self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
21hr ago
Thanks! Funnily enough, I'm already subscribed to Burial Goods, but didn't know he'd done voice work for this specific meme.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
21hr ago
Thanks for the heads up. I've let it out of the cage.
It would be uncharitable of me to simply point out that you're being sloppy in your thinking and leave it at that. But unfortunately, as far as I can tell, that is true. There is a kernel of truth here, but it's not a particularly new or non-trivial observation, and the bulk of it doesn't stand up to scrutiny when we going from playing word-games to considering what those words mean.
Let me explain:
You seem to think that the medium really is the message. Or, to steelman things, that media shapes our perception of our lives. Uh... That bit is true? I strongly wish I had a copy of that meme where some Twitter wag points out that when humanity invented the wheel, we imagined the universe as a wheel, when we invented clocks, the universe became one of clockwork, and when we invented computation, the universe became increasingly interpreted as one of computation.
Edit: Here you go, found it. https://old.reddit.com/r/sciencememes/comments/1jh25uw/5_minutes_after/#lightbox
Here's the central confusion, and it's worth stating it plainly: you keeps mistaking "X is a metaphor for life" with "life is literally X."
For a start, the "paradox" isn't paradoxical. The essay keeps returning to this idea that it's weird or significant that "life comes before books, but life is like books." This is only strange if you forget how similes work. Of course the thing being compared to comes first! We compare unfamiliar things to familiar things, and we create the familiar things from the unfamiliar template.
The fact that we can say "a neuron is like a computer" doesn't mean neurons are secretly running Windows 11 in your basal ganglia. It means we have computers now, and they provide a useful conceptual model. Your "paradox" is like saying: "Whales existed before nets, but now we say 'the net is like a whale's mouth and its filter feeding.' Isn't it strange how the whale came first but now the net defines our understanding of the whale?" No. That's just how language evolves.
I get the feeling that you consider this a deep ontological discovery when it's actually a banal observation about metaphor. You can tell because you never actually derive anything from this "paradox." There's no syllogism like "Books have property X; life is like books; therefore life has property X." Instead, there's just a vague sense of spooky symmetry, like discovering that the word "dog" spelled backward is "god" and deciding this reveals something about canine theology.
The bit about African audiences and the chicken is doing a lot of unearned work here. Yes, film literacy is real. Yes, different cultural contexts produce different ways of seeing. But the leap from "Africans in mid-century educational films noticed different things than Western audiences" to "educated modern humans are trapped in a film-plot prison and can't see reality anymore" is what I can only call an exceedingly ambitious framework.
First, the McLuhan anecdote is more complicated than presented. The original context was about audiences unfamiliar with cinematic conventions, not some profound statement about Western alienation from reality. When you show someone their first movie, they don't yet know the grammar. They don't know the significance of close-ups, cuts, tracking shots. They're seeing moving images, not narrative. This is a literacy issue, not evidence that literacy itself is a prison.
(I would bet my net worth that the flourishing African movie industry in the present day is not plagued by an epidemic of utter incomprehension. They watch movies just fine. Literacy is an acquired trait.)
But here's another problem: the essay uses this as a Just-So story about naive perception versus educated illusion. The African audiences see events (a chicken!) while the literate see plot (sanitary education!). That is really not how things work.
First, if you show me a boring instructional video and there's a random chicken in the corner, I will probably notice the chicken too. Not because I'm "film illiterate" but because the chicken is the only interesting thing happening. My "literacy" doesn't make me stop seeing the chicken; it just means I can also track the intended message. The dichotomy is false.
The implication is that these poor naive Africans, untainted by literacy, see the real world while we educated Westerners (for a very generous definition of "we" or "Western", given that this is my critique) are trapped in our symbolic prisons. This is just noble savage mythology with extra steps. Maybe the audiences were bored. Maybe they were resisting missionary-style health propaganda. Maybe McLuhan was just wrong. You don't stop to ask such questions, you're just using them as a prop for a point about how education = blindness.
But with the introduction of books, stories can now be singular. There can be just one author and one version. The pages remember. The beginning is set. And so is the ending. The story is already finished before you read it. Life comes before books. But life is like books. I see life as a book. Books have a determined end, so life has a determined end. One life, one book. As many books as there are lives. The books are stored in a library, surrounded by fog. Rumors said it contains all books in existence. The books were there before I came, and it will be there after i'm gone. I see books but see no authors. I see effects but don't see causes
The universe, and thus life itself, is deterministic at macroscopic scales, or close enough that I don't care about the difference. But just because events and their outcomes are pre-determined doesn't provide any additional power to alter them, or change the subjective experience of being a computationally bounded agent working under conditions of uncertainty.
