1,039 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2024
    1. Leisure was one precondition: enough people had to be free of the demands of subsistence to have time on their hands that required filling.

      for - boredom - Deep Humanity - boredom - psychology - boredom - adjacency - boredom - insight - history - modernity

      adjacency - between - boredom - insight - history - modernity - Adjacency statement - This is an insightful observation that - the affordances of a technologically sophisticated modernity - promotes boredom by providing a means to escape it, - rather than deal with it. - The notable decline of religiosity in the West also cuts off a traditional means of getting in touch with the wonder of existence - This could explain the tiffin popularity of meditation in the West as a non religious vehicle for centering in the here and now, - as boredom is a condition of avoiding the here and now

      • Leisure was one precondition:
        • enough people had to be free of the demands of subsistence
        • to have time on their hands that required filling.
      • Modern capitalism multiplied amusements and consumables,
      • while undermining spiritual sources of meaning
      • that had once been conferred more or less automatically.
    1. To what extent in this process is the client reconfiguring and refocusing on their relationship with those around them? Does the past have absolute process (in the Zulu incarnation)? It obviously may not in the Western practice, but perhaps the client may more easily come to terms with those around them as a result, and this is more beneficial than a "truer" outcome?

  2. Jan 2024
    1. 1:10:00 identity politics: the only stable "identity" is personality type, which is inborn and constant for life.<br /> my heresy: i found a hypothesis for the question: how must we connect different personality types to create stable groups?<br /> "the system" likes my work so much, they are threatening to bust my door, steal my stuff, and throw me in jail for five years, as a punishment for publishing my radical answer to the question: who are my friends?<br /> my book: pallas. who are my friends. group composition by personality type

  3. Dec 2023
    1. Exploring psychological responses to the climate crisis to strengthen relationships and resilience for a just future

      Climate Psychology Alliance

    1. we are certainly special I mean 00:02:57 no other animal rich the moon or know how to build atom bombs so we are definitely quite different from chimpanzees and elephants and and all the rest of the animals but we are still 00:03:09 animals you know many of our most basic emotions much of our society is still run on Stone Age code
      • for: stone age code, similar to - Ronald Wright - computer metaphor, evolutionary psychology - examples, evolutionary paradox of modernity, evolution - last mile link, major evolutionary transition - full spectrum in modern humans, example - MET - full spectrum embedded in modern humans

      • comment

      • insights

        • evolutionary paradox of modernity
          • modern humans , like all the living species we share the world with, are the last mile link of the evolution of life we've made it to the present, so all species of the present are, in an evolutionary sense, winners of their respective evolutionary game
          • this means that all our present behaviors contain the full spectrum of the evolutionary history of 4 billion years of life
          • the modern human embodies all major evolutionary transitions of the past
          • so our behavior, at all levels of our being is a complex and heterogenous mixture of evolutionary adaptations from different time periods of the 4 billion years that life has taken to evolve.
          • Some behaviors may have originated billions of years ago, and others hundred thousand years ago.
      • Examples: humans embody full spectrum of METs in our evolutionary past

        • fight and flight response
          • early hominids on African Savannah hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago when hominids were predated upon by wild predators
        • cancer
          • normative intercell communication breaks down and reverts to individual cell behavior from billions of years ago
            • see Michael Levin's research on how to make metastatic cancer cells return to normative collective, cooperative behavior
        • children afraid to sleep in the dark
          • evolutionary adaptation against dangerous animals that might have hid in the dark - dangerous insiects, snakes, etc, which in the past may have resulted in human fatalities
        • obesity
          • hunter gatherer hominid attraction to rich sources of fruit. Eating as much of it as we can and maybe harvesting as much as we can and carrying that with us.
            • like squirrels storing away for the winter.
  4. Nov 2023
  5. Oct 2023
    1. In the main psychological and philosophical dictionaries, textbooks, and leading world encyclopaedias there are for the most part three different opinions of the origin of this term which, as the word denoting scientific or philosophic dealing with the phenomena of psychic (subjective, conscious) life, has now come into very wide use. All the three names connected with the formation of the term "psychology" are the names of the people of German origin from the 16th century. Two of them are of little significance: Rudolf Göckel and Otto Casmann, while the third is very famous and generally known: Filip Melanchton

      It is important to state that these three names are important for the origin of psychology. Though the original philosopher may be unclear, the names listed in the paragraph were the first to document using the term "psychology".

    1. The results showed that the group asked to reduce their social media use had an average 15% improvement in immune function, including fewer colds, flu, warts, and verrucae, a 50% improvement in sleep quality, and 30% fewer depressive symptoms.
    1. Adolescents who spend more than 3 hours per day on social media may be at heightened risk for mental health problems, particularly internalizing problems.
  6. Sep 2023
    1. In psychology and sociology, masking is the process in which an individual camouflages their natural personality or behavior to conform to social pressures, abuse, or harassment.

      Masking as camouflaging real self

      Also see persona

    1. The dualism of scientific materialism and its one-person psychologies are arguably complicit in much of the psychological and social damage we are now recognising.
      • for: dualism, dualism - psychology, unintended consequences, unintended consequences - dualism in psychology, progress trap, progress trap - dualism in psychology

      • paraphrase

        • The dualism of scientific materialism gives rise to one-person psychologies
          • and are arguably complicit in much of the psychological and social damage we are now recognising.
        • For instance, a good deal of the historical denial of the role of psychological and social trauma has been traced
          • back to the Freudian model’s almost exclusive focus on the internal world;
            • the actual impact of others and society has been, as a result, relatively ignored.
        • Modern psychiatry, which accepts the same philosophical model but changes the level of explanation, is just as culpable.
        • Likewise CBT, with its focus on dysfunctional thought patterns and rational remedies administered from the outside, also follows the same misguided philosophy.
      • question

        • what are concrete ways this has caused harm?
      • future work
        • perform literature review on case studies where Winnicott's approach has been a more constructive therapeutic one
    1. Recent work has revealed several new and significant aspects of the dynamics of theory change. First, statistical information, information about the probabilistic contingencies between events, plays a particularly important role in theory-formation both in science and in childhood. In the last fifteen years we’ve discovered the power of early statistical learning.

      The data of the past is congruent with the current psychological trends that face the education system of today. Developmentalists have charted how children construct and revise intuitive theories. In turn, a variety of theories have developed because of the greater use of statistical information that supports probabilistic contingencies that help to better inform us of causal models and their distinctive cognitive functions. These studies investigate the physical, psychological, and social domains. In the case of intuitive psychology, or "theory of mind," developmentalism has traced a progression from an early understanding of emotion and action to an understanding of intentions and simple aspects of perception, to an understanding of knowledge vs. ignorance, and finally to a representational and then an interpretive theory of mind.

      The mechanisms by which life evolved—from chemical beginnings to cognizing human beings—are central to understanding the psychological basis of learning. We are the product of an evolutionary process and it is the mechanisms inherent in this process that offer the most probable explanations to how we think and learn.

      Bada, & Olusegun, S. (2015). Constructivism Learning Theory : A Paradigm for Teaching and Learning.

  7. Aug 2023
    1. In finance, the greater fool theory suggests that one can sometimes make money through the purchase of overvalued assets — items with a purchase price drastically exceeding the intrinsic value — if those assets can later be resold at an even higher price.
  8. Jul 2023
      • Title
        • Psychology and Global Climate Change: Addressing a Multi-faceted Phenomenon and Set of Challenges A Report by the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on the Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change
      • Authors
        • Janet Swim
        • Susan Clayton
        • Thomas Doherty
        • Robert Gifford
        • George Howard
        • Joseph Reser
        • Paul Stern
        • Elke Weber
  9. Jun 2023
    1. The first group comprised psychologists in the behavioural school, withfigures such as B. F. Skinner and Ivan Pavlov.
    2. We would nowadays probablycall the second group ‘constructivist’ or ‘cognitive’ or ‘sociocultural’psychologists, though the committee did not venture to name them as such. Thislatter school (or schools) they took to be associated with psychologists such asthe British Susan Isaacs, the Russian Alexander Luria, the American JeromeBruner, and the Swiss Jean Piaget.
    1. The key to hacking yourself is to increase your awareness of your emotional state. When you become aware that you are angry, the anger is losing the grip it has over you. When you are angry, you are sometimes doing things you would not have done if you were not angry. (Sometimes anger is healthy, it may also be a signal to us that our boundaries have been violated.)

