Another study on electrical brain stimulation showed that while animals would self-administer it, when it was automatically administered, the same animals would respond always to turn it off
Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind
On brain and drugs: https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/www.newscientist.com/article/...
And a pretty effective one at that. Stereotype accuracy is one of the most solid and replicable findings in psychology. There are very strong correlations between what people think is true about statistical discrepancies between groups and what the truth actually is. The relationships consistently replicate and are much stronger than most effects found in social psychology [0].
We must thus understand wokeism as a war on pattern recognition.
[0] https://cspicenter.org/reports/the-accuracy-of-stereotypes-d...
The underlying issue is about reactionary politics, which exists only to stop progress. I think if we look deep down, we know reactionary politics will object no matter what the issue or facts - therefore the objection has nothing to do with the question at hand or its outcomes. You can see it in climate change denial, as a simpler example. That is its purpose and reason - to object. Along the way, lots and lots of people will die and suffer. Blood, lost generations, are on our hands. And for what?
Ignoring and censoring the truth because it’s mean can be far more dangerous with far more disastrous effects.
Censorship of thoughts is not the way to go - and the pushback, if it stays that way, is going to be worse than we can probably imagine right now.
Everyone faces prejudices from some others; should everyone act on them? What kind of society will we have? On a practical level, how does that bring freedom and economic opportunity.
You have a great model that has been far more successful than anything in the history of humanity, the free world, based on universal human rights and equality. The (general) lack of prejudice where I live works wonderfully; the bigotry - almost always from outsiders who have no experience with the people they hate - is the only problem. If they all went away, we'd have one less problem.
That is a bold, unfounded, unappreciated accusation. I do not support hate. I support gut feelings borne in truth. I will continue to not give free car rides to homeless people and to offer to help carry groceries out to the cars of little old ladies in front of me in line at the grocery store - because yes, stereotypically, the homeless are more likely to be drug addicts, mentally unstable, and have a criminal record, and little old ladies are more likely to need assistance carrying things. I don’t hate homeless people nor do I hate little old ladies or consider them inferior. But please, feel free hire someone with face tattoos to be your child’s bus driver in the interest of ignoring all prejudice at all costs. The rest of us will continue to make decisions using common sense, regardless of what Twitter has to say about the matter.
> The (general) lack of prejudice where I live works wonderfully; the bigotry - almost always from outsiders who have no experience with the people they hate - is the only problem. If they all went away, we'd have one less problem.
Could it be you’re wrongly conflating prejudice with hate? Don’t discount peoples’ life experiences either. Furthermore, your example is anecdotal. There’s a plethora of widespread non-anecdotal data to back up “prejudice” being accurate and helping people make wiser decisions.
Maybe I'm prejudiced though!
Beautiful. This one goes into the collection of all time memorable HN comments.
I take it you have studied all the serious problems, so that you could come to the conclusion that this is indeed the most pressing one. Investing many years into studying human nature, the rise and decline of ancient civilisations plus the majority of philosophy is admirable! You don't happen to have written down any notes?
So opioids are know to be great pain relievers. What is interesting is for certain types of pain, they don’t actually make the pain go away, they just change the perception and emotional response to it.
Patients who receive opioids say “i can still feel the pain, but it doesn’t bother me now”.
So to your question, the impact of opioids isn’t necessarily on the pain sensing centers but rather further downstream in terms of how those sensations are perceived.
If you take a placebo and expect it to relieve pain, your brain adjusts to assume that outcome.
It’s not that different than asking you if you’re tired right now. If you have to go to work you might say “yes”, but if you’re about to jump on a plane for a vacation you might say “no”.
> 7. The Placebo Effect. We hear a lot about “pain gating” in the spine, but the PP model does a good job of explaining what this is: adjusting pain based on top-down priors. If you believe you should be in pain, the brain will use that as a filter to interpret ambiguous low-precision pain signals. If you believe you shouldn’t, the brain will be more likely to assume ambiguous low-precision pain signals are a mistake. So if you take a pill that doctors assure you will cure your pain, then your lower layers are more likely to interpret pain signals as noise, “cook the books” and prevent them from reaching your consciousness.
> Psychosomatic pain is the opposite of this; see Section 7.10 of the book for a fuller explanation.
Based on this idea, however, the study does not identify the key pathway responsible for placebo effect, but only the result of it. If the brain anticipate relief of pain, the parts related to pain would activate. If it anticipates other effects, other parts of the brain would do.