Analects

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

Can other animals understand death? Video on grief displays in other animals. Good companion to what animals think about death, which talks about e.g. the phenomenon of ‘playing possum’. More than just instinct it would appear. More evidence that humans aren’t so special after all.

On the ‘targeted’ community of positive psychosis

Journalists often depict the TI community as a postmodern tragedy – a byproduct of unregulated social media. Here are thousands of very sick people, we’re told, who are just reinforcing each other’s delusions and making each other sicker because they refuse to see psychiatrists
…
What if the TI community is an inevitable reaction to the shortcomings of medical psychiatry itself? Put differently, what if medical psychiatry is inadvertently pushing people like Luca deeper into the TI community?

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

The cases against free will. Good introduction to determinism.

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.

Mythbusting organic farming:

The sad truth is, factory farming is factory farming, whether its organic or conventional. Many large organic farms use pesticides liberally. They’re organic by certification, but you’d never know it if you saw their farming practices … They’re organic by the letter, not organic in spirit … Many natural pesticides have been found to be potential - or serious - health risks … nearly half of the pesticides that are currently approved for use by organic farmers in Europe failed to pass the European Union’s safety evaluation that is required by law

getting rid of pesticides doesn’t mean your food is free from harmful things … because organic foods tend to have higher levels of potential pathogens. One study, for example, found E. coli in produce from almost 10% of organic farms samples, but only 2% of conventional ones

science simply cannot find any evidence that organic foods are in any way healthier than non-organic ones - and scientists have been comparing the two for over 50 years.

the real reason organic farming isn’t more green than conventional is that while it might be better for local environments on the small scale, organic farms produce far less food per unit land than conventional ones.

Fewer people want to stand out from others:

Recent research and polling suggest that people may be more reluctant to express themselves and stand out than in previous years … Across the 20-year period, participants who completed the survey more recently reported a lower need for uniqueness, particularly in terms of not wanting to defend their beliefs in public forums and caring more about what others think about them.

Link to the actual paper is here.

Did a plague ruin the Roman empire? The Antonine Plague could be tied to many of the features of the decline.

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

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).

The virtues of propaganda, because facts don’t change minds. See also why do people believe true things:

Propaganda, be it for good purposes or bad, is a specific form of persuasion that taps into the nonrational and emotive sides of human beings. Persuasion that functions in this way is propaganda … people are fundamentally irrational and guided by their senses … A better understanding of propaganda and how to use it as a tool to change or educate people could advance the world in a positive way.

Bit aristocratic, isn’t it. Plato would be thrilled.

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.

On Turing’s 1952 ChatGPT

Adoption is predicated on transacting the life of a child. Interesting reflection by an adoptee on the psychology of adopting and being adopted.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Animals Trapped In Human Bodies. A profile on therians.

Dialect and the law:

If you don’t pay attention, the almost entirely arbitrary differences between Englishes can cause a huge fuss, whether in U.S. courts or somewhere else. But the dialectal diversity in this country means the consequences of seemingly minor linguistic differences are innumerable. Analyzing Supreme Court precedent, population statistics, everyday prejudice, and dialectal grammar reveals that “English” contains multitudes.

It might be good to say um:

Disfluencies such as pauses, “um”s, and “uh”s are common interruptions in the speech stream. Previous work probing memory for disfluent speech shows memory benefits for disfluent compared to fluent materials. Complementary evidence from studies of language production and comprehension have been argued to show that different disfluency types appear in distinct contexts and, as a result, serve as a meaningful cue. If the disfluency-memory boost is a result of sensitivity to these form-meaning mappings, forms of disfluency that cue new upcoming information (fillers and pauses) may produce a stronger memory boost compared to forms that reflect speaker difficulty (repetitions). If the disfluency-memory boost is simply due to the attentional-orienting properties of a disruption to fluent speech, different disfluency forms may produce similar memory benefit. Experiments 1 and 2 compared the relative mnemonic benefit of three types of disfluent interruptions. Experiments 3 and 4 examined the scope of the disfluency-memory boost to probe its cognitive underpinnings. Across the four experiments, we observed a disfluency-memory boost for three types of disfluency that were tested. This boost was local and position dependent, only manifesting when the disfluency immediately preceded a critical memory probe word at the end of the sentence. Our findings reveal a short-lived disfluency-memory boost that manifests at the end of the sentence but is evoked by multiple types of disfluent forms, consistent with the idea that disfluencies bring attentional focus to immediately upcoming material. The downstream consequence of this localized memory benefit is better understanding and encoding of the speaker’s message.

