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:
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?
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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?
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A literary guide to the subject of death.
Attribution: Ted Gioia Link
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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
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A short list of heuristics or principles for doing good creative research work.
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A Wikipedia page on science in 2023.
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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:
- Somatic: mimesis, emotions, humour, and the senses to kick things off.
- Mythic: stories, metaphors, binaries, and jokes to step things up.
- Romantic: extremes, gossip, heroes, and idealism to sharpen.
- Philosophic: simple questions, general schemas, and dialectics to move to a more analytic place.
- 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.
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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.
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The Perfection Of The Paper Clip.
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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.
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Why is slow motion so fun: Slow Motion Enhances Consumer Evaluations by Increasing Processing Fluency
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News stripped of the crap by AI.
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Why Do We Listen to Sad Songs? Maybe because it makes us feel connected to others.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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:
- We are alive.
- We are conscious.
- We were created by evolution.
- But consciousness can’t “do” anything.
- Huh?
Then makes the same claim about feelings:
Well, why do we have feelings? Consider this variant of our earlier puzzle.
- We are alive.
- We have feelings.
- We were created by evolution.
- We feel good when we do stuff that would help propagate the genes of someone in a hunter/gatherer band.
- But feelings can’t “do” anything.
- 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.
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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.
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Your DNA Can Now Be Pulled From Thin Air.
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A survey of all different scientific approaches in longevity biotech.
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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.
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Animals Trapped In Human Bodies. A profile on therians.
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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.
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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.
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The GrubHub Of Human Affliction: a depressing satire of journalism and the gig economy.
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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?).
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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.
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Profile of a computer-virus maker.
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The Bronze Age Has Never Looked Stronger
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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.
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Ancient Greek Terms Worth Reviving. Two you probably know. The rest, not so much.
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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.
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US Air Force conducts post-nuclear training exercise.
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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
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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.
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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
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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?
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Mapping retracted academic papers—locations unsurprising.
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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.
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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.
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Why some accidents are unavoidable. Paper on man-made technological disasters.
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The diverse economies of neolithic peoples. See also the paper. Builds on Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel notion of agricultural ‘packages’.
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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.
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Most AI Fear Is Future Fear
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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?
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How to beat roulette.
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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
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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.
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A history of toad magic.
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You Don’t Want A Purely Biological, Apolitical Taxonomy Of Mental Disorders
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On handling people, when everyone is the main character.
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Rotten meat a large part of paleolithic diets? Suggests perhaps fire was more for the purpose of processing plants, not meat.
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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.
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Interesting piece—normal people becoming killers.
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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’.
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Marilyn Monroe’s Psychoanalysis Notes. Curious.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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An example of how we construct our reality.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Link between IQ and income is also positive but underwhelming.
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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.
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For those of you asking me good GPT prompts, here’s a good example:
I want to learn about
. 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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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
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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.
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Wokeism is winding down. See also is performative populism over.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Let me ruin fairy circles for you: “plants on the circle’s periphery were outcompeting the grass inside the circle for water”.
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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.
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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.
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The infrastructure behind ATMs. The surprisingly complicated business of making your money available to you.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Was the T-Rex smart?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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How To Speak Honeybee. The history and future of interpreting honey-bee communication.
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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.
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Reminder that TikTok is spyware. Contra this post. Is there another chance for a ‘good’ social media?
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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.
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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.
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On profiling 911 callers to see if they were murderers. Another nonsense forensic ‘science’, like polygraphs and fingerprinting. Humans just aren’t that predictable.
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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.
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We are underinvesting in boredom’s creative potential.
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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.
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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.
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More ideas for efficient hot water bottle use than I thought possible.
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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.
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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.
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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
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How bad is crime? For the mays in which it modifies behaviour, perhaps quite a bit more costly than we might think.
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How to become wise. Insights from eastern traditions (by a white person?)—a trite trope, but some interesting insights.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Exercise is habit, not genetics? 17 twin pairs with different exercise habits suggests…
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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.
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A typology of the ‘new right’. See also this article, for something less US-centric.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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How Physics Can Improve the Urinal. I always wondered why this wasn’t already a thing.
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Generalized tendency to make extreme trait judgements from faces. Academic paper.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Chompsky & Hermann’s five filters in the modern era. A better version of my chompsky manufacturing consent today, and in video form.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Placebo effect getting stronger? US dominated effect. See also this article.
The value of placebos is underrated.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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”.
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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.
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Were ancients the intellectual equals of us? Graeber reckoned, probably.
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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.
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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.
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What would happen if you microdosed alcohol. Exploring Thomas Vinterberg’s latest film, Another Round, with the science.
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Walking Trees And Parasitic Flowers. “A series of botanical encounters in the rainforest, excerpted from Francis Hallé’s book “Atlas of Poetic Botany”.
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Tree thinking. Cute article with much poetic and tangential speculation on the relationship between trees and humans.
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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
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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.
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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.”
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Excerpts from famously prolific reader Tyler Cowan on how to read fast, well, and widely. Still probably won’t be as fast as him.
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An intro to Confucius.
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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.
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How to study effectively. “Forget cramming, ditch the highlighter, and stop passively rereading. The psychology of learning offers better tactics.”
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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.
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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:
- Intensity. Emotional, I assume as characterised by limbic system. See also the amygdala is not the fear centre.
- 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.
- A sense of clarity. Before and after. The neural explanations for this doesn’t seem very thoughtful.
- A sense of surrender. Also not thoughtful, neurally, but see also speaking in tongues where I talk a little about this.
- Transformation as a result of the experience. Essentially, this seems like intense practice (probably deliberate practice).
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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.
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What the fuck is dissociation? More common than you think.
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Stop Spending Time on Things You Hate. Interesting narrativised advice, but the cribnotes are:
- Schedule your downtime.
- Give your bad habits a monetary value (i.e. price them at your hourly wage).
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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.
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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.
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Neuroscience shows that spiritual experiences are correlated with brain states that we can all aim for, religious or not. See also speaking in tongues.
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Human exceptionalism is dead: for the sake of our own happiness and the planet we should embrace our true animal nature.
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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
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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.
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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.
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I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,