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The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

quotulatiousness.ca

171–180 of 275 posts

Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

#171

I had a weird tick as a kid where anytime someone said something to me I had to mentally adjust the length of the statement so the number of words was divisible by 5. So for example if you said "Are you going to school today?" I'd add "my good friend, Will" in my mind. It drove me nuts, but I was unable to stop. Then one day it just went away. Still have no idea what that was but it plagued most of my childhood. I re…

Did that seem to have a mathematical basis... a form of counting and grouping... or did it seem to have a rhythmic basis, like you needed a 'dah dah dah dah DAH' pattern in speech?

Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

#172

I remember a panel on a news program years ago where the one guest was a psychologist who was treating "untreatable" drug addicts by getting them "hooked" on running or weightlifting or martial arts. They would stop drugs but would instead be doing martial arts for hours a day or running 20 miles every morning. Then he would start treating the addiction personality and causes, but in many cases the patients would jus…

Psychology has the sizable problem that everything is a disorder but very little is actually known about any of them.

You can't say "ADHD is this" and point at a definitive cause, tis just a bag of related symptoms that is geared more towards consistent diagnoses (i.e. you go to five different doctors and they all diagnose the same thing) rather than attachment to a common underlying cause or consistent treatment plan and success phase.

This isn't to say psychology is useless, many people find great help in it... but when it comes down to it, it is scientists (who as a whole have some of the biggest problems in being good at being scientists) trying to describe malfunctions of the highest abstraction on the most complicated class of things known to exist... and just scratching the surface.

The last D is for Disorder... it's a value judgment and the question does need to be asked: if something isn't causing significant problems, is it a disorder? The answer isn't clear cut and people are going to draw the line in the wide grey area in different places.

The solution must be neuroscience continuing to advance to higher levels and replacing the vagueries of psychology with justifiable cause and effect explanations. It is advancing but still a far way off.

Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly, I used to get anxious about if I'd turned off the lights, locked the door, made sure the oven was off, etc at night. So now I count one number for each "thing" I do, and I know that I need to count up to 5 to "prove" I did it. Then, later in bed, I know I checked the front door because I know I counted to 5. You'd expect this would transfer to the "well, are you sure you counted", but I'm never actually an…

This is kinda funny, because I've had the opposite outcome. Well, "ish", because my situation isn't directly comparable. When I'd leave the house in the morning, there were always five things I needed to have with me: Wallet, phone, badge, glasses, and smokes. Once a month or so I'd get to work and realize I had left one of these at home. It was a tragedy to be caught an hour from home without my phone or glasses. It…

Two solutions I’ve used for similar are to tie the items to something I NEED - such as connect them to car keys - or get multiple copies.

Not always going to work but if I need to remember to bring a bag with me I put my car keys in the bag; harder to forget.

Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

#174
This quote is from a longer article. The specific comparison made there is how we relate to transgender people.

> Imagine if we could give depressed people a much higher quality of life merely by giving them cheap natural hormones. I don’t think there’s a psychiatrist in the world who wouldn’t celebrate that as one of the biggest mental health advances in a generation. Imagine if we could ameliorate schizophrenia with one safe simple surgery, just snip snip you’re not schizophrenic anymore. Pretty sure that would win all of the Nobel prizes. Imagine that we could make a serious dent in bipolar disorder just by calling people different pronouns. I’m pretty sure the entire mental health field would join together in bludgeoning anybody who refused to do that. We would bludgeon them over the head with big books about the side effects of lithium.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...

Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scott Alexander. He used to post on slatestarcodex.com, but has since moved to astralcodexten.substack.com .

You do realize that Scott Alexander slatestarcodex astralcodexten are all acronyms, right?

Probably, but Scott Alexander writes on the latter two things so realizing this is nothing but a curiosity. Dearest Claxton is also an anagram and as it so happens dearestclaxton.substack.com is not written by Scott Alexander. Or anyone really.

Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is absolutely not how strokes and broken bones are diagnosed. If one of your bones breaks, you have a broken bone. Whether it hurts, or stops you from doing things you'd like to do, is an unrelated question.

Someone close to me broke their arm, and had to have it pinned. As it healed the bone rotated and shifted slightly. In discussing whether they'd need to try to correct this movement via surgery, the doctor very much said "it's a problem if it's a problem". When it fully healed the person had full use of their arm, so the doctor was satisfied with the outcome. The doctor did also say that different countries had diffe…

This is akin to totalling out a car for cosmetic damage - are you trying to fix it back to as it were (may be impossible or exceeding costly or risky) - or is it working to get it back to good enough?

And circumstances make this different - a sports star is going to want to do everything to improve performance, whereas an office worker may just want functionality.

Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

#177
post #83

I personally have problems with doors, and stuff that should be locked. I can never be sure I locked properly. Totally did backtrack unreasonable distances just to check if I had closed the door. It's all fine when it's my door. Worst case scenario, I get robbed. However it's more of a problem when it's someone else's door. Worst case scenario, they get robbed, and that's a different story. Or pets get out... Obvious…

Have you tried getting locks that only release the key when locked? If you've got the key in your pocket then the door is locked. More time efficient than taking a photo every day.

Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

#178

I heard/read a similar mental "hack" about folks who fear leaving things "on" when travelling. Take pictures with your phone of all the things just before you leave. They'd be easily available, verifiable evidence that the stove is off, all the doors are closed/locked, furnace set, water shut off, and so on.

level 2 of that game, tho': "Is the list I made to know what to take pictures of complete? Did I really take pictures of everything? What about that thing I'm not remembering right now and wasn't on the list but I'm pretty sure I didn't turn it off, either ..."

Sunflower Labs https://www.sunflower-labs.com/ and Ring will have products for you. The latter is only $250 and you can stick a drone at home you can look through.

I think you could also just stick one of the Amazon Echo Shows that has Drop-in or Auto-Answer or whatever (the Google Nests don't, disappointingly).

Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

#179

This story is cute, but my concern for calling it a treatment method is.. what is stopping the OCD from transferring to a new concern? Surely, it's not about the actual hair dryer. If they suddenly get concerned about leaving the heat on or the lamp plugged in they will quickly run out of room in the car.

The way I see it is that if a server has run out of disk space, I first find the largest file, find the processes with that file open, truncate the file and restart them, and only then do I diagnose how I even ran into disk space issues.

If I don't do that, I might lose uptime. This gives me head room.

Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

#180
What's sort of disappointing is that many online games are capitalizing on these kinds of maladies.

A friend worked for a company, and hoarding behavior is one of the things baked into the game. People collect things, and some people compulsively so.

I would imagine "whales" might correlate with this.

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