I think it's important, as people who eat meat, to fully acknowledge the deep and societal harms that meat causes. It is well-studied that slaughterhouses are uniquely bad for a community and uniquely bad for the people who work there. Meat as a food can sometimes be bad for people, but meat as an industry is definitely bad for people. Knowing this can allow us to make more responsible choices even if we still end up eating meat, such as selecting for small, ethical farmers that also limit the trauma of themselves/those who do the slaughtering of their stock.
> In fact the amount of vegans I've met in life who didn't look like they were suffering from some illness has been very rare, only solidifying my position on this.
I would push against this sort of anecdotal view. The circle of people we eat with (and therefore know the dietary restrictions of) tend to be quite low compared to all the people we meet with on a day to day. Additionally, "looking sick" is a vague enough assessment that simply knowing someone is a vegan may very easily cause you to be much more critical of their appearance, and vice versa you may see someone who looks sick to you and then pay more attention to their dietary habits than you ordinarily would. Another thing to note is that all dietary restriction lifestyles is subject to a noticeably higher rate of disordered eating or intestinal issue that leads to the person participating in the dietary change and therefore it may be important to first determine if the disordered eating or gut issue caused veganism vs the other way around.
That is to say: even though I am neutral towards veganism itself, your logic as to why meat is good reads to me as quite flawed and poorly reasoned around.
What do you want me to say here? The science is pretty much settled that we are omnivores, you can't just ditch meat without consequences. Yes there are substitutes, but in practice do vegans consistently eat these at the right amount to compensate for the lack of meat in their diet? Well my first hand experience tells me this is a big fat NO.
Let's put it another way, imagine some guy likes to pester you about your eating habits, says they are unhealthy, and that their diet is healthy. Well the burden of proof is on them and as someone who cares about staying fit, if the guy trying to convince me either looks like skin & bones, or is overweight, then they are already on shakey ground. This has been my first hand experience multiple times.
Ultimately my ancedote is not meant to be a counter-argument, but instead a reminder to those reading to touch grass. Because why wouldn't your personal experiences matter more than the anecdotes and misinformation spread by strangers online? (This applies to my own anecdote as well)
I'm just saying that "well everyone I met who is vegan looks sick" is shoddy reasoning to proclaim eating meat is the healthy behavior. That's it. I already clearly said I have no opinion on veganism itself, nor am I pestering you with a claim that any one diet is healthy.
> Enough to have kids at age 18-20, and help their kids raise their own for 2-5 years when they reached that same age. Evolution didn't equip us to live much longer than that.
Huh? Humans can live upwards of 3 generations worth of humans. It's not uncommon for humans to remain functional enough to raise their grandchildren!
I'm always curious: what is the effect of noise on the noise producers? As much as I have a disdain for leafblowers, and as much as I absolutely despise people who play bass-heavy music at night, why don't they suffer the same ill effects and heart issues as the people they subject noise to?
I'm not sure of the answer, but it's generally the case that things affect us much more negatively when we have no control over them and feel at their mercy. I haven't read TFA to see if they controlled for this, but it wouldn't surprise me if that was actually the majority of the problem.
Edit:
> Researchers have found that the more people are bothered by noise, the greater the health risks they face from it.
It would be great to do a study where people learn a technique like meditation to be less "bothered" by noise and see how that affects their biomarkers.
I used to live in an apartment where the upstairs neighbour would just randomly start trampling super hard. If it had been a constant noise - like the cars driving outside - my brain would probably have gotten accustomed to it. It seemed to me like it was agitating because it was at random times, when I wasn't expecting it.
When I turn on the bass, I am in control. I can turn it on when I don't have anything important going on and I can always turn it off. That makes the bass enjoyable. If it's somebody else's bass, then I don't know when it starts, when it ends and whether it will interrupt me. That's the source of frustration for me.
I'm generally fine with monotonous background noise, as long as it's not too loud. There's probably still some subtle passive effect on my health, but I can live with that.
That said, one difference is also that they do use their leaf blowers after they wake up first or are in the mood to do it, so they're not disturbing their own sleep or quiet time.
It's not as simple as "they do" or "they don't." They seem to suffer less, and there are interesting reasons for that. GP is being downvoted because "they do?" is not a particularly helpful response.
An important but gentle pushback against things like this (tracking how much time you "have left"): if stuff like this isn't helping you, it isn't worth the reminder either. For some people the scarcity mindset is a motivating factor, for others it's a paralyzing one and for the latter I would encourage to consider this sort of conversation utterly meaningless and therefore wholly dismissable, not even worth the time in clicks.
