This is a good illustration of two different realities that might as well be applied to how we understand life, death, illness, and medicine. The gap between the old and the new is unbridgeable. /1
I don’t know what Goldeneye is so I have no way to relate to the feeling or experience of playing this game. By the question I may imagine it is exciting. This common feeling of excitement if familiar to me. /2
Excitement of adventure when you map the whole village and play cops and robbers (Cossacks and Bandits in the Russian version) into the night. You climb though windows, hide under fisherman’s boats, crawls through vineyards. The whole world is your playground. /3
Having no experience of a simulated reality, I cannot relate to the excitement of a computer game. The closest experience to a machine game excitement for me was a huge apparatus of a Battleship. It is exciting but not in the way reality is. /4
Reality of an illness is similarly different for me and an American who grew up with an idea that an illness is an option. I know that illness is reality to bear. An American who grew up in the age of a pill for every ill, knows to annihilate any symptom of his aliveness. /5
In the absence of the humble feeling reality brings, a man has but one option - to simulate a forever more exciting "reality" that can never find a match in reality. My experience with a game on the ground cannot match the excitement of Goldeneye in four-player split screen./6
I am content with it just as I am content with being sick and eventually dying. A modern man finds reality an unnecessary nuisance that simulated reality brings. It makes sense for him to breath by a ventilator and get excitement from a machine. /7
I want to stress that both experiences make sense to those who engage in them. Yet we cannot fully engage in each other's experiences because each of us lacks the means to interpret those experiences. Our reference points of meaning are different. /8
"While rejecting the acceptance of suffering as a form of masochism, anesthesia consumers tend to seek a sense of reality in ever stronger sensations. They tend to seek meaning for their lives and power over others by enduring undiagnosable pains and unrelievable anxieties: /9
the hectic life of business executives, the self-punishment of the rat-race, and the intense exposure to violence and sadism in films and on television. /10
In such a society the advocacy of a renewed style in the art of suffering that incorporates the competent use of new techniques will inevitably be misinterpreted as a sick desire for pain: as obscurantism, romanticism, dolorism, or sadism." #IvanIllich /11
The picture is of a village in the Crimea. It did not have a single telephone, no indoor plumbing (outhouse and banya), and drinking water was brought in by cistern trucks to fill concrete wells until next refill. There was some radio reception and very poor TV reception. /12

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More from @Medical_Nemesis

9 Sep
I found the thread underneath intriguing because of all the answers: there’s little solicitation of additional observable info. Majority of answers either look for a problem of numbers within the woman or offer ready solutions based on the numbers presented. /1
There is a split between place of a problem the woman herself as demonstrated by numbers or outside (type of diet, by numbers). /2
As always philosophically it’s between weight and having a decent meal. When the question is framed as weight a solution tends to be different than of you frame a question about the nature of food culture. /3
Read 4 tweets
9 Sep
There are two ways to classify acute respiratory disease: by symptoms (syndrome) or by causative agent. Most of the time a syndrome is used because there is no reason to look for a causative agent. /1
COVID-19 is an outlier. The reason for this is surveillance - we test to track the disease for some reason (epidemiological, political, or other stupid). As with most acute viral respiratory diseases, treatment is supportive not targeted. /2
Had we not gone nuts, there would be no covid-19. Majority of cases would squarely fall into common cold, sinusitis, or flu categories by symptoms. Clinically there is no reason to find what caused any of that because we have no targeted treatment. /3
Read 7 tweets
9 Sep
It is an interesting problem from a philosophical standpoint. One that would fall under the title of mathematization (of nature, reality, man, food). /1
Mathematics is the language in which God has written the universe. Galileo Galilei /2
The original wording. /3
Read 4 tweets
8 Sep
"The Pythagoreans, who saw number as a guide to reality, noticed that music could be described in mathematical terms, since the intervals between notes correspond to the ratios between strings. "

Did Pythagoreans see numbers? Or did they see ratios?/1
"But this is to misunderstand the Greek preoccupation with number and harmony."
Were the Greeks preoccupied with number? /2
"This thought shows up in the cosmology of Plato, who was a Pythagorean at heart. The sign over his Academy bearing the motto “Let no one ignorant of ­geometry enter” is apocryphal but apt."
Was geometry of the Ancient Greeks algebra? /3
Read 11 tweets
8 Sep
“Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.” /1
/3
Read 11 tweets
17 Jul
On “safe and effective”. /1
FDA is ill suited to guard your interest nor it is positioned to evaluate or decide if a particular therapy is of any benefit to you in the best of circumstances. /2
In case of benevolent liking of potions, there is hypothetically a small subset in a population for whom any cold presents danger and potion might offer a benefit providing they don’t possess personal physiological quirks that will make a potion harmful for them. /3
Read 7 tweets

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