Tall vs. Wide Conservation in Economics
A shower thought this morning: I had a thought of how Piaget's Theory of Conservation (the psychology test about wide vs tall containers,) is very similar to the current state of capitalism.
I was thinking how the US economy shifted so dramatically during Reagonomics, moving from the broad distribution with money in the hands of individuals, to the focusing of wealth in the hands of corporations. During this the US economy has continued to add more money and wealth from the world, however rather than being more broadly distributed, it becomes heavily focused around the corporations and the chosen few.
But, because it has netted more wealth, it is heralded as a success.
Is this an actual parallel of the psychological concept? Considering it largely is referred to as a way of highlighting youth neurological development, probably not - but I have no idea and I found the similarities notable.
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You are the sum of your five best friends. And that includes parasocial relationships.
I think this is very insightful and relevant to the modern era, politically and socially. It came from a Colin & Amir episode talking to Tim Ferriss. They were discussing the medium of longform podcasts and how if someone regularly listens to a multihour podcast that can sometimes mean they spend more time with the host in a week than people they consider their best friends, etc.
And given the absurd reality of the modern day, I wonder how much of this speaks to things going on today thanks to FOX News putting Trump directly into its viewers brain for hours each day, or Joe Rogan, etc.
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"Laziness death spirals"
I read lesswrong far less frequently than I used to, but this post came across my feed and I snagged it to be read later. Nothing amazing, but enjoyable none-the-less.
When you're in a laziness death spiral, it's hard to do anything deliberate. The first and most important step, which does take some willpower but not a lot, is to acknowledge, "I'm in a laziness death spiral today."
If you don't acknowledge it, here's what happens: You vaguely notice you you've been wasting time today; you feel a twinge of guilt, so you quickly decide, "I'm going to turn the rest of the day around, starting right now." And does that work?
Often it doesn't! Sure, after a small lapse you can just get back on track, but if enough laziness momentum has built up, a momentary reaction doesn't cut it. Deciding things quickly, in response to negative emotions, is exactly how you got into this situation! You're going to turn it around on a whim? You'll have a different whim in the next hour; what then? You need to take a step back and get your mind outside of the problem.
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Everybody says disciple is so important. But they never want to tell you why. I'll tell you why discipline is so important. It's the strongest form of self love. It's ignoring something you want right now for something better later on. Discipline reveals the commitment you have to your dream. Especially on days where you don't want to. The future you is depending on the current you to keep the promises you made yesterday.
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A look at the history of QWERTY
I had a conversation very similar to the custom keyboard portion of this video with coworkers a few evenings ago, discussing how I had also experimented with a custom keyboard arrangement - but, for me, the biggest issue was that it was not the only keyboard I used so I had to both learn a new layout and actively use a standard key arrangement.
The evolution of the keyboard was fascinating as I hadn't heard about those earlier designs before qwerty. Though, I will say, parts of the video were a slog as the presenter has an odd pacing to how he speaks at times.
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No Lessons Here
I've been absolutely loving Mentopolis on Dropout. This latest episode was great, but I was particularly struck by the "Adventuring Party" episode for this episode, which is their after show where the cast chat about the episode and what happened.
But, given the nature of Mentopolis, the conversations can turn to mental workings and mental health. This latest episode really does that and delves into a discussion about dealing with bad things that happen to us.
Brennan Lee Mulligan brought out an amazing and wonderful point he uses when people are looking at a terrible event and how people take those events and change their life because of it, even though it's a random event and it doesn't merit any change. The phrase he uses is, "Or, no lessons here." And I just loved that framing and ability of evaluating these things.
The conversation continues on and delves into conspiracy theories and how people turn to them out of a need to make sense out of the randomness of the world.
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Depression as a by-product of self-awareness
What a fantastic observation and I love Dr. K's conversation that delves into this. I think the idea that a depressive episode is basically an infinite loop of self awareness and evaluation is excellent.
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"Duping Delight"
Why do people who are lying about things keep doing it? Or why do people who are already wealthy feeling the need to con others further?