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?).

Life After Language:

Imagine a world a few centuries in the future, where humans look back on the era of reaction gifs as the beginning of the world after language.

More useful critiques of Freud than the usual ones:

His fundamental – and completely mistaken – insight was that all dreams express wish fulfilment. In the chapter “Distortion in Dreams” he confidently explains away, with convoluted inventions, the fact that so many dreams are nightmares, filled with anxiety. How can they possibly express wishes? … He tells us that when his patients had unpleasant dreams it was because their unconscious was trying to resist their analysis. Their dreams were fulfilling the wish that their dreams were not about wish-fulfilment. Heads I win, tails you lose. … Freud had to invent repression and infant polymorphic sexuality, castration anxiety, penis envy, the Oedipus complex and so forth, to justify his dogma that all dreams express disguised desires and can be decoded by the initiated.

Most AI Fear Is Future Fear

The problem of news from nowhere. See also my article:

politically induced mental and physical symptoms appear to be more pronounced among not just the young, but specifically those who are politically engaged and left-leaning … In the United States, the combination of being young, engaged, and liberal has become associated with anxiety, unhappiness, and even despair

Why progressives? The article suggests that conservatives: “care less about politics” and “conservatives tend to be a minority. So they have little choice but to acclimate themselves to a liberal environment and learn to interact with those who are different from them”. But one wonders if it’s simply that the solutions to conservative problems seem more tractable on the surface: a rejection of change, versus the welcoming of it.

You Don’t Want A Purely Biological, Apolitical Taxonomy Of Mental Disorders

Rotten meat a large part of paleolithic diets? Suggests perhaps fire was more for the purpose of processing plants, not meat.

Marilyn Monroe’s Psychoanalysis Notes. Curious.

An example of how we construct our reality.

Brain density is the key to intelligence? A twitter thread on encephalisation, but here they point out that human’s aren’t special—all primates are. See also that TED talk by Suzana HH:

Smarter entities are less coherent. The idea behind the AI collapse is that AI will use its inevitable intelligence advantage to eliminate humans in service of some goal. The paperclip maximiser will use all the resources to make paperclips, wiping us out in the process. But the smarter the entity, the less coherent its goal states are. Humans are much more of a hot mess of competing desires and intentions than, say, honeybees. It seems like AI will follow this principle. The more complex the world something operates in, the more complex its cognition must be. Anyway, here’s an article on the idea.

On the alien characteristics of LLMs: the Waluigi effect.

Short version:

After you train an LLM to satisfy a desirable property P, then it’s easier to elicit the chatbot into satisfying the exact opposite of property P

Why?

When you spend many bits-of-optimisation locating a character, it only takes a few extra bits to specify their antipode.

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

What happens, then, when large and powerful states, along with the transnational institutions and corporations they promote and protect, are all driving towards the same goal: the universalisation of an American-style “global economy” and its associated culture? … The expansion of this system has created problems — ecological degradation, social unrest, cultural fragmentation, economic interdependence, systemic fragility, institutional breakdown. The system has responded with more expansion and more control, growing bigger, more complex and more controlling … Modernity can best be seen as a system of enclosure, fuelled by the destruction of self-sufficient lifeways, and their replacement with a system of economic exploitation, guided by states and exercised by corporations. The disempowering of people everywhere, and the deepening of technological control

This seems a little alarmist, but the increasingly hydraulic nature of our modern way of being is superficially quite obvious. I was more impressed by the author’s idea to adopt James C. Scott’s ‘shatter zones’ to ameliorate it:

In his 2009 book The Art of Not Being Governed — subtitled, “an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia” — the historian James C. Scott … The “hill tribes” and “barbarians” living outside civilisation’s walls, he says, are neither “left behind” by “progress”, nor the “remnants” of earlier “backwards” cultures; they are in fact escapees. “Hill peoples are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppression of state-making projects in the valleys — slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labour, epidemics and warfare.”

