Been teaching/tutoring. The pay is not great but it’s survivable. Much more flexibility with my time. I can basically just show up, though I can’t get away with coasting or not having energy when I do show up (which is actually good!). Much more freedom to pursue my interests outside of work.
Perhaps I will want to do software again in the future, but if I do, it will be something hourly, contracting perhaps. There are still things I’d like to learn/explore in software but it’s hard to find a job to do that where it doesn’t suck all my headspace (I think something in the nature of salaried jobs and promotion structures, etc are designed to not be 40 hours a week, rather all of the hours in a week, even if one can theoretically choose to maintain their “work-life balance”).
Schizophrenia is usually a kind of coping mechanism to handle an unhandleable environment (e.g. family in the case of a young schizophrenic person). It’s also, as some psychologists (e.g. RD Laing) have argued, a kind of “journey”. If people are allowed to go through the journey, they often come out the other end healed.
ECT has always served to remove symptoms or “normalize” people by just frying them until they’re a hollow drone.
Drugs can be useful. I know many schizophrenic people are happy for their drugs. But we shouldn’t forget that “real schizophrenia” is impossible to model in mice (how do you model a terrible parental situation for example?). And more generally, we shouldn’t forget that schizophrenia is mostly social and psychological in origin, rather than purely biological. A drug can target some chemical that is present in this process, but the cause is not some exogenous chemical, so it does not treat the “real cause” (see e.g. The Myth of the Chemical Cure). Another way of saying this is that the biological system that needs to be modeled is really the holistic biological system of society, family, etc (can also be useful to think about this in a cybernetics kind of way—see e.g. Bateson who developed the “double bind” theory of schizophrenia).
Moral of the story, at least in my view: we should care and treat schizophrenic people with empathy and simultaneously aim to improve the social situations that induce schizophrenia. And how do we improve the social situations? Well, first, if needed, we just work on ourselves, our own self-respect, competence, moral agency, etc., and spread goodness to the people in our vicinity, whilst having faith that others who are quite equal to us and who we have no control over can do the same.
Do you have any sources for that? Because last I've read neuropsychiatry literature on the topic, schizophrenia is a brain-wide neuronal dysfunction, with psychosis being a downstream consequence of erroneous information processing - as in "2+2=5" type of erroneous.
I get that some people really want to believe that everything affecting the mind must be psychogenic, but with schizophrenia you're seriously stretching it. Schizophrenia isn't just a psychiatric disorder, it's a heavy duty brain dysfunction.
I'm pretty confident there's good evidence supporting a connection between "early childhood adversity" and the development of schizophrenia, but I'm inclined to agree: once the system has gone off the rails, it's probably too late for environmental intervention to rein things back in. And that's assuming there's any reliable way to initiate and maintain those environmental changes.
Realigning the internal systems involved in schizophrenia seems at least as important as improving external systems that might provoke it.
Childhood adversity well might be product of parents and the environment not knowing how to deal with early manifestations of psychiatric disturbances, honestly.
Preventative is always more important than fixing after the fact where like you said it may be very difficult to do so.
Basically what I was indicating though, and which I get from for example, RD Laing and Gregory Bateson, is that the best “cure”, societally-willing, is to provide a safe community environment where the schizophrenia is allowed to “run its course”. I know capitalist societies always want a commoditized solution like a pill, and certainly those can be useful, but we shouldn’t forget that a more personal, human solution is always better.
Western medicine can also learn a lot from eastern medicine in this regard. Luckily there’s a lot of research being done on what the pros and cons of each system are. Definitely recommend the book The Web that Has No Weaver for example.
Lang's ideas were Self-indulgent hippy stuff back then. His idea of schizophrenia being a journey, well psychiatric nurses I know have no patience for that.
> And more generally, we shouldn’t forget that schizophrenia is mostly social and psychological in origin, rather than purely biological
I'd be curious if you could provide references for that.
> ECT has always served to remove symptoms or “normalize” people by just frying them until they’re a hollow drone.
Well the classic work on sociology of mental illness is not about schizophrenia but about suicide (Emile Durkheim’s Suicide). The same types of social causes can be observed with schizophrenia, though, in the facts of geographic disparities in diagnosis as well as changes (usually increases in recent history) over time. See for example, how urban environments are more likely to give rise to schizophrenia [1].
Also recommend like I said Gregory Bateson’s work, or more recently books like The Myth of the Chemical Cure by Dr. Joanna Moncrieff.
