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At once tiny and huge: what is this feeling we call ‘sublime’?

“Here we have an account of sublime experience that oscillates between feeling reduced to nothing in comparison with the great spatial and temporal expanse of nature, and then feeling elevated by two thoughts ‘that only philosophy makes clear’. First is the thought that as cognising, thinking subjects we in a sense create (support, construct) our own world – a second nature, as it were – a world of our own subjective experience. And the second exalting thought is that we are in some sense ‘one with the world’, and in being unified with nature in all its temporal and spatial vastness, we are therefore ‘not oppressed but exalted by its immensity.’”

Book Review: Evolutionary Psychopathology

“Del Giudice seems to imply that a similar epigenetic mechanism “looks around” at the world during the first few years of life to try to figure out if you’re living in the sort of unpredictable dangerous environment that needs a fast strategy, or the sort of safe, masterable environment that needs a slow strategy. Depending on your genetic predisposition and the observable features of the environment, this mechanism “makes a decision” to “lock” you into a faster or slower strategy, setting your personality traits more toward one side or the other.”

The Best Interview Questions We’ve Ever Published

“…hiring well to begin with is one of the most powerful antidotes to paralyzing bureaucracy. You want to recruit and onboard people you know you can trust, so you that you don’t have to set up a bunch of newfangled process just to ensure productivity and quality.”

Depression and religion in adolescence

“…’a one standard deviation increase in religiosity decreases the probability of being depressed by 11 percent. By comparison, increasing mother’s education from no high school degree to a high school degree or more only decreases the probability of being depressed by about 5 percent.’

And for the most depressed individuals, religiosity seems to be more effective than cognitive-based therapy ‘one of the most recommended forms of treatment.'”

Vimeo: Vargsamtal – NOWNESS

Vargsamtal – NOWNESS

A Framework for Intelligence and Cortical Function Based on Grid Cells in the Neocortex: A Companion Paper

“In a pure hierarchical model, these connections would not be necessary. In fact, more than 95% of the synapses in the neocortex are not explained by the pure hierarchical model. Additionally, many AI and deep learning networks are built on this hierarchical model. They typically require dozens of levels and millions of examples to learn something, whereas a human can learn something new in just a few exposures. The brain is clearly doing something different, and the general hierarchical view explains some of the story, but not all, so there must be something missing.

We believe we have uncovered the missing piece: all cortical columns have a signal representing location.”

Pagans against Genesis

“And here we have the central problem: Greek and Roman philosophers criticised the Bible first and foremost because it presented the deity in terms that were utterly unacceptable to them. The biblical God is a passionate God, a capricious God – not the austere, immobile, unchanging God that Greco-Roman philosophers argued for.”

Religion is about emotion regulation, and it’s very good at it

“Emotional management is important because life is hard. The Buddha said: ‘All life is suffering’ and most of us past a certain age can only agree. Religion evolved to handle what I call the ‘vulnerability problem’. When we’re sick, we go to the doctor, not the priest. But when our child dies, or we lose our home in a fire, or we’re diagnosed with Stage-4 cancer, then religion is helpful because it provides some relief and some strength. It also gives us something to do, when there’s nothing we can do.”

The Tails Coming Apart As Metaphor For Life

“Mediocristan is like the route from Balboa Park to West Oakland, where it doesn’t matter what line you’re on because they’re all going to the same place. Then suddenly you enter Extremistan, where if you took the Red Line you’ll end up in Richmond, and if you took the Green Line you’ll end up in Warm Springs, on totally opposite sides of the map.

Our innate moral classifier has been trained on the Balboa Park – West Oakland route. Some of us think morality means “follow the Red Line”, and others think “follow the Green Line”, but it doesn’t matter, because we all agree on the same route.

When people talk about how we should arrange the world after the Singularity when we’re all omnipotent, suddenly we’re way past West Oakland, and everyone’s moral intuitions hopelessly diverge.”

10 Day Samadhi (Concentration) Retreat at Spirit Rock

“No one wants to experience sadness, but feeling sadness and desiring that the sadness goes away is worse than simply experiencing sadness in the present moment. The Buddha called our reaction to experiences the “second arrow” that hurts us. The first arrow is the experience itself; the second arrow is our unwise reaction to it that magnifies the effect.”

