crap.
It should only be a wonder why there aren't MORE furries.
Now consider how either a machine learning or neural network type AI would perform with this diet of input info.
People seriously think evolved intelligence is so easily reproduced? LOL
The two examples you gave could be highly salient/heavily imprinted because they are in areas highly important to reproductive fitness, ie reproduction itself and poison avoidance. Evolutionary pressure over generations is the training data for the genetic matrices that encode our neural matrices.
I think it's clear that formative stimuli like the exploding tomato happen and are not so uncommon. I don't share your puzzlement about why their effects are not more uniform.
* The brain is a large and complex system, and any given stimulus will hit different people differently.
* Processing of the stimulus in the years afterward can also greatly differ, based on subsequent formative stimuli, one's openness to new experience, etc.
It seems to like you're looking for a compact, unified, deterministic explanation of why X produces Y, whereas I don't expect such an explanation to exist in a large, somewhat chaotic system.
I suspect the tomato story is a slight misunderstanding.
My pet theory as to why so many people hate raw tomatoes (quite common in my experience) is something to do with them being vegetables (savoury tasting) masquerading as fruits.
You bite into broccoli or a cucumber and it tastes green and leafy, as you'd expect (so kids don't expect to like it or eat it raw)- you expect a cherry tomato to taste like a cherry or a grape (sweet), and instead it tastes like a raw tomato (savoury, awful). So your cousin wasn't imprinted with the unpleasant experience of a tomato exploding in his mouth, but with the fact that this unpleasant savoury-tasting juice came out, rather than sweet fruity goodness.
Good cherry tomatoes are sweet enough that I've made ice cream with them before. This is not trying to persuade you to like tomatoes; I don't care. But cherry tomatoes definitely should be sweet.
Small tomatoes also tend to be properly ripe. This is actually explained by the small size - a ripe full-size tomato will get damaged in transport by its own weight, but small ones are not heavy enough, and so can be transported and shelved when ripe.
Counterexample to the tomato thing: I also thought I didn't like tomatoes since childhood, but that was a belief, not a taste. When someone convinced me to try one at age ~17, and it was good. Now I like tomatoes. Maybe the same would happen with your cousin if they tried one. Maybe the same would happen with me again if I tried a Cheeto (I won't though lol)
This happened to me with cashews somewhere around age 35. I was on a long flight, hungry, and instead of any of the airplane snacks I expected, they brought out cashews. I was bummed but told myself "lots of people eat these, they can't be that bad", forced myself to nibble on one, and hey, now I like cashews.
We'll learn a lot about possible critical windows in sexuality if and when specific cohorts of children hit puberty and exhibit widespread fetishes for face masks.
Wouldn’t this only occur if the people in face masks were presented as sexy? Kids were still exposed to sexualized images of non-masked people on TV and possibly real people within their bubble.
As someone that has tried tomatoes as an adult, your cousin made the right choice. "He still won't try tomatoes" is equivalent to "he still won't stick his hand in fire".
I'll support this. I no longer have a visceral distaste for tomatoes, but I won't eat them if I can help it.
Fresh, that is. Sundried, pureed, or made into a sauce, I do like them. They just have to go through some process that makes them no longer taste fresh.
Do we know that all these childhood formative experiences are really the cause of anything, or if they are just the first time when something latent becomes salient?
Not "x made me gay" but "I realised i was Born This Way when I saw x".
"Born this way" is mostly a myth - twin studies show that the combination of genetics and shared environment isn't the main cause (one third of the explanatory power for gay men, one sixth for lesbians).
It could also be stuff like which individual neurons happen to connect to each other as the brain develops. Presumably the effect of any single neuron is small, but once you add together the randomness of many such events (including random events in other organs that then affect the brain through hormones and stuff, and random events other than synapse formation), it plausibly is enough to change noticable aspects of the person's mind like their sexuality. Technically this is in utero factors, but the factor affecting it is thermal noise, which is not shared. It's like how identical twins have different fingerprints.
Twin studies show that genetics aren't the main cause _of homosexuality_.
But they also show that genetics are the main cause of almost everything else. So "born this way" is mostly reality. It's the application to homosexuality that fails.
If you are on a different part of the womb from your twin, couldn’t you be exposed to different environmental influences? Eg. it could affect one twin’s brain/epigenetics if one side of the womb is exposed to more testosterone because the mother was under stress or something, while the other might be more shielded. This would be technically environmental but still be part of “born this way.” An older trans man was speculating on a podcast that he might have ended up masculinized because his mother was in a car crash during pregnancy. (I suspect post-natal environment plays a role in some cases for sexual orientation, though)
This seems theoretically possible, but how likely is it really? It strikes me as highly unlikely that this would be a bigger effect that genetics, and certainly not enough that "born this way" applies everywhere.
Quoting the study: "Biometric modeling revealed that, in men, genetic effects explained .34-.39 of the variance, the shared environment .00, and the individual-specific environment .61-.66 of the variance. "
So the explanation would have to include that the shared environment of the womb is meaningless, but that non-shared environmental factors in the womb are extremely important. This strikes me as far-fetched to say the least.
Probably with twins postnatal environment is usually much more significant in explaining the differences. I would guess that in many cases of different sexual orientations, both identical twins at birth have the potential to be bisexual but are influenced by social pressures and early experiences to end up identifying as gay or straight. I bet part of the supposedly lower genetic influence for lesbians is that one’s own sexual orientation is generally harder to figure out with an estrogen-dominant hormone system (and there seem to be a lot of bisexual women when it is socially acceptable?) Twin studies probably aren’t a great way of figuring out the impact of prenatal environment in the general population.
There's this hypothesis that women are more naturally bisexual, in which case it makes sense that environment is more determining on whether this tendency becomes practice.
This reminds me of training dogs. On the one hand they are incredibly trainable (for certain tasks). But they can carry one bad experience through their entire life.
So dogs having this incredible 'learning window' is the same trait that leads them to having 'cherry tomato-style' experiences inprint on them so strongly?
I remember it as if it were yesterday. As a young child I was walking to the shops with my Mum and she gave me a tomato to enjoy. I bit into it but a pip stuck painfully between my two front teeth and couldn't be dislodged without returning home. For a long time I wouldn't eat raw tomato, but now 70 years later I can eat cooked tomato or sliced tomato in salads. I still won't bite into a whole tomato.
Perhaps it is a matter of two influences colliding. The immediate strong event (e.g. the pip getting stuck) and a pre-existing strong aversion/desire (others messing with my teeth).
I didn’t like your ”just so” stories - kinks and fetisches come with incredible variations, so either you have to make up increasingly unlikely explanations, or you have to say that some fetisches can be rationally explained and others can’t, which seems strange. Whereas if you just believe it’s an unusual cross-wiring explained by childhood experiences, anything can fit that model.
Presumably the difference to tomatoes is that you’re _supposed_ to form sexual preferences at a young age and you’re mentally wired for it, but the mind being the messy thing it is it can easily get non-standard. This seems to include homosexuality, and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if it’s also how various trans things are formed.
Quoting ’Cryptonomicon’:
”I finally came clean to her about the stockings. It felt good. I'd been reading a lot about how the brain develops and had finally come to accept my stocking kink. It seems that when you are a certain age, somewhere between about two and five years, your mind just gels. The part of it that's responsible for sex becomes set into a pattern that you'll carry with you for the rest of your life. All of the gay people I've ever discussed it with have told me that they knew they were gay, or at least different, years before they even began thinking about sex, and all of them agree that gayness cannot be converted into straightness, or vice versa, no matter how hard you might try.
The part of your brain that handles sex frequently gets cross-wired into other, seemingly irrelevant areas at this age. This is when people pick up an orientation towards sexual dominance or submission, or when a lot of guys pick up highly specific kinks--say, rubber, feathers, or shoes. Some of them are unfortunate enough to get turned on by little kids, and those guys are essentially doomed from that point onwards--there is nothing to do except castrate them or lock them up. No therapy will unkink the brain once it has kinked.
So, all things considered, being turned on by black stockings wasn't such a bad sexual card to have been dealt. I laid this all out to Virginia during the trip home. I was surprised by how calmly she accepted it. I was too big of a jerk to realize that she was thinking about how it all applied to her.”
I doubt the exploding cherry tomato is the reason your cousin dislikes tomatoes. A chocolate truffle exploding in his mouth filling it with delicious goo is unlikely to have put him off chocolate.
It's common to find people who hate the taste of raw tomatoes (I'm one of them). I think it's like Coriander/Cilantro, where there's some compound that some people can taste and others can't.
I pride myself on being able to eat anything so spent many years developing a tolerance to raw tomato flavour, and so can now eat it without gagging but ugh, it's still awful. Even if I do sometimes voluntarily add it to burgers etc to maintain my tolerance. Many people have insisted that oh, I just haven't tried a GOOD tomato, try THIS organic heirloom homegrown flavoursome sweet cherry tomato... Nope they're all bad, sorry.
Re: the "bad childhood experiences cause lifelong specific food aversions", I'd put a personal anecdote on the table that I've never been able to make much sense of.
When I was a kid, I was a fairly picky eater (I guess most kids are, but I seem to have been worse than average - or so the adults told me). And I still vividly remember being totally (and irrationally) grossed out by a couple of specific foodstuffs, to the extent that I would throw up in my mouth if they were just brought near me.
Fast forward a few decades, and some of these are amongst my favourite foodstuffs.
The interesting thing is how the switch happened. In childhood, these foods were super yucky. And at some point during my teenage years, zap!, the aversion was suddenly gone. No laborious process of trying to re-condition myself. Just... seeing a plate of that food, and going "yum! let's have some of this!". If the aversion had not been as strong during childhood, this would not have been as surprising: but I really found these things revolting. And then all of a sudden... tasty!
Also interesting is that this did not happen with all food that my childhood brain considered suspect. A lot of cheese varieties are still off the map, particularly the more biologically active ones. But these are likely a special category, as we probably have some evolution-provided innate additional safeguard in our brains not to eat stuff that visibly has mold growing on it. A safeguard that I haven't been able to deactivate yet.
The term “temperature” usually wouldn’t be used for learning rates. Temperature, especially in the context of LLMs, is a parameter for softmax that determines how sharp you want the probability distribution of predictions to look (roughly, e.g., put 99.99% on the class that’s slightly better than any other or put approximately the same probability on everything almost regardless of the activations), controlling randomness of the output.
Having the learning rate (lr) higher at the beginning of the training and then decreasing it seems to speed up the training compared to having a small learning rate all along, but also, there are all sorts of lr schedulers, including those that decrease and increase the lr in a cycle (no one knows why this sometimes works better, and intuitions about mountains and hill-climbing don’t work well for spaces with millions of dimensions; gradient descent works from the derivative , not from looking around, and the you might be climbing weirdly combined counterintuitive mountains- https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/muLN8GRBdB8NLLX36/visible-loss-landscape-basins-don-t-correspond-to-distinct-algorithms).
People might call decreasing the learning rate “cooling”, but I think most wouldn’t use “temperature”.
