Reminds me of the video game Everything. Its a really cool game where you explore the various scales of the universe. It has its quirks (somewhat phoned in graphics like animals walking) but the concept and execution are great IMO, would love a sequel. Also bonus points for featuring Alan watts as a core character.
I tripped a lot in my early 20s, a whole lot, and never had a bad time. Well, I had some uncomfortable experiences, but not what I can now call a bad trip.
One of my first times after, in my experience, I literally went to hell. I was convinced I was on the outskirts, all the people at the party around me were demons, I was about to be tortured forever, and I was never going to see my son again and he was going to grow up without me..
I convinced myself I was in that position because I had wrecked and killed someone, and my punishment was forever replaying the experiencing of a life where I would grow up to have a son, only to have him ripped away from me, reminded of what I did, and then tortured for some nearly eternal amount of time....
Any conversations people had with me at the time, I heard the words they were saying but completely twisted the meaning of the words to fit whatever crazy narrative was going on in my head.
This has happened 4 or 5 times. Despite being familiar with the experience, in my mind it just reinforces that I am in a "loop" at the time, about to be tortured again..
It's happened with LSD, Mushrooms, and surprisingly even ketamine. *edit it also happened during an intense changa experience with a shaman in Tijuana, which was my most intense experience with anything to date..
You'd think I would not take this stuff anymore =p
I have at least slowed down considerably...
I have had an incredibly similar experience, including falling back into being convinced I was in a 'loop' when my mind was tired or on psychedelics. I've always found it interesting how common this type of bad trip is and wondered if there's a reason why it's so common. Cultural context can have a large impact on the type of trips you have, but I would not have guessed that western culture would create this type of bad trip, in particular.
Regarding your trip to hell, I'm interested to know if you have a lifelong belief in heaven and hell, or if it came by itself during the trip.
As an atheist with no supernatural beliefs (that I know of), I wonder if a trip on LSD for me would just be boring, or if these supernatural things become real during a trip even if you don't truly believe in them.
It's unlikely you'd find it boring simply because you're an atheist. The experience is typically quite intense, although it's dose-dependent as well as setting-dependent. I'm agnostic but my own experience was a heightened sense of panpsychism which went away later, because my rational, scientific mind didn't find the idea highly plausible.
You don't need religion or other beliefs - LSD has a strong body high, it feels good even if you don't get strong visual hallucinations. I gather that there are strong conditioning effects that determine what people see when they do hallucinate though - you won't encounter anything you had no concept of in the first place.
Interestingly, In 2006 I had both the best and worst night of my life (up to that point, this was pre-fatherhood) while on acid... but the acid wasn't really the primary factor in either direction..
Some of the best raves of the late 90s and early 2000s were at The State Palace Theater in New Orleans.. At the last party thrown there, I was invited to play first on the main stage, biggest soundsystem and crowd I ever played for, all my friends there to support.. Set goes great, we all hug and celebrate and and start tripping, and have a great time..
At about 4AM I go to get something in my record bag that I left on the stage by the decks.. someone stole it. It also had my car keys in it, among other things..
My buddy had to drive me 3+ hours away to get my spare keys, and hours back, and hours back home again, it was two days after the party before I finally settled in at home, without most of my keys and my stuff.
I had a friend who recorded and took pictures during my set, but in a different incident at the party, he dropped the camera in a literal hole in the floor of this dilapidating building, never to be seen again.
Despite being the worst feeling of my life, and being on acid, it wasn't a "bad trip" because it wasn't the trip's fault...
I would be interested to hear about your experiences.
username at gmail if you'd rather not share here.
>If our institutions can communicate their work better, supernatural beliefs will dry up a bit. We’ve seen this historically.
I feel like this article misses the reason why people distrust institutions. Being "kicked out of the tent" is no doubt part of it, but it's more that the institutions themselves have stopped trying to communicate in good faith.
In the past 50 or so years we've seen almost every institution (in USA at least) get caught in a massive scheme of lying and manipulation. The church was caught harboring pedophiles, the education system told us trades were bad and we needed to spend $100k+ to have a good job, the Healthcare system leveraged our own wellbeing against their profits, the government sided with insurance companies, banks, etc over its own people at every turn then proceeded to lie us into war after war after war, and all the the while the news has been proven to support almost every lie happily if the ad dollars go their way. Not a single institution hasn't failed us.
