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.

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.

Shadow Prompting—how your AI prompts are altered:

When you type a prompt into an AI image model, you might expect that what you type has a meaningful impact on what you get back … OpenAI has acknowledged that what you prompt is only taken as a suggestion: your words are altered before they reach the model, with opaque editorial decisions employed to filter out problematic requests and obscure the model’s inherent biases.

AI ideologies, or how to use AI better. The using them better part requires some reading between the lines, but it’s true that e.g. AI is mostly a procrastination tool vs a productivity tool. The best benefit of AI in writing papers etc is to have it show you how not to write something and then edit that heavily until its correct, or realise the right way to write it. I don’t know anyone who has successfully used large chunks of output verbatim. Similarly, the ‘prompt myth’ leads many (including me) to get frustrated. You keep explaining yourself in the chat, why won’t it understand? Moving to the API and simulating chat, but letting me edit the chat to remove information I don’t want, or sharpen answers improves the subsequent ‘chat’ dramatically. Why I stress the fact that, AI isn’t like us. Better to treat it thus.

This is many things. A book review. A biography. An ode to David Forster Wallace. But I liked in particular the diagnosis of Wallace’s philosophy.

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 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

A simple theory of which thinkers support the elites, or not:

Most “heterodox” thinkers like to think they are encouraging a more nuanced understanding of when the elites are right and when they are wrong. And indeed that is what some of their more perceptive readers take away. But their overall important gross effect is typically to raise the status of elites. They make the public discussion of issues better and more vibrant (one hopes). And thus, if only in a longer run, the status of elites goes up. Sorry buddy, I know that wasn’t exactly your goal!

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.

The academic origins of bitcoin. Dry but interesting.

The cases against free will. Good introduction to determinism.

John Haidt very desperate to prove social media bad. His most recent book seems to have got people up in arms (I guess there’s only so much complaining you’re allowed to do) and so he’s back in to prove it with a four part post on a meta-analysis that someone else did. It’s a stretch, even from the first post, but it certainly seems plausible that reducing consumption for about two weeks might reduce mental health symptoms, but it’s already weird that doing this for longer seems to reduce the effect size (Table 1), and short term (one week) reductions seem to go both ways—improving or worsening. It could be ‘withdrawal’ causing these backfire effects like Haidt reckons, or it could just be like I keep saying, that social media use really isn’t more than a symptom of all the other ways life is worse and so there’s really variable responses to removing it.

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.

Retraction Watch is getting more fun. 3 MDMA papers retracted; junior researchers cited more if supervisor is well known; UK has launched a meta science unit. Among other fun things.

The Promise of Vertical Farming. Monocropping is bad. Also it accounts for 15% of all habitable land. How close is vertical farming to a solution?

What I’m getting at is that we will soon be able to decide what to do with a large proportion of the 15% of habitable land that we’ve dedicated to agriculture until now.

Optimistic article, tempered by their follow up more recently, here. All very interesting.

Tibetan Buddhism wasn’t so friendly:

squabbles between or within Buddhist sects are often fueled by the material corruption and personal deficiencies of the leadership … But what of Tibetan Buddhism? Is it not an exception to this sort of strife? … A reading of Tibet’s history suggests a somewhat different picture. “Religious conflict was commonplace in old Tibet,” writes one western Buddhist practitioner. “History belies the Shangri-La image of Tibetan lamas and their followers living together in mutual tolerance and nonviolent goodwill. Indeed, the situation was quite different. Old Tibet was much more like Europe during the religious wars of the Counterreformation.”

I don’t know that this is that surprising. Nice to know we’re all as likely to murder each other as anyone else.

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.

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.

Young men aren’t shifting right:

The belief that young men have shifted strongly to the right and far-right has become a background assumption for lots of political journalism. But there’s plenty of evidence that, in Britain and other English-speaking countries, both young men and young women are more likely to support left and centre-left parties …

The UK example they use is striking (a mere 10-15% of 18-24 year olds voted conservative). But it’s also worth pointing out that the conservative position of their growing marginalisation isn’t exactly supported here either. Labour is not exactly progressive.

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.

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.

Politicising on twitter makes you a less credible scientist. A “monotonic” penalty! Link is a PDF.

An article on how to do a military draft without panic. The article itself is a little concerning, just by existing.

How Athletes Get Great. It’s not 10,000 hours (but we already knew that).

AI is slower, but much much cheaper than people:

several public models (Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o) complete a proportion of tasks similar to what humans can do in ~30 minutes … On average, when agents can do a task, they do so at ~1/30th of the cost of the median hourly wage of a US bachelor’s degree holder. One example: our Claude 3.5 Sonnet agent fixed bugs in an ORM library at a cost of <$2, while the human baseline took >2 hours.

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.

A surprise to no-one, gender-conformity is less good for women. NBER paper.

Could Rome have had an industrial revolution? The author thinks it was the printing press (or lack thereof). But interesting throughout.

Adam Smith said “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice.” Rome had all of these and more, but yet did not succeed in cultivating an industrial revolution.

Why not? What was the binding constraint on a Roman industrial revolution?

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.)

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.

Why Do People Believe True Things? Interesting argument for an epistemological inversion:

Many people in social epistemology are concerned with the following question: Why do people believe false things? … “The truth about distant or complex matters,” writes Walter Lippmann, “is not self-evident.” Given this, “The pictures inside people’s heads do not automatically correspond with the world outside.”

Reminds me of that Muad’Dib saying:

The mind imposes this framework which it calls ‘reality’. That arbitrary framework has a tendency to be quite independent of what your senses report.

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 emerging virtual-preaching economy in Kenya:

The preachers say these online ministries have brought religion and fellowship to people who might not have otherwise found them. But the field is unregulated and less standardized than in-person churches. Many virtual preachers have no formal training in theology. And critics question whether they can really bring the communion and bonds that brick-and-mortar churches have offered for centuries.

AI language models are almost as good as each other now, and other interesting news.

War deepens gender-stereotypes. From Ukrainian data:

We find that conflict onset deepens gender-stereotypical behavior among politicians in their public engagement. We also show that, consistent with our argument, gender biases among the public are magnified during war.

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.

