2,554 karma · joined August 29, 2012
From a Lakatosian perspective, the amyloid hypothesis is not necessarily wrong, but it is not paying off in terms of empirical insights relative to the amount of attention and funding it has received.
I have a cousin that had frequent, overwhelming anxiety attacks. She started eating breakfast consistently and the anxiety disappeared at the same time. Anxiety is strongly linked to gut activity, so the temporal correlation is a smoking gun, even if not dispositive.
For her, "understanding past trauma" was irrelevant to the solution.
Once we have quantum LLMs, the need for intermediate abstraction layers might change, but that's very [insert magic here].
The person your responding to clearly has a desire to do productive work with minimal roadblocks. In one person the roadblock to that desire/expectation might manifest physiologically as depression, in another person as anger, and in another as detachment. Getting rid of the roadblock is what needs to happen regardless of how the emotion manifests.
This does not mean that emotions are not addressed, but that they are addressed primarily as signifiers of a mismatch between the world and one's underlying desires/expectations, not the thing itself.
Sometimes, the desire/expectation of an individual is counter to the good of the overall system and group of people. In this case, a good manager might start by explaining the larger situation so that an individual can update their desires and expectations through the additional knowledge. Then new thinking/perception shifts the physiological experience of those desires (i.e., emotions).
In other cases, the gap between desires/expectations and reality is too big to bridge, which means emotions cannot be resolved in the current context.
Note: some people place electrodes on the tragus, as in this paper, but others stimulate the concha. Tragus needs one two pad clip, concha needs two one pad clips. The rubber pads are just slightly bigger than the eraser of a number 2 pencil.
My use of vagus stimulation is for managing anxiety and promoting digestion / gut motility. I have neck issues that probably impinge on this nerve, contributing to these symptoms. Evidence suggests that the effect isn't purely psychosomatic; when laying on my back with TENS, I observe an increased frequency of GI tract "gurgles" relative to off. The observable product of my GI tract has also normalized somewhat.
Impetuous or not, Peter was likely influenced by the many decisions made by lots in the Hebrew Scriptures. e.g., picking a scapegoat (Leviticus 16:7-10), assigning priestly duties (1 Chronicles 24), dividing land (1 Chronicles 6:54), etc. Furthermore, Proverbs 16:33 & 18:18 indicates the outcome of lots is from God and reduces conflict.
Anyway, ascribing random processes to the divine for decision making, particularly political situations seems to have strong textual support within the Judeo-Christian tradition. I'm curious about parallels in Islam and other offshoots.
Acts 1:21-26 Therefore it is necessary to choose one of the men who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus was living among us, beginning from John’s baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us. For one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection.” So they nominated two men: Joseph called Barsabbas (also known as Justus) and Matthias. Then they prayed, “Lord, you know everyone’s heart. Show us which of these two you have chosen to take over this apostolic ministry, which Judas left to go where he belongs.” Then they cast lots, and the lot fell to Matthias; so he was added to the eleven apostles.
Can you imagine this practice replacing the Papal conclave? Or, pastor selection at your favorite Protestant group?
In college, I became a scale-dependent realist, which is to say, that I'm most confident of theories / knowledge in the 1-meter, 1-day, 1 m/s scales and increasingly skeptical of our understanding of things that are bigger/smaller, have longer/short timeframes, or faster velocities. Maybe there is a technical name for my position? But, it is mostly a skepticism about nearly unlimited extrapolation using brains that evolved under selection for reproduction at a certain scale. My position is not that we can't compute at different scales, but that we can't understand at other scales.
In practice, the rationalists appear to invert their confidence, with more confidence in quarks and light-years than daily experience.