Scott’s thesis is that throughout history, escaping from the reach of oppressive states has been a popular aim, and that in response, some cultures have developed sophisticated ways of living in hard-to-govern “shatter zones”, which allow them to avoid being assimilated. Standard-issue historical accounts of “development”, he says, are really the history of state-making, written from the state’s point of view: they pay no attention to “the history of deliberate and reactive statelessness”. Yet that history — whether of hill tribes, runaway slaves, gypsies, maroons, sea peoples or Marsh Arabs — is global and ongoing. Taking it into account, says Scott, would “reverse much received wisdom about ‘primitivism’”. Instead, we would read a history of “self-barbarisation”: a process of reactive resistance, of becoming awkward, of making a community into a shape that it is hard for the state to absorb, or even to quite comprehend … localised, potentially dispersed cultures can be tough to conquer.

Then some ideas about how to go about it, with the obvious focus on the internet as a convenient place to create ‘shatter zones’. I must be honest though—the internet corresponds to an alarming rise in loneliness, so whatever the internet is theoretically capable of in terms of connecting people, the practice leaves much to be desired. This constant recourse to it as a solution needs to become a bit more sophisticated.

Adolescence is a one-shot chance of development:

Adolescence is a unique stage of moral development. Synaptic pruning peaks during this period, with tens of thousands of neural connections lost per second, meaning that for certain neural pathways, including those involved in moral decision making, adolescence is a one-shot chance of development.

A typical child’s moral development is a process of categorising behaviours into three primary domains: moral, rule-based and personal. Empathy is an important underlying skill for recognising the first category. Usually by about 4 years old, children can empathise with others to avoid causing harm and injustice, thus allowing them to deduce the moral relevance of novel situations … Fast-forward to adulthood and humans use an entirely different moral framework based on a larger number of moral categories … the ones that have the strongest influence on the moral judgments of an adult will depend on that adult’s in-group affiliations and social identity.

And so, before status and peer-group relations become the driver of a teenager’s behaviour, it’s important to provide moral problem-solving opportunities. Before the belonging drives moral learning, and the synaptic pruning cuts away the rest.

Smart people are better at convincing themselves they’re right, not being right. It’s a well-enough known phenomenon. One of the reasons cults are often populated by intellectuals. But in the case, it’s applied to ‘wokeism’.

A particularly prominent example is wokeism, a popularized academic worldview that combines elements of conspiracy theory and moral panic. Wokeism seeks to portray racism, sexism, and transphobia as endemic to Western society, and to scapegoat these forms of discrimination on white people generally and straight white men specifically, who are believed to be secretly trying to enforce such bigotries to maintain their place at the top of a social hierarchy. Naturally, woke intellectuals don’t consider themselves alarmists or conspiracy theorists; they believe their intelligence gives them the unique ability to glimpse a hidden world of prejudices.

It’s a curious argument, because it seems to assume the worst-case buy-in to progressive ideology is the norm across intellectual communities. I rather suspect that most woke people are not so much ‘glimpsing a hidden world of prejudices’ as upgrading their concern about some real prejudices. To conflate this rise in concern with the stranger fringes of wokeism seems like a category error.

but just don’t like obvious prejudices more than they care about whatever the anti-woke

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.

Let me ruin fairy circles for you: “plants on the circle’s periphery were outcompeting the grass inside the circle for water”.

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?

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.

Psychological capabilites for resilience. Studies from the Ukraine war:

Many of the psychological capabilities to improve societal resilience can be integrated into three broad focus areas: education, information, and inclusion. Education should not only raise awareness about trends that may affect national safety or potential threats to sovereignty, but it should emphasize a country’s unique strengths, national history, culture, and values … A psychologically resilient population must also be informed about the modern information environment and how it plays a role in shaping thinking and behavior … A whole-of-society and whole-of-government approach is inherently inclusive. Inclusion efforts often focus on bolstering national identity to give people a sense of pride and belongingness, but it can simultaneously train critical skills.

How to become wise. Insights from eastern traditions (by a white person?)—a trite trope, but some interesting insights.

The greatness of Maria Montessori.

‘it is the human personality and not a method of education that must be considered; it is the defence of the child, the scientific recognition of his nature.’ Children, she insisted, were the ‘forgotten citizens’ of the world. To understand their capabilities was to glimpse what all humans were capable of. She argued that her message about work – that it gave meaning to human life, that its full expression was possible only in a state of freedom – had implications for adults working in a factory as much as for children in a school.