      Hacks around anger

  10. May 2023
    1. gents learn their behavior,

      Behavior here is experience, information that is stored in the memory and retrieved for reflection and learning to happen. Does that mean Believable Agents or Generative Agents can essentially become aware of their own existence and potentially begin to question and compare the virtual/internal environment with the external environment ?

    2. A novel architecture that makes it possible for generativeagents to remember, retrieve, reflect, interact with otheragents, and plan through dynamically evolving circumstances.The architecture leverages the powerful prompting capabili-ties of large language models and supplements those capa-bilities to support longer-term agent coherence, the abilityto manage dynamically-evolving memory, and recursivelyproduce more generations.

      AI is turning humans to look inward for a new take on life as our identities and roles within society are being profoundly disrupted and transformed by Artificial Intelligence systems that can replicate or exhibit human-like behavior. It is also a great reminder of how complex social interactions are.

    1. Power allows people to act freely, power leading to approach motivation

      "Most contemporary psychological scientists define approach motivation as the impulse to go toward positive stimuli, where stimuli are external goal objects (Lang & Bradley, 2008)."

    2. Hierarchies in the correlated forms of power (resources) and status (prestige) are constants thatorganize human societies. This article reviews relevant social psychological literature andidentifies several converging results concerning power and status. Whether rank is chronicallypossessed or temporarily embodied, higher ranks create psychological distance from others, allowagency by the higher ranked, and exact deference from the lower ranked. Beliefs that status entailscompetence are essentially universal. Interpersonal interactions create warmth-competencecompensatory tradeoffs. Along with societal structures (enduring inequality), these tradeoffsreinforce status-competence beliefs. Race, class, and gender further illustrate these dynamics.Although status systems are resilient, they can shift, and understanding those change processes isan important direction for future research, as global demographic changes disrupt existinghierarchies.

      Abstract

  11. Apr 2023
    1. It is difficult to see interdependencies This is especially true in the context of learning something complex, say economics. We can’t read about economics in a silo without understanding psychology, sociology and politics, at the very least. But we treat each subject as though they are independent of each other.

      Where are the tools for graphing inter-dependencies of areas of study? When entering a new area it would be interesting to have visual mappings of ideas and thoughts.

      If ideas in an area were chunked into atomic ideas, then perhaps either a Markov monkey or a similar actor could find the shortest learning path from a basic idea to more complex ideas.

      Example: what is the shortest distance from an understanding of linear algebra to learn and master Lie algebras?

      Link to Garden of Forking Paths

      Link to tools like Research Rabbit, Open Knowledge Maps and Connected Papers, but for ideas instead of papers, authors, and subject headings.


      It has long been useful for us to simplify our thought models for topics like economics to get rid of extraneous ideas to come to basic understandings within such a space. But over time, we need to branch out into related and even distant subjects like mathematics, psychology, engineering, sociology, anthropology, politics, physics, computer science, etc. to be able to delve deeper and come up with more complex and realistic models of thought.Our early ideas like the rational actor within economics are fine and lovely, but we now know from the overlap of psychology and sociology which have given birth to behavioral economics that those mythical rational actors are quaint and never truly existed. To some extent, to move forward as a culture and a society we need to rid ourselves of these quaint ideas to move on to more complex and sophisticated ones.

    1. the entire premise of sci-fi is that a new scientific invention has changed the world, though we only seem to fully understand that in the context of a movie (where the changes are often for the worse and happen in fast-forward montages), but not in the context of the world today (where the changes are often for the better and happen one day at a time).

      Why do people grasp the impact technology has on society through the art of storytelling, through media? Even then, people seem to only think of it for a brief moment, unable to adapt their thinking and behavioral patterns amidst life transforming technological breakthroughs that resemble or hint to what the media showed them. People aren't quick to incorporate god-like technologies into their lives in order to improve them, let alone do proper research to be informed and have open dialogues about whether we are responsibly advancing and integrating technologies to our daily lives (TO THE CHILDREN) which are increasingly becoming more digitally dominant.

    1. If you suddenly transform the social lives of girls, putting them onto platforms that prioritize social comparison and performance, platforms where we know that heavy users are three times more likely to be depressed than light users, might that have some impact on the mental health of girls around the world? We think so
  12. Mar 2023
    1. there’s the famous 2019 paper by Allcott et al. which found that having people deactivate Facebook for a while made them happier, while also making them socialize more and worry less about politics
    2. [There’s also] a big new study from Cambridge University, in which researchers looked at 84,000 people…and found that social media was strongly associated with worse mental health during certain sensitive life periods, including for girls ages 11 to 13…One explanation is that teenagers (and teenage girls in particular) are uniquely sensitive to the judgment of friends, teachers, and the digital crowd.
    1. It is a law of nature that our thoughts and feelings are encouraged and strengthened as we give them utterance. While words express thoughts, it is also true that thoughts follow words. If we would give more expression to our faith, rejoice more in the blessings that we know we have,—the great mercy and love of God,—we should have more faith and greater joy. No tongue can express, no finite mind can conceive, the blessing that results from appreciating the goodness and love of God. Even on earth we may have joy as a wellspring, never failing, because fed by the streams that flow from the throne of God.
  13. Feb 2023
      • Title: Faster than expected
      • subtitle: why most climate scientists can’t tell the truth (in public) Author: Jackson Damien

      • This is a good article written from a psychotherapist's perspective,

      • examining the psychology behind why published, mainstream, peer reviewed climate change research is always dangerously lagging behind current research,
      • and recommending what interventions could be be taken to remedy this
      • This your of scientific misinformation coming from scientists themselves
      • gives minimizers and denialists the very ammunition they need to legitimise delay of the urgently needed system change.
      • What climate scientists say In public is far from what they believe in private.
      • For instance, many climate scientists don't believe 1.5 Deg. C target is plausible anymore, but don't say so in public.
      • That reticence is due to fear of violating accepted scientific social norms,
      • being labeled alarmist and risk losing their job.
      • That creates a collective cognitive dissonance that acts as a feedback signal
      • for society to implement change at a dangerously slow pace
      • and to not spend the necessary resources to prepare for the harm already baked in.
      • The result of this choice dissonance is that
      • there is no collective sense of an emergency or a global wartime mobilisation scale of collective behaviour.
      • Our actions are not commensurate to the permanent emergency state we are now in.
      • The appropriate response that is suggested is for the entire climate science community to form a coalition that creates a new kind of peer reviewed publishing and reporting
      • that publicly responds to the current and live knowledge that is being discovered every day.
      • This is done from a planetary and permanent emergency perspective in order to eliminate the dangerous delays that create the wrong human collective behavioural responses.
    1. The reason is that the journaling is in part an accumulative method: There is a long period of low-structured input which benefits manifest first acutely (writing in itself seems to be healing through understanding). After you amassed a time-line of thoughts you can try to find throughlines and patterns which then gives you access to deep insights if you have the right tools. Most of the time people use psychologists which I think is in a similar way problematic that people use physical therapists for too much of their problems: Many problems are best solved by the person that has immediate access to the ego-perspective (phenomenological layer, subjective access, etc.) of the problem. This is of course dependent on self-education on basic concepts of what I call true self-care. Self-care seems to be associated with stuff like doing pleasant things (hot bath, nice walks in the sun) nowadays. If you take the antifragile nature of us humans into account this is just another way of the modern hedonist to keep stuck. (This is important for my approach to incorporate journaling into the Zettelkasten Method)

      —Sasha Fast https://forum.zettelkasten.de/profile/Sascha

      I love the deeper definition and distinction of self-care here.

