moosey

Recently, I have become a proponent of Non-violent communication. Further, I have spent a lot of time trying to understand narcissism and gaslighting, and the abusive language tied to it. Understanding their use, and why they are used, has helped all of my relationships immensely.

I see a lot of reversion to abusive language in situations where there is obvious hypocrisy or an attempt to hide your desires (which is a major component of discussion in NVC). It is typical to see name dismissive name calling and condescension, which is different from group labelling... which is still probably categorization error.

Some examples of dismissive name calling in our current climate can be "You are just a (liberal/conservate/whatever)."; "That's just (stupid/silly/dumb)."; "Group X is (evil/brainwashed/sheep/etc.)". Anti-LGBT or Anti-any-category or group is basically abuse in the first place as well, as you should be able to directly attack their policy positions, rather than the group themselves. Labeling is just generally wrong, unless that label is based on an action: for example, "Biden voters" and "Trump voters" are categories based on action, rather than an attempt to apply a dismissive label.

By avoiding writers and commentary that use abusive language, I have rapidly found myself more informed. Further, I have discovered why I don't care for the works of Stephen Pinker. One example was when he tied the entire concept of environmentalism to anti-nuclear groups, and used the argument to deny all environmentalism in "Enlightenment Now".

I remember hearing, living in abuse will lead to abuse. It is a cycle. But what happens when verbal abuse is pervasive in a society, and it's part of the standard news cycle? Well, you get an abusive society.

Learn to spot abuse, and don't read those who use it in their writings and discussions.

I completely agree. I believe that social media algorithms should be declared illegal human psychological experimentation. Anything other than supplying a dumb pipe or obvious and simple mathematical explanations (for instance, a calendar) should be outlawed as such.

No more 'showing you this based on your preferences' black holes of addiction. No more conspiracy trails of nonsense.

Racism is not in our hearts - it's in our brains. A combination of in/out group bias, categorization error, inductive thinking and belief perserverance. Understanding these cognitive errors, and yes, that most decision making processes are made in our emotional centers, thus needing emotional intelligence training; this would all go a long way towards a more conscientious society.

These things can be taught directly. There is nothing special about it, and it's not about strengths or weaknesses. Most human brains work pretty similarly and have the same strengths and weaknesses, all of which can be managed or improved.

I recently read "The Organized Mind". I didn't expect it to be a book on ethics, but it certainly did impact me that way, and caused me to alter an enormous number of faulty mental behaviors, and allowed me to see abuse in language.

> "Oh look at those rednecks who voted for Trump, why can't they get a college education."

This right here is an example of why it's so easy. Part of what I'm reading there is fundamental attribution error. A person, anywhere right now, that can't get a college education in the US is dealing with a lot of headwind. Our education system is punitive, starting with an A and stripping you of points all the way through, causing undue stress, knowing that if you fail, you probably won't have the money to move forward, and will have great difficulty. Rich people get a free pass on this. Put a system like this together and the reason that people can't get educations is situational, not dispositional. We as a society must do better.

I mentioned miscategorization already, which is something that our brains naturally do when seeing people different from us, and requires intentional mental unbundling to see all humans as the same category. This is why racism is so common as well; without intentional work, humans will find categories by which to judge outsiders.

Our social media breaks human relationships because far too many interactions are decided publicly, through shame, rather than through communication. An enormous emotional abuse crisis in the US has now reached the highest levels of society, both private and public, and I certainly put enormous amounts of blame not on the companies that make social media sites, but because our brains are simply not well-tasked to deal with it. Further, the end of comprehensive mental health, particularly CBT and emotional withholding and the damages that they cause so many people and relationships.

I have a strong feeling that in the coming decade, there will be studies in cognitive psychology demonstrating the connection between stock markets and wealth and the base level fear/reward circuitry of the brain, delaying and reducing ethical and social cognition. Causing a focus on economic power rather than social conformity, and thus damaging society.

Regardless, I apologize for blathering, I think about this stuff a lot.

Hackers should be interested in this. It's clear that social media has a hand in the current state of society, however you feel about it. I have a sense that people that don't want violence are going to win politically, and soon. When they do, there will be repercussions for all social media and commenting style systems. HN won't escape this.

If people who want violence win the next set of elections, then that should also be of concern to hackers of websites. Take a look at the actions of the US president, after being called to task for breaking TOS.

With the geopolitical changes that will come about due to the coronavirus and upheaval that is beginning in the United States, it seems that social/web technology is central to geopolitics. It really stuns me that our conscientiousness to society, or lack thereof, isn't discussed far more often.

> Politics is a team based sport.

That's optional though. The modern media, in the interest of money, has done a good job of causing the population of the US to miscategorize themselves into D/R. If it instead focused on human welfare, then we wouldn't be in this mess.

Effectively, there is no difference between an apple and one with a bruise. I still get the same nutrition and taste, most other differences being unimportant.

