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throwaway56034on Your brain runs your body using something like a budget

The examples of my prof were way more basic: It's fine that they didn't know the term panic attack, but they should be able to know how fear feels. The person in my example said they started so sweat, had high heart rates and was feeling somehow unwell every time they had to enter an elevator. An adult usually is able to verbalize that experience as fear, though the actual trigger may not be known to them. The person in question first went to a general practitioner, who found no physiological cause and transferred the patient to a psychologist.

throwaway56034on Your brain runs your body using something like a budget

Good points! The research and practical experience for many of these aspects is already there, though mostly only in the context of therapy, i.e. in cases where people already experience problems to a degree that it negatively affects their personal and/or professional lives.

What I mostly meant was similar to your stress example. Many people don't actually know what stress is, how it manifests, and most importantly, what you can do about it. Many also don't know that people can have very different thresholds of tolerable amounts of stress, and that those thresholds can siginificantly differ for the same person doing different kinds of work/studying etc. (e.g. some people have very low tolerances for arguing/discussions in work groups but can effortlessly dig themselves into research for 8 hours, others can do meeting marathons but have problems with physical work affecting their mood and so on).

In these cases many aspects of both the basic knowledge, ways of prevention and methods of coping with stress are well known, they just aren't taught in regular school. There is slow progress, though. In my country there often are e.g. social pedagogues in primary and secondary schools, helping with these kinds of things - though often only when they already manifest themselves as problematic behaviour.

throwaway56034on A Survival Guide to Medieval Fairy Tales

>But when you say the US is "exceptionally violent" that is indeed what you're saying.

Compared to present countries, not the past, the US indeed is exceptionally violent, especially given the wealth in the country.

* Homicide rate is among the highest of all OECD countries, for example: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?location...

* The US still has legal capital punishment.

* The whole approach to the penal system being very revenge-based, resulting in very high incarceration rates etc.

* The prevalence of sexual violence, e.g. compare the US with Canada: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-health...

throwaway56034on Your brain runs your body using something like a budget

Absolutely, I myself am obviously procrastinating right now, I know it doesn't exactly help me achieve my goals for today, yet here I am, replying to you instead of doing the work I should :)

The problem I see is that there is no institutionalized way to educate about emotions. For abstract knowledge and training rational thinking we have schools and universities. For feelings/emotions, though, we were are all effecively just getting homeschooled: We can learn from our parents etc., but that's pretty much it.

Perhaps there should be something like a school for feelings. This obviously is a hot topic, though, with different cultures having different ideals etc., especially when it comes to things like purpose in live, like we could already experience in another thread :)

throwaway56034on Your brain runs your body using something like a budget

I had no intention to offend, sorry if I came across like that. But this is actually illustrative to the point at hand: Neither in my family nor in my whole social environment do I know a single religious person, yet most of those people feel some kind of purpose or meaning in their live.

Why humans actually do this is of course a hot topic in both philosophy and psychology, for at least a few thousand years now. I think the cognitive root lies in us being social animals. Being social means needing to keep the group together, which makes communication necessary, to align individual actions to a cohesive whole. Communication is hard, though, misunderstandings lurk everywhere. We therefore have to interpret the signals we got from the others, fill the gaps of the unsaid. We necessarily have to infer intentions, meaning, relations to us and so on. If we couldn't to that, we couldn't form cohesive groups, and therefore cease to exist as a species. We could become some other species, but not the current one, having discourse over the internet, sitting in different parts of the world.

All higher order concepts like "love", "purpose" etc. are more elaborate functions to sucessfully and peacefully live together. They actually exist, even physically, as processes in our brains and bodies. But they aren't necessarily ojective. If we as a species would have originated in a physically different world, say as spherical creatures living in the oceans of Titan, we would also have different sets of feelings and emotions. The idea of "love" of such a species could be a completely different one than our human concept.

throwaway56034on Your brain runs your body using something like a budget

As gods obviously don't actually exist[0], this is just a reframing of the idea that humans give meaning to their own existance.

[0] Don't want to start a flamewar here, but there are so many contradicting ideas of god out there that at least most of them must be wrong. So regardless of some conception of god being true, the purpose is still felt by all the faithful.

throwaway56034on Your brain runs your body using something like a budget

That's how humans think, we often can't fathom abstract ideas directly at all.

