skim_milk

Joined 10 years ago

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522
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Member since
Sep 9
Full-stack web dev pivoting towards a career involving psychotherapy. Just released https://vaknin-talks.com
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Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago
The last MD-11 crash with deaths was in 2009 and the last DC-10 kerfuffle was when their unapproved replacement parts fell on the runway and killed the Concorde. I wonder if flight 232 gave them a bad name - everybody seems to know that accident. Looks like have a good record otherwise.
Comment · 1 year ago
Awesome idea, for some reason I've never thought about using MVC patterns with LLM prompts. I got carried away and tried implementing this with ASP.NET Razor components, imagining the possibilities with this pattern.
Comment · 1 year ago
Bookworms are such a curious people, I love reading their pop-evo-psych-theory-of-everything articles and counting up all the occult references and hidden meanings. Waiting for a deep yellow sunset with royal blue skies to appear some day where they spill all the beans!
Comment · 2 years ago
Hmm - preservers, creators, and destroyers doing their jobs. Is this not what a healthy, functional society looks like, at least in any philosophy grounded in (albeit painful) reality? Or would you rather the preservers stop doing their job and let the others discover the consequences of their self-destructive fantasy? We might learn how pathetically dependent everyone is on each other for the N+1th time in recorded history.
Comment · 2 years ago
The book Hatred, Emptiness, and Hope by Otto Kernberg (a key Object Relational scholar) goes over all the latest advancements. Some people also are talking about Cloninger's phylogenetic origins of human consciousness and connecting it to these topics as well (e.g. personality organization from the Object Relationals - psychotic, borderline, neurotic)
Comment · 2 years ago
I've yet to find a reputable, established psychology scholar that actually believes psychology is a serous science. The drug pushers, actuaries, and politics/industry folk do enjoy funding their pseudoscience and appointing their people to university, and it does drown out reasonable voices, but it doesn't seem like the real academic psychology scholars take them too seriously.

On the contrary, many old-timer traditional literature-focused e.g. Object Relational psychology schools are having a heyday having their insights shown to align with reality using all the bleeding-edge genetics and AI-powered data going around.

Every time this comes up, it feels like a fake controversy manufactured by people who are tech-savy enough to know how to find scientific papers on Google Scholar, but, curiously, have yet to discover the library, or the conference or... the college lecture hall. You know, places where people discuss literature?

Yes, psychology is just a literature, and... I'm not sure anyone seriously disagrees? Perhaps this is just the natural conclusion to having a field swamped by well-meaning but misplaced industry funds, laypeople can't cut through the bullshit on Google Scholar or find a librarian.

Comment · 2 years ago
The problem with this philosophy is that we have brain scan studies, phylogenetic, developmental, neuroscience, and thousands of pages from established experts on psychology that document these three systems of learning and memory.

Who give a hoot we live in Descartes' demon and anything could be not real? The elephant is in the room. Id/ego/superego is clearly a thing, either that or you're not familiar with the field, or you're not living in shared reality! Malignant egalitarians who think everyone's opinions are just should really learn to push back harder on things that have, like, one in a trillion odds on being false.

The only thing up for debate are the definitions, functions, and boundaries of these three.

Comment · 3 years ago
Emergency responders have to deal with what I'd imagine the typical person would consider traumatic but we've agreed that their jobs are necessary in order for society to be efficacious. Not everyone has the same physiological response to disturbing content and it would appear people that take up these distressful emergency jobs are less likely to ever even have any traumatic stress responses in some studies IIRC.

Maybe up to 33% of the world's population would find reading text triggers traumatic stress responses if I had to make an educated guess - not to diminish their experiences. But I'd imagine most people would just find the job boring or somewhat nauseating.

Should be trivial to significantly reduce human cost without completely removing their jobs anyway.

Comment · 3 years ago
I wouldn't necessarily consider 'always loved' a precondition to health. In some psychological literature, a necessary requirement to raise a mentally healthy adult is having a 'frustrating' mother who forces her child to separate and establish boundaries - and of course still have unconditional but boundaried love.

Having an overly-loving, overprotective mother does not allow the child to establish boundaries in the same way as an emotionally abusive mother. Perhaps these children would become codependents or have fake, overdone empathy.

There are two sides to the trauma coin! And with just two comments into the post, perhaps we've already seen both?

Comment · 3 years ago
A significant portion of people committing suicides (no one knows how much %) are likely to be clinical or subclinical Borderlines. This population isn't shy because they critically rely on others in order to regulate their emotions for them.
Comment · 3 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
I've been doing some budget digital nomad for several years and the most boring part of it is having to re-explain what I do for a living every time I meet someone - oh why does every conversation start like this? I don't think I've even met a single soul who knew what programmers do or what "digital nomad" is when traveling within the USA over the past 2/3 years.

Granted, this is mostly rural camping and small-city AirBNB all in the borders of the US. (Except for one time I stopped in DC for a month - strangely the only people that came to talk to me were the homeless and even they held decent conversations)

We're getting our adrenal glands pumping over Narcissistic obsessives dedicating every ruminating moment towards writing the next hit piece where they finally resolve their past scenarios, and they finally said all the right things to the wrong people, in an orgy of retraumatizing material. Just ignore them, go travel, say hi to people, change the world and all that stuff.

Comment · 3 years ago
A strange proposition considering this is the current state of affairs for the current generation below age 25 - casual sex and uncommitted relationships (Lisa Wade).

60% of this population cheat habitually. Dating is down 60%. First-time marriages end in divorce almost half of the time, and around 80% of the time to the next marriage. Lifelong singlehood is extrapolated to be the most common relationship option in the younger generation.

Most literature on the topic of the younger generation notes that sex has been robbed of all intimacy and is about meaningless and anonymous masturbation with another's body. Relationship skills, intimacy skills, emotional intelligence are in serious decline (Twenge, Campbell, others).

This is does not seem like the hallmarks of a generation with an increased capacity to generate and form relationships of any type! Could we have possibly got something wrong with this initiative?

The author seems to have forgotten to ask what the next step in human evolution thinks about their situation!

Comment · 3 years ago
> categorical thinking of many sorts really get my goat

This also makes my blood boil, should we share so much in common somehow.

Race (still) has nothing to do with any of the GWAS studies, and this has been discussed in length since far before we started hooking up supercomputers to personality studies. These are discussing large differences in the chemical computers in our body that take possibly 100's of times or more longer to evolve than the amount of melanin in your skin or the shape of your nose would have evolved, and have evidently stayed that way for several 100's of thousands of years due to assortative mating.

So, given how literally every society ever tested all the way down to remote African tribes has all this exact same genetic diversity, would it not imply that this exact same distributed diversity is necessary for a healthy society to function?

Is it too difficult to imagine that certain groups of people, who we can't just use our eyes to pick out, are at greater risk from, say, macroeconomic shifts, which hampers their ability to be efficacious and extract favorable outcomes from the environment, has consequences even to certain groups that have it good?

Seems unbelievably great that we have all the data to prove all these emotionally dysregulated and life-hating schizoid racists wrong and be able to better labor distribution to improve individual and societal efficacy, but some anxieties are holding it back?

Here's an idea, you can easily prove the genetic determinism believers wrong by maintaining healthy boundaries and not internalizing other people's own self-destructive issues >:)

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