samhw

Quite. Psychiatry loves to talk about brain scans and neuroanatomy, but until it dares to actually use them for diagnosis, I think it should be regarded as window dressing.

And you should always read these studies with a careful eye to whether the ADHD subjects are medicated. Often the studies literally measure the effect of the medication and nothing else. (It's a cruel irony for schizophrenics, who are put on antipsychotics that shrivel the cerebral cortex, only to find their shrivelled cerebral cortex brandished as evidence of their supposed dysfunction.)

Also, note that fMRI does not and cannot indicate structural abnormalities in the brain. It just measures current brain activity, as revealed by the flow of magnetically-charged oxygenated blood through the brain. It tells us these people's brains are currently behaving differently from control subjects' brains. Which, it seems to me, is stating the bleeding obvious.

The law locks up the man or woman,

Who steals the goose from off the common,

But leaves the greater villain loose,

Who steals the common from off the goose

The law demands that we atone,

When we take things we do not own,

But leaves the lords and ladies fine,

Who take things that are yours and mine

The poor and wretched don't escape,

If they conspire the law to break,

This must be so but they endure,

Those who conspire to make the law

The law locks up the man or woman,

Who steals the goose from off the common,

And geese will still a common lack,

Till they go and steal it back

- 17th century English folk poem, post Enclosure Acts

What do you mean by 'cancel', outside the context of blacklisting entertainers? How does that apply to a CEO? Presumably anyone considering employing or funding him is entitled (and likely competent) to read the facts and others' thoughts about them.

I think the point about 'multiple accusers' is fair. People will come out of the woodwork, especially when there's money at stake (from the press or from legal action). Michael Jackson is a good example: undoubtedly he did rape some of those kids, but not all of them. Still, I don't see why this provides an argument against forming an opinion, rather than one for forming opinions judiciously.

Also, look up Jesse Washington if you want to understand what lynching means.

So what if it’s tremendous[ly] depressing? It’s depressing that basically no animal dies of old age in the wild. It’s still the reality.

Your comment doesn’t really seem to be trying to substantiate your claim, so much as it’s trying to paint a picture of how depressing his description of reality is. From that, I’m pretty confident you’re trying to define some ideal definition of love – which, if he’s correct, would not be ‘wrong’ but would simply not be common in the real world – while he’s trying to factually describe the motivations for human relationships in the real world.

(I’m not sure I quite agree with his gloomy picture, but I don’t think you are even coming at it with the same intent.)

It's not just the strict denotative meaning. It's also the valence and emphasis of the statement. It doesn't concentrate the mind on "what if it disappears?", but on "how likely is it to disappear?", to which the (supposed; bullshit) answer is 'not likely'. Someone might - on rational analysis - know what it means, and still come away with a better impression than if they said it outright.

Yeah, a genius heroin addict friend of mine drew a molecular structure for a new opioid[0] on the back of a napkin and sent it off to a synthetic chemist in China to be synthesised. To my infinite horror I actually tried a dose of what came back, at the same time as he took his dose, and in the recommended (high!) dosage of what I think was a decent chunk of a gramme. Luckily it worked. I can well see how someone could have the confidence to try something as mild as ibuprofen.

[0] Or pseudo-opioid, I'm not sure. He's a biologist and I'm not a natural scientist at all. All I recall is that it was a positive allosteric modulator of the mu opioid receptor, which, by and large, may as well be Greek to me.

The Wikipedia page is a bit better in giving the actual details in which the story is incorrect, and without the extended editorialising (though the final sentence is quite nightmarish even in its blankly factual wording):

> Because of the layout of the complex and the fact that the attacks took place in different locations, no witness saw the entire sequence of events. Investigation by police and prosecutors showed that approximately a dozen individuals had heard or seen portions of the attack, though none saw or was aware of the entire incident.[67] Only one witness, Joseph Fink, was aware Genovese was stabbed in the first attack, and only Karl Ross was aware of it in the second attack. Many were entirely unaware that an assault or homicide had taken place; some thought what they saw or heard was a domestic quarrel, a drunken brawl or a group of friends leaving the bar when Moseley first approached Genovese.[8] After the initial attack punctured her lungs, leading to her eventual death from asphyxiation, it is unlikely that Genovese was able to scream at any volume.[68]

And some slightly overlapping details in an article from which it quotes:

> The article grossly exaggerated the number of witnesses and what they had perceived. None saw the attack in its entirety. Only a few had glimpsed parts of it, or recognized the cries for help. Many thought they had heard lovers or drunks quarreling. There were two attacks, not three. And afterward, two people did call the police. A 70-year-old woman ventured out and cradled the dying victim in her arms until they arrived. Ms. Genovese died on the way to a hospital.

I mean, a friend of mine was an escort, and certainly ended up in entanglements like that. At the end of the day you are two human beings. Whatever your professional situation, these things are inexorable.

Well, this is bad news for the existence of infosec professionals...

What do you mean ‘a civil law issue and not a common law issue’? The UK’s civil laws[0] are very largely composed of common law; the two concepts are orthogonal, not opposites, and both or one or neither can easily be true at once.

A common law issue could be either civil or criminal and says nothing about whether it’s the police’s domain (which obviously would entail its being criminal law).

[0] In the only one of two ways that you could possibly be using the word ‘civil’ in this context, given we don’t have a civil law legal tradition.

Yes. They can delete it, they can create it, they can mutate it. That’s how it works when you send information about yourself to somebody else for them to store on their hard drives. This is true utterly irrespective of whether they in fact delete it (or do any other of those things).