I respect your approach. I bet you’re the kind of parent who apologises to their kids when you make mistakes

That sounds beautiful. You really captured the moment

A++ for effort (at you, for this candid clarification)

It’s frustrating how common IQ based things are still. For example, I’m autistic, and getting any kind of support as an autistic adult has been a nightmare. In my particular area, some of the services I’ve been referred to will immediately bounce my referral because they’re services for people with “Learning Disabilities”, and they often have an IQ limit of 70, i.e. if your IQ is greater than 70, they won’t help you.

My problem here isn’t that there exists specific services for people with Learning disabilities, because I recognise that someone with Down syndrome is going to have pretty different support needs to me. What does ick me out is the way that IQ is used as a boundary condition as if it hasn’t been thoroughly debunked for years now.

I recently read “The Tyranny of Metrics” and whilst I don’t recall of it specifically delves into IQ, it’s definitely the same shape problem: people like to pin things down and quantify them, especially complex variables like intelligence. Then we are so desperate to quantify things that we succumb to Goodhart’s law (whenever a metric is used as a target, it will cease to be a good metric), condemning what was already an imperfect metric to become utterly useless and divorced from the system it was originally attempting to model or measure. When IQ was created, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it was. It has been made worse by years of bigots seeking validation, because it turns out that science is far from objective and is fairly easy to commandeer to do the work of bigots (and I say this as a scientist.)

It’s one reason why I like Lemmy so much — conversations around here are so small scale that I can be confident I’m talking to a human.

I think being aware of the ongoing maintenance (and one’s ability to do it) still feels productive in a prepping sense. It’s sort of like meta-prepping? Like, I’d expect that in a disaster, your knowledge would be helpful in organising within your community. Certainly you’d fare better than me, as someone who has been fortunate enough to never have to consider emergency supplies.

I have a variety of blankets near my bed, of varying weight, warmth and texture. It’s mostly because of autism related sensory preferences that vary across situations, but it’s also great when hosting guests.

I’m not sure what definition you’re referring to, but I don’t see any reason why visualisation is necessary.

By analogy, I used to have a friend who was born with no sense of smell. This also greatly impacted his sense of taste. Despite this, he was an excellent chef. I once asked him about this apparent contradiction and he explained that because he knew this was something he lacked (it was discovered when he was a teenager), he had put extra work into learning how. He was very reliant on recipes at the beginning, because that was more formulaic and easier to iteratively improve. He most struggled with fresh ingredients that require some level of dynamic response from the cook (onions become stronger tasting as they get older, for example), but he said he’d gotten pretty good at gauging this through other means, like texture or colour or vegetables, and finding other ways of avoiding that problem (such as using tinned tomatoes, for consistency).

I found it fascinating that his deficits in taste/smell actually led to him being an above average cook due to him targeting it for improvement— I met him at university, where many of my peers were useless at cooking for themselves at first. To this, he commented that it wasn’t just the extra effort, but the very manner in which he practiced; obviously he couldn’t rely on himself to test how well he’d done, so he had to recruit friends and family to help give feedback, which meant he was exposed to a wide variety of preferences and ways of understanding flavour. He also highlighted that the sampling bias in my surprise — that all the times that he had cooked for me were things he had loads of experience cooking with and so he could work from knowledge about what works. Most people who had as much cooking skill and experience as he had would be way more able to experiment with new ingredients or cuisines, whereas my friend had to stick to what he knew worked.

I wonder whether aphantasic authors might feel similar to my friend — like they’re operating from recipe books, relying on formulae and methods that they know work.

With all due respect, I don’t believe aphantasia is a real thing. The way people imagine things is so varied, weird, strange, and unique that I don’t think it makes sense assigning labels

Labels should always be used with caution, but for me, learning about aphantasia led to me reconsidering the ways in which I imagine things, and this had a beneficial impact on how I communicated with people close to me. For example, I seem to be an odd mixture of relying on visual stimuli for thinking (so I have visual reminders all over, and reading complex info is way easier for me than hearing it), but also seem to lack the ability to visualise. This means that if my partner asks “hey, do you remember which drawer the mini screwdrivers are in?”, I would usually be unable to answer, despite being able to walk in, take a glance at the drawers and go “that one, there”. We didn’t realise how frustrating this was for both of us until we reflected on the possibility of me having aphantasia. Whether I do or not doesn’t matter. More relevant is the fact that now, when he asks me questions of where things are, it’ll often be accompanied by a photograph of the location, which drastically improves my ability to recall and point to where the item is.

