And just like that I became a racist.

People’s brains fall out of their heads on this one hey? Like wtf, you’re actually responsible for what you say seems pretty basic. Nobody is arguing for prosecuting anyone who expresses opinions, or what they earnestly believe to be true and communicate in good faith. Just, if you make shit up and people get hurt well then, you did that hey.

Hmmm lets examine this statement.

Isolated weird place, scary Russians, Russian stereotypes of intellectual game + tremendous violence.

Gee, it almost sounds like this is a too convenient racist lie. Any proof? The oldest reference just says ‘it totally happened’ and cites something I can’t access on Google books. It’s 20 years after the fact and not a primary source.

I’m in that bin and I’d say that a significant portion of my symptoms could be alleviated by making the world less of a horror show.

We’ve made society inequitable to the extent that if you go outside you will see heartbreaking tragedy, you have to pay to exist basically anywhere and consequently you have zero freedom, basically all of life is dictatorial, your mind is constantly under assault by ads/propaganda, family and friends are destroyed by forcing everyone to move around to find work/shelter, and you’re constantly like 3 bad months from losing it all.

TBH I’m shocked at how few people are depressed.

fair fair. I assume the group is probably planning to run a more interventionist study to see if the results hold when you run time forward.

It’ll be good news if it works (maybe, I do worry we’re going towards a brave new world style future where disquiet with the status quo is pathologised and medicated away. stunting criticism) but I won’t go bat for it yet.

I never actually got through my PhD and it was in physics anyway but yeah. It always seemed to me that the messier fields had these New Exciting Techniques ™ where you could vacuum up absolutely insane amounts of data and then play with stats till it showed what you wanted.

I don’t want to be like “Hur der they’re doing it wrong”. Studying anything to do with biology necessarily means you’re stuck with systems with trillions of variables and you have the awful problem of trying to design experiments where they hopefully average into background. I just thing that, consequently, until stuff replicates a few times (which, unfortunately, is almost never done because it’s not sexy. Anyway often papers are written so badly, and the universe so gloriously subtle, even mechanistic stuff like synthesis is a struggle to replicate) big headlines are irresponsible.

Is it though? Isn’t that more vulnerable to p-hacking and it’s kindred. I lack the expertise to make much of the paper, I’m just pretty disappointed with neuropsych as a field :P Data on depression treatment success are already noisy as fuck and in replication hell, classifying noisy as fuck data from fmri into broad patterns seems challenging in a repeatable fashion.

I guess we’ll find out in time if this replicates, if anyone even tries to do that.

Unless there has been serious effort in addressing the poor quality of fmri studies since the dead fish paper I would recommend cautious outlook.

article and link to fish study: https://law.stanford.edu/2009/09/18/what-a-dead-salmon-reminds-us-about-fmri-analysis/

It’s just an extremely usaian thing to do. Mega cringe to see constantly.

400k euro is still like the peak of wealth. Nobody is earning that much reasonably, even if there are even wealthier people doing shenanigans.

This is France

The… upper middle class…? An income of 400,000 euros? that’s 10x the median income.

What tf is rich then?

It’s reasonable to pay other countries for the damage already done to our collective world and to share around the wealth gained.

Of course rich countries aren’t doing that so here we are.

I’m not raging I’m Australian.

There’s no fucking antenna that pops out of people’s heads and overrides their thoughts when considered in abstract. That’s Murdoch rag level of boomer bullshit.

Idk what broken arse society you feel like you’re from but humans everywhere work towards the collective all the time. You try to come up with some derranged “actually we don’t support the vulnerable” because propaganda about costs is written about and yet even in the face of that people continue to not attack each other in the streets. Oh capitalism is cannabalism is it? fucking derranged take but even so you just conveniently ignore how that system is enforced by a tiny minority and billions of people struggle against it or try to tame it. Oh climate change inaction huh? yes sure if you judge us all by the fucked up leaders of states but what about all the protests? what about all the climate scientists? The journalists writing about? what about the fact that greenwashing is an effective marketing strategy?

Like I’m sorry that Shazza and Bazza on the street don’t know how to tackle massive structural issues but it is absolutely a lobotomised take to think that means they’re not decent creatures.

“The masses” are just individuals. You sound like a 20 year old who just discovered atheism and started reading the paper.

you need to spend less time online and more time talking to your neighbours.

neither are the people claiming humans are, as a herd, fairly dumb and incredibly selfish

wtf? by what standard?

Humans frequently band together during disaster, humans care for their young and old, humans don’t typically engage in cannibalism of the weak, humans rarely fight to the death or even serious injury, we live in cities of millions with astonishingly low rates of violence etc etc

where is this terrible selfish stupid behaviour? what standard are you comparing the species to? we’re more violent than orangutans but they’ve never set up water sanitation so I think we can call ourselves smart and we’re less violent than chimps or gorillas… are you comparing us to fictitious ideal beings or what?

Humans are wonderful. Not always good, not always reasonable, but wonderful.

We are rich, nuanced, vibrant beings. A small portion of us are defectors but by and large we are community focused and willing to give when we feel we are not being taken advantage of.

Unless you think all your friends, yourself, and your family are garbage it is inconsistent to assume a random sampling of humans would not display the same prosocial traits you find in them.

The one thing we are incapable of doing though is handling power.

Yeah. I am not a Buddhist but I’ve always found something rings true in the reflections on impermanence. When we bond with someone we accept the pain of loss, and when we feel it most people seem to describe relief once able to “let go” an accept it being over.

It seems to me that encouraging clinging and reminiscening stunts you a bit and only really provides temporary relief of the loss while drawing out the time it takes to process it.

Idk though, maybe I’ll have the misfortune to feel differently some day. It’s hard to judge someone hanging out with their spouse watching death creep closer each day. I have approximately zero idea what my opinions would be in the face of that.

My wife is fortunately still alive so maybe that colours my view. However when I’ve lost other people the blessed anaesthesia of forgetting has been essential in being able to function.

From the short quote it seems like she maybe has a healthy-ish attitude but idk… I feel like this would be a shallow simulacrum that prolongs grief.