Asking why people distrust institutions is the wrong question. Any partner that lied to you that much would never be trusted again, distrust is a defense mechanism that comes from years of betrayal. But still there's some implication that we should still trust them, despite the lies, and along with it a sense that distrusting them makes you crazy (paranormal/alien beliefs are a good example). This problem does not originate from the people, it's the result of a world where truth only gets in the way of profits and power and actual people are the lowest priority.
The church, the education system, the healthcare system, the government, and the banks, are all actual people. You guys are doing this to yourselves in an effort to scam each other.
A couple years back I was at a really really low point in life, I wanted someone to talk to. Not like counseling or anything, literally just someone to talk to one time over a cup of coffee, because it's not great to go without talking to people at all. I reached out to the churches from my small town to the nearest city. In addition I reached out to the above organizations, asking 'Is there anyone they can connect me with to get a cup of coffee and talk for like an hour at their convenience'. Most useful response I got was for paid christian phone counseling services and asking for my insurance provider information to see if it would cover it. No bible thumper preacher offered to talk, no Catholic priest, no one. I always kind of thought one trait of those groups was their willingness to talk to people.
This is not how society was the majority of my life. Something is very wrong, and very broken.
So I just searched if there was anything to connect and found this. The modern state of our society. I hate it:
From the front page: Is there an AI behind the priests on this platform?
No, our priests are real people who are here to offer you spiritual guidance and support.
https://priestchat.com/en/legal/terms-of-service
TOS: The Service provided by PriestChat.com is a platform facilitating simulated and purely fictional exchanges which are intended exclusively for entertainment and novelty purposes.
14. AI Disclosure
Nature of AI-Generated Content: All interactions, responses, suggestions, or communications made available through the Service may be partially or wholly generated by AI-based processes. These processes leverage algorithmic models, machine learning techniques, and potentially third-party computational platforms.se to any Content provided through the Service. Etc. etc.
Your perspective on religious institutions is very different than mine and I'm very curious how that came to be and how much different your experience was than mine. I'm in my thirties and since I was very young I've known *not* to trust most religious institutions and --being raised on Sesame Street and Mr Rogers-- instinctively was not fond of the people in them. Most church goers I would meet were usually not friendly to others who were different than them and were seemingly interested in their own "salvation" before others. Leadership was mainly interested in power/money and would be aghast if anyone dared question anything about the church - even something as stupid as a talking snake. Oh and Pikachu, Harry Potter, music and asking questions were all a ticket to eternal damnation even though you are loved. 25+ years later, I'm not at all surprised about the catholic church's rampant sexual exploitation of children or christians' downright hatred of others and complete lack of Jesus's teachings. Even the rise of christo nationalism and fascism in the US seemed like an inevitability. Seeing a church organization lie about a for-profit chat bot seems on-brand and has seemed on-brand for as long as I've been an inquisitive child.
The purpose of a system is what it does. In the US, 'the system' makes money for some at the expense of others. If rational thinking supported this system, it would be rewarded more. The fact that conspiratorial and supernatural thinking is on the rise suggest that it better aligns with the purpose of 'the system' - i.e. the transfer of money from the many to the few.
Nah, you're exhibiting the fundamental problem which is effectively conspiratorial thinking. Not in the UFO sense, and I don't mean it disparagingly at all -- I mean literally ascribing behavior to some type of superstructure that doesn't really exist.
"The healthcare system" is not one thing that "says" stuff. For every component of the education system that was trying to eliminate trades, there were others trying to combat it, and neither side was merely the decision of any conscious agent that could be said to be deciding or "saying" anything. All of the outcomes and the things these systems "say" are emergent phenomena from a confluence of countless forces. Sometimes they yield bad outcomes!
But that doesn't mean you can just toss out the system, largely because unless you alter the larger dynamics that produced that system, any replacement will just come to mimic the prior one. The individuals involved hardly matter.
