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> It also means your kid has no experience of online interactions with strangers, basically no SNS literacy, which also sounds like a disaster waiting to happen to me.

I think it would be better to allow them to be exposed to all this in a later phase, once, for example, they have plenty of experience with offline interactions with strangers. Learn how to walk, then learn how to run.

I really don't think the opposite order would work.


You would get them used to the more intimate and private interactions first ?

While doing small talk at the bus stop, telling someone you go to the middle school over there is small talk. Doing the same online is asking for problems.

Online interaction require a completely different mindset for a kid, it's a big enough gap IMHO to be treated as a separate thing that can be learned in parallel of offline interactions.

You can learn to swim while learning to walk.


And that's the root cause of many, many issues.

It's a pity so many of these issues get simply patched up through other means instead of properly addressing the real root cause.


This is like saying food is good.

It is. But then you have ultra-processed food, junk food, food you might be allergic to...

Some medicines are good, some medicines are the lesser bad, some medicines will kill you if you take them when not needed, some medicines you might be allergic too, and some medicines are just a patch to have you feel well and keep you going.


You don't need to be fake in order to be nice. Become nice, then you won't have to fake it.

One way of becoming nice is to act nice. A nice person is a person who acts nice towards other people.

You can act different than how you feel, and that is not being fake, it's being nice.

If we all acted how we felt, we'd all be dead already.


What about because something is objectively good for you?

For example, you could learn to like fermented foods (if you don't) because they are very healthy for you.


In this paradigm you describe, should we then strive to be authentic or should we refrain?

Don't you think this would open the doors to an endless amount of bad behaviours?


Yes.

No.


What if my authentic feeling and behaviour was to slap you in the face and laugh at you because you answered 'Yes.' to an 'either/or' question?

The problem is that for humanity, unrestrained behaviour will very quickly degrade into horrible things. There's scientific evidence for that, if everyday life is not proof enough for you.


> people who play music/video aloud on public transport

But that's not being authentic, that's being plain rude, and there should be a difference.

You can be authentic and still respect boundaries and be considerate towards other people.

And on the other side, if being rude is your form of authenticity, then you're not authentic, you're just another rude person, probably following a specific type of common behaviour.


> You can be authentic and still respect boundaries and be considerate towards other people.

From the point of view of the douche: why should they do that, for what gain? I suppose if they care about social cohesion they'd care, but on the flip side, people nowadays can seem to violate social norms and still get through life just fine, in the old days they might suffer if society shunned them.

Makes me think of the cafe sign that listed prices: "Coffee $5; A coffee please: $3; Good day, I would like a coffee please: $1", being pleasant helps when doing business as well, people will even avoid doing business with you if you're unpleasant (except maybe if your soup is really really good). Maybe the "loneliness epidemic" means that people are developing a tolerance to the unavailability of pleasant social interactions.

Now it makes me think maybe the Black Mirror social scoring ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcspUD0kF7g ) is a useful way to punish douches after all.


Placebo is by definition highly subjective, and not even in the sense of one's opinion, but rather that it works or not at a subject level.


Well that's a bit too much of a generalisation maybe?

Yes, there are old ways that have been proven wrong, which were based on ignorance at the time, but there are also old ways which are totally legit and are little known or accepted nowadays based on today's ignorance.


Take turmeric for example. It contains curcumin, a chemical that has quite good evidence for anti-inflammatory properties. However curcumin is not present in turmeric in clinically relevant quantities. People taking turmeric medicinally are not actually interested in the curcumin, if they were they would be taking a concentrated extract. They are interested in the ritual and cultural associations of turmeric.

In most cases when we do find evidence for something clinically relevant in traditional medicine we either discover that the effect is something other than it is traditionally associated with and/or that you need to take it at extreme doses for it to do anything at all.


Fair enough. Two points here, then:

- From a strictly scientific standpoint, wouldn't it be interesting to properly understand why and how it works?

