Curious Loop

“Privacy is when restrooms have doors” https://ift.tt/3cpCLMR

All organisms, including humans, face the fundamental challenge to interact with the environment in a manner that maximizes rewards while minimizing situations that lead to harm or such that cause boredom. Our reward system motivates us to primarily engage in activities that provide us with positive reinforcements. Fully aware of our biological traits, the strategy of the major media outlets is intended to disturb our values, make thinking seem unnecessary, and withdraw money from our bank accounts. But we don’t argue. We comply. And as I’ll argue below, this blind pursuit towards gratifying stimulus can be harmful to us.

This essay uses the metaphor to introduce several key themes of In the Cells of the Eggplant. That is a book about how to improve science and engineering through meta-rationality: a better understanding of how rationality works in practice. The ways we use representations, and relate them with reality, are central topics. This essay may be a useful alternative introduction to the subject.

Heavy social media use was linked to negative wellbeing and self-esteem, regardless of a young person's mental state, with more girls experiencing feelings of depression and hopelessness.

Among the 10 most-viewed articles of 2020 on The Strategist website was a @ProSyn piece by me on how Xi's regime is paying a high price for launching territorial aggression along the Himalayan frontier with India and triggering a still-continuing standoff. aspistrategist.org.au/the-strategist… https://twitter.com/Chellaney/status/1354346506292060160

‘We had to take full ownership of data’: Why Denmark’s biggest news site cut reliance on Google’s tech https://ift.tt/3pqvAaD

The Great Stagnation: A misguided narrative https://ift.tt/3cfLCjW

The Importance of Unimportant Inventions https://ift.tt/3ppBUPO

Giving advice is a last resort https://ift.tt/2KMEQqu

They Found a Way to Limit Big Tech’s Power: Using the Design of Bitcoin https://ift.tt/3cdn8rp

If you could broadcast one sentence to the whole world, what would you say? https://ift.tt/3pl3LjU

Moderna vaccine appears to work against variants https://ift.tt/3ogb4Z8

New Transistor Structures At 3nm/2nm https://ift.tt/2Mou5Lq