A system that naturally occurs as a result of the context like you describe sure sounds like a superstructure. Which in our case is a government that allows anyone with the money to steer the ship while actual people have little power to change anything. And when you put enough of those people with money in a room with people who take money and give them laws, it absolutely results in a single unified direction for that system. Of course there are disenters, but they are ineffective compared to those with actual power.
The institutions have failed to follow their own (supposed) standards, and failed to purge bad actors that subverted or abandoned those standards. Yes, ultimately it is the people at those institutions that have failed not the institution in the abstract, but their failure to be accountable triggers the only response the public has: to distrust or abandon existing institutions and seek or create new ones.
It's not a consipracy theory that the Catholic church harbored pedophiles, it's fact. Yes, there are many good people within the institution who are horrified by this. Not all participated in the conspiracy, and "conspiracy" might not be the right word. But the fact remains, this was the net behavior of the institution.
I totally agree, the Catholic church is actually quite monolithic/coherent/directly culpable for output behavior.
That's why I didn't list it in my response, though I think there's even a meaningful difference between "the church" (a super heterogenous type of organization) and "the Catholic church" (a single, highly centralized organization).
The health care system is heavily subject to licensing of various kinds, and academia is heavily defined by grant funding. If just a tiny handful of people in the government decide the healthcare system will say X, then it will say X.
As a case in point, GP refers to "the Healthcare system leveraged our own wellbeing against their profits"
That would point toward the business interests of actual provider organizations (like hospitals) or insurers, who have different incentives from each other and very different incentives from individual healthcare providers, who also have very different interests (and are very different people on a variety of dimensions) from those in academia who are "heavily defined by grant funding."
Perhaps you could share a concrete example of what you mean, because right now we're talking about 4 or 5 completely distinct, individually gigantic industries that all interact to produce "the healthcare system" and its behaviors.
The industries don't matter. They are all subject to very broad and powerful government licensing rules that can overrule their own opinions at any time.
For example, during COVID there were doctors who lost their license to practice because they disagreed with the government stance on vaccines. Therefore, the remaining doctors spoke with one voice. The government used them as sock puppets, in effect. Whether you agree with this policy or not, it is an example in which the healthcare system became one system that "said" things in concert.
No, they aren't "all" subject to licensing rules. That's why the specific industries do matter.
Can you share some examples of these doctors? AFAIK the only doctors who lost their licenses are those who created fake medical documentation or who shared verifiably false medical information. Not for "disagreeing" with the government stance on vaccines.
I don't know if you lived in a different timeline than me, but I remember a lively debate throughout the entirety of COVID. Consensus (and evidence) was overwhelmingly on one side, sure, similar to how consensus is that you should go to the hospital if you get a heart attack. And yeah, if a doctor advises someone against that despite strong clinical evidence that the patient is best served by going to the hospital, they'll jeopardize their license.
The problem is that when the government itself spreads verifiably false information, there are no reprocussions like there are for the individual who does it. Just like when an individual steals money they tend to face consequences, banks who do the same thing on a much more massive scale face nothing.
Just to preface. Covid is the new Nazis, all arguments end up devolving into its discussion. Im tired of talking about covid but it's hard to get past how our country handled it, both the people and the government. To answer your question:
https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/jun/06/did-fauci-say...
>He said the 6-foot guideline “sort of just appeared” and wasn’t based on any data, and that such a study would be difficult to do. He also said he didn’t recall any studies about masking young children, but said the guideline was the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s decision.
Making up arbitrary rules and then enforcing them saying "trust the science" is not coming from a place of honesty. Especially when combined with the deletion of emails.
First the strong rebuttal: "Verifiably false information at time of sharing" in this case would mean you have evidence that Fauci knew distance played no role in infection rates, or that a distance other than 6 feet was better, and put out information suggesting 6 feet was correct anyway. You have no evidence of this, of course, because this is not what happened.
The more general rebuttal is that you are revealing exactly the type of "can't be trusted with details" that kneecapped public health communications throughout COVID.
The question is why Fauci selected 6 feet instead of 4, 5, 7, 8 or even 6.1, 6.148, or even 6.489598365983 feet.
The reality is that there's no real reason to select any of these over any other. There's a continuous curve of difficulty of adherence and a continuous curve of transmission reduction.
Any specific number would have been "arbitrary", but very obviously a clear guideline is better than a completely non-actionable "stay as far away as you reasonably can."
This is like hauling out the guy who set interstate speed limits at 60mph and not 59 or 59.5 or 59.84846898 and then blasting him for selecting the "arbitrary" 60 miles per hour.
> you have evidence that Fauci knew distance played no role in infection rates, or that a distance other than 6 feet was better, and put out information suggesting 6 feet was correct anyway.
There are three options:
1. Fauci knew the correct answer to some degree of accuracy and picked a rounded off version.
2. He didn't know the correct answer but thought he did.
3. Fauci didn't know the correct answer, was aware he didn't know, and he made one up in order to sound knowledgeable.
You're arguing what happened is (1). What actually happened is (3), which we know because he admitted it.
Social distancing had no effect, and this was known early on. There is no known distance curve that correctly models SARS-CoV-2 transmission in the real world, largely because it spreads via aerosol clouds as well as droplets. The data for this was available nearly from the start because:
1. SARS-1 acted this way, as do other coronaviruses. Outbreaks of SARS-1 could be found spreading between apartment buildings on the wind.
2. The outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship showed cases appearing all over the vessel at random, even though everyone was confined to quarters. There was no physical contact in that case and it made no difference whatsoever.
Social distancing had no visible effect anywhere it was tried. What did work was high quality air cleaning equipment, as found on planes - places that remained remarkably infection free despite everyone being much closer than 6ft together.
It never takes long to get from "I need to be trusted with the facts!" to demonstrating just gobsmacking levels of willful ignorance.
> Social distancing had no visible effect anywhere it was tried.
> Our search identified 172 observational studies across 16 countries and six continents, with no randomised controlled trials and 44 relevant comparative studies in health-care and non-health-care settings (n=25 697 patients). Transmission of viruses was lower with physical distancing of 1 m or more, compared with a distance of less than 1 m (n=10 736, pooled adjusted odds ratio [aOR] 0·18, 95% CI 0·09 to 0·38; risk difference [RD] −10·2%, 95% CI −11·5 to −7·5; moderate certainty); protection was increased as distance was lengthened
Can you explain step by step how "SARS-1 could be found spreading between apartment buildings on the wind" and "the Diamond Princess cruise ship showed cases appearing all over the vessel at random" are evidence that standing close to someone is equal risk to standing further away from them?
This would be great evidence against the claim "if you are more than 6ft away, you will not get sick," and your airplane example would be great evidence against the claim "if you are fewer than 6ft away, you will get sick," but neither of these claims were ever made.
Such papers aren't worth much. For example, that meta-review claims masks work. Some other scientists did a different meta-review (the A122 Cochrane Review) that concluded the opposite (strictly speaking, that there was no useful evidence masks worked). If you dig into the details of why they disagree, you'll find none of the studies claiming this stuff works are scientifically valid whilst the Cochrane meta-review is very careful. Real-world reliable evidence > models.
So what happened: activists went directly to the head of Cochrane and demanded the review be disowned, which it was, despite it having been signed off on by the org previously and there being no scientific problems identified with the study. That's how they manufacture consensus in the healthcare system: top down orders from corrupt leaders who suppress beliefs and evidence that makes them look bad. They do this because it works. After all, look at this thread. People say, look at all the evidence! Look at the consensus! They can't all be wrong!
Yet a system that concludes both yes and no simultaneously isn't worth anything. The institutions of science failed during COVID, and frankly are failing most of the time hence the replication crisis. It's not specific to masks or social distancing. We can play that game for any claim you want to make about COVID, or many other topics. Science is broken.
> explain ... evidence that standing close to someone is equal risk to standing further away from them?
There are two components to this:
1. There's a threshold value beyond which a non-immune person becomes infected and that viral load in the exposure over that doesn't matter much. Given that viruses replicate that's not surprising.
2. That a sick person can emit infectious aerosols that can hang around in the air for long periods and travel long distances e.g. via air ducts.
The intuition you're working from is that SARS-CoV-2 viruses are created in the body, that they travel only in large droplets that fall to the ground quickly due to gravity, and that risk of infection is linear in dose. Thus, being far away from an infected person should reduce the risk linearly. That's the idea the "professionals" used to justify their policies, but it's based on a model that's too far from reality to be useful. It might work for a hypothetical spherical-cow type person standing on a perfectly empty and flat 2D plane, with no air movements. It doesn't work for real world scenarios with complex layouts and complex movements of people, which is why when you look at the behavior of the virus in real settings like the Diamond Princess or jet liners the results are completely different to what the model would predict.
What you said is that Fauci had no reason to believe that social distancing would be helpful and knew that it wouldn’t be helpful.
I just linked to very clear reason to substantiate his beliefs. Regardless of whether you agree with it or not, and even regardless of whether this view ended up actually being correct, this evidence existed.
It is empirically, obviously true there was reason to hold this belief.
> Yet a system that concludes both yes and no simultaneously isn't worth anything
I see that you’ve never heard of science… which concludes: “we don’t know yet” on most questions most of the time. The reality is we didn’t have high certainty on most of these questions and even still they’re open for debate. But we have to make decisions in the presence of uncertainty all the time! Even the decisions that ended up being wrong during COVID (of which there were plenty) were well within the aperture of reasonability given the conditions they had to be made under.
None of this gets even close to the threshold of the government propagating verifiably false information. Not even in the same ballpark.
> Such papers aren't worth much.
Lol. “How am I so confused about what’s going on?! Must be the institutions’ fault!”
You're citing papers which came after the public health authorities decided it would work, not before. Before the sudden about face the WHO had guidance for how to handle a respiratory virus pandemic. It said don't shut the borders, don't try and socially distance, don't restrict travel. All that was torn up and replaced overnight.
But there's nothing to speculate about here. Fauci explicitly told us the idea of social distancing "just appeared", which is easy to confirm just by looking carefully at the timelines. There was no evidence that led to the policy, it was just invented out of thin air. Not my claim: his. And then because academia is corrupt they promptly produced reams of papers claiming it worked great, although real world evidence showed it didn't. You can read these papers for yourself to see how motivated the reasoning is.
> The reality is we didn’t have high certainty on most of these questions
That's correct! There was uncertainty because there was no evidence these policies worked, which is why people got pissed off when they were presented as 100% dead cert things that only crazy Anti Science People could doubt. At no point did public health officials say, well, this might help or it might not so we'll leave it up to the citizens to decide what to do. Everything was 100% critical and had to be forced via law overnight because Science™.
You're trying to excuse what they did by saying they had to make decisions, but they didn't. They could have simply admitted they didn't know, done nothing and left it to individuals and their doctors to decide what to do for themselves. They chose instead to impose policies on the whole world by force, justifying it by claiming they were doing solid science when in reality the policies "just appeared".
Social distancing dates back literally to the 14th century dude. It is a standard tool in the contagion toolbox. The null hypothesis is that you would apply it to this contagion too until you have evidence otherwise.
No, he told us the number 6 "just appeared," as compared to the numbers 5 or 7.
> You can read these papers for yourself to see how motivated the reasoning is.
Please link to said papers.
Again, you're just wrong on all the facts. There are plenty of good reasons to have defaulted to social distancing. Not only was this logical at the time, but all evidence still points to it having been the correct decision in retrospect. I know you're in the habit of simply dismissing countervailing evidence, i.e. you've decided to give up on yourself, but there is literally centuries of evidence behind social distancing.
The fact that people caught COVID while far away from each other literally isn't even a dent in this body of evidence. And I don't mean that because it's weak evidence against it, but that it's not even evidence against it. Nothing about the social distancing hypothesis suggests one cannot get sick at a distance.
Details matter! Medieval quarantine ships worked against plague and cholera because those pathogens spread very differently to aerosolized coronavirus, and had very different mortality profiles. You can't just lump every possible pathogen into one bucket labelled "contagion" then claim you now understand it. That's exactly the kind of broken thinking and fake expertise that led to so much loss of trust.
