It's not simply that people believe specific things, but that they define themselves in terms of what they believe.
And in fact, it's often the case that people invest in specific beliefs not because they've reasoned their way to that conclusion, but simply because they've effectively picked it off the rack of possible beliefs as the one that most clearly represents whatever image of themselves they wish to promote - it's the position held by smart people or enlightened people or trendy people or moral people or strong people or whatever.
So if you try to argue against their belief, you face two immediate and generally insurmountable obstacles.
First, they're psychologically invested in the belief, so if you call it into question, you're not just threatening the belief - you're threatening their self-image. Anything that casts doubt on the belief by extension casts doubt on their self-affirming presumption that holding the belief demonstrates their intelligence/morality/whatever.
And second, since it's likely the case that they didn't reason their way to the position in the first place, they can't becreasoned away from it anyway. So itvinevitably shifts back to their psychological investment in the position, and your attempts at reason are a distraction at best.
That’s great question! From psychological perspective, people like to think that they are right. If they encounter some person or situation that threatens their believes they have three choices:
accept that they were wrong - might cause some unpleasant emotions, risks being perceived as not trustworthy/knowledgeable
assume the other party is wrong - the belief is upheld, no negative consequences
find some condition under which the belief in question does not apply - middle ground Of course, there are many situational and personal qualities that affect how easily person accepts other view as their own.
Eg. if you are self-proclaimed expert on some topic, naturally opinions different than yours are wrong, at least to you. However, if you approach your expertise with attitude of trying to understand underlying principles, it would be easier to accommodate for new, sometimes very surprising facts or theories.
Also, humans are very susceptible to biases, meaning the world they perceive is different to what “objectively” is. One of them is attribution bias, which causes people to assume some results depend on their actions - even if there in no basis for that. This bias started the whole “vaccines cause autism” belief. The reaserch paper which started the whole thing is based on a survey directed to parents of autistic childen asking, do they think autism of their child was caused by a vaccine. It is ridiculous belief for most nowadays, but it provided a clear cause of the disease for those parents.
I know my writing can be confusing sometimes, so let me know if you would like some clarification.
I feel that way about the default GNOME apps as well, they all provide the basic functionality that most users need, since specialist users would install specialist apps anyway.
One extension I won’t install is dash-to-dock or similar (I know some people like it and that’s fine), because being made to switch to the Activities view once you have too many windows to alt+tab between provides a useful psychological prompt to close unused windows or move stuff to other workspaces. That’s one of the things I most like about the GNOME workflow.
Yes, unconsciously, we are all subject to the influence of advertising and manipulation of information even if we think we are consciously aware of it and try to avoid it. Others around us are, and they influence us, culture dictates norms and communicates through overt and symbolic language. It impacts our decision making processes. Advertisers know this and have leveraged this since the creation of that field.
Here’s a fun piece by Adam Curtis about the origin of PR, advertising, and its roots in psychology at the turn of the 20th Century: The Century of the Self . I think folks here will enjoy it considering why we left Reddit :)
For those who watched DS9 during its first airings, did it seem odd to you that Vic Fontaine/James Darren sang entire songs in the later seasons of DS9?...
Sinatra and ‘lounge music’ made a big comeback in the nineties with younger people then in their early twenties, that would Gen X, not the boomers.
Gen X thought the late 50s and early 60s were interesting 30 years later.
The Bond revival was also in full swing with that age group too, which is why we got Bashir’s Bond hijinks combined with lounge culture.
James Darren was the real deal as a lounge singer. His career was trending upwards again during the show because of the lounge culture trend.
I’m also going to make a pitch for holodeck/holosuite episodes. I would absolutely argue that in the 90s they weren’t filler at all.
They aren’t as interesting now because they are too close to technology that we use everyday. That’s likely why we aren’t seeing Holodeck episodes in the same way in the new era.
While virtual reality, and shared role playing games are deeply established now through massively multiplayer games and discord, Star Trek in the 90s was actually doing its s job as a science fiction show imagining what people could do with VR and what could go wrong.
Taking it back to TOS, a shore leave planet that turned out to have interactive holographic characters and an operating system gone wrong wasn’t a trope, it was an entirely new concept. More, it built on the psychological thriller concept of imaginary things becoming real and dangerous that was at the core of The Cage and the MGM movie Forbidden Planet that inspired Roddenberry.