The Navy warrant officer John Anthony Walker, Jr. was convicted as a spy for the Soviet Union in 1987, and is serving a life sentence. The New York Times said he had been the most damaging spy in history, having helped the Soviets decipher over 200,000 encrypted naval messages. It wasn't the polygraph that caught him, nor surveillance by U.S. counter-espionage officers. His wife Barbara turned him into the FBI. He was bragging about all the money he was making, but Barbara was his ex-wife and Walker was behind in alimony payments.
What motivated this smart, devious fellow to be so foolish? Probably what I call duping delight, the near irresistible thrill some people feel in taking a risk and getting away with it. Sometimes it includes contempt for the target who is being so ruthlessly and successfully exploited. It is hard to contain duping delight; those who feel it want to share their accomplishments with others, seeking admiration for their exploits.
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50 Psychological & Psychiatric Terms to Avoid
Not just a listicle, it's an academic article and provides explanation for each term on the list. They sort them into five groups: Inaccurate or Misleading, Frequently Misused, Ambiguous, Oxymorons, and Pleonasms.
This isn't a list of terms to avoid for social reasons, it's about real problems the authors of this paper have with usages of these terms in pschological and psychiatric studies and papers. Very interesting stuff.
For example, why they discourage the use of the term 'antidepressant medication' to refer to a wide range of medications, some of which are actually used for treating anxiety, etc.
(2) Antidepressant medication. Medications such as tricyclics, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and selective serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors, are routinely called "antidepressants." Yet there is little evidence that these medications are more efficacious for treating (or preventing relapse for) mood disorders than for several other conditions, such as anxiety-related disorders (e.g., panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder; Donovan et al., 2010) or bulimia nervosa (Tortorella et al., 2014). Hence, their specificity to depression is doubtful, and their name derives more from historical precedence—the initial evidence for their efficacy stemmed from research on depression (France et al., 2007)—than from scientific evidence. Moreover, some authors argue that these medications are considerably less efficacious than commonly claimed, and are beneficial for only severe, but not mild or moderate, depression, rendering the label of "antidepressant" potentially misleading (Antonuccio and Healy, 2012; but see Kramer, 2011, for an alternative view).
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"Engaging with History" on the importance of history and context
Marcus Aurelius said, "We all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own," which to be honest sounds like something you'll find written on an $11 IKEA poster today. Part of the value of reading an Aurelius quote like that is that he said it almost 2,000 years ago. Its age is the important part. If it was true then, and it's true today, then it's a fundamental part of how humans work and of course it's going to be true for the rest of my life. So I should pay close attention to it.
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Article explains why populism has a leg up on democracy when it comes to modern politics messaging
There's a lot of good stuff in this article. Good, in the sense of quality of the analysis and writing, not so much in the tone of the future. The author Rick Shenkman writes about a paper by UC Irvine professor Shawn Rosenberg. In addition to that, there is an interview that is actually what I was initially directed to and then backtracked through the source article and then the PDF paper itself (though I haven't read the latter yet.)
I pull excerpts from both the linked article as well as the conversation further down. I pulled a lot because I struggled to find what I could cut. It all felt important.
Democracy is hard work. And as society's "elites"—experts and public figures who help those around them navigate the heavy responsibilities that come with self-rule—have increasingly been sidelined, citizens have proved ill equipped cognitively and emotionally to run a well-functioning democracy. As a consequence, the center has collapsed and millions of frustrated and angst-filled voters have turned in desperation to right-wing populists.
His prediction? "In well-established democracies like the United States, democratic governance will continue its inexorable decline and will eventually fail."
[...]
He has concluded that the reason for right-wing populists' recent success is that "elites" are losing control of the institutions that have traditionally saved people from their most undemocratic impulses. When people are left to make political decisions on their own they drift toward the simple solutions right-wing populists worldwide offer: a deadly mix of xenophobia, racism and authoritarianism.
The elites, as Rosenberg defines them, are the people holding power at the top of the economic, political and intellectual pyramid who have "the motivation to support democratic culture and institutions and the power to do so effectively." In their roles as senators, journalists, professors, judges and government administrators, to name a few, the elites have traditionally held sway over public discourse and U.S. institutions—and have in that role helped the populace understand the importance democratic values. But today that is changing. Thanks to social media and new technologies, anyone with access to the Internet can publish a blog and garner attention for their cause—even if it's rooted in conspiracy and is based on a false claim, like the lie that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring from the basement of a Washington D.C. pizza parlor, which ended in a shooting.
