The practical problem is figuring out that "others would have" something different than you would like, because they're emotional and irrational (as far as you can tell).

So when you say "good advice" I say, "it depends"

Not having the urge to commit violence would be a pretty good reason for trying to get help.

I definitely noticed something was wrong with me once I started school. Since then, I am constantly reminded of that by everyone around me. They have something I’m expected to have.

Just imagine if you were the weird one because you were the only person with emotions. You can’t escape it. You can’t fix it. Some people try to be “helpful” and “understand” but the entire time, they are pointing out you are beyond their comprehension.

It cause enormous anxiety to know you need to be something you are not. You have to learn to cope with it.

     I definitely noticed something was wrong with me once I started school

as for the challenge of making friends, for some reason, growing up, i didn't feel the need, but saw the benefit of not being submitted to peer pressure. i took my outsider status and relished in it, doing things that few others of my classmates did. i distanced myself and sought friends in after school activities. and as i was able to make a few friends once i joined university i felt that, given the circumstances, things didn't go that bad.

the making friends problem i am addressing by moving out of europe and living among people who are more welcoming than the average europeans, and also by applying this key understanding:

being a friend means to care about someone. you make friends by showing that you care.

i show that care to everyone who crosses my path, and with repeated interaction some of these people become friends.

One would never know.

It's not about birds in dinosaur times though - as an analogy I mean.

It's more about a particular bird being different from others of its species of bird.

This could be an advantage to their life and acceptance (e.g. they might be too pretty or stronger) or usually a big detriment to their life and the acceptance they get from their peers.

And given that "wrong" is basically socially defined as "the opposite on the majority is like and agrees to", being different in that sense is as good as being wrong.

(I'm specifically not saying 'wrong' for existing in society or having value to offer the world and, actually, if environmental factors make a difference to this sort of thing, then asexuality could well be increasingly common as a response to the state of the world vis-a-vis climate change and resource usage and all the other bad things humanity hath wrought)

I think that's a bit too reductive: asexuality ≠ not having kids. Even people who dislike the dentist won't mind going if it benefits them.

However, there might indeed be an issue in finding a properly fitting other half, but it seems[0] that the trait is not that uncommon either (order of magnitude seems to be about 1%).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asexuality#Prevalence

I completely lack sexual attraction. That doesn’t mean I can’t have and enjoy sex for other reasons.

Sexual attraction isn’t necessary to desire children. And lack of it is not a hinderance if you don’t mind the process. ;)

is it seeing someone and wanting to have sex with them? it never occurred to me that not wanting to have sex with everyone i find otherwise attractive is something unusual.

if anything i think many problems today come from people wanting to have sex with anyone they feel attracted to, or choosing a partner only because they are sexually attracted.

instead of choosing a partner because they love them and only wanting to have sex with them because of that love.

seems to me that being able to enjoy sex in the way you say is the better and healthier approach.

i think i feel similar to you and i always felt that this is normal and that sexual attraction is a concept sold by media and advertising. i never considered myself asexual because of it. i don't think sexual attraction mattered much in choosing a partner at least until a century ago or so.

The best way I can describe sexual attraction is having an emotional level awareness of sex as a category. It's not limited to physical appearance. There is something would make you want to have sex with another person.

> instead of choosing a partner because they love them and only wanting to have sex with them because of that love.

Given what you already said, this isn't a question an asexual person is likely to ask. They would already know the answer. :)

> seems to me that being able to enjoy sex in the way you say is the better and healthier approach.

Not really. I don't understand why sex is important. I don't understand why anyone would want to go out of their way to have it.

Sure, it's fun, but not enough to justify all the hype about it. If you want to get hot and sweaty, can we go play laser tag and gang up on some over-confident teenagers instead?

Why the heck does the entire history of human society care about this?

What would get me to want sex? When it's an add-on to another fun activity. Cuddling and sex! I'm listening. (Note to self, never suggest naked laser tag again.)

Hope that helps! :)

i have never felt anything like that.

Given what you already said, this isn't a question an asexual person is likely to ask. They would already know the answer. :)

i wasn't actually asking a question but making a statement.

i think my understanding and my feelings about this are much closer to yours than i am comfortable describing in detail in a public post here. (but i am open to continue this conversation in private, as i am very interested in getting a better understanding about this question.)

I don't understand why sex is important.

i understand it about as well as i understand why people want to have a car. (i don't have a car, and i don't drive). more specifically, i see sex as just one of the many ways that one can show affection to someone else. the trouble is that it has been overloaded with taboos and expectations unlike most other forms of showing affection. and i agree it is overhyped.

I'll leave figuring out which species as an exercise for the reader. Hint: highly-gregarious African canid with the same initials as All-Wheel Drive.

Lycaon! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_wild_dog

For reference, I was pronouncing it "kay-oh-deli-kay-on", as one really cool word. :p

QUÉ-oh-deh LIE-kay-on :)

Kayodé is the approximate spelling from the syllables. I was playing around with sounds for a constructed language and ended up with combination I liked.

