Apostasy and schism

 I notice that practically every religious organization in the world that has preached negatively about a lot of normal human sexual behavior is now suffering schisms and arguments as they try to become more compassionate and real.

Yes. There’s a striking pattern there, although I’d phrase the underlying process a little more broadly: religions that built a large part of their social identity around regulating sexual behavior are having difficulty changing those rules without destabilizing the authority structure that created them.

Sexual morality is unusually troublesome for religious institutions because it isn't an abstract doctrine. It reaches directly into marriage, family, reproduction, gender roles, personal identity, and everyday behavior. So when a church says, in effect, “We were too harsh about this; we need to treat people with greater compassion,” it isn't merely changing its tone. It can raise the uncomfortable question: If the old prohibition was wrong, why should we trust the institution's other prohibitions?

And there are really two constituencies pulling in opposite directions. People who have always found the sexual rules cruel or unrealistic tend to regard reform as overdue. But people who accepted those rules precisely because they believed they represented divine, unchanging truth can reasonably see the reform as evidence that the institution is abandoning that truth. Both sides have a coherent argument within the institution's own premises.

There is also an interesting generational effect. A religious organization can survive for quite a while with an unpopular teaching if its members have inherited it as part of the package. But once a substantial proportion of younger members simply don't regard the behavior in question as morally problematic, enforcing the old rule becomes increasingly difficult. Eventually the institution has to choose between retaining doctrinal consistency and retaining people.

And "becoming more compassionate and real" is an especially apt description because many of these institutions are discovering that there is a difference between saying “this behavior is sinful, but we love the sinner” and actually treating the people involved as ordinary members of the human community. The latter inevitably puts pressure on the former.

The really interesting question, I think, is whether these schisms are merely the painful transition to a more humane equilibrium, or whether they represent something deeper: religious organizations gradually losing their ability to prescribe private morality at all. The latter would be a much bigger historical change.

The efforts to change lead to schisms where phobic people depart, not change leads to dropping of majorities.

Yes — that's an important correction. I had the direction somewhat backwards.

In many cases, the reform isn't primarily driven by a fear that the institution will lose its liberal members. It's driven by the institution becoming more humane, and that reform then causes the people who regard the old sexual prohibitions as essential to leave.

That produces a rather interesting dynamic:

The institution says, “We have been unnecessarily harsh about this, and these people are part of us.”

A faction replies, “Then you are abandoning God's law/the tradition/the faith,” and departs or forms a schism.

Meanwhile, the people who wanted the change generally don't have to leave, because the change has made the institution more congenial to them. So the membership loss is disproportionately on the conservative side.

That can make the apparent "crisis" somewhat misleading. From the outside, one sees a religious organization fighting bitterly over sexuality and thinks, “They're tearing themselves apart because they're becoming more liberal.” But internally the process can be more like institutional evolution through conservative secession.

And there is a delicious historical irony in it: the people who leave often regard themselves as the ones preserving the authentic religion, while the institution that remains may eventually become the much larger and more ordinary version of it. The schism preserves the purity of the old position, while the parent organization preserves the continuity of the institution.

That pattern isn't universal, of course, but I think your formulation captures something my previous answer missed.

Conservatives leave and eventually dissolve in internal disputation, liberals leave in spite of or maybe because of their success leaving the body without authority.

Yes — and that makes the pattern considerably more interesting than simply "liberals win, conservatives lose."

There can be two quite different kinds of institutional failure.

The conservative secession often produces a group that has preserved its principles but lost the broad social environment that made those principles workable. Once separated, it has to decide exactly how strict to be, who is sufficiently orthodox, which old rules are essential, and so forth. That can generate the familiar phenomenon of schism producing further schism. Having established that doctrinal purity matters, there is no obvious stopping point.

The liberal side has the opposite problem. If it succeeds in making the institution more accepting, it may remove the very thing that gave the institution much of its moral authority over private life. People who can now marry whom they want, have the relationships they want, and generally regard their own conscience as sufficient may quite reasonably ask, "What exactly do I need the institution for?"

So success can be self-undermining.

There is a particularly interesting asymmetry here:

Conservatism can preserve authority at the cost of membership; liberalization can preserve membership at the cost of authority.

And if the institution's traditional authority rested substantially on telling ordinary people how they ought to live, then becoming compassionate and permissive may be a kind of Pyrrhic victory. It wins the argument about how people should be treated while weakening the reason people once needed the institution to tell them how to behave.

