This is actually probably more fair of a comparison then you'd think. Daily showers are bad for health your health[0], but I absolutely do them because my body produces a lot of oil and odor. This is a cosmetic reason similar to make-up.
There are parts of my body which, if not cleaned daily, will stink uncomfortably. Harvard webpage or not.
I'd equate perfuming it over to make-up, not showering..
It's also quite sad that a statement "we should put less make-up on" is immediately drifting into a discussion about not showering. Way to ridicule a viewpoint.
EDIT: I got arguments mixed up. It's master-lincoln who was making the health arguments, not you. You were talking about not holding women to unreasonable beauty standards. I mostly agree, although how to actually stop doing that is very much an unresolved question. I'm leaving this comment here because I think it is interesting, I may explore how to break down beauty standards in a future comment.
First off, I know this is long. It is long because I am having to deconstruct the way we think about showering and make-up. I do think the deconstruction is interesting, but I wouldn't blame you for deciding not to read this.
Though ndndjdjdn's comment was phrased pretty snarkily, but I do think it is a good point. I'll try to explain why, addressing the first and last points, followed by the middle point:
I grew up on a farm. It can smell "bad", especially right after a rain storm. However, since I lived there my entire childhood, it mostly just smelled different rather than bad. I wasn't bothered by it like visitors were, though if I had to pick, I'd prefer the non-after-rainstorm way it smelled to the after-rainstorm smell.
If everybody stopped showering, then everybody would start smelling "bad". I'm sure people would adapt quickly enough, though they would still probably prefer the smell of people who regularly shower to some extent. Thus people tend towards the "showered" state to be more appealing to other people, even though people would probably get used to it if we all eliminated regular showering from our habits.
Similarly, I have seen both IRL and online where men think women who aren't wearing make-up are sickly or ugly, and that women who are wearing natural make-up aren't actually wearing make-up. If a woman stopped wearing make-up, then men would suddenly find that woman to be less appealing, though men would probably get somewhat used to it if all women stopped using make-up. Thus women are pressured to be in the "make-up" state, even though men would probably get used to it if all women eliminated make-up use from their habits.
I would like to note that the logic of the last two paragraphs is the same. Thus, my rebuttal to your point that the body would stink "uncomfortably" is that it probably wouldn't be uncomfortable if everyone stopped showering.
Now to address the middle point. I don't think there is a meaningful difference between showering and showering + wearing perfume (which I will call "perfumed" from hear on). People being in the "showered" state is considered normal, and from that point of normalcy, being in the "unshowered" state is bad and the "perfumed" state is good. However, if we are trying to figure out the best way for the world to be, I don't think what is currently "normal" should matter at all.
Now let's lay out the states people can be in:
Smell wise, people can be in the "unshowered", "showered", and "perfumed" states. As laid out in the comment you are replying to, "unshowered", or at least not daily showered, is the healthiest of these states.
Sight wise, women can be in the "no make-up" or "make-up" states. As you point out, health wise the "no make-up" state is the healthiest of these states.
Thus, if we are prioritizing health above cosmetic appeal, everybody should be in the "unshowered" and "no make-up" state. As I have argued earlier, everyone would probably get used to this eventually, but there would always be pressure for people to shower and wear make-up. Thus I think it is inconsistent to want people to be in the "showered" and "no make-up" state if you are arguing health is the reason. My personal take is that we should just let people make whatever choices they want based on their own values, and not mine or yours.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk. I hope you at least found that interesting. If you did read all the way through, I'd be interested to hear your response.
I feel like we might have been reading the original arguments in different ways, so let me summarize how I see this thread:
I interpreted ndndjdjdn's comment as sarcasm. (due to the use of the phrase "next up") That is, I think he was saying that if you take sadcherry's logic to its limit, then people wouldn't shower or would shower less. sadcherry's logic is that people shouldn't wear make-up because it cosmetic is not beneficial to health. Thus I think ndndjdjdn was talking about the fact that people use showers for cosmetic reasons, and believes sadcherry probably doesn't actually want people to shower less, and so should probably rethink his views about make-up.
