I'm not actually entirely sure what gaslighting actually means, although I think that may be related to Feral's complaint about it. I've seen it used enough times that the meaning has become muddled, and I am pretty sure the word gets used incorrectly quite often.
It's a form of abuse where you intentionally try and make people distrust their own memories. It's called this because it's based on a play, Gaslight, where there's an abusive dude who fucks around with stuff in his house (like dimming the gas lights) to get his wife to doubt her memory and perception.
The purpose behind it is to make you doubt your own perceptions. But the person who is doing it is so clear and firm on their understanding that you start to depend on them to filter your world for you. Clearly you're perceiving things as wrong, and the abuser is seeing them as right. Which means your judgement is wrong and theirs is right. It's one of the things that makes most attempts to get people away from their abusers fail. When you can't really trust your own perception of reality, and someone is telling you that no one will understand your relationship, then someone tells you they don't understand your relationship it feeds into that cycle. The abuser said your best friend wouldn't understand and they were right. They must also be right about how much your best friend wants to sleep with you. Or whatever lie they choose to put in there about why your best friend is really trying to intervene.
The article dude annoys me a bit because he should not be talking about quantum mechanics
Very few people should be talking about quantum mechanics, and if someone is doing so who has not actually taken quantum mechanics, I am immediately skeptical and generally don't want to read what they have to say.
To be fair I am p bad at quantum mechanics and basically failed and had to redo the qm-themed question for my undergrad physics comps and got like a B or something in the class but um I did get a little better at it later and it's still better than no qm education at all...
I have no education in quantum physics
I just know just enough to recognize when somebody who knows nothing is working off of an even poorer understanding of not-quite-successful-analogies than my own poor understanding of the not-quite-successful-analogies
like this article dude who seems to be confusing quantum mechanics with some kind of bullshit ontology shit when he's like it tells us there isn't really a brain! oh fuck off brains are measurable
Yeah, I think it's definitely possible to get a really good layman's understanding like you seem to have; I think because of this you wouldn't use QM as an analogy in an article, probably?
oh I meant analogy in the sense that everything in physics is an analogy that does not actually tell you what is there
like the planetary model of the atom or the... anything, really. Anything explaining reality without going into some really heavy math is an analogy on some level.
I would not phrase it that way, calling physics an analogy; instead I'd say that physics often produces either simplified models (which require perfect or unrealistic conditions ie vacuum, smooth surfaces, etc), or low-resolution models (which describe things at a large scale but not at a very small scale).
But I guess my concept of physics also includes both heavy math and ugly, non-simple, experimentally-derived electron density maps of very small things.
Steam, LoL: credeiki
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ThomamelasOnly one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered Userregular
I'm all for scientists exploring metaphysics and physics and crafting theories etc.
That's great. They are trained to test their hypothesis etc.
But none of that shit puts food on the table for me, so I could give two fucks whether the keyboard I'm typing on is black or if my dim view of "reality" makes it black.
this is like a really needlessly hostile stance you're taking it seems
One of the most interesting revelations of physics was when basically E=mc2 actually clicked
going deeper into elementary particles, because like, atoms aren't a thing-thing, they're just particular arrangements of other smaller stuff. Who are arrangements of etc etc etc
and you never find anything that is.... a physical mass, the way we intuitively think of stuff. And I had, like most people I'd guess, thought of E=mc2 like the exchange rate between mass and energy, but mass is energy and oooooh
ThomamelasOnly one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered Userregular
I would say most gaslighting in an abusive relationship is a deliberate rather then accidental act. It's one of the things that creates both dependence on and protection for the abuser. They may not be aware of the term, but they are generally very aware of the effects.
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ChanusHarbinger of the Spicy Rooster ApocalypseThe Flames of a Thousand Collapsed StarsRegistered Userregular
i was accused of gaslighting once but i seriously had completely different memories of events from my ex
wait was i being gaslight
Meta-gaslighting.
...and of course, as always, Kill Hitler.
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OnTheLastCastlelet's keep it haimish for the peripateticRegistered Userregular
that page all about estranged parents is terrifying and fascinating to me. i can't help but reread it over and over from time to time. the ability to self justify and instantly warp any narrative/ignore what happened just blows my mind. if only i could harness this power and my horrible decisions weren't my fault and everyone else was at fault...
it is both my definition of evil and incredibly seductive as a possible means to escape this daily wish to not exist. though i know they're not actually happy, more like the furthest thing from it, whereas i have lots of happy moments.
