coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
My notes are disorganized, spread out over my app and screenshots, so I’ll give you topics to plug into google scholar. When you learn something, that information goes through a reconsolidation window <8 hours, which is the memory cementing into your brain. Now, when you remember something (from the cues that point to the old memory), the old memory is “reactivated” and then shortly afterward re-enters the “reconsolidation” window. During this window, an old memory can be updated and changed, including its emotional aspects, but only if it goes through reactivation before the attempted manipulation.
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memory reactivation reconsolidation craving / addiction [for its use in drug addiction and alcoholism, which can be extended outside its scope because addiction can be construed as a really strong desire or a thing just having very high positive valence]
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memory reconsolidation music / affect [one study found that, after reactivating a memory, if you remember it with music then the memory takes on the vibe of whatever music you listen to. In other words, when you remember things under the influence of music, your memories may become more like the music emotionally]
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Tetris effect PTSD [car accident patients at a hospital, when brought in during the reconsolidation phase of the memory, if you have them play Tetris their rate of PTSD decreases; similarly, if you have people reactivate a car accident memory and then play Tetris right after, their rate of negative flashbacks decrease]
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eyewitness misinformation effect test reconsolidation [if you have eyewitnesses take a test where they relay everything they saw, and then you introduce “misinformation” afterward eg by an interviewer just telling them false information, then they are likely to revise their true information into false information. This is stronger than if they didn’t take the test. The act of taking a test actually increases the amount of misinformation grafted and updated into the old, true information]
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reactivation reconsolidation fear / phobia [the new paradigm of treating phobias is that reactivation must occur for the memory to have longterm change through exposure. For instance, if you’re afraid of mice, you would briefly recall past fearful memories for 8 minutes, wait a few minutes, then “exposure” yourself to the mice. This updates previous memories, whereas an exposure session without the memory reactivation has less longterm extinction (or none at all)]
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a recent study trending online, “improving mental health by training the suppression of unwanted thoughts”. https://x.com/AdamMGrant/status/1888968823929471032 . In this study, the Cue of an unwanted thought is focused on for a couple minutes, and then a person “trains” himself to ignore any thoughts that come afterward. This is reactivating (focusing on cue intensely), and then updating the old memory through reconsolidation manipulation (focusing on quieting the mind).
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There’s a case I read of a child who saw a snake at a park and had no emotional reaction, but injured her hand on a car door an hour afterward. She became phobic of snakes. This is because the memory of the snake was meshed with the injury during the snake’s reconsolidation window, amplified by the evolutionary “potency” of snakes which make them particularly sensitive to this phenomenon (speculated).
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Alcohol after learning can help retain information, and thus is speculated to occur because it blocks out the learning of “new” information which can cause interference with the pre-alcohol information; in other words, the pre-alcohol reconsolidation is protected against any post-alcohol memory interference because we learn less when drunk.
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Perhaps one more tangential topic: giving yourself a test is often better for learning than reading / elaborating, but when you know very little of the material, it’s actually worse because you could “train” yourself to provide the wrong answer when seeing the cue. When studying, if you don’t know the answer, it’s better to not answer the question than guess, it would seem
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
Rolex may not produce many watches but the watches are expensive and this is why it results in ~ 2-3 billion in annual sales in America. Tariff it. I know a family who imports them, they live lavishly. Now consider there are hundreds of other brands that the wealthy obsessed over, and we ought to tariff them all, and give proceeds to middle class. Same with wine. Okay, a 30% increase on $7 wine doesn’t matter, but it begins to matter in the fine wine market and in clubs and so on.
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
Do you think the Muslim world’s proximity to Africa and use of Slavic slaves gave them a big advantage in warring against Europeans? They had a constant supply of slaves in their economy. I wonder how they would have done in war if they had no slaves supplying them constant boosts in productivity.
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
deciles spend a very similar proportion of their income on imported goods
“Proportion” being key here, because 134,000 households are sitting on 44 trillion dollars in wealth.
the lower deciles which can't afford to take the hit
This depends on where the tariff proceeds go. Your link is broken on my end so I can’t see the figures.