A jacket with a hole has massive loss of effectiveness, and I don't receive a new jacket to wear each day.

A car with a dent has significant loss of value, not that it's something I'm terribly concerned with, I run all cars until they die.

I don't blame anyone. I want the world to evolve into one where our society puts human welfare first. Blaming does not help that happen at all.

It is easy to get caught in a trap thinking heavily about money. When thinking about things we own, the emotion and fear centers are aroused far more than when we think about other people. To avoid this, I believe our society must be trained away from neoliberal and 'greed is good' thought.

Blaming people for this state of events, or the addictive qualities of facebook, or the dangerous misinformation spread designed to take advantage of cognitive flaws of the human mind - these practices will get us nowhere. One thing that businesses started doing right was the blameless postmortem.

Find the problem, fix it. Move on.

Technocrats? Business leaders are selected at random by our economy, or are born wealthy. This has been proven over and over in studies.

Your flowery language is designed so that you feel smart. The fact that you started the first sentence with 'overbearing incompetency' and then in the second sentence said 'technocrat' shows the disorganization in language, and demands that we define what a technocrat is.

> Technocracy is an ideological system of governance in which decision-makers are selected on the basis of their expertise in a given area of responsibility, particularly with regard to scientific or technical knowledge.

How tiresome.

You are exalting ignorance. That's what actually needs to stop.

There is an entire section of "the organized mind" centering on decision making. I am reading many things here that are discussed and explained from a cognitive psychology viewpoint in the book. I can't recommend it enough.

Collect the definitions that you are learning over time. Put them in Anki as multidirection cloze deletions. Then, just do your Anki deck each day.

You will find that your fluency in almost any subject is improved with this practice.

The stock market is perfectly representing, well, something. Any attempts to explain it require loads of mental gymnastics because it's a layer of abstraction over so many layers of abstraction that I fear we've collectively lost sight of human welfare and real human advancement. I can assure you that the stock market doesn't represent that.

Reduction in the cost of oil will also reduce the cost of expanding renewable energy. Along with social distancing that might last a year, I wouldn't be surprised if we didn't reach the level of oil consumption from 2019 ever again.

However, I also wouldn't be surprised if we went the other direction as well. The expanse of possibility is so wide that it invokes some anxiety. I have no predictive capability in this environment, which terrifies me.

In response to that previous comment, it should be noted that by using Anki daily, you will increase blood flow and connectivity in the hippocampus region. In turn, this will increase the amount of things that you can learn in a time period. I've been able to increase my new card count and review count over time without too much drain, and I answer questions far more quickly than I did when I started.

It's my daily gym activity for my brain.

I just take handwritten notes, then convert them into carefully designed and tagged cards in Anki. Even if I forget something, searching my Anki deck will usually not just tell me the information, but what book it came from, and often which page. I'm pretty diligent about careful note collation. I've definitely gotten better since I read "The Organized Mind", a book which was so enlightening for my persona that I built more than 1000 cards to remember as many of its concepts as I could.

Regardless, I'm reading my previous comment and should admit that I'm quite intense about efficiency in learning. Less so about money. I've spent a lot of time tutoring, making this an important subject to me and I get.... emotional. I apologize if my original comment seems rude. It certainly feels that way to me.

If you want to stop wasting your time, and want to learn something thoroughly and once, I would recommend learning how to use Anki effectively. It has reduced the amount of time it takes to learn new things, while simultaneously allowing me to remember them for far longer periods of time. I can currently stop an online course for months, and return to the same point when I come back, with far more knowledge of the subject than I had when I left.

Anki, like using a calendar and communication tools effectively, is just pushing the burden of organization, memory and attention out of your head, and into your environment. This will not only save you time, but it will also, if set up right, give you that sense of peace of knowing that whatever you are doing is exactly where you should be.

It's solid. I learned about it in "Learning How to Learn", but the mental concept stuff is from "The Organized Mind".

What's the point of supporting the current economic model if it doesn't support human welfare? What's the point of any of our abstractions if they don't serve human welfare?

I'm totally in agreement with you.

The pain of economic loss is processed in the emotional and reward centers of the brain. Empathy and compassion, on the other hand, are processed in advanced sections of the brain in the anterior prefrontal lobe. When we are encouraged to think about the stock market all the time, then the emotional centers are allowed to take over, and we forget that people are what's important.

> Mankind improves because systems become big, rigid, and unable to evolve. People come along and point that out, suggesting various theories about how those systems got that way, the reasons why they are wrong, and offering suggestions for improvement.

Actually, this sounds like "Institutional Sclerosis", which is actually one of the main reasons that nations fail - some structure becomes more important than the welfare of society, be it a leader, some entity (like the military) or great collection of power by few people.

This is exactly the situation that we see today that makes our society unable to evolve, and will guarantee the current slide continues.