Consider the idea of "time". We only think of time as movement in space, with either us moving or the time moving. I left that experience behind me. Looking ahead to the future. She has a great future in front of her.

throwaway56034on Your brain runs your body using something like a budget

What you've written is indeed obvious, but IMO that wasn't the point of the article. Consider this quote:

"Consider what happens when you’re thirsty and drink a glass of water. The water takes about 20 minutes to reach your bloodstream, but you feel less thirsty within mere seconds. What relieves your thirst so quickly? Your brain does. It has learned from past experience that water is a deposit to your body budget that will hydrate you, so your brain quenches your thirst long before the water has any direct effect on your blood."

IMO the point she tries to convey is that the budget doesn't track actual, objective resource use, which also means that individual budget constraints are not only constrained by the actual physiology, i.e. with training (mindfulness and so on) one can move the baseline and thus e.g. stress resistance.

Not a new point either, but you'd be surprised how many people don't know their own feelings. My psych professor told countless anecdotes of patients who didn't know that the disquieting feelings they experienced when e.g. being inside an elevator were actually a panic attack.

throwaway56034on NSA Spied on Denmark as It Chose Its Future Fighter Aircraft: Report

Russian “defence” spending is skyrocketing,

This is wrong, it barely keeps up with inflation: https://www.sipri.org/commentary/topical-backgrounder/2020/r...

This is a whopping 9% of the yearly defense spending of the US.

throwaway56034on Freiburg: Germany's futuristic city set in a forest

> We lived on the bottom floor and mainly relied on wood heat from the backofen in the center of the home to heat the rest, and when we didn't/forget to keep it goin I could literately see my breath while I laid in bed as I lived the furthest away from the source, and as someone born and raised in SoCal it was incredibly terrifying at first.

That is highly unusual for Germany - and most probably you'd be eligible for major reductions in rent paid until the landlord fixes this (depends on the actual temperatures attainable with the heat source).

Anyway, nuclear wouldn't help here: Only a tiny fraction of housing in Germany heats with electricity. It's mostly gas, central heating from power plants (with hot water pipes laid into the neighborhoods), or geothermal.

throwaway56034on Freiburg: Germany's futuristic city set in a forest

France didn't really build new plants either, the existing plants are just as old as Germany's. The one big new project under construction, Flamanville, is already way over budget, more expensive than renewables - even before taking decommissioning into account

throwaway56034on Sensors of largest digital camera snap first 3,200-megapixel images at SLAC

The article has the answer to your question: There was no lens, just a pinhole. The lens and filter system gets integrated "over the next few months". They tested the sensor array, not the lens.

throwaway56034on Sid Meier: “I don’t think I could make Civilisation today”

> Civ6 feels like a bad design problem.

Definitely! Multiple core mechanics are downright broken. Religion for example is a complete waste of time, as it has practically zero consequences outside of the mechanic itself. I can routinely beat the game while completely ignoring religion.

throwaway56034on AMD Announces Ryzen “Zen 3” and Radeon “RDNA2” Presentations for October

Well, Nvidia invented CUDA, it's no surprise that they won't give up their competitive advantage by properly supporting OpenCL or SYCL.

Edit: Also, SYCL should be supported by most things already supporting OpenCL, like Tensorflow for example.

throwaway56034on Sid Meier: “I don’t think I could make Civilisation today”

Perhaps Civ6 just isn't your thing, but your experience could also be exactly what Sid Meier describes: You have to grasp the different mechanics to get to the fun, strategic part of the game - which takes a while. Like in chess, where learning the game doesn't end, but actually only really starts once you know the basic rules of piece movement.

As a non-native speaker, I sometimes have a similar experience when reading English books written in a rather ornate style, i.e. where I don't know some of the vocabulary: I can follow along just fine, I get the story arc etc., but the book just isn't fun because lacking the vocabulary I can't grasp the fine details of the atmosphere, the character descriptions etc.

throwaway56034on What harm do minimum wages do?

The company can pay you anything between the legal minimum and the marginal product of your labor. As the labor market can never be perfectly competitive (i.e. an econ 101 textbook market), there will always be an employer who rationally calculates that paying more than minimum wage will be profitable - which in turn has an impact on the decisions of the other employers. This has nothing to do with them being nice guys.

throwaway56034on What harm do minimum wages do?

Marx didn't actually claim that labour should "get all the profits" - in fact he went to great lengths to explain his criticism of the contemporary socialist movement for demanding that (in Capital, Volume 1). Instead he differentiated profits from surplus value, the latter also containing the share of profits needed for reinvestment, further capitalization of the company etc. He criticized the 19th century socialists for demanding all profits should go the workers, because that would mean the inevitable failure of the company (the competition would reinvest, furthering productivity, and in the end outcompete the company paying out all profits).

Instead, Marx argued for worker control over the profits.