Pier Laurenzi
@md_pier
psychiatrist by day / culture junkie by night
My wife just compared all this tech-adjacent extreme longevity focus in men to anorexia in women. A physical manifestation of anxiety and lack of control. And now I can't get the thought out of my head. Spot on.
I believe all exposure to LLMs advances cognitive decline in the user. Outsourcing cognition + language removes development from the mind, & reasoning, &all second order gains of thought, which we will understand too late is the first order value. The journey *is* the destination
“Look for the thing you notice but no one else notices.” ~ Rick Rubin
I have come to believe that AGI is just another marketing lie
AI is showing us that creativity sits in an entirely different category to data retrieval.
I found myself thinking of something similar: Pre-scrolling, people would read something and then process it in the back of their heads for hours. I wonder if we can test for this ability somehow
I saw someone saying that they thought scrolling was affecting their memory formation, because it teaches the brain to immediately discard what it just saw to situate itself in a new context, over and over again. Something to this I think
Lots of noise on AI bots going to replace therapists. Allen Frances (DSM-IV) thinks they will. Big Silicon Valley players bet heavily on it. But beyond the tech bubble hype - will our patients actually embrace this? I am not entirely convinced…
My first Substack (full text below)
JMIR Mental Health: Exploring Suicide-Related Internet Use Among Suicidal #MentalHealth Patients in the United Kingdom: Cross-Sectional Questionnaire Study dlvr.it/TLpWSF #MentalHealth #SuicidePrevention #MentalHealthAwareness #SelfCare #Wellbeing
Dr Masterjohn's thread series on SSRIs is still in the making, but surely already quite interesting. We need more insights on SSRis and serotonin, for sure! BUT I'd like to respectfully ask: has @ChrisMasterjohn first-hand clinical exp in treating MDD/anxiety w/SSRIs ?
What was the biochemical analysis you did on these people and what were the nutritional interventions you began that failed prior to putting them on SSRIs?
Well interesting, but he i) Confused Prozac (fluoxetine) with fluvoxamine, and so botchered the dosage comparisons ii) Prozac dose for depression is around 40 to 60 mgs / day - so the mice are taking a very high dose: 1.46 mg/Kg * 75 kg (avg human) = 109 mg / day
After he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, Albert Camus wrote a letter of thanks to his favorite childhood teacher, whom he'd never forgotten. It's beautiful.
Stanford paid 35,000 people to quit social media. This was the largest study on emotional health in history. The results were so shocking, scientists called it "comparable to therapy." Here's what happens when you break free from the algorithm: 🧵
The protein story is based on statistical BS, amateur data fudging. Bro Science is really for idiots. 1- Some do very well growing muscles on minimal protein ing., others poorly on large doses. 2- Remove the line, see the fraud. 3- One of the authors failed to reveal he was…
I assumed taleb was on one, but I looked into it some more, and the protein for strength training literature is amongst the worst I've seen. e.g. spot the problems with this graph, from by far the most cited meta-analysis in the field (A source of the "1.6g/kg" myth) ...
Prior to the release of DSM-III in 1980, the most common diagnosis used by psychoanalysts was "neurotic depression," which was removed because DSM leaders did not want to use the term "neurotic." Neurotic depression was a valid diagnosis referring to mild and chronic anxiety and…
It baffles me everytime how little is know about human psychology by finance / MBA people. They know a lot about mass psychology (eg markets) and nil on individual psychology. Out-of-office behaviours are a mystery to them and they are blind to personality disorders
all u need to know on the dumb contemporary dopamine narrative
Interestingly, dopamine rarely makes us feel good. It tends to put us in a state of anxiety where we are constantly looking for a particular stimulus to relieve the tension. Lots of Buddhist meditation practitioners find inner peace by *decreasing* their dopamine production.