    1. The most important aspect of the body of the Zettel is that you write it in your own words.

      Writing in your own words also helps you to confirm you understand others' ideas.

  14. Jan 2023
    1. Therefore, we propose that flow and hyperfocus are the same phenomenon. Although we are mindful that just because two phenomena are descriptively similar, they are not necessarily mechanistically identical, there is no evidence to suggest that either flow or hyperfocus are distinct.

      Ashinoff and Abu-Akel propose an equivalence between "flow" and "hyperfocus". They mention later in this paper that "flow" is more often used in positive psychology literature whereas "hyperfocus" is more often used in psychiatric literature. Even so, they also qualify that they may just appear to be the same (ie, descriptively similar) while having a different cause (ie, mechanism of action).

    1. Who falls for fake news? Psychological and clinical profiling evidence of fake news consumers

      Participants with a schizotypal, paranoid, and histrionic personality were ineffective at detecting fake news. They were also more vulnerable to suffer its negative effects. Specifically, they displayed higher levels of anxiety and committed more cognitive biases based on suggestibility and the Barnum Effect. No significant effects on psychotic symptomatology or affective mood states were observed. Corresponding to these outcomes, two clinical and therapeutic recommendations related to the reduction of the Barnum Effect and the reinterpretation of digital media sensationalism were made. The impact of fake news and possible ways of prevention are discussed.

      Fake news and personality disorders

      The observed relationship between fake news and levels of schizotypy was consistent with previous scientific evidence on pseudoscientific beliefs and magical ideation (see Bronstein et al., 2019; Escolà-Gascón, Marín, et al., 2021). Following the dual process theory model (e.g., Pennycook & Rand, 2019), when a person does not correctly distinguish between information with scientific arguments and information without scientific grounds it is because they predominantly use cognitive reasoning characterized by intuition (e.g., Dagnall, Drinkwater, et al., 2010; Swami et al., 2014; Dagnall et al., 2017b; Williams et al., 2021).

      Concomitantly, intuitive thinking correlates positively with magical beliefs (see Šrol, 2021). Psychopathological classifications include magical beliefs as a dimension of schizotypal personality (e.g., Escolà-Gascón, 2020a). Therefore, it is possible that the high schizotypy scores in this study can be explained from the perspective of dual process theory (Denovan et al., 2018; Denovan et al., 2020; Drinkwater, Dagnall, Denovan, & Williams, 2021). Intuitive thinking could be the moderating variable that explains why participants who scored higher in schizotypy did not effectively detect fake news.

      Something similar happened with the subclinical trait of paranoia. This variable scored the highest in both group 1 and group 2 (see Fig. 1). Intuition is also positively related to conspiratorial ideation (see Drinkwater et al., 2020; Gligorić et al., 2021). Similarly, psychopathology tends to classify conspiracy ideation as a frequent belief system in paranoid personality (see Escolà-Gascón, 2022). This is because conspiracy beliefs are based on systematic distrust of the systems that structure society (political system), knowledge (science) and economy (capitalism) (Dagnall et al., 2015; Swami et al., 2014). Likewise, it is known that distrust is the transversal characteristic of paranoid personality (So et al., 2022). Then, in this case the use of intuitive thinking and dual process theory could also justify the obtained paranoia scores. The same is not true for the histrionic personality.

      The Barnum Effect

      The Barnum Effect consists of accepting as exclusive a verbal description of an individual's personality, when, the description employs contents applicable or generalizable to any profile or personality that one wishes to describe (see Boyce & Geller, 2002; O’Keeffe & Wiseman, 2005). The error of this bias is to assume as exclusive or unique information that is not. This error can occur in other contexts not limited to personality descriptions. Originally, this bias was studied in the field of horoscopes and pseudoscience's (see Matute et al., 2011). Research results suggest that people who do not effectively detect fake news regularly commit the Barnum Effect. So, one way to prevent fake news may be to educate about what the Barnum Effect is and how to avoid it.

      Conclusions

      The conclusions of this research can be summarized as follows: (1) The evidence obtained proposes that profiles with high scores in schizotypy, paranoia and histrionism are more vulnerable to the negative effects of fake news. In clinical practice, special caution is recommended for patients who meet the symptomatic characteristics of these personality traits.

      (2) In psychiatry and clinical psychology, it is proposed to combat fake news by reducing or recoding the Barnum effect, reinterpreting sensationalism in the media and promoting critical thinking in social network users. These suggestions can be applied from intervention programs but can also be implemented as psychoeducational programs for massive users of social networks.

      (3) Individuals who do not effectively detect fake news tend to have higher levels of anxiety, both state and trait anxiety. These individuals are also highly suggestible and tend to seek strong emotions. Profiles of this type may inappropriately employ intuitive thinking, which could be the psychological mechanism that.

      (4) Positive psychotic symptomatology, affective mood states and substance use (addiction risks) were not affected by fake news. In the field of psychosis, it should be analyzed whether fake news influences negative psychotic symptomatology.

  15. Dec 2022
    1. Happiness is pushed to some later date in the future while your present self battles with the misery of the current moment.

      Journey before destination, don't get caught up in the future, you'll miss the now. Instead, rest in motion

    1. In The Beginning of Infinity, physicist David Deutsch defines The Principle of Optimism: “All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.” From that principle, Deutsch writes, flow a few implications that help understand optimism:Optimism is “a way of explaining failure, not prophesying success”: If we’ve failed at something, it’s because we didn’t have the right knowledge in time. Optimism is a stance towards the future: Nearly all failures, and nearly all successes, are yet to come. Optimism follows from the explicability of the physical world: If something is permitted by the laws of physics, then the only thing that can prevent it from being possible is not knowing how.In the long run, there are no insuperable evils: There can be no such thing as a disease for which there can’t be a cure, because bodies are physical things that follow the laws of physics. If you want, you can call it “realistic optimism” or “pragmatic optimism” or “realistic skeptical optimism” or whatever you want to call it in your head to make it feel less doe-eyed, but the actual definition of optimism captures those, so I’ll just call it optimism.

      This is the kind if definition of optimism I have in mind when thinking about how I try to approach the world. Combined with a (hopefully!) well balanced sense of Humour, a bit of stubbornness and the kind of “naivetë” [[Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi]] described in his opus magnum “Flow” I am convinced it’s, in the long run, a quite unstoppable combination and quality that can, in fact, be trained and developed.

    1. For many intellectual tasks, the people with the least skill overestimate themselves the most, a pattern popularly known as the Dunning–Kruger effect (DKE). The dominant account of this effect depends on the idea that assessing the quality of one's performance (metacognition) requires the same mental resources as task performance itself (cognition). Unskilled people are said to suffer a dual burden: they lack the cognitive resources to perform well, and this deprives them of metacognitive insight into their failings. In this Registered Report, we applied recently developed methods for the measurement of metacognition to a matrix reasoning task, to test the dual-burden account. Metacognitive sensitivity (information exploited by metacognition) tracked performance closely, so less information was exploited by the metacognitive judgements of poor performers; but metacognitive efficiency (quality of metacognitive processing itself) was unrelated to performance. Metacognitive bias (overall tendency towards high or low confidence) was positively associated with performance, so poor performers were appropriately less confident—not more confident—than good performers. Crucially, these metacognitive factors did not cause the DKE pattern, which was driven overwhelmingly by performance scores. These results refute the dual-burden account and suggest that the classic DKE is a statistical regression artefact that tells us nothing much about metacognition.

