mentalisttraceur-reactions - Tumblr blog

[mentalisttraceur-reactions]

HELPPPPP

[mentalisttraceur-reactions]

Part of this scene really strikes a chord with me:

"Are you afraid of anything? No. Are you the toughest bastard you know? Yeah. You're strong... Stronger than I ever was."

And to a lesser extent

"Lenny could never have done that".

As a physically abused son who ended the abuse with his own strength... to me, few things can sound as good, from a physically abusive dad.

It validates and acknowledges the pieces of identify and self-image which were (and to large extent still are) most crucial for my endurance, self-worth, and feelings of safety/security.

After all, that's why I survive. That's why I feel good about myself despite the monstrous implication permeating my childhood that my worth was however bad it needed to be deserve how I was treated. That's why I am able to press on in life, despite seeing just cause for fear all around us better than most can.

It hits the nigh unremovable deep crave for parental pride, with one of the only approvals that I didn't have to learn to not value.

It comes about as close as possible to "maybe, just maybe, it was worth it, it was okay that this was done to me, despite how not okay it was, because nothing better could've forged me."

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Ok so my kid had an ear infection, right? As kids often do.

The doctor scraped out a bit of earwax to have a better look inside.

I was sent a bill for $200 PER EAR for this 5 second procedure which I did not give permission for them to do.

That was key- they did not ASK me if they could do this "procedure". And, as I OWN a medical practice (it's me. The medical practice is me, sitting in my house on video calls) I knew to call them when this bill came in to be like "You did not obtain informed consent for this procedure, and it was not en emergency procedure. You had full ability to gain my consent and didn't. I'm not paying."

And the massive hospital who owned the bill said "yuh-huh you do have to pay."

And I said "I own a practice. I know these laws. I do not owe you money for this."

And they conducted an "internal review" and SURPRISE! Decided I totally owed them money and they had never done anything wrong ever.

And so I called my state's Attorney General office, and explained the situation because, as I mentioned, I know the law. The AG got in touch within a couple days to say they were taking the case and would send the massive hospital conglomerate a knock it off, guys letter.

Lo and Behold, today I have a letter where said hospital graciously has agreed to forfeit the payment.

"How not to get screwed over by companies" should be part of civics class.

Know your rights and know who to call when they're infringed on. This whole process cost me $0 and honestly less effort than I would have expected.

May this knowledge find its way to someone else who can use it.

[mentalisttraceur-reactions]

This a a reminder to not fall victim to the sunk-cost fallacy. Just because you invested time and energy into something, does not mean you should indefinitely waste more time and energy on it, if you decide it’s not what you want anymore. This goes for anything, from books, to relationships, to jobs, to hobbies, etc.

If it’s not serving you anymore, move on.

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Id like to propose we invent a paper document u can have where it states that youve had a prescription for so many years, that u can just have it. Walk into any pharmacy. 200 miles from home. Nobody has ever heard of you. Show paper. Get prescription. For free. A prescription diploma. You put in so many years on this prescription, you graduate from having to ask for it. Life could be so perfect.

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Absolutely. Being affected intrinsically gives you an inalienable right to have a say.

An ideal governance mechanism needs to have the capability to implement that and to never lose it.

This is a pretty significant value that drove my design of decision shares.

i think they should allow everyone in the world to vote in american elections

[mentalisttraceur-reactions]

Check out this lady's beautiful weird dress

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Yes->No->Why? should have a selfishness option. Something like "your health risk matters less than my inconvenience" -> "honest asshole". At this level of granularity and charitability, that's a more accurate match for myself than any of these other options.

But if we want to diagnose and engineer solutions, rather than just putting more social judgement force on the sisyphian boulder of collective behavior:

There should also be a "not enough people will wear them" answer. (To lump this under "peer pressure" is failing to understand people, possibly due to willful clinging to enjoyable uncharitability. And it's different from "masks don't work" because it's a claim about conditionality of masks working.)

For some people, I suspect a lot of people, mask wearing simply has a high participation threshold for joining. They'd be more happy, or at least willing, to wear masks when enough people are wearing them that it feels fair, or feels like it will be effective. They're not willing to take on that extra personal cost when it seems like it won't move the needle on disease mitigation (including by encouraging more mask wearing).

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I really like how peaceful and cozy this is. Reminds me a lot of how I like to spend time in the rain - sit/lay just out of the rain, outside or right by an open window/door. Watch+hear+smell it, feel the cool humidity or the very edges of spray on my skin.