Yep thanks. I'm solidly in this group of people for whom this kind of thing is counterproductive. To the extent that I honestly can't even imagine the mindset of people who find this motivating. Making me depressed and anxious about how I'm spending my time is the door into the doom loop for me, not the door out of it.
Also consider those of us that need to be paralyzed long enough to consider what we are scare of so we can have space to address it and make changes. It's okay to be paralyzed, knocked-down, or fail at times.
Sometimes busyness is a blind that can be removed no other way.
This is assuming that more opportunities are being created in certain roles... Unfortunately there aren't being more house representatives, senators, etc. Professorships are increasingly rare. While you can argue that, roundaboutly, boomer executives and boomer equity owners (e.g. partners in law offices) can invest in more companies that will create new executive rooms and new partnership positions, the reality is we are actually seeing more and more corporate mergers which means less positions for upwards mobility.
Which is the objective we seek, full employment regardless of productivity concerns or productive allocations of finite resources?
I'd suggest that productive allocations increase our living standards, which is the goal of employment itself. Full employment for the sake of employment trends towards make-work, drudgery, high costs and low quality.
I think it's useful to consider this blog post as an anecdotal experience of someone who had a significant, traumatic experience with LSD for which they were entirely socially unprepared for even when those those experiences seemed to be known among those who take LSD (no one expressed surprise or confusion at their condition in their group). There is plenty of questions to ask here: why didn't this person's friends refuse to give them LSD, given their previous experience with shrooms? Why was this person so blindsided by HPPD? What is going on in the cultural millieu of hallucinogenic drugs where someone can have a bad experience with one hallucinogen and then, knowing this, willingly take even more without seriously being warned against by friends or online resources?
Seriously, if I had a friend who couldn't handle alcohol, I would stop drinking with them and I would certainly refuse to take harder stuff with them. When I first had anxiety from smoking weed, my friends promptly told me weed is probably just not a drug for me to take and to take lower doses or to abstain from it entirely in the future-- and anxiety was a well-known (to me) possible consequence from weed.
I've noticed this pattern where "anecdote" is deployed when someone disagrees with some point another person is making. But would you be chiming in here about "anecdotes" if this was a post by someone claiming acid helped them?
Yes; I think someone claiming a drug helped them is also a useful anecdote. I do think HN as a community tends to weigh positive anecdotes more than negative ones [when it comes to hallucinogens], and wanted to point out that this particular negative anecdote suggests there exists at least some amount of greater or more systemic concerns about how such an experience came about to begin with.
The post concludes that promoting LSD through anecdotal evidence is "harmful" and "naive" while condemning LSD through anecdotal evidence. I've had good experiences with hallucinogenics and think they're a societal net-positive, but if this post was promoting LSD based on a good trip with good results, it'd be equally bad. Maybe even more so.
Why not? I think it was Jeff Bezos who said “When data and anecdotes disagree, it’s usually the anecdote that’s right. Something is wrong with the way you’re measuring your data.”
If there’s a debate at all then the data are probably ambiguous or inconclusive, so let’s talk real human experience. Data says LSD is the best thing ever, and here’s one guy who has a terrible experience - is he wrong?
Jeff Bezos in that quote is talking about customer complaints and how they relate to SLOs.
When a customer is complaining about e.g. "your site being broken", there's usually some real problem they're complaining about (though whether it's your problem to solve, or their ISP, or their computer, or their lack of knowledge of how web browsers work, etc. is another question entirely.) But the point being, if your data says the customer can't possibly be experiencing an issue — i.e. if your data disagrees with the customer's own lived experience of having a problem at all, with the data saying that e.g. the customer made a successful purchase, when the customer says they couldn't even load the site — then that should suggest that your tools for measuring your data are broken, or that there's something else equally-fishy going on (like a Man-in-the-Middle.)
None of this applies to medicine/psychology, because medicine never has the sort of data that could even theoretically be used to make a claim like "this is 100% working, and anyone who says they have a problem is lying" — the sort of claim where even a single counterexample would be enough to refute that statement, and therefore where a single counterexample would be valuable.
Rather, the sort of claims made in medicine are Bayesian confidence claims. The sort of (evidenced) claim that gets a treatment approved by the FDA, goes something like: "treatment X tends to be well-tolerated in population Y, while producing a positive outcome of power Z with benefits outweighing the measured side-effects."