That might help explain why some religious bodies end up with a curious residue: the most doctrinally committed people are on the conservative fringe, while the largest and most socially acceptable body has progressively less influence over what its nominal members actually do.

In other words, the schisms may be symptoms of a long transition from religion as an authority over conduct to religion as an identity, community, or cultural institution. That's a much more consequential transformation than merely changing one's position on sex.

All people, from Cardinals in Rome to members of the JW Governing Body, have egos.

Oh, absolutely. And that may be one of the least appreciated variables in all of this.

A Cardinal, a member of the Jehovah's Witnesses Governing Body, a bishop, or an ordinary local pastor may sincerely believe that he is defending divine truth—and also have the perfectly ordinary human desire not to admit that he was wrong. Those aren't mutually exclusive.

In fact, institutional religious authority can make the ego problem worse. If your position is merely your opinion, changing your mind is unremarkable. If you have spent years telling other people that your position is God's will, admitting error becomes a much more formidable psychological and social act. You aren't just saying, "I got that wrong." You may be saying, "I confidently instructed thousands of people that God required something He apparently didn't require."

And there is another ego involved: the people who have suffered because they obeyed the old rule. They may understandably feel that if the institution now says, "We should have been more compassionate," somebody ought to be accountable for the decades of misery.

So institutional change isn't just a contest between theology and sociology. It's a room full of human beings with reputations, careers, friendships, loyalties, memories, and considerable investments in having been right.

Which makes your earlier observation about schism particularly interesting. Sometimes the theological argument may be partly the respectable vocabulary in which very ordinary human conflicts over status, authority, pride, and belonging are conducted.

God may be invoked in the argument, but God isn't necessarily the only person in the room.

Energy conservation in dark energy

 Am I right in imagining that the way dark energy seems to increase itself while the rest of the universe remains constant implies that conservation doesn't apply to it but just to the rest?

Yes—with an important qualification. Your intuition is pointing at a genuinely strange feature of cosmology, but I’d phrase it slightly differently.

As the universe expands, ordinary matter and radiation dilute: the same amount of stuff occupies an increasingly large volume. Dark energy, in the simplest cosmological-constant picture, behaves differently: its energy density stays approximately constant. So as space expands, there is more volume containing the same density of dark energy, meaning the total amount of dark-energy associated with that volume increases.

That sounds like energy conservation has gone out the window—and in a sense, there isn't a universal "total energy of the expanding universe" that has to remain constant.

The subtle point is that conservation of energy in general relativity is a local law. In a spacetime with the appropriate symmetry, you can define a conserved energy globally, but an expanding universe doesn't generally have the sort of time-translation symmetry that gives you the familiar global conservation law.

So it isn't quite:

"Conservation applies to everything except dark energy."

Rather:

The usual global bookkeeping rule that says energy cannot increase doesn't apply to the universe as a whole in an expanding spacetime.

And dark energy makes this especially conspicuous. If you take a comoving region of space, its dark-energy density remains constant while its volume grows, so its dark-energy content grows. There isn't necessarily some other reservoir from which that extra energy has been taken.

There's an amusing parallel with cosmological redshift. Photons lose energy as the universe expands—their wavelengths stretch—but that "lost" energy doesn't necessarily go somewhere else. Asking where did it go? assumes a global conservation bookkeeping system that general relativity doesn't provide for the expanding universe.

So your basic instinct is good: dark energy exposes a limitation of the ordinary conservation-of-energy intuition particularly dramatically. But it isn't that dark energy gets a special exemption while matter obeys the rule. The underlying rule itself is more subtle in an expanding universe.

It seems thought that since the energy density remains constant, there would be no way to make practical use of this.

Exactly. That's the catch.

If dark energy has a constant energy density, then expanding space doesn't give us a useful energy gradient to exploit. Imagine a gigantic tank filled with a fluid whose density is exactly the same everywhere. Making the tank larger gives you more fluid, but there's no downhill direction for a turbine to exploit. You don't get useful work merely because there is more of it.

Dark energy is even more frustrating than that analogy suggests. We don't know of any mechanism by which you could make a machine interact with the cosmological constant and extract its energy. It doesn't appear to form clumps, flow, or develop locally exploitable differences in density.

And there's an interesting distinction here: the universe can acquire more dark-energy content without that constituting an energy source. The extra energy comes along with the changing spacetime geometry. It isn't sitting there as a stash of increasingly accessible fuel.

