Thank you for the detailed reply and insight into your thoughts on the matter. In case you were curious I’m absolutely pro medication for anyone that it helps. Drugs are a wonderful outcome of medical science and the idea that we would withhold or make drugs inaccessible to those who need them for any reason (moral, financial, etc) makes me upset. People can choose to not take drugs if they want, but that should always be a personal decision, not one forced upon others.
Apologies if anything I said minimized your experience or struggles. I’ve done my best to reread everything I’ve said and I’m struggling to see what I could do better in the future to ensure no one else feels that way when I talk with them. If you happen to have the mental energy to help explain to me what would have been a better way to interact with you, I’d really appreciate the input! But if you’re feeling drained or like I’m asking for too much from you don’t worry about it at all 😅
My understanding is that we still do not have a great consensus on how our own brains operate - how we actually think. Is that out of date?
This is an incredibly complicated question. On a very basic level, the very physics of how decisions are made differ from a binary/coded system than how brains work (you don’t have 0/1 gates, you can have things encoded inbetween 0 and 1). On a slightly higher level, concepts like working memory don’t exist in LLMs (although they’ve started to include something akin to memory), LLMs hallucinate things because they don’t have a method to fact-check, so to speak, and there’s a variety of other mental concepts that aren’t employed by LLMs. On a much higher level there’s questions of what cognition is, and again many of these concepts just cannot be applied to LLMs in their current state.
Ultimately the question of “how our brains work” can be separated into many, many different areas. A good example of this is how two people can reach different conclusions given the same pieces of information based on their background, experiences, genetics, and so forth, and this is a reflection of diversity that affects everything from the architectural (what the physical structure of the brain looks like) to conceptual (how those might interact or what knowledge might inform differing outcomes).
Been in healthcare for well over a decade now, in a variety of roles. I’m currently a data scientist working in pop health for a large and world-renown academic medical center. I think my kind of neurodivergence (honestly not even sure how to label it) works really well for both the work that I do, and the work-adjacent stuff I learned to get really good at (my brain loves connecting things, so I’m very good at mapping out an org and figuring out who to talk with, how to navigate politics, etc.) which was helpful for my career. I sometimes wonder how much of my work time is spent on things I’m actually told to do, and how much comes from things I’ve found myself in charge of or involved in because I found them interesting or they were important to me (like diversity stuff).
Hopefully a community like this where people share their experiences can help you to discover the ways in which your brain is wonderful and beautiful. I have quite a few partners with ADHD and I’ve found the following traits of theirs rather admirable:
- When hyperfocused on something, they have a drive I am envious of, being able to hone in on, complete, and do repeated tasks that I would find draining - there’s a level of perfectionism here that results in some amazing output but not something I would be able to focus on for as long or as intently as they did
- Many of these individuals have SO MUCH energy! I say this as someone who a few weeks ago put in over 10k kcal in dancing on a weekend (sundown to sunup mostly nonstop). I find it incredibly invigorating to be around some of these people because they’re just so alive
- The ability to be flexible and spontaneous is greatly appreciated. I’m someone who really likes to go with the flow and doesn’t have strong opinions on many decisions, and I find that I vibe incredibly well with people who have ADHD. The spontaneity seems to lend itself well to many of these folks being the shining star or center of a party
- I never thought of myself as a creative individual because the way creativity is typically framed by society doesn’t match with my particular kind of neurodivergence, but spending time around ADHD people who are so dang creative has helped me to both tap into my own creativity as well as to reframe what I think of as creative
Carbon health specializes in urgent but not emergency care. It’s relatively low acuity. I’ve seen gpt4 use cases like this assessed by doctors (read a recent paper on this actually) and when it’s employed in this kinda of fashion most doctors are in favor of it. They have to review it anyways, this doesn’t feel particularly different to them than reviewing what a nurse or scribe was writing up for them (or they were writing themselves) and often the LLM does a better job putting it all into plain English so it’s both patient and doctor readable.
HIPAA law holds everyone who has access to the data accountable. A single violation can be punished by up to 50k in fines and prison time. If multiple records were accessed improperly you can see absolutely outrageous fines and this has happened! It’s perhaps one of the few areas in government that is taken seriously and there’s a lot of tech jobs in security in healthcare because of it.
Hey all. I’ve introduced myself elsewhere so I’ll keep this fairly short, I have a lot of trouble with loosely defined social concepts like gender and romance. More tightly defined ones like social norms I tend to have an easier job with. I also have aphantasia and am generally just a very odd person, which is part of why I like to identify as a bunny.
