Lachlan Brown
Publishes 1 feed
Silicon Canals
Technology, Politics, Mind. Since 2014.
18 posts · contributor
Lately
People avoid giving compliments because they expect an awkward exchange, but experiments found recipients felt better and less uncomfortable than the giver predicted — and the person offering the compliment also walked away in a better mood, meaning both sides misread a kindness before it happens
For decades, automation fears focused on factory workers while knowledge workers looked comparatively safe. AI’s trajectory has begun to flip that assumption: software developers, financial analysts and junior lawyers are already seeing parts of their work compressed or automated, while robots capable of broadly replacing human factory workers remain years behind.
People who cannot sit through a film without checking their phone aren’t distracted, they’ve spent so many years being reachable that stillness now registers to their nervous system as something going wrong
A randomized study gave 296 first-year students a supportive AI friend, a random human texting partner, or a daily journal — two weeks later, only the students messaging another person were less lonely, even though the bot had been deliberately designed using relationship science
Psychology says people who stopped reaching out because they didn’t want to be a burden aren’t being selfless — they internalised, very early, the idea that their need for connection was too much, and they have been quietly paying for it ever since
We are taught to find clarity first, then summon courage, then act, but the psychology of courage and uncertainty suggests the sequence runs the other way: you act on your values while still afraid and unsure, and the clarity assembles itself behind you
Cambridge Aerospace was just valued at $3.4 billion, less than two years after it was founded — and the two numbers that would let anyone test that valuation, the price of one Skyhammer and the size of its UK contract, have never been published as figures
Confidence appears to be contagious. A Birkbeck study found that interacting with a confident partner changed people’s own sense of certainty — and they stayed more confident even after the social interaction ended and they were making decisions alone again.
Psychology says people who feel genuinely restored after time in nature aren’t indulgent or avoidant —they’re often carrying a sensitivity that the built world was never designed to accommodate and the natural world never asks them to hide
Psychology says the kindest people you will ever meet aren’t naive or soft — they are often people who have experienced real pain in life and made a conscious choice not to pass it on to others
Feeling purposeless in your 60s or 70s isn’t simply a failure of character. Researchers can measure a broad decline in purpose across later adulthood, and some of its strongest correlates are exactly the losses that accumulate with age — declining health, widowhood and the disappearance of long-held social roles.
Psychology says people who grew up in homes where affection was unpredictable often spend their adult lives doing something called hypervigilance to rejection — scanning every relationship for the early signs that the warmth is about to go cold
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