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On July 30 2017 08:18 IgnE wrote:
so whats the internet fallacy buzzword for claiming that your opponent is a conspiracy theorist because they use "active" verbs to describe an emergent societal effect or an only apparently agent-directed outcome?
to Kwark, v.: 1. The act of attributing an absurd spin to another's argument that has the effect of needlessly shitting up a conversation; 2. The act of outright misrepresenting another's argument.
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United States44286 Posts
Oh hush. You're just mad because you lost your job as press secretary.
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Norway28892 Posts
On July 30 2017 08:02 Nyxisto wrote:Show nested quote +On July 30 2017 07:58 Liquid`Drone wrote:while I think igne hates those rhetoric-buzzwords like 'strawman' I've rarely seen better examples. I read virtually none of the arguments you guys are attributing to him and ridiculing him for in his posts. Sucks, too, because this is a really interesting subject and I thought a good discussion was starting, but instead I just see bad faith arguing.  I was literally accused of fascist thought because I dared argue that such a thing as mental health exists and should be cared about
I wouldn't have used the phrase fascist logic and I get that it doesn't motivate good faith arguing on your behalf, but come on, this post of yours is a perfect example of what I was describing. Igne did not say that there is no such thing as mental health (issues) or that these issues should not be cared about.
Rather, he's consistently arguing against an increasingly narrow definition of normality and the increased use of drugs to achieve this normality. It's a complicated and very difficult philosophical problem, 'to what degree should parents and medical experts be able to medicate children to make them achieve a baseline level of academic success'. He didn't say 'no children should ever be given adhd medication', he didn't say 'there is no such thing as adhd'. He thinks its prescribed much too frequently, and that sometimes, the benefits of adhd medication (increased ability to concentrate and succeed academically) might also have drawbacks (for example reduced creativity). I haven't seen specific numbers but I'm fairly certain american children get adhd medication more frequently than european children. This alone kinda means by default that one party gets it wrong, and personally I'm inclined to think that american children are given too much ritalin rather than that european kids get too little. But that's besides the point - if you think we should give it to 1 in 20 kids then that's fair enough.
To be clear, I've met kids with legit adhd who got ritalin to treat it. I've seen outbursts that definitely are hard to combine with like, being a regular well integrated member of society. I've also known lots of teenagers who didn't really need it and who sold their ritalin to other teenagers who wanted to do speed - this group has actually been bigger, in my experience, but that's probably related to my circles as well.
If, 100 years from now, prosthetic limbs vastly outperform regular limbs, like to the point where having regular limbs makes you handicapped compared to having prosthetic limbs, should parents be allowed to amputate limbs of their children to make them able to function in accordance with society's expectations for what the children are supposed to be able to do? Like, where's the limit? Because I agree that in many instances, adhd medication vastly improves the lives of children who get it. Probably a large majority, tbh, at least in Europe. But I also see a really interesting philosophical dilemma looming in the horizon.
Would like to make a longer post but I gotta go.
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This weird unholy Igne - xDaunt horseshoe alliance creeps me out
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United States44286 Posts
To respond to your futuristic ethics question, if I may take your hypothetical seriously, presumably the issue would be whether the operation had to be done while the child was too young to give informed consent. If there was no disadvantage to waiting for physical enhancement (beyond not having it), sure, wait, same way I feel about shit like circumcision. If we make it more interesting and add things like neurological enhancements that rely upon the plasticity of an infant brain to be fully integrated and give huge increases in quality of life/options then not only would I want it done to kids with the consent of the parents, I'd probably consider it abuse to deny them, like I would any other denial of healthcare.
Healthcare shouldn't be limited to bringing the weakest up to the average. Fitness is a comparative measure, current condition vs potential condition. Logically as potential is increased by science then fitness goes down. Before laser eye surgery was invented my eyes were as good as they could be. The invention of laser eye surgery made my eyes unfit and so I paid for the medical treatment of treating them. Losing one of our senses would be a disability. Having all the senses available to us is presumed to be ability. Once we can be given new senses by technology I don't see why having only the senses you're born with wouldn't be a disability. Entirely irrelevant to pretty much anything but I don't see the dilemma, I welcome our posthuman overlords.
