27 Jun 2010

Hairpin Bend

Although this answer is talking about the culture of Libertarians in general, I’m sharing this answer because I feel this is also a good analogy to why I’m elitist towards the definition of Hikikomori but it doesn’t mean I’m trying to insist a fan club community where people who don’t fit my definition should stay away from hikikomories and why I encourage non-hikikomories to participate but also I discourage people who don’t fit the label (from my perspective) to stop claiming they are hikikomories:
Libertarians, in my perception, are stuck in what I term a “hairpin bend”. That is, the people who are less wise than them are frequently indistinguishable from the people who are more wise than them.

There’s a large class of people who disagree with libertarianism because they’re clueless about economics, misunderstand the basic tenets and make stupid arguments. There’s another, smaller group of people who understand perfectly well how libertarianism works and choose to reject it for intelligent, well thought out reasons. From the outside, both will have roughly the same range of political beliefs.So what happens is some people from the first group will have an epiphany, they will finally get libertarianism and they will become a loyal convert. For some fraction of the group who become libertarians, they will have a second epiphany, realize the various fundamental flaws that make it a fundamentally unworkable system and leave libertarianism for a more mainstream political philosophy.

As you get a boiling off of the most enlightened members, the hairpin bend becomes a concentration of a certain type of person. This, in a large part, IMHO, explains the uniformity of personality of libertarians compared to many other social groups.Every time you have a hairpin bend, you tend to see this similar phenomena and it can often be used as a diagnosis for where hairpin bends exist.

Note: There may well exist further hairpin bends further up the wisdom chain and it does seem some people have an epiphany back into libertarianism. This is mainly a critique of the “naive libertarianism” viewpoint.

Source: http://www.quora.com/Why-do-libertarians-come-across-as-arrogant-and-thinking-they-know-all-the-answers

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20 Apr 2010

Word: Low Latent Inhibition

Just a word I recently found out that may lead to social withdrawal. (…or it may not, there’s no definitive study connecting the two)http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/001684.html

http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Latent_inhibitionhttp://highlysensitive.org/64/highly-sensitive-people-latent-inhibition-and-creativity/

http://the-mouse-trap.blogspot.com/2009/05/low-latent-inhibition-high-faith-in.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_inhibition

“Scientists have wondered for a long time why madness and creativity seem linked,” says Carson. “It appears likely that low levels of latent inhibition and exceptional flexibility in thought might predispose to mental illness under some conditions and to creative accomplishment under others.”

Most people are able to ignore the constant stream of incoming stimuli, but this capability is reduced in those with low latent inhibition. It is hypothesized that a low level of latent inhibition can cause either psychosis or a high level of creative achievement[3] or both, which is usually dependent on the subject’s intelligence.[4][2] Those of above average intelligence are thought to be capable of processing this stream effectively, enabling their creativity. Those with less than average intelligence, on the other hand, are less able to cope, and so as a result are more likely to suffer from mental illness.[5]

Previously, scientists have associated failure to screen out stimuli with psychosis. However, Peterson and his co-researchers - lead author and psychology lecturer Shelley Carson of Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Harvard PhD candidate Daniel Higgins - hypothesized that it might also contribute to original thinking, especially when combined with high IQ. They administered tests of latent inhibition to Harvard undergraduates. Those classified as eminent creative achievers - participants under age 21 who reported unusually high scores in a single area of creative achievement - were seven times more likely to have low latent inhibition scores.

In recent years, low latent inhibition is being looked at as less of a mental disorder; in the past it was often confused with schizophrenia, attention deficit disorder, bipolar disorder, and even depression, and almost all cases of misdiagnoses have been known to lead to over-medicated individuals.[citation needed] In some cases, these individuals have had adverse reactions to the intended medicines.[citation needed] In contrast to certain popular depictions, low latent inhibition is not a mental disorder but an observed personality trait, and a description of how an individual absorbs and assimilates data or stimuli. Furthermore, it does not necessarily lead to mental disorder or creative achievement—this is, like many other factors of life, a case of environmental and predispositional influences, whether these be positive (e.g., education) or negative (e.g., abuse) in nature.

