Tag: psychology

Do we need to jail animals?

zoos are still prisons, at the end of the day. can we do better?

Maybe we don’t need to jail animals. Maybe we just need to improve our ability to observe them in situ. There’s still plenty of open space that is, or could be, conserved. And we’re getting really good at surveillance! Let’s put our new skill to a different use. Fly cameras over areas of wildlife parks inaccessible to tourist vehicles. Enable online visitors to adopt and follow individual animals and their groups. Make it possible for anyone to have the sort of experience Jane Goodall did. The drone cameras sound creepy, but unlike the vehicles that carry tourists through those parks, the drones will keep getting smaller and more unobtrusive.

Do psychedelics make you weird?

the explanation that weird people gravitate toward psychedelics, even in the sciences, is a strong one. But it’s sufficient that I am hesitant to repeat the common view that psychedelics are not at all dangerous, or that they have no permanent side effects. There seems to me at least a moderate chance that they will make you more interesting without your consent – whether that is a good or a bad thing depends on exactly how interesting you want to be.

Robot Friends

any given conversation and image will not be completely unique. There are 7B people in the world, but 1 piece of text will not generate 7B different responses. When 2 people are chatting, it is possible a similar conversation has already taken place—we just have to find it.

The Cause of RBF

The cues are understated, yet the machine detects and interprets them the same way our human brains do. “Something in the neutral expression of the face is relaying contempt, both to the software and to us.”

i’ve been diagnosed with RBF, and the root cause is contempt. sounds about right.

Interspecies friendships

Animals in captivity have their food presented to them; they don’t need to worry about marking their territory or looking for mates the way an animal in the wild would. All those activities take time and energy, and if those needs are removed, the animals get bored. A playmate—even an unorthodox one—can be more satisfying than a meal. The animal’s motivation to engage socially and playfully maybe was higher in its need hierarchy than eating. There’s an 85% chance that Amur will end up eating his new friend.

Secret History Of Myers-Briggs

Less obvious at first, and then wholly undeniable, is how hard the present-day guardians of the type indicator work to shield Myers’s personal and professional history from critical scrutiny. For the foundation, as well as for its for-profit-research-arm, the Center for Applications of Psychological Type (CAPT), this means keeping journalists far away from Myers’s notebooks, correspondences and research materials, which are stored in the Special Collections division of the University of Florida library. Although they are technically the property of the university — thus open to the public — Myers’s papers require permission from CAPT to access; permission that has not been granted to anyone in the 10 years since the papers were donated to the university by Myers’s granddaughter, Katharine Hughes.

the murky history of a very dubious organization. reminds me of scientology.