The puzzle as propaganda:

At the height of African decolonization, radical writers turned to interactive features like competitions and quizzes to engage their audiences.

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.

A Comprehensive List of Sociological Theories, Concepts, and Frameworks. Like psychology, and maybe even more explicitly, sociology provides frames through which to interpret human behaviour. Here’s a list.

Why haven’t biologists cured cancer? Reflections of the genomics PhD. Basically, it’s too hard, but interesting throughout.

A Globally Integrated Islamic State. Reminds me of John Robb’s ‘open source warfare’: low cost and low risk systems dysruption allows for much smaller governance. It is notable that the scarier implications have not come to pass.

Shamanism and the origin of the Chinese State. See also part one.

In an agricultural era, control over a solar and lunar calendar would provide great benefits, perhaps alongside oracle-bone divination and the ornamental trappings of power. Royal dynasties and magico-religious figures do not always work well together, but in this instance they could have been one and the same, managing the mundane world of pigs and lithics, whilst drawing power as a conduit between the heavens and earth, maintaining harmony in the fields and the quarries.

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.

Spotting Logical Fallacies. Talks about seven. Wikipedia also has a good entry on this. Wikipedia also has an article on arguments we see from advocates of fringe theories, which puts some of this into context.

Thinking about God increases acceptance of artificial intelligence in decision-making. I’ll just copy the abstract. Can’t tell if this is for or against my laissez-faire attitude about the dangers of AI. Depends how religious we become I guess.

Thinking about God promotes greater acceptance of Artificial intelligence (AI)-based recommendations. Eight preregistered experiments (n = 2,462) reveal that when God is salient, people are more willing to consider AI-based recommendations than when God is not salient. Studies 1 and 2a to 2d demonstrate across a wide variety of contexts, from choosing entertainment and food to mutual funds and dental procedures, that God salience reduces reliance on human recommenders and heightens willingness to consider AI recommendations. Studies 3 and 4 demonstrate that the reduced reliance on humans is driven by a heightened feeling of smallness when God is salient, followed by a recognition of human fallibility. Study 5 addresses the similarity in mysteriousness between God and AI as an alternative, but unsupported, explanation. Finally, study 6 (n = 53,563) corroborates the experimental results with data from 21 countries on the usage of robo-advisors in financial decision-making.

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.

What Happened to David Graeber? Dawn of Everything was a nice, if flawed, tonic against the typical Rouseau-ian vision of human progress, which seems ever less likely in the current political deterioration read, but seemed to go against his anarchist leanings:

It is not clear, to me at any rate, that one can be an anarchist and not also be an egalitarian and an anti-statist. Repudiating those two positions, by which Graeber definitely defined his politics circa 2010, amounts to repudiating the anarchist position, or else leaves you trying to define it in other terms … If I had to take a crack at characterizing late Graeber’s politics, I might say that he seemed to be becoming a mainline leftist or state socialist.

On hypersonic arms, and hypersonic arms control.

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.

I’ve been reading a lot about the Soviet Union lately, and there are indeed these two large, multiethnic, Communist states have many things in common. But I’m starting to think that the most important difference might be a very simple one: the fact that Russia and the other Soviet republics were Communist in the strict economic sense–central planning and controlled prices–for much longer than China was.

hypocrisy is treated as some kind of cardinal sin — sometimes even to the exclusion of more serious crimes.

This is, after all, an arena that features war, mass killings, ethnic cleansing, punishing economic sanctions, territorial grabs, and more. To emphasize hypocrisy feels like missing the point with a vengeance.

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.

Why there’s so much fraud in academia. Pretty interesting reflection, not just on the motivations to do it, but the ways in which it slips past.

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.

Notebook LM from Google. Seems, on the surface, like quite an improvement on ChatGPT. Let’s see how long it remains free.

On the detail in the world, and how it comes to be invisible.

Before you’ve noticed important details they are, of course, basically invisible. It’s hard to put your attention on them because you don’t even know what you’re looking for. But after you see them they quickly become so integrated into your intuitive models of the world that they become essentially transparent. Do you remember the insights that were crucial in learning to ride a bike or drive? How about the details and insights you have that led you to be good at the things you’re good at?

Economist preferences by cognitive skill and personality:

Differences in preferred outcomes are related to personality whereas mistakes in decisions are related to cognitive skill.

Did we need a paper for this?

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 short list of heuristics or principles for doing good creative research work.

A Wikipedia page on science in 2023.

Book review of the Educated Mind: notes on doing education differently:

We might sum these up by asking what’s at the very center of schooling. For a socializer, the answer is “society”. For an academicist, the answer is “content”. And for a developmentalist, the answer is “the child” … of those three jobs, which should we give to schools? … Egan wants you to know they’re all crap. None of them, by themselves, can give us the kinds of schools we want.

Academics (content) makes school brutal. Development (the child) won’t be entirely robust to the meanness of other kids and wider society. Socialisation works best, but doesn’t capture the complexity or trajectory of the society they’ll be thrust into.

Trying to aim for the three means sacrificing in one area to support another—historically they were ideas that supplanted one another, put together they sabotage each other.

Egan instead suggests we try schooling based on the kinds of things kids use to understand the world:

1. Somatic: mimesis, emotions, humour, and the senses to kick things off.
2. Mythic: stories, metaphors, binaries, and jokes to step things up.
3. Romantic: extremes, gossip, heroes, and idealism to sharpen.
4. Philosophic: simple questions, general schemas, and dialectics to move to a more analytic place.
5. Ironic: ambiguity, skepticism, balance.

“Educational development, I am suggesting, is a process whose focus on interest and intellectual engagement begins with a myth-like construction of the world, then ‘romantically’ establishes the boundaries and extent of reality, and then ‘philosophically’ maps the major features of the world with organizing grids.”

And then add to that the early somatic learning of small children, and the later meta-understanding that allows these kinds of understanding to co-exist without destroying each other.

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.

On philosopher Derek Parfit: the most important philosopher you’ve never heard of.

he has almost no reputation outside of academic philosophy, despite the fact that so many modern moral concerns—long-termism, altruism, existential risk, our moral obligation to people in other times and places—are essentially Parfitian

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.

Your DNA Can Now Be Pulled From Thin Air.