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1) lets take the example of fish oil as supplement for the claim that most supplements are inactive. a variety of studies have been done with mixed results about the health benefits. this is further exacerbated by lack of quality standards in commerical products (see eg www.sciencedirect.com)
2) for psychoactive components even taking something like HTP or st johns wort or velvet bean/dopa mucana should be allowed. yet these are all actually very powerful brain modulators
3) for an example of a supplement that used to be available that was recently banned, and which i think is ridiculous, see dimethylamylamine, or geranium extract
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United States44286 Posts
Do you think the government should have usury laws against interest rates that are too high? Or should people be able to simply read their contracts and choose for themselves.
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On July 30 2017 09:04 KwarK wrote:
Do you think the government should have usury laws against interest rates that are too high? Or should people be able to simply read their contracts and choose for themselves.
i dont think drugs and psychoactive substances should be marketable products. i would ban most drug advertising.
but to answer your question yes there should be usury laws against super-exploitative rates
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I wish the usury laws applied more fully; but in many cases they don't apply due to being state laws, and the various interest sources being covered under federal law.
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United States44286 Posts
On July 30 2017 09:07 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On July 30 2017 09:04 KwarK wrote:
Do you think the government should have usury laws against interest rates that are too high? Or should people be able to simply read their contracts and choose for themselves. i dont think drugs and psychoactive substances should be marketable products. i would ban most drug advertising. but to answer your question yes there should be usury laws against super-exploitative rates
edit: I think I'm confused. You think psychoactive substances should be legal, freely available, but not marketed?
On July 30 2017 09:01 IgnE wrote:
for psychoactive components even taking something like HTP or st johns wort or velvet bean/dopa mucana should be allowed. yet these are all actually very powerful brain modulators
On July 30 2017 09:07 IgnE wrote:
i dont think drugs and psychoactive substances should be marketable products.
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On July 30 2017 09:10 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On July 30 2017 09:07 IgnE wrote:On July 30 2017 09:04 KwarK wrote:
Do you think the government should have usury laws against interest rates that are too high? Or should people be able to simply read their contracts and choose for themselves. i dont think drugs and psychoactive substances should be marketable products. i would ban most drug advertising. but to answer your question yes there should be usury laws against super-exploitative rates edit: I think I'm confused. You think psychoactive substances should be legal, freely available, but not marketed? Show nested quote +On July 30 2017 09:01 IgnE wrote:
for psychoactive components even taking something like HTP or st johns wort or velvet bean/dopa mucana should be allowed. yet these are all actually very powerful brain modulators Show nested quote +On July 30 2017 09:07 IgnE wrote:
i dont think drugs and psychoactive substances should be marketable products.
Sounds sorta like cigarettes but possibly slightly more strict?
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On July 30 2017 08:44 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Rather, he's consistently arguing against an increasingly narrow definition of normality and the increased use of drugs to achieve this normality. It's a complicated and very difficult philosophical problem, 'to what degree should parents and medical experts be able to medicate children to make them achieve a baseline level of academic success'. He didn't say 'no children should ever be given adhd medication', he didn't say 'there is no such thing as adhd'. He thinks its prescribed much too frequently, and that sometimes, the benefits of adhd medication (increased ability to concentrate and succeed academically) might also have drawbacks (for example reduced creativity). I haven't seen specific numbers but I'm fairly certain american children get adhd medication more frequently than european children. This alone kinda means by default that one party gets it wrong, and personally I'm inclined to think that american children are given too much ritalin rather than that european kids get too little. But that's besides the point - if you think we should give it to 1 in 20 kids then that's fair enough.
While I've tried to stay away from this ridiculous argument, from my understanding, this example seems to prove Kwark's point.
Even when spoon-fed all of the "relevant" information, parents are still incapable of making correct decisions about whether they should or shouldn't be medicated. If parents are fucking up the decision of whether or not to medicate their kids for ADHD even when there's a human being sitting in front of them answering all their questions down to minute details, how can making supplement providers label all their shit adequately and expecting consumers to make informed decisions about what is and isn't good for them possibly be good enough?
Biochemistry is fucking complicated. Pharmacology is fucking complicated. There's really no way you can put the burden of understanding shit on the consumer anymore when people literally go to school for years to understand this stuff. We don't live in a world anymore where the "informed consumer" can just look shit up and expect to have a good enough working knowledge of anything to be able to work out what is and isn't harmful to them, at least not on a timescale in which consumers want to make purchasing decisions. That's just the reality of the advanced society we live in these days. We need regulatory bodies to police these things precisely because the level of complexity is too high to put the burden of understanding on the consumer.