- From a purely practical standpoint, who cares about any of that if not only it works, but is also better and healthier than what you might get prescribed at the doctor's?*

* yes, in some cases, not all.


> From a strictly scientific standpoint, wouldn't it be interesting to properly understand why and how it works?

Personally I think it would be, but I think people who actually engage in using traditional medicine couldn't care less how it works beyond making it sound even more magical and spooky.

> From a purely practical standpoint, who cares about any of that if not only it works, but is also better and healthier than what you might get prescribed at the doctor's?*

I don't think most people engaged in traditional medicine care about it actually being healthier, again because they are first and foremost interested in the ritual and cultural aspects rather than the effectiveness of the active ingredients.

My reason for believing this is that people consistently ignore evidence that their favourite magical plant does nothing. And that even when there is evidence to support it, they frequently ignore all findings about effective doses and treatment plans in favour of doing the "natural" thing like making into tea or putting it in orifices you aren't meant to put plants in.


> I don't think most people engaged in traditional medicine care about it actually being healthier, again because they are first and foremost interested in the ritual and cultural aspects rather than the effectiveness of the active ingredients.

I think you're repeatedly resorting to all manner of generalisations. Maybe that's your experience, and all that you've seen. While I've seen a bit of that too, I've also seen quite the contrary, very smart and learned people scientifically exploring fringe approaches in order to obtain results.

I could give you some personal and near examples of that if it were to mean something.

There's also quite a lot in natural medicine (including papers and proper scientific studies, if that's the only thing that matters to you) if you look into it.


The very fact that "natural medicine" practitioners form their own group that doesn't interact much with evidence based medicine is just more evidence for my view. The whole community is more interested in forming some sort of secret club than it is in actually doing medicine. If it worked, it would just be conventional medicine.


> If it worked, it would just be conventional medicine.

There are many reasons why this is not true. One of them is profits, another one (at least where I live) is the mass oriented, streamlined healthcare, in which there are not enough resources to treat you as an individual, but rather as a number, a small part of an average.

For these reasons, as an example among others, when a woman goes to the doctor because her period is painful, they'll prescribe her birth control pills rather than raspberry leaf tea.


There is a third path where the traditional thing can't be commercialized so modern medicine doesn't pursue it. A (sincere) traditional practitioner might be less concerned with gaining and exploiting a patent, so the commercial potential isn't as important.

Telling that person apart from the sea of charlatans complicates things a bit. They're not the people who launch their careers with Oprah's help and spawn a million others riding in their wake.


That’s a thought terminating cliche. Academia doesn’t care about commercialization, they care about grants and they don’t much care which organization it comes from. You can argue why they don’t make it to market as FDA regulated medicines but not why there’s no positive evidence for their efficacy.

> Telling that person apart from the sea of charlatans complicates things a bit.

Peer review (for all its faults) and clinical trials that inform evidence based medicine. That’s how you tell them apart.


Interesting, you're describing exactly what I went through a few years ago.

In my case, however, I turned to pure ginger infusions, following the advice of a herbalist. Haven't gone through it again so far, plus it also works great for colds and flu.


So, gingerol is anti inflammatory. Fun fact, so is allicin, which is produced by garlic. You get a lot of medicine that looks quite a bit like quack medicine - for instance people making garlic extract: https://www.allicin-c.com/?AFFID=549212

But then you end up with peer reviewed studies which indicate some anti-viral properties of garlic: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7434784/


> You get a lot of medicine that looks quite a bit like quack medicine

It depends what you understand by "quack medicine".

To me, in the beginning, all the stuff about drinking weird plants and doing homemade remedies did sound a bit quacky. But that was because of my absolute ignorance.

People have been using these remedies for thousands of years based on a deeper knowledge of nature than your random dude has, but we've fallen into a scam where we are made to feel that anything not made in a lab and costing a certain amount of money is nonsense.

Garlic, onion, ginger, turmeric, honey, echinacea, raspberry... those are natural wonders for basic natural medicine.


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