I find it surprising sociopaths are allowed to just be free in society. They invariably are a net loss for society and certainly for anyone who is involved with them. I can’t even imagine how screwed this persons husband would be if this article were true. One way to spot a sociopath is to look at the people close to them. They almost always are a little odd or dumb. This is because smart, normal people never allow themselves to get too close to sociopaths. Somewhere along the line between acquaintance and close friend, most people get a peek under the veil and feel the cold, nauseating feeling that comes over you when you encounter pure, unnatural evil. People really don’t get it until they have some kind of experience with a sociopath. There’s nothing more creepy than getting that glimpse of their true nature, through a small crack in their facade, and seeing things that are totally outside of normal human behavior. Things you wouldn’t even think of until you saw it. The reason why nobody gets it is because it’s just too alien.
Sociopaths are dangerous. Everything in our culture and society is built around the fact, purposefully or not, that most people have basic empathy for the direct and visceral experience of seeing another person suffer. If you involve yourself with a sociopath, there are no mechanisms at play to help you. You will find yourself totally destroyed. If everyone in the world really knew what sociopaths are, they wouldn’t be allowed to roam freely. I’m astounded at how casually the subject is addressed in this thread.
Sociopaths are not inherently evil, they just have no inherent feelings for other people. But they can and often are taught how to behave "normally"–sure, it may not be their "true nature" or whatever to care for others, but if they're trying their best to emulate it and end up doing the same things that a normal person would as a result what is there to judge?
Actually, taking a step back: your comment horrifies me. It's coherently worded and looks similar the other comments in this thread on the surface, but you are very clearly advocating for the author and people like her to be locked up; calling this you're calling this wife a danger to her husband, this mother of a family a menace to society. This is a woman who took the time and courage to write about how she maintains a fairly normal life with a highly stigmatized psychological condition (often eliciting the very reaction you've had in your comment–"pure, unnatural evil") using words that I know if directed at me would make me fear for my very existence. I read comments every day that violate the Hacker News guidelines ("lol the author of this post is dumb", "the Clintons were behind 9/11") and it's usually easy to tell because they stand out as being gross violations that nobody is going to take seriously. But this…the conviction with which you say these words that I don't think I could make any more discriminatory…is what astounds me. I am honestly struggling for words to describe how wrong your comment feels.
Randomly locking up or segregating society based on perceived psychological conditions is a dangerous path...there are high functioning sociopaths, even those that never show "symptoms" or act on a lack of empathy.
There are lots of dangerous people groups. Are you going to include any veteran with PTSD? Or brilliant MBAs because they might learn to game the system or start a trading scam?
It's estimated that 46% of adults have a severe psychological condition at some point in their lifetime.
We have to be careful as a society of locking people up because of what they could do, not because of what they've done.
I'm sure there are lots of sociopaths with smart friends, they are just better at acting normal. Of course sociopaths all seem creepy, because they are the only ones you notice. If you look at someone like Ted Bundy, he had lots of fairly normal friends who were very surprised to hear what he had done.
And I think it's a bad idea to try and imprison people because of who they are.
So people who are born with a sexual desire to hurt small children, not rape but actually torture and mutilate as seen in the “hurt core” community, should be allowed to roam freely? Your opinion is an artifact of convention. How dull...
Of course people who were friends with Ted Bundy were surprised! Do you think they would be his friends otherwise? For every friend there were two people who weren’t surprised I can promise you. And yes some sociopaths are geniuses but that’s not relevant to my point at all. Most sociopaths are not able to play a rol perfectly forever. Ted bundy is a perfect example of that.
I once had the pleasure of encountering a sociopath in a social setting. He was charming and I was the only one who knew, and I knew instantly, everyone else loved him. And sure enough it was only a matter of time before the others came around one by one. If you know what to look for they are easy to spot. Extremely easy. The difference in autonomic responses alone is almost impossible to conceal.
The idea that people are imagining this, as other commenters have put forward, is nonsense. The idea that people are just getting old and drink too much soda isn’t right either although it’s close.
The reason why people report similar or overlapping symptoms is because they all have a problem with their immune systems. Overactive immune systems tend to cause a certain set of symptoms.