A sorting algorithm still has to sort the array. That task gets no easier even when we know precisely how it works, or what the sorted outcome should be. Your mind can't just skip to the end either.
You seem to think there's a library somewhere (the fog is a nice touch, very Dark Souls) where "your life" is already written, and this is somehow proven by the existence of libraries with books in them. But this is just more spooky existential poetry. You've come to a correct conclusion with an invalid argument, or rediscovered the Library of Babel. You could equally say "Life is like an improv show; improv shows are unscripted; therefore life is unscripted." The metaphor is not the territory.
An educated man sees a book, but not a dirty stack of paper. The stack of paper has been hidden. Likewise, an educated man sees only the plot and not the events.
This is framing predictive processing as a delusion. Our brains are prediction engines. We ignore the "dirty stack of paper" (the raw sensory data) to perceive the "book" (the meaning) because that is computationally efficient. You're treating this efficiency as a tragic loss of contact with reality. It’s not. It’s the only reason we aren’t catatonic from sensory overload. We don't see "plot" because life is a movie; we see "plot" because brains are causal inference machines.
Or, in another sense:
The educated man sees both. He acknowledges the stack of paper (the medium) but possesses the additional software to decode the symbols upon it (the message). For most practical purposes, the message really is more important. Both of us are engaging with written text, as opposed to parsing the specific arrangement of pixels on a screen.
Every action becomes a statement to the invisible audience. What you eat, what you play, who you meet, where you go.... in 1998, Truman could rebel against the show and move to reality. But where would modern humans go, when reality is a film now?
Reality isn't a film. That aside, behaving like you are being watched is a rational response to actually being watched! Gen Z in particular lives and dies through their phone and social media, we've got better panopticon surveillance than the Truman Show did. Curating one's personality and behavior makes sense, given that the thoughts and opinions of others can meaningfully impact your life. The only issue is going overboard and becoming a slave to public perception. But becoming some kind of schizoid who doesn't give a fuck what they're recorded as saying or doing is just a mistake in the opposite direction.
Before you arrived, some choices must have been made... That being vanished when you arrived, leaving you with a past that you did not create. What makes you you?
This is just a description of being born. Every human being "arrives" in a world where choices were already made (by parents, history, genetics, some butterfly farting in the Mesozoic). You inherit a genetic "past" you didn't create. Framing this as a unique failure of the video game medium ("The future is not yours"), when it’s actually just the fundamental condition of existence is a tad bit unfair. God knows I'd love it if video games were truly open ended with maximal player agency, but that's a possibility for the near future. You can't really draw any real conclusions from noticing that the medium is restrained by the limitations of human effort or even computational feasibility on existing hardwares and budgets, any more than them once using 8-bit graphics says something of real importance about the human condition.
"People like stories about transmigration and regression, therefore they must be unhappy with their own identity." This is a speculation presented as a proof. People also like stories about murder, but even the average True Crime Wine Mom doesn't actually want to be murdered. The popularity of a fantasy genre might indicate escapism, sure, but it might also indicate good marketing, or cultural trends, or just that reincarnation is a cool magic system. The essay treats the most surface-level pop culture observation as deep psychological evidence.
Life is not a book (it has no author). Life is not a film (there is no external audience, only peers). Life is not a game (there is no win condition, only continuation or cessation).
You're staring at a map, noting that the map is made of paper, and then worrying that the territory might be made of paper too. It’s a poetic thought, but as a rigorous analysis of reality, it’s hopelessly confused. We don't need to worry about whether we are "literate" enough to read the plot of our lives. We just need to realize that the "plot" is something we invent in retrospect to make sense of the little bit of signal buried in all of that noise.
