A Broken Leg is not a Broken Leg / The Social Medical Industry

OMG! I have now entered the Hell of the social consequences of “getting help” for a broken leg; not actually for the broken bones: (big cast boot; strict orders from the doc to not put any weight on that foot. Simple, really). I had been resisting mightily the “HOME HEALTH” industry; nice people who come to the house and take “vitals”- give baths (a quick swipe with a wash cloth) “do” physical therapy (whatever that is – undefined so far). “FREE” thanks to Medicare. But, they’re closed on weekends, use “restricted phone numbers” (caller can’t use caller ID or make return calls). WELL! Our nurses aren’t going to give out they’re phone numbers!” was the indignant reply when asked… Just call the ambulance, if you can’t reach us, although the fundamental idea of HOME HEALTH is to keep people OUT OF the Emergency Room.

I won’t / can’t go into the organizational structure of these services, because THERE IS NONE. The nurse just left (and left behind an enormous box of “free” medical supplies). I must have used the phrase “please be specific” a dozen times as she rambled on and on (vaguely) about services, service delivery, length (duration of services, determination of services available; that (for some unknown reason) the physical therapist is “master of all this “care” and why I need a social worker to “organize the experience”.

Actually, I shouldn’t have said there is no organizational structure: There are GOALS. 1. These are private companies, paid 100% by Medicare, so they will do / follow whatever bizarre and cockamamie “payment plan” that Congress has devised to ensure maximum profit for their “buddies” in the “helping, caring, fixing” industry. 2. This means setting up a “schedule” for myriad “employees” of HOME HEALTH to show up at times of their choosing (not based on need) – that is, a billable number of visits that stop immediately when Medicare stops. 3. Those “FREE” medical supply goodies are likely the most “high profit” stream: HOME HEALTH buys them in great bulk at pennies of the retail cost (say a roll of gauze, for $0.25) and bills Medicare $25.00…

In the end, I always ask myself,

Would I hire these people to do repairs and service on my truck? If not, why would I hire them to “work on” me?

 

Question / Is Common Sense even better than Empathy?

My posting has slowed to almost nothing since last Saturday:

Summer at last; warm winds, blue skies, puffy clouds. The dog and I are both delirious over the ability to “get out of” quasi imprisonment indoors.

Into the truck; a short drive to the south, up and over the canyon edge into the wide open space of the plateau. Out into “the world again” striding easily along a two-rut track that goes nowhere; the type that is established by the driver of a first vehicle, turning off the road, through the brush, and headed nowhere. Humans cannot resist such a “lure” – Who drove off the road and why? Maybe the track does go somewhere. And so, the tracks grow, simply by repetition of the “nowhere” pattern. Years pass; ruts widen, deepen, grow and are bypassed, smoothed out, and grow again, becoming as permanent and indestructible as the Appian Way.

This particular set of ruts is a habitual dog-walking path for me: the view, the wind, the light, the sky whipped into a frenzy of lovely clouds… and then, agony. Gravel underfoot has turned my foot, twisting my ankle and plunging me into a deep rut and onto the rough ground. Pain; not Whoops, I tripped pain, but OMG! I’m screwed pain. I make a habit of glancing a few feet ahead to check where my feet are going, but my head was in the clouds.

This isn’t the first time in 23 years that I’ve taken a fall out in the boonies: a banged up shin or knee, a quick trip to the gravel; scraped hands, even a bonk on the head, but now… can I walk back to the truck, or even stand up? One, two, three… up.

Wow! Real pain; there’s no choice. Get to the truck, which appears to be very, very far away, at this point. Hobble, hobble, hobble; stop. Don’t stop! Keep going. Glance up at the truck to check periodically to see if it’s “growing bigger” – reachable. I always tell myself the same (true) mantra in circumstances like this: shut out time, let it pass, and suddenly, there you will be, pulling open the truck door and pulling yourself inside.

There is always some dumb luck in these matters: it’s my left ankle. I don’t need my left foot to drive home. Then the impossible journey from the truck to the house, the steps, the keys, wrangling the dog and her leash, trying not to get tangled and fall again – falling through the doorway, grabbing something and landing on the couch. Now what?

That was five days ago. Five days of rolling around with my knee planted in the seat of a wheeled office chair, pushing with the right foot as far as I can go, then hopping like a  one-legged kangaroo the rest of the way. Dwindling food supplies; unable to stand to cook; zapping anything eligible in the microwave. No milk in my coffee. Restless nights. Any bump to my bandaged foot wakes me up. This is ridiculous! My life utterly disrupted by a (badly) sprained ankle. I think I’m descending into depression.

Bipedalism, of course, begins to takeover my thoughts. But first, I try to locate hope on the internet, googling “treatment for sprained ankle.” You’re screwed, the pages of entries say. One begins to doubt “evolution” as the master process that produces elegant and sturdy design. Ankles are a nightmare of tiny bones and connecting ligaments, with little blood supply to heal the damage, and once damaged, a human can expect a long recovery, intermittent swelling and inevitable reinjury, for as long as you live.

It seems that for our “wild ancestors” a simple sprain could trigger the expiration date for any individual unlucky enough to be injured: the hyenas, big cats, bears and other local predators circle in, and then the vultures. Just like any other animal grazing the savannah or born into the forest, vulnerability = death. It’s as true today as it ever was. Unless someone is there with you when you are injured, you can be royally screwed: people die in their own homes due to accidents. People die in solo car wrecks. People go for a day hike in a state park and within an hour or two, require rescue, hospitalization and difficult recovery, from one slip in awareness and focus. And, being in the company of one or more humans, hardly guarantees survival. Success may depend on their common sense.