In both the Berman era and in TOS, virtual reality shows were a key way to explore character development, relationships and team development within the ensemble of characters.
DS9 ‘Only a Paper Moon’ is a deep dive into withdrawal from reality due to trauma. I would say it may not be as successful now because it’s too on the nose and less allegorical given the way gaming and VR are used by many with trauma and anxiety as coping mechanisms.
Ascher Opler coined the term firmware in a 1967 Datamation article,[2][failed verification] as an intermediary term between “hardware” and “software”. In this article, Opler was referring to a new kind of computer program that had a different practical and psychological purpose from traditional programs from the user’s perspective.
As computers began to increase in complexity, it became clear that various programs needed to first be initiated and run to provide a consistent environment necessary for running more complex programs at the user’s discretion. This required programming the computer to run those programs automatically. Furthermore, as companies, universities, and marketers wanted to sell computers to laypeople with little technical knowledge, greater automation became necessary to allow a lay-user to easily run programs for practical purposes. This gave rise to a kind of software that a user would not consciously run, and it led to software that a lay user wouldn’t even know about.[3]
Originally, it meant the contents of a writable control store (a small specialized high-speed memory), containing microcode that defined and implemented the computer’s instruction set, and that could be reloaded to specialize or modify the instructions that the central processing unit (CPU) could execute. As originally used, firmware contrasted with hardware (the CPU itself) and software (normal instructions executing on a CPU). It was not composed of CPU machine instructions, but of lower-level microcode involved in the implementation of machine instructions. It existed on the boundary between hardware and software; thus the name firmware. Over time, popular usage extended the word firmware to denote any computer program that is tightly linked to hardware, including BIOS on PCs, boot firmware on smartphones, computer peripherals, or the control systems on simple consumer electronic devices such as microwave ovens, remote controls.
When we go out of our comfort zone, go for some new adventure or new challenge, we will naturally pay more attention to what happens in our minds as we’re going through this new experience....
I came to contact with the darker side during my teens (nothing too extreme), and the moment when I woke up from it and realized what I was doing was one of scariest moments of my life. In a weird way, it also gave me a bit of confidence as “awakening” was something that I felt with such a clarity. I really felt the wrongness, the empathy and the disgust, and I really felt the immeasurable (both tiny and large) gap between my “normal” self and my “darker” self.
On the other hand, playing violent games like Doom, Duke Nukem, Mortal Kombat was just fun, and being attracted and fascinated with the violent parts was somewhat weird but not so serious as in real life.
In the end, teens are age of self-discovery, and correlation is not causation.
Teenagers are kids and kids need to be watched over. Not just directly, but by equipping them with the right tools, a bit of wisdom and the knowledge of being loved. They know too little of the world to be left alone on the journey. What are the odds that they will deal with the necessary horrors of live, let alone the unnecessary ones, in a healthy way?
The fact that one of my parents made it impossible for me to respect him, and thus impossible to be really watched over by him (except for some twisted form of “reverse psychology” which I had not even realized) was not a cause, but a poor setting in which I, as any human ever, just had to meet my darker side and learn to manage it. (Not that he had any better equipment than me, probably even worse!)
Will future generations look at how big corporations do business today like drug dealers - have a product and then try and hijack the brain into continuously wanting or using said product - like how medical herion and cocaine were used as acceptable medical treatments in , I hopefully, assume ignorance...
Through either conscious design, or purely through the fact that coincidentally addictive designs are going to get higher engagement and therefore more likely to succeed, the vast majority of the economy is built around the rapid and repetitive consumption.
It bleeds people dry, boosts disinformation and outrage, and has severe psychological and neurological impacts on the people it affects.
Its seriously one of the worst things about modern society, and is even worse when combined with other issues we as a society face.
I honestly hope we can survive long enough to shift focus as a society, hopefully then we will see the current in the way we see the past
The national bourgeoisie use those patriotic feelings to manipulate the working class into slaughtering their actual brothers and sisters across borders.
Or perhaps different countries have different geopolitical interests which sometimes drive them to inflict violence upon eachother in pursuit of those interests
The people facing the exact same conditions, the exact same assault on their living conditions, the exact same war imposed on them.
Sweden and Finland have massively better living conditions than Russia and both have governments which were elected by the people. The illuminati you speak of are also either not very strong there or are incredibly benevolent considering how good the social programs are.
