self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
User ID: 454
It seems to be that recreational indulgence in handicrafts, like wood working for one, is far more common in the US than the West, let alone outside the Anglosphere.
I don't know whether it's because of cultural factors that value self-reliance, more free time, large houses with more room to dedicate to things like this, or a combination of the above.
I don't know a single person in India who has a similar hobby, only those who do it for a living. Of course, we lack hobby culture to an extent, but still..
This strikes me as extremely unlikely, verging on outright nonsense.
Let's look at the diseases in question, the initial cluster, namely the ones that Sarno isn't alone in suspecting are psychosomatic, share one commonality that they don't have signs but have symptoms, a bit of medical jargon that simply means that they have no visible-to-outsiders characteristics barring what the patient themselves report and feel. The only exception is joint hypermobility here.
This is reasonable enough, practically every doctor alive, especially in psychiatric practise, has seen such cases, and so have I. It's not much of a stretch to think that the human mind can create something as entirely subjective as pain by itself, in a myriad of different presentations. And invasive tests usually find little to no organic changes that could plausibly cause said symptoms.
Now, the ones Sarno thinks are psychologically induced go way beyond the plausibility of the above, for reasons that might not be obvious to non-medical people. So I'll take a crack at why this makes little sense:
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First and most obviously, they have physical signs and large changes in a consistent and syndromic fashion. I doubt the brain has the ability to cause sudden histamine release and hive outbreaks no matter how stressed someone is.
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Gluten sensitivity is characterized by a testable and obvious change, namely the production of tissue transglutaminase antibodies that are detectable in the blood, prior to confirmation by a biopsy from the intestines. It makes absolutely no sense that the manifestation of anxiety and depression would be the sudden onset of an autoimmune disease with obvious markers! And why to gluten of all things??
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Hell, IBD/Crohns are comorbid with depression because they're extremely annoying and debilitating diseases that cause a massive drop in QOL, I'd certainly be sad if not depressed were I diagnosed with that!
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Herniated discs?? You can literally see them on MRI most of the time, how exactly is the brain buck-breaking the spine??
All of these diseases have clear non-psychiatric pathologies, and obvious objective changes, and unless someone manages to dig up Sarno's figures and at least 3 or more studies confirming its individual claims, I would toss this in the trashcan without further debate.
Edit: I confused IBS and IBD, there's some debate on whether or not the first has psychological links, and there isn't any obvious etiology that I'm aware of.
Your opinions on moderation, are, of course, entirely your own prerogative. The Motte seems to form a very small, in absolute proportion, but enormous, relative, in the overlapping circles of the Venn diagram representing "freedom to express controversial opinions" and "relatively high quality discourse", throw in "politely", if you care to be stricter.
You want to get away with saying just about anything? Well, there's 4chan. Maybe Twitter. You want articulate and earnest users making long-form content? Plenty of options, none with a particularly wide Overton Window.
Before I became a mod, or even had any reason to assume they were going to add new ones, I certainly felt the poor bastards were overworked and underpaid (well, they're still the latter). I have access to site usage metrics, and they're largely flat since we left Reddit, which is surprising enough. Is the user base shrinking? Not that I can see by eyeballing a graph over months or years, though I am as concerned as anyone by the loss of the old pipeline from Scott endorsing us or simply through the contagion of being an active subreddit. But I foresaw apocalypse before the migration, and that very much hasn't happened.
At any rate, it would be a bit awkward if adding more mods didn't result in more moderation decisions, or minor changes in how it's done. What would the point be then, at least for the former.
Our old charitable custom was to treat strangers as if they were worthy of good faith. Increasingly the mods treat those whose good faith has already been established (such as the recently modded Kulak, Hlynka, Burdensomecount) as if they were strangers.
Oh boy, or maybe "if only you knew how bad things really are"(if we didn't take action)
I assure you that much of the suspicion of new users is because of the tendency of certain undesirables to play whack-a-mole, and that, if someone posts something only mildly objectionable, we usually let them right through.
