Now, just wait to get modded down by someone who doesn't spot the scientific truth of your statement, assuming it to just be a callous flame aimed at vegetarians and vegans.
Defending Janov by pointing to an anecdote and encouraging the reader to "try it and see what you feel like," instead of linking to an empirical study of his clinical results, only adds credence to the GP's allegations of pesudoscience, since those are the typical rhetorical methods of its defenders. I'm sure at least one of this site's intrepid Googlers can find some actual research on either side, assuming it exists. Of course, if it doesn't exist, that's a statement in itself.
His technique certainly goes against my understanding of healing. What Janov calls a "release of suppressed emotion," I call "rehearsing anxiety states," and I question the psychodynamic concepts that underlie his explanation of the technique. Unless Janov can show better results than the cognitive therapies, there's probably a better use of an hour than reading his book. Do you have any links to these results?
Only if you reject dualism and think that a human being is purely material.
You don't have to embrace dualism to disagree with the GP's claim. You just have to reject the notion of epiphenomenalism.
You and I are probably interested in the same problems, judging by your Swinburne reference, but I don't think that one's philosophical predilections toward monism or dualism say anything definitive about their beliefs about epiphenomenalism, nor does denying it require positing a soul (see Searle's Rediscovery of the Mind for an example.) Both seem to be inherently confused and artificial strictures of thought that don't say anything profound in the moral sphere (and I don't believe there's anything profound to say in the metaphysical sphere.)
If you haven't read any D.Z. Phillips, I'd recommend his Wittgenstein and Religion for an interesting and unconventional perspective on this subject.
Is the life on one miserable, selfish human being worth the torture and murder of 4,000 animals? Do any of these 'depressed' idiots ever think about this? Of course not!
Sorry, but you're wrong. Many do think about it, they just disagree with the the ethical conclusion that you derive from your thought about it. Slandering everyone who disagrees with you as unthinking idiots doesn't convince anyone of your ideas' correctness.
I hope you enjoyed your little anonymous scream at the world, though. Hey, here's a hint: happiness comes when you learn to stop screaming. Anonymous ranting doesn't bring anyone closer to the pleasure you claim to value so highly.
Pseudo programming sigs != going to change people's modding/tagging behaviour.
Well, first off, it's not a "pseudo-programming" sig. It's a sig that's been abbreviated using logical operators so that it doesn't run over the character limit. I'm a science and philosophy nerd, not a programming nerd, and it wouldn't even occur to me that my sig looks like a fake computer program.
Secondly, I disagree with your contention. True, it is highly unlikely that one person's sig will effect lasting changes in the uses and misuses of/. features. However, I certainly believe that an individual moderator, with no consistent behavior towards conscientiousness or abuse, could be reminded by my sig to side with the former after disagreeing with one of my posts. I have no way to test this hypothesis, but it makes sense given what I know of decision-making, and it costs me nothing to implement. So, I believe that my sig can change people's behavior, although certainly not in a widespread or meaningful way. This belief is not the motivator for my sig choice, though.
Let me point out that it's pretty presumptuous to even assume that a sig is meant to change behavior. Most sigs are just expressions of some tiny fraction of the author's opinion, frequently given indirectly through quotes or cultural references, that indicate a little something about the author's personality. So's mine: it points to my personal distaste for tag and mod abuse. On another level, it lets the reader know that I am the kind of stickler who cares enough about such things to make them the focus of my sig (which is every/.er's privilege, being a legitimized form of comment spam.) I previously had a Schopenhauer quote about the abuse of anonymity - not because I thought it would stop posters from abusing anonymity, but because I wanted to let the abusers know that I think they're cowardly assholes, and because I figured (correctly) that I might get e-mails from people who shared my interest in Schopenhauer.
I hope this helps, and I thank you for your concern.
So you get your depression cured by electrical stimulation, but you kill yourself due to the inescapable stream of crap-pop in your head brought by the stimulator? I'm pretty sure that counts as irony.
this technology doesn't address the root cause of why someone is depressed.