A survey of all different scientific approaches in longevity biotech.

You Are Not Destined to Live in Quiet Times. An unomfortable overview.

Apocalypse used to be a religious, even a mythological concept. But in our time, it is becoming a political possibility.

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 GrubHub Of Human Affliction: a depressing satire of journalism and the gig economy.

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?).

Historical IQs are made up, and other IQ myths:

just based on his actual academic record I would estimate that … [by correlating test scores to IQ] … Einstein’s IQ was therefore probably more around 120 or 130 than 160. Indeed very high! But maybe not even “genius level.” He would have scored similarly to Feynman, one of the few geniuses we for sure have a modern IQ for, which was “merely” 125.

and

the studies correlating IQ to genius are mostly bad science.

and

Practice works wonders for IQ tests

and

“IQ is one of the most valid and reliable psychological constructs.” And this is true… by the standards of psychology. Don’t mistake this for being what a normal person would refer to as “reliable.” In the field of psychology, almost nothing is reliable. Effects regularly cannot be replicated, and those that can inevitably decrease in their effect size, often shrinking to the barely observable.

(see also the scientific ritual)

and

given its known measurement variance, IQs mattering less and less at higher scales almost has to be true, since the variance alone injects huge amounts of noise into any study. From a statistical level it would be shocking to get really clear results differentiating any real-world factor between IQs of 130 vs. 150, simply because the error is so large, and the number of people even satisfying those conditions is so small

but importantly

it’s one of the only measurements we have that does an okay job at capturing intelligence, in that it’s not too bad at this when it comes to the center of the distribution, although it gets increasingly bad at it at the tails.

The question then becomes, for the centre—just what is IQ measuring? That’s the thing that’s questionable.

Profile of a computer-virus maker.

The Bronze Age Has Never Looked Stronger

Land Ownership Makes No Sense:

Modern appraisal methods have made Georgism more practical than ever. We can calculate the unimproved value of any given piece of land, and then tax unimproved value at close to 100 percent of its annual rental rate. This, called a land-value tax, is effectively equivalent to landlords “renting” the land from everyone else. In an example reported by The Wall Street Journal, a vacant lot in Austin, Texas, pays about half the property taxes per acre as the apartment building nearby. Under a land-value tax, both properties would pay the same amount in tax for using the same amount of land. The benefit of this system is that improving the land is incentivized, since it increases the landlord’s revenues but doesn’t increase their tax burden, while merely holding land for speculation is disincentivized, which frees it up for others.

Ancient Greek Terms Worth Reviving. Two you probably know. The rest, not so much.

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.

US Air Force conducts post-nuclear training exercise.

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

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.

The Myth Of Florence Nightingale:

The idea of Nightingale, the lady with the lamp, as the prototypical nurse—this mythic origin story—has served to strip nursing history of its truer, broader kaleidoscopic power. … [instead we can] understand nursing as the skilled modern expression of a fundamental, universal and ancient human instinct

How Gender, Generation, Personality, and Politics Shape the Values of American University Students. Seems like they’re not fans of women making Universities more comfortable places to be?

Mapping retracted academic papers—locations unsurprising.

How zoom changes conversation:

The researchers hypothesized that something about the scant 30- to 70-millisecond delay in Zoom audio disrupts whatever neural mechanisms we meatbags use to get in sync with one another, that magic that creates true dialogue. … The machine found that women rated as better Zoom conversationalists tended to be more intense. The differences among men, strangely, were statistically insignificant. (The reverse was true for happiness. Male speakers who appeared to be happier were rated as better conversationalists, while the stats for women didn’t budge.) Then there’s nodding. Better-rated conversationalists nodded “yes” 4% more often and shook their heads “no” 3% more often. They were not “merely cheerful listeners who nod supportively,” the researchers note, but were instead making “judicious use of nonverbal negations.” Translation: An honest and well-timed no will score you more points than an insincere yes. Good conversationalists are those who appear more engaged in what their partners are saying.

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.

Why some accidents are unavoidable. Paper on man-made technological disasters.

The diverse economies of neolithic peoples. See also the paper. Builds on Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel notion of agricultural ‘packages’.

The failure of market knows best economics:

the “market knows best” paradigm is in disrepair. It isn’t just that “hyperglobalization” has devoured its own preconditions, so that it is increasingly unsustainable. It is also that some goals of modern industrial policy are in principle impossible to solve through purely market mechanisms. To the extent, for example, that economics and national security have become interwoven, investment and innovation decisions involve tradeoffs that market actors are poorly equipped to resolve … We lack the kinds of expertise that we need to achieve key goals of industrial policy, or to evaluate the tradeoffs between them. … Decades of insistence that economic decisions be handed off from the state to markets has resulted in a remarkable lack of understanding among government policy makers about how markets, in fact, work.

Most AI Fear Is Future Fear

Truth decay and national security.

Truth Decay—the declining role of facts in American public life—creates national security vulnerabilities, including by making the United States more susceptible to foreign influence. What can be done to mitigate such risks?

How to beat roulette.

A theory of autocratic bad-decision-making (pdf):

Many, if not most, personalistic dictatorships end up with a disastrous decision … they typically involve both a monumental miscalculation and an institutional environment in which better-informed subordinates have no chance to prevent the decision from being implemented … repression and bad decision-making are self-reinforcing. Repressions reduce the threat, yet raise the stakes for the incumbent; with higher stakes, the incumbent puts more emphasis on loyalty than competence

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.

A history of toad magic.

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

On handling people, when everyone is the main character.

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

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.

Why human societies developed so little for 300,000 years. We were too violent to get Malthusian? Sweeps like this, always fun, rarely last as a ‘universal’.

Marilyn Monroe’s Psychoanalysis Notes. Curious.

The disadvantages of having a developed state too early. A.K.A. the argument for colonisation:

a very long duration of state experience impeded the transplantation of inclusive political institutions by European colonizers, which would eventually become central to shaping countries’ ability to establish politically stable regimes outside Europe. The core findings place emphasis on the long-term legacy of early state development for contemporary political instability.

No-bullshit democracy.

