Sneezing, sex, and epistemology

In Spain—and across much of the Spanish-speaking world—it’s common to respond to a sneeze with “Jesús” or “salud,” while French speakers might say “à tes/vos souhaits” and Italians “salute.” For me, that ritual can be oddly irritating; and, based on what I’ve seen in repeated online discussions, plenty of other people report the same annoyance (often describing it as a pointless, attention-drawing micro-obligation).

The point isn’t the sneeze. It’s the pattern: an involuntary spasm gets socially “underlined,” and the underline quietly demands a response (“thanks”), turning physiology into a mandatory interaction. Not because anyone is trying to scold you—usually it’s goodwill or pure habit—but because the script makes you manage, in public, something you didn’t choose.

What helped wasn’t “winning” against the ritual, but changing what my brain treats it as. When a script reliably needles you, you can sometimes treat it like a foreign language: ignore the literal sound and privately “translate” it into a functional meaning you choose. The content of the translation can be arbitrary (even exaggerated) as long as it reliably shifts your affect from irritation to neutral competence.

That same move scales to intellectual conflict. In debates, the urge isn’t always to clarify; it’s to crush, humiliate, or dominate—an adrenal state that tends to reduce precision and increase hostility. A deliberate reframe (“this could be my client,” “this could be my boss,” “this person is trying to think”) can lower dehumanization long enough to regain accuracy and keep the exchange structurally constructive.

This connects to AI alignment and axiology because the hardest part often isn’t optimization—it’s specifying what “doing well” even means (outer alignment) when values conflict, proxies tempt, and humans disagree under pressure. If our value talk is routinely distorted by identity, status, and conversational failure modes, then we shouldn’t be surprised that encoding “the right target” is brittle. A plausible, pragmatic thesis is: better alignment may require not only better models, but better human-side techniques for making value deliberation less reactive and more coherent—i.e., small, repeatable methods that help us do axiology in the real world rather than in idealized armchairs.

Read more: https://manuherran.substack.com/p/sneezing-sex-and-epistemology/