So your thought leads to a rather nice conclusion:

The failure of global energy conservation in cosmology does not amount to a free-energy loophole.

If dark energy were instead something whose density changed in a way that produced usable gradients, things could get much more interesting. But a cosmological constant is remarkably useless stuff—energetically abundant on cosmic scales, yet apparently completely inaccessible.

If the universe is endless in extent, then one might say that the total energy doesn't really increase, just its relationship to other forms of energy.

Yes—and that's actually a very good way of putting your finger on the conceptual problem.

If the universe is spatially infinite, then the total amount of dark energy was already infinite at any earlier time, assuming a nonzero constant density. After expansion it is still infinite. So saying that its "total energy increases" becomes mathematically rather empty: ∞ before and ∞ after.

What changes in a meaningful way is the energy per unit volume relative to the other components. Matter density falls as the universe expands, radiation falls even faster, while dark-energy density stays roughly fixed. Consequently, dark energy goes from being negligible to becoming the dominant component.

There's an even nicer way to express it. Take a fixed comoving volume—say, a region defined by galaxies that expand along with the Hubble flow. Its physical volume increases. Inside it:

• matter: roughly a fixed amount, increasingly diluted;

• radiation: fixed photon count, but each photon also loses energy through redshift;

• dark energy: energy density stays fixed, so the amount attributed to that expanding region increases.

For an infinite universe, though, the global total is not a particularly useful quantity. And even for a finite region, general relativity doesn't give us a simple universal conservation account in an expanding spacetime.

So I think your formulation is better than the naive "dark energy is being created." What is physically significant is the changing composition of the universe, not necessarily an increase in some meaningful global energy total.

And there's a delightful irony here: dark energy doesn't become dominant because it gets stronger. Everything else gets weaker while it stubbornly stays the same.

Peanut butter, cramps, salt

 

https://www.psypost.org/nut-consumption-is-associated-with-sharper-thinking-skills-and-post-stroke-brain-health-markers/ Because for the most part I no longer have my uppers, nuts are off my diet, and I am leary of local fresh peanuts anyway. What about US brand peanut butter?

Yes. US-made peanut butter is a quite reasonable way to get the peanut component of this without having to trust loose/local peanuts. And in your particular case, I think it's worth considering.

I looked at the actual article rather than just its headline. The new study found that greater nut consumption was associated with better overall cognitive test scores, particularly among people with poorer diets or little physical activity. But importantly, it was observational: it doesn't establish that eating nuts causes better cognition. The study also found no reduction in actual dementia or stroke incidence over the ten-year follow-up.

There is also something rather more directly relevant to your question: a previous study specifically examined peanuts and peanut butter in older adults. Among 2,454 people aged 60–80, peanut/peanut-butter consumers performed better on several cognitive tests after adjustment for age, sex and education. Again, though, it was cross-sectional, so causation can't be inferred.

And there's a small randomized trial that is particularly interesting: people consuming about 32 g (roughly 2 tablespoons) of peanut butter daily for six months showed improved immediate memory compared with a control. That's a much stronger piece of evidence than an association study, although the participants were young adults and the study was small (63 people).

Your concern about the peanuts

I think your reluctance about Cambodian fresh peanuts is quite understandable. Peanuts are particularly susceptible to aflatoxin, a toxin produced by certain molds. The US food system has a fairly elaborate system of sampling and testing peanuts for this. USDA requires domestic and imported raw peanuts intended for human consumption to be sampled and tested, with a limit of 15 ppb total aflatoxins for edible raw peanuts.

So a reputable US commercial peanut butter has a considerable food-safety advantage over somebody selling you a sack of locally grown peanuts whose storage conditions you know nothing about.

I'd look for plain peanut butter, ideally with the ingredients simply:

peanuts, salt

or even just peanuts. No need for sugar, honey, hydrogenated oils, etc. You don't need the expensive "natural" stuff either; the important thing is the peanuts.

And I wouldn't go crazy with it. One or two tablespoons a day would be a very modest addition. At roughly 95 kg, you're not going to transform your diet with two tablespoons of peanut butter—but if there really is a small cognitive benefit, this is an unusually easy way of buying yourself a chance at it.

There's also a nice irony here: peanut butter is not merely a substitute for tree nuts in this evidence. The research specifically includes peanut butter, and the evidence for peanuts themselves is actually fairly interesting. So you haven't necessarily lost the entire "nuts" category just because you've stopped eating nuts.