I believe the next advancements not to be technological. A combination of neuroscience and cognitive psychology can alter the human fabric of society in various directions. For an example of this, we can look at media produced in the United States and look at it as a cognitive psychology experiment that attempts to foment rage, which short circuits not just logical thought, but also the ability to feel compassion for others (emotions are powerful and deep in our psychology - compassion and empathy is a highly advanced mental activity, involving complicated parts of the prefrontal cortex).

This is one of the reasons that I think advertising and news media that takes advantage of high arousal emotions should be immediately outlawed as psychological experimentation, and that education should teach people how emotions can be used against them, and how to manage them effectively.

The first lesson of this teaching would be that all decisions, even economic ones (and ESPECIALLY economic ones) are made emotionally.

Ideas are easy to find, it's just that the bounds that we have been limited to work within, both economically and societally, have become tighter and tighter. Today, the leadership of the vast majority of private institutions have only the goal of increasing their own economic power, and similarly there is constant media production reminding people how important the almighty economy is, causing people to focus on any potential fear of economic pain. Regret being one of the most powerful emotional responses that we have.

We don't have to look far in any direction for solutions that improve our education systems, our research output, and the general welfare of humanity. Unfortunately, the forces of corruption will always be strong, and it will take a more creative and imaginative people to implement them.

> Krajbich said the results of this study suggest that many times we will take the route that worked yesterday and ignore the evidence of what normally works best.

I think that this is an example of "Denominator Neglect" I read about in the book "The Organized Mind", by Levetin. There is a section about organized decision making for complicated decisions. Medical decisions is in this group. At the same time, for most uncomplicated decisions, his advice is just to be more decisive.

Still, here are the basic steps that he outlined, I believe (from memory...): 1) Arm yourself with the best possible statistics about your procedure (things like NNT are good to know). 2) Understand your own biases. 3) Understand your own tolerance for regret. If a low chance of failure (5% or so) happens, can you ignore outcome bias? 4) If you still can't make up your mind, talk to your friends and family about your core values.

He also talks about how to converse with your doctor, understanding the incredible quality of knowledge that they have, while understanding some of the gaps that they might have.

I strongly recommend this book.

It alarms me that so many people look at the series of decisions, including the Supreme Court decision, and will argue 'yeah, this is fine'.

Sending people out in these cities was an ethical failure of enormous proportions, and the decision making processes that allowed it to reach that state should be roundly criticized.

If we aren't creative enough to realize that our systems require change at this period, that we actually need some level of societal organization change.

All organizations at all levels that blocked stay at home orders in Wisconsin no longer serve human welfare, and should be dropped.

I don't think that contemporary, high emotional arousal misinformation sources are harmless. I contend instead that the feeling of superiority and constant novelty of conspiracy theories lead to a dopamine-addiction loop. Since novelty is one of the primary focal points of the human attention system, we are hijacked and conned by these systems. This is why high-anger television (Fox News) has ads for gold and reverse mortgages. Turn off the ability to fight, make them angry, then when the cognitive defenses are turned off, take them for what they are worth.

Misinformation and the hole that leads into it are not harmless, and lead to mental degradation and emotional trauma.

You are comparing subjective predictions and mathematically modeled predictions. They are not the same thing.

We have enormous amounts of mathematical modelling and a vast history of information about our atmospheric history. Using this, we can make inferences about what is likely to happen due to climate change.

If I were to just make a rando statement about what will happen when climate change comes, that's different.

Learning to separate the two is an important tool.

I'm married with two children and I can assure you that not only has my mental state slipped because of the stresses of home life, but I also lost an enormous amount of social activity that I intentionally maintained in order to keep my brain and health at optimal levels.

I am OK, but my productivity is toast.

After this is over, the saddest possible outcome is if America returns to the same systems, having learned nothing. I don't expect it at all, but I've been more surprised in the past.

Our leaders, both business and government, find themselves entrapped in thinking about economics in terms of money. Soon we will be thinking about it in terms of productivity: how do we make sure enough food is made and distributed? How do we make sure we have enough medical supplies? We got away without thinking about productive capacity, instead focusing on money.

We will lose more people to this disease than any war since WW2, based on the statistics presented by people I trust. If we don't learn about wartime economics and fast, then the number will be higher than it needs to be.

Unfortunately, like I said, the people in charge are trapped in a box, believing that the systems that awarded them with great wealth must be the best possible system. The side-effect of this will be more death than necessary.

At the end of one of Harari's books he points out that nothing that we see today is natural or inevitable: that there are infinite outcomes for the way that humanity lives and organizes itself. Proof of this can be seen in how we've lived historically.

Those in power want us to believe that current power structures were inevitable, that the world wants to return to the current mean should we try to change it. We just have to stop people from getting power over others. I think that this is best achieved through random selection of leadership.

> I wish people like you understood economy.

What I understand is that we have decided that one particular measurement, GDP, has been taken to be more valuable than all other measurements. Such as, but not limited to, human welfare.

It's been this way since for decades, and we are now laying in the bed that was made.