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> Oh for goodness sake... If you are using this expression to express frustration, exasperation, annoyance[1] - say so explicitly, I'll stop right here. My experience indicates that when people are frustrated at any point during a conversation involving strongly held personal beliefs, it is best to let sleeping dogs lie, as that is usually the best for both the parties. [1] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/for_goodness'_sake >> SM is indeed that proof -- she is admirably surviving without fear, and being mostly happy at it as well.
> When a nuclear power plant nearly melts down, there are two possible reactions.
> One is to infer that the plant design is less safe that calculated, and reason accordingly.
> The other is to say, 'hey, the plant almost melted down but it didn't actually melt down!
> Nuclear power plants must be really safe! This is great!'
> Which do you think you are doing? So that is your third attempt to counter? Be that as it may, SM admirably surviving those four incidents is nothing at all like your analogy; there is no nuclear plant to nearly melt down (she actually survived those four incidents). What I'm doing, then, is to point out that she actually survived (despite the lack of fear), and on top of that, I'm saying that fear is overrated. You are saying that fear is a gift, and I requested for those people you think actually needed fear to survive. Even if you could not provide citations, could you at least provide reasonable situations where a normal person would need the instinctual reaction of fear to survive in modern times? > (In statistical terminology, we are dealing with heavily censored data: deaths are not recorded because of the rarity of the disorder, and we have a filtered distribution of only the datapoints/people still functional enough to have survived at all. If one of the uncensored datapoints, or the only datapoint, is an extreme outlier on a variable, such as experienced violence, that implies the whole distribution will be as or more extreme outliers.) There are only 400 reported cases of the Urbach–Wiethe disease (what you refer to as the disorder). And only some of the 50–75% of thoses case affect the amygdala (which is associated with fear). Even that subset doesn't necessarily experience a complete a loss of fear as SM did. So it is not just about deaths not being recorded. It may very well be that SM is the only patient with complete loss of fear, out of all those patients with Urbach–Wiethe disease. Indeed many patients actually suffer mood, anxiety and psychotic disorders (hardly an indication of lack of fear). To summarize, it makes no sense to use the dataset -- censored or not -- of people with Urbach–Wiethe disease, as not all of them experience complete lack of fear. Even if there are patients other than SM with complete lack of fear, we do not know the cause of their death to make any conclusion as to their lack of fear being the cause of their death (such as to continue treating fear as a gift, appreciated or not). |