Trust me, us Europeans are not exempt from the "everyone should see a psychologist" trope blasting social media the last decade. We are not blind to every Hollywood actor having a personal therapist either.
I think the main difference (speaking as a northern European) is that when you Americans speak of therapy you seem to mean the stereotypical "talk therapy" where as basically every therapy here is cognitive behavioral therapy.
Can cognitive behavioral therapy help someone who has a bit of existential dread about his tech job? Maybe. I don't think it's silly on it's face though to say "really?" if the poster's life is in order otherwise.
Geely acquired Volvo Cars around 2010, and there is certainly not much wrong with modern Volvos (aside for the regular stuff that is wrong with all modern vehicles).
Given Geely's various acquisitions, it makes sense that their cars would benefit from shared technologies so I wouldn't expect their vehicles to be much worse than westerns.
Seems like the main problem if you dislike China taking over the industry is that the automobile companies keep voluntarily selling their brands to them.
I don't mind trying a "better reddit", but seeing it's a team up with the reddit co-founder, what will set it apart?
There is something about modern reddit that irks me, at the same time I'm not sure if it really was better in the past if you strip stay the nostalgia.
So why digg? Less bots? Less algorithm? Better algorithm? More or less "AI"? Etc.
As a daily pooper I've wondered for a long time how much poop a weekly pooper poops in one session. Logically it should be seven times the amount I do, but frankly that sounds like an _absurd_ amount. Like multiple flushes worth.
Or is it much more dense and dry leading to less volume?
If you've ever prepped for a colonoscopy, you'd be surprised how much you can poop. In general, I am a daily pooper... but I was amazed just how much is in there! I was wondering if it was ever going to end!
Well it was responsive but it wasn't physically accurate at all, which makes it non-intuitive. The whole reason side-games like KZ and surf could exist was due to the bad physics. I competed in local IRC KZ tourneys and also surfed a lot in 1.6. The fact that you gained speed by moving left and right repeatedly doesn't make any intuitive sense. The surf scene was also heavily infected with frame-rate tricks (hotkeys to increase fps-limit in the air, and then lowering it on the ramps) since you floated more in the air the higher your FPS was. In the beginning you needed to have a PC that could support 250+ FPS to be a high-end surfer. This was fixed later with server-set fps limits etc. though.
It created an entire universe of movement based mini-games that I treasured more than the base-game, but it was mostly based on unintuitive physics and engine bugs.
I do agree that the modern game's "inertia" and slow heavy movement feels bad though. Last modern game that I remember had really fast and rapid movement was The Talos Principle.
I've never tried Ketamine but I have tried shrooms, LSD, and DMT. I have never found the effects be to lasting though, regardless of dose. After one or two days I'm always back to baseline.
I've wondered if a similar thing can be how much people are affected by things like Virtual Reality. After the initial five minute first try I never could get very immersed in VR (more than a regular 2D game). I could never feel any fear of height or anything for instance, it didn't grab me.
I've wondered a while if that is a correlation that spans other people. If the people who get blown away by VR would also have large lasting effects of psychedelics, and vice versa.
Have not tried DMT but have the three others. K is... weird. It's totally different from shrooms and LSD. With those, you can kind of steer your trip. With K, it steers you a bit.
Someone I'm very close to was also addicted, using it for emotional suppression. They're luckily off of it and in therapy but it can get nasty. Fair warning.
Have done both clinical Ketamine and Psilocybin therapy.
Ketamine was very interesting. Proper completely dissociative "K-hole" experience. I feel like it helped with Anxiety, but I can't pinpoint "why" from an introspective perspective.
Psilocybin on the other hand. Was a hero dose, and I'm a changed person afterwards.
Could feel the "layers" of my identity being stripped off, almost regression to a more child-like state. Very interesting experience. Had strong synesthesia: sounds would produce colors, colors would produce tastes, fun experience.
Near the peak of the experience I had these strong recurring auditory hallucination of my mothers says all these random words from my youth, these were accompanied by strong feeling of anxiety. After a lot of post-experience integration and reflection I realized that my mothers anxiety about the world was effectively "programmed" into my brain during my upbringing. e.g. Generationally transmitted anxiety.
Therapy always talks about childhood trauma, etc, but actually experiencing it was another level, and really helped me on my journey to being a less anxious person.
Before the Psilocybin experience, I suffered from existential depression: what's the point of living if the sun is going to explode in ~x billion years. Towards the peak of the experience everything was super chaotic, I felt like I was being transported into different realities (e.g. realities with different laws of physics, or different space time geometries). This was hugely anxiety inducing and would otherwise be called a "bad trip." I felt "lost" in this sea of all different realities.