You then posted your comment, saying that the health benefits of showers justify them even if they do have cosmetic benefits.
I then comment, saying that I shower in a way that is bad for my health because of cosmetic reasons. I wanted to imply that a lot of people shower like this, and therefor the fact that moderate showers might have some health benefits is irrelevant, because the way many/most people shower is actually unhealthy. I probably should have been more explicit about the fact that I thought many/most other people shower in unhealthy ways.
As an aside, I don't actually know of any concrete benefits to health besides making sure open wounds don't get infected. I tried to search the web for other benefits, and the only additional ones I got are exfoliation (which is cosmetic) and relaxation. (but relaxing things aren't generally classified as "healthy") With that in mind, I tend to believe the health benefits of showers are probably pretty over-hyped, (though not non-existent) and more like a cultural fiction to keep people showering than true knowledge.
I'd be interested to hear if you have a different take.
I agree on this, I previously didn't interpret the showering as a cosmetic action, but see that this line of thought would make sense now.
To your aside of health benefits of showers: I also tried to research this, but other than getting rid of contamination (hazardous elements e.g. during construction or demolishing, or just dirt on wounds) I couldn't find any serious claim that washing the skin is beneficial for health (outside of making sure hands are clean before touching food or mucous membranes), I just assumed there should be one.
I'm not sure there are any established health benefits of showering routinely. Cleaning in response to contamination, sure, but every day with lots of soap etc I'm more sceptical of.
What it really does is create an arms race within women, where those who opt out, with a few exceptions, are at a disadvantage to those who continue on and escalate. As a group, it would be a quality-of-life improvement for most, if they as a group ended the arms race but since there's no way for the group to enforce that, the arms race continues, with social media and technique videos advancing the front even further. For some the cost of participating in war becomes more expensive than the downsides, so they opt out and simply live with the disadvantage.
Guys who equate stopping to spend 30+ minutes a day painting your face with stopping to shower are part of the problem.
It's exactly those unnatural expectations of looks that are put on women, starting at a really young age, that are the issue here. Not boys, just girls. It skews expectations and boom, everybody feels like they have to do it. It's very sad. I'm not saying don't shower, don't cut or even brush your hair, etc. All fine. But the full-on makeup you see walking through a random city in the morning, geez, what are we doing to ourselves. And what are the guys doing? Nothing close to it, but spend a lot of time justifying it.
Sorry to be the devil's advocate (just call me Beelzebub ... sung like Queen [1])
There may be other factors. Hiring is complex. They could have judged tbis fairly and they may have had a better candidate. Having a project like this should probabilistically increase your chances.
First person know is belief. To some extent: this is just faith! Yes we have faith that the laws of physics wont change tomorrow, or we remember yesterday happened etc. Science tries to push that faith close to fact by verifying the fuck out of everthing. But we will never know why anything...
The other "know" is some kind of concept of absolute truth and a coincidence that what someone belives matches this. Whether that coincidence is chance or astute observations or in the paper's case: both.
Maybe, but it’s still a useful overload. No one wants to be pedantic every time they say they know something. It’s more of a spectrum which is really my own overloaded expression. My other one is “it’s a probabilistic matter, there’s no absolute here”
It is a fascinating topic. I spent a few hours on it once. I remember vaguely that the logic is very configurable and you had a lot of choices. Like you choose law of excluded middle or not I think, and things like that depending on your taste or problem. I might be wrong it was 8 years ago and I spent a couple of weeks reading about it.
Also no suprise the rabbit hole came from Haskell where those types (huh) are attracted to this more.foundational theory of computation.
The scary thing is excellent advances in all the other AI/ML need to fake people: text to speech and back, yolo, video generation. The illusion might become the reality. We need a few generations to die (100 years time?) before we will shake of this need to even be human! Who is going to say no to a perfect memory implant. Now a never get dementia implant. And so on! Finally what is the cow even?
That is great. How do you even handle the daily divergence that must happen due to micro decisions made by various APIs. For example I wont mention their name but one OpenAI compatiable provider doesn't fully work with OpenAI client and had various holes so you need to account for that. The other hard thing is just the fast pace of AI. What if the underlying concepts change!
