Readit NewsThis makes sense. By saying:
>Why bother?
You were describing how helpful a diagnosis can be.
Because knowing about the presence of a condition is better than not. Depending on the severity, untreated ADHD during the years of life where a child begins to establish good study habits, management of the condition, and other tools that work for them, can lead to issue down the road and into adulthood. We have the ability to address conditions like dyscalcula with little interventions to help the student be successful.
Just because something is imperfect doesn’t mean it should disregarded completely if the benefits (academic, social, and career success) outweigh the drawbacks of being untreated. The stigma argument is just FUD and letting that take over decision making for the well-being of a child is a bad path to go down.
There are often, unknown to the parent, invisible scars that the child with a non-neurotypical condition will carry for the of their life after having found out about a condition they’ve had since birth and was not addressed during the most critical time of their life when early treatment could have greatly reduced the harm caused by this disorder.
You make a good point about the benefits of receiving treatment. I personally have received training in social skills, goal setting, relaxation exercises, and realistic thinking. I learned those skills to overcome specific challenges. I had some anxiety, like every normal person does, so I learned a skill for that. I had trouble dating, so I learned skills for that. I felt overwhelmed, so I learned goal setting for that. I thought I was stupid, so I learned realistic thinking to avoid overgeneralizing and labeling. Throughout that process, I brought my challenges to a psychologist, and the psychologist taught me skills. That approach offers a way to help people without diagnosis, by suggesting treatments for specific challenges.
Can we keep the early treatment and drop the diagnosis?
> That said, aside from getting funding for treatment or acceptance of accommodations...
Both of those can also be life-changing, but you make them sound like trivial details. They are not.
Certainly, funding for treatment and acceptance of accommodation can make a life-changing difference. That in part motivates many caring and concerned practitioners to widen diagnostic criteria, so that more people can access benefits. I can see how I came across as trivializing those benefits. Quite the contrary, though, I meant to express that yes, diagnostic labels can bring positive results, and we need to weigh those against the negative results, especially when other options exist.
[0]: http://www.psychologysalon.com/2012/01/overpathologization-d...
The question then is if you take a trip from A to B, which choice from {walk, bike, train, ICE, EV} will result in the lowest change in total atmospheric CO2 from the time you leave A to the time you arrive in B?
Let's first just look at walking vs biking. Perhaps surprisingly you will actually produce more CO2 walking. Here's a site [1] with some example calculations. Their example is a trip of 3.2 km, with a walking speed of 4.8 km/hr and a biking speed of 12.8 km/hr.
Walking would take 40 minutes and burn 167 kCal, but just being at rest for 40 minutes would burn 56 kCal so we should count walking as costing 111 kCal.
Biking would be 15 minutes and burn 70 kCal, but just being at rest for 15 minutes would burn 21 kCal so we should biking as costing 49 kCal.
We produce about 0.7 kg of CO2 per 2000 kCal, so that gives 0.03885 kg CO2 for walking and 0.01715 kg CO2 for biking.
But wait...should any of that actually be included? The C in the CO2 we exhale comes from the C in the food we eat. For plants we eat they get it from atmospheric CO2. For animals we eat they get it from the food they eat, and so on with it also ultimately coming from plants that get it from CO2 in the atmosphere.
That's just contributing to fluctuations in atmospheric CO2 levels, not to an increase over time in CO2 levels. The question asked above probably should have not been about the lowest change in total atmospheric CO2 over the time of the trip but about the lowest change in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere that had not recently been in the atmosphere before the trip.
How to count the train is also unclear. The most straightforward way would be to figure the energy the train has to expend for the trip and divide it by the number of passengers, then attribute to each passenger the CO2 from producing that energy.
But the train is still going to make that trip regardless of whether or not you decide to take it. One could argue that for this comparison we should be looking at how much additional energy the train uses if you are on it compared to if you are not. That's going to be very small, and the corresponding CO2 is going to be very small even if the train gets it energy from fossil fuels.
You can get a situation where if you have a dirty activity and a clean activity you only actually come out ahead if enough people switch to the clean activity so that the dirty activity can end.
This is something to watch out for. It can lead to cases where the rational behavior is to advocate for the discontinuation of something on environmental grounds but to personally continue to do/use that thing until regulation or economics make it stop. Some people mistake that for hypocrisy but it is not.
If the train is an electric train and it has a clean source of electricity it might be down near walking and biking.
Similar for the EV. If it has a clean electricity source, it too might be down there near walking and biking. If we are including exhaled CO2 it could actually be lower if it has 100% green electricity because your kCal burn rate in the car should be the same as your at rest burn rate.
The ICE car is going to be way up there.
In summary I think then it would be bike and walk very low or even zero, ICE car very high, EV anywhere between walk/bike and maybe 80% of ICE car depending on its electric source, and train somewhere between EV and walk/bike again depending on electric source (assuming EV train).
[1] https://www.globe.gov/explore-science/scientists-blog/archiv...
Vehicles that weigh 4,000 pounds, primarily designed to move 250 pounds of people, are inefficient by design — there will never be enough materials or energy on Earth to change that. This will continue showing itself in pollution and other externalities, such as the significant microplastic pollution that comes from car tires [2], and the fact that EVs — which wear through tires faster — are making rubber one of the leading sources of Amazon deforestation [3.]
Of course, if you want to see solutions — they are buried all around us in North America, and exist all around us in many other parts of the world [4]. Feel free to contact me if you are interested in realizing solutions together, or just want to learn more. Contact in profile.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/21/africa/west-africa-benin-used...
[2] https://www.thedrive.com/news/tire-dust-makes-up-the-majorit...
[3] https://e360.yale.edu/features/rubber-plantations-deforestat...
[4] https://docs.google.com/document/d/19QpVabRn0RexxN1GYFbDojXr...
Walk -
Bike -
Train ------
Electric Car ------------
Gasoline Car ------------------------------
(Edits: formatting, pith)
If people are halfway through, a motivating thing to keep them going is the money they've already invested in it.
I bet you'll see a significantly higher dropout rate with free tuition. Like we see in public high school.
I can see what you mean about the halfway point. Maybe undergrad came easily, and at the halfway point, the student realizes that medical school simply isn't a good fit, or it's more work than they thought it would be. So they drop out. This is probably a good thing, to prevent people becoming doctors who don't have the chops or the attitude for it. Unfortunately, the school does lose some money on a candidate they ought to have filtered out in the interview.
Happily it's an empirical question, and we can circle back in a few years to see if the drop out rate increased or not. Maybe the drop out rate increases at first, and then the entrance interview becomes more stringent.
Some things can lead to benefits, without themselves being beneficial.
In psychology, diagnosis is sometimes like that. It can lead to treatment, accommodation, and funding, but the diagnosis on its own may not be beneficial, may cause harm through stigma, and may not be necessary to access the benefits.
The alternative: when possible, provide the benefits without labeling the person as disordered.