(This is why I'm a card carrying member of the Rationalist community, and why I refuse to read Continental philosophy. It helps to be immersed in a tradition where one's expected to speak plainly, and to refrain from the use or abuse of simile and metaphor any more than strictly necessary. Otherwise it's easy to end up making superficially striking connections and tie yourself into a knot)
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
I'd be genuinely surprised if there were enough Koreans (or even East Asians) in my neck of the woods to provide demand for that. On the other hand, I can only assume the margins are great, if they're flipping cuts of meat raw or marinaded for 2-4x cost.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
With frank confusion, I discovered that a Korean place near me offers raw meat as a delivery option on Uber Eats. This is normal enough for a grocery store, but this is a normal ass restaurant that'll sell you sliced pork belly, steak and the like, all raw, alongside relatively standard (and cooked) options.
Why? Is there a market for people who order ingredients for their meals from a restaurant? Having to cook takeout seems to diminish the value proposition, but I can't keep up with the kids these days.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
5d ago
I would strongly recommend that you speak to your doctor about a short course of anxiolytics. While benzos can be scary, this sounds like just about the perfect time. Alternatively, beta blockers will probably help.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
12d ago
Thank you!
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
12d ago
It's a UK thing, Imgur got into legal trouble for not following new age restriction laws, and opted to pick up their ball and go home. I don't even blame them.
(I did use a VPN to actually look, in fact, I keep it on almost all the time!)
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
12d ago
Is having it easy every time not an option? Oh well, I did work at it, and I'm reasonably optimistic about the outcome. Thank you!
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
12d ago
Sorry, I don't speak Spanish. (Thank you though!)
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
12d ago
I wish I was smarter so I didn't have to work like a donkey, but thank you!
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
12d ago
I tried to open this without a VPN and got the "content not viewable in your region", which isn't a great omen haha. Thanks nonetheless!
Welp. Exam's in 4 hours. I've studied on and off for 6 months, and very hard (by my standards) for at least 2. I've been a complete shut-in for two weeks.
My performance is at the point where I'll probably pass, but that's not a guarantee. A minor fluctuation in cut-offs (due to the scoring system and thresholds) could still make all the difference. The MRCPsych Paper A can vary from 40% to 60+% percent pass rates from batch to batch. Hopefully they'll be a little more lenient this time, as the last go had the most failures of recent history. I can kinda see through the matrix now, when it comes to awkward questions and terrible phrasing.
I'd have liked to go into it right after a full night's rest, but my sleep cycle wouldn't allow for it. Still, I'm hardly sleep deprived. Wish me luck folks, I could use some right about now.
Edit:
Reassuringly, the actual exam had me go what the fuck at roughly the same rate as the dozen mocks I did. Maybe even better! I could have wrapped up the whole paper in 45 minutes instead of 3 hours, but I opted to take a leisurely two just to triple check, not that that made much of a difference.
I would say that >50% of the questions had answers that I could have answered in my sleep. For the rest, I had far more 50:50 tossups between two plausible seeming options out of the five per question than I did examples of total ignorance. I did spot a few questionable questions, such as 5 different options for a description of schizophrenic mannerism, of which one was perhaps slightly less wrong than the rest. Most of the time, my intuition lead me the right way even where I wasn't completely certain of the correct answer.
Then there are the stupid questions:
Which test is required before prescribing atomoxetine and Ritalin (separate questions)? The correct answer would be none, because there isn't a single test that is strictly required or even strongly suggested according to standard guidance. That wasn't an option, so I opted for blood pressure (almost certainly correctly) because well, they're stimulants, but that's almost totally irrelevant in practice.
Then they asked us about the method of action of vortioexetine, presumably regarding its antidepressant effects. The answer is "nobody fucking knows", but sadly that wasn't a choice either. I went for 5-HT1A agonism because well, it does do that, and it's a common mechanism for many antidepressants. Sigh.
With the benefit of hindsight, I think I achieved the desirable goal of minimizing regret. I didn't make any stupid mistakes, or unforced errors. Where I was wrong, it was usually due to arcane trivia or genuine ignorance. Many claim that the mocks are harder than the real deal, and I'd say that's probably true for this one. The typical passing score is low 60s, I already did better on average on most mocks, and I estimate >=70% on the actual paper. Which is very likely a pass! Still too early to celebrate, but I'm not touching another fucking textbook till the results are out.
Thanks to everyone who wished me well, I appreciate it <3
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
13d ago
I agree that Bangladesh is a terrible place to fight, but I think that cuts much more against Bangladesh than against India.
