• DozensOfDonner@mander.xyz
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    10 months ago

    Working in neuroscience of consciousness field I feel him deeply. Although 57k sounds amazing to a Europoor

    • AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml
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      10 months ago

      You can basically half American salary numbers because we have to pay for a lot of stuff that Europeans usually don’t need to pay for. $57k in America is struggling if you live in a city. Anything below $40k is one car repair away from being financially ruined.

      • Uncle_Bagel@midwest.social
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        10 months ago

        American salaries are also always presented as gross income before taxes instead if net income after taxes like in Europe.

        • tryptaminev 🇵🇸 🇺🇦 🇪🇺@feddit.de
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          10 months ago

          we also do gross before taxes in Germany. 57k before taxes is still a solid salary in many areas of Germany. Some MINT and Financelords might want to disagree with that, but it is in the top 15% of salaries. At that Level you pay about 5,1k taxes, 5,3k pension and 4,6k for health, 1,3k eldercare and 750 unemployment insurance. (all mandatory)

          That seems quite a lot at first, but for instance unemployment pays 60% of your net income up to a year qfter loosing a job, health insurance also covers all children until they are 25 or earn more than 500€/month.

          • Asafum@feddit.nl
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            10 months ago

            It only sounds like a lot of taxes to us Americans that don’t actually do the math… I’m making almost 60kUSD so it’s a very real comparison for me. Like your 4.6k healthcare tax is my 14.4k pay cut (mandatory healthcare coverage for full time employees paid for by the owner @1,200/month for me) Your 5k general tax is higher than my 3.6k income tax, but everything else offsets that by such a large margin that arguing against it is laughable.

            Thing is we also pay a ton of of pocket when we go to the doctor too.

            I wish we had a number to use like your 4.6k but for America so in our arguments for universal healthcare we could show just how much more we really pay…

            Sorry for all the edits, I remember as I reread lol

              • Asafum@feddit.nl
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                10 months ago

                A not insignificant amount of money goes towards administrative pay for all the middlemen involved…

                Everyone has to get their slice of the… (Checks notes) necessary medical treatment of human beings… Ughh…

          • Damage@feddit.it
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            10 months ago

            57k gross is a bangin’ income in Italy, at that level you pay about 35-40% in taxes if you have no deductibles etc, which means net 2631€/month, about twice the average.

            You could work alone and support a stay-at-home wife

        • BigNote@lemm.ee
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          10 months ago

          Really? I had no idea. It turns out I make a lot more money than I thought.

    • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.ml
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      10 months ago

      The biggest lesson from neuroscience: Most psychology is BS and the entire field is little better than pseudoscience.

      • commiewithoutorgans [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        I think this is a very incorrect take. I don’t think neuroscience has been able to make a single claim against psychology yet, nor any real and predictable claims at all which place it above psychology in application or correctness. Psychology of course has problems, and I’m very open to discussions of issues with methods and shit. But don’t act like neuroscience has much of anything to say about it. They’re entirely tangential fields with one at the experiential level and the other at the technical/non-experience level. Common mistake of thinking you know too much from the meme

        • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.ml
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          10 months ago

          If we weren’t talking about a brain, but instead a piece of computer software, neuroscience would be digging into the source code to figure out how it works. Meanwhile psychology is like watching a bunch of YouTube videos of people demonstrating the software.

          One provides answers. The other provides guesses.

          • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            10 months ago

            Computer touchers stop assuming everything in the universe is a computer program challenge. Difficulty level: actually trying to respect fields of academia that aren’t about computers.

            • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.ml
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              10 months ago

              It’s a metaphor, my god. You want a less technical version? Neurology is like a farmer analyzing his soil to figure out it’s pH and NPK content to determine what crops will go best. Psychology is studying decades worth of Farmers Almanacs. The point is, only one deals with hard, definitive numbers.

              I will grant that my view is a matter of opinion, but it is my firm belief that any science that can not answer it’s own questions with solid, irrefutable, numerical answers is an undeveloped science.

              You may take that as an insult, in which case 1. It’s not meant as one, and 2. Get over yourself. It’s an observation. I’m not saying these fields aren’t important and won’t eventually develop far enough to have such answers, but as they are, right now, they are filled with deficiencies.

              Because there are no hard, irrefutable, numerical answers, these fields inherently invite biased studies with conclusions searching for evidence rather than the other way around. And while this may not be the norm, it absolutely exists and can be used to justify anything. Then other studies cite that study which cites that study, and on and on. And since it can’t just be disproven with an equation, its much harder to refute and correct.

              It’s educated guesses. Maybe some day they won’t be guesses, just like we don’t guess that 1+1=2 or that oxygen and hydrogen can combine to make water; but for right now, they’re guesses. And no amount of saying that’s offensive to those who study it will change that.

              • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                10 months ago

                It’s a metaphor, my god.

                Nothing good is going to come after an opener like that.

                Reductionism may make you feel very smart, but eliminating everything that doesn’t fit and doubling down on the belief that your hobby/specialization knows better than entire fields that are actually dedicated to the subject is sheer hubris.

                And no amount of saying that’s offensive

                I didn’t say that. I said the arrogance is obnoxious, because it is. And conjuring up imaginary enemies that are “offended” by your le logical factual facts is a crybully move.

