Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

english.elpais.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 137 posts

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#81

Post by nebulousthree »

swader999 wrote: post #68
dsign wrote: post #63

In 2015, I shared lodgings with a student of cognitive sciences. This week, conversations that I had with him and his friends kept haunting me. My friend would talk about how we didn't (don't) know so much about the brain. He was sure that the magic going in there is probably outside of what anybody can understand, and that it would take one thousand years to make any significant progress in said understanding. I hav…

ChatGPT is really good at goal seeking. It has no idea what should be the goal, that takes wisdom.

Or..luck and enough tries at it? Maybe there's survivorship bias in goal setting

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#82

Post by robocat »

dedev5 wrote: post #55
robocat wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simply? Cancer is because cells do not copy their data exactly - sometimes because the copying process is imperfect and introduces faults, and sometimes because viruses introduce faults. There is a stupidly large number of different copying faults, so there is a stupidly large number of possible types of cancer. Cancer is entirely dissimilar to many other diseases of the body. To cure cancer requires either preventin…

Removing viruses from our environment would make our immune systems much weaker to the viruses that inevitably get through, no?

The immune system is fiendishly complex: the technical debt of a system of programming by random mutations.

Answer:

I don’t think that our immune system would be weaker for novel viruses, because our immune system isn’t trained to work on unknown viruses. The immune system does work on known viruses, however for the virus to be detected, a person needs to have been infected the first time: so by induction it doesn’t matter for one person. Although population effects might matter (herd immunity, societal systems breakdown).

Background:

The immune system starts with a random generation of attacks. As a foetus the immune system learns to NOT detect its own cells (by removing any self-attacks). The immune system is left with the ability to detect a variety of things that are not its own cells.

The immune system also trains to not attack common environmental factors, which prevents allergies, but AFAIK that training stops within a few months of birth (there is a special organ for this).

There is a popular theory that if the immune system isn’t given something to attack then it attacks itself (creating auto-immune diseases) so we should “eat dirt” to prevent that. AFAIK there is no scientific consensus about that. Certainly we have counter-examples where viruses cause autoimmune diseases e.g. Epstein-Barr virus causing Multiple Sclerosis.

The immune system also trains to be able to quickly attack things it has attacked before. So it provides protection against some variation of some repeat viral infections because new variants might have the same attack point. This works better against repeat bacterial infections, because bacteria have more features to detect, so the immune system is more likely to have some defence against different variants. This part of the eat-dirt theory is a bit better, but still impossible to calculate the costs versus benefits. Personally I don’t try to “eat dirt”, but I mostly make little effort to avoid “dirty” things because the effort seems mentally costly (avoidance that worked would be socially damaging, IMHO).

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#83

Post by inglor_cz »

melling wrote: post #62
inglor_cz wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to current expenditure and human resources spent on treating and understanding cancer, what would constitute a real "decision to cure cancer" for you? Twice as much, ten times as much? Do billionaires and powerful politicians (or their loved ones) deliberately die of cancer because they collectively decided not to find a cure for cancer? Are you willing to entertain the idea that we don't yet fully understan…

Apollo project aka Moon Landing was the analogy. I do believe that was brute forced. And as I already pointed out, even if we fail, we can still save millions of lives. Plus the cost to treat people is spiraling out of control. https://www.fightcancer.org/sites/default/files/National%20D...

Once again, the physics behind space travel was already well known and it was mostly the technicalities that needed addressing. Compared to human metabolism, navigation in space is rather straightforward math. A lot of the necessary stuff was already discovered by Newton's time, in the 17th century.

We know a lot less about our own bodies than about celestial bodies, simply because relevant observation is nowhere near as easy. Observing and measuring activity of cells in vivo, within living human beings themselves, is a fundamentally hard problem.

We can do a lot of stuff in mice, but mice are rather different from us and results in mice usually don't translate to workable therapies for people.

Our problems with cancer, Alzheimer's etc. are problems of understanding, not technicalities. Imagine trying to fly to the Moon without knowledge of Kepler's gravity laws. No amount of money can compensate for such massive ignorance.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#84

Post by Tycho »

labrador wrote: post #58

I follow author Joyce Carol Oates on Twitter (we're about the same age) and she said something that liberated me. About memoirs she said something like "nobody reads them, not even your own family." I realized that was true because I know someone who wrote one and nobody cared. It freed me up so I could really get the message of Ram Dass in "Becoming Nobody." I used to work in health care and once there was a patient…

I have a former colleague who published his memoirs after his retirement, which I eagerly read, and I’m glad I did.

