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grabbalaciouson I was a drug rep and know how pharma companies pushed opioids

With very severe pain I don't see why one couldn't adopt a dual strategy of alleviating it both with drugs and by focussing on it during its most intense moments.

grabbalaciouson I was a drug rep and know how pharma companies pushed opioids

Yes. When stubbing a toe I've historically employed two strategies for dealing with it. In my youth I would shout and hop around the room, i.e. distract myself. Nowadays I pay as much attention to the pain as is possible and practical. Remarkably this approach does seem to alleviate the pain.

So my guess is that the function of pain is to direct attention to injury. Not just for thinking about ways to avoid repeat injuries but purely and simply to promote the healing response. Which is not to say that I wouldn't welcome a painkiller if the pain was great enough. It's just that the suffering caused does seems to increase with the efforts one makes to distract oneself from it.

grabbalaciouson Authenticity promotes well-being in life and at work

Start by making a habit of just telling the truth, as gently as possible.

grabbalaciouson Domes are overrated

If we look at the reasons why people have historically colonised parts of the Earth, many of them would now seem pretty crazy. But craziness was apparently no barrier to entry. Perhaps colonists just are morons?

(Myself I think we'll go when it's easy. The best way to make it easy is to work on relevant technology like nuclear fusion, automated manufacturing, CRISPR, and so on.)

grabbalaciouson Classics for the People

>Recovering the working-class classicists of the past can also function as a rallying cry to modern Britain to support the case for the universal availability in schools of classical civilisation and ancient history

This is somewhat begging the question of why those heroic people loved reading and debating the classics. One could argue that working class libraries and the tiny pockets of diverse private education were destroyed by government subsidy and the system of state education. This system now picks the tunes and imposes them universally. To influence a compulsory national curriculum one then has to compete with all the various propagandists anxious themselves to grasp the levers.

grabbalaciouson Friedrich Hayek’s recollection of his cousin Ludwig Wittgenstein (2016)

No, I explained it, Lebowski! I myself have been involved in circles where this strange form of philosophical posturing or virtue-signalling has reigned. They are short-lived circles. It may or may not have something to do with the total and rapid collapse of intellectual life in Vienna or the suicides mentioned in the article. I don't know. But it is a sign of decay. (OK, that last bit was opinion.)

grabbalaciouson Friedrich Hayek’s recollection of his cousin Ludwig Wittgenstein (2016)

>Every convention was dissected and every conventional form exposed as fraud.

This kind of blanket criticism is counterproductive and harmful. Our conventions 'know' more than we do and should be criticised only where they themselves seem to be causing harm.

grabbalaciouson The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann

'Feeling of responsibility' is a nice way of putting it but the fact is that creative geniuses are pretty irresponsible and unconscientious fellows. They abandon a lot of projects and can't force themselves to work on things that don't interest them.

grabbalaciouson The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann

Motivation is key here. It seems that von Neumann became too fond of prestige and spy stuff. So he was less creative. Smarter than Gödel, able to recognise the importance of Gödel's work, but unable to produce anything of similar moment.

grabbalaciouson Is sugar really bad for you? (2018)

So much of sugar's attraction is contextual.

Pure granulated sugar, straight from a packet, doesn't appeal -- not to me. Yet I suspect that cocaine does not have this property.

A bowl of frozen raspberries, with cream and an additional 2 or 3 teaspoons of sugar sprinkled on top, is very sweet, like delicious rocket fuel. Whereas a bowl of ice cream, containing double the amount of sugar, doesn't taste any sweeter.

grabbalaciouson Dopamine Fasting

Yes. To quote William Arkle,

'Purity is not goodness, it is having clear and undistorted communication with all our levels of experience.'

'The teaching of purity and simplicity is therefore not an attempt to narrow down our life and experience, it is not a type of punishment, it does not invalidate our individuality neither does it bring special dispensations with it from God. It is nothing more or less than what is understood in scientific terms as a law of condition of nature which we must accept and work with because it is not within our ability to change. To be pure is not to be in fear of making mistakes which will make God angry with us and thus punish us. It is rather to eradicate from our attitudes the hesitations and suspicions which prevent us acting and experiencing with intensity and conviction.'

https://williamarkle.blogspot.com/2019/06/a-geography-of-con...

It isn't necessary to be formally religious to understand that the object of purity is to make the varying intensity of one's responses be truly integrated with the situations that one encounters, whether one is being attacked by a lion, at risk of ostracism, receiving good news, celebrating a birthday, etc.

grabbalaciouson Super-precise new CRISPR tool could tackle a plethora of genetic diseases

>I hear you, a nuke is the ultimate tool for implementing widespread death.

That's not my point. I agree that the barriers to entry for biotech are lower.

My point is that whereas the only 'defence' against nuclear weapons is deterrence, i.e more nukes, it is possible to defend against biotech weapons without starting an arms race. This would consist of ongoing, costly research of antidotes by government and university labs (with a high barrier to entry).

grabbalaciouson Super-precise new CRISPR tool could tackle a plethora of genetic diseases

No, the creation of antidotes is feasible for government labs but there's no purely defensive countermeasure against nuclear weapons.