I used to be kind of low level anti-pharmaceuticals. Nothing too dramatic (never antivax), but definitely quietly on the side of other forms of interventions of any kind being preferable over drugs.
I still acknowledge that in many instances interventions can be better, but in a lot of cases a pharmaceutical intervention is the quickest, most effective and safest way for people to deal with whatever health or mental health conditions they have. And also lots of drugs are perfectly safe over the long term.
I think I was raised with a lot of ideas around purity, but when I came out as trans is when that started to change in a big way.
I thought lizards lived everywhere, and didn’t know until I was 18 that Oregon was on the west coast of the US, I thought California ended where Washington started and that Oregon was inland (we did not have geography in school).
When I finally went to college as an adult I took a world geography class as an elective because I felt so incredibly ignorant. Now, even years later I can help my kids with geography, quite a bit of it actually stuck.
For the longest time I was under the impression that everybody has unlimited potential, that you can essentially take a homeless junkie of the streets send them through college, give then a job and have a functioning intelligent person come out at the end. That is absolutely not true. based on my own experience we all have limits and glass ceilings. Yes, we all live on the same clock, but some of us have to deal with so much behind the scenes just to stay afloat while others can breeze through life like its nothing. There are people who are incredibly academically gifted but absolutely inept in personal or household stuff, some people are thick as a rock but incredibly charming, etc. We all have our strengths and weaknesses but sometimes of course all the marbles roll into the right holes and you get somebody who’s good at everything they touch and are almost doomed to success.
There are just things that I will never able to grasp, or habits that I will never able to form because I tried my whole life and it never worked out. I consider myself as a fairly baseline dude, so its safe to say that if I have these experiences the majority of people will have them as well.
For me it was that other people think in the same manner, basically. But it turns out that brain usage is very different for people. So some people use more of their visual cortex for maths, making them see color in numbers.
In this video Richard Feynman explains it better then I could.
Opening bananas.
Watch a nature documentary showing me a monkey knew better.
That if you weren’t part of “our” religion (my family’s religion, Catholic), you were basically living your life wrong and were an awful person. When I went to college I met people who believed different things, including in nothing, and I realized they were not, in fact, terrible, almost subhuman, people. I quickly changed for the better and that’s one of the best things to ever happen to me. It’s amazing how accepting you can be when you just accept people for who they are
It could easily have been the same for me, as my father is a Protestant pastor. Fortunately, my family has always been very tolerant and open-minded. That’s how my parents brought me up, for which I’m still very grateful to them today. It’s good to hear that you’ve found your own path, which certainly wasn’t easy. Respect, my friend.
I thought the “purple” skittles were supposed to be brown (I still think they look brown). One day I looked on the package. The rest is history.
Ever done a color blindness test?
Funny you say that, I’m actually a tetrachromat, which means I’m the opposite of colorblind. The purple skittles just didn’t seem purple. They chose such a drab shade of purple that, even to me (or even especially to me), rather than being recognizable as the same vibrant color as grapes, it appears to be the kind of purple you get from the sky on an exceptionally rainy droopy day.
It also helped that, after looking at such a drab sky, I ended up seeing the rainbow, thinking back to the skittles commercial, seeing what colors were actually in the rainbow, and thinking “wait a minute…”
That Tom Brady was a product of a winning system and would be average at best if he played with another organization. What made me realize I was wrong? Fuckin ring number 7 and our (the Bills) absolute owning of New England ever since he left.
I thought that the human body was incapable of making glucose. Learned about gluconeogenesis during a university nutrition course
Used to think that cis people normally think that they are girls or dislike their genitals, and that it was a phase I would grow out of. I didn’t, it just got worse and it was from browsing r/egg_irl and r/traa that made me realize that I was wrong and in-denial.
Thinking the words, “just calm down” in the heat of an argument with my wife will actually work if I just try it enough times. Mathematically it should but it seems math doesn’t care about that.