Actually made me think random business memoirs could be a rich vein of untapped entertainment/edification.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#86

Post by m463 »

ip26 wrote: post #80
labrador wrote: post #58

I follow author Joyce Carol Oates on Twitter (we're about the same age) and she said something that liberated me. About memoirs she said something like "nobody reads them, not even your own family." I realized that was true because I know someone who wrote one and nobody cared. It freed me up so I could really get the message of Ram Dass in "Becoming Nobody." I used to work in health care and once there was a patient…

I had two related revelations. First, all my most important pictures have people I care about it in them. Second, I watched family-in-law going through old family photographs and discarding objectively wonderful but unmarked photos of people that no one could identify anymore, and heavily filtering photos of family members that were identifiable but no one still alive had known. I had not put two and two together bef…

I might have to reframe my photographic thoughts...

A long time ago (during the film era) I remember taking all kinds of photos on vacation. I would routinely take photos of mountains and rivers and other beautiful landmarks. But in the end, when I would get the batch of photos back from the lab, having people in the image made it more interesting, and people I knew much more so.

I wonder if time will invert things and the interest will revert back to the landmarks.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#87

Post by scarface74 »

ip26 wrote: post #80
labrador wrote: post #58

I follow author Joyce Carol Oates on Twitter (we're about the same age) and she said something that liberated me. About memoirs she said something like "nobody reads them, not even your own family." I realized that was true because I know someone who wrote one and nobody cared. It freed me up so I could really get the message of Ram Dass in "Becoming Nobody." I used to work in health care and once there was a patient…

I had two related revelations. First, all my most important pictures have people I care about it in them. Second, I watched family-in-law going through old family photographs and discarding objectively wonderful but unmarked photos of people that no one could identify anymore, and heavily filtering photos of family members that were identifiable but no one still alive had known. I had not put two and two together bef…

I thought about this too. I am and only child and have no biological children. My stepsons were already 9 and 14 when we got married and they were never close to my parents and neither is my wife.

I will probably make digital copies of the pictures and get rid of most of them. But when I die, I have no allusion that anyone else will care. Honestly, my wife will probably be the last person who cares about my pictures.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#88

Post by germinalphrase »

walkhour wrote: post #78
germinalphrase wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After shielding them from law enforcement, has the public school system moved teachers accused of child abuse into different schools in a new community allowing them the opportunity to abuse again?

Yes [0][1]. [0] https://www.fox4news.com/news/teacher-arrested-sexual-abuse-... [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/summit-middle-school-p...

Were the educators shielded from law enforcement:

Article 1 > No, they were arrested by law enforcement.

Article 2 > after first accusation, yes - school administration argued that the initial accusation was not credible. After additional accusation > No, the educator and their organizational leadership were arrested by law enforcement.

Did the public school system moved teachers accused of child abuse into different schools in a new community allowing them the opportunity to abuse again?

Article 1 & 2: No.

In any case - I’m glad we agree that adults in a position of trust and power over children, who then abuse those children, should all be arrested, tried, and - if guilty - put in jail in their crimes. There is no amount of whataboutism that makes either group sympathetic.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#89

Post by ip26 »

theusus wrote: post #47

Seneca - "Make a goal to have already lived enough" I emphasise, and so some degree agree with the takes of the doctor. Being sick with some threating disease and then live with it for years or till death is painfull. We should be given a chance to cut it off.

I take umbrage. Has there ever been a parent who loves their children but would feel content in leaving them behind before they were grown?

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#90

Post by scarface74 »

walkhour wrote: post #33
belter wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see the number of priests abusing children, and take that as an example that, neither religion made them a better person, neither they seem afraid of the after life they preach about...

And nevertheless the percentage of priests abusing children is lower than the percentage of school teachers doing the same. Make sure to bring that up every time you talk about the public school system.

The difference is that the entire larger organization is corrupt and covering it up.
Post reply on HN