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
There’s an idea I keep reading that “lower/middle income buy most of their goods overseas and so will be hit harder by tariffs”, but I bet that if you look at actual dollar amount of imported goods, the wealthiest 10% eat up 99% of the dollar amount of imported goods. The Rolexes, foreign cars, lululemons, Canada goose, the multiple consumer electronics, the French fashion, the French wine, the obscure ingredients and cutlery at their restaurants, and so on. I hate all of this. So if Trump really does replace the income tax in the lower/middle class with the tariff proceeds, this may be incredible for redistribution. (Not that I think this will happen; who knows what he is going to do).
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
True but he’s gone down the Chesterton rabbit hole, which is a gateway drug to apologia and finally authentic religious interest
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
Scott is clearly very interested in Christian thought judging by his substack — does anyone know the extent of this interest?
Anyone have thoughts on Colors of her Coat? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-colors-of-her-coat
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
Do we know how early male children gravitate toward weapons of war?
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
Before we go without roofs, roofing companies will increase the wages they offer employees, and roofing companies will increase the quality of life they offer employees (fewer days a week, shorter hours). This is exactly what we want: greater quality of life for lower income and middle income Americans, at the direct expense of the upper class who waste our precious resources on ugly cars, biohazardous laws and Peloton machines. Contrary to popular belief, it has always been a zero-sum game.
coffee_enjoyer
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7d ago
It seems so, and I asked Grok about the last decade and he agreed. Although there have apparently been some referred “channel cases” related to incel stuff, but I’m not familiar with how that works and if convictions are public and I’m too lazy to look. That appears to be a terrorism prevention program, but the UK of course jails people just for material.
It must also be noted, just as a fun thought experiment, that if there are 100 murders a decade related to unrequited love, and if incels occupy 1% of the population, then we should expect 1 murder a decade which involves an incel, and involves unrequited love, and yet which was not actually caused by the ideology. Because men sometimes do kill unrequited crushes, all over the world, and have for all of history — without any accompanying ideological motive.
coffee_enjoyer
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7d ago
He was engaged in Reddit communities dedicated to disproving and dunking on incels: IncelsInAction and IncelTears, 39 posts altogether. In the community IncelExit, specifically dedicated to ensuring people do not become incels and instead find “healthy ways to cope”, he had 148 posts. He was a contributor to the Virgin subreddit, but that community actually has nothing to do with incels (obviously not every guy concerned about his virginity is an incel, otherwise literally every boy before his first experience is an incel).
He wrote,
”I’m not clarifying [sic, classifying] myself as an incel but people like similar to me they have had nothing but themselves and they socially had it tough. Like how can you have drive and will power?”
One could even argue that had he a community of people to commiserate with, that the chance of the attack would decrease; the whole reason for social support is to be heard sympathetically and to relate to someone else. Instead he was participating in subreddits that are absolutely merciless to boys to who exhibit anything approximating inceldom, which winds up including what a teenage boy naturally feels when he doesn’t have a girlfriend. (How many tens of millions once felt the pangs of “tfw no gf”?).
https://voxpol.eu/jake-davison-an-incel-case/
As an aside, I find the case especially sad because he posted in AfricansGoneWild. Look at his beard! His love for guns! My guy could have walked into a mosque and left with a Somali and a shahada.
coffee_enjoyer
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7d ago
Indeed, acid attacks have increased 70% over the year prior, and are disproportionately committed by Africans. The UK has had 500,000 knife offenses since 2014, and yet not a single violent crime has been found to be committed for incel motives over the past decade. (We even have a case of murder, thePlymouth shooting, where the perpetrator was knee deep in anti-incel online communities, and the triggering event was when the girl he was talking to online in America posted about him being a creep leading to the mods to delete his account (quite funny))
coffee_enjoyer
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7d ago
This series is not designed to be informative about any issue, though, it really seems designed to introduce terror and humiliation when specific cues are presented. These cues are the white child protagonist and a few buzzwords, but the show doesn’t even focus on the buzzwords, so it’s really only the white child. Just as someone who has spent a little more time than the average person reading about how specific cues can be manipulated to generate emotional reactions, modified through reactivation and reconsolidation, the directorial choices only make sense when you imagine an evil director who wants to inspire bad feelings about specific cues. Because it lines up too accurately.
