Women have been having kids past 30 since the dawn of humanity. The only difference is that now women tend to be older at the time of their FIRST pregnancy. Before the modern era women would start having kids in their late teens or early 20s and continue doing so until menopause in many causes, so that's up til 45-55. Plenty of women are perfectly capable of having healthy kids past 30 and even past 40.
That's a myth that the medical establishment wants to sell you. Women are fine and have children with no problem, long past that artificial "deadline".
Not 30 certainly, but once you get closer to 40, your chances of running into problems only goes up substantially.
Post 35, most couples should have a serious talk about kids. There’s a healthy chance that you’ll run into some problems either conceiving or carrying the fetus. Every aborted attempt can cost you months or more - a luxury you might not have if you’re touching 40.
My work provides me with a 1Password subscription (for both work personal use) that I take advantage of that is pretty good. I think they only require you to reauthenticate with your master password once every two weeks or something. I use a PIN, biometrics, or my Apple Watch to unlock it when it timeouts in between that two week period, and I've had no problems syncing between several of my devices.
That’s an interesting perspective. Did GIMP get there first but just not patent the tech or it just makes it so that GIMP cannot replicate improvements?
Adobe Photoshop was originally written for the Apple Macintosh pre-OSX in the late 1980s, pre-dating GIMP massively. Large numbers of software patents soon followed. trivia- Microsoft Word was also written natively for the Mac OS -- it was many, many years before a graphical Microsoft version was available.
Since gaslighting by definition means that you’re invalidating someone’s view of reality and basically calling them insane, I have a hard time seeing how it could be the victims fault.
You can disagree with people, and you can say that you don’t agree with their description of reality, but neither of those things are gaslighting.
Sometimes when trying to convince someone that they're wrong, you need to point out that there is a bias in their vision of reality. A bias is not a wrong logical step that can be fixed simply by pointing it out: it affects the ability itself to follow a different argument, and the entire view of reality.
Think for example of someone who is in a cult or deep into a religious belief; or think about those who believe in conspiracy theories of all kinds. They're basically called insane every day even in the media. Would you call that gaslighting?
Gaslighting is not an objective term so it makes no sense to try to cast it as such. What constitutes gaslighting depends on terms like "abuser" and "victim" and since these terms are subjective, it follows that the term gaslighting must be as well.
Still, I think it's worth involving personal morals when arguing for or against when a term like this can be used, because if we don't we can't really use subjective terms to describe anything.
Consider for example that other charged terms involving an "abuser" and a "victim" would be open for the same argument, but arguing that this means that no moral opinion can be made in any of these cases would (in my opinion) not be intellectually honest but simply nihilistic.
I don't think that it's very productive to say that any term open for subjectivity in this manner should either be hardened into an objective criteria or discarded, because morality has never and never will be something that can be proven scientifically, it has to come from subjective values.
> "abuser" and "victim" and since these terms are subjective
I'm not sure that "abuser" and "victim" are that subjective. I can imagine a lot of situations in which the roles of abuser and victim are pretty objective.
The problem with a term like gaslighting is that allows anyone who is in a strong disagreement with anyone else to 1) claim a victim role and paint their opponents as abusers; 2) by doing so, protect their own belief from being questioned. It becomes a tool of a "closed belief system" where attempts to question the belief are taken as proofs of its correctness, which is in general a hallmark of cults.
Yes, generally abusers like to paint themselves as victims, these kinds of inversions are quite common.
If limited to the perspective of debate, gaslighting is just a variation of an ad hominem attack, which is easily recognized and not subjective at all.
Telling somebody they are wrong is never gaslighting, but suggesting they can't be right due to some personal flaw often is.
I would call that gaslighting yes. Basically you're declaring their judgement incapacitated in some way and try to convince them to abandon their views or change their behavior by distrusting their own sanity.
You may think you are right in this, but it is still gaslighting.
An alternative approach would be to just point out the facts and use arguments, and counter their falsehoods, which implicitly recognizes their ability for sound reasoning. That is not gaslighting, but merely debate.
I doubt there is ever a really good reason to gaslight someone.
> I doubt there is ever a really good reason to gaslight someone.
"gaslighting" is defined as a form of manipulation that an abuser uses to sow self-doubt in a victim. But telling someone that they're dead wrong- while it might not the most effective way of convincing- is not necessarily a form of manipulation, nor the person on the receiving end must be considered a victim.