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also if we're being real for a second, some of the men (and people in general) you need to keep the closest eye on in your life are ones who vocally attempt to distance themselves from their capacity for violence by identifying it as a function of porn or any other ~cultural degeneracy~ which they so righteously and graciously choose to abstain from

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so matt's absolutely giving scorched earth orders behind the scenes right. Not only are publically visible transfems dropping like flies, but every third person who musters up the audacity to comment negatively on Staff or Matt about this vanishes fucking instantly

[mentalisttraceur-reactions]

Tumblr because my logo works better as a square.

Baldness is for nerds this is a battle to the death. If you have the same character/pfp on both platforms you have to decide which is the superior.

You have to explain your reasoning in the reblogs too

[mentalisttraceur-reactions]

One of the great virtues, in my opinion, is the ability and willingness to, like, drop kayfabe and just present your actual considered empirical and ethical views on something, seperate from any political or social "bit" that you feel the need to do about it as a public-facing individual. And keeping any "bit" that you do within bounds of some reasonable degree of honesty, even if you naturally find yourself exaggerating or being really pushy or whatever about a particular issue. I try pretty hard to be like this myself (although I'm obviously not perfect)—to be amenable to "okay but seriously, do you really think X" type questions, to shed heavy rhetoric in serious conversation among friends even if they strongly disagree with me, etc.

Nothing makes me feel crazier than when it seems like someone just won't "drop the bit" and let me talk to the real person underneath, even on a relatively benign subject or in demonstrably safe circumstances. I understand that this is a weird preference of mine and that most people can reconstruct a suitable model of the "real" person from heavily distorted outputs without ever being so gauche as to speak plainly. But it just drives me up a wall, and I do my best to surround myself with people who, perhaps even to a fault, are willing to "break character".

(I do think it's an epistemically useful trait, but insofar as it to some extent hinders "getting high on your own supply" that can still be counterproductive for a lot of practical purposes. So I recognize that this is all to some extent quixotic)

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In my case, unironically true.

Honestly might be more true than "hurt people hurt people", even though it's a strict subset, because I think the narrowing is removing a lot more counterexamples than examples.

I feel like the causal link is very strong from being raised with one or more people hitting you and developing emotions that cause you to hit people.

But maybe I'm just doing same-mind bias here. I do seem to have a temperment unusually suited for metabolizing being hit into wanting to hit.

there's that saying "hurt people hurt people", right, kind of a middlebrow moodboard aphorism, and clearly a lot of its appeal lies in its verbal structure. you can't do this with most words, obviously. but you can do it with any transitive verb for which the third-person plural present indicative is the same as the past participle. so we can come up with some others in the same vein and then maybe let them loose and see if any of them do big enough numbers to put on a T-shirt:

Upset people upset people

Hit people hit people

Cut people cut people

Put people put people

Typecast people typecast people

Spread people spread people

Wet people wet people

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I think one dimension of "enlightenment" or whatever is when finding yourself in the last panel excites you as novel opportunity more than it scares you.

Okay, maybe you died, maybe you're hallucinating, maybe reality is unraveling... So?

You figured out one reality when you were just a baby. You'll figure this one out too.

Go play with the shapes.

[mentalisttraceur-reactions]

TL;DR:

yes noise possible in individual measurements;

larger sample size one of best solutions;

many of the other best methods for filtering out noise in measurements, if calibrated welll for live human brains, could still be defeated by swapping in a dead fish brain.

one of the best academic paper titles

[mentalisttraceur-reactions]

Yes @ much of that, but that's not the point.

I'm not even convinced this was a false positive in measurement or BOLD imagining. A dead salmon will absolutely have oxygen changes as its cells finish dying and aerobic bacteria do their thing.

(Especially if the salmon was very fresh, or cooled soon after death and then allowed to reach ambient temperature before/during the experiment.)

So maybe that particular voxel wasn't noise, maybe it was actually measuring a spot where that one (1) salmon had oxygen still going down at that time. Then the only issue is the inevitable result of wrongly trying to fit a real measured change to an independent variable.

So then beyond that, the point is that for any possible method designed to find

differences in raw MRI readings

from living human brains

across situations rightly expected/known to cause a difference

(including, crucially, any conceivable/hypothetical methods that actually reliably produce correct results, including accounting for noise in individual measurements), if you give that method MRI readings from a dead fish, you might get an output which finds some difference to point at.