There's a rich literature on learning of food preferences. The top level idea that you need to know is that omnivores are evolutionarily sensitized to the effects of food, for the very good reason that a varied diet implies regular encounters with foods that might kill you.
If you play the nasty game of using radiation to make a rat feel nauseous after ingesting some food, it will most likely avoid that food forever. Omnivores can't afford to give foods many second chances. Which is part of the story about tomatoes.
Since sexual experiences and tendencies don't usually kill you, its reasonable to think that evolution will be more tolerant of them. An awful lot of the psychoanalytic stories about childhood experiences with big effects are just stories. They might matter a lot when they become stories that we tell ourselves and come to believe. but that's another topic.
If at age n you experience that some experience E is really bad, the probability per Laplace's rule of succession that the next E will be really bad is 1/n per year. Because n is small, 1/n is large. So you never do it again, and therefore can't update.
I would assume that the reason why formative experiences can have such a drastic effect, like being against eating tomatoes, has almost nothing to do with age specifically and a lot more to do with having little else to judge the experience by.
It's entirely plausible that your thirty-something cousin could bite into a cheery tomato and get squicked out for the first time, but he would have three decades of experience with various species of tomato at that point, which is what lessens the impact of any new information. I would assume that, without experience with e.g. dragonfruit, he could look at the inside of one at any age *for the first time* and justifiably decide it's a horror too gross to deal with. We simply have less experience generally when we're younger, which is why these moments tend to happen in childhood.
You're the psychiatrist, I'm the bumpkin. You tell me if that's not accurate. All I have to go on is logic.
There is absolutely no way that someone who bites into an unexpectedly disgusting thing would involuntarily inhale it. That kind of impulse would have been weeded out of the gene pool millions of years ago.
The high learning rate early in life likely does contribute to stronger imprinting/conditioning effects during childhood. Children's brains are still forming connections rapidly, so an intense experience can wire in certain associations more permanently.
Overcoming trapped priors later in life is difficult but not impossible. With enough contrary evidence and conscious effort, even adults can slowly weaken learnt associations. So while imprinting is stronger in childhood, neural plasticity continues through life.
i imagine childhood brain as less full of ruts and knotted pathways that adults have and swimming in BDNF—maybe the plasticity and new pathways that are triggered are done so in a way that is more potent bc there is a relative lack of others to compete with
Does valproic acid reopen critical windows in humans? I remember some excitement about this possibility about a decade ago. Was that just hype generated by a few underpowered studies?
"reacted in some profound way, like becoming a furry."
More likely ... let's back up to Freud, [paraphrased] "there are two kinds of deviation, deviation in aim, and deviation in objective." Is becoming a furry a deviation in objective: 'I tried to become a non-human ideation of an animal.' or is becoming a furry a failure in aim: 'I can't visualize a reasonably attainable human to human sexual model, I see more sexualization in animation than in humans.' I would think for a 'basement dwelling anime addict' the latter is the most likely case.
After writing this, I realized I have followed Freud into the trap of binary thinking, I do apologize for this.
> This still doesn’t explain the unpredictable nature of preference-changing events. My cousin had a bad experience with a tomato in childhood, but was that really his worst childhood experience?
I imagine it's probably something like "I didn't like tomatoes as a kid, so I didn't try them when I was older, so I didn't try them when I was older..." up to the present. Basically, he never had any reason to even gather more evidence about tomatoes being good or bad, so he never did, and never updated.
After your near-drowning, did you experience trepidation the first few times you went back to the beach?
I don't understand the logic here. How is a child who is updating stronger going to be more likely to end up in a trapped prior? If they're more willing to take 100-mile steps, why would we expect them to get trapped at a local minimum/maximum?
I think the implications of this theory on eating would be that children should be very adventurous with food, only to settle later in life on a narrow range of food preferences. That's opposite of reality.
And while there are some cases like that of a weird tomato aversion, that's an exception we shouldn't use to define the rule. My son had this issue with hot dogs, where he ate one while experiencing GI discomfort and decided that hot dogs make him sick. After a few months, he decided kielbasa and corn dogs are fine. I suspect he'll work his way toward the full hot dog experience again, so it definitely seems like a trapped prior. But if I accepted the hypothesis that children take larger step changes than adults, I wouldn't expect his priors to get trapped in the first place.
As a parent of 2 small children, I think it might match reality if we restrict attention to very early ages? My very limited experience is that there is a critical window around age 1-2 where kids will at least try pretty much anything you put in front of them, but at age 3-4 they start declining unfamiliar or unwanted food without trying it. Right now I've got just one child in each age range, so I'm operating from a very limited data set but I think it matches what I've heard from other parents in my family.
This is a great point that brings up more questions. My kids were adventurous early, too, but not so much after language development. Then they get more adventurous the older they get. It looks less like gradient descent, and more like a period of extreme prejudice from which they gradually recover.
One other feedback loop to consider is Identity: as a young child I said I didn’t like mayonnaise and people found that surprising, so I became A Person Who Doesn’t Like Mayonnaise. This stuck around until after college when I realized that my preference wasn’t actually grounded in anything and I could switch my mayo preference and no one would care or give me a hard time for it.
For somatic, “feel like I need to vomit” reflexes this might be less of a factor, but for things like “I am American and so speak English” or “I am not a math person” or “I am a Democrat” these identity-based loops from childhood can be impactful and very hard to get out of, and they don’t happen as often to adults.
> but for things like “I am American and so speak English” or “I am not a math person” or “I am a Democrat” these identity-based loops from childhood can be impactful and very hard to get out of
What's the circular part of "I speak English"? That's just a fact; it's as rawly objective as "my pupils are black". No one identifies as an English speaker even though in reality what they speak is Dutch.
Naively, wouldn't it make sense for childhood priors to be stronger, just because they arrive without a lot of other signal to balance them out?
Although I wonder if there's something weird about food preference that makes it particularly rigid in children compared to other things. Anecdotally, I was an incredibly, obsessively picky child, and at least compared to how I was then I'm not at all picky now, and I can pinpoint, almost exactly, the age where that shifted for me (around 24) but I could not tell you why at all.
There's a surprising number of people here who dislike tomatoes, including me. Is this worth polling on? Maybe a question on the next ACX survey?
Personally, I think it's the remaining nightshade-like taste on fresh tomatoes that puts me off, and I will happily eat tomatoes once they've been prepared in one way or another and they no longer taste fresh. Maybe this is akin to the cilantro gene and we just have a predisposion against that taste?
> In a typical AI training run, the AI starts at a very high learning rate (also called “temperature”) and gradually “cools” down over time.
Temperature and learning rate are unrelated* in a typical (modern) AI setup. Temperature is a parameter that determines how "spiky" the probability distribution you're using is, or equivalently, how concentrated it is: a heated posterior is very spread-out (high entropy) while a cold one is dominated by a single narrow peak (low entropy).
*Except in the special case of simulated annealing, which is rarely used in modern AI optimization.
> So at the beginning, you might start in a random place and want to see if 500 miles away is more mountainous. But once your hard work has brought you 1000 feet from Everest’s summit, you don’t want to take a 500 mile jump and end up in New Delhi and have to start all over again.
Now this is a *different* algorithm (sounds like adaptive hill climbing, maybe).
Gradient ascent doesn't have a probability distribution, so it doesn't have hot or cold temperatures. The step sizes are deterministic (which was my main point).
Did you ever have an experience with psychedelics? I'm not saying you should because it can be dangerous but at moderate doses that don't send you into alien words or ego deaths it is really interesting to observe your filters (I believe from the default mode network of the brain, which is suppressed by many psychedelics) first hand.
What I mean with this: There are actually quite a lot of things that go through an unconscious filter before your conscious mind gets to process them. These things are not only the often portrayed visual artifacts (intense colors, moving / breathing textures etc.) but also *thoughts*.
That means there are actually thoughts that your filter does not allow you to process at all. Many of these filters are also created during our childhood. Thoughts that scare you, that you are constantly told are wrong or impossible or thought that just did not make sense or help you in any way.
With those filters suppressed, you can have these thoughts again. This can lead to very scary experiences ("bad trip") but also lead you into states of childish joy, wonder and interest about things that you normally do not (actually *can not*) notice.
When I would start feeling nauseous on long car trips as a kid, my parents gave me orange-flavored Dramamine. Associating it with nausea is likely why I hate artificial orange flavoring to this day (although I like real oranges).
I wonder if variation in learning rate/critical period plasticity could explain the genetic correlation between ASD and intelligence.
If genetic variants speed up activity-dependent patterning of primary sensory pathways, it might result a longer period of consistent sensory training inputs for areas involved in higher order integration, during their respective critical window. At the same time, if primary sensory windows close earlier it risks these pathways getting "trapped priors", with downstream brain regions getting comparatively poor data from that sense. My dated recollection is that fundamental functions of the brain involve critical windows that close much earlier (eg. retinal calcium transients, ocular dominance).
Could such variation sometimes result in higher order regions overweighting a particular sensory pathway, with possible impacts to cognitive performance, and other times result in improved performance when pathways integrate appropriately? It seems potentially consistent with the age of onset, sensory features and fixed interests of ASD.
I developed hate for shiitake mushrooms in my late 20s due to a terrible meal I made on a hiking trip. Even the smell of shiitakes put me off the food.
Fast forward to when I was 41, I decided to try something: I like all other mushrooms, so what if I pretend my priors didn't exist? My wife cooked a meal with shiitakes in it. I sat down to eat. I blanked my mind, told myself that I had never eaten shiitakes before, and was tasting them for the first time.
They tasted great and now I can eat them again.
I guess my point is that people should try updating on things they think are impossible to update on. Maybe they get lucky.
Often when kids have that tomato explosion experience, parents will keep reminding them of it and kind of forcibly making them internalize it. 'Remember that time when...'.
The family has visitors over and you're introduced as the kid who had a tomato explosion and now hates tomatoes.
Family photos are being shown and there's you next to a tomato plant...
People mostly have no memories of times before they're like 5, so if everyone would just drop the topic right after the incident, these things would not get written to ROM so hard.
I was the kid who hated Nutella until this year (I'm 33) when I just went ahead and put some in my mouth. It's just not very good.
The innovation path unfortunately would need to involve a reduction in the obsession with like for like growth in profits as the key indicators of success.
I used to hear their radio commercials in the early 2000s and wondered how much business they lost due to people not being able to figure out how to spell the name. With Google's spelling correction it's not as big a deal nowadays, but I could think of about a dozen plausible spellings of Schick Shadel.
It's the sort of name a drunk can pronounce 😂
Is that similar to when a parent catches their kid smoking and makes them smoke until they puke? I've had significant doubts whether that was a good idea or not, even beyond questioning if it works. But it would be nice to know if it worked anyway.
They went out of business during the pandemic. Even though the program had decent statistics, better than places like Betty Ford, they were never quite accepted as legitimate. Possibly because it's kind of gross. But it really really worked for a lot of people, including the guy who owned that radio station mentioned below
Thanks John Money. Surely we can put this to use to cure trans people immediately.
???
Behaviorsm isn't without merits, but naive blank slate behaviorism applied to certain groups specifically (autistic, trans, and intersex people) has been bad. Anything vaguely akin to expanding this has to be vocally called out as roughly equivalent to the return of lobotomies.