It may, if the root cause of the depression is genetic.
I generally agree with your sentiment, though. A great deal of depression is comorbid with personality disorder, or can be strongly correlated to environmental factors.
In the former instance, there is probably little to be done in the clinical sense. Changing this person's emotional reactivity is likely to just bring different aspects of their disordered personality to light, and the chaos and alienation this can induce in the patient and their social group is probably no healthier than the depression. There's much more to this, but a discussion of therapy for personality disorders would be long and outside the scope of this discussion.
It is the second instance, I believe, where you hit the nail on the head. If a patient gets depressed by their own self-defeating thoughts and patterns of abuse in their life, then it is the role of the therapist to facilitate change in those thoughts and behaviors within the context of everyday life, not to recommend tinkering directly with the patient's neurons.
It is, of course, quite possible that some folks genes provide them with an abnormal system of emotional regulation, and that "rewiring" this system is the best way to enable them to participate in the full range of human experience. Given what I know of ethics review boards, it is likely that the few dozen folks who've undergone this procedure had not responded positively to the normal range of treatment, and that they have not been diagnosed as PD'd. I'll bet that getting cerebral electrodes implanted for depression probably requires at least as much review and investigation as bilateral cingulotomy, for example.
a billion people drown. My answer is: so what[...]look at all the construction jobs you'll get[...]New York, London, and other coastal cities are all old anyway and its time to just move on[...]Besides, you could take all of those disasters, and I'd almost rather have that, turning the whole world upside down, than give an extremist socialist liberal one thin dime.
Well, perhaps you could run for office to implement your unconventional ideas. I don't know if the "immature sociopath" demographic will be able to swing any elections, but...oh, right, my bad.
it's about a guy who got canned for making racist remarks on the job, looking for some way to lash out at Boeing and get some revenge. Fuck him.
Fired engineer: This plane is unsafe for the following reasons.
Boeing and government agencies: This plane is in complete compliance with FCC requirements, and this engineer is a racist.
Seems like it would be pretty premature to rush to some judgment on this issue without knowing:
1. The FAA's requirements for this new material, and their soundness.
2. Specific rebuttals of the claims, perhaps something more substantive than "it meets [unspecified] requirements" and vague, contextless mentions of future computer modeling.
I mean, fuck the guy if he's a racist prick. I doubt Boeing would allege something like that without a documented history, but I look forward to the release of the documentation when this goes to court. Still, I want to see some actual figures in response to his specific claims, and I don't understand why so many posters are in such a rush to judgmen...
As the wikipedia article you linked indicates, this "homeopathic dilution of zinc" is proven in clinical studies to be more effective than placebo in shortening colds.
The article cites all of two studies from within the last 10 years. Many more have been done, and the results are inconclusive (and not suggestive of the manufacturer's claims), but this is a wiki article and under no obligation to be accurate. I was pointing to the wiki article so that people could identify my reference; are you seriously trying to use it to back up a point of scientific inquiry?
I bet next you'll pull out some sort of ad hominem Foucault-esque silliness about power structures or something...
Science is that which follows the scientific method, not necessarily that which is advocated by designated authorities. The fact that those who claim to advocate "science" are generally only advocating submission to the designated authorities, is what is sad commentary on the state of education.
No surprise there. Have fun misreading the rest of the comments. Try not to fall into the trap of substituting a wiki page for the totality of research on a subject next time.
I use a product called Oxy something, long unpronouncable name. It's essentially hepititus that's been freezed dried 400X to fragment it and render it harmless but the chemical markers are intact.
I second mad.frog's post, and would like to add that the process you've described is complete unscientific marketing bullshit. This is sort of the point of TFA.
My grandmother didn't suffer a cold for almost two decades, and her only medicine was Harvey's Bristol Cream Sherry, so I suppose that must be at least twice as effective as whatever you're using.
