I’’m absolutely fascinated by cases of people with no inner dialogue, or with no mental imagery (aphantasia) - as it turns out, there are even more people (3% vs 1%) with hyperaphantasia, or extremely vivid imagery:
the existence of people in whom conscious, wakeful imagery is markedly reduced, or absent entirely, was neglected by psychology until the recent coinage of 'aphantasia' to describe this phenomenon. 'Hyperphantasia' denotes the converse – imagery whose vividness rivals perceptual experience. Around 1% and 3% of the population experience extreme aphantasia and hyperphantasia, respectively. Aphantasia runs in families, often affects imagery across several sense modalities, and is variably associated with reduced autobiographical memory, face recognition difficulty, and autism.
Some interesting bits:
neither is disabling, but there are some behavioral and psychological correlations
aphantasia is over-represented among people working in mathematical, computational, and scientific roles, whereas people with hyperphantasia are more likely to work in traditionally 'creative' industries - that is, artists have more object imagery, while STEM people have more spatial imagery
along the same lines, aphantasiacs are more likely to be autistic and introverted; there is likely some genetic component since siblings are 10x more likely to also have aphantasia
average IQ is marginally higehr in people with aphantasia, but hyperaphantasia people have strong autobiographical memory, which shows up in things like eyewitness testimony
normal people listening to scary stories show a hike in skin response that aphantasiacs don’t have (which makes me wonder if they respond to scary movies differently too?)
this might also be protective against forms of emotional disorder linked to aversive imagery, such as PTSD
Around 40% of people with aphantasia describe difficulty with face recognition, more than twice the frequency among people with average imagery vividness or hyperphantasia
hyperphantasiacs are more likely to have synesthesia
Today I learned about nullos, or people with a castration kink 😳
In fact, Gustavson himself — who is due to be sentenced this week after admitting conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm — maintained a now-defunct “Eunuch Maker” website, for men who are or aspire to be “nullos” (short for genital nullification). Not only did the site promote the niche fetish, it featured videos of these procedures for subscribers. Many of Gustavson’s co-conspirators have pleaded guilty to causing grievous bodily harm, their crimes ranging from freezing limbs for removal to the resection of nipples. But legal cases involving instances of consensual castration are becoming increasingly common.
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This doctrine, that consent is irrelevant to certain extreme sexual activities, has been adopted wholesale in the UK’s recently passed Domestic Abuse Act 2021, which states that “consent to serious harm for sexual gratification is not a defence in circumstances where a person inflicts serious harm on another”. While one may be satisfied with the use of this principle in the case of Gustavson, it’s a peculiar feature of UK law that one’s consent to a risky activity is dismissed merely because there is a sexual component at play. In a liberal society, we accept that people can consent to all manner of activities that may harm them — from extreme sports to boxing matches to various forms of elective, unnecessary cosmetic procedures. Some, such as Dr Senthorun Raj from Manchester Metropolitan University, have argued that the Spanner case is nothing more than an expression of judicial disgust at unusual activities, particularly those pursued by gay men.
Actually pretty thought-provoking case of the tension between our desire to uphold individual freedom and the reality that these are vulnerable individuals - for example, I hadn’t realized this shift in the BDSM community:
In cases of BDSM, it is clear that a duty of care is owed by the “dominant” (or “active”) party in the activity to the “submissive” (or “passive”) party: the dominant has an obligation to protect against unnecessary psychological and physical harm to the submissive regardless of consent.
This understanding of relational obligations had pride of place within BDSM communities under the banner of “safe, sane and consensual” — a motto coined in the Eighties. As a sign of our times, many BDSM groups have now moved away from the ethos of ‘safe, sane and consensual’ in favour of a model of ethical conduct known as “risk-aware consensual kink”, or RACK. RACK reflects a distinctly libertarian approach to BDSM, born out of a sex-positive turn that prioritises consent over considerations of health, safety or dignity. The removal of the “sane” element was justified on the basis it is “ableist” to deny people suffering from chronic mental health issues or severe trauma the pleasures of extreme BDSM. Under this model, many forms of extreme BDSM — from choking till unconsciousness to knife play — are legitimised as “ethical” merely because all participants are well-informed of the risks and fully consent. But the extreme cases filtering into the courts would suggest that this shift in the “rules” around BDSM has been dangerous.