“Throughout our daily lives we experience an influx of emotions, sensations, and sounds,” he writes. “If we had to consciously decide at all times what to ignore and what to pay attention to, we would quickly become overstimulated.

“This ability to screen things out of awareness that were previously tagged as irrelevant is called latent inhibition. Latent inhibition has a strong biological basis and operates automatically to filter out information.

“Those high in latent inhibition are very good at this inhibition. Those with a reduced latent inhibition have a difficult time with this form of inhibition. Reduced latent inhibition has been associated with schizophrenia as well as a predisposition to psychosis.” 

Peterson et al. (2002) argued that individual differences in a tendency toward exploratory behavior and cognition may be related to the activity of the mesolimbic dopamine system and predispose an individual to perceive even preexposed stimuli as interesting and novel, resulting in low LI. Moreover, under stressful or novel conditions, the dopamine system in these individuals will become more activated and the individual will instigate exploratory behavior. Under such conditions, decreased LI could help the individual by allowing him or her more options for reconsideration and thereby more ways to resolve the incongruity. It could also be disadvantageous in that the stressed individual risks becoming overwhelmed with possibilities. Research has shown that the combination of high IQ and reduced LI predicts creative achievement (Carson et al., 2003). Therefore, the individual predisposed to schizophrenia may suffer from an influx of experiential sensations and possess insufficient executive functioning to cope with the influx, whereas the healthy individual low in LI and open to experience (particularly an openness and faith in his or her gut feelings) may be better able to use the information effectively while not becoming overwhelmed or stressed out by the incongruity of the situation. Clearly, further research will need to investigate these ideas, but an understanding of the biological basis of individual differences in different forms of implicit processing and their relationship to openness to experience and intuition will surely increase our understanding of how certain individuals attain the highest levels of creative accomplishment.
 
“After all, decreased LI may make an individual more likely to see connections that others may not notice. Prominent psychologists such as Hans Eysenck and Colin Martindale have argued for the importance of disinhibition for creative thought. 

Erika Harris says:
03.16.09 at 7:48 am

As an HSP, I identify with having decreased LI. And I imagine most HSPs would. Even when we would very much like to filter out excess stimuli from our environments, our nervous systems keep feeding us the data and sensory inputs… regardless if we feel quite full. So, it seems since we don’t have access to *inner* LI, we place special emphasis on *outer* LI — we create sanctuaries for ourselves… quiet spaces… regenerative nooks where we can give our neurons a much needed break.

This was a very thought-provoking article. Thank you for it, and all of the treasures here.

A less able mind has a greater need to be able to filter out and ignore stimuli. A less intelligent person with a low level of latent inhibition for filtering out familiar stimuli may well sink into mental illness as a result. But a smarter mind can handle the effects of taking note of a larger number of stimuli and even find interesting and useful patterns by continually processing a larger quantity of familiar information.

Note from the text of the full paper that stress causes the release of the hormone corticosterone which lowers latent inhibition. In a nutshell, when an organism runs into problems that cause stress the resulting release of stress hormones causes the mind to shift into a state where it will examine factors in the environment that it normally ignores. This allows the organism to look for solutions to the stress-causing problem that would be ignored in normal and less stressed circumstances.

So perhaps we could hypothesize something like this:under stressful conditions,or in person-ality configurations characterized by increased novelty-sensitivity,approach behavior,and DA activity, decreased LI is associated with increased permeability and flexibility of functional cog- nitive and perceptual category [see Barsalou (1983)for a discussion of such categories ].Imagine a situation where current plans are not producing desired outcomes —a situation where current categories of perception and cognition are in error, from the pragmatic perspective. Something anomalous or novel emerges as a consequence (Peterson,1999), and drives exploratory behavior. Stress or trait-dependent decreased LI, under such circumstances, could produce increased signal (as well as noise), with regards to the erroneous pattern of behavior and the anomaly that it produced. This might offer the organism, currently enmeshed in the consequences of mistaken presuppositions, the possibility of gathering new information, where nothing but categorical certainty once existed. Decreased LI might therefore be regarded as advantageous, in that it allows for the perception of more unlikely, radical and numerous options for reconsideration, but disadvantageous in that the stressed or approach-oriented person risks ‘‘drowning in possibility,’’ to use Kierkegaard ’s phrase.

