samhw (u/samhw) - Readit News

samhw commented on Brain circuit scores identify clinically distinct biotypes in depression/anxiety nature.com/articles/s4159... · Posted by u/MBCook

Jach · 2 years ago

It's a shame that every time someone (e.g. upthread) mentions how even just MRIs are very expensive, often as an excuse for not using such tools, I think of all the times I've heard that other places like India make them quite cheap. Well, it's just one part of a giant pile of problems.

Thanks for the reminder about schizophrenics. Even though I've known about the effect (and especially the effect with use of lithium, which is thankfully not so commonly used), I've sort of forgotten about it as a factor in my thinking about the recent struggles of someone in my personal life. It's probably not forgotten by those working in the system, and wouldn't surprise me if it contributes to the incentives of the system encouraging people to be shut-ins and never challenge anything.

samhw · 2 years ago

Yeah, I am very troubled by it. I had a friend staying with me last year who I hadn't realised was schizophrenic (a hopelessly vague diagnosis but he undoubtedly had parted company with reality) and off his meds. It was horribly sad. He killed himself a few months later. My mum is a psychiatrist and insists that third-generation antipsychotics are not a 'chemical cosh', which I find doubtful, seeing as so many schizophrenics seem to consider them a worse prospect than unmedicated schizophrenia or death.

We're now giving these drugs to autistics, I gather, and low-dose olanzapine is even being trialled for kids with Asperger's. Compared with lobotomy I suppose it requires less cleaning up.

Since you mention India, I should add that India and other poor countries manage to treat schizophrenia with better remission rates than the UK and US: https://www.nature.com/articles/508S14a

samhw commented on Brain circuit scores identify clinically distinct biotypes in depression/anxiety nature.com/articles/s4159... · Posted by u/MBCook

Aurornis · 2 years ago

Unfortunately, the topic of ADHD and brain imaging has been full of bad research and grifters. At the extreme end, people like Dr. Amen were writing books about how ADHD and neuroimaging were correlated, which turned into attempts to sell SPECT imaging for ADHD purposes through his clinics.

Using brain imaging to push questionable psychiatry premises was very popular for a while, and you need to take a lot of research from that era with a huge grain of salt. Remember that with the right settings, neuroscientists can even produce images showing activity in brain regions of completely dead salmon: https://www.wired.com/2009/09/fmrisalmon/

samhw · 2 years ago

Quite. Psychiatry loves to talk about brain scans and neuroanatomy, but until it dares to actually use them for diagnosis, I think it should be regarded as window dressing.

And you should always read these studies with a careful eye to whether the ADHD subjects are medicated. Often the studies literally measure the effect of the medication and nothing else. (It's a cruel irony for schizophrenics, who are put on antipsychotics that shrivel the cerebral cortex, only to find their shrivelled cerebral cortex brandished as evidence of their supposed dysfunction.)

Also, note that fMRI does not and cannot indicate structural abnormalities in the brain. It just measures current brain activity, as revealed by the flow of magnetically-charged oxygenated blood through the brain. It tells us these people's brains are currently behaving differently from control subjects' brains. Which, it seems to me, is stating the bleeding obvious.

samhw commented on Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince buys local paper, feuds over mansion build archive.ph/2024.04.17-121... · Posted by u/only_an_egg

Spivak · 2 years ago

So what do ya do when they manage to buy the government instead? I don't know if there's any good answers here, if there was an obvious solution we would have implemented it by now. I'm not saying that the alternative isn't worse but the current state of things is nonetheless bad.

The fact that this guy very nearly got legislation quietly passed against the will of the larger community means something is terribly broken.

samhw · 2 years ago

The law locks up the man or woman,

Who steals the goose from off the common,

But leaves the greater villain loose,

Who steals the common from off the goose

The law demands that we atone,

When we take things we do not own,

But leaves the lords and ladies fine,

Who take things that are yours and mine

The poor and wretched don't escape,

If they conspire the law to break,

This must be so but they endure,

Those who conspire to make the law

The law locks up the man or woman,

Who steals the goose from off the common,

And geese will still a common lack,

Till they go and steal it back

- 17th century English folk poem, post Enclosure Acts

samhw commented on US designates more Chinese tech companies as military collaborators theregister.com/2024/02/0... · Posted by u/DaveFlater

yumraj · 2 years ago

> Who has China invaded?