How to be a happy nihilist

Let me demonstrate with a game, ‘spot the meaningless meaning’. Next time you’re at the supermarket, pharmacy or really any non-enlightened space of commerce, pay attention to what the products are attempting to offer. One might expect a barrage of quality and utility assurances: ‘these chickpeas are low sodium’, ‘this facemask is non-irritating’. But, increasingly, aspirations are higher. A chocolate bar isn’t skim (skimmed) milk powder and sugar, it’s a chance to create an intergenerational family moment. A lipstick isn’t a bullet of colour to light up a drawn face, but a weapon of radical self-expression. Rather than informing a population of philosophically fulfilled, elevated beings, the ubiquity of all this bite-sized meaning has had an adverse effect, fuelling our familiar, modern malaise of dissatisfaction, disconnection and burnout. The fixation with making all areas of existence generically meaningful has created exhausting realities where everything suddenly really, really matters.

and

The broadest explanation of nihilism argues that life is meaningless and the systems to which we subscribe to give us a sense of purpose – such as religion, politics, traditional family structures or even the notion of absolute truth itself – are fantastical human constructs

and

When promoting nihilism as the antidote to the commercialisation of meaning, I tend to meet the same repeated questions: if there’s no point, then why do anything? Why get out of bed? Wash your hair? Treat another person with kindness? Not fall into a quivering heap? … when you stop focusing on a greater point, you’re able to ask simpler but more rewarding questions: what does happiness look like right now? What would give me pleasure today? How can I achieve a sense of satisfaction in this moment? Most of the time, the answers aren’t complex. They’re small delights already at hand – time spent with loved ones, a delicious meal, a walk in nature, a cup of coffee.

Exercise is habit, not genetics? 17 twin pairs with different exercise habits suggests…

Human intelligence is converging:

most recent studies report mainly positive Flynn effects in economically less developed countries, but trivial and frequently negative Flynn effects in the economically most advanced countries … these trends, observed in adolescents today, will reduce cognitive gaps between the working-age populations of countries and world regions during coming decades.

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.

Generalized tendency to make extreme trait judgements from faces. Academic paper.

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.

The Messiah Of Zooming Out. On Alexander Grothendieck, a mathematician who saw more than most:

the philosophy was this: If a phenomenon seems hard to explain, it’s because you haven’t fully understood how general it is. Once you figure out how general it is, the explanation will stare you in the face.

and

his commitment to the principle that all problems become easy if only you can find the right generalizations. Another, as we’ve also seen, is his willingness to redefine classical objects like points and curves in order to make them more susceptible to being generalized. The third, which is equally central, is Grothendieck’s lifelong insistence that mathematical objects are intrinsically uninteresting — instead it’s the relations between mathematical objects that matter. The internal structure of a line or a circle is boring; the fact that you can wrap a line around a circle is fundamental.

Intuition is to listening as analysis is to reading. From the abstract:

we demonstrate that thinking from spoken information leads to more intuitive performance compared with thinking from written information. Consequently, we propose that people think more intuitively in the spoken modality and more analytically in the written modality.

A nice overview of audience capture:

This is the ultimate trapdoor in the hall of fame; to become a prisoner of one’s own persona. The desire for recognition in an increasingly atomized world lures us to be who strangers wish us to be. And with personal development so arduous and lonely, there is ease and comfort in crowdsourcing your identity.

How to care less about work. Might be paywalled so use archive.ph. Some highlights:

So what work is actually valuable? It’s incredibly unclear. Many knowledge workers, ourselves included, find themselves insecure in some capacity about the work they’re doing: how much they do, whom they do it for, its value, their value, how their work is rewarded and by whom. We respond to this confusion in pretty confusing ways. Some become deeply disillusioned or radicalized against the extractive, capitalist system that makes all of this so muddled. And others throw themselves into work, centering it as the defining element of their self-worth. In response to the existential crisis of personal value, they jump on the productivity treadmill, praying that in the process of constant work they might eventually stumble across purpose, dignity, and security.

and

Once you figure out what [things you once took pleasure in], see if you can recall its contours. Were you in charge? Were there achievable goals or no goals at all? Did you do it alone or with others? Was it something that really felt as if it was yours, not your siblings’? Did it mean regular time spent with someone you liked? Did it involve organizing, creating, practicing, following patterns, or collaborating? See if you can describe, out loud or in writing, what you did and why you loved it. Now see if there’s anything at all that resembles that experience in your life today.