“You need faith to stick with projects that deliver progress in “mysterious” ways over long periods of time. By “faith” I’m not referring to belief in God; I mean having faith that time you spend in contemplative practice is time well spent.”

“If you want to improve your mind and better understand reality, you have to train your mind. If you want to be happy with a human brain and heart not wired to prioritize happiness, you have to train your heart and mind. Train. It’s like going to the gym to exercise: you have to work at it. It doesn’t happen automatically. Meditation is one way to do this.”

Why did the witch trials dwindle?

“Where there was more conflict between Catholics and Protestants (in Britain, between Anglicans and Presbyterians), witch trials were widespread; in places where one creed dominated there were fewer. The authors conclude that churches engaged in a sort of “non-price competition”, gaining converts in confessional battlegrounds by advertising their commitment to fighting evil by trying witches.”

Toddlers Like Winners, But How They Win Matters

“…bonobos always prefer a winner — even when that dominance comes from beating others up.

“They prefer dominant individuals, no matter how they achieve their dominance,” notes Kiley Hamlin, an associate professor studying developmental psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. “Whereas human babies, in this case, are preferring only those who are dominant and not mean.””

[…]

This study fits into a large body of work by her lab and others, Hamlin says, showing that human babies prefer helpers and distain bullies of all kinds.”

Extreme Athleticism Is the New Midlife Crisis

“For her dissertation, Christensen conducted a field study of 100 milers as they went through the race. She tracked their emotions and their levels of confidence as they journeyed through the various stages. What she found is that runners who were able to accept their pain and not see it as a threat were able to succeed on the trail.

“There’s really something transcendental about that experience,” she says. “People need to go to the edge. Somehow that’s good for us, to be reminded of our mortal limits.

When we push our body to that end it creates such a sense of compassion and gratitude for what your body can do.”

When will I be me? Why a sense of authenticity takes its time

“…these studies suggest that our perceived sense of authenticity is continually changing. We do not think of ourselves as stagnant beings. Moreover, people hold positive expectations that they are constantly moving towards becoming their true self, and they place immense value on knowing and expressing who they really are, so much so that they believe their future selves will be a more authentic version of their current selves, and their current selves are more genuine than their past selves.”

Community Plumbing

“Yet growing up in that environment impressed upon me that pretty much everything can be made and fixed by regular people. It helped me appreciate how the world hangs together — how a building stands up, how electricity gets to the outlet, how water gets in the kitchen sink and out of a flooded basement. Triangle offered an elegant geometry. You could buy frames and fasteners for fixing material things, and you could access a social infrastructure that gave shape to the community. The world was built from the stuff on its shelves.”

When people laugh, they can change their minds

“I once interviewed the Dalai Lama, and I said to the Dalai Lama, ‘Why do Buddhists giggle all the time?’ Because they do. They just see the whole thing as a joke, you know, and they’re wonderful to be around. But he answered a different question, he said, ‘What I like about laughter is that when people laugh, they can change their minds.'”

John Cleese

Generating Beginner Heuristics for Simple Texas Hold’em

“While developing game playing agents that approximate optimal play has been the focus of much of artificial intelligence games research, the strategies found are rarely ever applicable by humans, requiring a lot of processing power and working memory.

[…]

In this work, we discuss how to generate game playing heuristics aimed at beginner players.

Following simple heuristics is not exclusive to novice players. Instead, the theory of bounded rationality reasons that humans make decisions based on the difficulty of the problem at hand, the limitation of their knowledge and the amount of time available. Applying simple heuristics in turn can be more effective, as they are less prone to cause errors in execution.”

Simplifiers and Constructors

“These two types of science roles, simplifier and constructor, are both needed for creating the ecosystem of science. But why should it be that understanding the components (in simplifier fashion) does not open up the complete architecture of all science to us? The reason is that complete comprehension of one level of abstraction does not give enough understanding to help know what might happen when we combine components at this first level into a more complicated assembly. The rigidity of bricks does not make arches an inevitability.”

The Secret Life of Science: How It Really Works and Why It Matters by Jeremy J. Baumberg