One can easily see how this response could have been selected for evolutionarily. At the same time, one can also see how chronic stress could lead a person to fall into a state of confusion as a sustained large flood of stimuli could overwhelm the brain by giving it too much to think about and make a person unable to clearly see solutions that will relieve the feeling of stress.

Additional:1. This isn’t related but it might add to my post here so I’m linking the two each other.

2. Fictional but some might feel it adds to the above (it’s also what led me to the wiki article): http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SherlockScan Sherlock Scan

A device used to introduce a detective character and his skills. The detective mentions some fact about the person he’s just met, something that is not immediately obvious and he has no way of knowing (“Quitting cigs looks like it was good for you”, “How’s the wedding planning going?”). The other character looks skeptical or surprised, then the detective describes his reasoning from a set of minor clues (state and style of clothes, marks on skin, etc.) and consequent assumptions. Note that this is often cited as a demonstration of a detective’s deductive ability (reaching a conclusion via a connected, logical chain of observations) when in fact, this is an example of inductive reasoning (reaching a conclusion via a series of generalised observations) and is far less logically sound. (Of course, this is also the sort of evidential reasoning employed during most scientific experiments. The result of such induction is a likely solution, but not necessarily the only solution.)

3. The orchid-dandelion effect: http://the-mouse-trap.com/2010/03/31/stress-and-neurogenesis-the-orchid-dandelion-effect/ I would first like to briefly summarize the findings of the study:
  • chronic stress paradigm used was that of social defeat (cohabitation with a socially dominant conspecific). 10 days of this social defeat were administered. this typically leads to social avoidance behaviors and these behaviors are correlated with other depressive phenotypes.
  • after 10 days when social avoidance (time interacting with a potential friendly con-specific) was measured it was found that about half the mice exhibited social avoidance and were sensitive to the stress; the rest of the half were ‘resilient’ and did not differ from control mice (not exposed to chronic social defeat) in their social avoidance.
  • all mice, both resilient and sensitive , showed decreased proliferation in subgranular zone (SGZ) for new cells immediately after stress exposure. This effect disappeared / normalised after 24 hrs.
  • Cell survival for cells created before stress exposure was not affected by stress exposure.
  • cell survival for neurons created 1 day after stress exposure was enhanced selectively for those mice that were susceptible or sensitive to stress, but was not enhanced for the resilient mice or the mice taken as a whole.
  • when the mice were irradiated, before stress exposure,  to prevent neurogenesis, then the social avoidance behavior, even in susceptible mice disappeared. It is thus evident that social avoidance is mediated by increased neurogenesis post-stress exposure in the susceptibel mice.
Overall, the results I believe are clearly in favor of conceptualizing the susceptible mice as ‘orchid’ mice – having enhanced tendency for neurogenisis following positive/negative events of interests. they are biologically sensitive to context and exhibit neurogenesis reactivity similar to stress reactivity shown by orchid children. Given a positive life experience the increased neurogenesis post-event helps in having happy memories and cognition s and better functioning; preponderance of negative life vents in contrast lead to more negative and longlasting cognitions and memories leading to reduced functioning. Of course the dandelion mice are resilient and not that much affected by chronic stress. However, they would also not be able to make best use of environment in good conditions.

The only hiccup I see in the whole scheme of things is the effect of anti-depressants on neurogenesis and my earlier theorizing that cells may die under repetitive stress and reduced or absent neurogenisis would be a prime factor in depression. However, the relation between neurogenesis and stress will be , I am sure, complex and needs to be settled empirically, rather than theoretically.  However one thing is clear, neurogenesis has a rpime role to play in depression , mediated perhaps by, chronic stress exposure and genetic diatheisis (orchid-dandelion effect).