      The Dunning-Kruger effect (DKE) seems to be a statistical regression artefact that doesn't actually explain whether people who are good at a task are able to estimate their own abilities at the task

    1. To a large extent, we have failed to recognize that poverty places enormouseconomic, social, and psychological costs on the nonpoor as well as the poor.These costs affect us both individually and as a nation, although we have beenslow to recognize them. Too often, the attitude has been, “I don’t see how I’maffected, so why worry about it?”
    2. Accordingly, poverty acts to reduce overall available bandwidth. It does thisthrough creating greater stress and worries, reduced nutrition, exposure to toxicenvironments, and so on. For example, the constant worry of how to survive ona day-to- day basis acts to reduce bandwidth:Being poor means having less money to buy things, but it also means havingto spend more of one’s bandwidth managing that money. The poor mustmanage sporadic income, juggle expenses, and make difficult trade-offs.Even when the poor are not actually making financial decisions, thesepreoccupations can be distracting. Thinking and fretting about money caneffectively tax bandwidth.23This body of research has demonstrated that it is important to understanddecision- making not only within the socioeconomic context of individuals’lives, but within the psychological context as well.
    1. Perceptions of failure don’t always lead to shared ideas of how to learn from these lessons.

      Really good insight that I hadn't really considered before. If normally opposing parties reach the same end goal then nobody wants to think about why, we'd rather just take the win.

    1. Of course, the closest you can get is having the activity available in your own living space, but as unused home treadmills and exercise bikes demonstrate, this has its pitfalls. There could be something about a thing always being available that means there’s never any urgency.

      There seems to be a minimum at which hyperbolic discounting stops working because things are too easy to access

    2. You may have heard of hyperbolic discounting from behavioral economics: people will generally disproportionally, i.e. hyperbolically, discount the value of something the farther off it is. The average person judges $15 now as equivalent to $30 in 3-months (an annual rate of return of 277%!).

      this is fascinating and must relate to delayed gratification

    1. I have about fourteen or sixteen weeks to do this, so I'm breaking the course into an "intro" section that covers some basic stuff like affordances, and other insights into how tech functions. There's a section on AI which is nothing but critical appraisals on AI from a variety of areas. And there's a section on Social Media, which is the most well formed section in terms of readings.

      https://zirk.us/@shengokai/109440759945863989

      If the individuals in an environment don't understand or perceive the affordances available to them, can the interactions between them and the environment make it seem as if the environment possesses agency?

      cross reference: James J. Gibson book The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966)


      People often indicate that social media "causes" outcomes among groups of people who use it. Eg: Social media (via algorithmic suggestions of fringe content) causes people to become radicalized.

  16. Nov 2022
    1. Meta-analysis statistical procedures provide a measure of the difference between two groups thatis expressed in quantitative units that are comparable across studies

      The units are only "comparable across studies" if there weren't any mishaps (eg, clinical or methodological heterogeneity). If there's clinical heterogeneity, then we're probably comparing apples to oranges (ie, either participants, interventions, or outcomes are different among studies). If there's methodological heterogeneity, then that means there's a difference in study design

    2. Quadrants I and II: The average student’s scores on basic skills assessments increase by21 percentiles when engaged in non-interactive, multimodal learning (includes using textwith visuals, text with audio, watching and listening to animations or lectures that effectivelyuse visuals, etc.) in comparison to traditional, single-mode learning. When that situationshifts from non-interactive to interactive, multimedia learning (such as engagement insimulations, modeling, and real-world experiences – most often in collaborative teams orgroups), results are not quite as high, with average gains at 9 percentiles. While notstatistically significant, these results are still positive.

      I think this is was Thomas Frank was referring to in his YT video when he said "direct hands-on experience ... is often not the best way to learn something. And more recent cognitive research has confirmed this and shown that for basic concepts a more abstract learning model is actually better."

      By "more abstract", I guess he meant what this paper calls "non-interactive". However, even though Frank claims this (which is suggested by the percentile increases shown in Quadrants I & II), no variance is given and the authors even state that, in the case of Q II (looking at percentile increase of interactive multimodal learning compared to interactive unimodal learning), the authors state that "results are not quite as high [as the non-interactive comparison], with average gains at 9 percentiles. While not statistically significant, these results are still positive." (emphasis mine)

      Common level of signifcances are \(\alpha =.20,~.10,~.05,~.01\)

    3. Paper gives surprisingly good overview of models of learning within the cognitive sciences up to 2008. Attempts to dispel myths and summarize the literature on multimodal learning. Link to paper on Semantic Scholar

    4. Scaffolding is the act of providing learners with assistance or support to perform a taskbeyond their own reach if pursued independently when “unassisted.”

      Wood, Bruner, & Ross (1976) define scaffolding as what? (Metiri Group, Cisco Sytems, 2008) The act of providing learners with assistance or support to perform a task beyond their own reach if pursued independently when "unassisted."

      What term do Wood, Bruner, & Ross (1976) define as "The act of providing learners with assistance or support to perform a task beyond their own reach if pursued independently when 'unassisted.'"? (Metiri Group, Cisco Sytems, 2008) Scaffolding

    5. Schemas are chunks of multiple individual units of memory that are linked into a system ofunderstanding

      How do Bransford, Brown, & Cocking (2000) define schemas? (Metiri Group, Cisco Sytems, 2008) As chunks of multiple individual units of memory that are linked into a system of understanding

      What term is defined by Bransford, Brown, & Cocking (2000) to be "chunks of multiple individual units of memory that are linked into a system of understanding"? (Metiri Group, Cisco Sytems, 2008) Schemas.

    6. Learning is defined to be “storage of automated schema in long-term memory.

      How is learning defined by Sweller in 2002? (Metiri Group, Cisco Sytems, 2008) The storage of automated schema in long-term memory

      What term does Sweller define as the "storage of automated schema in long-term memory"?

    1. Kirschner, Paul, and Carl Hendrick. How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice. 1st ed. Routledge, 2020. https://www.routledge.com/How-Learning-Happens-Seminal-Works-in-Educational-Psychology-and-What-They/Kirschner-Hendrick/p/book/9780367184575.

      The Ten Deadly Sins of Education by @P_A_Kirschner & @C_Hendrick <br><br>Multitasking was v interesting to read about in their book! Learning pyramid & styles still hang around, sometimes students find out about learning styles & believe it to be true so it's important to bust myths! pic.twitter.com/Kx5GpsehGm

      — Kate Jones (@KateJones_teach) November 10, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
    1. Nostalgia, a sentimental longing for one's past, predicts or augments psychological wellbeing (PWB).

      Could this, in part, be behind some of the bump for slogans like "Make America Great Again" by looking back to an imagined past?


      Kelley, Nicholas J., William E. Davis, Jianning Dang, Li Liu, Tim Wildschut, and Constantine Sedikides. “Nostalgia Confers Psychological Wellbeing by Increasing Authenticity.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 102 (September 1, 2022): 104379. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2022.104379.

  17. Oct 2022
    1. The information ecosystem is broken. Our political conversations are happening on infrastructure—Facebook, YouTube, Twitter—built for viral advertising. The velocity of social sharing, the power of recommendation algorithms, the scale of social networks, and the accessibility of media manipulation technology has created an environment where pseudo events, half-truths, and outright fabrications thrive. Edward Murrow has been usurped by Alex Jones.

      I believe the variable of lies and misinformation thriving in virality is based on the idea that negativity is more engaging and intriguing than positivity. When something stimulates a negative feeling such as fear or anxiety, people engage because they feel insecure whether it be relative to the condition of their environment or internal self-perception. For example, if you read something negative about the President, you care because you live in the United States and relate it to your own well-being. Further, if someone read negative articles about a person they envy, they may feel inclined to engage & share it because that person's success made them feel inferior. Unfortunately, negativity sells.

    1. Sincecopying is a chore and a bore, use of the cards, the smaller thebetter, forces one to extract the strictly relevant, to distill from thevery beginning, to pass the material through the grinder of one’s ownmind, so to speak.

