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MonDie

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  1. I recently watched a YouTube video documentary called "Jellyfish Invading Japan". Jellyfish thrive in dead zones that result from pollution, over-fishing, or climate change, and the jellyfish out-compete the natural fish populations. However, a chef discovered ways to cook the toxic nomura jellyfish. I wonder whether our jellyfish problem might solve world hunger.
  2. MonDie

    about veganism

    Many alternatives to the meat and vegetables diet exist: hexapods (insects) might be more sustainable than livestock, and over 1 million species are identified, and more generally, arthropods include "fiber" in the form of chitin, although we don't eat the shells of crustaceans; earthworms are Annelids, which AFAIK do not use us as hosts although the leeches do suck our blood (the body type called "worm" probably evolved ten times); edible jellyfish; protistan algae (brown algae/seaweed) and non-plant archaeplastida (green and red algae/seaweed) contain medically interesting compounds; UV treated mushrooms provide vitamin D, but the fungi unfortunately are more abundant than diverse (some 100K known species) Maybe we'll eventually find ways to eat microscopic organisms like mites or the cyanobacterial relatives of chloroplasts.
  3. If Kim Jong Un had genuine paranoia, a trait often allied with anger and fear, would he genuinely believe the nukes would decrease the hostility of his peers? Maybe the nukes are more like bargaining chips that derive their value from the appearance of being threatening. Delusional fear and anger indicate psychiatric problems, but sane, delusion-free people usually don't seek the demise of their own kin. Nepotistic Patterns of Violent Psychopathy: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3428807/
  4. I purchased Paul Ekaman's Emotions Revealed, Revised Edition to understand others, but it also helped me to understand myself. Moreover, this forum lacks the psychology experts who would otherwise provide far more information than I could. Enjoy (criticizing) my theorizing that followed my reading this book. Where else would I put it? The Book I Read The book began with Ekman's decades-old research that searched for universal emotions, or rather the universal facial expressions of emotions. His 60's research on the isolated Guineans confirmed the universality of happiness (the smile), sadness, anger and disgust, but not surprise. However, Ekman gradually adds other possibilities to the list, suggesting that they may be expressed vocally, or not at all. Each emotions produces changes like involuntary contractions of facial muscles, increased blood flow to the legs or arms, muscle weakness, and/or the cognitive changes which are a recurring theme of his book. Identifying Situations through Various Modes of Perception Although Ekman relates emotion signalling to the senses, distinguishing vocal signals from facial signals (pg 60), he never relates triggers to the senses. I wondered about the size of this over sight. Emotions are responses to situations, but one has to identify that situation. I hypothesized that emotional activation requires the activation of multiple perceptual triggers that through learning are linked to the situational trigger. Moreover, like the "trigger" corresponds to emotions, might each mode of perception have a corresponding system for its processing? Although the blind rely on Braille, their aptitude for seeing by feeling does not surpass the sighted's. Paul Ekman distinguishes automatic appraisal from reflective appraisal (pg 31), which happens only after thoughtful reflection upon the occurrence. Perhaps perceived information activates ideas, and these ideas can become associated with the emotions that would otherwise be activated by perceived triggers. The Role of Priming Ekman discusses the cognitive biases that emotions cause, and any psychology student would think that these emotional states might be primed states, i.e. that the angry person, for example, is primed toward observations and recollections of hostility that perpetuate his anger. Moreover, perception can be affected by priming, and we all know that a fearful person can perceive fearful stimuli—stalkers, monsters, etc.—that are actually absent. Ekman, who recommends taking a time out, sees that these biases can be problematic. However, in the context of identifying situations, this bias might focus the emotional person's attention, making him primed for observations consistent with his emotional state so he might gather more information about the unfolding situation. Moreover, priming and spreading activation could be thought to connect with learning and emotional development. A simple description of how this might occur is easy. Some perceivable phenomenon frequently presents alongside the relevant situation. The perception, frequently activated alongside the emotion, develops a mutual association with the emotional network. Each one activates the other, and the perception becomes a new, learned trigger. Thereafter, the new trigger will prime the other triggers, and this will encourage a continual re-establishing of the new trigger's link to the network. Moreover, despite its intensity no single perception will be a sufficient indicator of the situational trigger, so the mutual activation does not become a positive feedback loop of ever increasingly intense experiences. However, the possibility of a positive feedback loop is interesting psychiatrically. Priming Continued: Sequence of Activation For example, a panic episode can be worsened by the embarrassment of having a panic attack in public. It seems an awful