Newsletter
Giving in to Fight or Flight and other things
November 22, 2024
Hello,
Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:
Excerpt: One particularly sticky idea is the idea of ‘fight or flight’ or whatever variation of “fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and sometimes f***”. As you might be able to tell from the slow accumulation of f’s, fight or flight is suffering from the chinese whispers effect that has us drawing wildly innappropriate conclusions from academic literature and the superficial silliness of many pop-psych ideas—where will the f’s end! So, let’s dust of the f’s and make them useful again.
Main idea: Stress is a good thing before it’s a bad thing. It motivates us to act. We are scared of the f’s, but we don’t need to be. We should fight for things worth fighting for and fly from things that aren’t. Use the f’s as guides to action, not just things to avoid.
China gives US firm guidance:
According to the Chinese readout (https://guancha.cn/internation/2024_11_17_755645.shtml) here’s what he told Biden were the 7 “lessons of the past 4 years that need to be remembered”:
- “There must be correct strategic understanding. The ‘Thucydides Trap’ is not historical destiny, a ‘new Cold War’ cannot and should not be fought, containment of China is unwise, undesirable, and will not succeed.”
- “Words must be trustworthy and actions must be fruitful. A person cannot stand without credibility. China always follows through on its words, but if the U.S. side always says one thing and does another, it is very detrimental to America’s image and damages mutual trust.”
- “Treat each other as equals. In exchanges between two major countries like China and the United States, neither side can reshape the other according to their own wishes, nor can they suppress the other based on so-called ‘position of strength,’ let alone deprive the other of legitimate development rights to maintain their own leading position.”
- “Red lines and bottom lines cannot be challenged. As two major countries, China and the United States inevitably have some contradictions and differences, but they cannot harm each other’s core interests, let alone engage in conflict and confrontation. The One China principle and the three China-US joint communiqués are the political foundation of bilateral relations and must be strictly observed. Taiwan issue, democracy and human rights, development path, and development rights are China’s four red lines, which cannot be challenged. [Note: Bold text in the original] These are the most important guardrails and safety nets for China-US relations.”
- “There should be more dialogue and cooperation. Under current circumstances, the common interests between China and the United States have not decreased but increased. Whether in areas of economy and trade, agriculture, drug control, law enforcement, public health, or in facing global challenges such as climate change and artificial intelligence, as well as international hotspot issues, China-US cooperation is needed. Both sides should extend the list of cooperation, make the cooperation cake bigger, and achieve win-win cooperation.”
- “Respond to people’s expectations. The development of China-US relations should always focus on the wellbeing of both peoples and gather the strength of both peoples. Both sides should build bridges for personnel exchanges and cultural communication, and also remove interference and obstacles, not artificially create a ‘chilling effect.’”
- “Demonstrate great power responsibility. China and the United States should always consider the future and destiny of humanity, take responsibility for world peace, provide public goods for the world, and play a positive role in world unity, including engaging in positive interaction, avoiding mutual consumption, and not coercing other countries to take sides.”
Things are moving.
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In defence of slouching: the bad science behind good posture.
Having spent more than a decade studying the posture sciences of the past and present, I am still stunned at how often these fear-mongering articles appear, especially since there is negligible evidence to support a causal link between slouching and back pain in an otherwise healthy person.
Still looks bad though.
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Can fiction improve you? I placed a link to a podcast with the interesting writer Gwern the other day. There he said:
You could definitely spend the rest of your life reading fiction and not benefit whatsoever from it other than having memorized a lot of trivia about things that people made up. I tend to be pretty cynical about the benefits of fiction.
It’s a reference to his work critiquing the fiction improves theory of mind stuff. But as this writer points out:
That’s why we have a canon. That’s why serious readers pay more attention to the best works. And that’s why fiction’s uses are so hard to discern. Poetry offers us more ways of seeing into ourselves than logic ever can, but they must be used together, discerningly.
Are we convinced we’re measuring the right thing?
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How people spent their time in the 1930’s:
They spent 48 hours working, 56 hours sleeping, 31 hours on home obligations, and 24 hours eating or running errands. What remained, a rather precarious 9 hours per week, was time spent in the pursuit of what could generously be called pleasure.
From work by Thorndike, famous for his operant conditioning work. As the author of this writer points out:
the raw math of our leisure isn’t so different … perhaps [Thorndike would] offer the same advice: rather than merely expanding the hours devoted to entertainment, perhaps we could elevate the quality of our daily routines
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Against the Placebo Effect. Contra my article on the placebo effect:
The picture that emerges is that a placebo pill has almost no effect when administered by researchers who do not care about the placebo effect, but the exact same pill has an enormous effect larger than all existing treatments when administered by a researcher who really wants the placebo effect to be real. The most parsimonious explanation is that it is the research practices, rather than the placebo.
Impressively comprehensive, but not super strong—a lot of digging here. That said, it does emphasise how unreliable the placebo is, as are efforts to find it. It seems likely that the mechanism is not singular.
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On Thought-Police Britain
One vital function of bureaucracy is as a substitute for social trust, especially at scale. And as “post-liberal” critics such as Patrick Deneen have observed, a liberal social order that declines to embrace a unified moral vision will end up bureaucratising those aspects of life that would elsewhere be governed by morality. Grievance procedures, HR departments, safeguarding, and so on all formalise governance in some aspect of public social and moral life in which we no longer agree on the common good, and hence don’t trust those in power to pursue that good. We view procedures as more neutral than people; hence instead of needing to argue morality, make judgements, or form relationships, we increasingly rely on these purportedly neutral, impersonal mechanisms to do it for us.
A kind of dry rot of bureaucracy is visible everywhere. With it comes the implicit assumption that individual moral judgement and authority are suspect by definition, and the only surefire guarantee of “safety” is their removal from or replacement by systems.
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I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,