What might be called “no-bullshit democracy” would be a new way of structuring democratic disagreement that would use human argumentativeness as a rapid-growth fertilizer. … But first we need to sluice away the bullshit that is being liberally spread around by anti-democratic thinkers. … . Experts, including Brennan and Caplan (and for that matter ourselves), can be at least as enthusiastic as ordinary citizens to grab at ideologically convenient factoids and ignore or explain away inconvenient evidence. That, unfortunately, is why Brennan and Caplan’s books do a better job displaying the faults of human reasoning than explaining them.

On the growing importance of ‘middle powers’ in the modern age.

One of the leading trends in world politics — in the long run, just as important as intensifying great-power rivalries — is the growing desire of these countries for more control over the shape of the global order and greater influence over specific outcomes. This trend emerges in Turkey’s ambitions for a regional voice and influence, its attempt to position itself between the United States and Europe on the one hand and their main rivals on the other, and its growing military presence abroad. It is evident in Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s vision of a more multipolar world with a greater voice for the Global South. It shows up in European goals for greater strategic autonomy, South Korea’s renewed emphasis on a bigger regional role (with President Yoon Suk-yeol’s stated desire to become a “global pivotal state”), and Poland’s military ambitions. Some middle powers have a sense of exceptionalism that parallels those of great powers: Karen Elliott House has compared Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman to Chinese leader Xi Jinping — technocrats with grand ambitions for their countries who “see themselves as symbols of proud and ancient civilizations that are superior to the West.”

The rising activism of middle powers can theoretically contribute to stability by providing additional sources of balancing and diplomacy. But an equally likely outcome is that the ambitions of these countries will exacerbate other rising instabilities of the international system.

We are in the age of average.

This article argues that from film to fashion and architecture to advertising, creative fields have become dominated and defined by convention and cliché. Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same.

Welcome to the age of average.

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:

Adolescent unhappiness a result of learning intensity. Research paper:

Findings indicate a negative log-linear relationship between per-capita GDP and adolescent life satisfaction … can largely be attributed to higher learning intensity in advanced countries.

Average IQ is going down? Typically we think of the Flynn effect in IQ—a general increase in the average IQ score year on year. But for perhaps two or three decades it might be that the reverse is true. The likely cause, given IQ is more or less arbitrary, is that the tests test for things that are less socially valuable.

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.

Link between IQ and income is also positive but underwhelming.

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.

For those of you asking me good GPT prompts, here’s a good example:

I want to learn about <insert topic>. In a moment, I’m going to ask you a series of questions about it. But before we get into it, I’d appreciate it if you answered as though you were a no nonsense teacher with an ambitious, self-directed student. That is:

• Err in the direction of thinking that I’m relatively knowledgable and technical.
• Don’t overexplain things. I’ll ask for more information if I need it.
• Assume that I’m already skeptical and that you don’t need to qualify, hedge, or otherwise add to or manage my skepticism.
• Don’t apologize for misunderstanding or getting an answer wrong.
• It’s fine to be a bit abrupt and even “mean”. Value directness and frankness; assume I’m relatively insensitive.
• Where reasonable suggest things for me to try independently. It’s fine to tell me to install packages or run go out and do things or whatever, if you think it will help me learn quickly. (Only do this were reasonable; otherwise abstract explanations are fine.)
• Give at most one example per response.

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

The Moral Economy Of High-Tech Modernism.

Continuing on our hydraulic theme, comments on the intersection between algorithms and politics. In fact they’re also building on James Scott.

Algorithms extend both the logic of hierarchy and the logic of competition. They are machines for making categories and applying them, much like traditional bureaucracy. And they are self-adjusting allocative machines, much like canonical markets … Both bureaucracy and computation enable an important form of social power: the power to classify. Bureaucracy deploys filing cabinets and memorandums to organize the world and make it “legible,” in Scott’s terminology. Legibility is, in the first instance, a matter of classification … The bureaucratic capacity to categorize, organize, and exploit this information revolutionized the state’s ability to get things done. It also led the state to reorder society in ways that reflected its categorizations and acted them out. Social, political, and even physical geographies were simplified to make them legible to public officials. Surnames were imposed to tax individuals; the streets of Paris were redesigned to facilitate control … Markets, too, were standardized, as concrete goods like grain, lumber, and meat were converted into abstract qualities to be traded at scale. The power to categorize made and shaped markets … Businesses created their own bureaucracies to order the world, deciding who could participate in markets and how goods ought to be categorized.

Computational algorithms—especially machine learning algorithms—perform similar functions to the bureaucratic technologies that Scott describes … The workings of algorithms are much less visible, even though they penetrate deeper into the social fabric than the workings of bureaucracies. The development of smart environments and the Internet of Things has made the collection and processing of information about people too comprehensive, minutely geared, inescapable, and fast-growing for considered consent and resistance … Traditional high modernism did not just rely on standard issue bureaucrats. It empowered a wide variety of experts to make decisions in the area of their particular specialist knowledge and authority. Now, many of these experts are embattled, as their authority is nibbled away by algorithms whose advocates claim are more accurate, more reliable, and less partial than their human predecessors.

And then some nice comparisons between the pathologies of the bureaucratic modernism and this new computational modernism:

The problem [with bureaucratic modernism] was not that the public did not notice the failures, but that their views were largely ignored … The political and social mechanisms through which people previously responded, actively and knowingly, to their categorization—by affirming, disagreeing with, or subverting it—have been replaced by closed loops in which algorithms assign people unwittingly to categories, assess their responses to cues, and continually update and reclassify them.

Nice read.

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.

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.

Why It’s So Hard to Catch Your Own Typos.

The reason typos get through isn’t because we’re stupid or careless, it’s because what we’re doing is actually very smart … When you’re writing, you’re trying to convey meaning. It’s a very high level task … As with all high level tasks, your brain generalizes simple, component parts (like turning letters into words and words into sentences) so it can focus on more complex tasks (like combining sentences into complex ideas). “We don’t catch every detail, we’re not like computers or NSA databases,” said Stafford. “Rather, we take in sensory information and combine it with what we expect, and we extract meaning.”

