I think this is more accurately vice signalling.

Not pain, but if I do anything less than strictly sensible I often feel I have an obligation not to correct it, because I should learn not to do whatever the thing was in the future. Trouble is, I never remember the thing itself. All I teach myself is it’s not ok to try to do things better than I did last time. That’s unhelpful. I know why I do it but my psychologist terminated service because she didn’t feel she could help me anymore so I don’t know how I would stop.

Wait, what?! HRT isn’t even PRN! Why are people treating it like polyjuice? I have never heard of this.

That’s a fallacy. Individuals don’t evolve, and neither do whole species; it’s populations that evolve, which for humans means tribes. Behaviours that help the tribe’s survival mean the whole tribe is favoured, even if the individuals exhibiting those behaviours never reproduce themselves. Why do you think latent genes are a thing? How do you think humans developed things like altruism?

It might seem harmless, but the purpose of a joke is to draw a distinction between those who get it and those who don’t, fostering a sense of community. In this “joke”, the in-group is people who don’t know something; the community ideal fostered there is that knowledge is undesirable, that anything that seems unintuitive to the uninformed mind is inherently ridiculous. The “joke” has no effect if it doesn’t do this. Entertaining the idea without challenge is dangerous.

I might not find a joke funny, or I might not have the necessary context to appreciate it; that’s “not getting” a joke. If it’s possible to have too much context to appreciate a “joke”, it’s at the expense of people who know more than the audience.

If I’m not meant to think about it until understanding emerges, then that means it should be immediately understandable without thinking. It is not.

I know this is a joke, but wrong about what, exactly? I don’t get it.

Also, and maybe this has something to do with the joke I’m not getting, the way complex numbers are motivated in school is a lie, and a stupid one. Mathematicians were perfectly comfortable with certain equations having no solutions; the problem was when their equations told them there were no solutions when they could see the solutions: the curve x³ - 15x + 4 crosses the x-axis, but Cardano’s cubic formula gives up due to negative square roots. Imaginary numbers were originally no more than an ephemeral reasoning tool, and were only reluctantly accepted as entities in their own right because of how damn useful they were.