Maybe you've only spent time around PhD candidates at Ivy League schools where people are more likely to have access to wealth, but if you've spent any time at all around PhD candidates you'll find this is generally not the case. As a PhD candidate from a lower SE class, I've found that the majority of my peers are from a similar class. However, I am not connected to a private university though I am in medicine.

Studies on this show great variation across doctoral fields. Economics doctoral students tend to come from more affluent backgrounds, while the majority of Social Sciences doctoral students are from a lower SE class. Overall there seems to be a trend that doctoral students in fields with more lucrative career prospects tend to come from a higher SE class.

From what I have read, your claim only applies to the majority of faculty members, which tend to come from backgrounds with an income that is higher than the national median income.

I am speaking solely from anecdotes, but Social Science grad students generally have a Rabbi from early on their career. That is, they are favorite students, close students to at least one powerful/influential figure in their field. A lot of favoritism and a different kind of nepotism play an important part Social Sciences academia.

And to be successful in Social Sciences academia, you need a "mentor"/"Rabbi", and also be a proponent of a certain kind of politics.

In season 3 (I think) Herc caught the mayor doing something inappropriate in his office and his silence was rewarded with promotions. Later on, someone told him "[The mayor] is your rabbi. If he loses the election, your career will go no further."

But when you are in the social sciences, your mentor takes responsibility for whole of your career.

They see to it that you are ultimately "placed" in life.

Also, what papers are deemed good or influential depend a lot on who you have good relations with, as there are no clear definitions of good/influential like there are in exact science fields.

I am just saying what I have seen.

If you are familiar with 90s-00s vocabulary, you will know what I mean by "Rabbi". It has nothing to do with Judaism or Jews.

> rabbi

> (noun) By metaphor from the Jewish religious role, an older, more powerful or higher-ranking person in the corporation where one works (but usually not in the chain of command) who can give good advice about office politics, and may be able to pull strings, remove heads, or otherwise provide protection from hostile forces.

There's nothing I can say that will make it better. Just know a stranger on the internet is taking a moment to cry with your pain.

>Initially during the prodrome, a change in brain structure seems to be present in the temporal lobe volume and cingulated. On follow-up in those who have gone onto a psychotic episode, further changes can be seen in the cingulate, temporal lobe, and parahippocampal gyrus.

Structural changes occur before an episode has even occurred.

Upon a very, very brief read it still seems difficult for them (in my opinion) to find that schizophrenia is primarily genetic in nature when there still could be potential causative agents that only siblings share (the same house, the same food and water, the same household/generational chemical/drug use/exposure, etc.) which may yet explain the changes/differences. I will take a closer look when I have the time and look at the wealth of references they included (they do have some pretty large studies referenced that support their findings). Thanks again.

I just want to say that while I may seemingly appear to be particularly hostile to the physical causative angle or the genetic (or predictive) angle of mental illness, I just want to clarify that this is mostly because of the fears I have about the current/near-future clinical/societal implications of this being established, in my opinion, prematurely.

There's unarguably a lot of good that research can do in this area, however, I just hope that more understanding in these areas are reflected clinically by a massive diversity of treatments. Especially, laser-focused treatments that cause minimal side effects.

I don't think there's any arguing from me that if we were able to stop the progression of schizophrenia before first-episode psychosis (especially without using anti-psychotics long-term or at all) that it wouldn't be a good thing.

Or as other commenters pointed out, to stop these people who share these markers from doing things that might worsen/manifest their illness, like cannabis. Or researchers finding out how the endocannabinoid system is involved in the illness, including potential therapies (like tackling the systemic inflammation that is common in serious mental illness).

It's just a slippery slope if we go about this in the wrong way. Like forced treatment. Or applying treatments to other differences that may not cause distress to the individuals or inhibit their functioning or participation in society (like forcibly treating high functioning individuals who are on the autism spectrum).

Or incorrectly diagnosing schizophrenia/psychosis in one person and inappropriately treating them, when in reality there were two or three distinct diseases causing a similar illness or set of symptoms. Who knows, there is a distinct lack of knowing still in this field. I just know that the profit-motive needs to disappear before true progress and medicine can happen.

For example:

- We have a Chrome extension at https://go.Storytell.ai/chrome that I used to ingest all the HN comments; you can run that on any HN page to summarize all the comments in real time. (Here's an Adobe PMM talking about how he uses it: https://www.tiktok.com/@storytell.ai/video/72996137210752566... )

- We've also built OpenAI's Assistant API into Storytell to process both structured data like CSVs along-side unstructured data like PDFs: https://www.web.storytell.ai/support/engineering-demos-updat...

And also, think about this, unless you’re a shareholder with openai, knowing the “opinion” of others isn’t going to impact your life in any form. I’m not saying you shouldn’t read it or participate in the discourse, but there’s no need to be overwhelmed by opinions let alone build a chat bot to get through it.

Storytell's vision is to distill signal from noise → giving you a different way to navigate 1800+ comments where you're the one in control of how you spend your time doing it is our objective here.

I was addressing the parent’s comment about being overwhelmed about not being able to go through the opinions. I’ve felt similar way before I realised they were just fomo. If anything, apps like storytell are actually better way to consume these things :)