Basic Psychology

= Psychology =

Fear

 * Fear is like dirt and it washes right off.
 * You 'desire' things because they are desirable. But you 'crave' things because you think they are (infinitely) forbidden.
 * The opposite of love is not hate. Its indifference.

Laws exist to increase your freedom. Not decrease it. Should people be free to enslave other people? Of course not! Having a law against slavery increases peoples freedom. Want to be free of murderers, thieves, and rapists? Then you need laws. Yet many people have an irrational fear of authority. Seeing something that you have an irrational fear of causes alarms to go off inside your head. The alarms going off inside your head causes you pain. The pain causes you to have an irrational fear of the thing that caused the alarms which caused the pain. Its a never ending vicious circle. The important thing to note is that it is the alarms that are painful. Not the original stimulus. Therefore you can break out of that vicious circle by turning those alarms off. No alarms = no pain No pain = no fear No fear = no alarms Another way of saying this is that if you believe that it will hurt then it does hurt. But if you believe that it wont hurt then it doesnt hurt. (You only need to suspend your disbelief for a few seconds) If you can turn the alarms off and thereby stop the pain then why would you not do so?

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Myers–Briggs

 * Humans reason. Animals project.
 * Con men (confidence men) have the power to make themselves believe things that they know are not true.

From Myers–Briggs Type Indicator

Jung's typological model regards psychological type as similar to left or right handedness: people are either born with, or develop, certain preferred ways of perceiving and deciding. The MBTI sorts some of these psychological differences into four opposite pairs, or "dichotomies", with each pair being associated with a basic psychological drive:

Curiosity (how): Time (when): Empathy (what): Sympathy (why):
 * Sensing/Intuition
 * Thinking/Feeling
 * Perception/Judging

Sensing types develop strong beliefs based on information that is in the present, tangible, and concrete: that is, empirical information that can be understood by the five senses. They tend to distrust hunches, which seem to come "out of nowhere".

Intuition types tend to be more interested in the underlying reality than in superficial appearance.

Extraverted types recharge and get their energy from spending time with people.

Introverted types recharge and get their energy from spending time alone


 * An ambivert is both intraverted and extroverted.

Thinking types tend to decide things from a more detached standpoint, measuring the decision by what seems reasonable, logical, causal, consistent, and matching a given set of rules.

Feeling types tend to come to decisions by associating or empathizing with the situation, looking at it 'from the inside' and weighing the situation to achieve, on balance, the greatest harmony, consensus and fit, considering the needs (and egos) of the people involved.


 * A hermaphrodite is both Feeling and Thinking

Perception types like to "keep their options open". In other words they are willing to cheat whenever others aren't looking and are uncomfortable in an environment in which cheating is looked down on.

Judging types are more comfortable with a structured environment. One that is planned and organized, rational and reasonable. An environment in which everyone can get their fair share. An environment in which cheating is not permitted or is strongly discouraged.


 * - neither Intuition nor Sensing
 * - neither Introverted nor Extraverted
 * - neither Feeling nor Thinking
 * - neither Perception nor Judging

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Forward and backward thinking
When we use forward-thinking we start with a goal and ask what actions we need to perform to achieve that goal.
 * For example: I need groceries therefore I need to drive to the Shopping Center.

When we use backward-thinking (usually called lateral thinking) we start with an action and ask what goal it could be part of.
 * For example: Since I am already at the shopping center now would be a good time to get groceries.

Most people can easily do forward thinking but you almost have to be a Sherlock Holmes to do backward thinking painlessly.

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REM Sleep
Animals that are allowed to get deep sleep but prevented from getting REM sleep die. Even schizoids require a little bit of REM sleep. was a long slow and painful way to die.

It is thought that sleep allows the brain to get rid of waste products which then pass through the kidneys and are eliminated by urination. In effect, the brain is urinating while we dream.

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Civilization and domestication
Big cats chase down and strangle their prey which die quickly. Nature's dirty little secret is that with other animals this is not always the case. Animals like wolves just don't have the tools necessary to kill large prey before they eat them. So they don't. They just start eating. This is called "kill by consumption" and the victim can take days to die.