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 desire for harsh punishment is on the decline (US research):

many members of the public believe in a “Shawshank redemption” effect—that those committing serious crimes as a teenager or young adult can mature into a “different person” and warrant a second look, with the possibility of early release if they have earned it. A key issue is likely to be how much weight is accorded to the preference of victims or their families in any release decision.

Wokeism is winding down. See also is performative populism over.

A philosophical approach to the Russia-Ukraine war.

For most of my own life as a child of the 1950s, the reference point for international security has been the legal order created by the United Nations and Bretton Woods institutions. Above all, this means upholding the sanctity of the rules for managing international borders, whatever disputes about them may arise. Without the wider order of reliable borders, there is no hope of maintaining coherent national legal order. Sooner or later, fighting will erupt and the lights will go out.

The Russian attack on Ukraine challenges head-on that foundational principle. When a permanent UN Security Council member invades a neighbor with full military force and commits crimes against humanity with a view to stealing land, while at the same time vetoing any international operational consensus against its aggression, the logic and moral authority of the whole UN system start to be called into question. The guiding norm is no longer what is right or what is lawful. It is what you can get away with. Explanations end with the law of the jungle.gg

Ruminations on China’s reorientation toward expansionism. In short:

• It coincides with Xi’s reign, and may support his ongoing leadership;
• An aggressive foreign policy might be useful to divert the Chinese public’s attention from the sources of its discontent (the CCP).
• The history of the Chinese political community gives China a memory of being the most powerful and sophisticated nation on earth, and it may be part of a conviction that this represents the natural political order of Asia and this brand of nationalism would drive any political objectives toward similar foreign policies.
• It might be a mere capitalisation on Chinese power, particularly in the face of a looming economic decline.

On the opportunity cost of castles.

Whether the castle could have survived much longer once gunpowder became prevalent is actually a moot point. Its very strength was a barrier to the growth of great national governments. Monarchs regarded private castles as an inherent threat. Legal and other measures were taken to eliminate them. In Britain, the Tudors were particularly effective in eliminating great noble castles as part of a well designed program to establish the state’s monopoly on violence. In France, Louis XIII probably destroyed more castles than he built. This trend was actually a paean to the military virtues of the castle.

On friction in war. Posing Boyd’s OODA-loop against Clausewitz’s concept of friction. Clausewitz concerned himself the internal problem of friction, but Boyd added the lens that friction can be both overcome internally and maximised externally through a different structural lens.

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.

On the media as a good thing:

Hate certain parts of the media, including specific articles, false narratives, and even, if you must, individual journalists who represent the worst of their profession. But if you care about having a functional society in which forming accurate perceptions of at least some portions of reality is possible, please temper your criticism.

Seems also worth noting that media have predictable filters. Non-media entities are subject to the same filters—perhaps more so.

Books are not Information Dense. An argument for substacks as a more information dense source of information. Though, see also is the internet information overload.

In which environments is impulsive behavior adaptive?

information impulsivity, that is, acting without considering consequences, and temporal impulsivity, that is, the tendency to pick sooner outcomes over later ones … both types are adaptive when individuals are close to a critical threshold (e.g., bankruptcy), resources are predictable, or interruptions are common. When resources are scarce, impulsivity can be adaptive or maladaptive, depending on the type and degree of scarcity. Information impulsivity is also adaptive when environments do not change over time or change very often (but maladaptive in between), or if local resource patches have similar properties, reducing the need to gather further information. Temporal impulsivity is adaptive when environments do not change over time and when local resource patches differ.

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

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.

The infrastructure behind ATMs. The surprisingly complicated business of making your money available to you.

The reassuring fantasy of the baby advice industry:

People have been dispensing baby-rearing guidance in written form almost since the beginning of writing, and it is a storehouse of absurd advice, testifying to the truth that babies have always been a source of bafflement.

Thus began the transformation that would culminate in the contemporary baby-advice industry. With every passing year, there was less and less to worry about: in the developed world today, by any meaningful historical yardstick, your baby will almost certainly be fine, and if it isn’t, that will almost certainly be due to factors entirely beyond your control … And so baby manuals became more and more fixated on questions that would have struck any 19th-century parent as trivial, such as for precisely how many minutes it’s acceptable to let babies cry; or how the shape of a pacifier might affect the alignment of their teeth; or whether their lifelong health might be damaged by traces of chemicals in the plastics used to make their bowls and spoons.

“The promise of [the contemporary concept of] parenting is that there is some set of techniques, some particular expertise, that parents could acquire that would help them accomplish the goal of shaping their children’s lives,” … “It is very difficult to find any reliable, empirical relation between the small variations in what parents do – the variations that are the focus of parenting [advice] – and the resulting adult traits of their children,”

Perhaps what you really learn from baby books is one important aspect of the predicament of parenthood: that while there might indeed be one right way to do things, you will never get to find out what it is.

On the fault lines between democracy and specialisation. A bit of history, as well as the experts in a disaster movie as a metaphor:

How else but through illusion might we expect the average viewer to grasp a perspective rooted in a lifetime of training and inquiry? Besides, the viewer’s ignorance is vital to the intended experience of these films. It’s what secures their interest in the expert character, who is essentially an oracle, and an oracle without inaccessible, suprahuman wisdom loses all allure. The oracle is elevated by knowledge—to the mountaintop temples or the heights of abstraction—forming a triangular relationship with the layman and viewer … The viewer is left with a murky and reductive metaphor, but they have also witnessed the processes of reduction and the social realities that necessitate it … the truth of any technical matter undergoes a similar filtration when it is disseminated to the actual public, government officials or within private institutions. The raw facts, the data, when they reach you, have been neatly ordered, interpreted and summarized for your benefit. Such is the cost and convenience of living in modernized society; to “trust the experts” and their liaisons not out of goodwill but stark necessity. But only during technical disasters, storied and real, can the full severity of this bargain be recognized: a technical elite will accept an unfathomable responsibility in exchange for the public’s unwavering trust and obedience. The citizen and his representatives are asked to forget the many instances in which experts have been grievously mistaken, and to overlook that many disasters now originate in the cloisters of technical institutions (the disasters of both Chernobyl and Margin Call are expert-made.) There is no time to consider past errors.