For instance —
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the hiding of the boy’s face in the car, so that you don’t relate to him on his isolated journey back
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the emotionless bureaucratic faces of the police that strike down any sympathy to the boy; the bureaucratic language intentionally designed to train the viewer to treat the boy in a dehumanized way
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the white woman chosen for the minimum possible amount of emotional expression on her face, even worse than that Star Wars actress of yore
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the third episode which begins in a way that you could plausibly feel sympathy, and then reconsolidates that into terror and fear at him and some disgust
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the questioning designed to humiliate him, in other words, to demean his status in the eyes of the viewer
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showing a random encounter of a white student bullying a black student (the nephew of the cop or something), and then having a white woman cry over an African girl, for no other reason to instill a sense of a racial villain
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the use of childhood photos to make the viewer think it’s real
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the music (described as “tense and oppressive” in the subtitles)
Here’s what I mean. Imagine you like your friend Joe. I can get you to dislike him a bit more, maybe a lot more, by presenting a series of cues about Joe and then right afterward elaborating upon the ways in which Joe is unlikable. I can show you Joe’s face, and then I can play ominous music and talk about murder — this alone would move the needle if done repeatedly. I can go further, and have a sequence of clips of Joe mentioning why he is likable, and then right after each sequence I can show you someone in a higher status position showing no empathy to him and then talking about him like he is dehumanized. I can show you clips of him dehumanized, for instance him pissing himself, needing his father to put on pants for him, being stripped in front of him, being asked whether he’s gay — intuitively you know, bullies will create rumors like this because bullies are looking for the best way to reduce your status — and if I do this in the right sequence and with right power, everyone will like Joe less, scientifically, it will be measurable. You don’t realize how strong the effect is: there are studies which show it can be used to reduce cravings in alcoholics by reconsolidating the cues of alcohol to cues of disgust. It’s strong.
Someone involved in this movie was specifically interested in psychologically manipulating the viewer, to decrease positive valence associated with white male children and even white males generally, and increase it for minorities and women. Cue by cue, this is really what the movie is about, and the actual incel etc stuff takes up only a small fraction of the screen time, and wasn’t the intended cue manipulation by the director.
To make it worse, the black actor who we are supposed to consider a dignified British person is actually not, and I don’t mean in a physiognomy-enjoyer way, I mean in real life he was jailed for a gun offense and fined for assault, and his own demographic in the UK is disproportionately responsible for stabbings. But consider also that physiognomy reactions are strong: imagine Steve Schirripa playing a math genius, or imagine an aboriginal Australian woman teaching a Chinese guy how to do math — this is the British version of this, someone from a criminal people in a position above a boy who looks like he should be singing Anglican evensongs at King’s College Cambridge. Literally inverting the entire social order of the UK, the best that the UK can produce being put into a humiliation ritual by the worst that the UK still has to deal with.
coffee_enjoyer
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7d ago
The first episode is pro police brutality. The protagonist of the first two episodes is a police officer, and the daughter corrects her parents when they ask about a complaint. The response is considered justifiable by the police and the child’s own counsel didn’t consider police brutality worthy of attention. The audience takeaway is that this action is justified — all the cool protagonists were involved, and it’s only an angry low class Dad who temporarily wants to file a complaint. Episode two is where we learn about incels and the “red pill” from the detective’s son, and that this is what caused the murder. The accomplice is also clearly depicted as being incel adherent, hence his obsession with looks and asking the detective about whether he got girls.
I have never seen a piece of media that is so clearly a psy-op. The series is designed to (1) make children afraid of ever coming across something online about incels or the red pill by introducing a strong terror response, for instance (a) imagining themself as the boy and having your father watch as the police inspect your penis [this is the director’s intent, hence the focus on the father’s face], (b) making the boy utterly humiliated and demeaned, for instance his peeing himself and crying and then being thrown in jail after being humiliated by a woman, (c) making you think you can be an accomplice also thrown in jail, hence the plot line of the body who was beaten by the black girl [the only time the “authority-coded” characters cry and sympathize is for the black girl]; (2) make women afraid of boys who look or behave like the boy protagonist, by associating the boy with all sorts of evils and shock and humiliation; [3] artificially raise the status of minorities, for instance the black police officer and the south Asian teachers, whereas there’s an ugly white police officer who is intentionally depicted as an ugly older incel
It’s really not about “bullying is bad” at all. That’s what episode three was about. Episode three is about raising the possibility that this is the case, and then the director shooting down the notion psychologically via (1) depicting the boy as aggressive and manipulative and violent, (2) making us unsympathetic to the boy and instead sympathetic to the dominant detective, (3) showing the detective denying any sympathy to the boy at the end and then breaking down, signaling to the viewer to sympathize with the woman and not the boy.
