Monoid Mary

thestore.substack.comMothersshe knows the shape you're in

24 Nov 2024

for those of you who know me from elsewhere, i haven't been doing social media a lot, but i have been trying to write more on substack. i wrote this on mother's day, and ... it's kinda still where i'm at. trying to figure out how to enter a new phase of my life. thestore.substack.com/p/mothers

found a copy of Julian Jaynes's The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind at the local thrift store, mystifying how these things happen. that book. i love it. wrong, maybe, but interestingly wrong, so much more important and interesting than many books that are more correct

may we all have the guts to be interestingly, ambitiously wrong in public

apparently now i have some new ailment causing me to wake up at 7 a.m. feeling rested and cheerful instead of waking up at 7 a.m. feeling groggy and resentful, researchers are baffled

is this what happens when you "sleep well"

what to do with all this energy might fuck around and start writing another book, if my brain keeps, like, working

currently reading May We Feed the King (Booker 2026 shortlist) and the chapter titles are incredible, each time i read a chapter i go back and re-read the title of it to consider the relationship between the title and the content, which i thought would be annoying and pretentious but i kind of love

it is already helping my son a lot just knowing he has ADD (he has been diagnosed, by a pro not just by mom), that it's a thing with a name, with modes of treatment, that he isn't just ... you know all the stereotypes already (lazy, etc). makes you more legible to other people too, i s'pose

less the painful feeling of shards of glass and more like the noise of like if you had a bag of glass shards, imagine that noise all the time inside your skull. anyway, i haven't had it since i started taking it topiramate, and i don't miss it. it puts me on edge a lot.

people are always like, "how many migraine days do you have per month?" and i'm like .... how to count? do i count all the days that i have the freaky vertigo going on, all the days of glass shards, all the days of trigeminal nerve spikiness, or just classic migraine days? 🌈✨topamax✨🌈 gets em all

it is weird to be talking about this in public, when there are people who know me IRL here, because i am not sure too many people who know me think that i have serious brain problems, but i do. my own husband didn't realize how severe they were until recently.

i guess i don't always feel very comfortable talking about them as serious. my parents were very much in the, "you should stop feeling sorry for yourself/being so dramatic" camp so i just never trusted that constantly feeling like there were shards of glass inside my skull was a big deal

i hadn't bothered getting diagnosed because i knew i didn't want meds for it so what good would it do, i thought, but i did finally because i thought it would help make it even more legible (and also hopeful?) to him, and make my advice seem more pertinent, and i think it did.

i can't say like i've "always known" because i certainly did not, and i have some other things wrong in my brain (cluster headaches, vestibular migraine, etc) and it can be hard to know which difficulties to attribute to which particular brain problems.

keep hoping i'll run into bankhead in a dark alley or something (THIS IS NOT A THREAT OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE)

Tom Nichols@radiofreetom.bsky.social

sigh

i worked as a medical transcriptionist for some time, one of my many little careers, and this kind of mistake is super common, despite the romance of having layers of exhausted, bored, sometimes not overly bright humans standing between what you said to the doctor and what ended up in the chart

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i keep thinking about that guy referring to AI as "charismatic megatech." i generally consider myself a humanist and basically a hater of Silicon Valley and all that and yet here i am to once again remind you, humans make *a lot* of mistakes. it's a huge problem!

back in like 2016, i told chris, "eh self-driving cars are not going to replace human drivers anytime soon" and he was like "but people are bad at driving" and you know what, we were both right! people suck at driving! unfortunately, that particular alternative doesn't work that great either.

maybe the kids don't want to inherit my china set, but they are surely going to be thrilled to inherit my mint condition collection of McSweeney's

since i started migraine medication, a bunch of weird problems that i didn't know were related to migraines and would not have tried to describe -- and probably could not have very successfully described, had i tried -- to a doctor as a "symptom" of anything have magically resolved

it is difficult to describe the level of relief this is

i keep saying my brain feels so smooth now and chris is like, i'm not sure most people are going to interpret that the way you mean it if you tell them that

i quit prealgebra halfway through senior year of high school because i had to sit next to these extremely noxious twin boys who were constantly bragging about their drinking and sexual activities. i hated them so much. just found out one was convicted of domestic partner abuse, and i thought, yes.

sometimes you just gotta trust them instincts

Monoid Mary reposted

neutral

@neutral.zone

Also, the healthcare management industrial complex is itself a huge problem. Determining the best-supported next step for any given action is effectively subsumed as to whether we can justify, bill, authorize and complete patient care inside the allotted capacity.

