Thanks for this article, it starts out with a strong Scientific background. What I personally found interesting as I started to investigate nicotine vapes a few years back was the lack of solid evidence out there which showed any real harm from nicotine vapes and also how shoddy nearly all the science on how addictive of a substance nicotine was (almost all of it is conducted on cigarettes, failing to control for other chemicals or used outdated animal models of addiction which exaggerate addictive quality).
As we’ve seen throughout the entirety of human history, making substances illegal does not stop people from using them. I’m glad someone has taken the time to investigate this, and I hope we can learn in the future that banning substances doesn’t work. In fact, all the evidence points towards declining usage and increasing safety as drugs are legalized and controlled as they become less adulterated and the taxes can be used for purposes such as fighting addiction.
This is incredibly anecdotal story. It’s one that highlights the experience of one elder doctor and how they don’t like the expansion of a technology they don’t understand and don’t wish to adapt to. There’s countless studies and even metastudies out there about how incredibly useful and important telehealth is. Hell, there’s even reviews of metastudies which highlight how useful this technology is and how abundant we have data to prove its efficacy. The article doesn’t spend any time touching on the other side of the argument. It’s hyperfocused on this one doctor’s opinion of healthcare, and their perception of it. The one patient he focuses on, is exactly the kind of patient for which the kind of telehealth he was practicing (zoom style narrative only telehealth) is not particularly well suited. There’s a reason that there’s telehealth devices which exist to allow the use of a sphygmomanometer, stethoscope, otoscope, and other important checkup tools or are a hybrid telehealth environment where a nurse can do these and report findings to a doctor who’s present virtually.
As an aside I’m not sure what to think of the publication openmind magazine. They’re relatively new and they claim to have a focus on unbiased reporting, but they also claim to be here to address and debunk conspiracies and deceptions and controversies. If this is meant to be a think piece, the lack of addressing the obvious scientific gap between this anecdotally based thinking about a very well established scientific field makes me think twice about whether this is truly out here to be based on fact or whether this actually just a conservative mouthpiece trying to pass itself off as focused on facts.
With all of that being said, I do think there’s an important consideration to be made in healthcare, and one that’s been discussed in extreme depth in the literature - what kinds of care are better for telehealth and which are best for in-person (or at least, what tech would we need for the two to be comparable). There are absolutely important considerations on what specialties and workflows do well in the telehealth field and which ones are not well suited. Emergency and trauma care, for example, are unlikely to have any telehealth components for a long time. Dermatology and mental health, on the other hand, are extremely successful in the telehealth space and were early adopters. There’s also a specific set of skills and a way of approaching diagnosis that are fundamentally different for those people you see in person and those you see via telehealth and if you are not adequately trained on these considerations it makes a lot of sense that you might not work well in between the two mediums.
I first was introduced to this concept through a TED talk on behavioral economics as it relates to language - as mentioned in this article, languages which grammatically associate the future and the present together also happen to save more money for retirement, practice safer sex, prioritize their physical health, etc. It’s made me think a lot about all the other ways language likely interacts with how we think, what values we place on society (and society places on us) and other far reaching effects of language on cognition. Thank you for this article as it talks through, in detail, many of these differences based on language structure and has provided me with a plethora of papers to read through!
A few months ago I read Hoffman’s book A Case Against Reality. It was an interesting read, one in which I ended up learning more about quantum mechanics than I ever thought I would when I picked the book up. Frankly I think the book could be distilled down to a much shorter version, as the central concept was not a particularly complicated one, just one which challenges conventional ways of thinking. I think this talk does a better job. If your curious to learn more about the science that supports this particular way of thinking or a more in depth exploration of what it means, particularly with relevance to the concept of spacetime, I’d suggest giving the book a read.
Horseshoe theory was never meant to describe political attitudes. Horseshoe makes the classic mistake of confusing economic policy with social in an attempt to oversimplify and classify individuals. Perhaps most importantly, there’s exceedingly little scientific study of horseshoe theory and what little is out there happens to fail to prove the horseshoe theory hypothesis.
Not to nitpick too hard, but it sounds more like they can distinguish between strangers and their owner, and that when exposed to audio of their owner talking, they can distinguish between two tones - those humans typically use with other humans and those humans typically use with animals and infants.
Interesting science. Thanks for sharing!
I remember when congress “investigated” big oil for making record profits during the last recession
big whole lot of nothing came of that, I remember thinking ‘well that can’t be good for the rest of capitalism’… and here we are. Cat’s out of the bag, government doesn’t want to do anything about it.
Dopamine is not the only important neural pathway. Mainstream vaping is typically of two varieties - nicotine and cannabis. While dopamine is technically involved in both, the receptor pathways which are perhaps more important are the nicotinamide receptors in the former and cannabinoid receptors for the latter.
I think there’s a good chance for some sampling bias. At the very least there’s some selection bias, in that it’s representative of Australian Gen Z individuals who opted into some ‘willingness to participate in surveys’ on an online website (or seemingly so, it’s possible they may have signed up in person? its unclear in the methodology section exactly how they were recruited, but it does give some high level ideas).
In 2021, an online survey was conducted across Australia’s major cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Canberra and Adelaide. The actual study participants were recruited using simple random sampling (based on computer-generated random numbers) from a database of 35,000 people who have previously indicated willingness to participate in surveys.
Out of 698 randomly invited participants, 478 responded by completing the survey, generating a response rate of 68.5%.
