221–229 of 229 posts
> Not all humans have the same HK2 viruses in their genomes. Did they take the list of all HK2 viruses, and test them all to see which one had a prevalence in identified addicts? If they did that, would they admit it in the paper? Maybe I've become too cynical, but my default is to assume statistical misuse these days.
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We should take incidence rate of such characteristics into account before proscribing general approaches
I believe it will be hard to get those numbers. I take history as evidence that there are plenty of people or groups out there, who do violence to gain benefit. It was rather the norm. The strong eat the weak. Humanism is a relativly new concept. One worth pursuing, but maybe not blinded by idealism.
I believe it is worth the effort
> It was rather the norm. The strong eat the weak.
There are a variety of reasons for this. Different reasons have different most effective solutions. If we choose as our general solution something that has narrow scope of significant positive effect and wide scope of moderate negative effect, I'd say we've chosen poorly as that will harm society as a whole rather than help it. Which is why the hard task of getting those numbers is worth it.
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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18066758 and marked it off-topic.
Serious question - what does detaching a thread in HN do? Because I still see it show up in the main comment section.
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Stephenson is great, but just for the record, the claim that Germans understand "süchtig" as "seeking" goes too far. Süchtig is the adjective to Sucht (addiction), not to Suche (search), and although the etymological link is clear, there's nothing romantic or compassionate about the word.
Thanks: I'm sure I would have gone a long ways before discovering anything more about the context of that statement. However, I note that Stephenson does seem to have described this as a loose translation. Is the German word used as an adjective, or is that also an issue of translation?
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Yes, obviously, if that can be proven to be the cause? Proper criminal rehabilitation and reintegration is very important.
It is. But there are psychopaths out there who simply don't do violence out of fear from counterviolence. Remove the threat with social works and they laugh about it. So in general I agree, that there are better methods than punishment, but for some it works.
I prefer to mix sciences of dynamics with love and mindful design. I've had a nuff* of the narratives of static sciences. What happens when we allow for resident psychopaths to shamelessly and fearlessly be themselves? Is that something we even have examples of happening, particularly where the dominant culture was a peaceful one of equanimity, autonomy, and interdependence? If we (humanity) haven't conducted that natural experiment, I'd love to give it a shot & work with them to answer the question of how can a community change to include them.
* I propose the unit of "nuff" as a subjective metric of satisfaction. What I say is a nuff is a nuff for me and what you say is a nuff is a nuff for you.
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> The reason I hesitate to dismiss the AA view is that it strikes me as quite possible that, for a subset of addicts, any kind of hope of moderation can be disastrous. This, absolutely this. And since it is impossible to know in advance if moderation is possible for a given person, AA optimizes for the worst case scenario and assumes that no one can handle moderation, which has the greatest likelihood of success for…
AA isn't so much a recovery program as a submarine Christian conversion program; it's seldom better than nothing, and often worse. Very consistently and well-marketed, though. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/the-irr... (Fun fact: when it started, it wasn't anonymous -- except one of the founders kept showing up drunk in public, and they realized this itself was pretty quickly debunking their succ…
A couple of the chapters were fine, and listening to people tell stories of their experiences was great, but there is a heavy cult-like vibe pushed on you relentlessly at most.
They parrot on about the fact that you are helpless to effect change in your own life and without the group, you will inevitably drink again.
That turned me off completely and I never went back. Still haven't had a drink in a year since either.
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AA isn't so much a recovery program as a submarine Christian conversion program; it's seldom better than nothing, and often worse. Very consistently and well-marketed, though. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/the-irr... (Fun fact: when it started, it wasn't anonymous -- except one of the founders kept showing up drunk in public, and they realized this itself was pretty quickly debunking their succ…
I think this is a rather unfair distortion of AA. I know many who have been tremendously helped by the program. It does work for many. It's explicitly unreligious -- they have a notion of a higher power, but make the conscious effort to allow each member to have their own definition of this higher power. It's not a religious process in the sense most would think of it. I also don't think it's fair to mention any one…
I knew about this 'misunderstanding' that most people have about AA and its 'higher power' thing.
I actually attended meetings though, and their 'unreligious process' is actually anything but.
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This is not possible because of quantum mechanics. You cannot know the exact location and speed of particles in your brain and therefore cannot build a deterministic model to predict its behavior.
I think chaos theory suffices to establish your second sentence, without needing to bring in quantum mechanics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory