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I agree with your points actually, although not a fan of the pessimism about the sites future. Personally I believe many long time lurkers, like myself, will become posters now that the gaze of AEO is gone. I certainly hope the quality of comments and discourse remains around the same level, and I'm now galvanized to help achieve that.
You're right that I painted a far too rosy picture, I need practice anticipating arguments and I also need to think through this idea. I only became convinced recently and I'm still willing to toss it out if I find strong evidence against it. Part of why I'm posting it here.
My argument is more that a significant portion of chronic pain could be cured by incorporating this idea into treatment. To be clear, I know for a fact that many chronic pain illnesses have concrete causes, and are unfortunately much harder to fix.
Say there is a line between treatment styles of 'think your way out of the pain,' vs. 'all pain is caused by concrete factors that we know, and your mental attitude has no bearing'. Right now I think the line has move too far in favor of the latter, and we need to take a more diverse approach when treating chronic pain.
This will become increasingly relevant as more and more activity takes place on a computer, and we inevitably become even more sedentary than we are now. Figuring out the issue now could prevent a whole host of problems from cropping up in the future.
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