All of this is true. Not just true, but verifiably true. We all lived through it as well.
Let me say that again, you (the reader) saw these things with your own eyes, you heard these things with your own ears, not just for a couple days but for more than a year.
You know this is true.
And yet, why would some people choose to ignore that it happened?
To me, this is/was an even greater eye-opener than the disease or the vaccine itself.
I don't blame anyone for not trusting the government. Anyone who's read (or lived) history and with a rational mind would scrutinize every single thing coming from them, particularly if their health is involved.
Another thing that doesn't help, but this is almost exclusively a memerican problem, is that people enjoy polarizing these issues to their absolute extremes. Things are either vantablack or HDR-white. And if you happen to be on the other end "you should die or go to prison".
You don't have to trust the government. There are plenty of institutions that can explain the value of vaccinations. If you only distrust your own government, just look at the recommendations in other countries.
That's the problem, though. It is those other countries that the pro-nationalist movement, where a lot of this stems from, don't trust. Things like worldwide consensus on the need for vaccinations are seen as an attempt to subvert their own nation.
So after all this scrutinizing, they come to the conclusion vaccines don't work? Like, we the vaccine experts doing web searches and trusting social media posts from unknowns? Not the people that actually do work with it like scientists? Super interesting conclusion.
Of course, we're not talking about experimental vaccines in labs. I think it's pretty clear everyone here is talking about FDA-approved vaccines that reach the population. The fact you want to argue this shows a severe lack of reading comprehension.
- Synesthesia is not rare. You probably know someone that has synesthesia, even they haven't mentioned it.
- There are many forms of synesthesia. Many documented forms that we know of, and very probably a bunch we haven't documented yet.
- There are cases of tasks where we are able to measure enhanced performance of that task by synesthetes. (2)
- While some synesthetes do have a single form of synesthesia, it is common for synesthetes to experience multiple forms. We've found cluster groups where subjects with a given form are more likely to have another form within the same cluster.
From the other writings on the OP's site, we can see that they report to have at least two forms of Colored Sequence Synesthesia: Grapheme -> Color, and Day of the Week -> Color.
Their report of their experience in the linked article sounds like possibly Shape -> Motion. This is a form they could have, and it's plausible that someone already known to be a multiple synesthete might also experience this.
It is also plausible that someone with a Shape -> X type of synesthesia would be able use that to spot the odd shape out faster than others.
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(1) I maintained the online synesthesia battery for a number of years while working in the Eagleman Neuroscience Lab at Baylor College of Medicine
(2) Some of these are ones that allowed us to study synesthesia on a larger scale by testing online! Among those, one particularly notable form of test is Stroop Interference. Genuine synesthetes are able to respond much faster and more accurately, and we get a good clear separation between them and controls.
Back when I was handling it, we were still using Flash for most of the interactive tests, because that was how you had to do it when it was first built circa 2007. Obviously those would have had to be redone in HTML5 since then to keep it working on modern browsers.
"Smaht" people continuously parrot things they read elsewhere, usually in a contrarian way, to assert themselves in a futile and shallow way.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with getting one CT at a specific point in your life to right a disease which, as TFA states, has a 25% incidence rate.
The smaht ones will now point me to that study of 1-5% of cancers being linked to CT scans. Yeah, sure, but those are not from people who got one-two in their lives.
A week ago I went to a launch party for a product that's supposed to "revolutionize design" (a web app w/ an OAI prompt).
No demo, only like two pictures of the actual product. Founder spent like half an hour giving a speech about the future, etc...
"All of you here will get access to it in a couple weeks."
Couple weeks go by ... I "get access". It's a .dmg, 1) What, I open it, it's not even an app, it's an installer ..., I install it, the app opens up and it's a giant red button that takes you to a website to create an account ...
I wouldn't say that, but it is a pretty annoying community, and one that I'm happy to leave behind, in favor of LLMs.
I think you may be right about the "doubling down." The Meta discussions seemed to get a lot nastier, as time went on. Might have something to do with centrists being driven out by zealots. Happens all the time, especially in communities in crisis.
One of the many things I don't like about C++ is that auto isn't type inference but instead C++ has type "deduction" which is a little different, in some cases a type will be "deduced" even though what you wrote was ambiguous and you may have wanted a different type.
Society tends to transfer skills/talent/achievement/luck in one field and assume those attributes hold good in all fields because they were successful in one area, even if there is no justification, so their beliefs tend to carry lot more weight and influence than the average joe and hold the field back.
Talented people when sidetracked may no longer be as effective contributors, for example Einstein's dogmatic beliefs in aspects of quantum mechanics or similar other topics likely partially contributed to his diminished contributions in later part of his life.
Ideally the best case is balance between being courageous to hold any kind of belief strongly even if its not conventional wisdom, but also at the same be willing to change in the face of strong evidence.
What exactly is wild about the 30 odd years of his later life that he spent trying to build a unified field theory ? The rest of the physics community at the time(and even largely now) did not share his ideas, maybe grand unified theory is possible maybe not, but getting stuck with it without a lot of progress did happen?
I would have thought of all examples this would be less controversial, it had nothing to do with politics or ideology or religion, it was an entirely technical belief, he felt chasing.
In an alternative reality he may have switched to another area of study after hitting dead ends with unified theory with better results.
It is not for us to say or expect what luminaries do, it is privilege for us they do share anything at all, but it is not also true we do lose a bit when such brilliant minds do get sidetracked ?
> is wild about the 30 odd years of his later life
There's also the extremely important EPR paper from 1935, twenty years before his death. He certainly didn't stop producing useful science just because he felt it was a good idea to explore ideas that didn't work out.
I only said he became far less productive for his level of talent not that he completely stopped contributing.
I kept away from political examples as it inevitably gets contentious[1]
I was just trying to highlight the challenge that talented would have on one hand have strong faith in their intuition at the same time be able to change their mind when presented with overwhelming evidence.
How do you define socialism? I see ppl throw around this term without ever defining it. They probably mean a soviet style central government , which of course is terrible.
Einstein was merely talking about looking after your people. Carl Sagan as well. The government is there to ensure the system is running healthy and enables its citizen to thrive and prosper. But instead we have a system that is extractive and funnels resources and power to the top.
Einstein was basically warning about what is happening now. We are the richest country in the world yet we let ppl die or starve if they don’t have money.
Our system does not follow capitalism the way it was defined. It’s been totally corrupted by the Epstein class and if people don’t push back against this corruption then we are straight to a future as depicted in Elyisium.
It seems clear he understood it was a tricky problem, and writing at the time many of the potential problems were not apparent:
"Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?"
That's why it still persists.
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