Some, like chicken soup for colds, are said to be actually effective.
It certainly makes sense, from the present scientific understanding of physiology, that ingesting a steaming hot, flavorful, (generally) nutritious substance during a respiratory infection would promote comfort and positive emotions, which are correlated with good health.
That's a far cry from claiming that water has a memory, as do the advocates of homeopathy.
Besides, what else would one want to eat with a cold? Sashimi?
Re:So Slashdot joins the anti-homeopathy conspirac
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Science vs. Homeopathy
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· Score: 1
It was, and a funny one at that. I'm just predicting that it will get at least one angry response.
Many people I talk to say that there is a direct correlation between the homeopathy and his healing. I guess I am just a pessimist.
Or just a realist. When I read your story, the first thing that occurred to me was: No wonder the dog got better. I'd imagine that finding itself dunked in noxious and irritating chemicals, repeatedly, in an unfamiliar environment, would wreak total havoc on a dog's stress level, and having that trauma removed from its experience would enable its natural systems to function better. There is an observed correlation between positive emotional states and healing, and the homeopathic remedies were just as worthless as the dip in that case: neither was producing an improvement in condition.
It's too bad the term "holistic" seems to have been hijacked by these quacks, because there's some promising stuff there that doesn't rely on unscientific conjecture.
I think what he meant was that the fact that it is pure junk science is completely uncontroversial.
I would suggest that there is no controversy because the people who know and use the phrase "junk science" already know about the lack of evidentiary basis for homeopathic claims, while those who don't generally accept homeopathic claims with little reflection, and are willing to pay money for homeopathic substances to "give them a try." Since very few people die as a result, there's really no mass movement on either side. It's just highly successful marketing for the patent medicines of our times.
Re:So Slashdot joins the anti-homeopathy conspirac
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Science vs. Homeopathy
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· Score: 1
Excellent flamebait. I find it hard to believe that someone who writes under the name "David Hume" could actually endorse the viewpoint in your posts, so I can only assume you're hoping to enjoy some copious nerd hate, which you will no doubt receive in short order.
The writers picked the topic because of a relative lack of controversy. This is unsurprising to me, but not for a good reason. My experience - I would love to see some research, hopefully proving me wrong - has led me to believe that a majority of people accept the spurious claims of homeopathy advocates. I'm disheartened about this by the number of otherwise perfectly reasonable people who have insisted that I should pay money for a homeopathic dilution of zinc to fight a cold virus.
"My last cold only lasted three days, must have been the Zicam," is so wrong on multiple levels, and it's a sad commentary on the state of education that such thinking is so widespread, although it's only fair to note that such has always been the case with regards to medicine.
My favorite part of the article is this three-bong-load abuse of physics by Lionel Milgrom, a contributor to this very special journal edition, who proposes a theory (I shit you not) of quantum entanglement of humans:
"It is as if at a deep level, everything in the universe is instantaneously linked together in a vast holistic matter-energy network of interacting fields which transcends ordinary concepts of space and time," Milgrom says. "And we, composed of trillions of particles are an inseparable part of it: far from what reason seems to tell us."
Mr. Milgrom, you and I share the same perspective on the universe. Unfortunately for you, it's called religion, not science, and your attempts to dress it up as science for the purposes of promoting our generation's version of patent medicine are the worst sort of shameful mockery.
Also, "instantaneously?" How can any two things be made instantaneous by a force that "transcends time?" You're as shitty a philosopher as you are a physicist, Mr. Milgrom.
Both of these could reasonably considered informative, however the second is likely untrue, since in my experience idiots are quite likely to be the last to realise
Remember, there's a big gap between "likely untrue" and "always untrue." When someone can look at their own statement, realize what it implies about their capacities, and then confidently declare "I am an idiot," they are displaying insight that is well above average, and certainly deserving of mod points.
