Analects

The feeling of the ‘a-ha’ moment fosters conspiracy theories. Really emphasises some of my critiques of the whole leadership consulting thing.

PaperQA2, the first AI agent that conducts entire scientific literature reviews on its own.

Chat GPT as cultural criticism:

It throws in our faces: why do we have so many jobs and school assignments that can be done by a non-thinking probability machine? Why do our students (even the ones paying a jillion dollars!) want to skip their lessons?

More in thread.

How Syria Broke Turkey. Interesting throughout

On neuroarchitecture. Ridiculous sounding name, but interesting throughout:

We spend a lot of time in places with spatial stressors and this could gradually affect our mental health

It’s easy to hack airplane wifi. Obviously illegal, but interesting how weak the protections are on these things. Makes one wonder how secure my own wifi is.

Rotten Meat & Fly Larvae—What You Aren’t Told About Traditional Diets

Humans have always enjoyed eating rotten and putrid meat. Some of the anecdotes seem outrageous, bordering on the absurd to contemporary ears.

They then list all the anecdotes, in horrific detail. My favourite quote:

the meat is so full of lethal byproducts that the local people (Khanty, Evenki etc) have to be conditioned from childhood to be able to stomach it and not die a horrible death from neurotoxin overload.

I’ve said it before. Atavism isn’t the answer.

Evidence shows ordinary citizens in the Western world are now richer and more equal than ever before?

We define wealth as the value of all assets, such as homes, bank deposits, stocks and pension funds, less all debts, mainly mortgages. When counting wealth among all adults, data show that its value has increased more than threefold since 1980, and nearly 10 times over the past century … wealth has also become more equally distributed over time. Wealth inequality has decreased dramatically over the past century and, despite the recent years’ emergence of super-rich entrepreneurs, wealth concentration has remained at its historically low levels in Europe and has increased mainly in the US.

Not exactly in keeping with the fun graphs that populate my instagram feed.

We’ll never give up hope that there’s life there, will we.

For Plato, rationalists and mystics can walk the same path:

For Plato, the sensory world is epistemologically fallible. True knowledge lies only with the Forms, which exist in a realm separate from the material universe and are accessible only through a person’s intellect, not their senses. This might explain why Plato often uses the word ‘theios’, meaning ‘divine’, to describe the Forms. Just as the mystery initiate seeks a special relationship with the divine, so does the philosopher seeking the Forms.

See also this and this and this.

Essays on UFOs and Related Conjectures. Reported Evidence, Theoretical Considerations, and Potential Importance.

Cats grieve fellow pets. Science. Here’s a Guardian article explainer.

How to find new spiritual practices. It reminds me of Tara Burton’s thesis, an encouragement of ‘remixed’ spiritualites with an emphasis on a choose-your-own-adventure sort of thing. But I really wonder how fulfilling this ends up being.

Ants are very cool. Here is one quote:

the algorithm Harvester ants use to regulate their foraging behavior across the desert is uncannily similar to the Transmission Control Protocol used to regulate data traffic on the internet, for example. Meaning that ants beat us to network design by a hundred million years.

A touching suicide pact? Scientists Pat and Peter Shaw died in a suicide pact. Here, their daughters reflect on their parents’ plan - and their remarkable lives. Poignant. Inspired me to write about why people kill themselves (usually it is not so poignant).

On the ‘empathy economy’ as jobs are automated. Many good points. Here’s one:

“in the Feeling Economy, [that emerges during the increasing automation of jobs] many previously disadvantaged groups or individuals may have a better chance to develop their talents and to be included in the labor market.” They like to believe that this shift will simultaneously raise the floor by legitimating less-recognized jobs like caregiving and open up the ceiling by causing higher-income jobs to deprioritize “hard” technical skills—thus making it more accessible to both those without an expensive formal education, and those mistakenly perceived as less technically adept. One chapter of Rust and Huang’s book is even titled the “Era of Women” in giddy anticipation of the AI revolution’s democratizing effect.

Unfortunately, this analysis fails to consider the ways in which bias also subtly creeps into our views of who is capable of empathy and care … As the media theorist Wendy Hui Kyong Chun has remarked, the category of the human subject has largely been constructed through exclusion—“through the jettisoning of the Asian/Asian American other as robotic, as machine-like” and the “African American other as primitive, as too human.” In this paradigm, only a narrow sliver of (white) people are deemed truly human, possessing the fullest range of emotive faculties … As currently “low-status” jobs like caregiving become more established, it’s easy to imagine how the women of color who have long served as the backbone of the profession might be excluded from its glorious future, losing ground to white counterparts flocking to a newly lucrative field. (Look, for instance, to the whitewashing gentrification effect of cultural legitimization in the cannabis industry.)

Very good article on dialectical behaviour therapy. Now spilling out of more ‘severe’ treatment programs into self help for the general public, we’re bound to see the language of dialectics spill into day to day use. The new amygdala (see also the other distractions). I like their conclusion as something to keep in mind. It generalises to all ‘parts work’:

When the illusion of control falls short, DBT’s ethic of present-tense thinking and skilled self-reliance is met with an equal and opposite reaction: a culture fixated on the trauma plot, where people hold tightly to their stories as evidence that their lives aren’t their fault. Now that a logic of skillful self-management has become synonymous with mental health, people are left with two bad options: externalize the problem, molding it into a carefully crafted story about other people’s misbehavior so people will stop yelling at you to get a grip; or internalize it and commit to ceaseless skill acquisition in the hopes of someday needing nothing. DBT and its critics represent opposite sides within an often contradictory mainstream mental wellness culture ensnared in yet another dialectic — one that holds that you are defined by your trauma, yet accountable for your woes.

We can add this dialectic to our list: your pain is your responsibility; your pain is not your fault. You are good; you need to change. Fight the terms of capitalism and ableism; capitulate to them when you need to. DBT is a palliative that makes people into docile workers and uses a corporate vocabulary to remodel their behavior; DBT is one way to make the world survivable.

On aphantasia—no mind’s eye. The wildest part is that you’d never know unless you asked:

Aphantasia and hyperphantasia are not disorders. People at either extreme of the spectrum don’t have problems navigating the world. Aphantasics are often fine at describing things, Bartolomeo said. When he’s asked them how they can visually describe objects or people from their memories when they lack mental images, they respond: “I just know,” he said.

More evidence against the marshmallow test. See also this marginalia.

No clear pattern of moderation was detected between delay of gratification and either socioeconomic status or sex. Results indicate that Marshmallow Test performance does not reliably predict adult outcomes.