Placebo effect getting stronger? US dominated effect. See also this article.

The value of placebos is underrated.

Tool use and language share brain regions. This shouldn’t be that surprising—language is essentially a motor task, after all. But that this happens not in the cortex but the basal ganglia is interesting:

We observed that the motor training and the syntactic exercises activated common areas of the brain in a region called the basal ganglia

Cortex does transformation of input to output. Basal nuclei are mostly known for doing action selection (i.e. which to do among many alternatives). Is this a tangling of actions communicated vs actions acted?

How to function in an increasingly polarized society. It feels like perhaps a more efficient method of functioning would be to just step back a little from the froth, but failing that, you might like these suggestions.

Are we on the verge of talking to whales? A project attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks with artificial intelligence, then talk back to them.

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”.

Human cognition might have nothing whatsoever to do with computation. Worth keeping in mind that just because a theory is old, it doesn’t mean it’s correct.

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.

On ‘romantic friendship’:

Murdoch’s own account of love. In The Sovereignty of the Good (1970), she theorised that love is vision perfected. It is seeing the other person with clarity, as she really is, in all her particularity and detail. In Murdoch’s view, love is a willingness or a choice to see another person this way. But it is also more than this. Love is a desire – a desire to really see the other person and to be seen by them in return.

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”.

Tree thinking. Cute article with much poetic and tangential speculation on the relationship between trees and humans.

On care in meditation. See also Seven common myths about meditation

Crucially:

If you’ve never explored the depths of your psyche, and/or have a history of unexplored trauma or untreated mental illness, it would be reckless to launch into formal meditation practice, in the same way that someone with physical limitations would be ill-advised to embark without training on a challenging mountaineering expedition.

and importantly

Meditation isn’t for everyone, and there are many routes to mental wellness and the kind of mental states achieved through rigorous contemplative practice.

You are a network. A concise way of phrasing everything is ideology and spirituality of the mind:

The network self view envisions an enriched self and multiple possibilities for self-determination, rather than prescribing a particular way that selves ought to be. That doesn’t mean that a self doesn’t have responsibilities to and for others. Some responsibilities might be inherited, though many are chosen. That’s part of the fabric of living with others. Selves are not only ‘networked’, that is, in social networks, but are themselves networks. By embracing the complexity and fluidity of selves, we come to a better understanding of who we are and how to live well with ourselves and with one another.

See also The mind does not exist, from Aeon.

What the fuck is dissociation? More common than you think.

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.

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

Can single cells learn?

We exhume the experiments of Beatrice Gelber on Pavlovian conditioning in the ciliate Paramecium aurelia, and suggest that criticisms of her findings can now be reinterpreted. Gelber was a remarkable scientist whose absence from the historical record testifies to the prevailing orthodoxy that single cells cannot learn. Her work, and more recent studies, suggest that such learning may be evolutionarily more widespread and fundamental to life than previously thought and we discuss the implications for different aspects of biology.

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.

Everything is better than death? I’m left highly unconvinced by this. Here is an extract:

There is a popular idea that some very large amount of suffering is worse than death. I don’t subscribe to it

I predict that most (all?) ethical theories that assume that some amount of suffering is worse than death - have internal inconsistencies. 

My prediction is based on the following assumption:

• permanent death is the only brain state that can’t be reversed, given sufficient tech and time

• The non-reversibility is the key. 

What is innate and what is learned in human nature?

common intuitions about what our ideas are and how they arise – from nature or nurture – constitute a psychological theory. For the most part, this theory is tacit: few of us ever stop to ponder these questions. But this tacit psychological theory encompasses our self-image. It depicts human nature as we see it. This is who we think we are.

we, humans, are in a double bind. Not only do we fail to grasp our psychological reality, but we are often oblivious to our nearsightedness. We assume that abstract ideas must be learned, but we are all too happy to presume innate emotions, for instance. How do these attitudes arise? And why does the notion of ‘innate ideas’ have the ring of an oxymoron?

