[ Posted by Janka
Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:09:08 GMT ]
Since this keeps on surfacing, for the hundreth time, no, sensible institution anywhere do not expect their medical professionals to take the Hippocratic Oath, or in any case to follow it even if it is ceremonially read.
If they did, it would put an end to half of family planning ("I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy"), all minor surgical operations performed by anyone else but specialists ("I will not use the knife, not even on sufferers from stone, but will withdraw in favor of such men as are engaged in this work"), and to medical schools as we know them ("hold him who has taught me this art as equal to my parents and to live my life in partnership with him, and if he is in need of money to give him a share of mine, and to regard his offspring as equal to my brothers in male lineage").
There are modernized "Hippocratic" and other Doctor's Oaths, some of them pretty nice. But they are not the same oath that was used by the Ancient Greeks.
Posted in Plain English | Tags lääketiede | no comments
[ Posted by Janka
Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:09:52 GMT ]
Internetissä oli keskustelu siitä, että minkälainen ostoskassi on kaikista ekologisin. Että paperikassiko vai uudelleenkäytetty muovikassi vaiko puuvillakassi vaiko semmoinen oikein erityis-ekologinen kassi jonka saa tilata Amazonista.
Oikea vastaus on tietysti ei mikään yllämainittu. Oikea vastaus on se kassi joka sulla on jo. Enkä usko, että ei ole mitään kassia, takuulla on. Jos muka ei todellakaan ole mitään vanhaa koulureppua tai messuilta saatua mainoskassia, niin käytät ensin loppuun ne kaikki paperi- ja muovikassit joita sulla kuitenkin on kotona, vaikka et tunnusta, ja sillä aikaa kun ne kuluu loppuun askartelet uuden kassin vaikkapa vanhasta paidasta tai sen virkatun liivin purkulangoista, jonka muuten heittäisit pois.
Ei tarvitse ostaa minkäänlaista kassia, Amazonista tai muualta.
Posted in Sama suomeksi | Tags ekologia, unsolicited advice | 1 comment
[ Posted by Janka
Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:38:25 GMT ]
You can hear it claimed-- or in any case read it on the interwebs -- sometimes by religious people, sometimes by young men who think selfishness is cool, that if you take a scientific worldview, there is no reason not to place your personal pleasure above that of everyone else.
I do not think that claim holds water. It is true that science itself cannot give you a reason for why you should value pleasure, or oppose to suffering. Pleasant and unpleasant are subjective, not directly measurable concepts. We can measure things that associate with suffering -- we can measure blood pressure or stress hormones, we can observe nutritional state and death, we can ask people to rate their pain on a scale of 1 to 10 -- but the fact that we designate pain and suffering as unpleasant is, well, consensus based on personal observation.
At the heart of science is a set of core assumptions of how knowledge can be acquired. One of these is that personal observation is not enough to draw conclusions about external realities, but that to be considered true, the result of an experiment must be replicable -- that is, others must be able to say "yes, I did the same experiment, and I saw the same thing". Another is the so called "Occam's razor" principle, which states (among other things) that if an explanation is sufficient to fully explain a phenomenon, there is no need to, and indeed you should not, add to that explanation something that there are no consistent observations of.
If we accept the personal observation that pain and suffering are unpleasant and something we would like to avoid, I do not think there is any scientific way to claim that you should consider your pain and suffering any more (or any less) important than that of someone else. Science, first of all, assumes at its core that other humans exist; the whole idea of trying to contruct experiments that function the same regardless of who performs them has built-in the idea. Second, even if it did not, I think Occam would force us to conclude that the likeliest explanation for our perception that others like us exist is that they indeed do so.
In any case, given that other people do exist, it does seem to me that there is no scientific evidence whatsoever that would suggest that our own pain and suffering are somehow more important than those of others. We can of course construct possibilities where it might be so -- maybe all the world is illusion except our own consciousness, say -- but by the Occam's razor principle these must then be discarded.
Science does not give you any reason why you should value the avoidance of pain, or the gain of pleasure. But given that you do value them in your own case, I think science does not give you any excuse to not value them in everyone else's case too.
Posted in Plain English | Tags filosofia, filosofia, tiede, tiede | 4 comments
[ Posted by Janka
Thu, 18 Feb 2010 15:13:02 GMT ]
Alabamassa meni biologian professori ja ampui muutaman kollegansa. Lehdissä on railakkaasti epäilty, että "ampumisen syy oli viran epääminen".
Eikä ollut.