The general point is that if we want to model causality we have to include the full system in question. If we narrow our perspective to an inner sub-system, then anything outside looks like an exogenous cause. But we may have to keep expanding wider and wider to get an accurate picture. Intervention can be done at any level of granularity, but the lower it is done, the more we’ll be missing on the root cause of damage, which is likely causing harm elsewhere too.
> we shouldn’t forget that schizophrenia is mostly social and psychological in origin
While it's not possible to completely decouple biological and social risk factors, my understanding of schizophrenia is in direct contradiction with your claim that it's primarily social.
As I understand it schizophrenia, the extremely high heritability strongly implicates biological factors. Beyond heritability, many of the other risk factors also implicate a biological basis, from microbe infections, drug use, and pre-natal biological stress (nutrition, maternal health, etc).
None of that contradicts the need to treat people suffering from schizophrenia with empathy, or to improve the social situations they're in, but I think your central claim about "mostly social" is wrong, and undermines the rest of your argument.
Agree, but really the question is: why is it going up and why is it going up much faster in certain locations or among certain demographics? Or why are outcomes much better in certain locations/environments/demographics?
For example, it is more prevalent in urban environments, more prevalent among minorities in western countries, etc. it has better outcomes in “developing” countries.
Core human biology likely hasn’t changed much in recent history, so what had changed? Many of these factors that have changed, like drug use, are also very much related to social and economic factors. Of course these are all psychologically related and biologically related. But the point is we need to model the whole system, and focus on what has been changing if we want to get to root causes of change.
The abstract would seem to suggest methamphetamine is one correlation; you might also reasonably suggest toxoplasmosis and I have heard a naturopath suggest that it can be treated nutritionally(!) I'm certain there's other valid explanations
Poverty in terms of what? Needs of the body are met for many (though generally with cheap, ugly, and/or low quality products lacking craftsmanship) but needs of the soul are at an all time low. Just judge from the present mental health crisis—likely the worst in human history—which is largely fueled by disconnection which is an inherent feature of capitalism.
The “poverty” narrative a lie, a rehashing of the old “savages” narrative. It goes hand in hand with this idea that "poor" countries need the western world’s help. No they don’t. Has forced indebtedness helped them? No. And most of their people did not even get a say in the matter of becoming indebted. Advertising of nonprofits and the like is still littered with posters of white men kissing little black babies. It’s quite strange.
In fact, America as a culture is quite new and though it has many good qualities, seeds which can be watered to make for a better future, at present it has become especially barbaric, which is of course not news. These other “impoverished” countries generally have much more historic and developed cultures, ways of handling themselves, etc.
Also, it’s not like “capitalism” was proven and tested before “it” came to be. It has been an incredibly complex process. And it’s not that “it” even will be replaced at some single moment. It’s always a process, and this particular process is already underway.
I would not say that corporations in America are characterized by merely fulfilling consumer desires, rather creating consumer desires—often without precedent—and then fulfilling those desires that were created. As can be seen by the sheer quantity and market size of advertisement (which is the business of manufacturing desire itself).
It appears that we can be encouraged to desire almost anything, or at least an incredible amount of things…
Interesting question. Well, both are now capitalist hells, but very different forms.
Both individualism and collectivism have positive and negative sides. With individualism, the positive is e.g. self-expression, creativity, innovation, while the negative is e.g. selfishness and disconnection. With collectivism, the positives are e.g. connection and supporting others, while the negative is e.g. imitation and lack of diversity. Ironically, when pushed to extremes the negatives of individualism and collectivism seem to kind of equate with each other (though it may not look that way at first glance from the outside).
All this to say that yes I mostly agree with you, though it’s complicated since the pros and cons are often quite different. And I think this is often misunderstood (since people may, for example, for their own more individualist country focus on the positives of individualism while for another more collectivist country focus on the negatives of collectivism—-or vice versa).
+1. And let's not forget too that "AI", that is, ML models, are not "autonomous" in the way that humans are autonomous. Sure, we use the word "learn" to describe what they do, which is one word that we also use to describe what people do. But ML models are always wielded by people or corporations for particular purposes.
If a corporation was to directly publish some copy that appears plagiarized, we'd call that plagiarism. I don't see how adding a piece of code—one that's fully created, owned, and wielded by the corporation—as an intermediary changes anything. If anything, it looks like plagiarism-as-a-service, which seems worse (at least to my eyes).
