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The Poison We Pick

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Re: The Poison We Pick

#91

Post by jatsign »

maxerickson wrote: post #76
jatsign wrote: post #74

Loved the way the article was written. I read a lot of long-form articles and have a few favorite writers. Is anyone aware of a service that will track individual writers and give an alert when they post something new? Sort of like an RSS feed for an individual writer, regardless of where their new article is posted.

Twitter. No, I'm serious. If you don't want the tweets, just filter links out of tweets. But the part where writers promote themselves on Twitter is true enough.

Not a bad idea, but the first writer I checked, Dexter Filkins, doesn't seem to use it. :\

The most reliable method might be to grab RSS feeds from a lot of online magazines like the New Yorker and parse the Author field. But that'd be a lot of manual work since the feeds change format sometimes...

Re: The Poison We Pick

#92

Post by jimbokun »

dnomad wrote: post #69
dmreedy wrote: post #23

I've been talking with my brother a lot about this recently, especially as a function of the overall decrease of 'meaning' in the world. I think it goes back even further, to the advent of postmodernism in the throes of World War I. They were the first lost generation, but I don't think they were the last. The death of modernism and the accompanying assault on the bastions of objective meaning (as discussed in the ar…

Only a very disingenuous reading of history would lead to the conclusion that our society is less "objective" than the past. What has been lost is widespread confidence and faith in those institutions that previously served as the pillars of society -- the church, the king and the nobility. Now people are completely on their own for their worldview. What's become abundantly clear is that people are very, very bad at…

"A life wasted playing video games for 12 hours a day still beats one wasted slaving away for 12 hours a day on the farm."

This is not at all self evident, can you back up this statement?

"orders of magnitude"

So people living today are literally 100x or 1000x happier than a century ago? Again, do you have any basis for this claim? How do you measure it?

Re: The Poison We Pick

#93

Post by zbentley »

pwaivers wrote: post #36

> "And so we wait to see what amount of death will be tolerable in America as the price of retaining prohibition. Is it 100,000 deaths a year? More? At what point does a medical emergency actually provoke a government response that takes mass death seriously? Imagine a terror attack that killed over 40,000 people. Imagine a new virus that threatened to kill 52,000 Americans this year. Wouldn’t any government make it…

In America, the distribution of deaths has an (at least) equally significant effect as the number of deaths, at least up to a point where the number gets particularly huge.

The distribution effect is often ignored by non-US reporting about various "social maladies" (stupid term, but gets the idea across) in the country: the US is surprisingly internally divided not just in politics, but in empathy. There's often a nation-tribalist effect of "people are dying not in my (city|town|state|area|demographic|politcal party); I consider those deaths sad, but no sadder than someone dying in another country", which I think is important and often overlooked.

Re: The Poison We Pick

#94

Post by foxbarrington »

noahdesu wrote: post #48

The first thing I did when I opened this article was search for "rat", and was happy to see it there. From the comments I saw I had a hunch it might be: I recently finished a really powerful chapter in the book "Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs" which describes an experiment involving rats that ostensibly shows that addiction isn't about the chemical, but rather it's about the environme…

In addition to rat park[0], there's also been an amazing study wrt to Viet Nam vets[1]. Only 5% of soldiers relapsed to heroin use in the first year of returning home. Compared to a traditional 90% relapse rate when addicts treated in the US return to their homes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/05/3718949...

Re: The Poison We Pick

#95

Post by lamename »

foxbarrington wrote: post #94
noahdesu wrote: post #48

The first thing I did when I opened this article was search for "rat", and was happy to see it there. From the comments I saw I had a hunch it might be: I recently finished a really powerful chapter in the book "Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs" which describes an experiment involving rats that ostensibly shows that addiction isn't about the chemical, but rather it's about the environme…

In addition to rat park[0], there's also been an amazing study wrt to Viet Nam vets[1]. Only 5% of soldiers relapsed to heroin use in the first year of returning home. Compared to a traditional 90% relapse rate when addicts treated in the US return to their homes. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/05/3718949...

