14 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2023
    1. there's a lot of um dissonance confusion that we live as if living a normal life while watching news in our our pocket a kind 00:08:00 of planet in our pocket that says everything's falling apart and yet we go to the shop and we buy our milk and we walk back home as if things were normal so that's kind of the metac 00:08:12 crisis too it's the experience of of confusion that's now baked into our lives as we hear about our world collapsing on the news and on our phones 00:08:25 but often live as if life could carry on forever
      • for: cognitive dissonance, local vs global, polycrisis - cognitive dissonance
  2. Mar 2023
    1. the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its “synthesis” report summarizing the findings of its sixth assessment (the last occurred in 2014). The findings are painfully familiar: the world is falling far short of its emission goals, and without rapid reductions this decade, the planet is likely to shoot to beyond 1.5 or even 2 degrees Celsius of warming this century (we are at 1.1 degrees now). We seem to be stuck in a doom-loop news cycle where scientific reports create headlines, and earnest climate commentators insist the new report represents a true “wake-up call” for action, and then . . . emission keep rising. They hit a record once again in 2022. The world of climate politics appears to exist in two completely different worlds. There is a largely liberal and idealist world of climate technocrats where science informs policy, and there is the real, material capitalist world of power.
      • A good observation
        • about the cognitive dissonance of the situation
  3. Aug 2022
    1. You can use terribly slow scripting and techniques and get something working, not because the tooling is genius, but because the hardware is so incredibly fast.

      If the thesis is sound, then logically we should expect the instances where people have decided to "use terribly slow scripting and techniques" to produce better programs; the not-slow (non-"scripting") stuff to be worse.

      You can only pick one:

      • software is worse because hardware improvements mean that what were previously noticeable inefficiencies are no longer noticeable
      • programs that are written in low-level languages and don't as much incur runtime overheads are better on average because they're written in low-level languages that aren't as wasteful
    1. It should be dead simple to distribute content (eg. static content).It should be easy to build apps.It should be not too hard to build a platform.

      The thing that gets me about takes like this is that it's all the stuff below the Web content layer that accounts for what makes all this stuff harder than it needs to be.

      What's the hard part about distributing content (static or not, but let's go with static for simplicity)? It's registering a domain, updating DNS, and keeping a Web server up—all systems that have nothing to do with the "infernal" trio and also generally programmed in what are typically described as saner languages and their traditions. It's either that, or it's relying on somebody else, like GitHub Pages, and integrating the implementation details/design decisions for their value-add into your workflow.

      To "build a platform" is ambiguous, but it sounds a lot like "creating a server-side application to serve non-static content and handle associated requests". Is the infernal trio to blame for the difficulties of that, too?

    1. The point is to write bug-free code.

      With this comment, the anti-JS position is becoming increasingly untenable. The author earlier suggested C as an alternative. So their contention is that it's easier to write bug-free code in C than it is in JS. This is silly.

      C hackers like Fabrice Bellard don't choose C for the things they do because it's easier to write bug-free code in C.

    1. What is not OK is what I perceive as the dominant attitude today: sell SciPy as a great easy-to-use tool for all scientists, and then, when people get bitten by breaking changes, tell them that it’s their fault for not having a solid maintenance plan for their code.
    1. I avoided using languages that I don't know how to bootstrap like node.js

      There's a weird (read: "weirdly obvious") category error here. NodeJS is not a language. (This wouldn't be so notable if the comment didn't go on to say "The key point is writing to an interface and not an implementation.")

      The puzzle piece that fits the shape of the hole here is "JS". JS is the language, NodeJS is one of its implementations—and chubot knew both of these things already, so it's odd that it was expressed this way. Plus, there's a lot more diversity of JS implementations than exist for e.g. Python...

  4. Jul 2022
    1. Should something new be experienced, it will be unexpected, may beoverwhelming and may not fit into any meaningful representation or expression at all. The new assuch, the possible source of transformation, regeneration and vision, does not submit to the orderimposed by the personware, it is naturally on a collision course with it and a source to various degreesof cognitive dissonance. As such, it poses a threat that a well-functioning cognitive system mustmediate.