The biology of erogenous zones. The main thing I took away from this was that my capacity for sensation is decreasing and also sometimes the genitals are connected to the feet.

Babies learn to talk in the womb. Highlights:

When babies are born, they cry in the accent of their mother tongue

Some restless infants don’t wait for birth to let out their first cry. They cry in the womb, a rare but well-documented phenomenon called vagitus uterinus

Language learning begins in the womb … Exposure to speech in the womb leads to lasting changes in the brain, increasing the newborns’ sensitivity to previously heard languages … newborns had not just memorised … [these elements of speech] … they were actively moving air through their vocal cords and controlling the movements of their mouth to mimic this … Babies are communicating as soon as they are born, and these abilities are developing in the nine months before birth.

Giant rat penis redux - AI-generated diagram leads to journal article retraction. There is a hand in this leg. Still made it into the Journal Medicine. See also the giant rat penis in another AI-generated figure that made it to publication.

On Turing’s 1952 ChatGPT

The Secret Of Minecraft:

“A generative, networked system laced throughout with secrets.”

One Friend In One Month: cute, if sad essay about how hard it is to make friends in the modern era.

I’d resigned myself to a life of catch-up coffees, halfway intimacies, and adult softball leagues. I told myself it took bravery to confront this reality. Maturity.

One wonders if the happy ending was an editorial decision.

Are we in a simulation (pdf)? A head-pounding philosophy paper:

as far as I can tell, the basic thrust of the simulation argument has real philosophical force and interest—especially when interpreted in the Type 2 manner I’ve argued for here (that is, as not resting on the likelihood of any particular set of empirical claims). Perhaps it does not, ultimately, work—but I don’t think its failures are at all obvious

And whether we buy simulation arguments or not, they are a reminder that the world we see and take for granted is only a part of the world; and that in principle, our overall existential situation could in fact be many different ways, not all of which we are accustomed to considering

The Ju/‘hoansi protocol. Really, a means of exploring different and more organic forms of governance. But echoes of Graeber’s Dawn of Everything.

More evidence social media isn’t so influential. See also Stuart Ritchie on this. See also Peter Gray on this.

The man who won the lottery 14 times. How a rogue Romanian economist escaped poverty, wrote an algorithm, and gamed more than a dozen lotteries around the world.

The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel:

The [James Webb Space Telescope] data, though, revealed that some very large galaxies formed really fast, in too short a time, at least according to the standard model. This was no minor discrepancy. The finding is akin to parents and their children appearing in a story when the grandparents are still children themselves.

Status competition is a white-people thing?

We found that Black and White Americans tended to make status comparisons within their own racial groups and that most Black participants felt better off than their racial group, whereas most White participants felt worse off than their racial group. Moreover, we found that White Americans’ perceptions of falling behind “most White people” predicted fewer positive emotions at a subsequent time, which predicted worse sleep quality and depressive symptoms in the future. Subjective within-group status did not have the same consequences among Black participants.

Some new, some old, observations about the mismanagement of depression. Good just for the highlights. Full paper here:

Depression is neither disease nor disorder rather an adaptation that evolved to serve a purpose

Depression is so much more prevalent than currently recognized that it is “species typical”

Antidepressants drive neurotransmitter levels so high that homeostatic regulation kicks in

Antidepressants may suppress symptoms in a manner that increases risk for subsequent relapse

Cognitive therapy works by making rumination more efficient and “unsticking” self-blame

Adding antidepressants may interfere with any enduring effect that cognitive therapy may have

How to extract insights with seemingly limited resources. On reshaping data for better understanding

Are men still more influential than women? I mean obviously, and unfortunately, yes. But encouraging changes, most striking when woman are a 2:1 majority.

LLM persuasiveness is capped. I told you.

model persuasiveness is characterized by sharply diminishing returns, such that current frontier models are barely more persuasive than models smaller in size by an order of magnitude or more. Second, mere task completion (coherence, staying on topic) appears to account for larger models’ persuasive advantage. These findings suggest that further scaling model size will not much increase the persuasiveness of static LLM-generated messages.

A data scientist’s reflections on AI:

I started working as a data scientist in 2019, and by 2021 I had realized that while the field was large, it was also largely fraudulent. Most of the leaders that I was working with clearly had not gotten as far as reading about it for thirty minutes despite insisting that things like, I dunno, the next five years of a ten thousand person non-tech organization should be entirely AI focused

Social media for AI:

While the interface looks like Instagram, the app’s main twist is that, when signing up, you create an AI character, or Butterfly, that starts generating photos and interacting with other accounts on its own. There is no limit to the number of Butterflies you can create, and they are designed to coexist with human accounts that can also post to the feed and comment.

Why moralising is psychologically annoying:

Many genuinely good arguments for moral change will be initially experienced as annoying. Moreover, the emotional responses that people feel in these situations are not typically produced by psychological processes that are closely tracking argument structure or responding directly to moral reasons. Instead, they stem from psychological mechanisms that enable people to adapt to local norms – what’s called our norm psychology.

The genetic bottleneck in humans.

The bottleneck occurred between 813,000 years ago and 930,000 years ago, and reduced an ancestral human species to less than 1,300 breeding individuals. The issue persisted for 117,000 years, and aligns with a chronological gap in the African and Eurasian human fossil records in that period.

A nice piece on the scientific history of alcohol and health. Explains the origins of the myth and the more recent reversal. It’s a good demonstration of how the biases in the scientific ritual play out.

Mostly useful for the high level ideas on how to prompt AI better.

Retrospective on AI by Jack Clark (of Anthropic fame). Obviously bullish, but interesting nonetheless.

A literary guide to the subject of death.

CBT might just be the ‘gold standard’ for white people:

understanding the impact of cultural adaptations is still in the early stages. Some trials in the review found no benefit of cultural tailoring; others suggested that the benefits don’t last … [and some evidence suggests it can lead] to worse therapeutic outcomes

A Wikipedia page on science in 2023.

What’s making kids not alright? And some on how to make them alright. Good notes on social media and it’s value, not just harm. Also coping:

There’s coping by expressing what we’re feeling, and there’s coping by taming or bringing back under control our emotions … if we start on the expressing category, there’s talking about what we’re feeling and seeking social support … listen to music … make things … art … And then there’s the taming category. whether it’s going for a walk or taking a bath or finding a food that we love and enjoying it or getting with a TV show that we know we’re going to leave the end of the episode feeling better than we did when we started. And I think, if we can bring coping forward as the thing to focus on — the distress, that is a done deal.

See also social media might not be making us miserable.

The Perfection Of The Paper Clip.

