71–79 of 79 posts
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Welcome to psychology. Turns out, it's unethical to design "repeatable experiments" when it comes to the human existence, which is why we have to make do with less rigorous forms of science. That doesn't mean it isn't science, it just means it's harder to draw solid conclusions than "just run a repeatable experiment".
This sounds as if you are saying that all psychology experiments are unethical. I'm sure that's not what you meant - expand?
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I attended a seminar on geoengineering and carbon capture and storage this semester. At some cost we could capture the CO2 that comes out of a power plant, clean it, compress it to 1500 psi or so, then inject into the ground somewhere. Engineers get bonus points when they use the CO2 to flush out extra oil, since CO2 mixes so well with oil. (Roughnecks have been pumping CO2 out of the ground in Texas and using it for…
I remember reading about the sudden death of a few hundred people in a coastal village way back when, and it looked like the lake belched a CO2 pocket and suffocated everyone. Terrifying, you're suddenly out of breath but don't know why, and then you die without knowing you'd be okay if you stood on a roof or tree.
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I don't know too much about it. But I knew somebody who said they had it and it turned out to be a more ordinary psychosis that they eventually had treatment for. Seems to me that if you are correct that it doesn't exist, that there can still be people who genuinely believe they have it and may have another illness. Those people deserve better than to be dismissed as crackpots. Like maybe to approach it as one would…
Up to the mid-70s psychoanalysis was one of the core clinical practices in American psychiatry (the evidence is the shift between the DSM-II in 1974 and the DSM-III in 1980), and what psychoanalysis means by "schizophrenia" is something entirely different from what the modern approach means. This was a wildly serious problem. Psychoanalysis was really only practiced at scale in the US and Argentina, so people made up…
I have one thing I would like to highlight:
> people made up theories of why New Yorkers were more psychotic than Londoners (this is somewhere in "Listening to Prozac").
Maybe I need to read your source for more context. But I could see this being a very alluring theory in prior decades, before New York and urban areas in general started seeing massive crime drops, gentrification, etc. In the 70s and 80s many talked about New York as an ugly place, somewhere to escape from. It's pretty different now.
Then I wonder about some other uniquely American problems, like the extent of our gun violence, or poor health care. And I wonder what people may say about mental illness rates compared to other developed counties. (Surely someone has looked.)
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You mean like planting an article into the results for a certain search query, then manufacturing a (news)event that causes someone to want to research that particular subject?
Article submitter here :) I just want to clarify that I did not find this ResearchGate article by googling for dexamethasone. I hadn't heard of that until now! I found a link to this article on the front page of a certain news site, and thought the fine people of HN would enjoy it.
Thank you very kindly for the corrective post!
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A potentially very effective propaganda tool.
You mean like planting an article into the results for a certain search query, then manufacturing a (news)event that causes someone to want to research that particular subject?
This example (which OP helpfully told me I was mistaken about) would have been one of a sort of "forced hand" as in stage magic. I doubt as anyone could have foreseen that specific paper being googled up, but one can easily foresee things relating to that drug being more exposed in a group like ours than they were ... 4 years ago or something. Add a lot of little things up like that, and you can really push things in a desired direction in a group of people. Enough groups of people, and you are influencing an entire society in pretty radical ways. Lots of modern propaganda works this way in large and small ways. If you've been alive for a while, you'll see that we've had some pretty significant changes for the last couple of decades.
My "contribution" would have been providing a model to test scenarios. They actually funded a considerably less speculative project than mine: more or less Poisson regression applied to this problem.
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Article submitter here :) I just want to clarify that I did not find this ResearchGate article by googling for dexamethasone. I hadn't heard of that until now! I found a link to this article on the front page of a certain news site, and thought the fine people of HN would enjoy it.
Well then, my post should be a great illustrator of both the birthday paradox and both its application to the original article about the poor lady with the brain tumor, and an alternative explanation for this unusual event. Brains are great at finding patterns. Sometimes brains find patterns even when there aren't any! Thank you very kindly for the corrective post!
This reminded me of the guy who thought a third party was interfering with his life, and then realized he had CO poisoning thanks to a good person on the internet. And the third party in question was his past self. https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/34m92h/update_... So I wonder...is it possible that this person's memory (of e.g. personal health research) or consciousness was affected by the malady to the…
But this is the first and only instance I have come across in which hallucinatory voices sought to reassure the patient of their genuine interest in her welfare, offered her a specific diagnosis (there were no clinical signs that would have alerted anyone to the tumour), directed her to the type of hospital best equipped to deal with her problem, expressed pleasure that she had at last received the treatment they des…
I remember reading a reddit comment and my internal voice changed to what seemed to me like a very relaxed well studied black pimp.
I've had audio hallucinations before when I was a teenager and had a high fever and I could hear bell-like noises from a wall and what I can only describe as female angels singing -- the hallucinations had a very positive mental impact and in the morning I felt much better physically.
Anyway -- all these audio hallucinations have been very positive, I don't want to think how bad any negative voices can be.
The human mind is such a fascinating thing.
This reminded me of the guy who thought a third party was interfering with his life, and then realized he had CO poisoning thanks to a good person on the internet. And the third party in question was his past self. https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/34m92h/update_... So I wonder...is it possible that this person's memory (of e.g. personal health research) or consciousness was affected by the malady to the…
No one on this thread is talking about the simplest explanation: that unseen entities were communicating with this woman. Of course this explanation flies in the face of scientific naturalism. But it’s good to question beliefs based on new evidence. Research by Ian Stevenson and Dean Radin is compelling in pointing to a pan psychic reality.