transgenderer:

ethnianmandarin:

nuclearspaceheater:

kontextmaschine:

nuclearspaceheater:

kontextmaschine:

nuclearspaceheater:

kontextmaschine:

stoicmike:

If I was born in some other country I would be waving some other flag. – Michael Lipsey

I’m Prepared To Give My Life For This Or Any Country

Is there a name for the unstated belief that everyone exists prior to their birth in some universal, possibly atemporal pool of souls that is drawn from at random as people are born, that is implied by, among other things, any use of the work “luck” to describe the circumstance’s of one’s parentage?

The “

Veil of Ignorance

”?

No, that’s a thot experiment about explicitly imaginary circumstances.

Which is totally distinct from religio-mystical narratives that underlie ethical worldviews

Except it’s not really a narrative that most people who use it would even recognize. It’s just there, in the unstated and unconsidered ramifications of so many different lines of thot and argument, from those espoused by people who actually might believe in a literal pool of souls, to those who would explicitly deny such a thing.

there is no name for this myth – i’ve looked and tried to find it. this myth only exists in stories and lessons. that’s how u can tell it is living. some day it will be given a universally recognised name by some unborn scholar of a civilisation that doesn’t exist yet,  but not for a while yet.

i think this “myth” is often just a metaphorical way of stating the belief that all humans share some fundamental similarity, or that all people, upon birth, have fundamentally identical selves, and its only those things that happen to you in life that make you different from other people. collective metaphors are like…a thing society does sometimes

I’d never really thought about this before, but this idea seems incompatible with other widely shared ideas about how people’s personalities are formed, which is interesting (?).

Like, my initial reaction was “oh, this is a nature vs. nurture thing, because to imagine that ‘the person you are’ might have been born with different parents – and not by adoption – you have to assume genes don’t affect ‘the person you are’.”  But then I was like, wait, this is also hard to reconcile with effects of upbringing, since a person who got a different upbringing might well not be “you” either.

It’s very common these days (due to the rise of psychotherapy?) to think that the emotional reactions one has in adult life are heavily influenced by childhood relationships with family members.  (I mean, this is obviously true of people who have PTSD as a result of those relationships, but the claim is that the influence isn’t restricted to cases like that.)  This idea produces a really convincing story when applied to me and to a number of people I know, so I’d wager there’s something to it.  But then, insofar as these reactions are a nontrivial part of one’s self or personality, it doesn’t make sense to imagine that you could have been brought up in some totally different family and still been “you,” not without some messy caveats.

(If someone tells their therapist “I’m always motivated to seek these things out of human relationships, because I conspicuously didn’t get them from my parents when other kids did,” and the therapist says “well, if you had been born to other parents, you wouldn’t do this,” that … isn’t very helpful?  The conversation itself is premised on the idea that these effects happen and matter and cannot just be whisked away by invoking their “arbitrariness.”  [Well, I don’t know every school of therapy; maybe there are some that do try to do that.])

Anyway, you could straightforwardly carry all of this over to the case of patriotism, although I don’t know if it’d be equally valid there.  I.e., “if you were born in some other country you would be waving some other flag” may be like the therapist’s comment in the previous paragraph.  “What happened to me was arbitrary” does not imply “what happened to me is reversible” or “what happened to me is merely incidental to my own self-concept.”

(via transgenderer)

ithelpstodream:

“i’m socially liberal but fiscally conservative”

(via afloweroutofstone)

arjan-de-lumens:

nostalgebraist:

American medical establishment: “I can be your angle….or yuor devil”

Hmm. As far as I can tell, this seems to be a case of a particular genre of sensationalist statistics one runs into every now and then, similar to e.g.

• “200000 children are abducted each year”, where the thing people are concerned about are stranger abductions but something like 99.8% of the abductions in the statistic are non-stranger “abductions”, e.g. child visiting non-custodial parent longer than they are supposed to. ( http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2007/01/800000_missing_kids_really.html )
  
• “One school shooting per week since Sandy Hook”, where the thing people are concerned about is Columbine/VTech/Sandy Hook type shootings where someone with no apparent motive enters a school in order to shoot as many randomly-chosen kids as possible, while most of the shootings in the statistic are things like suicides, accidental discharges, targeted attacks stemming from ongiong conflicts, etc ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/06/29/has-there-been-one-school-shooting-per-week-since-sandy-hook/?utm_term=.8d9d455475d3 )

For this particular statistic, it seems to stem in part from “preventable lethal adverse event” being an overbroad metric, which seems to be basically the number of bad health outcomes that could be prevented with perfect god-like-omniscient understanding of all patents’ health situation.

One relatively common source of such events seems to be that of dosing of blood thinner drugs (e.g. warfarin), which produce “preventable lethal adverse events” in two ways:

• deadly blood clots that could have been prevented with a higher dose of the drug
• deadly bleedings that could have been prevented with a lower dose of the drug

which produces a situation where most blood-clot/bleeding-related deaths in people who take such drugs or could be candidates for such drugs can be categorized as “preventable lethal adverse events”, yet there doesn’t exist any known way to dose these drugs in a way that fully avoid both problems at once, and the “solution” of not giving such drugs at all produces considerably worse outcomes than trying to dose these drugs in a way that minimizes the sum of these two risks.

This kind of thing, where no perfect treatment is possible and the choice of how to do treatment basically becomes a statistical numbers game, seems … rather distinct from the kind of thing where people due due to blatant treatment mistakes, which is what I would expect the real worry here to be.

The actual number given above, 251404, comes from http://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2139 ; one thing to note is that BMJ, that ran that thing, has allowed some pretty detailed rebuttals to be posted as well, such as e.g. http://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2139/rr-54  (although given the nature of present-day media, the orginial article has gotten a lot more attention than any rebuttal will ever get) :

Second, the authors of the article do not provide any sort of formal methodology. Their estimate seems to rely on extrapolating preventable death rates from those reported in other studies. They then place the estimate derived from these heterogeneous studies in a “ranking” of causes of death in the US to make their argument that it is the third leading cause. These two steps are both precarious.  The four studies on which they appear to base their estimate on use different methodologies and wildly varying definitions that Makary and Daniel collapse into their vividly-titled construct of “preventable lethal adverse event”.   It is not clear how the “point estimates” they derive were calculated, but it is notable that the denominators across the studies are not comparable and no confidence intervals are reported. 

As it turns out, this approach has been implemented in research settings on at least three occasions.[4-6] In all of these studies, the authors sampled deaths from multiple institutions and asked trained reviewers to look over the cases to identify possible quality of care problems and to make a judgment about the preventability of death. In all three studies, reviewers estimated that around 3% to 5% of deaths were ‘probably preventable’ (a greater than 50% chance that optimal care would have prevented death).  The largest and most recent of these studies[5] reported that trained medical reviewers judged 3.6% of deaths to have at least a 50% probability of avoidability. Applying this rate of preventability to the total number of hospital deaths in the US each year produces an estimate of about 25,200 deaths annually that are potentially avoidable among hospitalized patients in the US—roughly 10-fold lower than the estimate advanced by Makary and Daniel.

The Makary and Daniel claim that medical error accounts for more than 250,000 deaths per year therefore stands in contrast to the results of several robust studies performed using the type of review they say is needed for medical error to be listed on a death certificate.

(via arjan-de-lumens)

American medical establishment: “I can be your angle….or yuor devil”