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Comment by justinator | Hacker News Reader

I do share your dream - perhaps it's just empathy?

Maybe a good start is to believe people who tell us they're suffering, even if what they're suffering from isn't obvious and physical.

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My fiance had intercranial hypertension. Which is a complex way of saying "we don't know the root cause of why your spinal fluid is causing so much pressure in your head that you want to take a ice pick and poke a hole in it!" which also decreases EVERYTHING due to brain pressure, so more tired, less ability to think, less sensitive to all senses, less emotional control (especially because you're in constant pain / fear of sudden motions causing a lot of pain).

Hard to explain to people that she's not just lazy. Thankfully a relatively easy procedure helped and now she's on the road to a slow recovery.

Edit: Maybe it is just empathy. It is hard to see my tax money going towards turning brown kids into skeletons, and not making people who's life already sucks suck a lot less.

> Which is a complex way of saying "we don't know the root cause of why [...]"

A thing a lot of people don't seem to be aware about modern medicine. We can treat many things, we know a whole lot more than we used to, but a lot of this knowledge is often incomplete. Many of the body's systems are very badly understood. Treatment for most of those issues is symptom management more than anything else.

This is true. We know experimentally that certain drugs are helpful for certain symptoms. In some cases we have some idea of why they work, but far more often than you might think, it's a case of "we know it works but really don't know why."

Hi, this was enlightening. I'm a dude who has IIH myself for now almost half a decade and I was at no point told this could reduce my cognitive abilities. I take Diamox just in case (to reduce the intracranial fluid).

It was a heering experience to get this diagnosed. One day all of a sudden my head started hurting and didn't stop, for months. But I had no other symptoms so doctors didn't take me seriously and my neurologist appointment was several months AFTER the onset of the symptoms (yes, months!).

That was until I accidentally went to an ER ophthalmologist who saw my optic eye nerves and went holy smokes. I went through so much pain. All of this at a very young age. I developed severe anxiety and depression.

I haven't done well academically speaking compared to my peers. I feel shitty about this everyday, since all of my friends are better off than me.

I'm on HN but not in IT (I am inept at programming, tried several times, I am just not capable of it), but various friends of mine are in IT and make 5x my salary and it makes me feel worthless, because they enjoy life at a different level than I do because of their income. Nicer homes, cars, stability in finances, etc... It makes me feel like I'm just not worthy of life because hey, if they can make it, why can't I? I am supposidly as capable as they are... right?

Thank you for making me aware I have an illness that can make me a bit less capable compared to my peers.

I'm going to use this to be less harsh on myself and hopefuly find something in which I find myself better off one day within my own limitations.

Thank you.

I've had something so very similar. At one point I started having a lot of 'pressure' headaches after coming of Zoloft. It lasted for about 4 months. Just constant throbbing pain in the temples, and prevented me from doing critical thinking or working on my software projects. It was a horrible brain fog that basically crippled me mentally. I could do physical labor fine, but anything requiring me to use mental skill just left me sitting there like I was brain dead. After 4 months I went to the ER, got a MRI scan, went to a neurologist, and none of them could figure it out other than say it's because of anxiety. They put me on some blood pressure medication, and it seemed to mostly go away over a few months. I still have some headaches with the same type of pain but not lasting all day.

I am glad to hear they are gone (in their original form). must've been an awful experience. It's incredible what the mind can do sometimes.

Take care of yourself and always be your own advocate at the Doctor's!

> It makes me feel like I'm just not worthy for life because hey, if they can make it, why can't I?

Honestly though, nobody should have to earn a decent living, regardless of level of ability. They're alive, and not by choice, so they should be able to enjoy it. Meritocracy is just cruelty when extended to the conditions of one's life - we want those with the fewest intrinsic resources be made to suffer? I don't.

This element of our society being so stingy with our bottom economic half hurts everyone as that half spend their money quickly and locally. The cutting taxes of the wealthy since "they'll invest more in 'creating jobs' and grow the economy" hasn't worked. That 'investment' went mostly to sweatshops in other countries. This is compounded with other draining tax breaks lije carried interest and the scam where corps by their own shares at a tax advantaged situation. The middle class has shrunk and standards of living have declined for I'd guess 2/3 or more of Americans.

"We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living." - Buckminster Fuller

I've never liked that quote because without context the criticism of inspectors and their tools sounds foolish to me. Inspectors generally serve an extremely useful role, I think the friction is that they're people. I compare them to a linter. We should probably have more inspectors unless AI can do it more easily, because capitalists will cut corners, risking the health and lives of others, at basically any opportunity.

I don't think the quote was a specific dig against Inspection-related professions, but more a criticism of make-work (or so-called bullshit) jobs. Maybe a more modern version of the quote would replace "inspectors" with "administrators".

>neurologist appointment was several months AFTER the onset of the symptoms (yes, months!).

But but but but I thought that could only happen in SOCIALISM countries! We pay arms and legs because we get MORE TIMELY care, right?