I would say most gaslighting in an abusive relationship is a deliberate rather then accidental act. It's one of the things that creates both dependence on and protection for the abuser. They may not be aware of the term, but they are generally very aware of the effects.
I don't think that gaslighting in a narrow sense is likely to be as common as you are making it out to be, especially with the extreme broadening of the definition as of late.
Emotional manipulation, sure, abusive relationships are full of that. Explicitly trying to cause a person to seriously doubt their perception of reality? That seems significantly less likely.
I ate an engineer
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
Ahahaha, I got Mint on this week's Sentinels one-shot with three minutes left to go before the weekly timer expired
that...was very satisfying.
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ElldrenIs a woman dammitceterum censeoRegistered Userregular
The article dude annoys me a bit because he should not be talking about quantum mechanics
The idea that what we’re doing is measuring publicly accessible objects, the idea that objectivity results from the fact that you and I can measure the same object in the exact same situation and get the same results — it’s very clear from quantum mechanics that that idea has to go. Physics tells us that there are no public physical objects.
it's that super common complete misunderstanding of what "observe" means. The reason you and I can't measure the same electron twice is that it's not in the same situation once I've observed it because I had to do stuff to it.
This is infuriating to me. Particles are changed by observation because to observe them you need to physically interact with them. This is not some magic property of the human mind shaping reality.
It's not as if this isn't how we observe everything
Just a billion photons reflecting off the door doesn't change it nearly as much as bouncing elementary particles off each other
Same as bouncing a billiard ball off a brick wall doesn't change it as much as bouncing it off dave's head
fuck gendered marketing
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OnTheLastCastlelet's keep it haimish for the peripateticRegistered Userregular
it's fun when you come upon an advice question and it so obviously follows the pattern of gaslighting/abuse
that page all about estranged parents is terrifying and fascinating to me. i can't help but reread it over and over from time to time. the ability to self justify and instantly warp any narrative/ignore what happened just blows my mind. if only i could harness this power and my horrible decisions weren't my fault and everyone else was at fault...
it is both my definition of evil and incredibly seductive as a possible means to escape this daily wish to not exist. though i know they're not actually happy, more like the furthest thing from it, whereas i have lots of happy moments.
*taps chin, lays down under desk*
There is a happiness about self awareness that most people do not really try to grasp, I think.
The illustrative part of the Schrödinger's cat analogy is the part that people usually miss, too.
The point is not that the cat is both alive and dead, that's not the weird part. The point is that macroscopic systems can be made to obey quantum rules.
I would say most gaslighting in an abusive relationship is a deliberate rather then accidental act. It's one of the things that creates both dependence on and protection for the abuser. They may not be aware of the term, but they are generally very aware of the effects.
I don't think that gaslighting in a narrow sense is likely to be as common as you are making it out to be, especially with the extreme broadening of the definition as of late.
Emotional manipulation, sure, abusive relationships are full of that. Explicitly trying to cause a person to seriously doubt their perception of reality? That seems significantly less likely.
Perception of events is very, very malleable.
Not "YOU ARE MAD! YOU ARE MAD AND YOUR SHOES ARE SHRINKING!" but "it wasn't that bad"
A mental health student group put like 200 backpacks along the sidewalk with
sheets of paper about a US college student who committed suicide. Jesus Christ I'm trying stay positive for exams here.
schrodinger's cat analogy needs to continue past "it's both alive and dead" because quantum mechanics gets so much weirder
the double slit experiment is, essentially "The cat is both alive and dead at the same time, right? Well, the live cat now eats the dead cat, which is the same cat"
EM you should write a pop science book about the belief of Tayy al-Arz, the Islamic version of astral projection, and tie it to quantum physics by conflating fuzzy terms from wildly different fields
Title it Quran Physics, sell millions
I have no problem manipulating this nonsense to make money because I want a lot of objects that cost money
that page all about estranged parents is terrifying and fascinating to me. i can't help but reread it over and over from time to time. the ability to self justify and instantly warp any narrative/ignore what happened just blows my mind. if only i could harness this power and my horrible decisions weren't my fault and everyone else was at fault...
it is both my definition of evil and incredibly seductive as a possible means to escape this daily wish to not exist. though i know they're not actually happy, more like the furthest thing from it, whereas i have lots of happy moments.
