Gaywallet's recent activity
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Comment on The entropic brain: a theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs in ~science
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Comment on The entropic brain: a theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs in ~science
Gaywallet Link Parent Agreed, but it is easier to just recruit people and scan them, then to recruit people, have them take drugs and scan them. Yep, brain scans wrt meditation and sleep and studies on these brain...no ego vs. less ego
Agreed, but it is easier to just recruit people and scan them, then to recruit people, have them take drugs and scan them.
meditation
Yep, brain scans wrt meditation and sleep and studies on these brain states are fascinating.
What do you mean by this? It's a bit of a problem that we have no idea what our thought processes really are (hence an argument against free will). At any rate, RCH and his colleagues are already on it! Check out their more recent work.
More to get people to free-form explain what they are thinking - this can give insight into mechanistic action. I suspect targeted questions trying to see how various biases affect us under different circumstances or how different emotionally triggering events are perceived is what will actually end up happening in the lab.
Do you have any direct links to their more recent work? Thanks!
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Comment on The entropic brain: a theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs in ~science
Gaywallet Link Still working my way through the article, but I find it a fascinating theory. It makes me wonder, however, if this isn't observable already without the use of psychedelics by finding people who...Still working my way through the article, but I find it a fascinating theory.
It makes me wonder, however, if this isn't observable already without the use of psychedelics by finding people who either have a very diminished sense of ego, or feel like they have no ego. I think the classic relatable example of this is people going through a mid-life crisis who are unable to find a defined sense of self. Others, such as social chameleons, view themselves as having a very flexible sense of self. Would they, perhaps, have different activation/inhibition patterns then people who feel very strongly about their sense of self?
Ignoring the psychoanalytic application of the data, I do believe that understanding entropy in the brain as it relates to cognition (in particular frontal lobe vs. non-frontal lobe) - I think we can gain a lot of information about how we process thought through the application of psychedelics and targeted questions / study design. It would be interesting, for example, to train people to explain their thought process when presented with certain types of information as well as measure responses (such as emotion) to understand how things are processed when entropy is increased.
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Comment on Americanisms the British public can't bloody stand in ~humanities
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Comment on What are some lifehacks you would recommend? in ~life
Gaywallet Link Parent Roth or not really depends on how much you make and how much you intend to make when you retire. Roth means you pay taxes now, 401 means you pay taxes when you take it out. Generally speaking,...Roth or not really depends on how much you make and how much you intend to make when you retire. Roth means you pay taxes now, 401 means you pay taxes when you take it out.
Generally speaking, 401s tend to work out better if you use the money for the intended purpose only and don't start taking out money until you actually retire, because if your income is zero besides the stocks you sell, chances are your income in retirement is going to be significantly lower than your income when you are making money - putting the money into a 401 will reduce your currently taxable income today and the total taxes you pay on the income will be less when it's sold because it's not putting you into a higher bracket than you were paying when you put the money in.
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Comment on What are your long term savings goals? Are you saving towards a purchase of anything in particular? in ~life
Gaywallet Link I've been regularly contributing to a 401 for nearly a decade and I've been maxing it out for a few years now. I was looking at how much was in there and if I continue to work and max it out every...I've been regularly contributing to a 401 for nearly a decade and I've been maxing it out for a few years now. I was looking at how much was in there and if I continue to work and max it out every year, what will be there when I'm 65. The number surprised me. I then looked at what I currently own in stocks and funds and used an online calculator to estimate how much would be there when I'm 65 with average returns. That number was very similar.
So I changed my strategy this last year. While I'm still saving what I can, I need to actually start spending some of my money because when I look back on my life, there's not a lot of big experiences I can point to and say "I really enjoyed my trip to..." or "That time I did...".
My suggestion to those still trying to save and are relatively young is the following:
- Put all your money into an index fund. My recommendation is vanguard total stock index (admiral or regular, depending on what you can afford).
If you want to diversify, split between index funds. If you're a bit older and want more security (or suspect a need to get out of the market in the next 5-10 years), get some bonds or lower risk investments.
I say this as someone who used to day trade and who still owns a decent amount of stock (working on selling them off as the timing is right and redistributing to an index fund instead). I say this because the headache you cause yourself trying to beat the market just isn't worth it. You might win some years, but you won't win all years and the reality is that index funds do a better job in the long run than the vast majority of people including people who decide to go into trading as their choice of career.
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Comment on Three Years of Misery Inside Google, the Happiest Company in Tech in ~tech
Gaywallet Link Parent I hate when people try to argue this, especially when >50% of votes are still owned by very few individuals. These individuals very much have the right to choose how the company focuses it's...trying to balance the business requirements of being a very large public company
I hate when people try to argue this, especially when >50% of votes are still owned by very few individuals. These individuals very much have the right to choose how the company focuses it's efforts. Sure, the stock price might take a hit, but when your net worth is hundreds of millions of dollars, why should you care?
