Ran Prieur

June 7.

2023-06-07T19:50:39Z

June 7. A few psychology links. Helplessness Is Not Learned. There have been a lot of experiments that seem to show learned helplessness, but neuroscience has discovered that helplessness is actually the default. Whatever it is, your brain starts with the assumption that you can't do anything about it, and then learns the sense that you can do something about it.

The top comment in the Hacker News thread is about learning that you can control the clutter in your home. But I'm thinking about the opposite: things that stress us out because we feel like we should do something about them, when we have basically zero influence. This includes everything ever covered on TV news.

Artists must be allowed to make bad work, a short blog post arguing that social media is harmful for creative work, because everything people do is in the public eye, and they're afraid to take risks.

The Proteus effect "describes a phenomenon in which the behavior of an individual, within virtual worlds, is changed by the characteristics of their avatar." The obvious direction to go with this, is that our behavior in the physical world is also heavily influenced by what we look like, and what behavior other people expect from someone who looks like that. So, if someone changes their look, it's probably because they want to act like that kind of person would act, and it's easier if they look like that.

June 5.

2023-06-05T17:30:37Z

June 5. Good news links. Emissions are no longer following the worst case scenario

A paywalled article about Mississippi schools. Through a set of reforms, they've gone from worst in the nation to above average.

Two PubMed science articles. Ariadne is a non-hallucinogenic analog in the phenylalkylamine chemical class of psychedelics, so it has the therapeutic effects of a good psychedelic, but you don't trip. Personally, I'd rather get the therapeutic effects and also trip.

A Simple Exercise to Eliminate Gastroesophageal Reflux: practice swallowing upside down.

And a thread from Ask Old People, What's a food that was common when you were growing up but you see rarely if ever nowadays? Some of these are good, but most of them are terrible: chicken ala king, jello with marshmallows, chop suey, salisbury steak tv dinners. So this is one way the world is getting better.

June 1.

2023-06-01T13:50:18Z

June 1. Stray links, starting with doom. Microplastics are falling from the sky. "The predicted downpour will range between 40 and 48 kilograms (88 and 106 pounds) of free-floating plastic bits blanketing greater Paris every 24 hours." Inevitably something will evolve to eat this, but it may take a million years without our help. The sci-fi scenario is that we bioengineer something to eat microplastics and it also eats plastics that we like.

'Farming good, factory bad', a belief that George Monbiot disagrees with, arguing that "storybook farming" cannot feed the world without terrible ecological destruction. Permaculturists would surely argue that super-intensive farming would still work, but Monbiot's solution might be more realistic: "a shift from farming multicellular organisms (plants and animals) to farming unicellular creatures (microbes)."

Good news on urban design, Federal Zoning Bill Would Preempt Local Parking Mandates, and another article on the same subject, This little-known rule shapes parking in America. The rule is that new construction has to have a certain amount of parking. Killing that rule is something both the right and left can get behind, the right because then property owners can do whatever they want, and the left because what they usually want is less parking, which leads to denser and more walkable neighborhoods.

Something fun for the weekend, The Most Underrated Sci-Fi Movies of the 1970s, where underrated means not Star Wars. I've seen more than half of these movies, and this article is right on about how interesting they are, despite their flaws or because of their flaws.

And a ridiculous goal by my favorite footballer, Morgan Weaver. The bigger the moment, the better she performs, and she'll eventually be a key player on the national team.