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Serotonin booster leads to increased functional brain connectivity

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Re: Serotonin booster leads to increased functional brain connectivity

#191

Post by germinalphrase »

vbtemp wrote: post #189
pr0zac wrote: post #73

I’ll probably be downvoted for pointing this out but I feel like it’s important. 90% of the comments at the time of my posting this are great examples of the logical fallacy a lot of intelligent people fall into where they think their intelligence in one area means they’re qualified to make assessments or reach conclusions in fields outside of their own. This would be the same error in judgment that’s turned the noot…

It's kind of like how we all have our favorite podcasts to learn about new things. When it's a topic we don't know much about it's so interesting and we learn so much, but when it's a topic we're experts in, we get exasperated about how inaccurate or misleading it is.

Aka “Gell-Mann Amnesia”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

Re: Serotonin booster leads to increased functional brain connectivity

#192

Post by throw4847285 »

Roark66 wrote: post #156
pr0zac wrote: post #73

I’ll probably be downvoted for pointing this out but I feel like it’s important. 90% of the comments at the time of my posting this are great examples of the logical fallacy a lot of intelligent people fall into where they think their intelligence in one area means they’re qualified to make assessments or reach conclusions in fields outside of their own. This would be the same error in judgment that’s turned the noot…

I wish I could upvote your comment twice. Based on my observation how a childhood friend of mine was treated for a psychiatric condition I think all of the "science" of using drugs to treat mental issues is at the level of advancement comparable to medieval blacksmiths doing dentistry. It essentially comes down to "hey, try this, are you better or worse, worse? Try something else. Better, have more of it". All the th…

As somebody who is mentally ill and has tried lots of different drugs in a very unscientific way, with mixed results, you'd think I would agree with you. But actually, I don't.

Take lithium for example. We have now over 100 years of evidence that lithium is effective for treating bipolar disorder. Do we understand the action mechanism? Not really. And yet it's helped countless people live a better life.

This is just how technology works. Often, the tech precedes the science. Humans are very good at experimenting. There are huge gaps in modern psychiatric science, but also, there are loads of trials being run and evidence being collected about what generally works and doesn't work. But human brains are too different from each other for the same thing to work in every case.

So here we are. It's flawed, but we're getting somewhere, and we have to keep moving forward because mental illness is no joke and people need care. Same is true with experimental cancer treatments.

Re: Serotonin booster leads to increased functional brain connectivity

#193

Post by throw4847285 »

naasking wrote: post #160
bla3 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you heard (intelligent!) non-tech people talking about tech? Why would (intelligent!) tech people fare better talking about non-tech? Domain knowledge is more important than intelligence almost everywhere.

> Have you heard (intelligent!) non-tech people talking about tech? Why would (intelligent!) tech people fare better talking about non-tech? Becoming an effective programmer trains one's strict logical and causal reasoning skills, since we're always building or debugging large and complex systems from simpler components. We see all kinds of crazy emergent behaviours all of the time, and learn to understand how such t…

I think they would fare far worse. Because of the way that our economy is structured, tech people are overpaid and overvalued, and thus have an inflated sense of their own importance which causes them to overestimate their intelligence.

Re: Serotonin booster leads to increased functional brain connectivity

#194

Post by wizeman »

panragon wrote: post #96
wizeman wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no such thing as "intelligence in one area", intelligence is a general ability. You're basically ignoring everything that psychology has studied regarding intelligence.

That's just because he's using the word 'intelligence' here in place of the word 'competence', but that might just be because it's the verbiage competent people often use about themselves. This is a fair correction, but other than that he's obviously correct, being a talented software engineer doesn't give you any ability to understand the nuances of neurochemistry.

> being a talented software engineer doesn't give you any ability to understand the nuances of neurochemistry.

This is a bit of a non-sequitur based on what you said before.

Being competent or a talented software engineer is correlated with being an intelligent person, which in turn is correlated with the ability to understand the nuances of [insert topic here].

That doesn't mean that being a talented software engineer necessarily gives you the ability to understand the nuances of neurochemistry, but it is suggestive that it does, if the engineer has an interest in neurochemistry.

Also, being an intelligent person doesn't necessarily mean that you are competent or have expertise in a certain area, sure, but that is not a "logical fallacy" as the GP was saying, nor has much to do with intelligence as he seemed to be arguing (or at least, "fluid intelligence", as it is often understood).