Ever notice how left-wing heritability denialism gets put on hold whenever politically convenient?
Hey non-philosopher:
1. I'm not left wing
2. I believe in IQ
Please be a bit nicer? I enjoy your commentary and don't want to see you banned.
Apologies. I will try to do better.
This started my day with a smile. Thank you, Moon Moth!
The natural reaction when someone says something unkind is to say something unkind back to them back to them but how much better would the world be if people just said “Please be a bit nicer”?
Perhaps we can start a campaign! Get T-shirts printed!
Please be a bit nicer?
PS. Well done too to Alephwyr for accepting the advice!
I think his assumption was justified. I've never before seen someone who both believes in IQ and isn't left-wing, but also uses the "this idea has historically led to bad things, so we have to call out anyone who thinks in that direction" argument.
Isn't that the entire premise behind the suppression of leftism in the United States and other western countries? Soviets bad, therefore Food not Bombs practitioners should be arrested?
I think "X would have bad implications if applied to situation Y, so we must fight against X wherever it appears, even in situations where it could be true" is a bad idea.
I'm not opposed to the entire idea of trapped priors or a critical period, but it needs to be handled responsibly. When there is an elephant in the room and you don't acknowledge it while advancing a perspective that could have implications related to it I think it's important to try to provoke things into the open.
John Money was a quack psychiatrist who didn't believe in innate gender. He tried to prove his point by persuading a family to raise their son as a girl. Instead of being conditioned into a happy little daughter, the son hated living as a girl and rebelled against it from the age of two until his parents finally let him detransition when he was fifteen. I think Alephwyr's point is that trying to cure trans people through childhood conditioning is as futile as John Money's attempt to make a child transgender.
I agree with you, but I also think that Alephwyr's comment was very strawmanny/misrepresenting Scott's position as well as confusing-to-readers (which is what prompted my initial reply).
Scott could simply deny that he thinks Transgenderism is post-natally conditioned. It would immediately resolve this.
I think there are a lot of trans people who have felt that way for their entire lives and are happy being that way, but there are also a lot of trans people who become trans late in life due to weird life events and are still happy being that way.
Are you implying treatments exist for those who are unhappy being that way? If so please present evidence.
Is there a word for when you accuse an opponent of something completely unrelated to what they said, then use the refusal to discuss the unrelated thing as the critical piece of evidence for your accusation?
Paranoia (non-pejorative)
Or he could ignore it. "Trans" was not mentioned at all in his post, so it is on the reader to infer the post has anything at all to do with transgenderism.
Were he to confirm OR deny the assertion that transgenderism is post-natally conditioned would prove nothing at all, since it is simply an argument from authority, for which I have not even heard Scott considers himself such an authoritative source to provide guidance on a stance.
Unless Scott's position has updated without my knowing, I believe Scott's running hypothesis is "The mind/brain contains an innate map of the body, part of that map includes gender, sometimes the map is wrong. Sort of like phantom limb pain." However, this post was written a decade ago. So take it with a grain of salt.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender-identity/
Thank you. This assuages my concerns somewhat.
It was more complicated than that. His penis was badly injured in a circumcision gone bad. Well, social constructionism was in vogue then (as now), so of course if the anatomy had been changed, why not raise the child with the new anatomy?
Money was following the theories of the time. It shows how much damage bad theories can do to vulnerable people as much as it shows Money was a perv (which also appears to be the case).
True. But David Reimer really was vocally unhappy as a girl from an early age and only became more so as he grew older, so it seems like a lot of misery could have been avoided if Money and his family had listened to him instead of continuing the experiment for thirteen years.
I agree. I'm anti-trans-ideology, but I don't think Money is any kind of slam-dunk case against childhood transgender treatments. The problem wasn't that Reimer's gender identity was being indulged; the problem is that it was being ignored.
I think the family were only going along with what the doctors, particularly Money, were telling them. But if they had known all that was going on, they probably would have objected. Money was definitely an abuser, and that's part of the entire problem with the current drive to re-brand paedophilia as MAPs (minor attracted persons); while doubtless there are genuine people involved, there are also doubtless exactly these kinds of abusers wanting to use the campaign to hide under and get themselves protected ("you're persecuting me and I'll sue you if you don't stop slandering me as a paedophile! the psychiatric establishment is re-defining my condition so it's a medical state not a criminal offence!")
I'm confused. It's not a criminal offense to be attracted to minors. This seems pretty obvious? And implying someone has abused minors when they haven't is indeed slander. The word "pedophile" technically refers to the former but in common parlance is understood to be the latter. This is a problem for people in the former category.
It's inevitable that some criminals will find cover under this. Just as black criminals find cover under "anti-racist" rhethoric. But that's still vastly better than rounding up all black people on general suspicion.
I actually will agree with that. Money stuck to his ideology instead of listening to the patient, and Reimer was the victim.
The entire psychology community really wanted gender to be socially determined for political reasons, which is why they were so happy to accept those findings.
It's worth noting that all of these gender treatments are based on ideas that have no basis in science. The people who were doing these treatments did not have any scientifically valid reason to believe they'd be helpful, but these treatments have continued despite this fact.
The fact that they went from totally different causes for gender identity to assuming that altering people's genitals surgically and socializing them as that gender would help them is deeply troubling, because totally different causes would be very unlikely to have exactly the same treatment - but not getting sued for disfiguring the genitals of thousands of intersex children while following Money's treatments does provide a motivation for not wanting to say that these treatments don't work/are harmful.
It gets even worse when you dig into the story because the guy was actively abusive, and shouldn't have been let anywhere near children (or indeed any vulnerable person) but that was back then when everyone respected authority and if a Respected Doctor says this is the way to do things, why not?
Also why I have such strong feelings about the "we won't tell your parents because they wouldn't understand and might stop you" interventions with schools and trans kids. Much too easy to abuse "trust me, I'm an Authority Figure expert on this and I can tell you what is going on and what to do if you just follow along".
I'm sorry to directly question your character, I realize it's ad hominem, but are you a person who identifies with or is sexually attracted to dragons?
Yes to both, and there are many other things which could be used to impugn my character as well.
No worries, I was just curious about Scott's "fetish/imprint ->broadly, furries?" -> "lobotomies!?" in terms of reaction.
Ok your writing is very good
Thank you. I will try to write more.
Awesome.
I always thought an un-PC dragon story would be a bookish winged, firebreathing dragon who gets picked on by the other dragons for not wanting to set fire to stuff. So he takes up with a cute serpentine loong who lives in the water.
Okay, I find myself confused, because that story seems to fall extremely well within the realm of "politically correct" as I know it. A story about a quiet outsider who doesn't fit in with their peers but finds someone who validates them for who they are? So, two questions, because I'm genuinely curious:
1) (Roughly) how old are you? (I want to know if this is generational semantic drift) For reference, I graduated high school roughly a decade ago.
2) How are you defining "PC" (or "un-PC") such that that the story above is "un-PC"? Or what aspects of the story make it so?
Again, not attacking you, I'm genuinely curious at how your view is different than mine here.
Figure out what ethnicities the dragons would be if they were people.
Now does it make sense?
...Okay, that's a stretch, and so much less interesting that I was hoping for.
Did you ever see Disney's "The Reluctant Dragon"? It brings new meaning to "flaming", wink wink nudge nudge.
I recognise you from bsky. :)
Off topic, but you remind me of several people I knew quite well on a forum from before the net was silo'd into social media dystopias. You wouldn't happen to have participated in late 'aughties forum culture, would you?
I did. But I am trying to avoid making it too easy for random parties to collate large chunks of my identity.
Okay, follow up question, did one of those forums have the initials ED?
I have had like 100 handles because I was banned 20+ times from the forums I used the most, but I don't think so.
Okay, now you've gone and outed the both of you as having "erectile disfunction."
I have role played as a dragon in online games in the past. There was a high amount of sexual charge to my interactions, but these remained firmly within the gaming fantasy world.
Besides, it's really hard to get to meet dragons any more 😂
**That** was a very disturbing wikipedia page. But I suppose I should thank you for bringing it to my awareness. :-/
Also, "ycleptance" and "foredoomance" are kind of awesome words, and I regret that I won't be able to use them if I ever manage to forget their origin, because not everyone else will also have forgotten.
Sure, but only with their consent. In fact, I think any sexual preference that the individual having it prefers not to have should be cured. This is why conversion therapy should not be banned.
Conversion therapy does not work and is therefore fraud. Fraud should be illegal.
I wonder how much standard talk therapy is in the same boat, tbh.
Also, it is often forced on children by parents. And this kind of thing falls somewhere near the border of what parents should be allowed to decide for their children.
>One of my distant cousins won't eat tomatoes. His parents say when he was very young, he bit into a cherry tomato and it exploded into goo in his mouth, and he was so upset he wouldn't eat tomatoes from then on. Now he’s in his 30s and still hates them. Is this fairly described as a “critical window” for food preferences?
Don't we all have a story like this? I ate sriracha as a kid and got food poisoning. I now have a strong negative reaction to the smell of sriracha.
>So at the beginning, you might start in a random place and want to see if 500 miles away is more mountainous. But once your hard work has brought you 1000 feet from Everest’s summit, you don’t want to take a 500 mile jump and end up in New Delhi and have to start all over again.
It seems pretty universal that as things scale upward in mass (and accumulated learning/knowledge can be viewed as mass), they become less "maneuverable". Speedboats vs ocean liners, etc.
Maybe this relates to your language post from yesterday, where a child with a vocabulary of 10,000 words can more easily learn a new language than an adult with a vocabulary of 20,000 words (and an increased number of deep rules that must be discarded, like "adjectives of quantity come before adjectives of color".)
Well, at least in the case of AI training, it's not a case of being UNABLE to move fast, it's a case of not WANTING to move fast. We could easily program the learning algorithms to keep the same high speed throughout (in fact, that's the default), but that produces worse results.
Organisms and vehicles becoming less maneuverable as they get big seems like probably a square/cube thing, where mass grows with volume but control surfaces grow with area. I don't really see how the same principles could apply to learning.
I don't understand Scott referring to algorithmic temperature as "learning rate". A learning rate should have something to do with the speed at which knowledge is acquired. Temperature is totally different; it's a metric for how often you do something random instead of doing something methodical.
The idea is that if you make enough random guesses, a few of them will likely be somewhere near the target you're trying to find, and a methodical search from there will get you to the target. But I don't really see any connection to "learning" or "speed". Making a random move usually doesn't involve any learning.
Yeah, I thought temperature was an inference-time hyperparameter, not a training-time hyperparameter
>Don't we all have a story like this?
No.
There is a large literature on this within the physiological psychology field--it's called 'flavor toxicosis'.
1) I even have a story like this *as an adult*, where a bad experience with green olives made me like them less, permanently.
2) Adults have much higher standards for themselves than for children. I suspect it's easy to learn a new language to an intermediate level: do it full time, without distractions or financial worries, and deliberately stay away from writing aimed at adults (which comes with an explosion of vocabulary, sentence structures, obscure turns of phrase, cultural references, and so on). Conversely, you will not learn a second language in a few years if you spend 5 minutes per day on duolingo after work.
