Tag: psychology

APA Meeting Photo-Essay

You know how drug companies pay 6 or 7 figures for 30-second television ads just on the off chance that someone with the relevant condition might be watching? You know how they employ drug reps to flatter, cajole, and even seduce doctors who might prescribe their drug? Well, it turns out that having 15000 psychiatrists in 1 building sparks a drug company feeding frenzy that makes piranhas look sedate by comparison. Every flat surface is covered in drug advertisements. And after the flat surfaces are gone, the curved surfaces, and after the curved surfaces, giant rings hanging from the ceiling.

Perceptual Control

Translating Predictive Coding Into Perceptual Control

some people (often including me) find free energy/predictive coding very difficult to understand, but find perceptual control theory intuitive. If these are basically the same, then someone who wants to understand free energy can learn perceptual control theory and then a glossary of which concepts match to each other, and save themselves the grief of trying to learn free energy/predictive coding just by reading Friston directly.

Larissa MacFarquhar

COWEN: If you’re an extreme altruist, are you too subject to manipulation by others? If you care so much about so many other people, and those people actually can be harmed pretty easily at low cost, does this mean that you, the extreme altruist, you just go through life being manipulated?

MACFARQUHAR It’s funny you say that because one thing that I have noticed about the extreme altruist . . . You know what? I don’t want to call them extreme altruists. I think they’re people with a very strong sense of duty. The people I met were very, very different from each other, but one thing they had in common is they really, really barely cared about what other people thought. They had to feel that way because almost everyone they met thought they were at best weirdos, and at worst dangerous megalomaniacs. So they were unconventional in their degree of duty but also in many other ways.

on extreme altruists

Tribal Politics

He could get people to change their position on welfare, 100%, all the way to the other side of the spectrum of policy, just based on what party they were told supported that position. After they said they supported that position, he asked them why they supported that position, and they didn’t say, ‘Because my party does.’ They came up with other reasons. So, after being experimentally induced into holding a position that they actually didn’t agree with, they then came up with reasons that they thought they agreed with that.

How to Make Friends

My wife and I have started a practice we call The Friendship Meal. What happens is something like this: we take a person or a couple and invite them to come have dinner with us. It’s almost always a disorienting thing to begin with — we don’t know them, they don’t know us, and everyone’s pretty shy. And sometimes the meals stay there: shyness and lack of connection, we eat and go separate ways. But sometimes that special spark happens, and, all-of-a-sudden, the conversations last for hours. And that makes the risk worth it!

Destroying psychology

interesting piece on the replication crisis in psychology, and what’s next.

Lindsay talks with psychologists all the time who aren’t eager to embrace the updated rules, and he understands why. “Our literature is packed with unreliable findings. And I can imagine if you hitched your whole wagon to a concept that doesn’t seem to be a real thing, that could be threatening.” Like Heathers, Nick Brown sometimes shakes his head at the reluctance among researchers to acknowledge what, to him, seems obvious. To continue to defend a system that’s churned out stacks upon stacks of hopelessly flawed papers, rather than to own up to the truth and try to fix it, seems pointless. “I don’t know whether they genuinely believe they’re doing the right thing or there’s a sort of doubt niggling at the back of their mind, but they don’t want to acknowledge it. Maybe the people who need to make those changes, in that deep, dark moment before they go to sleep, they think to themselves, ‘How are we going to get out of this?’”

Value Heuristics

We need to navigate complicated philosophical questions in order to decide how to act, what to do, what behaviors to incentivize, what behaviors to punish, what signals to send, and even how to have a society at all. Sometimes we can use theories from science and mathematics to explicitly model how a system works and what we want from it. But even the scholars who understand these insights rarely know exactly how to objectively apply them in the real world. Yet anyone who lives with others needs to be able to do these things; not just scholars but ordinary people, children, and even chimpanzees. So sometimes we use heuristics and approximations. Evolution has given us some of them as instincts. Children learn others as practically-innate hyperpriors before they’re old enough to think about what they’re doing. And cultural evolution creates others alongside the institutions that encourage and enforce them. In the simplest case, we just feel some kind of emotional attraction or aversion to something. In other cases, the emotions are so compelling that we crystallize them into a sort of metaphysical essence that explains them. And in the most complicated cases, we endorse the values implied by those metaphysical essences above and beyond whatever values we were trying to model in the first place.