Se saattoi ehkä tuurilla olla ampujan päällimmäiseksi kokema motiivi, mutta syy siihen, että ihminen ottaa ja ampuu toisen ei kylläkään ole pettymys viran täytössä, tai tyttären menetetty kunnia, tai taloudellinen ahdinko, tai mikään muukaan motiiviksi kelpaava. Syy on jossain muualla: pääasiassa siinä, ettei suureksi käynyttä pettymystä ja ahdistusta pysty käsittelemään muuten kuin väkivallalla, ja pienemmässä määrin siinä, että käsillä on ase. Mutta pettymys ja ahdistus sinänsä eivät ole päällimmäisiä syitä murhiin -- jos olisivat, murhia tapahtuisi melkolailla enemmän.
Erilailla huvittava on Iltalehden raportti, että ampuja oli "tunnettu yliopiston kampuksella räväkkänä ja kantaa ottavana persoonana", joka "on muun muassa ääneen kritisoinut yliopiston päätöksentekoa". Jos sillä pääsee hullun kirjoihin ja jonnekin rauhalliseen paikkaan täysihoitoon, niin mulla ois täällä monta tulokasta.
Posted in Sama suomeksi | Tags psykiatria, yliopisto | no comments
[ Posted by Janka
Tue, 16 Feb 2010 10:55:26 GMT ]
I do not claim to know anything about philosophy or metaphysics or anything related, but I will now proceed to talk about it/them anyway. You have been warned.
Namely, following from the sidelines some more knowledgable people discussing things, I seem to notice that they think in dyads. That is, they ask questions like, are morals more defined by the society or by the individual? Are an individual's beliefs shaped by the physical world or the other way round? Is what we perceive as reality really physically real, or is it a social construct?
To me, the obvious answer to all of those and similar opposing concepts is "both". Depending on case, it could be more one or the other, and the questions are typically not even answerable in the general case.
But what's even more interesting to me that most of the amateur philosophers I listen to seem to always picture it as a question between two entities, while it seems to me that it is always a triad: the individual mind, the physical reality, and social interactions between individuals are all three involved and interacting.
Posted in Plain English | Tags filosofia | 6 comments
[ Posted by Janka
Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:22:02 GMT ]
One of the many diversions I have followed is the occasionally hilarious Failblog. I dropped it today, though, because I realized it annoys me more often than it amuses me, because of its tendency to label as fail 1) humor that I actually find funny, 2) whatever reminds someone of sex, and 3) fat people. Plus try and sell me t-shirts, which I admit are funny t-shirts, but I do not need more.
There I fixed it is better.
Posted in Plain English | Tags työtuhoseura | 2 comments
[ Posted by Janka
Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:48:46 GMT ]
Sleeping rocks.
That said, let's go on to a pet peeve.
I utterly frigging hate watching when people bang their heads into stone walls.
I mean; if you have tried doing or accomplishing something in a particular way for five times, and it has never worked, how realistic is the assumption that this time, if you just concentrate hard enough and invest enough willpower, or whatever, it will magically start working? If you have tried getting people to do something in a particular way five times, and it has not worked, how likely it is that if you just motivate them well enough or assume that this time, everyone will play nice with each other and do their part, they'll suddenly pull through?
Personally, I think the probability of the stone wall suddenly magically collapsing if you bang your head to it the sixth time is pretty close to zero.
So why oh why is it so hard for people to sit down and think what they could do differently next time to make it at least a bit likelier?
Grh.
Posted in Plain English | Tags ei näin, I dont want to play anymore | no comments
[ Posted by Janka
Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:10:10 GMT ]
If I could get one of those change one thing in your body whishes that sometimes feature ladies' and teens' magazines, I would not change my physical appearance, but I would change my need for sleep.
I always joke that I am better at sleeping than waking up. People have told me that being good at sleeping, as in, mostly being able to sleep at nights, is a blessing and complaining about it is distasteful. I agree it is a blessing, and I actually like sleeping a lot. However, it would be nice if I did not have to do quite so damn lot of it.
I need something like 9.5 to 10 hours of sleep every night, or I will start accumulating a sleep debt. It is actually hard to know what the exact amount I need is, because there rarely are more than two nights in a row when I am not sleeping off a debt, but it seems to have stabilized to at about 9 hours 40 minutes with extensive testing over December and January, from lights out to ready to get up. And there's not much there in either end to get rid off, either; I fall asleep in about 15 minutes and it takes about the same from first becoming aware of it being morning to being wide awake.
Anyway, nine and a half hours every frigging night means everyone who is at the average 7 or 8 has 2-4 hours more in their every day than I do. I can tell you that I could really, really use those hours. I think it should be made a law that every adult's need for sleep be scientifically determined every five years, and those needing more will be allowed to work less for the same pay.
This is not made easier by the fact that I am also insanely sensitive to lack of sleep. Most people I know happily take away an hour from every night during weekdays, and catch up on weekends. If I did that, by Wednesday I would have (I have) ceased to accomplish a thing, and by Friday I would probably murder somebody.
In addition, I am terribly bad at sleeping during the day. No matter how tired I am, if I try to nap, I simply don't fall asleep. My mother says I've been this way since a very small child, which apparently was a pain; I sympathize but I think having to suffer about it in my adulthood is still a cruel and unusual punishment.