At 16 I had a bad stomach virus shortly after eating a sub, and it was about 5 years before the nausea on tasting one went fully away (what helped quite a bit in the meantime was switching to a different meat, and having a flavorful soda or sports drink instead of water).
wanted to note that you are incorrectly using the term 'furry' to refer to people who are attracted to cartoon animals; not all furries are.
I don't think anything he said logically implies otherwise. People who are attracted to cartoon animals are a subset of furries, therefore people who gain a sexual attraction to cartoon animals necessarily become furries. It's a unidirectional claim. I don't think he's claimed that this is the source of all furries, thereby incorrectly assuming equality of sets.
I don't think that's true. Sexual attraction to furries isn't the same as identifying as one yourself.
I was under the impression that the term "furry" encompasses the entire sexuality. That is, people who are sexually attracted to anthropomorphic animals (whether cartoon or humans in costumes), and people who dress up as animals for sexual reasons, are all furries.
I suppose you could make a distinction between furry-dressers and furry-attracted people and then only use the term "furry" for one category, but there's such a huge overlap and they're mostly part of the same communities that such language would be unnecessarily pedantic for most people who don't participate or care. It seems simpler to just acknowledge that like with any subculture, furries can vary in degree of hardcore enthusiasm and participation.
Technically, within the furry fandom the term for those who like to dress up and have sex in their costumes is "murrsuiters". Basically:
* A fan of anthropomorphic characters is called a "furry", whether they dress up in a costume or not.
Most don't, either because they personally don't care that much for owning a costume, or because costumes are expensive, or require a lot of maintenance, etc.
* Costumes are called "fursuits", and thus the subgroup of furries who own one or more and dress up in them are called "fursuiters".
The typical fursuit is ill-suited for sexual activity. It lacks the required holes and is made from materials that'd be ruined if any bodily fluid, especially sticky ones, got into them, that kind of thing.
* Finally, there are those who have a fetish on fursuit-wearing and like to have sex wearing one. They typically own one or more fursuits especially designed for sexual activity, called "murrsuits", and are therefore called "murrsuiters".
Such for-sex costumes are similar to BDSM ones in that they have the necessary holes and are made from materials that are easily washable, but otherwise look like typical fursuits.
Hence we have murrsuiters as a subset of fursuiters, which in turn are a subset of furries.
Are "plushies" no longer a thing?
They are, ranging from those who just collect plushies, to those who adapt them for adult use. There are lots of ways to slice the fandom into specific subgroups and interests.
There are furries who aren't interested in the sexual aspect *at all* and are just into it for the 'being another species' bit or cosplay or other reasons that they identified with cartoon/anthropomorphic animals (often due to social isolation/bullying as children).
A big confusion here is between furries as a "fandom" and as a sexuality. There is overlap, but there are people in all 4 quadrants. Furries who are in the fandom but not into the fetish stuff tend to object if you lump everyone together.
While difficult to prove, I think it's directionally true that furry is a fetish subculture. I went on e621 and almost all of the top-used tags related to sex.
As Eric Blumrich said in the Burned Fur days, "by and large, furries are bi and large."
That is a hilarious quote.
Also, I am unclear as to whether the original commenter was saying "furries are not always a sexual thing" or "not all furries are sexually attracted to cartoon animals specifically". I was sort of assuming the latter?
There is an extraordinarily strong fetish subculture within the furry fandom, but also a vehemently non-fetishist subgroup. I have no numbers, but I figure the fetishists may be 60% or more of the total.
That said, it isn't surprising that maybe 95% or more of the available art is of the fetishist kind. The reason is that fetishist furries spend a *lot* of money commissioning drawings, paintings, animations, stories etc. And since most of the art available is commissions, you see where this goes.
On the other side, the community is quite united in the goal of making everyone feel welcome and comfortable, hence the extensive tagging of content. By taggint their content very accurately, uploaders allow people to filter in what they want to see, as well as to filter out what they don't want to see. Those who don't want to see any sexual content can thus mark the option not to see it, and their browsing will be almost 100% guaranteed free of it, while still providing them thousands upon thousands of images.
Interestingly, all this extensive tagging also makes generative AI drawing systems trained on furry content extremely accurate for both sexual and non-sexual content alike. An unintended but quite welcome side effect.
>60%
This is a significant underestimate. Fandom surveys from Bailey/Hsu and later Furscience indicate that among male furries, 98% or more report some degree of sexual attraction as part of their experience, with a rate of >90% among furries as a whole.
That may be the case, yes. However, keep in mind this isn't a statistic of all furries, but rather of all furries willing to fill surveys about their interests, sexual and otherwise. Also, having some interest is a very vague concept and covers a much broader range than those who are invested in the fetishist side of the fandom.
For example, I know furries who never take part in such surveys, who entered the fandom having been fans of Disney cartoons when young, and who will admit they felt a crush on Gadjet, but who have no interest whatsoever in porn drawings or murrsuiting. They therefore aren't fetishists, and won't be totalized in statistics, but even if they were, depending on how the question was asked, they might end up counted amont the fetishists due to that childhood crush.
Another one I know is a deeply neurodivergent guy who loves the "babyfur" side of the fandom, and who has a "baby bear" as a fursona. He's also completely ace, with no interest whatsoever in anything approaching sexuality in any form. Depending on how the question was asked, he'd end up falling into the fetishist bucket due to how babyfurs are generally classified.
And so on and so forth. Which is why I think the number may be high, yes, but not that high. The furry fandom threads on the edge of several different gender/attraction axes, which makes it difficult to reduce it to a single one on attraction alone.
IMHO a better measurement would be to ask whether they specifically look for sexually explicit content, and split it into three bins: never, rarely, frequently. That'd provide a more accurate view of how much of the fandom is fetishistic.
The Furscience stats:
96% of furry men view furry porn, 78% of women do. 59% view it daily.
This includes most asexual furries, as it happens. "Asexual", when it comes to furries, often means in practice "sexual interests niche enough and distant enough from reality such that they have no sexual interest in real-life people." This describes a number of asexual furries I know personally, and more I've observed.
There's a degree of social desirability bias and a degree of privacy-about-sexual-matters that makes it difficult for onlookers to form fully accurate perceptions about the nature and extent of sexuality involved in the sphere.
Eh, maybe. Let me give an example using myself. I'm a part of a NSFW furry porn channel on Telegram that exists for members of a different, main SFW group, to post NSFW content. Even though the NSFW group is well advertised on the main group, only 67% of the members of the main, SFW group are members of the NSFW one. That alone suggests to me the lower percentage is more accurate.
Atop that, I'm a member of the NSFW group mostly because there are interesting conversations there on gender identity and related subjects that develop around some of the posted images. My Telegram is configured to only download images when those are tapped to save on data transfers. If you were to look at my viewing of that channel, more than 95% of the images are untapped, as I'm mostly demi myself and seeing those drawings feels very meh. The remaining 5% or so are when someone remarks on one of the images and I tap on it to see what they're talking about. Some of those I find beautiful, in the sense of being very well drawn by skilled artists (think Renaissance-nude-paintings levels of artistry) -- but even those cause no arousal in me.
I guess on average I tap one image every three days, give or take. So by the metric of the research above, as framed in your comment, I'm an ace, with a niche enough interest, who fits straight into the 96% of furries who view furry porn. And yet that absolutely doesn't describe what's going on with me.
Those two facts (the relative number of subscribers, and my own anecdotal self-evidence), plus the conversations I have with other furries, together make me doubt the at-first-glance implications of those numbers, more than the numbers themselves. The numbers are likely correct given the questions asked, but they probably don't tell the story they seem to be telling.
Now I'm imagining a sci-fi dystopia where everyone is forced to be open about their fetishes (for some reason, maybe because someone foolishly included "sexual satisfaction" in a bill of rights somewhere, and then some judges found an emanation from a penumbra). People are hooked up to electrodes and bombarded with an AI-generated adaptive firehose of porn, to rapidly home in on exactly what they're attracted to. All asexuals to date have eventually had an attraction identified, sometimes after years of "investigation" which can cause massive SAN check failures. But our protagonist may be the first and only true asexual in the society - can they persuade the Powers That Be that they're happy just as they are, before the avalanche of porn drives them insane? Subplot: the porn-generating AI has become sapient, and is actually trying to communicate through the medium of porn, a message which only our protagonist is capable of comprehending. Will the two of them fall in platonic love and reform their society?
Nowhere near 95% of furry art is porn.
If you look at, say, Derpibooru, it's about 25% porn, which is probably about right. Most furry art isn't pornographic in nature.
e621 is heavily pornographic because it's a porn site that also has SFW work on it.
I think there are people who specifically have a furry fetish, but as a furry, I've always just liked anthropomorphic animals (and dragons and gryphons) in all forms of media.
Or to put it another way - it's not that I specifically have a fetish for furries, it's that I like everything to be furry, including my porn. It's a general aesthetic/worldbuilding preference. I like video games that have furries, and in fact, generally prefer that they not be especially sexualized outside of media where it is specifically designed for titillation.
Also, e621 is a porn site. There is SFW art there, but it is run by Bad Dragon, who make dragon dildos, and the site is primarily porn oriented.
If you look at other furry fandom sites (like Derpibooru, the booru for MLP fanart) the ratio is more like 10 safe:1 questionable:2 explicit, so about 25% is porn or porn adjacent.
> the AI starts at a very high learning rate (also called “temperature”)
For modern models we're talking about completely different things when we talk about temperature and learning rate. I think the confusion here is probably due to the idea of a learning schedule being similar to simulated annealing.
Specifically,
- 'Learning rate' is a parameter used during the training of a model, which behaves roughly as Scott described (it determines how much the model should update when given new training data)
- 'Temperature' is not about learning at all, but about how models generate their output. Models like ChatGPT don't actually work by giving you the most likely next token; they actually give you the probabilities of all possible tokens. We then pick which token to output by sampling that distribution (this gives more natural output than always picking the most likely token). The temperature is a scaling factor that gets applied to that distribution before sampling occurs - a higher temperature reduces the probability mass of the most likely outputs and distributes it among less likely outputs, making 'surprising' outputs more likely.
Doesn’t “temperature” get used for both of these concepts?
I don't recall hearing 'temperature' in regards to learning rate (I'm a data scientist). The idea of having a different learning rate early vs late in training I've seen called an adaptive learning rate. It's possible that the LLM community has adopted that usage but idk. Temperature, if I recall, originally is a term from simulated annealing, and then entered the popular lexicon as a user-exposed tuning parameter for GPT models. For both GPT output and annealing it has the same meaning: take some root of the relevant distribution to shrink everything to 1 to smooth it out, just as how heating metal 'smooths out' its molecular structure (this is just a restatement of what Godshatter said).
Temperature isn't just for GPT models. The reason the term is used is that virtually all models which predict categorical distributions do so with a softmax, which basically just means parameterizing them as a Boltzmann distribution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_distribution). The softmax temperature parameter is just the literal temperature in the Boltzmann distribution.