I find Kulak and BC entertaining, they even have a point at times, I am studiously mute on certain others, but Kulak didn't get banned (last time I checked), merely warned not to be unnecessarily combative, and BC is an out-and-proud fan of drama who got away with a lot before a time out.
What you can get away is with is pretty proportional to your standing in the community, believe me I'm sure I've gotten away with things I feel compelled to mildly mod these days, if only because I hold myself to higher standards.
So are there good alternatives to the motte out there?
Not that I'm aware of. The SSC subreddit is neutered. The Schism, an offshoot of us more tuned for progressives (and I believe) more restrictions on speech is barely in action, the Culture War Roundup subreddit, well it was dying a while back, and I half suspect is gone. /r/Drama? For very loose definitions of "good alternative", I suppose, though I'm glad it exists. It's slim pickings out there.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
6mo ago
Another test for the Motte:
I'm listed as being closest to libertarian, which I will admit isn't entirely incorrect, even if I'd prefer to term myself a classical liberal with libertarian tendencies. Ideally I'd prefer a test that broke things down in a more granular manner, but I suppose of the options available here, I can't complain too much it lumped me in with the libertarians.
My results below
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
8mo ago
This is as good a place to ask for technical support as any I guess:
For the past few months, my pc has been consistently crashing under heavy load, in graphically demanding games like Escape from Tarkov, Warhammer 3 etc. In normal use and less intensive games like Rimworld, no issues.
After about 15-20 min of gameplay, I get a full crash to a black screen with the pc powered off, and it refuses to post for several minutes regardless of what I do, at which point it often restarts on its own. The American Megatrends screen doesn't usually show up unless I cycle power, at which point it doesn't tell me anything useful either.
The crash seems to be so total and abrupt that I can't find any useful logs to figure out wtf is going on.
I've run CPU and GPU stress tests on OCCT and furmark, and they only seem to cause issues unreliably.
It seems thermally related, since the problem is less severe when the AC is running, but unfortunately the AC is currently on the fritz exacerbating the issue, but fixing the AC isnt really a definitive solution is it?
I noticed >85° C temps on my Ryzen 5600x, so I changed the thermal paste, and while temps dropped by 5-10 degrees, the crashing hasn't abated.
GPU temps hover in the 50s-60s range in Tarkov, which seems quite reasonable. It's a 3070 for what that's worth.
The other potential culprit is my geriatric 600w power supply, over 10 years old at this point, but why would it be thermally related?
I'm not running any OCs, and I've maxxed out my fan curves to help, not that it's doing much. My case has two extra blowers, and I even took off the sides to help with airflow.
Anyone have any idea as to how I can figure out what exactly is wrong? I can't really afford to replace my GPU, but I could consider buying a new PSU if need be.
This issue didn't plague me when I first built this current setup with the same components, but it's been several months and I'm losing my mind :(
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
9mo ago
Race is far too predictive for me to give this real credence. I'm only racist because I seek to understand reality, and unfortunately reality is racist as hell.
It's rare indeed that a rational agent is worse off with additional Bayesian evidence, and as mentioned, race is very strong evidence.
It's certainly not everything, as even most HBD-ers would accept, but goddamn do theories for why the world looks the way it does fail utterly without considering it.
As far as I'm concerned, the policy of acknowledging both race and additional information you have about a person is strictly superior to doing the same but ignoring race. I'd be more concerned if a black doctor was treating me since I know about how much AA they receive, I'd be less concerned if the doctor publicized his SAT score or had other objective markers for performance like a specialization in a field where his race counts for nothing (I doubt that's the case in the US, but I could be wrong). This is where AA in general taints by association, said doctor could absolutely be someone who managed to get in without not so subtle nudges, but since they usually lack a way to prove it, they're automatically discounted in the eyes of a rational agent with no additional information.
To use your example of running into a young male in a hoody at night, yes you should be significantly more concerned if he was black, the stats don't lie. Certainly you should avoid being in that situation in the first place, but feel no shame about crossing the street well in advance.
