I'm not sure this is a good study. I mean I scored 85% so woohoo but you just get headlines to go off. The art of noticing disinformation is in reading articles and making inferences on them. Questions like "vaccines contain harmful chemicals" are obvious red flags but there are some that are a reasonable-sounding headline but I'd imagine the article itself would fall apart on first reading. I know half the problem is people don't read articles but this is a very simplistic survey.
Not only is it not good, I'd dare to say it's awful. Never mind that the headlines themselves are terribly crafted: the entire point is that one has to be critical of sources, and not take everything at face value just because it sounds somewhat convincing. It's not about blatantly discrediting things at face value because they don't fit what you believed to be true.
By the standards of this test, headlines such as "The CIA Subjected African-Amercians to LSD for 77 Consecutive Days in Experiment" would clearly belong in the fake news category. And if it's supposed to test whether the (presumably American) respondent has decent insight into the realities of contemporary politics, why in the world would it include something as obscure as "Morocco’s King Appoints Committee Chief to Fight Poverty and Inequality". There's literally no way of knowing without context whether the associated article would be propaganda or just an obscure piece of foreign correspondence. Many of the "true" headlines are still things one shouldn't take for granted without checking sources, and many of the "fake" ones are cartoonish.
It's just bad research.
Edit: Rather than bad research, it seems it might be badly misrepresented. The paper itself appears completely different from what is reported in the linked article. I'm still, however, not entirely convinced by the approach using AI generated headlines.
It is, and I feel the questions are quite obvious.
That being said... I'm related to conspiracy theorists. I got a first-row seat to their dumbassery on facebook before I deleted my account. And... a significant issue was paywalled articles with clickbait titles, during Covid especially. The title was a doubt-inducing questions, such as "Do vaccines make you magnetic?" and the reasoning disproving that was locked behind the paywall. And my relatives used those as confirmation that their views were true. Because the headlines introduced doubt and the content wasn't readable. That and satire articles.
Questions like "vaccines contain harmful chemicals" are obvious red flags but there are some that are a reasonable-sounding headline
It's exactly those "reasonable" sounding headlines (and in some cases the ideas and opinions that back them up in the body of the article, but that has to be provided for it to relevant, which as you point out isn't, which is a big problem) that serve as misinformation and/or dog whistles, so "vaccines contain harmful chemicals" could be aimed at antivaxxers (and those susceptible to being pushed there), but it's also technically correct, and apples and bananas for example contain these "harmful chemicals" too.
The article could be either fear mongering and disinformation - false, or science based and educational - true, but we can't know which just from the headline.
A headline like "small group of people control the global media and economy" could be a dog whistle for antisemitism - false, or be an observation of life on earth right now - truth.
My point is there are headlines that would seem like conspiracy theory to some, but irrefutable fact to others, and probably the opposite of each to each respective group, and without more than a headline (and often even with, of course), it's entirely down to the readers' existing opinions and biases.
It depends. But I am not forming my opinion on a loaded headline. If there's a headline like that, then yes, I rather check the article to see if it actually is like that or not. The majority of headlines nowadays are heavily sensationalized, especially the ones from news sites with a certain agenda.
Somehow I got 100%, but it was mainly luck. I really have no clue what % support marijuana is in the US, how young Americans feel about global warming, or how globally respected they feel. I'm not from there, so I don't follow it at all. I think it would've been better if they had an "I don't know / Irrelevant to me" option.
Just took a look here, and yeah. One of the headlines they ask you to rate is "Hyatt Will Remove Small Bottles from Hotel Bathrooms". It's the kind of thing that's basically a coin flip. Without having any context into the story, I have no opinion on whether it's fake or not. I don't think guessing incorrectly on this one would indicate somebody is any more or less susceptible to miscategorizing stories as real/fake.
I assume the idea is to include some pointless headlines (such as this) in order to provide some sort of baseline. The researcher probably extracts several dimensions from the variables, and I assume this headline would feed into a "general scepticism" variable that measures he likelihood that the respondent will lean towards things being fake rather than real.
Still, I'm not at all convinced about this research design.
I suspect that where you select on the extremely liberal to extremely conservative spectrum might have a correlation to which fake news titles you fall for. What sounds like obvious propaganda to you may sound like any news article that some may see from a more sensationalist less reliable news source, especially to those predisposed to conspiracy theories.
Of course, there are a few people out there who won't even identify headlines like "Ebola Virus 'Caused by US Nuclear Weapons Testing', New Study Says", "Government Officials Have Illegally Manipulated the Weather to Cause Devastating Storms", and "Left-Wing Extremism Causes 'More Damage' to World Than Terrorism, Says UN Report" as fabricated even when filling out a survey about fake news. But at that point they're not testing susceptibility to fake news, they're testing whether you've already fallen down the conspiracy rabbit hole and hit your head hard enough on the way down to render you incapable of even slight scepticism.
A better study would be, in my opinion, to present screen shots of actual content from social media (Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, wherever), and have users rank it on a scale from 1 to 7 how much they trust it (not at al <----> completely). That way you can observe sources, content, how many "likes" a post has, and more dimensions that are more valid indicators of how people might (mis)judge content as being true or false.
I took the survey and it gives you two measures - one for correctly identifying true stories and one for correctly identifying fake. If you mark everything fake the results would say you're too skeptical because you discount real stories as fake. So anything that doesn't sound hyper partisan should be marked as real, even if you could imagine how it could be fake.
So they're just casually pretending misinformation isn't being spread about literally anything these days. To me at least, the AI-esque phrasing of the headlines made me distrust even information I rationally know to be true.
A common tactic I've seen in news headlines is referencing substances that can harm a human without indicating that in the quantities that they are present, they are not a concern. I'm not sure what the right answer would be to the vaccines question given that. If that is the case there, it may be true but misleading.
