BjoernKW

Yes, they certainly can.

However, the prevalence of side effects with psychedelics is in the single-digit range, whereas with SSRIs you're almost certain to be experiencing some sort of - often severe - side effects for the rest of your life.

SSRIs are by no means safe or well-tolerated. They have all sorts of severe, life-altering, mostly permanent side effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_serotonin_reuptake_i...

There are countless heartbreaking stories of people who were prescribed these drugs not knowing what they were subscribing to. In many cases, the effects of those drugs are worse than the symptoms they are supposed to alleviate. With "I Don't Wanna Be Me" there's even a song by Type O Negative (from Peter Steele's own experience with Prozac) about the devastating effects SSRIs can have on a person's life.

These drugs are handed out like candy while the physicians prescribing them often point-blank deny any side effects or even attribute those to the illness they are meant to treat.

Psychedelics, on the other hand, have actually been proven to be effective for many syndromes SSRIs are commonly used for and by comparison are very safe when used with proper preparation, medical surveillance, and in the right setting.

The only reason psychedelics are still widely shunned is a Puritan attitude to human well-being: You're not supposed to feel better than the common neutral base level. Any drugs achieving that (alongside with other, more specific and intended medical effects) are maligned and ostracized.

> This is a kind of strange take. Do you think conference topics are mutually exclusive?

To some extent they are, yes.

First, it's about what people spend their time and focus on. If you're focussing on regulating, there's less time you can spend on innovating.

Then, some of that regulation actually precludes innovation in certain areas. So, by establishing the premise that regulation is justified by organising a conference on it, you're delegitimising discussion on the kind of innovation that regulation attempts to prevent.

> You're not really providing any concrete examples of GDPR failing, so there's not much there to respond to.

GDPR was - allegedly - targeted at the likes of Facebook or TikTok, which to my knowledge do very little to implement GDPR in a way that's conducive to user privacy.

At the same time, everyone running a tiny website has to put in enormous effort to implement that regulation, because otherwise authorities might come for them through ruinous fines.

Yes, this does happen, particularly because in some EU countries (Germany being the worst offender) it's so easy to impose fines on small businesses at scale, this literally has become a business model for authorities and law firms.

> The AI Act is a big set of legislation which is interesting and impactful. Why would we not set dedicated time aside to talk about it?

Well, in other parts of the world you have people talking about progress and how to advance the human species while in the EU we have people talking about how to regulate every minute detail of human life. You can't get any more telling than that.

> I support GDPR and believe sometimes disruption is needed to safeguard individuals' interests.

GDPR has completely failed at that. Individuals' interests and privacy are worse off than they were before GDPR.

Small companies are burdened with byzantine rules that achieve nothing to improve users' privacy while the worst offenders - large conglomerates and authorities - simply don't care. The latter are largely exempt from GDPR anyway while the former have huge legal departments to deal with GDPR as they see fit.

Money. It's as simple as that. Europe (glossing over relatively minor regional differentials here) still is one of the richest places in the world.

They just decided to use those resources for the wrong purposes. Again, it's as simple as that.

> I attended a conference on the AI Act

I find it quite baffling that there's even such a thing as an entire conference on a specific law.

> Regulation is intended to be strongest in a quite narrow set of use cases explicitly defined as high-risk.

Intention vs. implementation always seems to be a major issue with EU legislation.

They always claim that these regulations are supposed to target "large companies" or a small number of cases, yet in reality it's usually the small companies and entrepreneurs that suffer while the supposed target audience of large players scoffs at these laws.

Hence, I consider these claims to be outright lies intended to calm people down while the EU continues to collude with incumbents to further entrench their dominant position and smother any kind of change or innovation.

> GDPR will have been more 'disruptive' in practice than the AI Act for the vast majority of developers

Relevant EU representatives at the time claimed there not just wasn't any disruption due to GDPR, but that this regulation would even even spark innovation.

Well, that turned out nicely ...

The EU commissioner responsible literally claimed she could implement all GDPR requirements for a public website herself in a matter of just a few minutes. These people are as arrogant as they are clueless.