Whine ends here. Now, for more coffee.
Posted in Plain English | Tags life, self, sleep | 2 comments
[ Posted by Janka
Thu, 28 Jan 2010 09:22:44 GMT ]
Some time ago, I volunteered to participate in a QN Podcast's "Voices" episode. These episodes consist of the awesome Sage asking questions about a particular topic from 4-6 people, and then combining the answers (either recorded by the participant themself or read by someone else) to an interesting, beautiful, inspiring glimpse into various human lives.
The below is a modified version of my answers to her questions concerning career choices. If you want to hear what she did with these, see QN: When I grow up (4 Voices). I was absolutely delighted about the reader who did my part; I feel she managed to portray my feelings despite being a complete stranger to me.
This is highly personal and publishing it is pushing my confort limits for this blog. Which is partly why I do it. Enjoy.
What did you want to be when you were twelve? Why?
Sometime between ages 10 and 12 I became aware of the fact that the world in general is a nasty place. Like, I suspect, many idealistic children grown up in relatively safe environments, I was shocked hearing about such things as wars and famines, and quite unable to believe that adults could not stop those things if they wanted to.
I decided to become a doctor, so that I can travel to the places with these problems and help the people. Being a naive and idealistic child, I was convinced that human suffering can and will be solved in my lifetime. I never doubted that. After all, it is just a question of the rich giving food to the hungry, and all the people deciding together that they will not fight the wars anymore. That's all it takes, and since people are inherently good and sensible, we just need to organize things a bit, and it'll be alright.
Part of me still believes that. But like the child, I have no idea where to start from. (Unfortunately, they did not teach that in medical school, after all.)
What did you want to be when you were eighteen? Why?
At 18, I was still planning to become a doctor. To be honest, that was probably more because I had spend the last six years telling everyone that's what I will become, and it would have been to embarrassing (I felt) to change my mind. Appearances were very important to me at that time of my life, though you might not have figured that out if you saw me, as my chosen appearance was to be more than a bit peculiar.
Now that I think about it, so was propably everyone else's at the time - we all wanted to be unique, just like everyone else.
I suppose I was still five years old in one sense: I was still unable to envision myself as an adult with a job, and I picked a career that sounded fancy, without really understanding what it means. Very rarely during my studies did the thought enter my mind that I had better learn the stuff, because I will need it when I am a doctor. When I went to see a doctor myself, I did not really imagine myself on the other side of the desk.
For someone having entered medical school out of the wish to help people I was paying very little attention to the tools that could help me do so. I still had a genuine belief that doctors help people, and I still had the genuine wish that someone would do something. I just could not imagine myself as that someone.
What's your career now?
Telling you about my current career (if you can all it that) would require a longer answer than a podcast episode. I went on to finish medical school, then (partly because I did not find I was ready to be a doctor - unsurprising after not spending all the years preparing that I should have) went on to get another degree in computer science.
Currently, I am doing my PhD on the applications of a certain computational method on certain type of medical research. It is highly specialized and about as far as you can get from concrete helping of people without actually leaving the field of medicine altogether or using your MD title to cheat money out of patients or the public.
I have also recently gotten back to actual work at a clinic, in child psychiatry, but after 1.5 years of working half time in both I decided I need to actually concentrate on one thing at a time, and I decided to try and finish the PhD first. I have now given it a mental deadline, and then I'll be out, one way or another. (I am not sure if I have said this with quite these words to my supervisor, so, if you heart the episode or are reading this: yes, I seriously mean it.)
How do you feel about your current career?
Sometimes I hate it, and sometimes I love it.
There is a lot in science I detest. Or, rather, not in the science itself, but in the culture of science. For one who was very concerned with appearances in her youth, I have come a suprising way and started to feel terrible about the necessity and pressure to keep them up. And there is a lot of that in science. There are days - one day every week, probably - when I think I just cannot take it anymore.
Many things in the culture of science need to change, and will change in the coming decades - but I am not sure if I have enough in me to be part of that revolution, either.
But of course, it is not only that. It is also exciting to be part of the community that spends their time discovering new things and disproving old truths. It is a fairly free job, too, most of the time: I can decide when to come to work, when to leave, I can work late if I want to and no one thinks me weird, I can take a day off to just read at home if I am trying to learn something new... That kind of things.
The practical side of my work, with actual patients... well, I love it and I hate it, too. And for much of the same reasons: I love the work itself, I like patients - yes, in the end, I do like helping people, and I am told I am and I feel reasonably competent at psychiatry for one without that much experience. But I hate and detest the public health care bureaucracy, especially with the panicky reorganizations that the supposed global economical depression causes just when we would need more time to work in peace and more resources because of it.
