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Aella

21 Oct, 9 tweets, 2 min read

I used to have this attitude of... medical professionals have trained a huge amount, and are very experienced, and it's a bit silly to think I, a rando with access to google, could make better decisions than they could.
One of the key events that made me change my mind-

was when I happened to end up going to two doctors back-to-back, and I asked them about the same issue - can I take birth control with estrogen if I get aural migraines?
They both gave me strong, clear, confident answers - one yes, one no. I was so confused. 2/

Realizing (for the first time in my life) I couldn't trust one of these doctor's opinions, I did my own research, digging deep into the... actually pretty spares literature about how dangerous it is.
Evidence suggested yea it is more dangerous, but not a lot? 3/

Iirc it was roughly around the same risk of stroke as getting in a car accident, per year. I was like oh, I'd be willing to take that risk, and then I didn't know why the doctors hadn't just *told me* what the increased risk was?? Did they even know?

And I found out later that the literature on this is decades old, from when women were taking over 2x the amount of estrogen in their birth control than they are today, and there's evidence that stroke risk decreases proportionately with estrogen dose. Did the doctors know that??

No, they probably didn't. And this experience helped destroy the magical aura of authority doctors had for me; after this I realized doctors were probably regurgitating outdated or bad information and completely ignorant to the actual risk differences.

Once another doctor frowned when I described how an earlier doctor had treated me. Then he looked at the CDC website and was like "oh nvm the CDC updated its recommendation, you're fine."
Did he even look at WHY it was updated? Did he AGREE with it? Ir-fucking-relevant.

The more I interact with doctors, the more I become increasingly shocked at the lack of knowledge they seem to have about why they're doing what they're doing. They're like a dumb computer; punch in the symptoms and you get a binary "safe/not safe" treatment suggestion.

At this point I've nearly fully taken over my own health. I research in depth every question I have by reading ACTUAL STUDIES, I order prescription medications from overseas online and lie nonstop to doctors when I can't, I order my own lab tests, I monitor my own damn self.

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More from @Aella_Girl

Aella

@Aella_Girl

14 Oct

After Zoes article, I see lots of confusion over how Leverage Research related to rationalists, and some people describing them as in the same bucket. Here's a thread explaining!

Leverage drew a lot of people from the rationalist and EA communities, but also drew from others; Zoe was unaffiliated with rationalists before joining leverage, for example.
Geoff apparently worked with some standard rat institutions like CFAR early on.

Rationalists outside of Leverage had no idea what was going on inside of Leverage, it was very secretive. One of my other friends who I knew before she joined Leverage (she was also not a rat), would tell me almost nothing about what was going on in her life now.

Read 8 tweets

Aella

@Aella_Girl

4 Oct

The problem with cults is that almost all of the cult isn't bad. People don't join cults because they're stupid, they join because the cult provides them something immensely valuable, something that could be valuable to us too, something that heals and helps them. 1/

It's just, a little part of the cult *is* poison, and then that bleeds into everything, and is seeps into your bloodstream far more effectively because it piggybacks on the good things you readily accept. You're starving, and it's a delicious meal laced with arsenic. 2/

And for those inside, it makes it hard to conceive of it as a cult. Cults are 'bad' things, right? How could this be a cult when there's so much here I value and people I love? Leaving and declaring 'this is a cult' means turning my back on the things I find beautiful. 3/

Read 4 tweets

Aella

@Aella_Girl

30 Sep

I genuinely do not understand the moral outrage that people express at some of my lines of questioning. It's a bit novel each time, and to some extent I'm drawn to figuring out which kinds of question that trigger the outrage. But it seems so inconsistent!

Some qs I predict people would get upset about, but they don't at all. Others seem extremely innocuous or basic questions I assume everyone asks and then I get slapped upside the head with surprise anger. I've learned ppl are touchy about trans, pedos, bestiality, and autists.

and like, it is intuitive to me that those questions are more charged, but not intuitive to me that they're anger inducing. I've sort of assumed the charged areas are the most interesting places to ask qs and some part of me
doesn't get why everyone else doesn't feel the same

Read 6 tweets

Aella

@Aella_Girl

6 Sep

If you're in a community with a dude that acts real sus towards women, the only options are a) kick him out or b) keep it hush. This sets up a bad binary; what if the dude isn't *quite* sus enough to justify the extremeness of kicking? What if he provides huge value elsewhere? 1/

If a dude doesn't manage to be egregious enough, have a weak enough social network, or provides too much value, it's hard to trigger the KICK HIM OUT, which leaves us with b) KEEP IT HUSH.
I sorta want an option c) LET HIM STAY BUT ALSO BE PUBLIC ABOUT THE SUS BEHAVIOR

A version of c kinda exists with whisper networks, when you join a community and someone takes you aside at a party after they see you talking to Joe and goes 'haha yeah he's nice but be careful with him, Bethany reported he xyz'd her last year'

Read 5 tweets

Aella

@Aella_Girl

5 Sep

If cats have 4 legs, but a cat loses one, does it make it not a cat? What if it's also got a bit of genetic mutation? What if it's a lot of mutation? What if it was brought up by dogs? How much catness can you strip away and still have a cat?
This is how I think about gender 1/

There's no answer on what makes a cat not a cat or not, but we can be 'more catlike' or 'less.' To jump from one bucket (cat) to a different bucket (dog, or some other new thing), you need a *lot* of changes to the structure and traits and associations entirely. 2/

And to be clear, I am *absolutely pro* attempting to jump buckets in genderspace, I just also think it's extremely hard to do, because there's a huge amount of traits to strip away. A 3-legged, mutant cat raised by dogs still registers to us as 'cat', tho a weird one. 3/

Read 12 tweets

Aella

@Aella_Girl

23 Aug

Like everyone else, I've been real interested in doing a commune-style thing with some friends, kinda off-grid-ish, because "lil tribe in woods" is the ideal, right?
And I still want it, but sometimes I wonder if we've been too permanently socially crippled to pull it off. 1/n

I would fail as a survivalist. I don't have the knowledge to repair tools, to forage, how to prevent mold, treat wounds, etc. I was formed in a 'civilization' mold, where the most I need to know about my own shit is how to hit the flush lever. Set me into the woods, I'd die. 2/n

I wonder how much something like this is going on with cultural tribes. Are our attempts at tribe building doomed to fail because we're trying to come at it through a 'civilization' mold? How much do we not know that we don't know about how to sustain this type of community? 3/n

Read 6 tweets

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