*taps chin, lays down under desk*
The thing is, we all do this, to some degree. It seems extreme when you read it, but everyone has their own narrative, their own "story", and we go to great lengths to continue to justify this story, including denying evidence and arguing when people do not agree with the details. I would argue that this isn't necessarily evil, but it's simply being human. It's a coping mechanism for our poor human brains.
A mental health student group put like 200 backpacks along the sidewalk with
sheets of paper about a US college student who committed suicide. Jesus Christ I'm trying stay positive for exams here.
That's a hell of a psych experiment
fuck gendered marketing
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ChanusHarbinger of the Spicy Rooster ApocalypseThe Flames of a Thousand Collapsed StarsRegistered Userregular
Posts
That cat gaslit me.
The purpose behind it is to make you doubt your own perceptions. But the person who is doing it is so clear and firm on their understanding that you start to depend on them to filter your world for you. Clearly you're perceiving things as wrong, and the abuser is seeing them as right. Which means your judgement is wrong and theirs is right. It's one of the things that makes most attempts to get people away from their abusers fail. When you can't really trust your own perception of reality, and someone is telling you that no one will understand your relationship, then someone tells you they don't understand your relationship it feeds into that cycle. The abuser said your best friend wouldn't understand and they were right. They must also be right about how much your best friend wants to sleep with you. Or whatever lie they choose to put in there about why your best friend is really trying to intervene.
I would not phrase it that way, calling physics an analogy; instead I'd say that physics often produces either simplified models (which require perfect or unrealistic conditions ie vacuum, smooth surfaces, etc), or low-resolution models (which describe things at a large scale but not at a very small scale).
But I guess my concept of physics also includes both heavy math and ugly, non-simple, experimentally-derived electron density maps of very small things.
Can we reference the cat and buttered toast experiment?
this is like a really needlessly hostile stance you're taking it seems
going deeper into elementary particles, because like, atoms aren't a thing-thing, they're just particular arrangements of other smaller stuff. Who are arrangements of etc etc etc
and you never find anything that is.... a physical mass, the way we intuitively think of stuff. And I had, like most people I'd guess, thought of E=mc2 like the exchange rate between mass and energy, but mass is energy and oooooh
What novel?
this one is really good for that
The bible am I right fellow faqihs
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
I'd love it if you took a look at my art and my PATREON!
wait was i being gaslight
Star Wars
Party time
Excellent
No one likes to talk abut Mittens.
it is both my definition of evil and incredibly seductive as a possible means to escape this daily wish to not exist. though i know they're not actually happy, more like the furthest thing from it, whereas i have lots of happy moments.
*taps chin, lays down under desk*
I don't think that gaslighting in a narrow sense is likely to be as common as you are making it out to be, especially with the extreme broadening of the definition as of late.
Emotional manipulation, sure, abusive relationships are full of that. Explicitly trying to cause a person to seriously doubt their perception of reality? That seems significantly less likely.
that...was very satisfying.
It's not as if this isn't how we observe everything
Just a billion photons reflecting off the door doesn't change it nearly as much as bouncing elementary particles off each other
Same as bouncing a billiard ball off a brick wall doesn't change it as much as bouncing it off dave's head
here, enjoy this one
http://ask.metafilter.com/281786/Did-my-boyfriend-just-get-married
spoiler: OF COURSE HE JUST GOT MARRIED
If the stream suddenly stutters and then I die horribly, that's the actual game stuttering.
https://beam.pro/EchoPlays
Dang, a tenured professor at 29.
The point is not that the cat is both alive and dead, that's not the weird part. The point is that macroscopic systems can be made to obey quantum rules.
Perception of events is very, very malleable.
Not "YOU ARE MAD! YOU ARE MAD AND YOUR SHOES ARE SHRINKING!" but "it wasn't that bad"
sheets of paper about a US college student who committed suicide. Jesus Christ I'm trying stay positive for exams here.
I think it's normal for memories not to align, so questions of gaslighting kind of depend on how the rest of the relationship was.
the double slit experiment is, essentially "The cat is both alive and dead at the same time, right? Well, the live cat now eats the dead cat, which is the same cat"
I have no problem manipulating this nonsense to make money because I want a lot of objects that cost money
a
a
a
Stone, by Adam Roberts
That's a hell of a psych experiment
well we constantly had disagreements about past events and then that term got thrown out and i was like
whoa hey waitaminute