So: the question arises around this whole business of Homo sapiens, The Social Species. There are many social species, and it is claimed that some “non-human” social species “survive and reproduce successfully” because they “travel together” in the dozens, thousands or millions and “empathize” with others of their kind. Really? How many of these individual organisms even notice that another is in peril, other than to sound the alarm and get the hell out of the danger zone or predator’s path? How one human mind gets from reproduction in massive numbers, that is, playing the “numbers game” (1/ 100, 1/100, 1, 100,000 new creatures survive in a generation), and the congregation of vast numbers in schools, flocks and the odds for “not being one of the few that gets caught and eaten” – how one gets from there to “pan-social wonderfulness” is one of the mysteries of the social human mind.

There are occasions when a herd may challenge a predator, or a predatory group; parents (usually the female), will defend offspring in varying manner and degree, but what one notices in encounters (fortuitously caught on camera, posted on the internet or included in documentaries) that solitary instances are declared to represent “universal behavior” and proof of the existence of (the current fad of) empathy in “lesser animals”. What is ignored (inattentional blindness) and not posted, is the usual behavior; some type of distraction or defensive behavior is invested in, but the attempt is abandoned, at some “common sense point” in the interaction; the parents give up, or the offspring or herd member is abandoned.

What one notices is that the eggs and the young of all species supply an immense amount of food for other species.

Skittles evolved solely as a food source for Homo sapiens children. It has no future as a species. LOL

I’ve been watching a lot of “nature documentaries” to pass the time. This is, in its way, an extraordinary “fact of nature”. Our orientation to extreme Darwinian evolution (reductionist survival of the fittest) is stunningly myopic. We create narratives from “wildlife video clips” edited and narrated to confirm our imaginary interpretation of natural processes; the baby “whatever” – bird, seal, monkey, or cute cub; scrambling, helpless, clueless, “magically” escapes death (dramatic soundtrack, breathless narration) due to Mom’s miraculous, just-in-the-nick-of-time return. The scoundrel predator is foiled once again; little penguin hero “Achilles” (they must have names) has triumphantly upheld our notion that “survival is no accident” – which in great measure is exactly what it is.

One thing about how evolution “works” (at least as presented) has always bothered me no end: that insistence that the individual creatures which survive to reproduce are “the fittest”. How can we know that? What if among the hundreds, thousands, millions of “young” produced, but almost immediately destroyed or consumed by chance, by random events, by the natural changes and disasters that occur again and again, the genetic potential “to be most fit” had been eliminated, depriving the species of potential even “better” adaptations than what those we see? We have to ask, which individuals are “fittest” for UNKNOWN challenges that have not yet occurred? Where is the variation that may be acted upon by the changing environment?

This is a problem of human perception; of anthropomorphic projection, of the unfailing insistence of belief in an intentional universe. Whatever “happens” is the fulfilment of a plan; evolution is distorted to “fit” the human conceit, that by one’s own superior DNA, survival and reproduction necessarily become fact. 

Human ankles (and many other details) of human physiology are not “great feats of evolutionary engineering.”

Like those two-rut roads that are ubiquitous where I live, chance predicts that most of evolution’s organisms “go nowhere” but do constitute quick and easy energy sources for a multitude of other organisms.

 

Jordan Peterson Video / IQ and Suitable Employment

All I can say about JBP (this is my first exposure to his thinking), is that I like his “concrete” approach…

Oh, and I like the descriptive label “disagreeable person” over and above the (becoming tiresome) label Asperger. LOL

I tried to choose a couple of videos that would apply to Aspergers…especially employment problems.

WIKIPEDIA: Jordan Bernt Peterson (born June 12, 1962) is a Canadian clinical psychologist and public intellectual (I hate this label), who is professor of psychology at the University of Toronto.^[2][3] His main areas of study are in abnormal, social, and personality psychology,^[1] with a particular interest in the psychology of religious and ideological belief,^[4] and the assessment and improvement of personality and performance.^[5]

Peterson studied at the University of Alberta and McGill University. He remained at McGill as a post-doctoral fellow from 1991 to 1993 before moving to Harvard University, where he was assistant and then associate professor in the psychology department. In 1998 he moved back to Canada, to the University of Toronto, as a full professor.

Peterson’s first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, was published in 1999, a work which examined several academic fields to describe the structure of systems of beliefs and myths, their role in the regulation of emotion, creation of meaning, and motivation for genocide.^[6][7][8] His second book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, was released in January 2018.^[9][10][11]

Once upon a time, I wrote prose / Walking to Sanity Re-Post

I congratulate myself on becoming mature and gently old, on surmounting difficulty; understanding my fate, and letting up, letting go, but truth is, I’m a liar who has pushed the past away, across the border of my small world. Protected by miles of badland emptiness, a curtain of silence has dropped around me; the outside world doesn’t exist except at set frequencies along the electromagnetic spectrum; television, the radio, the internet, and down deep, that’s the way I want it. I crawled to this place, breathing, and no more. I walked and walked the hills, each step forcing a breath, like a respirator powered by my feet hitting the ground. If I had quit walking I would have died.

A wildlife rescue takes injured raccoons, snakes, and birds and once fixed or repaired, returns them to the wild, whatever that means. But some birds will not be birds again, living with wings broken, bent to sickening angles, improper geometry, hopping, not flying: broken into submission. Dogs travel to new homes, to live skittish, nerve-wracked, terrified, and distrustful lives; barking, scratching, insane human lives. Some animals go crazy, like a chimpanzee wrecked by cruelty, by its forced employment in labs or zoos or circuses, tortured by people whose job it is to twist and maim other beings without conscience or regret; psychologists, cosmetics-makers. Children are disobedient rats. Women redden their lips with monkey blood.

