Curt Doolittle

Category: Human Behavior and Cognitive Science

  • Marketing Data: women buy things simply because they’re more expensive, and men

    Marketing Data: women buy things simply because they’re more expensive, and men buy things simply because they’re cheaper.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-12-23 14:44:16 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/679673883126030337

    Reply addressees: @voxdotcom

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/679672826501197824

    IN REPLY TO:

    @voxdotcom

    The hidden tax women pay on just about everything https://t.co/EpGDCVGJ6K https://t.co/RlZdjGJpMH

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/679672826501197824

  • SPEAKING OF BOWDEN Bowden had a nervous breakdown (which is the outcome of stres

    SPEAKING OF BOWDEN

    Bowden had a nervous breakdown (which is the outcome of stress and depression). Your brain basically gives up trying to solve whatever problem is bothering you and just disassociates from reality in order to save itself. Which is kinda cool when you think about it: Sort of the human version of a computer crashing and rebooting.

    —“Mental breakdown (also known as a nervous breakdown) is a general term for an acute, time-limited psychiatric disorder that manifests primarily as severe stress-induced depression, anxiety, or dissociation in a previously functional individual, to the extent that they are no longer able to function on a day-to-day basis until the disorder is resolved. A nervous breakdown is defined by its temporary nature, and often closely tied to psychological burnout, severe overwork, sleep deprivation, and similar stressors, which may combine to temporarily overwhelm an individual with otherwise sound mental functions.”—

    I had a roommate have a breakdown in College – I think due to a relationship failure. I’m not sure. Also possibly due to rather egregious consumption of alcohol and LSD. I mean, i watched him eat three SHEETS of blotter acid at a club in Westchester. Obviously I immediately found another way home… lol We didn’t see him for at least three days I think. (I am not into drugs.)

    I try to relate to the experience. I developed terrible panic attacks in my mid 20’s and it took a long time to figure out that it was caused by sleep deprivation from sleep apnea created by my food allergies. (I still have to be careful about allergens keeping me awake all night.) And I was very scared that something was seriously wrong with me at the time, and that affected my behavior significantly.

    There was this ridiculous desire of the psychological profession to attribute it to my abusive childhood. Which I had overcome largely by the time I was in college, and certainly by my mid twenties. But it turned out that I was sucking on adrenaline all night to stay in a state of half-sleep but never really resting. (I sleep with a plastic bite guard type thing that eliminates the problem assuming my weight doesn’t get out of hand.) And you know, sleep deprivation sucks. It causes visual and auditory interference. (It didn’t help that I was working like crazy). You can’t think straight at all, and out of nowhere you go from feeling ok, to tragically exhausted in an instant.

    So I can understand what it’s probably like for your entire mind and body to lose it for a bit. I know the feeling of wanting a vacation because my autistic OCD sort of does that to me regularly.

    Anyway, my roommate called me from the hospital having obviously mostly recovered already. “Curt, these people are crazier than I am! They keep asking me if I think I’m Jesus Christ! Please get me out of here!” His parents had sent him in after he was no longer being logical (although I didn’t think he was illogical – he was talking about harmonies on violins, so he must have been acting out of character during the conversation – a behavior which I had seen start to develop despite having moved out and in with my girlfriend by then.)

    I actually felt closer to ‘crazy’ when I got the cancer diagnosis. I just fell into depression and confusion for a long time. Everyone I know does to some degree. But we soldier onward. 🙂

    Anyway, my tragedies in life, other than my divorce, are all largely health related. In my view, I seem to accumulate trauma with each tragic event, and it adds some kind of mental weight that you have to drag around like Marley’s chains. But on the other hand each tragedy has given me CLARITY as to what is more important in life. And while I wish I learned that lesson without the tragedy and trauma, I am still happy to learn what is important in life:

    Friends, Family, Something Interesting To Do, A safe place to do what you want, and the Health and Resources to afford them.

    What isn’t important in life, is things. Which was hard for me to ‘get’. Signals being powerful influences upon us.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-12-23 05:36:00 UTC

  • Q&A: SEPARATENESS OF THE MIND? —“Q: I came to be aware [of] Julian Jaynes’ the

    Q&A: SEPARATENESS OF THE MIND?

    —“Q: I came to be aware [of] Julian Jaynes’ thesis materials. Seems to jive with your theme, Curt. You alluding to a similar theme when referencing the Pentateuch, or the Bible?”—Mark Palmer

    Great question Mark. Great Question.