Ukraine and Russia were both victimized heavily by socialists, causing their shitty economic system today, but Ukraine is attempting to align itself with the west, geopolitically and economically, so that it can reap the same economic benefits that the rest of their brothers in Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Western Europe, North America, and Asia are all reaping from having free market economies and extensive international trade. The oligarchs in control of Russia don’t like this, because Ukraine has too many resources, is too close, and is too geographically valuable to lay outside of their empire, so they impose this war upon the Ukrainian and Russian people so that they can secure their interests. And of course, Ukrainians don’t like this, and neither does the West, so the Ukrainians fight back and we help them.
To be an internationalist isn’t to devalue a connection to the community of fellow workers in your country, it’s to extend it across borders.
To be an internationalist is to ignore all of human history and psychology in pursuit of a utopian pipe dream.
Or perhaps different countries have different geopolitical interests
Riiight… because the average Russian is gaining so much by this war? Just like the average USian benefited so much from the US occupation of Afghanistan?
considering how good the social programs are.
Do you mean the social programs they only have because Swedish and Finnish elites feared a Russian-style revolution so much? Those social programs?
causing their shitty economic system today,
Russia’s “shitty economic system” was created by the west’s rapacious “shock doctrine” of the 90s, dipshit. Get your facts straight.
To be an internationalist is to ignore all of human history and psychology in pursuit of a utopian pipe dream.
Riiiight… because imaginary lines drawn on a map must (somehow) be genetically encoded in humans by some kind of capitalist magic.
Oh, are you talking about that guy that was found in Pakistan?
I know you’re a communist and therefore aren’t able to understand things about the world, but you have to know that people can, y’know, move around, right?
Also… 9/11 wasn’t a “terror” attack. If the US wants to play colonialist empire, it becomes a justifiable target. All of it.
By this logic, the USA should’ve committed genocide in Afghanistan like the Soviets did because if Afghanistan wants to play terrorist they become a justifiable target. But I’m sure you’ll come up with pretzel logic to say that that’s somehow not what you’re saying.
Stop using terms you don’t understand. You have never experienced democracy, and you know nothing about it.
The United States invented freedom, liberty, democracy, and McDonald’s. I should know a thing or two about all of that.
No, Clyde… get this right - “shock therapy” was invented by the Chicago Boys in the 70s and 80s… Chilean “students” of magical capitalist grifters such as Milton Friedman. Your history is as garbage as your politics.
Who cares, the only people who actually implemented it that anyone cares about are Boris Yeltsin and his colleagues in Eastern Europe.
Then you should have no trouble providing proof of this “tribal” gene whose existence you are peddling, Clyde. I hope this won’t take you long.
Look, look, look, I know you’re a communist, but you have to be able to understand that genetics are complicated, right? It’s not possible for me to give you one or two genes that are responsible for human psychology, there’s like thousands of them that all interact with eachother to make you act like you.
I guess this is what happens when you lack the ability to comprehend anything that isn’t quantifiable. Thank you, materialism!
Having tears in one’s eyes is still far better than having shoe polish on one’s tongue - it doesn’t matter if it’s over-priced shoe polish.
bourgeois shoe polish tastes better than Stasi shoe polish lmao
Every efficiency study, environmental model, and psychological model disagrees with your sentiments that WFH productivity is less than in office productivity. I am a software engineer, so it might be anecdotal and industry specific, but my experience as well as the studies done by my employer show that they get more out of WFH employees or Hybrid (1-2 days a week in office) than the traditional route. Commutes, in office distractions, etc are massive drains on the employee.
I have a friend who has been using an e-cigarette for 10+ years. He doesn’t seem any less addicted to smoking as back when he was using old-fashioned cigarettes....
It depends whether you want to stop or not, it’s as simple as that.
E-cigarettes can be a great way to quit smoking, if that’s what you want. If you just switch to an E-cigarette and expect to magically stop smoking, you’re in for disappointment. Nicotine cessation is entirely psychological.
It’s a little bit like that Lap band surgery. You still have to want to lose weight after, otherwise you will blow it open and it will do nothing.
If anyone actually wants to quit smoking I highly suggest the book “Easy way to stop smoking” by Alan Carr.
