this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
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No problem, i recognise the style of question because it's how i would approach it.
As you correctly noted a few times, this is an emotionally charged topic so a higher than normal amount of people will interpret the question through the lens of their emotions
Even with the best intentions and most detailed prefaces you should still manage your expectations on the types and tone of replies you will get to such a question.
I think of it this way :
In more concise wording, people are going to people, don't let them foist their issues on to you, engage when you want, disengage when you don't.
At least that's what works for me.
I do see what you mean, what i was saying is that the understanding of "norm" isn't very clearly defined in these sorts of cases.
Eye colour is relatively easy (within defined colour brackets) you can look at the single item of data and categorise so it's easy to partition the population based on something like that.
With things like mental health diagnoses we can't even reliably agree upon what brackets to apply so it's significantly more difficult to apply the idea of a norm.
in turn that makes the idea of abnormal equally difficult to define.
I agree with them all being functions of brain chemistry.
Though i don't rule out something we'd consider supernatural or spiritual because honestly i don't really know much of anything to be definitively ruling out something like that.
I don't subscribe to them in my daily life, but who knows.
The answer to most of this is "it's complicated" and we're basically using best guesses at this point, these guesses are based on scientific principles, but all that science really is is a semi-concrete method of defining and refining what our best guesses currently are.
What i was trying to convey is that while all of these things could be considered "attributes", in reality it's much more nuanced than it seems, musical talent has many forms, as does ADD and sexual orientation/preference.
Honestly i'd consider most brain stuff to just be unique expressions of an individual, rather than a set of labels, but that isn't very helpful in most circumstances.