csours

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33309818/

My personal feeling is that I can eat like a king every day of the week. If I only had access to one kind of dessert, I'd be fine. I'd get tired of it. Oh, vanilla ice cream again.

But we have access to a wide variety of highly palatable foods, each with distinct flavor profiles; and advertisements reminds us how much better we'll feel after a snack!

Big recommend for Guyenet's "The Hungry Brain"

(randomly chosen podcast interview)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl1g8l-MdZk

I tried a course of allergy injections (I didn't notice any effect). I asked how much it would cost - NO ONE KNOWS. They have to submit it to insurance and then insurance spins a wheel and says a price.

Health care is not designed for any human in the system. Almost everyone is having a terrible time. It's all for the shareholders.

Without proper control you could also say that weight loss is associated with loss of heart muscle mass.

An infinite number of factors go into developing a personality, this covers a lot of the big ones.

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Lately I've been thinking about the windows of plasticity and why people change beliefs as adults.

The sad fact is that a lot of people have a lot of very wrong and bad beliefs, and unfortunately most of them are already adults, so you don't get to discipline those beliefs out of them (I hope you can read this as tongue in cheek); You will never get mad enough at a person to fix them. Anger is motivating, but you don't get to pick the direction.

As I understand it, psychologists believe that parents and the environment of a person's youth set a lot of their basic beliefs about the world, but it is their friendships in adulthood that most determine their value system - you want what is best for your friends (and yourself).

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To me this also ties into evaluating the actions of historical figures; people seem to get hung up on very flat depictions - was it ok that a person who did good things also did bad things? Well, they are a whole-ass person, raised in a different time and place. They didn't choose when and where and by whomst they were raised. They had some level of choice in their friend group, but that is also constrained by time and place.

I feel that you can judge people and actions, while also allowing space for humanity and personal stories; but that does take a lot of time and emotional work. It is much easier to just choose one side of the coin or the other, face or heel.

I feel that it is important to accept that some things are hard to talk about, and it is important to understand why those things are hard to talk about.

It is hard to communicate rationally while the fight or flight response is engaged. It is hard to communicate rationally to people who either explicitly want to hurt you or who don't mind if you are harmed.

I am saying that acceptance is complicated.

Yes people have strong opinions.

Denying that strong opinions exist harms communication.

Person Y won the election

Person Y won the election and that is BAD

Person Y won the election and that is GOOD

It is not a matter of denial, it is a matter of what story is made to accept the event.

If you have not had to fight about the topic, you can just make the first bare assertion. The event happened.

If you have fought about the topic and your central nervous system gets activated when you think about it, then the assertion will likely include moral judgement. The event didn't just happened, it happened for a good or bad reason.

Virtue signaling is done by people in every in-group; when it is done by people my in-group is fighting against Virtue Signaling does not feel like a virtue.

Science relies on rational communication between people who disagree, because we can fool ourselves, and we can fool our in-group. The narrative fallacy doesn't just affect weak minds; by yourself, you won't outsmart your own filters.

To learn about the world, you have to accept the world, and some things about the world are hard to accept as bare facts. Donald Trump was elected president. Can you accept that as a bare fact? Probably not if you've fought with people about it. There's a drag show in town. Can you accept that as a bare fact? ... IQ tests have a history of racial disparity. ... The earth is round and orbits the sun. ...

A lot of rational minded people tend to disparage emotional intelligence, but I feel that rational communication across strong moral feelings requires a lot of emotional work and trust, and it's really hard to trust while you are fighting.

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I feel like 'virtue signaling' is poorly named. I think 'Comfort Signaling' and 'Loyalty Signaling' are easier to talk and reason about.

* I am flying this flag because I want my people to be comfortable with me.

* I am flying this flag because I want my people to know that I am loyal to them, and I don't care about what other people think. (Or, I'm fine with the other people hating me because of this flag)

https://www.kbb.com/geo/metro/1993/

> $10,749 -> $23,288

https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=10749&year1=19...

Murder rate 1%

22 Angstrom

Purple Burglar Alarm

That narrative takes place in a framing story.

'Science', among other things, is a very detailed framing story that modern society uses to evaluate facts.

An individual's framing story includes all of their history and biases and motivated reasoning and incentives and all the rest of the fallacies.

So yes, bad science is fiction, but even good science is narrative. If this feels wrong, go re-read a paper. Look at a figure or a sentence in the abstract. Your mind constructs a narrative.

Not criticizing the monocausal theories, but LLMs "do a bunch of stuff with a bunch of data" and if you ask them why they did something in particular, you get a hallucination. To be fair, humans will most often give you a moralized post hoc rationalization if you ask them why they did something in particular, so we're not far from hallucination.

To be more specific, the models change BOTH the "bunch of stuff" (training setup and prompts) and the "bunch of data", and those changes interact in deep and chaotic (as in chaos theory) ways.

All of this really makes me think about how we treat other humans. Training an LLM is a one-way operation, you can't really retrain one part of an LLM (as I understand it). You can do prompt engineering, and you can do some more training, but those interact and deep and chaotic ways.

I think you can replace LLM with human in the previous paragraph and not be too far wrong.

https://www.justice.gov/jm/jm-9-85000-protection-government-...

