Because it’s bad to be stupid. People are ashamed to be stupid because it’s a shortcoming. There is no world in which we can value a trait (intelligence) and not feel proportionately bad about its crippling deficiency. Pretending otherwise is some combination of being purposely obtuse and condescending.
> People are ashamed to be stupid because it’s a shortcoming.
So you are saying that people should be ashamed to be "special-needs" or "retarded"?
"Retarded" is not the same thing as stupid. You are using a similar but distinct concept as a stand-in for stupid. For example, I've heard people who were being socially awkward called "autistic" as a pejorative. They did not have autism, but they were being socially awkward because the two concepts are distinct. You can say it's bad to be stupid or bad to be a dork, but by using "retarded" or "autistic" in this way you're saying this group of people exemplify these traits and are thus "bad" themselves.
The answer to such a question is pretty much always no. (cd. Betteridge's Law)
Being (developmentally) retarded is a a way to be stupid. There a lots of other ways each with their own merits. People with intellectual disabilities aren't inherently bad, or morally bad, or necessarily worse that any person without a diagnosable disorder. That said, the whole idea is that the typical process of cognitive development is slowed or stalled on the way from baby to adult. This has undeniable disadvantages and, all else being equal, nobody should want it.
My feeling is that you must mix empathy with empiricism, and be brutally honest about the practical facts, while obviously not extending that to any unfounded personal judgements.
> People with intellectual disabilities aren't inherently bad, or morally bad, or necessarily worse that any person without a diagnosable disorder ... all else being equal, nobody should want it.
When you call someone r-, you are saying they are bad because they are acting like someone with intellectual disabilities. You are asserting that it's okay, because nobody should want to have an intellectual disability.
“Do no evil” is idealism. “Don’t undermine our marketing to grab data assets that don’t align with our business model” is cold self-interest.
I have much more faith in a company staying true to the latter. Not 100% faith, because their assessment of what business model to pursue can change, but it’s certainly not comparable in flakiness to corporate idealism.
As a physician, I wish more folks appreciated that “disability” is a property of the relationship between a person and their environment, and can emerge (or disappear) based on changes in that persons capability as well as changes in their environment.
For an obvious example: a patient with reversible heart failure can’t walk without severe shortness of breath today, but they can in three months. Today they need disabled parking; three months from now they do not.
Exactly! I am deaf and when I’m in an environment that’s fully signed, I cease to be disabled. Truly! And those who aren’t signing-aware in such environments become disabled language-wise.
That reminds me of a time I went to the pub with friends after work. I was sat at the table with my back to the rest of the pub. After a while I though "wow it's really quite in here tonight" at which point I turned around to find that the pub was packed, but with deaf people all signing to each other. Turns out it was a monthly deaf meetup at the pub.
It really demonstrated your point. I was quite jealous of their ability to hold a conversation with people all the way across the pub :)
Can we apply "disability" to all abilities, like being hungover and therefore temporarily sensitive to light and sound, or should it apply to specific ones, like being injured and therefore temporarily sensitive to light and sound?
You are really hung up on trying to reconcile that 'disability' has a different meaning in an English dictionary as from a court of law. In different contexts, the word will mean different things. When in doubt, provide additional details to alleviate any confusion - this will vary on a case by case basis.
The meaning of words will always depend on the context they are used in. Even outside of a court of law, there are still people here who disagree that a person with an occupied hand is still disabled.
That seems like something that will shift towards one or the other as society talks more openly about disabilities.
I'd probably call that a "hands busy" situation rather than a disability situation, but some of the same computer features may be helpful for both situations.
I don't know what a doctor would say here. Just noting that medical jargon sometimes carries moral or legal tones independent of any actual medical distinction.
For instance if you're taking a legal drug that habituates you, they don't like calling you an addict, so you're experiencing cessation syndrome. A change in legal status of the drug would presumably lead to a terminology change.
And I'm not going to revisit DSM fights, but suffice to say, a number of changes made to certain diagnoses over time reveal more about sociopolitical changes than anything having to do with psychiatry.
Your statement regarding legal status of a drug and addiction is wrong. Alcohol and tobacco are legal drugs and you can not only evolve a dependency on them, but if your addicted you’ll be called an addict. The same is true for other legal drugs used as medication, e.g. benzodiazepines or opioids. If you’ve developed physical and/or psychological dependence on such a drug, you might suffer from withdrawal, which is not a different thing than discontinuation, but rather a special case thereof. Addiction and withdrawal compare to dependency and discontinuation like a hoarder compares to someone who relies on the service of a cleaning lady.
Same question. I’m a lifelong NYer, and a metro card has never failed in me in use or in structural integrity. I tend to replace them every five years or so for eventually /losing/ them, but that’s it. What more could you ask for?
In my advanced cardiac life support training, an EMT once put it this way (addressing some nerves at being responsible for a critical life or death event):
Their heart is stopped - they are dead. You can’t kill them any more dead, you can /only/ bring them back to life. So what’s to be nervous about?
Don’t pick it apart. It’s not hard to pick apart. But thinking about it that way really does help take some of the pressure off and let you focus on doing the deed.
If notarization isn't common in the country where you are, you should probably escalate through AWS support in that country. They probably have an alternate procedure. If you're talking to US-based support, they are used to thinking this is a trivial request. Getting something notarized is something that can be handled in 5 minutes at places as common as convenience stores. Most people have coworkers that are notaries and can do it without even getting up from their desk.
If that's not the case in your country, ask them for a different procedure. It's not something they intend to be onerous.
I'm not interested in recovering that account anyway, I'd spend more money (in terms of time spent dealing with them) on trying to get it back than what I'd owe in a few decades.
In Germany you can also get documents notarized in (Catholic) parish offices. I think they do it for free.
That said, this sounds unreasonable and if you're not in the US this may violate consumer protection regulations if they didn't require the same level of verification to sign the contract in the first place.
> A problem with modern psychology is the diagnostic criteria aren't very much based on underlying causes as on being able to reliably diagnose patients based on symptoms regardless of physician. This leads to people agreeing what your diagnosis is
That is true. The groupings persist because they are useful in facilitating communication regarding potential complications, prognosis, and patterns of response to treatments.
People seem intent on throwing away the above utility with a backhanded “but that’s not the Real Diagnosis.” It’s not, but within the limitations of our current understanding of neurology, it’s the best we have come up with so far (allowing for some limitations due to the pace of spread of innovations, politicking, etc.)
Clinician and researcher in mental health here. In my view, you're being too charitable.
> The groupings persist because they are useful in facilitating communication regarding potential complications, prognosis, and patterns of response to treatments.
These are reasons, but they're a distant second. Mainly, they persist because those groupings - diagnoses, in other words - have become necessary for billing. The DSM, for instance, is an economic document, not a scientific one. For most people, it sits on a shelf, gathering dust.
As for "the best we've come up with so far", you'd perhaps be interested to learn how often the decisions about these groupings are made because of politics and economics, and not by science [1].
Thank you for coming out with us! I tell my doctors all the time, I’m tired of being diagnosed, I want you to listen to how I feel. That has got to be so much further in helping me than any diagnosis has.
They comprise a large percentage of the caloric intake of a lot of bird species, which are already fragile due to ecosystem fracturing. This could result in a hit to bird populations - and if the mosquitos adapt and rebound, the birds are unlikely to rebound nearly as quickly, allowing for a potential enormous boom in total mosquito population.
I don’t really know why this prompted straight up downvotes. These are the exact concerns voiced in multiple Nature articles over the past decade or so.