Your choice of papers is an example of this problem in action:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2966666/ - it's about school closures+flu, but people got upset about school closures because unlike flu COVID overwhelmingly affected the very old and very sick, so it didn't make sense to close schools to protect kids. It's also the kind of analysis that's likely to be P-hacked.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1929395/ - a mortality report on Asian flu. What point are you trying to make with this paper? If it's about school closures again, it gives attack rates of 59% for asian flu in schools, but attack rate for SARS-CoV-2 in schools was measured at more like 4% (again, with mild cases that didn't endanger the kids). You can't reduce infectiousness and impact by 10x+ and say they're the same.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2808319/ - SARS-1 this time, which is at least a coronavirus! But it's also one that had very different mortality/spread profiles to SARS-CoV-2 (I don't personally think it should have been called SARS-2 because of this difference, even though they're closely related otherwise). It's an observational regression analysis again, so low quality evidence, but what it shows is that even for SARS-1 where quarantine was more effective the number-needed-to-quarantine was uselessly high, with 7.5 infected needed to be quarantined to eliminate just one case. That's completely unworkable especially as social distancing isn't even close to the same thing as an actual quarantine. This paper is the sort of analysis that led to the pre-2020 WHO recommendations against quarantine and travel restrictions for RV epidemics, and supports what I'm saying: they could easily have known social distancing wouldn't work, and probably did know.
Again: what you said is there was no basis to believe social distancing would help.
I have just linked to basis to believe exactly that.
Sure, it may have turned out that COVID-19 would be totally different (though it didn't -- we now know empirically social distancing was helpful here too), but even if it had, clearly there was evidence to assume from the start that distance from infected person would be a component of infection rate.
The number isn't the point, the messaging of "this number is science" is. If it were delivered clearly as "we done have all the information, but our best judgement based on a, b, c says the number is X" that would be far better and most of all honest than "it is 6ft and that's the science, follow the rules or don't enter public spaces"
There's not "a lack of information." The information is there's a continuous curve of transmission. You could have complete information and you would still need to pick an "arbitrary" point.
> it is 6ft and that's the science, follow the rules or don't enter public spaces
Link to which guidance you feel most closely stated this. I have never seen any guidance from CDC, NIH, FDA, or anywhere else that resembles this.
Again, I do not care about covid and have no interest in arguing with you about covid. This is a discussion about eroded trust in institutions. And denying that the government's handling of covid had a causal relationship with the current distrust of institutions is as insane as denying covid itself. If you think that during that time the government exemplified honesty which would build trust, I do not have any argument that will convince you beside saying to increase your media literacy. Good luck.
As is typical: "The government did x y z things to destroy trust!"
"Can you show me where?"
"No, but there's less trust now, ergo the government did it!"
Another hypothesis for you: You were peppered with bullshit from non-government sources so thoroughly and so frequently that you abdicated your responsibility to understand what's true and what's not.
This is, of course, the goal of such information campaigns.
In theory, I buy the argument that the government should be able to successfully overcome the 24/7 bullshit machine that you plugged yourself into, but I personally struggle to imagine a good/safe/non-authoritarian way for it to achieve that.
So I'm left with the conclusion that we each bear some amount of responsibility to try to counteract the game of telephone when it comes to understanding matters of personal or national importance, and you (like many other perfectly fine/smart/honorable people) failed to meet that obligation. Not really a personal critique given you didn't know the game you were playing and how proactive you needed to be in it, but here we are, and I'd recommend a high-agency look at how you chose to find and interpret information. The institutions were not the problem here.
You just echo the institutions you defend so fervently by being sanctimonious. I hope you're a politician or healthcare exec, someone who at least has an interest in defending this mess. Otherwise it's just sad. Again, good luck.
I'm not going to get into the weeds about COVID because you said:
> the things these systems "say" are emergent phenomena ... Consensus was overwhelmingly on one side ... [those who disagree] jeopardize their license
Rephrased, it's not happening and it's good that it's happening.
Pick your side: either you want agreement in the healthcare system to be trusted because it's the result of many independent decisions pointing in the same direction, or you want a system that punishes dissent. You can't try to claim the benefits of the first whilst cheering on the second.