To some degree, I agree that it’s nonsense to assign labels when in nature and in humans, variation is the norm. Certainly it can lead to reductionism and ignoring wide swathes of that variety if one is on a quest to sort people into boxes. However, there is still a lot that we don’t know about how the brain works to process things and labels can be instructive either in researching aspects that we don’t yet understand, or for regular people like me who find benefit in a word that helps me to understand and articulate that there are ways that my partner thinks and processes information that seem to be impossible for me to emulate. “Aphantasia” helped both of us to be more accepting of these differences.

Framing a phenomenon as either real or not isn’t especially useful though, largely because of the ambiguity in the phrasing. An example in a different domain is that I’ve seen a wide variety of people claim that they don’t think autism is a real thing. This tends to be received as offensive to many people, not least of all autistic people who feel like their lived experience is being directly attacked and questioned. Sometimes it is, and their anger is justified. However, I’ve also seen the “autism isn’t a real thing” sentiment come from (often autistic) people critiquing the label and how it’s used, especially in a clinical context. They argue that it perpetuates a binary framing of autistic and not autistic, which further marginalises people who do have a diagnosis, and isolates some people who have autistic traits but are overall sub-clinical in presentation (who may have benefitted from understanding these traits from an autistic perspective). Regardless of one’s view of the arguments, it’s pretty clear that these are two very different stances that might be described by “autism isn’t a real thing”.

I make this example because debating of the utility of labels can be a great and fruitful discussion that helps to improve our understanding of the underlying phenomena and people’s experiences of them. Framing that debate as what’s real or not can lead to less productive arguments that are liable to cause offence (especially on the internet, where we’re primed to see things in a more adversarial manner)

I have known people with aphantasia who were avid readers of fiction, and I’ve read accounts that more or less say “good writing allows me to somewhat vicariously enjoy a sense that I don’t have, perhaps similar to how deaf people can enjoy music.”. Besides that, fiction is so diverse that the necessity of visualisation ability likely varies across genres, authors, time periods etc…

My gut says that aphantasia would almost certainly affect how people would engage with fiction, but that it’s not a determinant of whether they do or not. Ditto for autism (indirectly responding to OP: I have anecdotally found that autistics are rarely ambivalent on fiction — we either can’t get enough of it, or can’t engage with it at all. Some people I have known have directly attributed their love of fiction to their autistic modes of being)

I don’t think I’m clear on what you’re asking? Is it that you’re confused as to how a person can be a fantasy or sci-fi author with aphantasia?

If that is what you’re asking, then as someone with aphantasia, I likely can’t explain how that can happen anymore than people who don’t have aphantasia (like you, I presume) could explain to me what it’s like to visualise things. What I can say is that whilst I don’t tend to read fiction much nowadays, I used to be an avid reader of both sci-fi and fantasy. I’ve found that immersive writing tends to involve descriptions that involve more senses than just sight, and also that the environment can be effectively described through how characters interact within the world. A well described world might be easy to visualise, but I don’t think that being able to visualise things is necessary for producing that.

Not least of all because all the best writers also read a lot, and fiction is predominantly written by and for people who don’t have aphantasia. Through this, I would expect that an author with aphantasia would become proficient in writing that facilitates readers’ visual imaginations, even if they themselves didn’t engage with fiction in that manner.

Background: I did this experiment with the pre-existing belief that I likely have aphantasia.

Starting with the important question, no, I didn’t know the answer to these things before being asked

The ball was red, but I don’t think my initial “rendering” involved a colour of a ball at all, because the colour isn’t relevant to how it rolls. The ball felt cold, because that’s one of the ways I understood its weightiness, and thus how it rolls. The ball was small enough to hold in one hand, but in “visualising” its size, I imagined how it would feel in my hand. The ball I imagined was a bit larger than a tennis ball and much heavier. I can imagine the force my fingers would need to exert to grasp it.

The person who pushed the ball had no gender because it wasn’t relevant. When I considered the person’s gender, they were a woman, but that information seems to have gotten lost when I “looked away” by considering other questions; when I reread the questions, I “forgot” what gender the ball pusher was, and this time they were man. I suspect that because the information wasn’t relevant to the manner the ball was being pushed, the person pushing the ball was in a sort of superposition of gender, where they are both and/or neither man and/or woman, because it was liable to change whenever I “looked away”.

The ball pusher(s) didn’t look like anything unless I really pushed myself on this question and then I’m like “erm, I guess they were brunette?”, but I think a similar thing happens as with the gender question — unless I have a way to remember what traits I assigned to the ball pusher, I’m just going to forget and have to regenerate the traits. I suspect that if I were actively visualising something, these details would stick together better, like paint to a canvas.

The table has a similar effect of nebulousness. My only assumption before you asked further about the table was that it was level (because the ball started at rest) and rectangular/square. When I tried to consider the table in more detail, I asked myself “what can a table be made out of”. Wood comes to mind most obviously, because I have a wood table near me. Laminated particle-board is another thing. I also remember some weird, brightly coloured , super lightweight plastic tables from school. It could also be metal. It could have four legs, or it might have a central base like the dining table at my last house. It might be circular, or oval, or rhomboid. I think I just modelled it as squarish because I’ve learned enough mathsy-physics that I’m inclined to think of spherical cows, and having a straight edge is easier to model for mathematically, and to draw.

Brains sure are wacky, huh?

I opened this question and realised with a sense of dread that I don’t think I have an answer to this question; often it feels like my days are slipping by without making meaningful progress in the things I care about.

That may or may not be true, but regardless, I’m going to use this space to improve at self forgiveness. It’s difficult to show myself the compassion I deserve as a human, but it’s easier if I try to think of myself as a dear friend. If I were my friend, I’d feel proud of me for my strength, and angry on my behalf at the fact I am having to endure so much bullshit that is holding me back. I’d feel sad, but hopeful for the hypothetical future where I might be more free to make progress on my goals.

Without a frame of reference, I don’t think this constitutes improvements on anything per se. However, by setting my flag down here and underscoring my intent to be kinder to myself, I am creating a future where I will be able to look back on this comment and think “wow, such progress”. The second best time to plant a tree is now, and all that.

• When my house guests text “#wifi” to me, they get an auto reply with the WiFi password.

• NFC tag stuck to my medication pouch. When I boop my phone to it (or tap a shortcut on homescreen), I can select what medication I have taken. The medication and the time gets added to the bottom of a Google sheets spreadsheet, that I, or someone supporting me can check to get an overview of how frequently I’ve been taking medication (especially useful for spotting high pain chunks of time due to more frequent usage of PRN pain meds).

• Another aspect of the medication tracking above is that it also can tell me the last time I took medication. For example, if I take ADHD meds at 12pm, then my next dose would be 4pm. If I tap the shortcut at 3pm, it’ll tell me I last took meds at 12pm and I’m next due at 4pm. Alarms tend to either startle me or not be noticed, but when I had smart lights and a notification light on my phone, I could make a colour gradient where “you have just taken meds” = red and “you are due to take meds” = blue, and as time progresses, the colour slowly becomes more blue. This works well for me, because I like visual reminders

To be fair, AlphaFold is pretty incredible. I remember when it was first revealed (but before they open sourced parts of it) that the scientific community were shocked by how effective it was and assumed that it was going to be technologically way more complex than it ended up being. Systems Biologist Mohammed AlQuraishi captures this quite well in this blog post

I’m a biochemist who has more interest in the computery side of structural biology than many of my peers, so I often have people asking me stuff like “is AlphaFold actually as impressive as they say, or is it just more overhyped AI nonsense?”. My answer is “Yes.”

Eh, there’s a reason that Mildly infuriating exists as a community — sometimes the best way to exorcise one’s aggravation is to give space to the annoyance by sharing it with other persnickety people.

Tangentially related: I really enjoyed the EULA of Baldur’s Gate 3:

Something about potential wide scale fraud came out recently about a prominent Alzheimer’s researcher. This article covers it quite well: https://www.science.org/content/article/research-misconduct-finding-neuroscientist-eliezer-masliah-papers-under-suspicion

It’s grim, especially when considering the real human cost that fraud in biomedical research has. Despite this, like you, I am also optimistic. This article outlines some of how the initial concerns about this researcher was raised, and how the analysis of his work was done. A lot of it seems pretty unorthodox. For example, one of the people who contributed to this work was a “non-scientist” forensic image expert, who goes by the username Cheshire on the forum PubPeer (his real name is known and mentioned in the article, but I can’t remember it).

Something I find annoying is that being effective at SEO means being in a constant war with people whose literal job it is to be good at SEO to trap me in useless crap.

I just skip the in-between stages — I’m a botnet pretending to be a woman