This has got to be a joke…

Tibet in 1951

India in 1962

China-Vietnam war 1979

Currently, China has border dispute with every country it shares the border with, except two: North Korea and Pakistan

It is illegally building outposts in S. China Sea encroaching on every other country’s marine zone.

It is constantly threatening Taiwan

It is building Navy at a massive pace, attacking every country using its hacker force

It is a singular biggest threat to world peace at this time.

samhw · 2 years ago

It also continues to farm human beings. Tens of thousands of human beings each year are murdered to order (or, more accurately, they have their organs cut out and then are left to die) for Western transplant tourists who will pay upwards of $100k for the prime cuts.

They and their medical systems and governments know full well that a heart transplant scheduled on a particular date three months in advance admits of no pleasant explanations. But nobody cares.

China Tribunal judgement (2020): https://chinatribunal.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/ChinaTr...

2022 update from Ethan Gutmann (who wrote one of the major early reports): https://chrissmith.house.gov/uploadedfiles/gutmann_-_witness...

samhw commented on Gravity Payments CEO Dan Price resigns seattletimes.com/business... · Posted by u/rmason

jiriknesl · 4 years ago

Forming an opinion is great and everyone's right.

Nowadays, exactly the same process you describe, is used to cancel people without proper chance for them to defend themselves. So I would be double careful with "multiple accusations", amplified in mass media and/or social media bubble because this is exactly how mob virtually lynches people in 2022.

samhw · 4 years ago

What do you mean by 'cancel', outside the context of blacklisting entertainers? How does that apply to a CEO? Presumably anyone considering employing or funding him is entitled (and likely competent) to read the facts and others' thoughts about them.

I think the point about 'multiple accusers' is fair. People will come out of the woodwork, especially when there's money at stake (from the press or from legal action). Michael Jackson is a good example: undoubtedly he did rape some of those kids, but not all of them. Still, I don't see why this provides an argument against forming an opinion, rather than one for forming opinions judiciously.

Also, look up Jesse Washington if you want to understand what lynching means.

samhw commented on On Being Rich-ish: Lessons I learned becoming suddenly middle-class residentcontrarian.com/p/... · Posted by u/embeng4096

Feritioyyyyy · 4 years ago

Oh boy...

My wife wouldn't and no woman in a relationship I know would care about this either.

Love is not based on income.

That sounds tremendous depressing.

A partnership is teamwork not two doing different things.

samhw · 4 years ago

So what if it’s tremendous[ly] depressing? It’s depressing that basically no animal dies of old age in the wild. It’s still the reality.

Your comment doesn’t really seem to be trying to substantiate your claim, so much as it’s trying to paint a picture of how depressing his description of reality is. From that, I’m pretty confident you’re trying to define some ideal definition of love – which, if he’s correct, would not be ‘wrong’ but would simply not be common in the real world – while he’s trying to factually describe the motivations for human relationships in the real world.

(I’m not sure I quite agree with his gloomy picture, but I don’t think you are even coming at it with the same intent.)

samhw commented on Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down gamerant.com/rumor-google... · Posted by u/achow

kbenson · 4 years ago

Not being explicit gives wiggle room for people to let their hopes override their logic when interpreting how it will work.

Some number of people will read that and say "it's safe, I knew they would assuage my concerns" that wouldn't otherwise if they just said "well, you might lose you games in that case.". Those are the people being targeted.