                Get over yourself

                You first. You’re making extraordinary claims without extraordinary evidence, and in the process saying that entire fields of academia are false/pointless because they’re not special Main Characters with an exclusive grasp of reality like, presumably, yourself.

                • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.ml
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                  10 months ago

                  Nothing good is going to come after an opener like that.

                  Yea, and nothing good will come from a shitty meme attacking a choice of metaphor rather than it’s content. Which is what you did to start. What a great picture you posted, is that supposed to represent the strawman you built rather than form any actual argument other than “no you’re wrong”?

                  • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                    10 months ago

                    You don’t deserve better because you didn’t offer anything of value to respond to with better.

                    “Psychology worthless because brain is a computer” is a level of arrogance on the level of a physicist claiming that they are the master of all things biology by extension of their field and that biology is a worthless subject.

                    Similar actual usefulness in application too. I wouldn’t ask a physicist how to preserve coral in the Great Barrier Reef, and I certainly wouldn’t ask you to perform therapy sessions for PTSD victims. It’d be just as disasterous, probably moreso in your case considering the sheer arrogance you’re presenting because you touch computers and think very highly of yourself and believe that your computer touching has godlike universal application.

                    Actually, it’s worse than that, because at least the physicist has a straight line that can be drawn, however distant, to biology through chemistry. You don’t even have that.

          • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            10 months ago

            The only self-described neuroscientist I’ve seen that had such open and direct hostility toward psychology, and had such “everything psychologists do is bunk, trust me bro” arrogance like yourself, was Sam Harris.

            And Sam Harris is a quack and a fraud that has failed to submit even a single peer-reviewed scientific paper since his family-funded “foundation” assigned him his doctorate so he could peddle books. You’re not a Sam Harris devotee, are you?

            https://rhizzone.net/articles/sam-harris-fraud/

          • commiewithoutorgans [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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            10 months ago

            I’d dig into you here but comrade @[email protected] managed to perfectly. You use the analogy because you believe in what the metaphor represents (that brains can be better analyzed at the level of neurons to understand what they are, while dumbass psychologists think you can get it from experiential analysis). The computers are always of course a metaphor, but you’re influenced deeply by the thought processes which arise from the simplification of human experience (or any living experience) to a mathematical basis which computers also use. There is no reason to believe this or take the analysis at that level as any more serious than experience (which we also can’t prove but I can feel something so I believe it)

      • machiabelly [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        Really? What psychology has been disproven by neuroscience? Are psyc people resisting it or are they working together? Considering how much psyc has changed the world and helped people I think the idea that it’s BS is a little strange.

        • robot_dog_with_gun [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          10 months ago

          we don’t understand the brain very well, psych is somewhere between leeches and luminiferous aether.

          if it was more well understood then people won’t need to go to 15 fucking different therapists before finding one that helps (if you’re lucky), antidepressants would do better than batters do at baseball, you wouldn’t need to try dozens of different medications to find one that works (if you’re lucky), and they’d take effect more quickly.

          • Thordros [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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            10 months ago

            Capitalism doesn’t put money into social sciences so social sciences are leeches and humour theory pseudoscience. It’s unknowable, because the money just isn’t there. The free market had decided.

            • GreenTeaRedFlag [any]@hexbear.net
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              10 months ago

              There is money in psychology, but it’s all put into making people act more normal. This can be good and useful for some people, many people need aderall to comfortably live, and it’s good to stabilize depression, but these being driven by profit means often the underlying problem isn’t fixed(in the cases this is possible) and society remains ableist(for issues that are endemic). Other social sciences can be kind of a crapshoot. Many anthropologists are doing very good, important, meaningful work. But not all. Archeology is a land of contrast, and sociology is good when not practiced by privileged westoids.

            • robot_dog_with_gun [they/them]@hexbear.net
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              10 months ago

              i mean, (some) painkillers, muscle relaxers, and lots of other drugs work pretty fucken good. we don’t have a great understanding of general anesthesia but all that stuff works most of the time in a way that is simply not the case with brain stuff…

              • LinkedinLenin [any, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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                10 months ago

                Consciousness is complex in a way that isn’t effectively modeled by insurance-mediated healthcare and science, which overemphasizes quantitative variables in a field that’s profoundly qualitative. Not to mention the obsession with the individual, ignoring the systems that individuals exist within.

                • robot_dog_with_gun [they/them]@hexbear.net
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                  10 months ago

                  cool i just want to not feel shitty all the time and i felt like this when i had a stable financial situation and a partner so i know it’s not exclusively because of capitalism, which means the psych field needs to step up its shit, not just help build the guillotines.

                  • LinkedinLenin [any, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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                    10 months ago

                    It’s not that every psychological problem is directly due to capitalism (though many are directly or indirectly) it’s that capitalist psychology mostly cares about profitable treatments, whether they’re effective or not. I’m inclined to think some form of talk therapy or psychoanalysis may be more helpful to a lot of people than solely symptom-based treatment. But who can afford to go to therapy for years?

                    Even from the pharmaceutical side, we’re mostly just tweaking the mechanisms of consciousness without necessarily addressing or understanding the holistic structure, so the best we can hope for is trying various meds until one sort of works. But most of us can’t afford to spend years trying a new med every few months, with all the turbulence and uncertainty that goes along with it.

                    Cbt, dbt and the like are somewhat useful at treating certain symptoms, but generally fail to address root causes. And the way they’re often applied, they seem more intent on teaching people to accept their treatment under capitalism than anything.