As I was coming down from the peak and started to reintegrate, I had a strong distinct sense of "coming back" to our current reality. It felt like finding a safe tropical island in a sea of chaos: e.g. our currently reality is a safe space and point of stability in a sea of chaos and uninviting realities.
I was truly, deeply, grateful to be able to return to the familiar and it made me really really deeply appreciate myself and the blessing that our reality is to us.
Post the experience I also acquired the ability to observe my emotions from a third person perspective. e.g. rather than feeling "angry" I could tag the emotion "angry" and react accordingly, almost as if I gained ring 0 access to my brain when I previously only have ring 1 access.
All-in-all probably the most profound and healing experience of my life.
1. Deeply felt and understood my anxiety was generationally passed on from my mother's anxiety,
2. Eliminated my existential depression, giving me a deep appreciation for the beauty of our reality,
3. Gave me ring 0 access to my emotions making me a much more stable, calm person.
Beautiful description of your experiences. The psilocybin experience sounds like it was guided by a professional? was it and if so, how did you find that person?
I think it probably correlates with low openness.
If you are low in openness, I could see psychedelics having long lasting effects on a person's personality.
I have never found the effects to be lasting at all either but my openness is already at 11. If anything, I probably need less.
I wouldn't do Ketamine because I know for a certain type of person, they instantly fall in love with "spiritual heroin". I know almost for certain I am that type of person.
I think for some forms of treatment-resistant depression, no "rapid" treatment can work because the depression has caused physical atrophy, mostly in the hippocampus, over many years. Various studies have shown this atrophy, both in MRI and cadaver studies. So the tissue loss might take years to recover unless we discover some new neurogenic compound (RIP NSI-189). Ketamine, SAINT TMS might still work for other depression though.
The brain doesn’t necessarily need the same exact hardware to do the same function, but in adults if it’s lost they will probably not regain the function without intervention. Neuroplasticity-inducing substances may very well enable the brain to create new connections and rebuild functionality even if the physical neuronal mass does not recover.
This paper suggests as much:
“Conversely, chemogenetic activation of ABINs without any change in neuron numbers mimics both the cellular and the behavioral effects of ketamine, indicating that increased activity of ABINs is sufficient for rapid antidepressant effects.”
You should try DXM for an interesting "baby ketamine" experience. Just get the pure Robotussin gelcaps, I wouldn't do less than 2 bottles and actually thats generally a good place to start for a decent 2nd plateau trip without getting into the more crazy upper echelon dissociative effects and experience
Its seems crazy right? I mean I guess you can start with one but its best used a bit stronger than that and for a purpose like resetting when you'vr been in a bit of a rut.
Be sure to keep something around to catch any vomit, personally I've almost never not vomited once when it starts to kick in. Have music and media to consume
ehh it wont(ymmv?) kill ya but it sure will rock your world that is certain. truly ill-advised would be to take 60-100mg of benedryl with them, that will shatter reality itself
As a teen, DXM was a frequent escape. I always liked the 'afterglow', which seemed to lift my mood for a week or afterwards. When I saw the studies come out about ketamine years later, it all made sense.
However, I introduced it to my peer group back then and in college, and there were some that seemed to be slow metabolizers of DXM. Ketamine is shorter in duration and lacks (minimizes) many of the worst aspects of DXM like body nausea/body load.
Also, try Amanita Muscaria microdosing that has legal and different active alkaloid (muscimol, not psilocybin), look for the new "Microdosing with Amanita Muscaria" book.
Maybe I should have clarified, I don't have any diagnoses and don't consider myself depressed in the layman usage of the word. The baseline I'm talking about is whatever you call the regular Joe state.
Since I anticipate some people might go "so what lasting effects did you expect?" I guess I'm thinking more about all the amazing stories you read everywhere about psychedelics. Even in movies and media it's usually presented as something that transforms you in one way or another. I've never quite found that to exist.
People have already argued for ChatGPT content in the training data, but I also think it could have something to do with how the models learn self-identity combined with anthropomorphization.
To us humans, self-identity is often the most learned thing of all. We spend our entire lives, every hour of every day, learning who we are (the identity constantly being modified). To many humans the knowledge about who they are is more obvious that 1+1=2.
For an AI model this is completely reversed. Especially for a completely new model. The scale of training data containing nothing about who it is, compared to the slight fine-tuning data in the end that gives it an identity is hardly imaginable.
