The comment says that you may want to treat the same things in different orders as being the same "thing".
A better, in my opinion, English translation of the univalence axiom is, "identity is equivalent to equivalency" (formally, [(A=B)~(A~B)]). You can find this translation in the HoTT book[0].
I can think of a single example where we edited a user's comment without them asking us to, and it happened a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13012176. As you can see, I posted what we did and why. The alternative would have been to kill the comment outright.
Edit: my conscience reminds me that I've also edited several spelling mistakes over the years. That was mostly when I was filling in for pg.
Given what I've seen of your behavior (and sctb's) on HN, I didn't think my parent would be able to come up with any. I generally push back against apparently baseless accusations (which is what I assumed in this case) by asking for evidence.
Thank you. That's a good approach to take, because if people do provide specific links, we can look into what happened and explain it. Grand accusations about HN moderation are nearly always without specific examples, which I suppose is a kind of evidence in its own right.
Yeah and leeches used to be called "medicine" but if you shy away from doctors because of what the profession practiced in the past (things that are illegal now) you're not exactly doing yourself any favors.
psychotherapy is a form of treatment for many psychological disorders as defined by the DSM-V. The treatment varies based on the therapist's style and patient preference, but it always centers around talking to a licensed professional about the patient's feelings, behaviors, thoughts, dreams, fears. Through talking, the therapist can spot patterns of harmful and destructive beliefs and thought patterns. To use a bit of jargon, they can deconstruct a patient's defenses and suggest changes in thoughts/actions that - if followed - may often alleviate some or all of the symptoms.
Perhaps the thing that bothers you is that it's an inexact science ?
I upvoted you, but I would like to say that I think jsprogrammer's remarks being downvoted into oblivion is not warranted. He (she?) may have made his (her?) point inartfully, but it is a valid point: what is the basis for believing that "therapy" (whatever it may mean at this particular point in time) actually works, that it is anything more than a placebo?
For example, this to me is a yellow flag:
> talking to a licensed professional
Why is licensure such a key feature? Licensure can be as much an indication of political corruption and protectionism as scientific validity.
[EDIT: Just for the record, I actually do believe that therapy works, and I have advocated for it myself. That doesn't make it any less valid to ask the question: what is the basis for this belief?]
> jsprogrammer's remarks being downvoted into oblivion is not warranted.
he's making loaded statements out of ignorance because he wont bother to google psychotherapy's definition. There is a therapeutic process to talking and learning to manage emotions and cope with defenses.
Licensure is a key feature so you prohibit people from making fake therapeutic claims or quackery. Or to limit taking advantage of emotionally vulnerable people (it still happens, but licensure requires insurance). Same reason you or I can't call ourselves doctors and claim to cure physiological illness. Do you disagree with that "licensure" too ? Why can't you and I open up a back and spinal clinic ? We could probably make a lot of dough.
I dont know why its acceptable to denigrate the field of psychology. Is the 'engineering way' the only way to solve problems ? Should they just "stop it" until they have humans figured out down to a schematic/circuit ? Then they can treat all the anxiety/depression from our overworked consumerist lifestyles and make us into the perfect capitalist cattle ? Is psychology bullshit because Apple doesn't yet sell iPsychometers with USB-C interfaces so we can patch our brains with the latest "update" and all be perfect?
Humans aren't machines and healing or treatment for psychological pain and mental illness isn't done by running a script. It's done by interviewing patients, classifying symptoms, taking surveys, attempting (and often failing) treatments, doing double blind trials. Things that aren't deterministic, which is also the nature of reality. Why can't you face that ?
edit: let me give you specific examples of why you need a license to practice:
* patient comes in and says they were raped. and the alleged rapist is still doing it. unlicensed quack might be scared to report it to the police, might avoid helping the patient at all because it's "too difficult", or might try to exploit abuse victim for his own sexual pleasure.
* elderly suicidal patient divulges financial info to therapist, who then tips off a dirty lawyer/estate planner into contacting the patient and stealing /exploiting him.
* husband and wife go to therapy. Husband knows he's getting divorced but doesn't want to pay half. So he pays off the therapist to give biased testimony in court blaming the wife for false actions.
* therapist was personally harmed by a particular person earlier in life. now they take joy in intentionally misleading/upsetting other patients who look/act like the one who hurt them.
I hope this is enough to see why the field is regulated.
What makes you think I can't? (And why are you getting so defensive?)
> I dont know why its acceptable to denigrate the field of psychology.
Don't confuse denigration with legitimate criticism. Jsprogrammer's comments may have been loaded and ignorant, but they were not wrong: lobotomization was in fact considered a legitimate therapy in the not-so-distant past. And Psychology has a very checkered history, e.g.:
So some skepticism of the profession's claims is not entirely unwarranted.
BTW, but for the defensive tone, I think your response was very good, and exactly the sort of thing that is needed in this discussion. I upvoted you again.
I apologize, yes I was defensive. Probably because I need more practice having my ideas challenged. Thank you for bringing this to my attention and I will work on it. (and thank you HN for somehow cultivating a community where we can have such a forum).