problem, the panic of fear combined with the fear of panicking. Ekman suggests that embarrassment might be a universal emotion. Fear and anger send blood to the legs and arms, respectively, and embarrassment sends blood to the face. This is a blush. However, the muscular expressions for embarrassment, not unique in their own right, might present in a unique sequence (pg 235). Moreover,—I struggled to find the page again—the duration varies from emotion to emotion. Ekman notes that fear can be brief and that suprise, which often precedes fear, is usually very brief. Relief (pg 193) is unique in that it often follows fear. Therefore, a common progression would be to proceed from surprise to fear to relief. However, the laughter of relief does not become associated with the fear response. In my experience it is the opposite: laughter, related or unrelated, causes a cessation of fear. Perhaps the new emotion merely diverts my attentional resources from the fearful to the delightful, ending the vicious cycle of self-perpetuating fear priming. However, intravenous needles, which activate fear's theme of imminent pain, cause me to rapidly alternative between fear and laughter. Lastly I will concede that the allocation of attentional resources that occurs with changes in blood flow might be a superior explanation at times. Perhaps the difference between altered blood flow and priming will be related to Ekman's distinction of evolved triggers from learned triggers. Realistic Scenarios and Recollections In the second chapter, Ekman says that emotions can proceed from the imagining, remembering, or talking about a scene (pg 33-34). Although he does not discuss the difference between memory and imagination, I would find it interesting. I know that my emotions would be stronger if the imagined scenario seemed realistic or likely, and, likewise, the imitative facial expressions that accompany my imaginings of social affairs are not quite like the real emotions that occur in response to my perceived surroundings. This distinction could be relevant to patients with psychotic delusions. I appreciate all criticism, especially if you are better than me. Thank you. Thank you so much.
  5. Any effects will probably be discovered by affective (neuro)scientists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_classification Credit to Paul Ekman's recent book: One could associate a gun with any emotion or any evolved emotion trigger. Anger stimulates confrontational or even violent behavior, but sadness, which looks similar to boredom or tiredness, brings a loss of muscle tone. I imagine that most people associate a gun, either their own or someone else's, with fear, but another person might learn that he can overcome angering frustrations by displaying his weapon. Anger and fear frequently alternate, which might be related to "fight or flight." Furthermore, a target-shooter, hunter, action-film addict, or sadist might experience anger mixed with any of various "positive emotions", all of which produce the same facial expression, the smile, unfortunately.
  6. stupid. They're just stupid. Caravan of Thieves - Ms Priscilla
  7. Somehow it never occurred to me to give defendants the choice to waiver their gun rights. It would be double-blinded: The defendant chooses as he awaits the verdict, and the jury separately decides the 2+ competing punishments. After that, we're left wondering how the cost of random gun-checks would compare to the cost of imprisonment. Why can the gun lobby force otherwise eligible offenders to instead rot in jail? Yee-haw!
  8. ISPs are promising not to, but a subtle blockage might seem accidental. I recently switched to Tutanota, an encrypted email service, because it supports U2F security, one of various 2FA security standards. Tutanota just tweeted this. "Comcast Temporarily Blocks Tutanota. This Shows Why We Have to Fight for Net Neutrality." https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/comcast-blocks-and-unblocks-tutanota-net-neutrality I was intrigued by this comment regarding customer satisfaction with ISPs. Also, "web platform designers" was poor word-choice.
  9. That was not their conclusion, but that is observable in the data in Table 6, if "Emotional Stability" refers to inversed Neuroticism. Neuroticism is one of the five factors, and alpha/stability is a hierarchical factor. My reasoning has gone like this. Primary Psychopathy, low Agreeableness. Secondary, low Conscientiousness. Secondary psychopathy -> lower religioisity Secondary psychopathy -> lower mentalizing; lower mentalizing -> lower religioisity Conscientiousness -> higher religiosity (Well established correlation of religiosity with agreeableness and conscientiousness, and conscientiousness is usually stronger) Per Table 6: high Conscientiousness -> high RWA Per Table 6 + hierarchical analysis + IQ correlations: RWA -> high alpha/stability, but low IQ When you use the inversed "Emotional Stability" factor, all five of the factors are socially desireable and positively correlated. In a six-factor analysis, the new-comer, honesty-humility, might break this pattern, potentially explaining instances of weaker correlations with Agreeableness as compared to Conscientiousness. That is all. Have fun!
  10. The Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test is a decades-old test of "mentalizing", the ability to read emotional signals and to understand the emotions that cause them. It was designed to distinguish autistics from normal people, but it really only measures one of several dimensions of autism. It is unique to only show pictures of the eyes. Unlike the mouth, which can be manipulated consciously, the eyes convey our emotional state more accurately.
