IC4RUS

That might not immediately seem so bad, but imagine that you didn't own a car (due to being too young or too poor). Then, suburban life may start to feel positively suffocating.

Furthermore, there is a distinct lack of independence for teens who can't drive - the nearest non-residential building can be more than a mile away. Even if you can drive, the popular destinations for errands are big-brands like starbucks, walmart, and CVS. Public transport is practically nonexistant.

This is obviously anecdotal and I think you make a good point, but it should still be considered that being familiar with American suburbia does not mean that it's impersonal and almost surreal nature is invisible to those who grew up there.

This set off the crank alarm for me, which got even louder when he made claims about it being a sort of cure-all for psychiatric and even non-psychiatric problems (depression, PTSD, anxiety, concussion recovery, and even cognitive performance). Furthermore, he appeared to lack a technical or mathematical understanding of the technology itself, using only vague analogies about aligning the frequencies of different parts of the brain and whatnot. However, I'm not the one with titles and prestigious academic positions, so my complaints about his lack of evidence weren't taken too seriously.

I asked him direct questions, but he didn't answer much other than that his brother, a chiropractor, had helped him write the software for prTMS and designed the protocol (which I thought was very odd). Furthermore, he described prTMS as TMS-like treatment that was based on EEG readings and supposedly personalized, but given at a fraction of the intensity of usual TMS treatment (which made me skeptical that it would work).

I'm surprised that he was able to attract so many big-name patients and supporters - which included the Notre Dame University football team too. And, given that his lofty claims about prTMS are completely unsupported by research, I'm not surprised that it has reached the public eye.

Some of what was discussed in the article was news to me ($10 million in funds he said was for him, claims about Newport's surveillance, etc) However, none of it was surprising. He appears to have a history of disputes with his partners and employees (including at other offices that offered prTMS not mentioned in the article) and Notre Dame (he 'treated' their football team). It's a bit ridiculous to hear him claim that people's lawsuits and complaints are simply a result of jealousy and malicious behavior, considering his history of deceit.

Edit: it appears that he's under investigation for the university funds he took: http://rewired.inewsource.org/UC-San-Diego-Investigation-10-...

However, other sources I've read state that police don't necessarily have to do this unless they want your testimony to be court-admissable (https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/police-questioning-m...).

So I'm a bit confused - could someone clear this up for me?

It's not too often that I see words like 'tentacular' and 'bathos' in the same article as phrases about metaphorical dick-sucking (see above).

More seriously, I've been getting more into literature and literary critique recently, and am a bit surprised about how personally affronted he seems by the book - is this sort of reaction common in literary criticism?

Yeah it's not so subtle in some...

Wish there were more ads like this today - they're much more visually impressive than the ones I see today

So, it's difficult to say whether or not selective schools (ivy league and whatnot) actually prepare students better, or if they just tend to admit people who have high earnings potential in the first place.

Might sound like a nitpick, but it's pretty relevant if you're comparing a low-cost public school to a selective private one.

So, consciousness being computable may not necessarily imply that any given computer could do so. One potential way for this to be the case is if consciousness is tied to some form of hypercomputation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercomputation), which can provide outputs that are not turing-computable. This would mean that a traditional computer couldn't simulate consciousness, but that another hypothetical machine might be able to.

I'm also not sure about why the exact number matters - 200 kids matters a lot when future professors are drawn from the pool of students who have successfully completed a PhD.

2. Treating 'nicely' is far from enough if another company is simply able to offer a better package. For example, are small/new tech companies not deserving of keeping their investments because they can't pay their devs as well as some large ones? Or if they can't match the prestige of other companies?

I think you're missing the point of the comment.

It's interesting to connect this to ideas of confabulation in neuroscience/psychology to that of DP/DR. There's evidence that we may actively confabulate stories to explain what we're doing, even if we don't actually know. This is explained a bit here: https://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/the-situati.... Oliver Sack's writings explore the topic a bit too, where those with severe mental injury or impairment would create unrealistic stories to explain their bizarre actions.

So, I wondered if part of the DP/DR involved losing the ability to confabulate and create a narrative regarding why I was acting the way that I was. And, part of my recovery was trying to recover that 'delusion.'

Furthermore, the article 'Anxiety Changes Depersonalization and Derealization Symptoms in Vestibular Patients' has a couple relevant sections:

'It has been hypothesized that “depersonalization is a hard-wired vestigial response for dealing with extreme anxiety, combining a state of increased alertness with a profound inhibition of the emotional response system.” The proposed mechanism is that the medial prefrontal cortex inhibits the emotional processing of the amygdala and related structures in response to increased anxiety resulting in a dampening of sympathetic output and reduced emotional experiencing that leads to hypervigilance, attentional difficulties, and emptiness of the mind.'

This provides evidence that DP/DR involves lessened emotional response. Later, the article states:

'The role of the limbic system and the amygdala in particular is very important, since affective memory connections to past experience could be an important factor in making new perceptions feel familiar and real'

So, I wonder if DP/DR is partially caused by a lessened ability to create narrative/reasoning about control over one's actions (with the emotional hyporeactivity exacerbating the feeling of detachment from the environment). And, if you consider these often-faulty narratives to be a bit delusional, then maybe you could make that conclusion!

Although laboratory experiments suggest it is possible that some substances used in Ayurveda might be developed into effective treatments, there is no scientific evidence that any are effective as currently practiced.[11] Ayurveda medicine is considered pseudoscientific.[12] Other researchers consider it a protoscience, or trans-science system instead.[13][14] In a 2008 study, close to 21% of Ayurveda U.S. and Indian-manufactured patent medicines sold through the Internet were found to contain toxic levels of heavy metals, specifically lead, mercury, and arsenic.[15] The public health implications of such metallic contaminants in India are unknown.[15]

This is the sort of site I'm imagining: http://www.logicalincrements.com/

However, my comment was more arguing against what you said with the context in a previous comment:

"What's so great about the web, that makes you say it is one of mankind's greatest inventions?"

-I don't believe that an invention being used largely for unhelpful uses makes the (still large) amount of benefit any smaller. So, even if educational use is dwarfed by facebook, it's is still a wonderful tool for many.

Well that's an argument from ignorance if I ever heard one. Much of anything I've ever learned is from the internet ( e.g. Wikipedia, books, oddly specific youtube vidoes on car repair), and I'd have a much harder time in my career without the amount of material on Math/CS online. One can literally find top level educational material for free, whether from sources like MIT opencourseware or the many textbooks freely available. I'm sure other people have found great uses for the web too.

I suspect you're caught in a bit of a bubble.

So, if one isn't facing a certain ethical situation, they can't make judgements about the response? This seems like quite poor reasoning to me.

Besides, why can't one accept that two different actions committed by different nations are both wrong? I suspect you're assuming that the posters are from the US too, which isn't necessarily true.

I don't see how this happens at all. Dystopian military force? And if someone tried, it'd be a major conflict.

Some are motivated by other considerations, such as impact of work and work/life balance.