_game_of_life

You can't logic yourself out of beliefs, I completely get that. Once you realize how depressed you are, you're usually also mired in terrible thoughts and negativity.

But in my experience, I HAVE to try to logic myself out of patterns of behaviors. I also need to fight those beliefs, as futile as it seems. Hear me out here:

I think one of the most toxic things was when I thought it was a chemical imbalance completely out of my control -- so there was nothing I could do but take pills and passively wait for my brain chemistry to correct itself.

I have recovered from like 4 or 5 episodes of major depression now, and the key for me every time has been a) realizing I'm depressed b) waiting for/creating a day when I have the energy to think and address this, and then c) reflecting on and fighting against thoughts and behaviours extending/reinforcing the depression.

Obviously this is a messy and inefficient process with a lot of slippage. And maybe it doesn't work for other people, or maybe I've got something else wrong with me than just major depression, and that's why it works.

Anyways, not trying to invalidate your experience, just sharing what I've found works for me.

I'm still waiting on my "new kind of science." Wolfram makes all sorts of interesting claims, maybe he should focus more on interesting results.

The thing about therapy, is that you usually want benefits to last for a duration that makes the effort put in worthwhile.

>Only four studies looked at longer-term outcomes after CBT.

>No clear evidence showed maintained improvement in symptoms of anxiety among children and young people.

If you take a look at the results further they conclude:

>The few controlled follow-up studies (n = 4) indicate that treatment gains in the remission of anxiety diagnosis are not statistically significant.

I'd like to remind you that "significant" in the context of a meta-analysis means "statistically significant." If something performs at the level of a self-help book, most lay people would agree that is not a very effective treatment, even if it has a statistically significant impact.

It is done because otherwise in the 9/10 cases where things do not improve, you feel you have failed. Much easier if the client fails you instead.

You can tell yourself, "well, maybe next time they'll get better -- after all, it takes many relapses before people kick a drug habit!"

This is a lot easier to swallow than "Oh god this stuff barely is working at all, I'm mostly just a gigantic resource suck and the money I'm paid would be much better spent getting this person stable housing and other support--but that's a lot less attractive to tax payers."

I got out of social work when I had that realization. Initially I coped by saying I was a "Good Person" in a helping profession, so I never looked too deeply into whether any of this horse shit actually was "evidence-based."

Every Psych 101 class should cover the current findings on efficacy of psychotherapies. But they never do, for obvious reasons.

If you look at a longitudinal, high-quality trial (or meta-analysis, since you'd be very lucky to find any of these) of ANY psychotherapy for a specific problem, they are all pretty underwhelming in terms of efficacy.

Even CBT for conditions like anxiety in youth is poorly supported. This one, for example, shows that it is no more effective than a self-help book:

https://www.cochrane.org/CD004690/DEPRESSN_cognitive-behavio...

You can also see the similar conclusions in these meta-analysis:

https://www.cochrane.org/CD008712/SCHIZ_cognitive-behavioura...

https://www.cochrane.org/CD012614/ENT_cognitive-behavioural-...

I think it is important to realize that medications and therapies for most psychological illnesses are not particularly effective.

We try them because they are still better than doing nothing at all.

There also seems to be decent evidence that receiving empathy and compassion from therapists is more effective than their mode of therapy (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_factors_theory).

I have often seen in the mental health industry, people overstating the efficacy of treatments. CBT and anti-depressants are particularly bad offenders.

And as much as their past has portions that are super fucked up, wasn't that also a reflection of American society at the time?

I just think that for as much harm as the FBI historically caused, they've also busted enormous criminal rings and done a lot to reduce organized crime. I genuinely think Americans would be worse of without them, even with my bias as a leftist that typically loathes alphabet soup surviellance agencies.

I love the topic too, a comedian whining about "cancel culture."

So great. Sparks joy. Definitely not a tired subject, more please!

http://mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html

https://bellard.org/nncp/

I don't see examples of high performing symbolic AI based compression algorithms anywhere, but again I am very ignorant, do you have examples?

I'm not a Rustacean but these memory related CVEs need to stop. Any small steps toward a memory safe(r) OS is good news to me!

I find it faster and more accurate to use a specific package in an interpreter than query Wolfram Alpha or use Mathematica. And for the simpler things a search engine will do!

That's odd to me. You don't think they'll look at the design and learn from the advances made during those centuries of hours? That's hardly throwing it all away.

The consensus in research was that Rust is extremely promising for designing a next gen memory safe OS. Some data structures are troubling to implement (paging table, etc.) but the benefits are significant.

This is just a DE but if it's a sign of more things to come potentially over the next decade I am very excited.

Linux is always going to be fragmented, and other OS (ex. Android) are either already integrating some Rust or are strongly considering it (ex. Microsoft).

Also I think about how young we are as a species that uses the scientific method to question our reality.

