Interesting thought piece on the importance of interconnection and what is lost when the connections are obscured. I just wish more people in charge of creating AI were spending more time thinking about what we lose in this compression. Thanks for the link, I appreciated the read.

At what point does indirectly become directly? I think what’s most important here is intent - this man was clearly knowledgeable enough to know he was causing harm and still chose to do so in order to increase shareholder profit. There is malice here no matter how you slice it.

It didn’t surprise me that these passed, given the recent passage of a sweeping justice reform where cop oversight was removed and they were authorized to use drones and received a bunch of funding. But I am quite sad that it finally did get overturned - I saw it on nearly every ballot for the last several years; the Republicans were desperate to overturn it. I really hated that every time they wanted to tie the removal of theft and the removal of drug charges at the same time. Now we’re back to a state where many decriminalized drugs are criminal again, calling into question weird conflicts such as the sale of certain mushrooms in Oakland being legal but possession no longer.

I’m not about to try and solicit the hatman are you crazy? the hatman will show up if the hatman wants to

hatman is such a chill dude, just be sure to pay your debts

Marking NSFW or placing CW: in the title are both perfectly acceptable. We’re likely not going to remove anything if you forget to do either, this is mostly a post about being nice and accommodating where we can 💜

And thank you for engaging in good faith! Appreciate you 💜

As an aside I have a degree in neurobiology and work in health care and would be happy to discuss things with you if you ever have questions.

Yes, antidepressants are not considered addictive by the same big pharma companies who told us that Oxycodone was not totally fine.

No, I’m talking about how researchers, who do not have conflicts of interest, have to say about these drugs.

What is the difference between a physical dependence and addiction?

Googling this will give you plenty of pages drawing the distinction between the two. For example, here’s a webmd article on the difference. In short, it’s meaningful to draw clear distinctions and definitions around where an urge is coming from. Withdrawing from a substance does not necessarily mean you desire the substance. Taking the substance to avoid withdrawal symptoms might happen because you wish to avoid the negative symptoms, and treating the symptoms could be enough to get someone off the substance causing problems. Addiction, on the other hand, is characterized by a strong desire to continue drug use despite the ways in which it is negatively affecting one’s life. It is possible for addiction and physical dependence to have overlap (and for many drugs this is common) but they are mutually exclusive - one does not necessarily imply the other and the presence of one does not mean there is the presence of the other.

If they aren’t addictive, but cause the same withdrawal symptoms which result from addiction, in some cases severely, then what should we call them?

While withdrawal symptoms can vary with the nature of addiction, one does not need to be addicted to experience withdrawal symptoms. Many common, non-addictive chemicals have withdrawal symptoms. Nearly every drug has some kind of withdrawal symptoms. Withdrawal symptoms are the direct biological consequences of a human changing their equilibrium with the addition of or removal of an exogenous substance or the regular use of said substance and the long-term biological changes it can have on one’s body.

At a high level, I would highly suggest you educating yourself on drug dependence and recovery as well as the psychology of addiction. These are high level basic concepts which are taught to you in any human-centered biology and psychology coursework.

I’m removing this because Sabine has repeatedly been lambasted by the media for junk science, and because she’s a known transphobe.

Antidepressants are highly addictive and it doesn’t get talked about

SSRIs are not addictive and almost no antidepressants have addictive qualities. Many can cause withdrawal symptoms, which is very different from addiction, and a few select agents have been misused in contexts where access to drugs are low and quality of life are low, such as prison, but this kind of use needs to be considered in context, as these individuals are desperate for escape.

Please do not spread misinformation.

It’s a big step up from literally drowning lab rats as an experiment, but we’ve got a long way to go before we get even reasonably ethical with lab animals 😔

To be fair if anyone was gonna not kill them when they’re done, this lab seems like they might be the ones.

Yes, but if a review board were to sign off on them and then someone managed to significantly hurt or damage themselves, one could theoretically apply some of the blame to the review board for not doing their job to ensure that a study was safe. The whole idea of having ethics as a part of the review board was born of some of the studies they used to sign off on that were ultimately problematic and resulted in seriously damaging some individuals, such as minorities and kids.

Been really disappointed in my states recent measure track record. NIMBYism is currently winning and we’re headed back towards a tough on crime approach that never worked. It’s really sad to see

Sorry by experimental what I meant here is something which is not ready to be tested in humans - this scientist was skipping a bunch of the necessary steps to show this is a safe thing to do (in lab grown cells first, for example) to proceed to human experimentation.

Ethically speaking, we should not be experimenting on humans, even with their explicit consent. It’s not allowed by any credible review board (such as the IRB) and in many countries you can be held legally liable for doing experiments on humans.

With that being said, there have been exceptions to this, in that in some countries we allow unproven treatments to be given to terminal patients (patients who are going to die from a condition). We also generally don’t have repercussions for folks who experiment on themselves because they are perhaps the only people capable of truly weighing the pros and cons, of not being mislead by figures of authority (although I do think there is merit of discussing this with regards to being influenced by peers), and they are the only ones for which consent cannot be misconstrued.

Bbhh hope you’ve been well friend 💜

Would love to see you start posts and discussions about what next! I’ve personally been really energized by all the activity I’ve been seeing in activism, queer, and anarchist groups since the election results were clear.

Absolutely. If someone is being openly fash, please report them so we can remove them.

But I’ve seen a lot of really heated infighting where people were treating others in bad faith. Let’s not do that.

My dude, I told you to chill and take a step back. People were reporting you for being confrontational. I flagged my comment to help you understand that this was me helping you understand how we do things on Beehaw. If you think someone reminding you of the rules, asking you to take a step back, asking you to not be confrontational and doing their best to treat your comment with good faith and providing you educational material is “rude and condescending” or that it is “talking down to others” then you’re probably not a good fit for this instance.

I’m going to time you out from our instance for 7 days. Please take that time to reflect. If you repeatedly show this behavior on our instance, you may find yourself with longer timeouts or even being removed.