Achsjullllyallyyyyiu, humans also do a form of Selective breeding voluntarily and it’s why families that tend to live in a more rural farming type communities tend to naturally be larger. We breed for what our families job is going to be.
This is not really what I’m talking about, making more people so you can make them work on the fields is kinda different from breeding dogs with inhumanely short snouts for aesthetic purposes
All I’m saying is the Human race is very adaptable and we have changed a lot since drawing on cave walls.
Culturally, yes, physically, a little bit, psychologically, no. Our minds are still optimized for the savannah, and not the office, factory, or farm. Cultural adaptations, in the form of religion and etiquette, which we patch in after birth are what fill the gaps and make us actually capable of thriving in such a foreign environment to what our biology is made for.
A good post about the kinds of arguments people use online, including tactics which are about the argument itself or some of the people involved in the argument, as opposed to being about the argument’s supposed topic....
To your second point, this is actually a major problem of debates from a psychology stand point. Unless people are willing to change their beliefs, debates actually strengthen their belief in their previously held ideas. It is useless to debate someone that is not willing to change their mind.
Maybe you see a plant you have to collect in game or a rock wall that looks different. What items have you caught out of the corner of your eye that you realized was just your brain so focused on looking for things in a game that you saw it IRL and made you double take?
there’s a known psychological phenomenon that people who play lots of tetris sometimes see tetris when they close their eyes and dream about it in their sleep
Exactly that, it’s a question I answered, therefore I can’t ignore the fact that “people” have these stereotypes. I get what you mean with repeating these stereotypes, but it would be weird if that would make an answer more or less incorrect/insufficient. Emphasis on “people”, I myself don’t have any strong feelings about these stereotypes.
Having said that, these are things that will always exist in my eyes, people will try to get an indication of a person as soon as possible, even without the proper information, but that is a whole other psychological discussion.
I don’t think human psychology will allow a united approach to global warming. Too man people are too stupid, to egoistic or just in such a tight spot they can not afford being “climate-friendly”....
For one, the LEDs mess with your sleep. Some wavelength of light make your body think it’s day therefore inhibiting melatonin production (the hormone that makes you sleepy).
Furhermore, a general advice for better sleep is to keep electronics outside if the bedroom, as they are too psychologically engaging (e.g. “I’ll just check one more post on Lemmy”).
Well the past does not exist in any meaningful way, does it? Maybe the past painter was “stupid” (I would not express it in that way) but doesn’t it mean that the present one is smarter?
I am not a doctor, professional psychologist or anything even remotely close. As far as I know, having strong (especially negative, such as shame or hate) feelings towards your (past) self can be a residue of a normal reaction to abnormal circumstances, otherwise known as psychological trauma.
It’s worth knowing that psychological trauma is really common. When I say “common”, I don’t mean to diminish it – quite opposite, psychological trauma can be pretty debilitating. What I mean is that many aspects of psychological trauma have been known and studied for a long time, and lot of methods have been developed to explore it and help people deal with it – or even heal it. I suggest you try and find someone safe to talk to.
Trained therapists are excellent for this, because, well, they know lot of effective methods on how to help people speak, and second, they are normally from outside of our close circles, which is a surprisingly huge advantage. I’ve experienced this myself: as soon as I sat into that comfy chair, I’ve realized that this nice person was not ever going to judge me (she’s probably heard sh*t i can’t even imagine). Within first five minutes of conversation I’ve already noticed myself, how I put away a mask I didn’t even know I was wearing. If only for this single realization, it was worth it.
In some of the music communities I’m in the content creators are already telling their userbase to go follow them on threads. They’re all talking about some kind of beef between Elon and Mark and the possibility of a boxing match… Mark was right to call the people he’s leaching off of fucking idiots.
I’m saying that since we rely on software every day, there are a few concepts that every person should understand on a basic level.
Loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong before anything software-related I’d put knowledge of fundamental statistics in the queue for things people deal with on a daily basis that they should understand at a basic level. It’s one of the most critical skills a person can have in modern life and it’s one that almost nobody (including almost all programmers) has any kind of understanding of. If they did have a better understanding of it, to quote the Great Sage Equalling Heaven:
That knowledge would help them make better decisions and probably the world would be better if most people had it.
