Clarity comments on Rationality Quotes July 2016 - Less Wrong

1 Post author: bbleeker 01 July 2016 09:02AM

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Comment author: Clarity 01 July 2016 05:40:41PM 1 point [-]

A guy named Harold Schraeder studied prevelance of chronic whiplash in Lithuania, of all things. He found the prevalence was zero. In most Western nations, a certain subset of people who get in car accidents suffer chronic disabling neck pain, presumably related to having their neck get suddenly jerked by the force of the impact. But Schrader found that this never happened in Lithuania, even though they had a lot of accidents and their cars were no safer than ours. Simotas and Shen found that there was zero whiplash in demolition derby drivers, even though they got into crashes all the time and it was basically their job description. Further studies found that accident victims with more neck injury were no more likely to develop whiplash than victims with less neck injury. Perhaps, they argue, chronic whiplash isn’t a bodily injury at all, but a culture-bound syndrome in which people who expect whiplash to exist use its symptom profile as a way of expressing their psychological tension.

Comment author: ignoranceprior 01 July 2016 08:42:22PM 6 points [-]

Source, since you didn't link it.

Comment author: ChristianKl 02 July 2016 10:20:11AM *  1 point [-]

Downvoted for failure to provide the source.

Comment author: Good_Burning_Plastic 02 July 2016 04:58:26PM 2 points [-]

From the bullet at the end, I guess he tried to link it but got the Markdown wrong.

Comment author: ChristianKl 02 July 2016 08:39:11PM 1 point [-]

There's an edit button. It doesn't take that much work to fix formatting.

Comment author: WalterL 02 July 2016 05:08:06AM -2 points [-]

Dude seems to be bending over backwards to avoid the obvious conclusion. Whiplash is a scam, just a lie folks tell to try and get settlements.

Comment author: ChristianKl 02 July 2016 10:27:17AM 1 point [-]

It's just on story of many that fits into the same explanation. Explaining the story isn't the core motivation of his theory.