NickM

Well of course on a certain level your ability to feel anything is the result of biological processes, but that doesn't mean that the specific things you feel aren't a result of the specific experiences you've had.

Nobody in this thread is arguing that feelings happen completely independently of biological processes, but there's a hugely important difference between "I had a bad experience that altered my feelings, and that's reflected in my biology" vs "my biology just did something of its own accord that had nothing to do with my life circumstances, and that change altered the way I feel".

You seem to be arguing that because anhedonia correlates with certain biological changes, that it must be caused by those changes. That could be true (and probably is true in some cases) but it does not necessarily follow that it is always true, or even true the majority of the time; the causation could could flow in a different direction.

Of course that question is an oversimplification since the answer is certainly some of both; but the prevailing wisdom seems to be that it's mostly/all biological changes leading to feeling depressed, whereas I'm not convinced the scales don't lean more in the other direction, at least on average.

EDIT: but as to your point about stress leading to elevated cortisol levels, to me that's clearly not a biological cause. The cause is stress, and the elevated cortisol levels are an effect of the stress. It's not like the hormone levels just went up all by themselves due to some genetic abnormality or something; if they did, then yeah maybe that's a biological disease that warrants some kind of chemical correction, but that's not at all what we're talking about.

Maybe more people are anxious and depressed than in the past because modern life really sucks for a lot of people. I'm not saying that's a simple thing to fix, and certainly there is a biological component for some people...but the idea that societal changes are increasing rates of anxiety and depression seems way more plausible than there being some sudden and mysterious shift in the biology of a significant percentage of the population that needs correcting via medication.

And, even if they are better than just an active placebo, the mechanism is probably not the effects on serotonin levels. (Discussed previously here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32160703)

I'm not positive on the specifics but I believe it has more to do with the combination of supported voltages/amperages offered by different chargers. i.e. a "350 kW capable" charger in practice means it can do 800V charging, which other chargers of lower kW ratings typically can't do, and the EV6 requires 800V to reach its max charge speed but can't actually handle a high enough amperage to get to 350 kW.

Like I said though, I might be confused on some of the details there, but I'm fairly positive it's not just waste heat...dissipating 110kW of waste heat would require some pretty insane cooling hardware.

Oh, and EVs presumably vary wildly in their "fuel economy" (miles per kilowatt-hour or whatever unit EV folks use), so even a "fair" comparison of charging rate presumably wouldn't paint the entire picture.

This is indeed a good point. A more relevant measure of charging speed would be something like "miles per hour at EPA rated efficiency", though even that gets messy since most cars don't charge at a linear speed. And I haven't seen any car manufacturers use this metric other than Tesla, who like to brag about their supercharger stations exceeding 1,000 MPH of charging speed (though only the newest stations can just barely do that, for very short durations, and only on certain car models). "Time from 20%-80% charge" would also be a better metric, due to non-linear charging speed curves, but I haven't seen that one used much either.

Yeah this is one area where there's a lot of deceptive marketing. For example the Kia EV6 specs list a max fast charging rate of 350 kW but what that actually means is that you need a 350 kW charging station to reach the car's actual max charging speed of 240 kW (or 180 kW, depending on the battery options).

Granted, that is still nice and fast, and the EV6 is a great car, but it's really frustrating how hard it is to compare charge speed from different manufacturers.

I assume people do it to sound knowledgeable or to make it sound like their ideas are backed by science, but neurotransmitters are vastly more complicated and subtle in their effects than is implied by these kinds of usages, and emotions and behaviors are tremendously more complex than the "my neurotransmitters made me do it/feel it" narrative would suggest.

Investing in BTC is like buying shares of stock in a company that produces nothing and has high ongoing costs that are only paid for by continuing to issue new shares.

Is this a "as far as I can tell based on my knowledge of immunology" or "as far as I can tell based off of personal experience and gut feeling"?

I mean, what you're saying sounds plausible, but on the other hand it also sounds plausible that maybe periodic exposure to random viruses and stuff does strengthen your immune system, so I'm curious if your take here is actually based in science or is just an off-the-cuff idea.

Arguably this has already started happening.

But I think the real problem is not the moral failings of individuals; I think the real problem is that we've collectively built a system that rewards people for doing the wrong thing. If we can collectively decide to fix the system to reward better behavior, then everyone wins. This is still a tremendously difficult undertaking, but it at least feels possible to me.

So nowadays I try to spend my efforts pushing for systemic change instead of worrying about how much plastic I used today or whatever. In some cases this still boils down to individual action, like when I bought my first EV, but in that case I didn't buy it to try to cut down my own emissions, I bought it to try to help fund EV R&D, raise awareness of EVs, and help companies scale up manufacturing and whatnot.

Not only does working for systemic change give me more hope, it's also more personally satisfying to feel like part of a broader movement to build a better world, rather than feeling like I'm just one tiny drop in a bucket of individuals trying to limit their own damage.