Where does memory information get stored in the brain?

memory information in the brain is commonly believed to be stored in the synapse … However, there is a growing minority who postulate that memory is stored inside the neuron at the molecular (RNA or DNA) level - an alternative postulation known as the cell-intrinsic hypothesis

And more inside.

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.

You don’t think in any language:

The idea is that behind the words of a language lie concepts and behind the sentences of a language lie combinations of such concepts. To have a belief or a thought is to have a particular combination of concepts in mind. To believe that a man is running, then, is to have the relevant mental concepts, e.g., MAN and RUNNING (concepts are usually written in capital letters in cognitive science), and to have the capacity to put them together (i.e., MAN RUNNING). In this sense, the language of thought is the common code in which concepts are couched, thus explaining how speakers of different languages can at all entertain the same sort of thoughts. We all think in roughly the same mental language, a system composed of concepts that allows us to represent and make sense of the world.

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.

How squid and octopus get their big brains. With video. Essentially, very similarly to vertebrate brains. We diverged from cephalopods before brains were a thing so it is very interesting that:

two independently evolved very large nervous systems are using the same mechanisms to build them

Something about the world and the being in it seems to eventually prefer brain-like solutions at a certain level of complexity.

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!

Postgenomics as the new evolutionary theory. Using the old ‘gay gene’ notion to emphasise that post-genetic accounts, speaking to the range of genetic, social, and environmental factors we now use to explain human behaviour, are just another version of ‘whatever I want to explain it explains it’:

Postgenomics today is thus playing out the rationalising functions that scientific inquiries into rather historically contingent identities and behavioural patterns always perform. Accordingly, the paradigm can generate some relatively valid postulates – it’s likely that our sexualities and genders are textured by a mix of social experience, the firings off of neurons, hormonal swirls and the transcription of DNA. But such science also allows defenders of the status quo – in all its libidinally liberated, economically devastated glory – to cast the world as it appears as the way that the world was meant to be. For all the high-powered machinery, impressive statistical methods and massive datasets that go into this knowledge production, we have inherited once again a collection of ‘just-so stories’ – that is, accounts of human nature depicted through a diverse confluence of causes rather than strictly genetic factors – now updated for our postgenomic age.

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.

What animals think of death. More common that one might expect.

The opossum’s death display, also known as thanatosis, is an excellent demonstration of this, not because of what it tells us about the opossum’s mind, but because of what it shows us about the minds of her predators: animals such as coyotes, racoons, dogs, foxes, raptors, bobcats and large snakes. In the same way that the appearance of the stick insect tells us something about how her predators see the world, and which sorts of objects they avoid eating, the opossum’s thanatosis reveals how common the concept of death is likely to be among the animals that feed on her.

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.

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.

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.

On the inability to comprehend the mass-shooting phenomenon. No answers, but that’s the point.

In a country where the random slaughter of children is so common that it’s been integrated into the structure of ordinary life, literary culture simply has nothing to say on the subject. It will talk about awkward interactions and sexual confusion and learning to love yourself in the face of trauma, but it’s afraid to touch this thing that seems to sum up the entire experience of modernity … What we have instead of the mass-shooting novel is the mass-shooting essay. Mass-shooting essays, classically, are full of solutions. They work in a fairly simple way: you pluck out a single, overriding factor that causes these events, and then you suggest how it might be sensibly eliminated …

The shortcomings of these essays aren’t the fault of the essayists. Srinivasan and Yang have perfectly reasonable ideas about why these things happen—the problem is that these things are not reasonable. They are outside the remit of the essay, a form in which things are supposed to be broken down into comprehensible pieces and coherently analyzed. This might be why the tone of these essays is shifting. Hopelessness is seeping in. The political system is inadequate to respond to these murders, but so, it seems, is our ordinary sensemaking apparatus, the power of reason, language itself. The best recent mass-shooting essays have been Elizabeth Bruenig’s in the Atlantic, but they’re less essay than threnody: a wail of helpless grief, crying the last whole truth left: “It’s going to go on indefinitely. It’s not an end, exactly, but life inside a permanent postscript to one’s own history. Here is America after there was no more hope.”

Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science.

