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The headline is quite a bit of clickbait. And the frame of the article is aimed at clicks and keeping the reader hooked by creating the impression he had made s

The headline is quite a bit of clickbait. And the frame of the article is aimed at clicks and keeping the reader hooked by creating the impression he had made some monumental mistake. He had some brain swelling shortly after the surgery. Thats it. Still great to have posted it, amazing guy

rjh29 5y ago
Thanks, headlines like these I always go straight to the comments to find out why the headline is totally wrong. It's quite satisfying. If you like this sort of thing check out the 'savedyouaclick' subreddit for more!
- mwattsun 5y ago
  This is the greatest thing about Hacker News in my opinion. Obviously, there are limits on what I know so I depend on people here to help me out. Thank you! That said, I've learned that headlines are often not written by the authors of the article, but the magazine editor to drive clicks. “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues.” Gell-Mann Amnesia https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
  - cf141q5325 5y ago
    Its also a great danger. I didnt aim at giving a summary, i just called out the frame the author created. Something that "fao_" pointed out well when coming to the authors conclusion as well.
    - mwattsun 5y ago
      I wasn't responding to the contents of the article, but the usefulness of Hacker News as a reality check. I skimmed the article. It's from 2016 so it's outdated and doesn't include comments about Elon Musk's Neuralink
fao_ 5y ago
Have you tried reading the article? Because he literally gave himself severe brain damage / trauma from the operation: """ At first the procedure that Kennedy hired Cervantes to perform—the implantation of a set of glass-and-gold-wire electrodes beneath the surface of his own brain—seemed to go quite well. There wasn’t much bleeding during the surgery. But his recovery was fraught with problems. Two days in, Kennedy was sitting on his bed when, all of a sudden, his jaw began to grind and chatter, and one of his hands began to shake. Powton worried that the seizure would break Kennedy’s teeth. His language problems persisted as well. “He wasn’t making sense anymore,” Powton says. “He kept apologizing, ‘Sorry, sorry,’ because he couldn’t say anything else.” Kennedy could still utter syllables and a few scattered words, but he seemed to have lost the glue that bound them into phrases and sentences. When Kennedy grabbed a pen and tried to write a message, it came out as random letters scrawled on a page. At first Powton had been impressed by what he called Kennedy’s Indiana Jones approach to science: tromping off to Belize, breaking the standard rules of research, gambling with his own mind. Yet now here he was, apparently locked in. “I thought we had damaged him for life,” Powton says. “I was like, what have we done?” """ """ Kennedy’s recovery had continued to go poorly: The more effort he put into talking, the more he seemed to get locked up. And no one from the US, it became clear, was coming to take the doctor off Powton and Cervantes’ hands. """ From that description: - Motor control impairment - Extreme language impairment to the point that subject is unable to write coherently - Literal fucking seizures - Possible prefrontal damage While it was just "postoperative brain swelling" and the brain "can heal". It's unlikely that he made a completely full recovery, indeed later in the article it is alluded that he has permanent motor damage: """ When I meet Kennedy there one day in May 2015, [...] Kennedy says with a slight Irish accent [...] “The retractor pulled on a branch of the nerve that went to my temporalis muscle. I can’t lift this eyebrow.” Indeed, I notice that the operation has left his handsome face with an asymmetric droop. """ And likely, prefrontal damage from his inability to refrain from commenting the first thing on his mind[0]: """ Kennedy said when we first started watching the video. But now he deviates from our discussion about evolution to bark orders at the screen, like a sports fan in front of a TV. “No, don’t do that, don’t lift it up,” Kennedy says to the pair of hands operating on his brain. “It shouldn’t go in at that angle,” he explains to me before turning back to the computer. “Push it in more than that!” he says. “OK, that’s plenty, that’s plenty. Don’t push anymore!” """ The reporter later refers to his "garbled answer", indicating that he still has language formation problems, and that actually seems well-indicated from the snippets of quotes we see from him. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontal_lobe_injury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontal_lobe_injury

rjh29 5y ago

Thanks, headlines like these I always go straight to the comments to find out why the headline is totally wrong. It's quite satisfying. If you like this sort of thing check out the 'savedyouaclick' subreddit for more!

mwattsun 5y ago
This is the greatest thing about Hacker News in my opinion. Obviously, there are limits on what I know so I depend on people here to help me out. Thank you! That said, I've learned that headlines are often not written by the authors of the article, but the magazine editor to drive clicks. “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues.” Gell-Mann Amnesia https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
- cf141q5325 5y ago
  Its also a great danger. I didnt aim at giving a summary, i just called out the frame the author created. Something that "fao_" pointed out well when coming to the authors conclusion as well.
  - mwattsun 5y ago
    I wasn't responding to the contents of the article, but the usefulness of Hacker News as a reality check. I skimmed the article. It's from 2016 so it's outdated and doesn't include comments about Elon Musk's Neuralink

fao_ 5y ago

Have you tried reading the article? Because he literally gave himself severe brain damage / trauma from the operation: """ At first the procedure that Kennedy hired Cervantes to perform—the implantation of a set of glass-and-gold-wire electrodes beneath the surface of his own brain—seemed to go quite well. There wasn’t much bleeding during the surgery. But his recovery was fraught with problems. Two days in, Kennedy was sitting on his bed when, all of a sudden, his jaw began to grind and chatter, and one of his hands began to shake. Powton worried that the seizure would break Kennedy’s teeth. His language problems persisted as well. “He wasn’t making sense anymore,” Powton says. “He kept apologizing, ‘Sorry, sorry,’ because he couldn’t say anything else.” Kennedy could still utter syllables and a few scattered words, but he seemed to have lost the glue that bound them into phrases and sentences. When Kennedy grabbed a pen and tried to write a message, it came out as random letters scrawled on a page. At first Powton had been impressed by what he called Kennedy’s Indiana Jones approach to science: tromping off to Belize, breaking the standard rules of research, gambling with his own mind. Yet now here he was, apparently locked in. “I thought we had damaged him for life,” Powton says. “I was like, what have we done?” """ """ Kennedy’s recovery had continued to go poorly: The more effort he put into talking, the more he seemed to get locked up. And no one from the US, it became clear, was coming to take the doctor off Powton and Cervantes’ hands. """ From that description: - Motor control impairment - Extreme language impairment to the point that subject is unable to write coherently - Literal fucking seizures - Possible prefrontal damage While it was just "postoperative brain swelling" and the brain "can heal". It's unlikely that he made a completely full recovery, indeed later in the article it is alluded that he has permanent motor damage: """ When I meet Kennedy there one day in May 2015, [...] Kennedy says with a slight Irish accent [...] “The retractor pulled on a branch of the nerve that went to my temporalis muscle. I can’t lift this eyebrow.” Indeed, I notice that the operation has left his handsome face with an asymmetric droop. """ And likely, prefrontal damage from his inability to refrain from commenting the first thing on his mind[0]: """ Kennedy said when we first started watching the video. But now he deviates from our discussion about evolution to bark orders at the screen, like a sports fan in front of a TV. “No, don’t do that, don’t lift it up,” Kennedy says to the pair of hands operating on his brain. “It shouldn’t go in at that angle,” he explains to me before turning back to the computer. “Push it in more than that!” he says. “OK, that’s plenty, that’s plenty. Don’t push anymore!” """ The reporter later refers to his "garbled answer", indicating that he still has language formation problems, and that actually seems well-indicated from the snippets of quotes we see from him. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontal_lobe_injury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontal_lobe_injury