      !- for : climate change, rapid whole system change * This is a common response of people conditioned to the status quo personware - it is overwhelming and threatening * Defensiveness and conservatism to preserve the familiar elements of the status quo is a common response, including all forms of climate denialism * Early stages of pandemic in which people were afraid to don masks for fear of being ostracized

    2. In summary, X, Y and Z clearly occupy entirely different positions in the social fabric andeach experiences life entirely differently. They live with entirely different sets of constraints andopportunities and consequently face different challenges both psychologically and in their interactionswith the rest of the world. And yet, all three of them suffer from a cognitive dissonance between theirindividual drives and dispositions and the demands of the social roles they feel obliged to play.

      !- example ; lebenswelt, lebenslage, multi-meaningverse, perspectival knowing, situatedness

      !- key insight : social dissonance between their aspirations and demand of social roles they feel compelled to obey.

  5. Feb 2022
    1. Our brains work not that differently in terms of interconnectedness.Psychologists used to think of the brain as a limited storage spacethat slowly fills up and makes it more difficult to learn late in life. Butwe know today that the more connected information we alreadyhave, the easier it is to learn, because new information can dock tothat information. Yes, our ability to learn isolated facts is indeedlimited and probably decreases with age. But if facts are not kept

      isolated nor learned in an isolated fashion, but hang together in a network of ideas, or “latticework of mental models” (Munger, 1994), it becomes easier to make sense of new information. That makes it easier not only to learn and remember, but also to retrieve the information later in the moment and context it is needed.

      Our natural memories are limited in their capacities, but it becomes easier to remember facts when they've got an association to other things in our minds. The building of mental models makes it easier to acquire and remember new information. The down side is that it may make it harder to dramatically change those mental models and re-associate knowledge to them without additional amounts of work.


      The mental work involved here may be one of the reasons for some cognitive biases and the reason why people are more apt to stay stuck in their mental ruts. An example would be not changing their minds about ideas of racism and inequality, both because it's easier to keep their pre-existing ideas and biases than to do the necessary work to change their minds. Similar things come into play with respect to tribalism and political party identifications as well.

      This could be an interesting area to explore more deeply. Connect with George Lakoff.

  6. Sep 2021
    1. Billionaire business owners deployed lobbyists to make sure Trump’s 2017 tax bill was tailored to their benefit. Confidential IRS records show the windfall that followed.

      @choppa1890 says "will read and get mad about one of these days"

      With respect.....this learned attitude is the leading contributor to the problem with modern America. The quote reflects cognitive dissonance that is dealt with through a weak form of denial. @choppa1890 uses a mentally acceptable task (posting in Hypothesis) and 'avoidance', to resolve the dissonance. @choppa1890 can not allow him/herself to read the article, create knowledge and emotion. It's too much to think about so I will make a note in Hypothesis and move on!

  7. May 2021
    1. Examples of this sort of non-logical behaviour used to represent identity can be found in fiction in:

      • Dr. Seuss' The Butter Battle Book (Random House,1984) which is based on
      • the war between Lilliput and Blefuscu in Jonathan Swift's 1726 satire Gulliver's Travels, which was based on an argument over the correct end to crack an egg once soft-boiled.

      It almost seems related to creating identity politics as bike-shedding because the real issues are so complex that most people can't grasp all the nuances, so it's easier to choose sides based on some completely other heuristic. Changing sides later on causes too much cognitive dissonance, so once on a path, one must stick to it.

  8. Sep 2020
    1. “Motivation conditions cognition,” Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, wisely told me. Very few Trump supporters I know are able to offer an honest appraisal of the man. To do so creates too much cognitive dissonance.
  9. Dec 2015
    1. Agreementis the good stuff in science; it’s the high fives.But it is easy to think we’re in agreement, when really we’re not. Modeling ourthoughts on heuristics and pictures may be convenient for quick travel down the road,but we’re liable to miss our turnoff at the first mile. The danger is in mistaking ourconvenient conceptualizations for what’s actually there. It is imperative that we havethe ability at any time to ground out in reality.