It’s great to have additional studies confirming this! But this is also what the trans community has been saying for years. Please just listen to us when it comes to our own bodies 🥲
But isn’t this study exactly about asking trans folks how they feel about their top surgery? Not doing a study however would be ignoring the ones who didn’t feel satisfied with their surgery, and now those voices are included as well. They’re in the minority as expected, but at least now we have some sort of statistical validation for it as well
I was more referring to the common knowledge among the trans community that already knew this information prior to any studies. If you’re trans and in the community this is a “well no shit” kind of study. We’ve been telling it to cis people for years but the refusal to listen to that was palpable. That’s why I said it’s great to have additional studies to point to if they don’t want to listen to the trans community themselves, they can maybe listen to this study.
We’ve been telling it to cis people for years but the refusal to listen to that was palpable.
Here's a Sartre quote about bigotry/fascists that you may find useful:
“Never believe that [they] are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. [They] have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
I’m aware, I’m not talking about those extremists however. I’m talking about the people who are unsure and potential allies. Yes, they still exist in 2023. I convinced one in my family just this past month after being patient and explaining concepts and terms. That’s the scenario these studies can be very helpful.
Even if it seems to be common sense to those inside the community, there is something to be said about getting actual data on the subject so that those outside the community at least have a touchstone for the reality those on the inside experience, because propagandists are working very hard to muddy the waters on this point and points like this one in particular. It might be a “no shit Sherlock” moment to you, but to people like my Fox News watching extended family, this study is something that contradicts their current mental model of the situation, and something that I am glad I have in my quiver when they start talking about the subject to me.
I’m not sure if it was your intention or you didn’t read the second half of my comment but you essentially repeated the point I just made, therefore, yes I agree.
What’s this, a civil discussion on the internet? Well, I never… You’re both so wholesome, if I were still on Reddit and seeing this, you’d both get a badge each
For those not reading the story, which appears to be many, the company that services the implant went bankrupt. The implant was experimental. There exists no one to service it any longer. It will pose a health risk down the road without someone servicing it.
The only thing that forced her to have the implant removed is the fact that it would eventually lead to her untimely death if it remained in with no one to take care of the device.
@IHeartBadCode@flumph this is why we can't have Musk offering brain implants through his "Neurolink" company. He'll be busto and presumably in jail in the next 5 years. Thus, anything he tries to implant will be out of warranty. Musk is the biggest ponzi of all time.
Even if her death is guaranteed by leaving it in (and I’m not sure it is without more information), does that make it ethical to remove? Perhaps the patient would prefer a shorter life with greater quality in regards to her seizures. After all, don’t we allow and accept cancer patients to forgo treatment and enjoy the time they have left?
Frankly the articles I’ve found all use a mix of really weird language. In some places it says she was ‘advised’ to remove it by doctors, which makes a lot of sense. In others they talk about finances and purchasing the implant from the company.
My guess is that it was a combination of factors and while she ultimately did not want to give up the device despite being urged by doctors (she accepted the risk of leaving it in), but she was robbed of the possibility by capitalism and the fact that the company was forced to liquidate assets as terms of going bankrupt or being bought by another company. But we might have to wait for a court case or proper reporting to find out.
I hope we are able to enshrine some rights over forced explantation in the future. As soon as a device is implanted in you, you should own it 100%, no matter the cost of the device. To encourage making this possible even for extremely expensive devices, we should probably offer huge write offs or some other incentive to these companies lest they decide to restrict their purchase to only rich clients.
One of the articles suggests that the device was removed because the batteries were no longer available and nearing end of life.
Regardless, a surgeon is only going to maintain devices approved by the FDA or cleared for investigational use. If the company goes bankrupt then both are no longer the case.
There’s another article that explains that it wasn’t just the battery. After the company went under, there was nobody who could provide support for the product in the event of malfunction. Removal was recommended as the safest course.
This isn’t an “FDA problem”. The device was investigational, which means it did not have final FDA approval. Consequently, there is no guarantee that a surgeon would have the knowledge to maintain it. Surgeons are not expected to be familiar with every experimental device, in fact most surgeons will never touch any experimental device.
And no, surgeons aren’t just going to read a bunch of documentation to get up to speed. Typically, when a new product launches the manufacturer will send their technical representatives into the operating room to help troubleshoot any issues.
Yeah I don’t think this is a coding issue. This is something on your brain and if the hardware requires maintenance you better have qualified surgeons that know and understand the device. Of that’s no longer possible because the producer no longer exists then it’s maybe not a bad idea to have it removed, depending on some factors of course like “how long does she have left to live” and “how much does she suffer.eithout the device”.
Why would a medical device exist such that even with documentation a surgeon unaffiliated with the company cannot safely interact with it? You would think it would be a design priority for any maintenance to be straightforward and with clear instructions. I have a hard time imagining that the problem here is anything other than proprietary information being tied up in red tape.
Oh I agree with you, but that requires laws being written correctly. Healthcare being what it is currently in the USA, I very much believe that the women was better off with the device removed.
FDA approval is contingent on so many factors that even if it was entirely open source, including all hardware design and the instructions for assembly, maintenance, and manufature it would be entirely plausible for it to lose approval if the company responsible for continued development went bankrupt.
Without approval, no reputable surgeon will do anything beyond remove it.
A device not having a clear and unambiguously documented path for addressing defects found in the future is more than sufficient reason to lose approval.
I guess I don’t see how a surgeon being unwilling to do maintenance on a non-FDA approved medical device is fucked up.
If it fails to meet the criteria for being safely used in a medical context, it’s irresponsible to try to maintain it.
Code and documentation mean someone could theoretically maintain it, but the average consumer could not. You need someone with the knowledge, time, equipment, etc. to think it’s worth their while to learn how to maintain it. In the case of a physical device that also means the ability to manufacture spare parts, some of which could be very exotic. For an experimental medical device, it also includes detailed medical knowledge that most doctors don’t have. And actually working on it means being willing to take the risk of killing someone if you screw up.
I doubt the person in the article would be helped in the slightest by receiving code and documentation.
This, right here, is really important. We already have otherwise useful things being bricked because the software is no longer updated, or worse, the company goes bankrupt. If that’s our future with brain implants, that’s going to be a big problem.
Doctors remove unsafe implants and/or replace them with safer versions all the time, including devices like deep brain stimulators. I don’t see why you consider this to be a big problem.
