Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
#209, #StandUpLocust, #MurphysFerry, Surah Yunus 10:71
User ID: 2418
I understand residency, I’m just loosely thinking about your career trajectory more broadly. Residency can’t be pretty brutal, sorry to hear what you’re going through.
I haven’t read the ICD-10. My mother was a homemaker all her life but her small library was filled to the brim with a lot of medical literature that she liked to read and study about (for some reason). Occasionally I picked things up here and there.
But don’t be down on yourself to think you didn’t have the bravery to go into programming when you entered fucking medical school. Passion is what allows you to endure and if you’re going through that, you’re a very capable guy. My like of healthcare as a subject matter rests at the floor. I couldn’t do what you’re doing.
I diagnose them with moderate to severe intellectual disability.
Hahahahaha.
Instead, I ignore them, and feel glad about the fact that 99% of people don't have such awful takes. There's plenty of room for critique of psychiatry, which I have done myself, but it's not a fraud. I treat sensible criticism with respect.
There’s actually quite a sizable minority of people in the US that truly believe that. Maybe it’s the case that psychiatrists over-diagnose people(?); don’t know. I’ve never seen one. A lot of people seem to think psychiatrists are just glorified counselors that deal drugs. I don’t know if it’s still a common practice to think you can establish a working hypothesis on someone in 15 minutes. That seems completely absurd to me. But I’d take your word on the matter as a psychiatrist over mine any day of the week.
Really hope you do well.
One problem people have is in what they think a “friendship” is. I knew many people for all walks of life growing up, but I can count on maybe little more than two hands the amount of people I can truly call friends, the rest are either acquaintances or people teetering on the edge between one or the other. There’s people I’ve known for 20 years who I’m on great terms with who I wouldn’t describe as my friend.
Several years ago, my best friends younger brother came home from school one day and when we were all hanging out he asked me what the difference between a friend and an acquaintance was. I said “an acquaintance is just someone you know.” “A friend is someone who puts in work on your behalf.” (Putting in work is a phrase used by gang members to commit acts to socially prove you’re a part of the in-group.) If you’re someone’s friend, you care about them, and work where you can in ways that promote their self-interest where opportunities are available to do so; because your friends are an extension of you. I’ve made sacrifices and taken hits to my reputation for my friends before, to me that’s what it means to be someone’s friend. I will go far out of my way to support my friends. Very far out of my way.
If you feel normal without many friends (or even any), I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with you, although it’s a little sad you’ve not experienced the sustained joy of sharing interactions and experiences with others that make you feel connected. For some people it just takes time, for others they just haven’t found their tribe yet.
In retrospect you ever think you’d have chosen a different career path entirely? The front lines of health and medicine always had zero appeal to me. I definitely have my preferred path I would’ve chosen, except for the fact that the industry hadn’t matured and established such that there was a viable and well defined path at the time I’d have come of age to first begin pursuing it in higher education.
When I was in the later years of grade school and throughout junior high and early high school, I was in gifted and AP programs and high achieving courses for a time and I’d always been administered tests that I had no doubt were designed to have you fail; they were enormously difficult. Comprehensible and I could and did do them but the amount of work was enormous. I think perhaps like you albeit at a younger age I just wasn’t mentally prepared for it; and having the right attitude and perspective is a huge part in being able to make it in various disciplines and when you’re up against challenges. Back then I just wanted to go play with my toys and video games by myself and be left alone. By the time I was in high school I deliberately underplayed things to coast by so I didn’t have to get recognized by everyone else. If blowhards want to excel and look good by performing better than you, let them. The brightest stars burn out the quickest and have the shortest lives. If you looked at my report card around that time I had everything. A’s, B’s, F’s and D’s; just enough to squeeze by. My mental health was better because of it but those who knew me didn’t like what I was doing at all.
Is it possible for you to pivot to a psychiatric modality that’s less straining on you mentally? When I read the DSM-IV several years ago, that alone was enough to give me a mental illness. How do you feel about the people who say psychiatry is a fraudulent, applied science in the first place?
This generally makes even liberals uncomfortable, because it all of a sudden means that they're relying on their neighbor's good will not to shoot them. If the only thing that keeps you from dying on the road is the unwillingness of other drivers to cross the center line and kill you, then "unwillingness" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, and everyone generally understands that encouraging deployment of the Final Argument of Kings can/will lead to defect/defect spirals.