While the elites formerly might have successfully squashed conspiracy theories and called out populists for their inconsistencies, today fewer and fewer citizens take the elites seriously. Now that people get their news from social media rather than from established newspapers or the old three TV news networks (ABC, CBS and NBC), fake news proliferates. It's surmised that 10 million people saw on Facebook the false claim that Pope Francis came out in favor of Trump's election in 2016. Living in a news bubble of their own making many undoubtedly believed it. (This was the most-shared news story on Facebook in the three months leading up to the 2016 election, researchers report.)
The irony is that more democracy—ushered in by social media and the Internet, where information flows more freely than ever before—is what has unmoored our politics, and is leading us towards authoritarianism. Rosenberg argues that the elites have traditionally prevented society from becoming a totally unfettered democracy; their "oligarchic 'democratic' authority" or "democratic control" has until now kept the authoritarian impulses of the populace in check.
Now from the conversation / interview on Salon. The bolded text is the initiating question, and his response follows.
How are you feeling about the state of the world and the global crisis of democracy? Several years ago, you predicted how bad things would get with the rise of global fascism and right-wing populism. You were largely ignored.
To me the world is somewhere between disconcerting and scary. Look at the world more broadly, Whatever my concerns may have been back in 2019, the world has continued to evolve in a direction that I was concerned it might. In fact, the world may have even become worse in terms of the prospects for democracy than I warned about in 2019.
I argued that liberal democratic politics is complicated, and populist alternatives offer a vision that is much simpler. All that populism demands is a simple story of cause and effect. All one needs to do is act: Authoritarian power is the solution.
This populist vision also has a very simple story about society and identity. In this story, social groups are natural. We think of them categorically. They don't have lots of overlap. In-groups and out-groups are distinct. Evaluative judgments are binary, a simple black-and-white story. There is good and bad. It's not a judgment in the sense of a subjective judgment. This way of thinking offers simple understandings of what is objectively true and what is not true, and is therefore deemed to be less valuable.
Populist ways of thinking about the world are ultimately just a lot simpler than the complexities of thinking about action as having multiple causes and consequences, thinking about groups being inherently diverse and overlapping, and thinking of judgment as a subjective, tentative thing. All of that is way too complicated for populists. Most people, not all, naturally incline toward that simpler vision if it is offered to them.
We tend to think about groups in negative terms, and when you're making evaluative judgments about things, they tend to be dualistic, black-and-white and unequivocal. That type of populist thinking was marginalized for a long time. What were once unacceptable ways of talking about politics are now part of the global discourse, and people are attracted to them. Many people do not really understand what liberal democracy is and why it is important, so they ultimately end up choosing populist alternatives.
Ultimately, that outcome is an ironic result of the greater openness of the public sphere and the democratic arena of ideas, where more people are empowered to make choices on their own. The gatekeepers have lost control.
[...]
How do we create a healthier democracy in the United States? What can the average American do on a day-to-day basis?
I am optimistic. I believe that there are solutions to the problem. We need to fix a broken educational system. The average American has trouble having productive discussions with people they disagree with and who are different from them. They're also not very good at reflecting on their own values and beliefs. The average American is also not very good in terms of critical thinking and understanding general principles.
We need to create an educational system that prepares adults to effectively negotiate the complexities of democratic life. We also need to broaden our understanding of what democracy is, beyond just voting. For the most part, you vote for candidates, and most people end up voting for their candidate either on the basis of a single issue, or they really have no idea at all and they're just voting for the party or their group identity.
America needs more deliberative democracy, and institutions and structures from the local level on up that will empower citizens to become more active. In the end, the American people need to be more involved in their own self-government.
Imagine you are the doctor of democracy and America is your patient. What is your assessment?
The patient is not terminal, but the patient is not stable either. They are moving toward critical condition.
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"It Goes by the Name 'Bedtime Procrastination' and You Can Probably Guess What It Is"
I'm in this article and I don't like it. - As the meme goes.
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A list of articles on Loneliness
This is a link to a page which links to five different articles about loneliness in the modern era, some were written during Covid, and some were written well before. Definitely some insight to be gained from them as we all could do with a better understanding of loneliness and how we do, and can, process it.
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