The immune system is very complicated, very broad in its jurisdiction and very poorly understood. It is scientifically proven that certain chemicals (common food additives for example) cause no immune (allergic) response at all whatsoever, but cause an immune response to other chemicals. So the immune system is not just complex as a monolith but also has inputs that interact with one another, leading to a combinatoric level of complexity. When you also consider that immune function and mediation (as seen with some food additives, for example) is observed in emotional stress — something that is as close to being unquantifiable as anything could be — one can see that it might be the case that this is a disease that has evaded medical science until now.
Chronic fatigue syndrome was observed in gulf war vets and was so common among them that it was coined “gulf war syndrome.” One researcher has hypothesized that this is due to an immune response which takes the form of cell deactivation via ATP signaling which he has named “cell danger response.”
Meanwhile, it is widely appreciated that autism is not caused by destroyed neural circuits but by deactivated neural circuits. And people with autism can experience remission under certain circumstances, like having parts of their brain electrically shocked, most commonly via TMS. Cell danger response could also explain this.
This researcher, whose name is too complicated to bother spelling it, used this hypothesis to design a study in which an obscure drug that blocks ATP receptors was given to autistic children. All of the children who received this drug experienced immediate and unprecedented improvement in their symptoms, unprecedented both in the context of these patients and in the context of medical science. That was just months ago. Further studies are coming.
The gulf war vets were all exposed to chemicals, stress and a heavy regimen of crazy vaccines designed to make them immune to biological warfare agents, if I remember correctly.
As I have pointed out, immune inputs influence one another. The combination of stress, chemicals and vaccines likely caused gulf war syndrome, even though politically this begins to ruffle feathers.
There has been no study so far that has looked for a connection between this wholistic idea of immune dysfunction and autism. That is to say, there are no studies looking at the combination of stress, chemicals and vaccines and autism. There have been no studies looking for a connection between the former and a collection of disorders that might include autism. Further, there have been no purely randomized studies looking for a connection between vaccines and autism. But as I have shown, even if there were, it might still miss the connection because the connection is not between vaccines and autism, it is between many immune system inputs and many possible adverse outcomes. And that is not even to consider the fact that autism might have multiple, totally separate and distinct causes besides immune dysfunction, which again none of the current studies look for. The issue is not settled and people who bark at me when I bring this up are stymying science...
Obviously, even if what I claim is true then it would still be in the best interest of society to administer vaccines. Please do not lose your composure.
Until very recently I had absolutely no inclination to believe that chronic fatigue was real or that there might be some sliver of truth to the vaccine thing. But then I was stricken by an immune problem myself, which is a huge story, but coincidentally I found that the ketogenic diet completely cured me which, because my illness fell into an established and unambiguous field of medicine, was totally inexplicable. So I went down the rabbit hole which led me to see that the ketogenic diet is extremely potent anti inflammatory, is useful for curing many other things, and that there is a medical revolution in the pipes regarding inflammation and metabolics, the implications of which I am not sure anyone is ready to reconcile with.
Mast cells are immune cells that contain many different kinds of molecules, one of which is the famous “histamine.” These cells release these molecules in response to immune signals. Their chemicals are not understood. It is scientifically proven that (in mice I think) wounds cannot heal without mast cells present. This shows you how broad their function is, and opens even wider the possibility of very complicated and unintuitive problems resulting from their dysfunction. Mast cells are present in the heart, the emotional centers of the brain and many other places. You will notice that many long haulers report tachycardia, depression and anxiety.
So a single person decides they don’t like my comment and now it’s faded out where nobody will bother reading it. I think it’s important so I am asking for the upvotes to not dip below zero because I would like as many people to read it as possible whether they upvote or not... it was a similar comment that literally saved my life.
Note that many people read downvoted comments, and upvote them to counteract “unfair” downvotes. If you regularly get downvoted by more than -1, I would read it as a strong signal that you need to be more critical in how you present your thoughts.
I think that your comment deserves the downvotes (despite how factual it may be), because you are bringing in contentious subjects without sufficient nuance, and without tying them into the topic very well.
There is a lot of data that we could study from everyone given the unique expressions of our immune systems. And with many variables that exist, we measure a miniscule few and therefore cannot often get a good picture of chronic health issues. As to your comment downvote, it may rise again. Sometimes trolls and/or people who don't like new ideas will readily dismiss things (here and elsewhere).