Which is ironic because they’re usually the party that believes in the innate peacefulness of humanity and the supposed natural harmony that exists between distant groups. It’s strange to me that liberals seem to be the only group of people I regularly encounter that honestly believes they aren’t an in-group, let alone one that also has an out-group bias like everyone else.
I don’t usually involve myself in these discussions anymore because they’ve been discussed to death and rehashed endlessly. I used to partake in them quite frequently. Now? Hardly. To me the solutions have already been found, they’ve been known, but the people don’t want to face reality. That’s all there is to it.
Take a concept the left loves so much like “diversity” (which, in all in favor of, to a point, even most conservatives are). Well what’s wrong with how they conceptualize it?
Diversity is a source of conflict within institutions and therein, societies. Conflicts impede institutions insofar as it inhibits them to performing their proper functions; and that’s even if one doesn’t adopt the goal of artificially promoting it. If a school divided by conflict it can’t teach as well as a harmonious one. An army divided can’t fight as well as a unified one. A society riven by conflict is a less pleasant place to live than a peaceful one. You don’t have to be a philosopher to understand this. This is common sense.
The idea that any society or institution is improved by large-scale diversity is an aberration of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. There is ‘no’ serious political philosopher or statesman of the past would have entertained the idea for a moment. The entire goal of politics is to create social order and harmony. Basically, it’s the problem of getting along with one another. Social life has to deliver net benefits to its participants, or people will go their separate ways, and society will collapse. Straight up. But beyond that, since we’re not just selfish individualists, you have to cultivate social responsibility and investment, so people work to better society and are actually willing to sacrifice to ensure that it’s preserved and perpetuated.
Those are the great problems of politics, creating social harmony and a sense of an identification with the body politic, responsibility to the body politic, willingness to lay down one’s life for the body politic. Now tell me, does diversity help with those goals?
The prevailing dogma is that diversity will strengthen literally everything. Presumably it means every institution touched by diversity will perform its function better. Neighborhoods will be better places to live. Governments will better promote justice and harmony. Schools will better educate and train students. Hospitals will better heal the sick, etc. But this makes zero sense. Every institution is defined by its goals. So to function properly, every institution has to find people who are good at promoting its goals. Teachers have to teach. Firemen have to fight fires. Soldiers have to fight enemies, etc. The primary criterion for hiring and promoting people in any institution is ability to contribute to the institution’s purpose. No institution can be improved by introducing competing criteria of success, like diversity.
This is why as soon as diversity becomes the “greatest strength” of any institution, people will naturally lower its proper standards of success to promote diversity. And that’s why too much diversity isn’t a strength, it’s a weakness. But don’t for a second think you can’t also go overboard in the other direction. Diversity is a good ‘if’ it contributes to the institutional goals of society. It is not an intrinsic good.
To give an example, in academia, economics halls have often been assailed for being far too insular and siloizing itself from the discourse with other academic disciplines. This is led to an environment where economists spend far too much tinkering around with mathematically abstract economic models that bear little resemblance to reality. The solution for this wasn’t to encourage more English majors to enter into economics courses. It was to demand economists have an interface with businessmen to bring theory and practice together. And it led to projects like The Atlas of Economic Complexity.
People like to say "overthrow the government", as if the government wasn't following the wishes of the people.
This has been overwhelmingly true for most of history. One accolade I’ll give to democracies over the kinds of systems I’m more palatable to is that democracies have proven themselves to be the most sustainable political system of the future thus far. Maybe that’ll continue to change with time though.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
23hr ago
Leave it to the Israelis to equate blood libel with anal rape. That’s a stretch even for the anti-Semites.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
23hr ago
If it comes to a revolt, then you can take the guns out of the basement and ignore the regulations about whether you're allowed to carry them in public; if you aren't participating in a mass revolt against an unjust government then it's not constitutionally important whether you can carry them around or not, so long as you are allowed to have them in reserve in case of a revolution.
This is the part people almost never highlight that’s even more important than emphasizing one’s right to a firearm for self-defense. A right to overthrow the government is written into the second amendment. Makes it difficult to determine where the clear dividing line is between a warranted insurrection (no such thing in the eyes of the government) and sedition.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
23hr ago
What does it feel like when you’re going through a depressive episode? Is it some kind of spontaneous mental rush of sadness or grief? Are there specific life events that trigger it? Depending on the kind of thoughts you choose to meditate on and contemplate, controlling your state of mind plays a very large and active role in influencing your mental state; which is hard because humans don’t have direct access to their emotions.