      Barbara Tuchman recommended using the smallest sized index cards possible to force one only to "extract the strictly relevant" because copying by hand can be both "a chore and a bore".

      In the same address in 1963, she encourages "distill[ing] from the very beginning, to pass the material through the grinder of one's own mind, so to speak." This practice is similar to modern day pedagogues who encourage this practice, but with the benefit of psychology research to back up the practice.

      This advice is two-fold in terms of filtering out the useless material for an author, but the grinder metaphor indicates placing multiple types of material in to to a processor to see what new combinations of products come out the other end. This touches more subtly on the idea of combinatorial creativity encouraged by Raymond Llull, Matt Ridley, et al. or the serendipity described by Niklas Luhmann and others.


      When did the writing for understanding idea begin within the tradition? Was it through experience in part and then underlined with psychology research? Visit Ahrens' references on this for particular papers to read.

      Link to modality shift research.

    1. Cattell, J. McKeen. “Methods for a Card Index.” Science 10, no. 247 (1899): 419–20.


      Columbia professor of psychology calls for the creation of a card index of references to reviews and abstracts for areas of research. Columbia was apparently doing this in 1899 for the psychology department.

      What happened to this effort? How similar was it to the system of advertising cards for books in Germany in the early 1930s described by Heyde?

    1. This is a pretty good example of a strawman argument. The author uses the correct exponential growth formula to describe a precise 1% improvement rate. But that's not what the 1% improvement idea is about. For instance, consider https://nextbigideaclub.com/magazine/get-1-better-every-day/19161/ or https://betterhumans.pub/continuous-improvement-how-to-get-1-better-every-day-from-today-a8128c942c61 The argument isn't based on a strict interpretation of 1%.

    1. BICEPS acronym is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License: Paloma Medina 2015
  18. Sep 2022
    1. As discussed in Chapter 1, there are many myths and misperceptions sur-rounding who the poor are. The typical image is of someone who haslived in poverty for years at a time, is Black or Hispanic, resides in aninner-city ghetto, receives two or three welfare programs, and is reluctantto work. On all counts, this image is a severe distortion of the reality.

      The authors here do themselves and their public a disservice by repeating the myth up front before trying to dispel it. This may psychologically tend to reinforce it rather than priming the reader to come to believe the opposite.

      A better framing might instead be George Lakoff's truth sandwich: present the truth/actuality, then talk about the myth and then repeat the truth again.

    2. Heather E. Bullock

      https://psychology.ucsc.edu/about/people/faculty.php?uid=hbullock

      Heather E. Bullock is an American social psychologist. She is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Blum Center on Poverty, Social Enterprise, and Participatory Governance at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Bullock is known for her research on people's beliefs about economic disparities and the consequences of stereotypical beliefs about the poor on public policy. This includes work examining attributions about poverty made by news media, and how such attributions influence public support of welfare policies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heather_E._Bullock

    1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overload-helps-fake-news-spread-and-social-media-knows-it/

      Good overview article of some of the psychology research behind misinformation in social media spaces including bots, AI, and the effects of cognitive bias.

      Probably worth mining the story for the journal articles and collecting/reading them.

    2. A 2015 study by OSoMe researchers Emilio Ferrara and Zeyao Yang analyzed empirical data about such “emotional contagion” on Twitter and found that people overexposed to negative content tend to then share negative posts, whereas those overexposed to positive content tend to share more positive posts.
    3. Experiments on Twitter by Bjarke Mønsted and his colleagues at the Technical University of Denmark and the University of Southern California indicate that information is transmitted via “complex contagion”: when we are repeatedly exposed to an idea, typically from many sources, we are more likely to adopt and reshare it. This social bias is further amplified by what psychologists call the “mere exposure” effect: when people are repeatedly exposed to the same stimuli, such as certain faces, they grow to like those stimuli more than those they have encountered less often.

      This seems slightly different than the mere-exposure effect that Ahrens (2017) delineated. Are they same/different/related, but contextually different?

    4. social groups create a pressure toward conformity so powerful that it can overcome individual preferences, and by amplifying random early differences, it can cause segregated groups to diverge to extremes.
    5. In a set of groundbreaking studies in 1932, psychologist Frederic Bartlett told volunteers a Native American legend about a young man who hears war cries and, pursuing them, enters a dreamlike battle that eventually leads to his real death. Bartlett asked the volunteers, who were non-Native, to recall the rather confusing story at increasing intervals, from minutes to years later. He found that as time passed, the rememberers tended to distort the tale's culturally unfamiliar parts such that they were either lost to memory or transformed into more familiar things.

      early study relating to both culture and memory decay

      What does memory decay scale as? Is it different for different levels of "stickiness"?

    1. "Respondents across all countries were worried about climate change (59% were very or extremely worried and 84% were at least moderately worried). More than 50% reported each of the following emotions: sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty. More than 45% of respondents said their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily life and functioning, and many reported a high number of negative thoughts about climate change (eg, 75% said that they think the future is frightening and 83% said that they think people have failed to take care of the planet).

      !- for : Social Tipping Points - Tipping Point Festival - Meaning crisis

    1. Why is this important in this history of psychology?

      "The present work will, I venture to think, prove that I both saw at the time the value and scope of the law which I had discovered, and have since been able to apply it to some purpose in a few original lines of investigation. But here my claims cease. I have felt all my life, and I still feel, the most sincere satisfaction that Mr. Darwin had been at work long before me, and that it was not left for me to attempt to write 'The Origin of Species.' I have long since measured my own strength, and know well that it would be quite unequal to that task. Far abler men than myself may confess that they have not that untiring patience in accumulating and that wonderful skill in using large masses of facts of the most varied kinds, -- that wide and accurate physiological knowledge, -- that acuteness in devising, and skill in carrying out, experiments, and that admirable style of composition, at once clear, persuasive, and judicial, -- qualities which, in their harmonious combination, mark out Mr. Darwin as the man, perhaps of all men now living, best fitted for the great work he has undertaken and accomplished." This comes from the Classics in the History of Psychology Limits of Natural Selection By Chauncey Wright (1870). This shows us the importamce of the limits including in theories like this one. Natural selection indicates that the strongest will be the ones that will survive and there for will be the ones that will be able to have offsprings and make their generation endure. But thjis has a limit due to the sexual selection because it shows that the natural selection can not be impossed to people in any way or form. I see this working in psychology in a very big way because now that we are in a generation that is so ruled out by the social media this concept wants to persist and endure no matter what. I can see natural selecetion slowly decreasing amd really another type of selection evolving with the next future generations.

      Angela Cruz Cubero (Christian Cruz Cubero)

  19. Aug 2022
    1. The effects of this familiarity of phenomena have often been discussed.Wolfgang K ̈ohler, for example, has suggested that psychologists do not open up“entirely new territories” in the manner of the natural sciences, “simply becauseman was acquainted with practically all territories of mental life a long timebefore the founding of scientific psychology . . . because at the very begin-ning of their work there were no entirely unknown mental facts left which theycould have discovered.” 1

      There seem to be fewer surprises in psychology than in physics.

    2. And this system of linguistic competenceis qualitatively different from anything that can be described in terms of thetaxonomic methods of structural linguistics, the concepts of S-R psychology,or the notions developed within the mathematical theory of communication orthe theory of simple automata.

      What are the atomic building blocks that would allow stimulus-response psychology to show complex behaviors?

    3. particular branch of cognitive psychologyknown as linguistics

      Chomsky categorized linguistics as a branch of cognitive psychology.

    1. Below is a two page spread summarizing a Fast Company.com article about the Pennebaker method, as covered in Timothy Wilson’s book Redirect:

      Worth looking into this. The idea of the Pennebaker method goes back to a paper of his in 1986 that details the health benefits (including mental) of expressive writing. Sounds a lot like the underlying idea of morning pages, though that has the connotation of clearing one's head versus health related benefits.