India does not need to occupy Bangladesh to win anything that matters to it. There is already a convenient water barrier and rough terrain in the north that makes a defensive line on the Indian side quite workable. If Dhaka tried serious military adventurism, the Indian objective would not be to hold Dhaka, it would be to smash the Bangladeshi military and government C2, then sit behind its own rivers and wait. From that perspective, NE India is not strategically vital enough to justify India throwing itself into the full nightmare of riverine counterinsurgency inside Bangladesh.
On the other hand, Bangladesh is almost encircled by India, has very little strategic depth, and is highly vulnerable to both air attack and blockade. The Bangladesh Air Force is small, made up mostly of elderly F-7s and a handful of MiG-29s, and their ground based air defence is basically point defence with a few modern Chinese SHORAD systems around key sites rather than a dense layered network. In a shooting war, IAF squadrons already stationed for China or Pakistan contingencies could be retasked to hit Bangladeshi C2, logistics and fuel pretty quickly, with relatively low risk. "Victory" for India in that scenario is simply degrading Bangladesh to the point where it cannot meaningfully project power across the border.
Which is why, as you say, the more plausible threat is not regular Bangladeshi forces crossing rivers in strength, but Dhaka tolerating or quietly supporting Bengali militants on the Indian side. Even there, I think the constraints are pretty tight. Bangladesh is small, poor, and extremely exposed to Indian economic pressure. Hosting insurgents that blow up Indian bridges or kick off serious ethnic cleansing in Assam would invite air strikes and land/sea blockade that the country is in no position to ride out, especially without explicit Chinese backing. They'd effectively be betting the survival of your regime on Beijing deciding you are worth a confrontation with Delhi. That's a... really poor bet IMO.
There are deep class, regional and religious cleavages, and Hindu Bengali attitudes toward Muslim Bengalis are often quite hostile. West Bengal is still roughly 70 percent Hindu and 27 percent Muslim overall, and even in Assam the picture is a mix of Assamese Hindus, Bengali Hindus and Bengali Muslims rather than some unified "Bengali front". There are obviously communal tensions and sporadic violence, but the modal pattern in Assam and West Bengal is low level background strife and political jockeying, not large, disciplined sectarian militias just waiting for a shipment of AKs.
And as far as Indian Muslims go, I think people outside the region often underestimate how boringly normal this is in practice. Even in actual Indo-Pak wars, we did not see large scale Hindu–Muslim bloodbaths outside specific flashpoints, and there weren't significant numbers of Indian Muslims defecting to Pakistan. Outside of J&K, the overwhelming revealed preference has been to treat "Indian" as the primary political identity, or at least not to act on any divided loyalties in a militarily relevant way.
Hell, Bengali Muslims hate Pakistan. You know, the whole. Independence war and genocide deal. That's particularly true in Bangladesh, for obvious reasons.
Bangladesh might be cooling previously cordial ties, but they're not suicidal. I can't see a plausible path to them taking direct action, or even enough indirect action to matter. It's in a similar ballpark to Mexico deciding to invade the US during a war over Taiwan.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
13d ago
Bangladesh's military is rather impotent. Sure, they could supply rebels and insurgents in Assam and the NE, but they're highly unlikely to divert a significant portion of Indian resources from a western front.
Even with recent political changes, I very much doubt that Bangladesh has the appetite for conflict. They're a small country, mostly surrounded by India, with little strategic depth and extremely susceptible to naval blockade.
You'd need them to host a significant Chinese presence to matter, and that isn't particularly on the cards for the foreseeable future. If it was a war with India vs China +- Pakistan, I can see it making a difference.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
13d ago
The thing is, I believe the standard interpretation would be which specific outcome is most likely in such exams.
For example, a question that offers 5 side-effects for clozapine and asks for most common one will expect a single choice (and usually not have an all of the above option).
The question doesn't directly imply that the choices are mutually exclusive, thought the presence of an "all" option is suggestive (to someone who has picked up the vibe). A more sane option would be simply to ask "which of the following is commonly seen?", where all of them is clearly the correct choice.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
13d ago
I was the penis at this game
I request more clarification and explanation of terminology. Were you the donkey in question too? I suppose getting sucked off would leave a good impression.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
14d ago
Going by stated preference, you really want to accommodate her wishes and keep her happy.
While her switching to a different reason for turning down the shift is somewhat concerning, people are allowed to have multiple reasons for not wanting to do something. They even state the biggest one first, and in isolation, when they really ought to tell us everything else that matters. The fact that she disagrees with you on the viability of her career in that particular place? Well, that needs addressing.