From rational to woo: Why a Silicon Valley culture that was once obsessed with reason is going woo. The appetite for this at the executive level of large companies is also surprisingly high. But also, motivated by reasonable critiques. See also (here) objectivity obsession.

“It turns out that, like, intuition is incredibly powerful … an incredibly powerful epistemic tool,” he said, “that it just seems like a lot of rationalists weren’t using because it falls into this domain of ‘woo stuff.’”

they’re also far more likely to embrace the seemingly irrational — religious ritual, Tarot, meditation, or the psychological-meets-spiritual self-examination called “shadow work” — in pursuit of spiritual fulfillment, and a vision of life that takes seriously the human need for beauty, meaning, and narrative.

Why is slow motion so fun: Slow Motion Enhances Consumer Evaluations by Increasing Processing Fluency

News stripped of the crap by AI.

Why Do We Listen to Sad Songs? Maybe because it makes us feel connected to others.

The Quest To Quantify Our Senses:

our new sensing machines more accurately capture and analyze the microtime and microspace of our breath, heartbeat, brainwaves, muscle tension, or reaction times. But they do this for another reason. Our sensing machines now conceive and create techniques that aim to fulfill that long sought-after dream of those forgotten 19th-century researchers like Fechner and Marey: to become one with what Fechner called the animated substance of the technological world itself.

When everyone can sound intelligent, elite conversations will become less intelligible. On the top-down influences of social capital (luxury beliefs) and ChatGPT—a prediction that trendy language will become less sophisticated in a reaction against the accessibility of sophisticated language.

But the bottom line is that ChatGPT’s output is quite plain. It might seem excellent and correct to a non-native speaker or to an unsophisticated reader. But an actual NYT editor could easily tell this isn’t the right stuff.

Just like in the fashion industry, cheap substitutes can only fool some people. But unlike fast fashion, we can expect AI’s capabilities to improve exponentially — making it harder to spot mass-manufactured text.

And yet, I suspect that as machines become better at sounding like sophisticated humans, the most sophisticated humans will adopt even more nuanced, coded, and complex ways of speaking that are harder to imitate.

The mass production of “premium” goods resulted in a world where “money talks and wealth whispers.” The mass production of “premium” content will give rise to a world of Quiet Intelligence — everyone will think they sound smart, but those who are really smart (or “in”) will communicate at a whole different level.

Do feelings have a ‘hard problem’?

Author recaps the hard problem of consciousness:

There seems to be no need for consciousness. Physics wouldn’t care if we were all “zombies”. Why aren’t we?

I like to look at it this way:

1. We are alive.
2. We are conscious.
3. We were created by evolution.
4. But consciousness can’t “do” anything.
5. Huh?

Then makes the same claim about feelings:

Well, why do we have feelings? Consider this variant of our earlier puzzle.

1. We are alive.
2. We have feelings.
3. We were created by evolution.
4. We feel good when we do stuff that would help propagate the genes of someone in a hunter/gatherer band.
5. But feelings can’t “do” anything.
6. The hell?

Interesting, but I think this is a category error. Feelings are the natural extension of a nervous system and the equivalent in non-nervous animals.

On early Sydney, the Bing AI. Very odd.

Sydney absolutely blew my mind because of her personality; search was an irritant…This tech does not feel like a better search. It feels like something entirely new. And I’m not sure if we are ready for it.

Animals Trapped In Human Bodies. A profile on therians.

The gender well-being gap:

women score more highly than men on all negative affect measures and lower than men on all but three positive affect metrics, confirming a gender wellbeing gap

However, when one examines the three ‘global’ wellbeing metrics – happiness, life satisfaction and Cantril’s Ladder – women are either similar to or ‘happier’ than men

The concern here though is that this is inconsistent with objective data where men have lower life expectancy and are more likely to die from suicide, drug overdoses and other diseases. This is the true paradox – morbidity doesn’t match mortality by gender. Women say they are less cheerful and calm, more depressed, and lonely, but happier and more satisfied with their lives, than men.

Which makes one wonder if the problem is actually that we measure happiness in a way that favours men’s interpretations (and those appear to be worse interpretations?).

The Bronze Age Has Never Looked Stronger

Why Do Dogs Turn Their Heads to One Side?

the head tilt could be a sign of mental processing — meaning that the pups are likely paying attention or even matching the toy’s name with a visual memory of it in their head.

The Largest Vocabulary In Hip-Hop (rappers ranked and deconstructed):

io9 writer Robert Gonzalez blew my mind with this point, “On The Black Album track ‘Moment of Clarity,’ Jay-Z contrasts his lyricism with that of Common and Talib Kweli (both of whom “rank” higher than him, when it comes to the diversity of their vocabulary):

I dumbed down for my audience to double my dollars They criticized me for it, yet they all yell “holla” If skills sold, truth be told, I’d probably be Lyrically Talib Kweli Truthfully I wanna rhyme like Common Sense But I did 5 mil - I ain’t been rhyming like Common since

How to beat roulette.

A history of toad magic.

On the dissolution of states, and the solution of new ones.

The 1990s were not just a time of fracturing sovereignties in Europe. The same kind of thing was happening in the American hinterlands. The decade saw an explosion of a new kind of housing complex: the gated community, the latest innovation in spatial segregation … the multiplication of the walled communities called them “private utopias.” The phrase was well chosen. To those who said that the paleo visions were far-fetched, one might respond that their future was already here, in the segregated realities of the American city and its sprawling surroundings. The gated enclaves and walled settlements, the object of much angst and editorializing from centrists and leftist liberals concerned about the decline of public culture, were one of the more stimulating bright spots for libertarians. They asked the question: What if these hated suburban forms were good, actually? Maybe here, in miniature, the project of alternative private government could take root, the creation of liberated zones within the occupied territory. This could be “soft secession” within the state, not outside it. The crack-up could begin at home.

Interesting piece—normal people becoming killers.

Marilyn Monroe’s Psychoanalysis Notes. Curious.

