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I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it

theatlantic.com

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Re: I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it

#161

Post by renewiltord »

refulgentis wrote: post #139
Arete314159 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but doing a little research on pubmed in March of 2020 allowed me to see all the research that had already been done on SARS, that showed spread within apartment complexes and indicated these sorts of diseases were almost certainly airborne rather than spread by droplets. And a lot of "outsider" aerosol experts were saying that all year. Still it took the CDC months and months to admit it. When the experts start…

Sadly, the bar, and duration required for the science you describe is higher than "a little research on pubmed...on SARS". I'm a little flummoxed by the description of not rushing science as political.

You: “Not rushing science”.

March 2020

HHS Head: “MASKS DON’T WORK! …”

NIAID Head: “At this time, in the United States, there is no reason to wear a mask”

Dude, looks like someone rushed the science, man. They just rushed it in the wrong direction because they are not good at their jobs.

Bezos was a better epidemiologist in March 2020 than our institutions. I wonder why that is. Maybe smart is smart and dumb is dumb.

Re: I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it

#162

Post by renewiltord »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #150

A good point to make is that unlike most other professions, negligent -or downright dangerous- doctors are not naturally flushed out of the profession by market mechanisms that keep other professions in check. As documented by Marty Makari's book "Unaccountable", state boards rarely if ever sanction doctors for negligence. First, bad doctors are protected by a code of omerta from public exposure [1]. This is often be…

Notably someone as incredibly malignantly incompetent as Christopher Duntsch worked for two years after his first horrible work was discovered.

These people are protected in their incompetence.

For generations we’ve been told that regulation will help. It hasn’t. Suing post facto hasn’t. It’s time to try something else. It’s time to try deregulation and market factors.

Re: I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it

#163

Post by ggm »

phaedrus wrote: post #157
ggm wrote: post #79

At the other end of the scale, unrelated to severe trauma I truly believe we don't come back from anaesthesia entirely the same. I have no scientific basis for this belief, it's just how I feel about the experience of waking up from anaesthesia twice. The "who am I" in this article is strong. Who is asking the questions? Is it the same "me" from before time? The other one, knew what parmesan looked like.

My uncle was noticeably not the same person after coming back from general anaesthesia. So I know what you mean, although I can't think how to sufficiently explain this to other readers who may not have experienced it. I wonder if it's like that old sci fi philosophical conundrum of whether you'd still be the same person if you went through a teleporter that actually duplicates you.

Either Hofstadter or Daniel Dennett has written about this in "the minds eye" when a teleporting system breaks and there are two of "you" and experiences diverge from a common root. Most SF about teleporting passes over what happens to your empty husk after "you" move on. Some do many-worlds. "Waystation" by clifford simak has tanks of recycled bodygunk in the teleporting stations to make new incomers.

Re: I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it

#164

Post by ggm »

lostmsu wrote: post #114
ggm wrote: post #79

At the other end of the scale, unrelated to severe trauma I truly believe we don't come back from anaesthesia entirely the same. I have no scientific basis for this belief, it's just how I feel about the experience of waking up from anaesthesia twice. The "who am I" in this article is strong. Who is asking the questions? Is it the same "me" from before time? The other one, knew what parmesan looked like.

Been through anesthesia, did not notice anything of the sort.

You're told not to drive or sign legal documents for a week after in Australia. That's a very long time to be considered "compos mentis" in my book. Brain plasticity being a "thing" and psychoactive drugs like ketamine or psylocibin being capable of encouraging brain rewiring why would you be "the same person" after that experience: I would argue that literally your brain changed. Well. Anaesthesia is not well understood and the models of what it does are unclear. You think you came back unaltered. Ask an anaesthetist about older patients and mental decline.

I felt different. I felt partially robbed of time (and I know for a fact I was alert for 20min after one, being interviewed for a drug trial, a period of time I have no recall, except what I was told by the consultant yet, somebody was answering questions...

Re: I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it

#165

Post by StavrosK »

v0x wrote: post #153
throwaway205826 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but this is a very interesting question. Why do you ask?

