Quite a bit of Silicon Valley inside baseball, but an interesting read.
"But people who know him say that Zuckerberg has truly been altered in the crucible of the past several months... And he’s also worried. “This whole year has massively changed his personal techno-optimism,” says an executive at the company. “It has made him much more paranoid about the ways that people could abuse the thing that he built.”"
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By no means supporting everything argued for on this blog, but I think this is actually a pretty good point:
"I think of respect for free speech as a commons. Every time some group invokes free speech to say something controversial, they’re drawing from the commons – which is fine, that’s what the commons is there for. Presumably the commons self-replenishes at some slow rate as people learn philosophy or get into situations where free speech protects them and their allies.
But if you draw from the commons too quickly, then the commons disappears. When trolls say the most outrageous things possible, then retreat to “oh, but free speech”, they’re burning the commons for no reason, to the detriment of everybody else who needs it.
(this is how I feel about everything Milo Yiannopoulos has ever done or said.)"
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"One evening during the rainy season in Kenya, a black rhinoceros mother and her baby came to a clearing where salt had been left out to attract animals. After licking up some of the salt the mother moved away, but the rhino calf got stuck in the deep mud. It called out, and its mother returned, sniffed it, examined it, and headed back into the forest. The calf called again, the mother returned, and so on, until the calf was exhausted. Apparently the mother rhino either could not see the problem—the calf was uninjured—or did not know what to do about it.
A group of elephants arrived at the salt lick. The mother rhino charged the elephant in the lead, who sidestepped her and went to a different salt lick a hundred feet from the baby rhino. Appeased, the mother went to forage in the woods again. An adult elephant with large tusks approached the rhino calf and ran its trunk over it. Then the elephant knelt, put its tusks under the calf, and began to lift. As it did so, the mother rhino came charging out of the woods, and so the elephant dodged away and went back to the other salt lick. Over several hours, whenever the mother rhino returned to the forest, the elephant tried to lift the young rhino out of the mud, but each time the mother rushed out protectively and the elephant retreated. Finally the elephants all moved on, leaving the rhino still mired. The next morning, as humans prepared to pry it loose, the young rhino managed to pull free from the drying mud on its own and join its waiting mother."
JF Masson and S McCarthy, "When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals"
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This is so upsetting. :'( How many people have to die of fentanyl or other opioid overdoses before the state wakes up to the need for prescribed heroin and supervised injection facilities? Simple measures like this would prevent pretty much all deaths and also save huge amounts of money in averted crime, medical bills and policing. Yet the government is incapable of doing anything but parroting the same old "tough on crime" slogans.
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Apparently Dutch "tulip mania" wasn't all that irrational, or really a big deal in the larger picture.
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I mean, what do you expect to happen with such incoherent policy-making? "Coffee shops" in the Netherlands are allowed to *sell* cannabis, but production and distribution are still criminalised. So... obviously criminal gangs are going to be capturing that market?
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Enjoyable social interaction is apparently somewhat like getting high on opioids...
"Our results show that pain tolerance positively predicts social network size. This therefore supports our hypothesis
that variation in the μ-opioid system underlies individual differences in sociality"
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This is kinda great
"Adults, Holt thought, needed to stop when they felt that potent reaction to cuteness bubbling up within them, and think about why they were feeling it. Often, he argued, that gush of “gah-so-cute” came out of a feeling of misplaced superiority over children. (Sianne Ngai, a more recent critic of cute, has called cuteness “a way of aestheticizing powerlessness.”)" Slate
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What's interesting about this study is not the headline "antidepressants work"... It's kind of obvious, and also very different classes of drugs of grouped under the category "antidepressant". What is interesting is exactly *which* drugs turn out to be most effective, on average.
Most effective in absolute terms: Amitriptyline (tricyclic antidepressant, serotonin–norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor), Mirtazapine (tetracyclic antidepressant, blocks histamine, adrenergic and serotonin receptors) and Venlafaxine (selective serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor)
Best when accounting for both effectiveness and tolerance: Agomelatine (melatonin receptor agonist, serotonin recept antagonist), Escitalopram (selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor, SSRI), Vortioxetine (serotonin re-uptake inhibitor and modulator - affects various different serotonin receptors in different ways).
Yet when people think "antidepressant", they're overwhelmingly thinking of SSRIs! There are actually many options available and different things might work for you depending on your individual brain chemistry.
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Another great interview, completely different content to the Vulture one, all totally amazing. What a life.
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“To stop a bad guy with a gun, it takes a good guy with a gun.” Guardian
(I have to say, even with a gun and firearms training, it's quite a thing to confront someone actively shooting at people. I don't know if I'd be able to do it. I don't think we should be relying on people being able to do it to keep anyone safe.)
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I remember this blew my mind when I read about it a while ago... Some languages have abstract words for smells (i.e. they wouldn't say "it smells like a lemon", they'd name a general property shared by lemons and the thing they're describing). Wouldn't it be useful if we could import this vocabulary into English? Think how useful it would be in food preparation and any number of other activities...
"Speakers of Jahai and other related languages have precise words for different smells. They're equivalent to the range of words—red, blue, pink—that English has for colors..."
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Perhaps unsurprising, but good that the research is being done.
"When it came to self-reported depressive symptoms or anxiety, researchers found there was no difference between transgender kids who were allowed to transition and their peers and siblings — nor did they differ from national averages. Likewise, transgender children scored just as developmentally normal as their peers on measures of self-worth."
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Such heady cultural-political theory, opinions welcome.
"The crucial point here is that the destabilisation of Fordist [assembly-line] industrial culture was well under way long before Thatcher came on the scene in any significant way, and that that destabilisation was driven as much by the attempts of the most radical sections of the working class to to transcend its limitations as by any other factor. Everything Mason says about the ultimate outcomes of that history is true. But left thought and left politics are not served at all by any conception of this history which imagines that the Fordist world would have been sustainable if only it hadn’t been for Thatcher. Working people themselves had done with it long before 1979. The elements of the industrial working class who Thatcher assaulted in the early 80s were already residual, and their leaderships realised far too late what the New Left had been trying to tell them since the early 60s: that without a radical democratisation of their aims and their practices, without an embrace of feminism and cosmopolitanism, without an understanding of the technological revolutions which were already well under way - they would be doomed."
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Really worth reading this to get an understanding of how sexual predators are actively protected and enabled by communities. Even if someone is popular and charismatic, and has always been nice to *you*, they may still be assaulting and hurting others - especially younger and more vulnerable people.
[CN for quite graphic description of sexual assault - in the main article, not what I've quoted here]
"“At that point, I basically turned on the guy,” Singh says. He stopped engaging with him, and began warning others about Morgan. Then, he says, the scene began to close ranks. “I was initially taken aside by a couple of people and bought coffee to have a friendly chat—and basically told everything I’ve heard is a lie, and it’s not true, and he’s a lovely man and you just don’t know him, you shouldn't listen to the lies.”
When he continued, he and Emma’s social lives in the group began to peter out. People stopped contacting them. They stopped being invited to parties and gigs. By 2005, he says, they were cut off, and he’d basically stopped engaging with the Goth crowd at all."
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“If you’re anti-rape, you’re going to have to be anti-prison.” Vice
[CN: general discussion of sexual violence, no graphic descriptions]
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One of the more important/frightening bits of news I've heard in a while: Xi Jinping appears to be setting himself up as dictator for life. This probably won't change much in the short term, but will mean that political tensions can't be released by the change over in leadership every tens years and will continue to develop over the course of his reign. Expect the world's largest economy to become much more chaotic and unpredictable when he starts losing his faculties and grip on power.
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