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I'm sure this is going to work
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On July 30 2017 08:44 Liquid`Drone wrote:
If, 100 years from now, prosthetic limbs vastly outperform regular limbs, like to the point where having regular limbs makes you handicapped compared to having prosthetic limbs, should parents be allowed to amputate limbs of their children to make them able to function in accordance with society's expectations for what the children are supposed to be able to do? Like, where's the limit? Because I agree that in many instances, adhd medication vastly improves the lives of children who get it. Probably a large majority, tbh, at least in Europe. But I also see a really interesting philosophical dilemma looming in the horizon.
Bring on the augmented limbs, apart from some dystopian economic issues which have to be addressed this is a good thing. I'm fundamentally opposed to this (basically religious) "we have strayed too far from gods light" reasoning. There's no fix point in 'Nature' to go back to, never was. We're not happier if we all live in the savannah or whatever
Actually I don't know why the left has moved away form this. They were on board with the 'augment all the things' mentality at some point, that was the right angle.
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Trump is playing 12D chess. We're not worthy of his genius.
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Joke's on him, Twitter's blocked in China!
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2774 Posts
On July 30 2017 09:27 Nyxisto wrote:Show nested quote +On July 30 2017 08:44 Liquid`Drone wrote:
If, 100 years from now, prosthetic limbs vastly outperform regular limbs, like to the point where having regular limbs makes you handicapped compared to having prosthetic limbs, should parents be allowed to amputate limbs of their children to make them able to function in accordance with society's expectations for what the children are supposed to be able to do? Like, where's the limit? Because I agree that in many instances, adhd medication vastly improves the lives of children who get it. Probably a large majority, tbh, at least in Europe. But I also see a really interesting philosophical dilemma looming in the horizon.
Bring on the augmented limbs, apart from some dystopian economic issues which have to be addressed this is a good thing. I'm fundamentally opposed to this (basically religious) "we have strayed too far from gods light" reasoning. There's no fix point in 'Nature' to go back to, never was. We're not happier if we all live in the savannah or whatever Actually I don't know why the left has moved away form this. They were on board with the 'augment all the things' mentality at some point, that was the right angle.
Where's the necessity in augmenting children?
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On July 30 2017 09:46 Nixer wrote:Show nested quote +On July 30 2017 09:27 Nyxisto wrote:On July 30 2017 08:44 Liquid`Drone wrote:
If, 100 years from now, prosthetic limbs vastly outperform regular limbs, like to the point where having regular limbs makes you handicapped compared to having prosthetic limbs, should parents be allowed to amputate limbs of their children to make them able to function in accordance with society's expectations for what the children are supposed to be able to do? Like, where's the limit? Because I agree that in many instances, adhd medication vastly improves the lives of children who get it. Probably a large majority, tbh, at least in Europe. But I also see a really interesting philosophical dilemma looming in the horizon.
Bring on the augmented limbs, apart from some dystopian economic issues which have to be addressed this is a good thing. I'm fundamentally opposed to this (basically religious) "we have strayed too far from gods light" reasoning. There's no fix point in 'Nature' to go back to, never was. We're not happier if we all live in the savannah or whatever Actually I don't know why the left has moved away form this. They were on board with the 'augment all the things' mentality at some point, that was the right angle. Where's the necessity in augmenting children?
If you are going to use them as adult it seem reasonable to be teaching how to use them before that. Other than that I can't really see any. Same as having cell phones.
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I suspect IgnE is particularly vulnerable to being strawmanned for a couple of reasons. First, many of his posts are sarcastic with no clear indication in the post (although sometimes you can tell because he puts quotation marks around things). Second, he almost seems to pride himself on many of his posts being almost impossible to parse, at least to me and I suspect to the majority of posters in this thread. As a result it's very easy for other posters to think he's saying something he's not, either because he did say it but only sarcastically, or because he chose such an obfuscated way of expressing his actual position that it's easy for people to misread it.