  11. I guess I need to watch what I say. Those tables are showing "zero-order correlations", which might mean that those data were output before controlling for other variables, like Machiavellianism or RWA/SDO. The pattern seen in the SDO column is still interesting, but my recollection of another publication raised interesting questions about the RWA findings. Disparities in the Moral Institutions of Criminal Offenders: The Role of Psychopathy (Aharoni, Antonenko, Kiehl, 2011) Figure 1 sums it up: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3107598/figure/F1/ Whether you want to compare psychopaths to narcissists (low Agreebleness) or antisocial personalities (low Agreeabelness and Conscientiousness), we should expect that, per Table 6 from above, they would be lower in right-wing-authoritarianism. In this publication from 2011, they scored lower on the "moral foundation" called "respect for authority." The problem is to come: This correlation was not particularly strong, surpassing only the correlation with ingroup loyalty. PCL-R scores had a stronger inverse correlations with "Harm Prevention" and "Fairness." However, I read that publication long ago, and there are newer ones that I have not read. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3861283/ Lastly, I will give an idea about the correlation of religiosity with higher conscientious, higher alpha/stability, and lower openness. To the extent that it really is "typical", the typical religious personality might be described as a rule-following personality, a personality that does not waver unpredictably. In contrast, history shows that many "plastic" intellectuals were rejected by the religious community. Openness/Intellect comprises part of the hierarchical factors called "Positive Emotionality" and "Beta/Plasticity." Galileo and Darwin were not rule-breakers, but mold-breakers, adaptive thinkers, who were lumped together with run-of-the-mill trouble-makers. I might study next—for the research already exists—how creativity and innovation are affected by systems of reinforcement that focus on punishments instead of rewards. Rewards say, "Find a path to point B." Punishments says, "Don't stray from the path, you might cause a C."
  12. Correction: In that sample, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness were un-correlated with SDO after controlling for (Free of) RWA. Anyway, now I have read the publication except its long discussion section. On Self-Love and Out Group Hate: Opposite Effects of Narcissism on Prejudice via Social Dominance Orientation and Right Wing Authoritarianism (Cichoka, Dhont, Makwana, 2017) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5601291/ Table 6 reviewed the data from Study 4, which was conducted in post-Communist Poland. Furthermore, it derived more statistical power from its sample size, but it used the "Single-Item Narcissism Scale" and assessed the Big Five with a ten-item scale. Coincidentally or resultantly, the correlation of narccisism and prejudice not only dropped below significance but even was heading in the other direction. The researchers repeat and emphasize the positive and contrapositive of an opposite pair of findings: narcissism is indirectly related to higher prejudice through SDO (Free of RWA) and lower prejudice through lower RWA (Free of SDO), and the reversed findings apply for low narcissists. One would presume that the prejudice via SDO effect overpowered the prejudice via RWA effect in their previous samples but not this Polish sample. Lastly, their failure to correlate individual narcissism and collective narcissism may be a deviation from prior research, for this correlation's existence is stated in the intro to Study 4. In Study 3, the association of narcissism and prejudice appeared to decrease after they controlled for psychopathy and Machiavellianism, but I have to wonder whether what resulted was a purer measure of narcissism or a measure of narcissistic extraversion, which likely arises from the mixed correlations of the honesty-humility factor. Indeed, extraversion was inversely related to prejudice, for extraversion is always strongly correlated with openness. Of course, this could carry an unexpected implication that the low honesty-humility samples, like the one obtained from the Iranian university, might be less prejudiced in some ways. If narcissism and RWA (Free of SDO) were inversely related through this pathway, IQ might be an important explanatory variable, correlating differently to Openness and Conscientiousness. This could explain the particularly strong correlation of Conscientiousness and RWA. That is probably all... now... after I give thanks to Wikipedia. Thank you, Wikipedia
  13. Some of you might be lost since this post draws information from all of the previous ones. First, less interestingly, I noticed that this data obtained from an Iranian university sample is consistent with an opposing effect from honesty-humility. It identifies correlations with neuroticism (inversely) and extraversion, but the magnitude of the agreeableness correlation has decreased with respect to the conscientiousness correlation. This opposite effect was inferred from (A) the failure of religiosity to significantly correlate with the modesty & straightforwardness facets of agreeableness and (B) what seemed to be an opposite, positive correlation of Neuroticism/Introversion and the modesty facet of Agreeableness. Basic Religious Beliefs and Personality Traits https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3428642/ Even more interesting was some research on collective narcissism. On Self-Love and Out Group Hate: Opposite Effects of Narcissism on Prejudice via Social Dominance Orientation and Right Wing Authoritarianism I didn't actually read it. I skipped to Table 6: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5601291/table/per2114-tbl-0006/ EDIT: but Table 4, which provides the zero-order correlations from Study 3 rather than Study 4, shows something different. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5601291/table/per2114-tbl-0004/ This decades-old concept of "collective narcissism" might need a new name, but that is not the point. Agreeableness and Conscientiousness correlated positively with collective narcissism, right-wing authoritarianism (especially Conscientiousness), and social dominance orientation. Furthermore, emotionally stability (inverse Neuroticism) correlated with right-wing authoritarianism. Recall that secondary psychopaths, which is probably linked to lower religiosity, scored lower on the RMET (Reading The Mind in the Eyes Test), which is linked to religiosity, but primaries did not and exploitative narcissists might score higher. This could help to explain the prejudice of the latter groups. Although I would want to see research on vasopressin too, oxytocin has been linked to higher social skills, but also higher prejudice in some scenarios. All of this is consistent with inference from the observation that BPD is more frequently diagnosed in women, who are well-known to be less narcissistic than men, and gay men. The different diagnoses received by these disadvantaged groups would suggest less prejudice. Of course, women tend toward higher oxytocin and higher religiosity, so there is more going on, but my point is that secondary psychopathy might be linked with belonging to disadvantaged groups and being less prejudiced. In turn, this may help to explain why religiosity, despite its many admirable associations, is correlated with greater prejudice. Not everything good is entirely good. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170303-how-collective-narcissism-is-directing-world-politics