Went down the rabbithole on Taleb after being reminded of him again today:
A bit about the curse of knowledge and Taleb’s narrative fallacy where humans tend to see patterns in noise where there really are none, Mediocrastan vs Extremistan (e.g. normal distributions like human height or weight vs man-made systems like wealth, which have far more extreme outliers):
The immediate consequence of this disparity is that the exact opposite rules apply in Extremistan as what applies in Mediocristan. The average and the median are not the same. And some examples will be very much on the extreme. In particular you start to understand that in a world with these sorts of extremes in what can happen it becomes very difficult to predict what will happen.
Living in Extremistan is why antifragility is important:
… Rather than being fooled by randomness, if you’re antifragile you expect randomness. Rather than being surprised by black swans, you expect them, knowing that there are both positive and negative black swans. Armed with this knowledge you lessen your exposure to negative black swans while increasing your exposure to positive black swans. Extremistan is never going to be a great place to live, which helps to explain much of the discomfort caused by modernity, but if you’re antifragile, it at least takes the edge off.
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If this starts to look like we’ve wandered into the realm of magical thinking again, I don’t blame you, but at its essence being antifragile is straightforward. For our purposes antifragility is about making sure you have unlimited upside, and limited downside. Does this mean that something which is fragile has limited upside and unlimited downside? Pretty much, and you may wonder if we’re talking about man-made systems why would anyone make something fragile. This is an excellent question. And the answer is that it depends on two things, the probability and the order in which things happen. In artificial systems fragility is marked by the practice of taking short term, limited profits, that occur with high probability. But having the chance of suffering low probability, catastrophic losses. On the opposite side antifragility is marked by incurring short term limited costs, with high probability but having a small chance of stratospheric profits. Fragility assumes the world is not random, assumes there are no black swans and ekes out small profits in the space between extreme events which they never saw coming, but which were totally predictable, and going forward won’t happen again… (If this sounds like the banking system then you’re starting to get the idea.) Antifragility assumes the world is random and that black swans are on the horizon and pays small manageable costs to protect itself from those black swans (or gain access to them if they’re positive).
Some examples of antifragility include insurance (hedging yourself against catastrophic downside by paying a small bit every month) and following religious commandments like avoiding alcohol or casual sex. Fragility includes things like government (you get to spend a bit more, but create a potentially huge black swan).
Free markets are successful because they allow people to be lucky → so you should tinker lots to collect lots of black swan opportunities. Luck is perhaps the one big differentiator between winners and losers in Extremistan.
Avoid the ludic fallacy: the misuse of games to model real-life situations.
If a coin is flipped 99 times and lands on heads, an academic, using models, might say that the 100th flip has a 50/50 chance of landing heads, whereas a realist or practitioner would suggest that the game is rigged.
Negotiate the purchase of bankrupt estate assets from banks because bankers don’t care as much as owners, and are likely to off-load at a much lower price than the latter because they don’t have skin in the game.
10 days in the last 50 years were responsible for half the returns in the financial markets.
Attend parties and write books → this generates Extremistan serendipity.
Mulling on these:
We humans tend not to laud silent heroes and/or the act of not taking visible action.
As an entrepreneur or leader, you might feel compelled to do something — to take action. But oftentimes, the most prudent and rewarding path of action is to do nothing.
All ‘non-dull’ activities and professions belong to what Taleb calls Mediocristan — they are non-scalable professions that don’t benefit from Black Swan events.
Contrary to the notion that information is power, it can be toxic in Extremistan if we allow ourselves to fall victim to confirmation bias and anchoring.
I’ve long been an advocate of not watching the news, mostly because it gives you an overly negative world-view, and fills your head with junk.
Taleb points out that watching the news comes at the risk of developing and incrementalist, Mediocristan view of the world, impairing our ability to see and think how we should in Extremistan.
The anti-Pinker: we will have fewer but more severe crises argues Taleb.
While people like Steven Pinker and the late Hans Rosling argue that the world is better than it has ever been — it might be hard to argue this given the numbers — what they miss, according to Taleb, is the risk of large deviations.
Taleb argues that we will have fewer crises, but the impact of them will be far greater than ever before.
