Much appreciated! I'll take you up on that and DM you if I ever need a serious talk, but I'm quite all right for the time being. I'm not worried about dying per se, but the original surgery was very much Not Fun for various reasons (I woke up during the operation) and I'd like to avoid being in that position again if I can.
Something like an Apple Watch with ECG tracking might be good just for the peace of mind. I told my dad to get one
Very useful in some ways, surprisingly un-useful in others. It lets you have a look and get an idea of what is 'normal' and what is 'not normal' on a moment to moment basis. It's less useful in that many conditions produce the same biomarkers. For example, low heart rate variability can either be a sign of relaxation and recovery (good, go and get some exercise) or your body desperately trying to relax and activating the parasympathetic nervous system after serious exertion (maybe not good, you need to relax and not do anything strenuous). Low stress just before you wake can be a sign that you're well-rested (good) or that you're very tired and your alarm woke you in the middle of a sleep cycle (less good). And so on.
Ideally sensors are a good way to sort through the psychological chaff such as excess stoicism or excess hypochondria/anxiety and get a good idea about what's actually going on with people, but it doesn't seem to work that way. There also seems to be a dearth of individual high-detail studies, just very specific medical studies on unusual cohorts or vast field surveys.
I'm sorry, I had to laugh. This is a good reminder that patients are not made alike
I imagine this comes up a lot :) But for certain types of people saying 'I would love to do X with you but the doctor says I can't because of Y, what a joyless bastard he/she is amirite?' can be much easier than saying 'I'd like to do X but it makes me nervous'. I don't know how you'd go about finding which patient responds to which approach except through experience and stereotyping, but I bet it has a big payoff especially if you ever go private.
Corvos
18hr ago
I do note that the main article currently on the English language section of Yomiuri, a Japanese paper, is about Gaza.
I've got a tab of verapamil, which is similar to a beta blocker. In practice they've usually died down quickly enough that I don't have time to fetch and take it, which is good.
Did the surgeons or cardiologists not give advice regarding lifestyle modifications or exercise tolerance?
They did, in Japanese lol. Broadly they said, "Look, just don't worry about it. Do whatever exercise you like - it won't help but it won't make things worse. In practice go on living your life the same as ever." Which is... nice and all, and better than the alternative, but somehow less reassuring than 'eat salad, never let your heart get above 160, and we want you to wear a 24h ECG once a year' or whatever. I try not to think about it too much, or else I will turn into a hypochondriac.
It seems to be genetic (at least one of my elderly relatives used to have it I think) and to die down as you get older.
Corvos
19hr ago
I will probably be in London sometime between Monday to Wednesday next week
Cool! That's today to Weds, or next week?
I presume you've gotten that looked at? My impression is probably anxiety, and CBT or the drugs would help if that's the case. Maybe even just a beta-blocker for symptomatic relief if it gets bad.
Had keyhole surgery (catheter ablation) a couple of years back when it flared up to multiple several-minute bouts of 180bpm a day. Much better now, only once every few months, but I live in fear of it getting worse and needing surgery again. Realistically could be a lot worse but it's made me risk-averse in a way I dislike.
That's true. This exam isn't the end of the world if I fail, just £500 I won't be getting back. But I do very much want to pass it in one go - deferring it is an option, but I'll only be getting busier in the future and I'm already a bit overdue for an attempt.
To moan in general, the exam is designed by sadists, with much of it of limited/negative utility in actual psychiatric practice. But I am not credentialed enough to be consulted on such topics, so I'm dealing with it. It's also pointlessly hard, but eh, I can manage that too.
Good to hear that it's not do-or-die, at least. Worst comes to the worst, spreading the study out over a longer period will make you much more likely to retain the knowledge.
Best of luck!
Corvos
19hr ago
GPT-5T is incredibly smart
Do you find it reliably better than default 5? It seems to me that it's rather over-done and prone to skip ahead to something that is not necessarily what I want, rather than answering the specific query and working through with me as I prefer.
Corvos
21hr ago
The eternal problem of “are you sure?” almost universally lowering its previously declared confidence in any subjective answer also remains.
Works on people too though.
Corvos
1d ago
Fuck, I’m sorry.
I have stress-provoked tachycardia which is less crippling but certainly unfun and produces perhaps a similar ‘I need to do important things to have a good life but not too many things or else my body will go wonky’ dilemma.
I’m sort of failing to manage it at the moment but generally I would advise trying to separate out one’s stressors a bit. Don’t go drinking the night before the marathon. Try to have specific study times that don’t coincide with your worst work shifts. If possible, try to have the confidence that you can take a break every so often without fucking up your life.
Corvos
1d ago
As I have lamented before, I barely play video games these days.
True, and I apologise for not being around to play something as I said I might be. Work picked up a bit but mostly I’m too lazy even to be properly thoughtfully lazy…
I have my doubts about getting a massive screen because of eye strain. I’m told that if you have a big screen dead in front of you (ie you’re looking straight ahead rather than down a bit) your eyes instinctively try to focus on the horizon and it messes you up long term. I work on this thing most of the day so I want to be careful about that.
https://cluvens.com/scorpion-ergonomic-gaming-chair.html
A friend and I have a pact that when our careers takes off and we become immensely rich we will buy one of these lol
You have exams?
