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Being ugly doesn't cause depression. Though in some cultures ugly people are treated badly, and in some cultures many people have personalities that get depress
by curi 19y ago
Being ugly doesn't cause depression. Though in some cultures ugly people are treated badly, and in some cultures many people have personalities that get depressed when others (wrongly) treat them badly.
Now, if you take a culture like that as a given, you can say that ugliness causes depression, and call it a fact. And say you've proven your point. I don't dispute the possibility of making very misleading simplifications of this sort which are true in a sense.
But if we want to explain what's going on in our world, it isn't reasonable to take culture as a fixed point. It would be much more fruitful to take our genes as a fixed point, and look at what our culture causes in the context of our genes, and how a different culture would, in that context, cause something else. Doing that, we could come up with some ways our culture should be changed.
One way to see what is the true cause, A or B, is to consider what would happen if you changed only one (at the time of its creation). So if we change genes, thousands of years ago, our culture could very well have developed to have the same results, despite the genes being quite different.
But if you change imagine our culture developing differently, then having the same genes we have today won't stop it from creating different gender stereotypes.
- Tichy 19y agoI think you don't want to get my point. Yes, there are ugly people who are happy. Are you saying that nothing causes depression? Some things apparently do cause depression. I was just giving an example - maybe it is not uglyness, then it is something else. I don't care, but it is something. And no, uglyness does not cause depression - not getting a mate because of ugliness causes depression. But that again is at least in part biological. I know you will deny that, though, because you did so in another threat some time ago. Anyway, if we deny the biology, we could culturally train ourselves to only be attracted to apes, and humanity would die out. I never took culture as a fixed point, in fact I pointed out several alternative cultures, both existent and hypothetical. Now I am waiting for you to describe a hypothetical culture in which things are like you want them to be, so that we can verify that it could really work that way - or perhaps biology would get in the way. Edit: and I don't get why you deny that being ugly causes depression - on average.
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- curi 19y agoWe have a culture that (sort of) causes ugly people to get depressed. There is nothing innately depressing about being ugly, the whole idea of being depressed about it, and indeed of what is ugly or pretty, is in our culture. So, our culture has code to have people detect certain traits caused by genes, and act differently in their presence. Just like it detects mountains, and has people act differently in their presence. But no one goes on and on about how mountains control human personalities and determine gender differences (or mountain-raised-near differences).
- Tichy 19y agoFor lack of statistics on the amount of people doing startups in mountain regions compared to seaside regions, no doubt... I live nearby the mountains and I can tell you that people in the mountains have a very different culture from the people in the flatlands, or at least used to have. I am talking about the farmers - they have different problems to face in the mountains than in the flatlands. So I am sorry but yes, mountains control human personalities and culture.
- curi 19y agoAha, now we are getting somewhere: genes are a red herring. All the arguments regarding intelligence, DNA, memes, apes, irrelevant. You would have taken the same position about mountains. Or, I take it, hurricanes, earthquake zones, forks, dolls, different types of houses, TV shows, anything (though some things are more or less influential). I guess to start with, you have said living in mountain regions is correlated with different kinds of culture. But you have not said by what mechanism it causes it. Which actually is the same question I kept asking about genes. So please do answer it.
- Tichy 19y agoNo, it is not just a correlation. The environment influences the development, that's all - genes are also clever enough to use the information in the environment for a more efficient encoding. Are you asking me to explain in a news comment how the human brain develops from genes, how the brain adapts to the environment, how psychology works, and so on and so on? Not all steps in the development process are fully understood yet, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist. Although I guess also yes, I would have claimed that other things than genes can affect human psychology.