Tagged “psychology”
Tyler Cowen on Effective Altruism
Self-recommending
Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think
The social survival mammoth - the irrational and unproductive obsession with what others think of us. It is more possible in smaller tribes, impossible in the global one.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
How I Wish Trauma Had Been Explained to Me
The word trauma is too loaded - they use the word "splitting" to describe the response of setting painful things aside, until you are ready to process them. But then instead of processing them, you just keep putting off dealing with them, or avoiding things that remind you of them.
'Someone's typing...': The history behind text messaging's most dreadful feature
The Rising Tide of Global Sadness
Contrary to Steven Pinker's insistence that everything is getting better; Gallup poll of people in 140 countries indicates long-term decrease of quality of life for billions of people. Rising GDP doesn't help you if you have chronic pain or not enough to eat.
What makes us dance? It really is all about that bass
Attachment styles
Google Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro | Hacker News
surprising(?) amount of biased claims in there. "I have had great luck with phone x", some hating on google for login screens, etc.
The Curious Afterlife of a Brain Trauma Survivor
Coming back as someone different after a traumatic brain injury, and overcoming symptoms.
Punishment, Puppies, and Science: Bringing Dog Training to Heel
Studies all seem pretty loose. Lot of self-reported, correlational studies with the unsurprising result that people with happier dogs punish them less.
A UK study that used dog trainers and didn't self-report, but they didn't measure baseline recall!
An environmentalist gets lunch
On effective environmentalism. I wonder if carbon is an oversimlified metric and we are ignoring too many other factors, like ground/water pollution, or animal welfare in farming operations optimizing for high-efficiency.
The BOM has been tinkering with its app. Here's how to read the rainfall forecast correctly
Sensible change - instead of showing 50% and 25% amounts to 75% and 25%.
I assume them getting in-band about half the time will make people claim they are "wrong" about rain predictionss less.
Inflationary Vice – Theodore Dalrymple
High prices and shaping before, even long after it's over. Remember reading some story of someone's parents washing/reusing plastic wrap and foil and things after a war.
myNoise background noise
People Spend Too Much Time on Decisions with Equally Satisfying Outcomes
Less Alone
cabinsitting in a national forest
For What Do We Want To Be Wanted?
On wanting to be wanted, and the mismatch between "ideal mate" checklists vs actual selections
Does hazing actually increase group solidarity?
Apparently probably not
Gratuity: Who Gets Paid When Art Is Free
- Gifts increase in value when given away
- Most platforms now don't sell music, either subscriptions or ads
Safety
How I started letting go of my anxiety: slowly and reluctantly. I relaxed more when I noticed that I felt better. And then I kept letting go, more and more and more
The most useful skill you can acquire as a human is the ability to help other people feel safe.
If you don’t feel safe, your anxiety will bleed through.
A weird evolutionary quirk in the human eye
Will ectoplasmic green skies be alarming enough to make people take climate more seriously? Undecided.
Some interesting overviews on how eyes work though.
Repeat After Me: It’s Normal to Play the Same Song Over and Over Again
I remember some stat of number of listens people would do of happy songs (200ish) vs sad songs (800ish)
Heightened dream recall linked to increased creativity
so keep a dream journal!
Schopenhaur's 38 Stratagems, or 38 ways to win an argument
excerpts from The Art of Controversy
Human Brain Compresses Working Memories into Low-Res ‘Summaries’
The second Netflix introduces ads I would drop my subscription
Can relate to this. Avoiding ads most of the time I find TV ads very jarring
From millionaires to Muslims, small subgroups of the population seem much larger to many Americans
My lizard brain is no match for infinite scroll
Me either. Logging out of twitter has helped reduce the effect.
How Relationship Satisfaction Changes Across Your Lifetime
Notes apps are where ideas go to die. And that’s good.
Writing to allow yourself to forget shit. Much of what is on this page.
Things you notice when you quit the news (2016)
Tim Urban: Elon Musk, Neuralink, AI, Aliens, and the Future of Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast #264
Archives of Sexual Behavior
Porn Sex versus Real Sex - but based on data already nearly 10 years out of date!
Reading on smartphone affects sigh generation, brain activity, and comprehension
This reply spoke to me. I did it a few years ago and it has helped a lot.
I've silenced my phone 8 or 9 years ago and it's been like that since then. (With unmuting it very occasionally. Like a few times a year, maybe.) The notification frequency must have grown a lot since then.
I have no idea how people can deal with their phone beeping and vibrating constantly. Actually, I get annoyed pretty quickly when e.g. my partner leaves her phone in the room.
Jay's Blog
Unlearning Perfectionism
Perfectionism is more often about being afraid to be bad at things
This Video Will Make You Angry
“One with the cloud: Why people mistake the internet’s knowledge for their own”
Interesting area, and the discussion on whether it matters where the knowledge is stored.
Nurture the nature
You Are Not Who You Think You Are
brains are weird. This quote in particular fascinated me:
That seems exciting. I’ve long wondered if in 50 years terms like “emotion” or “reason” will be obsolete. Some future genius will have come up with an integrative paradigm that more accurately captures who we are and how we think.
12 Mind-Bending Perceptual Illusions
Ask HN : What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read? : Hacker News
The Psychology of Prediction
Some good bits around how using past information can backfire. Either overfitting if looking too far back, or spending too much effort on predictions.
Enough effort goes into an initial forecast that updating your views when new information becomes available can trigger the sunk-cost fallacy and cause you to be right or wrong for the wrong reason.
Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does
Original title was "Why Captcha Pictures Are So Unbearably Depressing", which felt a bit complainy compared to the updated one. I agreed less with that take on the article, but a lot with the sentiment from the HN comments
A website with captchas is like a retail store with metal detectors; it's not somewhere I feel welcome.
Herding Cats and Free Will Inflation [pdf]
I liked Uri Bram's comment on this: "A PDF, but well worth the inconvenience".
What happened when I stopped using Emojis
Some interesting thoughts on writing and communication, and a brief technical dive into emoji encoding and display.
Excerpt from We Learn Nothing, by Tim Kreider
There's a Second Brain in Your Gut
The Secret Life of Secrets
100 Tips For A Better Life
This was a pretty solid list. Mostly simple & sensible.
Link appears to have sadly already suffered linkrot, need to start backing these things up.
A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon
Good writeup of the scary phenomenon of getting people to people batshit insane conspiracy theories. "Don't trust experts. Do your own research. Here's some facebook posts to get you started".
Exponential-growth bias and overconfidence☆
Highlights:
- People exhibit overconfidence in their ability to calculate exponential growth
- People exhibit overconfidence in their ability to use a spreadsheet
- The results suggest insufficient demand for help and tools
CBT In The Water Supply
Effect of the spread of information from fringe to broad adoption to "everyone knows this"
What Happened To 90s Environmentalism?
Tradeoffs: The Currency of Decision Making
Excavating AI
Digging through the history of biases and problems with training data and categories used for ML tasks
Learning How to Think: The Skill No One Taught You
The best way to practice is to spend time thinking
Caring about tomorrow
Why haven’t we stopped climate change? We’re not wired to empathize with our descendants. Artificial distance that we add to 'other people'
See all tags.