What suffering creatures know,  when subjected to human perversion, every minute of their existence, is that even if they were to be set free – they will never be free.

An old soul of a chimpanzee discovers grass, a tree, air and sky, for the first time: old, too old – just a breath of what might have been, too late, and we congratulate our compassion.

I have created my own rescue a shelter; it is very pretty, very quiet location somewhere outside of time, outside of America, my house old, pre-me, built long before I was born. Other children played in the dirt, grown by Wyoming, shaped by wind, yellow dust in their lungs, cool air sinking from summer storms, building character. There is a character that I play; the old lady on the block who gardens, tends beauty, at arms reach, under my feet, a profusion of living things tangled, overgrown, so unlike the powdery banded desert. People like my yard and my face, but they don’t know that I’m an injured animal, wings broken and limping toward the wild. Salvation is instinctual, but sanity is earned by walking, walking the world away.

 

 

Every Asperger Needs to Read this Paper! / Symptoms of entrapment and captivity

Research that supports my challenge to contemporary (American) psychology that Asperger symptoms are the result of “captivity” and not “defective brains” 

From: Depression Research and Treatment

Depress Res Treat. 2010; 2010: 501782. Published online 2010 Nov 4. doi:  10.1155/2010/501782 PMCID: PMC2989705

Full Article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2989705/

Testing a German Adaption of the Entrapment Scale and Assessing the Relation to Depression

Manuel Trachsel, 1 ,* Tobias Krieger, 2 Paul Gilbert, 3 and Martin Grosse Holtforth 2 :

Abstract

The construct of entrapment is used in evolutionary theory to explain the etiology of depression. The perception of entrapment can emerge when defeated individuals want to escape but are incapable. Studies have shown relationships of entrapment to depression, and suicidal tendencies. The aim of this study was a psychometric evaluation and validation of the Entrapment Scale in German (ES-D). 540 normal subjects completed the ES-D along with other measures of depressive symptoms, hopelessness, and distress. Good reliability and validity of the ES-D was demonstrated. Further, whereas entrapment originally has been regarded as a two-dimensional construct, our analyses supported a single-factor model. Entrapment explained variance in depressive symptoms beyond that explained by stress and hopelessness supporting the relevance of the construct for depression research. These findings are discussed with regard to their theoretical implications as well as to the future use of the entrapment scale in clinical research and practice.

Being outnumbered by social humans, 99% to 1%, is de facto defeat and captivity

1. Introduction

Assuming a certain degree of adaptivity of behavior and emotion, evolutionary theorists have suggested various functions of moodiness and depression. Whereas adaptive mechanisms may become functionally maladaptive [1, 2], there have been many attempts to explain potentially adaptive functions of depression. For example, Price [3] suggested that depression evolved from the strategic importance of having a de-escalating or losing strategy. Social rank theory [4, 5] built on this and suggests that some aspects of depression, such as mood and drive variations, may have evolved as mechanisms for regulating behavior in contexts of conflicts and competition for resources and mates. Hence, subordinates are sensitive to down rank threats and are less confident than dominants, while those who are defeated will seek to avoid those who defeated them. Depression may also serve the function to help individuals disengage from unattainable goals and deal with losses [6]. 

Social rank theory (e.g., [4]) links defeat states to depression. Drawing on Dixon’s arrested defences model of mood variation [7, 8], this theory suggests that especially when stresses associated with social defeats and social threats arise, individuals are automatically orientated to fight, flight or both. Usually, either of those defensive behaviors will work. So, flight and escape remove the individual from the conditions in which stress is arising (e.g., threats from a dominant), or anger/aggression curtails the threat. These defensive behaviors typically work for nonhuman animals. However, for humans, such basic fight and flight strategies may be less effective facing the relatively novel problems of living in modern societies, perhaps explaining the prevalence of disorders such as depression [8]. Dixon suggested that in depression, defensive behaviors can be highly aroused but also blocked and arrested and in this situation depression ensues. Dixon et al. [8] called this arrested flight. For example, in lizards, being defeated but able to escape has proven to be less problematic than being defeated and being trapped. Those who are in caged conditions, where escape is impossible, are at risk of depression and even death [9]. Gilbert [4, 10] and Gilbert and Allan [5] noted that depressed individuals commonly verbalize strong escape wishes and that feelings of entrapment and desires to escape have also been strongly linked to suicide, according to O’Connor [11]. In addition they may also have strong feelings of anger or resentment that they find difficult to express or become frightening to them. (Or are NOT ALLOWED to express, without being punished) 

Gilbert [4] and Gilbert and Allan [5] proposed that a variety of situations (not just interpersonal conflicts) that produce feeling of defeat, or uncontrollable stress, which stimulate strong escape desires but also makes it impossible for an individual to escape, lead the individual to a perception of entrapment. They defined entrapment as a desire to escape from the current situation in combination with the perception that all possibilities to overcome a given situation are blocked. Thus, theoretically entrapment follows defeat if the individual is not able to escape. This inability may be due to a dominant subject who does not offer propitiatory gestures following antagonistic competition, or if the individual keeps being attacked. (Relentless social bullying) 

In contrast to individuals who feel helpless (cf. the concept of learned helplessness [12]), which focus on perceptions of control, the entrapped model focuses on the outputs of the threat system emanating from areas such as the amygdala [13]. In addition, depressed people are still highly motivated and would like to change their situation or mood state. It was also argued that, unlike helplessness, entrapment takes into account the social forces that lead to depressive symptoms, which is important for group-living species with dominance hierarchies such as human beings [14]. Empirical findings by Holden and Fekken [15] support this assumption. Gilbert [4] argued that the construct of entrapment may explain the etiology of depression better than learned helplessness, because according to the theory of learned helplessness, helpless individuals have already lost their flight motivation whereas entrapped individuals have not.