You're claiming healthcare advice is an emergent phenomenon and also agreeing that people who spread "verifiably false" misinformation lost their license - a totally non-emergent phenomenon. I get that your faith in authority is so strong you don't really believe there were any mistakes made there, and thus that the people who were fired for opposing public health mandates weren't really part of the healthcare system at all in some sense. But they were a part of it, and mistakes were made by public health officials, many of which they later admitted to.
Again: pick your side. Advice motivated by career-ending penalties for non-compliance cannot be said to be an emergent phenomenon.
How many licensure boards are there in the US? Roughly 60.
How many allow their doctors to relay verifiably false medical information with their patients? Roughly zero.
Is this because there's some big conspiracy of all 60 licensure boards getting together to suppress information, or is it because each of them has independently reached the self-evident conclusion that licensees spreading false information destroys the credibility of the profession?
You seem to be under the impression there were no conspiracies during COVID, which is nonsense. You can read the Slack logs of the channels where conspiracies were organized (e.g. the papers denying lab leaks were organized that way). You can read emails where people were given their top-down orders. You can read meeting notes and journal reviews where people say that whilst claim X is true it would cause people to stop following government orders so it should be suppressed. You can read interviews with public health officials who say they organized conspiracies to lying, and you can observe that the entire medical profession went along with that. The synchronized flipflops on masks alone was enough to destroy many people's belief in doctors and public health.
By all means, try and wordsmith your way out of these facts. It doesn't work. Trust in the medical profession has dropped through the floor, and it will keep falling further for as long as responses like yours are common in discussions of it.
As for your 60 number, those are mostly state level boards, who have a monopoly over licensing in that state. If a doctor gets struck off in a state they could move to another, lose all their customers and home, and try to start again, but in practice those boards don't approve doctors who were struck off in another state regardless of reason. So in reality it's not much different to having one. The wider argument is of course silly, akin to arguing that if two dictators happen to make the same decision their countries aren't dictatorships because all decisions are emergent phenomena arising from the wisdom of the crowds.
> You seem to be under the impression there were no conspiracies during COVID, which is nonsense.
You seem to be continuing to put words into other people's mouths.
> You can read emails where people were given their top-down orders.
This is literally not true (I've read the emails)
> The synchronized flipflops on masks alone was enough to destroy many people's belief in doctors and public health.
One man's "synchronized flipflop" is another's "appearance of new evidence and tradeoffs."
> You can read meeting notes and journal reviews where people say that whilst claim X is true it would cause people to stop following government orders so it should be suppressed.
Can you link me to this?
> You can read interviews with public health officials who say they organized conspiracies to lying
Can you link me to this?
> akin to arguing that if two dictators happen to make the same decision their countries aren't dictatorships
No, it's like arguing that if two dictators happen to make the same decision, it doesn't mean they are acting in coordination with one another. Which is obviously true.
All I see in this thread is someone confidently asserting that he needs to be trusted with the truth despite reflexively dismissing data that doesn't fit his priors and, apparently, believing that it's unreasonable to assume that being physically closer to a person with a respiratory virus produces a higher risk of infection than standing further away. (I find that you're never far from truly insane opinions in convos with these "just a skeptic" types)
You have done a fine job of demonstrating the loss of trust in the profession though, I'll give you that! It is almost entirely (not entirely, but almost entirely) due to people who have simply decided to be confidently wrong and, when asked for examples or sources over and over and over again, fail to produce them.
You obviously have a right to form your own opinion on all of this stuff, but demonstrably don't have the capability to do it. Many such cases!
Everyone needs to simply go to a pharmacy or a doctor's office outside the US one time. If everybody did that, the US Healthcare system would be doused with gasoline, lit on fire, and be burned like the trash that it is.
I'm very happy I switched from Kindle to kobo. Kobo is not ideal but getting koreader/syncthing to work on it was a breeze compared to Kindle. It's a much less locked down platform, and it has usbc which got rid of the last micro USB cord I had in my backpack.
I bought a Kobo ereader, because I figured that being the same company as Libby, it would be really easy to use with library books and audio books.
It's not at all.
I should have known better, because the interface on Libby itself is almost unusable. There's no way to search books at a specific library. You have to search their store, open a book, click on a menu, then see if it's available in your library. It also works with audio books, but that functionality doesn't work at all with audio books borrowed through Libby.
