chronic rhinitis

About two months ago, I realized that I am chronically congested. It seems I never get better from colds, because I always have mucus. So I went to the GP (huisarts), which sent me to the ENT (KNO, otorhino-laringologist), which made me take out blood for an allergy test.

I have been looking forward to the results all month, and...

Goddamn it, I have no allergies!


His explanation is that I have "hyper-reactivity" to things such as: pollution, perfumes, changes in temperature, humidity, etc, and that there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. So it's: chronic non-allergic rhinitis.

Being one who doesn't accept defeat, I asked him tons of questions.

He also said that the mucus is produced by the mucosa, and that nasal blockage maybe sometimes be caused by swelling which however is NOT due to allergy. My idea with this whole thing was precisely to open my nasal passage more widely, so that when things swell, there's still plenty of room for the air to flow.


Since this was my first allergy test, I decided to go back and clear up whether I am allergic to sulfas... So I asked to look at my medical records. Unfortunately, the secretary had some serious PMS, and wasn't amused with my unusual request:

Bitch- Wij hebben geen tijd voor dit soort ding.
Me- Heb ik geen recht op mijn resultaten?
Bitch- Ja. Maar dat doet de doktor. Heeft 'ie uw uitslag gegeven?
Me- Ja, maar allen wat de KNO betreft. Ik wil iets anders kijken.
Bitch- Begrijpt u het niet? Dit is een KNO... alles is KNO hier.

Finally, I managed to ask the doctor for half a minute, who told me that sulfas are not covered in the test.

It would have been fine if she told me to go ask my GP, but instead she said "we don't have the time to help you", and "you should have asked the doctor when you had the chance", when I was arguing that I should have the right to access my medical records.


It sucks that she managed to intimidate me, take away my positive energy, despite me being totally within my right (having all the "gelijk"). It had to do with her talking faster than me and me not being able to explain myself very well in Dutch. I should practice keeping my spirits with such negative people. Can theater workshops help me deal with nasty people in reality? :-)
I think the first step should have been to lose my respect for her, which I didn't do.

In any case, people like her are a hazard to sick people. Her negativity is contagious.


Anyway, what am I going to do about my nose now?? Should I go live in the middle of the desert?

Causal models. evidence SUPPORTS hypothesis

Causality Lab at CMU
This is very cool if you're interested in causal models.


I want to define a "supports" relation.

Given
d : Data
H : Hypothesis

We define a relation |= (read "SUPPORTS") as

d |= H iff H explains d


First Refinement:

what gets explained by a hypothesis is not the data itself, but a particular property of it. For example, when you have a data set with the variables (TV-watching-frequency, Obesity), what we wish to explain is the positive correlation between the two variables. Of course, causal models do not necessarily provide a mechanism.

So back to our definition of "SUPPORTS":

d |= H iff there exists a property P of datasets of this type such that H explains P(d)

i.e. exists P : Property(d) (H explains P(d)) #note that P is not a predicate. Predicates are of type A -> t for some A (t is the type which can only take values in {true, false}).

Although, of course, we want to generalize this to degrees. If we want to be able to do inference to the best explanation (explanations corresponding to causal models here), we would choose the model with most explanatory power... However, it might be a good idea to incorporate Occam's razor here.

From the Formal Epistemology conference

From the Formal Epistemology conference where easwaran is speaking:

Gabriella Pigozzi - Judgment aggregation without paradox: fusion operators at work

The combination of individual judgments on logically interconnected propositions into a collective decision on the same propositions is called judgment aggregation. An example is a set of premises and a conclusion in which the latter is logically equivalent to the former. The problem with judgment aggregation is that when majority voting is applied to some propositions (the premises) it may give a different outcome than majority voting applied to another set of propositions (the conclusion). This problem is known as the doctrinal paradox. The doctrinal paradox is a serious problem since it is not clear whether a collective outcome exists in these cases, and if it does, what it is like.

Rolf Haenni, Stephan Hartmann - Modeling Partially Reliable Information Sources

Daniel Steel - Must a Bayesian Accept the Likelihood Principle?

Andy Egan - Some Counterexamples to Causal Decision Theory

Laura E. Schulz and Alison Gopnik - Causal Learning Across Domains

link to wikirpg.com, wiki for ball games

wikirpg.com

I'd like to create a wiki for ball games, if only to document all the variations on soccer that people play in Brazil.