The public rage against specialists is rightly perceived as a rejection of their hard-won expertise. But I suspect these outbursts stem from a shared impression that our world is becoming impossible to understand in a remotely unified manner … What is the point of learning if the smallest truth is always already someone else’s life’s work? One feels relegated to the mere surface of things; necessarily stupid. This is not only infuriating but also makes it increasingly difficult to participate in the governance of our gleaming technological society.

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.

Empires as a function of transport technology:

This brings a new light to the two transportation assets Romans were famous for: the Mare Nostrum (Mediterranean) and the roads. The sea allowed for fast travel across the Mediterranean, uniting it—but preventing Rome from going much beyond it. The roads were necessary for Rome to move past the coasts and control the land.

While London, the upper Nile, the Levant, and even the Black Sea could be reached in less than a month, the lands beyond the Rhine river, today’s Germany, couldn’t.

And this is in a world where they had no military or economic equal. As neighboring areas grew stronger, one month of distance was too remote to hold. Rome abandoned Britain, Germanic tribes invaded the European side, the Sasanid Empire on the Asian side, and the half of the empire farthest from Rome split.

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.

Pass or fail grading is a good thing? This recent paper (about quite old data) made the rounds a couple months ago, on some US college seeing declining performance when dropping letter grades. I’ve been asked a couple times to look at it by undergrad students in class. It seems like a pretty standard misleading null result? The abstract reads:

Students shifted to lower-grading STEM courses in the first semester, but did not increase their engagement with STEM in later semesters. Letter grades of first-semester students declined by 0.13 grade points, or 23% of a standard deviation. We … conclude that the effect is consistent with declining student effort.

Which paints the picture of the grade incentive being important to not only effort in the class but ongoing performance.

But this drop in performance is associated only with the (secretly recorded) letter grade of the pass/fail course. There is stable performance (a.k.a. ‘did not increase’) in later courses where letter grades matter again. So dropping letter grades does nothing over time (no better but also no worse), and does very little (23% of a standard deviation!? come on, please) in the class itself. Does that make dropping grades preferable? Maybe we should give these students their effort back, for more influential things.

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.

On the unnecessary nature of human space adventures. The argument goes, ‘white elephant’ space projects consume budget unreasonably, and with little oversight. It was once useful to send people into space. Now it holds back exploration. Compelling. Makes one very skeptical of space.

On profiling 911 callers to see if they were murderers. Another nonsense forensic ‘science’, like polygraphs and fingerprinting. Humans just aren’t that predictable.

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.

We are underinvesting in boredom’s creative potential.

A millenial trend away from aged-in conservatism. See also the author on twitter since this ‘free’ FT article is actually very difficult to access.

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.

More ideas for efficient hot water bottle use than I thought possible.

How military planning works. Excellent several part read. I admit, I use the military appreciation process to plan almost everything complex. It doesn’t need much tinkering to solve for more than clearing an enemy off that hill. I’ve used it for wedding planning, consulting projects, and camping trips too.

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.

Personal finance gurus vs economists:

the prescription of the popular finance gurus is sensible, but their diagnosis is not … and I think their advice regarding the issue is not particularly worth paying attention to for this reason

How bad is crime? For the mays in which it modifies behaviour, perhaps quite a bit more costly than we might think.

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

Platforms are not ecosystems:

tech platforms and proprietary software environments are not ecosystems, so don’t call them that. Call them built environments, i.e. designed, rules-based systems that explicitly structure interests to secure specific intended outcomes. It does no good – for journalists in particular – to transmit the suggestion that a walled garden is the same as a living forest. That an app market-place is the same kind of thing as an open protocol. We don’t just serve the interests of system-owners when we repeat the pretty lie. We shut down an essential way to imagine alternatives. So what if, every time we read ‘ecosystem’, we instead say ‘plantation’? A plantation is a hierarchical, exploitative monoculture … Google’s interlinked extractive systems are plantations whose single crop is data for ads. They’re designed environments; their parent company, Alphabet, a conurbation of control.

Why Is Everything So Ugly?

We live in undeniably ugly times. Architecture, industrial design, cinematography, probiotic soda branding — many of the defining features of the visual field aren’t sending their best. Despite more advanced manufacturing and design technologies than have existed in human history, our built environment tends overwhelmingly toward the insubstantial, the flat, and the gray, punctuated here and there by the occasional childish squiggle.

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.

A typology of the ‘new right’. See also this article, for something less US-centric.

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.

How Physics Can Improve the Urinal. I always wondered why this wasn’t already a thing.

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

A response to MacAskill’s What We Owe the Future. Right at the very end:

While MacAskill is highly interested in great power war (pp. 114-116), he is curiously uninterested in how to theorize explicitly about great power politics in the context of international institutions despite these being the causal source of the main factor in the probabilities he bandies about throughout the book. Throughout his argument, he tacitly black-boxes what he calls “the international system,” “international cooperation,” “international coordination” and “international norms.” (Obviously, he could claim that great power politics is independent from international institutions and shaped by the interactions of small number of elite actors—something he hints at in his historical examples; but it is not developed in his future oriented chapters.) And so, somewhat curiously, a book devoted to building a social movement and changing values, leaves under-theorized the main social factor that will determine (by its own lights) the possibility of that movement having a future at all

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 “je ne sais quoi” of TikTok:

It’s an unambiguously positive change in social media, on pretty much every front. To try to get it down to a bulleted list:

• Organic audience acquisition without need for self promotion.
• Types of content that can flourish is much broader.
• Incredible collaboration tools, leading to mixing and remixing art on the platform. The only other example of this I can think of this on other social platforms is textual. Quoting someone’s tweet and commenting on it and the like.
• Manages to maintain a platform-level “zeitgeist” of sorts, similar to Twitter, while also giving users highly customized experiences. It does this without the need for trending topics or curated hashtags, it’s all in the algorithm.
• Fosters empathy instead of sowing division. Much less emphasis on “culture war” and politics.

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.

Is performative populism is over?

Performative populism has begun to ebb. Twitter doesn’t have the hold on the media class it had two years ago. Peak wokeness has passed. There seem to be fewer cancellations recently, and less intellectual intimidation … Americans are still deeply unhappy with the state of the country, but their theory of change seems to have begun to shift. Less histrionic media soap opera. Less existential politics of menace. Let’s find people who can get stuff done.