Financial resources, mostly. The EU is still one of the richest regions in the world, the emphasis being on 'still' here. If they don't act now and if they don't act decisively, the EU will be economic backwater in a few years.

In terms of resources currently still available and if they put their will to it: perhaps. It might be an uphill battle, but it could still be possible.

However, given the current environment, it's impossible for this to happen, because the EU (which is largely equivalent with Europe in this context) is obsessed with regulating everything to death instead of creating opportunities for future prosperity.

They're literally doing the exact opposite of what is needed.

> unless you're being treated by a psychiatrist

Quite to the contrary, while there is plenty of evidence of specific types of therapy yielding actual results, there's often very little evidence of the methods commonly applied by psychiatrists (i.e. medication) to be actually beneficial.

In fact, some types of psychiatric drugs (with SSRIs probably being the worst offender) are actively harmful, while evidence of their presumed positive effects is vague and ambiguous at best.

Because pure black doesn't exist in nature and usually is perceived as jarring. Common design principles therefore advocate for using a colour that's almost - but not actually - black.

Sounds (pun intended ;-)) intriguing. Is a specific visually perception related to specific sound, e.g. like the classic example of a musical note evoking the perception of a specific colour?

On a slightly related note, being colour blind Neil Harbisson - the world's first legally recognized cyborg - had an antenna implanted in his skull that allows him to perceive colours as sounds (musical notes and even chords, specifically); so, the inverse route in a way.

> I have distinct memories as a kid of mapping things into abstract 3d spaces. The number line in my head is a weird 3D thing I still visually navigate whenever I think about numbers.

I do the exact same thing! I wrote a blog post about how I visualise numbers: https://bjoernkw.com/2022/01/02/i-see-numbers/

It's a specific type of synaesthesia called "time-space synaesthesia".

Because pure black doesn't exist in nature (well, save for black holes, that is) and usually is perceived as jarring. Common design principles therefore advocate for using a colour that's almost black.

The key term is "Early Modern English". The Oxford English Dictionary might be a good starting point: https://www.oed.com/discover/early-modern-english-spelling-g...

Actually, reading Shakespeare perhaps is the best approach. Not only will you pick up these forms along the way, but you'll also learn a lot about the English language from the language's most quintessential and influential writer.

Additionally, his poetry is beautiful - and often quite witty - and the stories are archetypical.

When using 'thou', thou shouldst of course use the corresponding inflexion, too: "Where dost thou blog?"

> $30B in an app to hail a cab

Whereas, in some places in the EU (Germany for example being particularly notorious) you can't reliably hail or pay for a cab by digital means - because "the rules"™.

Before 2022, their de-facto headquarters and most of their employees were still located in St. Petersburg, even though the main company was registered in Prague.

> This is false. Many innocents are killed including children

That article - just like all other sources - mentions one 8-year-old girl, not "many innocents" and not several children either. Hence, this is deliberate misinformation.

> You can't determine where the device is when the bomb is activated.

You absolutely can. It's highly likely to be in the targeted person's pocket. Where else would it be?

After all, people usually don't hand their phones to random strangers or leave them lying around - and those pagers aren't even mere personal devices used for private purposes. Why would any of those devices end up anywhere else but the pocket of the person using it?

> This is an indiscriminate attack.

Launching rockets at civilians is. Blowing up pagers explicitly used for terrorist activities isn't.

> Now I'm struggling to see the differences between their activities and blowing up airplanes or launching rockets from schools and hospitals.

Well, the obvious difference is that blowing up airplanes or launching rockets at residential areas intentionally targets civilians in order to spread a maximum amount of terror among the civilian population while blowing up pagers that were used for coordinating attacks against Israel very specifically targets operatives involved in such activities.

Some of the initial footage shows such a device going off while innocent bystanders remain unharmed. You can't get any more targeted than that.

Yes, such a pager might have ended up in the hands of a non-involved person, but given the facts known so far that's very unlikely, because there's a reason those people were carrying these devices on them: They were afraid of being tracked down by Mossad in the first place.

This is where superconductors come into play, i.e. materials that allow you to move electricity at no loss due to electrical resistance. The problem with those (traditionally, at least) has been that they usually operate at very low temperatures, which of course again require energy to be maintained.