These individuals are choosing greed over morality, even when they have so much money that they have the privilege to afford not to do so. They have no excuse for their behavior and they can't fall back on "oh but it's a public company" when they control the majority of votes.
To me, this article is about the weaknesses of large social systems when exposed to malicious forces.
There's a potential financial cost in terms of lawsuits to consider, but there's also the potential financial cost of driving away all your world class creative minds that are helping make your company what it is (not to mention the mental/moral cost to self). I don't think they made the right choice, but we won't really know for certain for another several decades.
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Comment on Some <details> about more <small> updates (you'll get that in a minute) and general Tildes feedback/questions/comments in ~tildes.official
Gaywallet Link Parent TildesAutomator or something so there's no confusion as to whether this is "officially" the website or something that people have set up. Might not be a bad idea to include a documentation page or...TildesAutomator or something so there's no confusion as to whether this is "officially" the website or something that people have set up. Might not be a bad idea to include a documentation page or something so that recurring schedules can be traced back to a user.
I'm not sure this will ever become an issue, but there's the possibility for abuse in a system like this, so it might make sense to either restrict access until anti-spam is implemented, or implement a system of peer-review of some sort to approve new scheduled creations.
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Comment on Three Years of Misery Inside Google, the Happiest Company in Tech in ~tech
Gaywallet Link While I had heard of most of this through the media and grapevine living in the area with friends who work at Google, to hear the internal politics of what exactly was happening is very eye...While I had heard of most of this through the media and grapevine living in the area with friends who work at Google, to hear the internal politics of what exactly was happening is very eye opening. I know that Google has slowly been slipping out of 'do no evil' into 'do some evil' but I had no idea the extent to which this was happening at the leadership level. In many ways this article is appalling and I'm glad to know a bit more of the internal politics. At one point I had considered that I might be willing to work at Google if the right job and the right price showed up, but I think I'd rather turn towards a company with stronger morals at this point.
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
Gaywallet Link Parent As someone who's played lots of card and board games, and several virtual board/card/etc. games I've been interested in slay the spire for a bit, I just haven't had the time to pick it up and play...As someone who's played lots of card and board games, and several virtual board/card/etc. games I've been interested in slay the spire for a bit, I just haven't had the time to pick it up and play it. It's nice to hear someone who's unfamiliar with the genre is having such a fun time. That's a solid recommendation.
whats the correct term for this
synergy?
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Comment on How to make your fitness tracker count steps more accurately in ~health
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Comment on An armed man who caused panic at a Walmart in Missouri says it was a 'social experiment' in ~news
Gaywallet Link Parent Easy to remember Nearly everyone can understand it Seems plausible enough that it could happen to anyoneHow does this cultural meme hold so much staying power today?
- Easy to remember
- Nearly everyone can understand it
- Seems plausible enough that it could happen to anyone
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Comment on What Do We Do About the Violence of Lonely Young Men? in ~misc
Gaywallet Link Parent And this is why we're hitting an impasse. We're not talking science, we're talking our beliefs on how things are. We simply don't have the science, and when I ask for it or challenge the...it seems to be a very deeply coded thing.
And this is why we're hitting an impasse. We're not talking science, we're talking our beliefs on how things are. We simply don't have the science, and when I ask for it or challenge the assumptions of the poor quality science we do have we keep running into the same problem.
This is a fairly naive view of how science works.
Yeah no we're not going to go there.
You're the one who stated that ethnicity and background were far more mutable and changeable than gender, and yet we have plenty of historical examples of people taking the assumption that it's not it's not mutable and ending up with bunk shitty science about how certain ethnicities are biologically stupider than their white European counterparts. At the same time you're making the argument that it's safe to say there's an assumption that gender is immutable and we should also make assumptions about this immutability and proceed to study gender scientifically in the same fashion.
I'm urging caution because it's exactly these kinds of assumptions that got us into bad science that has taken decades to undo and we've still got assholes pointing to this shitty science as proof that racism is justified. Let's not do the same with gender and transgender individuals, shall we?
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Comment on What Do We Do About the Violence of Lonely Young Men? in ~misc
Gaywallet Link Parent I think we just fundamentally disagree on how solid the concept of gender is. Assumptions in science are extremely dangerous. It costs us almost nothing to ask the question and failing to do so...It's the same way with gender. Just because the definitional lines are fuzzy on the margins doesn't mean the general symbolic idea isn't there.