It's like you were locked inside a dark room for 100 years, only allowed to ingest information about the world, history, etc., through texts and sound, no other senses. At your 100:th birthday a person comes in and lectures for an hour about who you are; your name, your age, your hobbies, your life. Then you are let go into society.
Isn't it obvious how you might occasionally hallucinate that you are Napoleon from time to time? After all you know so much more about him, his life, his aspirations, his internal thoughts, his history, than the one hour lecture could possibly give you. And even this silly thought scenario is not even close to the same scale as an AI model.
To me it's almost surprising that a model can have any self-identity at all. Let alone be as consistent as it is today.
> In such a way, Leibniz, to cite Milton, dared to “justify the ways of God to men.” Voltaire responded with a snarky misreading that exploited the undeniable empirical fact that evil was not balanced by good in the lives of every discreet individual. But Leibniz made no such claim. The best world was optimized as a whole, containing just as much good and evil as was required for the totality of creation.
I like this paragraph. I've never been a big fan of Voltaire's criticism (although I may have not understood it fully, not being a philosophy expert of any kind). To me it always seemed like Liebniz tried to explain why there was suffering on the whole, and Voltaire responding with "there is suffering!". Like you are not really arguing the point.
My question has rather been that, if suffering is required and a child getting bone cancer and dying at five is the best of all possible worlds, maybe the whole project should have been scrapped at the planning phase. I assume God was not forced to create a world?
Couldn't that be a misreading of Voltaire though? I didn't interpret Candide as "there is suffering", I interpreted it as "this is obviously not the best possible world and no logical gymnastics can convince me it is"
(With the collorary that logic is pretty useless in moral philosophy if it's only used to find contrived justification for the status quo.)
> My question has rather been that, if suffering is required and a child getting bone cancer and dying at five is the best of all possible worlds, maybe the whole project should have been scrapped at the planning phase.
Is that better? it would also require not having all the good things from creation.
Nah, just create the world at a state where modern medicine can cure cancer, like we're on the slow road to doing.
In the 1800s someone might have asked "if suffering is required and a child is going to die of a systemic infection, maybe the whole project should have been scrapped at the planning phase".
To me it's clear that human flourishing without much suffering is possible in this universe and it's more about knowledge and power to prevent suffering being hard to come by. The kind of knowledge that e.g. could have been written down in ancient religious books or whatever if we had a best possible world.
> Nah, just create the world at a state where modern medicine can cure cancer, like we're on the slow road to doing.
We would have cures for every illness if not for human selfishness and evil. Look at all the money and effort spent on war during the last 10,000 years, on legal fees and disputes for the last 5,000 years. Rather than love our neighbors as ourselves, too many of us in our hearts say, "This land is MINE! This money is MINE! This patent is MINE! The credit is MINE!" If all this effort went to instead cultivating gifted individuals to research and cure diseases we'd have all our cures.
You don't know that the child wouldn't have grown up Hitler.
The argument seems similar - not exactly, but similar - to the question "if global warming is real, why is it snowing here". A function describing the maximum global integration over happiness could very well contain many local minima.
I might be misinterpreting Leibniz’s central argument, but doesn’t the idea of the best of all possible worlds not depend on how humans (or any kind of life really) perceive it? This is similar to the idea that an unaligned AI agent could get its own idea of “best world”.
Also, I get the impression that in modern times, people fall away from religion because they can’t explain why God allows evil in a satisfactory way. But in the distant historical past, they were more motivated to reason or figure out why God intentionally causes evil things to happen.
> "if global warming is real, why is it snowing here". A function describing the maximum global integration over happiness could very well contain many local minima.
Love that answer. its a really good analogy.
Of course plenty of people I (probably most people) do not understand it with regard to global warming....
Yes, but an omnipotent God could presumably just make Hitlers not exist. The argument rests on the assumption that there are hidden dependencies in the laws of the universe, such that it was logically necessary that Hitler (or insert whatever other evil here) had to exist to make the best possible world. That's hard to swallow.
Consider that many people today, who live better than the kings of centuries past, are depressed. One could conclude that happiness is a state of improvement over past experiences, not necessarily an absolute scale. If this is true (and I personally believe that it is), then evil is in fact a necessary baseline against which happiness can be improved upon.
Apologies, re-reading this - which is literally false -, in view of a quick re-read of some salient paragraphs:
the Architect in Leibniz is omnipotent, and his project is regarded as the best possible; only, the project involves a limited humanity that cannot understand it.
