Grunya Sukhareva was studying (and published about, including in English) what we would now consider Autism in the 1920s. Perhaps it is because she was a woman, or because she was a Soviet, but histories often gives this credit to Leo Kanner or partial credit to Hans Asperger. I understand this is an obituary, but it does no one a service to indicate Donald Triplett was the first person to be treated for Autism.
Indeed, one might even say the description on wikipedia clearly indicates he fared far better than many kids that did get treatment, even though they had much less symptoms than this guy.
There is a subtle but critical distinction in medicine between describing a cluster of symptoms and diagnosing a new condition. AIUI Sukhareva did the former and Kanner (also citing Sukhareva in later publications) the latter.
In particular, I don't think anyone is claiming
> the first person to be treated for Autism.
(Which depending on how you approach the question must either have been thousands of years before this, or could not happen until after Kanner proposed its existence). Rather the article is quite explicit,
Society takes the child-incidents more seriously because of how much more vulnerable children are to predators and how much trauma a predator can inflict. We take a snip it in the bud approach with anyone involved in these crimes. I agree that what you are talking about is terrible, and if law enforcement had unlimited resources we would stop all of that activity too.
Being able to find answers to commonly asked questions instead of making demands on people's time by asking is a huge part of maturity. It's very common for Discord servers to have a self-serve faq/resources channel. It's rude to ask questions that can be answered there.
In this situation I find the best thing to do is to link to the resource that answers the question. A 'teach how to fish' approach. If a question is often asked that isn't answered in documentation then I enhance the documentation.
Sure, but
1) they're kids. Of course they're immature (and of course there will be kids. It's a community built around video games).
2) asking questions is just kind of how Discord works. Knowledge isn't stored and organized like on old-school forums or Reddit. Discord is a tool where people are expected to be available for almost real-time discussion. I personally struggle with that format, and tend to only use Discord as a messaging app for small groups of friends. I've tried joining Discord servers organized around a topic with larger groups of people, and it just doesn't seem to work for my brain, so I leave.
There are probably a half dozen platforms that we could declare 'good enough' and stop all major R&D in. Maybe some changes to the interior/self driving systems as those are being researched for EVs anyway. Maybe some minor tweaks to the internals as issues are identified at scale. The design and production is good today, and it wouldn't be a major loss if they represent the height of consumer ICE while EVs take over.
A large reason why car manufactures update model lines is to comply with updating emissions, efficiency, and safety regulations. This is the environmental condition that forces major model refreshes.
New construction homes are almost universally Value of Land + Cost to build structure + ~10%. The supply/demand aspect of new construction cost only factor into the value of the land, and how increased demand can cause increased labor/material costs.
It's not like real estate developers pull numbers out of a hat to determine how much to charge. Most areas will have several major developers in direct competition to attract new home buyers, and if their costs every get out of hand people will just start buying land and managing the build themselves.
What would you advocate to lower the cost of housing by 50%?
Personally I suspect the land cost is one huge part of why people don't build their own homes today. Today's version of the sears catalog home would be like "2 dozen people buy a small plot of land together in/near the city and build a condominium to share the land in a cost-effective way". But while random people can build a basic pre-fab home with lots of determination, they probably can't build a 5-over-1.
I ride motorcycles, bicycles, and more recently e-bikes. The statistics for injury/fatality are worse than cars. However there's a few things you can do to significantly decrease risk of injury and the severity of the injury. The top three things are
1. Do not combine alcohol with the activity. A disproportionate ratio of fatalities involve the operator having some alcohol in the blood stream. I'll throw things like "being hydrated" and "not tired" into this bullet.
2. Using the correct safety gear. The amount of gear I wear is well above the minimum legal requirements. Specifically the DOT helmet certification is a joke compared to every other motorcycle helmet certification on the market.
3. Rider training. You get significant insurance deductions for taking a course every 2 years. That's because staying fresh on your training actually has a huge impact on accident likelihood.