Maybe all of my knowledge today will not stand the test of time, and will be considered just as silly as someone from the 1600s seems to me today? (ex. A natural philosopher that believes in abiogenesis)

But a mutual respect and bond can exist if we both strive to prove ourselves wrong, adapt, and grow.

A lot more people can script now, so open source packages of computer algebra systems (Sage, numpy, scipy etc.) Probably take a small bite.

And then you have closed source ones to consider like Matlab.

The second largest chunk probably being bitten out of it is its web and app competitors (desmos, symbolab, etc.) Alexa rankings show that these see a lot more traffic and engagement (2 - 3 times).

Finally, a small portion of its functionality is now covered by search engines. I imagine they'll continue to gobble things up. There are also a few good Web tools, I used one for a linear algebra course I found a lot better than the freeware version of WolframAlpha that came with my Raspberry Pi.

I can't find any reports on its revenue or net income. I would be super curious who uses it. Maybe it's growing... who knows? I also remember it being recommended a lot in the early 2010s.

There are a lot of incongruities in research surrounding them that psychology fails to address and warrants skepticism.

For example, more recent longitudinal studies on personality disorders like Borderline Personality Disorder (BDP) pretty consistently show that 80 - 90% of people once diagnosed with the disorder no longer meet the diagnostic criteria after a decade.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abst...

I find this interesting, because Abnormal Psychology usually teaches that personality is resistant to change, and thus personality disorders rarely show improvement.

Moreover, studies like this one

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%252Fs11920-014-044...

indicate that Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is actually pretty controversial among psychologists, with a wide variation in how it is measured and diagnosed. They note a lack of longitudinal studies as well -- perhaps NPD shows a similar phenomena as BPD where 9/10 no longer meet the diagnostic criteria several year later (despite showing other social defecits).

Am I a narcissist for challenging psychologists to provide better scientific evidence for the disorder? Hopefully not! Yet I still view the construct of personality disorders with skepticism.

They were not designed to survive 7-8 decades regardless of diet, because by this time reproductive success (and therefore fitness and pressure) is zero for women and almost zero for many men.

Devil's advocate against this point: Grandparents might increase the reproductive success of their children's children, helping their genes propagate in accordance to Kin theory.

Devil's advocate against Devil's advocate of this point: Grandparents might also decrease the reproductive success of their offspring, since they must care for their own children as well as their parents. Hence, the near inescapable phenomena of dementia as age increases into the 100s, and the trait of Senicide (ex. Ättestupa) in many cultures.

My point being, maybe it is best to avoid categorical statements about "evolutionary perspectives."

edit: Correction, Ättestupa is mythological and not a good example of Senecide. The wiki for senecide has many other examples, however.

Fasting absolutely can have downsides. The link in the comment you are replying to, for example, recommends a five day fast which is a lot longer than I've ever seen recommended.

The first obvious downside is that people with health conditions like diabetes, underweight, immunocompromised, etc. need to consult a doctor first. They would probably call a 5 day fast with zero intake of food or electrolytes needlessly reckless with little evidence to support it over a shorter fast.

Medical studies also tend to be of poor quality and don't stand up to meta-analysis by organizations like Cochrane. For example:

https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...

https://www.cochrane.org/CD013496/VASC_does-limiting-times-y...

The Mayo clinic also argues theres not enough high quality evidence even on intermittent fasting at this point to recommend for or against it in weight loss (where you think it would be of obvious benefit):

https://healthletter.mayoclinic.com/issues/july-2020/is-inte...

Speculating on in-vitro effects and microbiological mechanisms scaling to result in things like cancer prevention or life extension seems like a fools errand.

People saying "oh but it's natural" are also making a naturalistic fallacy. It was also "natural" for much of human history to be infested with parasites and ravaged by disease. Natural is not necessarily good.

Wow, was I ever wrong. This article says it's not too uncommon for people to live 30 years after their transplant. Other articles say that even the obese are eligible for transplantation now. Very impressive.

https://wexnermedical.osu.edu/blog/how-long-do-transplanted-...

That being said, I know life extension and nootropics and all that jazz is a really popular topic with tech bros, so its worth noting the side effects of calcineurin inhibitors are really bad.

It's also neat ciclosporin was isolated from some scandanavian fungus living in the soil. Makes me sad thinking about how once we are able to significantly understand and appreciate genetics and related biotechnology later this century, half of the species on earth will already be gone, their amazing biological traits and compounds lost forever.

Children scream and throw tantrums. Adults channel those emotions into productive means or recreational outlets. Adults understand that their colleagues also experience the same frustrations and emotions, and it's unfair to be a messy bitch and pollute the work environment with that garbage.

I really can't imagine thinking someone losing their cool and composure at their job is a sign of competency, of all things...

What if human knowledge is fundamentally both more inductive and collectivist than we care to admit? After all, Hume's problem of induction (that deductive reasoning stems from induction) does seem to suggest this as a potential resolution.

