Looks like the mysterious protective effect of alcohol is poor research

[DrZoidberg]

Considering alcohol consuming is time wasting at best it is difficult for me to find anything beneficial in it.

I also think it's time wasting. But so is life in general. And something is going to kill us. Why not let it be something inebriating. I love drinking alcohol.

 

[DBT]

A glass of wine or a mug of beer, or two, taken occasionally is very relaxing and conducive to good cheer, fellowship and/or contemplation...hence not a wast of time at all.

 

[DrZoidberg]

A glass of wine or a mug of beer, or two, taken occasionally is very relaxing and conducive to good cheer, fellowship and/or contemplation...hence not a wast of time at all.

Since alcohol raises cortisol it's not relaxing. What alcohol does is hampers the neurological communication in your brain given the impression that activity is less. Somebody who really is stressed should avoid alcohol like the plague. If you've got a stressful job you can quickly enter into a vicious circle with alcohol. Which is how an alcoholic is created.

It also hampers self judgement, so you only think you're having deep thoughts. Everybody becomes an idiot with alcohol. The only thing you wrote that was correct is that it helps cheer and fellowship because it lowers inhibition (because everything is dulled in the brain). But it doesn't actually help communication. Emotional connection is mostly illusory. We're just too anaesthetised to notice. But the emotional bonding is real. It's great for immature people who have trouble expressing emotions to get the illusion of emotional communication. Which is probably why it's so popular. Especially among young people.

I don't have any illusions about alcohol. I still enjoy drinking. I enjoy being smashed on it. And do now and again. But as drugs go it's not my favourite. The only thing it has going for it is that it's legal. But I hate the hang-overs. Ketamine or shrooms is much better. Just as fun as alcohol, but doesn't make me an idiot, and I can have proper interesting conversations with people and I wake up the next day happy and well rested.

Alcohol. Not my drug of choice, but still the one I use most often

 

[DBT]

A glass of wine or a mug of beer, or two, taken occasionally is very relaxing and conducive to good cheer, fellowship and/or contemplation...hence not a wast of time at all.

Since alcohol raises cortisol it's not relaxing. What alcohol does is hampers the neurological communication in your brain given the impression that activity is less. Somebody who really is stressed should avoid alcohol like the plague. If you've got a stressful job you can quickly enter into a vicious circle with alcohol. Which is how an alcoholic is created.

It also hampers self judgement, so you only think you're having deep thoughts. Everybody becomes an idiot with alcohol. The only thing you wrote that was correct is that it helps cheer and fellowship because it lowers inhibition (because everything is dulled in the brain). But it doesn't actually help communication. Emotional connection is mostly illusory. We're just too anaesthetised to notice. But the emotional bonding is real. It's great for immature people who have trouble expressing emotions to get the illusion of emotional communication. Which is probably why it's so popular. Especially among young people.

I don't have any illusions about alcohol. I still enjoy drinking. I enjoy being smashed on it. And do now and again. But as drugs go it's not my favourite. The only thing it has going for it is that it's legal. But I hate the hang-overs. Ketamine or shrooms is much better. Just as fun as alcohol, but doesn't make me an idiot, and I can have proper interesting conversations with people and I wake up the next day happy and well rested.

Alcohol. Not my drug of choice, but still the one I use most often

Sure, that's true. Can't argue with that. But I was speaking for myself. I find it relaxing (not that I drink a lot), but a couple of glasses of Moscato, or a mug or two of beer I can get so mellow that I practically melt into my padded recliner....which is all that counts. Each to his own poison and to hell with the rest!

 

[ronburgundy]

A glass of wine or a mug of beer, or two, taken occasionally is very relaxing and conducive to good cheer, fellowship and/or contemplation...hence not a wast of time at all.

Since alcohol raises cortisol it's not relaxing. What alcohol does is hampers the neurological communication in your brain given the impression that activity is less.

That is incredibly over-simplistic. Cortisol is not the sole determinant of being "relaxed". Alcohol reduces excititory nerve pathways and relaxes the muscles. It also lowers release of glutamate and thus lowers overall brain activity and increases the effects of the inhibitory transmitter GABA. So, while heart rate does increase a bit, most CNS activity is actually less and especially the ruminating worrisome thoughts.

It also hampers self judgement, so you only think you're having deep thoughts. Everybody becomes an idiot with alcohol.
The only thing you wrote that was correct is that it helps cheer and fellowship because it lowers inhibition (because everything is dulled in the brain). But it doesn't actually help communication.

Except the controlled experiments showing positive causal impact of moderate alcohol use on creative problems solving and word association or the sorts shown to be central to novel insights that are often impeded by being narrowly focused on the obvious.

And alcohol lowers inhibitions, which leads to people being more honest in what they say to others. Most people are dishonest in the vast majority of interactions. They suppress thoughts and feelings out of fear of embarrassing themselves or creating conflict. There are studies that being intoxicated does NOT make you unable to realize you are taking these risks or being "inappropriate" but it inhibits the emotional fear that typically leads people to suppress making these thoughts and feelings public. It reduces the near constant filtering and editing of speech that people typically engage in to manufacture a public image.