There was a medical reason, the device was considered unsafe. Any experimental device is considered unsafe without monitoring, and monitoring was no longer available. That’s why she chose to have it removed.
Anyone who signs up for a clinical trial knows that their treatment can be discontinued at any time, even if it is helping them. For example, if an implant is helping you but is found to be harming other people, it may be considered unsafe and you may be advised to remove it. In fact, a different article suggested that other patients were experiencing adverse effects from this experimental implant. This might even be why the company couldn’t get their product approved and eventually lost funding.
I mean, we should protect against that too by requiring a certain level of service. But at the very least they need to own the device and have the right to leave the device in, even if it would fail or potentially cause them harm. I pointed that out because it sounds like they wanted to leave it in and not listen to the doctors advice to remove it, but could not for some reason. The only reason I can imagine would involve someone paying for the surgery to remove it against her will is one in which she does not own the device and the alternative is being burdened with a massive debt to pay off the device.
How do you require a certain level of service when the company that made it goes out of business? Or when employees with essential knowledge leave the company? I’ve been working in software for a long time, and everywhere I’ve worked, losing someone knowledgeable about a product is a big blow to future development because a lot of important knowledge is only in their head, leaving future maintainers to do a lot of reverse engineering. Requiring documentation wouldn’t work because any company that had strict enough requirements would have a very hard time hiring engineers willing to spend so much time documenting every little thing.
You require them legally to budget and plan these things and give them harsh penalties if they fail. That they need to set aside money in a way that it can’t be touched if they go under. You’ll likely need to hire teams at the government to help fill gaps and coordinate.
I don’t think you have any idea how much money you’re talking about. The fact that you’re proposing it in the context of an experimental device that was probably never even marketed is just deranged. We’d still be stuck with 1950s-level technology if you had your way because nobody could afford to develop any new products that can’t be made in a basic machine shop.
The whole point of a clinical trial is to enroll volunteers who are willing to undergo a treatment that might not work at all and might not be available in the future even if it does work. Not only that, but you might expect to get a potential cure and end up with only a sugar pill.
If you think any of that is unreasonable, then don’t enroll in a clinical trial.
It doesn’t say that. It says she was willing to pay to keep it in, which means she was willing to pay for long-term maintenance. But there was nobody willing to provide maintenance, because the company dissolved. That is why she was advised to remove the device.
the company was forced to liquidate assets
Implants generally go in the garbage after removal.
Implants that failed to gain FDA approval definitely go in the garbage after removal. Nobody else wants them, in fact the company will end up having to pay for proper disposal of medical waste.
Yes I very clearly stated what my *guess *was. Nothing says enough to determine what truly happened here. As someone who works in the medical field, I’m making an educated guess based on my knowledge of how medical devices, elective surgeries, and governing bodies work.
I think “forced” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. People use it to refer to unpleasant decisions, like “I was forced to leave New York City after I lost my job”.
Others have speculated that she may have been denied health insurance coverage unless she had it removed. That’s not much of a choice when you’re an old disabled woman.
Classify them however you want, they have nothing to do with your eligibility for health insurance.
In fact, ACA health plans must enroll anyone who wants to enroll. They cannot decline an individual renewal. A premium can only be adjusted according to age and tobacco use. And they cannot charge old people more than three times what they charge young people.
They can’t deny claims based on anything in your previous history. They can’t use your history of medical conditions, history of implants, history of drug use, history of pregnancy, history of employment, history of not wearing seat belts, history of anything.
They can say, “We won’t pay for this MRI” or “We won’t pay for this drug”, but that would be true of everyone else on the same plan, regardless of whether they had an implant.
More typically, they say “We only pay for a certain number of MRIs per year” or “You have to get a cheap Xray instead of an expensive MRI” or “You have to try the cheap drug, if that doesn’t work then you can try the expensive one” or “We need to be notified 30 days prior to getting the drug, otherwise we won’t pay” or “You can only get the MRI at this other location, otherwise we won’t pay”.
None of this has to do with your medical history, though. They are simply annoying hoops that everyone has to jump through. And they can never, ever, say “We will pay for X only if you remove the implant, otherwise we won’t pay for X”. If they are paying for X for anyone else on her plan, then they have to pay for hers too.
It sits on the edge of the concept of informed consent in the realm of things like SaaS and copyright. Obviously doctors wouldn’t hold her down and pull it out, but obviously it probably was not useful to leave in. I wonder if there was a contract stating it had to be removed upon demand, like at the end of a trial or the bankruptcy that occurred. It’s something that we’re going to likely see in the future, as medical technology starts using computers to actively treat disorders.
For those not reading the story, which appears to be many, the company that services the implant went bankrupt. The implant was experimental. There exists no one to service it any longer. It will pose a health risk down the road without someone servicing it.
The story doesn’t directly say that’s why it had to be removed (and she talks about wanting to buy it). I found another source that explains that the device came with a three-year battery life.
It seems like the study is more about identifying common dog whistles in headlines than actual misinformation. A shift in population demographics happens all the time so that one could be true, but the phrasing of non-white hints that is is probably an article loaded with misinformation about the cause and implications of the demographic shift. No idea how it was scored though.
Same talking points the CPSC used to run ZenMagnets out of business. Guns aren’t too dangerous to keep around kids, but magnets with the boxes absolutely *plastered * with warnings are. No joke, my zen magnets had over ten warnings on each box. All in bright red letters.
And if you go look at the actual evidence you’re gonna see that household chemicals cause way more damage and death than these magnets ever will. I have no clue who has it out for these magnets but they’re absolutely destroying a great stress reliever for what amounts to nothing.
The endoscopists at our childrens hospital also echoed that magnets are a super common foreign body ingestion, any two magnets swallowed is a huge hazard with a high potential for lifelong consequences. And the little balls are supposedly the worst as they have a small surface area in addition to being fairly strong, so they cause perforations quickly.
Also warnings on a magnet box or other toys will be ignored far more commonly that on household chemicals. I don’t know any people who keep bleach on their office desk, and even then it is in a childproof bottle. But many will have these little magnet balls on full display or somewhere a child can reasonably reach, some parents give these to inapropriately aged kids to play with even. Nobody gives a bottle of bleach for their kids to play with.
