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

5-year study finds no brain abnormalities in 'Havana Syndrome' patients

cbc.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 100 posts

Re: 5-year study finds no brain abnormalities in 'Havana Syndrome' patients

#71

Post by diogenescynic »

jmyeet wrote: post #9

Everyone who looked at Havana Syndrome when it came out with a critical eye realized immediately it was a BS story. Sonic weapons? Oh please. Thing is, this sort of thing happens all the time. A prominent and current example is cops and fentanyl. If you listen to cops, they will tell you that just being in the rom with fentanyl can be deadly, breathing it in can be deadly. I'm not sure where this started but it's bec…

I agree with pretty much everything except for this:

>Crime is lower on pretty much every metric than it was 20-30 years ago where the last big panic set in the mandatory minimum mania and the carceral state exploded.

I see 'crime' all over now... it just isn't considered a crime now that it's been decriminalized. 20-30 years ago, I never ever saw open drug sales and drug use, open prostitution, mass looting/shoplifting, deaths from overdoses are exponentially worse, car break ins constantly, etc. And I do agree with the copaganda arguments in general, but I just can't align how much visible crime is all over the West Coast and this vague notion that crime isn't getting worse. Yeah, maybe if you're only tracking murders... but everything else is so much worse and our kids will be exposed to things we never saw until we were well past adulthood.

Re: 5-year study finds no brain abnormalities in 'Havana Syndrome' patients

#72

Post by tantalor »

ipaddr wrote: post #65
ceejayoz wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a pithy saying, but misused here. Not bothering to look into it would be "absence of evidence". Extensive looking into it and finding nothing much across many different people and many different scans by many different researchers is a form of evidence.

Evidence we are not good at finding brain abnormalities.

We can actually do a very good job at detecting damage to very tiny structures in the brain. The only problem is the brain needs to be removed from the patient and then sliced very thinly before it can be imaged.

Re: 5-year study finds no brain abnormalities in 'Havana Syndrome' patients

#73

Post by diogenescynic »

tantalor wrote: post #12
Aurornis wrote: post #7

> Yet sophisticated MRI scans detected no significant differences in brain volume, structure or white matter — signs of injury or degeneration In case it wasn’t clear: Neuroimaging can’t visualize every possible problem. They performed one type of testing and didn’t find anything. That’s not the same as concluding that there are no problems. It should go without saying that a clean MRI isn’t proof that other neurolog…

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

This is a cop out argument in my opinion because you can never prove a negative. This is just more FUD. You can just always make this argument even if all evidence points to the contrary. "Well you just haven't found the right evidence yet." Right....

Re: 5-year study finds no brain abnormalities in 'Havana Syndrome' patients

#74

Post by diogenescynic »

janalsncm wrote: post #38
fngjdflmdflg wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Crime is lower on pretty much every metric than it was 20-30 years ago where the last big panic set in the mandatory minimum mania and the carceral state exploded. Crime was very high in the 1990s though and it's regulation wasn't from a sudden "panic" but a steady growth from 1950 as it climbed from 5 deaths by homicide per 100,000 in 1950 to 10.4 in 1980 and 9.4 in 1990.[0] If anything there is more "mania" about…

Homicides in the US today are 7.8/100k, which is still above the 1950 number. I wonder what accounts for the difference. Globally, the US has a higher rate than other countries likely due to guns, but it’s not like guns were illegal in 1950.

Lack of community, the break up of the nuclear family (i.e. more single parents=less child supervision), loneliness, mental illness and drug induced mental illness, inadequate access to mental and/or health care, and lack of any unified/mass culture that would set standards for behavior. Go checkout other countries that have a few of those things and you really will not find the rates of gun violence we have. Also, most of the gun crime seems to be black on black crimes, but it's taboo to even bring up racial differences without someone accusing you of being some Charles Murray-esque racist (even if you're just citing publicly available data).

Re: 5-year study finds no brain abnormalities in 'Havana Syndrome' patients

#75

Post by diogenescynic »

GuB-42 wrote: post #40
jmyeet wrote: post #9

Everyone who looked at Havana Syndrome when it came out with a critical eye realized immediately it was a BS story. Sonic weapons? Oh please. Thing is, this sort of thing happens all the time. A prominent and current example is cops and fentanyl. If you listen to cops, they will tell you that just being in the rom with fentanyl can be deadly, breathing it in can be deadly. I'm not sure where this started but it's bec…

> Everyone who looked at Havana Syndrome when it came out with a critical eye realized immediately it was a BS story. There is a lot of bullshit around it, sure, but no one seem to dispute the reality of the symptoms. It may be psychosomatic, and I honestly think it is the most likely explanation, but it doesn't solve the problem. If diplomats in Cuba went crazy, then why did they go crazy? Diplomats are people and I…

How is this any different than a placebo effect? You could give everyone a sugar pill and then if a few people started complaining about the side effects, another 30-40% would quickly follow. The human brain is incredibly susceptible to group think. I can't remember the exact psychological experiment, but I remember learning about how they did an experiment where they'd have a group look at pictures of things to define a color (i.e. the apple is red or green, the milk is white) and there would be person involved who was a collaborator with the study and would be loud and vocal, but every now and then make an obvious mistake (the dot would be orange, they'd say it was yellow) and other people would just agree with them since the other times they were right so the non-collaborators would actually change their answer from what they saw with their own eyes, to something they didn't but was just suggested by the defacto loudmouth in the group.