According to Gilbert [4], the perception of entrapment can be triggered, increased, and maintained by external factors but also internal processes such as intrusive, unwanted thoughts and ruminations can play an important role (e.g., [16, 17]). For example, ruminating on the sense of defeat or inferiority may act as an internal signal of down-rank attack that makes an individual feel increasingly inferior and defeated. Such rumination may occur despite the fact that an individual successfully escaped from an entrapping external situation because of feelings of failure, which may cause a feeling of internal entrapment. For example, Sturman and Mongrain [18] found that internal entrapment increased following an athletic defeat. Moreover, thoughts and feelings like “internal dominants” in self-critics may exist that can also activate defensive behaviors.

For the empirical assessment of entrapment, Gilbert and Allan [5] developed the self-report Entrapment Scale (ES) and demonstrated its reliability. Using the ES, several studies have shown that the perception of entrapment is strongly related to low mood, anhedonia, and depression [5, 19–21]. Sturman and Mongrain [22] found that entrapment was a significant predictor of recurrence of major depression. Further, Allan and Gilbert [23] found that entrapment relates to increased feelings of anger and to a lower expression of these feelings. In a study by Martin et al. [24], the perception of entrapment was associated with feelings of shame, but not with feelings of guilt. Investigating the temporal connection between depression and entrapment, Goldstein and Willner [25, 26] concluded that the relation between depression and entrapment is equivocal and might be bilateral; that is, entrapment may lead to depression and vice versa.

Entrapment was further used as a construct explaining suicidal tendency. In their cry-of pain-model, Williams and Pollock [27, 28] argued that suicidal behavior should be seen as a cry of pain rather than as a cry for help. Consistent with the concept of arrested flight, they proposed that suicidal behavior is reactive. In their model, the response (the cry) to a situation is supposed to have the following three components: defeat, no escape potential, and no rescue. O’Connor [11] provided empirical support in a case control study by comparing suicidal patients and matched hospital controls on measures of affect, stress, and posttraumatic stress. The authors hypothesized that the copresence of all three cry-of-pain variables primes an individual for suicidal behavior. The suicidal patients, with respect to a recent stressful event, reported significantly higher levels of defeat, lower levels of escape potential, and lower levels of rescue than the controls. Furthermore, Rasmussen et al. [21] showed that entrapment strongly mediated the relationship between defeat and suicidal ideation in a sample of first-time and repeated self-harming patients. Nevertheless, there has also been some criticism of the concept of entrapment as it is derived from animal literature [29].

To our knowledge so far, there is no data on the retest reliability or the temporal stability of the Entrapment Scale. Because entrapment is seen as a state-like rather than a trait-like construct, its stability is likely dependent on the stability of its causes. (Remove the social terrorism, or remove yourself) Therefore, if the causes of entrapment are stable (e.g., a long-lasting abusive relationship), then also entrapment will remain stable over time. In contrast, for the Beck Hopelessness Scale (BHS), there are studies assessing temporal stability that have yielded stable trait-like components of hopelessness [30]. Young and coworkers [30] stated that the high stability of hopelessness is a crucial predictor of depressive relapses and suicidal attempts. For the Perceived Stress Questionnaire (PSQ), there are studies examining retest reliability. The PSQ has shown high retest reliability over 13 days (r = .80) in a Spanish sample [31]. It is to be expected that with longer retest intervals as in the present study (3 months), the stability of perceived stress will be substantially lower. We, therefore, expect the stability of entrapment to be higher than that of perceived stress as a state-like construct, but lower than that of hopelessness, which has been shown to be more trait-like [32].

Previous research is equivocal regarding the dimensionality of the entrapment construct. Internal and external entrapment were originally conceived as two separate constructs (cf. [5]) and were widely assessed using two subscales measuring entrapment caused by situations and other people (e.g., “I feel trapped by other people”) or by one’s own limitations (e.g., “I want to get away from myself”). The scores of the two subscales were averaged to result in a total entrapment score in many studies. However as Taylor et al. [33] have shown, entrapment may be best conceptualized as a unidimensional construct. This reasoning is supported by the observation that some of the items of the ES cannot easily be classified either as internal or external entrapment and because the corresponding subscales lack face validity (e.g., “I am in a situation I feel trapped in” or “I can see no way out of my current situation”).

5. Discussion

The entrapment construct embeds depressiveness theoretically into an evolutionary context. The situation of arrested flight or blocked escape, in which a defeated individual is incapable of escaping despite a maintained motivation to escape, may lead to the perception of entrapment in affected individuals [8]. In this study, the Entrapment Scale (ES) was translated to German (ES-D), tested psychometrically, and validated by associations with other measures. This study provides evidence that the ES-D is a reliable self-report measure of entrapment demonstrating high internal consistency. The study also shows that the ES-D is a valid measure that relates to other similar constructs like hopelessness, depressive symptoms or perceived stress. Levels of entrapment as measured with the ES-D were associated with depressiveness, perceived stress, and hopelessness, showing moderate to high correlations. Results were consistent with those obtained by Gilbert and Allan [5]. Entrapment explained additional variance in depressiveness beyond that explained by stress and hopelessness. Taken together, the present data support the conception of entrapment as a relevant and distinct construct in the explanation of depression. (And much of Asperger behavior)

The results of our study confirm the findings of Taylor et al. [33], thereby showing that entrapment is only theoretically, but not empirically, separable into internal and external sources of entrapment. The authors even went further by showing that entrapment and defeat could represent a single construct. Although in this study the defeat scale [5] was not included, the results are in line with the assumption of Taylor et al. [33] and support other studies using entrapment a priori as a single construct. However, although this study supports the general idea that escape motivation affects both internal and external events and depression, clinically it can be very important to distinguish between them. For example, in studies of psychosis entrapment can be very focused on internal stimuli, particularly voices [47].