A lot of sociopaths lead pretty normal lives. Pro-social behavior is generally pretty beneficial, even if you are doing it for practical reasons and not out of empathy.

In this case, do something minor (stealing) to scratch the itch that, if left unscratched for long enough, could result in doing something major (violence).

It feels like a reaction to societal rules that don't make sense in their experience of the world, and so maybe the itch exists because the rule(s) seem irrational and arbitrary to them.

Or maybe the lack of empathy leaves a hole to be filled with mischief.

I think it is always difficult to analyse why someones does something. In Psychology, behaviour is like a Feynman diagram, you can always rotate the picture and get a valid particle interaction. What is cause and what is effect is hard to tell, but yes some people steal out of a sense of justice if you can call it that.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdPMUX8_8Ms

One of the neat things they do with the diffusion transformer is to enable creating smaller or larger models simply by changing the patch size. Smaller patches require more Gflops, but the attention is finer grained, so you would expect better output.

Another neat thing is how they apply conditioning and the time step embedding. Instead of adding these in a special way, they simply inject them as tokens, no different from the image patch tokens. The transformer model builds its own notion of what these things mean.

This implies that you could inject tokens representing anything you want. With the U-Net architecture in stable diffusion, for instance, we have to hook onto the side of the model to control it in various sort of hacky ways. With DiT, you would just add your control tokens and fine tune the model. That’s extremely powerful and flexible and I look forward to a whole lot more innovation happening simply because training in new concepts will be so straightforward.

Before: Evaluate the image in a little region around each pixel against the prompt as a whole -- e.g. how well does a little 10x10 chunk of pixels map to a prompt about a "red sphere and blue cube". This is problematic because maybe all the pixels are red but you can't "see" whether it's the sphere or the cube.

After: Evaluate the image as a whole against chunks of the prompt. So now we're looking at a room, and then we patch in (layer?) a "red sphere" and then do it again with a "blue cube".

Is that roughly the idea?

A random forest is also a universal function approximator so anything a neural net can do, so can a random forest (in theory). In practice, neural nets are easier for modern hardware to optimize while I think trees incur computational overhead due to branchiness.

It’s a recipe for burnout, but I did get a lot done. A good protocol for very tight important deadlines, but it took its toll.

One thing worth noting that's been skimmed over, maybe because of the target article, is that second-order meta-analysis and review concludes that psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy efficacy have both been overestimated or overstated, and that the combination of both is more effective on average than either alone. This is also consistent with my impressions.

There's a lot that could be said about it.

First, like a lot of academics, there's a lot of inflated hype and publication bias. It applies to behavioral and mental intervention research as well as other things, so you end up with overstated effects of interventions.

Second, both psychiatry and clinical psychology suffer from a certain amount of insecurity about being seen as "real sciences." As a result, I think (this is just my personal opinion) there's a certain tendency to apply poorly-fitting models from other fields to treatment research, sort of blindly, and it results in poor investigation of underlying mechanisms. Writing this out, it might not be obvious what I mean by this to someone outside the field, but one way of explaining it is that intervention research in psychopathology (pharmacology or psychotherapy) has historically been distracted by concerns about emulating "real scientific disciplines", and as a result a certain amount of self-criticism that might have resulted in faster improvements (by shedding actual dead ends) were not pursued, and research into methods and approaches (for approaching interventions in general) that are more uniquely suited to behavior and psychological phenomena were kind of neglected. I think this trend continues. Basically people in a lot of very high-profile institutions are afraid to say their grade A "empirically supported" interventions aren't so great, or not actually better than other, supposedly "grade B" interventions, because they're afraid it will be jumped on as a sign of weakness of the discipline, rather than of rigorous attempts at improvements. To be fair to these people, a lot of the time that is what happens to these fields: instead of saying "well that was a good idea that didn't work out, good people in the field are looking at this closely", some critics will tend to target the entire field as being incompetent. This is counterproductive, really, and sometimes it looks like a lose-lose position for those in the field.

Third, there is fairly strong evidence that different treatments work well for some people but not others, but that we don't really have a good way to predict what will work for whom. So, for example, the efficacy for drug A might be sort of small to modest overall, but high for one subset of people, and low for another subset of people; the efficacy for psychotherapy B follows similar patterns. This is one reason why combination treatments work: you're kind of applying a shotgun approach with the idea that one thing will stick. People have tried to predict what works for whom but it doesn't work out so well in a replicable sense. As someone else noted, a more accurate way of understanding things is that there's little evidence for the general differential efficacy of one intervention over another in most cases (most things tend to have about the same probability of "working" on their own, and that probability is lower than you might think based on the way they're sometimes discussed in the literature).