> " Any action likely to raise an issue or the perception of an issue under this provision requires consultation with the Public Integrity Section, and such action shall not be taken if the Public Integrity Section advises that further consultation is required with the Deputy Attorney General or Attorney General. "

Don't get stuck in a framing story.

It might do better as a submission than the video link

0: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258929911...

Just saying "highly illogical" is not very helpful.

(The following is all my imagination, any resemblance to reality is coincidental)

So, I think he would talk about how the mind is not a machine designed for rationality. The mind is a holographic projection, a story told by a collection of organs in your head, fed by sensations from your body.

I think he would talk about the dilemma of aspiration. If you aspire to rationality, and you feel that rationality is the best system of thought, then you will be driven to believe that you are highly rational. Unfortunately, in many things, you cannot differentiate between logical consistency and post-hoc rationalization.

Humans know this; so we have things like peer review.

Unfortunately you also cannot trust another person to rationally evaluate your beliefs - humans have a strong history of in-group/out-group dynamics. It is beneficial to signal agreement and trustworthiness; it is harmful and painful to signal disagreement with the in-group.

And so rational thought requires rational communication with people you disagree with - and people in the out-group, because your in-group may have centered on a wrong, harmful or otherwise useless belief.

Rational communication requires an overlap in perspective. Not the same point of view, but at least a minimal consensus in perception of reality and goals. For instance, most people believe that it is good to invest in young people in some way, though they may disagree about what that means.

Unfortunately, in-group/out-group dynamics can make this very difficult in times of active conflict, as humans have a very strong sense of morality, and sending moral signals to your in-group is more important that rational communication.

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No one had a plan that got humans to this point in our story. No one has a plan for humans in an age of worldwide social media. We have to build it together.

I don't like country music, but I can see the appeal. Things are simpler in the country - you have to believe in real things like trucks and cows, not theoretical things like software and commodity futures contracts.

It's nice to deal with things that are simple and real.

Of course, at the time it made sense to someone.

Title is bad no matter what.

Edit:

Here's another Narrative:

The author is a university professor and most often writes for students.

As such, they expect the reader to fully and completely read the whole selection, as they will be tested on it.

I, however am not a student, and so the first thing I do is evaluate whether an article is worth my time. I do this by reading 3 or so paragraphs, skim for keywords, and the last paragraph. This is so common there must be a name for it [0] that I don't know because I am also not a media studies graduate.

As this is so common, it must be written for; the author is expected to introduce any keywords in the first 3 or last paragraph. If they do not, the editor should return it.

The title is generally not written by the author, but may be selected from a list that are provided by an editor. The author should update their writing so that the title makes sense in context.

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0. grug brain media literacy?

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Edit 2: I have no idea if the narrative above is true

A better article would have the title:

Life is Not A Story, Life is Many Stories.

I have but one meager, measly, impoverished point of view, but I can tell multiple stories from my one point of view, because I can imagine the point of view of other people.

What is dangerous is being trapped inside a single story, which can be related to trauma in some cases. (Search something like trauma story loop)

When you are trapped inside a single story, you can have strong feelings that you MUST respond in certain ways to certain stimuli, as there is no other story that could be true. When you can tell a different story, you can make progress.

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Edit: the author's reference to 'perspective taking' is very much like what I am saying. It's still a silly article.

> "Think of the ways that perspectives organise experiences differently. By ‘perspective’ I mean something more complex than ‘point of view’. I’m referring to the way we engage with the world from a particular position or orientation that draws our attention to aspects of experience, like how our visual ‘perspective’ allows bright colours to show up more easily than dull ones. Perspectives are shaped by our place in the world, our beliefs, values and what we think matters. As the philosopher Elisabeth Camp explains, a perspective ‘helps us to do things with the thoughts we have: to make quick judgments based on what’s most important, to grasp intuitive connections, and to respond emotionally, among other things.’ Through perspective some features of our experiences ‘stick out in our minds while others fade into the background.’

Perspectives, then, determine the narratives we adopt. In other words, our core beliefs and values shape the way we see things and what we take to be important in our experiences. It is our perspectives that generate our narratives. Perspective also explains why our narratives can differ so radically from those of other people, even when we experience the same events. But once we understand these perspectives, we can see how flexible our narratives can truly become. Perspectives, it turns out, don’t have a linear, ordered structure. We can’t think of them in terms of sequences of events, like stories. In some ways, perspectives are better represented by the non-linearity of poetry."

My comment on that Gettier post:

Puttiers: When a junior engineer fixes something, but a different error is returned, so they cannot tell if progress was made or not.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41850429

***

justified: in the sense of deriving from evidence

true: because it doesn't make sense to "know" a falsehoood

belief: i.e., a proposition in your head

***

Justified: there is an error message

true: there is an error condition

belief: the engineer observes the message and condition

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Where's my cow?

Are you my cow? [0]

0: https://www.amazon.com/Wheres-My-Cow-Terry-Pratchett/dp/0060...

It is technically possible to find the messages after dismissing them, but you have to dig through a bunch of menus, they don't show up in any default messaging app (at least on stock Pixel Android)