What does replacing the Big Bang with God lose out on? Both of them share the attribute of serving as a termination point for materialistic explanations. Anything posited past that point is unfalsifiable by definition, unless something pretty significant changes in terms of our understanding of physics.
Simplicity, in the information theoretic sense, since you're dispensing with all the complexity involved with God. And that is the case, while waffling about omniscience and the lot might sound simple in natural language to a brain that, at the first go around, doesn't see all the glaring issues with that package deal, good luck showing the Kolmogorov complexity isn't ridiculous. And complexity needs to be justified, and boy does God not constrain expectations in the least.
If there's an unmoved mover/uncaused cause, that means that there's at least one non-materialistic answer that's unavoidable. Materialism's whole point is that no non-materialistic answers are necessary, that it offers a seamless answer to all our questions. This is a seam, and not a small one either. And as I argued in our last go-round, it's not the only such seam.
Explaining "all but one" beats the alternatives on offer. Mathematics is not considered invalid because it begins from base axioms. Besides, our intuition is hopelessly flawed in such matters, whether or not the Big Bang was an Uncaused Cause remains an open question in physics, and the universe doesn't give a shit about how much of an affront it is to our sensibilities it is to have things like that around. Time itself ceases to have meaning both before the Big Bang (which started the clock), or in more prosaic entities like black holes.
Besides, why isn't the Big Bang covered by "materialism"? It can very well accept such a primitive, since nobody claims that black holes are a failure of the same. Our intuitive notions of causality went out the window the moment quantum mechanics, with all it's superposition, entanglement and reference-frame/observer dependent definitions of cause and effect arrived.
If it conflicts with intuitions or our notions of "satisfying" answers, so much the worse for the latter. The math does a better job, or at least works while our intuitions halt and catch fire.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
10mo ago
I don't know about you, but if I lived a life of at least several decades in Narnia, then the fact that I returned as a child is hardly sufficient to make me suppress or deny the memory. There's willful ignorance, and there's that.
Not to mention that she has her family to corroborate her claims.
My money is still on mental retardation.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
1mo ago
Honestly, my approach is, fuck it, why not?
Well, there are actually reasons why not, such as the hope we can find a less ghoulish cure, things like mirror therapy for phantom limb (well, that one's already gone, its just that maybe there's an equivalent), or the fact that they might go on disability.
But if someone who is otherwise healthy and financially sound wants to chop off pretty much anything for any reason, my opinion as a psychiatrist-about-to-start-training is a shrug, presuming I was convinced that nothing else we could do would help.
Surgeons aren't that gung-ho in my opinion, maybe it's because I worked too long in Onco Surgery, but I've seen more cases turned down as non-resectable or not worth it than those that were done knowing it was futile. Surgeons usually want what's best for the patient too, even if it's in conflict with their wallets. They're rich enough that's not the biggest deal.
Chop off a mole, a limb, a dick, anything at all. As long as you make sure you're not a burden on the rest of us, it's not my business, unless you ask me for my advice.
PSA:
For the love of all that is unholy, avoid Tinder if you find yourself at a point in your life that dating apps are appealing.
Hinge and Bumble are much better, at least from the perspective of a guy.
Why so?
Well, the women on Tinder are, in my experience, spoiled brats who expect male attention to be handed to them on a silver platter, as breakfast in bed. The design of the app, while more egalitarian than Bumble (which requires women to be the ones to approach you first, unless you pay), incentivizes much more mindless swiping. You are one cut of meat among many others, and the 1% of guys who are prime Wagyu are pulling most of the women (a mild exaggeration, it's probably more like the standard Pareto deal of 20% getting 80%). Even if you're lucky enough to match with a bored girl looking at all the options, they're congenitally lazy. Why wouldn't they be? They've got a million horny men to choose from and can afford to be picky.
In contrast, Bumble, by forcing the woman to make contact, is actually doing guys a favor. A hi or hello means a lot more when you know for a fact that she's into you, and trust me that low bar counts for a lot.
Even Hinge, with its focus on limiting matches daily (cynically, a ploy to make you pay for more), means that your profile is likely to get more consideration than a surface judgement. You can expect people to actually read the damn bio.
