Thank you for writing this!
I'm the one who wrote about my own similar realization, with How predictive processing solved my wrist pain.
If what we claim here is true (and specifically if the 2022 Ashar et al. Pain Reprocessing Therapy paper does replicate[1]), the implications feel pretty enormous. It suggests that a large fraction of the 800 million-1 billion who report chronic pain could experience permanent relief from <8 hours with a practitioner.
After my own experience, I pivoted from ML into pain research (building computational models). I went through the Pain Reprocessing Therapy training and have since been iterating on it (have so far successfully brought ~20 people to resolution, I'd say at... (read more)
Do you have some good pointers for fascia-based expllanations?
Good point — somatic exercises can change the way I use my wrists. Though, I'll note that the pain often notably changed in the course of the exercise. This could still be fascia-linked, but also strengthens my sense that the feedback loop as I described above captures some core dynamic.
Two incredible posts of yours — thank you also for sharing. I have been using PP here in a more loose ('poetic') sense. From a quick look at your post, it does seem like we mostly agree about the underlying phenomena. I look forward to reading in more detail your PP gripes.
Yeah — the book "The Way Out" is a popsci general introduction that contains the outline of the exercises enough to try it yourself. Happy also to talk more if that'd be helpful.
This is a post about a period of major suffering I went through, and how I acquired the knowledge and skill to eventually lift me out of it.
Disclaimer: this is not medical advice — consider it a personal narrative, perhaps a starting point for exploration.
[Note: this section is about my personal experience. You can skip to the technical arguments here]
I am about to give up. My eyes are bleary after four days of staring at numpy arrays. I want to smash my keyboard and throw it out into the snow, but I have promised myself that I will fix this bug by the end of the week.
Besides a dull headache, I... (read 2241 more words →)
This is very cool! Thank you for experimenting with grants in this format
You may find inspiration in papers like Modular Politics, which spawned Metagov, an online research community I'm a part of attempting to experiment with and understand digital governance. Although their focus is largely online platforms, there are a number of scholars adjacent to the community who study non-digital governance. (Related is the excellent 80,000 hours interview with Audrey Tang where she talks about Taiwan's governance experiments with Polis.)
The best older/non-digital literature I know of is from Elinor Ostrom — Governing the Commons is particularly good and provides a meta-ethnography of different long-lasting governance structures (ranging from villages in Yamanashi prefecture deciding how to harvest grain to Zanjera irrigation communities in the Phillipines).... (read more)
Probably not for most people. I've found there's something importantly load bearing about the presence of another person that is hard to articulate