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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna

Anonymous asked:

Some of the most effective anxiolytics (including pregabalin, baclofen and highly addictive phenibut) are GABA analogues. Isn't that the most promising direction for synthesizing new, safer anti-anxiety drugs?

Eh, maybe? Benzos and barbituates are the two most effective antianxiety classes of all time, and neither is a straight GABA analogue (though they both work on the GABA system). Beta-blockers and SSRIs really help some people in ways that don’t involve GABA and so can help people who for some reason don’t respond to or aren’t suitable for GABAergic drugs. Bacopa also seems to be in this area. Maybe a more specific criticism is that GABA analogues seem to be short-acting, or at least not the sort of long-term effects you get with SSRIs. I definitely think it is one direction to go, but not the only one.

Anonymous

Anonymous asked:

Do you think it's possible to use consensual operant conditioning (on oneself or the other person) to evoke complex reactions, such as changing personality traits, reversing food preferences or falling in love?

No. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/19/can-you-condition-yourself/ . Conditioning seems to work not so much on reward itself as on surprise - that is, reward (or punishment) that you didn’t expect.

Anonymous

I’m midway through a book arguing that junk food is literally addictive, and for some reason reading about it has made it true for me. I had some Gatorade this morning and now I’ve been desperately craving more Gatorade all day, and if I have some Gatorade that just makes the cravings worse a few hours later. This never happened to me before I started reading books arguing that junk food is addictive. Does this sort of thing happen to other people?

cw food
serinemolecule

Anonymous asked:

_Nickel and Dimed_ did for me pretty much what you hope books-about-being-poor would do for people at large. It is intellectualized rather than tearjerking, and about voluntary rather than inherited poverty, leaving predictable angles of attack for those concerned with purity, but IMO it is a candidate.

slatestarscratchpad answered:

I read that too and it was really good, and I was thinking about it when I wrote that. Then I made the mistake of looking for commentary about it online, and found various people who tried the same experiment with opposite results, and everyone telling everyone else they were doing it wrong or spinning it dishonestly or whatever.

serinemolecule:

millievfence:

slatestarscratchpad:

millievfence:

She was also horribly condescending and refused to listen to actual poor people.

It’s been a long time since I read the book; remind me what you mean?

It’s been years for me too so I don’t have exact quotes to support the general feel of condescension.  One thing highlighted in reviews is her surprise that no one figured out she was middle class writer doing research and that they didn’t care even when she told them.

The not listening thing is hard because it’s mostly about what she didn’t do.  In Scratch Beginnings, which is a new grad doing the same thing, you hear a lot of stories about how he asked the people in his homeless shelter what to do, and then did it.  There are zero of those stories in Nickel and Dimed.  At one point she breaks her rules and calls a doctor friend because she has a horrible rash, without ever asking a co-worker what they would do if they got a horrible rash.  

The starkest example is probably when her housing costs strictly exceed her daily income, and she turns down an offer of housing from a friend.  Crashing with friends is what an actual poor person in that situation would have done.

The only thing I remember about Nickel and Dimed was that she started out by living in a hotel, which I don’t think any actual poor people do. I kept wondering how she expected to earn more money than she spent on housing when she lived in a hotel.

I’ve known poor people who lived in hotels (more often motels) for a while. Some of them couldn’t afford the security deposit/first month’s rent for an apartment. Others didn’t have the kind of credit history or bank affiliation that would convince a landlord to rent to them, or couldn’t figure out the system enough to make it happen. Others got kicked out of somewhere for some reason or another and stayed in hotels until they could find somewhere else - which can be really hard if you don’t have a car and so have to live within walking/bus distance of wherever you need to be.

serinemolecule Source: slatestarscratchpad

Anonymous asked:

If residency is an apprenticeship, and the last two years of medical school are just paying to hang around some people, would you support a pilot program to see how "let's just give people more residency/apprenticeship time and no traditional medical school" would turn out?

The problem is that we don’t want to give people who know literally nothing about medicine any important patient care responsibilities. And if they’re not going to be doing real work, hospitals don’t want to pay them a salary or use their own resources training them. There’s already a doctor shortage partly because of how hard it is to get hospitals to take residents.

Anonymous

Anonymous asked:

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and am delirious, vaguely scared, like the start of a panic attack, see a bunch of colors and have trouble working my hands, but can still move. Is partial sleep paralysis a thing?

I don’t know, but people can have panic attacks in their sleep. And some people with sleep apnea who stop breathing in their sleep will wake up confused and in a panic.

Anonymous