General Discussion

A bit apologetically since this is so serious a topic.. but to the extent that the human brain has a role in understanding the mess we are in maybe there is a point.

I have been feeling so low I even wondered if there was something to Seasonal Affective Disorder and if that was why it being overcast the last couple of days made one feel this bleak. The last time I felt this glum was that foul Madison Square Garden event just before the election.

I wonder sometimes if one can control one’s general low spirits over the state of reality by trying to track what is affecting one’s moods.

I read in Nicholas Carr’s book “The Shallows” that women are good at detecting scammy websites (I have to look up exactly what he said) and the next thing is a little pop, but this was one of the rare things I came across that while a little pop, struck me as somewhat interesting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gift_of_Fear

I am skeptical of a lot of studies of the Ariely, Gino, Zimbardo, Milgram, Pentland, Haidt, Pinker, MIT Media Lab, Sunstein, Kahneman, Ramachandran, Deepak Chopra, Elkins, Facebook emotion contagion, Freakonomics, Harriri, Kosinski, Malcolm Gladwell type, Woebot, a lot of Epstein associated crap aimed at clogging up the social sciences with surveillance Panopticonware driven hack like attempts to understand the human mind and brain. Lie detectors, emotion ai etc. The stuff popular on those awful TED tech talks and crap that makes for airport best-sellers.
I see it where I live all the time. The most third rate crap imaginable.

Even without misconduct those studies seem to be terrible and ill-conceived bschool fluff that churns out foul things that never work like “nudge theory” and “lie detection”. And as far as I know “subliminal advertising” is a scam.

Things like harm reduction that do work are undermined.

Anyway, I have wondered why and how one responds to things without ambiguity using sparse amounts of info and the normally obligatory explanation is..because it works for me to avoid drivel I dislike as generally kinda sleazy, lightweight.

There is the type of science I think would be hard and inexact but not necessarily bunk. Most of this stuff is junk.

And looking around glumly, it doesn’t seem like all the crap I dislike is working out well for anyone.

Not one thing I listed as charlatanry is hard science or like the stuff anti-vaxxers push. I have never had any use for conspiracy theory as it all looks like the banality of evil.

Further, after annoying everyone and a tonne of theft, the more honest ai scientists turn around and admit that LLMs are overrated and then blandly move on to other drivel. Timnit Gebru/DAIR/Emily Bender and Yan LeCun are pretty much the only scientists I trust to be honest about ai.

In a very complex society we make calls all the time about stuff we don’t understand well and cannot possibly gain much knowledge of.

About a week ago I woke up feeling really bleak and I had a dream in which somehow Current Affairs’ piece on Bitter Roots struck me as one of rare rays of sunshine out there:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/bitter-root

Strange…the ways of the human brain..a mysterious organ at the end of the day and far from pliable or docile.

I usually turn to good solid science not coding and ai (ai ) to have some hope even to find good metaphors:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/break-it-to-make-it-how-fracturing-sculpts-tissues-and-organs-20260227/

Use of metaphors this way is kinda scary not cool:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jun/05/john-naughton-networker-spooks

Lightweight fluff is rightwing, but slips under the public radar due to the infatuation with and submission to tech oligarchs:

https://www.thedriftmag.com/what-was-the-ted-talk/

You need it all and would have it all in a civilized democratic society- environmental issues, civil, women’s, lgbtq rights, science, family planning/abortion, affirmative action, animal welfare, social safety nets, regulatory oversight, healthcare, peace, separation of church and state, education as a right.

We mostly seem to have corporate welfare, cottage industries of disinfo, several warring religions and chaos.

This should be a call to build systems globally that can withstand Trump and the present scotus and corrupt politicians everywhere. I pretty much dislike all our politicians here..I am in a communist state in the global south and I absolutely hate our local govt though they claim to be “left”. They have never seen an environment destroying industry or corrupt, misogynistic scam they wouldn’t use and they use divide and rule to enrich themselves at the expense of the earth. And I distrust everything but the courts which are not quite as crass yet.

The Trump era has to result in updated safeguards for democracy, safe from transactionalism and corruption and extortion/manipulation of the general public.