Fact is, for it to work as a placebo, you need to believe it will work.

What’s even wilder is you don’t have to consciously believe it, you can unconsciously believe it and it will still work! Doctors will routinely prescribe placebos and be very open about the fact that it’s just a placebo, that there is no chemical compound in the medication.

And yet, the act of taking a pill from a bottle seems to trigger something. Recent research has actually identified part of this mechanism in rat brains. There really is a part of the brain that can be tricked into releasing a set of chemicals that relieve pain, reduce inflammation and create better moods. Someday we might have a placebo pill that actually has medication in it. Wildly convoluted how the brain works.

I was raised by hoarders. I was the only one who ever did any cleaning. I was the only one in the house who knew how to operate the washing machines and vacuum cleaner at age 10. I made huge efforts sometimes to keep the place clean and organized, which turned into huge dramas as my parents used the new clean space as a reason to fight and be victims, until they would bring more shit in and leave it piled on top of the old shit.

To this day, if I could live in a blank, white box with nothing else at all, it would be heaven.

Next thing you’re going to tell us is that we SHOULDN’T become absolutely obsessed with the personal habits and sex lives of other people whom I will never meet nor be involved with in any way! Preposterous!

The best story I ever heard about this was a single dad who had to take his teenage daughter to the doctor because she got an infection from inserting a toothbrush handle or something else that wasn’t sanitary, and instead of giving her ANY kind of scolding or negative judgement, he was very loving and helped her laugh it off, and then he just left on her pillow a $100 gift card to Adam & Eve or some other large, commercial, adult site that lets you buy gift cards.

I don’t think it’s appropriate to even suggest an age here, but I think as a parent you will know when it’s time to have the talk/leave the card.

I am almost appreciative that Linkedin just overtly embraces the synthetic and manufactured cultural dance we do in business, like nobody expects anyone to do anything but show their most pretentious and carefully cultivated images. You don’t log into Linkedin expecting to see a video of Uncle Jim ranting from the front seat of his truck about immigrants, and that’s almost beautiful.

It brings me back to an age when people actually tried to conform just a little for the sake of social progress, people kept their shit to themselves and worked to be part of a system. It was as close as we ever were to being even remotely socially conscious.

Libertarians = fedora kids and survivalists and flat earthers who don’t feel connected to Trump.

Libertarians also tried to make a “utopian” town that embodied all of their ideals where nobody was coerced to pay for services or assistance, and long story short the town was overrun by trash and bears and libertarians trying to kill each other. Just google Grafton, New Hampshire, it was a whole fantastic story.

Bears can be trained to drive cars and communicate through various means, it’s thought they may be as smart as great apes like gorillas. This is why they were a choice circus animal for a long time.

Yes, this should be terrifying information.

Seems like every billionaire has all these lofty goals and huge dreams to make the world better… but only if they get statues erected of them personally.

So yes, we are not a mature enough species to handle power and wealth, we can’t even take care of our planet and all we had to do there was not pump poison into the air and we couldn’t even pull that off. Lets cap wealth at a hundred million bucks, tops, and then forcibly take away their money and build houses and gardens and water purifiers all over the developing world. There are probably fucking genius savant children being born who could solve all our problems, out of 8 billion people the odds only increase, but if the majority of these potential world-changing children die from dysentery and other diseases in vast numbers every day, then we’re losing talent constantly.

If anyone was running the world like a business, they would need to get called in for a performance review, asap.

All I know is for 2 years I wore one and didn’t catch a damn cold.

I’ve cohabited with someone with a major immunity problem and had to take normal, established-before-covid guidelines for making sure I don’t bring back a virus that would kill someone I care about. I wore a mask for months going out, washed my hands, avoided crowds. Never got sick.

So that was before covid. Imagine how it feels seeing the whole world be advised to do the same thing, and absolutely losing their collective mind about it, while millions of people died.

It will never make sense. I mean, logically I have studied psychology and have come to understand the mechanics of people’s irrational, emotional reactions. What doesn’t make sense is how we elected a clown that led our nation in the direction of chaos and followed his example.

The economy is doing great.

For the people who manage and control the economy.

