( Read more... )

Oh, wow, just realized this works toward a real explanation of why folks who live in walkable big cities (like SF, NYC) are so liberal.

Walking a big city is wildly noisy. It presents streams of "threatening visual imagesI learned this week that even a very confident, multitasking, neurotypical-in-good-ways ;) friend had quit a job in the core ( Read more... )

Why do we accept our own personal fears and hates, even as we suggest that others’ fears and hates are bad signs about them?

Relative to low status folks, high status folks have less occasion to fear or hate. Complaining that your opponents have a “politics of fear” or hate is really just complaining about their low status [ :) ]
-RH

Sympathy is for the historically disadvantaged, the poor, and people aligned with such groups ( Read more... )

High openness-to-experience liberals are more physiologically confident.

At least for 46 adult participants with strong political beliefs (would love to see that screening process!, like an opposite of jury selection??), a team of EIGHT psychologists (what a ratio for a primary study!) famously found in 2008:
Views may have a biological basis. ( Read more... )

This chamber music (a cello and an upright bass) is simply wonderful to write to, read to, think to, focus on for its own sake. I heard them live this month in a sparse small space, and wow.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, but Robin Hanson is right way more than that because he's an overclocked wild spinner. He laps the truth at least twice an hour.

On foraging vs farming lifeways, I think he's on to more than he realizes:This transition [ from foraging to farming (= digging + herding) ] meant huge changes in attitudes and ( Read more... )

Vipassana aims to break the habit of blindly making affective judgments about mental states, and reverse the damage done by doing so in the past. This habit may be at the root of many problems described on LessWrong, and is likely involved in other mental issues ( Read more... )

[...]believes the right company "won" the social media wars: Its great rival, MySpace, founded in Los Angeles, "is about being someone fake on the Internet; everyone could be a movie star," he says. He considers it "very healthy," he adds, "that the real people have won out over the fake people."
Technology=Salvation, A+++ headline!

Numerous emperors, no clothes.

Very rich content in the current WSJ profile of Peter Thiel:
Our technocratic elite told us to expect an ever-wealthier future, and science hasn't delivered. Except for computers and the Internet, the idea that we're experiencing rapid technological progress is a myth"People don't want to believe that technology is ( Read more... )