What I just can’t wrap my head around is —
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is it a foreign country somehow spending, like, billions of dollars in espionage and subterfuge to get this show made and shown to the youth? Why would anyone show this to their own children?
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is it a domestically made psy-op in order to, like, “subjugate” white people in the UK further? Did the government think they were getting too uppity because of the grooming gangs?
Like there is nothing organic about the directorial decisions at all.
coffee_enjoyer
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9d ago
What are Americans most zealous about and willing to fight someone over? Sports? Not counting politics.
coffee_enjoyer
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14d ago
When you've…
Well yeah, because enormous things are at stake, and the choices are binary. We don’t have the luxury to care about inconsequential matters when the binary is so consequential. The very nature of the country is at stake: demographics, who becomes the eternal national villain. Any public criticism of Trump makes Republicans less likely to win in the future. And conservatives want Republicans to win. I’m sure if I were a radical transgender, or a black nationalist, I would feel the same way but in the other direction. What you’re asking is essentially —
why don’t conservatives decrease their chance of existential victory in order to punish the administration for something which the media has already punished them for?
— and the answer is simple: they want to win. I’m sure there’s a lot of criticism internally, but why would an influencer countersignal their own army here? Is the middle of a battle the right time to loudly denounce Napoleon?
coffee_enjoyer
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15d ago
I have a feeling there are many more factors to this, but I don’t really want to go through numerous dry textbooks to find it… maybe there’s a meta study I can find
coffee_enjoyer
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15d ago
Anyone have good reading on a hypothetically optimized placebo effect?
coffee_enjoyer
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16d ago
Keren Yarhi-Milo, the current dean of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, is a former Israeli intelligence officer. Do you think she is “advancing American interests”?
coffee_enjoyer
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16d ago
The actions that Columbia have announced will have an immediate effect on combating anti-Semitism, holding those responsible for the harassment of Jewish students accountable, and reorienting Columbia to its academic mission. Columbia has committed to: Reviewing admissions procedures to ensure an unbiased admissions process and specifically studying the decline in admissions of Jewish students.
https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/columbia-comply-anti-semitism-task-force-preconditions-met.html
Everything has and always will be pure tribalism. One must simply long for his tribe and dedicate his life to hardening it.
coffee_enjoyer
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17d ago
Would she cry over a wounded bird or a refugee?
coffee_enjoyer
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17d ago
Have you ever seen a neurotic bleeding heart black woman? seems exclusively like a white phenomenon, sometimes Hispanic and Asian.
coffee_enjoyer
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17d ago
The science of practice is going to have an effect no matter what kind of thing you’re learning. Variable practice, spacing, retrieval, elaboration. For instance, it is always going to be better to do 5 reps of A, 5 of B, 5 of c / d / e, all in one “session”, then just sitting down to do one technique for an hour. Always. And it is better to attempt to retrieve the technique out of your mind than looking back at notes; better to elaborate upon it with thoughts and examples and scenarios of your own; better to draw something you find interesting than otherwise (hence the nudes of art history); better to draw and then check your results like a test. And it’s going to be better to try fit in two or three short practices a day, rather than one long one every three days.
coffee_enjoyer
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18d ago
What is the most enjoyable conspiracy / new age belief to hold? I don’t mean convincing or beneficial, but just pure fun. Like, if beliefs were games or desserts, which belief would you buy to enjoy for an overindulgent weekend?
(Inspired by the weird egyptian pyramid theory going around online)
Not sure how this passes the intuition test. If I force you to labor in a mine and beat you if you don’t, the mines will be productive, and I don’t have to pay you much. Or, if I have to pay a cook $30 an hour to come to my house, it is more productive if I pay you in $4 beans and beat you if I don’t comply. All of the extra “resources” saved could be taxed to raise armies.
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