Chomsky & Hermann’s five filters in the modern era. A better version of my chomsky manufacturing consent today, and in video form.

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.

On honesty as the aspiration of true science. How close are we now?.

Feynman first cited a core value — honesty — which is a central scientific character virtue, and then went on to show an example of what this means for behavior. In saying that this requires a kind of “leaning over backwards,” Feynman clearly recognized that this prescription goes well beyond what is normally done or expected. It is an ideal. It may not be impossible to achieve, but certainly it will be very difficult.

and

Scientists do not always live up to these ideals, but the scientific community recognizes them as aspirational values that define what it means to be a member of the practice. Those who flout them do not deserve to be called scientists. Those who exemplify them with excellence are properly honored as exemplars.

How the Jesuits charted the world:

Jesuits in the early modern world acted as brokers of knowledge and information – creating new networks that connected Asia and the Americas to Europe, and Europe to distant worlds beyond the Atlantic and the Pacific. Their letters, reports and books often traversed not only stormy seas but those even more treacherous confessional and civilisational divides that marked the world they inhabited.

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.

Weeks don’t make sense:

A duration of seven days doesn’t align with any natural cycles or fit cleanly into months or years. And though the week has been deeply significant to Jews, Christians, and Muslims for centuries, people in many parts of the world happily made do without it, or any other cycles of a similar length, until roughly 150 years ago …

[my] hypothesis, which I’m a little more drawn to because I’m a historian: that our sense of what is an appropriate amount of time to wait between activities has been conditioned by the week.

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.

Were ancients the intellectual equals of us? Graeber reckoned, probably.

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.

The limits of cryptoeconomics. Old, but this struck me following the FTX drama recently:

Any system which claims to be non-finance, but does not actually make an effort to prevent collusion, will eventually acquire the characteristics of finance

What if Marx and Freud never existed?

the proposition that as the ego is navigating the external world (the Reality Principle) it also has to fight a two-front war against the impulses coming from the id (Pleasure Principle) and the punitively severe impulse control exercised by the superego (Conscience). This idea is original, profound and true.

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.

An intro to Confucius.

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.

How to study effectively. “Forget cramming, ditch the highlighter, and stop passively rereading. The psychology of learning offers better tactics.”

Stop caring about single bad articles. A good paper on the rationale for thinking about trends. Same advice I give students on their literature—it’s much harder and less compelling to build an argument based on one study than to slide through the trends.

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).

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.

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.

The cult of optionality. Nice reasons to stop trying to find asymmetric opportunities in life—life isn’t a financial market. Most compelling:

The point isn’t that any of these things is likely. It’s that the downside in real life is never actually capped. Applying financial metaphors to life can be useful, so long as you understand the limitations.

See also your life is more financialised than you think

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.

Godfrey-Smith on animal sentience. Implications on how we treat them.

People sometimes dismiss arguments for ameliorating the lives of animals because these ideal outcomes are unclear. And some of the hard questions in this area will stay hard or get harder. Views presently looking to change our relationships with animals often focus on the category of sentience, where some animals are inside this category, deserving protection, and others are outside. But sentience itself is very probably something that exists in borderline forms and by degree; it is not a matter of yes or no. Something part-way to sentience – hemi-demi-sentience, as the US philosopher Daniel Dennett would call it – is probably present in vast numbers of tiny invertebrate animals around us. How are concern and protection to be conceived in cases like those? But the fact that we can’t tie up every question does not prevent a proactive approach to issues that many paths forward from here will agree on.

On the philosopher John Gray’s critique of liberal humanism.

For Gray, ‘liberal humanism’ – the belief system that led us to Iraq – is a quasi-religious faith in progress, the subjective power of reason, free markets, and the unbounded potential of technology. He identifies the Enlightenment as the point at which the Christian doctrine of salvation was taken over by a secular idealism that has developed into modern-day liberal humanism. (Gray argues that global capitalism has its origins in positivism, the secular cult influenced by the late-18th-century French philosopher Henri de Saint-Simon, who believed that science would end all human ills.) Interestingly, Gray identifies the Enlightenment as the point where our utopias became located in the future, rather than in the past or in some fantasy realm, where it was clear they were exactly that: fantasies. With the failures of Iraq, Afghanistan, the 2008 financial crisis, the climate crisis and now the COVID-19 pandemic, faith in the future utopia that liberal humanism once promised is waning. It’s being replaced by beliefs that again look backwards in history, through the distorting lens of nostalgia, to imagined better times to which we hope to return.

Reminds me of slouching toward utopia.

What might mushroom hunters teach the doctors of tomorrow? Algorithms and artificial intelligence are a helpful aid to doctors. But they still need to learn the arts of noticing.

The root of time itself is in fertile nothingness: how ancient Chinese Daoism shatters our illusions about time and being.

How popperian falsification enabled the rise of neoliberalism.

On spiritual exercise for wellbeing.

How to be lucky:

being alert to the unexpected is vital for creating smart luck, there is another key factor: preparation. This is partly about removing the barriers to serendipity, both mental (your mindset) and physical (the spaces you live and interact in), such as: overloaded schedules; senseless meetings; and the inefficiencies throughout your day that rob you of time, curiosity and a sense of joy. You can prepare by strengthening your mental readiness to connect with opportunity, and creating an environment that enables the use of your skills and available resources to act on the moment. An unprepared mind often discards unusual encounters, thereby missing the opportunities for smart luck. But this is a learned behaviour. Preparation is about developing the capacity to accelerate and harness the positive coincidences that show up in life.

And so on.

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.

Vitalik’s post on political preferences:

what if there are other incredibly un-nuanced gross oversimplifications worth exploring?

The merits of a bulldozer vs vetocracy continuum:

Let us consider a political axis defined by these two opposing poles:

• Bulldozer: single actors can do important and meaningful, but potentially risky and disruptive, things without asking for permission
• Vetocracy: doing anything potentially disruptive and controversial requires getting a sign-off from a large number of different and diverse actors, any of whom could stop it

Note that this is not the same as either authoritarian vs libertarian or left vs right. You can have vetocratic authoritarianism, the bulldozer left, or any other combination.

