Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48179590

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https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/02/28/who-likes...

Once you get that group control is when you have problems.

This is kind of an interesting deeper dive into why people support fascism. Maybe not surprising but highlights the two main reasons: something like "we need a strong leader to take control of the government away from corrupt elite and put it back into the hands of the people" and "the government needs to be in the hands of the real, true, competent people, and not the other, fake, lesser people".

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/political-science/artic...

Personally I'm past the point of "what does fascism look like" and want to have a realistic discussion about "how do you reestablish a democracy when you're in a fascist regime?" So far the historical examples at my fingertips are all basically some variant of "people get tired of it, the cult leader passes away and everyone kind of magically agrees that fascism isn't working".

The program sounds reasonable until you become aware that the patients most in need are often the ones least likely to improve. It also ignores the reality that sometimes even the most rigorous, well reasoned treatment plans fail for unpredictable reasons. Do you punish providers and patients for that?

"...In practical terms, GM is looking for people who know how to build with AI from the ground up — designing the systems, training the models, and engineering the pipelines — not just use AI as a productivity tool."

That's my personal impression of the anger. It's not so much luddite anger, its like Clippy anger and millenial anti-Boomer anger mixed together.

It's like a twist on the Turing test, where some humans can't tell the difference between a human and a computer, but others can, and they tend to be younger on average. The Turing test ironically ends up telling you more about the person taking the test.

I wouldn't call the surgical interventions a scam, but their risks have routinely been understated and as a result the arguments for them overstated.

Something like GLP-1 medication is exactly what was needed. The whole area needed to move to something more like how depression is treated, with psychological behavioral therapy and medication being frontline, and surgery only being reserved for rare very high risk cases of last resort.

I've seen this photo before but never with any historical context, other than its significance as a photography milestone.

That site explains the context of it as a news photo relatively well.

It's a classic psychological phenomenon, where individual differences are obscuring time course patterns and vice versa.

Of course, this sidesteps the question of why (in the hypothetical example) the overall individual differences exist. Assuming those general individual differences are reliable and "real", you still have to explain why they are there, and if they predict significant outcomes, why they do, and so forth.

The message of the paper is good, although I think the press release (not surprisingly) overstates the significance of the paper. I think these kinds of issues have received a lot more attention in the literature in the last decade or so in neuroscience. It also sort of sidesteps a lot of the more thorny questions about truly person-specific patterns and how to determine when they're meaningful.

Not a criticism of this project — it's a good idea, it just highlights the central question of "how well is this model working?" I'm not sure it's so straightforward.

It's very dark. I tend to be libertarian about these things and feel like it's none of the government's business. Get a warrant and do your investigations if you want to prove someone is a foreigner up to no good. There is no real problem unless you're xenophobic or racist.

So I don't agree the "underlying idea is fine" at all. This is a step further though, by putting an administrative and financial burden on people to have a bank account.

The fact this is normal in other places in the world doesn't make it ok to me either — two wrongs don't make a right. And in any event many other places are more socialized than the US, so there isn't the same kind of burden on many places as there would be in the US. It would be one thing if the administration were bending over backwards to provide public healthcare, expand education and public research, but they're doing the opposite.

One issue is heterogeneity in effects across individuals. Even with traditional antidepressants, it's common for people to respond to one drug class but not another. So it's conceivable, just based on this study, there are people who might respond to psychedelics who might not respond to other things, and vice versa. So even if the effect in the general population, on average, is the same, it might be useful for a different subgroup, which is still differentially useful.

I suspect a lot of these effects have been overhyped, but the same could be said of any depression treatment, and there's good evidence for a lot of treatments even if the effects are smaller than they're sometimes made out to be.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47660962

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# Comments: 1