And by those people I include you and me, but for different things. It's impossible to be completely objective and rational all the time, and I'm sure you can come up with just as many instances as I where hope overrode reason for a while. Statements like these are specifically to keep us around when we fall into that category.

samhw · 4 years ago

It's not just the strict denotative meaning. It's also the valence and emphasis of the statement. It doesn't concentrate the mind on "what if it disappears?", but on "how likely is it to disappear?", to which the (supposed; bullshit) answer is 'not likely'. Someone might - on rational analysis - know what it means, and still come away with a better impression than if they said it outright.

samhw commented on The inventor of ibuprofen tested the drug on his own hangover smithsonianmag.com/innova... · Posted by u/thrusong

ilamont · 4 years ago

A not uncommon scenario. Here's how the first "upper endoscopy" was performed in the 1950s, after a GI fellow at the University of Michigan read a foundational paper about fiberoptic cable in Nature:

Hirschowitz, like a lot of fellows and young researchers in science, first tested the device on himself in February 1957. He managed to control his own gag reflex, passed through his esophagus and looked around in his own stomach. He then scoped a patient indicated on the slide as patient #2. A most remarkable aspect of this discovery was that it was not supported by grants and was carried out by a GI fellow, and two physicists who worked very hard to create this incredible advance.

The same talk also notes the Australian researcher who discovered the role of Helicobacter pylori in curing stomach ulcers tested the culture on himself:

He stated that his halitosis was so bad, that his wife told him that he had to sleep on the couch. After the infection was established he treated himself with the anti-Helicobacter therapy and completely recovered.

https://blogs.harvard.edu/lamont/2020/01/30/advances-gastroe...

samhw · 4 years ago

Yeah, a genius heroin addict friend of mine drew a molecular structure for a new opioid[0] on the back of a napkin and sent it off to a synthetic chemist in China to be synthesised. To my infinite horror I actually tried a dose of what came back, at the same time as he took his dose, and in the recommended (high!) dosage of what I think was a decent chunk of a gramme. Luckily it worked. I can well see how someone could have the confidence to try something as mild as ibuprofen.

[0] Or pseudo-opioid, I'm not sure. He's a biologist and I'm not a natural scientist at all. All I recall is that it was a positive allosteric modulator of the mu opioid receptor, which, by and large, may as well be Greek to me.

samhw commented on Former PM Abe Shinzo dies after being shot www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/e... · Posted by u/coolandsmartrr

sweetheart · 4 years ago

There were three mass shootings in my city this past weekend, and one of them included a friend of a friend. But life goes on because this is America.

My friends and I decided to stop going to large events. How sad is that?

samhw · 4 years ago

In the same vein, I was discussing police responses to mass shootings on Twitter, and was quite surprised to find Wikipedia took me to a disambiguation page when looking up “[random small town] shooting”: https://twitter.com/samziz/status/1544460684829904896

samhw commented on Former PM Abe Shinzo dies after being shot www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/e... · Posted by u/coolandsmartrr

rainworld · 4 years ago

The Kitty Genovese story was a psyop:

https://www.apa.org/gradpsych/2012/09/tall-tales

samhw · 4 years ago

The Wikipedia page is a bit better in giving the actual details in which the story is incorrect, and without the extended editorialising (though the final sentence is quite nightmarish even in its blankly factual wording):

> Because of the layout of the complex and the fact that the attacks took place in different locations, no witness saw the entire sequence of events. Investigation by police and prosecutors showed that approximately a dozen individuals had heard or seen portions of the attack, though none saw or was aware of the entire incident.[67] Only one witness, Joseph Fink, was aware Genovese was stabbed in the first attack, and only Karl Ross was aware of it in the second attack. Many were entirely unaware that an assault or homicide had taken place; some thought what they saw or heard was a domestic quarrel, a drunken brawl or a group of friends leaving the bar when Moseley first approached Genovese.[8] After the initial attack punctured her lungs, leading to her eventual death from asphyxiation, it is unlikely that Genovese was able to scream at any volume.[68]

And some slightly overlapping details in an article from which it quotes:

> The article grossly exaggerated the number of witnesses and what they had perceived. None saw the attack in its entirety. Only a few had glimpsed parts of it, or recognized the cries for help. Many thought they had heard lovers or drunks quarreling. There were two attacks, not three. And afterward, two people did call the police. A 70-year-old woman ventured out and cradled the dying victim in her arms until they arrived. Ms. Genovese died on the way to a hospital.