Newsletter
Everyone's Suggestible and other things
January 10, 2025
Hello,
Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:
Excerpt: There’s this idea that some people are more suggestible than others—more susceptible to psychic influence. These people are the ones that do wild stuff at a hypnosis show, or are more susceptable to misinformation online. What this idea misses is that suggestion is actually something that works on all of us.
Main idea: Everyone is suggestible, not just children or the easily hypnotised; our memories and behaviours are heavily influenced by external suggestions, more than we like to acknowledge.
On Fables and Nuanced Charts:
While data visualizations appear to present information objectively, they are laden with assumptions. Some of those assumptions are held by the chart maker, and others are held by you.
One of the reasons you shouldn’t get so worked up by those plots of stuff you see on Instagram. See also Problems with P-Values and The trap of scientific evidence.
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Tools for Thinking About Censorship:
But for this particular reflection, please remember these five points:
- The majority of censorship is self-censorship or middleman-censorship, but the majority of that is deliberately cultivated by an outside power.
- For this reason, we cannot consider state and non-state censorship separate things. State censorship systems work dominantly via shaping and causing private censorship.
- No real censoring body has ever had the resources of Orwell’s fictitious Ministries—not even the Inquisition or the great totalitarian powers of modernity like the USSR, but they want us to think they do. Real censorship regimes tend to see themselves as constantly underfunded and understaffed, racing to grapple overwhelming crises, while attempting to seem all-reaching and all-knowing as a part of their own propaganda. We must analyze their actions remembering that the need to conserve resources and seem stronger than they are shapes everything they do.
- Censorship aims to be visible, talked about, seen, feared. This increases its power.
- Censors’ projection of fear and power is a form of deliberate psychological manipulation which can outsource censorship far beyond the censor’s sphere of control, even to citizens of other nations. We can only combat it if we work hard to cut through the Orwellian illusion and remember the realities of how censorship works.
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People living underwater:
The Vanguard project is a pilot program for the full-scale Sentinel underwater habitat … which Deep hopes to complete in 2027. A typical Sentinel crew would be six people, but the modular system could be configured to support as many as several dozen, at depths as great as 200 meters
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Advertisers Keep Avoiding News Sites. WSJ, so use a un-paywaller like archive.ph:
Forty percent of the Washington Post’s material is deemed “unsafe” at any given time, said Johanna Mayer-Jones, the paper’s chief advertising officer, referencing a study the company did about a year ago. “The revenue implications of that are significant.”
Blunt tools, are the problem. Amusing, but no wonder paywalls are more and more frequent.
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Pinker using the Second Law of thermodynamics as a metaphor:
The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in an isolated system (one that is not taking in energy), entropy never decreases … any perturbation of the system, whether it is a random jiggling of its parts or a whack from the outside, will, by the laws of probability, nudge the system toward disorder or uselessness … The Second Law defines the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order.
And then,
More generally, an underappreciation of the Second Law lures people into seeing every unsolved social problem as a sign that their country is being driven off a cliff. It’s in the very nature of the universe that life has problems. But it’s better to figure out how to solve them
I mostly see Pinker telling people to cool out and stop worrying so much about bad things because everything is fine, not to think about solving things, so this was also a nice change.
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The Woman Who Spent Five Hundred Days in a Cave. I’ll just copy the Browser’s intro, who I got this from, because it’s dead on, and better than anything I could come up with:
Every twist in this tale about a Spanish woman who spent 500 days living utterly alone in a remote cave makes the jaw drop further. Her goal was total disconnection from all human contact, although she did allow security cameras and a panic button in case of emergency. It was “a year and a half inside a sensory-deprivation tank”. She achieved this and, mostly, she thrived
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The World’s Most Expensive Eating Disorder. On Bryan Johnson, of “injecting my son’s blood plasma to make myself biologically younger” fame. As the article itself notes, it’s a little harsh, and psychology by media is never really a thing people should do. But I watched the Netflix doco, and you really can see the parallels to eating disordered behaviour. Bryan talks through his depressive episodes, and the relief he experiences by engaging in high-demand control of his eating and other health behaviours. ED in men (and, these days, increasingly in other genders) can often look a bit different. Concentration on muscle-mass and definition, for example, instead of weight loss is very common. Makes sense that we might see it bleed into this optimising/bio-hacking space too.
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I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,