No single anecdote (= clinical data) refutes that kind of statement. Instead, you need to compile and quantify a bunch of them (= clinical data meta-analysis) to actually make an argument for or against that claim.
Knowing this, any attempt someone might make to wield a single anecdotal claim to influence the credence you give a statistically-derived Bayesian-confidence statement of the safety and efficacy of a medical treatment — especially where you don't have an intuitive sense for how much data went into the statistics that led to the original statistical claim — should be regarded as an attempt to manipulate you with rhetoric, rather than honest debate praxis.
Which is not to say that the anecdote is false! You can totally believe that the person's lived experience is real, and empathize with them, and try to come up with solutions for their problem; while also taking as hokum any attempt by them to convince you that their anecdote generalizes.
Anecdotes are rarely definite proof of anything. But bayesian evidence is bayesian evidence.
And if someone tried to argue that LSD can never cause visual snow, a single anecdote is enough to refute that. Anecdotes are not always wrong in debate.
Except of course we can't know for sure the anecdote was an example of LSD causing visual snow, the drug might have been spiked or it could've just been a coincidence...
Anecdotes are at best a clue that there's more research needed. Unfortunately for many people they're also often far more memorable and even convincing than cold hard statistics.
The thing is, anecdotes can be easily made up. I’m not saying that’s happening in the case of visual snow, but we need studies to talk about things like this, not anecdotes.
No and the reason is I have seen far more anecdotes about good trips than bad, which pushes me to believe that is the norm. And by far more I mean in my life I have seen maybe a 10:1 ratio. There would have to be a flood of negative reports over a period of years to tilt me in the opposite direction to counteract that.
> What is going on in the cultural millieu of hallucinogenic drugs where someone can have a bad experience with one hallucinogen and then, knowing this, willingly take even more without seriously being warned against by friends or online resources?
In attempts to (rightly) justify legalization, we now first have to appeal to the puritan-descendant US society and persuade it that it has great medicinal potential (because recreational potential is not enough). Consequently, you see overly exaggerated headlines that tout these substances as a miracle cure. Which, honestly, it might be for some people with certain conditions in a specific settings.
But, a person then reads "a new LSD study" and might conclude that their psilocybin trip was not a success, but maybe the LSD is going to change their world for the better.
If we just legalize these non-toxic substances, the conversation around them changes. The same happened to cannabis (where still nowadays, many people use the "medicinal" angle to justify their recreational habits so that they are not judged by the society, despite cannabis being legal in a number of US states).
Sorry, I don't mean to blame the author of the blog post. If anything I'd like to know why their friends didn't step in for them, nor that they never came across the potential long-term consequences in even a casual research step prior to taking LSD. I'm wondering if the hallucinogen community isn't upfront enough about not taking hallucinogens under certain circumstances and that's something we can glean from this anecdote.
Wut? Aren't you explicitly talking about an academic context? Wouldn't that matter a heck of a lot what class your brother was getting taught? Like, hypothetically I can disagree with feminism but I'm just being stupid if I go to a feminism 101 class and get mad the professor is teaching feminist theories.
I think using an example of {x} where x is an academic subject matter, and the complaint was that it was used in an academic setting, and is used as an example of a bad behavior involving academic institutions, it's worth inquiring if that example is valid! If I presented a mathematical proof in a math paper in a math journal, my proof being incorrect is kind of a big deal.
The opportunity cost is still likely 100k/yr for the rest of your life, even with the FAANG salary to assistant professors.
consider this:
You can be a new grad, get hired at Apple, and earn an entry-level salary[0]. Let's say we won't include the bonus and you get 130k/yr. You colleague is a new grad and goes to a PhD program at Duke University[1] where they earn 33k/yr.
In your first year, your PhD program colleague earns 97k less than you.
From years 1-3, your average base pay will be 138k, and your PhD colleague earns the same wage. They now earn 105k less than you for each of those years. Your colleague is in the hole over 400k opportunity wise.
In your 4th and 5th year, you can expect to earn 141k on average. Your colleague, still making 33k/yr, is now making 108k/yr less than you. At the end of 5 years, your colleague has completed their PhD and is in the hole over 600k in opportunity cost.
