Author Archives: autolink

How to get people to like you: 7 ways from an FBI behavior expert

How to get people to like you: 7 ways from an FBI behavior expert The single most important thing is non-judgmental validation. Seek someone else’s thoughts and opinions without judging them. Suspend your ego. Focus on them. Really listen, don’t just wait to talk. Ask them questions; don’t try to come up with stories to […]

The Three Blind Spots of Politics

The Three Blind Spots of Politics “Liberals first. In their eagerness to empathize with the victim, they can turn the victim into an object rather than an independent actor. […] Conservatives dehumanize in their own way. In their zeal to preserve civilization and the American way of life, they demonize those that they see as […]

Book Notes: The Undoing Project

Book Notes: The Undoing Project “Amos liked to say that if you are asked to do anything—go to a party, give a speech, lift a finger—you should never answer right away, even if you are sure that you want to do it. Wait a day, Amos said, and you’ll be amazed how many of those […]

Parenting : Who is it really for?

Parenting : Who is it really for? from: June 28, 2017 at 11:48AM

Travis/Trump: What Uber Tells Us About The White House

Travis/Trump: What Uber Tells Us About The White House from: June 28, 2017 at 11:46AM

Oh For Two

Oh For Two “If both of these authors are correct, then we have two political parties that aren’t really about anything. They’re competing fiercely and inarguably offering Americans some kind of choice – only someone truly out on a limb would argue that there is no difference at all between having Trump or Hillary in […]

Children use salience to solve coordination problems

Children use salience to solve coordination problems (pdf) 8-year-olds > 5-year-olds > 3-year-olds at finding ways in the environment to coordinate with each other if there is no method for communication. 3-year-olds were no better than chance.

The War on Work—and How to End It

The War on Work—and How to End It “Yet every underemployed American represents a failure of entrepreneurial imagination. We can do better. Our educational system must improve the way it provides skills that bring higher earnings, and we need to experiment with new forms of vocational training. We should encourage entrepreneurial energies, including by making […]

Whole Foods: Amazon’s best new customer ↦

Whole Foods: Amazon’s best new customer ↦ from: June 27, 2017 at 10:24AM

How A.E. Housman Invented Englishness

How A.E. Housman Invented Englishness “Housman insisted that the task of poetry was “to transfuse emotion—not to transmit thought”; it was to make your throat clench and your hair stand on end. The emotion his own poetry most often elicits is that of overwhelming sadness.”

What Intelligent Machines Need to Learn From the Neocortex

What Intelligent Machines Need to Learn From the Neocortex “These three fundamental attributes of the neocortex—learning by rewiring, sparse distributed representations, and sensorimotor integration—will be cornerstones of machine intelligence. Future thinking machines can ignore many aspects of biology, but not these three. Undoubtedly, there will be other discoveries about neurobiology that reveal other aspects of […]

you can’t fake it

you can’t fake it “Tricks of evolution aside, I’m left to wonder: what makes people insecure? Why is the condition so common? An obvious culprit, if you’re in my position, is capitalism” … SMH, the ancient religions answered these questions a long time ago. But modern atheists can’t get past the ‘wrongness’ of the literal […]

If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it

If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it from: June 16, 2017 at 12:27AM

Sunbathing in the Rain: Do we all need a little time to sit and think?

Sunbathing in the Rain: Do we all need a little time to sit and think? “A recent study by psychologists at the University of Virginia asked subjects to simply sit in a room and ‘just think’ for 6 to 15 minutes. In the room was a button allowing subjects to electrocute themselves if they wanted. […]

What Is Depression, Anyway?: The Synapse Hypothesis

What Is Depression, Anyway?: The Synapse Hypothesis from: June 13, 2017 at 05:50PM

How to apologize properly

How to apologize properly from: June 13, 2017 at 05:39PM

The most avid believers in artificial intelligence are aggressively secular – yet their language is eerily religious. Why?

The most avid believers in artificial intelligence are aggressively secular – yet their language is eerily religious. Why? “Both religion and science, he observes, are ways of transcending our inherently fragile condition; they are versions of a ‘rebellion against human existence as it has been given’. But religious tropes in the AI community are motivated […]

Michael Lewis and the Parable of the Fourth Cookie

Michael Lewis and the Parable of the Fourth Cookie “With incredible consistency the person arbitrarily appointed leader of the group grabbed the fourth cookie, and ate it. Not only ate it, but ate it with gusto: lips smacking, mouth open, drool at the corners of their mouths. In the end all that was left of […]

How a Single Gene Could Become a Volume Knob for Pain

How a Single Gene Could Become a Volume Knob for Pain from: June 7, 2017 at 01:12PM

Interesting Sociology

Interesting Sociology from: June 6, 2017 at 01:32PM