Oh that's interesting, I wasn't aware of the Boltzmann connection. I had assumed it was by analogy with the temperature in metallurgic annealing.
I think there may also be a different subsystems learn differently aspect here. I’ve personally had food poisoning from a particular fast food restaurant and then not eaten at that entire chain for years. Similarly my girlfriend won’t go anywhere near vicinity of any kind due to a terrible experience in high school with a concerning quantity of coconut rum. I think we have a system that jumps further on bad food experiences and is much much more willing to trap into priors in a negative direction for very understandable survival reasons. E.g. berries that look/smell like this caused me to vomit all of my food up once, therefore I will never eat them again in case they are poisonous.
Once when, I was a child, I came across a puddle of rotting raspberries. and the smell was revolting. Naueseating, and it stuck in my memory for decades. I have recovered somewhat, and now they are a neutral food, which I can eat without pleasure or aversion. But mostly I'd prefer some other berry, any other berry, I don't care which, because whatever it is, I'll probably actually enjoy it at least a tiny bit.
The food example is interesting. Tomatoes are a nightshade plant, many people are allergic to them. I've come to assume that when people have strong negative food associations that it's related to that "don't eat, may be poisonous, my body reacts badly in some way" even if they don't necessarily realize there's more to it than "I hate tomatoes because my parents fed me one as a kid and it was disgusting to me in the moment." There are plenty of foods out there that people are commonly allergic to, and others where some people have a distinct taste difference (e.g., the cilantro/coriander tastes like soap phenomena). Also add in known ethnicity pool differences (how well someone processes alcohol in their system for example). Oh and certain other oddities like those who cannot process phenylalanine and have to limit or avoid certain foods/drinks with it.
Idk, I'm not sure the food examples work in a theory about learning rate. How many times do you have to get a pounding headache from red wine before you think, hmm, maybe I should switch to white? Or how many times do you have to get hives from eating a shrimp cocktail before you think, hmm, maybe I shouldn't eat shellfish? You couldn't have learned that as a kid because no one (we hope) is making their baby drink red wine. The biggest difference between kids and adults is that as a kid, you're often being force fed so it's disgusting and you spit it out immediately versus as an adult you're thinking, but everyone likes red wine so I just need to keep drinking it (i.e., social pressure) and you have to overcome that "but everyone loves it maybe I will eventually too" thought to realize what your own body is telling you.
When I was around 8 I bit into a meatball that had a large egg soaked uncooked breadcrumb in the middle that was pretty gross and unappetizing.
To this day, I cannot eat a meatball.
I grew up in NJ in a large Italian family so I was forever exposed to *meatballs.
*all types - yo : )
It would make sense for "bad experience with this foodstuff" to be something that triggers the wiring over "avoid possible poisoning". If you just go around merrily stuffing any sort of berry or fungus into your mouth, you're not going to last too long in the wild. 'Just' getting off with being violently sick or nauseated by the experience means that you'll avoid that in future and so cut down the risk of "this may look shiny and delicious but it will kill you". Think of the Tide Pod Challenge, whether or not there really were significant numbers of teenagers eating laundry pods, there's enough signalling of "bright colours, shiny, looks yummy" that they're a genuine risk for toddlers and small children mistaking them for candy. Even as an adult who knows better, the "this looks like candy and candy is delicious" association works, so having a very robust "don't eat this ever again" mechanism as defence makes sense:
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-teenagers-eat-tide-pods-2018013013241
I don't think we have anywhere the same kind of strong aversion to "oops I nearly drowned" since you can always avoid going into large bodies of water, but you need to eat or else you die. Not eating = dying, eating the wrong thing = dying, not surprising that 'strong reactions to bad food experience' last longer and are 'stickier' than "I went swimming and went out of my depth and that was a bad idea".
I think the only way to get past food aversions is to try the food again (even a tiny nibble) a bunch of times, and if those experiences are good, you start liking the food and get over the aversion. My guess is that the tomato thing is less about the specifics of the original experience, or the fact that it was in childhood, and more about your cousin (presumably) deciding each and every day for the subsequent decades to never try cherry tomatoes again. By contrast, you've presumably had lots of positive beach experiences between the scary one and today. (Exposure therapy is obviously related.)
(A useful parenting tip that I got from the book "Bringing Up Bebe" is that it's inordinately important to try to get a kid to eat even just one bite of each kind of food you're serving. After 5 meals in 5 different weeks where they grudgingly eat a single bite of a certain food X, you might find that they have started liking X and now gobble it up.)
It's like 'getting back in the saddle'. If you fall off a horse, it's important to ride again as soon as possible, because if you don't, you'll just reinforce the negative experience and get stuck with a permanent aversion/fear.
As a motorbike rider for 30 years this is most definitely the truth.
After a very nasty smashed wrist a few years ago I swore I would never ride again. The wrist took some time to heal and I realised that life without a motorbike was very dull!
The first ride was a slightly nervy affair but I was soon back to enjoying myself again on two wheels.
Yep, for example if you have a bad diving experience there's only one thing for it, try, try again :-P
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12441555/Shocking-moment-lifeguard-kicks-young-man-10m-high-dive-board-refused-come-down.html
(video of impromtu training session)
When I was about six my grandparents tried introducing me to sprouts, and I wasn't very impressed to say the least. So the next day they tried another tack and served what they called brussels. I thought those tasted much nicer, and have been fond of brussel sprouts ever since!
Re the tomato trauma Scott mentioned, I wonder if the mess caused by chomping down on a cherry tomato wasn't reminiscent of blood, and thus associated with some previous bad experience such as a cut or a nose bleed.
I was given an erroneous diagnosis of Hazelnut allergy after a reaction to something that may or may not have contained some.
I avoided them for about 5 years and then accidentally ate something with Hazelnut in and... nothing happened...!
During the time I was supposedly allergic I was super vigilant and somewhat afraid of any potential consequences.
Now, I eat them whole in my breakfasts.
Faulty beliefs seem able to create a whole plethora of physical responses..
I always figured these were something like a manifestation of chaos, in the mathematical sense. When you’re growing everything that comes later depends on what came before. Signals or their absence matter more. There’s not a “go back and redo the last step” feature in most of biology. The best thing to that is our cognition and I think that only comes after it develops right.
It seems to me that the fetal (through adulthood) developmental process of synaptic pruning matches your idea of chaos molded by signal. Here’s a quote from Terrence Deacon’s The Symbolic Species:
“Like Darwinian evolution, the adaptive structure of neural circuitry emerges out of the selective promotion and elimination of specific variant patterns. By initially overproducing connections that have been spread to a wide variety of targets, and then selecting from among these on the basis of their different functional characteristics, highly predictable and functionally adaptive patterns of connectivity can be generated with minimal prespecification of the details.”
Taking some online courses from the Santa Fe Institute about Chaos really changed the way I saw the world. I used to think being really good at math would just help you be able to solve all problems, but the more I think about it now the more I think even god-like AI is going to really struggle with some of that stuff.
Ah yes, Santa Fe. I remember a reviewer of Kauffman’s Origins of Order remarking that “you'll be so excited you'll want to rush and explain it to someone else” but you’ll simply have to “face the fact that you are now relatively alone on a higher plane.”
I don’t know anything about the boundaries of AI, but I always wonder how it fits with John Mayfield’s ideas about Evolution as Computation: “random events and random choices are the ultimate source of all goal-oriented information.”
It does feel to me like humans mostly cannot escape dualistic framing. General AI lives in a neighborhood where right next door is Colonel GiM, and directly across the street is Captain Homunculus.
(GiM= Ghost in Machine)
I would think most people here are familiar with Chaos. Also as a funny aside, there seems to be some strange attractor in midjourney where if I use it via can of soup to alter images of myself it always wants to put me in a turquoise blazer. It’s very odd and I wonder if it will be used as a source of divination for weird cults in the future.
AI stuff is odd because I think of it like blowing dust in an attic to find beams of sunlight. Those beams are the order found in the chaos. I also consider the fact that LLMs work at all as strong philosophical proof that a lot of the constructionist arguments about language are not correct, ie language represents something real and orderly about the universe.
On ghost in the machine stuff… I’m starting to have very esoteric pan psychist but less fun thoughts about what this all means for what we are, really, and what it means for something to be alive and intelligent.
I like that image of dust revealing shafts of sunlight. The interesting thing about that is that the form of the shafts is created by what is blocking the sun. The shape of nature is created by what is not possible. Terrence Deacon calls this “the efficacy of absence.” It’s what gives the concept of possibility space a sense of teleonomy. From there one could choose a panvitalist view of the world, “This leaves open the possibility that most physical events have no conscious aspect, and yet may nonetheless exhibit properties like end-directedness, information, value, and so forth.”
That is a beautiful way to describe the nature of nature. Defined by what is not allowed. That’s more or less my own view.
The everything is alive stuff is fun until you resolve it down to what that means. For me it’s not that much fun. Some of this for me resolves down to mathematical versus computational universe stuff. I fall into the math camp. Things exist in material reality and as the concept of what they are in immaterial reality.
Yea those Santa Fe courses are very mind broadening. Escape from Newtonian imperatives is really liberating.
How does this programming relate to life long diet, behavior, skills? And how much more effort is required to retrain? We invest on a thesis. We spend 1.7T in US on food, 1.9T on healthcare cost of poor nutrition. You use to go to grocery and were thin, now you get diabetes. We have been trained to like ultraprocessed food even though it's bad for us. We don't invest in behavior change. We do invest in things people want. They want to live longer but are stuck eating the things programmed in their brain in their youth. What is the innovation path of least resistance to better health and behavior change?
Pretty sure you don't need to be trained to like fat, sugar and crispiness. Cavemen would in all likelihood have loved a hamburger or a bar of chocolate!
I don't think this is right, because if you go to other countries, you'll find people who genuinely don't like super-sweet stuff. I'm British but live in China: many people here don't eat chocolate, saying, "it's too sweet." Confuses the hell out of me, but that's what they say! And the most obvious reason why this might be the case is that they didn't have chocolate when they were kids, and so never developed the taste for it.
Incidentally, I'm early 40s, and have spent neatly half my life in the UK and half in China. Over my 20 years here, my tastes have changed, but there seems to be a hard core of food preferences formed early in my life that aren't changing. That includes chocolate, potatoes, and certain kinds of convenience foods - I still like classic British baked beans, even though I very rarely eat them, for example.
So I think there's a fair chance that cavemen who grew up on a diet that is to us very bland and lacking in seasoning would find our ultra-salty, ultra-sugary food very offputting.
I'm an American in Germany and the germans favorite thing to say about a good dessert is that "it's not too sweet" - like that's a compliment. My wife is German and we both get a real kick out of this because - and it's just a theory - that it is a lie. Like the British they lie to themselves that food doesn't need sugar or flavor. It's just post-war propaganda. Sugar was heavily rationed after the war so they got used to boring desserts and a bland diet, food as sustenance not as something to savor.