Your time and attention are far better rewarded on the latter two, though of course anyone blessed enough to be handsome will likely get what they desire on any platform. I'm hardly ugly, just average in terms of facial attractiveness (optimistically a 7 out of ten when I've grown out my beard and lost weight, as I have now), but I find that charm, wit and general markers of intelligence (like the ability to write a bio more entertaining than a dictionary), are more viable ways to stand out.
I'd rather not brag, but I'm frankly stunned at the sheer disparity. I tentatively wager that this isn't an India-only phenomenon, and if anyone is soured on online dating, branch out from Tinder. If you're a handsome Chad, by all means carry on, but if you need to sell yourself with something other than just looks or a Ferrari, give it a whirl. This presumes you don't have the option of dating in the workplace or hitting up bars, but you wouldn't be reading this if those were the case.
(I have a longer draft from when I was very drunk, and it's surprisingly well written, slightly more sober yet hungover me is impressed, but it says much the same)
PS: It's a damn shame that the OG OkCupid is dead and a conglomerate is wearing its corpse. But I wouldn't have been legal to use it when it was actually good, so what do I know.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
7mo ago
Err, it's the entire rest of my comment.
What most civilizations would find unbearable and deserving of an outright war of eradication, such as regular bombardment of population centers by rockets, the Israelis make tolerable through technology, even if it involves sending missiles a hundred times the expense to blow them up.
They desalinate enough water to thrive in a desert that hasn't had far better days since the Bronze Age, when human-caused desertification ruined most of it.
They have chip fabs, and while I didn't bother to look it up, I doubt that even the Gulf States with their trillions have the technical capacity to build the same, at least not while having locals in charge. I emphasize it because they're close to the pinnacle of human technology, as complex as any supercollider, but profit and power generating in themselves. We build cathedrals these days, but to turn sand into thinking rock.
You don't forge a technocratic marvel like Israel in the midst of hostile territory without much in the way of natural resources without human stock that are several cuts above the average.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
5mo ago
Infinite universal cycles, simulation, and God are all equally non-materialistic, and it seems to me that information theory doesn't apply to non-materialistic explanations.
I genuinely do not see how that applies. Why is a simulation or an infinite universe non-materialistic? I'm not being intentionally obtuse, I don't see it.
If a simulation bottoms out in a basement universe, then there's clearly a materialistic explanation for everything running inside it for one.
Infinite cycles of universes, multiverses and the like do not mean that they don't meet the criteria, which I consider interchangeable with materialism for all practical purposes, of being described by the "true" laws of physics, or at least better ones than we have today, which work mighty well within the one universe we have to work with. Ignorance is not the same as incompatibility.
I don't think you can write a computer program that produces either "God" or "A looping Universe" or "The computer the universe is being simulated on" as output in any meaningful sense
You can produce entities with a conception of "God" by running human DNA, plus a support structure for the same. That's how we ended up running about and uttering His name.
The Kolmogorov complexity of a concept can be much less than the exhaustive description of the concept itself. Pi has infinite digits, a compact program that can produce it to arbitrary precision doesn't, and the latter is what is being measured with KC. I believe @faul_sname can correct me if I've misrepresented the field.
A Big Bang is defined by extrapolating backwards from the laws of physics, as well as additional supportive observations. If you posit a God that's responsible for the Big Bang, then he's got that much complexity and much, much more.
Further, it's the combination of complexity and no added value when it comes to constraining expectations that severely disprivileges claims of God being a more succinct/favorable/supported explanation for anything, let alone the origin of the universe.
Christians did not reject the concepts of math or gravity or the rocket equations.
Abiogenesis? Evolution? Don't tell me there isn't a sizeable number of Christians who deny either/both. At the very least, I presume you believe that God set up the parameters to produce either.
The whole claim of Materialism is that it was better because it left no need for anything further
No, it can be better because it's better than everything else on the table.
There are no forced conclusions are forced. All reason is irreducibly axiomatic. We all believe as we will. We each make our bets and take our chances.