We review studies examining language and cognition, contrasting English to other languages, by focusing on differences in modality, form-meaning mappings, vocabulary, morphosyntax, and usage rules. Critically, the language one speaks or signs can have downstream effects on ostensibly nonlinguistic cognitive domains, ranging from memory, to social cognition, perception, decision-making, and more. The over-reliance on English in the cognitive sciences has led to an underestimation of the centrality of language to cognition at large …

But crosslinguistic investigation shows this sensory hierarchy is not pan-human: in one study of 20 diverse languages tested on the codability (i.e., naming agreement) of the perceptual senses, there were 13 different rank orders of the senses, with only English matching the predicted hierarchy better than chance. Where English makes few distinctions (e.g., olfaction), other languages encode myriads (Figure 2). This has wide-ranging implications as people’s sensory experiences align with linguistic encoding, even determining the likelihood of an entity appearing in conscious awareness. It also raises questions about the validity of using English speaker judgments in tasks purporting to tap into visual semantics or visual complexity, since what is expressible in English may not be in other languages

US-centric, but interesting post asking why so many interventions help women but not men.

The problem is not that men have fewer opportunities; it’s that they are not seizing them. The challenge seems to be a general decline in agency, ambition, and motivation.

The neural correlates of near death experiences. Like I point out in my article on speaking in tongues, it always seems like news that the brain produces states that reflect experiences. But that’s its job. I suspect that whatever happens after life is not going to be so easily describable as those who experience near death articulate, nor indeed do I think that these experiences represent some sort of inter-plane travel. But similarly, I don’t think this is an argument against it. Merely that (surprise) the brain maps experiences.

Not new, but the crisis of masculinity.

Ambition doesn’t just happen; it has to be fired. The culture is still searching for a modern masculine ideal. It is not instilling in many boys the nurturing and emotional skills that are so desperately important today. A system that labels more than a fifth of all boys as developmentally disabled is not instilling in them a sense of confidence and competence.

Probably not a central issue, but an interesting one. More interestingly and concisely explored by Sebastian Junger. Perhaps my time in the military biases me, but Junger’s point that the military is one of the last places one can go to ‘become a man’ experientially checks out (and implies many issues).

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.

Effect sizes for anti-depressants vanish when subjected to rigorous analysis.

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.

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

Not just IQ or EQ, but CQ: cultural intelligence determines your success. This is not such a surprise of course. Bourdieu told us long before Henderson. But a good reminder.

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’.

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 psychology of killing:

once I began to spend time with people who had killed, I learned that killing is often highly contextual and arises from a specific set factors that are present at that time; which may never occur again

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

Why Intelligent People Are Less Happy:

An argument for why intelligent people are less happy—because intelligence does not measure how good you are at solving the poorly defined problems of life:

Spearman … did not, as he claimed, observe a “continued tendency to success throughout all variations of both form and subject-matter,” nor has anybody else. It merely looks as if we’ve varied all the forms and the subject-matters because we have the wrong theory about what makes them different … I think a good name for problems like these is well-defined … problems

Behavioural economics is just a list of biases: an argument that behavioural economics has fallen into a trap of simply creating a taxonomy of biases rather than an applicable model for thinking about human behaviour

There is no theoretical framework to guide the selection of interventions, but rather a potpourri of empirical phenomena to pan through … The point of decision-making is not to minimize bias. It is to minimize error, of which bias is one component. In some environments, a biased decision-making tool will deliver the lowest error.

A short summary of Friston’s Baysian Brain theory: the brain is a prediction engine more than it is a reality processor.

Bayesian Brain theory flips this idea around again so that cognition is a cybernetic or autopoietic loop. The brain instead attempts to predict its inputs. The output kind of comes first. The brain anticipates the likely states of its environment to allow it to react with fast, unthinking, habit. The shortcut basal ganglia level of processing. It is only when there is a significant prediction error—some kind of surprise encountered—that the brain has to stop and attend, and spend time forming a more considered response. So output leads the way. The brain maps the world not as it is, but as it is about to unfold. And more importantly, how it is going to unfold in terms of the actions and intentions we are just about to impose on it. Cognition is embodied or enactive…

How and why fringe theories stack:

believing that Earth is flat essentially requires that you think that NASA’s achievements are part of an elaborate conspiracy: there is no ability to travel to the Moon, nor are the photographs of a globular Earth from space authentic.