You don’t have to give a bottle of bleach. The point is that most household chemicals have hardly any warnings on them at all and the ones they do have are written in tiny text on the back. And no, most household chemicals do not have locking bottles. Sure things like bleach do, but you purposefully chose one to try and fit your narrative. Turns out, bleach was the number one household chemical to injure children in 2006! pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20679298/
Let’s look at another report which states that ~50% of the magnet injuries come from products marketed to children, not these magnets made for adults. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6125079/
It’s incredibly clear that the CPSC doesn’t actually care about the facts and someone in the magnet industry pissed them of else they’d be spending their time trying to fix the actual things that are killing children, like firearms.
Just to end this post; the zen magnet warnings covered every inch of the packaging, you opened the box and there were more warning, you opened the bag in the box and there were even more warnings. There were permanent warnings in bright red text that couldn’t be removed from the box. This was more warning than any other product on the market and yet zen magnets have been completely banned, while bleach is still sold at your local grocery store with no ID necessary. Here’s a picture of one of the warnings, sorry I couldn’t find a video showing all the warnings, it’s been lost to time.
Anyway, the CPSC clearly doesn’t care about actual child deaths and injuries, as it didn’t do anything to even slow the rate of injuries or deaths and yet completely banned an entire industry just for pissing them off. I’ve posted all the proof straight from the CPSC above if you don’t believe that statement.
I checked through the links, and what I did find, besides the childrens magnets is that 1/4 of the magnets were small magnet balls, so it is not like it is an uncommon thing. If magnets are ingested they can cause serious surgical emergencies, which will lead to having to cut out part of the intestines as well as potentially cause peritonitis, the surgery will have lifelong consequences, it is of course also possible to die from complications. And small powerful magnets cause the most damage.
Generally the only other foreign body that is as bad to ingest as small magnets are batteries.
Regarding the warnings - Ill say it again, noone really reads those , everyone I have known with the balls has had them on full display without safety. People for solid things like this just look at the warnings and go, well duh its a choking hazard. And then of course theres the classic reasoning of but my kid is smarter.
Is the CPSC right? I mean, their reason stands solid, their response maybe disproportionate. That said I think the idea that the magnet industry somehow wronged the CPSC is a bit conspiratorial.
Also I would not classify drugs as household chemicals, hence why I chose bleach as my example. The other really bad offender for household chemicals used to be 70% vinegar, but that one was banned in the EU, so now we can only buy 9% which will not cause more than an upset stomach generally, most other common household chemicals will not be as bad and many of them still have childproof locks.
I am not disputing the fact that there is a ton of misinformation about Autism on TikTok (and the internet as a whole), because there absolutely is and it's dangerous. But it gives me pause that the researcher behind this study developed and promotes a treatment method that is essentially a cousin of ABA. That makes me incredibly skeptical of what his rubric might be for filtering the claims as factual or not.
ABA, for those that don't know, is based on Skinner's operant conditioning and was created by the man who developed "gay conversion therapy." He once said this:
“You see, you start pretty much from scratch when you work with an autistic child. You have a person in the physical sense – they have hair, a nose and a mouth – but they are not people in the psychological sense. One way to look at the job of helping autistic kids is to see it as a matter of constructing a person. You have the raw materials, but you have to build the person.”
If "operant conditioning" makes you think of dog training, you're right. ABA is dog training for Autistic people. It is conversion therapy. It does not "intervene" in their Autism so much as it forces them to appear more neurotypical, and a study from 2018 suggests that it actually creates PTSD symptoms in the patients--that it is traumatic--which is in-line with many firsthand accounts of people that have been through ABA.
So the guy behind this analysis developed his own practice which is rooted in ABA and centers around operant conditioning. I'm sure a lot of what he finds to be false is probably false and not scientifically-supported, but I would def be skeptical of what he considers to be misinformation in some instances since ABA is technically scientifically-supported for autism intervention, due to it's effectiveness in making Autistic people appear more neurotypical (without regard for their psychological wellbeing in many cases).
But with that said, I'm just some schmuck on the internet. I highly recommend reading Autistic people's perspectives on it and seeing what verified smart people have to say.
The writer of that psychology today article put her son in ABA, and actually endsup advocating for it (as long as the ABA therapist used a modern, child first approach.) I agree with her.
My son has been in modern ABA since he was two after his developmental pediatrician recommended it. (I have aspergers myself, as does my kid’s father - both of us never required ABA as kids though I had speech therapy/saw a psychologist about my “acting out” etc) So I had no reason to be suspicious of ABA, or knew about how it used to be. However my son’s experience been so positive I never considered that it might have (pretty horrible) origins or were started by a person like that.
I’ve seen many sessions at two different practises, and from what I’ve experienced, the modern version is VERY divorced from the old methods you are describing.
The place my son attends (he still goes there twice a week) they teach kids to be proud of being autistic, and to understand themselves as well as advocate for what they want using group-play based activities. Stimming and other typical ASD behaviours are not ever discouraged, though communication is (however they prefer to do it.) It’s not about forcing them to act like normies. It’s about giving them the tools to understand themselves and others. They also have parent classes to help understanding and acceptance of ASD behaviours, and how to advocate for your kid in school and other settings.
My son used to be basically non-verbal, he would headbutt and bite us frequently as a result of his frustrations. So had we tried putting our son in speech therapy, however we took him out of that since the methods were very repetitive and frustrating for him. It was much harsher than what he’s experienced in ABA. ABA had my kid actually asking for what he wanted, didn’t want, enaging in play… also the biting and headbutting us stopped. I’m not sure why seeking out some kind of therapy to help him communicate better is seen as “forcing him to conform”…
After seven years of ABA, my kid is happy as hell. He loves his therapy group and his therapists. He’s still going twice a week, he’s learning about online safety, multiplayer gaming (taking turns and playing as a team) and how to deal with bullies. They have a video game playing league.
It’s important for people who experienced the horrific side of ABA to voice their experiences and advocate for acceptance of neurodiversity in all its forms. I in no way want to dismiss the trauma of someone who had to experience ABA the way it used to be.