Probably a reference to this[1] although the tweet is since deleted. Basically, some guy had heard/felt a sound like a bass guitar string snapping in his head and had some pretty serious symptoms afterwards, which he thought were physiological but many commenters leaned towards some psychological issue, since the OPs explanations were somewhat nonsensical. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27003207

Yep, that's it!

Re: I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it

#166

Post by m463 »

throwaway205826 wrote: post #13

A few years ago I got some kind of brain illness. Doctors were unable to come up with a strong diagnosis, which is apparently quite common for such cases. One of the effects of the illness was that I essentially became stupid. I couldn’t focus on anything (even trivial activities like watching television), I couldn’t compose emails, I would get disoriented easily. It was absolutely terrifying not knowing whether or n…

To be honest, there are some computer problems that you really only get an inkling of when you've seen "weirdness" like that before.

I remember one debugging session that I traced all over the universe, only to find it was a (kernel) stack overflow. The debugging exacerbated the problem because the debug routines ended up using more stack to log the error.

The problem was strange in that it moved around and things broke that were not a problem.

for reference, most operating systems have stack sizes of many megabytes for userland programs, yet kernel stack sizes are usually just kilobytes.

I expect there are analogies like that with the human body, and with many more systems and with a time-critical life-and-death backdrop, I'm glad I'm not a doctor.

Re: I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it

#167

Post by lostmsu »

ggm wrote: post #164
lostmsu wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been through anesthesia, did not notice anything of the sort.

You're told not to drive or sign legal documents for a week after in Australia. That's a very long time to be considered "compos mentis" in my book. Brain plasticity being a "thing" and psychoactive drugs like ketamine or psylocibin being capable of encouraging brain rewiring why would you be "the same person" after that experience: I would argue that literally your brain changed. Well. Anaesthesia is not well unders…

In many cases patients receive relatively strong pain relief drugs after surgeries, such as opioids. Are you sure the recommendation you mentioned is not due to that rather than anesthesia?

What if the feeling of change is an illusion? Many people after doing shrooms think they felt unity with all life, but I am yet to see where that experience would let them better interact with fellow humans.

Re: I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it

#168

Post by princekolt »

caconym_ wrote: post #50
megablast wrote: post #9

Cars are so incredibly destructive to society, in so many ways. But most people are so blasé about them.

Does anyone else feel like it's almost always a pickup truck? This article^[1] that I found a while back claims occupants of a car are 2.5 times more likely to die in a collision with a pickup truck than another car. It's an atrocity, and it's insane to me that it's almost totally absent from the public discourse. ^[1] https://www.iihs.org/topics/vehicle-size-and-weight

Because it is. Getting hit by a pickup truck is much closer to being hit by a semi than by a compact car. Not only the shape is similar, but pickup trucks can be multiple times heavier than cars.

Re: I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it

#169

Post by princekolt »

sakopov wrote: post #108
megablast wrote: post #9

Cars are so incredibly destructive to society, in so many ways. But most people are so blasé about them.

Most people are blasé? Most people don't have a choice because they don't live in San Francisco or New York where billions are spent on infrastructure and proper city planning which accommodates pedestrians and public transportation.

Most people don’t need a massive truck either.

Re: I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it

#170

Post by qwerty456127 »

antihipocrat wrote: post #160
qwerty456127 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, kind of. I'm pretty sure I am neither my ego nor my body. But besides the body and the ego (the ego being a product of the body) no thing which could be reasonably called me physically exists. I am a rational kind so even if I believed in immortal soul in the Christian sense and could imagine an ethereal projection of my body retaining my memories going to some heaven after my body death, I would still understan…

Does the universe exist? If so, then the atoms that comprise your body also exist, and defining your body as a distinct object within the universe is categorical.

> Does the universe exist?

This is hardly possible to rationally give a logically true answer to this question. I would say it does because despite being unable to tell their nature reliably, despite the fact all we perceive is just a representation of what is, we can observe the fact phenomena (any) take place and if something happens it has to happen to something. Even an illusion, a hallucination, has some physical existence (e.g. in form of a pattern of chemicals and electrical currents in the neurons). Nothing unreal exists © (except the Unreal Tournament).

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