I'd have been better off buying a generic Android ereader and running Libby on it, than to use their own product, with their own service.
I think a lot of this can be ascribed to "startups don't always do the right thing" and you have to learn a lot over time.
That's said, I've been a customer for a while and the t-shirt debacle is one of the dumbest things I've seen a small company do. Even if you try and call it marketing cost (no name on the shirt makes that hard), there's no way it was the most efficient use of money for marketing.
And setting up infrastructure for it wreaks of "I'm bored with search let's do t-shirts." it completes goes against "do one thing really well" and just seems like a waste. If I were one of those investors and my money got spent on that I'd be really upset.
On the other hand, I see it as evidence that adtech is not in control of the company. Public companies or companies beholden to ad money would never be able to get away with a stunt like that. Can you imagine Meta sending each of their users a T-shirt? At > $40 RPU they could afford it.
The (publicly listed) bank I'm a customer of sent me a pair of oven mitts during the 2008 financial crisis, with an accompanying note that I'd paraphrase as "there have been rumors about our financial stability, and to show how untrue they are we're sending a gift to our customers".
It remains the worst customer retention pitch I've ever seen.
I think their problem with open source is more that they can't have complete control and make every user's decision for them, security is just a nice tag along to that.
One of those values is "ISS total mass." Is that calculated using launch/deorbit weights or is there some kind of sensor on board that can measure that? I figure if you did a specific type of burn you could calculate the weight from that, but I'm wondering if they have something more clever.
It's just an estimate and isn't that accurate. Yes, the closest you can get is orbit determination before and after the reboosts, and acceleration data.
Not an expert but I think its possible, the problem is that the gyroscope alone wouldn't be sufficient. When the gyro rotates once, the massive spacecraft will obviously have rotated exactly once relative to the gyroscope. However if you could track the space station's rotation relative to an independend stationary observer in space (lets say an array of pulsar data), then you could count the amount of turns of both the gyro and the spacestation relative to the background of space. Then the amount of turns of the gyro times the mass of the gyro would give you the mass of the space station minus the independend floating objects. Meaning you'll need to add the mass of the gyro itself as well.
Please correct me if i'm missing something obvious. This should work right?
Not its mass directly, but you can use it to calculate the moment of inertia. Move the CMGs a fixed angle and looking at the responding change in rate of the ISS. Mass can be determined from maneuvers when you fire the thrusters. Assuming you know the force from the thrusters very well (this has its own errors) you can look at the acceleration from the orbit determination before and after the thruster burns and back out the mass.
In a uniform gravitational field, it isn't. On the earth's surface, acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 m/s^2, independent of the mass of the falling object. See Galileo's Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment.
The field is not uniform though. So in theory, if you know the orbit and firld exactly, you can calculate it.
In the present case, I guess the precision with which one knows the orbit and other stuff (like the exact gravitational fiel of the earth) doesn't work out.
If you've never tried it, I highly recommend playing Kerbel Space Program[1] (it works on Linux, Mac, and Windows!).
That game taught me so much about orbital mechanics, which led to rabbit holes of textbooks and videos[2].
The first big lesson KSP taught me was: why, when launching a rocket, you don't just go straight up but, instead, have to lean over pretty aggressively.
This feels different. As a tax payer don't you want your city to work to get more funds? That feels far more acceptable than a private entity lobbying so they can increase profits, possibly at the expense of the payer.
Did LLMs not take time and effort to create? There's this ongoing sentiment in the AI detractors that for something to be meaningful it requires a human to have spent time making it. Meanwhile we live in a world where the overwhelming majority of things we see and interact with are already made by machines or are machines themselves.
I'm excited for the day when Google finally bites the bullet and makes their biggest UI "upgrade" to date, removing the search bar and keeping pesky user input from interfering with targeted ad revenue.
What does that mean? Are you creating your own LLM, finetuned off the books from your library or something else? Hard to pick up on what you’re saying.
The Chrome intent integration engine coupled with recent 'Bard' conversations as well as whatever Google 'Home and Meet' hardware has overheard you saying removes the need for any user interaction. All that's left is to tell you what to buy and where.
