His whole life after becoming an advocate for Spiritualism is this mashup of tragedy and comedy. Like, he keeps insisting that Houdini has magical powers. It'd be like if Stephen King was positive that the secret to Penn and Teller's magic was that they are sorcerers.
Can't make someone who doesn't want to comprehend spend energy reading properly.
They're too stuck injecting their own meaning into a few words or sentences to read the entire thing, so they interrogate her about "missing" elements that were already written in the posts but they refuse to process.
Schema pretty regularly play a role in mental health conditions, including the content of e.g. schizophrenic delusions. Arousal, including the salience our social environment reinforces, is one of the most essential features of how our minds work.
Some people just really struggle to accept that people can think and behave in ways that don't reveal their deepest, most essential nature - that your brain can make you do something other than what the felt "you" wants or, conversely, change what that "you" even is.
It might have been a conversation against himself. In his preliminary mythology, dwarves used to be 'greedy followers of Morgoth who were unable to make crafts of their own' and then received a glow-up.
youtu.be/yZvH4wIKGCM?...
Epstein's suicide is also after he already made an attempt previously and failed. He was clearly trying for it.
Or possibly he saw something but misinterpreted it as an 'artifact'.
One wrong paper by a luminary in the field delayed progress in the study of peptic ulcer disease for 30 years.
It took Barry Marshall's risky self-experimentation to overturn decades of consensus.
It's really easy for a suspicion/dislike/grievance (even a valid one) to grow out of control and "confirm" way more than is reasonable.
Group dynamics and poor constructs seem to guarantee it. It can be more frustrating from one's "own side" though right-wing ofc had major examples like post-9/11.
i really hate that rumfeld's "known unknowns" is constantly mocked because it's a legitimately really useful description
It's amazing how much damage can be done by a group of people without anyone in their social circle to just look at them and ask "Are you out of your goddamn mind right now?" when they say the stupidest shit imaginable.
Over the years I've also seen differentiation between small-scale interpersonal attempts at dialogue with pessimism about getting large segments of the MAGA population to reconsider their positions. Latter certainly has a disengagement from anybody outside of "centrist pleads to get more racist"
Yoon Suk Yeol sentenced to life in prison for leading insurrection in South Korea www.theguardian.com/world/2026/f...
𝗕𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝘀 𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗮𝗯𝗹𝘆 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝘅𝘁 𝗱𝗲𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁
Circuits and networks can shift "computations" quite dramatically.
Check this computational model of the role of neuromodulators.
#neuroskyence
doi.org/10.1162/Neco...
Because she's attempting to address the pseudoscience spreading in some fat activist circles but also push back against idiots who, rather than wanting to seriously consider it as a human health problem, only care about fat status as a social hierarchy which favors them.
I am in the situation she is wrt body weight catching up with me and causing serious issues.
Reminding people about scientifically informed medical advice isn't agitprop. Pushing back against people trying to blur those vital lines with pseudo-empathy (actually killing them) is morally essential.
A lot of Economics minded people are expecting the AI bubble to pop within the next 3-4 years.
People talk about this stuff in terms of how much it'll suck for gaming and I hate to inform you how many MRI machines, X-Rays, all sorts of other vital machinery are just a Windows IoT Edition PC in a beige plastic box with a big magnet/accelerator/whatever attached.
🚨 New Paper from UP NExT (Univ. Pitt NeuralEngineering Cross-Translation): We discovered that microglia the brain’s immune cells, aren't just a "cleanup crew". During brain stimulation, they act as hidden neural modulators, actively monitoring and contacting neurons to help manage circuit stability.
Elon and MAGA tend to see 'culture' as their fetishized aesthetics rather than a system of human learning transmission.
It's easy to be concerned about vaccines when you stop being concerned about viruses. You can only stop being concerned about viruses in a world with vaccines.
What I love about ichthyosaurs: they're marine REPTILES pretending to be fish pretending to be dolphins.
Like, if you unfocus your eyes here, it's a dolphin, right?
But I think we need to talk about Ichthyotitan: a marine reptile pretending to be a fish pretending to be a BLUE WHALE.
Someone pointed out that the actual audio isn't saying what you're claiming and they are correct.
Best I can discern, what was said is "when are you taping him/it?" That would also match expecting the awkward long pose by Pinker and Epstein.
So I am not surprised Pinker found the trip normal.
I was radicalized years ago by getting added to a food writers forum in which I learned that the food writing industry is so godawful that many recipe writers end up just making things up or estimating because they aren't given time to try out the recipes. It's not you!
Why do otherwise rational people disagree about the same evidence? Our new paper finds that group membership is a deeply rooted influence on how we form beliefs, leading even preschoolers to bias their evidential standards and form inaccurate beliefs.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Great article by @jenlucpiquant.bsky.social .
Also: the leaded gas ban also coincided with the most incredible decrease in violent crime ever recorded in America.
More on that here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2...
Portlanders turned sour to local leftist activism after a bunch of pro-Palestine protestors set fire to Millar Library. They had enough presence of mind to avoid burning books, but could not understand why moral outrage and symbolic acts of resisting complacency undermined them rather than helped.
I'm not favorable to Catholicism, but I like far-right types leveraging parallel power even less.
Just a few months ago, a child in the US developed the most feared complication of measles (subacute sclerosing panencephalitis) from an infection they had years ago when they were too young to be vaccinated. I hate to think about what is being unleashed by this virus as a future tragedy.
Are episodic and semantic memory really that different? Using closely matched tasks, we found no substantial neural differences between recalling personal experiences and general knowledge: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02390-4
