> Pain a warning signal from the body. It's something one should listen to, not just try to ignore and overrule.
This is vastly overstating the rationality of the human body. It's no more rational than the human mind, which is often quite irrational. Your body isn't the product of medical school, nor intelligent design, but rather random natural selection, which is decent but demonstrably far from perfect.
Sure, but how good are you at judging if a human mind is irrational or not without engaging in conversation with it? Why not extend that logic to your body.
All human minds are irrational, including mine. And yours.
> It's no more rational than the human mind
Neither is a car, but I still take it to get checked out when a warning light is on.
> Neither is a car, but I still take it to get checked out when a warning light is on.
I can't believe I need to say this, but cars did not evolve by natural selection. Cars are intelligently designed (by humans, not by God) to show a warning light when there is a problem you should get checked out. So cars are actually rational in that respect.
Hacker News comments never fail to depress me.
> I can't believe I need to say this, but cars did not evolve by natural selection.
You didn't need to say that because that's not relevant. The issue was about signal to noise. The logical stance is to assume signal is signal, until you know otherwise.
> Hacker News comments never fail to depress me.
That's also a signal.
> The issue was about signal to noise. The logical stance is to assume signal is signal, until you know otherwise.
I know otherwise. I have a lifetime of experience—lifetimes of experience, counting the experiences of other people—to know that pain is often just noise.
Pain is ancient. It predates rationality by millions of years, perhaps billions. The dumbest animal experiences pain. It's not a finely tuned system with documented diagnositic codes.
Especially if a new one, pain is undoubtedly a 'warning signal from the body' which is a succinct metaphor we all understand and has a clear meaning. If you don't know why or from whence the pain, check it out. It may be one of those things or perhaps not.
The previous commenter appears to argue that you need to diagnose every headache, which sounds absurd to me.
Occasionally I have a headache. Not frequently, and I don't necessarily know why. These things just happen. I take a painkiller, and problem solved. I've been seen by doctors over the years for physicals or other reasons, and there's no indication of any underlying medical condition. An occasional headache is not an indicator of something more serious, and the painkiller is not "masking" a larger problem.
The same goes for random muscle aches. They're infrequent, but they can happen, for whatever reason, and there's no reason to panic or to suffer when you can just make them go away.
I don't think I'm unusual here. As far as I've heard, random, infrequent headaches or other aches are extremely common.
Moreover, there are pains that we know the cause: for example, I experience a bump or a cut. My body continues to annoy me with pain unnecessarily. Yes, I'm healing, I'm well aware of that. I just need my body to STFU with the pain and stop reminding me of it.
Thank you, I share this sentiment but couldn’t quite put it into words. Sometimes it isn’t that deep.