I don’t know, I think there’s more to be said for actual experience and someone’s attitude more than education. Having a deep understanding of psychology can only help with analyzing issues and understanding people’s motivations, but there’s still going to be a disconnect from academic understanding of a subject, and actual experience and connection with a challenging area of learning.

Or to put it more simply, in my last job as a manager I hired two people who had psychology degrees or majors for a technical/data position on a team, hoping for the very same kind of understanding and empathy with each other that you would think an education in human psychology would provide, and those people turned out to have the most issues with others because of their own lack of real-world experiencing socializing and maintaining relationships with others.

Just to continue to throw wrenches into the preconceptions, let’s not forget that a huge part of what we consider success in the modern world can be attributed to emotional intelligence as much as spatial awareness and logic.

A lot of CEO’s and people who climb high in the world are excellent at understanding how others feel and using emotion to communicate, share and inspire people to follow. Sometimes it’s the only thing leadership figureheads even know how to do. It’s also very, very hard to manage teams effectively if you don’t have a good understanding of how people feel at different times, how best to address those feelings and an idea how to manage the emotional atmosphere in a workplace. Yes, having good logic and reasoning is massively important, but rarely alone.

TIL I am actually radicalized because I would prefer catgirls.

Hasn’t been linked to reddit yet probably.

Getting away from reddit has shown me that there are unspoiled places in the digital world out there, communities of people who actually care about the topic and not performatism and internet attention.

That’s another great question that unlocks another incredibly strange point about reality.

You’re only moving faster/slower through space/time to an outside observer. Your own rate of time and your own velocity through space will always feel centered on you, and it will always look like the rest of the universe that is slowing or accelerating.

And in fact, another mind-melty point behind relativity is that if you jump out of a 20th story window, there is no action that says you’re falling, instead the action is saying that you have changed your velocity (or altered Earth’s velocity in respect to your acceleration) and now the rest of the world is passing you very rapidly. It would feel like Earth and the building and everything else is wooshing past you while you stand still. And that’s a correct perspective. It is rushing past you, you are sitting still in space. (The problem comes when that wall of asphalt and dirt swings past and doesn’t miss you.)

If you fall into a black hole where spacetime is distorted as far as we can imagine, to you nothing will feel different (at first) you will see the whole universe seem to roll into a tight ball behind you and it will look like it’s in rapid-motion if you pointed a telescope into it, you would see stars being born and galaxies fading and the entire future of the universe will rush past and you will hit the singularity at the death of the back hole, some billions and billions and of years into the future. If you could magically escape right before you get pulled apart, you would find the entire universe has died outside and all the stars have gone out.

Not moving and no mass = frozen in spacetime

You’re always moving at the speed of light through time. When you accelerate, you are borrowing from your speed through time and converting it to speed through space. The faster you move through space, the slower you move through time. The faster you move through time, the slower you move through space.

It’s far stranger than that.

The problem that shows exactly how tangled the problem is, is this: accelerating is the same as gravity.

Not “they feel the same” or “We can compare them” or " They’re similar in many ways" no, I mean literally. They are the same thing. This has been proven.

The force that is making you stick the planet is the same as being in a car and driving constantly faster and faster forever.

If this makes zero sense to you, that’s good, it means you’re human. But it also means that our vision of the universe is radically different than whatever kind of objective reality is out there, if there is one.

(What gives is time. Time is what’s changing when you move through space AND when in a gravitational field. You can also study this field for decades and barely come closer to being able to visualize it. Our brains were not meant.)

They mean something that can be used to mark change, they mean clock in the purely physics sense… but don’t worry, you’re probably not dumb, these articles are so horrible at communicating theoretical physics ideas it might as well be abstract, new-age greeting cards.

the new system is not there yet.

I’m glad at least one other person gets it, where we’re at and what our actual situation is.

My worry is about how bad things are going to get before the “new system” begins to solidify. We have like, three or four different serious wildcards that are so unpredictable that I can’t fathom what the next four decades are going to look like. We’re about to see the fastest and most profound changes to society in all recorded history, but we still have brains that were developed in the Ice Age for surviving bears and wolves. We’re not the rational, thinking species we think we are and we’re about to collectively run headlong into that reality for the first time as a species.