Is social media making us miserable? Stuart Ritchie (of Science Fictions fame) thinks that, if so, it’s not that deep:

when the authors of the “Facebook arrival” study raised their standards in this way, running a correction for multiple comparisons, all the results they found for well-being were no longer statistically significant. That is, a somewhat more conservative way of looking at the data indicated that every result they found was statistically indistinguishable from a scenario where Facebook had no effect on well-being whatsoever.
Now let’s turn to the second study, which was a randomised controlled trial where 1,637 adults were randomly assigned to shut down their Facebook account for four weeks, or go on using it as normal. Let’s call it the “deactivating Facebook” study. This “famous” study has been described as “the most impressive by far” in this area, and was the only study cited in the Financial Times as an example of the “growing body of research showing that reducing time on social media improves mental health”.
The bottom-line result was that leaving Facebook for a month led to higher well-being, as measured on a questionnaire at the end of the month. But again, looking in a bit more detail raises some important questions. First, the deactivation happened in the weeks leading up to the 2018 US midterm elections. This was quite deliberate, because the researchers also wanted to look at how Facebook affected people’s political polarisation. But it does mean that the results they found might not apply to deactivating Facebook at other, less fractious times – maybe it’s particularly good to be away from Facebook during an election, when you can avoid hearing other people’s daft political opinions.
Second, just like the other Facebook study, the researchers tested a lot of hypotheses – and again, they used a correction to reduce false-positives. This time, the results weren’t wiped out entirely – but almost. Of the four questionnaire items that showed statistically-significant results before the correction, only one – “how lonely are you?” – remained significant after correction.
It’s debatable whether even this result would survive the researchers corrected for all the other statistical tests they ran. Not only that, but they also ran a second model, controlling for the overall amount of time people used Facebook, and this found even fewer results than the first one. Third, as well as the well-being questionnaire at the end of the study, the participants got daily text messages asking them how happy they were, among other questions. Oddly, these showed absolutely no effect of being off Facebook—and not even the slightest hint of a trend in that direction.

The conversations of plants. I’ll copy the highlights:

• Plants emit ultrasonic airborne sounds when stressed
• The emitted sounds reveal plant type and condition
• Plant sounds can be detected and interpreted in a greenhouse setting

Conspiracies are the price of a complex, liberal society:

Conspiracy theories are also reactions to a diffuse, fractured, conflictive society in which there are just too many competing narratives around, so that falling back on a grand narrative which makes sense of everything is profoundly appealing. For a blessed moment, the whole lot falls neatly into place, as an opaque, impossibly complex world becomes luminously simple, purposeful and transparent.

Opinion piece, but some good points. See also political polarisation is a lie for a bit on this from me.

The lucrative business of book-styling.

Ashley Tisdale infamously caused a stir when she admitted to purchasing 400 books to fill her empty shelves overnight before Architectural Digest filmed her house. “Obviously, my husband’s like, ‘We should be collecting books over time and putting them in the shelves.’ And I was like, ‘No, no, no, no. Not when AD comes.’”

A trend toward buying books wholesale for decoration.

Who do people think are influential in their own community? US research:

• US residents once named business leaders.
• Today, US residents typically can’t name anyone and if they do, rarely a business person.
• Often, whether influencers or government individuals were named it was at the state or national level.
• Plausibly because of a decline in local media.
• Suggests a trend toward nationalised politics, with the corollary that national politics is less representative than local ones.

The man who solved his own murder. On Alexander Litvinenko—a former Russian spy was poisoned with a cup of tea in a London hotel.

What ‘long covid’ means. A doctor on the difficulty of characterising and treating [functional disorders] (a.k.a. ‘psychosomatic’) that might overlap with structural ones. Good to read with this piece on multiple chemical sensitivity.

On COVID accelerating the meaning crisis.

I think that the pandemic accelerated people’s re-evaluations of many of their commitments. We came out of it more strongly committed to activities we value highly, including passionate interests and family relationships. But we became less committed to jobs and classes that have only instrumental value to us. Young people were affected the most.

Why do humans double-bounce when they walk?

walking this way would have given early humans an edge in persistence hunting—pursuing animals until they surrendered from fatigue. Our flat feet and heavy legs aren’t optimized to let us move as fast as four-legged sprinters, so it’s possible that our gait pattern evolved to grant us an advantage for distance, not speed. Because the second bounce catapults the leg from the ankle, rather than powering its swing from the hip, the motion uses a lot less energy, allowing our ancestors to stalk prey for hours or days without needing to recover.

Was the T-Rex smart?

Incentivising hoarding:

In a landmark 1986 study, Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetsch and Richard Thaler gathered evidence that most people find this sort of behaviour unacceptable. (For example, 82 per cent of respondents thought it was unfair for a hardware store to raise the price of snow shovels after a snowstorm.) We could argue over whether these feelings of outrage at “profiteers” are simply mistaken or tap into some deeper wisdom, but the practical point is that firms know that they will be criticised if they build up stores and try to sell them at a profit in a crisis. As a result, they will spend less on storage than they should. A second problem is that supply interruptions have a large social cost. The cost of a blackout falls partly on the electricity supplier but mostly on customers, and so the supplier is likely to skimp on storage, backups and other ways to improve reliability. Then there is the third problem, which is that some kinds of storage are extremely expensive. Could the storage problem be solved? Governments could subsidise some forms of storage and stockpiling … They could do more to encourage trade and collaboration … they could invest more in early warnings of trouble. They will need to stand ready to resist the inevitable grumbles that the stockpiles constitute a waste of taxpayers’ money.

Different ways of doing life. Here, living with wolves:

The sanctuary was a thorough teacher, testing my every limit. Blisters bloomed across my feet from the miles I put in each day simply walking through the compound in my stiff new hiking boots, trailing staff through hours of chores. In my off time I studied the sanctuary’s handbook, memorizing the animals’ names and backstories, how to tell them apart, what medications they took and why, and how to safely administer them directly into a wolf’s mouth. Then, after nearly fourteen nonstop days, I passed the requisite exams to officially become an animal caretaker.

Serotonin as the habit signaller.

which neurochemical system is the most crucial for controlling the balance between more automatic and more deliberate cognitive processing? Based on previous research, my colleagues and I had a hunch that the serotonergic system might be a good place to look … what if serotonin was being used by our brains to digest information – that is, to process information flow between the distributed circuits of neurons required to identify, decide and act? … Any time there is a problem to be solved or a decision to be made, our brains must figure out which resources to deploy to meet the challenge … serotonin helps the brain continue with an automatic or habitual approach to a situation when that seems to be working well

Is the internet information overload? Interesting reflections on the benefits and drawbacks of the information age. Highlights:

If you look at a site like Buzzfeed, it has reports about the death of Kim Jong Il right next to viral videos about cats. It’s jarring – and seems a little amoral … [this is] pointing to the benefits of having a very small aperture for news. That aperture was controlled by full-time professional editors, but … what comes through the news hole now is anything anybody is interested in enough to post … when you have so few apertures for news and they’re controlled by such a similar set of people, you get a certain limited set of stories. We at least now have the opportunity to create filters that let in more than the traditional room of middle-aged white men. If we’re not reading the stuff that matters, it’s our fault.