Being Mormon.
They always told us that people who gave us anti-mormon literature just made stuff up and it was Satan’s way of tempting us. They said to never take any anti-mormon literature and if someone did give it to you then to throw it away without reading.
But at the same time they taught us that the Mormon church was the true church. And they also taught us truth was absolute. Well, i figured if truth is absolute, and if the church was THE true church then it would be able to withstand any criticism. So i read anti mormon literature, like the CES letter. From there i did my own research about various things and found that the Mormon church made up a lot of stuff and did lots of gaslighting.
There was some specific issues that i also had been struggling with, like their treatment of women, gays, and black men/women. That also helped push me to want to make sure if the Mormon church was really true. And it wasn’t. Now i can love my friends unconditionally.
Good on you for challenging beliefs and forming your own opinions. Not easy to pull yourself out of these things.
That my dad cared about or respected me. After a family dinner, my wife asked me if he always talked about me like that and it just kind of clicked. Things like telling my kid, “If you play too many video games, they’ll melt your brain like your dad” or “why would anyone pay you that much” when I told them that I broke a six figure salary. She made me realize that this wasn’t normal and I didn’t have to sit there and listen to it just because of who he is.
I haven’t spoken to him or really any of my side of the family in almost two years now. Good riddance.
I thought I’d live a comfortable stable life pursuing the sciences for the sake of knowledge. I learned in the past year or two through studying political economy and climate science that this is pretty unlikely. These days idk what to do. I want to do something more useful, I want to help people but it all feels quite hopeless. It often feels like revolution is the only option but I fear it may even be too late for that. We are already past the point where hundreds of millions will die and be displaced. We are already past the point of inevitable severe famine and societal collapse in many places. We aren’t even accomplishing damage control and it feels like most people don’t even dare acknowledge it.
If it makes it any easier, those hundreds of millions of people are going to die anyway, the only tragedy about it is that it’s from something we could technically prevent or mitigate, but most things are like that… Traffic, smoking, guns, unhealthy diet… The climate changing isnt really going to affect the earth, our short sightedness and ignorance will just make lots of areas we can comfortable live in now much less comfortable or unlivable entirely. It’s going to suck, but do what you can with what you have and just the fact that you know enough to care means you have something to offer.
You are vastly underestimating what will happen if we allow things to continue as they are. We are already at the point of severe famine and 100’s of millions dying and global emissions have continued to increase at essentially the same rate as before every year. Every day that we do nothing the list of dead grows longer. If I were to do nothing but watch then I would consider myself complicit. I think the worst part is that we all know exactly who is responsible but still somehow do nothing about it. I’m genuinely honestly shocked that we don’t see them all as the mass murderers they are. This cannot be a sane world.
Despite this, I do appreciate the condolences.
No, we are not past that point. Stuff can happen fast. Christianity becoming a world religion after being some strange hippy cult for few generations, the collapse of the eastern europe noone predicted. I agree it looks grim and I’m not optimistic, but I refuse to give up just a few years after grasping global warming. It is not too late and becoming a doomer is not helping.
As a non American who has never been to the US, but grew up well within its sphere of cultural influence.
I thought that about half of the population was black, maybe 40% minimum. I was surprised to learn that it was just above 10% in reality.
Rinsing after brushing teeth. The fluoride in the toothpaste should stay on your teeth for to be effective. So you should floss, then brush, and wait to rinse
I learned last year that you’re supposed to floss BEFORE you brush. I have no idea why no one ever taught me that.
Yeah you loosen up every thing and then brush it out. Actually, I floss, swish, then brush. I end with brush by because the fluoride concentration in toothpaste is much much higher than in most fluoride mouthwash. I’d rather leave that on my teeth after I’m done.
I floss, rinse, then brush. The fluoride content of toothpaste is much higher than rinse, so I’d rather end having that on my teeth than a weaker dose from the rinse.
I’m referring to rinsing w water or even drinking water
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