As a kid I used to put sugar on my frosted flakes, I wish everyone was as fortunate as I was : )
Yep, I have definitely toyed with that idea as well. Ultimately, I don't think it's right - my Chinese wife doesn't have any reason to pretend in front of me, and she really never chooses chocolate. She also notices sweetness in savoury foods much more than me. It seems as though her tastebuds are just set at a higher level of sensitivity to sweetness than mine - and I see lots of people here who seem to share her tastes. I don't discount the possibility that there's an element of talking themselves into it, but I think they've talked themselves into it successfully!
In the next generation, that will probably all change. Kids who've grown up with fizzy drinks and McDonald's ice cream will probably have a higher tolerance for sugariness; I'm sure cavemen kids would adapt, too. But I still think there's a fair chance that if you brought a bunch of cavemen to modern Britain/America, they'd reject most process foods.
Anecdotally, it's definitely not always a lie. I think many foods and drinks are way too sweet now, but this was not so when I was a kid. No propaganda on this from anybody in my family - my grandparents, who experienced the war, love sweet stuff. I probably think it's a matter of habit. As I ate less sweets, I became calibrated to less sweet tastes - and now too sweet foods taste off-putting - like it's just too much. I will still get totally temporarily addicted if somebody puts out a bowl of sweets though :)
Was about to say this! :) My diet is low-carb and many sweets are just overwhelmingly sugary to me - as Vitor below says, the taste profile ends up overwhelmed by the sweetness, leaving nothing particularly interesting to taste.
For calibration: A common dessert I make for myself is unsweetened yoghurt, coconut shavings, raw cocoa nibs and a small handful of raspberries. It's not very sweet (nearly all of the sweetness comes from the raspberries, with a little from the lactose in the yoghurt), but it's basically perfect for me.
(Also, 90% chocolate is my favourite chocolate percentage. If the percentage goes any lower, the chance I'll like the chocolate goes down, not up. That said, I've had a few good 70% ones. Conversely, everything I've sampled under about 60% has never struck me as anything but gross, though as a kid (pre-teen) I dimly recall thinking otherwise. Can't get back into the mindset, though.)
It *is* a compliment. It's very easy to make a 7/10 dessert by just making it very rich and sweet. A 10/10 dessert has a much more complex flavor profile that is indeed "not too sweet" compared to the 7/10 baseline. It requires higher quality ingredients and skill in assembling and balancing them before you dare pulling back on the sweetness a bit.
ETA: I'm Swiss, so roughly part of the same food culture.
I hear "not to sweet" as a complement for desserts and other sweets in the US all the time. I presume, signaling sophistication, as the mainstream palatte is seen as preferring sweet to the point of being cloying.
Which I tend to agree with, many desserts are disgusting after one or two bites if you give up sugar for a while.
(Though I think food really is sweeter here because of big corn - your postwar socioeconomic explanation is interesting to hear)
I believe there is evidence that comfort foods get etched in our brain before we are adults. Convince magnifies that. We did reprogram the food system, boosting yield and draining taste, to achieve scale. Snacks backfill the gap. My question is how hard is it to change that childhood programming?
Not hard at all if you have will power.
I used to fall for the box of birthday donut trick at work and would gorge myself on them every time they showed up.
Once I reclassified these and similar items as non - foods, avoidance became very simple. As did weight loss 😉
Just a bit of cognitive prestidigitation...
This also explains why pedophiles aroe ften victims of abuse themselves when they were children.
I doubt that. It's very pre-"The Nurture Assumption" thinking.
While we tend to downplay nurturing these days, that's only in the regular situations. I don't think anyone should doubt the ability of childhood trauma to mess people up.
Judith Harris' view was that even child abuse doesn't mess people up. She said the reason not to abuse a child is the same as the reason not to abuse an adult.
My reading of the literature (although I in no way claim to be an expert in the field) is that abused children do tend to have pretty substantially worse outcomes, even after controlling for other factors.
Now, I agree with the basic argument of "even if it doesn't cause worse outcomes, it's still wrong because of other reasons", but the point about it not messing people up seems pretty hard to support?
What factors are being controlled for? Genes?
Socioeconomic factors, mostly. I can't quickly find any adoption studies which would shed light on possible genetic factors, but while I don't discount possible genetic involvement, my baseline is to be leery of attributions to genetic involvement without cause.
But let me turn it back on you. So we have children being subject to what reasonable people would agree is abuse - can you provide much proof that it *doesn't* mess them up?
At the risk of being unnecessarily pedantic, this is slightly misleadingly phrased. A more correct way of saying it would be "people who are convicted/detected pedophiles are more likely to claim to have been sexually abused as children than a member of the general public".
Even if we grant that their statements are true (and given that at least some of these claims are made in a context in which claiming to be an abuse victim may have material impact on their lives through less punishment etc, we should be careful about), an increased rate (roughly 3x, from my reading) is not the same thing as "often". If the base rate is, say, 1%, that'd still only work out to 3x - a significant increase relatively, but a long way from "common".
My reading of the literature is that child sex offenders are more likely to have been abused themselves, but pedophiles are not more likely. Abuse doesn't corelate with the attraction, it correlates with the being willing to offend.
"animals that can’t see out of one eye for the first few months of life permanently lose the ability to process that eye"
As someone with ONH that's much worse in one eye than the other, I'd like more information about this finding, if anyone has it on hand.
Possibly a reference to form-deprivation myopia, but that results in physical deformation of the eye, whereas Scott seems to be alluding to a visual processing issue in the brain.
See here: https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/david-h-hubel-and-torsten-n-wiesels-research-optical-development-kittens
As a parent of an extremely premature child, I'm familiar with a few specific physical critical development windows. If you do not practice the swallowing reflex when you are an infant, you will struggle perhaps for the rest of your life (my son was intubated for months). Similarly, the development of your alveoli in your lungs seems to happen primarily in the first 5-7 years of life or so.
These examples don't relate to the idea of critical windows for developing preferences, but I thought I'd offer them as additional concrete examples.
For much of my life I was unable to eat any food located between two slices of bread (by definition, a sandwich), which my mind categorized as revolting and vomit-inducing, even though I like bread and food that comes on a single slice of bread (isn't that illogical?)
This was due to a bad experience in my childhood, not with food in itself, but because it was the food I had to eat during a very stressful period.
I'm not even sure I can eat one today.
Does this include buns such as burgers or hot dogs?
The bread we use in Italy is different from your bread (if you’re American). As far as i can tell, American bread is usually soft, due to the oils in it. Most of our bread (not all) is, how can I say it, hard, rigid. This is the bread that triggers that memory.
Burgers, like they serve at McDonalds, use soft bread, which to me is a different food item. I have eaten them without any problem in the past.
But it’s more complicated than that. We have native soft bread sandwiches in Italy, a common one is called “tramezzino”. It has always scared me, so I’ve never eaten one. That is because, although it’s made with soft bread, so I know the feeling in my mouth would be different if I ate one, it does look like that memory, visually, because it’s made with two bread slices.
A food-filled bun made with hard bread (like, here in Rome, a "rosetta"), does trigger that memory somewhat, though not as much as two slices of hard bread.
Anyways, it’s been 30 years, and at this point, I think I’ve grown out of these issues.
Of course, it’s easy for me to say, since I don’t have to bite into one right now.
Luckily, a "belegtes Brötchen" is as good as, or perhaps even superior, to any kind of cold sandwich.
There must be something unique about early life bad food experiences. Nothing else sticks so vividly and almost permanently.
The reverse is true as well; nothing is soothing like the comfort foods of your childhood.
Yep! Two sides of a coin.
I had a deeply upsetting experience with Tanqueray gin at age 18 and still can’t stand the thought of it.
Oh, dear. That's decent gin.
Did it put you off all gin, or just some types?
Gin across the board. Didn’t generalize to other liquor though.
guessing this is because it's really important to distinguish between bad foods and good foods evolutionarily. like how babies put lots of stuff in their mouth except plants because plants can be poisonous.
Smoked haddock! 😱
> tomatos
> sexual animals
I think food disgust is likely considerably going to be different from sexual disgust in how its managed.
Like avoiding poison every day vs avoiding sex that may be the one time you pass on your genes outside your tribe
> sexual disgust
This might depend on who is trying to do what to you.
And whether or not it involves a tomato..
I recall that "hot tomato" was a slang expression for an attractive woman, but that was before my time. Maybe 70s or early 80s?
That's a new one to me. The 70s were my university days and I never heard that phrase used ..
Hot potato maybe but that's something totally different...
Childhood vs adulthood doesn't seem to be rocket science: children simply have less background to compare against. It is like wise old men vs. young naive ones, only the comparison is even worse.
Unlike AI - real intelligences have an ever ongoing comparison and update of input vs. experience. A simple example: if apples fall down - 100 past experiences of apples falling down won't be overwritten by one example of an apple falling up. A child, however, doesn't have 100 past experiences - maybe only has a couple so the fall-up outlier makes much more of an impression.
As for the ongoing fetish with "bad imprint" - the assumption being made is still that furries are just miswiring firing off random chance.
I say assumption because I do not think furries were a thing before television. Note that this is even though children have had stuffed animals for a long, long time; even animated animals in movies only constitute a relative handful of hours per year prior to the advent of television.
It is just as likely that it is the hundreds/thousands/tens of thousands of hours which children spend watching fake talking cartoon animals (basically people but that look like animals) on television that causes the miswiring. In this case, it is this prolonged conditioning in an entirely artificial experience as opposed to some neuron firing too strongly once during a child's viewing of a cute animal.
And if this is so, the problem isn't evolution - the problem is garbage being input into children at high rate:. GIGO. It is actually a testament to evolution that so few children are permanently miswired after such a regime of indoctrination that would make Guantanamo look like a week of spring break. If kids are watching 2000 hours of TV + internet videos a year from age 4 to 14 - that's 20000 hours of potentially bad info going in - and more importantly, is likely a greater source of input than any single other input including parents. Add in 1500 hours of schooling per year/12000 hours from 4 to 14 with a LibsofTikTok type teacher - holy crap.
It should only be a wonder why there aren't MORE furries.
Now consider how either a machine learning or neural network type AI would perform with this diet of input info.
People seriously think evolved intelligence is so easily reproduced? LOL
The two examples you gave could be highly salient/heavily imprinted because they are in areas highly important to reproductive fitness, ie reproduction itself and poison avoidance. Evolutionary pressure over generations is the training data for the genetic matrices that encode our neural matrices.
I think it's clear that formative stimuli like the exploding tomato happen and are not so uncommon. I don't share your puzzlement about why their effects are not more uniform.
* The brain is a large and complex system, and any given stimulus will hit different people differently.
* Processing of the stimulus in the years afterward can also greatly differ, based on subsequent formative stimuli, one's openness to new experience, etc.
It seems to like you're looking for a compact, unified, deterministic explanation of why X produces Y, whereas I don't expect such an explanation to exist in a large, somewhat chaotic system.
I suspect Scott would also be happy with some method for reversing the effect once it had occurred.
Just wanted to say I appreciated the visual pun in the image for this post.
I suspect the tomato story is a slight misunderstanding.
My pet theory as to why so many people hate raw tomatoes (quite common in my experience) is something to do with them being vegetables (savoury tasting) masquerading as fruits.