(In the original writing above I meant 'omnipotent' in an oblique way (including "clarity" and "satisfying all" as "perfections"), which is too stretched and rhetoric not to mislead.)
I think you are just restating what I said. Yes, Leibniz and any of his defenders must assume that there are hidden constraints to what is possible that lie beyond human understanding that made Hitler (just to use a very salient example, but insert whatever evil you like), necessary to achieve a greater good. It is ultimately an argument from faith (just trust in God, he had the best for the world at heart) that can only be accepted by those who already believe.
I meant that it is explicit, not just an assumption but the very metaphysics. A Logos is thought as predominant over the Agent that uses it. (Otherwise, it would be logical to have perfection and only perfection immediately.)
> an argument from faith
I think it remains (it was intended to be) a logical argument from the very definitions (not from devotional faith).
--
Edit: sorry, but I realize I misremembered a few important details, that could make the above quite misleading...
Leibniz speaks of full omnipotence. So, that Logos is not "above" Divinity in an ontological sense, but in a purely logical sense. I.e. it was impossible to do differently as this is "the best possible plan", not "the best achievable".
> we are not well enough acquainted with the general harmony of the universe and of the hidden reasons for his conduct; and that makes people recklessly judge that many things could have been improved [... // ...] to know in detail his reasons for ordering the universe as he has, allowing sin, and granting his saving grace in one way rather than another, is beyond the power of a finite mind
> My question has rather been that, if suffering is required and a child getting bone cancer and dying at five is the best of all possible worlds, maybe the whole project should have been scrapped at the planning phase. I assume God was not forced to create a world?
It is not really possible to answer these questions when one does not know the spiritual infrastructure. Eg, say reincarnation of the soul is real, and in a previous life a soul has been in the body of an industrialist on whose account cancer causing pollution was spewed out. In the next incarnation, it seems valid for that soul to experience the effect of the earlier incarnation's actions. If that is it, the soul may in fact be learning and growing, which may be the point of the exercise.
I know that this is all conjecture, but I hope I am relaying my point - that without understanding the spiritual domain, these sorts of moral appraisals are moot.
That is a really excellent point and in fact gets at the difficulty of arguing any rational point about religion. I'd guess that every rational argument that appeals to religion at all can be made to work or not work depending on this background "spiritual infrastructure". This is one reason why rationalists often feel like religious thinkers are moving the goalposts.
Maybe the 5-year-old who died of bone cancer was just playing Roy on the hardest difficulty.
However, this shiftiness also undermines every religious platitude as well. God loves you, everything happens for a reason, etc. etc. etc. -- maybe, or maybe God is trapped in a human coma patient and Loki is just fucking with us. If you have degrees of freedom over this "spiritual infrastructure" then it's completely impossible to reach any conclusion.
I think you and Voltaire are thinking along the same lines. Both are a rejection of a bloodless utility maximisation creed on the simple basis that human morality just doesn’t work that way.
"Their first child, Sofya, had been conceived in Baden-Baden, and was born in Geneva on 5 March 1868. The baby died of pneumonia three months later, and Anna recalled how Dostoevsky "wept and sobbed like a woman in despair"."
So Dostoevsky suffered the pain of losing a child.
Despite that, an argument about "tear of child" was put into antagonist's mouth.
As a long time lurker here I created an account just to reply to this. I'm in the same boat! Diagnosed five years ago.
It has taught me one thing about how hard finding causations is. While my liver is not fully healthy, ever since diagnosis it's been unchanged (according to scans) and my liver values have been good (for five years!). The reason? Chance, as far as I can tell. I am on the most conservative bog-standard treatment available (only UDCA), and it has been working really well.
Reading online there are a lot of people doing antibiotics etc. I'm not being negative about these attempts (I'm sure it has some efficiency, studies seem promising), my point is just that if I took _anything_, I would contribute my mild progression to it and praise it like a panacea. Causation seems almost impossible to find with n=1. To me pure chance seems to dictate a lot.
I am expecting a day when it all goes downhill though. With that said there does seems to be people who can go all their life without needing a transplant (the doctors seem more confident of this than the statistics, which is another strange oddity, but the statistics have always seemed overly harsh to me. I wonder if late diagnoses contribute to this).
I think the main difference (speaking as a northern European) is that when you Americans speak of therapy you seem to mean the stereotypical "talk therapy" where as basically every therapy here is cognitive behavioral therapy.
Can cognitive behavioral therapy help someone who has a bit of existential dread about his tech job? Maybe. I don't think it's silly on it's face though to say "really?" if the poster's life is in order otherwise.