Monoid Mary@argumatronic.bsky.social

when we talk about AI and its possible uses in healthcare, i am not really sure what to do with the fact that human folly and error were already such a substantial problem in healthcare that there were, for example, probably deaths in the thousands each year from fully preventable causes

on the folly side, we have things like antivaxxers and people who think they can cure cancer with large doses of vitamin C. on the error side, we have a great and diverse number of things from my doctor who didn't believe me that i had an infected C-section wound to incorrect medication dosages

@chris--martin.functional.cafe.ap.brid.gy

personally i think AI is likely to be a wash overall, as it makes some types of folly and error more likely and others less likely, depending on the users and circumstances. i know that i have an especially grim view of the human healthcare professionals because of their steadfast refusal to help me

Monoid Mary reposted

Tim Carmody

@tcarmody.bsky.social

This is the funniest thing I've seen today, possibly ever

Monoid Mary reposted

Chris Martin

NEWS: I tried to do something on a web site and it did not work

I Swear I Am Not Getting Off on Sharing These Lurid Details with You: My Substack Post on the Cornell Rape Case

it's getting about time for me to take up a new career, and i'm thinking chestnut farmer this time

my sons seem to think they have to decide on one career, and i'm like no no children i've had like 5

i recently read something in which a bunch of bay area EA/rats are interviewed and one of them is scott alexander and he says, "oh yeah we did all the hard stuff already with AI so now it's just finishing the easy stuff, the lizard brain stuff" and i was like hold up

but human life has been getting more and more bounded and abstract to the point where it's become easy to believe that intelligence is coextensive with things that can be read and written, with abstract types of knowledge we invented, and it simply isn't, that couldn't possibly be the case

there's always been a warning that humans will learn to adapt themselves to the machine, and the threat has been believed to be something recognizably a Machine (a steam engine, a computer, maybe a Fordist assembly line). but the first tech we molded ourselves to may have been an alphabet.

of course things that are entirely abstract and textual and that humans can understand from beginning to end seem difficult to us because we have to think about them and learn them consciously but also of course they are easier in some sense (e.g., to feed to a machine) because of those conditions

writing is such an obvious boost to our abilities that we've invented it a few times in the course of human history, and yet easy enough to do once you are intelligent enough that we've done it a few times and adapted it to our purposes many, many more

hold up and let's look at these unquestioned assumptions, mr rationalist

why would you assume that things we can do without thinking and don't really understand why or how because they took billions of years to evolve and exist in various ways across various species would be "the easy stuff?" sincerely, what the fuck

my husband and i both use Claude routinely, although for different purposes, and every time i see people talking about "AI," both pro and con, i just have no idea what anyone is talking about. nothing anyone says seems to line up with mine or chris's actual experience of using the thing.

for a really long time now my head has been in this constant state of hyperarousal, hypervigilance, just pop-pop-popping, always a hair's-breadth away from pain, and that's starting to fade and idk but i am kind of excited to see what's it like to have a modicum of chill for once in my life

well this thread really took a turn

sort of like that one episode where that chatGPT model kept overusing "goblin" this Claude is obsessed with hemicrania continua.

anyway, it has helped a lot to do research i wouldn't otherwise have had the patience or mental wherewithal to do, given everything. for the first time in my life i have been given a medication that so far seems appropriate to my status and my brain feels sort of ...good?

i have the medical thread going because i have some unusual things wrong with me and my doctor charges me $200 per visit to have absolutely no idea what is wrong with me and not do any research in between times whereas with Claude i can tirelessly search through medical research to find answers

you can't use it stupidly, you have to use it smartly, because it does weird stuff. it gets hung up on weird things, like my Claude currently believes i have hemicrania continua (i don't and i'm not totally sure why it thinks so?).