I, for one, welcome our new self-insight-possessing commenters.
have I accidentally logged into some kind of bizarro-Slashdot, where everyone is polite and respectful? And is there a way of making sure I don't accidentally end up on the other one again?
Staying out of the Politics and YRO threads may reduce your vitriol exposure by as much as 300%. Ask your doctor!
*Disclaimer: poster is a frequent and vitriolic contributor to Politics and YRO threads.
Thanks for proving, with your citation, that your signature is pure slander. Participated? What utter horseshit.
I know a lot of conservatives think that their values aren't represented in government, but it sure seems to me like we've got one filled with paranoid fascist enablers who can't even be troubled to read, so what's the complaint?
No. And I'd bet that far, far more than 39% of Democrats agree with me on this one, despite the GGP's sig. One gets exposed to a great deal of the "9/11 truth" crowd living in a Vermont college town. Yet they're a fringe minority even in this wackiest of East Coast states, which is a natural consequence of positing "evidence" that varies from unsubstantiated allegation to unabashed falsehood.
It's sad, to me, that we have a president so morally bankrupt that some people will believe any conspiracy ascribed to his administration.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the major revenue stream would be high-margin service contracts.
Now, just wait to get modded down by someone who doesn't spot the scientific truth of your statement, assuming it to just be a callous flame aimed at vegetarians and vegans.
Defending Janov by pointing to an anecdote and encouraging the reader to "try it and see what you feel like," instead of linking to an empirical study of his clinical results, only adds credence to the GP's allegations of pesudoscience, since those are the typical rhetorical methods of its defenders. I'm sure at least one of this site's intrepid Googlers can find some actual research on either side, assuming it exists. Of course, if it doesn't exist, that's a statement in itself.
His technique certainly goes against my understanding of healing. What Janov calls a "release of suppressed emotion," I call "rehearsing anxiety states," and I question the psychodynamic concepts that underlie his explanation of the technique. Unless Janov can show better results than the cognitive therapies, there's probably a better use of an hour than reading his book. Do you have any links to these results?
You don't have to embrace dualism to disagree with the GP's claim. You just have to reject the notion of epiphenomenalism.
You and I are probably interested in the same problems, judging by your Swinburne reference, but I don't think that one's philosophical predilections toward monism or dualism say anything definitive about their beliefs about epiphenomenalism, nor does denying it require positing a soul (see Searle's Rediscovery of the Mind for an example.) Both seem to be inherently confused and artificial strictures of thought that don't say anything profound in the moral sphere (and I don't believe there's anything profound to say in the metaphysical sphere.)
If you haven't read any D.Z. Phillips, I'd recommend his Wittgenstein and Religion for an interesting and unconventional perspective on this subject.
Sorry, but you're wrong. Many do think about it, they just disagree with the the ethical conclusion that you derive from your thought about it. Slandering everyone who disagrees with you as unthinking idiots doesn't convince anyone of your ideas' correctness.
I hope you enjoyed your little anonymous scream at the world, though. Hey, here's a hint: happiness comes when you learn to stop screaming. Anonymous ranting doesn't bring anyone closer to the pleasure you claim to value so highly.
Well, first off, it's not a "pseudo-programming" sig. It's a sig that's been abbreviated using logical operators so that it doesn't run over the character limit. I'm a science and philosophy nerd, not a programming nerd, and it wouldn't even occur to me that my sig looks like a fake computer program.
Secondly, I disagree with your contention. True, it is highly unlikely that one person's sig will effect lasting changes in the uses and misuses of /. features. However, I certainly believe that an individual moderator, with no consistent behavior towards conscientiousness or abuse, could be reminded by my sig to side with the former after disagreeing with one of my posts. I have no way to test this hypothesis, but it makes sense given what I know of decision-making, and it costs me nothing to implement. So, I believe that my sig can change people's behavior, although certainly not in a widespread or meaningful way. This belief is not the motivator for my sig choice, though.
