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[delphonso]

How hard-coded is sexuality? Is it entirely biological, or is there an environmental factor to it? If it's at least partially environmental, at what point does it lock in? To avoid sounding like an ass, I know that attempting to remove the gay from someone is futile at best, and a hate crime at worst, so the answer to that last question is likely to be either "there is no environmental factor; not applicable" or "really early".

Basic physical attraction is probably there at birth. What is "sexy" is widely social (see differences in beauty standards across societies and time). That stuff probably sets in around the age that kids' hormones start kicking in - so I guess around 15? Whatever the age is that kids start to look for partners or sexual information. For me it was 15ish.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Due to the discovery of epigenetics, the biological/environmental division has moved from "hazy" to "obliterated" in recent years. Sexuality probably has some degree of epigenetic factor involved in it, though ultimately we just don't know.

There is no "gay gene", that's definitely absurd. There probably isn't even a polygenetic gay factor. But of course, sexual conversion has objectively never produced anything but pure failure even if looked at without caring that it's an atrocity.

The example I liken this to is food preference. Different humans like different foods. This difference is fundamental and innate. We do not consciously control what foods we like, and though we can to a degree put dents in food preference you cannot make a food you hate into your favorite by forcing yourself to eat it nor does it seem very common that you can permanantly turn yourself off from a food that you love no matter how often you eat it.

Food preferences have definite foundational elements - fat, salt, and sugar are nearly-guaranteed winners. Yet specific foods containing these elements may be loved or hated. And sometimes people like foods that are totally arbitrary in this regard. The highest fat, salt, and sugar content doesn't always become a person's most favored foods.

You have a fuck engine in your brain that's operating off ancient scriptures of evolutionary success, layered over one another so thick that no one thing is easily read. Most people regardless of sexuality like looking at asses. But not everybody. A person can certainly choose to violate their instruction set - people going against their sexuality sometimes do get something out of it. But you can't change the fuck engine's actual operating parameters, not really.

And ultimately, humans regardless of sex and gender all look a lot more alike than anything else looks like us. People in the stone age appeared to have been able to... "appreciate" curvaceous sculptures, so these are the tolerances we're dealing with here. There's really no reason to even expect in the first place that it wouldn't fire off on other humans without appreciation of if it's a heterosexual paring or not. The really weird thing is not why some people are gay, but why anyone isn't bisexual.

The answer to that probably lies in the social thesis, sometimes called the "gay uncle hypothesis" - a certain mix of sexualities is evolutionarally advantageous, so it was long ago coded into socially advanced forms of life.

[bloop_bleep]

Most (maybe almost all) factors associated with a human probably have a mix of biological and environmental factors. You have your genes and you have transcription factors which activate/deactivate your genes. Obviously, both are important. Those transcription factors are based on other genes (which are based on other transcription factors...) or on environmental stimuli. Genes and transcription factors are really interdependent on one another. Really the distinction between environmental and genetic rarely becomes useful outside of heredity discussion.

[Egan_BW]

A brain is an impossibly complicated machine created by another impossibly complicated machine, and we know nothing.

[methylatedspirit]

A brain is an impossibly complicated machine created by another impossibly complicated machine, and we know nothing.

I agree with the content, but I'd like to slightly disagree with the "impossibly" part. The fundamental building blocks of this machine are incredibly simple and are in theory well-understood, but the emergent complexity that arises as a result of its construction is indeed impossible for any human to understand. If there were some being powerful enough to fully understand humans, it would not be able to understand itself to that extent.

Is there anything that we fully understand, come to think of it? There are points that we understand, but I don't think we can safely say we've explored the entire knowledge-space of all possible points for any domain of knowledge. Considering that there must be infinite such points for infinite such domains, in the limit, we do indeed know nothing.

[TheSteppeWolf]

You know how Asians being hard to tell apart is a common stereotype? Do Asian countries also have this stereotype but about white people?

