Tag: psychology

Desire modification

Obviously, the technology would be incalculably dangerous. With d-mod, local nonsatiation goes right out the window, since you can instantly dial yourself to a “bliss point” where you are just perfectly satisfied and don’t want anything else. That’s the end of scarcity. When we can decide what we want, desire becomes less important than meta-desire. What do we want to want? D-mod is like putting the parameters of the utility function in the utility function itself. The resultant “clades” of humans will be very, very different from each other, much more different than people are now. This will make human interaction very weird.

Depressing suburbia

Finally, a scientific explanation for the feeling of depression I get from suburban environments dominated by Applebee’s, OfficeMax and 8-lane thoroughfares. Urban design can have a measurable effect on how people feel. Researchers examined levels of self-reported happiness in 10 major cities. Quality urban environments do indeed contribute to happiness among residents.

“People are often connected to quality places that are cultural and distinctive. Not all neighborhoods are the same. Some are designed and built to foster or enable connections. Other are built to discourage them (e.g., a gated model) or devolve to become places that are antisocial because of crime or other negative behaviors.”

Death to suburbia. I have nothing against truly rural communities, it is the sea of despair and mediocrity in between that is the problem.
2012-07-13: I have said as much for 10 years

Nearly everything that these families had striven for — material possessions, good jobs, extracurricular enrichment for their kids — made them wholly miserable.

On Burnout

Burnout is not its own category in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It’s not something that can be treated pharmacologically; it is not considered the same thing as depression or a midlife crisis, though sometimes they coincide. The term was first coined by a psychotherapist named Herbert Freudenberger, who himself probably took it from Graham Greene’s novel A Burnt-Out Case. (“I haven’t enough feeling left for human beings,” the book’s numb protagonist, Querry, wrote in his journal, “to do anything for them out of pity.”) While working at a free clinic for drug addicts in Haight-Ashbury, Freudenberger noticed that the volunteers, when discouraged, would often push harder and harder at their jobs, only to feel as if they were achieving less and less. The result, in 1974, was the book Burnout: The High Cost of High Achievement. Others soon followed. A subspecialty of psychology was born.

lots of bla bla on burnout

Backward Lies

Have people tell their story backwards, starting at the end and systematically working their way back. Instruct them to be as complete and detailed as they can. This technique increases the cognitive load to push them over the edge. A deceptive person, even a professional liar, is under a heavy cognitive load as he tries to stick to his story while monitoring your reaction.

The Satisfaction Paradox

a future where amazon and others sell the recommendations as a service but the actuals goods are free.

While it may be a long while before every adult is sharing art or innovations on a global scale, we can already see the abundance of good stuff piling up. Netflix has more great movies a click away — after I filter out the dross — than I can watch in my lifetime. What do I watch next? Spotify and other music streaming services will have more fantastic, I-am-in-heaven music available everywhere all the time than I can ever listen to. What do I listen to next? Google will have every book ever published only 125ms away, and collaborative filtering, friends recommendations and a better Amazon engine, will narrow down those stacks to the best 10K books for me. So what do I read next?

I believe that answering this question is what outfits like Amazon will be selling in the future. For the price of a subscription you will subscribe to Amazon and have access to all the books in the world at a set price. (An individual book you want to read will be as if it was free, because it won’t cost you extra.) The same will be true of movies (Netflix), or music (iTunes or Spotify or Rhapsody.) You won’t be purchasing individual works.

Mars500

studying long-term effects of extreme confinement

The purpose of the Mars500 study is to gather data, knowledge and experience to help prepare one day for a real mission to Mars. Obviously there will be no effect of weightlessness, but the study will help determine key psychological and physiological effects of being in such an enclosed environment for such an extended period of time.