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2nd Term Part IX - How Lame is my Duck

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Re: 2nd Term Part IX - How Lame is my Duck

WisconsinWildcard said:
The pragmatic solution is to try and limit the amount of alcohol consumed by adolescents. I will not pretend I know enough about the multitude of factors going into that argument.
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With the testing done on rats, how do we figure out the level for the rate of consumption where long-term damage is truly done? Even that's not going to be an exact answer due to the variables associated with each kid (size, gender, body fat %, and basal metabolic rate, and a few others, I'm sure). Still, getting a baseline chart for adults to use while talking with children could be a true starting point, similar to the BMI.
 
Re: 2nd Term Part IX - How Lame is my Duck

WisconsinWildcard said:
Kep did a nice job covering it. As with many things, there is a difference and a disconnect between the data and the pragmatic solutions. We know alcohol is neurotoxic, even at relatively low doses. In a former life, I did research in hippocampal neurogenesis and both short term cell dividing and long term neuronal integration are very easily inhibited by alcohol. That data is straightforward and as a scientist, that is usually where I stop talking.
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The data at the cellular level may be straightforward, but does it matter at the whole organism level? If I'm a 16-year-old and I have a couple of beers each week at dinner and my cells therefore stop dividing for a couple of hours per week, does that really have a statistically significant effect on my health, life expectancy, or capability for achievement in life? Good luck trying to find straightforward data that answers those questions!
 
Re: 2nd Term Part IX - How Lame is my Duck

LynahFan said:
The data at the cellular level may be straightforward, but does it matter at the whole organism level? If I'm a 16-year-old and I have a couple of beers each week at dinner and my cells therefore stop dividing for a couple of hours per week, does that really have a statistically significant effect on my health, life expectancy, or capability for achievement in life? Good luck trying to find straightforward data that answers those questions!
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Does it matter on a whole organism level? Yes. Many a drunk rat and monkey can tell us that other mammalians who imbibe are less capable of learning (in rats, largely motor as they lack good correlates to other areas), have smaller hippocampi, shorter life span, and other deleterious heath effects.

However, doing those tests in humans runs into a bit of pesky ethics; hence the "model" part in animal model. You mention statistical significance (which is important) but another term that is important is clinical significance. Something can be statistically significant but not clinically (or pragmatically) significant. (Think of a statistical significant reduction of flu duration of 2 hours, who would pay for that drug?)

I was careful to not make any suggestions for policy because you are right to point out the difficulties in digging out effect on health, etc. However, we know alcohol is neurotoxic, and inhibits neuronal development in every situation in every organism we have studied. We know humans continue to develop their prefrontal cortex well into their twenties. We know (and it is a hot area of research) just how important the prefrontal cortex is to human personality, morals, and the ability to interact appropriately with other humans. Therefore, I do not think it is unreasonable based on current data to say that the smaller amount of intake of alcohol in the young, the better.
 
Re: 2nd Term Part IX - How Lame is my Duck

Can you make alcohol less neurotoxic, or is damaging your neurons what creates the buzz?
 
Re: 2nd Term Part IX - How Lame is my Duck

Ethanol is ethanol. Fortunately and unfortunately.

Unless you're talking about deuterated ethanol. Where deuterium replaces the hydrogens. That **** would **** you up for about 7x as long as run of the mill ethanol. And tritiated would be somewhere between 20-30x longer.
 
Re: 2nd Term Part IX - How Lame is my Duck

Of course, tritium is very weakly radioactive and extremely expensive. Deuterium is just plain old expensive.
 
Re: 2nd Term Part IX - How Lame is my Duck

I don't look at it from science perspective. We as a society will give an 18 year old the ability to make decisions like voting, joining the military, contracts, take out loans etc. and yet we don't allow them purchase or consume alcohol?
 
Re: 2nd Term Part IX - How Lame is my Duck

Jimjamesak said:
I don't look at it from science perspective. We as a society will give an 18 year old the ability to make decisions like voting, joining the military, contracts, take out loans etc. and yet we don't allow them purchase or consume alcohol?
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If we raised the age for joining the military to 21 we wouldn't have a military. :cool:
 
Re: 2nd Term Part IX - How Lame is my Duck

As a former 18-year-old, I can honestly say 18-year-olds are too stupid to be trusted with voting.
 
Re: 2nd Term Part IX - How Lame is my Duck

Hell, even at 30 I'm not sure I have the requisite wisdom to be voting.
 
Re: 2nd Term Part IX - How Lame is my Duck

dxmnkd316 said:
As a former 18-year-old, I can honestly say 18-year-olds are too stupid to be trusted with voting.
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This isn't relevant. Most 50 year-olds are too stupid to be trusted with voting. But our system talks about universal adult suffrage, so as long as humans of a certain age are considered adults, that's it, end of argument. Drinking is a privilege, voting is a right.
 
Re: 2nd Term Part IX - How Lame is my Duck

A much higher percentage of 18-year-olds are too stupid to vote than 50-year-olds. That's why I said it. I think back to my thoughts when I was 18 and I barely knew the difference between my anus and my ulna.
 
Re: 2nd Term Part IX - How Lame is my Duck

dxmnkd316 said:
A much higher percentage of 18-year-olds are too stupid to vote than 50-year-olds. That's why I said it. I think back to my thoughts when I was 18 and I barely knew the difference between my anus and my ulna.
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Ulna's in Russia, right?

A much higher percentage of 18-year-olds are too ignorant to vote than 50-year-olds. The bell curve of stupidity is the same for any age.
 
dxmnkd316 said:
A much higher percentage of 18-year-olds are too stupid to vote than 50-year-olds. That's why I said it. I think back to my thoughts when I was 18 and I barely knew the difference between my anus and my ulna.
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That's like trying to parse the difference between comments on YouTube vs. comments on Yahoo...both will make you dumber for having read them. Does it really matter which is technically worse?

Put another way, 50 year olds aren't any brighter, you're just no longer compelled to be around them like you were in high school.
 
Re: 2nd Term Part IX - How Lame is my Duck

unofan said:
Put another way, 50 year olds aren't any brighter, you're just no longer compelled to be around them like you were in high school.
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Aint that the truth. High school is where you learn how to drink, drive, have sex, and get the hell away from the average. For some, all in one night.
 
dxmnkd316 said:
As a former 18-year-old, I can honestly say 18-year-olds are too stupid to be trusted with voting.
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As a former 18-year-old I agree.

I just disagree with the logic of "you're 18 now, so you're on your own now. You're responsible enough to join the military, take out a loan, legally marry, be in pornography, basically free to live your life as you see fit. Except for alcohol. You're not responsible enough for that." It's a silly double standard. If it really is a privledge, then we should license it like cars (or how guns should be) because there are 50-year-olds that can't handle it and 18-year-olds that can
 
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