I have two, based on observations of significant others and coworkers. OCD is caused by one or more overbearing, controlling parents, and overbearing parents (especially during potty training) lead to adults who are obsessed with their digestive processes.
A former significant other suffered from OCD to a crippling degree, and his mother was the most overbearing, controlling person I’ve ever encountered. I have a handful of coworkers and a couple friends with the disorder, and all complain loudly about overbearing parents, but exert the same influence on their own kids. Then they complain that they are afraid their children “inherited” OCD from them. I realize the evidence is mixed regarding OCD, but it sure sounds like *bad habits *are being passed down rather than genetic quirks.
Same thing seems to hold true for those with potty issues. My two nearest coworkers tend to over-share and trade stories daily of intestinal distress. It’s very off putting to me but nearby coworkers don’t seem to mind the discussion at all and others will often trade stories. But these two extend the same obsession to their children and worry themselves silly over how many bowel movements their children have and the potty training stories were just horrific. Hovering over the kids, trapping them on the potty for as much as an hour waiting for something to happen, refusing to allow them dinner or television before they pooped, and other sorts of punishment for failing to go to the bathroom on command that sound so counterproductive that it borders on abuse. I’m almost certain these over managed bathroom habits will lead to a lifetime of fixation on digestive issues to their detriment. But I’m more than willing to have my theories debunked because it would mean less worrying for the future health of micromanaged children.
Anyone here with OCD or a nervous stomach have an overbearing parent? Or any pet theories of your own to share and have debunked?
I’ll take a stab at this one because it’s backwards. Most abusers were themselves abused, and some heavy drinkers had one or more parents who drink. As proof take a look at yourself and your parents. Do you do things exactly the same way they did, think along the same lines or have you become your own person?
I have this theory that the US will continue to print money to pay thier debt and inadvertently drive down the value of the debt almost to the point of defaulting. I feel like the american dollar will continue to loose value to the point where imports become less and less attractive and we start more manufacturing at home. Retooling and rebuilding our manufacturing base will help employment as well as attract more workers from outside the U.S. I think after about a 10 or 15 year downturn we might again see a good healthy upturn in the economy with a revived tax base.
People don’t like Obama because he is black but I can’t prove it. They say they don’t like him for a lot of reasons, he wasn’t born here, he’s a Muslim, he’s like Hitler, he’s a socialist, and some reasons that they can’t even mention out loud. I’ve heard people state that they wish someone would shoot him, yet state that it doesn’t mean they would shoot him themselves, so that doesn’t make them racist. I think they don’t like him because he is a black man in the White House; but I can’t prove that because these people always seem to have one black friend (and only one), so that proves they are not racist.
I’m not a biologist, neurologist, geneticist, or any other -ist that might be related to this charming delusion.
I wonder if profoundly traumatic or revelatory events may in some way inscribe themselves genetically, such that after countless generations subject to the same conditions, they give rise to instinctive behavior that allows members of a species innate knowledge of how to survive in their environment.
No, let me try it again. People who abuse children were often abused themselves, *but not all abused kids will not grow up to become abusers. *
Real life example: my mother was abused, but she never abused us. My mother smoked, but I never smoked. See? Just because something awful happened to you doesn’t mean you are doomed to perpetuate it. However, if you were abused by your mother, it is likely that she was also abused by a parent.
OK. Well another one of my theories is that being Irish, I have a strong Irish liver. Because the Irish drink a lot, their bodies have adapted over the centuries and have built up a tolerance.
Are you saying all people who don’t like Obama don’t like him because he’s black? Or just that there exists a set of people such that those people dislike Obama because he’s black and they deny that they dislike him because he’s black.
I personally dislike him because he’s from Columbia and Harvard and I went to a rival Ivy. If he’d gone to my school I’d like him just fine.
It’s that set that blows my whole theory! If they would only own up to there hate and embrace their inner (tantrum throwing) child then I could get the Nobel prize.
But no, there are very few people that have the balls to come out and say they don’t like having a N-word person as there president. At least your hatred has an intellectual base to it since you brought up Columbia and Harvard. Why can’t more people be creative about the lie they tell the world? It’s the lukewarm racism that throws a wrench into my theory.
I do have such a theory and I have not succeeded in even getting anyone to comment on it. It is that time is best viewed as logarithmic; there was nothing before time 0 because log(0) is -infinity. That there will be no entropy death of the universe; things will just slow down and interactions will take place over larger and larger distances and, from out point of view, will take longer and longer, but not from a logarithmic point of view. So you could still have life, even intelligent life, it just is very slow. The free energy of the universe will never hit 0, although it does approach it asymptotically. Some thermodynamicist has studied the question of how much energy is needed for a computation and the answer is there is no minimum, but the less you use the slower it is.
In Steven Weinberg’s First Three Minutes, I had the impression that as much happened between 10^{-43} seconds and 10^{-42} seconds as happened between 10^{-42} seconds and 10^{-41} and so on. There was, from our point of view, nearly infinitely large energy and things, including computations, were happening at near infinite speed. It was so fast that perhaps there was some kind of life, even intelligent that evolved and disappeared and to whom we represent the entropy death of their universe.
How’s that for a totally off-the-wall theory? And yet I do not know that it can be refuted.