Ask anybody who is in any of the traditional knowledge fields, and she or he will very likely tell you that the Internet has made them smarter. They couldn’t do their work without it; they’re doing it better than ever before, they know more; they can find more; they can run down dead ends faster than ever before. In the sciences and humanities, it’s hard to find somebody who claims the Internet is making him or her stupid, even among those who claim the Internet is making us stupid.

How To Speak Honeybee. The history and future of interpreting honey-bee communication.

Reminder that TikTok is spyware. Contra this post. Is there another chance for a ‘good’ social media?

The decline of ‘old masters’ in art: an emblem of how time annihilates what makes things special and leaves only the value in the ‘top’ of any category of thing.

The fake neuroscience of God. A neurosurgeon-cum-prophet tells of heaven after a near death experience. The legitimacy of the account relies entirely on his authority as a doctor, but he talks about nothing but anecdote. And as the reporter reveals, even that is flimsy. The best part is when the Dalai Lama, a co-speaker at an event attended by the neurosurgeon makes the aside:

that Buddhists categorize phenomena in three ways. The first category are “evident phenomena,” which can be observed and measured empirically and directly. The second category are “hidden phenomena,” such as gravity, phenomena that can’t be seen or touched but can be inferred to exist on the basis of the first category of phenomena. The third category, he says, are “extremely hidden phenomena,” which cannot be measured at all, directly or indirectly. The only access we can ever have to that third category of phenomena is through our own first-person experience, or through the first-person testimony of others.

“Now, for example,” the Dalai Lama says, “his sort of experience.”

He points at Alexander.

“For him, it’s something reality. Real. But those people who never sort of experienced that, still, his mind is a little bit sort of…” He taps his fingers against the side of his head. “Different!” he says, and laughs a belly laugh, his robes shaking. The audience laughs with him. Alexander smiles a tight smile.

“For that also, we must investigate,” the Dalai Lama says. “Through investigation we must get sure that person is truly reliable.” He wags a finger in Alexander’s direction. When a man makes extraordinary claims, a “thorough investigation” is required, to ensure “that person reliable, never telling lie,” and has “no reason to lie.”

It does seem rather unlikely that God would be a butterfly, even without investigation.

Dog breed differences in cognition. No surprises that the Aussie Kelpie was a stand out:

Significant breed differences were found for understanding of human communicative gestures, following a human’s misleading gesture, spatial problem-solving ability in a V-detour task, inhibitory control in a cylinder test, and persistence and human-directed behaviour during an unsolvable task. Breeds also differed significantly in their behaviour towards an unfamiliar person, activity level, and exploration of a novel environment. No significant differences were identified in tasks measuring memory or logical reasoning. Breed differences thus emerged mainly in tasks measuring social cognition, problem-solving, and inhibitory control.

Is ‘feeling fat’ really a manifestation of underlying sadness?

those with eating disorders aren’t alone in describing changes in their experience of body size. But why take any of these reports seriously? Perhaps those with eating disorders, anaesthesia experiences, and Alice in Wonderland syndrome are equally guilty of misidentifying their true feelings

and

This research suggests that, when many eating disorder sufferers report feeling fat, they aren’t misidentifying their emotions, but describing their proprioceptive experience. Their body maps represent them as larger, which causes them to physically feel larger, which they report as feeling fat. It is no wonder then that the clinical mantra ‘fat is not a feeling’ sometimes falls on deaf ears.

and

For clinicians and loved ones who hope to combat the harmful effect that feeling fat has on sufferers of eating disorders, a first step should be taking their complaints seriously. By accepting that, in some cases, feeling fat is a description of physical misperception, we can try to understand the nature and effect of these unsettling bodily experiences, and help sufferers realise them for what they are: deeply misleading. This isn’t to say that every complaint of feeling fat is a reference to misperception. Associating sadness or anxiety with feeling fat does occur, and clinicians have success in guiding clients to identify their true emotions. However, it should be kept as a live possibility that ‘feeling fat’ is sometimes used to describe misleading proprioceptive experiences of body size.

The honesty of pornography. The last paragraph:

All of this is to say that pornography is remarkably honest, and not simply because, as anti-pornography feminists allege, it documents patriarchy’s debasement of women. Rather, it is honest because it showcases the hard, often confusing work of reconciling private desire with public life, of admitting that sex with others can be unethical, of distinguishing between fantasy and reality. Antique pornography makes these contradictions obvious, circulating knowledge that we think, today, is at odds with eroticism. But perhaps it isn’t – perhaps there’s a utility to pornography’s mixed messages. Perhaps it was designed to confuse us, the better to underscore the clarity with which we should enter into the messy endeavour of sex with other people.

Cows are more resilient than you think:

To estimate how far the cows had paddled during their ordeal, journalists seemed to have measured the shortest distance between Cedar Island and the Core Banks using digital tools like Google Maps. Most put the swim at four miles; NBC preferred the precision of 3.39 miles … In fact, Aretxabaleta said, the probable routes taken by the cows, whether living or dead, range from 28.5 to nearly 40 miles. At the low end, that’s considerably greater than the distance across the English Channel. It’s more than ten times what swimmers complete in an Ironman triathlon. By Aretxabaleta’s measure, the absolute shortest period a cow would have been in the water is 7.5 hours; the longest is 25 hours.

A personalised alternative to antidepressants is on the way:

the treatment of depression is currently evolving in unexpected ways. This is based on a shift away from thinking about depression as a disorder of ‘chemicals in the brain’ to an understanding that depression is underpinned by changes in electrical activity and communication between brain regions.

but

At times, this resistance seems to reflect a perhaps wilful ignorance of evidence or even an ideological approach to medicine rather than an evidence-based one. There is a danger that a highly novel treatment, such as home-based closed-loop stimulation, will produce a similar degree of professional resistance, especially given that treatment informed by artificial intelligence could be seen to reduce the role of the clinician in the decision-making process.

Imagination as key to human specialness. “Imagination isn’t just a spillover from our problem-solving prowess. It might be the core of what human brains evolved to do”.

On the problematic popularisation of ‘trauma’:

trauma books may not be all that helpful for the type of suffering that most people are experiencing right now. “The word trauma is very popular these days,” van der Kolk told me. It’s also uselessly vague—a swirl of psychiatric diagnoses, folk wisdom, and popular misconceptions.

What would happen if you microdosed alcohol. Exploring Thomas Vinterberg’s latest film, Another Round, with the science.

Walking Trees And Parasitic Flowers. “A series of botanical encounters in the rainforest, excerpted from Francis Hallé’s book “Atlas of Poetic Botany”.