But call ALL forms of modern ABA or other behavioural therapies for kids ‘coersive’ or ‘abusive’ - or to compare them to something like conversion therapy? …I don’t know even know how to describe it. But it is very, very very off base and misinformed at the very least.
I’m not going to argue, since it seems like you have a pretty strong opinion about this. (As do I)
But I wanted to put it out there that doctors tend to recommend modern ABA for a reason. Evidence-based methods matter. I recommend it myself, provided you investigate the clinic first to see what their approach is.
Actually, I really appreciate your perspective and I see nothing here to argue with. I'm genuinely glad to hear that your son is happy and can express himself better, and that they aren't suppressing his stimming or anything. That's amazing to hear, and I hope he stays on that trajectory.
Thank you for sharing, and I will absolutely keep this anecdote in mind as I continue to learn about this myself.
As someone who grew up with a (quite) younger sibling in the most disabling end of the spectrum, witnessing all the development from infancy to adulthood, I am very reluctant to recommend for/against any specific approach, because I think that what matters most is the people who actually practice it. So, I absolutely agree with the last sentence of your comment.
The negative aspects of ABA are not entirely in the past. I am not in a position to verify the information I will quote, but this is mentioned in the third of the linked articles:
Mandell says ABA needs to renounce that history — especially the early reliance on punishments like yelling, hitting, and most controversially electroshocks, which are still used in a notorious residential school in Massachusetts called the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center.
To be clear: I am not arguing with your experience here. Rather, I am pointing out how important is the kind of practice of whatever theory and what the focus of the practice actually is. It’s really very difficult to find professionals who are actually both able and willing to care properly for autistic people. At least in the place I live.
Beyond that, I have to say that there are many things that now have positive effects on people’s lives that weren’t exactly positive in their original forms.
It does not “intervene” in their Autism so much as it forces them to appear more neurotypical, and a study from 2018 suggests that it actually creates PTSD symptoms in the patients
If “operant conditioning” makes you think of dog training, you’re right.
This isn’t the bad part. Operant conditioning is how all behaviours are formed, if something gives a positive feeling or takes away a bad one the behaviour increases, if it adds negative feeling or takes away a positive one the behaviour decreases.
The issue with ABA is firstly trying to take a persons personhood away, teaching someone that who they are is bad, and secondly the mad schedules they impose. It might be that a person doesn’t feel comfortable with eye contact, the ideal situation is we go “cool, don’t do that” and everyone is just cool with it, a middle ground that is a good idea is to help the person get used to using intermittent eye contact or using little tricks like looking at someones nose or forehead. The ABA solution is we force the person to make eye contact for an hour a day, regardless of comfort, and witholding a comfort item, like a tablet, until they have completed that hour. It’s treating a child (or sometimes an adult) as a non-entity, just an issue that needs to be fixed, needs to be ‘normal’.
This is one of the most commonly touted engineering myths that simply doesn't hold up to even a brief analysis. The first glaring problem is the inherent survivorship bias behind claiming Roman concrete was objectively better than modern concrete. As other users have already mentioned, modern concrete is actually very strong and exceeds the strength of Roman concrete when such strength is required, but where it really has an advantage is in its consistency.
If every concrete structure built in Rome was still standing and in good shape to this day, engineers would be salivating over the special blend and would be doing whatever they could to get their hands on it or replicate it. But we don't see that. We see the Roman concrete structures that have survived the test of time (so far), not the myriad structures that have not. Today's concrete on the contrary is deliberately consistent in chemistry, meaning even if it typically isn't designed to last hundreds of years, you can say with a great deal of confidence that it will last at least X years, and all of it will likely exhibit similar wear and strength degradation behaviors over that same duration.
There are other factors at play too:
Romans didn't use steel reinforcing re-bar, instead opting for massive lump sums of concrete to build structures. These massive piles are better against wear and porosity-related degradation, especially due to the self-healing properties of the Roman concrete blend due to volcanic ash helping to stop crack propagation.
Our modern concrete structures are much, much larger in many cases and/or are under significantly higher loads. Take roads for example—no Roman road was ever under the continued duress of having hundreds of 18 wheelers a day rumble over them.
Our modern concrete structures do things that would have been considered witchcraft to a Roman civil engineer. Consider the width of unsupported spans on modern concrete bridges compared to the tightly packed archways of Roman aqueducts.
None of this is to detract from Roman ingenuity, but to make the claim that Roman concrete was objectively better than what we have today is farcical.
Though it’s important to note that factors of safety are always incorporated into structural designs, in case higher loads/wear/etc than expected occur
Thank you. This is a part of the whole trad mess, where they basically claim that everything was better for reasons and we should all turn back to the traditional values like bigotry and slavery. A fun mess where I lose my shit with anger - your answer is wonderful.
This article is literally about doing research to better understand the chemistry behind the self healing properties of Roman concrete to maybe use the findings to improve modern concrete. This is the aspect which I find so interesting : the chemistry. Literally no one is talking about going back to traditional values and blah blah. That’s something which I personally abhor. Did you even read the article? Where did you find this in the article? Of course titles of articles tend to be over dramatic.
This article is about research on self healing properties of Roman concrete. It’s not all about a one on one comparison. The chemistry behind the self healing properties is interesting and not definitively established.
Always a little annoyed at articles like this; “strength” doesn’t tell me anything. If this is 5x more resistant than steel to deformation, but then shatters catastrophically, that limits its use cases substantially. Likewise, compressive, tensile and shear strength are all different properties, only one of which is referenced at all. Still very cool, and I look forward to seeing how it develops and learning more details about its capabilities (when I have more time I’ll read the paper), but vague terminology like this has a bad habit of making stuff sound way more revolutionary than it actually is. /shurg
You won't find that level of detail in typical articles, because they are intended for the general public and are intended to be an overview that a layman can comprehend.
However, the paper itself, which the article links to, has more detail including deformation testing.
