Comments on: OT20: Heaven’s Open

By: Irrelevant

Irrelevant — Sun, 24 May 2015 10:34:23 +0000

What, you don’t think the chemical test lab/auditory frequency modulator/mop is a sophisticated apparatus?

By: Good Burning Plastic

Good Burning Plastic — Sun, 24 May 2015 08:58:56 +0000

it pretty much requires sensitive scientific apparatus to reliably sort out

Does it? After all many people can tell pork, beef and mutton apart without any scientific apparatus, and pigs are more closely related to sheep or cattle than to us.

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By: Citizensearth

Citizensearth — Sun, 24 May 2015 08:21:14 +0000

Ah hide was hidden for me due to js being turned off. Whoops. Fixed now. Thanks.

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By: Leo

Leo — Sun, 24 May 2015 03:23:22 +0000

I believe some very general claims about chronic (meaning lasting, not necessarily permanent) conditions, but I’ll narrow it down to just depression. If I’m wrong about depression, I’m most likely wrong about the other cases.

I have known a lot of severely depressed people. Some of these people intellectually believe that they’re very brave and strong for surviving, for getting out of bed, for making an appointment with a doctor; that it’s fine to let everything but survival fall by the wayside in a pinch; that they should enjoy as much happiness as can be found inside their limitations; that they belong to a brotherhood of fighters against depression, and should be proud of it, and talk about it, and ask for help. They don’t usually alieve those beliefs, but are constantly encouraged to. They are also expected to talk about their feelings and feel better from doing so; to enjoy cute things and compliments and hugs; and to want reassurance and sympathy.

Some others hold themselves to the same standards they do while not depressed, and are ashamed when they inevitably fall short. They believe their depression is a weakness that they ought to be able to overcome alone, and are reluctant to discuss it. They talk about it little and late. They don’t form a community. Because of this, they tend to overtax the few people (me) they turn to for support. [I don’t mean you, mate, you rock.] They often try to shock themselves out of the depression by requiring more of themselves.

The first group copes with depression better, recovers from depression faster, and kills themselves a hell of a lot less than the second.

I don’t know of any studies that directly support these observations. I can point out correlations between their demographics, but that wouldn’t make it obvious which way the causality goes.

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By: Troy

Troy — Sat, 23 May 2015 03:52:15 +0000

Give me an example of a smart and reasonable person who has believed in a god and written about why they believe this. In fact, give me the best example you know of.

Richard Swinburne. The majority of his corpus is devoted to this.

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By: Larry Kestenbaum

Larry Kestenbaum — Fri, 22 May 2015 16:46:29 +0000

I just noticed that OzyFrantz.com now points to a plausible-looking pseudo-blog, in Spanish, with nothing but spam content.

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By: James Picone

James Picone — Fri, 22 May 2015 05:18:55 +0000

There’s a ‘hide’ button on comments. Hide a top-level comment and the entire tree goes away.

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By: Citizensearth

Citizensearth — Fri, 22 May 2015 05:16:46 +0000

Scott, have you investigated a way to alter the comments so that a comment tree can be minimised? This would make it much easier to skip over a topic of no interest and wade through the mountains of comments you now have I’m thinking there would be a either a WP plugin or you could get someone to look at the template you’re using?

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By: Tarrou

Tarrou — Thu, 21 May 2015 04:37:17 +0000

Measuring the success of a process of teaching other people via the internet how to interact with others is pretty much impossible.

As a personal aside, I’ve found many of the principles to be sound, and certain of the larger community to be more informative and less self-promoting than others (RPR, Rollo). There is no magic or routine, but if you want to sink some time into becoming a more attractive, socially skilled version of yourself, there are people who can help. They are mixed in with a howling madhouse of egotists, liars and lunatics, so ymmv.

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By: Tarrou

Tarrou — Thu, 21 May 2015 04:30:41 +0000

DID is somewhat controversial as even existing. Don’t know where Scott falls, but most of my training was from professors who thought the whole thing was either a medicalization of normal psychology or a cynical scam.

I’m not sure where I fall, but the first case which made multiple personalities famous was almost certainly a scam.

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