Absolutely, I agree that the field is not perfect. Let me address the link you sent (I haven't read the book):
Psychoanalysis (also called the psychodynamic method) is but one of several prominent forms of therapy. I've never undertaken it, as I cannot afford to go 3hrs/week for a year or more, so I cannot talk from experience.
I have read quite a bit about it from textbooks and I see a lot of merit to at least the theory. Merit, I say, because it appeared to corroborate with anecdotal evidence from my own life. I have seen the pattern in people, over and over again, who re-enact the behaviors they learned during their youth. You particularly hear about it with domestic violence: girls that grow up seeing mommy getting beat up (somehow) (very often) seem to become attracted to violent men and repeat the cycle. Boys who grow up seeing daddy beat up mommy (tend to) become aggressive toward women when they are adults.
So I don't personally think the entire field of psychoanalysis is bullshit. The books I've read said that a good psychoanalyst can shake the patient to their core. It sounds like they are trained to sniff out the patient's malignant / self-defeating behaviors and show them how they are reenacting them in the therapeutic relationship. From there, I don't know exactly how they motivate change, but once they break you down on such a primitive emotional level, once your defenses are removed and layed before you, it makes sense that you would be weakened enough to consider making a change.
So that's my case for psychoanalysis. Now, of course someone could take advantage of that. Maybe a patient is simply bipolar and their problems have nothing to do with reenacting their mom's abuse cycle. An unethical therapist could take advantage of that and milk the patient for 3 years' therapy and then say "oh yeah actually you just need to be on meds". It's malpractice and I'm sure it goes on every day in the medical field. MD's milking medicare. experienced dr's running unnecessary tests "just to be sure" when they know exactly whats wrong. Doing an X-ray in the hospital instead of an outpatient clinic so they can charge 3X more. Malpractice will always be around both in medicine and psychology.
> Licensure is a key feature so you prohibit people from making fake therapeutic claims or quackery.
Here in Canada, diary farmers need to be licensed to sell dairy products, as do poultry producers (chicken, turkey, eggs, etc.)
Not because anyone is worried about someone selling fake milk or trying to claim ducks are chicken (quackery, get it?). If they were, they'd be equally worried about farmers producing other kinds of food, whom we do not require licensing from. Rather, the story behind it is much simpler: The government at one point found it important to disallow competition to give the people operating in these markets an advantage to help them remain viable, for similar reasons as to why the US has provided farm subsidies over the years.
Anyway, the point being that regulation does not necessarily legitimize a profession. It may simply be an indictor of what interests lobbied hard enough to get economic protection.
I dont doubt that regulation enables regulatory capture, but what if assholes started selling dairy products that weren't up to sanitary code ? Say, like, a food truck. One day it's there, one day they're gone (conveniently after selling 50gal of tainted milk that sickens dozens). what do you do about that ?
> There's presently no standard objective laboratory test
I don't know what's so special about a "laboratory". Is there a name yet for this fallacy "because a machine told me, it must be true." ? Should we name it the "calculator fallacy" or the "internet fallacy" ?
from your link: "That is why NIMH will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories." Its research, it doesn't do any good to toss DSM for treatment of mental disorders. I believe thats why they revise the DSM every year (?), is to keep up with changes in diagnosis. If a new classification system comes along, then replace "DSM" with whatever they call theirs.
that makes treatment easy then. POOF! all mental illness disappears because the book is "invalid". FYI you're using a defense called denial[1] when you do that :)
That's going to be hard to organise if no one is sure what they're supposed to be treating.
It looks like you're using a God of the Sciences argument - because we don't have a full and complete model of mental anguish and self-defeating behaviours, nothing we currently believe about them can be useful or true.
This turns out to be inaccurate. Therapies are tested regularly. Some score better than others, and statistically the results are at least as valid as the result of clinical drug trials.
It would be useful to have a complete Theory of Mind, but no such thing is likely to exist for a while.
Luckily it isn't needed to make a difference. The most useful therapies are results-oriented rather than process-oriented, and the most consistent results come from behavioural reinforcement techniques (where "behaviour" includes "persistent emotional states.")
This doesn't mean other kinds of therapy are useless. But they are less reliable - which may be because they can be more challenging for both sides, or because they don't work, or for all kinds of other reasons.
Stop thinking in "types" and responses and most certainly--stop thinking that things happen for "absolutely no reason".
Everything happens for a reason. Anxiety is a mental state. Until that state is resolved, the anxiety will persist. Strong self-reflection is the way out.
Cannabis can help to rocket you through your anxiety and helped me figure it out pretty quickly.
The CEO of Google was busted by his emails for conspiring to suppress wages.
WikiLeaks recently released a 2014 email[1] from Eric where he appears to conspire with the Clinton campaign/dnc to have "low paid permanent employees".
Since many attempts to convince you to use this site as intended have failed, we've banned your account.
If you don't want it to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
More like acquiescing to Apple's demands that Google do that, and they did quite actively, but not at his/Google's initiation. Which doesn't change the crime that much.