Yes. Here in Mongolia it's specifically about Russians.

[Egan_BW]

If I'm about $80 richer now than I was a month ago, is that progress or stagnation?

[MrRoboto75]

If I'm about $80 richer now than I was a month ago, is that progress or stagnation?

Progressively stagnant

[Frumple]

If I'm about $80 richer now than I was a month ago, is that progress or stagnation?

I mean, does being 80 bucks richer meaningfully improve your financial situation? Make it more likely you can actually manage an emergency without going into debt (probably not, that's all of 9ish k over a decade)? More likely you can maintain food and shelter? If yes, then progress. If no, stagnant. If not beating inflation, probably just screwed

[Egan_BW]

Yeah, it doesn't do all that much for me, I suppose. Sadly this amount of work is already as much as I feel like I can handle, mentally, and I can't cut down costs much more than I have, so...

[methylatedspirit]

Is there a term for the inability to tolerate (unnecessary, unrealistic) motion? I don't get motion sick from animations (such as those in PC and phone interfaces), but I absolutely hate them, so much so that I've disabled all animations on all my devices. I don't care if this makes my phone/PC/whatever feel laggy, I don't want animations shoved in my face.

I've watched Youtube videos where the foreground thing moves relative to the background, and I actually have quit watching such videos because the sheer cognitive load of it is too great for me to handle.

It's fine when things start moving and then stop moving, but if it keeps on moving, I start focusing on the path it takes instead of the thing itself.

I wonder if it's something wrong with me, or if it's just me being born in an era before animations became as prevalent as they are now. I was born in 2002, so that means I was raised on Windows XP. When I went back and tested XP for something, I noticed no point-A-to-point-B animations. A few fade-ins and fade-outs, but that was it.

But that doesn't quite explain how when "certain things" jiggle, I start looking at the jiggleage and I start trying to simulate the entire system in my head instead of the "things" themselves. It ends up detracting from the "things" themselves. It's like I lack the dedicated hardware to accelerate motion processing, so everything has to be done in software.

[Bumber]

Is there a term for the inability to tolerate (unnecessary, unrealistic) motion?

Closest term I know is visual hypersensitivity.

[methylatedspirit]

If you're sampling in frequency domain (such as in digital cameras, unless those things are somehow sampling in time domain, which would need sampling rates of many terahertz), what does sampling rate do?

In digital cameras, sampling rate corresponds to frame rate, but is there a general way to think about this that applies to anything that samples in frequency domain?

If you were to sample the signals coming off the hair cells in the cochlea (which apparently record in frequency domain, not time domain like microphones do), what does sampling rate mean there?

Does it even make sense to consider sampling rate in a system that works in frequency domain? I think there has to be something wrong with my understanding here.

[methylatedspirit]

Is there a difference between genderqueer and nonbinary? The way I've defined* those terms from reading online is as follows:
Genderqueer: Describes anyone whose gender identity is non-normative.
Nonbinary: Describes anyone whose gender identity does not conform to the gender binary.

Which are identical, as far as I'm concerned. "Non-normative" is "anything that is outside the norm", which then just leads to "outside the gender binary", which leads directly to "nonbinary". They are functionally identical, with the caveat that it is by these definitions. A different set of definitions would likely yield different results.

I'm tempted to just merge them together, but I think something's wrong here, almost certainly with how I'm reading it or the fact that my reading material is limited. Why would there be 2 words for the exact same thing? There has to be a difference somewhere, perhaps in connotation or something.

*The reason why I'm stating definitions is that definitions are the foundation on which meaning is derived, at least in my head. Faulty definitions lead to faulty meanings. Please tell me if the definitions are wrong.

[delphonso]

A quick google suggested that a person who is genderqueer might be applying the binary to themselves in a non-normative way. Such as, I am both a male and female, or I am neither.

The binary still exists in that situation. A non-binary person avoids the issue.