😉
And that’s just the beginning of the list. I’d also put basic psychology, basic marketing, basic civics even ahead of any degree of software knowledge. Knowing marketing, for example, wouldn’t cause someone to be fooled to the point of saying something like this:
But they should know what cryptocurrencies and AI are, since those technologies are slowly becoming a part of our lives.
But gentle snark aside:
But I think something went wrong in our society if people don’t understand very important concepts that impact our daily lives and which are mostly decades old.
Try tens of thousands of years old. You make it sound like the problem is technology. The problem is the same as it’s always been: people. A better understanding of people, of their motivations, of the tricks they use to further those motivations, etc. is what makes you better able to manage life and society. Understanding the tricks of marketers and advertisers (even before those were words in human language!) is what makes you understand things like “hype cycles” and “if you haven’t paid, you’re not the customer”. You’re focusing on a single channel of abuse. There are MILLIONS of channels of abuse. Learning why people find said channels and how/why they exploit them is a far more valuable skill.
Oh, and statistics. You need that too. You have NO idea just how bad we are at those and just how important that knowledge is for spotting grifters, liars, and other scum.
Ah, I see. So you are an expert in psychology, marketing and statistics. That is truly amazing. It’s completely irrelevant to the topic of our discussion (which is about privacy and software), but very cool.
Why people can't handle the truth?
If faced with critical thinking, people tend to disregard what you’re trying to say and push back to their outlook.
Does anyone actually like the default GNOME workflow?
I gave it a fair shot for about a year, using vanilla GNOME with no extensions. While I eventually became somewhat proficient, it’s just not good....
deleted_by_author
Why did Vic Fontaine sang entire songs in the later seasons of DS9?
For those who watched DS9 during its first airings, did it seem odd to you that Vic Fontaine/James Darren sang entire songs in the later seasons of DS9?...
Firmware. (seemel.ink)
Is moving to IPv6 worth it?
The question above for the most part, been reading up on it. Also want to it for learning purposes.
Going out of comfort zone is good because it can help catch our "inner demons" at work
When we go out of our comfort zone, go for some new adventure or new challenge, we will naturally pay more attention to what happens in our minds as we’re going through this new experience....
Will future generations look back at the rentention tactics used today like how medicine was used in the past?
Will future generations look at how big corporations do business today like drug dealers - have a product and then try and hijack the brain into continuously wanting or using said product - like how medical herion and cocaine were used as acceptable medical treatments in , I hopefully, assume ignorance...
Sorry Russia, the Baltic Sea is now NATO’s lake (www.politico.eu)
Remote Work to Wipe Out $800 Billion From Office Values, McKinsey Says (www.bloomberg.com)
archive.is/QmvwU
Do e-cigarettes actually work?
I have a friend who has been using an e-cigarette for 10+ years. He doesn’t seem any less addicted to smoking as back when he was using old-fashioned cigarettes....
We're lucky that our bodies require sleep, otherwise our cultures would have us working 16-20 hour days.
YSK About Debate And Meta-Debate (slatestarcodex.com)
A good post about the kinds of arguments people use online, including tactics which are about the argument itself or some of the people involved in the argument, as opposed to being about the argument’s supposed topic....
How often have games made you do a double take in real life? (i.imgur.com)
Maybe you see a plant you have to collect in game or a rock wall that looks different. What items have you caught out of the corner of your eye that you realized was just your brain so focused on looking for things in a game that you saw it IRL and made you double take?
Why are Japanese cars considered to be more reliable than US or European cars?
What New Game Hype Does To Your Brain - Daryl Talks Games (youtu.be)
Super interesting video on the psychology of hype. I recommend the channel’s other videos too, they’re all very reflective and well written!
Stop global warming using technology?
I don’t think human psychology will allow a united approach to global warming. Too man people are too stupid, to egoistic or just in such a tight spot they can not afford being “climate-friendly”....
Everything has LEDs now and they drive me nuts
Why does every small appliance or useful home electronics item have the BRIGHTEST LEDs in them?...
Anyone else feel like ~99% of their life was kind of wasted?
In the last year or so I started to see so many people of my age that have done truly incredible things and still doing more....
I think the average person just simply doesn't care about their privacy.
In some of the music communities I’m in the content creators are already telling their userbase to go follow them on threads. They’re all talking about some kind of beef between Elon and Mark and the possibility of a boxing match… Mark was right to call the people he’s leaching off of fucking idiots.