If he simply meant "being competent or an expert in a certain area" doesn't automatically mean that you are competent or an expert in another area, then sure, I agree, and it's true that many comments on Hacker News exhibit this pattern, and this observation is often justified.

But let's not also conveniently ignore the opposite pattern, where a (presumably intelligent) person that doesn't work in a certain field can also provide much better insights than many people with many years of expertise in that same field (especially in things like, say, interpreting scientific papers, which can be legitimately hard to do correctly, for many reasons).

I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but a significant percentage of people of almost every field, even with many years of expertise, is pretty damn incompetent... you just have to step outside your bubble if you don't think so.

This includes software engineering, BTW. There are many software engineers with years of experience who don't even know what a bug tracking system or what a source code management tool are (although, not all of them are incompetent, strictly speaking). That should tell you something.

Re: Serotonin booster leads to increased functional brain connectivity

#195

Post by [deleted] »

vbtemp wrote: post #189
pr0zac wrote: post #73

I’ll probably be downvoted for pointing this out but I feel like it’s important. 90% of the comments at the time of my posting this are great examples of the logical fallacy a lot of intelligent people fall into where they think their intelligence in one area means they’re qualified to make assessments or reach conclusions in fields outside of their own. This would be the same error in judgment that’s turned the noot…

It's kind of like how we all have our favorite podcasts to learn about new things. When it's a topic we don't know much about it's so interesting and we learn so much, but when it's a topic we're experts in, we get exasperated about how inaccurate or misleading it is.

[deleted]

Re: Serotonin booster leads to increased functional brain connectivity

#196

Post by bannedbybros »

tnel77 wrote: post #190
bedobi wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> intelligent people fall into where they think their intelligence in one area means they’re qualified to make assessments or reach conclusions in fields outside of their own you're describing 99.99% of hackernews, lol (and I'm not even sure people here are that intelligent in the first place) (in case anyone is reading this thinking I'm saying I'm intelligent, rest assured I'm not)

I like HackerNews because the conversations are mostly intelligent and polite. Not always, but it’s far better than my experience with Twitter and Reddit.

[dead]

Re: Serotonin booster leads to increased functional brain connectivity

#197

Post by bannedbybros »

robg wrote: post #140
pr0zac wrote: post #73

I’ll probably be downvoted for pointing this out but I feel like it’s important. 90% of the comments at the time of my posting this are great examples of the logical fallacy a lot of intelligent people fall into where they think their intelligence in one area means they’re qualified to make assessments or reach conclusions in fields outside of their own. This would be the same error in judgment that’s turned the noot…

I’m a neuroscientist and I don’t feel qualified to weigh in. The problem of any complex problem today is the niche nature of expertise.

[dead]

Re: Serotonin booster leads to increased functional brain connectivity

#198

Post by PragmaticPulp »

acumenical wrote: post #58

I wish we stopped treating serotonin as a button that automatically improves mood. It is bullshit. Let's recognize the complexity of neural signaling. Whenever people call serotonin the happiness hormone I want to throw up. Such people would probably never believe that if you inject serotonin, the result is extreme pain at the injection site.

> I wish we stopped treating serotonin as a button that automatically improves mood.

We don’t. Studies like this are specifically searching for mechanisms by which serotonin and mood are related.

I think you’re projecting the pop-culture idea of serotonin on to the research.

Re: Serotonin booster leads to increased functional brain connectivity

#200

Post by pgt »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #101
DiscourseFan wrote: post #19

Something in our industrial processes must be screwing with people's serotonin levels because Psychedelics and other serotenergic drugs are becoming the defacto treatment method for a whole host of ailments. I personally suffer from IBS, migraines, sleeping problems, and mood swings, if I haven't taken a dose of psychedelics in the last 6 months. Now, getting regular exercise, eating well, staying hydrated, sleeping…

> Something in our industrial processes must be screwing with people's serotonin levels because Psychedelics and other serotenergic drugs are becoming the defacto treatment method for a whole host of ailments. This is a comically bad inference. P1: We have ailments that can be treated with class X of drugs that act on body process Y P2: We increasingly use those drugs Conclusion: Z is messing with body process Y

Why is it "comically bad inference" to postulate that something environmental may be messing with our serotonin systems if psychedelic serotonergics cure ailments that we know require messaging via serotonin? (IBS ~ gut, migraine ~ brain, sleeping problems, and mood swings ~ brain)
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