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Messages - TLEILAXU

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31
I don't trust the words of buddhist westerners, but I do think buddhism is kinda fascinating with e.g. their mummies and shit.

32
Popping off to a couple of things at the moment.
Deathspell Omega - Ad Arma
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-sNygFHM9M
Lagwagon  - Angry Days
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QW0Ae742ZKk
Ennio Morricone/Joan Baez - Here's to You
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oday_Fc-Gc

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You say though, that it has nothing to do with "control" but really, she did take over responsibility for her own health, took to influencing her own outcome rather than passively handing it off to a doctor, or anyone else.  So, indeed, if you don't like the word "control" don't use it, but she certainly did exercise influence on her outcome.  That's the point.  If you don't like the notion of "locus of control" call it whatever you like, the outcome is still the same.  Rather than be passive and think of things as just happening to her, she took action and changed behaviors and got better results for it.  Maybe people do not do that.
She changed behavior in the sense that she changed her diet but that's not the same as the "dude just be more positive" that you often hear. I mean, maybe I'm misunderstanding what you meant with control and agency, I took it to mean control of your own mentality, so to speak, which is where Mikhaila's case is so interesting because it wasn't about any of that, it was about diet.

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"I'd rather die than not eat sugar"
I mean, shouldn't that tell us something about how deeply people are stuck in these things? I'm reminded of the Bakker example with the moth flying into a bug zapper. It can't resist the light.

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there is almost certainly, in my mind, something they could do, psychologically, to ameliorate it.
I mean, I don't disagree, but I see this more as behavioral re-wiring rather than assuming some locus of control or whatever.

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I mean, I don't necessarily disagree with the first part of what you said; if I had e.g. depression I wouldn't want to take any drugs myself, because I'd be too afraid of the side-effects. Still, by denying or downplaying the biology involved we're doing ourselves a huge disservice. Just take Mikhaila Peterson. Auto-immune problems, depression etc. all seemingly connected to some real weird gut microbiome phenomenon. It was never about changing the world-view in her case, it was just about changing her diet.

But in her case, imagine that she had no intent on changing her way of thinking and behavior.  If she just insisted that she should do nothing different, but be given the pill to make her condition go away.  In fact, that sort of what is what happened with her as a kid, with the initial diagnoses and the poor results it gave her.  All the anti-inflammatory drugs in the world could not help.  Only once she started to think about the "problem" in a different way and changed her conceptualizing of the nature of the problem and her behavior, was she able to change the outcome.  See, she actually took control over her own health, rather than being a victim and demanding a pill to stop it.  So, I don't think your example proves your point, in fact, really just the opposite.
I mean, I see what you're getting at but no, haha, I don't agree. She didn't 'will' her condition away, it wasn't about world-view or having a positive outlook on life, it was about physical illness caused by some weird digestive shit. I agree that the drugs didn't help, and in that case you do what you have to do (been there myself, googling, experimenting with my own solutions when the doctors and the pills kept not improving anything), but I don't think this has anything to do with 'control'. Just because something is not in your control doesn't mean you have to lie down and be a fatalist victim, I mean, why should you? On the contrary it can be a liberating experience since you don't have to feel guilty about not 'controlling' your life the proper way.

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If the way you think causes problems, all the drugs in the world won't work.  If the fundamental problem is just a biological mis-working, then sure, it can work to just take a pill.  My hunch though, is that there are far more people in the former camp, than in the biologically malfunctioning camp.
But are you sure of that? And what of everybody in between, who need that joint therapy?

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If fact, I think many people with poor health, are in this camp.  They don't want to stop eating bad food, they don't want to stop over-eating, they just want a pill to make these things have no consequences.  It seems plausible that it could work the same sort of way psychologically for a variety of issues, in many cases.
I just don't agree here. I don't think anybody actually wants to be a fat fuck. They might rationalize it (because they're in control of their lives after all, aren't they?), but I don't think anybody genuinely wants to be stuck in these unhealthy behavioral loops.

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My assumption, which could like be wrong, because who the fuck am I, but it would be that more "general anxiety" and "general depression" could be dealt with through a non-pharmaceutical approach
Does it have to be? I mean what about a case by case basis?