I think you knew what you were getting into when you brought up the autism issue. It's an extremely controversial topic. FWIW even with the down-votes, I read your comment.
They state very bluntly that MS is an autoimmune disease... when did this become clear to mainstream science? I believe it is though, and I also believe that remyelination is always occurring but hampered in MS and even regular people. Taking away the inflammatory signal will result in remyelination without any stem cells in my opinion.
> They state very bluntly that MS is an autoimmune disease... when did this become clear to mainstream science?
A while. The primary symptom of MS, the demylination, is caused by the immune system attacking the myelin. The _why_ of the immune system's attack is still unknown at this point in time, but that it _does_ has been known since at least 1965, with Schumacher's criteria.
I don’t think it’s that settled at all, certainly not in 1965. Prineas in 2001 showed that MS progression may occur in the absence of immune cells and inflammation, for example [0], and people have complained of progression even when taking extremely strong immunosuppressants.
While involvement of the immune system seems likely, and certainly most treatments target the immune system, I don’t think causality has been rigorously demonstrated. It has however been a few years since I looked into it.
As an aside, ISTM quite likely that there may be several causes for MS.
I wonder how often science gets derailed simply because people are in the habit of expecting a single answer to their questions. We know that car accidents cause lacerations, although there are plenty of cases that happen in the absence of car accidents. Isn't it possible that MS is a symptom with multiple possible causes, any of which could set off a vicious cycle of nerve degeneration?
The scientists don't get derailed, but I get too many forwarded articles with silver bullets. One of my friends suggested intentionally getting stung by bees. This is magical thinking for a complex illness.
On the other hand, tecfidera had as the active ingredient a chemical I can buy from alfa aesar for $22 a liter. There's a lot of things that no one has studied yet I guess, for better and worse.
> Prineas in 2001 showed that MS progression may occur in the absence of immune cells and inflammation
MS researcher here. MS as an autoimmune attack is largely settled in mainstream neuroscience. The paper you cited does not show what you said it does.
From the paper:
> restricted largely to short segments of disrupted myelin located within linear aggregates of microglial cells
The paper is interesting because it shows that demyelination is happening in lesions that we thought were inactive, but actually do contain microglia and macrophages (immune cells) eating myelin (i.e. an autoimmune --immune system attacking self-- attack). The paper is paywalled but I but you can read it on sci-hub (https://sci-hub.scihubtw.tw/10.1002/ana.1255) Although just reading the abstract says the opposite of what you are claiming, the entire thing is about microglia and macrophages contributing to lesions that the researchers thought were inactive.
OK. I might be quoting the wrong paper, and I’m not a researcher, but I remember clearly that he found a case (14yo girl IIRC) who died during an attack, and there was no immune activity at the site of at least one of the lesions.
If I’m wrong about this then I will accept it, I don’t have an axe to grind.
MS is a catch all. Multiple causes can result in demyelination even if the mechanism is the immune system. You have MS if you have demyelination products detectable in your spinal fluid and have lesions on the spinal cord. Whether it's a genetic, environmental, or some other underlying condition clearly varies, for instance the version that I have is almost certainly genetic because of family history but plenty of other people get it with no family history.
But I think people are pretty sure that certain B cells are the easiest to interrupt culprit, my current medication literally just kills a specific B cell and that treatment last six months. Take from that what you will.
_Causality_ is unlikely to be demonstrated until a direct cause is known, and for a complicated illness like MS, it is likely to be a variety of factors, an active and changing area of research.
That in itself doesn't in any way mean that MS wouldn't be classified as autoimmune, however. If there is a high degree of immune system involvement, then it is generally classified as autoimmune, or immune-mediated. And that had been demonstrated. Such as in this [0] paper.
You seem to be well informed. Do you know if there are any studies on: if one suffers from one autoimune condition is he more likely to suffer from others?
I am in no way an expert, which makes me very hesitant to answer these sorts of questions. I am a random person on the Internet. Take that into account when you read what I've written, and weigh it very skeptically.
My knowledge comes from my own health. I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia (which is probably not an autoimmune disease. Probably.), after a ten year long process. MS was the other diagnosis being considered at the end of that process. If I had lesions, MS, if not, FM. Because the latter leaves no physical traces that can currently be detected (there is some progress on that front, but one study does not a trend make).