So that is not sufficient, in itself, to show that those methods are always producing garbage results when given MRI readings from something that behaves in the ways the relevant algorithms were designed to handle.

You could have a method with a stellar track record at reliably producing true results, very few false positives when used as intended - and it would still produce false positives when given input it wasn't designed to handle.

Just one thing to consider: live human brains have a whole lot going on, in different areas, at different levels of intensity, so it would be eminently reasonable for an fMRI implementation to only show differences relative to some average noise floor. Of course, since each brain is different, it would have to figure out the noise floor anew for each pair/series of scans being diffed. So somewhere in the software stack of your MRI machine or your fMRI algorithms, some piece of code is probably automatically adjusting sensitivity or what's considered "significant", for each thing being measured - like a camera adjusting the brightness automatically. But a dead brain is probably a lot less active, and thus has a much lower noise floor, and thus small random variations would be enough for statistical significance. So we can easily imagine a method that would be really good at avoiding false positives in a highly active brain, yet predictably tend to produce false positives with a dead/low-activity brain. Now, maybe the paper itself addresses this. But like I said, what's described above doesn't. And this is just one of several necessary components for this to cast doubt on the overall viability of fMRI to infer changes in live human brain activity.

Another quick elaboration: fMRI trying to find diffs between two or more scans strikes me as an expectation maximization problem, where we assume that there's one latent boolean variable which has changed: that the subject has begun or stopped doing a specific task with their brain. So if you expect one boolean latent variable and try to maximize that expectation over a dataset where there's zero latent variables (because the brain is dead and isn't doing shit), what happens? It produces a false positive, and yet expectation maximization works correctly when the assumptions are correct.

So if application to brain activity inference is truly beyond the scope of the paper, then the paper says next to nothing, To discredit any work claiming to use fMRI for brain activity inference, to show any brain activity studies as shoddy, it absolutely has to show that the dead fish result is somehow representative of a false result when trying to infer brain activity. In itself, the dead fish is just a smaller, reproducible test case of how you can get false positives, but that alone doesn't tell you if those same false positives would've made it through to the final result given a live human brain, or when analyzing findings from multiple brains (vs, say, being under the noise floor, or failing to dominate expectation maximization, or [...]).

Finally, the most important part:

Sample size is approximately always one of the most relevant things in the picture. But I would say it is especially relevant here - even the most relevant thing, precisely because of possible noise in individual readings!

A false positive from one dead salmon doesn't really matter if your methods would rule it out as noise as soon you have two or more salmon. That's why it's standard good study of almost anything is to look for commonalities and differences between the different samples. That's literally the most significant part of separating real trends from noise. That's how you start to figure out which of the differences you picked up are actually related to what you're testing vs coincidence. For fMRI, oxygen depletion differences only matter if they are consistent across multiple brains doing the same task.

You know, I literally assumed in good faith that this dead fish study was done with multiple dead salmon. Like, at least a dozen. Because that's what it would've taken for it to say something actually interesting. And then while writing this post I find out it was done with one salmon!? One!?

The way @derinthescarletpescatarian was talking this study up, I thought it must've used enough dead fish to at least make a strong case for sample sizes larger than typical, leaving only the relatively subtler matter of whether dead fish was sufficiently different to bypass methods that might already be in use to reduce false positives with live humans.

(And when I originally reblogged in agreement, iirc I was even imagining it as a gigchad steelman paper with some robust logical proof showing how in fact they weren't sufficiently different, like "first we show that currently popular methods would produce false results like this for any set of fMRI scans which satisfies the following properties: [...]", "next we show that fMRI scans of live human brains satisfy these properties ", etc.)

But now it sounds like we were just a second dead salmon short of this study clarifying itself as an extremely boring nothingburger: the same voxels just wouldn't have shown up as changing in both fish, and the standard methods of looking for consistencies across multiple fMRI diffs would've filtered out the one voxel that lit up in the first salmon.

(Maybe I'm being too harsh though. I find it really hard to believe that circa this paper, people really were publishing peer-reviewed papers on brain activity with sample size =1; that any serious scientist in the field believed that looking at just one brain was enough for any novel conclusion. But if they were, then clearly an fMRI study with precisely one dead salmon was exactly what we needed.)

one of the best academic paper titles