theluddite

Your dad sounds awesome. Is it the kind with a narrow front? Those 50s IH tractors are sweet, but most of the ones around here have the narrow fronts, and it's so hilly that I'm mortified of them. Mine is a Ford 800. Absolute beast of a machine, and it's older than my parents!

Tell your dad to join Lemmy so we can start an antique tractor community!

I genuinely don't know. I used to think it all goes back to the cold war, but I don't know anymore. I'm in my mid thirties, and the only hope I have is that the generation after us seems more radicalized by climate changes, school shootings, and so on. They're our only hope. In my activist circles, I'm starting to meet 22 and 23 year olds, and they're so young and already so active and politically educated. I really truly hope that's a trend and not just a fluke.

I'm not sure. I think the two party system is itself a symptom of a citizenry with very little political education, because ultimately we could exert power collectively if we had the consciousness to do so. There's a small but very active leftist population in the US, but for whatever reason, we struggle to organize and break into mainstream.

The average American thinks Karl Marx is almost literally a demon from hell, socialism is when free stuff, communism is when government owns everything, and anarchism is when bombs.

Our state legislators, at least here in Vermont, and I've interacted with many of these, are generally landlords, and they themselves have little background or even interest in political theory. Our news rarely even covers other countries. As a result, we don't even have the vocabulary for how things could be different.

I'm actually a dual citizen. I'm currently in Spain visiting my family, and it's just shocking to me how much better things are here. I come about once a year, and by comparison, the US is just uncivilized. I don't know how else to put it. It's a huge comfort to me that I have a place with family and whee I speak the language to escape if/when things finally end in the increasingly inevitable violence that is coming.

Omg lol those commercials are perfect. You're making fun of them, but have you considered that that approach to healthcare maximizes GDP 🫠. Big pharma, big companies in general, really does run the show here. Send help, please.

I'd say it's getting worse here, and more worryingly, it's getting worse faster. My doctor friends are very clear about this: Our healthcare system has already collapsed, but you only know about it if you're in it in some way.

Every year, my health insurance goes up in cost some ridiculous amount. This year, my partner and I had to spend some 4000 USD for our annual premium (that is in addition to what her employer is already paying for "employer provided" healthcare [itself a scam]), plus our deductible, or the total amount we have to spend before our insurance covers virtually anything, is 8000 USD. After that, there's "co-insurance," which I'm pretty sure didn't exist 10 years ago and is a concept I don't fully understand, but it's some cost sharing arrangement with insurance companies before you finally hit your "max out of pocket." I don't even know what my max out of pocket is anymore.

The billing is similarly insane. Every time I interact with any healthcare system, I don't just receive a single bill, but instead I receive a stream of confusing letters, each with differing amounts, and they trickle in for months and months.

I and many of my friends no longer pay our medical bills. I really just ignore them. When a healthcare debt collector call, I inform them that they are the most vile bottom-feeders and absolute scum of the earth, and that my payment plan is the revolution. So far, that hasn't been a problem for me, which is only because I live in Vermont, and we do have some laws regulating healthcare debt, plus all our hospitals are not-for-profits. In much of the US, most hospitals are for-profit, and not paying your bills means you end up in a bad legal situation really quickly.

To add to all that, somehow, hospitals are perpetually low on funds, and wait times to see a new doctor are easily a year.

The situation is plainly unsustainable. We tolerate it because we are a stupid, pathetic, illiterate, and completely dominated population, terrified of each other and of change, but also too afraid to admit to ourselves that our pride at being the world's most special country is a lie, because it's the only thing we have left as the rest collapses around us.

Meanwhile my 1951 tractor still runs strong. I'm a big right to repair guy (lord knows I've repaired that thing a million times) and I celebrate the victory, but these laws are a tiny step in our profit-driven, disposable world. Repairability and longevity need to be fundamental design considerations. We'll never get there with ticky tack regulations on a world where modern tractor manufacturers go out of their way to install computers on their tractor specifically so you can't repair it yourself.

Yeah again we don't really disagree very much. I think you're misinterpreting what I'm saying. I definitely don't think I did this:

Yeah, and my point was that you’re just shifting it from this one (mental health) to that one (the state of the world).

As I said before, I don't want to shift to any one new way, but rather to critique everything being always understood in the context of "mental health," as per this article. The framing of this article is ridiculous, but also completely normal. I was just proposing that as a counterpoint to the prevailing narrative, not as a replacement. I think I already explained that in the follow-ups.

The good news is that your basic point is largely being acknowledged by the mental health community.