At any rate, great job if you’re feeling better! w00t w00t!
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
1d ago
E-readers I don’t like for the same reason I find it difficult to do content creation on a tablet. It feels too constricting and I need to space out and feel like I can breathe when I’m on the system. I have Bluefire Reader on my iPhone but even so, I only read a few pages on a book I’ve stolen off LibGen or somewhere else until I receive a copy of it in print.
Inalterability doesn’t imply futility. Choice and determinism are compatible regardless of how a complete picture of the universe’s physics turn out. All you have to do is rebut the intuition that leads you to fatalism.
Let’s just go ahead and say there’s a means–end relation between a contemplated action and a goal, just in case the desirability of the goal rationally contributes motivation for taking the action which is to say all else being equal (i.e., in the absence of conflicting consequences of higher priority), it makes sense to take the action for the sake of the goal’s achievement.
By what criteria can someone recognize the existence of a particular link? There’s an evidential criterion in that there’s a means–end link from action to goal, just in case the goal is more likely to be found to obtain when the action is found to be taken than when the action is found not to be taken (i.e., the action’s occurrence is correlated with the goal’s occurrence). A counter factual criterion implies there’s a means–end link from action to goal just in case the goal would obtain if the action were taken, but not otherwise (or at least the goal would more likely obtain if the action were taken than if otherwise). A causal criterion would mean there’s a means–end link from action to goal just in case the action causes (or tends to cause) the goal to obtain. And then as already mentioned, a fatalist criterion; which implies there’s never a means–end link from action to goal; and all actions are futile. (No one takes fatalism seriously in practice, but a lot of people believe it would indeed follow if the universe were deterministic; and therefore, they reject determinism).
The second one is somewhat counterintuitive. Inference involves propositions of the form, “If X then Y; we infer consequent Y from antecedent X.” But logic textbooks distinguish many varieties of inference (including subjunctive inference and material implication). Mathematical logic more often uses the latter because it’s much simpler to formalize. In material implications, “If X then Y,” just means, “It is not the case both that X is true and Y is false.”
The first three criteria often coincide with one another. If I take the action of crossing the street to achieve the goal of getting to the other side (and take that to mean that “action” as the initiation of a series of muscle contractions, not as the passage across the street, so the goal’s achievement doesn’t just follow tautologically from the action’s occurrence.) Knowing that I will cross informs you that I’ll get to the other side, but knowing I will not cross informs you otherwise, which justified the evidential criterion. If I walked across the street, I would (likely) get to the other side, but (very likely) not otherwise, fulfilling the counter factual criterion. And my walking across the street ‘causes’ me to get to the other side, fulfilling the causal criterion. By any of those three criteria, there’s a means–end link from the action of crossing to the goal of getting to the other side. Given that means–end link, and other things being equal, my desire to be on the other side rationally motivates my crossing.
The problem in Newcomb’s Paradox though, is that the criteria diverge. Taking just the opaque box, forfeiting the $1,000, is strong evidence that you obtain $1,000,000 in the opaque box, but taking both boxes is strong evidence that the opaque box is empty. But taking the transparent box or not has ‘no’ causal influence on the content of the already-sealed opaque box. The evidential criterion says there’s a means–end link from the action of taking just the opaque box, to the goal of obtaining $1,000,000 in the opaque box #1. But the causal criterion says otherwise; if there’s a means–end link, then it’s an acausal one. (This is also the exact same divergence that happens in real life Prisoner’s Dilemma situations)
The causal and evidential criteria diverge even in some completely mundane cases, where an action correlates with (but doesn’t cause) a subsequent state. If you were to take just the opaque box and not both, then there would be $1,000,000 in the opaque box, #2. In a more rigid formulation, counterfactual links are just causal links, what would differ if you were to take just the opaque box compared with your taking both boxes is whatever taking just the opaque box causes and nothing more than that.
This is why the fatalist criterion can’t be correct. Because there are innumerable means–end links in a deterministic universe. Even under the interpretation of Many-Worlds, quantum mechanics is technically deterministic (in that quantum amplitude flows deterministically through configuration space), and ‘still’ has the property that a given classical state (in some particular configuration-space branch) is followed by a prior, divergent classical successor states (in subsequent branches). It “looks” nondeterministic as far as choice is concerned but in any case present state of our universe is compatible with multiple futures, in some sense or other. Whether or not the multiplicity of futures is genuinely nondeterministic in some sense, the argument still holds. Some degree of multiplicity of futures is compatible with choice (even though it isn’t required), but ‘excessive’ multiplicity would undermine choice.
