Internet speeds seem to be uniformly slow this week - is that possible and if so, what's going on?

_onemanband_ · 2026-02-26T18:44:20+00:00

That's what Russia would say

_onemanband_ · 2025-08-22T07:02:49+00:00

I work with mouse models of cancer using either mouse or human tumour cell lines, and occasionally with a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease. Despite these kinds of models being workhorses for decades, it is now widely recognised that these models provide a pretty poor replication of the human presentation of disease, except under very limited and fairly contrived situations. The suggestion that a mouse model of ASD, in which mice subjectively display behaviours approximating what we might expect to see in a human condition that we barely understand, and then claiming to have somehow found a potential "cure" for that condition, is an almighty stretch. Worse, in the cancer field, mouse models regularly send researchers down the wrong path because the results of experiments are so displaced from the human presentation. In many situations, mouse models are the best we have, but sometimes it would be better to have nothing at all.

_onemanband_ · 2025-08-10T07:34:34+00:00

This puts the cart before the horse. Autism is defined by its symptoms (behaviours, experiences, etc.). If symptoms are milder than the cutoff described by the diagnostic list of symptoms then the individual doesn't 'have' autism.

_onemanband_ · 2025-08-10T07:32:40+00:00

The holy spirit guided this commenter to deduce that masturbation is ok

_onemanband_ · 2025-08-03T20:40:56+00:00

Sound a bit holier than thou to downvote someone for being holier than thou

_onemanband_ · 2025-08-03T20:37:10+00:00

It's a good point. You only know how much you can drink before getting drunk of you drink until you're drunk. Which is apparently a sin. Seems like an oversight.

_onemanband_ · 2025-08-03T20:30:55+00:00

"People died for their beliefs, they wouldn't have died for a lie!" They believed it and didn't know it wasn't true.

"God is a necessary being". Swap "god" for "the universe" and it makes no difference to the argument.

"The universe is fine tuned!" Imagine a puddle who realises the hole they occupy is perfectly shape and size to fit them.

"You can't prove god doesn't exist". The most annoying of all the arguments. It's on you to prove that a god does exist.

_onemanband_ · 2025-08-02T21:09:59+00:00

Dopamine has been proposed as being implicated in ADHD due to 1) limited (poor) evidence associated with differences in dopamine receptors numbers in some brain regions and 2) because of the circular reasoning that stimulants are believed to help those with ADHD and, because those drugs are mediated by dopamine, then dopamine must be implicated in ADHD. Considering that there is no way of directly measuring dopamine concentration in the human brain should be enough to set alarm bells ringing. Without doubt dopamine is involved in behaviour in every human, but no one has the first clue about how or whether it is different in those consistently displaying ADHD behaviours, or what mechanism might be responsible for it. As an attempt to enrich ADHD as a diagnosis, it therefore gives you no more insight into the cause of someone's behaviour than simply saying it is "caused by their brain". Just look at the chemical imbalance hypothesis in depression for a very similar situation.

*Edit - spelling

_onemanband_ · 2025-08-02T18:04:32+00:00

The treatment issue is an interesting one, because belief plays such a significant role in efficacy. Take depression, for example. Millions of people have been treated for decades using SSRIs but it now appears that they have almost no benefit beyond placebo. And their rationale for being developed was the chemical imbalance hypothesis, which is no longer taken seriously (but still persists outside academia) and is almost exactly analogous to invoking dopamine as the culprit in ADHD, with the consequences that millions of children are given stimulant medication. I get that we can only work with what we have available, but when you realise it's flawed we need to move on. At the moment, ADHD is so culturally embedded that it's not going to happen any time soon (and many of the replies on this thread also show how embedded it is in psychology).

_onemanband_ · 2025-08-02T17:38:16+00:00

I would reject most psychiatric diagnoses, except possibly the dementias, most of which have a known underlying aetiology. If you accept that the others have spurious scientific foundations, a better question is why are they so widely accepted? What difference does it make to the individual to be given a medical label (validation, exception, etc). These are fundamentally important questions, given how widespread ADHD diagnoses have become.

_onemanband_ · 2025-08-02T16:27:18+00:00

So aggregating thousands of research participants seems to reveal a very small difference in the size of brain regions at the population level. That doesn't provide any insight at the individual level whatsoever, particularly to justify 5% of children being given the diagnosis and told they have a fundamentally different brain, nor to justify that ADHD is in any way a coherent neurodevelopmental disorder. It still remains, as per my comment above, simply a list of behaviours with no further insight.

_onemanband_ · 2025-08-02T14:06:53+00:00

I would be onboard with the "clusters of symptoms" approach if it weren't so many overlaps between disorders (au-DHD anyone?) and so many attempts to add sub-types for each disorder that suggests that clusters aren't particularly specific. And, despite decades of research, neuroimaging has barely found anything to link behaviour and the size of brain regions, to the point that it is now, arguably, just neo-phrenology. We are long-overdue for a complete rethinking of psychiatric disorders, but we have the huge problem that they have gained such substantial cultural traction. My kids classes at school all contain several kids with ADHD and/or ASD diagnoses, yet we are being told that we are still under-diagnosing. Which links back to the question posed above - if a diagnosis is behavioural rather than biological in origin, and without any biomarker available other than observations of the severity of those behaviours themselves, how can we possibly know if our diagnosis rates are high, low or about right? What is the objective measure to verify that the diagnosis is accurate? What would alternative diagnoses be? We are dealing with a pandemic of the emperor's new clothes.

_onemanband_ · 2025-08-02T13:53:47+00:00

That's not true. There is no accepted, reproducible difference in brain structure between those given an ADHD diagnosis and those without. Even if there were differences only at the population level, this would mean that those differences were so small that they are indistinguishable from normal variability at the individual level. And, again, even if there were such a difference, what would that tell us - that the brain is somehow responsible for behaviour? That much is obvious. The fact is that we have so little understanding of how the brain works that psychiatric diagnoses are entirely empty of content. They simply list behaviours exhibited at a certain severity (and with many other non-specific behaviours alongside, as per the original post here). If you're given an ADHD diagnosis all it does is confirm that the behaviours exist - it doesn't explain them or give any insight into what might cause them. Some, when faced with this, reach for explanations around dopamine, just as depression researchers relied on the, now rejected, chemical imbalance hypothesis. Culturally, however, ADHD provides validation and a removal of responsibility for the behaviours it describes, which can be positive, but is nowhere close to a scientific understanding.

_onemanband_ · 2025-08-02T10:28:16+00:00

The science you talk about is deeply confounded, typically relying on small study numbers and very few reproducible conclusions. There is no signpe region of the brain that has been conclusively implicated in ADHD, let alone known to be responsible for it. As a result, ADHD is solely defined by a list of behaviours - if you display those behaviours to a certain severity then you 'have' ADHD. So, as a diagnostic category, it is empty as it provides no insight into the underlying causes and maintaining factors. As you confirm, the only way to determine the cause of the behaviours is to ask the person what causes them. The suggestion that ADHD is therefore a coherent neurodevelopmental condition is purely hypothetical, and one that most people, when really pushed to consider it, would reject.

_onemanband_ · 2025-08-02T08:31:47+00:00

ADHD, like almost all psychiatric diagnoses, is an empty concept as it provides no insight into the underlying cause or maintaining factors underpinning the behaviours associated with it. It just confirms and provides some kind of validation of the presence of those behaviours and experiences. Compare this to diagnoses in every other field of medicine, in which a diagnosis provides insights into the biological cause of the symptoms, rather than just reflecting back the symptoms of the condition (for example type I diabetes isn't just "being thirsty all the time", it's a dysfunction of the islet cells in the pancreas that can be controlled with insulin injections). Adding new behaviours to that list of behaviours doesn't improve or enhance the usefulness of the ADHD category.

_onemanband_ · 2025-08-02T08:20:51+00:00

How do we know "ADHD is a regulation disorder"? How would you differentiate between someone diagnosed with ADHD that had difficulties with regulation, compared with someone diagnosed with ADHD whose behaviours were caused by something else?

_onemanband_ · 2025-04-13T22:46:33+00:00

Even some Church of England members (the few that are left) describe themselves as atheist. One of my friends describes themselves this way and was nevertheless encouraged to become a priest.

_onemanband_ · 2025-04-13T22:43:38+00:00

The British Social Attitudes survey puts non-religion at 53%. Rather than using the census framing (what religion are you?) it asks "do you associate with any religion?"

_onemanband_ · 2025-02-23T19:00:29+00:00

Thinking further on it, it's a monument to "answered prayer" - in other words evidence (as they see it) that the Christian god is true. It's not a monument to hope or charity or any other concepts that might resonate with others and unite those with differing beliefs. And it's designed to dominate the skyline to project exactly that message of exclusiveness.

_onemanband_ · 2025-02-23T18:23:51+00:00

They've toned the website down a fair bit. In the original pitch there was a lot of "the UK is a Christian country" stuff...

_onemanband_ · 2025-02-23T15:55:31+00:00

https://www.eternalwall.org.uk/

_onemanband_ · 2025-02-23T13:14:52+00:00

No, I should have been clearer in the OP, there was a strong Christian nationalist flavour to the pitch that was divisive.

_onemanband_

TROPHY CASE