Reminds me of the contrarian cluster.

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.

Misconceptions About the Innateness of Emotions and Ideas:

we assume that abstract ideas must be learned, but we are all too happy to presume innate emotions, for instance

If we believe that the mind is ethereal, distinct from the body, then ideas (notions such as ‘helping others is good’ or ‘objects are cohesive’) must be disembodied as well … [unlike] the innateness of emotions, sensations and motor plans. Each of these psychological states can be linked to a bodily organ

[this] conspiracy … [is] why we wrongly view affective psychiatric disorders as destiny, whereas cognitive disorders such as dyslexia seem only ‘in the mind’

Excellent literature review of the effects of intermittent and periodic fasting.

a number of studies indicating that frequent fasting cycles may … increase side effects and even mortality … daily fasting/TRF periods of approximately 12 hours appear to be associated with benefits without known negative effects

It looks like all of these are strategies (including the usual 14 or 16 hour daily fasts) best used regularly, but not ongoing, and the re-feeding period might be just as important as the fast. From the abstract:

[intermittent fasting] lasting from 12 to 48 hours and repeated every 1 to 7 days and [periodic fasting] lasting 2 to 7 days and repeated once per month

And from the conclusion:

the refeeding period that has more recently emerged as an equally important process involved in the regeneration, and possibly rejuvenation, of systems, including organs, cells and organelles.

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.

Vaccine hesitancy for COVID-19 is a portfolio of motivations:

• dissent: not just anti-vaccine but a spectrum of dissenters from “highly educated parents who are interested in holistic, naturalistic child-rearing to conspiracy theorists who want to abolish vaccines entirely”
• deliberation: “a time of watchful waiting … a skepticism of a system that has consistently demonstrated that their health is not a priority.”
• distrust: “distrust regarding the entire government”
• indifference: people who are “not concerned at all” about the virus.

The Informational Value of Negative Emotions:

The capitalist mindset lures us into the trap of thinking that unless we are positive, happy and moving we must be condemned as ‘negative’. But why would … paying attention to … sadness … grief … anger … be called ‘negative’?

Emotion is informational and the ceaseless movement towards productivity does us no favours by ignoring the information space of negativity.

taking steps is easy, standing still is hard

The continued failure of the economy of small pleasures.

extrinsic incentives such as money or grades to learn [make it] harder to learn new related information when that incentive is gone … the learning outcome may be poorer due to the absence of reward

Adding to the point of Genetics is Nurture, this article suggests the same thing but the other way around. An environment is specified often by the preferences of the organism (in this case that of the child by the parent). Thus, the environment is an extension of the genetic predisposition. Either way you argue it, the distinction between nature and nurture really doesn’t exist in a meaningful way.

Why We Should Avoid Saying “Person With Autism”:

[you shouldn’t] say “person with autism” … This sends exactly the wrong signal. If autism is dimensional, we should think of it the same way we do height and wealth – and we say “tall person” and “rich person”. Saying “person with Height” or “Person with Richness” is strongly suggestive of “person with the flu” – it implies a binary class that you either fall into, or don’t. But that’s the opposite of what most research suggests, and the opposite of the thought process that will help you think about these conditions sensibly … most mental disorders are dimensional variation rather than taxa a lot of people still want psychiatry to deliver the [binary]. It’s not going to be able to do that. If you hold out hope, you’ll either end up overmedicalizing everything, or you’ll get disillusioned and radicalized and start saying all psychiatry is fake.

Why Individuals Avoid Information:

A common hypothesis posits that individuals strategically avoid information to hold particular beliefs or to take certain actions—such as behaving selfishly—with lower image costs … We find evidence for other reasons why individuals avoid information, such as a desire to avoid interpersonal tradeoffs, a desire to avoid bad news, laziness, inattention, and confusion.

But for survivors of sexual abuse, the argument over repression versus forgetting is largely beside the point. Most victims are primarily concerned with what they remember, not how.

n the origin of and dissolution of the FSMF. Again though, the ‘thorny’ topic of repressed memories usually misses the fact that at least some ‘repression’ is the same thing ‘directed forgetting’, the terms are interchangeable, and that bad memories, real or fake, repressed or forgotten, all cause the same kinds of damage.