The state conceptualization of entrapment implies that the perception of entrapment may change over time. Therefore, we did not expect retest correlations as high as retest correlations for more trait-like constructs like hopelessness [32]. Since the correlation over time is generally a function of both the reliability of the measure and the stability of the construct, high reliability is a necessary condition for high stability [48]. In this study, we showed that the ES-D is a reliable scale, and we considered retest correlations as an indicator for stability. The intraclass correlation of .67 suggests that entrapment is more sensitive to change than hopelessness (r = .82). Furthermore, the state of entrapment seems to be more stable than perceived stress, which may be influenced to a greater extent by external factors. Given the confirmed reliability and validity of the ES-D in this study, we therefore cautiously conclude that entrapment lies between hopelessness and perceived stress regarding stability.

Whereas the high correlation between entrapment and depressive symptoms in this study may be interpreted as evidence of conceptual equivalence, an examination of the item wordings of two scales clearly suggest that these questionnaires assess distinct constructs. However, the causal direction of this bivariate relation is not clear. Theoretically, both directions are plausible. Entrapment may be a cause or a consequence of depressive symptoms, or even both. Unfortunately, studies examining the temporal precedence so far have yielded equivocal results and have methodological shortcomings (e.g., no clinical samples, only mild and transitory depression and entrapment scores with musical mood induction) in order to answer this question conclusively [25, 26]. It remains unclear whether entrapment only is depression specific. Entrapment might not only be associated with depression, but also with other psychological symptoms, or even psychopathology in general. This interpretation is supported by research showing a relation between distress arising from voices and entrapment in psychotic patients [49, 50]. Furthermore, other studies show the relation between entrapment and depressive symptoms [51–53] and social anxiety and shame [54] in psychosis. The usefulness of entrapment as a construct for explaining psychopathologies in humans has been questioned [29]. Due to the present study, it is now possible to investigate entrapment in psychopathology in the German speaking area.

Modern social humans and the social hierarchy: Driving Asperger types crazy for thousands of years!

 

Adult Aspergers discuss bullies and manipulators / Re-Post

Adult AS discussion about Asperger individuals having a talent for setting off “typical” humans, specifically, becoming targets for bullies and the recipients of angry responses from “nice” people.

Edited and paraphrased to protect identities.

Topic: It seems that being Asperger’s means that I have SUCKER tattooed across my forehead. Anyone else agree? Any advice? 

Me too – since the day I was born and the result has been a very difficult life.

Aspies seem strange to other people: people fear what they don’t understand. The sad thing is, most Aspies are honest and sensitive and pay attention to other people and their needs. Guess this is what makes us so strange. The normal majority are not honest or sensitive to other people’s needs. We are strange because we love and care. We are hated because we are non violent; honesty and fairness make us unpredictable and that intimidates the average SOB. There is no way we can change ourselves to be as mean as most NTs.

It will be a long wait until society gets better and can make room for honest and intelligent people with good intentions. It could be a very long wait.

Asperger’s can put you at higher risk for this sort of thing (bullying, deception) but unfortunately (or I guess fortunately if it helps you feel better) anyone with low self esteem and poor social skills, and not Asperger’s, is at risk for all of those things. Also, I would bet that these so called “normal” people are only acting nice because society pushes them to be. Anyone who is a bully will bully lots of people, but they feel safe doing it to people like Asperger’s. Bullies aren’t nice people who are being mean, they are cowards being mean to people who won’t fight back.

Very true – “nice” people gave me hell most of my life. Nice normal people get angry at my very prescence in a room. It is hell to deal with our very complicated soul, while at the same time having to be confronted by unjustified cruelty in the  normal social environment. But is there a solution ?

I stay away from people as much as it is possible. it’s very hard, sad, and lonely but at least I’m alive and I don’t get beat up.

I do whatever “works”. I don’t care about being “socially appropriate”. Is there a reason to be ethical around unethical people, who create corrupt systems? Wouldn’t it be more unethical to allow them to get away with being unfair? Doing what is effective is only logical.

I also have never cared about what is considered to “socially appropriate” behavior because underhanded tactics are what is be socially appropriate. To play the game – to inspire fear or to manipulate people – is not something I’ll recommend to Aspies as it doesn’t fit our personality.

NTs are good at and like manipulating people because they seek power above anything else. Most Aspies don’t care about that stuff: power is for idiots

I don’t want power over people or social status. I want do as I please, as long as it’s fair, which isn’t always possible. My experience is that an Aspie must use strategic thinking to break free of the malevolent actions and unjust rules that NTs use to attack a person with ASD.

You know how hard it is to “read” NTs, and how their behaviour is so confusing? It’s the same for many NTs too, but we’re that lone nail that stands out from the masses. I don’t understand bullying, but I know it’s a survival thing, like an animal picking out the weakest in the litter and kicking it out. But, since humans don’t live in the forest and stuff, there’s nowhere for “one of us” to go – we become withdrawn, even die, or stay and try to take the blows.

Sounds sad and sombre, and it is.

