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Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

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Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#321

Post by torben-friis »

gavinray wrote: post #295
vmception wrote: post #202

Has someone that thought they were taking LSD ever turned into a permanent schizophrenic zombie or in a mental institution, or is it all urban legend. If someone that didn't know they were predisposed to mental illness, is it applicable to dismiss their experience in order to maintain how safe LSD is? If any of this is true, are there any sources aside from "my friend's friend's brother took too much and now he is...…

Permanent schizophrenic zombie, maybe a bit extreme, but severe and traumatic long-lasting psychological damage is a not-uncommon phenomena. I had a fling with psychedelics in my teens, and everything was great until the one time it wasn't. I was taking psychedelics pretty much every weekend, and by my count have tried over a dozen of them. Had an experience with LSD which completely shook me to my core and gave me s…

If you don't mind me asking (and this is clearly a sensitive topic so feel free not to reply): What do you mean by PTSD and flashbacks? As in, was the trip so bad that remembering it creates anxiety, or are you reliving unrelated traumatic memories that weren't an issue to live with before using the drug?

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#322

Post by GuB-42 »

vmception wrote: post #202

Has someone that thought they were taking LSD ever turned into a permanent schizophrenic zombie or in a mental institution, or is it all urban legend. If someone that didn't know they were predisposed to mental illness, is it applicable to dismiss their experience in order to maintain how safe LSD is? If any of this is true, are there any sources aside from "my friend's friend's brother took too much and now he is...…

When I looked up into illegal drugs, I found it very difficult to find reliable data.

On one hand you have anti-drug people, usually backed by the authorities. Listen to them and all drugs will make your body rot, give you hallucinations like datura, and for some reason cause complete addiction after a single dose.

Drug users on the other hand will tell you that it not as bad as alcohol/tobacco/coffee/... that concerns are unfounded, that police is the only risk, etc...

The truth is almost impossible to find. Even peer reviewed research is lacking. I guess there are several reasons for that. Availability of controlled substances. Ethical concerns regarding experimentation. Issues with neutrality.

Now from what I gathered about LSD (and psychedelics in general): these are very random. If you take a reasonable dose, you are most likely going to have a nice, fun trip and nothing more. But it can also fuck you up for years, or maybe bring significant improvement in your life. High doses increase the chance of extreme effects and nasty bad trips, but it shouldn't kill you unless you are dealing with industrial quantities. The substance itself is not addictive, but the social context may be. The big problem is that there is no way to tell how it will go for you. There are ways to improve your chances, but it will always be random.

As for fake LSD, there are cheap reagent tests for that. They are not 100% reliable but that's better than nothing. You can also send your sample anonymously to a lab that will do a much more accurate GC/MS analysis for you.

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#323

Post by JabavuAdams »

keldaris wrote: post #311
harimau777 wrote: post #246

I don't know if this would be my "one question" if I could ask the most brilliant minds in science, but something that always bothered me: When I took physics they basically said "at first scientists were disturbed by the fact that magnets imply that two objects are interacting without any physical contact, but then Faraday came along and said 'the magnets are actually connected by invisible magnetic field lines' and…

I'm a physicist specifically working with magnetic systems, but I have very little pre-graduate teaching experience, so take this attempt to answer the question with a grain of salt. The reason some people regard Faraday's original explanation of the eponymous law (it is worth noting that at the time it was widely regarded as inadequate and handwavy) as illuminating is because Faraday visualized his "lines of force"…

That interview is so good! What a dick, but what a teacher!

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#324

Post by willhoyle »

superbaconman wrote: post #296

I'd love to see shows like 'Nature' and 'Planet Earth' but focused exclusively on single celled organisms; I find that whole world very interesting. Journey to the Microcosmos on youtube is the closest thing I've found.

Cells at work! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cells_at_Work!

It’s an animated series that takes place inside the human body. I’ve been meaning to watch it myself. It’s supposed to be pretty accurate.

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#325

Post by gavinray »

torben-friis wrote: post #321
gavinray wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Permanent schizophrenic zombie, maybe a bit extreme, but severe and traumatic long-lasting psychological damage is a not-uncommon phenomena. I had a fling with psychedelics in my teens, and everything was great until the one time it wasn't. I was taking psychedelics pretty much every weekend, and by my count have tried over a dozen of them. Had an experience with LSD which completely shook me to my core and gave me s…

If you don't mind me asking (and this is clearly a sensitive topic so feel free not to reply): What do you mean by PTSD and flashbacks? As in, was the trip so bad that remembering it creates anxiety, or are you reliving unrelated traumatic memories that weren't an issue to live with before using the drug?

It literally feels as if I'm being transported back to that same night, starting to relive it all over again. It's entirely illogical but if you knew what happened it might make more sense (happy to elaborate here and give a brief description of what happened/why it messed me up so bad, I'm perfectly okay to talk about it now).

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#326

Post by api »

JabavuAdams wrote: post #284
umvi wrote: post #119

I would like to understand how cellular biology processes actually work. Like, how do all the right modules and proteins line up in the right orientation every time? Every time I watch animations, it seems like the proteins and such just magically appear when needed and disappear when not needed [0]. Sometimes it's an ultra-complex looking protein and it just magically flys over to the DNA, attaches to the correct sp…

They don't. This is a pet-peeve of mine, and it's reinforced by animation after animation. Everything is being jostled around randomly. The molecules don't have brains or seeker warheads. They can't "decide" to home in on a target. The only mechanisms for guidance are: diffusion due to concentration gradients, movement of charged molecules due to electric fields, and molecules actually grabbing other molecules. It's…

The best programmer analogy I can think of is: imagine a system where every instruction always runs concurrently and every output influences everything with varying probabilities.

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#328

Post by JabavuAdams »

spodek wrote: post #287

Consciousness. How is it possible that the thread is up 5 hours and ctrl-f consciousness returns nothing?

Because no one knows what it is or even agrees on a definition. Consciousness is a pre-scientific concept at this point.

There are attempts to rigorously define it. I'm currently reading this paper, but not really convinced: https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#329

Post by JabavuAdams »

Crazyontap wrote: post #149

What happens when you actually fall inside a black hole and what is the singularity. I never really understood what happened really when the guy fell inside it in Interstellar and how come he started seeing all those photos. I just accepted it as Hollywood bs. I know my question is based on a movie but would still like to know what will someone witness (assuming of course they somehow live)

That was just Hollywood BS. But it made for a good story.

The singularity is a sign that General Relativity breaks down -- an artifact of the theory, not necessarily a physical thing.

Re: Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?

#330

Post by achenatx »

I consider that there are 4 levels of scientific writing.

1) news articles/lay press - basically terrible and typically get things wrong

2) scientific lay press (scientific american, discover, science news) - get things right, but generally no data/citations or nuance

3) journal summaries - get things right, citations and data for everything. Good summary of the latest scientific thought on a topic. Tend to push a point of view, which generally will be right, but that educated people can debate. Dont always show the data, but at least refer to it. These help you to get up to speed with the primary experiments that were used to establish current thinking.

4) first source articles - typically make claims too broad for the actual results. But has all data. Often times the claims don't follow from the data at all. Generally have to work in the field to understand strengths and weaknesses of methods and you cant just take the conclusions at face value.

As a PhD student, I used #3 a lot to get centered on a space. To understand 4, I typically had to learn directly from my research advisor or other grad students that specialized in an area.

My point here is that you can find these summary articles in journals (microbiology, immunology,virology etc). They are published infrequently so can be hard to find, but they exist and you should look for them.

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