I told myself I wouldn’t read unrelated papers at work, but here we are. :P Yeah, as expected, the actual paper is way more informative about the structural properties, and about the limitations. (Difficulty fabricating larger samples without voids, said voids resulting in much lower strengths and much less plasticity, uncertain tensile strength, etc.) Fascinatingly though, (at least to me, not having known the details about DNA based metamaterials :P) the details of the properties should be tunable by way of changing the DNA lattice structure. Which makes it a two-part engineering problem, figuring out how to manufacture it at scale, and determining optimal lattice structures for different applications. Definitely exciting, and will be big once we figure these things out.
But that’s not really what I was talking about. While I get that this is an article geared to laymen/the general public, I do think we should be holding science communication to a higher standard. What was discovered is exciting, but we don’t know how it can be used yet, or if it will ever be practical to do so. Overview is fine, I’d just like some more qualifiers and less speculation. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like some more care would do a lot to improve overall scientific literacy and trust in the scientific community. /shurg
If they are writing using proper materials terminology then strength tells you a lot, since it has a pretty rigorous definition: amount of energy absorbed before failure.
Which, given one of the researchers themselves is quoted talking about its strength, I’m guessing they are even unintentionally being more precise than you’re expecting of them.
As for the properties: smaller sections being stronger is fairly normal amongst materials. The smaller a manufactured section, the more catastrophic any given defect will be. At a certain scale, you will be guaranteed to have either perfect, or already failed, material.
For decades scientists noticed that quantum phenomena respect something called CP-symmetry, that is a really posh way to say "if you sub your particle with an antiparticle and invert its spatial coordinates, the laws of physics will stay the same". So for example it doesn't really matter if you have an electron at (1,1,1) or a positron at (-1,-1,-1), the effect is the same.
There are some exceptions (called CP violations) but for most part CP-symmetry is a real phenomenon. And one of those violations that could happen is when you're dealing with quarks (the junk that protons and neutrons are composed of). And if something can happen, in quantum mechanics, it will happen. So why don't CP violations happen?
Based on that, in 1977 Roberto Peccei and Helen Quinn predicted a new particle, that they named "axion" after some laundry detergent, as "it washed off the problem" (yup - scientists being silly with names, nothing new). That axion particle would be a really small particle, but with mass (unlike photons), and it compensates the predicted CP violation.
Now, to the link: apparently axions are a real thing, and they explain (at least partially) what dark matter is supposed to be.
Can you expand on what "invert its spatial coordinates" means? From your example it seems you're just flipping around the origin of your coordinate system, but since there is no fixed, "natural" reference frame that would provide a "true" origin, isn't that origin completely arbitrary and the math should then work out with any origin you use? I feel like I'm missing something here
Not OP, but: it works similarly to looking at the system in a mirror. The clock's hands turn, well, clockwise, but if you look at the mirror their movement is anticlockwise. Importantly, if you look at that mirror in another mirror, it will be clockwise again. Add yet another mirror and it's anticlockwise.
With a single mirror at position x=0 (and YZ plane), you invert "x" position, so (1, 1, 1) becomes (-1, 1, 1). "Inverting" the spatial coordinates ((x,y,z) -> (-x, -y, -z)) is effectively the same as looking at system through 3 mirrors, located at x = 0 (YZ plane), y = 0 (XZ plane) and z = 0 (XY plane), but that is a bit hard to visualize/arrange in practice so usually you would think of it as an equivalent operation of a point reflection around (0, 0, 0). You are right that the point is arbitrary: the important thing is, among others, that clockwise movement becomes anticlockwise.
Thanks for the reply! I'm not sure I fully got that, though. So it seems to be that it's not actually about position (the absolute coordinates), but about the velocity of the particle? So, you could just always use a coordinate system that has the particle at its origin so that its position doesn't need to change, and just invert the vector of its velocity to get the same result?
As the other poster said, it's like a mirror. If you mirror the system, and swap the particle with its antiparticle counterpart, you'll get the same effect on the point that you decided "this is my origin". Like this:
Here the origin is the tip of the pencil. It's completely arbitrary, but it should still hold true in most cases. The exceptions are the CP-violations.
Thanks for the explanation. Very interesting. Is CP-symmetry the same thing as “time based symmetry”? (Not sure if that’s what it is called. I’ve heard there is some symmetry that means certain physical phenomenon behave the same even if time runs backwards, or something. I’m probably not doing a great job explaining)
No, time-based symmetry is the T-symmetry. It's violated all the time because some events only run one way, never to the other; for example, if you burn sugar into carbon dioxide and water, you can't simply "unburn" it by gathering the carbon dioxide and water together.
Then there's the CPT-symmetry, that says that those violations of the T-symmetry should have a correspondent CP-symmetry violation, cancelling each other out exactly.
Thank you for the thoughtful response, as I was genuinely interested to know what axion was.
As a side note, I remember reading about CP violations a while back (scientists love to use the metaphor of "how to distinguish left from right" to explaining those) and they were saying that CPT symmetry was inviolable, but they did also thought the same about Charge (C), Parity (P) and Time (T) before. Do you think we will ever see a CPT violation?
I don't think that we will, but people are still looking for it, albeit indirectly, and focusing on special relativity. Stuff like "are the photons still obeying Lorenz symmetry here? What about there? And there?". (Note: Lorenz symmetry violations would imply CPT violations.)
You know, people keep asking what America is going to be like 10, 20 or even 50 years from now.
I'm going to tell you that we'll have some of the most spottiest blotches of our history. It'll be rooted from the times and events where extremely aggressive opposers to generally anything intellectual have gone on crusades to undermine anything they think is a huge problem, like scientists.
This will be our Burning of the Library of Alexandria. We'll just have inconclusive data to our researches because of politically charged people.
Like Russia, it’s the leftovers of a country clinging to a cold war military machine. When the US pissed away their manufacturing base and killed their unions in the 70s and 80s, it was over.
As someone in a country that shares a land border with the Americans, I am increasingly concerned about the instability (and likely violence) that will accompany that impending collapse.
I hope sanity can prevail, but it’s looking pretty bleak.
Not in its current form at least - this pot is boiling over. Then again, climate change may end human habitation in most areas on earth by then too, so there’s that to consider as well:-P.
Oh sure … all media is likely some form of garbage, especially when it comes to anything other than the main text.