They are definitely related. Many studies have found links between inflammation and both anxiety and depression. There's even a Wikipedia page about the depression/inflammation link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depression_and_immune_function

But that's not always the case; this is exactly the point I'm trying to make. The whole problem is that your vote only gets a second chance to be counted if your preferred candidate gets eliminated. If your preferred candidate loses because somebody else wins before your preferred candidate gets eliminated, then none of your later rankings affect the outcome whatsoever. This is why you can't actually vote honestly in IRV if you want your vote to count.

Let me try to illustrate this with an example:

Let’s imagine the US switched to RCV before the 2020 election, and Mitt Romney decides to run as an independent. Now let’s look at, say, West Virgina, which is a pretty red state, and went about 70% Trump 30% Biden in the 2020 election in real life

WV Democrats are still going to vote for Biden, and they’d probably prefer Romney over Trump, so let’s say they all vote in that order, but imagine roughly a third of Republican voters in West Virgina like Romney better than Trump, so we end up with this:

45% vote Trump, Romney, Biden; 25% vote Romney, Trump, Biden; 30% vote Biden, Romney, Trump

Romney gets eliminated first, his voters fall back to Trump, and Trump wins. The Democrats all wanted Romney over Trump, but Biden was never eliminated, so their second choice of Romney had no bearing on the outcome. But, what if they’d strategically voted for the “lesser of two evils”?

now we have: 45% vote Trump, Romney, Biden; 25% vote Romney, Trump, Biden; 30% vote Romney, Biden, Trump

Now Romney is a clear winner, he has the majority of first choice votes, so nobody’s second or third choice even matters. So basically in this example, Biden was a spoiler candidate for Romney, and all those Democrats are going to be super disillusioned when they realize that the “it fixes the spoiler effect" and "you can vote honestly” lines are both wrong, and they could’ve had a better outcome if they’d voted strategically, just like in the old system.

Anecdotally I was having a bunch of bizarre symptoms this summer and thought I had long Covid too, and ended up in the hospital due to heart complications which turned out to be from Lyme. They treated me with the standard antibiotics and I’ve been pretty much fine since then.

Now don't get me wrong, as a Democrat there is a part of me that is happy Peltola won, but this was clearly a pretty messed up outcome given that Begich was the condorcet winner and that Alaska is a very red state. Republicans are right to be upset about the way this election played out.

Now obviously FPTP also has the possibility of spoiler candidates, but at least in that case it's pretty easy to understand the situations in which you might be throwing away your vote. Do you think most of those Palin voters had any idea that they could have elected Begich by voting strategically? Complex, opaque voting systems like this are super bad for democracy IMO.

I mean, I realize this is somewhat subjective, but "more people ranking a candidate first can cause them to lose" seems like a pretty absurd outcome to me.

I'm not saying approval voting is perfect either, sure it has flaws, but at least it doesn't violate the monotonicity criterion (or a variety of other important criteria that RCV fails to satisfy).

RCV actually literally has the exact same problem you're describing with voting strategically, it's just subtler and harder to understand. The problem is, if you rank A > B > C, then your subsequent preferences after A only matter if A gets eliminated. If A comes in second place, then your "B > C" preference has no impact, and C may be elected whereas if you "dishonestly" voted for B first you might have allowed B to win.

I think the bigger shame would be to spend so much effort promoting RCV, only to have people become jaded and disillusioned with voting method reform in general when they realize RCVs many glaring problems.

The biggest problem with RCV IMO is that it looks like it eliminates the spoiler effect, but it really only eliminates it in simple cases where the third-party candidates are not competitive. This suddenly becomes very obvious and painful in cases like Burlington, 2009 or Alaska, 2022 where voters were told "RCV is great because you can vote honestly", only to realize post-election that this was entirely false, and that they threw away their votes and let the election go to a candidate they despise.

Trust is extremely important in political movements, and very easy to lose. I fear RCV is going to poison the well for any FPTP alternatives for a long time to come.

That said, it's not something that's really happening right now anyway, so the "power your home with your car at night" idea seems unlikely to take off unless there is a (possibly misguided) legislative push for it.

Say what you want about Approval voting, but this is also one of the areas where Approval voting is clearly better. It's very easy to understand, and much simpler to tabulate the results when it's still just "the person with the most votes wins".

Inflation causes excess capital to flow into assets, which the poor don’t have and HN commenters do.

I'm not sure I agree with this, as inflation seems to have scared markets off of their peaks. I mean, they're not down that far, but I don't see a lot of upper middle-class folks profiting off of this situation. Maybe this is true for some assets, but unless I'm missing something, markets in general do not seem to be feeding off of inflation in the way you're describing here.

Inflation was an issue for a while, but a lot of that seemed to be driven more by temporary supply constraints in certain sectors than any actual currency devaluation, and inflation already seems to be dying down anyway. The recent interest rate hikes also didn't seem to have nearly as much impact on the markets as everyone feared they would.

What exactly is everyone so scared about that we all seem to think the economy is headed for a major recession?