 

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25 Sep 2009

Justice by Points

Justice by points essentially means they’d ignore a crazed ax wielding man walking down the street because they are buys ticketing people and trying to harass them into a half-excuse to arrest them. Then when the ax man comes back after butchering a family, they call a mini-army and take him down, then get even more “Points”. But the officer who just gives warnings and stares away bad guys before they do something bad at least doesn’t get a promotion, if not fired…

And, likewise, Prosecutors will go after girls photographing themselves nude but ignore insider traders and other high-profile crimes. More “Slam Dunk” cases, better score. Criminal who do a Lot of damage to society but can afford good lawyers, bad score.

Source: http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2009/09/25/schoolgirls-arrested-for-photographing-themselves/

Typo issues aside, this is why even as a Hikikomori, it is important to discuss the laws and policies of the world. It may seem like this is a problem for the outsiders or that we should deal with these issues with a severity of most internet forums (i.e. dogmatic and viciously against anyone with opposing opinions) but the problem is that the rest of the world are too busy tiring themselves to really listen unless there’s a special occasion like the election.

Yes, most of us aren’t politicians, political science students and internet sadists but that’s why we have one of the most ample opportunities to listen and apply that dream by the US Constitution Founding Fathers which was for law to be understood and discussed by common lay-men and not be controlled by a “ruling class” (I’m sorta combining a theme by Marx here). That said, I’m not saying many of us don’t know some politics but I think we as an online community even when talking about politics treat it like the rest of people do and I can sit here and type all kinds of adjective of what that means, but those of you who’ve participated in an online political discussion already know how, just like religious topics, they are often anxiety-inducing topics even to normal internet surfers. How we progress beyond a community that won’t crumble when bringing up those themes will be a huge test of how much our community has improved beyond normal communities. How much we value the information we get from that kind of a community may even be the X-factor in elevating us into an online community so unified the likes that may never have existed before.

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21 Sep 2009

Practice rephrasing common phrases to wordings that suggest possibilities.

From: http://thinksimplenow.com/happiness/the-power-of-language/

Alot of the article’s content I find to be too long winded in defending it’s point. (The not seeing salt in front of you bit for example.)

Similarly, alot of the alternative examples can be attributed to positive “woo-woo” thinking phrases but I find the core points:

  • can’t doesn’t exist
  • must is always only in your head

and

  • opportunity is so everywhere that you can find it if you look for it

…to be “golden rule” truths that make this post worth sharing:

Suggested Action Items:

  • Come up with alternative phrasings to popular I can’t phrases. Here are some examples:
    • Instead of saying “I can’t find it”, say “I have not seen it yet, l will keep looking.” or “If I could find it, where would it be?”
    • Instead of saying “I can’t get it working”, consider saying “It is not working yet, but I will keep trying until it works.” Or “I am still working on this. If you have a sec, will you help me?”
    • Instead of saying “I can’t make it today because…”, consider skipping out the excuses and give a firm but honest answer, “I am going to pass on it now, maybe next time? Thank you for inviting me. It means a lot.”
Stop telling others they can’t do something. Alternatives to “You can’t do that” are “I prefer you not to do that” or “I don’t recommend doing that because …” or “I tried it last time and it did not work for me, maybe it will work for you.”

Suggested Action Items:

  • Instead of saying “I have to do this“, say “I want to do this” or “I am doing this because (insert benefits to you)”
  • If you don’t want to do something, instead of giving people excuses starting with “I’d love to but, I have to…“, just gracefully say “Thanks for the invite, but I am resting at home tonight.” Or “Thank you. I have plans tonight. Maybe next time.” (Note: a date with yourself at home count as plans.) You don’t owe anything to anybody. Be honest and do so with your head held high.
“Your beliefs don’t simply reflect your reality, they create your reality.”

As for why I hate these:

a.