If you're trying to convince someone to leave a cult, or to abandon conspiratorial thinking, or to reject the propaganda that they've heard all their life, or to stop blaming their parents or partners for everything that's wrong in their lives.. you might face a point in which you have to tell that person that they're wrong and their biases are corrupting their vision of reality. The attempt however is not manipulative nor the person on the other end is a victim- quite the contrary.
> "gaslighting" is defined as a form of manipulation that an abuser uses to sow self-doubt in a victim. But telling someone that they're dead wrong- while it might not the most effective way of convincing- is not necessarily a form of manipulation, nor the person on the receiving end must be considered a victim.
Well put and this is exactly my point
> ... you might face a point in which you have to tell that person that they're wrong and their biases are corrupting their vision of reality.
I think you make a mistake here by conflating two different things. This is what I reacted to:
> they're basically called insane every day even in the media. Would you call that gaslighting?
There's a big difference between telling someone they are wrong and telling them they are insane. Or making them doubt about their capacity for judgement by convincing them their biases are corrupting their vision of reality, thus losing confidence in not only their views, but their ability for independent thinking, and yielding to your relentless argumentation.
The first one is not gaslighting but the second one does kinda fit your definition. It needs an intent to change something in their behavior (manipulation), which I assume exists here. In reality, gaslighting is often sufficiently subtle to disempower otherwise intelligent people.
The fact that you think you are doing something noble and true by attempting to get someone out of a cult does not alter the equation. It can even end up being abusive. For example, fundamentalist christians trying to 'heal' people from their homosexuality. They think they are dispelling the corruptive influence of sin, and the people who enter therapy are often convinced of this as well. But, in fact, these christians are widely recognized as abusive and the people they target as victims.
I think I understand your point. Telling someone that they have a distorted view or reality can definitely be manipulative and abusive- no question about it. The problem though is that being told that your view of reality is distorted doesn't per se constitute an attempt at manipulation or abuse; framing all such interactions as manipulative is wrong. It ends up being used to affirm the consequent: that someone who is told that their vision of reality is wrong is victim of some abuse.
There is one case where we agree: telling somebody they are wrong is not gaslighting, ever. For example, Bob claims Lizard people blew up the Nord Stream pipeline. Alice says Bob that he is wrong about that. There is a truth-claim from Bob, and Alice refutes that truth claim. This is not manipulation or gaslighting or anything like that. Similarly, if Trump claims that climate change does not exist, that is not gaslighting - he is simply, wrongly but simply, trying to refute something. This is all fine.
However, things start to get messy when Alice says to Bob: you have always been vulnerable to conspiracy thinking. This is where Alice is making a new truth claim herself that is not about Bobs particular views, but about his capacity to hold any view at all. It doesn't refute Bobs truth-claim about the Lizard people, at least not directly. In fact it doesn't even address this at all. Instead, it aims to persuade Bob of 2 things:
1. I am vulnerable to conspiracy thinking.
2. Therefore I should not trust my own judgement in case of the involvement of Lizard people in the Nord Stream pipeline.
Ok. However, it also sows more doubt in Bobs mind:
3. If I can't be trusted to think about Lizard people, how can I be confident in any other matters? Should I even vote? Maybe I am crazy.
Now, maybe Alice says she was just trying to do Bob a favor and rid him of delusional views about Lizard people, but does that matter? The effect is the same: Bob is starting to doubt himself. Has he been gaslit by Alice?
Suppose we later find out that this was her intention after all, and this is just one step in her attempt at gaining control over Bob. Is it now gaslighting? Of course it is, but I would argue it was already so in the first place.
> I doubt there is ever a really good reason to gaslight someone.
Manipulating others is pretty much the activity most highly rewarded by our economy. It's deeply immoral but someone with no morals clearly does have very good reason to engage in gaslighting or other forms of manipulation.
So it's a good thing if there's a growing awareness on the part of victims.
I'm not sure anyone would notice a difference, especially with an interface like Siri where you can't easily flip enough coins to create a statistical distribution. And even then, pseudo-randomness would mean there's a seed, but that's probably shared with all other users (and likely not only for coin flipping), so I guess from your perspective there won't be a difference.
I don't know about iOS/Siri in particular, but Linux these days has good sources of entropy that can make for good randomness. And I'm not sure why you believe that Siri's random seed would be shared with anyone?