Well, I think you are mischaracterizing my point though.  I am saying, that yes, any effectiveness will indeed be a case by case basis, but, my hunch is that there are more cases where a non-drug approach could and would work than are currently both proscribed and generally accepted by patients.  I think part of that could be because the non-drug approach is also a lot of work and will require changes in assumptions, world-view and manners of thought, which many people just don't want to do.  POeople really do seem to have a "just give me a pill" approach.  In the same way that where I live, most people have high blood pressure, but won't alter the slightest bit of their diet.  "Just give me a pill, I am not going to change what I am eating."

Forgive my bias, but I can't help but imagine that psychology can work the same way.
I mean, I don't necessarily disagree with the first part of what you said; if I had e.g. depression I wouldn't want to take any drugs myself, because I'd be too afraid of the side-effects. Still, by denying or downplaying the biology involved we're doing ourselves a huge disservice. Just take Mikhaila Peterson. Auto-immune problems, depression etc. all seemingly connected to some real weird gut microbiome phenomenon. It was never about changing the world-view in her case, it was just about changing her diet.

36
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drugging yourself likely will not have the long-term effect one would likely want.
I completely agree.
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My assumption, which could like be wrong, because who the fuck am I, but it would be that more "general anxiety" and "general depression" could be dealt with through a non-pharmaceutical approach
Does it have to be? I mean what about a case by case basis?

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It is, to me, a mistake the even court the idea of a total "biological locus of control" for most cases of general anxiety or depression.  Again, this does not preclude that some cases might well feature such a thing.  But to default to the idea of that, is, in my opinion, a mistake, because it will tend to inform a lack of agency on the part of the sufferer.  Even if they are indeed largely a victim of circumstances outside their control, conceding even the small amount of control they do have, in my opinion, is a massive mistake.
Why? Maybe the incessant need to be in control actually fuels these things, and being told it's not your fault can be a relief.

37
Lol @ this demonization of the big pharma. Of course nothing is perfect, and sure you've got doctors around who just put you on various shitty ass anti-depressants whose side effects are perhaps not even worth it, but at least somebody is fucking trying.
Tell you what, if you ever end up with a kid with e.g. schizophrenia a you'll be happy that there's somebody making drugs to treat it.

Well, the gulf between an "anxiety" or "depression" diagnosis and schizophrenia is really vast, in my opinion.

Like I said though, it isn't as if I am unbiased on this.  However, that doesn't mean I am 100% incorrect to think that some things could be better treated without drugs.  I actually think that the "fact" that drugs work for something like schizophrenia is part of why it is assumed that it would work for something like "general anxiety."  But just because both fall into the  realm of "psychology" does not mean they are best handled via the same (sort of) proscription.

While it's funny to imagine that I am taking some Luddite line here, it's really not the case.
In what sense? You can talk about loci of control but that doesn't make them anymore concrete. Who are you to say that somebody's suicidal thoughts aren't just as much an 'external' locus of control as somebody else's epilepsy? Isn't the notion that these diagnoses are not really biological, not "real" diagnoses, in a sense responsible for pertuating the stigmatization? Like I'm not saying CBT should be thrown out, obviously taking anti-depressives alone might not cure your depression, but while you're talking about "procedural issues", these drugs are helping patients, except when they don't of course, because nothing is perfect and everybody is unique and not everybody responds to drugs the same way, but at least somebody is trying to make products to improve the livelihood of patients, can you believe that?
I just think it's funny/sad that it's become such a popular opinion to hate "big pharma" these days. People sharing stories on facebook about how it's all a big scam and how "natural" plant pills (which you can buy from our 100% natural ayurvedic medicine store) and "mindfulness" cured their depression and what have you.

38
Lol @ this demonization of the big pharma. Of course nothing is perfect, and sure you've got doctors around who just put you on various shitty ass anti-depressants whose side effects are perhaps not even worth it, but at least somebody is fucking trying.
Tell you what, if you ever end up with a kid with e.g. schizophrenia a you'll be happy that there's somebody making drugs to treat it.