Isn't understanding mostly a set of connections and relationships about a thing? I can use memorized/practiced knowledge of trig and calc to solve problems, sure, but just like the rat if I was born 4000 years ago I'd probably just struggle with the concept of negative numbers -- with near certainly I wouldn't be able to invent them to solve a maze either.

So I would argue that perhaps all knowledge and understanding seems to be fundamentally inductive, and is hard to conveive of with just a single person in isolation, same as a mouse. Large communities of people with millenia of progress, useful abstractions, and recorded insight though?

Perhpas understanding is scalable with communities and time, and thinking of understanding on the individual level of a mouse or a human is missing the forest for the trees?

That's a great quote. When I worked at a harm reduction site (pre pandemic), I also noticed the meth users seemed to be deteriorating more rapidly than usual, and this was in Canada.

Whatever the solution to this problem is, I worry something has become broken in our societies. You can even see it in this thread, with people quoting a goddamned podcaster (Joe Rogan) and spreading a ton of misinformation about addiction (eg. disputing that addiction is strongly linked to socio-economic status).

Google scholar exists and this crowd is supposed to be educated. This quote from the article says it better than I could:

>"Crystal meth is in some ways a metaphor for our times—times of anomie and isolation, of paranoia and delusion, of communities coming apart. Meth is not responsible for these much wider social problems, of course. But the meth epidemic is symptomatic of them, and also contributes to them."

Then I suffered a disability and came upon the realization similar to Helen Macdonalds, in H is for Hawk:

"There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all.

You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, [...]"

In an effort to adapt to this, I clung to stoicist philosophy. Life is to be weathered, through the development of virtues, and above all else--realizing what you have control over, and what you do not.

Upon becoming homeless, I realized this wise and practical branch of philosophy had not exactly delivered on it's promises. You cannot be destitute, sick, and isolated, and still manage to be happy, despite Stoicist claims to the contrary. This branch of philosophy oddly seems entitled to me now--little wonder it grew popular with intelligentsia, emperors, and now tech CEOs. I grew to far prefer its philosophical progenitor, Cynicism.

For this phase of my life, Albert Camus resonates and brings comfort. Life is absurd. The challenge is not to unravel or create meaning for life, but to image personal happiness in a stochastic world that defies explanation (though some such explanation may indeed exist, it is certainly absurd to human minds. I envy the dismissive confidence of those that proclaim "no point!")

This philosophy has served me far better than the others, though who knows what will come in the twilight of my life. Life is strange, fellow travelers.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a50/1230517/

Goes into depth debunking most of the conspiracies I've heard of.

My best ELI5 for the one you are asking about:

Does a bar of chocolate need to melt completely into a puddle of liquid before it changes shape and becomes softer?

Of course not. The chocolate bar will become mushy and deform before it becomes a liquid.

Jet fuel burns at 800 - 1500 F, whereas steel melts at 2750.

But just like chocolate on a warm day, it loses its strength at much lower temperatures. By 1500 degrees steel is at less than half of its strength.

Have you ever wondered how ancient civilizations managed to melt metals, or create ceramics? After all, they didn't have jet fuel yet!

Well, when some kilns use wood as a fuel source, they can burn at up to 2000 F! Wow! Isn't combustion neat?

The WTC was full of flammable materials like wood, plastic, rubber, and cloth. Jet fuel burns at 1500, but just like a wood kiln, other sources of combustion can make things much hotter.

TL;DR - You don't need to heat something to the point of being a puddle of liquid to weaken it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruelty_to_Animals_Act,_1876

The act states that:

> "Researchers would be prosecuted for cruelty, unless they conformed to its provisions, which required that an experiment involving the infliction of pain upon animals to only be conducted when "the proposed experiments are absolutely necessary for the due instruction of the persons [so they may go on to use the instruction] to save or prolong human life"

It also contains punishments for not giving animals anesthestia, which is a ridiculous waste of resources if "people didn't even think animals felt pain until the 1980s."

To my knowledge Android doesn’t censor the Taiwanese flag emoji at the request of the Chinese communist party, if the locale is mainland China.

But maybe you consider that a pro and not a con.

My emotions are disdain and disbelief that people still gobble up this horseshit. Nothing wrong with that. Do you believe yourself to not have any emotions and are an arbiter of truth and perfect logic?

Please.

That saying doesn't seem to be true at all if you sort by age. If you have your nobel prize by 30 you are an outlier.

There are similar sayings for mathematics that don't hold up. I don't really understand where the perception comes from when it is easily fact checked?

You assume I've neither read the article or researched demonology. I have.

All of the neopagan bullshit and demonic sigils can be traced back to obvious frauds starting in the 19th century, when occultist grifting was in vogue.

This is a simplistic article on an already childish subject.