Doesn’t matter. If a real war starts you want a lot of men and the only reliable way is conscription. No one could have fought WW2 with a volunteer military. Ukraine aren’t relying on volunteers. Israel don’t rely on volunteers. You do the best you can with what you’ve got available.
Peace-time armies will not ask for that, that’s for sure, but when a real war is on the table (like it looks to soon be the case here in Europe) then things change.
This is definitely one of those citation needed comments.
Firstly, professional armies are recruited from the general population and are on average no better or worse than conscripts.
Secondly, the above comment completely sidesteps the moral aspects. Why should the burden of military service fall predominantly on the poor and the desperate? Why should decision makers be able to only send other people’s children to war?
To your first point, it really ought not require a citation to understand that people who have been training full-time for years make better soldiers than people you pull out of civilian life and ship off to the front after a few months, and who want nothing more than to exit the service.
There is no modern, professionalized army that wants conscripts. None. Conscripts are a liability, and a measure of last resort.
To your second, it’s far from just the downtrodden that fill the ranks of professional armies. In many countries, e.g. France (where I served), the upper classes of society (grande bourgeoisie and nobility) are over-represented in the ranks.
> Firstly, professional armies are recruited from the general population and are on average no better or worse than conscripts.
This isn’t true. The US and UK conscript armies of WW1 and WW2 were significantly healthier and better educated than the general population. Lots of people grew up in wretched poverty and had deficiency diseases or were malnourished or had parasites. Those people were rejected.
It is illegal for the US military to accept recruits with an ASBAB score of ten or below, roughly equivalent to IQ 83. The military is in some sense representative but it is not a random sample.
Question from a non-cryptographer: why use 192bit nonces instead of 256? I can’t imagine those extra bits would be considered costly in any practical application.
There is no space for 256 bits: 192 bits is 96 bits from the underlying nonce space, and 96 bits that go into the 128-bit CMAC block (along with the necessary prefix). We could make the CMAC input longer, but then we'd have to run the AES-256 block function more times (and we'd hit some annoying key control issues in the CMAC KDF).
This is actually similar to why XChaCha20Poly1305 has 192-bit nonces, and consistency with the other major extended-nonce AEAD is another mild advantage.
Reducing security below 128 bits in order to save a block of AES will anger the gods and surely we will be made to pay. Turn back now, while there is still time.
Beyond the importance of controlling the placebo effect, I am worried that a lot of the drug-depression research is overlooking an important possibility: that the thing about ketamine/psilocybin/etc that is helping with depression is not some latent property of the molecule, but rather the actual transcendent experience of the trip. In other words, the trip is the point, not the mechanistic neuro-tinkering [0].
Importantly, this tracks with what we know about the protective effects of things like religiosity against depression. As such, the qualitative experience of the drug might not be something we can (or should) do away with. I would even go as far as suggesting that an absence of transcendence in one's life is precisely what causes a large segment of people to become depressed in the first place, and that perhaps drugs are helpful only insofar as they produce a transcendent experience.
This isn't to say we can't take a scientific approach to treating depression, but that has to be balanced with something profoundly metaphysical: the actual qualia of life experience. Wellness isn't the absence of disease; it's the presence of thriving, and that includes within it a component of things like hope, inspiration, and elevation above the ordinary. We used to have various ceremonies designed to turn us towards the numinous, but we've pretty systematically dismantled those in favor of a grounded hyper-rationality [1]. As a scientist, I can't really object to rationality on its own, but it may be worth considering non-rational, transcendent experience as a fundamental psychological need.
[0] If you're a materialist, you might object that neurological machinery is not differentiable from qualia. Fair enough! I even agree! My point is simply that medicine needs to consider qualia as a major parameter in the treatment of depression. Fixing depression is not like fixing a car.
[1] I suspect most people here are familiar with Nietzsche's "God is dead quote". Many people in my entourage are floored to discover that he correctly predicted the dramatic increase in anxiety, depression, neuroticism and nihilism that is present in modern life.
> No patients sought conventional antidepressant treatment within 5 weeks of psilocybin. Reductions in depressive symptoms at 5 weeks were predicted by the quality of the acute psychedelic experience.
I think there's another out there with similar findings, that the stronger the mystical-type experience induced, the stronger the impact on the pathology. I haven't been able to dig it up though.
A lovely take. For years now, JHU has been emphasizing that the benefits of psilocybin are strongly correlated with whether one has a "mystical-type experience." My own explorations (long ago) strongly bore this out.
I’ve had many treatments for depression throughout my life, to include trans cranial magnetic stimulation, which I think is considered a rather modern second or third line type intervention.
Ultimately none of it has mattered much. I went through the “Death of God” thing at about seven years old and also acquired a condition that causes me chronic pain to this day around then. It seems rather natural that that could cause someone to be sad.
I suppose at the end of the day, you can’t escape modern life and you can’t create a god where none exists, so we try drugs and other tweaks to the brain because it’s what we have.
My experience is oddly similar. But I do question whether existential anxiety about the existence of a deity at age seven, is more of a symptom of trauma than a cause. In my case I grew up in a dismally religious family, in an alienated place, at a time when the disconnect between my families belief and the implicit beliefs of modernity were in stark contrast. It was fairly inevitable that the contradictions would become absurd. I don't see that revellation as responsible for my dark worldview though. That's likely more mundane toxic family, learned helplessness, chronic health related stuff.
I’d say my religious upbringing was a positive experience actually, to the point that today I wish I was able to believe in it. My brushes with evangelical Christianity however are what initially caused me to question the whole thing - it’s hard to believe that they believe in what they say when their actions are so in contradiction with the words in their religious texts. That this was so apparent to a seven-year-old me is quite an indictment and I think explains a lot of the recent secularization of the US.
I do have a possible surgery that may relieve the pain at some point and I think that that hope may be about the closest thing I have to religion these days.
Alan Watts reopened my interest in the metaphysical while deconstructing western mythology. Check out some of his lectures if you're interested in exploring the potential for reviving some of those positive experiences.
That's the wrong level of description. It adds little to the argument about whether neurochemistry or perception underly the efficacy of psychedelic treatments. As a counterpoint - human cognition and perception only exist in contexts beyond the brain - a perceived world, brain development through perceptual stimulation, language acquisition etc. Brain in a vat does nothing.
One of the most delicious ironies in life is to ask these people why they think philosophy is poo-poo, and then revel in the fact that their answer is exactly philosophical in nature.
