naevaTheRat

naevaTheRat, 8 months ago

2 people take the same dose of heroin, they repeat the experience 5 times each on the same time line. Lets say they both has the same surgery. One person stops easily, experiencing mild withdrawal that feels like a flu and goes on with their life without ever thinking about it again. The other feels a powerful compulsion to take more, they maintain their usage say initially through extending a medical script and later the black market.

What was different between the two? Maybe you think person 2 had terrible moral character but if they had never been given heroin this would never have manifested. We call that pathological difference a disease and try and treat it. What would you call it?

naevaTheRat, 8 months ago

So you say the difference is some moral deficiency? ok well why don’t we try and treat that. After all we need pain killers in medicine and we want to make them as safe as possible.

Let’s call junkeyism a disease and see how we can stop it happening. Maybe by understanding if some people respond better or worse to different kinds of drugs, maybe we could identify a test we could do to work out what would be safe for someone?

Like what do you think it means when a doctor calls something a disease? People can make bad decisions and still get diseases. If inject yourself with the blood of everyone you meet you’ll eventually get a few, they don’t stop being a disease just because you gave it to yourself (and also we might ask why someone felt compelled to do something so foolish and could we have helped them).

naevaTheRat, 8 months ago

It’s very rude to just swear at someone who hasn’t done anything to you. You don’t seem very nice.

I’m still confused though, if someone ate some mercury because they bit down on a thermometer or something should their mercury poisoning not be diagnosed as mercury poisoning? should it not be treated the same way?

naevaTheRat, 8 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

An incomplete but better than most pop science explanations is as follows: Suppose I have 2 envelopes and 2 letters. We have a stamp that has A and B on it next to each other. Without looking we put the letters next to each other, randomly Orient the stamp and apply it. Then we fold the letters up and put them in the envelops. Now we look at the stamp as see it has A and B on it.

We know that one letter contains A and the other B but not which, you take one and fly to Siberia while I enjoy a nice holiday in Tasmania (sorry but this is the sacrifice of science). I open my letter and see a B, instantly I know that in Siberia there is a letter containing A.

Light speed etc isn’t violated here because we travelled below light speed when setting it all up, I haven’t affected your letter just gained some insight about the overall system by inspecting one part of it.

Now there are a lot of things I’ve glossed over but it’s much closer to opening letters than psychic woo particles.

edit: as to keeping them latched it’s hard. The coupling is like conservative laws (e.g. spin up and spin down so no net overall spin) but any interactions destroy the coupling (or rather extend it to whatever just might’ve swapped spin with a particle). AFAIK nobody has maintained a system over lightyears for that reason among many, but like shipping pineapples to England the barrier appears practical rather than theoretical.