I also don’t think the question was designed all that well
When asked about the main contributors to climate change and presented with a long list of factors allowing multiple choices and an open-ended “Other” option to include another opinion
How many should I select if I’m talking about main contributors? I’m sure many participants asked themselves this question when clicking boxes. If I click every box, is that reflective of the “main contributors”? When I hit 5 boxes, is that enough? If I’m trying to disambiguate between the options of “livestock and agriculture” and “big corporations and industry”, I’d definitely side with the latter as more important because you can have sustainable livestock and agriculture but large corporations typically do not. Also the latter is a larger box which holds most of the problems of the former. Do I select both when we’re talking about “main contributors”? I’m not certain how I might have answered, had I been presented the same survey.
In the end, I think the author jumps to more conclusions than is supported by the limits of the methodology employed.
The liberal cry that everything they don’t like is Russian interference, that every bit of political activism or deviation from the norm in any direction is the result of a proxy war between Russia and/or China and the rest of us.
Huh, do people really say this? I haven’t experienced this online, but yea, I can get why that’s just absurd and harmful.
People desperately looking for tech CEOs to address disinformation by embracing centralized arbiters of truth.
I mean, I think they’re mostly just asking for them to actually remove content that is reported for being misinformation because the amount of it that was going around the last two major elections has been quite a bit. But again, perhaps I may not be running in the right social circles to see how this is framed.
A rather densely worded article which makes some good points, but I don’t really know many people who think of disinfo in the way the author is framing it. Perhaps I haven’t dived in very deeply on how people view disinformation - my take on it is that while there are major interests out there (such as the mentioned Russian troll farms) it’s the day to day misinfo that’s most troubling to me. It’s the fact that shitty articles get re-shared by people who don’t take two seconds to question the information… they look at the article title and go “why yes, the transgenders are ruining sports” and spread along the message. Sure, the person behind said article might be intentionally sharing this to groups on facebook which they know are full of the kind of people who do this, but I don’t see the malicious actors as the source of the problem, but the shoddy education system which allows so many people to buy into bad journalism like this. The people resharing without a thought are how we ended up with Donald Trump, and I think we would have ended up with him even if they weren’t seeded with disinformation because the quality or the quantity doesn’t matter here, only the resonance of the message. They used to share blog posts and commentaries which avoided fact and talked about feeling, disinfo is not a new concept, it’s just happening in a new medium and has a new face.
I’ve been slowly seeing more and more parties booked as afrobeats and it’s slow rise in EDM subgenres. I’m a huge fan of melodic and syncopated rhythms, often finding myself drawn towards DnB, breaks, UK garage, etc. perhaps at least partly because western music so rarely plays with variation in the rhythm and instead plays with melody while keeping rhythm fairly steady.
Absolutely. Most of us are anti-capitalist and a fair deal of us are anarchist too. I happen to be both. Really our only guiding principle is that of being nice to each other. We believe that most social media likes to live by the letter of the law and because of such there’s too much wiggle room to be a piece of shit but still never break any rules and that drives away people from a platform and makes nice people leave (not to mention provides excessive burden to minorities). Anyone is welcome to express or iterate their opinion on various matters, but as soon as it is dehumanizing or exploitative it’s no longer nice, and not the kind of behavior/content that we would allow.
I don’t think it’s a problem until it interferes with your ability to do more important things in your life. If you have the time and capacity to explain why something is incorrect on the internet it can be beneficial for many of the ways you just outlined.
However, if you spend excessive amounts of time doing that, or prioritize it over the needs of the people you value in your life, it’s a problem in your life that you should probably address.
It’s sad that our education system is failing so many people that they don’t see through this kind of product. It’s also fucked up that we can’t create a system which regulates against it and protects people from being manipulated so obviously. Chronic pain sucks ass, and I don’t blame someone for giving it a shot when in many cases nothing else works.
All animals will do just about anything to avoid pain. Framing an addiction through the lens of escaping pain is perhaps something we need to consider. I think the focus needs to be on medication management. If the options available to me are to be in pain all the time, or be physically addicted to a drug which removes the pain but for which I’m not chasing a stronger dose always (or at least am able to cycle between a number of drugs to reset tolerance), I’m absolutely going to choose the latter.
With that being said, opioids in general are physically addictive, which is problematic. Other drugs such as dissociatives like ketamine are much less addictive. In fact, if opioids are kept to a rather short course and lower doses you can probably avoid physical addiction for most individuals. The problem is that we don’t really have a good scientific background for figuring out how to manage this and we’re unwilling to give it a try because of how much we demonize drugs and this all or nothing mentality around addictive substances.
It was only a matter of time until the truth about opioids’ addictiveness became obvious and undeniable. Only THEN did the “whole” medical system start clamping down on opioids.
Sorry I didn’t mean to minimize the topic down as much as I did. This wasn’t meant as an explanation for the beginning or the source of the opioid epidemic. Just another step along the path of poor management. You summed it up better above, thank you.
People aren’t getting opioid prescriptions from their therapist, lol
The reason the opioid epidemic is as bad as it is, is because the medical system as a whole has clamped down hard on who can prescribe opioids so people turn to street drugs from lack of access. There’s also unfortunately a lot of people who got addicted back when it was much easier to get opioids for pain and when it wasn’t managed in an appropriate way.
Very likely double exposure
Could be done with purely photographic techniques, or aided through the use of technology like image editors
Apologies, upon re-reading my comment I see that I didn’t really spend enough time to word this appropriately. Vapes are not harmless. There is absolutely a harm to inhaling any vaporized liquid, or just inhaling hot gas in general. We don’t know the full extent of the harms it causes, but we have a decent amount of knowledge from similar hot inhaled substances to draw some high level conclusions.
I was mostly speaking towards the harm reduction angle and how many places around the world have taken a hard stance on this - banning the substance because it is problematic. It always struck me as rather shortsighted, especially when presented with the alternative, a much more adulterated and toxic substance, still being legal. In general drug prohibitions do not work and I appreciate an article talking about the intricacies of that.