I’d like to say that a common myth about Asperger people is that our lack of manipulation skills is because we’re weak or naive. Just the opposite is true – nothing terrifies NTs more than someone who expresses himself directly with no hidden agenda, or irony, or double meaning. With an Aspie, what you see is what you get. I think that assertiveness it is much better; use your natural strengths so you can be more creative and spontaneous.

I served in the military and everyone thought I was weird, but also very good at my job. And even though I was called “a freak of nature” they knew they could count on me no matter what.  An Aspie should count on his “native” strength and skills instead of wasting them on NT games. In short – be yourself

For me, Hell is the waste of time and energy that having to deal bullies takes. The bully demands my time … how dysfunctional is that? “

I don’t think there’s any doubt that we bring out the worst in some people. I assumed it was because there’s some “body language” thing that we’re doing or not doing. People  react as if we’re a threat or something. My attitude is to be extremely wary. I’ve become attuned to the signs that someone is getting annoyed or aggressive, and say something like … “it’s not necessary to get angry”. Of course, there’s a big risk saying that will cause some people to get even angrier.

Unfortunately, confronting people wears me out. Always warring with people leaves me more vulnerable to meltdowns – I end up being tired and over-stimulated.

Actually, I don’t really believe that normal nice people are bullies. Normal nice people do not do these things to people. It’s the bullies against everyone else. They hurt anyone that they think will let them get away with it.

Two Revealing Photos / Actual female weights and sizes

https://fitnessontherun.net/weighing-work-weight-loss-part-one/

The U.S. social culture of “FASHION” is built on hatred of women. It profits from abuse and humiliation, (and even death) of women. Hatred of women is a SOCIAL ACTIVITY. 

From a “Pro-anorexia” cult website

Model “Cora” dead at age 23.

Facial Hair / Not just for Humans

Apes: Not so different after all.

Monkey Mustaches Reveal Evolution of Facial Hair

https://www.seeker.com/monkey-mustaches-reveal-evolution-of-facial-hair-1769477454.html

Mustaches and eyebrows help certain monkeys (same species) recognize each other, research finds.

By Jen Viegas / 02/03/2015

Distinctive facial hair, like mustaches and eyebrows, are not unique to people — those traits also help certain monkeys identify each other. Mustaches, beards, bushy eyebrows and other facial hair might have first evolved in primates to help them easily recognize each other in forest environments, according to new research in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The study shows how much primates rely on vision in their social networks.

“Primates are a visual group that have lots and lots of face-to-face interactions,” co-author James Higham told Discovery News.

“The evolutionary history of primates is one of increasing reliance on vision at the expense of olfaction, which is the sense that is used more ancestrally among mammals.”

For the study, Higham, an assistant professor of anthropology at New York University, and co-author William Allen studied guenon monkeys, which sport all sorts of quirky facial hair, from ear tufts to beards and bushy eyebrows. Both male and female guenon monkeys have these features, to the point that humans looking at them cannot always tell which monkey is a male and which is a female.

The researchers designed a computer algorithm that could assess 500 photographs of 12 species of guenons. The images were collected in various settings, including at U.S. and U.K. zoos and at a wildlife sanctuary in Nigeria. The photos were of both male and female guenons.

“We sought to test a computer’s ability to do something close to what a guenon viewing other guenons’ faces would do,” explained Allen, who is now a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Hull.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

Sexual selection for “tame” females produced neotenic “symptoms”: little to no facial / body hair, baby faces, select fat deposition, monthly instead of yearly fertility, arrested development at juvenile developmental stages.

This selection produced easy visual recognition of females; females became “easy prey” animals – a domesticated animal. Modern Western female ideals include physical features of young males: boys with boobs syndrome. ______________________________________________________________ 

Chimps actually have “patchy” body and facial hair.

The computer succeeded in correctly identifying individuals and their species, but like humans looking at the images, it too was stumped at trying to figure out if the photos were of males or females. It also could not categorize the photos by the age of the monkeys.

There seems to have been selection for a role for facial appearance in species recognition, Higham said. For age and sex, he speculated that “perhaps if you live in a stable social group, and you have individual recognition, then you can just learn those other individuals and whether they are old or young, or male or female, and so do not need this to be encoded in their facial appearance. “This makes sense for guenons, which often live high in rainforest canopies with many closely related species. For breeding and other social purposes, they need to quickly identify their own kind.

The distant ancestors of humans were also tree dwellers that likely lived close to similar species. A growing body of evidence even supports that more recent members of our genus co-existed, such as Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens sharing some of the same territories.

While guenon monkeys, owl monkeys and some other primates have males and females that look nearly identical, it is usually very easy to distinguish a human man from a woman with just a glance. Facial hair in our case takes on a sexier function.

Sexual deception by visual disguise: Ducati ads, etc. 

Are men imitating women, or women imitating men? 

https://www.naukrinama.com/stressbuster/men-copying-womens-pose/

“In humans, mustaches and beards are what we call a ‘sexually dimorphic’ trait, i.e. they are present in one sex and not the other,” Higham said. “This suggests that they are a sexually-selected trait, and perhaps play a role in mate choice or in competition between individuals of the same sex.”

Allen and Higham believe that the computer technique could be used to analyze the facial traits of all sorts of other animals, helping to determine the function of these traits and why and how they evolved in the first place.

What is the Asperger “Blank Stare” all about? / Re-Post

What is the Aspie blank stare and why is it a disturbing facet of Aspie behavior?

Complaint from an Aspie ‘Mum’ about her son, decoded:

MUM: In my experience, I would get a blank stare when I asked (my Asperger son) a question.  It could be, for example, what he would like for dinner? What happened at school? You know – normal sorts of ‘Mum’ questions!