I see no reason to disagree. As Yudkowsky said, there's no argument that can convince a rock.
Because the math says it happened, but the math also says it can't happen. That is just another way of saying "we don't have a good explanation for this phenomenon."
"Our explanation is better, even accounting for incompleteness"
Our "intuitive notions of causality" are the foundation of Materialism. Abandon those, and what remains? If you get to appeal to miracles, why shouldn't I?
No? I mean, to hell with the initial reasons for why people adopted materialism, that is irrelevant in evaluating its truth value, or if not entirely irrelevant, then hardly the most pressing aspect.
I fail to see how the Big Bang counts as a miracle, as the word is commonly used.
The math doesn't do a job at all.
It predicts the universe originated from a pointlike singularity, which both conforms with observational evidence, and is more than the Bible gets right.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
6mo ago
I am under the impression that most of the side effects can be minimized, if not avoided, by a sensible regime and cycling.
I'm idly curious, I'd like to be better informed before trying it, since I'm well aware of the risks involved.
what I've gathered of your comments you haven't exactly optimised protein intake, sleep and workouts
Undoubtedly, but you try managing the last two while working as a doctor! About the only muscles that get a good workout are my glutes from running up and down the stairs. There are Ortho bros who manage to stay shredded, but I'm not them. I've heard that someone who doesn't even lift yet takes tren gains more muscle over a period of time than a natty person working out.
only positive effect would be that you'd have increased muscle growth
And what do muscles entail? Attractiveness? Higher social standing? Luck with the ladies? I'm not in it for the sake of being a beefcake.
At any rate, I have tried working out consistently for about 6 months when I was in college. Sure, I lost weight and became more toned, but I certainly didn't look very muscular. I am aware I probably did a pretty bad job of it, especially when it came to nutrition, but it's not like I've never hit the gym. I find it boring and painful, and in this case I see a tempting shortcut and only wish to know what are the odds of their being a bear trap under the leaves (for certain definitions of bear).
Rolls up sleeves
Aight, I'm here to pitch. I might not be a psychiatrist, yet, but it's that or die trying so I'll try and defend the much maligned field.
On an object level. You're mostly right. Psychiatry is largely pre-paradigmatic. We only have very vague ideas about the underlying underpinnings of many of the most common diseases.
We can find pretty reliable correlates in some cases, such as subtle differences in neuronal wiring or the activity of larger regions that associate with mental illnesses like depression, autism, OCD and so on. Unfortunately, much like the discovery of Tau proteins in Alzheimers, just because we have a marker for the illness does not mean that reversing the marker will reliably reverse the disease. All the drugs that claimed to reduce neurofibrillary plaques did jack-shit for actually curing Alzheimers.
However, being a part of modern scientific medicine, it cannot but assert that mental disorders can be explained by studying the body, the contradiction being that the day psychiatry discovers the bodily cause of mental disorders will be the day that it ceases to exist as a specialization of medicine, for said cause would fall under the jurisdiction of another specialization: If it’s in the brain then it would be neurology, if it’s in the genes it would be medical genetics, and if we were to discover a new organ in the body then a new specialization will be born to study it, leaving psychiatry in the past.
Oh boy.
For example, autism
Now, we’re going to get a little technical. Grey matter ripples into peaks and troughs called gyri and sulci, respectively. According to researchers from San Diego State University, these deep folds and wrinkles may develop differently in ASD. Specifically, in autistic brains there is significantly more folding in the left parietal and temporal lobes as well as in the right frontal and temporal regions.
“These alterations are often correlated with modifications in neuronal network connectivity,” Culotta says. “In fact, it has been proposed that strongly connected cortical regions are pulled together during development, with gyri forming in between. In the autistic brain, the brain reduced connectivity, known as hypoconnectivity, allows weakly connected regions to drift apart, with sulci forming between them.” Research has shown the deeper theses sulcal pits are, the more language production is affected.
Yay! We have a neurological, albeit still rough, understanding of what's going on here.