On the value of nurture. “Exploring how different brain states accompany different life stages, Gopnik also makes a case that caring for the vulnerable, rather than ivory-tower philosophising, puts us in touch with our deepest humanity.”

Excerpts from famously prolific reader Tyler Cowan on how to read fast, well, and widely. Still probably won’t be as fast as him.

Brain states as a clue to transcendence. Phrased as how spiritual retreats achieve this, but equally can be viewed as pointers to achieving it elsewise.

Summary, the ingredients that characterise the experience are:

1. Intensity. Emotional, I assume as characterised by limbic system. See also the amygdala is not the fear centre.
2. A sense of oneness or unity. Associated with decrease in associative cortex, which puts your senses together. Likely the same thing that explains the mushroom unity effect—mushrooms increase connectivity which similarly affects how associative cortext puts your senses together. Up or down, you want less of a neural representation of you-ness.
3. A sense of clarity. Before and after. The neural explanations for this doesn’t seem very thoughtful.
4. A sense of surrender. Also not thoughtful, neurally, but see also speaking in tongues where I talk a little about this.
5. Transformation as a result of the experience. Essentially, this seems like intense practice (probably deliberate practice).

Stop Spending Time on Things You Hate. Interesting narrativised advice, but the cribnotes are:

1. Schedule your downtime.
2. Give your bad habits a monetary value (i.e. price them at your hourly wage).

The Tyranny of the Female-Orgasm Industrial Complex:

I surprised myself with the ire that bubbled up over the course of writing this essay; I hadn’t realized how much lingering resentment I had toward those men—and later, toward the female-orgasm industrial complex in which I saw the self-interest of such men reflected—who made me feel deficient and ashamed for a situation out of my control, and one that I had long ago made peace with. As grateful as I am to Dr. M and Justin for their support, moreover, for offering a safe space in which to further explore the frontier of my own body, I find myself wondering, when I think too hard about it, whether their professed “calling” is actually just more male selfishness in disguise.

God in a meritocratic society. Interesting thoughts that generically apply to a secular, materialist state. I’m not sure the meritocracy is the most relevant part.

the meritocracy’s anti-supernaturalism: The average Ivy League professor, management consultant or Google engineer is not necessarily a strict materialist, but they have all been trained in a kind of scientism, which regards strong religious belief as fundamentally anti-rational, miracles as superstition, the idea of a personal God as so much wishful thinking.

Thus when spiritual ideas creep back into elite culture, it’s often in the form of “wellness” or self-help disciplines, or in enthusiasms like astrology, where there’s always a certain deniability about whether you’re really invoking a spiritual reality, really committing to metaphysical belief.

Neuroscience shows that spiritual experiences are correlated with brain states that we can all aim for, religious or not. See also speaking in tongues.

Human exceptionalism is dead: for the sake of our own happiness and the planet we should embrace our true animal nature.

On indifference (pdf):

It is a paradox of our time that the more Americans learn to tolerate difference, the less they are able to tolerate indiffer- ence. But it is precisely the right to indifference that we must assert now. The right to choose one’s own battles, to find one’s own balance between the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.

See also paradox of tolerance.

On spiritual exercise for wellbeing.

Adjusting your attitude is easier than you think:

Between the conditions around you and your response to them is a space. In this space, you have freedom. You can choose to try remodeling the world, or you can start by changing your reaction to it.

Another nice way of saying it. See also emotion and the mind, interruption theory.

The sad decline of heresy:

today’s heretics, who betray remarkably little interest in metaphysics. Indeed, the closest most of them ever come to anything resembling genuine theological speculation is in their naive, and largely tacit, belief in universal salvation (not to be confused with the theological virtue of hope, which it in fact mocks). Few if any of them would run afoul of the proscriptions of the ancient councils or of the terrifying sentences of the Quicunque Vult, if for no other reason than that they are unacquainted with them.

It’s a cute article.

On Zen kōans: a good video on the unsolvable riddles some Zen buddhists use to achieve transcendence.

What we get wrong about emotions.

In the past decade, scientists have begun to understand precisely how emotions and rationality act together. The key insight is that before your rational mind processes any information, the information must be selected and evaluated. That’s where emotion plays a dominant role. Each emotion—fear, disgust, anger—causes certain sensory data, memories, knowledge, and beliefs to be emphasized, and others downplayed, in your thought processes.

In case you weren’t already convinced by on emotion, autopoiesis, predicting human behaviour, emotion and the mind, etc.

A paean to pigweed, a modern saint.

As we seek to survive in an age of ecological collapse and cultural chaos, perhaps it is to the weeds we should look for advice. I think of Pigweed, invading Europe as Europe colonized America. As Europeans took over America, Pigweed flowed back on the ships, into the countries that were invading its original ecosystem. It performed a reverse colonization. Pigweed originally only from the Americas is now dispersed across Europe and Asia. Pigweed says plant me in disturbed landscapes, dirty soil, chemical sludge. Plant me where the pain lives and I will learn how to survive. I will learn how to turn this poison into greenery, into stalk and seed and a tap root so long and sturdy it is almost a sword, capable of sucking up water not available the shallow rooted soy and cotton plants. My body needs to learn how to adapt to an increasingly chaotic environment. It needs a saint that teaches me how to get I touch with the wily, cunning knowledge of place. My saint is a seed on the wind. A vegetal plague. Pigweed.

Motivating creativity:

the … optimal reward scheme is maximally uncertain—the agent receives transfers for success, but their distribution has an extreme variance

It makes you try lots of things. Is this surprising? It doesn’t feel surprising, but as the author notes, does:

shed light on the non-transparent incentives used by online platforms, such as YouTube

Social media and teenage mental health.

Estimates indicate high-speed wireless internet significantly increased teen girls’ severe mental health diagnoses – by 90% – relative to teen boys over the period when visual social media became dominant in teenage internet use. I find similar effects across all subgroups. When applying the same strategy, I find null impacts for placebo health conditions – ones through which there is no clear channel for social media to operate. The evidence points to adverse effects of visual social media, in light of large gender gaps in visual social media use and documented risks. In turn, the analysis calls attention to policy interventions that could mitigate the harm to young people due to their online activities.

The ghostly radio station that no one claims to run. A history of ghost radio stations as cryptography outposts—still a thing!