In terms of presentation, it’s very rare for writers of these types to have the guts to address Orwell’s Politics in the English Language. My guess is that they are just rehashing some old advises or they haven’t dug deep enough to the why of these methods or it simply ruins the whole “positive minded” angle they have because nothing is more bleak than trying to explain how we live in not only a dumbed down society but in a self-training negativity inducing one.

It’s just much easier to put the blame all on our shoulders. Make it a case of bad habits we picked up. Hide the decay and you can make the pesticide look like the miracle pill.

Ultimately though, the worst case the presentation does is it relies on confirmation bias to deceive those who agree with it when the much grander more cynical social problem doesn’t have this flaw.

I can guarantee you that most of those people who like or agree with the article aren’t doing so because they found how their beliefs do really shape their reality but instead they found how true it is indeed that they often say “I’m sorry.” alot.

I had this problem too but then that leads to my 2nd issue:

b.

The thing with these articles is that they focus too much on words on some aspect and then they focus too little on other aspects and you end up throwing the dice and hoping that your implementation of the article works out just like when you’re hoping that generic affirmation given to you works out vs. a well done affirmation that an informed person and you developed to maximize it’s effect.

Saying sorry for example. it’s worth an attempt because even if you really have a non-constant apologizing belief, saying sorry all the time will annoy the wrong person.

That’s where these kinds of article dig deep: They go beyond that annoyance aspect and pull you into the argument that the word also changed your belief or that if you change the word, your belief will change from the lack of using that word.

Where it doesn’t dig deep though is the issue that it just doesn’t work for every word and it doesn’t work for most words like can’t because these words are often beyond beliefs and rely on other aspects like skills, talent, time, opportunity and sentence structures.

Saying you will replace can with I will keep looking for example won’t really do you much good because you already have the belief that you will keep on looking despite saying those words!

Not only that, it tricks the more blinded of positive thinkers to adapt the idea that negative thought is all about excuses!

The ultimate lie though is when you adapt this to most common phrases and find out that instead of it helping you, you end up mentally thinking in your head: “Ok, I won’t say this. I won’t say this.” …and you end up not only thinking and saying the common negative inducing phrases more, you still don’t quite get the impact of why certain words are dangerous.

Not only that, these articles ignore the fact that we often adapt words because of our surroundings. Unless you happen to change your environment into a positive one, all these alternative sentences are merely small fishes in a torrent of negativity you are constantly being bombarded with. You’re not going to change by adapting it willy-nilly. It’s only going to hit you when the phrases themselves make sense to you because you’ve already changed your beliefs and can resist the constant anti-bombardment from your surroundings. By that time, most of these word alternatives would be useless to you and the ones that didn’t work are still constant distractions in your head if you still believe in this idea!

That said the reason why this philosophy has importance is because even as cliche as they are today, many of them can still send warnings and alert us to the self-negativity that we may be unconsciously and habitually imposing on our beliefs.

This goes beyond the value of positivity because as Orwell alluded to: left ignored, these can allow politicians to pull a fast one on you and your beliefs.

It’s the old appeal to pathos but it’s not just prevalent in politics anymore. It’s prevalent in ads, blogs, infotainment, etc. and sure you might already know this and feel this is common sense knowledge in this day and age but that’s why Orwell’s article was important when it was written.

It wasn’t because people then didn’t know of this but Orwell with that article brought it to the forefront and presented the full danger of what words can do from a political angle. In fact, it can be argued that it wasn’t enough and that it only popularized the idea of keeping words simple, understandable and direct while not hitting home the fact that we should particularly be wary of common words all around us. Wary enough to attempt a dictionary out of it. Wary enough to explain why certain words in certain sentences and certain structures are belief-changing despite neither being hypnotism nor subliminal advertising.

Instead what we ended up having on a common enough layman plate is some positivity blogs taking this concept and selling it as “feel good” articles, some positivity blogs suggesting this because they one day realize how changing one word changed their mindset and over-hyperbolize it to all other words without testing and narrowing to words that really worked for them and in between those, some pop psychology on the way the unconscious mind and habits influence our beliefs.