This is one reason why 1) some rehab is more effective than others 2) people aren't always encouraged to go back to their home environment after rehab

Re: The Poison We Pick

#96

Post by lamename »

cstavish wrote: post #34
tclancy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A fictional world is readily graspable I've been reading "Sapiens" and one of the recurring themes is the idea humanity's success is built on the ability to create useful fictions to bind large groups to a goal or cause. I think we are struggling with that in the first world as we give up religion without a clear replacement fiction that reassures people someone will be there if they get sick and when they die. In a…

Sapiens?

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

a sort of maco-history of human civilization. Highly recommend

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapiens%3A_A_Brief_History_of_...

Re: The Poison We Pick

#97

Post by naeemtee »

chrisgd wrote: post #54

I think almost all problems we discuss every day: political divide, millennial job prospects, student loan debt, drug crises can be traced to wealth inequality. At it's core, all these problems evolve from unfettered capitalistic pursuits. The middle man taking their cut of student loans and having no means to resolve that debt through bakruptcy. No growth jobs that offer no safety net. For profit schools, prisons an…

Singapore has one of the world's highest income inequalities and faces virtually none of those problems. Distilling it down to "income inequality" is reductionist, political scapegoating.

Re: The Poison We Pick

#98

Post by jaredhansen »

noahdesu wrote: post #48

The first thing I did when I opened this article was search for "rat", and was happy to see it there. From the comments I saw I had a hunch it might be: I recently finished a really powerful chapter in the book "Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs" which describes an experiment involving rats that ostensibly shows that addiction isn't about the chemical, but rather it's about the environme…

Regarding the Rat Park experiment, Scott Alexander had a pretty thorough discussion here:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/25/against-rat-park/

Re: The Poison We Pick

#99

Post by latencyloser »

dnomad wrote: post #69
dmreedy wrote: post #23

I've been talking with my brother a lot about this recently, especially as a function of the overall decrease of 'meaning' in the world. I think it goes back even further, to the advent of postmodernism in the throes of World War I. They were the first lost generation, but I don't think they were the last. The death of modernism and the accompanying assault on the bastions of objective meaning (as discussed in the ar…

Only a very disingenuous reading of history would lead to the conclusion that our society is less "objective" than the past. What has been lost is widespread confidence and faith in those institutions that previously served as the pillars of society -- the church, the king and the nobility. Now people are completely on their own for their worldview. What's become abundantly clear is that people are very, very bad at…

I remember in college reading "Laborem Exercens", despite it's very religious justifications, had a major point that resonated with me about the "dignity of work". In my interpretation of it (as a 20 year old), it argued that much of man's (and woman's) meaning in life is derived from the work that they do because of the interactions with the earth that work often creates. If you take that away, much of life's meaning tends to fall to the wayside as well.

That being said, if I stop to think really hard about whether I'd enjoy 12 hours of farm work or 12 hours of video games, I can't say I really know which one I'd prefer. A tired, overworked me says the video games. But I know having had several days of uninterrupted laziness before, that I'd quickly feel lost and unhappy with the video games as well because there's no "larger" gratification from them than whatever immediate feedback the game system provides.

Re: The Poison We Pick

#100

Post by Arnt »

meri_dian wrote: post #44
Arnt wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you intend to say that the Scandinavian countries' deliberate policies against social fragmentation since about 1950 haven't had any effect? Or that they wouldn't have any effect elsewhere? Or that they don't exist?

Scandinavian countries don't have social fragmentation on the scale of the US because they are not the US. Not nearly as diverse, or large. They have much more history and common ancestry and culture and community. There is very little of use that can be gained from comparing Scandinavian countries to the US.

They weren't the US a hundred years ago either, yet they had vastly higher social fragmentation then than they do now.
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