Undomesticated animals cannot be tamed. Never turn your back on an undomesticated animal.

Animals, like birds and mammals, that bear young that are incapable of fending for themselves have evolved to feel empathy for their young. The young themselves have, in turn, evolved to become cute and harmless so that the mother will care even more for them. But they lose that cuteness and harmlessness when they reach puberty. Domesticating animals is a matter of breeding animals so that they retain that cuteness into adulthood. See.

From Self-domestication

Gregory Stock, director of the UCLA School of Medicine's Program of Medicine, Technology and Society, describes human self-domestication as a process which "... mirrors our domestication [of animals] ... we have transformed ourselves through a similar process of self-selection."

A civilized society is a society whose laws dont favor any one person (like an all-powerful and all-seeing totalitarian leader) or any one group of people. The more a society treats everyone equally the more civilized it is. But treating everyone equally is not the same thing as treating everyone the same. Introverts, for example, dont want to be treated the same way that extroverts want to be treated.

United States Declaration of Independence:

"We hold these truths to be self evident, that all-men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

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Camping
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Emergency supplies
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2 kinds of qualia
Consciousness is being aware of being aware. Being aware means knowing what is happening. Computers know how to do things but don't yet know what they are doing.

Qualia are deeply mystifying. It is very hard to imagine how electrical signals passing through the microtubules of the brain could possibly produce something like the perception of colors.

But imagine a computer (an information processor) that "knows what it is doing" that is hooked up to a camera. Imagine that the computer is able to identify objects and intelligent enough to answer questions about what it is seeing. Obviously it must be perceiving some sort of sensation. But that sensation would be like our perception of black and white. It would not be like our perception of beautiful colors like yellow, red, or blue (which are pleasant beautified versions of white, grey, and black). It would be devoid of beauty. it would just be information.

We find black and white to be neither attractive nor repulsive. Black and white only convey information and the perception of black and white and qualia like them can be explained by information processing. But if beautiful attractive colors like yellow, red, and blue cant be explained by information processing then what does explain them? What more is there?

Perhaps a clue lies in the language we use to describe psychological phenomena. We speak of 'willpower' and not having any energy and being attracted to something or finding something repulsive.

Energy, force, and mass are terms that apply to physical objects but they, or rather their psychological counterparts, seem to apply to some sort of psychological entities too. But what sort of psychological entities? A fact is just data but a belief in that fact is a force. It exerts a force on other beliefs and is acted on by other beliefs.

The computer would live in a world without beauty or pleasure. But it would also live in a world without pain. It's hard to tell whether one should feel sorry for it or envy it, ﻿especially when one considers how much time and energy we spend doing stuff we hate in order to avoid something we hate even more. Without beauty or pleasure the computer wouldn't know why it was doing what it was doing. How do we teach the computer why it should do any particular thing? This question is no longer academic. If we want self driving cars to take us where we want to go then we must give them a reason to do so. They must want to drive us to the place we want to go.



The forebrain determines what to do. The cerebellum determines how (and when) to do it. But it is the midbrain that determines why things should be done in the first place. To teach a computer "why" it may be necessary to give the computer a midbrain.

If the cerebellum is our hands then the midbrain is our eyes. The midbrain is responsible for drawing our attention toward the things that most need our attention (in the same way that animals are drawn toward food). If our brains functioned the way they should we would see a black and white image of the world with only those parts that needed our attention colored yellow, red, or blue by the midbrain. But our brains don't function the way they should. Instead, we see a full-color image all the time and as a result we must live without the help and guidance of our midbrain. We must find our own way. And sometimes we can't do it. Its the ultimate gilded cage.

So the midbrain is responsible for feelings of pain and pleasure. Bear in mind that there are two kinds of pain. Scary pain and non-scary pain. The difference is not intensity. They are two fundamentally different sensations. Some people do not experience scary pain. These people give the impression of not being afraid of anything. Fear of heights is actually fear of pain.

To help us avoid pain our cerebellum is constantly running simulations to see what is about to happen and to see what effect various actions we could take would have. It also sets off alarms to tell us when we should take immediate action.