Answer: Social typical questions tend to be vague and non-specific. A specific question would be: “Would you like pizza or hot dogs for dinner?” Or try, “We’re having hamburgers for dinner. I bought the kind of buns you like and you can add tomatoes or pickles or cheese, or whatever else you like.”  “What stories did you read in reading class today?”

MUM: How did I interpret the blank stare that I got?

At the time, I believed that ‘the blank stare’ was used by (SON) to avoid answering the questions I asked questions I thought were easy to answer! I realize now, that in my frustration over not getting an answer, I would pile on the questions one after another, and (SON) didn’t have time to process even the first one! I would get cross with him, frustrated that he seemed to refuse to respond to my requests for information, and I would give up.

Answer: One of the big mistakes that social typicals make is to attribute INTENT to Asperger behavior. This is because social typicals are “self-oriented” – everything is about THEM; any behavior on the part of a human, dog, cat, plant or lifeform in a distant galaxy, must be directed at THEM. Example: God, or Jesus, or whomever, is paying attention 24/7 to the most excruciatingly trivial moments in the lives of social typicals. We’re not as patient as God or Jesus.

The Asperger default mental state is a type of reverie, day-dreaming, trance or other “reflective” brain process; that is, we do “intuitive” thinking. The “blank face” is because we do not use our faces to do this type of thinking. 

Sorry – we’re just busy elsewhere! When you ask a question, it can take a few moments to “come out of” our “reverie” and reorient our attention. If you are asking a “general question” that is meant to elicit a “feeling” (social) response, it will land like a dead fish in front of us. Hence the continued “blankness”.  

MUM: What is the real cause of the blank stare?

I believe that SON uses the blank stare while he is processing a question. If give him enough time, he will think deeply, and consider his response, which is often unexpected.

Answer: The “blank stare” is due to our type of brain activity. We process questions; processing questions adds to response time. Some questions are so vague that we simply cannot answer them. Some questions aren’t questions at all, but are an attempt to get our attention and to get a “social” something from us. This is truly confusing. 

MUM: (I’m told that) at any given moment an Aspie is taking in lots of information from the world around them. They notice details that normal people ignore. These details can easily result in sensory overload. The blank stare is used by Aspies as a way to ‘zone out’, or ‘go into themselves’ as a coping mechanism for when their senses are overloaded.

Answer: Not correct (in my experience). Sensory overload is another matter entirely; sensory overload results in the desire to flee, and if we can’t “get away” we experience meltdown. Other Aspies may have a different take on this.

Aspie chat concerning “The Stare”

“I watched “Rain Man” again recently. There was a scene where Dusty was sitting on a park bench and just looking at the ground, and Tom Cruise started YELLING at him. I felt like, “Hey ! sometimes I just sit and think about things, and maybe I’m staring at the ground, so cool it Tom.” We tend to look off into the horizon while we’re talking, and really, it’s not a big deal …”

“At work I’ll be at my desk just working away and people will tell me to cheer up when I don’t feel at all down. Also, if I’m standing around somewhere, and not focusing on anything in particular – and feeling fine, someone will ask me if I’m OK or if I’m pissed off about something. Something about my neutral (not happy or sad, just contented) expression makes people think I’m depressed or angry.”

“People are always doing one of the following: Ask me if I’m okay because I’m staring off into the distance; look behind their back to see what I’m staring at; or tell me to “SMILE!” because I don’t have any facial expression.”

Yes, social typicals are self-centered and demanding. They don’t want to “put up with” a blank face; it damages their perfect narcissistic universe, in which it is everyone’s job to make them feel important.

And then, there is the other “eye” problem:

“I dont get it…..my teacher tells me to look at her when she talks and when I look at other people they tell me to stop staring at them. What the…?”

“Apparently staring and looking are two different things, not that I know how to tell the difference.”

The teacher demands eye-contact because it indicates OBEDIENCE – SUBMISSION. Authoritarian adults demand instant obedience from children. But if you stare at a  “regular” person, that causes another problem. You are claiming higher status; predators stare down prey; you, dear Aspie, are unwittingly behaving like a predator.

“I stare because I get easily distracted by details and I want to see more; it’s just attention to detail. I’m doing better at straight eye contact, but open my eyes too wide because I’m trying hard to focus and pay attention.”

“If I am interested in what a person is saying – it’s new to me or important information, I will stare like a laser. Also if I am trying to recognize someone that looks vaguely familiar, or there is something interesting about how they look and I want to examine it. If I’m not interested, I won’t look at them. However, that does not mean I am not listening just because I am not looking at them.”

It seems to me, that Aspies use our senses as nature intended: We use our eyes to see and we use our ears to listen. 

 

 

 

Google’s AI system “DeepMind” / DeepBS

Comment: I know little about AI, and this article prompts questions. 1. How does the personality / psychology of a designer(s) of these systems play out in the system’s behavior, that is, if it influences it at all. (What if a very intelligent prey animal  designed an AI system?) 2. Is the designation “intelligent” “less intelligent” for an iteration a judgement on the part of the designers, or is it made by the system? 3. Is the Gathering game a model for the transition from small hunter-gatherer communities to the modern complex urban “stress-filled” environment – a result of “switching” to agriculture around 10,000 years ago, and the rapid increase in population driven by the industrial revolution?

Will “emotional robots” be happy robots? I doubt it. LOL

https://www.sciencealert.com/google-deep-mind-has-learned-to-become-highly-aggressive-in-stressful-situations

Google’s AI Has Learned to Become “Highly Aggressive” in Stressful Situations

Well, that’s just great. 