I am not really in IT either, although for a few years I worked for a software company (as customer support, not programming or engineering). I've only ever posted 2 things here, and they were things I was sharing, not my own writing:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230212152245/https://www.gigab...

and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfkem5e5Iqg

(https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=EchoReflection)

In 2013 I was in a very serious motorcycle accident (coma for 1 month, 2 broken legs, broken hip, broken left arm, several broken ribs, collapsed lung, multiple skull fractures, inner ear bones damaged on both sides. My brain damage was such that my short-term memory was basically zero for a long time, as well as damaged nerves that control vision. The road to recovery was/is long, I still have what are referred to in the medical world as "sequelae", which just means "ongoing effects or symptoms", but, long-story-short, I really, really, really believe that we can all improve our lives and our brains if we A: want to, and B: try. I highly, highly recommend the book "Atomic Habits" by James Clear: https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/atomic-habits-an-easy--proven-...

Audible: https://www.audible.com/pd/Atomic-Habits-Audiobook/152477926...

And Jordan Peterson's books "Maps of Meaning" and "12 Rules for Life" were pretty life-changing.

Jordan Peterson has a LOT of really helpful content on YouTube (a lot of people don't like him bc I guess he's kind of "conservative", but I think it's more the case that he thinks postmodernism and "wokism" are detrimental to a healthy society.

https://www.youtube.com/@JordanBPeterson

Andrew Huberman has a lot of great, helpful videos as well. https://www.youtube.com/@hubermanlab

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequela

Good luck on your journey.

It's empathy, but also literally the smarter/cheaper/more humane way to do healthcare, free at point of service. An ounce of prevention vs a pound of cure.

what really makes me see red is the fact that how we do healthcare is worse, more expensive, and less helpful than were it given to all, and STILL, people vote against universal health care. The only benefit to our system as yet is its ability to enrich a few rent seeking billionaires in the middle of us and our doctors. But because crab in a bucket Billy Joe in rural kansas "don't wanna pay for sum un elses helfcare". Evil, stupid, individualistic self harming fucking animals we are in the US. Barbarians to let our citizens in the richest country in the world go bankrupt because they got sick. Evil.

>perhaps it's just empathy

Any system can be hacked, including empathy. We call it "fraud" and unfortunately it seems that the number of humans who can keep two concepts in their head at the same time are vanishingly rare. So you end up with a useless "empathy vs fraud" debate repeated endlessly, roughly corresponding to the left and the right, and it doesn't go anywhere. Of course, what we need is a synthesis. The left needs to be more attuned to fraud that targets empathy, and the right needs to stop using the risk of fraud as an excuse to do nothing.

Unfortunately, "risk of fraud" is a cover for the belief that giving their money to people who haven't worked as hard as they have is theft. Many want to decide who deserves their money more than themselves.

Being poor or disabled is effectively a character flaw.

Another example of the fundamental attribution error on the right. In the same way, many on the left believe that having money means that you've stolen it and don't deserve it. So it cuts both ways.

Delusional centrism.

One side : use our immense wealth as the richest nation on earth to provide basic services to all citizens by maybe taxing billionaires so they only have 1/10 b instead of 100.

Other side: if you're poor, it's your fault. Get fucked.

Laughable you can consider those two positions in any way comparable or equitable. Absolutely silly the enlightened centrism I'm seeing here. Gross and dishonest to even pretend like there's more than one viable non ecology destroying, democracy preserving political position in the us.

Stop obsessing over what marxists think of profit, consider what they want to do with the wealth they redistribute. Make all our lives better for literally zero quality in life change for the rich who we'd tax. Tell me who's going to have any discernible decrease in quality of life if wealth was capped at 1b or 10 vs infinite and I'll call you a silly little child.

You highlight the difference between zealous advocacy and debate. The advocate cannot admit the flaws of their own position, or the merits of the other position. You characterize the left in a moderate way, and the right in an extremist way, even though extremism exists on both sides.

I miss the cultural norm that privileged debate over zealous advocacy, leaving the latter to lawyers and politicians.

>Zealous advocacy is centrist handwaving that ignores material realities on the ground. Acting as if noting one side is reasonable with faults and the other are lunatics not fit to old office is empirical, here's some proof. Side A are passing a 4% tax on millionaire's and passing universal school meals for kids. [0] B are forcing 12 year olds to carry their rapists' child to term. [1] You're mistaking empirical pragmatism with "zealous advocacy" because you've probably bought a little too much horseshoe theory nonsense or some other centrist silliness. [0]https://www.npr.org/2023/08/18/1194424563/free-school-lunch-... [1] https://theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/14/mississippi-aborti... Please, tell me what extremism is there from the left outside of twitter??? Because I can list dozens of articles like [1] that the right are doing on the ground, right. now. Please, privileged debate away.

Sharing someone else's dream is empathy. Wanting people to be treated with dignity is just plain decency.

The issues the parent poster brings up are policy choices. I think it is good to believe people when they say they are suffering, but a better start is to vote for folks who are willing to treat people like people.

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