You bite into broccoli or a cucumber and it tastes green and leafy, as you'd expect (so kids don't expect to like it or eat it raw)- you expect a cherry tomato to taste like a cherry or a grape (sweet), and instead it tastes like a raw tomato (savoury, awful). So your cousin wasn't imprinted with the unpleasant experience of a tomato exploding in his mouth, but with the fact that this unpleasant savoury-tasting juice came out, rather than sweet fruity goodness.
There are attempts to find genetic or chemical explanations for the raw-tomato-skeptics among us: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cocktail-party-physics/tasters-choice-why-i-hate-raw-tomatoes-and-you-dont/ , but my explanation feels like it better matches my experience.
Agreed. Fresh tomatoes are wonderful. But some truly unpleasant things can be done to them in the name of mass production and preservation.
Good cherry tomatoes are sweet enough that I've made ice cream with them before. This is not trying to persuade you to like tomatoes; I don't care. But cherry tomatoes definitely should be sweet.
Small tomatoes also tend to be properly ripe. This is actually explained by the small size - a ripe full-size tomato will get damaged in transport by its own weight, but small ones are not heavy enough, and so can be transported and shelved when ripe.
Counterexample to the tomato thing: I also thought I didn't like tomatoes since childhood, but that was a belief, not a taste. When someone convinced me to try one at age ~17, and it was good. Now I like tomatoes. Maybe the same would happen with your cousin if they tried one. Maybe the same would happen with me again if I tried a Cheeto (I won't though lol)
This happened to me with cashews somewhere around age 35. I was on a long flight, hungry, and instead of any of the airplane snacks I expected, they brought out cashews. I was bummed but told myself "lots of people eat these, they can't be that bad", forced myself to nibble on one, and hey, now I like cashews.
Children are also more sensitive to bitter tastes than adults, so some things literally do taste worse to them.
I haven't read this yet, but I greatly appreciate the image on the front page.
Yes. But alas, it doesn't seem to appear on this page. Silly Substack.
We'll learn a lot about possible critical windows in sexuality if and when specific cohorts of children hit puberty and exhibit widespread fetishes for face masks.
Puts me in mind of "Coming Attraction" by Fritz Leiber.
Wouldn’t this only occur if the people in face masks were presented as sexy? Kids were still exposed to sexualized images of non-masked people on TV and possibly real people within their bubble.
As someone that has tried tomatoes as an adult, your cousin made the right choice. "He still won't try tomatoes" is equivalent to "he still won't stick his hand in fire".
I'll support this. I no longer have a visceral distaste for tomatoes, but I won't eat them if I can help it.
Fresh, that is. Sundried, pureed, or made into a sauce, I do like them. They just have to go through some process that makes them no longer taste fresh.
Do we know that all these childhood formative experiences are really the cause of anything, or if they are just the first time when something latent becomes salient?
Not "x made me gay" but "I realised i was Born This Way when I saw x".
"Born this way" is mostly a myth - twin studies show that the combination of genetics and shared environment isn't the main cause (one third of the explanatory power for gay men, one sixth for lesbians).
"Born this way" doesn't have to imply genetic causes. It could also be random biological factors rather than external experiences.
It must by definition be limited in in utero factors, though, and in twin studies the uterus typically qualifies as a shared environment.
It could also be stuff like which individual neurons happen to connect to each other as the brain develops. Presumably the effect of any single neuron is small, but once you add together the randomness of many such events (including random events in other organs that then affect the brain through hormones and stuff, and random events other than synapse formation), it plausibly is enough to change noticable aspects of the person's mind like their sexuality. Technically this is in utero factors, but the factor affecting it is thermal noise, which is not shared. It's like how identical twins have different fingerprints.
The division of everything into genetic, shared environment, and non-shared environment presumes that everything has either genetic or environmental causes, ignoring stuff that would be better thought of as just random. There's an SSC post about this topic: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/16/non-shared-environment-doesnt-just-mean-schools-and-peers/ .
Twin studies show that genetics aren't the main cause _of homosexuality_.
But they also show that genetics are the main cause of almost everything else. So "born this way" is mostly reality. It's the application to homosexuality that fails.
If you are on a different part of the womb from your twin, couldn’t you be exposed to different environmental influences? Eg. it could affect one twin’s brain/epigenetics if one side of the womb is exposed to more testosterone because the mother was under stress or something, while the other might be more shielded. This would be technically environmental but still be part of “born this way.” An older trans man was speculating on a podcast that he might have ended up masculinized because his mother was in a car crash during pregnancy. (I suspect post-natal environment plays a role in some cases for sexual orientation, though)
This seems theoretically possible, but how likely is it really? It strikes me as highly unlikely that this would be a bigger effect that genetics, and certainly not enough that "born this way" applies everywhere.
Quoting the study: "Biometric modeling revealed that, in men, genetic effects explained .34-.39 of the variance, the shared environment .00, and the individual-specific environment .61-.66 of the variance. "
So the explanation would have to include that the shared environment of the womb is meaningless, but that non-shared environmental factors in the womb are extremely important. This strikes me as far-fetched to say the least.
Probably with twins postnatal environment is usually much more significant in explaining the differences. I would guess that in many cases of different sexual orientations, both identical twins at birth have the potential to be bisexual but are influenced by social pressures and early experiences to end up identifying as gay or straight. I bet part of the supposedly lower genetic influence for lesbians is that one’s own sexual orientation is generally harder to figure out with an estrogen-dominant hormone system (and there seem to be a lot of bisexual women when it is socially acceptable?) Twin studies probably aren’t a great way of figuring out the impact of prenatal environment in the general population.
There's this hypothesis that women are more naturally bisexual, in which case it makes sense that environment is more determining on whether this tendency becomes practice.
This reminds me of training dogs. On the one hand they are incredibly trainable (for certain tasks). But they can carry one bad experience through their entire life.
So dogs having this incredible 'learning window' is the same trait that leads them to having 'cherry tomato-style' experiences inprint on them so strongly?
I remember it as if it were yesterday. As a young child I was walking to the shops with my Mum and she gave me a tomato to enjoy. I bit into it but a pip stuck painfully between my two front teeth and couldn't be dislodged without returning home. For a long time I wouldn't eat raw tomato, but now 70 years later I can eat cooked tomato or sliced tomato in salads. I still won't bite into a whole tomato.
Perhaps it is a matter of two influences colliding. The immediate strong event (e.g. the pip getting stuck) and a pre-existing strong aversion/desire (others messing with my teeth).
I didn’t like your ”just so” stories - kinks and fetisches come with incredible variations, so either you have to make up increasingly unlikely explanations, or you have to say that some fetisches can be rationally explained and others can’t, which seems strange. Whereas if you just believe it’s an unusual cross-wiring explained by childhood experiences, anything can fit that model.
Presumably the difference to tomatoes is that you’re _supposed_ to form sexual preferences at a young age and you’re mentally wired for it, but the mind being the messy thing it is it can easily get non-standard. This seems to include homosexuality, and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if it’s also how various trans things are formed.
Quoting ’Cryptonomicon’:
”I finally came clean to her about the stockings. It felt good. I'd been reading a lot about how the brain develops and had finally come to accept my stocking kink. It seems that when you are a certain age, somewhere between about two and five years, your mind just gels. The part of it that's responsible for sex becomes set into a pattern that you'll carry with you for the rest of your life. All of the gay people I've ever discussed it with have told me that they knew they were gay, or at least different, years before they even began thinking about sex, and all of them agree that gayness cannot be converted into straightness, or vice versa, no matter how hard you might try.
The part of your brain that handles sex frequently gets cross-wired into other, seemingly irrelevant areas at this age. This is when people pick up an orientation towards sexual dominance or submission, or when a lot of guys pick up highly specific kinks--say, rubber, feathers, or shoes. Some of them are unfortunate enough to get turned on by little kids, and those guys are essentially doomed from that point onwards--there is nothing to do except castrate them or lock them up. No therapy will unkink the brain once it has kinked.
So, all things considered, being turned on by black stockings wasn't such a bad sexual card to have been dealt. I laid this all out to Virginia during the trip home. I was surprised by how calmly she accepted it. I was too big of a jerk to realize that she was thinking about how it all applied to her.”
I doubt the exploding cherry tomato is the reason your cousin dislikes tomatoes. A chocolate truffle exploding in his mouth filling it with delicious goo is unlikely to have put him off chocolate.
It's common to find people who hate the taste of raw tomatoes (I'm one of them). I think it's like Coriander/Cilantro, where there's some compound that some people can taste and others can't.
I pride myself on being able to eat anything so spent many years developing a tolerance to raw tomato flavour, and so can now eat it without gagging but ugh, it's still awful. Even if I do sometimes voluntarily add it to burgers etc to maintain my tolerance. Many people have insisted that oh, I just haven't tried a GOOD tomato, try THIS organic heirloom homegrown flavoursome sweet cherry tomato... Nope they're all bad, sorry.
Re: the "bad childhood experiences cause lifelong specific food aversions", I'd put a personal anecdote on the table that I've never been able to make much sense of.
When I was a kid, I was a fairly picky eater (I guess most kids are, but I seem to have been worse than average - or so the adults told me). And I still vividly remember being totally (and irrationally) grossed out by a couple of specific foodstuffs, to the extent that I would throw up in my mouth if they were just brought near me.
Fast forward a few decades, and some of these are amongst my favourite foodstuffs.
The interesting thing is how the switch happened. In childhood, these foods were super yucky. And at some point during my teenage years, zap!, the aversion was suddenly gone. No laborious process of trying to re-condition myself. Just... seeing a plate of that food, and going "yum! let's have some of this!". If the aversion had not been as strong during childhood, this would not have been as surprising: but I really found these things revolting. And then all of a sudden... tasty!
Also interesting is that this did not happen with all food that my childhood brain considered suspect. A lot of cheese varieties are still off the map, particularly the more biologically active ones. But these are likely a special category, as we probably have some evolution-provided innate additional safeguard in our brains not to eat stuff that visibly has mold growing on it. A safeguard that I haven't been able to deactivate yet.
The term “temperature” usually wouldn’t be used for learning rates. Temperature, especially in the context of LLMs, is a parameter for softmax that determines how sharp you want the probability distribution of predictions to look (roughly, e.g., put 99.99% on the class that’s slightly better than any other or put approximately the same probability on everything almost regardless of the activations), controlling randomness of the output.
Having the learning rate (lr) higher at the beginning of the training and then decreasing it seems to speed up the training compared to having a small learning rate all along, but also, there are all sorts of lr schedulers, including those that decrease and increase the lr in a cycle (no one knows why this sometimes works better, and intuitions about mountains and hill-climbing don’t work well for spaces with millions of dimensions; gradient descent works from the derivative , not from looking around, and the you might be climbing weirdly combined counterintuitive mountains- https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/muLN8GRBdB8NLLX36/visible-loss-landscape-basins-don-t-correspond-to-distinct-algorithms).
People might call decreasing the learning rate “cooling”, but I think most wouldn’t use “temperature”.