Tyler Cowen argued something similar on a recent episode of Eric Weinstein’s podcast, suggesting that access to weapons of mass destruction has been somewhat commoditised relative to what it was during World War 2.
Again, the absence of evidence is no evidence of absence.
Don’t run for trains — missing trains isn’t painful if you don’t run.
The organism with the most secondary uses wins
I wrestle with this one, since I think peaks and troughs are what make life interesting (and constant mild good news can raise dopamine baseline which makes peaks harder to come by):
22. To have a happy life, opt for lots of mildly good news, instead of few significant pieces of good news — this is because we fall victim to hedonic adaptation.
But I resonate with this one really strongly:
No stress + short bouts of extreme stress > moderate stress consistently
This aligns with Naval Ravikant’s philosophy on work:
“Train hard, sprint, rest and reassess — then go at it again.”
https://thedecisionlab.com/thinkers/philosophy/nassim-taleb
According to Taleb, growth only occurs through enduring volatility and distress. Just as you build muscle by breaking down your muscles in the gym, Taleb claims that systems will improve by being exposed to difficulties. When you go to the gym your body responds by getting stronger. Similarly, when a system faces shock, it will build up overcompensating resources that will improve its chances of succeeding the next time it faces a stressor.9
Based on these three key lessons, Taleb demonstrates that we must welcome uncertainty and stressors because they are what make systems stronger. He believes that shielding systems from distress only serves to make them weak and crumble in the face of opposition. Just as an overprotective mother does little to prepare her child to face the real world, trying to protect a system from any stress makes it likely to fail when distress (black swans) inevitably comes. Taleb writes in Antifragile, “This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.” 1
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While most people may view globalization as a positive, Taleb has never been afraid of controversial opinions, as stated in his book Antifragile: “Difficulty is what wakes up the genius”.1 That may be because he believes “You may never know what type of person someone is unless they are given opportunities to violate moral or ethical codes.” 1
Some cute ones:
[If] someone is making an effort to ignore you he is not ignoring you.
The danger of reading financial & other news (or econobullshit) is that things that don’t make sense at all start making sense to you after progressive immersion.
When someone starts a sentence with the first half containing “I”, “not”, and “but”, the “not” should be removed and the “but” replaced with “therefore.”
High Modernity: routine in place of physical effort, physical effort in place of mental expenditure, & mental expenditure in place of mental clarity.
A great book eludes summaries. A great aphorism resists expansion. The rest is just communication.
For a free person, the optimal – most opportunistic – route between two points should never be the shortest one.
What counts is not *what* people say, it is *how much* energy they spend saying it.
I trust those who are greedy for money a thousand time more than those who are greedy for credentials.
An egregore is a “non-physical entity that arises from the collective thoughts of a distinct group of people.” Hoel uses egregore to introduce the idea of a group mind, while simultaneously charting the history of that idea. Back in the late 19th century, some educated Londoners, including William Butler Yeats, took an interest in the occult. Inspired by this new found obsession these men founded the secret Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The members of this society dabbled with many esoteric constructions, including the summoning of benevolent egregores.1
With the arcana of egregores out of the way, Hoel’s primary thesis is that the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was onto something. Namely, that group minds are possible and social media may be in the process of creating one, or more likely many.
On classic group minds like religion and national identity vs Enlightenment humanism:
To be more precise, Christianity is more than a belief system, it’s a group mind.
Hirsi Ali is saying that we need white magic. We need a benevolent egregore to confront the many malevolent egregores which threaten us.
Shermer counters by advocating for science and humanism, but both of these things are the opposite of magic. They not only aren’t benevolent group minds, they're destructive of them. . .At the core of Enlightenment humanism and scientific naturalism is skepticism. And much of this skepticism is directed at traditional group minds, such as religion or a nation’s sense of itself.
The substack he is talking about is Erik Hoel’s piece on social media creating egregores:
According to neuroscience’s answer to the binding problem, if you synchronize different parts of the brain, you get a single consciousness bound together. So following the idea’s logic: if you synchronized different people, what do you get? Is it not at least imaginable you could get some sort of experience that goes beyond any individual person’s consciousness? A group mind?
