Is this supposed to be an external vagus nerve stimulation device? Or is it just intended to LOOK like one, and thereby confuse people…?

It’s a cranial electrotherapy stimulation device, which sends current pulses across the head.  Apparently this causes changes in brain activity, but it’s possibly an indirect effect achieved via stimulation of the cranial nerves, so maybe it is a vagus nerve (etc?) stimulator?  But that’s not treated as a foregone conclusion in the studies I’ve seen

The galaxy of large adult sons contains many constellations, and sons don’t necessarily have to be adults to belong.

Cash Aid Could Solve Poverty — But There's A Catch →

Verbal brain noise: “what if … sex golf”

Where’s this chat by the way?

It was a brief one-on-one conversation with an IRL acquaintance a while back, so not something joinable or ongoing

(I have been spending a lot of time on Discord lately but this wasn’t from there)

wirehead-wannabe:

wirehead-wannabe:

Epistemic status: I have had two alcohols and am a lightweight

@nostalgebraist is right to criticize Baren Coen’s (SERIOUSLY WHY IS THAT GUY COUSINS WITH BORAT HOW) research, but at the same time I have a REALLY strong sense that something like the empathizing/systemizing thing just HAS to exist. Like, “systemizing” definitely describes a trait that I’ve had since forever, and that a lot of (especially male) aspires like me identify with strongly.

I don’t really know, in general, what to do with feelings of “I identify strongly with this personality factor that doesn’t have much empirical backing.” I feel it with sortinghatchats, and I feel it with this too. Maybe I’m just super suggestible but… come on there’s no WAY these thing int actually exist, right? Surely we just haven’t nailed the details down yet? Idk.

@nostalgebraist I… don’t really have a great definition, which is part of why I’m disappointed with how shoddy the research is. But certain items on that test like “I enjoy seeing where rivers empty into the ocean” are like, super duper accurate and most of the systemizing questions feel like they all stem from the same Thing. I should add too that trying to use empathizing/systemizing as a Unified Theory of Autism feels obviously wrong to me, because @aprilwitching and @funereal-disease and people like them are relatively common.

Ninja edit: also Baren Cohen seems to conflate “interest” with “ability”, which maybe partly explains where he got the idea that autistic people are low EQ

One of the ways that Baron-Cohen’s concept seems insufficient to me is that it lumps together “abstract modeling” (which can err on the side of over-generalization) with “attention to detail” (which can err on the side of under-generalization).

There’s a kind of “systems thinking” that is about distilling something to its essence – understanding a machine, say, by going from its physical form (with its many details) to a sort of mental schematic, “this part does this, and makes this part do this, and that’s how it works.”  There is a similar thing in math and theoretical physics, where the virtuoso practitioners are always “reducing” something to some other thing, cutting through the irrelevancies, revealing a simple skeleton.

As a personality trait (or an aesthetic?), this seems almost the opposite of the thing where people get really into fine distinctions in a domain of interest.

Speaking in broad caricatures, there’s a big difference between the stereotypical analytic philosopher who is never satisfied in an argument until you can express your disagreement in a schematic logical form (”so we’re really talking about …”), and the botanist who wants to tell you all about their favorite flowers, appearing to value the distinctions between species for their own sake.

(Was Nabokov, as I describe him here, a “systemizer”?)

(via wirehead-wannabe)

Copy/pasting something I said in chat, because I like this but can’t be arsed to write it up as a post:

[context: we were talking about this post by @shlevy]

i do think shea has a good point about futurism having less of a closed loop with evidence than other kinds of reasoning we see as rational/scientific.  i’m not sure it has to be this way, but here is why i think it *is* this way:

first, there aren’t really “theories” (or even “approaches”) about how to do futurism in general that one could stack up against each other.  mostly there have just been individuals trying to forecast, who don’t belong to some longer-lasting tradition.

and to be confident in current futurological predictions on the basis of evidence, you would need to say something like “it comes from a successful theory/approach,” since these forecasts are often about distinct hypothetical periods that won’t even start for a while.  if two people disagree now about what the 2040s will be like, say, they can’t say “OK, let’s do this experiment that will distinguish the two,” because the 2040s are not experimentally accessible.  (kurzweil is a bit of an exception here in that he’s been making a combination of short and long term predictions since the 1980s)

another way of putting it is, if we ask “who is the person alive today with the most skill in predicting what the world will be like in 100 years?”, we have no way of directly assessing that skill.  the closest we could get is to compare them to people who made such predictions >100 years ago, and see whether they resemble the good predictors or the bad predictors.

which is what a theoretical tradition could enable: you could say “i’m taking the same approach as these people who were right 100+ years ago”

but such traditions don’t exist, and can’t exist for a long time even if we start now

and i’m pessimistic about the possibility for making such theories, both on general considerations (it’s a v hard problem), and because the theories would have to remain stable over lengths of time across which the majority of human thought often goes through major upheavals.

like, in pre-1700 europe all sorts of smart people put scholarly effort into trying to predict the future on the basis of the bible.  in a few hundred years, our own approach to futurology might seem similarly irrelevant