    Well, I don’t really agree with how Jaynes is stating it, but I agree that the ‘separateness’ of the mind, and it’s self criticism, is a fairly recent invention in human history. You can see it if you talk to native americans and unexposed south american indians. Their distinction between the dream world and the rational (self critical) world is not bifurcated. It took me a while to understand this. They’re also far less verbally capable. So I suspect that the evolution of language and the evolution of the mind from from intuition are produced by the same evolutionary consequences.

    I mean women are definitely unable to control the noise in their heads as well as men are – this is the difference in our operating methods. I’d have a nervous breakdown if I had to be a woman for a day.

    Well, I’m trying to make the statement that the both the hebrew and the christian-greek-roman bible were constructed by means very similar to the construction of the constitution.

    But why is there such a difference between the content of archaic religion and the content modern of law? Or between the regulation of the roman empire, and the regulation of women, slaves, and the masses of medeterranean poor?

    The difference is PROPERTY. The asset of poor people is charity and cooperation. The asset of propertied people is property.

    Religion for regulation of norms (opportunity and insurance) and law for regulation of property (physical things).

    So what does that mean for our future? I think I have that figured out. But I want to eliminate the artificial distinction between Law(aristocracy), Philosophy(middle class) and Religion(poor).

    These technologies all serve the same purpose: regulation of classes.

    Curt

    Source date (UTC): 2015-12-23 04:07:00 UTC

  • ADVICE FOR NERDS This should be obvious, but for people who excel at learning, a

    ADVICE FOR NERDS

    This should be obvious, but for people who excel at learning, and love to learn, I have a bit of advice that you might want to consider:

    “Your understanding is not a deliverable, it is not productive, it is a cost.”

    There is a big difference between learning and entertainment. There is a big difference between problems and puzzles. There is a big difference between going from problems to books, and from books to problems.

    Whether you chew hallucinogenic roots, drink alcohol, play video games, watch movies, read books, or learn new things, you are just a consumer of other people’s efforts, and not a contributor.

    We do not get paid for consuming. We are paid for producing. Consuming may do little harm, but it does no good.

    So if you are learning, if you are experiencing, it may be rewarding, but it is just entertainment.

    Either one learns – bears a cost – for the production of an output, or one is just a dead weight on one’s peers.

    I have this problem in technology fairly often although because of my current occupation, less so than I used to. But I still hear and see it everywhere in all walks of life.

    Learning is not an intrinsic good. It is a form of conspicuous consumption – a form of hedonism, a luxury, a spending of an inheritance. And in business it is a parasitism.

    So learn only to produce something. That is what we pay each other for.

    If you want to learn for recreational purposes realize that all you’re doing is a more expensive and time consuming and arguably less physically harmful form of recreation.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-12-22 05:26:00 UTC

  • THE “EXAGGERATED FIGURE” IS HOW THE MIND ‘SEES’, MOVES AND FEELS (aesthetic igno

    THE “EXAGGERATED FIGURE” IS HOW THE MIND ‘SEES’, MOVES AND FEELS

    (aesthetic ignorance)(feminist lack of self control)

    1) Starting with Michelangelo’s David, possibly reaching it’s greatest heights with the works of Rodin, sculptors sought to appeal to our minds, rather than correspond to reality.

    2) We finally understood why humans prefer these dimensions when we learned about the structure of the cortex, and discovered the Cortical Homunculus:

    https://harvesteros.files.wordpress.com/…/homunculus.jpg

    3) We study eye movements of the genders and we look at ‘parts’. Strangely enough women DO look at feet, and men look at waist and eyes.

    As Aesthetic works, Disney figures are ‘perfect’ for appealing to the human mind.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-12-22 03:09:00 UTC

  • YOU CANT UNANCHOR YOURSELF —Tetlock finds that teams of amateurs trained in ga

    YOU CANT UNANCHOR YOURSELF

    —Tetlock finds that teams of amateurs trained in gathering information and thinking about it systematically outperformed experts in assigning probabilities of various events in a competition organized by IARPA, research agency under the Director of National Intelligence. In this conversation, Tetlock discusses the meaning, reliability, and usefulness of trying to assign probabilities to one-time events.—

    Source date (UTC): 2015-12-21 14:41:00 UTC

  • FEMININE GENETIC DENIALISM Mothers of Serial Killers, Murderers and Career Crimi

    FEMININE GENETIC DENIALISM

    Mothers of Serial Killers, Murderers and Career Criminals Demonstrate Denial As Genetic Cognitive Bias.

