Basic Psychology

In , Freud argued that the was the source of the personality's desires, and therefore of the psychic energy that powered the mind. Freud defined as the instinct energy or force. Freud later added the (also contained in the id) as a second source of mental energy.

In 1928, published a seminal essay entitled "On Psychic Energy". Later, the theory of psychodynamics and the concept of "psychic energy" was developed further by those such as and.

Just as physical energy acts upon physical objects, psychological energy would act upon psychological entities (i.e. thoughts and beliefs). Psychological energy and force are the basis of an attempt to formulate a scientific theory according to which psychological phenomena would be subject to precise laws akin to how physical objects are subject to Newton's laws. This concept of psychological energy is completely separate and distinct from (or even opposed to) the mystical eastern concept of spiritual energy.

Types
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. Jung's typology theories postulated four cognitive functions (thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition), each having one of two polar orientations (extraversion or introversion), giving a total of eight dominant functions.

The (MBTI) is based on these eight hypothetical functions, although with some differences.

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Sensing/Intuition

 * Curiosity/Anti-curiosity

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/Introverted

 * Time/Anti-time

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/Feeling

 * Empathy/Anti-empathy

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/Judging

 * Sympathy/Anti-sympathy

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.


 * Autistic - neither Intuition nor Sensing
 * Aspergers - neither Introverted nor Extraverted
 * Schizoid - neither Feeling nor Thinking
 * Schizophrenic - neither Perception nor Judging

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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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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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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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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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