And yet, pray tell what a neurologist is going to do about it? Take an autistic child to a neurologist or neurosurgeon and ask for them to be cured. I'm sure they're too kind (for all their ego), to laugh you out of the room, but all they can offer is pity and a referral to a shrink or SALT.
Similarly, depression is primarily a disease of the brain (leaving aside conjectures about the gut brain axis, general inflammation and so on). Can a neurologist do anything about it?
Well, nothing a psychiatrist doesn't already do. In other words, therapy, meds and more aggressive interventions like electroconvulsive therapy (and ketamine, LSD and so on).
What have you achieved, barring a rebranding?
Even as we begin to understand some of the underlying processes of pathophysiology in depression, such as why rebooting the brain with induced seizures works when meds fail, it does not change the fact that ECT works beyond reasonable doubt.
In a world where we suddenly discovered, with perfect accuracy, the exact neurological underpinnings of mental illnesses (and didn't just cure them in the womb or immediately developed miraculous treatments), you know what would happen?
Specialization of labor. In other words "neurologists" doing the same shit as psychiatrists do today.
You're falling prey to semantics and fuzziness of definitions.
Geriatrics is a perfectly respectable specialization in medicine despite, last time I checked, there being no "old age organ" (well, maybe the thymus). Huh. Why hasn't their lunch been taken by all the cardiologists, oncologists, neurologists and other people with well-defined magisteria?
Specialization.
It is convenient.
It works.
On the other hand there are the encyclopedists, who will argue that the fact that we haven’t discovered the bodily sources of mental disorders does not mean that we won’t succeed in the future. We have certainly made discoveries in this direction: Not only do we know now that it is impossible to be sad or mad without a brain, but we also know what specific brain part or substance is required. But even after all the advances in neurology, still no neurologic exam is indicated for the diagnoses of mental disorders, and for good reason. Because ultimately, what decides if someone has a mental disorder or not are arbitrary criteria. The fact that homosexuality is no longer a mental illness is only because of the fact that society has shifted its values towards the acceptance of diverse sexual orientations, were it not for that fact we would speak about the “homosexual brain” just as we know speak about “the depressed brain”. We could also speak about “the carpenter brain” or “the the writer’s brain”, and treat all of those conditions as illnesses.
You poor man. You've been beaten to the punch by Dr. Scott Alexander Sisskind on several occasions, though I'm too lazy to link more than one, but which handily contains links to yet more ink spilled on the topic. Worry not, it happens to the best of us.
So are mental disorders real? Of course they are. Whether they are mental or disorders, that’s another question. They are real because they are a set of behaviors that have been observed to occur together: Feelings of sadness, self-harming ideas or behaviors, inability to feel pleasure, these are all things that are real, observable, measurable, and treatable. But are these symptoms a mental problem? Are they a medical problem, or a problem at all? This is highly debatable, and in any case, not a solid foundation for a science.
My answer is a resounding mu that brings all the local cattle to the yard.
None of this matters. Not that I really see any reason to call it "highly debatable".
You mistake medicine as practised as "science" whereas what doctors outside research settings do is closer to engineering.
I don't particular care that we don't know the exact cause of depression. I know of multiple batteries of tests that, with reasonable accuracy, tells me whether or not a given patient will benefit from counseling, medication, and other interventions, and which, when measured serially over time, tells me if it's working. And vice versa, if you take someone who doesn't have the markers of depression and feed them SSRIs, it doesn't make them happier. So what if it isn't actually a deficiency of serotonin that causes depression? The drugs, while less effective than desirable, are not useless.
I really don't see any reason to twist yourself into knots about whether depression is "mental", as opposed to what, neurological? Biochemical? All of the above in same capacity, depending on your appetite for abstraction?
"Medical"? Come on dude.
To draw an analogy, let's say you have a malfunctioning PC, or maybe a server rack in an AI datacenter. A vascular surgeon notices the water cooling is leaking and bills you $70000. A cardiologist checks the PSU. The neurologist makes sure the RAM is seated tightly or otherwise asks their neurosurgery buddies to bend some socket pins and reapply the thermal paste.