Let me point out that it's pretty presumptuous to even assume that a sig is meant to change behavior. Most sigs are just expressions of some tiny fraction of the author's opinion, frequently given indirectly through quotes or cultural references, that indicate a little something about the author's personality. So's mine: it points to my personal distaste for tag and mod abuse. On another level, it lets the reader know that I am the kind of stickler who cares enough about such things to make them the focus of my sig (which is every /.er's privilege, being a legitimized form of comment spam.) I previously had a Schopenhauer quote about the abuse of anonymity - not because I thought it would stop posters from abusing anonymity, but because I wanted to let the abusers know that I think they're cowardly assholes, and because I figured (correctly) that I might get e-mails from people who shared my interest in Schopenhauer.
I hope this helps, and I thank you for your concern.
Good marketing.
So you get your depression cured by electrical stimulation, but you kill yourself due to the inescapable stream of crap-pop in your head brought by the stimulator? I'm pretty sure that counts as irony.
It may, if the root cause of the depression is genetic.
I generally agree with your sentiment, though. A great deal of depression is comorbid with personality disorder, or can be strongly correlated to environmental factors.
In the former instance, there is probably little to be done in the clinical sense. Changing this person's emotional reactivity is likely to just bring different aspects of their disordered personality to light, and the chaos and alienation this can induce in the patient and their social group is probably no healthier than the depression. There's much more to this, but a discussion of therapy for personality disorders would be long and outside the scope of this discussion.
It is the second instance, I believe, where you hit the nail on the head. If a patient gets depressed by their own self-defeating thoughts and patterns of abuse in their life, then it is the role of the therapist to facilitate change in those thoughts and behaviors within the context of everyday life, not to recommend tinkering directly with the patient's neurons.
It is, of course, quite possible that some folks genes provide them with an abnormal system of emotional regulation, and that "rewiring" this system is the best way to enable them to participate in the full range of human experience. Given what I know of ethics review boards, it is likely that the few dozen folks who've undergone this procedure had not responded positively to the normal range of treatment, and that they have not been diagnosed as PD'd. I'll bet that getting cerebral electrodes implanted for depression probably requires at least as much review and investigation as bilateral cingulotomy, for example.
Well, perhaps you could run for office to implement your unconventional ideas. I don't know if the "immature sociopath" demographic will be able to swing any elections, but...oh, right, my bad.
Fired engineer: This plane is unsafe for the following reasons.
Boeing and government agencies: This plane is in complete compliance with FCC requirements, and this engineer is a racist.
Seems like it would be pretty premature to rush to some judgment on this issue without knowing:
1. The FAA's requirements for this new material, and their soundness.
2. Specific rebuttals of the claims, perhaps something more substantive than "it meets [unspecified] requirements" and vague, contextless mentions of future computer modeling.
I mean, fuck the guy if he's a racist prick. I doubt Boeing would allege something like that without a documented history, but I look forward to the release of the documentation when this goes to court. Still, I want to see some actual figures in response to his specific claims, and I don't understand why so many posters are in such a rush to judgmen...
Oh. Ah.
Everyone knows the game is only fun when played as "strip Operation" with a group of drunk college students. Who the hell wants to see robots naked?
(...he says, kicking a nearby Sorayama book under the couch.)
The article cites all of two studies from within the last 10 years. Many more have been done, and the results are inconclusive (and not suggestive of the manufacturer's claims), but this is a wiki article and under no obligation to be accurate. I was pointing to the wiki article so that people could identify my reference; are you seriously trying to use it to back up a point of scientific inquiry?
I bet next you'll pull out some sort of ad hominem Foucault-esque silliness about power structures or something...
No surprise there. Have fun misreading the rest of the comments. Try not to fall into the trap of substituting a wiki page for the totality of research on a subject next time.
So...there's money to be made in the field of sage enemas, once I work out where to stick the fuse?
I second mad.frog's post, and would like to add that the process you've described is complete unscientific marketing bullshit. This is sort of the point of TFA.