The greater point is that the CEO of a company with digital user assets, let me call them, can be thoroughly evil, while company policy and enforcement keeps his hands from directly tampering with those assets.
Silently changing someone's postings is one of the vilest betrayals of trust a platform can commit, the only worst I can think of is forging new ones out of whole cloth, and if that happens without major changes resulting in the company, that says a great deal about it as a whole, and whether you should have any dealings with it, especially seeing as such assets have been used to criminally convict people, and specifically one Rowan O'Connell for this company.
CEO of Google emails being used in a court of law to secure a negative outcome for Google, is off-topic in a sub thread about the CEO of Google being able to edit Google emails and other data?
Did Eric challenge the authenticity of the emails? I've never heard him do so.
I now understand why you couldn't specify in what way my comment was "off-topic".
More likely it's because the comment has nothing to do with editing users' content — unless it's meant to suggest that someone else faked Eric Schmidt's email (from the time 5+ years ago when he was CEO of Google) to incriminate him.
The comment has everything to do with editing content. Schmidt was effectively convicted on the content of his emails. I don't think Schmidt was able to edit an email used in that case.
It is a positive example of what the poster I responded to was claiming.
Additionally, this CEO (now of Alphabet) has continued to engage in seemingly illegal behavior over Google email. I'm not aware of Eric disputing any of these allegations, even though I have confronted him on them multiple times.
The broader topic is about some golang moderators not wanting to associate with a company because of that company's actions. The downvoted comment simply extends the reasoning to other areas. It's pretty relevant imo.
Your post exemplifies our problems: instead of addressing what you see as wrong with said institutions (many of which actually work rather well) you literally launch an ad hominem attack from your very first word, characterizing your opponents without bothering to build an argument. Incoherent and inchoate nonsense like that which you've posted here just adds to the existing political noise and is itself an obstacle to any progress (which I define as a sustained increase in the median household's real income for short).
To be clear, are you talking about institutions as the article defines them?
Institutions are organisations or patterns of behaviour built by societies to help solve social or economic problems which the law or private markets cannot fully address.
If I'm on the right track, an example of institutional legitimacy might be, "Banks can be trusted to hold your money" (vs stuffing it under your mattress), and FDIC insurance might be an example of an action to support or create that legitimacy.
Banks, at least as depositories for money, seem worth having...
Your example speaks to my point: there's nothing new, innovative, technically challenging (beyond the norm).
I really don't see what there is to write home about. This article reads as a PR announcement (which is okay) disguised as a technical achievement (which it isn't).
Maybe not the biggest breakthrough ever, but it does fill a gap. Animations like this on the web really weren't possible without either using Flash or SMIL. A completely JavaScript based solution is very welcome.
I think the annoyance is the slightly smug tone of "Look what I invented. Vector animation and keyframes!"
It's a cool implementation but it feels like they are claiming to have broken amazing new ground. To people that don't understand much of the background technology that's exactly how it reads.
That fact has been so inconvenient for the government that the entire system has been redesigned to thwart it. Can't prove Al Capone is a mobster? Prosecute for tax evasion.
Keep passing broad overlapping laws and they can charge anyone with something. Then they don't have to change the law, only who they decide to prosecute.
I'm saying nobody would have been looking at him for tax evasion if he wasn't a mobster, even if he was doing it.
And after Capone the mobsters started paying their taxes, so now they charge them with money laundering, which is essentially a law against paying your taxes on unexplained income.
That's nice. But if you decide to run for high office 30 years from now it will become known that drew pony porn in college and never really stopped. That's the meaning of kompromat.
Like Trump, where the worst impropriety they could come up with was that he slapped women's arses? Everyone has something they'd rather not talk about.
I think the era of amendments has passed. Very unlikely we see a new one anytime soon.
Amendment XXVI, 18-year-olds can vote, ratified in 1972. Amendment XXVII, left over from 1789, relates to Congressional pay increases, ratified in 1992.
I didn't even know about the last one (I assume I can trust Wikipedia about it)? Which means the last "real" amendment was 44 years ago. None of the currently unratified amendments seem at all close to reaching the required number of ratification votes.
Yeah, well, in the UK the government is trying to justify sweeping constitutional and case law changes based on a non-binding referendum barely passing.
>I agree with the sentiment elsewhere in these comments that the solution isn't to completely delete your accounts (I think they can have some value when used in moderation), but rather to change the way I use them.
I would hope the solution to your problem is not for me to delete my accounts.
Your problem sounds like you're following people with weak content. Follow new people and stop following (or make better) the weak.
The comment says that you may want to treat the same things in different orders as being the same "thing".
A better, in my opinion, English translation of the univalence axiom is, "identity is equivalent to equivalency" (formally, [(A=B)~(A~B)]). You can find this translation in the HoTT book[0].
Also, check out multisets[1].
[0] http://saunders.phil.cmu.edu/book/hott-online.pdf (PDF page 16, or book page 4)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiset