robryk @robryk@qoto.org

@wpalmer @rysiek

Going viral is a random process. Would you expect the influence of randomness (from the point in time when the post is published) to be larger or smaller here?

@retr0id What's your opinion of sharing links to your posts using other instances' "view remote post" feature?

@pixelfed Could the intervening version have caused out-of-sync follow relationship status between the two parties?

@taedryn

> since your initial impulse was to wonder why anyone would want a different body, that you're more in the cis part of the spectrum/gamut we call gender.

I thought that cis/trans was the other dimension: the one that corresponds to "what is your body image" and didn't think the "how malleable it is/how strongly held is it" had a name. Am I wrong?

> It's not whether your body is wrong or right, so much as it is whether your body matches how you think of yourself, and how much of a problem that is.

Sorry, my wording was poor.

@taedryn

So, I initially got very surprised when told that trans people wish their bodies to be different as an end goal (I would naturally assume that the whole thing is about social meaning of gender and body shape is mostly a means to an end).

When I realized that this was very surprising to me, I started to wonder why it was so surprising, so I started wondering whether I could imagine how I'd be bothered to have a female body. I'm not sure if I failed, because I couldn't really find anything in particular that would bother me as being wrong (as opposed to annoying) -- so either I failed at imagining it or my gender identity is very weak (or is this a false dichotomy?).

@taedryn I think that it would help to be more verbose about what "fantasize" means. There is a spectrum of interpretations ("wished that to be true and imagined it", "imagined it", "was curious what would be different and thought analytically about it", ...) and answers might depend on that.

@rysiek

I think that article talks about two similar situations as if they were the same.

If we are in a situation where the wagers are fractions of the person's wealth, then all those conclusions follow and I see no caveats.

However, if the wagers are absolute-sized, and much smaller than initial wealth, then:
a) eventually the same thing will happen,
b) but on a impractically long timescale.

In that case, the obvious reason why the same will happen is that random walks on a real line will visit every place with probability 1, so always eventually someone will go bankrupt. Repeat enough times, and there's only one person with money left.

However, the same reasoning can be used to show that (in a society where children take father's surname) eventually there will be one surname only: because there's a nonzero probability of a surname disappearing in the next timestep, and there's no way back from it having disappeared.

I'm not sure what happens with the original setup from the article in the limit of small bets (i.e. in the limit where fraction of wealth that's wagered tends to 0) if we also adjust number of bets per unit of time inversely proportionally. I suspect that their conclusion holds, but the convergence gets slower, but my intuition could be wrong here.

@grrrr_shark

And I've just learned that he's died last year.

So, in the spirit of making people's passing not-totally-sad (as in, it's better that they've existed and died compared to them not existing at all), some anecdotes about Dr. Włodzimierz Borkowski:

He specialized in neonatology. I don't remember how I know this, but one of the reasons for that was that he himself had joint problems that made walking over non-level surfaces hard for him that were caused by some perinatal issues.

He would treat his patients, whether young or adult, as people who should know what he's thinking. Apart from him actually answering questions of children (and not just saying something to make the child be satisfied), he'd point-blank admit when he didn't know something, or wasn't sure. (This created very polarized opinions about him among patients.)

So, something that happened at least once to my parents was that we went to see him (I don't remember what the problem was anymore, probably something related to pollen allergy); he in the end didn't have a good guess on the underlying cause, so he said so, gave some advice on symptom avoidance, asked us to try to make some observations, and to come back in 2 weeks or so. A few days later my parents got a phonecall: he thought about it in the meantime and had a new idea, that he wanted them to try.

@CynicalDreamer@mastodonapp.uk @SharonGibson3

Do you know whether anyone tried to measure this across more countries?

@grrrr_shark

Don't worry, I don't particularly mind non-misleading and correct snark :)

What _is_ worse for me is that I used to have a splendid way of looking for reasonable specialists in Poland: ask my (former) pediatrician for recommendations (in all cases I remember spanning my childhood to when I was twenty-something this always yielded people who would actually think, and would happily answer your questions).

@grrrr_shark

> Sometimes things happen that are not within your experience :)

Yes, this one was far enough that I was very surprised.

> Unfortunately, it's not uncommon in CH.

Hm~ given the popularity of things like homeopathy I can see that being the case :(.

And now I realized that I assumed that the MD requirement consisted of the MD giving a prescription for the vaccination, and that being realizable by a pharmacy, which is probably not the case :/.

@landley

Interestingly, increasing redundancy often has similar effects.

@bacigalupe

The way that study's described it seems that it showed us that people who would choose to get vaccinated against flu are less likely to suffer from Alzheimer later on. So, maybe recommending flu vaccinations would cause the same effect, or maybe it's caused by something upstream of the vaccination that wouldn't be affected by recommending flu vaccinations alone.

Sad thing about controlling for confounders is that it's not the case that adding more controlled confounders makes the result more likely to be correct: sometimes one can _introduce_ a confounder that way. Consider e.g. a hypothetical case where people who are more diligent will both be vaccinated against flu *and* will be more likely to have their ailments discovered. In that case correcting for the confounder of "ailments that have been discovered" actually creates a fake correlation between flu vaccinations and lack of ailments.

@grrrr_shark

Huh?

First, I'm surprised that this'd involve the GP at all (Impfapotheken cover the city of Zurich very densely and there's one or two in every larger town in the canton). Secondly, huh? I'm truly confused why would a GP mind doing that. What was the reasoning, if you don't mind?

@GinevraCat

There are ways in which it's somewhat easier (for some pairs of contries?): it's easier to assume that everything works as described. (So, _if_ everything works as described and there's little reading between the lines of anything, it actually works better.)

@mastodon Is there a reason to read the count other than monitoring how close something is to the fd limit?

@doctormo @darnell @boyter

We already have search engines scraping instances. Mastodon by default includes a robots.txt that indicates that that's allowed. I'm somewhat surprised that this is not a bigger deal given the thread above (and that very few people use a different robots.txt on their mastodon instance).

@TechConnectify Is it a question of phrasing of those replies or of their content? (e.g. is it related to what your model of the person who would write in that way is thinking, or to the reply having approximately zero userful information for you?)