> Lobotomized subjects similarly report feeling intense pain but not minding it I'd sign up for that, actually.
Afterwards you’ll regret it, but you won’t mind it.
“Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”
11–20 of 60 posts
Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”
#12My cousin feels pain or discomfort but only a little. This almost affected her when she gave birth because her water had broken but she didn’t feel any contractions at all until it was almost too late. Luckily she got to the hospital in time and her son was born perfectly normal but it was a bit harrowing.
More interestingly, her son inherited this. He doesn’t feel pain the same way normal people do. Once her son broke his wrist and had to go to the hospital. He wasn’t in pain, but I think they had to pull on the arm to put it back in place properly (is this called traction?). The doctor was putting in all his effort to separate the wrist from the arm, and the dad almost fainted because it looked so gruesome but all the son looked like was mildly discomforted from the tension. The doctor was apparently shocked at how little pain he felt.
The son also pulled out all his teeth on his own, as they got loose. He said it bothered him to have loose teeth, but the act of pulling them out didn’t bother him at all.
Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”
#13i think one evolutionary purpose of chronic pain is to remind about the event which caused it. for example, every time it rains i'm reminded of all the events which caused fractures. hopefully that helps with not repeating them.
I strongly suspect that chronic pain directly reduces fitness by far more than it indirectly (through reminders) might increase it. However, as long as the effects are part of a highly conserved subsystem and also remain mild enough relative to the fraction of the population that experiences them, then there's a good chance they won't be meaningfully selected against.
Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”
#14This reminds me a lot of pain related to finance and gambling losses, underwent by someone being much riskier than they should have been. You can tell someone about the risks of gambling or very-high risk investing, but in my experience the best teacher by far is for them to experience pain from something gone wrong themselves, which is generally them losing a lot of their hard-earned money, and feeling somewhere between 'terrible' and 'I want to kill myself'.
It's the one type of reinforcement that hurts badly enough that it can correct their future actions to be of more reasonable riskiness. A lot of people that I watch go through the psychological cycle of gambling, whether via casinos, cryptocurrencies, stock options, etc, will often not stop until they're forced to by the pain of a terrible loss. It's unfortunate that this is the most effective method for some things to be taught, but that is part of life.
Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”
#15Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”
#16This reminds me a lot of pain related to finance and gambling losses, underwent by someone being much riskier than they should have been. You can tell someone about the risks of gambling or very-high risk investing, but in my experience the best teacher by far is for them to experience pain from something gone wrong themselves, which is generally them losing a lot of their hard-earned money, and feeling somewhere bet…
I didn’t lose a lot but enough to feel it! Trading options can teach you a lot, it is one of the few areas where you need to form an opinion, reinforce it and then have it either affirmed or torn down (at great cost). Sometimes I wish political, social and economic opinions had to withstand such an immediate and potentially costly test, would certain teach some people some things.
Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”
#17This reminds me a lot of pain related to finance and gambling losses, underwent by someone being much riskier than they should have been. You can tell someone about the risks of gambling or very-high risk investing, but in my experience the best teacher by far is for them to experience pain from something gone wrong themselves, which is generally them losing a lot of their hard-earned money, and feeling somewhere bet…
I didn’t lose a lot but enough to feel it! Trading options can teach you a lot, it is one of the few areas where you need to form an opinion, reinforce it and then have it either affirmed or torn down (at great cost). Sometimes I wish political, social and economic opinions had to withstand such an immediate and potentially costly test, would certain teach some people some things.
It definitely took me quite a few lessons to have a good idea what I was doing there myself. Skin in the game is definitely important, and has become increasingly less common in society, to the detriment of many systems.
Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its intellectually hazardous to anthropomorphize chaos, like ascribing a purpose to evolution.
Yup. It always rubs me wrong when some says "Oh, the organism evolved to overcome that environmental factor". It's more accurate to say "The environmental factor selected for a genetic variation that improved fitness."
I understand that's common nomenclature, but to me "selected" always feel like it implies intelligence in some manner. I've always preferred saying "the environmental factor caused evolution" in some manner or something similar.
For example, if feels more natural to me to say "an obstacle in my path may cause me to go around it", compared to "an obstacle in my path selected for me to go around it".
I think of evolution as a system than reacts to conditions, similar to a state machine. It's hard for me to think of those conditions as acting in some way on a system, but perhaps that's just a failure in my own thinking.
Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”
#19[c-f] nociception -> zero hits This surprised me. Nociception is the term you will find in the biological literature because we can't quantify how (for example) a mouse "feels" when it's tail is dipped in hot water but we can quantify the behavioral response and use it as a proxy for the underlying biological mechanism. Once you separate the biological and psychological responses in this manner the reasoning seems (t…
"Nociception" is one of those words which assumes its conclusion, and is a kind of dormitive fallacy. "What is pain?" "Well, it is a behavioral response to a nociceptive stimuli..."
Talking about nociception may be useful once you have already gone through all of the anomalies about pain and made a good case for distinguishing between the different parts and have an implicit taxonomy. But it's not useful for my essay to just jump straight to a handwavy 'oh, you have "nociception" (whatever that is) vs motivation as an example of bi-level optimization'. And once it's all been covered, there's still no particular reason to bring in that jargon unless I need a quote or something using it, which I haven't so far.
Re: “Pain Is the Only School-Teacher”
#20This reminds me a lot of pain related to finance and gambling losses, underwent by someone being much riskier than they should have been. You can tell someone about the risks of gambling or very-high risk investing, but in my experience the best teacher by far is for them to experience pain from something gone wrong themselves, which is generally them losing a lot of their hard-earned money, and feeling somewhere bet…
>but that is part of life
Makes one wonder whether technology can help here. Seems that, so far, there is no substitute for direct experience.