plus some ancillary assumptions (more-general “theory” beliefs like “skepticism of medical authorities” can cause more-specific “claim” beliefs like “vaccines have harmful additives”, but not vice versa)
This jumped out to me because it seems potentially untrue; I would expect there to exist at least some instances where people’s belief about the specifics comes prior to, and is what causes, their beliefs about the general theory.
The “Phantom of Heilbronn” was an unknown female serial killer, whose DNA was found at numerous crime scenes across Austria, France and Germany from 1993 to 2009. It was eventually realised that the DNA belonged to a woman working in a factory, making the cotton swabs that were used to collect evidence.
There is also scope for helping people think through a thing in a way that they would endorse, e.g. by asking a sequence of questions.
As aptly demonstrated:
My “took 30 seconds to think about it” first impression is that the common thread is twofold: firstly that you can’t die from being bad at the thing, and secondly that you are fundamentally capable of performing at the necessary level. That way the forced practice is both survivable and also leads to mastery.
In swimming or subsistence farming you might die before figuring it out. In math you might hit cognitive limits. Come to that, in child rearing it’s also possible for it to go wrong if you hit some hard limits and resort to infanticide or neglect… tragic but not exactly unknown.
Tried to check a couple of the claims I found particularly surprising, was not especially siuccessful in doing so:
pray that the brain doesn’t actually use things like temperature for cognition (it probably does).
Link here goes to a 404 error
Parts of this are easily falsifiable through the fact that organ transplant recipients sometimes get donor’s memories and preferences
Seems overstated to treat this as established “fact” when the source presented is very anecdotal, and comes from a journal that seems to be predisposed to spiritualism, homoepathy, ayurveda, yoga, etc (PS also your link formatting is broken)
My reward is usually reading fiction or playing a video game.
How do you avoid noticing that you could do those things without doing the habit first?
what’s the best way to actually make this acceptable (and popular) in China?
Depict a conspicuously Chinese research team as well-meaning noble patriots, who are quick to think only of the common good, and who supply some of the crucial insights. I don’t know if that would be sufficient, but it would be a start.
(the title of the Guardian article actually calls it a “scheme” by name)
The word “scheme” doesn’t have quite the same negative connotations in the UK as I gather it does in the US. Government (or otherwise large-scale) programs and projects being described as “schemes” is fairly common.
Describing a person as “scheming” carries the association of being devious and underhand, but somehow not so much for big organisations.
There’s the old syllogism,
Something must be done
This is something
Therefore: this must be done
Not sure if there’s a snappy name for it
I’m not working on X because when I start to look at it my brain seizes up with a formless sense of dread at even the familiar parts of the task and I can’t find the “start doing” lever.
I’m not working on X because the ticket for it was put in by that guy and I don’t want to deal with the inevitable nitpicking follow-up questions and unstated additional work.
I’m not working on X because if I start doing the easy parts that would commit me to also doing the hard parts. Maybe if I leave it, some other sucker will take it on and I won’t have to do it at all.
I’m not working on X because to even get started I would have to figure out how to disambiguate the requirements, and that requires a flexible mode of thought that is a bit beyond me right now.
I’m not working on X ’coz I don’t wanna and no-one can make me. X sounds tedious and unrewarding, and there’s so much of the internet I haven’t read yet.
I’m not working on X because no-one will notice or care that I didn’t specifically do X. If anyone asks I can say I was doing Y and Z today, act like they took up more time than they actually did, have an X-shaped amount of extra slack in my day, and get paid the same salary either way.
My favourite similar construction:
I needed a sign for my fish and chips shop, so I ordered one online. What they sent me said “FishandChips”, so I had to write to them and explain that there were supposed to be spaces between Fish and and and and and Chips.
They weren’t sure what I meant. I suppose to be clearer I should have placed quote marks before Fish and between Fish and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and Chips and after Chips.
And you may well be wondering where I ought to have placed quotes and commas in that thing I just said...
Considering my options for following without needing to remember to check the site: what gets posted into the newsletter, and how frequent are the updates? Is there an RSS feed?
The other kind of sentence, an utterance that rings definitely false to someone who knows what’s going on, but which serves to point a beginner in the right direction, is one I don’t have a word for
I’ve heard “lies to children” for that. An initial simple and technically incorrect explanation that prepares the mind towards understanding the later more detailed explanation, by which you come to understand that the first explanation wasn’t actually true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children
I didn’t know about Terry Pratchett’s involvement in popularising the phrase until I looked it up just now.
“Lab leak” doesn’t necessarily imply “created in a lab”.
The “leak” theory as I’ve understood it is still about a naturally occurring virus—with samples being collected from wild animals and studied at a lab, before it escaped again.
A less formal way of putting the same thought process, in case it helps it click into place for anyone, might be “Every observation I make has some possibility of being contradictory evidence. That this observation, of a green apple, isn’t contradictory means that my [All ravens are black] theory has faced another opportunity to be disproved and survived unscathed”
I’m not conscious, though. I’m not self-aware. If I have qualia, it’s a very tiny amount of qualia.
How do you know?
“Very near to sleep” seems to me like an altered state of consciousness, but not unconsciousness. With “asleep” not actually being a binary state, whereby you can end up in a near-sleep state either by being very nearly about to fall asleep, or by rising into a very shallow phase during sleep.
The brain can also stop forming long-term memories while still being conscious in the moment (like being “blackout” drunk) so that your remembering self has no recollection of that period, even though you were minimally awake for it.
I really despise being advertised to, and I reserve every right to have my own hardware do whatever I want in the way of changing the data a site sends me before displaying it (as you say, it should be up to me what I see).
If the site wants to run some intrusive thing that monitors whether there are ads being displayed and refuses to send any more data if they aren’t, then fair play and I’ll take my eyeballs elsewhere. If they want to paywall their content so that they don’t need to run ads, then I’ll consider the cost of a subscription (although I’m even more likely to look favourably on the “pay what you want/voluntary support from the keenest for free content for everyone” Patreon type model).
But whatever the case, I feel no compunction about blocking every ad I’m technologically capable of blocking; and I can’t say I have a great depth of respect for nag screens that are so easily circumvented. If you don’t want to serve me content, then actually don’t, but sending a combination of [content + nag screen] is a blob of data that’s easily transformed into just [content].
My sense (from 10+ years on reddit, 2 of which spent moderating a somewhat large/active subreddit) is that there’s a “geeks MOPs and sociopaths”–like effect, where a small subreddit can (if it’s lucky enough to start with one) maintain a distinctive identity around the kernel of a cool idea, with a small select group who are self-selected for a degree of passion about that idea.
But as the size of the group grows it gradually gets diluted with poor imitators, who are upvoted by a general audience who are less discerning about whether posts are in the original spirit of the sub. Which also potentially drives away the original creative geeks, when the idea feels played out and isn’t fun for them any more.
That and large subreddits needing to fight the tide of entropy, against being overrun with the same stuff that fills up every place that doesn’t actively and strenuously remove it—the trolls, bots, spam, and political bickering.
Of all the conceivable way to arrange molecules so that they generate interesting unexpected novelties and complexity from which to learn new patterns, what are the odds that a low-impacted and flourishing society of happy humans is the very best one a superhuman intellect can devise?
Might it not do better with a human race pressed into servitude, toiling in the creativity salt mines? Or with a genetically engineered species of more compliant (but of course very complex) organisms? Or even by abandoning organics and deploying some carefully designed chaotic mechanism?
Oof, right in the existential anxiety.