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Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

reuters.com

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Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#181

Post by sewercake »

ip26 wrote: post #156
dkersten wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I struggled with RSI for a couple of years until I read John Sarno's "The Mind-Body Connection" on the recommendation of someone from HN. Sarno's thesis is that many chronic pain conditions (those without a clear physical mechanism, such as RSI or chronic back pain) are psychosomatic. I've had two RSI episodes in my life. The first one was similar to what you described and went away without any physical interventio…

1) Is it worse in your mouse hand? Don't overlook the mouse. 2) Is the KA2 wide enough for your shoulders? A split keyboard was the ticket for me, due to the set of my shoulders.

what split keyboard are you using? Do you recommend it? Currently in the market for one.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#182

Post by ethbro »

jimmy1 wrote: post #15
nateberkopec wrote: post #10

Over the next 20 or so years, expect a lot of syndromes/conditions to be reclassified, as Michael Sharpe puts in the article, as "biological condition[s] that can be perpetuated by social and psychological factors.". I struggled with RSI for a couple of years until I read John Sarno's "The Mind-Body Connection" on the recommendation of someone from HN. Sarno's thesis is that many chronic pain conditions (those withou…

> the pain is real, it's just caused by processes in your brain, I don't find this particular statement very revolutionary. We have known for a long time that physical pain is manufactured by the brain as an evolutionary tactic to help us prevent further harm to ourselves. If we didn't "feel pain" when we were on fire, we would burn to death.

It goes a level deeper than that. Learned from dating a very good massage therapist for awhile, our minds relatively commonly cause physical changes that lead to pain symptoms.

E.g. you subconsciously favor your back, leading to overexertion of other muscles, leading to physical degradation and pain from those muscles

Talking with her was eye opening on the amount of sub-major muscle "stuff" that is constantly subconsciously working in our muscular-skeletal system.

"You hold tension in your neck" is a remarkably complex statement (and solution).

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#183

Post by nathan_long »

zzocn wrote: post #131
nathan_long wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, genetically, is a race?

Whether you are white or black or have epicanthic fold or stuff like that is 100% encoded in your genes. Someone saying "in terms of IQ, asians > whites > blacks", which is easily provable, will get in big trouble.

> Templeton used the same strategy to try to identify race in human populations that evolutionary and population biologists use for non-human species, from salamanders to chimpanzees. He treated human populations as if they were non-human populations.

> "I'm not saying these results don't recognize genetic differences among human populations," he cautions. "There are differences, but they don't define historical lineages that have persisted for a long time. The point is, for race to have any scientific validity and integrity it has to have generality beyond any one species. If it doesn't, the concept is meaningless."

> ...

> Among Templeton's conclusions: there is more genetic similarity between Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans and between Europeans and Melanesians, inhabitants of islands northeast of Australia, than there is between Africans and Melanesians. Yet, sub-Saharan Africans and Melanesians share dark skin, hair texture and cranial-facial features, traits commonly used to classify people into races. According to Templeton, this example shows that "racial traits" are grossly incompatible with overall genetic differences between human populations.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/1998-10/WUiS-GSRD-07...

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#184

Post by tomp »

llamaz wrote: post #177
alexandercrohde wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are huge proponents of tabula rasa. Consider, fore example, I do research and realize trait X correlates with IQ. Also suppose trait X is highly visible so that I can easily identify who has it (just for concreteness, let's say it's black eyebrows, and 20 IQ points). This would drive the internet batty. The same is true if any such correlations are found for a number of other traits.

The purpose of your circumlocution is to remain ambiguous enough to fall back to a less controversial position when called out. Just say what mean, which is that skin colour correlates with IQ. I hate it when your ilk make race vs IQ seem like an edgy new opinion that is being suppressed. It used to be mainstream globally, but we moved past that through dialectics. When the "bell curve" book was published, we resurre…

> The purpose of your circumlocution is to remain ambiguous enough to fall back to a less controversial position when called out. Just say what mean, which is that skin colour correlates with IQ.

No, parent is rightfully pointing out that it's IQ in general, not any specific trait X. X could stand for race/skin color, but it could also stand for ancestry (e.g. Askenazi Jew, which IMO have same skin color as the rest of Europeans), or sex, or maybe other things as well.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#185

Post by [deleted] »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #142
theli0nheart wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you tell someone their back pain is caused by repressed emotions, you get what happens in the article. But...you would (or could?, or should?) never tell someone that, because how would you know? Maybe there is some link but to conclude that it could be the case is pretty silly. So it's not like that's a stigma, it's just a statement not based in fact that evokes a strong reaction because you're telling someone…

Yeah, I think the thing a lot of commenters are missing is that the medical field itself has a pretty bad history of telling people "it's all in your head" when there turned out to be specific, treatable biological causes. This is especially true for CFS, where for a long time it was seen not just to be psychosomatic, but actually "not really that bad." As another example, stress was blamed as the main cause of ulcer…

[deleted]

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#187

Post by fenomas »

zzocn wrote: post #131
nathan_long wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, genetically, is a race?

Whether you are white or black or have epicanthic fold or stuff like that is 100% encoded in your genes. Someone saying "in terms of IQ, asians > whites > blacks", which is easily provable, will get in big trouble.

> Whether you are white or black or have epicanthic fold or stuff like that is 100% encoded in your genes.

Sure, but that doesn't mean your race is. Race is a subjective classification based on objective characteristics.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#188

Post by vgoh1 »

nateberkopec wrote: post #10

Over the next 20 or so years, expect a lot of syndromes/conditions to be reclassified, as Michael Sharpe puts in the article, as "biological condition[s] that can be perpetuated by social and psychological factors.". I struggled with RSI for a couple of years until I read John Sarno's "The Mind-Body Connection" on the recommendation of someone from HN. Sarno's thesis is that many chronic pain conditions (those withou…

When I was a child, I would suffer from terrible muscle contractions in my calves. I would get a charlie horse in the middle of the night, and it would not go away completely for over a day. I couldn't put my foot flat to walk properly, and it was very painful. After about a dozen of these attacks, I noticed a pattern - they would occur on the night before something that I was dreading - a test I wasn't prepared for, a school dance, etc. Once I realized this, it never came back again. On the outside, it appeared that I was faking the muscle issues, but actually, my mind was causing charlie horses deliberately. It was very odd, but will always stick with me that the connections between body and mind are not well understood.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#190

Post by twentythree »

dTal wrote: post #168
onion2k wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately we have some people who put their beliefs and politics above science and will actively act against investigation only because a line of inquiry could result in evidence against their view. You say that's people putting beliefs and politics above science, but while that's a rational thing to suggest there are two problems with it. Firstly, a lot of issues don't and can't have any scientific rationale beh…

You know, I think science is a lot more capable of converting "is" into "ought" than it is commonly given credit for. I think there's room for a kind of "moral pragmatism". After all, our morals all came from somewhere - some type of reasoning drove their creation, be it conscious or evolutionary. There's a rock bottom, and science can expose contradictions between our core axiomatic beliefs, and our more shallow cac…

> cost savings compared to life imprisonment

Minor nitpick: it's actually more expensive to execute someone than to imprison them for life, mostly because of the increased legal costs.

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