My grandmother didn't suffer a cold for almost two decades, and her only medicine was Harvey's Bristol Cream Sherry, so I suppose that must be at least twice as effective as whatever you're using.
It certainly makes sense, from the present scientific understanding of physiology, that ingesting a steaming hot, flavorful, (generally) nutritious substance during a respiratory infection would promote comfort and positive emotions, which are correlated with good health.
That's a far cry from claiming that water has a memory, as do the advocates of homeopathy.
Besides, what else would one want to eat with a cold? Sashimi?
It was, and a funny one at that. I'm just predicting that it will get at least one angry response.
Or just a realist. When I read your story, the first thing that occurred to me was: No wonder the dog got better. I'd imagine that finding itself dunked in noxious and irritating chemicals, repeatedly, in an unfamiliar environment, would wreak total havoc on a dog's stress level, and having that trauma removed from its experience would enable its natural systems to function better. There is an observed correlation between positive emotional states and healing, and the homeopathic remedies were just as worthless as the dip in that case: neither was producing an improvement in condition.
It's too bad the term "holistic" seems to have been hijacked by these quacks, because there's some promising stuff there that doesn't rely on unscientific conjecture.
Not really, because if you RTFA, what these people are doing bears only the faintest resemblance to research (in that they have a journal.)
Excellent flamebait. I find it hard to believe that someone who writes under the name "David Hume" could actually endorse the viewpoint in your posts, so I can only assume you're hoping to enjoy some copious nerd hate, which you will no doubt receive in short order.
The writers picked the topic because of a relative lack of controversy. This is unsurprising to me, but not for a good reason. My experience - I would love to see some research, hopefully proving me wrong - has led me to believe that a majority of people accept the spurious claims of homeopathy advocates. I'm disheartened about this by the number of otherwise perfectly reasonable people who have insisted that I should pay money for a homeopathic dilution of zinc to fight a cold virus.
"My last cold only lasted three days, must have been the Zicam," is so wrong on multiple levels, and it's a sad commentary on the state of education that such thinking is so widespread, although it's only fair to note that such has always been the case with regards to medicine.
My favorite part of the article is this three-bong-load abuse of physics by Lionel Milgrom, a contributor to this very special journal edition, who proposes a theory (I shit you not) of quantum entanglement of humans:
Mr. Milgrom, you and I share the same perspective on the universe. Unfortunately for you, it's called religion, not science, and your attempts to dress it up as science for the purposes of promoting our generation's version of patent medicine are the worst sort of shameful mockery.
Also, "instantaneously?" How can any two things be made instantaneous by a force that "transcends time?" You're as shitty a philosopher as you are a physicist, Mr. Milgrom.
Remember, there's a big gap between "likely untrue" and "always untrue." When someone can look at their own statement, realize what it implies about their capacities, and then confidently declare "I am an idiot," they are displaying insight that is well above average, and certainly deserving of mod points.
I, for one, welcome our new self-insight-possessing commenters.
Staying out of the Politics and YRO threads may reduce your vitriol exposure by as much as 300%. Ask your doctor!
*Disclaimer: poster is a frequent and vitriolic contributor to Politics and YRO threads.
Thanks for proving, with your citation, that your signature is pure slander. Participated? What utter horseshit.
I know a lot of conservatives think that their values aren't represented in government, but it sure seems to me like we've got one filled with paranoid fascist enablers who can't even be troubled to read, so what's the complaint?
No. And I'd bet that far, far more than 39% of Democrats agree with me on this one, despite the GGP's sig. One gets exposed to a great deal of the "9/11 truth" crowd living in a Vermont college town. Yet they're a fringe minority even in this wackiest of East Coast states, which is a natural consequence of positing "evidence" that varies from unsubstantiated allegation to unabashed falsehood.
It's sad, to me, that we have a president so morally bankrupt that some people will believe any conspiracy ascribed to his administration.