  14. How did all of us build a border wall?
  15. SOMEBODY should give some input. FYI wired.com is very informative, and it seems to be very pro-net-neutrality. Personally, I do not see what good will come from this repeal. The loosening of restrictions often has short-term economic benefits, but these FCC regulations are designed to ensure that internet service providers (ISPs) do not squelch the competition of web platform designers. In the case of ISP competition, we do not have many ISP choices anyway. You can get AT&T broadband, Comcast broadband, or a wifi hotspot. Other options like satellite internet simply aren't cost-efficient unless you live in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately I do not know that the limited number of ISPs is attributable to physical constraints upon the Internet infrastructure (see Internet backbone), but I am more concerned about the effects on small programmers. The fast lanes seem to be another avenue for monopoly because they could create a vicious cycle: some web designers get more business; they make more money; they buy a fast lane with the money; they get more business because their product is in the fast lane.... I can understand why this would be a bigger problem.
  16. I need another coffee. This is why a single, unmediated correlation can be worse than uninformative. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediation_(statistics)
  17. This seemed to be an exceptable place for this thought, which is a nuanced, contrary perspective. I fathomed why, comparing the parties to their bases of support, conservative parties might have proportionately more narcissists who would score high on social dominance orientation SDO. In the context of the five factor model, conservatism is probably related to Openness, inversely related, more than any other factor. Although Openness, Intellect, is socially desireable, the proclivity for experimentation might backfire occasionally. This blogger explains that IQ is linked with some troubling behaviors like drug abuse. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201011/why-intelligent-people-use-more-drugs Perhaps most conservatives are low Openness, but these conservatives do not become our politicians. The correlation of Openness to Extraversion is always the strongest correlation, and the two factors merge into a hierarchical factor called Positive Emotionality PEM. Open people seek novelty and unconventionality, new ideas and aesthetics, and new people. Extraverts want to be around people, and they are outgoing and warm. In contrast, narcissists are usually more outgoing and assertive than warm, but, with extroversion spared, they could still make successful politicians. Unfoutunately they probably have higher SDO along with an affinity for deceit, and the SDO would be what actually drives their conservatism. Being natural politicians, however, they easily step in for the conventional minded who are weary of "progress." ... is what I hypothesized.
  18. Like many mental disorders, it might be related to problems with sleeping. Know that even non-pharmaceutical substances can be psychiatrically problematic. Many supplements along with their "recommended" intake are not sufficiently screened, but their availability is considered an important freedom. The answer might be right in front of you.
  19. 0, 0; 1, 1; 10, 1; 11, 10, 1; 100, 1; 101, 10, 1; 110, 10, 1; 111, 11, 10, 1; The binary version definitely prefers 1 more than 0, surprise. 0, 0; 1, 1; 2, 2; 10, 1; 11, 2; 12, 10, 1; 100, 1; 101, 2; 102, 10, 1; 110, 2; 111, 10, 1; 112, 11, 2; and we appear to be alternating between 1 and 2, but all even numbers above 2 are non-primes. 0, 0; 1, 1; 2, 2; 3, 3; 10, 1; 11, 2; 12, 3; 13, 10, 1; 20, 2; 21, 3; 22, 10, 1; 23, 11, 2; 30, 3; 31, 10, 1; 32, 11, 2; 33, 12, 3; and our only 3, which is the analogue of 9, Did not appear again after three itself. Grunt work complete.
  20. The Notwist - No Encores Curiously, I cannot access that email address anymore.
  21. Gotye - State of the Art "Paranoidea" was not a joke. The ten page essay is almost complete, friend.
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