Now your colleague gets an associate professorship position. This assumes your colleague is extremely lucky and does not go into a post-doc. They earn 115k [2] base at NYU. In your 6th year at apple you're still making that 141k. You're still out-earning them by 26k. Your colleague is on the tenure track, which can take 6 or 7 years. [3]. All that time you're getting more and more YoE, while their pay band stays relatively the same during this time. Let's say the opportunity cost is 26k over 6 years, so an additional 156k to their over 600k.
At full professorship at NYU, your colleague is earning 162k [4] after 5 years PhD + 6 years tenure track. You, an Apple engineer (probably senior at this point), with 11 YoE are earning 165k/yr [5] at this point. Your colleague has cost themselves 750k in opportunity cost, and you're still earning a bit more than them! A full professor may never catch up to the opportunity cost of academic track, salary wise.
tl;dr: EVEN IF you get paid 160k base as a full professor, your years of phd + tenure track associate professor salary will mean you will likely never, ever catch up with someone who new-graded at a FAANG and never left that circle.
I get your using glassdoor and citing sources, but it's even worse, because someone competent enough to go straight into an associate prof position after PhD would guaranteed be making more than $200k at 6 years tenure at Apple, probably closing in on $300k.
But then you have to work at Apple. One the one hand, that's the dream of many people. On the other hand, I had some experience with people who went for that $300k, and Apple chewed them up and spit them out. They were working on a "secret project" which we all know was the driverless car. Such a shit show according to those people, so I'm glad I turned down the job. I hear the project is in zombie mode these days but who knows.
If you can put up with living inside of a police state like Apple, then maybe that's for you, but academia is such a completely different environment from that (very open and all about collaboration), it's hard to put a $$ amount on what it would take for me to put up with that abuse.
If you have a PhD in CS and you get tenured track position immediately right after finishing grad school without doing any postdocs, then I guarantee you can make at least 200k/year in your first year at any decently big tech company.
I have seen people with 2-3 NIPS papers and a bunch more from other conferences failed to obtain assistant professorship, it's ridiculous right now.
I appreciate all the research you did, but you're missing several key aspects of how faculty are compensated that changes your analysis.
First, faculty salaries as reported are typically 9-month. There's an extra 3 months of earning potential for professors, where they are effectively free agents. They can spend that doing research, or any number of other activities. Or nothing
Second, professors own their work product. If you are a salaried employee at a corporation, everything you do on company time is owned by the corporation. If you try to sell your work product or take it to another job, you will likely be fired and/or sued. This is not true for faculty; we own our lectures and all the content we produce for our courses. We can take it and use it other jobs, sell it as a book, make it available for free, or anything.
Third, we own our own time off the job. I'm free to run a consultancy even though I'm employed full time as an academic. I can make as much as I want through that, and people are willing to pay what I want because of my degree and my affiliation with the institution I work at. I doubt Google will let you trade on being a Google engineer while working at Google. Indeed, most FAANGs have a clause in their contracts stating that they basically own all ideas you think of, whether on or off the clock. If you're willing to take their salary for that kind of trade, then you might think it's worth it. For academics, they think perhaps they will have a good idea one day and turn it into a startup or patent it, and many do.
Fourth, I have control over a lot of other people's money. So while I'm not paid a lot, I get to use millions of dollars in funding and equipment. If I move to another university, I can take my money and my project with me. I have hundreds of thousands of dollars of sensors and equipment in my office that I've bought over the years that I personally didn't have to spend a dime on, but which is pretty much entirely mine to use.
All this is to say that a straight comparison of salaries isn't going to get you the full story. For instance, is there any amount of money you can pay such that you can take 3 months off every summer, and still have a position in the fall? How much would you pay your company to own an idea you had on company time? Do you have an office with a door? Do you have an assistant? Do you own what you work on?
> Indeed, most FAANGs have a clause in their contracts stating that they basically own all ideas you think of, whether on or off the clock
They can claim that all they want, but in California, that's not exactly true. What you do, on your off time, on your own hardware, that isn't related to a work project, is yours.
Great analysis and arguably much too conservative. But the assumption is that positions in industry are equally stable. In the world of startups not so much. And Google and Facebook making even FAANG look volatile.
That academia job is less stable. Bring in grants or go home. Compete with others to climb a pyramid that gets more and more narrow at the top.
Even if you are laid off at Google or Facebook, with those on your resume, anybody will take you, unless you are some weird incompetent fluke. If you didn't get a new grant, you'll have a hard time in academia. Good luck switching institutions once you are unsuccessful in the grant game.
