Newsletter
Reflections on a PhD and other things
June 9, 2024
Hello,
It’s been over a year since my last newsletter to you, so this is your chance to remember why you subscribed to me. It’s been a rough year, but now it’s over, I’m back to focusing on btrmt. Website has been overhauled with a couple of long awaited features—a search function (go home and press ctrl+/), and an actual about page. I also have better filtering of the articles now. All PhD procrastination, but it’ll also clear some of your emails out of my mailbox.
Otherwise, here’s everything since my last little missive to you—a year’s worth of articles, and a heap of interesting links from around the web. Enjoy.
- dorian
New Articles:
Many aspects of my PhD were surprising to me, but in hindsight, they didn’t have to be. Here’s my reflections on how I’d go about it if I’d known.
Full article at bottom of email
We see short light waves as blue, medium as green, and long as red. When the brain senses short (blue) and long (red) but not medium (green), it ‘makes up’ a colour to fill in the blank.
Pop-neuroscience is just a fancy way of saying ‘calm down’
Pop-psych theories on stress often use complex jargon to describe fundamentally simple concepts. They act less to inform, and more to reassure us, fascinate us, and absolve us of responsibility.
Brain waves are subject to the same pop-psych fluff as everything else brain related. There’s no harm in it, but looking a little more carefully actually makes them a useful tool for understanding behaviour.
Active listening is misleading
Active listening isn’t about ticking boxes in conversation; it’s about diving into emotions to transform surface-level chit-chat into deep, collaborative dialogue. Forget models, focus on feelings.
The obsession over objectivity is a confusion of two things. There’s rationality, the desire to be less biased. Then there’s truth which is going to be necessarily biased toward whatever aspect of the world we’re trying to understand. In both cases objectivity is irrelevant.
Eerie coincidences aren’t that eerie
Your phone probably isn’t eavesdropping for ads. Your brain’s job is to highlight unexpected hits while ignoring the misses. Eerie coincidences are probably just you not noticing all the times something weird could have happened but didn’t.
P-values are no gold standard. The way we use them today means p-values have a probability distribution. Just one could be an outlier, and the way publishing works, probably is. It’s the reason for so many ‘too good to be true’ findings—they are.
Panpsychists reckon they’ve one-upped materialists and non-materialists in explaining how consciousness might have come to be by telling us that everything is conscious. Then they just leave us hanging.
Leadership consulting is usually more ‘feel good’ than ‘do good’
Leadership consulting proposes to fix leaders, but because we can confuse ‘making leaders feel good’ with ‘making leaders better’ it usually fails. It doesn’t have to though: just take the extra step from ‘collective vision’ to ‘collective norms’.
On managing magic mushroom experiences
Mushrooms change the balance between inside-out forces (the all-consuming neural networks that support the ‘self’) and outside-in forces (the environment and world around us). This model seems most useful in explaining the mushroom experience.
Our nervous system transforms senses to feelings long before they become thoughts and behaviours. One can’t talk about them in isolation. Our aversion to emotions is just an aversion to passionate emotions. But just remember that your body is better at your life that you are.
To close the say-do-gap, we need to feel some ownership of the problem, we need the social support to support the change, and we need to know how. Anything less will make us focus on how good thinking about changing feels and not actually putting in the work.
Saving the planet is an illusion
Sustainability discussions often prioritise saving the planet, missing the fact that the planet doesn’t care about climate change. Maybe we should focus on the imminent death and disease instead of the planet’s feelings.
Rituals are often dismissed, but they’re just procedures with a purpose. We all engage in ritualistic behavior—many habits and routines meet this criteria. Redefining them through the uncomfortable lens of ritual prompts us to question our own practices and beliefs.
We’ve been taught that cults are dark and scary things. But we have been fooled. The cult is a prominent building block of modern community. If you’re not in one, you’re probably doing something wrong. The question is, is the cult you’re in a cult you chose?
The most successful facts about the world are the ones that subvert our weakly held beliefs. They look like they’re about improvement, but they’re more often simply entertainment dressed up like education.
New Marginalia:
My links and notes on interesting content from around the web:
I’m not going to reproduce all the marginalia that went into this email, since there were over 150 of them. Just checkout the marginalia themselves.
I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,