    Why do you assume that they would not consistently vote and speak to defend our enemies?

    Primeval woman was the possession of any group of brothers that could capture her. She cares not who captures the herd, only that there is competition such that women have options.

    Woman is Pandora, Eve, and Steinem: destroyer of civilization.

    Her talents must be marshaled just as mens must be marshaled.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-12-21 07:48:00 UTC

  • Men have had a much harder time taming women’s irrationality and impulsivity tha

    Men have had a much harder time taming women’s irrationality and impulsivity than they have their own. We kill off troublesome men. We just constrain troublesome women. Men have no more place in midwifery and nursery than women have in politics and war.

    We spent tends of thousands of years incrementally suppressing male behavior while merely containing female behavior. But we turned the ballot box into Pandora’s box and let loose all the evils in the world.

    Women have no place in politics and war

    Source date (UTC): 2015-12-21 06:03:00 UTC

  • WOMEN AREN”T MORAL THEY’RE OPPORTUNISTIC Female Political Openness is just an ex

    WOMEN AREN”T MORAL THEY’RE OPPORTUNISTIC

    Female Political Openness is just an excuse to obscure their fear of confrontation mixed with their natural optimism about offspring – without which they would never bear the heavy costs of children. We cannot confuse the irrationality of women with science, reason or morality. It is an unscientific, irrational, and immoral impulse that inhabits the female brain for the simple reason that a rational female would never bear and raise children.

    Care of the young and old is a female responsibility ad intuition. Care of the civilization is a male responsibility and intuition. Women will give away a civilization out of intuition just as readily as they will gift their children without limit and take the family, tribe, nation, and civilization into conquest and destitution.

    Women have no place in politics. That is the less of the past century. In as little as ten decades of political enfranchisement women have destroyed western civilization.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-12-21 06:02:00 UTC

  • THIS WEEK’s ASPIE POST Aspies tend to love everyone. The difficulty in empathizi

    THIS WEEK’s ASPIE POST

    Aspies tend to love everyone. The difficulty in empathizing, common rejection, and desire for connection with others makes all successful connections more enjoyable. The hard part to manage comes in three:

    1) It’s hard to find relations since listening to others most of their language consists of signals we consider either meaningless, tedious or confusing. So you must learn patience to listen and try to ask about how and why people feel the way they do. Most of us understand spoken emotions. Meanwhile the autistic impulse tries to control you into avoiding exactly what you are trying to accomplish. This is why ssri’s are so effective: they dull the impulse and allow you to practice building the strength of will over the autistic impulse. Social anxiety disorder is controlled by the same means. We must see the autism spectrum as excess in uterine suppression of the growth of the self. And that we must assist the growth of the self to compensate. We tend to think as engineers today rather than gardeners and foresters. The mind is constructed more like a tree and some artful bonsai may be needed.

    2) It is easy to alienate relations via over sharing minutia fascinating to the autistic mind because system-thought provides constant touch stones amidst sensory chaos in socially and emotionally dense environments. So developing self monitoring is necessary and it’s very hard work. Again the problem is severity: some of us are weakly affected and can rely on will. Others more so and require help in training. Others need chemical assistance to suppress the autistic impulse. And some of us lack sufficient self to imagine the very idea of self monitoring – and it is those people that are non functional.

    3) Once you mature having not experienced all the “silly” distractions of normal minds, you can gain this sense of superiority that comes with expertise in anything, and you can lose your desire to engage with (boring, dull, stupid) normals. This requires acceptance that only comes with age: normals have different feelings and needs and they usually fail to mature intellectually as far as we do – or rather they stop maturing at much earlier ages. So the only technique I have developed is love. I keep working a problem in my head in order to keep the big black scary machine busy, and I merely enjoy the company of people like a warm bath or sunny day. But what has surprised me is that simple and good people do not engage in as much signaling with false intellectualism. So I prefer the company of common people for my emotional health, and the company of competitive and intellectual people for my mental health.

    So how do we socialize? The trick for us is to develop something we can share with others that is interesting. So that we are valuable to the conversation.

    My strategy is to seek to help everyone I encounter in some small way. This usually involves getting to know them while looking for some opportunity to assist.

    And in that act of inquiry I show interest in others: seeking to understand, not to agree.

    That’s my lesson for this week to aspies.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-12-20 03:54:00 UTC