Otto Kretschmer

You seem to be assuming that we shouldn't treat antisocial people because treating them harms them in some way. Well, how?

Is that always the case? What about the cost to benefit ratio? If you have major depression, take an SSRI and it happens to work fine for you, having erectile dysfunction or some other minor side effects will be a really minor thing compared to feeling like being psychologically in hell 24/7.

But there is a defined condition. It's called Antisocial Personality Disorder in the DSM-5 and is covered under Dissociality personality dimension in the ICD-11. I used "psychopathy" as a thought shortcut, just like some people may still call mild autism "Asperger's" even though it's no longer used in diagnostic textbooks due to having been subsumed into the broader Autism Spectrum Disorder. What of the above is unclear to you?

@exchemist @studiot As I explained in my previous post - what I had in mind was the combination of traits that was once covered under the label named psychopathy, not the literal word "psychopathy". Imagine if I asked "What did Elon Musk just write on Twitter?" and you argued that he didn't write anything because Twitter doesn't exist. For me this is sophistry.

Simply because the name psychopathy is no longer used in diagnostic textbooks doesn't mean that the specific traits are not present in the population. You may call the Earth a gas giant but you'll never turn it into one. In DSM-5 here is the diagnostic unit called Antisocial Personality Disorder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder#Treatment In ICD-11 ASPD does not function as an independent diagnostic unit but it's symptoms are covered under Dissociality trait domain under the general diagnosis of Personality Disorder.

How would you approach this? en. The core problem of psychopathy is that it comes with complete lack of guilt or remorse as well as lack of fear, sadness and profound egocentricity - their condition doesn't cause them any suffering so they don't feel broken and thus, do not generally want to change. Some actually view their lack of empathy as an asset that helps them succeed in life. Now the smarter and more introspective ones do know that they are different from other human beings and are missing out on a lot of things - these would likely agree to treatment, but what to do with the rest?

He has CFS if I am not mistaken.

To elaborate since I cannot edit posts for some reason: If I had ulterior motives and wanted to sell a book or supplements (what is the evidence BTW?), I would have found a much better place to promote them than a small science-related forum full of highly skeptical people. I would have opted for some alternate medicine-, wellness- or even bodybuilding-related forum or subreddit, preferably one where broscience is strong. This forum seems like a very crappy (yes...) place for marketing anything. I am not active anywhere on the web except here, Reddit and one alt history forum. Science is not even my primary area of interest, it was one when I was a teen (and it was mostly space stuff and evolution, not medicine) but not now.

I don't benefit, financially or otherwise.

It's his thread, not mine. I only opened it because he asked to to since I am a more well known forum member. You are directing your thoughts at a wrong person.

I highly suggest everyone reads the content of what is included in the OP: That's what @Michael Harrop expects everybody to do. First link: Second link (his advocacy):

It's not life that is statistically impossible but... God. If the multiverse hypothesis is true - and it almost certainly is - the number of spontaneously generated universes will vastly exceed the number of universes created by a conscious, sentient being(s). And even if God or gods were scientifically certain to exist, we would have no reason to believe that it's specifically the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God that is true. The chances of his existence would in fact be infinitely small since the number of possible deities is inifinite.

I second @Michael Harrop, it's better to start a second, more general purpose thread about the gut microbiome. EDIT: Done: https://scienceforums.net/topic/136452-gut-microbiome-general-discussion-thread/

Yes - gut microbiota is even involved in autism. And Alzheimer's.

AFAIK Jesus obviously did believe in God but his beliefs different from that of modern day Christians - he very much viewed himself as just another Jewish prophet and intended his teachings to be for Jews only. Until 70 AD Christianity was divided into two groups, the followers of Paul of Tarsos who were universalists and believed the message of Christ to be for everyone and Jewish followers of Jesus who believed Jesus had preached only for Jews, the latter group took part in the First Jewish Revolt and were decimated. The universalists were thus left as the only group of Christians.