Another thing that is missing is for the field to adopt decision theory properly. At the moment it's usually left to the patient to decide that a treatment is not working for them and pick a different therapist. If we can't predict which treatment will work, we should at least have some research into how long to try each one, and in what order, and any indicators that might allow us to switch early from one that is not working. At the moment I think a huge amount of suffering is endured because therapists don't have good incentives to give up when their treatment isn't working. (At least in my country in the private sector. The public sector has different issues - they are incentivised to declare victory early - and I don't know how it works in the US)

> methods and approaches (for approaching interventions in general) that are more uniquely suited to behavior and psychological phenomena were kind of neglected

Can you give some examples and expand on this? I realize it's speculative but I'd like to hear your speculations :)

> we don't really have a good way to predict what will work for whom. So, for example, the efficacy for drug A might be sort of small to modest overall, but high for one subset of people, and low for another subset of people; the efficacy for psychotherapy B follows similar patterns

In the case of psychotherapy my feeling is that there's an additional complication, which is that efficacy depends not only on what (is it psychotherapy B1, B2, etc.) but also on who - because efficacy has also to do with the quality of relationship between therapist and client, this varies a lot, and it is not a function of modality*. Do you agree? and if yes, what methods do you think would be best suited to studying this?

(* I dislike that word "modality" but it's what people use to describe the different therapeutic methods, so it's at least clear in this context.)

That's a big topic, probably something you could write many papers about, or a book. I probably also overstated things a bit. But it does come up in important ways.

I don't know I had anything in particular in mind although for example:

Defining a behavioral or psychological "placebo" or control becomes very complex really quickly. There's ways to approach it, such as a waitlist control, or a psychoeducational control (where clients get education but not therapy per se), or even, say, a pharmacological control for a psychotherapy study, but none of them are quite the same, and there's really no way to do true blinding. I think for a long time, people would just try to import this notion of a waitlist control or something without tackling the question of "what's an appropriate control", or trying to decide it if it's even possible. I think some of these issues have resolved but I suspect that approaching RCTs without trying to emulate drug trials so closely might have resulted in more progress faster, by honing in on what are particular components of controls versus therapies.

Another example I've discussed with my colleagues is related to our lack of understanding of the nature of psychological interventions. So for example, with a medication, it's pretty clear for the most part what the molecules involved are, their proportions, and so forth, even if we don't understand mechanisms well. But with something like, say, CBT, even if you accept its superiority in terms of efficacy (which isn't really the case), where are the boundaries? What exactly is a "cognition" and what components of it are key to understanding progress or lack thereof? A lot of psychological variables have boundaries that are fuzzy to us, and if you think about it, the notion of causality itself is a little murky (what does it mean to say that a cognitive bias "causes" negative mood?). There's some philosophical and scientific answers to these things but in general we just kind of take them for granted, and I think some of it is associated with a very operational, protocol-driven approach to intervention research influenced by other areas of medicine.

> In the case of psychotherapy my feeling is that there's an additional complication, which is that efficacy depends not only on what (is it psychotherapy B1, B2, etc.) but also on who - because efficacy has also to do with the quality of relationship between therapist and client, this varies a lot, and it is not a function of modality*. Do you agree? and if yes, what methods do you think would be best suited to studying this?

Yes there's a lot of evidence for client, therapist, and relationship factors. The nature or quality of the therapeutic relationship is one of the "common factors" posited to be shared across different therapies that have demonstrated efficacy, in the sense that you can define it for a variety of types of therapies and it predicts outcomes.

As for how to study it in a "matching" sense is tricky. It's easier to identify background characteristics of clients and therapists that predict outcomes, or to predict that, say, a given therapist is associated with better outcomes without understanding why, and you can ask clients and therapists basically some variant of "how comfortable do you feel? how is this going?" and it predicts outcomes well, but in terms of matching clients and therapists a priori is less certain. It's a bit like predicting dating outcomes, which are also tricky.

I actually have some hope for the use of LLMs and related methods in this space, with videos and whatnot. My guess is ideally there would be some kind of intake assessment of some sort; traditionally these are aimed at assessing problem areas for a client and strengths, but shifting that more to finding out who they might work well with, or what approach might work, probably would show a lot of benefits. Kind of like speed dating but maybe instead with some standard initial contact with therapy method and therapist match in mind (maybe even in some kind of online videorecording format?).

It may be there's some inherent level of unpredictability in the sense that clients don't always disclose everything intially, or aren't aware of what is relevant, so don't provide in that regard, or circumstances shift over the course of therapy (e.g., a relationship goes sour, or improves over the course of therapy) that becomes critical to the therapy match process itself. There's a kind of dynamic, self-organizing quality in that way.

I also think in general there probably isn't enough research into why clients feel like things aren't working when they feel that way, and trying to rectify it (or conversely, when a therapist is frustrated about something with a client's progress). A study to do that correctly would be really expensive and necessitate having the right diversity of therapists. Therapy studies also often tend to be organized around grand therapeutic approaches too, like CBT versus psychodynamic versus interpersonal, and less focused on specific relational questions like "what are problem areas identified by a client in therapy, with the thereapeutic relationship". It certainly happens, but probably not as often as it should.

If this metastudy is accurate, it means that therapy is effective but your choice of therapy method doesn't matter very much.

And, of course, as others point out, the auditory distractions are only part of the problem with an open floor plan.