Whereas what psychiatrists are doing is both a combination of relatively simple things like giving drugs dusting the fans, as well as the equivalent of prompt-engineering an LLM. The brain, despite operating according to the same physical laws as an H100 loaded with GPT-4, is just as nigh impossible to understand from first principles, and some higher order discrepancies difficult to treat by looking at bare meat/metal. That does not mean we exist in utter epistemic helplessness. What we do works. It is not perfect. It is not complete. It is, however, not useless or a waste of time. What is is semantic arguments and forcing allied specialists to do jobs that they're no better equipped to do than we are, simply because that sounds neater and more scientific. Categories and doctors were both made for Man, and not the other way around.
Complex systems that aren't amenable to direct analysis at the elementary level are still amenable to modification and control. That is what psychiatrists do. If we were folded into neurology, then congratulations, all you would achieve is neurologists performing the same tasks a psychiatrist does, and likely end up creating a new subspeciality which is all but psychiatry in name (and we already have the opposite approach with some of the nerdier shrinks becoming neuropsychiatrists) .
This is the same line of thinking that would assume that, if one day we replaced the Standard Model with a Grand Unified Theory of Everything, then we no longer need those overly abstracted biologists, and those fussy chemists. Why, just model everything at the level of fundamental quantum mechanics? What do you mean the computer caught fire when I tried to diagnose ADHD using Feynman path integrals?
None of what you say is forbidden knowledge tacitly swept under the rug by psychiatrists, the witch doctors. The typical reaction, from anyone who has acquaintance with a textbook written after that fraud, Freud, would be the same long-suffering sigh as if you accosted an economist and told them that their models are flawed because they assume rational actors acting in enlightened self interest. They know that's not how it works. They're more than happy to fudge their idealized calculations or look for deeper trends. It's not an easy task, and in many ways, the interaction of many minds operating under relatively well-defined incentives is easier to model than a single one which is a fractal, sweltering, wet and buzzing ball of noise on the verge of criticality .
It's all rather moot at that point.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
5mo ago
You would hardly be the first or last person to make that observation on the discrepancy between pure demographics and advertising, be it here on the Motte or elsewhere. That's not the same thing as this being false, it's obviously true for anyone who has eyes, but it's been debated ad-nauseum here.
Thankfully my diligent use of ad-block prevents such visual and auditory pollution from entering my sensoria, most of the time. That's ads themselves, regardless of content. May the day come soon when AR filters get rid of them from my perception of non-digital reality.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
11mo ago
On an unrelated note, it's weird to me that you lot in the West drink beers with 4-5% abv. In India, that's the alcohol content of alcopop, whereas Real Men™ drink the stuff that's 8%, right at the legal limit for beer.
Miss me with what weak watery stuff.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
4mo ago
Pakistan-Iran attacks updates: 9 killed near Iran’s southeast border
For those not following along, Iran seems to have picked a bone with Pakistan for sheltering militants and has launched airstrikes within their territory. In retaliation, the Pakistanis seem to have launched their own attack on Iranian soil.
I'm not a very good Indian, by any standard, but even I am chortling at the whole affair. The US was far too timid about striking the Taliban when they fled over the porous border, and it took goddamn Bin Laden for them to take off the kid gloves and send Gravy Seals in. On the other hand, fellow Islamist nations seem to be far more laissez-faire about just taking each other on, on a whim, and I can't say I really feel like Pakistan is the aggrieved party.
Honestly, I don't even see much in the way of downsides for a hot war between the two, whoever loses, the rest of us win.
I find poetry grossly overrated, it's been largely superseded through song.
I can count on the fingers of a single hand the poems I find compelling enough to strike a chord in me, often producing outright frission, such as Howl by Ginsberg, Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas, and for more left-field examples:
The tiger
He destroyed his cage
Yes
YES
The tiger is out
By a six year old child named Neil who has more talent in his undropped balls than Rupi Kaur has in her whole body.
Or less seriously:
Heaven brings forth innumerable things to nurture man.
Man has nothing good with which to recompense Heaven.
Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill.
By Zhang Xiachong, a bandit leader from 17th century China.