I suppose there's the 12-year-old me speaking here: I like the work, I want to do it, I see what should be done, and I cannot understand why we cannot just do it the sensible way.
What do you plan to change in the next five years?
During the next two years or so, I want to get my PhD (or quit trying), and I want to get my full lisencing as a physician so that I can do private practice, which requires about a year's worth of full-time work in health care still.
I mostly want those, and especially the lisence, because I think they are my current best option to freeing myself to pick and choose my own work.
I still want to change the world, even if I now think that my 10-year-old self's idea that we will see the end of wars and famines in our lifetime simply because people are good and don't want those things was, uh, slightly exaggerated. That if it was likely to work that way, it would have happened already.
I am at a point where predicting where I'll be in five years is pretty much impossible. And I am excited about that: an adventure is starting. Closing 40 years, I've finally realized that I can become an adult, and that it sounds like a lot of fun.
Posted in Plain English | Tags self, työ | 3 comments
[ Posted by Janka
Tue, 26 Jan 2010 10:02:15 GMT ]
I seem to be able to separate four distinct parts to my thought processes. In all seriousness they are probably neither distinct from each other nor undivisable into further subclassifications, but it would be interesting to know if these divisions make sense to other people.
So, four parts or maybe rather four types of thought processes. The order I present them in is not consciously significant.
Firstly, there is what I call "the perceiving mind" or sometimes "the impulse generator". Other people have called it "the monkey mind, constantly jumping from thought to thought like a monkey jumps from branch to branch". It is the part that sees, hears, reacts; it presents random concepts, ideas, impulses, desires, memories, judgments to the other parts. "Oh, the sun's out", "what time does the the Monday meeting start again", "need to remember to read that private message", "I'm hungry", "let's check Facebook", just to give examples of what it came up with while I was typing the previous sentence. In addition to outside perceptions, it seems to bring up internal impulses, negative and positive: such as "I feel cranky/content", "I am a useless/clever person", memories both when prompted by something and at seemingly random. It has no conception of time or place or continuity, really; each impulse surfaces and immediately dies, to be replaced by the next.
Secondly, there's "meta mind": the observer/commentator/decider that I think most people think when they think about "I". This is the meta-process that can think about thinking and about doing. It seems to constantly talk to or about the impulse generator, occasionally commenting on the flow mind (see below). "Glad the sun is so down that I don't need to close the curtain. Hey, I'm not concentrating again. I don't need to check the meeting time now, really. It was really a good idea to make that dish, it smells very good and I did not have to go do groceries. Then again, groceries would mean I would go for a walk... I didn't do any exercise yesterday. I really need to concentrate now, and not check facebook. --- See, that was a nice stretch of flow" - it is the "internal voice" in your head, constantly talking with itself, talking to the rest of you.
Thirdly, there is a "flow mind" that can think or do without thinking about the thinking or doing. I think the flow mind is active all the time, but it is easiest to introduce to the meta-process after you have been very "concentrated". During periods of "full flow" the observer/commentator dies down, and there are no "metathoughts" either about what you are doing or about whatever the impulse generator comes up with. The impulses sort of still are there, but they are not picked up, and the metaprocess sort of still is there (because it is part of you you), and it can recall the flow afterwards. Flow is usually thought about in the context of creative work, where it is a desirable thing: the state of thinking/doing/creating where nothing else exist to the creator. It is not only good or good in itself, though; it is also possible to be in a flow that is harmful, for example when some worry or anxiousness or the desire to be more drunk is all that is in your mind, and the metaprocess does not manage to intervene.
Fourth, there is my "tao mind", which is hard to describe because it is not verbal or an impulse that I can talk about verbally - and this is where it gets its name from too, the essence of the concept of "tao" being that it cannot be named or described. It is what is there when all the other three manage to be quiet at the same time. It does not mean there is a blank, or that observations stop; it is just that they are not picked up by the other processes. The Tibetan Buddhist tradition, I am told, describes it as "the mind in between of two thoughts", and various meditation traditions exist that attempt to invoke it - though most seem to be designed to invoke it in a particular state of peacefulness, instead of just what is. It is the "core self", while not really even being much concerned in the distinction between "self" and "world".
These are, naturally, parts of my conscious mind. There are other parts of "me" - my personality traits, my body, probably something like my internalized moral code, as some examples.
It has made my life better when I have started to think that neither of these alone is "me". When I am in an anxiousness flow, it is not "me" that is there, it is a runaway process that does not listen to the other parts, but which the metaprocess can interfere with as soon as it manages to wake up. "I" am not the one that has all sorts of silly impulses when she should be concentrated; it is a part of me that offers these impulses and I can take them or leave them. "Flow" is separate from the "meta" process, not directed meta thoughts. And so forth. I am more complex than any of the "I" I perceive, and it's fun to be consciously aware of this.
Posted in Plain English | Tags psykiatria, self | 4 comments