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It’s undeniable that social media does feel very “mind-like” to interact with, in a way that (again, just how it feels) goes beyond the minds of the individuals. E.g., on social media there’s clearly a window of attention (“the current thing”), and as a network it can distribute tasks and ideas and come to conclusions, at least of a sort. Debates are considered, then are over, as played out as an already-handled thought. At its best this aspect of social media is joy to experience, the information so pertinent, the vibes so high. At its worse we call it “online mobs” or “cancel culture.”
It’s also undeniable that social media use has potent effects in individual psychologies such as rising depression, rising polarization—you can track all this stuff statistically (and notice that pretty much no other factors can explain it), or you can just look at the trends of TikTok teens speaking in fake voices pretending to have multiple personality disorder (possibly not even a real disorder, and if it is, incredibly rare). If something has that much ability to affect psychologies, perhaps it’s worth considering a far more speculative effect (or risk?): that it is slowly conglomerating us, all of humanity, into some sort of group mind. In the early stages, of course, like fetal axons finding each other on an agar plate, forming only a raw and fibrous and unorganized thing mere years into a centuries-long growth.
TIL Singapore has a Hell Museum:
The museum’s Ten Circles of Hell present a series of gruesome, grotesque warnings to avoid sin. In one scene, a minion of the underworld is busy impaling people on a hill of bloody knives (a placard makes clear that they deserved the punishment because they had been either “plotting the death of someone to steal his property” OR “charging exorbitant interest rates as a moneylender”).
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For most of human history, our species lived in small bands, often groups of fewer than a hundred people. Then, suddenly, around 12,000 years ago, complex civilizations began to pepper the landscape, as cooperation and coordination surged. This presents a puzzle: why the sudden shift in our behavior?
Some have argued that “Big Gods”—complete with their watchful eyes gazing down on us from above and threatening to punish us for sin—were the key component in social cooperation and the rise of civilization, moving us from our simple hunter-gatherer roots to sophisticated, sprawling empires. But is that true?
How have secular societies replaced the threat of divine punishment to deter civil sins? Is religion intrinsic - a byproduct of our cognitive architecture and desire to control the uncontrollable - or intrinsic, a way to bond societies?
What’s interesting is that early supernatural beings weren’t actually particularly interested in moral transgressions like cheating, stealing, killing etc - “They were fickle demons, tricksters and spirits, not omniscient gods who worried about whether any random human had wronged his neighbor.”
But then:
Over time, Norenzayan argues, divine forces shifted within these administratively weak human groupings. Thus emerged what Norenzayan calls “supernatural monitoring,” a belief in an omniscient presence that never averts His gaze from sin. Everything is tracked, monitored, then punished.
It is now a nearly universal feature of religious belief systems that a divine presence prohibits certain behaviors—and rewards others. And that presence is always watching. In addition to the omniscient sky gods of today’s major religions, ancient Egypt was home to Horus of Two Eyes. The Incans were watched by Viracocha. Today, in modern Tibet and Nepal, Buddhist depictions of eyes are dotted across villages, reminding everyone that nothing can ever be truly hidden.
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A mutual conception of divine punishment thus served as an enforcement mechanism. According to proponents of the Big Gods theory, that mechanism was the essential trigger for complex human societies to emerge, linking people together beyond immediate, personal bonds such as family and friends.1
In other words: perhaps the omniscient divine gaze paved the way for civilization to rise.
This is interesting:
Most religious experimentation fails. The anthropologist Richard Sosis studied 200 religious communes that emerged during the 19th century. The average commune lasted for just 25 years. (Secular communes were even less successful at creating social bonds; the average one lasted just 6.4 years). By contrast, the largest religions, with billions of believers, have persisted for thousands of years.
Why? Norenzayan suggests the answer: because the Big Gods—the supernatural watchers—provided the strongest social glue.
Yet we’ve only become less violent over time, as we’ve become more secular:
With a somewhat brighter outlook on the role of governments, Fitouchi, Singh, et al. argue that secular institutions can do the job of Big Gods—and do it better—so long as people trust the state to enforce the rules. Sure enough, the data seem to match this relationship.
This graph, compiled by those researchers from the World Values Survey, shows a clear trend. The more that people believe they can generally trust others in their society, the less they tend to believe that “belief in gods is necessary to be moral.” Similarly, they point to the fact that people distrust atheists less in societies with stable, efficient political institutions, making the Kazakh proverb obsolete. With democracy, transparency, and rule of law, even the non-believers can be trusted.
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