A room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor would be the breakthrough required for doing this at scale. This of course would still require significant infrastructure investment.

> Unless I missed something, you have yet to share the science that supports your view.

There you go:

- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9368251/

- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026427512...

- https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/sweden-covid-and-excess-... (Sweden being "notorious" for not having mandated lockdowns)

Comparing excess mortality in Sweden and Germany (which had numerous lockdowns): https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/covid?tab=chart&Metric=...

> but your response suggests science isn't driving your beliefs here

I find this kind of argument - which indeed seems to have become quite fashionable during the pandemic - to imply that dissenting opinions aren't supported by science to be pretty offensive, particularly when recent revelations (e.g., in Germany, since that country has been mentioned in this thread) have shown that quite often mandates were driven by politics rather than being supported by science.

> targeted places (like emergency rooms).

While ERs aren't the first places that come to mind, because for the most part they don't treat patients with communicable diseases, there's nothing that keeps hospitals from implementing such mandates. I'd welcome that, because as should have become obvious from this this thread I'm very much in favour of wearing masks.

> that's not what people are "implying" when they discuss fighting covid.

While they don't have any actual expertise on the matter, there still is a small but very vocal #ZeroCovid bubble (e.g., on the social network formerly known as Twitter) that quite literally implies that - and little else - for fighting COVID-19 today.

> Your claim was that "lockdowns" did little or nothing

I still stand by that claim. Compared with alternative, less restrictive measures, lockdowns achieve very little, especially when considering the massive downside they come with.

Like you said, lockdowns were justified in early 2020 when we knew very little about COVID-19. Later, though, they amounted to nothing more than authoritarian virtue signalling.

> Nobody (other than you) has mentioned reinstating lockdowns.

Not explicitly. More often than not that's what people mean when they're saying that politicians have given up on fighting Covid.

Maybe. That's far from certain, though. What's more, this would have come at a tremendous cost - and not just in the strict economic sense of the word. Lockdowns and other restrictions do have severe side effects.

I'm very much in favour of using (or even mandating) air purifiers and dissuading (or banning) people from going to work or sending their kids to school with a communicable disease (including any respiratory illness, not just COVID-19; people seem to think "It's not Covid. So, it doesn't matter.").

Implementing such highly useful measures hasn't been tried, though, at least not at any meaningful scale. Everything politicians tried was about more restrictions and ever more severe lockdowns.

> Vaccines aren't perfect, even including them about 3-5% of the infected have a risk for debilitating long-covid (i.e. ME/CFS). It's not a gamble I want to take part in.

Again, I'm totally fine with that. I'm myself still getting vaccinated once a year with an updated vaccine and I occasionally still wear masks depending in the setting (cramped indoor spaces, particularly during cold season).

If people personally want to avoid that risk that's perfectly ok. Demanding others behave in a certain way (e.g., by enforcing restrictions on their freedom of movement) is not, though.

I suppose that might ruin the fingerprint, but worth a try.

Although this statement of course has been made with tongue in cheek, it's worth pointing out that with modern devices borrowing a finger only works if the finger is still warm (which usually translates to the owner of that finger being alive).

I don't know about Switzerland, but this very famously was known to be the case in Germany: https://www.dw.com/en/german-health-care-tackling-covid-with...

> On the other hand, a fax machine is usually located in an office that's only physically accessible to people with badge access.

Well, again during the pandemic, the documentation of individual vaccinations in vaccination centres in Germany of course was done on reams of paper (because "more secure than digital" ...). That paper was then sent daily (via messenger, no less) to so-called "digitisation centres", where those piles of paper were scanned - and yes - turned into PDFs.

In Germany, long-established and entrenched processes and technologies are often confused with being reliable and safe.

Fax machines are still widely used, particularly in public administration and larger organizations in general.

The preposterous as well as appalling argument often heard in favour of this is that "fax is more secure than email" and somehow doesn't put privacy and the sacred German "data protection" at risk (because said data protection seemingly on applies to digital stuff).

Famously - or rather notoriously, during the pandemic local German health authorities faxed case numbers and other relevant data to federal authorities, which led to massively delayed response times and a general unavailability of dependable, actionable data.