Sorry to hear the finger flick doesn't work :(. TIL about dewaxing (why anybody would even think that would help...).

Sound targeting is IMO something only worth doing in an especially-exotic clinical setting in particular - like fMRI while anesthetized, or watching skin resistance or brainwave baseline or reading cortisol level directly out of the bloodstream or something.

(I was actually trying to ask about how this all started, although sound testing is the far more practical disambiguation of what I (unclearly) said!)

I wonder what you can realistically do to try and "sensitize the bar" (in the sense of raising or lowering it), as it were, so more people can be classified in the "actually untenable level of baseline stress" group - so you can then be classified under the "significant life impact" FDA exemption thing.

> My hunch is that we'll want to develop risk profiles for T and H based on genetics. My ears are sensitive and I shouldn't have exposed myself to loud sound at all as a kid. Probably should be part of military admission screening.

Shakes head I think I can see what you mean about "society is broken", this sort of thing definitely should be part of core competency in terms of standardized testing, who knows how much wreckage quietly exists out there that's directly been caused by the way things are done now.

I happened to land on t3x.org recently (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29702573, the root of which was very interesting) and found my way to https://www.t3x.org/bits/sensitivity.html. It's not much but it echoes the same ideas FWIW.

In any case, given your vet status, I wonder if you could wheedle your way into the side doors of some military medical audio labs and be a (heavily conditional) lab rat of some sort? Or go through the VA? (<existentially-scary voice> "embrace the bureaucrazy!")

((NB, That was a mistype above, which I immediately decided to keep. :D))

Maybe you could get an hour here or there in an anechoic chamber - which might actually be unpalatable given the stop-start non-continuous nature of the situation, but could work.

Or... what if... there's work out there, that generally requires absolute quiet? Like, beyond-library-quiet levels of quiet? Where everyone's in anechoic chambers for the majority of the day...?

I wonder if there's a way for you to constantly (eg, twice a week (>:D)) go "hi, I'm still here" in the general direction of Fundamentally Broken, Inc™ in a way that optimizes for minimum attention span use?

> Anger: I never experience true quiet, so my baseline cortisol is elevated. I become easily angered. Yelling mostly. This raises my T and H. Any significant brain activity raises my T and H. I never finished uni nor accomplished much. My attention span was wrecked after I got this.

I have a 0.2% version of the same thing, I think (particularly with the yelling - I liken it to an abused dog howling desperately in pained terror, except it manifests as anger and seething... totally gets construed correctly every time, welp!!!). I'm kind of impressed you're still here considering that you're describing an infinite feedback loop of doom.

I get the impression this was caused by some sort of event that occurred when young... and then exacerbated by hearing loud sounds in the military...?

I can completely understand something like this wrecking attention span. Whenever I'm around a device (presumably resonating at some ultra-low/high frequency(s)) that I don't like (can't hear anything, but I still respond to Something™ like crazy - still figuring the details out), it's like my involuntary fight-flight response monopolizes the pathway(s) in my brain used for a) inner tranquility, sense of "I'm okay" and mental space and b) problem-solving and higher-order thinking. Completely blocks it, and if I try to shift the gears manually it just makes my brain flip out.

(I wonder if you can monitor cortisol continuously, like blood glucose level? Hmmm....)

> Tech: I detached a few years ago when I decided to drop out of life, prepare for suicide, and focus on shitposting 24/7 until death about the largely unattributed scumbag targeting incidents that I've accumulated over decades. Problem solving isn't on my radar any longer.

Idea. Stupid, unfair idea that will make you angry (if it's even possible at all - it probably is):

Replace suicide as Plan Z with having your auditory nerves severed instead.

You've probably already thought of this and debated it up and down a few hundred times. I won't argue with any of that, nor the fact that music is obviously important.

I'll instead make this point: suicide does not consider the long term by definition. It's always a reaction to a set of immediate-term potentials exceeding immediate-term tolerances. In a scenario where you discover "your price" (your maximum tolerance) and then take steps to respond to that, supposing some ideal set of circumstances in which whatever strategy you deploy is completely thwarted, it may be easier to revisit that place again and again, both because you've taken the step, but also theoretically because if you're taking the step it's because the potential to tolerance ratio has started trending beyond your maximum limit, and may continue to do so.

That absolute-immediate-term snap point hasn't been reached, yet, by virtue of the fact that you're still here. I'm guessing whatever technique you've thought of is not only peaceful but also reasonably contingent and redundant enough that it would be highly unlikely to be thwarted in practice. Which is why I'm making the argument that you swap `rm -rf --no-preserve-root /` for `rm -rfv /dev/snd/`.

I read an article a while back... I think it was written by a military pilot or similar role; talking about how one of the purposes of training is not just to get "how to do X" into rote/procedural memory but also to encode "in scenario X I will make decision Y" to the procedural memory in the mind, by consciously committing to the decision during training. All the what-ifs get thought through, all the questions get asked, and if there are any questions or uncertainties left in the field it's a chaotic situation and hopefully you brought your wits, or you didn't pay attention in training.

So here, I'm basically saying, if you reach the point where you're like "that's enough", for "that's enough" values of "that's enough", if you were to commit (now) to this alternative, you'll have no identity left, but you'll still have your life.

The question is whether that scenario is worth living to you. You ultimately have no control over your life (see also, my points about suicide in my last comment), but you have absolute control over your identity (as much as society seems to be absolutely obsessed with convincing us otherwise??).

This is mostly a classical debate crossed with a thought experiment. I am very interested to hear your responses/counterarguments.

> Muffs: Sure, I can wear muffs and plugs for short jobs. I'd be ok. But I'd prefer no exposure because it took decades for the T to subside, and only a few months of playing a musical instrument (with muffs and plugs) to make it worse again. That was about 3-4 yrs ago; T still worse than it was 5 years ago. Any exposure is risky.