These borders change and flow too rapidly over time to actually pin down as specific things so I don't think there is a strong argument for this being as immutably coded as gender.
I think we just fundamentally disagree on how solid the concept of gender is.
We have to make tons of assumptions just to move through the world and we tend to reexamine them when there is some compelling evidence to do so, which I'm not really seeing here.
Assumptions in science are extremely dangerous. It costs us almost nothing to ask the question and failing to do so often taints our view of the world. Fundamental biases in science have caused us to have to undo years of experiments and start over at ground zero an uncomfortable number of times throughout modern (let alone all) history.
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Comment on What Do We Do About the Violence of Lonely Young Men? in ~misc
Gaywallet Link Parent And I'm not arguing against this, I'm talking about how we approach the design of these educational materials and studies we need to conduct to understand the best approach. The end result might...Like I said, representation matters and people need to be able to see themselves reflected in the role models you want them to have.
And I'm not arguing against this, I'm talking about how we approach the design of these educational materials and studies we need to conduct to understand the best approach. The end result might be exactly the same, or it could be wildly different, we won't know however, if we go in with blinders on.
doesn't really make sense when we're talking about biology. The contention is that it does.
Let's be careful not to mix the social concept of male with the biological concept of sex.
There being edge case exceptions to the general sexual dimorphism doesn't negate the rule.
I heavily disagree that it's all edge cases. The behavior of individuals who identify as male is extremely different from person to person to the point that if presented with two individuals who identify as male that there are very few if any things you could say about the two that would almost always be correct.
There is a wide spectrum of diversity between two species of birds as well, but it's still useful to understand the concept of species and it would be incorrect to talk as if the concept of speciation doesn't have an impact on the real world behaviors and traits of those birds.
I'm curious what your take on ethnicity, race, etc. are given this statement. Do you think knowing someone's race or ethnicity has real world impact on the behaviors and traits of those humans? Do you treat race and ethnicity with the same weight as sex or gender?
We are talking about psychologically damaged human beings here. Adhering to conventional standards of "scientific" proof would literally be unethical and if you're going to stake out the claim that you won't be convinced by anything less it starts to sound like you're just being stubborn and trying to create impossible standards before you'll entertain the thought.
I'm not saying we need to create an unethical study in order to prove my point, all I'm saying is that given the information we have we need to not assume. We need to take the context of the information we do have and ensure that when designing for the future we don't draw the wrong conclusions from this information.
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Comment on What Do We Do About the Violence of Lonely Young Men? in ~misc
Gaywallet Link Parent To be clear, I'm not arguing that how we implement education doesn't necessarily include some aspect of this. But if we don't even bother to test whether degendered education on toxic behavior...It's kind of similar to the argument about why representation matters. People need to be able to see themselves reflected in the models they want to emulate or it won't have any resonance with them.
To be clear, I'm not arguing that how we implement education doesn't necessarily include some aspect of this. But if we don't even bother to test whether degendered education on toxic behavior reaches these individuals, we are potentially depriving ourselves of a better solution to the problem. My issue is that people in this thread seem unwilling to challenge the assumption that while the presentation is unique masculine, that does not necessarily mean that the education needs to be. We simply don't know until we ask the question and I want us to ask the question rather than just assuming the answer.
Their inability to develop constructive ways to perform the role of being male is the main reason it's manifesting in such negative behaviors
And my hot take question is why does the role of male and female need to exist? Why can't we have roles that aren't gendered? We have professions which tend to lean male or female which do not directly discourage certain genders from entering them. For example, male nurses. We all know male nurses. Male nurses are not any less of a nurse than female nurses.
And this line of questioning leads me directly to another quote in your comment
What those roles are and how they should be structured can vary dramatically from one society or culture to the next, but the intrinsic need to have a sense of belonging and understand what your community is along with your place is in it, that's all pretty innate.
Which begs the question what is special about the roles of male and female?
if anything is deeply encoded, it's of course going to be gender since we're a sexually dimorphic species
We're also an incredibly diverse species and both gender and sexual identity fall upon a much larger spectrum than simply 1 or 0. The 1 or 0 doesn't inform me of practically anything.
The models exist, but I don't think the individuals in question "have them." Like they don't see themselves in it and there's too much counter-programming for it to break through.
Is there too much counter-programming needed? Where's the proof? I think we need to stop making assumptions about how things are without testing it first.
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Comment on What Do We Do About the Violence of Lonely Young Men? in ~misc
Gaywallet Link Parent Apologies if I was unclear in my intentions. My goal is not to deprogram, it's simply that if we are going to educate people on "correct" or "right" or "moral" or "good" or "desirable" behavior,...Well for one thing, embarking on a grand social engineering campaign to deprogram people out of having the concept of gender sounds like something out of an Orwellian dystopia.