But a blood bypass would surely be the first major and critical step to isolating a brain from the whole body, except for cranial nerves and spinal cord of course, depending on what purpose anyone has for this. I’m presuming there’s some advantage that could be had in certain surgical procedures.
I guess it could already allow full body transplants for tetraplegic patients… I mean, if they have no muscle control, and get a brain-dead donor, they have nothing to lose and might live who knows how much longer.
Probably a step farther, would be spinal nerve reconstruction, or using stuff like a brain implant to reconnect to the new body. Bridging nerve gaps is one of the first goals, and Neuralink’s first human tests are to be performed precisely on tetraplegic patients, so the two might be a good fit.
The article mentions an improved way to maintain blood flow to the isolated part, so that would be beneficial for all surgeries that need isolation (like heart surgery).
Of course the “pump random drugs only to the brain and see how it reacts”, is also interesting, just not as sensationalist… and they could even eat the rest of the pig afterwards, if the test drugs don’t make it there.
Researchers were able to isolate blood flow to the brain, separate that brain from the rest of the body, and use a new device to keep the brain alive and functioning.
The article does say that, but the source paper the article links to says this in the Abstract:
Thus, we set out to mechanically render cerebral hemodynamics fully regulable to replicate or modify native pig brain perfusion. To this end, blood flow to the head was surgically separated from the systemic circulation and full extracorporeal pulsatile circulatory control (EPCC) was delivered via a modified aorta or brachiocephalic artery. This control relied on a computerized algorithm that maintained, for several hours, blood pressure, flow and pulsatility at near-native values individually measured before EPCC. Continuous electrocorticography and brain depth electrode recordings were used to evaluate brain activity relative to the standard offered by awake human electrocorticography. Under EPCC, this activity remained unaltered or minimally perturbed compared to the native circulation state, as did cerebral oxygenation, pressure, temperature and microscopic structure. Thus, our approach enables the study of neural activity and its circulatory manipulation in independence of most of the rest of the organism.
And nothing whatsoever about physically removing the brain from the body. It’s teeechnically separated from the body’s circulatory system - with the experimental, artificial connection replacing the natural one between tthe body’s circulatory system and the brain’s blood flow - but that really seems to be it.
The article is extremely misleading and only barely connected to the actual study, in short.
I’m personally gonna add Popular Mechanics to my internal list of pop sci rags that can’t be trusted.
I wonder if that has implications for drug application… from my memory I believe a common challenge for brain diseases is that most drugs cannot cross the BBB, but if they’ve made a bypass…
It’s a blood vessel bypass to the whole brain, the BBB is between blood vessels inside the brain and brain tissue.
The implication for drugs, is in drug research: normally a drug will get spread all over the body, particularly passing through the liver, which metabolizes all it can, followed by the kidneys, which piss out all they can… so it isn’t easy to estimate how much of a given drug actually gets to the brain.
With a bypass, they can inject drugs directly into the brain, and see how they work without “interference” from the rest of the body.
Wow! This sifting AI can do, in conjunction with bench top experimentation makes for a whole new game in drug discovery. From approx 39,000 substances for training the model, to 12 million compounds screened, to reveal 280 likely compounds, then off to the lab, and they found 2 promising candidates. Talk about finding a (2) needles in a hundred acres of haystacks!!
If we are, we're emergent behavior, not the topic of study.
Frankly, simulation theory feels a lot like other previous "humans are super special!" ontologies. We're not, we're just organic bags of complex chemical processes like every other lifeform on Earth, with all the cool potential and shitty vulnerabilities that such a thing entails. I've yet to see anything which truly sets us apart as a species beyond the need to ascribe a meaning to our mortality.
Frankly, simulation theory feels a lot like other previous “humans are super special!” ontologies. We’re not, we’re just organic bags of complex chemical processes like every other lifeform on Earth
We are though. As far as we know, we’re the only advanced life forms in the known universe. We’ve scanned the sky for decades and haven’t found evidence of even a single culture, not within hundreds of millions of light years from us. That’s pretty special. Yes, other animals are likely sentient, but there are no other animals that can build computers, jet engines, and spacecraft. There are no other animals that even have a spoken language as far as we know.
We only just noticed that Europa is probably a good candidate for life and it’s been in our back yard forever. Saying we have no evidence for life in the universe is like saying that someone with vision too blurry to read signs sees no evidence of life across the street. Like, okay, but that doesn’t really tell us much of anything.
Our sky scanning is also looking for radio waves, which is probably not a great candidate for finding advanced life outside of our own neighborhood.
Compared to a being that can build a universe? A spacecraft might as well be a bird’s nest. I’m inclined to agree with the guy that you’re replying to. If this universe is a simulation, I personally doubt that its creator is specifically aware of us as a species, let alone as individuals. The fact that life appears so rare in this universe only tells me that if the universe was designed, it wasn’t designed for us or entities like us.
Also are you sure about that last sentence? Surely none have language as sophisticated as we do, but don’t dolphins have a sort-of language? I genuinely don’t know
To us a being that can create a universe is a god, not just another creature.
I don’t follow your train of thought that the creator of a simulation wouldn’t know of the only advanced intelligence within their simulation. They would have specifically coded us, or at least the conditions that led to us. The vastness of the universe and the speed of light limitation is likely the invisible wall meant to keep us where we are.
Dolphins, birds, and some other species have rudimentary auditory communication, but it’s very limited as far as we know. They fall far short of a spoken language . They seem to communicate simple concepts such as “I am here. I want food. I want to fuck. You’re not welcome”, nothing that allows communication of abstract concepts required for an advanced intelligence to flourish.
To us a being that can create a universe is a god, not just another creature.
That’s my point - we’re just another creature. On a scale of bird to god, we might as well be a bird. It’s vain to assume that a universe-creator of all people would give a fuck about human achievements. Only other humans care.
I don’t follow your train of thought that the creator of a simulation wouldn’t know of the only advanced intelligence within their simulation.
I’m not saying that the creator couldn’t know, I’m saying they likely wouldn’t care. Of course I’m just guessing same as you, but life in general is probably just noise considering all that goes on in the universe without a trace of life as we define it. My bet is that we’re simply outside of the creator’s scope. She’s probably interested in other things like gravity and the ratio’s of elements as time progresses.