Someone who hates how their father behaved and treated them, and put their soul into being better as a human being would still fit that "resistance" theme. That resistance could totally manifest in them not engaging in aggressive or corrosive behavior toward other men, if that's part of what they hated in their father.
> Following a double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-group design, we demonstrated that psilocybin (0.17 mg/kg) induced a time- and construct-related differentiation of effects on creative thinking.
Can we please stop pretending that double-blind is remotely an option for psychedelic research. The purpose of subject blinding is that the subject will not know if they received the treatment so that both groups have equal placebo effect. Psilocybin is active in such a way that it is obvious to the subject if they received placebo or the treatment.
I'd really like to see a psilocybin study where they give one group psilocybin, give another group an active placebo, and ask them if they think they are in the psilocybin group or active placebo group. I imagine people guess correctly >90% of the time.
It's possible to do good medical science without double-blind. Pretending that you are doing double-blind when you actually are not just generates doubts in the methodology.
I've seen a talk by an MDMA researcher, who reported that there were people in her studies that swore they'd taken MDMA, had tear-filled therapeutic breakthroughs, only to later find out they'd only taken the placebo.
I've noticed the skeptics here like to raise this argument on every article related to psychedelic research. As if they've found a gaping hole that somehow casts "doubts" on the methodology of decades worth of clinical trials.
Unfortunately this line of thinking doesn't hold up to scrutiny, and completely misses the forest for the trees. Mainly because the only implied alternative is to not blind subjects at all! How exactly would that reduce bias or otherwise improve the clinical trial design...?
> I imagine people guess correctly >90% of the time.
Yes in some cases you're right. Here's a paper from last year that does exactly what you asked [0]. They note that "Placebo could be distinguished well from active substance and correctly identified in 96% of the sessions." The placebos were ethanol and mannitol, for LSD and Psilocybin respectively.
The important takeaway is that subjects still had to guess. They didn't know their group assignment with certainty. And that is key to reducing bias.
I'd really like to see someone articulate a coherent alternative to subject blinding in psychedelic research.
Yours is my favorite comment, and this type of thinking is why I bother to raise this question from time to time. I don't think this invalidates the entire line of research, but I do think it's less than fully transparent to present psychedelic research as if it were double-blind. I imagine the guess rate for a drug like atorvastatin (Liptor) is much closer to 50%. This false double-blind isn't unique to psychedelic research either. I think it's a wider fault of medical science to treat double-blind as a ritualistic silver bullet that controls for placebo instead of considering if it's applicable to all experiment designs.
Here are two ideas that I think are better than subject blinding for psychedelic research. I think the first one is the preferred method, but I think the second option is still better than using a placebo group or active placebo group.
* Have one group receive an established treatment and another group receive the psychedelic treatment. For psychedelic assisted therapy the comparison could be traditional therapies. I'm sure there are methods in the literature that promote increased creativity in subjects that could be used for this study.
* Double the treatment group. If you don't need to divide the subjects into multiple groups then you can put more subjects into the treatment group.
I don’t see how double blind is impossible here. Perhaps another drug that also gives you a high, on a base that has never taken any recreational drugs, could be viable?
I’m curious how the medical community measures other interventions with a similar issue (e.g. talk therapy, physical therapy, surgery, etc…). How do they show efficacy when it’s obvious the person is knowingly receiving treatment >90% of the time.
If there is an acceptable measure, why are psychedelics held to a different standard?
> Psilocybin is active in such a way that it is obvious to the subject if they received placebo or the treatment.
Not really true. "Medicinal doses" are typically a gram or less, unless a heroic dose (>3g) is somehow medicinal now. Under a gram the effects are pretty subtle with strains like Golden Teachers. If they're using Albino Penis Envy's then the effects could be a bit more pronounced, but really only to a regular psilocybin user. You could easily induce the yawning and giggliness via other drugs.