TL;DR: Take box B.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
1d ago
I’ll refer you here to the episode that had “thermodynamics” in the title, if you’re interested to hear about the issues with a carbon tax.
I think there needs to be a line drawn between efficiency from cutting unnecessary things, and efficiency from removing all redundancies and backups.
And this is where the balance is. You saw it in the policy sphere as well after COVID struck, where people saw just how fragile shipping and supply lines were. I don’t know how many people were paying attention but within Biden’s cabinet, people were talking about the necessity of a large scale program of re-industrialization in the US; because of it.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
2d ago
My father was a senior software architect that was a pioneer in SIEM log analysis. Sumo Logic was the last company he worked at before entering retirement and before that he worked for ArcSight when it was acquired by HP and LogLogic before that. The stories he used to tell me about needing to “hold the tech guys back” drove him and other senior developers crazy.
The requirements would be defined, the guidelines would be established, the objectives already determined and then you always had the other guys (as well as management) trying to fuck with shit. The amount of screaming matches they all got into in meetings was incredible. During one instance one of the senior women developers said aloud sarcastically “what should our goal be?,” and he sarcastically said “I think our goal should be log analysis…,” to shame the rest of the people in attendance. Yeah. It was that bad.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
2d ago
My guess is if they don’t understand technical debt and path dependencies to begin with, in no way are they going to understand that you can institute a KPI for anything. It’s what you measure that actually matters. People in the SOC have been dealing with this forever in infosec.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
2d ago
Lol. You’ve got to be kidding me. I see “Professional Bullshit Artist (PBA)” in the job market of the future.
Jevons Paradox isn’t something you want to deal with, with crises like climate change looming on the horizon. When solving that you have to go to public policy, not to tech (1, 2). The problem with greater efficiency is that the effective production and precision of inputs isn’t necessarily the most optimal one when it increases fragility. That was the whole point Taleb was making when he wrote Antifragile a number of years ago. I’m all for efficiency and all that, but it doesn’t mean it’s without some massive drawbacks.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
2d ago
Economists have been making this point for a while now. The efficiency gains here haven’t meant a labor drawdown resulted in time shaving activities for workers, it’s been 2x, 3x, 4x the extractive productivity to produce larger profits.
Modern manufacturing is bigger!. Jobs are down because automation and robots are more efficient than people, but we make more now locally than we used to.
Global manufacturing has actually gone down though (for the reasons you alluded to). That’s not actually the gain people think it is however, because there’s a trade off between resilience and efficiency; especially as technological demands increase in industries like automotive.
I know satellite farming in agribusiness is one example where efficiency is really proving itself to cut down on waste and the poor industry practices of old, but not all industries are benefitting from efficiency. The social system hasn’t yet managed to adapt to rapid technological progress. Especially the government.
Case in point. A little more than a year ago I had to call the IRS to retrieve a document related to my father’s old tax return. It involved me having to send in information about myself and a few other things and they’re still requiring people to fax in paperwork to some random office, wait 2-3 days, with no direct callback number to the agent you’re talking to, to then get a single document physically mailed to me. It’s not like I could just, oh I don’t know, email them a passworded attachment of what they asked for and check it right there over the phone.
The youngest kids in my extended family don’t even know what a fax machine is. Or a VHS tape. Or a Cassette tape. Or how to write in cursive. Or know how to write a check. The IRS is still using fax machines…
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
2d ago
I think it was the economist Ha-Joon Chang that argued the washing machine was more revolutionary than the Internet was, basically for reasons along this train of thought.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
2d ago
People shouldn’t be conflating LLM’s with AI, the way they’re imagining the future. I remain firmly convinced that the utility of LLM’s will stay relegated to that of a glorified (and occasionally useful) autocomplete at worst, and at best a work assistant. Some of the recent updates to Gemini that I’ve played with have definitely sharpened their understanding to provide accurate answers to what I’m asking it; the only problem being that they were nothing like the answers it had previously given before; meaning it’s essentially given me every answer under the sun.