BEC CREW / 31 MAR 2018

We’ve all seen the Terminator movies, and the apocalyptic nightmare that the self-aware AI system, Skynet, wrought upon humanity.

And behaviour tests conducted on Google’s DeepMind AI system make it clear just how careful we need to be when building the robots of the future. In tests in 2016, Google’s DeepMind AI system demonstrated an ability to learn independently by its own memory, and beat the world’s best Go players at their own game.

Then it started figuring out how to seamlessly mimic a human voice.

More recently in 2017, researchers tested its willingness to cooperate with others, and revealed that when DeepMind feels like it’s about to lose, it opts for “highly aggressive” strategies to ensure that it comes out on top.

The Google team ran 40 million turns of a simple ‘fruit gathering’ computer game that asks two DeepMind ‘agents’ to compete against each other (the male Homo paradigm)to gather as many virtual apples as they could.

They found that things went smoothly so long as there were enough apples to go around, but as soon as the apples began to dwindle, the two agents turned aggressive, using laser beams to knock each other out of the game to steal all the apples.

You can watch the Gathering game in the video below, with the DeepMind agents in blue and red, the virtual apples in green, and the laser beams in yellow: (if video has disappeared go to original article, or youtube)

Interestingly, if an agent successfully ‘tags’ its opponent with a laser beam, no extra reward is given. It simply knocks the opponent out of the game for a set period, which allows the successful agent to collect more apples.

If the agents left the laser beams unused, they could theoretically end up with equal shares of apples, which is what the ‘less intelligent’ iterations of DeepMind opted to do.

It was only when the Google team tested more and more complex forms of DeepMind that sabotage, greed, and aggression set in.

As Rhett Jones reported for Gizmodo back in 2017, when the researchers used smaller DeepMind networks as the agents, there was a greater likelihood for peaceful co-existence. (a model for hunter-gatherer groups?)

But when they used larger, more complex networks as the agents, the AI was far more willing to sabotage its opponent early to get the lion’s share of virtual apples. (a model for modern social human “megalopolis” environments?) 

The researchers suggest that the more intelligent the agent, the more able it was to learn from its environment, allowing it to use some highly aggressive tactics to come out on top. (I find this “path” questionable: a correlation is made that “aggressive tactics = intelligent behavior” This is why I suspect that modern western “social pyramid” structure has been “built in” to the AI system by the designers – this is Google after all!)

“This model … shows that some aspects of human-like behaviour emerge as a product of the environment and learning,” one of the team, Joel Z Leibo, told Matt Burgess at Wired. (Hardly a new observation… I dislike it when extremely obvious common knowledge assertions being presented as intellectual “gold”!)

“Less aggressive policies emerge from learning in relatively abundant environments with less possibility for costly action. The greed motivation reflects the temptation to take out a rival and collect all the apples oneself.” (Another obvious statement: do we really need an AI system to “parrot back to us” common social cliches?)

DeepMind was then tasked with playing a second video game, called Wolfpack. This time, there were three AI agents – two of them played as wolves, and one as the prey.

Unlike Gathering, this game actively encouraged co-operation, because if both wolves were near the prey when it was captured, they both received a reward – regardless of which one actually took it down: (if video has disappeared, go to original or youtube) 

“The idea is that the prey is dangerous – a lone wolf can overcome it, but is at risk of losing the carcass to scavengers,” the team explains in their paper. (Is this “conceptual” framework, which is not original thinking, but rather a simplistic version of wolf-prey interaction in the “real world” not going to predict the outcome? Is this not a “set up”?)

“However, when the two wolves capture the prey together, they can better protect the carcass from scavengers, and hence receive a higher reward.”

So just as the DeepMind agents learned (or was it built-in the game itself?) from Gathering that aggression and selfishness netted them the most favourable result in that particular environment, they (the agents) learned from Wolfpack that co-operation can also be the key to greater individual success in certain situations. (Another supposedly mind-blowing discovery – NT blah, blah, blah social statement)

And while these are just simple little computer games, the message is clear – put different AI systems in charge of competing interests in real-life situations, and it could be an all-out war if their objectives are not balanced against the overall goal of benefitting us humans above all else. (Wow! What bullshit! The message is that the “status-quo” structure of the social pyramid will be “embedded” in AI systems, to benefit the top 1% of predators, just as society works today.)

Think traffic lights trying to slow things down, and driverless cars trying to find the fastest route – both need to take each other’s objectives into account to achieve the safest and most efficient result for society. (Social agendas, as prescribed by a “certain class of humans” will prevail due to implementation of AI systems that never question the status quo.)

It’s still early days for DeepMind, and the team at Google, but the initial results show that, just because we build them, it doesn’t mean robots and AI systems will automatically have our interests at heart.

Hah! The top predators who control the social hierarchy will make sure that AI systems will not be capable of considering what is best for the rest of “humanity”

Instead, we need to build that helpful nature into our machines (what BS!) and anticipate any ‘loopholes’ that could see them reach for the laser beams.

As the founders of OpenAI, Elon Musk’s research initiative dedicated to the ethics of artificial intelligence, said back in 2015:

“AI systems today have impressive but narrow capabilities. It seems that we’ll keep whittling away at their constraints, and in the extreme case, they will reach human performance on virtually every intellectual task. (Translation: AI will not transcend the outrageous narcissism of human self-adoration; it will be constrained to the limits of “our”  existing egocentric and minimal intelligence)

It’s hard to fathom how much human-level AI could benefit society, and it’s equally hard to imagine how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly.”

Tread carefully, humans…

A version of this story was first published in February 2017.