He might be narrowly right on the idea that psych drugs aren't intended to "restore normal brain chemistry," because it's not the brain chemistry specifically that we care about. The implications of a phrase like "normal brain chemistry" are probably an oversimplification of the brain anyway, but even if they weren't, the brain chemistry would be a means to an end anyway. I'll try to explain what I mean (and for the record, I have no background in neuroscience so forgive me if some of my descriptions are a little ignorant).
Imagine a hypothetical brain with 4 different types of neurotransmitters, each of which has an abundance which can be quantified on a scale of 0 to 1 (no point in giving units or anything more realistic, since this is such a simplified hypothetical anyway). And let's imagine that a "normal" brain has an abundance of 0.5 for each of these neurotransmitters. Normally if one or more deviates too far above or below that 0.5 mark, various symptoms or disorders can occur, so normal brain chemistry would typically be described as a brain with abundances of 0.5/0.5/0.5/0.5 for A/B/C/D.
But suppose a drug is developed for people with low B which acts in the synapse just like B, but with 4 times the strength; we'll call it B'. So if someone has 0.1 B, we would give them 0.1 B' and they're symptoms go away. But they don't have "normal" brain chemistry right now; a normal brain has:
A: 0.5
B: 0.5
B': 0
C: 0.5
D: 0.5
Instead, they have:
A: 0.5
B: 0.1
B': 0.1
C: 0.5
D: 0.5
If someone else has a disorder where their brain doesn't respond as strongly to the presence of B, so they'll experience low-B symptoms if they have anything lower than 0.9, we could give them 0.1 of B' and they would no longer have symptoms, but they wouldn't have "normal" brain chemistry either. Point is, our goal isn't to get to "normal" brain chemistry, it's to treat disorders and minimize or eliminate symptoms.
Actual brains can't be described by such simple parameters, but the principle remains the same: if people with normal brain chemistry don't have behavioral or psychological issues, that's great, but if someone does have issues for some reason, we don't necessarily care about making their brain indistinguishable from someone without those issues, we just care about dealing with the issues. If that means putting the brain in some other abnormal state, that's fine as long as it deals with the issues.
It doesn't really support some of his bolder claims about ADHD though (assuming I understand those claims correctly). If kids are having psychological and behavioral problems, it makes sense to give them treatment for it. If that treatment has bad side effects, we should look for another treatment that has fewer side effects, but in the meantime, keep giving the best treatment we have (unless those side effects are worse than the consequences of going untreated). I don't think there's much evidence that ADHD is caused by flash games or smart phones, but even if it is, so what? However they got the disorder, they have it, so let's do something about it.
The idea that it's "fascism" or "social control" seems to stray dangerously close to the ideas of some anti-education movements, specifically that there's something innately right or good about how kids are naturally, and that if we interfere in any way we're destroying their special snowflake-ness. I don't think it's hard to see why a lot of the selfish, childish, and irrational behavior of kids is bad, and that a world where adults were all like that would be a worse one. A lot of the purpose of the education system is to take the wide range of personality types and behaviors people are born with, and reshape them into a narrower band of socially-approved ones. You easily might be able to describe our treatment of children with a lot of terms that would be considered quite horrible when applied to political systems (e.g. dictatorial, authoritarian, paternalistic); that doesn't mean that we're treating our children horribly, it just means it can be horrible when the government treats adults like children.
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For all intents and purposes, brain chemistry in relation to ADHD is exactly the correct term. It's used by the professionals, haven't seen them bickering about semantics.
Nor can we tell whether the problem lies with a deficiency of norepinephrine itself or of its chemical constituents, dopa and dopamine.
Norepinephrine is also a chemical.
And yes, the goal is "normal" brain chemistry. You'd be right if all levels are "standardised", but they aren't. The same way for example you have people who don't respond at all to paracetamol (me), where as others can work with it. There's no "level X" that you need, there's just a threshold. That's why usually (in germany for sure and the UK as far as i can tell at least) a diagnose always has to be hand in hand with a psychological/behavioural evaluation, because you can't just look at a box somewhere behind the frontal lobe and check how many screws are in there, and decide that it's too little (simplified).
Obviously many more things go with it, but the jist of it. I don't know if the US handles it similar though, i went through the process in germany and watched my nephew go through it in the UK.
I know you said you're describing it simplified, but it feels a bit misleading just because it's infinitely more complex.
edit: should add that it was almost 30 years ago in germany, so things might've changed.
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EPT