It’s a cool “toy” to prompt a human driven research project or to chase down answers to problems, but even when correct information is provided, you still have to vet and validate the veracity of it.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
2d ago
So long as people don’t have to live with the ideological byproducts and waste generated by the downside of the policies they advocate, they’ll continue to be at liberty thinking up all kinds of fanciful garbage encircled with every halo of bullshit you can think of. You saw this with the hysteria of Martha’s Vineyard and the controversy surrounding that debacle.
It wasn’t just the economy though. People vote just as much along identitarian lines and projected onto Trump the values they sought to find in his statements.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
2d ago
The rich have always been very class conscious.
I imagine what it would all look like if the Black Death struck again, in 2026. The workable solutions to any of this would be tyrannical in nature. “Free and open” is a recipe under trying circumstances to give natural selection free reign to determine the course and outcome. Maybe some people want to live under that paradigm. Normal human beings do not.
I remember reading a history book on the effects it had on Britain in the 13th century. One natural consequence that fell out of the havoc it wrought across the country was that the whole society became younger. It was a horrific time to live through, but the social transformations that co-evolved in the wake of the pandemic were amazing to read about. It made me reflect on history in a way I’d never considered before.
Opening repertoire’s were always my weakness originally and it was where my deficiencies showed, but in end games I was always rock solid and had near machine optimal moves. I always preferred the Ruy-Lopez. I also liked to emulate Dubov playing the Tarrasch but my calculation was never as complete or precise as his. Watching him play is beautiful, despite my style being wholly antithetical to his own.
I was curious to see if Yagiz Kaan could steal one from Magnus or at least draw him, since he’s now the youngest 2700 ever to play the game; but Magnus never loses endgames. It took balls to see such a young kid so eager to swim out to the deep end of the pool. You could tell he realized the single blunder he made where it was lost for him. My boy’s been taking our people to the Promised Land for nearly 20 years, #VikingPower. Chess belongs to the North, 💪 👊 ⛪️ 🇳🇴 🇸🇪.
But I’m proud of Yagiz. Kid’s got a bright future and I look forward to watching his games.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
4d ago
Always keep the expendable chaff on the front line to soften up the enemy before the real battle starts.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
4d ago
… If you want the player to feel awesome upon obtaining a colorful cloak or a new spell, then you don’t want everything in the world vivid and dazzling, because the novelty and pleasure of these things reduces the power of those reinforcers. If the mobs are colorful and the characters around you are all wearing awesome things, then picking up some basic “red cloak” is no longer as pleasant, and thus no longer reinforced. Pleasure from stimuli are competitive to each other. (In a boring classroom, even a black and white VHS is a good reinforcer; not so in a mall)...
I’ve had thoughts about this in real life and have come to the opposite conclusion. One thing I love looking at the buildings of North Korea for (Yeah. I know.) is their obsession with pastel colors, looking like a city full of abandoned colored marshmallows. When I walk around the parking lot of my employer and I see the same silver, white, gray, black colored cars everywhere, it really leaves things looking incredibly sterile, with the life having been sucked out of everything.
I didn’t not know that, :o. Thank you.
Men and women are capable of being friends but in my own life I generally advise against it, especially if they’re in a relationship. I have many women friends in my life but the nature of those friendships is built very differently from the ones I have with my guy friends. (Yes, most of your guy friends want to fuck you; I don’t care how much they lie about it.) It’s also a major reason I don’t date women who keep male friends. Women aren’t stupid, they know what they’re doing by keeping men in the mix that play into the role of their backup plans “just in case.” In a relationship you’re either all in or not. A person who keeps one foot permanently out the door tells you much about the sincerity of their commitment.
Men often interpret women’s friendship as sexual interest because most men get zero attention from women. But I’ve seen it the other way as well, where women insist they’ve dropped every signal and the guy isn’t interested. (No. He sees it. He doesn’t want to risk interpreting your friendship as sexual interest, so he cautions himself not to press it. He’s not stupid either.) The problem is women flirt and express interest with full plausible deniability, and that’s why they lose out on so many opportunities. If you want to make a move, it has to be one that’s unmistakable and that you can’t back out of; you have to be able to bear risking rejection.
There’s only two women in my life (apart from my mother) that I’ve had an “I have to be careful about this person,” moment; who could read me very well; and it was eerie. I loved hanging with them though because they had an incredibly high powered perception and amazing situational awareness. It was very evident to me that they hid their intelligence from the rest of the group, but they were very confident people and just every “once” in awhile they’d drop the mask on purpose. Occasionally we’d be talking about something and look over at each other at the same time and smirk. They knew what I was thinking before I did.
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