Emotional connection is mostly illusory. We're just too anaesthetised to notice. But the emotional bonding is real. It's great for immature people who have trouble expressing emotions to get the illusion of emotional communication. Which is probably why it's so popular. Especially among young people.

IF anything, older adults are more likely to be constantly dishonest in most of their relationships. Being "mature" is quite often denoted by being "appropriate" and "polite" in discourse, aka being dishonest about what you actually think and feel.
Many people enjoy social interactions while all involved are mildly intoxicated because there is greater sincere expression of emotion and thought, which is why there is an increased bonding and sense of comradery.

Ketamine or shrooms is much better. Just as fun as alcohol, but doesn't make me an idiot, and I can have proper interesting conversations with people and I wake up the next day happy and well rested.

Really? I find shrooms to be far less of a social drug. When I'm on shrooms, I don't like to be around more than 1 or 2 people (and they need to be on them too).

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Dancing goes better with alcohol. Not talking that competitive horseshit here, just casual gatherings where a good DJ does his thing and folks get to Swing, Cha-cha, Waltz, Line, etc.. It's great fun and a little wine makes it more fun.

 

[funinspace]

Americans certainly seem to have some VERY strange attitudes towards alcohol - I am not sure if this is partly a hangover (in more than one sense) from Prohibition; Or whether Prohibition is just one of the symptoms of this strange relationship with drink.

You guys need to be more like the Germans or the Australians - you won't find many people in either nation who think that drinking beer is 'time wasting'.

Hey, that is a big broad brush you are a stroking us with. Up in these parts, we even cart our wine bottle up to the nearby public park to legally chill at open air concerts. Beer and wine is also sold at the event. Then again, Oregon kind of like their wineries and micro-breweries. You can even have your growler filled up to take home some...

 

[Speakpigeon]

A tried to have a little red wine on a regular basis in 2013. Infortunately my performance in jogging dropped very significantly that year so I stopped the wine after five months and my performance recovered but it took several months to get back to normal. A few weeks after I had stopped I also had a (minor) car crash, something really uncharacteristic of my driving.

It's all just one case and maybe there's no causation at all but I'm sure it would be a very bad idea to keep drinking just to try to invalidate the correlation. Instead I preferred to stop the wine and it just happened that the problems stopped.

I also didn't try pure alcohol but maybe I should because grape juice seems just as bad as red wine in my experience. Maybe one day I will want to try it. I have four bottles of fine Irish dew that have been with me since the 1980's! They're... decorative.

Finally, I think most people, including doctors, seem to forget that we're not all alike and that what may be bad for most may be good for some and vice versa and I don't think most studies could show that. So, sometimes, unscientific personal experience may tell you more than science does (at least for now).

As for waste of time, you could try shadow mode, i.e. drink while doing something useful like watching television or talking to your neighbour.

Also, the usefulness of alcohol may be all in its facilitating social interactions. I'd like some science budget spent on trying to prove that Europe surged to prominence on the back of it's alcohol consumption.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

You can even have your growler filled up to take home some...

Growler: A pail or other container used for carrying beer, especially a half-gallon or gallon glass jug with a gasket or screw cap. (from the sound made by carbon dioxide escaping from under the lids of metal pails in which beer was carried in the past .)

Or maybe "a small iceberg".
EB

 

[ronburgundy]

A tried to have a little red wine on a regular basis in 2013. Infortunately my performance in jogging dropped very significantly that year so I stopped the wine after five months and my performance recovered but it took several months to get back to normal. A few weeks after I had stopped I also had a (minor) car crash, something really uncharacteristic of my driving.

Wait.... You drank "a little red wine" for a breif period, then weeks after you were no longer drinking, you got in a car accident. So, your inference is to blame the alcohol even though "not drinking" was the event the preceded the accident? That is some serious confirmation bias. The problem isn't just that its just a single event, but that your causal attribution doesn't even make logical sense. Had the accident happened when you started and were still drinking, that would still be coincidence but at least consistent with the theory of alcohol being the cause.

Also, the usefulness of alcohol may be all in its facilitating social interactions. I'd like some science budget spent on trying to prove that Europe surged to prominence on the back of it's alcohol consumption.
EB

Well, the fact that Europe was consuming more alcohol than most of the societies that it surged ahead of and continues to do so is evidence against any notion that regular alcohol consumption does notable harm to any of the factors important for societal progress.
And the increasingly heavy drinking in the parts of Asia that are also doing increasing well pretty last half century is further evidence against such aggregate harms of alcohol.

Also, there is scientific evidence in randomized experiments that modest levels of intoxication improves creative thinking and problem solving that requires insight (in contrast to solving problems by merely applying known formulaic solution procedures).