      Compare/contrast the two methods.

      Is there research underpinning morning pages?

      See also: Expressive Writing in Psychological Science https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1745691617707315<br /> appears to be a recap article of some history and meta studies since his original work.

    1. As Tiago Forte writes in his excellent book, ‘Building a Second Brain’, “every bit of energy we spend straining to recall things is energy not spent doing the thinking that only humans can do: inventing new things, crafting stories, recognising patterns, following our intuition, collaborating with others, investigating new subjects, making plans, testing theories”.

      This is exactly the kind of language that is driving people psychotic: that there's only 2 modes - recalling and creating. Yes, there are these 2 modes. But there are others too, the most important of which are "resting", "reflecting", and "gestating". Without these others, which we must visit in balance with recalling and creating, we will end up in a rubber room.

  20. Jul 2022
    1. They're drawing primarily from students with the following broad interests: - learning sciences / educational psychology - sociology of education (to influence policy/practice) - those with strong real-world experience (looking to apply it to a specific area)

      tuition coverage & stipend<br /> must be based in Baltimore<br /> prefer one speaks to faculty members for alignment of research areas and mentorship prior to joining

    1. embodied cognitive science has been greatly helped by an article written last year by elmo felton mined after ook school a foray into the world of ecological psychologists and an 00:23:44 activist this shows you how this work from the 1920s appears to contemporary embodied cognitive scientists and we're going to have the good luck that elmo will join us in class so we should have a very 00:23:58 productive discussion about the very strange world of jakob von ogsku

      Elmo Felton wrote a recent paper about Uexkull and the umwelt in the field of ecological psychology.

  21. Jun 2022
    1. As my colleague Robin Paige likes to say, we are also social beings in a social world. So if we shift things just a bit to think instead about the environments we design and cultivate to help maximize learning, then psychology and sociology are vital for understanding these elements as well.

      Because we're "social beings in a social world", we need to think about the psychology and sociology of the environments we design to help improve learning.

      Link this to: - Design of spaces like Stonehenge for learning in Indigenous cultures, particularly the "stage", acoustics (recall the ditch), and intimacy of the presentation. - research that children need face-to-face interactions for language acquisition

    1. i talked to todd rose about this notion of collective 00:00:51 illusions you know humans are a tribal species prone to conformity and in a lot of instances we act according to what our in-group wants rather than what we want as individuals ironically todd's research shows that we make poor 00:01:04 inferences about the majority consensus and that failing to recognize collective illusions can have negative consequences on our identities relationships values and society to avoid falling into conformity traps todd encourages us to 00:01:17 live congruent private and public lives that adhere to our personal convictions

      This impacts the whole Stop Reset Go transformation matrix: Individual Inner Transformation Individual Outer Transformation Collective Inner Transformation Collective Outer Transformation

      According to researcher Todd Rose, author of the book Collective Illusions, conformity traps occurs when we succumb to collective illusions and create a gap between our private and public lives.

    1. Since one cannot prove that it is inaccurate, you cannot discount its possibility.

      False. Per Hitchens's Razor, "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."

      Put simply, the responsibility for proving a claim rests with those making the claim. One may safely discount the possibility of anything that cannot be proven.

      See also "Russel's Teapot".

    1. There is even significant evidence that expressing our thoughts inwriting can lead to benefits for our health and well-being. 11 One ofthe most cited psychology papers of the 1990s found that“translating emotional events into words leads to profound social,psychological, and neural changes.”

      11 James W. Pennebaker, “Writing about Emotional Experiences as a Therapeutic Process,” Psychological Science 8, no. 3 (May 1997), 162–66

      Did they mention any pedagogical effects in this work?

      How does this relate to the ability to release thoughts from working memory because they're written down and we don't need to spend time and effort trying to remember them? What are the references for this work? I suspect I've got them linked around somewhere...

      What other papers/work cover these intersections?

  22. May 2022
    1. Demand-side solutions require both motivation and capacity for change (high confidence).34Motivation by individuals or households worldwide to change energy consumption behaviour is35generally low. Individual behavioural change is insufficient for climate change mitigation unless36embedded in structural and cultural change. Different factors influence individual motivation and37capacity for change in different demographics and geographies. These factors go beyond traditional38socio-demographic and economic predictors and include psychological variables such as awareness,39perceived risk, subjective and social norms, values, and perceived behavioural control. Behavioural40nudges promote easy behaviour change, e.g., “improve” actions such as making investments in energy41efficiency, but fail to motivate harder lifestyle changes. (high confidence) {5.4}

      We must go beyond behavior nudges to make significant gains in demand side solutions. It requires an integrated strategy of inner transformation based on the latest research in trans-disciplinary fields such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, neuroscience and behavioral economics among others.

    1. new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to seewhether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, andpeople will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!”

      You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a

      Gian-Carlo Rota, Indiscrete Thoughts (Boston: Birkhäuser Boston, 1997), 202.

      Richard Feynman indicated in an interview that he kept a dozen of his favorite problems at the top of his mind. As he encountered new results and tricks, he tried applying them to those problems in hopes of either solving them or in coming up with new ideas. Over time by random but combinatorial chance, solutions or ideas would present themselves as ideas were juxtaposed.

      One would suspect that Feynman hadn't actually read Raymond Llull, but this technique sounds very similar to the Llullan combinatorial arts from centuries earlier, albeit in a much more simplified form.

      Can we find evidence of Feynman having read or interacted with Llull? Was it independently created or was he influenced?

      I had an example of this on 2022-05-28 in Dan Allosso's book club on Equality in the closing minutes where a bit of inspiration hit me to combine the ideas of memes, evolution, and Indigenous knowledge and storytelling to our current political situation. Several of them are problems and ideas I've been working with over years or months, and they came together all at once to present a surprising and useful new combination. #examples

      Link this also to the idea of diffuse thinking as a means of solving problems. One can combine the idea of diffuse thinking with combinatorial creativity to super-charge one's problem solving and idea generation capacity this way. What would one call this combination? It definitely needs a name. Llullan combinatorial diffusion, perhaps? To some extent Llull was doing this already as part of his practice, it's just that he didn't know or write explicitly about the diffuse thinking portion (to my knowledge), though this doesn't mean that he wasn't the beneficiary of it in actual practice, particularly when it's known that many of his time practiced lectio divina and meditated on their ideas. Alternately meditating on ideas and then "walking away" from them will by force cause diffuse thinking to be triggered.

      Are there people for whom diffuse thinking doesn't work from a physiological perspective? What type of neurodiversity does this cause?

    2. . In a 2004 study byAngelo Maravita and Atsushi Iriki, they discovered that when monkeys andhumans consistently use a tool to extend their reach, such as using a rake toreach an object, certain neural networks in the brain change their “map” of thebody to include the new tool. This fascinating finding reinforces the idea thatexternal tools can and often do become a natural extension of our minds
    1. it's like that's 00:44:13 called like maintenance rehearsal in uh in the science of human memory it's basically just re reintroducing yourself to to the concept how you kind of hammer it into your mind versus elaborative rehearsal is kind of what you're talking about and 00:44:26 what you do which is to uh elaborate on more dimensions that the the the knowledge you know uh that relates to in order to create like more of a a visual stamp on your mind

      Dig into research on maintenance rehearsal versus elaborative rehearsal.

    1. But no one is the CEO of your life in the real world, or of your career path—except you.

      To that effect, it might do some good, in terms of developmental psychology and early education to adopt some aspects of this phase in life into the curriculum (not talking about just formal education but also in parenting as well).

      It is like making someone accustomed to a feeling or experience by slowly exposing them to small amounts that are interesting or bearable for them—like building up a resistance to a poison.

    1. He and his fellow bot creators had been asking themselves over the years, “what do we do when the platform [Twitter] becomes unfriendly for bots?”