Some illnesses do have a likelihood to be co-morbid with others. FM for example, has a large number of illnesses it often masks, which may mean it is more likely to have that sort of comorbidity, or it may mean that the statistical model to work out if it is more likely to occur is extremely difficult to create.
I can't speak to whether a disease being autoimmune in nature makes it more likely to trigger other autoimmune illnesses, but it wouldn't be surprising to me. A malfunctioning immune system can malfunction in unexpected ways.
IME, many doctors, and even some consultants, use fibromyalgia as a catch-all where there is chronic pain and fatigue, but they can't find the underlying cause - basically a big umbrella to cover what are likely a broad spectrum of diseases and health issues.
I suffer from chronic pain and fatigue, and was previously diagnosed with fibromyalgia by both a rheumatologist and a neurologist, despite not even meeting the diagnostic criteria, and having an unrelated auto-immune health issue. Later on, via a skin biopsy I insisted on, it was discovered that I had small fibre neuropathy - damage to the small nerves responsible for pain signalling.
You didn't say anything about your specific symptoms, but if you have chronic limb pain, it might be worth looking at getting a biopsy.
> IME, many doctors, and even some consultants, use fibromyalgia as a catch-all where there is chronic pain and fatigue, but they can't find the underlying cause - basically a big umbrella to cover what are likely a broad spectrum of diseases and health issues.
That is very much not myself. I meet all the diagnostic criteria, and regularly experience somewhere around a hundred of the two hundred known symptoms. There is not another illness that matches my symptoms as well as fibromyalgia. I am a case study in what FM looks like at its very worst (literally, I've been featured in several journals as a case study).
I went through a variety of nerve studies before the diagnosis was made, and they're functioning perfectly. Including multiple biopsies. Getting the FM diagnosis is not easy where I live, most specialists would rather send you away with no diagnosis than that one. I met the criteria for FM on day one, and went through a decade of being tested for absolutely everything else.
The propensity for overdiagnosis, in some nations, of FM, causes me no end of pain whenever I raise the illness. There is always someone who feels the need to tell me that they believe it doesn't exist, or think that I must have something else that has gone undiagnosed, or think that they can suddenly cure it. That's exactly why I don't talk about it in detail. People think that they're helping, especially if they're empathetic. But all it does is undercut the last fifteen years. It makes the suffering more... Lonely. I can appreciate the sentiment, but I've never been able to appreciate the gesture.
I do expect that somewhere in the future FM will be split into several different types, and even illnesses. The illness is extremely "young", it got its name in 1993 (30-40 years younger than MS). Most of the illness is a total unknown at this point in time. There's no real global agreement as to what kind of illness FM is. It gets called autoimmune, neurological, rheumatoid, etc. depending on where you live. The evidence is currently leaning towards neurological, as FM has markers in the white matter of the brain that are unique to those who suffer from it. But we'll probably need another decade or two to be certain about that.
There is some mixed data, but the consensus is that MS is strongly correlated with other autoimmune diseases. This article has a good summary of several papers on the subject. You can scan down to the section on "Studies of Autoimmune Comorbidities in Multiple Sclerosis"
We've been seeing this kind of shitshow from the big tech companies for years on HN. It's really the only way for people whose livelihoods are at stake to get a modicum of support, so I certainly upvote them, and have been for years (mostly under my former alt).
So this is it! Bethesda is officially dead. ESO was the early prognosis and 76 was the death rattle. This is the funeral.
Morrowind was a masterpiece of a game. Oblivion was amazing. Skyrim was quite special and carried the genre forward but left behind important bits from morrowind. The job of making the spiritual successor to oblivion and morrowind is now officially open to anyone because Bethesda will never do it.
Reading the comments it struck me: why is tele operated agricultural robots not a thing? A robot with wheels and an array of cameras and arms. It rolls down the line and remote workers pick the fruit. Maybe even out of country workers being paid pennies...I’m sure the latency could be overcome. You could host thousands of humans with very few robots. Better productivity, lower cost in the long run and you’re resilient against labor problems which is really good when all your labor is illegal. If nobody gives a good reason why it doesn’t exist I would be receptive to people who might want to do a start up...
