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D_Malik comments on LINK: In favor of niceness, community, and civilisation - Less Wrong Discussion

26 Post author: Solvent 24 February 2014 04:13AM

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Comment author: D_Malik 05 March 2014 09:36:40AM *  1 point [-]

If I try to avoid to show emotions on my face, it gets tense. That reduces blood flow in my face. Less bloodflow means that it's more difficult for my immune system to clear my face of bacteria that cause acne.

This is very interesting; is this a significant cause of acne, and if so how do you know? If this were true, we would expect that other things that decrease blood flow in the face (such as cold weather, maybe?) would also increase acne.

Here are other hypotheses on acne, not sure whether they're true:

  • Acne is a defense mechanism employed when the body detects that one is low-status. That is, it's a way of making yourself less threatening to the rest of the tribe so that they won't slaughter you. If true, this could be mediated by status hormones like testosterone and cortisol.
  • Sunlight and/or shortage of vitamin D causes acne. (I have anecdotal evidence that tanning reduces acne.)
  • Acne is caused by weird foods, such as dairy or sugar.
  • Acne is caused by excessive face-washing, which screws up homeostatic processes controlling the amount of oil and water on the face.
  • Acne is due to evolutionary inertia: after our ancestors became hairless, they didn't have enough time or enough evolutionary pressure to evolve to excrete less oil on overly oily areas.

Several of these would also explain the nerd-acne connection. Or, that connection could go the other way round, because acne could cause people to stay inside, have lower status, etc.

Comment author: ChristianKl 05 March 2014 11:22:31AM 0 points [-]

If this were true, we would expect that other things that decrease blood flow in the face (such as cold weather, maybe?) would also increase acne.

Cold weather might reduce your blood flow for a few hours but it will come back to normal once you are again in a warm environment.

If I would run an experiment I would attempt to measure how tense the muscles in the face happen to be and how warm the skin happens to be and see whether those ratings correlates with the amount of acne.

This is very interesting; is this a significant cause of acne, and if so how do you know?

It's a working theory of myself at the moment.

The background is there are techniques in the hypnosis realm for resolving "trapped emotions" which often work to help solve physical alignments.

My perception of the bodies of other people is also getting better and I get better at perceiving when a certain part of the person I'm interacting with is colder and tenser than it should be.

Acne is caused by excessive face-washing, which screws up homeostatic processes controlling the amount of oil and water on the face.

As far as self reports go, some people improve their acne by washing their faces less and others by washing it more.

Acne is a defense mechanism employed when the body detects that one is low-status. That is, it's a way of making yourself less threatening to the rest of the tribe so that they won't slaughter you. If true, this could be mediated by status hormones like testosterone and cortisol.

Hunter gatherer tribes have nearly no acne. I would be wary with an explanation that focuses on the utility of getting acne in a hunter gather tribe to explain the acne we have in Western civilisation.

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