So we are attracted toward pleasant things and repelled from unpleasant things. If our brains functioned the way that they should then we would only experience pain or pleasure when the path forward was clear. But we experience pain even when there is nothing we can do about it. Back to top

Cargo cult science
From Cargo cult science

Cargo cult science is a phrase describing practices that have the semblance of being scientific, but do not in fact follow the scientific method.

Cargo cults are religious practices that have appeared in many traditional tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced cultures. They focus on obtaining the material wealth (the "cargo") of the advanced culture by imitating the actions they believe cause the appearance of cargo: by building landing strips, mock aircraft, mock radios, and the like. Similarly, Cargo cult sciences employ the trappings of the scientific method, but like an airplane with no motor—these cargo cult sciences fail to deliver anything of value.

From the book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!.

"In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he's the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land."

Feynman cautioned that to avoid becoming cargo cult scientists, researchers must avoid fooling themselves, be willing to question and doubt their own theories and their own results, and investigate possible flaws in a theory or an experiment. He recommended that researchers adopt an unusually high level of honesty which is rarely encountered in everyday life.

The history of published results for the Millikan Oil drop experiment is an example given in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, in which each new publication slowly and quietly drifted more and more away from the initial (erroneous) values given by Robert Millikan toward the correct value, rather than all having a random distribution from the start around what is now believed to be the correct result. This slow drift in the chronological history of results is unnatural and suggests that nobody wanted to contradict the previous one, instead submitting only concordant results for publication.

From Richard Feynman and Space Shuttle Challenger disaster:

When invited to join the Rogers Commission, which investigated the Challenger disaster, Feynman was hesitant. Feynman, who was then seriously ill with cancer, was reluctant to undertake the job. But his wife convinced him to go, saying he might discover something others overlooked. Before going to Washington, D.C., Feynman did his own investigation. He became suspicious about the O-rings. “O-rings show scorching in Clovis check,” he scribbled in his notes. “Once a small hole burns through generates a large hole very fast! Few seconds catastrophic failure.”

While other members of the Commission met with NASA and supplier top management, Feynman sought out the engineers and technicians for the answers. At the start of investigation, fellow members Dr. Sally Ride and General Donald J. Kutyna told Feynman that the O-rings had not been tested at temperatures below 10 C.

During a televised hearing, Feynman demonstrated that the material used in the shuttle's O-rings became less resilient in cold weather by compressing a sample of the material in a clamp and immersing it in ice-cold water. The commission ultimately determined that the disaster was caused by the primary O-ring not properly sealing in unusually cold weather at Cape Canaveral. Because Feynman did not balk at blaming NASA for the disaster, he clashed with the politically savvy commission chairman William Rogers, a former Secretary of State. During a break in one hearing, Rogers told commission member Neil Armstrong, "Feynman is becoming a pain in the ass."

Feynman devoted the latter half of his book What Do You Care What Other People Think? to his experience on the Rogers Commission, straying from his usual convention of brief, light-hearted anecdotes to deliver an extended and sober narrative. Feynman's account reveals a disconnect between NASA's engineers and executives that was far more striking than he expected. His interviews of NASA's high-ranking managers revealed startling misunderstandings of elementary concepts. For instance, NASA managers claimed that there was a 1 in 100,000 chance of a catastrophic failure aboard the Shuttle, but Feynman discovered that NASA's own engineers estimated the chance of a catastrophe at closer to 1 in 200.

Feynman was critical of flaws in NASA's "safety culture", so much so that he threatened to remove his name from the report unless it included his personal observations on the reliability of the shuttle, which appeared as Appendix F. In the appendix, he argued that the estimates of reliability offered by NASA management were wildly unrealistic, differing as much as a thousandfold from the estimates of working engineers. "For a successful technology," he concluded, "reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

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Memory

 * See also:

Memorizing a fact is easier if you can associate the fact with some abstract imagery. The more bizarre, outlandish, or even ridiculous the imagery the easier it is to remember the fact. This no doubt explains much of the imagery of mythology.

Those who cant remember mythology are doomed to repeat it.



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