The worst crime to us layman is that these articles don’t even put the disclaimer on how changing your words can make you come off as weird when talking to someone else.

Yes, it’s obvious and “we should’ve already known that” but certainly enough, this fact is more elusive than “drink moderately” ads.

You wouldn’t believe how easy it is to start adapt a new word, get confident with it and suddenly you test it on a conversation one day and it just sounds bad. No matter how well it worked in your head or how valid the word is, it just sounds bad.

Just imagine yourself replying to another person with this: “I have not seen it yet, l will keep looking”

It’s THAT bad only this is the more obvious ones. Imagine actually having a decent word and trying it anyway. The whole thing not only falls apart but your positivity minded ideology immediately dips down to full anxious negativity.

Anyway, this author asks What are some alternative phrases you can suggest to and these are my suggestions (and also my reply). They’re far from decent and alot of them I got from elsewhere (and I don’t speak these out loud) but these are what I have:

  • News -> Olds (News as in newspaper. I think I got this one from Steve Pavlina - I’m not really anal for sources. Anyway here’s the sentence that inspired it: Most news stories are repetitive, redundant, and say the same things twice.  Very few stories are actually fresh and new.  News should really be called “olds.”)
  • Positive -> Pro-active (although this is really spelled proactive, I prefer the emphasis on the word “active”)
  • Multitask -> MultiFocus (Because it is not the number of tasks we are constantly doing that reduces our efficiency but rather the number of things splitting our focus that confuses us to what we want to be doing.)
  • Practice -> Grind/Grinding (This one is more negative and is obviously an rpg reference)
  • Taught -> Enabled them to discover
  • Polyphasic Sleep -> PolyActive Healing (My uneducated attempt at self-psycho-analyzing: The desire to replace the word sleep with the word healing to clarify to one’s consciousness the true value of sleep and hopefully lessen the misinterpretation that one is merely “resting” or wasting away their time when one is feeling drowsy but busy.)
  • Nice Guy -> Annoying Pussy (I’m serious with this btw. Here’s the rationale: The phenomena by which mainstream society conformizes and verbally praises the act of annoyance and wimpiness and re-interprets these as the act of a legitimate nice male person thus subsidizing this behaviour which results in men misguidedly adapting this approach to court women.)
  • Teacher -> Opportunizer (A word replacement designed to focus on the true structure of learning thus keeping people from turning these educators into authoritarians of education.)
  • Difficult -> Challenging (The first word replacement that got me back to believing in this concept. Forget where the original link was though. It probably sounds fluffier without it and maybe it still would even with it but it was a strong influence to me at the time)
  • H.E.L.L. (another negative one and this one doesn’t apply but it stands for History, Experience, Life, Legacy)
  • Storytelling -> Storysharing (I personally prefer the words Plagiarizing but it is offensive to many and there’s a negative connotation in that word that even I couldn’t avoid in my head.)

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10 Sep 2009

Burb; Psychiatrist

happyharry78: What exactly is a "burb"

Tank-the-Hatchet: If you don`t know, your most likley are one. FR: A burb is someone like Mr. Rogers or Pollyanna or the ppl of Pleasantville before color came to town. PPL who work 9-5 jobs, beeing content in there hivementality and only carrying about cutting the lawn on Saturday. There expierences are restricted to shakeing there heads at the news every night and mubeling How evil and sick the world is.

happyharry78: (...) your nearest psychiatryst

Tank-the-Hatchet: I hate shrinks. There even worse then burbs. They only have there little slotboxworld and if they can`t fit you into one of these, then someting must be wrong with you. Any hint of indviuality and none-borg-obbidence to the masses makes you a danger to soceity and you need to be locked up in there POV.

They pretend to know everything in the world but in reality they don`t have a clue cause all they know about the world is from books.

Source: Flesh + Blood

Topic Title: I hate this movie

Source: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089153/board/flat/39776781

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