Of course, this matter is a bit confusing. Because, for example, (1) it's not always plagiarism, (2) defining what exactly is plagiarism even in the purely non-technological realm is difficult (and likely somewhat subjective), and (3) there is a lot of corporate marketing which suggests this "AI" is "autonomous" (presumably to distract from who exactly is autonomous in this picture). And of course ML art is quite useful for many things. But I mean, so are artists.
Not long ago, a lot of Silicon Valley rhetoric was that the purpose of "technology" was to free up time so that people could be more incentivized to "do what people love to do" like, for example, artistic creation. But now it seems that rhetoric was just that: rhetoric, or what was needed to be believed/said at the time.
And now at our present time, when technological "progress" has been followed a bit further (that is, when we've developed our machinery a bit further under the incentives of our present economic system), much rhetoric has conveniently shifted to something else, something largely contradictory, but again precisely to what is needed to be believed/said to continue following the same incentive structure.
>Sure, we use the word "learn" to describe what they do, which is one word that we also use to describe what people do. But ML models are always wielded by people or corporations for particular purposes.
This is extremely important. "Learning" in machine learning is an aspirational label, not a descriptive one. People who claim otherwise either drank too much of their own Kool-Aid or are simply dishonest. This isn't just "wrong" in some taxonomical sense, this is dangerous in a very practical way. Conflating machine "learning" and human learning will inevitably lead to various kinds of sabotage of human learning.
I mean, at what point will this change? When the AI has to first be trained by being in a robot in the physical world for 10 years learning human concepts before it can start looking at art in the ultimate goal of learning how to draw?
The main reason AI will be reproducing copyrighted works while the original license is not trivial to identify will be that in those instances, humans are already violating copyright at a high rate. It's just flown under the radar thus far as required machinery to so easily surface violations was not available.
Copilot is capable of going beyond retrieval and is competent at using variables, comments, types and local context to infer intention and generate appropriate code and even comment on it. Whenever copilot correctly predicts code of yours that's a novel combination of concepts, copilot has originated novel code.
For esoteric concepts, you usually already have to know how to prime it but Copilot is especially useful when it helps you bump into things you didn't know you didn't know (one way to increase the odds of this happening is to write out your thinking so far in markdown or comments. You'd be surprised how helpful and clever Copilot can be in some instances). My point here is Github isn't charging $10/month for run of the mill retrieval. My opinion is code-gen LLMs contribute value and more open versions are worth building.
Indeed, the "learning". To my mind, the most simple (but still speculative) explanation of the "learning" phenomena - working examples and limitations / failures - we see is that the large models implicitly memorize the training inputs (or some derived features that can be used to approximately reconstruct the inputs) and then do something between interpolation and rather simple non-parametric learning.
The effect is outputs are basically a somewhat sensical agglomeration of copy-pasted" snippets.
That said I think the results are often useful and sometimes fascinating. We should not fool ourselves about the learning that these large neural nets do, though.
I am not sure human rights fit the case, but it is one of the most remarkable developments. It is a self replicating distillation of our culture. If our human-based culture grew up and had a baby-culture...
yes, this should happen, or we just build a new slavery system. but before this happen, using this argument to escape from question about copyright is dishonest.
Well, just from reading this, I can tell that you have great potential, not just as a hirable economic agent but, more importantly, as a human being. Being "qualified" according to some company's stupid protocols (which may, for example, just be biased to whether you can follow rules) says nothing about you. So don't feel bad. And speaking of you—the real, internal you, not the you as measured by external social institutions/norms—I completely agree that you should keep learning what you like to learn and finding ways to express yourself.
As for jobs, in the short term definitely consider other jobs (e.g. I recently got a job as a math/CS tutor, pivoting away from my previous software job), or worst case, beg for some shitty job for now and/or ask for assistance from family/friends/etc. Doing so requires humbling yourself in that external sense (like the external sense of being "qualified") but that external you is not the you that matters. So keep fighting for (and improving) that real, beautiful you, whatever it takes!
It’s quantity first and foremost, of calories and of gas carrying us around rather than our own bodies.
Put in the bigger picture of our capitalist consumer economy, which has been unstoppably growing since the neoliberal policies of the 1970s, it seems like the quite logical result. (As is the fact that there is more information still trying to convince us these are not problems—-e.g. big is beautiful! or coke == happiness—-than who are trying to point us towards solutions, i.e. halting and/or at least slowing the liberal regime.)