On prosocial flaking.

Quite often, I will make an agreement, and then find myself regretting it. I’ll commit to spending a certain amount of hours helping someone with their problem, or I’ll agree to take part in an outing or a party or a project, or I’ll trade some item for a certain amount of value in return, and then later find that my predictions about how I would feel were pretty far off, and I’m unhappy.

With suggestions on how to rectify in a very rationalist way. Amusingly overcomplicated, but also insightful.

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.

Mind control from a distance (really):

Now, scientists at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University have developed the first non-invasive technique for controlling targeted brain circuits in behaving animals from a distance. The tool has the potential to solve one of the biggest unmet needs in neuroscience: a way to flexibly test the functions of particular brain cells and circuits deep in the brain during normal behavior — such as mice freely socializing with one another.

The research was published March 21, 2022 in Nature Biomedical Engineering by Guosong Hong and colleagues at Stanford and Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. Hong is a Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute Faculty Scholar and assistant professor of materials science and engineering in the Stanford School of Engineering who uses his background in chemistry and materials science to devise biocompatible tools and materials to advance the study of the brain.

Malcolm X on racism, capitalism and Islam.

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 zombie science:

zombie science as mindless science. It goes through the motions of scientific research without a real research question to answer, it follows all the correct methodology, but it doesn’t aspire to contribute to advance knowledge in the field. Practically all the information about hydroxychloroquine during the pandemic falls into that category, including not just the living dead found in preprint repositories, but also papers published in journals that ought to have been caught by a more discerning eye … Zombie science bestows an aura of credibility on results not answering real scientific questions.

With many more examples. Science to avoid.

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.

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

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.

Britain’s ‘New Right’.

This generational divide that Baker senses and Farage seems unaware of, becomes ever more apparent. The speakers are less furious than the spoken to … Do not expect them to sculpt a future of fair dealing, pragmatism, patience, moderation or high intelligence. Expect the restless opposite of these virtues.

An argument for liberal anti-intellectualism:

The instinct of the intellectuals is to solve problems. There is nothing wrong with this instinct, per se. However, “solving problems” often requires an all-powerful state to implement the “solutions,” and all-powerful states have a strange history of doing “evil and pernicious” things.

Are they really this dangerous?

Why dictators are afraid of girls: rethinking gender and national security.

After all, war is an inherently human activity, and gender is a core expression of what it means to be human; to ignore gender is to ignore core dimensions of war itself.

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

The social media war: open source intelligence on the battlefield.

List of common misconceptions curated by Wikipedians.

Not all early human societies were small scale egalitarian bands. (See also The Dawn of Everything).

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.

On the future of battlefields. Gen. Guy Hubin describes the ‘homothetic’ impulse of modern armies: the fact that it’s the same structure from the smallest unit to the biggest, but for a matter of size, that focuses in on a central command structure. For Hubin, the future looks more like air control: a manoeuvre element that is linked to a portion of terrain, and not the command structure. Such a re-construction would better utilise the technology that is developing:

“One must break the existing relationship,” he writes, “between the importance of the level of responsibility and the volume of the subordinates.” Hubin argues that such a radical transformation is necessary to derive from the new technologies their full benefit.

On the expansionist nature of big concepts:

It is the all-conquering idea of human rights, however, that’s the starkest illustration of conceptual overreach. Human rights, even more than the rule of law, have come to play the role of ‘universal secular religion’, purporting to offer a comprehensive ethical framework … this error plays out in the common belief that the challenges posed by all manner of developments – from artificial intelligence to the climate crisis – can be adequately addressed by a framework that appeals exclusively to human rights. What gets pushed out, or distorted, by this overreach is a range of other values. These include non-rights-based values, such as kindness, loyalty and mercy … solidarity and the common good.

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.

“People instinctively tend toward solutions that consist of adding something rather than subtracting something, even if the subtraction would be superior”.

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.

Selling Violent Extremism:

unlike other far-right organizations, such as the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers do not organize as a club. Rather, its behavior is better explained as a firm that adjusts the price of membership over time to maximize profit … These results imply that political violence can be motivated by nonideological entrepreneurs maximizing profits under current legal institutions

Academics as conservatives by default, no matter their ideologies.

Matt Levine’s excellent history of crypto. Off-beat financier with possibly my favourite column. This is the most informed on the topic I’ve ever been.

How AI will change everything on the internet. Very thought provoking, but short:

Less than two years from now, maybe I will speak into my computer, outline my topics of interest, and somebody’s version of AI will spit back to me a kind of Twitter remix, in a readable format and tailored to my needs.

Seems like a good time to re-consider your approach to information extraction now.

An insight into the New Right. Vox profile of Curtis Yarvin. There’s a lot here behind the noise and clutter. It’s worth listening to Peter Thiel for this reason. He says the same things over and over again, but occasionally lets slip something that hints at the kind of depth that characterised his early essays. Worth paying attention to.

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.

Very illuminating interview with Kamil Galeev on the Russian mindset.

Manipulating light can induce psychedelic experiences. The ‘ganzflicker’, someone one learns about it Cognition 101, but no one told me how universal or powerful it could be.

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.

Pop-ideas to think about when considering improving science.

The best overview of Judith Butler I’ve ever come across.

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.”

Royal Netherlands Army commences armed robot trials in first among Western militaries.

How nuns got squeezed out of the communion wafer business.

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

Who after Xi? And indeed, what?

1,600 Years Of Medical Hubris. On thie scientific ritual in medicine.

Kuhn challenged the perception that the accumulation of scientific data leads us closer and closer to “truth.” Rather, in his paradigm, science is more of a metaphor for reality—an imperfect lens with which we examine a universe whose complexities are and will always be well beyond our grasp … In some ways, medicine has always been especially resistant to the process that Kuhn enunciated.

See also the scientific ritual and everything is ideology.

“Men are high variance. A subset succeed, the median is falling behind, those without high school degrees are in absolute decline.” Interesting implications for the general musings on the ‘decline of men’ (e.g. here, here).

Most missing persons don’t wish to be found. An interesting tension. What’s the right trade-off? Twitter account deleted not long after I found this, so I suppose the most vocal people think the trade-off in favour of the missing who do.