Creativity and insight are what are essential aspects of intellectual and scientific progress that requires not merely new applications of old ideas and assumptions, but whole new frameworks that don't make the same assumptions. Of course, science also requires lots of tedious work and attention to detail in the collection of data. So, while being drunk all the time would hamper scientific work, it is highly plausible that occasional intoxication by some of the people who are trying to construct and/or apply scientific theories in novel ways would have a net benefit to the intellectual progress at the societal level.

It is also worth noting that their is a positive correlation between alcohol use and general intelligence. Below is just one graph from one study, but others using different intelligence measure show the same result.

This relationship holds up even after controlling for just about every plausible confounding variable you can think of (sex, race, ethnicity, religion, marital status, number of children, education, earnings, depression, satisfaction with life, frequency of socialization, childhood social class, mother's education, and father's education). This suggest some kind of meaningful and more direct relation between drinking and intelligence, but the exact causality is still hard to tease out. There are reasons why more intelligent people might choose to drink, such as to use alcohol quiet their more chronically active mind (making alcohol use more a byproduct of greater intelligence). Regardless, the positive relationship is evidence that there are no damaging impacts of moderate alcohol use on general intellectual skills, that are strong enough to counter whatever produces the robust positive association between these variables.

That doesn't mean extreme drinking won't harm your brain or that being highly intoxicated doesn't impair you while drunk. Those are atypical instances that can have effects that have different effects than the far more common instances of people drinking modest amounts on

 

[Speakpigeon]

Wait.... You drank "a little red wine" for a breif period, then weeks after you were no longer drinking, you got in a car accident. So, your inference is to blame the alcohol even though "not drinking" was the event the preceded the accident? That is some serious confirmation bias. The problem isn't just that its just a single event, but that your causal attribution doesn't even make logical sense. Had the accident happened when you started and were still drinking, that would still be coincidence but at least consistent with the theory of alcohol being the cause.

I did provide some justification for the possible correlation I see between the car crash and the little red wine. To make it explicit, I never had an accident for more than 35 years and the only significant event in that period in terms of life-style was my experiment with the red wine. It's irrelevant that the crash occurred when the drinking had stopped for several weeks since the event considered is not immediate drunkenness from a few drinks too many but the possible long-term effect on my physiology of consumming alcohol for a significant period of time.

And I didn't in fact settle on any hard inference. It just got me suspicious. It's called bayesian inference.

I also didn't stop the wine because of the car crash (obviously) but because of my poor performance in jogging and if I have already assumed a possible causal effect on my jogging, even weeks after I had stopped the wine, I think it's rational to assume an increased probability of a causal effect on the car crash itself, although I would accept that it has to be less certain but essentially because the car crash was a one-time event subject to specific circumstances.

Also, the usefulness of alcohol may be all in its facilitating social interactions. I'd like some science budget spent on trying to prove that Europe surged to prominence on the back of it's alcohol consumption.
EB

Well, the fact that Europe was consuming more alcohol than most of the societies that it surged ahead of and continues to do so is evidence against any notion that regular alcohol consumption does notable harm to any of the factors important for societal progress.
And the increasingly heavy drinking in the parts of Asia that are also doing increasing well pretty last half century is further evidence against such aggregate harms of alcohol.

Also, there is scientific evidence in randomized experiments that modest levels of intoxication improves creative thinking and problem solving that requires insight (in contrast to solving problems by merely applying known formulaic solution procedures).

Creativity and insight are what are essential aspects of intellectual and scientific progress that requires not merely new applications of old ideas and assumptions, but whole new frameworks that don't make the same assumptions. Of course, science also requires lots of tedious work and attention to detail in the collection of data. So, while being drunk all the time would hamper scientific work, it is highly plausible that occasional intoxication by some of the people who are trying to construct and/or apply scientific theories in novel ways would have a net benefit to the intellectual progress at the societal level.

It is also worth noting that their is a positive correlation between alcohol use and general intelligence. Below is just one graph from one study, but others using different intelligence measure show the same result.

This relationship holds up even after controlling for just about every plausible confounding variable you can think of (sex, race, ethnicity, religion, marital status, number of children, education, earnings, depression, satisfaction with life, frequency of socialization, childhood social class, mother's education, and father's education). This suggest some kind of meaningful and more direct relation between drinking and intelligence, but the exact causality is still hard to tease out. There are reasons why more intelligent people might choose to drink, such as to use alcohol quiet their more chronically active mind (making alcohol use more a byproduct of greater intelligence). Regardless, the positive relationship is evidence that there are no damaging impacts of moderate alcohol use on general intellectual skills, that are strong enough to counter whatever produces the robust positive association between these variables.

That doesn't mean extreme drinking won't harm your brain or that being highly intoxicated doesn't impair you while drunk. Those are atypical instances that can have effects that have different effects than the far more common instances of people drinking modest amounts on

That was the idea, yeah, but I seem to be less gung ho than you about it. I have a friend who was happy to insist on a correlation between catholicism and the success of Western civilisation. Also, Europe was still lagging behind China in many areas still in the 14th or 15th century even though alcohol had long been in use in Europe by then.

And you do realise that this is at best a statistical effect so that you can't draw any hard inference for any particular individual?
EB