My understanding is that all humans have the ‘hardware’ to see polarized light, but that most of us filter it out—that is, it is a software issue. However, you could also phrase this as ‘the eyes register the light, but the brain discards the information’.
Tem42
Karma: 507
Have you considered replacing immediate jolts with slower jolts? Just as your brain is ready to get serotonin flowing from exercise, it is also programmed to get it from eating (and cooking), and from hanging out with your children. Using these sources of longer-term positive reinforcement may also have positive feedback in improving your wife’s afternoon, which may start an overall positive feedback loop in your family life.
Also, you mentioned that you dislike noise. You may want to look into Sensory Integration Disorder—even if you have a mild case, some common coping strategies may improve your life and reduce your need for decompression time after work.
Americancentric, but: I would suggest that if you have a phone, programming the numbers for the local police, a good urgent care clinic in your area (a wiser choice than the ER, when possible), and your garage (especially if you don’t have AAA). 911 is an important tool, but it is not always the best tool for the job, and the cost of updating your address book is essentially zero.
Oh, and perhaps the New York Public Library’s virtual reference service (depending on your long-distance plan).
The study already given above includes some detail: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/238511/papers/2006-brewer.pdf
I don’t know of any that are free, but What Color Is Your Parachute? is generally recognized as a good one, and is likely to be available at most used book stores—though would probably have to settle for an older edition.
Edit: and any library will have a copy.
More general: “you should have an environment that is conductive to you doing X”. Lots of people thrive in adversity, and a notable minority aren’t very social. This may actually be true for most people in limited situations… I was very unlikely to clean up other people’s liter and dog poop until I moved into a neighborhood where 1) no one cleans up at all and 2) people thought it was weird to do so. (If instead they had thought that they should clean up, but were too lazy, I would have seen the mess as a fitting punishment for their laziness, and would only have cleaned up that which directly impinged on my immediate environment). Of course, I don’t give this as an example of a healthy environment, just as an example where a motivation to do productive work is not dependent on social support.
Asperger’s syndrome is no longer given as a category in the DSM-5 because it is assimilated into the ASD rating scale. Asperger’s syndrome would fall into the “Autism Spectrum Disorder—Level 1” category. You can see why most people continue to use the term Asperger’s :-) The DMS-5 states:
“Individuals with a well-established DSM-IV diagnoses of autistic disorder, Asperger’s disorder, or pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified should be given the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder”. (Not Social Communication Disorder).
I think you have (1) and (2) reversed. Also, verbal communication is impaired on all three levels.
The Pre-Historical Fallacy
Since you have also indicated that you are interested in finding a life partner, and since the value of a life partner is dependent on your personality (and not a hypothetical ‘ideal personality’), you may be asking the wrong question. A more relevant question might be “what are ways to reduce the investment cost of finding a life partner?” Once that question is answered, then you will have to decide if it is worth the investment.
It is not at all hard to prove the first statement in that paragraph—although if you would like to use a word other than prove, I am okay with that. I certainly don’t mean to suggest that evolution is ‘just a theory’, but rather to point out that just because we have an effective law of nature that explains large amounts of the world, we cannot pretend that it will explain everything that we are interested in talking about.
To be clear, I am not saying that something like ‘spirituality’ or ‘humanity’ is somehow apart from the physical laws or observed processes of nature. I am saying that when we talk about the effects of human nature on X, we need to remember that you do indeed need to consider what is the scientific evidence for ‘human nature’, and what is conjecture. Most people do not use ‘human nature’ and related terms in a way that is meaningful, even in science writing.
I am talking about the pretty much anything that refers without references to the idea that ‘humans evolved to X’ or ‘it is human nature to X’. My background is in anthropology, with comparatively little exposure to evolutionary psychology, but in my experience the ethnographies, papers, and meta-studies that this information would ideally be based on are very clear about their shortcomings.
However, even when your data is a handful of surviving and marginalized ethnic groups, field notes from the 50s, and some promising bones, you can make some good strong statements about behavior, diet, etc. This leads to conclusions that are highly technical and precise, but with limited scope. Most science writers want exactly the opposite—non-technical and broadly applicable. So they latch onto some factoids, make ‘reasonable’ generalizations, and ignore the fact that most anthropologists are very clear on what is known and what is supposed.
There are examples of anthropologists giving interesting theories and arguing with limited data—the aquatic ape hypothesis is a perennial example (now long obsolete). But this is in no way a problem in the field; every science has hypotheses, and within the field the evidence, or lack of evidence, is clearly stated.
It is not true that people cannot—or do not—interact successfully with people that are less intelligent than they are. Many children get along well with their younger siblings. Many adults love being kindergarten teachers… Or feel highly engaged working in the dementia wing of the rest home. Many people of all intelligence levels love having very dumb pets. These are not people (or beings) that you relate to because of their ‘relatability’ in the sense that they are like you, but because they are meaningful to you. And interacting with people build social skills appropriate to those people—which may not be very generalizable when you are practicing interacting with kindergarten students, but is certainly a useful skill when you are interacting with average people.