Re: 5-year study finds no brain abnormalities in 'Havana Syndrome' patients

#76

Post by GuB-42 »

diogenescynic wrote: post #75
GuB-42 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone who looked at Havana Syndrome when it came out with a critical eye realized immediately it was a BS story. There is a lot of bullshit around it, sure, but no one seem to dispute the reality of the symptoms. It may be psychosomatic, and I honestly think it is the most likely explanation, but it doesn't solve the problem. If diplomats in Cuba went crazy, then why did they go crazy? Diplomats are people and I…

How is this any different than a placebo effect? You could give everyone a sugar pill and then if a few people started complaining about the side effects, another 30-40% would quickly follow. The human brain is incredibly susceptible to group think. I can't remember the exact psychological experiment, but I remember learning about how they did an experiment where they'd have a group look at pictures of things to defi…

That's what "psychosomatic" means.

But the prospect you raise is maybe one of the scariest and lends itself well to conspiracies. It can mean someone, maybe deliberately, caused some mysterious illness among diplomats, through suggestion alone, causing international tension. Not my hypothesis of choice, but it may actually be a more plausible conspiracy theory than sonic weapons.

Something happened, and something caused it. Just saying "it is a placebo effect" is dismissive. If it is a placebo effect, then where are the sugar pills? Who is the "loud and vocal collaborator"?

It made more than a thousand people sick, I think it shouldn't be dismissed, so that these people can get better, and to prevent others from suffering the same problems. Knowing the cause, be it psychological or physical, would certainly help.

Re: 5-year study finds no brain abnormalities in 'Havana Syndrome' patients

#77

Post by coliveira »

Aurornis wrote: post #7

> Yet sophisticated MRI scans detected no significant differences in brain volume, structure or white matter — signs of injury or degeneration In case it wasn’t clear: Neuroimaging can’t visualize every possible problem. They performed one type of testing and didn’t find anything. That’s not the same as concluding that there are no problems. It should go without saying that a clean MRI isn’t proof that other neurolog…

You can believe on your pet conspiracy theory, however the fact is that there is no evidence these people were affected by anything real.

Re: 5-year study finds no brain abnormalities in 'Havana Syndrome' patients

#78

Post by coliveira »

diogenescynic wrote: post #73
tantalor wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

This is a cop out argument in my opinion because you can never prove a negative. This is just more FUD. You can just always make this argument even if all evidence points to the contrary. "Well you just haven't found the right evidence yet." Right....

Yes, this argument only works when there is no study of any kind. After a lot of research, a lack of evidence points to a lack of existence.

Re: 5-year study finds no brain abnormalities in 'Havana Syndrome' patients

#79

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

tivert wrote: post #43
janalsncm wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homicides in the US today are 7.8/100k, which is still above the 1950 number. I wonder what accounts for the difference. Globally, the US has a higher rate than other countries likely due to guns, but it’s not like guns were illegal in 1950.

> Homicides in the US today are 7.8/100k, which is still above the 1950 number. I wonder what accounts for the difference. Globally, the US has a higher rate than other countries likely due to guns, but it’s not like guns were illegal in 1950. Could it be an urban/rural thing? I'm sure the US population was proportionally far more rural/small town in 1950 than today (on clear display from so many small towns depopula…

rural areas have higher per capita crime. it's just less commonly reported.

Re: 5-year study finds no brain abnormalities in 'Havana Syndrome' patients

#80

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

fngjdflmdflg wrote: post #45
janalsncm wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homicides in the US today are 7.8/100k, which is still above the 1950 number. I wonder what accounts for the difference. Globally, the US has a higher rate than other countries likely due to guns, but it’s not like guns were illegal in 1950.

The murder rate went up by 22% in 2020[0] but it had went down back to the 5 range in the 2010s. Here's the full chart from that PDF. 1950 | 1960 | 1970 | 1980 | 1990 | 2000 | 2005 | 2010 | 2017 | 2018 5.1 | 5.0 | 8.8 | 10.4 | 9.4 | 5.9 | 6.1 | 5.3 | 6.2 | 5.9 >it’s not like guns were illegal in 1950. true but even a murder rate of 5 is high compared to Europe and this is likely due in large part to guns largely bein…

note that while Switzerland is sometimes used as proof that guns aren't the problem, they do ban private ownership of ammo.
Post reply on HN