Machine in the ghost.

the central cultural conflict for religion in this century … [will not be] the old touchstones that configure ideological divisions between the orthodox and heterodox, the mainline and the fringe, conservatives and liberals, with arguments about abortion, birth control, gay rights and so on dominating our understanding of cultural rift … By the end of the century, there could very well be debates and denunciations, exegeses and excommunications about whether or not an AI is allowed to join a Church, allowed to serve as clergy, allowed to marry a biological human … ‘AI may be the greatest threat to Christian theology since Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species.’ … it could equally be argued that, just as evolutionary thought reinvigorated non-fundamentalist Christian faith … so too could artificial intelligence provide for a coming spiritual fecundity

Particularly poignent given the recent obsession with ChatGPT.

I often paraphrase myself, something like:

The Rarámuri believe that each moving body part has a unique soul, from the joints of the fingers to the ‘heart’ and the ‘head’. These souls, or ariwi, must be cared for lest they become sick and the body begins to fail. Similar ideas pervade many health traditions. Today we would call these things organs, or cast our net wider perhaps and include other systems like the microflora of our bodies.

But, it’s actually quite difficult to reference this, because the book that taught me this is old and obscure.

Then I realised I have a way of doing that—just do a marginalia. So here is the marginalium.

I’ve included a link to the archive.org book. It’s fascinating. The part about ariwi is not long, but it stuck with me.

A loose reflection on the meaning of ritual. Is pour-over coffee not a ritual, purely because it’s not coercive? Seems wrong. Rituals are just some established format for a ceremony. Rituals being deployed to reify power is simply a use-case?

The Rising Tide of Global Sadness. The gist in the conclusion is enough:

We live in a world of widening emotional inequality. The top 20 percent of the world is experiencing the highest level of happiness and well-being since Gallup began measuring these things. The bottom 20 percent is experiencing the worst. It’s a fundamentally unjust and unstable situation. The emotional health of the world is shattering.

A drone made out of sticks. John 11:35.

Today’s Older Adults Are Cognitively Fitter Than Older Adults Were 20 Years Ago, but When and How They Decline Is No Different Than in the Past. That is to say, we decline from a higher point.

Inventing New Particles Is Pointless.

Since the 1980s, physicists have invented an entire particle zoo, whose inhabitants carry names like preons, sfermions, dyons, magnetic monopoles, simps, wimps, wimpzillas, axions, flaxions, erebons, accelerons, cornucopions, giant magnons, maximons, macros, wisps, fips, branons, skyrmions, chameleons, cuscutons, planckons and sterile neutrinos, to mention just a few. We even had a (luckily short-lived) fad of “unparticles”. … All experiments looking for those particles have come back empty-handed, in particular those that have looked for particles that make up dark matter … Talk to particle physicists in private, and many of them will admit they do not actually believe those particles exist … the biggest contributor to this trend is a misunderstanding of Karl Popper’s philosophy of science, which, to make a long story short, demands that a good scientific idea has to be falsifiable. Particle physicists seem to have misconstrued this to mean that any falsifiable idea is also good science.

Is astrology ‘space racism’? Always good to trouble ourselves with these kinds of things.

The gossip trap: How civilization came to be and how social media is ending it. Interesting enough exploration of our ‘silent years’—the huge gap between modern physiology and modern civilisation. The thesis: when society is small enough for each of us to know each other, society is organised through social pressure. When we exceed that, natural social hierarchy breaks down and we are forced to use other tools (i.e. civilisation). ‘Gossip’ is posed as a constraint on innovation. The outro suggests that social media has brought back the ‘gossip trap’.

It is not clear precisely to me how this is entirely a bad thing, although the author things so:

The gossip trap is our first Eldritch Mother, the Garrulous Gorgon With a Thousand Heads, The Beast Made Only of Sound.

I’d be more likely to agree that this modern form of the gossip trap is a bad thing, and point to the loneliness epidemic, the hydraulic trap and the amusement trap as examples. But I’m inclined to suspect the gossip trap facilitated not by social media but by actual connections to people brings many benefits we are quick to dismiss or ignore.

How nuns got squeezed out of the communion wafer business.

Wikipedia donations go to many more things than Wikipedia. Both this account and the replies feel like distracting cherry-picking, but the size and wealth of Wikimedia was interesting.

Trey Howard, arguing Russian nuclear risk is low.

The Tale of Richard Hoskins: A Life Most Cursed. Sort of makes a disorganised skeptical foray into an edge case of trauma-related gender dysphoria, but don’t let that distract you. A fascinating story of a man.

It’s hard to imagine what a modern curse would look like today, how that would affect your life, but the story of criminologist and religious scholar Richard Hoskins comes as close as we might possibly get. His tale is one of almost unbelievable sorrow, witchcraft, murder and adventure, the kind of life one associates with an era gone-by.

A simple question to change how you feel:

there is actually a much simpler way to change how you feel, as my colleagues and I, along with other researchers, have found. It starts with answering the question ‘How do you feel?’ … research shows that the mere act of answering this question actually changes the emotions you are currently feeling.

Words to describe the heart.

The “torment of a tight spot” (amhas) … The “conceit of self-loathing” (omana) … the … delight that flows from being free of regrets (pamojja)

and so on. Fun.

Kind of disorganised, but interesting comparison between chicken and human intelligence.

Mostly good for the overview of fasting (see also this). But also a very btrmt-like look at health ideology, with interesting and less common examples. Always fun to see how close one can skate to the fringes without getting too woo-woo.

Midlife crises are less spectacular and more depressing, now:

This paper documents a longitudinal crisis of midlife among the inhabitants of rich nations. Yet middle-aged citizens in our data sets are close to their peak earnings, have typically experienced little or no illness, reside in some of the safest countries in the world, and live in the most prosperous era in human history.

Evidence take to support Jaques:

in midlife a human being is forced to come to terms, painfully, with the certainty of his or her own eventual mortality.

Interview with the “last man standing in the floppy disk business.”

A plain language AI model tricked into helping plan a drug raid. Amusing.

Knitting took a long time to invent. So, in fact, did everything.

Collaborative writing project about a shared alternate universe where magic (anomolies) are real. Excellent.

Why ‘cheap things’ don’t bring happiness.

Our reluctance to be excited by inexpensive things isn’t a fixed debility of human nature. It’s just a current cultural misfortune. We all naturally used to know the solution as children. The ingredients of the solution are intrinsically familiar. We get hints of what should happen in the art gallery and in front of adverts. We need to rethink our relationship to prices. The price of something is principally determined by what it cost to make, not how much human value is potentially to be derived from it. … There are two ways to get richer: one is to make more money; and the second is to discover that more of the things we could love are already to hand

Solving Bauman’s ‘liquid modernity’ with commitment.

In a culture addicted to endless choice, vows offer a higher freedom.