      There's some odd irony in this quote. Kazemi indicates that Twitter was unfriendly for bots, but he should be specific that it's unfriendly for non-corporately owned bots. One could argue that much of the interaction on Twitter is spurred by the primary bot on the service: the algorithmic feed (bot) that spurs people to like, retweet, and interact with more content and thus keeping them on the platform for longer.

    1. Where everyone can manipulate code like we manipulate word

      Reminds me a gain of Roam.

      What if humans spoke in compilable code? What if we thought in that? What if we do?

  23. Apr 2022
    1. Thus have been briefly noticed the results obtained by research in the Leipsic laboratory during the past seven years. They prove conclusively that it is possible to apply experimental methods to the study of mind. The positive results are, besides, not insignificant, and will compare favourably with what has been accomplished during the same period in many chemical, physical and physiological laboratories. An increased interest is everywhere being taken in experimental psychology, and we may hope that we shall some day have as accurate and complete knowledge of mind as of the physical world.

      As experimental psychology was being pushed to evolve into new science through development of experimentation, observation, appliance of external stimuli and reaction of the psyche; the results produced equate to the ones in other scientific fields. The importance of having psychology be a natural science is to understand how an individual's psychology functions in response to the stimuli. Experimentation would allow better understanding of conscious beings. The experiments discussed provide value to adapting psychology as an experimental science that would benefit students and provide equality to psychology in comparison to a field like chemistry.

    1. a phenomenon that psychologists call “thecaricature advantage”: the fact that we recognize a caricatured face even morereadily than we recognize a true-to-life depiction. While a caricature does distortits subject’s actual appearance, it does so in a systematic way, exaggerating whatis unique or distinctive about that individual—thereby making him or her evenmore instantly identifiable.

      Exaggerating the features of people and objects in systematic ways helps people to more easily assimilate both knowledge about them as well as the ability to distinguish between them in an effect which psychologists call the "caricature advantage."

      Link this to using caricature as a mnemonic technique for strengthening one's memory of objects and people.

    2. Humans’ tendency to“overimitate”—to reproduce even the gratuitous elements of another’s behavior—may operate on a copy now, understand later basis. After all, there might begood reasons for such steps that the novice does not yet grasp, especially sinceso many human tools and practices are “cognitively opaque”: not self-explanatory on their face. Even if there doesn’t turn out to be a functionalrationale for the actions taken, imitating the customs of one’s culture is a smartmove for a highly social species like our own.

      Research has shown that humans are "high-fidelity" imitators to the point of overimitation. It's possible that as an evolved and highly social species that imitation signals acceptance and participation by members of the society such that even "cognitively opaque" practices will be blindly followed.

      link to: https://hypothes.is/a/lROFtsDkEey_yHtNNJ_NfQ

    1. With personal stability (job, hobbies, network, etc.) and age you care less and less what people think and put less emphasis on what people think about you. - At the same time, you judge people less and less because, what does your judgment really matter? And when you judge people less you judge yourself less. - A lot of awkwardness is a function of trying hard to fit a social shape and failing. When you let go of most social expectations of yourself and others, in my experience mostly because of age and stability, you lose the awkwardness.
    1. One of the most effective ways of enhancing memories is to provide them with a link to your personal life.

      Personalizing ideas using existing memories is a method of brining new knowledge into one's own personal context and making them easier to remember.

      link this to: - the pedagogical idea of context shifting as a means of learning - cards about reframing ideas into one's own words when taking notes

      There is a solid group of cards around these areas of learning.


      Random thought: Personal learning networks put one into a regular milieu of people who are talking and thinking about topics of interest to the learner. Regular discussions with these people helps one's associative memory by tying the ideas into this context of people with relation to the same topic. Humans are exceedingly good at knowing and responding to social relationships and within a personal learning network, these ties help to create context on an interpersonal level, but also provide scaffolding for the ideas and learning that one hopes to do. These features will tend to reinforce each other over time.

      On the flip side of the coin there is anecdotal evidence of friends taking courses together because of their personal relationships rather than their interest in the particular topics.

  24. Mar 2022
    1. the use of gestures to enhance verbal memory during foreign-language encoding.

      Manuela Macedonia wrote her Ph.D. thesis on the use of gestures to enhance verbal memory for language acquisition.

    2. There isthe auditory hook: we hear ourselves saying the words aloud. There is the visualhook: we see ourselves making the relevant gesture. And there is the“proprioceptive” hook; this comes from feeling our hands make the gesture

      Gestural mnemonic associations work on three levels: auditory associations, visual associations, and proprioceptive associations.

    3. In one study, subjects who had watched a videotapedspeech were 33 percent more likely to recall a point from the talk if it wasaccompanied by a gesture. This effect, detected immediately after the subjectsviewed the recording, grew even more pronounced with the passage of time:thirty minutes after watching the speech, subjects were more than 50 percentmore likely to remember the gesture-accompanied points.

      People are more likely to remember points from talks that are accompanied by gestures. This effect apparently increases with time.

      What does the effect of time have on increased lengths? Does it continue to increase and then decrease at some point? Anecdotally I often recall quotes and instances from movies based on movements that I make.

      What effects, if any, are seen in studies of mirror-neurons and those with impairment of them? What memory effects might be seen with those on the autism spectrum who don't have strong mirror-neuron responses? If this is impaired, what might account for their improved memories for some types of material? Which types of material do they have improved memories for?

      Is the same true of drawing points from a speech using the ideas of sketchnotes? Is drawing an extension of gestural improvement of memory?

    4. Such results suggest that the act of gesturing doesn’t just help communicatespatial concepts to others; it also helps the gesturer herself understand theconcepts more fully. Indeed, without gesture as an aid, students may fail tounderstand spatial ideas at all

      Could the pedagogy of using gestures to understand "strike and dip" in geology also be applied to using the right hand rule in better understanding electricity and magnetism? Would research on this idea show similar results as in geology? This could be an interesting way of testing this result in another area.

    5. Researchers who study embodiedcognition are drawing new attention to the fact that people formulate and conveytheir thoughts not only with words but also with the motions of the hands and therest of the body. Gestures don’t merely echo or amplify spoken language; theycarry out cognitive and communicative functions that language can’t touch.

      Embodied cognition is a theory in psychology that a the mind is shaped by entire body of an organism. The mind is not only attached to the body, but the body influences the mind. Movement of the body doesn't just amplify one's spoke language, for humans, but it helps to create cognitive and communicative functions that language cannot, and these extend not only to viewers, but the communicator themself.

    1. L’imitation et l’influence du jeu interactif sont bien mises en évidence dans une étude de Orit Hetzroni et Juman Tannous, de la Faculté des Sciences de l’éducation de l’Université de Haifa (Israël)

      ==>l’échantillon de l’étude est est extrêmement limité, l’étude n’est pas répliqué et elle ne permet pas de retirer de résultats concluants

    1. Psychologists call this mechanism activeinhibition (cf. MacLeod, 2007

      Active inhibition is the filter that prevents our minds from being constantly flooded with memories and allows us to focus. It acts as a barrier between our long term memories and our immediate present.

      Is the filter behind active inhibition really active or is it passive? What is the actual physiological mechanism?

    2. Although hewas very good at remembering facts, Shereshevsky was almostincapable of getting the gist of something, the concepts behind theparticulars and distinguishing the relevant facts from minor details.

      Solomon Shereshevsky faced an extreme version of the sort of information overload many of can relate to, however in his case, because his memory was so good, he found it difficult to get the gist of something because the minor details drowned out the broader ideas.

  25. Feb 2022
    1. If we put effort into the attempt of retrievinginformation, we are much more likely to remember it in the long run,even if we fail to retrieve it without help in the end (Roediger andKarpicke 2006)
    2. Reading, especially rereading, caneasily fool us into believing we understand a text. Rereading isespecially dangerous because of the mere-exposure effect: Themoment we become familiar with something, we start believing wealso understand it. On top of that, we also tend to like it more(Bornstein 1989).