Edited: added a bit on hill-climbing
There's a rich literature on learning of food preferences. The top level idea that you need to know is that omnivores are evolutionarily sensitized to the effects of food, for the very good reason that a varied diet implies regular encounters with foods that might kill you.
If you play the nasty game of using radiation to make a rat feel nauseous after ingesting some food, it will most likely avoid that food forever. Omnivores can't afford to give foods many second chances. Which is part of the story about tomatoes.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8455326/
Since sexual experiences and tendencies don't usually kill you, its reasonable to think that evolution will be more tolerant of them. An awful lot of the psychoanalytic stories about childhood experiences with big effects are just stories. They might matter a lot when they become stories that we tell ourselves and come to believe. but that's another topic.
If at age n you experience that some experience E is really bad, the probability per Laplace's rule of succession that the next E will be really bad is 1/n per year. Because n is small, 1/n is large. So you never do it again, and therefore can't update.
I think that's a large-ish part of this story.
I would assume that the reason why formative experiences can have such a drastic effect, like being against eating tomatoes, has almost nothing to do with age specifically and a lot more to do with having little else to judge the experience by.
It's entirely plausible that your thirty-something cousin could bite into a cheery tomato and get squicked out for the first time, but he would have three decades of experience with various species of tomato at that point, which is what lessens the impact of any new information. I would assume that, without experience with e.g. dragonfruit, he could look at the inside of one at any age *for the first time* and justifiably decide it's a horror too gross to deal with. We simply have less experience generally when we're younger, which is why these moments tend to happen in childhood.
You're the psychiatrist, I'm the bumpkin. You tell me if that's not accurate. All I have to go on is logic.
That's same in predictions as Freud just with more sophisticated mechanics
Just came to tell everyone that there's nothing wrong with pregnant Sonic, at least according to this song.
https://youtu.be/nkXz4UrPSuU?si=HhJMb9EToNlmsFA7
He aspirated tomato juice, and you didn't aspirate seawater? Just guessing, of course.
There is absolutely no way that someone who bites into an unexpectedly disgusting thing would involuntarily inhale it. That kind of impulse would have been weeded out of the gene pool millions of years ago.
Gasping has not, alas, been weeded out.
The high learning rate early in life likely does contribute to stronger imprinting/conditioning effects during childhood. Children's brains are still forming connections rapidly, so an intense experience can wire in certain associations more permanently.
Overcoming trapped priors later in life is difficult but not impossible. With enough contrary evidence and conscious effort, even adults can slowly weaken learnt associations. So while imprinting is stronger in childhood, neural plasticity continues through life.
i imagine childhood brain as less full of ruts and knotted pathways that adults have and swimming in BDNF—maybe the plasticity and new pathways that are triggered are done so in a way that is more potent bc there is a relative lack of others to compete with
Does valproic acid reopen critical windows in humans? I remember some excitement about this possibility about a decade ago. Was that just hype generated by a few underpowered studies?
"reacted in some profound way, like becoming a furry."
More likely ... let's back up to Freud, [paraphrased] "there are two kinds of deviation, deviation in aim, and deviation in objective." Is becoming a furry a deviation in objective: 'I tried to become a non-human ideation of an animal.' or is becoming a furry a failure in aim: 'I can't visualize a reasonably attainable human to human sexual model, I see more sexualization in animation than in humans.' I would think for a 'basement dwelling anime addict' the latter is the most likely case.
After writing this, I realized I have followed Freud into the trap of binary thinking, I do apologize for this.
> This still doesn’t explain the unpredictable nature of preference-changing events. My cousin had a bad experience with a tomato in childhood, but was that really his worst childhood experience?
I imagine it's probably something like "I didn't like tomatoes as a kid, so I didn't try them when I was older, so I didn't try them when I was older..." up to the present. Basically, he never had any reason to even gather more evidence about tomatoes being good or bad, so he never did, and never updated.
After your near-drowning, did you experience trepidation the first few times you went back to the beach?
These observations are so susceptible to selective memory and the pitfalls of post-hoc explanation.
I don't understand the logic here. How is a child who is updating stronger going to be more likely to end up in a trapped prior? If they're more willing to take 100-mile steps, why would we expect them to get trapped at a local minimum/maximum?
I think the implications of this theory on eating would be that children should be very adventurous with food, only to settle later in life on a narrow range of food preferences. That's opposite of reality.
And while there are some cases like that of a weird tomato aversion, that's an exception we shouldn't use to define the rule. My son had this issue with hot dogs, where he ate one while experiencing GI discomfort and decided that hot dogs make him sick. After a few months, he decided kielbasa and corn dogs are fine. I suspect he'll work his way toward the full hot dog experience again, so it definitely seems like a trapped prior. But if I accepted the hypothesis that children take larger step changes than adults, I wouldn't expect his priors to get trapped in the first place.
As a parent of 2 small children, I think it might match reality if we restrict attention to very early ages? My very limited experience is that there is a critical window around age 1-2 where kids will at least try pretty much anything you put in front of them, but at age 3-4 they start declining unfamiliar or unwanted food without trying it. Right now I've got just one child in each age range, so I'm operating from a very limited data set but I think it matches what I've heard from other parents in my family.
This is a great point that brings up more questions. My kids were adventurous early, too, but not so much after language development. Then they get more adventurous the older they get. It looks less like gradient descent, and more like a period of extreme prejudice from which they gradually recover.
One other feedback loop to consider is Identity: as a young child I said I didn’t like mayonnaise and people found that surprising, so I became A Person Who Doesn’t Like Mayonnaise. This stuck around until after college when I realized that my preference wasn’t actually grounded in anything and I could switch my mayo preference and no one would care or give me a hard time for it.
For somatic, “feel like I need to vomit” reflexes this might be less of a factor, but for things like “I am American and so speak English” or “I am not a math person” or “I am a Democrat” these identity-based loops from childhood can be impactful and very hard to get out of, and they don’t happen as often to adults.
> but for things like “I am American and so speak English” or “I am not a math person” or “I am a Democrat” these identity-based loops from childhood can be impactful and very hard to get out of
What's the circular part of "I speak English"? That's just a fact; it's as rawly objective as "my pupils are black". No one identifies as an English speaker even though in reality what they speak is Dutch.
Naively, wouldn't it make sense for childhood priors to be stronger, just because they arrive without a lot of other signal to balance them out?
Although I wonder if there's something weird about food preference that makes it particularly rigid in children compared to other things. Anecdotally, I was an incredibly, obsessively picky child, and at least compared to how I was then I'm not at all picky now, and I can pinpoint, almost exactly, the age where that shifted for me (around 24) but I could not tell you why at all.
There's a surprising number of people here who dislike tomatoes, including me. Is this worth polling on? Maybe a question on the next ACX survey?
Personally, I think it's the remaining nightshade-like taste on fresh tomatoes that puts me off, and I will happily eat tomatoes once they've been prepared in one way or another and they no longer taste fresh. Maybe this is akin to the cilantro gene and we just have a predisposion against that taste?
> In a typical AI training run, the AI starts at a very high learning rate (also called “temperature”) and gradually “cools” down over time.
Temperature and learning rate are unrelated* in a typical (modern) AI setup. Temperature is a parameter that determines how "spiky" the probability distribution you're using is, or equivalently, how concentrated it is: a heated posterior is very spread-out (high entropy) while a cold one is dominated by a single narrow peak (low entropy).
*Except in the special case of simulated annealing, which is rarely used in modern AI optimization.
> So at the beginning, you might start in a random place and want to see if 500 miles away is more mountainous. But once your hard work has brought you 1000 feet from Everest’s summit, you don’t want to take a 500 mile jump and end up in New Delhi and have to start all over again.
Now this is a *different* algorithm (sounds like adaptive hill climbing, maybe).
Doesn't that describe gradient ascent with a declining learning rate?
Gradient ascent doesn't have a probability distribution, so it doesn't have hot or cold temperatures. The step sizes are deterministic (which was my main point).
Did you ever have an experience with psychedelics? I'm not saying you should because it can be dangerous but at moderate doses that don't send you into alien words or ego deaths it is really interesting to observe your filters (I believe from the default mode network of the brain, which is suppressed by many psychedelics) first hand.
What I mean with this: There are actually quite a lot of things that go through an unconscious filter before your conscious mind gets to process them. These things are not only the often portrayed visual artifacts (intense colors, moving / breathing textures etc.) but also *thoughts*.
That means there are actually thoughts that your filter does not allow you to process at all. Many of these filters are also created during our childhood. Thoughts that scare you, that you are constantly told are wrong or impossible or thought that just did not make sense or help you in any way.
With those filters suppressed, you can have these thoughts again. This can lead to very scary experiences ("bad trip") but also lead you into states of childish joy, wonder and interest about things that you normally do not (actually *can not*) notice.
When I would start feeling nauseous on long car trips as a kid, my parents gave me orange-flavored Dramamine. Associating it with nausea is likely why I hate artificial orange flavoring to this day (although I like real oranges).
I wonder if variation in learning rate/critical period plasticity could explain the genetic correlation between ASD and intelligence.
If genetic variants speed up activity-dependent patterning of primary sensory pathways, it might result a longer period of consistent sensory training inputs for areas involved in higher order integration, during their respective critical window. At the same time, if primary sensory windows close earlier it risks these pathways getting "trapped priors", with downstream brain regions getting comparatively poor data from that sense. My dated recollection is that fundamental functions of the brain involve critical windows that close much earlier (eg. retinal calcium transients, ocular dominance).
Could such variation sometimes result in higher order regions overweighting a particular sensory pathway, with possible impacts to cognitive performance, and other times result in improved performance when pathways integrate appropriately? It seems potentially consistent with the age of onset, sensory features and fixed interests of ASD.
> Now he’s in his 30s and still hates them.
I developed hate for shiitake mushrooms in my late 20s due to a terrible meal I made on a hiking trip. Even the smell of shiitakes put me off the food.
Fast forward to when I was 41, I decided to try something: I like all other mushrooms, so what if I pretend my priors didn't exist? My wife cooked a meal with shiitakes in it. I sat down to eat. I blanked my mind, told myself that I had never eaten shiitakes before, and was tasting them for the first time.
They tasted great and now I can eat them again.
I guess my point is that people should try updating on things they think are impossible to update on. Maybe they get lucky.
Often when kids have that tomato explosion experience, parents will keep reminding them of it and kind of forcibly making them internalize it. 'Remember that time when...'.
The family has visitors over and you're introduced as the kid who had a tomato explosion and now hates tomatoes.
Family photos are being shown and there's you next to a tomato plant...
People mostly have no memories of times before they're like 5, so if everyone would just drop the topic right after the incident, these things would not get written to ROM so hard.
I was the kid who hated Nutella until this year (I'm 33) when I just went ahead and put some in my mouth. It's just not very good.
The innovation path unfortunately would need to involve a reduction in the obsession with like for like growth in profits as the key indicators of success.
I have no clue how this can be achieved though..
"Not too sweet" something someone under 12 years old has never said, ever.
I used to put sugar on my Frosted Flakes, that apparently would kill an adult (poster on on here) from Europe or Asia.