I unfortunately have extensive personal experience with the mental health community, and this has not been my experience at all, but I live in that land of Xanax, the USA, and our mental health community fucking sucks. Our psychiatric hospitals are barbaric. It is still perfectly normal to throw a psych patient into a room with nothing but a bed, a fluorescent light, and a camera, not provide them with food and water, lock the door from the outside, and leave them there for hours.

the fact that issues do not live in isolation in someone’s brain as some kind of hormonal imbalance that can be fixed with some pills.

This is awesome. The "chemical imbalance" theory of mental illness is scientifically debunked, but here in the US, it's absolutely still taught in school and told to patients. It's what my doctors have told me. If you tell people they have a chemical imbalance in their brain, that tells them that they have an innate medical problem, and that it must be overcome with medication. It's almost like the drug companies come up with the theory 🙃.

Are you familiar with the book "Mad in America?" There's also a sequel, "Anatomy of an Epidemic," and a website. Maybe to an outsider from the US, this is just what the normal mental health community is like, but to me, discovering their work really helped me understand the barbarity of my own experiences.

I agree with this point.

👍

How is this not an over-simplification? People are miserable for all kinds of reasons. Of course the problem and the solution is always some combination of the world and how we interpret the world, but sometimes the problem lies more in the interpretation than in the world, right? It may have nothing or nearly nothing to do with climate change or the state of the world at large

Maybe it is, but is it useful? Right now, our currently accepted model for dealing with our widespread sadness is to go to doctors. Biden administration recently announced it wants to start screening every American over a certain age for anxiety.

I propose we consider that maybe people are more sad because the world is actually getting worse in a variety of ways. Sure, it's simple, but I think it's a great starting point. This way of thinking won't help us understand every single so-called mental health problem, but isn't it a reasonable starting point, rather than screening every American for anxiety.

would agree that solutions to mental health problems need to be examined in a biopsychosocial context, but whereas you say that just looking at the person and not the world is too limiting, I think just looking at the state of the world is too limiting.

Sure. That's fine. I even agree. Multiple models and theories can coexist and have utility, even if they're conflicting. My main point is that we're seemingly stuck on one. There will never be one theory that explains anything perfectly, and I think the one we're using now is particularly harmful for the reasons that I have set out.

No, I am saying it is overused, not oversimplified.

Oversimplification on its own is usually one of the weakest critiques of a model, because the point of any model is to simplify. For example, reducing the entirety of the sun and the Earth and everything in or on them as two point masses in an empty space is a ridiculous, almost offensive oversimplification, but it's really useful for understanding our orbit. It's an insufficient critique to say this model of our galaxy is oversimplified, because it obviously has utility. Often, the best theories or models are really simple. When we have really good, simple models, we often call them things like "elegant."

Mental health, as a model, is actually extremely complex. You can spend a lifetime getting advanced degrees in that field and you'd probably barely scratch its surface. I wouldn't dream of calling it an oversimplification. If anything, I'd say you're more likely to find a fruitful critique going in the other direction.

I'm becoming increasingly skeptical of the "destroying our mental health" framework that we've become obsessed with as a society. "Mental health" is so all-encompassing in its breadth (It's basically our entire subjective experience with the world) but at the same time, it's actually quite limiting in the solutions it implies, as if there's specific ailments or exercises or medications.

We're miserable because our world is bad. The mental health crisis is probably better understood as all of us being sad as we collectively and simultaneously burn the world and fill it with trash, seemingly on purpose, and we're not even having fun. The mental health framework, by converting our anger, loneliness, grief, and sadness into medicalized pathologies, stops us from understanding these feelings as valid and actionable. It leads us to seek clinical or technical fixes, like whether we should limit smart phones or whatever.

Maybe smart phones are bad for our mental health, but I think reducing our entire experience with the world into mental health is the worst thing for our mental health.

Yeah but I can tell you if something is a crosswalk

I'm not sure if that article is just bad or playing some sort of 4D chess such that it sounds AI written to prove its point.

Either way, for a dive into a closely related topic, one that is obviously written by an actual human, I humbly submit my own case study on how Googles ad monopoly is directly responsible for ruining the Internet. I posted it here a week ago or so, but here it is in case you missed it and this post left you wanting.

"I gave an LLM a wildly oversimplified version of a complex human task and it did pretty well"

For how long will we be forced to endure different versions of the same article?

The study said 86.66% of the generated software systems were "executed flawlessly."

Like I said yesterday, in a post celebrating how ChatGPT can do medical questions with less than 80% accuracy, that is trash. A company with absolute shit code still has virtually all of it "execute flawlessly." Whether or not code executes it not the bar by which we judge it.

Even if it were to hit 100%, which it does not, there's so much more to making things than this obviously oversimplified simulation of a tech company. Real engineering involves getting people in a room, managing stakeholders, navigating conflicting desires from different stakeholders, getting to know the human beings who need a problem solved, and so on.

LLMs are not capable of this kind of meaningful collaboration, despite all this hype.