I see. :(

Wow.

Yeah this doesn't have any great solutions. Not really much point beating about the bush and dodging saying that.

It's an oddball suggestion (feel free to yeet it), but I'm curious if you've ever tried fish oil for any reason. Bear with me :) - the sole reason I mention it is that, I actually had a Really Bad™ reaction to some tech a few years ago, which exacerbated my own sensitivity to the point where I basically had a sustained baseline tolerance of zero (go near computer = Bar Fight Mode, I'd constantly pick fights due to internally sustained aggravation), and I was equally sensitive a year later to how sensitive I was a week afterward. Completely coincidentally I happened to trial a different brand of fish oil for my autism (Nordic Naturals), and while I observed I felt fractionally sharper after switching and regarded the trial a success, it wasn't until I tried a random gadget and... didn't fall apart... and... continued to not fall apart... that I realized that it was actually A Big Deal. I'm unfortunately still selectively sensitive to certain things (which I'm trying to work on), but the fish oil seemed to make some things click into place that apparently just needed a bit of a shove, and gave me some baseline viability. Which is the caveat emptor: I'm very bullish about alternative therapy (although it's what I use the most), moreso than drug-based therapy, because the alternative approach is more about gently nudging individual components this way or that (within the natural extent of their bounds) and seeing if there's any improvement rather than deploying green-field turnkey "engine go brrrrr" solutions that basically file any side effects under "deal with later". So the question is whether your circumstances and context would benefit from the same thing - and it's a good question.

> Societal issues: Zero Trust, applied to technocratic incumbents means breaking up big tech, banning data hoarding and data brokering, banning cameras everywhere, policing satellites - a futile pipe dream, indeed. The risks of power asymmetry via tech will only rise. I am not optimistic at all about the future of democracy. Asymmetric power hoarding opportunities will probably increase significantly over the next 50 years - a scary prospect.

I've seen a couple threads on here talking about kids learning programming, with stymied comments wondering just how some 19 year old or 15 year old or 8 year old can figure out where on earth to start with the profusion of opportunities and languages and environments and libraries and frameworks and distractions and conflict... given that this generation is supposed to be suffering from a silent epidemic of ADHD and autism, don't we presumably need less complexity than existed in the 80s, not more? How on earth is this coding thing supposed to work out?

It's fascinating that those comments seem to orbit around ideas of doing things like starting kids out learning QBasic or Turbo Pascal (as the comment authors did), as though that's an irreplaceably necessary first step to being able to grasp the complexity of everything else.

Perhaps this represents a scenario where someone hasn't fully internalized/normalized the fundamentals of programming, and they're still special-casing everything around an untenably-narrow bottleneck of oversimplification.

But I wonder if the same sorts of trip-ups and biases that can lead to (in this case) perceptual pathologies, can apply near-universally to perception of society as a whole.

There seems to be a noteworthy cognitive bias for certain inputs to slot into certain interpretative models. I'm not sure how much of this is nature/genetic and how much is nurture/indoctrination (see also, toddler's picture books with model towns where everything in the right spot), but there's always seems to be "here are the peasants" and "there's the ruling power over there" and "(the peasants are all dying of this that and the other)" "(the ruling power has no idea (because the peasants are too many abstraction levels below them))". I'm hesitant to interpret the Stanford Prison Experiment as accurately representative, but it is nonetheless interesting that people have such divided opinions about it - it's obviously touching a nerve somewhere, so we're obviously sensitive to this sort of stuff.

A little while back while discovering chaos/group/game theory etc I summarized my newfound understanding as the question "what's the difference between cause and effect and network effects?". Realizing the mathematical void of empathy in emergent events has actually been really liberating.

So, winding back to society and technology, I 100% agree with you that the amount of untapped, un-recognized societal potential (denoting unexpended energy) is higher than it has ever been, and that the entropy pool has both a wider range and more coiled-up immediate momentum than ever before. Cue rollercoaster ride much. Things are going to get pretty crazy in the short to medium term in some interesting and challenging new ways.

But I maintain an optimistic perspective that I'll personally ultimately be okay, by recognizing there is nothing I can individually do to improve the societal situation as a whole in certain areas. (It's like supermarket reusable bags, or "energy-saving" lightbulbs, or whatever - doesn't remotely steer the Titanic away from the iceberg even a fraction of a degree, but it gives everyone something shiny to do so we forget we're going to crash and stop squabbling (across the board - from confused posts on Facebook to equally confused motions at the UN). Achievement unlocked: Idiocracy)

And in recognizing there's materially nothing I can do, I just look at what's around me, and I (try to) survive. And I figure it out, in much the same way the latest generation of coders are figuring it out (with or without the help of the broken education system ;) hah!).

This reads like a bit more of a pat answer than I would like, I have an existentially sore throat atm and am not articulating at 100% efficiency. :/

I explain the above to basically say, I hold the view that whoever's in power effectively got there by chance, by being in the right place at the right time. TL;DR, emergent alignment. That's it. This view is youd-better-believe-it a bunch of self-indoctrination :D that (for me at least) really seems to help shatter the perspective that my circumstances are some sort of immovable situation I fundamentally can't change without going through route X Y and Z. I can; I just solve for making my moral compass happy and achieving whatever I need. It's basically the definition of hacking: taking a bunch of threads everyone kind of looks at in an ingrained way, and going "okay let's use this this way", and then making something new that doesn't have any definitions or reference points for people to latch on to and say "but that won't work!". They say rules are meant to be broken... but nobody forgets to add the context that it's not the correctness of the rules that is meant to be broken, but that the rules say things have to be done certain ways :D

(NB. I'm very happy to keep talking, here or elsewhere - if the thread locks my email's in my profile.)