As an aside, in case anyone reading this knows I saw someone offhand remark that another instance owner helped them set up hetzner volume storage and connect it to their instance (probably for pict-rs) and would very much appreciate a link to a guide or someone to talk to about connecting volume storage
I’ve always found it weird the push back against looping polyamory under the queer umbrella. Yes, there are some cis straight poly folks out there, but if you’ve ever been poly you’d realize that they too get a lot of identity erasure, face stigma from talking about having multiple partners, etc. Obviously everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but if queer is supposed to represent non cisheteronormative behavior, I think its fair to call monogamy another kind of normative behavior and celebrate diversity in human attraction and relationships.
Apologies, upon re-reading my comment I see that I didn’t really spend enough time to word this appropriately. Vapes are not harmless. There is absolutely a harm to inhaling any vaporized liquid, or just inhaling hot gas in general. We don’t know the full extent of the harms it causes, but we have a decent amount of knowledge from similar hot inhaled substances to draw some high level conclusions.
I was mostly speaking towards the harm reduction angle and how many places around the world have taken a hard stance on this - banning the substance because it is problematic. It always struck me as rather shortsighted, especially when presented with the alternative, a much more adulterated and toxic substance, still being legal. In general drug prohibitions do not work and I appreciate an article talking about the intricacies of that.
Thanks for this article, it starts out with a strong Scientific background. What I personally found interesting as I started to investigate nicotine vapes a few years back was the lack of solid evidence out there which showed any real harm from nicotine vapes and also how shoddy nearly all the science on how addictive of a substance nicotine was (almost all of it is conducted on cigarettes, failing to control for other chemicals or used outdated animal models of addiction which exaggerate addictive quality).
As we’ve seen throughout the entirety of human history, making substances illegal does not stop people from using them. I’m glad someone has taken the time to investigate this, and I hope we can learn in the future that banning substances doesn’t work. In fact, all the evidence points towards declining usage and increasing safety as drugs are legalized and controlled as they become less adulterated and the taxes can be used for purposes such as fighting addiction.
This is incredibly anecdotal story. It’s one that highlights the experience of one elder doctor and how they don’t like the expansion of a technology they don’t understand and don’t wish to adapt to. There’s countless studies and even metastudies out there about how incredibly useful and important telehealth is. Hell, there’s even reviews of metastudies which highlight how useful this technology is and how abundant we have data to prove its efficacy. The article doesn’t spend any time touching on the other side of the argument. It’s hyperfocused on this one doctor’s opinion of healthcare, and their perception of it. The one patient he focuses on, is exactly the kind of patient for which the kind of telehealth he was practicing (zoom style narrative only telehealth) is not particularly well suited. There’s a reason that there’s telehealth devices which exist to allow the use of a sphygmomanometer, stethoscope, otoscope, and other important checkup tools or are a hybrid telehealth environment where a nurse can do these and report findings to a doctor who’s present virtually.
As an aside I’m not sure what to think of the publication openmind magazine. They’re relatively new and they claim to have a focus on unbiased reporting, but they also claim to be here to address and debunk conspiracies and deceptions and controversies. If this is meant to be a think piece, the lack of addressing the obvious scientific gap between this anecdotally based thinking about a very well established scientific field makes me think twice about whether this is truly out here to be based on fact or whether this actually just a conservative mouthpiece trying to pass itself off as focused on facts.
With all of that being said, I do think there’s an important consideration to be made in healthcare, and one that’s been discussed in extreme depth in the literature - what kinds of care are better for telehealth and which are best for in-person (or at least, what tech would we need for the two to be comparable). There are absolutely important considerations on what specialties and workflows do well in the telehealth field and which ones are not well suited. Emergency and trauma care, for example, are unlikely to have any telehealth components for a long time. Dermatology and mental health, on the other hand, are extremely successful in the telehealth space and were early adopters. There’s also a specific set of skills and a way of approaching diagnosis that are fundamentally different for those people you see in person and those you see via telehealth and if you are not adequately trained on these considerations it makes a lot of sense that you might not work well in between the two mediums.
What this doesn’t show is active users, just total. For quite some time we’ve been one of the most active large instances. I don’t remember the exact timing, but we’ve held the spot of 3rd most active for some time, we just now have total users to match that.