In short - one person whom I know from another forum is a long term advocate of research on gut microbiome and fecal microbiota transplantation - it's an exciting area of study that will help treat a wide variety of human diseases in the future. He's a disabled person with little financial resources and has been advocating on various science- and disease-related places on the internet for years but was met with either hostility or apathy. He would welcome any kind of help but currently, his main goal is to get as many people from the US to e-mail the Congresspeople. This is his letter to US legislators, summarizing his work: https://forum.humanmicrobiome.info/threads/the-fda-and-fmt-regulation-part-2-jul-2024-humanmicrobes-org-i-met-wit.520/#post-1370 This is his advocacy history and his complaints about what's been happening with the FMT: https://forum.humanmicrobiome.info/threads/continued-letters-and-complaints-to-the-fda-nih-and-hhs-jan-2025-fmt.842/ He should join this forum soon. He asked me to create a thread in his name since I'm already a known forum member. A note to moderators: If linking to another forum breaks forum rules, do not close this thread. Either remove the links or PM me and I'll do it myself. It's important for me that this thread stays open. With regards.

IMHO measuring the impact of environment on traits like Openness to Experience seems difficult to me, even with identical twins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openness_to_experience

Sometimes even longer. I'm 31 now and I was poor at long term planning for nearly all my life, I pretty much only lived in the present. Over the last 3 years I've developed my predictive and planning skills largely due to consious work and self discipline.

I myself possess the aforementioned traits (my intellectual curiosity is probably in the top 1% of the population). I wouldn't oppose my tuture wife/partner possessing them as well. In fact, this would be the optimal kind of partner for me, I doubt I'd have much to talk about with an aintelectually average person.

I mean raising kids to have high Openness to Experience, one of the Big Five personality traits. It includes several traits: intellectual curiosity, aesthetics, fantasy, adventurousness, feelings, values. In other words, children who, when they become adults, constantly self-educate (out of genuine curiosity), can have deep discussions about the theory of evolution, macroeconomics and political theory alike, have good imagination, appreciate art and beauty, are open to new and unconventional value systems etc. The crucial period is childhood and adolescence when neuroplasticity is much higher than in an adult. The crucial point is that the upbringing cannot be forceful. Forcing a child/teen to do anything will most likely backfire when they get older. It's also morally wrong for me, my parents never forced me to do anything and I cannot imagine forcing my future kids either

The Chinese used to have a similar idea during the Shang dynasty with the supreme god being the Shangdi but later the Zhou conquered China and repalced him with a more impersonal idea of Heaven.

Like I said, I am not an AI expert or even a major AI buff, just a regular user unfortunately. :( I would recommend asking on Reddit in some AI or tech-related subreddits.

On the benchmark I use (Livebench) it scores marginally higher than Gemini 2.5 Pro, mostly slightly higher on reasoning (97 vs 94) and math. It's equal on everything else.

It's an AI architecture that will likely replace the currently dominant transformer architecture within a few years. The "symbolic" part of it (usage of knowledge graphs, logic rules etc.) allows neurosymbolic AI to derive the same knowledge from drastically fewer examples. As an example - in order to learn what a cat is, regular neural networks need to be given tens of thousands of cat photos - if the training data only includes cats that are indoors, the model will struggle to recognize a cat in a forest, a city etc. since it learns correlation, not the underlying concept.Neurosymbolic AI does not have this problem because it can learn what "catness" is about from just a handful of pictures or even a single one. When teaching neurosymbolic AI to stop at red, you no longer need to show it dozens of hours of cars stopping at red lights in every possible weather and lightning conditions - it's enough to show it a single video and it'll derive the general rule. The neural part handles perception ("That's a traffic light," "The color is red"). The symbolic part has a hard-coded rule: IF object_is_traffic_light AND color_is_red THEN initiate_stop(). The model doesn't need to learn this core traffic law from data; it's given as a fact. It only needs enough data to learn to recognize the objects reliably. It's creativity is also going to be higher since the AI will no longer have the need for every possible outcome to be included in the training data in order to know it. This is a rather basic answer and I guess an AI enthusiast more knowledgeable than I could provide a more detailed answer.

Wait for neurosymbolic AI guys.