> Imagine how hopeless we would be if we approached medicine this way, lumping together both Black Lung and the common cold as “coughing diseases”, even though the treatment for one of them is “bed rest and fluids” and the treatment for the other one is “get a different job”.
Well, this is definitely happening for some parts of medicine, like IBS or many forms of chronic pain.
> If you feel like you’re drowning, your Oxygen Governor is like “I GIVE THIS A -1000!”. When you can breathe again, though, maybe you only get the -1000 to go away, and you don’t get any happiness on top of that. You feel much better than you did before, but you don’t feel good.
Anecdote but: you absolutely feel good. At least, I did.
I was going to say the same thing: medicine does this all the time. The crucial thing to keep in mind though is that it usually has a decent awareness of the difference between when it has a decent working model of underlying causes, or if it is currently stuck at a "least-terrible reverse-engineered behavioral rule of thumb" stage of understanding. The latter can still often be better than doing nothing, and what kind of doctor would choose to not help their patient just because they don't understand why the cure works most of the time?
> Anecdote but: you absolutely feel good. At least, I did.
I don't know you but glad you're still with us, first of all. Anyway, I think the author was trying to say that the feeling of relief doesn't typically make one seek out the experience of drowning again. Although benign masochism exists of course (which is the technical term for the way people can learn to enjoy negative emotions and experiences). Which probably would be an interesting thing to explore using this cybernetics approach.