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Criticisms of “The Body Keeps the Score”

(josepheverettwil.substack.com)
250 points adityaathalye | 2 comments | 22 Oct 25 18:49 UTC | HN request time: 0.4s | source
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jamestimmins ◴[22 Oct 25 19:23 UTC] No.45673919[source]▶
I've been playing with the hypothesis that if information is controversial/surprising and targeted at laypeople, it is almost guaranteed to be misleading or outright false.

The only way to convincingly make the case for new information is with pretty rigorous technical arguments, which is fundamentally at odds with a lay audience. If someone has those rigorous technical arguments, they'd be making them in journals to a technical audience, and the results would slowly become consensus.

Obvi there are counter-examples, but as a general rule I think this is far more true than not. Which is why if you learn from Forbes that someone is close to cracking AGI, you can almost outright assume this is untrue.

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hathawsh ◴[22 Oct 25 19:39 UTC] No.45674136[source]▶
I think you're headed in a helpful direction, but I'm looking for ways to narrow the phenomenon a little more. For example, yesterday I heard from my mom, who is not into technical things, that a lot of the Internet was down. She had heard it on the news. I didn't believe it at first because that information was surprising and clearly targeted at laypeople, but soon I learned it was true: AWS us-east-1 had major issues. So my doubt was unfounded. I'd like my doubts to be more accurate.
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1. parliament32 ◴[22 Oct 25 20:12 UTC] No.45674551[source]▶
But it's not really true, is it? "The Internet", as in the network, was doing just fine. A large number of services that chose to build their business on the back of another were down, of course, but "a lot of the internet is down" is different than "a lot of websites are down".

If, say, Level 3 and Tata and Telia had a simultaneous outage, that would qualify for "a lot of the internet is down".

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2. B-Con ◴[23 Oct 25 00:04 UTC] No.45676685[source]▶
To be fair, from a functionality standpoint, AWS hosts like 1/3 of the value that a layperson gets from the Internet, which is all that a non-technical person really cares/things about. ie "the Internet" essentially refers to the top 10-30 services they use.

Which is uncomfortably pragmatic. Many people can go weeks while only directly interacting with a handful of Internet-based services, most of which are presented as apps.

I'm waiting for the day that the lines blur even further and people start saying "my Apple doesn't work" when AWS goes down and 1/3 of their iPhone apps stop working. Or the day that ISPs stop acting as carriers and the Internet truly factions.