Tagged “psychology”

The marshmallow experiment, Stanford Prison Experiment, cooperation breakdown in nature and tribes - all apparently bad science

Where social psychology has been used to:

• portray humans as dumb pieces of clay to be molded
• unduly indict groups that researchers dislike
• to provide convenient experimental confirmation of bits of popular wisdom (“power corrupts”, “evil is banal”, etc.)
• contraindicate views researchers call “narratives” but which are really ‘views researchers dislike’
• affirm the singular importance of small, unreliable aspects of human behavio

then it’s probably wrong.

I mostly just liked the phonetic similarity of the two words

This is the new culture. And its most striking feature is the absence of Culture (with a capital C) or even mindless entertainment—both get replaced by compulsive activity.

"Many significant, but mostly small, differences"

Behaviour geneticists contend that the rough rule of thumb when it comes to the determinants of adult personality and other traits is 50–0–50, that is, roughly 50% of the variance in personality, behaviour, and other traits is heritable (influenced by genes), roughly 0% by the shared environment (what happens within the family and is experienced similarly by all siblings), and roughly 50% by the non-shared environment (what happens inside and outside the family not shared by siblings)

"a life characterized by a variety of interesting and perspective-changing experiences"

this is cool. would like to make a converter to generate these from color images

I think this is the source of the "men at 25 at mature as women at 18" thing.

any field with “behavioral” in its name is not real

50s radio voice:

When bad things happen, does your mind suddenly go blank?
Do you feel tired?
And just end up not responding?
Your brain might use ‘the freeze response’ in the face of stress.

describe the hallway you too to get into this room (or some aspect of the previous room). People remember details differently

People become preoccupied with food

we often apparently underestimate how much people will act to avoid adverse outcomes

related

, that treating loneliness simply by telling lonely people to go out and socialize more (the way you can treat a phobia of snakes with exposure) will often not work because it fails to address the root cause of the loneliness. In fact, a recent meta-analysis confirmed that simply providing lonely people with easier access to potential friends has no effect on subjective loneliness.

Adapting to solitude, and downsides of getting stuck there

listen to philosophers and calm down, apparently

Some of these experiences sound terrifying.

Good things to emulate in there.

Be willing to be bad at things, ask lots of questions (even if they seem obvious), trying hard at things (can mean failing lots).

Great summary in top comment

1. Medium: text -> images -> video -> 3D graphics -> VR
2. AI: time -> rank -> recommend -> generate
3. UI: click -> scroll -> tap -> swipe -> autoplay

That we get more immersive and more passive

Self-recommending

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.

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.

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.

surprising(?) amount of biased claims in there. "I have had great luck with phone x", some hating on google for login screens, etc.

Coming back as someone different after a traumatic brain injury, and overcoming symptoms.

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!

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.

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.

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.

cabinsitting in a national forest

On wanting to be wanted, and the mismatch between "ideal mate" checklists vs actual selections

Apparently probably not

• Gifts increase in value when given away
• Most platforms now don't sell music, either subscriptions or ads

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.

Will ectoplasmic green skies be alarming enough to make people take climate more seriously? Undecided.
Some interesting overviews on how eyes work though.

I remember some stat of number of listens people would do of happy songs (200ish) vs sad songs (800ish)

so keep a dream journal!

excerpts from The Art of Controversy

Can relate to this. Avoiding ads most of the time I find TV ads very jarring

Me either. Logging out of twitter has helped reduce the effect.

Writing to allow yourself to forget shit. Much of what is on this page.

Porn Sex versus Real Sex - but based on data already nearly 10 years out of date!

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.

Perfectionism is more often about being afraid to be bad at things

Interesting area, and the discussion on whether it matters where the knowledge is stored.

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.

How different you and your brain behave in times of extreme emotion. Makes people bad at empathising with others ("I would never do that.."), and bad at predicting or understanding their own behaviour.

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.

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.

I liked Uri Bram's comment on this: "A PDF, but well worth the inconvenience".

Some interesting thoughts on writing and communication, and a brief technical dive into emoji encoding and display.

This was a pretty solid list. Mostly simple & sensible.

Link appears to have sadly already suffered linkrot, need to start backing these things up.

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".

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

Effect of the spread of information from fringe to broad adoption to "everyone knows this"

Digging through the history of biases and problems with training data and categories used for ML tasks

The best way to practice is to spend time thinking

Why haven’t we stopped climate change? We’re not wired to empathize with our descendants. Artificial distance that we add to 'other people'