Apologies if I was unclear in my intentions. My goal is not to deprogram, it's simply that if we are going to educate people on "correct" or "right" or "moral" or "good" or "desirable" behavior, that we should educate to behavior, not to "male behavior" or "female behavior". There's no need to gender it. We can absolutely tailor it so that people who identify as male get educated differently than those who identify as female, but the education itself does not need to be gendered. It's not so much an attack on gender itself as it is doing our best to remove anyone's preconceived notions of gendered behavior simply by removing it from education.
But arguing we should remove the concept of norms altogether doesn’t really address this.
While I do think we should remove the concept or norms, my argument was for divorcing the concept of norms when it comes to figuring out how to deal with this specific problem. That our education to these "lonely men" should not be gendered, even though the problem it is solving is heavily driven by gendered norms.
The whole “get rid of all the rules and expectations and we’ll be fine” approach is fundamentally misguided.
When did I say it would solve our problem? I was merely pointing out that it contributes to the problem so we might as well start to tackle it now, especially since it's contribution is leading to an undesirable outcome.
We’re social creatures and we are at our happiest when we feel like we’re fulfilling our role.
That's an interesting take. Why do you think this is the case for social creatures? Can you define "role" for me in this context?
They have no constructive model for how to be good men.
But they do have constructive models on how to be a good person which are at times at odds with the constructive models on how to be a man. To me that seems like a flaw with the construction of gender roles in the first place.
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Comment on What Do We Do About the Violence of Lonely Young Men? in ~misc
Gaywallet Link Parent Not sure I agree here. Sure, some anthropology would be studying fringe/odd/interesting tribes but a good deal of it is studying "normal" civilizations. You need both to properly frame any insight...That’s basically how most anthropology works though, you study some random tribe with interesting social norms or dynamics and draw insight about what that means for the rest of humanity.
Not sure I agree here. Sure, some anthropology would be studying fringe/odd/interesting tribes but a good deal of it is studying "normal" civilizations. You need both to properly frame any insight you should be drawing.
it’s important focus on the world as it really exists rather than as we wish it to be.
The way the world really exists is what this article points out - "lonely men" causing violence. We can't fix this problem without thinking about how we wish it to be, a place where "lonely men" don't cause violence. If we're already going to be focusing on how the world should be, why must we constrain our thoughts?
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Comment on What Do We Do About the Violence of Lonely Young Men? in ~misc
Gaywallet Link Parent A fair point, however it make me wonder that if the hypothesis is that it's related to male-vs-male competition for access to mating females, then what would happen if we fix this socially? I also...A fair point, however it make me wonder that if the hypothesis is that it's related to male-vs-male competition for access to mating females, then what would happen if we fix this socially?
I also think it's important to point out that it's a "tendency" - it's not a guarantee. Humans could be one of the groups in which it's not a given truth for the same reasons it is in other observed animals. We should be cautious about inferring the reason for a specific sample within a larger sample size without more information.
To be clear, I do believe that hormones and genetics absolutely affect aggression and that while we have yet to really prove it, testosterone is likely one of the biggest contributors. I only ask these questions to get people thinking scientifically. It's very easy to say "this is what we always see, so it must be the case here too" and have that bias us.
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Comment on What Do We Do About the Violence of Lonely Young Men? in ~misc
Yes but you don't want to conflate the two. It's very possible that the mechanism of action for psychedelics isn't quite as expected in the theory of the author. We'd need to test it's not something unique to psychedelics altering the mind in a way that we didn't evolve through, rather than the proposed "reversion" to a more "primitive" state.
To be clear, I'm not thinking of this as a large scale study, but rather a smaller scale study to help provide insight into what needs to be researched. The second part of my statement where I talk about it likely being specific, targeted questions such as one that reveals a bias we know to be true in humans (such as say, anchoring bias) and testing whether psychedelics influence how we approach thinking is what I expected to be more rigorous (and more likely to be approved). I didn't mean to conflate the two or to imply that we would be conducting smaller scale studies like this for the express purposes of quantitative data capture, but more to explore what exactly does a state of increased entropy do to how we think and approach problems.
I'm not convinced there is single-neuron resolution for discrete thoughts and even if there is the simple variety in human genetics and how we approach thinking would make things far too messy for this to be of any use for us outside of very limited scope - very specialized sections of the brain such as how we interpret vision are standardized enough among the population to potentially deduce mechanisms of action on single-neuron scale and draw conclusions that might be useful to other humans, but single-neuron resolution in the frontal cortex, for example, is probably not very useful.
Thanks!