Corvos
1d ago
I own a goddamn OLED 4k HDR high refresh rate TV
Which you use as a monitor, right? How are you getting on with that? I nearly copied you but balked at the price.
Granted, but it does seem so to me. I observe that my consciousness exists, and that nobody can tell me how this is so. 'It's just a property of complex systems' seems like a non-answer to me, spoken in a very confident tone of voice, and being entirely too vague to be useful. How do complex systems produce this property? Does it only happen if those patterns are in a meat brain? Are AIs conscious? PCs observing themselves via their antivirus software? Rocks?
It's like Sophism. Yes, we cannot prove that the world exists. But it seems to me that it does. Likewise the assertion that humans beings don't have free will, to which I can only note that for all intents and purposes I seem to. Assertions to the contrary seem essentially to be faith-based to shore up a particular conceptual model and don't really help at all to make sense of the world. Even the people who claim to have become enlightened by discovering that their own ego doesn't exist just act just like everybody else, right down to the sexual harrassment scandals. At least if we discovered that the entirety of human consciousness was powered by fairy farts we might be able to get somewhere new with that.
Corvos
1d ago
Agreed. Materialism is a prescriptive hypothesis about how the world is that can be disproven without invalidating the empirical process. Indeed, materialism as conceived in the 19th century has taken a certain number of knocks in the last hundred years with the discovery that the universe has a specific start point and that the location and behaviour of particles and waves is fundamentally undeterministic.
Corvos
1d ago
You are both trying to achieve diametrically opposite things. Clearly, it's not possible for CEOs to be seriously concerned about downside risk so that they are responsible stewards, whilst also making them feel safe and detached enough to comfortably take serious risks.
Neuroscience doesn’t cover qualia. The hard problem is that there is no known mechanism for material reality to interact with or produce subjective thought and experience. To produce specific neural patterns, yes, but not to produce subjective experience.
Lots of materialists attempt to resolve this by saying that neural patterns are subjective experience, but this doesn’t actual solve the problem, it just declares it not to exist. Humans clearly do have subjective experience and we have no idea how that might relate to electricity produced by bags of salty water (cells). The fact that altering the cells changes the subjective experience still doesn’t tell you the mechanism by which one produces the other.
If it turns out that souls and angels and demons are real, then physicists will publish articles constraining the relevant parameters of archangel Gabriel in short order.
I think you are confusing empiricism and materialism. If angels exist then materialism - the idea that physical particles and waves are the only phenomena in the universe - is wrong. You might or might not be able to make empirical predictions about how angels and ‘spiritual matter’ behaves, but that is not materialism or physics. And there is no guarantee that spirit would be amenable to this approach - ‘social science’ has broadly failed because human behaviour at scale is not a phenomenon that yields well to empiricism, being non-consistent over both time and space.
Corvos
1d ago
If you specify that for this person the maximally moral impulses produce ‘max enjoyment’ ie max hedons, then tautologically not?
Corvos
1d ago
I've lived on top of a supermarket before. It's not ideal because of all the noise, especially early morning deliveries. Lots of crashing and banging.
Corvos
3d ago
How do you get smart enough to manufacture thermite and nitro, plus detonators, but not smart enough to realise that you're going to get arrested when you leave them behind to take a piss in front of police officers? Serious question. Is it just that mental illness affects different cognitive capacities differently?
Corvos
3d ago
Also a 100,000 dollar bill, again for use between major banks only. Private handling of one was illegal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_one-hundred-thousand-dollar_bill
My aunt just used a rolled up newspaper applied to the nose for a mild negative reinforcement, equivalent to the dope slap. But dogs are social animals, they’re as motivated by disapproval as much or more than pain. “BAD DOG” in the right tone of voice is usually all you need, I think.
Corvos
4d ago
The big issue with processing rare earths is the pollution AFAIK so yes, Europe probably not a great place to start. Though I bet the Poles or somebody would be happy to stick some factories in a less-used area and reap the increased influence and military protection that comes with it.
Corvos
4d ago
Because modern progressive culture sees that as analogous to praying with an anorexic for them to lose weight, ie abetting self-harm.
Corvos
4d ago
Hmm. Major questions for me are:
- To what extent is China’s economy now independent on exports? That is, to what extent can China exercise their right to not export items without catastrophic damage to their industries?
- Is the most likely non-Chinese partner for rare earth processing America (I imagine so, Trump will see this as a great way to bring EU in line), Russia via India, or can Europe do this in house?
Corvos
4d ago
At the risk of being pedantic, we were training dogs for millennia before the shock collar was invented, and also in many countries the shock collar is banned, so it cannot be necessary even if sometimes useful.
I make no comment on the morality, I think that depends on how it’s used.
An interesting read, as long as it's not compulsory. I find it interesting that it has a new section 'to reflect changing cultural attitudes around gender dysphoria' but once you get into the more usual boring disorders it will tell you the gender incidence and relative ratio with bracing honesty.
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