Forms of modern life may differ in quite a few respects – but what unites them all is precisely their fragility, temporariness, vulnerability and inclination to constant change. To “be modern” means to modernize – compulsively, obsessively; not so much just “to be,” … but forever “becoming,”

A vow is a declaration not of independence but of a bond. When we vow, we are giving up our future freedom … Our liberty is given us so that we in turn can freely dedicate ourselves to something greater.

Taleb on Christianity. Interesting ideas on the moral authority of religion as bound up in the mystery of the thing. There is an adage, ‘beauty is truth’. Perhaps things are less true when they are less beautiful and they are less beautiful when we can understand them better.

Effectively, Catholicism lost its moral authority the minute it mixed epistemic and pisteic belief –breaking the link between holy and the profane … For once religion exits the sacred, it becomes subjected to epistemic beliefs.

Ten types of arguments commonly used by advocates of fringe concepts (from Wikipedia editors). Very interesting.

At the present time, Wikipedia does not have an effective means to address superficially polite but tendentious, long-term, fringe advocacy. Some contend that this is a main flaw of Wikipedia; that unlike conventional encyclopedias, fanatics can always get their way if they stay around long enough and make enough edits and reversions.[3] In this sense, Wikipedia’s ‘commitment to amateurism’ does not always work for the best interests of the project.

On the value of religion for liberalism:

Anti-anti-theism helps to protect liberalism from jejune invocations of ‘utilitarianism’ and from an anti-spiritualism that can hardly uphold the dignity of the human person

Thaler speaks about his nudges. He compares his version of libertarian paternalism to giving directions when asked, but of course no one is asking and who is to say his directions are the right ones. He is right that everything is a choice architecture though, so perhaps it doesn’t matter so much whether we like it. Also fun critique of old-school econ theory—rational actors posed as unscrupulous ‘Econs’.

Why bother reading the bible?

On multiple chemical sensitivity. An interesting piece I wonder if would be as interesting pre-long-covid:

People within the online MCS community call themselves ‘canaries’, a species historically used as sentinels in coal mines to detect toxic levels of carbon monoxide … The question for people with MCS is: will anyone listen?

Speaking of long covid, here’s a similar piece on that.

The Contradictory Nature of the Elizabethans:

the Elizabethans … They had a passion for virtue and a genius for cruelty. They had wonderful manners and barbaric inclinations, lovely clothes and terrible diseases. They oscillated madly between the abstract and the corporeal. And among his contemporaries, nobody oscillated more madly than John Donne

The World’s Most Peculiar Company: Hammacher Schlemmer. A mail catalogue company with surprising success still today.

The Personal and Private Nature of Smartphones:

because smartphones are considerably more personal and private than PCs, using them activates intimate self-knowledge and increases private self-focus, shifting attention toward individuating personal preferences, feelings, and inner states

People underestimate how enjoyable and engaging just waiting is.

The logical mystic—on Witgenstein’s Tractictus:

Simply, the truly religious was outside of speech. It could only be “shown” – and, as he puts it in Tractatus, “what can be shown cannot be said.”

To call a religious belief or practice “false” is, to use a basic philosophical term, to commit a category error. Truth and falseness belong to the sorts of “facts” which make up the world, the meaningful propositions of language. Religious belief – the mystical – is not a fact of this sort, and therefore to submit it to the truth tests of propositional logic is incorrect.

My work consists of two parts; that presented here plus all I have not written. It is this second part that is important.

An article from the 60’s on LSD and the ‘third eye’, or more accurately, the role of serotonin in psychedelic states.

the mystery of the LSD-serotonin antagonism persisted. Serotonin is not an unusual chemical in nature; it is found in many places–some of them odd, like the salivary glands of octopuses; others ordinary: it abounds in plants; bananas, figs, plums are especially rich in it. What was it doing in the brains of humans? What was its evolutionary history? In 1958 a Yale Medical School professor of dermatology named Aaron B. Lerner published a paper on the pineal gland which placed this elusive substance in some vague kind of historical perspective and provided for it a real functional role in the brains of mammals.

Ethical astrology:

Astrological forecasting tends to describe the future more thematically or archetypically than concretely, and the vast majority of astrological prediction today falls into this category … Horoscopes work this way

Astrological prediction, wielded gently and skillfully, can help to “spot the meaning and the movement [going forward] by looking to what is different,”

The downside to the immense meaning-making potential of astrology? It renders the practice vulnerable to misuse by uncareful types with dubious commitment to honorable behavior.

An excellent article on the Antikythera machine.

On the view that there is no fate worse than death:

There is simply nothing worse than permanent death - because it cannot be repaired. And everything else can be repaired, including the damage from any amount of suffering.

permanent death is the only brain state that can’t be reversed, given sufficient tech and time … The non-reversibility is the key.

An interesting perspective, but appears to assume human immortality. One does wonder if suffering that can’t be reversed in a human lifetime, or suffering that takes generations to dilute away would still be preferable to a life lost for this writer.

Microdosing alcohol: A surprising and unpredictable way to boost creativity

The Risks and Social Costs of High Culture:

High culture now functions like a counterculture, entailing a conscious act of dissent from the mainstream … it carries more social risk than reward. Preferring things that are old, distant, and difficult to those that are immediate and ubiquitous means alienating oneself from one’s community, in some cases from one’s own family. It is at best an inexplicable quirk, at worst a form of antisocial arrogance.

Anthropological Case Study for the Lockdown as a ‘Spiritual and Economic Reset’:

at once an ethical retreat and an opportunity to recalibrate the economy … ethics and exchange were logically linked, though the governing principle was reciprocity, not accumulation

From an Indonesian community who would voluntarily retreat every couple of years. Similar ideas to this more modern-focused take

The ‘marshmallow test’ has consistently failed the replication challenge. Even the author wasn’t sold on it.

“[Mischel] also didn’t think that any simple measure of individual differences was going to be very good at predicting behavior,” Benjamin continues. “Despite the popular perception that the marshmallow test is a crystal ball,” he clearly expected only to see only weak correlations with marshmallow test results in the latest study

Re-evaluating Income and Happiness Beyond $75,000:

experienced well-being rises linearly with log income, with an equally steep slope above $80,000 as below it

A rebuttal to the conventional wisdom that income over $75,000 does not increase happiness. Possibly due to continuous experience sampling vs a dichotomous (yes/no) methodology. One wonders if that means people feel differently from moment to moment about happiness than when asked to evaluate happiness overall.

Maybe it’s more convincing when an economist writes a book about it, but luck is at least in part an openness to opportunity. As Camus, “Let us not look for the door, and the way out, anywhere but in the wall against which we are living.”