Googling around I find some recent stuff. It seems to have started being on people’s minds in the past five years only. A lot of complicated articulated arms and inputs. I am only more convinced that there is arbitrage here... a very simple articulation mechanism, something akin to what hello robot did vs willow garage, would be totally new. And you don’t have to replicate perfectly the performance of humans because it’s a sliding scale, you could use the robot to downsize at first, following it with a small human team.
Depends on what you’re harvesting but the challenges are likely to be in the actual picking motion not dropping/bruising/cutting the food, if there is any selection happening the senses of touch and smell are largely gone, navigating the plant without damaging it, not compacting the soil around the roots more than necessary, overall speed, etc.
Bespoke harvesters for things like potatoes and almonds obviously destroy humans in the productivity department. If we’re still picking it that’s a good signal that automation will be tricky.
We probably have the technology to do most of it now, but you may wind up with a half million dollar robot.
Machines get stuck in mud, trample / cut plants, pieces of plants get stuck in machine, and require frequent maintenance. The more degrees of freedom, the more failure points. Also, robots are $$$$, while unskilled human labor is $. Still, there several agro robotics startups.
Few years ago I was part of the networking team to build a new greenhouse. Normally they would need hundreds of employees but this was reduced to 3. Fully automated, everything on rails.
This is how it is already. It just takes time to amortize, build, and operate facilities.
All of the popular psychedelics are extremely potent anti inflammatories, even at sub-psychoactive doses. And the effect lasts for months. And inflammation touches almost every modern illness... so it is a magic bullet. They also cure cluster headaches and migraines and people who suffer from those would certainly call it a magic bullet. Should we be testing every possible application to see what sticks? Yes.
There should be a paper floating out there about DOI, which is actually the most potent anti inflamatory, more so than Lsd. He has other papers too. Sorry I’m on my phone.
It’s routine for labs to insert threads into brains? It’s routine for non-rigid, fine threads to be inserted via robot? I’m just being honest, your comment is not very convincing. And it skims over important details like the fact that all electrode solutions before were not sub-dermal.
I did not really say that any of this is routine. Nor did I try to be particularly convincing.
But implantation of ultra flexible and thin electrodes is not new (and it is promising, sure), several groups have been working on « mesh electrodes ». As of now it has not really proved safe enough for chronic use in humans.
The subdermal aspect is also certainly a nice advance, but relatively useless in a lab setting (and impossible in rodents).
The robotization is not really impressive, all electrophysiological apparati are robotized, for obvious reasons: nobody can reproducibly place electrodes with micrometer precision by hand.
But hey, let’s wait for some papers to be out and we’ll judge then.
Ok so I looked it up and it appears that this concept of very thin and light electrodes is basically taking off right now with multiple implementations. In this context, Neuralink is basically competing against other products for a share of the neuro-implant market, which will be big at some point. Why doesn’t your comment mention any of this? Or the relative merits of each competitor? It’s not clear that neuralink was the first or the last to do any of this. Why should their effort to find an electrode material that prevents loss of signal be minimized? Shouldn’t they be encouraged to find a solution like the other people trying to find a solution in academia?
And I know you won’t answer this because nobody ever answers questions that aren’t inflammatory or insulting... but how could information not be encoded in the brain? When you dream, your brain could not possibly be generating the raw sensory signals... the only way to explain lucid dreams is heavy encoding of information and a really powerful guessing system to fill in gaps where signal decoding was weak or didn’t happen.
Sorry if I did not make that clear but I fully agree that their endeavor towards better electrodes should be encouraged, and maybe even saluted when they provide evidence of improvement over the state of the art.
The question of information in the brain, including whether it is encoded is a really hard one. Of course we can easily find some areas of the brain whose response is _correlated_ with aspects of the outside world. But what does it mean? Who (or what) is decoding it, why? Many different metaphora and analogies can be (and are) readily applied to the brain. As of now, it is safe to say that a comprehensive theory of neural processing has not really been able to answer all of these questions. It’s just all very complex.
Sociopaths are dangerous. Everything in our culture and society is built around the fact, purposefully or not, that most people have basic empathy for the direct and visceral experience of seeing another person suffer. If you involve yourself with a sociopath, there are no mechanisms at play to help you. You will find yourself totally destroyed. If everyone in the world really knew what sociopaths are, they wouldn’t be allowed to roam freely. I’m astounded at how casually the subject is addressed in this thread.