I personally would think that the problem under discussion is not related to intelligence, but in trying to help an introvert identify the most fulfilling interpersonal bonds without making them more social in a general sense. However, I don’t know the kid in question, so I can’t say.
More relevant may be your supply chain. If you have given your cow all required shots and drink the milk within a day—and without mixing it with the milk of dozens of other cows—you are going to be a lot better off than if you stop off at a random roadside stand and buy a gallon of raw milk.
Not exactly true; we probably don’t need to know how consciousness arises. We would certainly have to rewire synapses to match the original brain, and it is likely that if we exactly replicate brain structure neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse, we would still not know where consciousness lies, but would have a conscious duplicate of the original.
Alternatively you could hypothesize a soul, but that seems like worry for worry’s sake.
The flip side to this is that there is no measurable difference between ‘someone who is you and feels conscious’ and ‘someone who is exactly like you in every way but does not feel conscious (but will continue to claim that e does)’. Even if you identified a mental state on a brain scan that you felt certain that was causing the experience of consciousness, in order to approximate a proof of this you would have to be able to measure a group of subjects that are nearly identical except not experiencing consciousness, a group that has not yet been found in nature.
Evidence that killing is wrong is certainly possible, but your statement “I think that killing is wrong” is such weak evidence that it is fair for us to dismiss it. You may provide reasons why we should think killing is wrong, and maybe we will accept your reasons, but so far you have not given us anything worth considering.
I think that you are also equivocating on the word ‘imply’, suggesting that ‘distasteful implications’ means something like ‘logical implications’.
| Are you saying the specific hypothesis is problematic, or that the whole logical structure is?
Both the hypothesis and the logical structure are appropriate. What is not appropriate is presenting weak hypotheses as explanations without identifying them as weak and without giving alternative hypotheses.
To exaggerate just slightly, you might compare the use of these explanations to the use of government conspiracies as explanations for major political events. It is easy to come up with explanations that assume conspiracy, and it is obviously true that the government is hiding information from us in some cases, but without strong evidence that we do not currently have, tales of the Illuminati are only amusing, not productive. Likewise, explanations based on human evolution are very easy to construct, and it is obvious that we evolved…
| To prove the second statement, we just need to find gene variants that are strongly correlated with religious beliefs.
This is a bit off topic, but interesting! So… That’s not quite true. We might, for example, find that genes that are correlated with imagination, creativity, or schizophrenia are also correlated with religious beliefs. But that doesn’t mean that either these genes or these traits evolved ‘for religion’ in any meaningful sense… any more than we would use that sort of rhetoric to prove that ‘humans evolved specifically for the purpose of experiencing schizophrenia’. We are muddying teleology here just a bit, but in many cases that is exactly the purpose of these arguments.
No—The debate has been exaggerated a bit, but the old-school ethnologists who wanted to defend that the peoples that they were studying were the One True Tribe were really very old school. There have been people who are hesitant to ignore the original interpretations, but there have been few if any anthropologists in the last 70 years that would deny that conquest and population movements were a major cultural factor in most areas of the world.
Edit: P.S., Tu quoque and argumentum ad hominem are both fallacies. Trying to suggest that my argument ‘that people should look at the evidence’ is wrong by pointing to people like me who have not looked at the evidence is hardly LessWrong worthy behavior.
Most evidence tends to be pretty clear even in the field of anthropology. You can publish a speculative theory, but more often a paper is going to say “we found these bones with these markers here, {type of dating} indicates age of X with a margin of error of Y”; “technology X was found at Y at a depth of Z, this matches/does not match technology A in aspects B and C, but not P, Q, etc.” Ethnologies are a bit more suspect, but you can check who visited when and observed what, and see if the observations are consistent. And as you might imagine, genetic studies tend to be fairly clear cut.
When you make a more general statement about ‘human nature’, you start to move into frequency counts of observed societies, which mean that your sampling frame is very limited, and much more likely to give you exceptions than rules. Much of what you see in informal writing is broadly extrapolated from comparison with animals and broad assumptions both about the environment and about humans (assumed lack of) ability to adapt without genetic change.
As a shorthand, as in most fields, if a claim is made and a peer reviewed paper is not cited, assume that this is not the proper source for this information.
It is worth noting that Musical Ear Syndrome is often framed as a condition in which ‘victims’ can ‘suffer’ from auditory hallucinations. Any intrusive mental event can occur to the point that it is negative. I have also heard some sufferers of OCD (specifically Pure O) complain of ever-present music.
However, I agree that in general, more music in your head is better :-)