You need to sit her down, explain the financial situation, and ask her what she wants, and doesn't want. Where did she imagine things were heading? Is she feeling lukewarm about moving in together?
That said, I do wonder what you're doing about the PTSD. The best evidence when it comes to therapy relates to the forms that involve desensitization. If you don't want to cough up the money, I might recommend simply booking a weekend at an Airbnb, practicing packing or figuring out transportation at a new location. Start nearby, same neighborhood even, and then slowly keep pushing yourself till you can begin to contemplate a move. Perhaps consider heavily staggering the actual move, should it happen. I would presume you'd have to sell your house to move into the new one, but if there's a period of extended occupation of both locations, move things over slowly, with friends and family around.
Then there are the more experimental treatment options, psychedelic therapy involving MDMA, ketamine therapy etc. Often both effective from the outset, and particularly so for treatment resistant cases of PTSD. They might be worth exploring if the standard drugs and talk therapies didn't help.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
15d ago
Yes. The exams run by the Royal College of Psychiatry, to be specific. Why Civics for People Who Failed Civics 101 is included is beyond my comprehension.
The official breakdown of marks is useless. The ratio, as far as I can tell is:
50% clinically relevant information (generous)
25% Why do they feel like I need to know this?
25% An ungodly assortment of antimemes and cognitohazards masquerading as multiple choice questions. Questions that have me questioning myself, or at least my life decisions.
I paid £500 for an exam with a 44% pass rate, I deserve better :(
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
15d ago
Often enough people who have no idea about item-response theory, test analysis, teat validity, or test reliability are involved in test creation and they end up making extremely bad tests.
"But Doctor, instrumental validity and test analysis/reliability are explicit parts of the exam syllabus!"
Not kidding. It's there. You'd hope the people making the exam would understand that better; the Royal College claims that every question in the exam goes through careful vetting, but I suspect they're the kind of vets that hang around kennels.
Questions being difficult or relying on arcane knowledge is one thing. Being malformed is a step too far.
Since I'm already talking about bad questions:
"Which of the following ideologies place the needs of the group over the individual?"
Socialism/Communism/Collectivism/Individualism/Capitalism
I've steeped myself in exam-speak enough to know that collectivism is the right answer. But really?
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
15d ago
William and Diane Corndale are seeking help for infertility. They have been trying to conceive for 5 years, but have so far been unsuccessful. Which of the following is the most likely consequence of this stressor?
Select one:
Feelings of guilt
Negative impact on self-esteem
Decrease in frequency of sexual intercourse
Increase in number of disagreements
All of the listed options
Your answer is correct.
Difficulty in conceiving may place significant stress on a couple, and there's the potential for a wide spectrum of psychological struggles to ensue.
The correct answer is: All of the listed options
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I don't want to be right at the cost of my sanity.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
15d ago
Minds.
Specifically, the minds of the awkward creatures who write the MRCPsych questions, filtered through third party study materials and question banks (who go off the recollections of the depressed students leaving the exam hall, not primary sources).
Why? I find that ~half of my nominal error rate arises from a game of "what did the examiner fucking mean by that?" Multiple potentially correct answers is the least of it, I just ran into the conjunction fallacy in the wild.
For any events A and B, P(A and B) ≤ P(A).
A child presents with {symptoms}, which can be caused by diseases A, B or A+B (as presented by options for answers).
Which of these is the most likely diagnosis?
Well, A+B can't be more likely than A or B by themselves right? Feminist librarians are rarer than librarians.
Or so the sane would think. Alas.
As Szasz said "insanity is a sane response to an insane world". He's listed in my notes as a notable antipsychiatry advocate, and I'm beginning to believe he has a point.
(You can rescue the question by saying it's violating the rules of English instead of probability, but it's the kind of intervention pediatricians would counsel against)
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
15d ago
I have quite recently taken up the use of ellipses mid sentence, though I've always been fond of using them for trailing sentences. I don't think I'm a Boomer, though it is an association I make, for American Boomers at least.
Haven't seen it much in the UK or India, though I must admit I don't text near-pensioners much.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
15d ago
Thank you for the very lucid explainer. Out of curiosity, will the poor bastards working without pay get backdated pay once a budget is passed?
You're not going to get far with a consistent habit of booing the outgroup and clear consensus building. I note multiple previous warnings, so I'm going to extend a 3 day ban to make this one stick.
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