Luke

Neuropsychology, rock climbing, and mycology 🍄

[Kos Samaras @KosSamaras]

Every few years our political class goes looking for the “quiet Australians.” In 2019 they found a flattering fiction…..the aspirational mortgage-belt couple, the franking-credit retiree, the tradie worried about his ute that was being threatened by EVs. It was all BS. There was zero data behind any of it. But it told us exactly which Australians our political and commentariat class are willing to lend agency to. It’s almost never the people who actually are the real quiet Australians.

The real ones don’t read the opinion pages. They empty your bins. They wipe your parents in aged care. They clean the office after you’ve gone home. They work the night shift at the meatworks. And the political class treats their labour as the one cost that can always be squeezed and the one claim that can always be deferred.

Watch what happened when 7,000 ASU members stopped Melbourne’s bins this year. The councils blamed the state’s rate cap. The state said the councils were sitting on healthy surpluses and crying poor. Each side pointed at the other, and the garbo, a human being who just wanted to stop picking up weekend shifts to break even, dissolved into the gap between two institutions. That’s the bet our political class makes again and again: muddy who’s responsible, and the public will shrug and move on.

But voters aren’t fooled, and this is where the political class keeps getting it catastrophically wrong. In Hume, the council that told 17,000 households their bins were a casualty of state stinginess is the same council that found $24 million to restore the Broadmeadows Town Hall. The money is always there for the building, the precinct, the plaza, their own renos. It’s the people who keep the suburb from drowning in its own waste who are told the well has run dry, that there is no money to help them feed their kids.

This is why the system is being turned over. We keep telling ourselves the revolt against the major parties, the surge to One Nation, is a story about culture or grievance or misinformation. A moral failing in the voter to be fixed with better messaging. It is nothing of the sort. It is an entirely rational response from an outer-suburban, mortgage-stressed working class that has watched its political class find money and agency for everyone except people like them.

My article on why Garbos are just as important as health workers - below.

[Luke @werldknot]

Every reason to consider how group differences could be explained by other factors. Hard to argue with sample sizes reported in the study, but I don't witness this personally and can't see it having any material consequences.

[Luke @werldknot]

Implications of sex diffs in line orientation seem grossly overblown here. JoL is a trivially easy task, hence its utility testing for neurological issues. Basically useless for most testing. Its routine to see 80yo women with dementia score full marks. Nothing to see here

[Labrador Skeptic @SaysSimulation]

Fascinating! The single largest testable mental difference between the genders is that men are interested in things, and women are not. The next two largest differences are mental shape rotation capabilities, and line angle judgment.

All three are core to civilization.
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[Boyan Slat @BoyanSlat]

Excited for @TheOceanCleanup to come to the Manila Bay region! Today we signed with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources to work together on stopping plastic pollution in the Pasig River before it reaches the ocean.

[Luke @werldknot]

@awaisaftab Idk if this tangent flows well from your insightful initial post. To humour the notion, why can't the experienced opacity and surrounding processes be seen as an intrapsychic social problem in the typical case, contorted by loneliness/shame and other externalised social ails?

[Awais Aftab @awaisaftab]

This reminds me of the phenomenological line of thinking… in a healthy psychological state, our mental faculties have a “transparent” quality and they are the invisible lens through which we engage with the world. In psychopathology, the psyche loses its transparency, and becomes opaque, heavy, rigid, alien, forcing itself into conscious awareness and inviting obsessive introspection.

[Luke @werldknot]

@ClimbingCoachX Totally valid.

[Cecilia Rosca @cecilia06155274]

@sanilrege The threshold for giving high-dose thiamine should be very low in any confused or malnourished patient

Better to overtreat than to miss the window before permanent memory damage (Korsakoff syndrome) sets in

Great reminder

[Luke @werldknot]

@MarsdanVM @shoindokazui @nabe1975 I think straight swords were easier to produce and they liked the double edge for armoured fighting/piercing. I'm thinking middle ages. All this is from some videos I watched on the topic from and English blacksmith who seemed well read on the history.

[Luke @werldknot]

@MarsdanVM @shoindokazui @nabe1975 I believe a significant influence on common Western swordcraft (particularly for military purposes) was durability and efficiency tradeoffs. Also given the popularity of hand and a half/long swords, which were more effective when fighting against armour than curved blades

[Luke @werldknot]

Can't blame psychiatrists for this. Culturally, we are fated to this and our ineptitude to handle it. It's bloody tragic

[Luke @werldknot]

In Oz, the best accessible care we have for a person in desperate need is mostly awful. Ultimately, all involved hope to agree that the patient was either:
1. So desperate that mild-moderate relief is sublime
2. Not really suffering significantly anyway.

Psychiatry is stuck

[Daniel Owens @dsowens17]

The problem with this framing is that it shifts the debate away from the quality and nature of psychiatric care to the quantity of it.

The real question is not simply whether enough people are receiving treatment, but whether the dominant model of treatment, especially heavy reliance on medication, is itself part of the problem.

It sidesteps the fact that significant numbers of people who have received psychiatric care remain dissatisfied, harmed, dependent, or poorly served by it.

It also ignores the extent to which medication has displaced broader, safer and more comprehensive forms of support because drugs are faster, cheaper and easier for healthcare systems to scale.

Expanding access to an increasingly “meds first” mental health system does not address concerns about overprescribing, dependency, poor long term outcomes, or the erosion of non-pharmacological care.

The APA still seems far more comfortable defending the existing model than seriously confronting its limitations.

[Hesheng Liu @hesheng3]

Lesion network mapping (LNM) has been powerful in linking symptoms and brain functional circuits, but ongoing debates highlight that it is still hard to isolate symptom-specific effects. We came up with a new method, robust LNM (rLNM) — a unified framework combining null models and selective specificity to reveal reliable, symptom-specific networks from background structure. https://t.co/6WHpBRNuQn
@bttyeo @foxmdphd @ndosenbach @club_scan

[Luke @werldknot]

@ClimbingCoachX @indole_gaines @desnivelados That is to say, there aren't any good ones.

[Luke @werldknot]

@ClimbingCoachX @indole_gaines @desnivelados I feel the shape of arguments in favour of French/US vs Aus systems essentially mirror those of imperial vs metric measurement

[Nathan Beacom @Zheschool]

In Gulliver's Travels, a foolish professor invents a language machine which aims to allow anyone to write works of philosophy and politics without the necessities of knowledge and study. The general effect seems to be the increase of general foolishness.

[Luke @werldknot]

@ArtemisConsort What would possibly lead to to assume those who live and perceive every expression of their habitat would have no appreciable understanding of that system? Shallow stuff mate

[Paul Schofield @pschofie79]

I’m going to let my kids have every minute of screen time they want until it’s proven by science that doing so will definitely kill them.

[Maryam Fotouhi, MD @Maryamfotouhi11]

#RadInTraining #Tweetorial
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Clinical MRI Biomarkers to Differentiate Parkinson's Disease from Its Mimics 🧠 ✨
Parkinson's disease is still primarily a clinical diagnosis, but MRI can add meaningful diagnostic value when interpreted beyond “no acute intracranial abnormality.”

[Tyler Black, MD @tylerblack32]

In short:

ADHD is highly heritable, lifelong, biologically real, and treatable. The drugs lower mortality. If your take is "it's not real" or "everyone's just overdiagnosed now," you're roughly 30 years behind the literature. Catch up, hot stuff.

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