      The mere-exposure effect can be dangerous when rereading a text because we are more likely to falsely believe we understand it. Robert Bornstein's research from 1989 indicates that we will tend to like the text more, which can pull us into confirmation bias.

      Bornstein, Robert F. 1989. “Exposure and Affect: Overview and Meta-Analysis of Research, 1968-1987.” Psychological Bulletin 106 (2): 265–89.

    3. Separate and Interlocking Tasks

      Chapter 9 of How to Take Smart Notes looks at some of the psychology research involving attention, multitasking, decision making, willpower, concentration, expertise, planning, to highlight the value of the design and structure of the zettelkasten as a positive tool for helping one to be more productive in their thinking and writing work.

    4. Conversely, we can use the Zeigarnik effect to our advantage bydeliberately keeping unanswered questions in our mind. We canruminate about them, even when we do something that has nothingto do with work and ideally does not require our full attention. Lettingthoughts linger without focusing on them gives our brains theopportunity to deal with problems in a different, often surprisinglyproductive way. While we have a walk or a shower or clean thehouse, the brain cannot help but play around with the last unsolvedproblem it came across. And that is why we so often find the answerto a question in rather casual situations.

      One can use the Zeigarnik effect to their advantage by keeping specific unanswered questions in their mind so that it can use the diffuse thinking effect to solve them while doing other activities like walking, doing the dishes, etc.

    5. psychologists call the mere-exposure effect: doing something many times makes us believe wehave become good at it – completely independent of our actualperformance (Bornstein 1989). We unfortunately tend to confusefamiliarity with skill.

      The mere-exposure effect leads us to confuse familiarity with a process with actual skill.

    6. The slip-box provides not only a clear structure to work in, but also forces usto shift our attention consciously as we can complete tasks inreasonable time before moving on to the next one.

      Ahrens provides a quick overview of some research on distraction, attention, and multi-tasking to make the point that:

      The simple structure and design of the zettelkasten forces one's focus and attention on small individual tasks that cumulatively build into better thinking and writing.

      (Summary of Section 9.2)

    7. Good students, on the other hand, constantly raise the bar forthemselves as they focus on what they haven’t learned andmastered yet. This is why high achievers who have had a taste ofthe vast amount of knowledge out there are likely to suffer from whatpsychologists call imposter syndrome, the feeling that you are notreally up to the job, even though, of all people, they are (Clance andImes 1978; Brems et al. 1994).

      He's saying here that smart, high achievers are more likely to suffer from imposter syndrome specifically because they've read more broadly and know what they're doing.

      Does the psychology research indicate this? Is there a higher incidence of imposter syndrome at the higher end of the spectrum in part because ones' knowledge of the Known Unknown Framework is dramatically expanded?

      Look into these sources for more detail on this question.

    1. I don't think it's a surprise to anyone to know that there are certain activities that help create that space, and it’s been widely commented upon. Doing the dishes, walking the dog, cleaning the house – you need to be doing something.For me, pruning trees in our olive grove is perfect. It takes a little bit of attention, but not that much attention.

      This is related to the idea of diffuse thinking caused by taking breaks or doing things that don't require extreme concentration. Flaneuring... walking, etc.

      You want an activity that requires a little bit of attention but not too much attention. Doing dishes, walking, errands, etc. are good examples.

      Relate this to the

    1. Highlighting would be a crude form of knowledge telling. Knowledge transforming involves interpretation on the part of the content producer.

      Scholars who study writing differentiate between knowledge telling and knowledge transforming.

      Highlighting can be seen as a weak form of knowledge telling. It's a low level indicator that an idea is important, but doesn't even go so far as the reader strengthening the concept by restating the idea in their own words similar to the Feynman technique.

      One could go steps further by not only restating it but transforming it and linking it into one's larger body of knowledge or extending into other contexts.

    1. Timothy Caulfield. (2022, January 31). How Do You Respond When an #AntiVaxxer Dies of Covid? Https://nytimes.com/2022/01/30/opinion/culture/covid-death-mental-health.html?smid=tw-share by @JamesMartinSJ “Indulged in regularly, #schadenfreude ends up warping the soul.” “Don’t find another person’s misery the subject of mirth, glee or satisfaction.” Good reminder. One I needed. [Tweet]. @CaulfieldTim. https://twitter.com/CaulfieldTim/status/1488183630056755205

  26. Jan 2022
    1. Duckworth and Seligman, 2005;

      He cites this article in line, but doesn't provide the details in the bibliography:

      Duckworth AL, Seligman MEP. Self-Discipline Outdoes IQ in Predicting Academic Performance of Adolescents. Psychological Science. 2005;16(12):939-944. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2005.01641.x https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2005.01641.x

    1. “It makes perfect sense,” says Moro from his home in Boston. “For the game to be a success, it needs to be simple and playable, and picking the most common terms means that in the end, we all get it right in just a few tries.”

      Esteban Moro

      For games to be a success they need to meet a set of Goldilock's conditions, they should be simple enough to learn to play and win, but complex enough to still be challenging.

      How many other things in life need this sort of balance between simplicity and complexity to be successful?

      Is there an information theoretic statement that bounds this mathematically? What would it look like for various games?

    1. How does living in an environment defined by individual achievement—­measured by money, privilege, and ­status—alter a person’s mental machinery to the point where he begins to see the people around him only as aids or obstacles to his own ambitions?
    1. Frenzel, S. B., Junker, N. M., Avanzi, L., Bolatov, A., Haslam, S. A., Häusser, J. A., Kark, R., Meyer, I., Mojzisch, A., Monzani, L., Reicher, S., Samekin, A., Schury, V. A., Steffens, N. K., Sultanova, L., Van Dijk, D., van Zyl, L. E., & Van Dick, R. (2022). A trouble shared is a trouble halved: The role of family identification and identification with humankind in well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. British Journal of Social Psychology, 61(1), 55–82. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12470

    1. Hari puts his general air of unworldly distraction down to his dyspraxia, but it comes across as donnish.

      Johnann Hari has indicated in an interview that he suffered from dyspraxia.


      I wonder how this may or may not affect his writing about being distracted with respect to his book Stolen Focus. Cross reference: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jan/02/attention-span-focus-screens-apps-smartphones-social-media

    1. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1477714767854850049.html

      original thread: https://twitter.com/garwboy/status/1478003120483577859?s=20

      This takes a part Johann Hari's Guardian article Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen, but it does so mostly from a story/narrative perspective. Burnett is taking the story as a science article (it was labeled "psychology") when it's really more of a personal experience story with some nods to science.

      Sadly the story works more on the emotional side than the scientific side. It would be nice to have a more straightforward review of some of the actual science literature with some of the pros/cons laid out to make a better decision.

  27. takingnotenow.blogspot.com takingnotenow.blogspot.com
    1. What we Remember by Manfred Kuehn https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/

      archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20201021192005/https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/

      Dutch psychologist Wilem Wagenaar conducted memory related experiments on recollecting what, where, who, and when for the most interesting experiences of his days. It turned out that the "What?" was most useful followed by where? and who?, but that "when?" was "useless in every instance".

      p.116 of Stefan Klein, The Secret Pulse of Time: Making Sense of Life's Scarcest Commodity, Marlowe & Company, 2007, New York.

      Despite this, timestamps might serve other functions within a note taking system. The might include conceiving of ideas, temporal order of ideas presented, etc.

  28. Dec 2021
    1. There is the mammal way and there is the bird way." This is one scientist's pithy distinction between mammal brains and bird brains: two ways to make a highly intelligent mind.
    1. Among the oldest surviving scholarly works in neurosurgery is the so-called ‘Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus’(Breasted, 1930)
      • DId Susrutha surgical expertise bear lterary evidence for neurosurgery ?

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  29. Nov 2021