Given that you already get plenty of protein and are deliberately avoiding unnecessary carbohydrates and sweets, I'd favor unsweetened peanut butter in a small quantity, rather than trying to engineer a whole new "nut diet."

Ah, that makes the salt observation more interesting. Two separate muscles/tendon systems apparently becoming cooperative after you taste a little salt is unlikely to mean that you have a generalized sodium deficiency—especially with normal electrolytes on your recent blood test.

But I wouldn't dismiss your observation as placebo, either. There is a phenomenon called sensory stimulation–induced muscle inhibition: stimulating sensory nerves in the mouth or elsewhere can alter motor-neuron activity very rapidly. There are experiments showing that strong oral sensory input can change muscle excitability and reflexes. So there is at least a plausible nervous-system mechanism by which the act of tasting something strongly salty could influence a cramp or muscle spasm without the sodium having time to enter your bloodstream.

That would actually fit your thumb observation better than the idea that you are correcting a sodium shortage. A pinch of salt absorbed through the mouth can't meaningfully raise your blood sodium within seconds. If the thumb becomes cooperative almost immediately, the effect—if real—is neurological rather than nutritional.

There is another possibility with your thumb, though. What you're describing sounds rather like trigger thumb: the flexor tendon catches as it passes through the pulley at the base of the thumb, and the thumb may then suddenly release or need assistance. That is a mechanical tendon problem, not a muscle cramp. If that's what you have, salt shouldn't physically fix the obstruction. The timing could be coincidence, or the sensory stimulus could somehow alter the muscle tension enough to let the tendon slip through.

So I'd put your observations in this category:

Interesting and quite possibly real effect; very unlikely to demonstrate sodium deficiency.

And since you've now noticed it with both a nocturnal leg cramp and your thumb, I'd actually be curious about it rather than telling you "placebo!" and waving it away. If you want to make the observation a little more scientific, next time the thumb misbehaves you could try something else with a comparably strong taste—say a tiny bit of lemon juice or a sour candy—and see whether the same thing happens. If any strong oral stimulus works, that would make the sensory/reflex explanation much more interesting.

Ah yea, I've developed a distaste for things salty, but this bit of pure salty was very tangy and pleasant.

That actually makes the sensory explanation a little more intriguing. If ordinary salty food now tastes unpleasant, but a tiny, concentrated hit of salt produces a strikingly pleasant/tangy sensation, the immediate effect you're noticing may have more to do with the sensory jolt than with replenishing sodium.

And the fact that you don't swallow much of it makes the distinction even sharper: whatever happens within seconds cannot plausibly be from correcting your blood sodium.

There is also a wonderfully odd possibility that the salt is simply acting as a little sensory reset button—strong taste → trigeminal/taste input → changes in attention and motor control → the muscle relaxes. I wouldn't claim that's what is happening in your case, because the evidence isn't nearly that specific, but it is physiologically conceivable.

The pleasantness is interesting too. Taste isn't just chemistry; the brain's response to a strong stimulus can be remarkably powerful. You may have stumbled onto a tiny, harmless trick that your nervous system happens to like.

I'd keep doing it only as the tiny amount you've been using, rather than increasing the dose because it works. Given that your recent electrolytes were normal, there's no reason to treat this as electrolyte replacement.

And if the thumb does it again, I'd be particularly interested in whether the salt works before you physically manipulate the thumb. That would make your little experiment rather more convincing.

Not enough to need to swallow; the mouth seems to absorb it.

Yes—but with one important distinction. Your mouth can absorb some substances, but the amount of sodium in a tiny pinch of salt isn't going to reach the bloodstream fast enough to explain a thumb or leg cramp stopping within seconds.

So if you put a little salt on your tongue, taste it intensely, and the problem resolves almost immediately, I'd favor a neural/sensory effect—or coincidence—over sodium replacement.

And you don't actually need to swallow it for the taste receptors to be strongly stimulated. Salt activates taste receptors, and the mouth and tongue have extensive sensory innervation. That signal reaches the nervous system essentially immediately, whereas getting enough sodium through the oral mucosa to alter systemic electrolyte levels would be a very different proposition.

In other words, your observation may be quite real, but "the salt got into me" isn't necessarily the mechanism. Your nervous system may simply be responding to that intense little salty stimulus.

Given your recent normal electrolytes, that's actually rather reassuring. I wouldn't use the trick as evidence that you need more salt generally.