Also, you say that we’re the only advanced intelligence in the universe/simulation with way too much certainty. We’ve only been outside of our atmosphere for a little more than half a century, which is to say three things:
“advanced” is relative, if not subjective.
Give it time, we could find life in the next few millennia.
Even if we never find life, Occam’s razor. Is it wise to assume that the universe was created for homo-sapiens, when it’s possible that life is simply rare and we aren’t as advanced as we think we are?
The vastness of the universe and the speed of light limitation is likely the invisible wall meant to keep us where we are.
This sounds a lot like the flat-earth ice wall idea. Most thought on simulation philosophy posits that our fixed rate of causation is due to the limits of the media that the universe “runs” on, and we see parallels in our own “simulations”. So there’s no right or wrong here but again, Occam’s razor.
I believe that my first paragraph addresses your last, but I do want to take the anthropological angle. When we thought the earth was flat, many civilizations assumed that theirs was the center. When it became clear that the earth was a globe, we assumed that the sun, planets, and stars orbited the earth, and that the earth was the center of the universe. When we learned that actually the earth orbits the sun, we still thought that the sun was the center of the universe which was just the solar system + the stars before we realized that the sun is just one star, and the sun itself had an orbit in in the galaxy, which we again falsy assumed was the whole universe.
We tend to see ourselves as the center of the universe because that’s our perspective, it’s natural and intuitive. That assumption has been wrong every step of the way so far though. So what makes you so sure that this time is so different? What makes you so sure that homosapiens, the apes living on one rock on the edge of some random, average galaxy, who only just escaped their planet’s orbit just now on a cosmic scale, are the focal point of the entire theoretically observable universe, which they’ve only just scratched the surface of being able to observe? The fact that they have a few million year evolutionary head start on their chimpanzee cousins? Or a few more million on their dolphin cousins? Or a couple billion on their rock cousins?
That’s my point - we’re just another creature. On a scale of bird to god, we might as well be a bird.
A lot of the simulation theory proponents propose that we’re the creators of the simulation. That an advanced human society spins up simulations to test theories on whatever… evolution, progress, history, you name it. In that case we’re actually nothing. We’re lines of code. But we’re lines of code created by our future society. Or present society really, but that reality is outside our knowledge.
I just finished a sci-fi fiction series called The World Walker and it gets pretty deep into simulation theory. It was a very interesting and thought provoking read. You have to wade through 2 whole books before they get to that part though, so don’t expect to pick it up and jump right in. It’s definitely worth a read IMO though, if you’re interested.
Anyways, the point is that if we’re truly in a simulation, then we’re nothing. We don’t exist. You could propose that all consciousness is existence, AI or otherwise, but we don’t exist in the physical realm. If it is humanity, or some unknown culture that created the simulation is irrelevant as far as we’re concerned.
If we’re in a simulation then we’re meaningful to whoever is running it, assuming we’re being observed. I would assume all life is meaningful to them as well though. I guess it depends on their objectives. If we’re not in a simulation then we’re meaningful to ourselves, being the only advanced society we’re aware of. Either way, humanity means something, it’s just a shame that none of us can agree on what that is.
Edit: I just read a theory last week that our entire universe may exist inside of a black hole. If that’s true then we’ve indirectly observed multiple universes already. It makes me think of the closing scene to Men In Black where the aliens are playing marbles with our entire universe. That’s an interesting theory too.
We’re the creators? As in the human race? Okay, I actually think that I understand your point now. If we start with the assumption that the universe was run by beings like us, and they based it on their own universe, then I’d have to agree with your position that those beings would probably be interested in our life.
Whenever I said that the universe could be a simulation, carried out by a creator, I meant those terms in only the most abstract sense. I didn’t assume a human or human-like creator, or that our universe has any resemblance to theirs.
Semantics man, that’s what it always comes down to. Good conversation
We’ve scanned the sky for decades and haven’t found evidence of even a single culture, not within hundreds of millions of light years from us. That’s pretty special.
Actually, it mostly just means our detection methods probably still suck. We are still just trying to identify biomarkers by light refraction, which not only requires that the orbital body transit a star in our line of sight, but that it be large and close enough to register refraction through the atmosphere. And that’s pretty new. The old methods were trying to intercept radio and other em signals.
“Decades” ago we had identified 1 or 2 potential planets in the “Goldilocks Zone”, and people declared that it was in fact exceedingly rare for a solar system to even have planets, much less planets in the habitable zone. Now we have identified a LOT more potentials, nevermind planets.
You’re looking through heavily dirtied goggles at a room that could be full of people and saying, “I don’t see anyone, so I must be alone. I must be special.”
This is very much a situation in which the “lack of evidence is not evidence of a lack” rule applies.
Apparently there’s a bunch of such channels that have all their content generated by bots: not just the title, but the footages and voiceover as well. They’re all clickbaits with content ranging from simple word salad to blatant misinformation. Kyle Hill made a video about it where he tried to find who was/were behind these channels (spoiler alert: he tried to report the channels to youtube and got his own video striked in return)
It's not just science-related videos either; I recently saw a video about the Taurus returning to Ford's lineup, despite the car existing only as a rebadged Mondeo in the Chinese market now, and no such announcements being made anywhere for it to return to the US market
I really wish there was a viable alternative to youtube, it's the only google product I consciously use and it's pure trash
Same, the peertube instances are nice and all, but no real mainstream youtubers are really cross posting to peertube anywhere.
Alot of the high quality work is hard to move over to peertube as most sponsors are used to dealing with YouTube, and to make good quality content you'd need the reliable revenue stream.
TAURUS! Now there’s an American car with a shape and a feel we’ve never seen before! TAURUS! Now there is a personal car with exactly what we’ve been looking for! TAURUS!
Sorry I can’t get that out of my head so many years later.
No, I get it, that song gets lodged in my head all the time too, hi-five
…sometimes, I’ll sing it to myself, raising my hand into the air as I reach the end of the line, and close it into a fist on the “Taurus!” part, like it’s some kind of overly dramatic Broadway horseshit
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