39
Cool! I'm running out of space for my child-por- I mean landscape images so this can't happen soon enough.

40
The show runners are supposedly professionals and this their only job. They said that they chose Arya to kill the NK because no one would see that coming. Like, I can't even...
LUL

41
This livestream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vp5WBUcLNs
Kewl. I personally listen to this channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKJEOgjmipU while studying dark tomes, insidious scrolls and sunken reliefs, but I'll keep an eye on that one fo sho.
Also, popping off to Lagwagon, the only good(great?) pop-punk band if you ask me.
Angry Days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QW0Ae742ZKk

42
Maybe it's something of the case that genetics and environment are both first and second-order effects?

In other words, neither is "the cause" even though it is somewhat trivially true that the genetics "comes before" the environment the genes will be in, really both the genes and environment are the "substrate of actualization?"  One necessarily actualizing the other, by turns.

OK, well, I am not sure what I even wrote there.  But it seems like something someone smart might say about this.
Haha I'm not sure either. It sounds exactly like something a philosopher would say. I think this quote helps answer it though.
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The eLife work underscores an urgent need for future studies to involve more people, a greater diversity in data and more family-based replication analyses. It also calls for more sophisticated statistical methods that can better control for population structure and other environmental factors — something researchers are already working on as they continue to delve into exactly what went wrong with the initial analyses. “The methods developed so far really think about genetics and environment as separate and orthogonal, as independent factors. When in truth, they’re not independent. The environment has had a strong impact on the genetics, and it probably interacts with the genetics,” said Gil McVean, a statistical geneticist at the University of Oxford. “We don’t really do a good job of … understanding [that] interaction.”

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https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-turmoil-over-predicting-the-effects-of-genes-20190423/
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Various innovations in the field of genomics over the past few decades have given researchers hope that resolutions to long-lasting debates might finally be on the horizon. In particular, many have become optimistic about the prospects for disentangling the threads of “nature” and “nurture” — that is, about determining the extent to which genes alone can explain differences within and between populations.

But two recent studies are now calling some of the methods underlying those aspirations into question.

A key breakthrough was the recent development of genome-wide association studies (GWAS, commonly pronounced “gee-wahs”). The genetics of simple traits can often be deduced from pedigrees, and people have been using that approach for millennia to selectively breed vegetables that taste better and cows that produce more milk. But many traits are not the result of a handful of genes that have clear, strong effects; rather, they are the product of tens of thousands of weaker genetic signals, often found in noncoding DNA. When it comes to those kinds of features — the ones that scientists are most interested in, from height, to blood pressure, to predispositions for schizophrenia — a problem arises. Although environmental factors can be controlled in agricultural settings so as not to confound the search for genetic influences, it’s not so straightforward to extricate the two in humans.

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Given that some experts want to roll out polygenic scores in the clinic, it’s already clear that this flaw could deepen the disparity in health care. In a study published last month, researchers found that trying to translate insights gleaned from European data to make health predictions in people of African descent led to as much as a 4.5-fold drop in accuracy. Others have tried using polygenic scores to make poorly supported claims about differences in behavioral and social traits between populations (such as IQ and education attainment, which are far more difficult to define and unpack than height is, yet are being used to potentially inform future policymaking decisions). “It’s kind of scary,” said Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania who emphasized how critical it is to collect more underrepresented genomic information.


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I can barely understand any of that shit, but will be cool to follow.

45
Philosophy & Science / Re: Another galaxy without dark matter
« on: April 18, 2019, 09:38:56 pm »
Recall, Newtonian equations seemed to explain gravitation, until we realized they didn't really, only from one inertial perspective.  So, something akin to that might be the case here.  We figure that the "seemingly missing" force must be from "something" and so infer that this something is Dark Matter/Energy.  It could be the case that we simply are not "using the right perspective" or that our method of calculation is just missing something.

Yeah, when I first learned a bit about this dark stuff and then heard about a galaxy with none of it - I was like, well that galaxy looks just fine ( could be it's not ), so this dark stuff ain't necessary - or it could be like you say, since we think something is there we know nothing about, could be it's not there and we're not understanding something that can explain our results/readings.
Actually, it's the opposite. The fact that you can find galaxies that behave as if there's no dark matter strengthens the conclusion that there IS something dark and heavy and at the same time demolishes alternate theories (for how would these galaxies without dark matter behave as they do in that case?).

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