When Alex Turner puts I Wanna Be Yours by John Cooper Clark to music with his dulcet tones, he blows dry words on paper out of the water.
Poetry is dead because it's largely obsolete, no two ways about it.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
5mo ago
I suspect that insurance companies would ask you to take a driving test, how else are you they supposed to know you have the minimum acceptable levels of competence, before further actuarial concerns?
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
7mo ago
Decided to redo the cover art for my novel:
Any strong opinions on which one looks best?
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
10mo ago
I really don't care enough to litigate this further or look up the primary source that is-
checks notes
An almost century old children's novel.
That being said, if there's "magic that makes forget most of their time there", then that entirely undermines the whole "problem" since it's possible the poor girl isn't in willful denial, but genuinely believes that she hallucinated the whole thing.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
1yr ago
I've been long providing semi-solicited medical advice online that people who experience chronic fatigue, sleepiness and tiredness should get assessed for sleep apnea.
And now that I've finally decided to take a dose of my own medicine, the results are in: I've got severe sleep apnea, especially the positional variant which is much worse when I sleep on my back.
I stop breathing approximately every 2 minutes while asleep, and have had my oxygen saturation drop to as low as 70% for prolonged periods. No wonder I feel like shit during the day!
There are a bunch of potential therapies, ranging from using a CPAP machine to keep airways patent through the night, surgical removal of tissues in the throat, mandibular splints, and even ensuring that you lie on your side so that you're less prone to apnea.
Has anyone ever been treated for it? I'd love to hear your experience so I can decide on what to do for myself, it's rather frustrating to find out that I've got it at such a young age, especially since I'm not obese. Even more annoying if it turns out that I took antidepressants for so many years only for my symptoms to not actually be due to depression :(
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
5mo ago
It's to say that stratification by resource distribution is key to all human hierarchies and it's hard to see this system being abandoned any time soon. Therefore UBI will be distributed according to how closely some individual or group fulfils the role the 'system' considers prosocial in that context. Social credit, belonging to the right group, participating in a certain way, all this varies, but the core structure will be similar - UBI if.
There are different grades of what we might call "post-scarcity", from the worst being something akin to modern welfare or even medieval charity, to the unbounded abundance if we somehow get infinite energy/negentropy (I'm not counting on that).
Thus, even if we don't all receive an equal share, given the sheer amount of resources out there, even just in the Solary System, I fully expect that even with a non-egalitarian distribution, we can all be wealthy beyond belief, or if you've got an exceptionally vivid imagination, leading the kinds of lives available to a modern billionaire or at least a multi-millionaire. That's still true even if the people with the lion's share are truly absurdly well off, the former represents a rounding error on available resources for a long, long time.
In other words, if they were motivated to maintain hierarchies, it could be on the scale of who has dibs over entire star systems or galaxies while the rest of us are merely filthy rich.
One can argue that, from the perspective of a medieval peasant or even nobility, we're already there, at least in the West.
Call me a congenital optimist, but I don't expect that the people who do opt to keep the rest of us alive after we're economically obsolete are likely to keep us at subsistence levels or even what we might call in hardship today if they wanted to cheap out, there's always VR, and I'm not one to turn my nose up at it. I'd obviously prefer a more equitable distribution, but there are plenty of ways to slice the lightcone such that the scraps provide eudaimonia..
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
6mo ago
Muslims are a tiny minority aren't they? What are they going to do, vote Republican?
I can agree that they're not stupid, but willful ignorance? Absolutely.
A God that doesn't do anything else except set up a clockwork universe and then fuck off and never intervenes where anyone can see it isn't an entity worth worshipping.
Cue apologetics about how if God was obvious, then there would be no need for "faith", which is absolutely howl-worthy when you consider how convenient it was that there were clear and obvious miracles right up till the point we could properly document and examine them.
That is willful ignorance, for all that they're drinking their own kool-aid. At some point a rational entity who hasn't fucked their own priors sees that an explanation without a million epicycles that reduced to God doesn't really do anything is better stated as God not existing.
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