Kinesthetic genius exists. Intuitive genius exists. It’s simply that we may not always identify it as ‘genius.’

Josh interviews famed anthropologist Wade Davis about the ‘genius’ of other cultures and how anthropology can teach us to listen more deeply to each other and to thus expand our notion of what it’s possible for a human to be.

Would we be nearly as intelligent without animals to teach us about ourselves?

Over three repeated interviews, participants developed false memories of the suggested events under minimally suggestive conditions (27%) and even more so using massive suggestion (56%). We then used two techniques to reduce false memory endorsement, source sensitization and false memory sensitization. This reversed the false memory build-up over the first three interviews, returning false memory rates in both suggestion conditions to the baseline levels of the first interview.

Merely informing people about the possibility of having false memories implanted was enough to get them to second guess their false memories.

exposure to a stereotype, regardless of whether one agrees with it, can shape how one experiences and learns from interactions with members of the stereotyped group, such that it induces individual-level prejudice

Computational modeling revealed that this preference was due to stereotype effects on priors regarding group members’ behavior as well as the learning rates through which reward associations were updated in response to player feedback. We then show that these stereotype-induced preferences, once formed, spread unwittingly to others who observe these interactions, illustrating a pathway through which stereotypes may be transmitted and propagated between society and individuals.

Frederick Cook has just returned from the very roof of the world, the first man to reach the North Pole. Or so he says. Journalist Philip Gibbs has been watching him, and he’s convinced he’s lying.

We conducted semi-structured interviews with 26 people who reported experiencing existential distress following psychedelic experiences. We explored the phenomenology of participants’ difficulties and the ways they navigated them, including what they found helpful and unhelpful in their process.

Our findings suggest that psychedelic-induced ontological shock leads to cognitive, emotional and social ungrounding which can in turn lead to existential confusion. Grounding, whether somatic, through embodiment practices, or through social connection and the normalisation of unusual experiences, helped people navigate their confusion

striving for value-free science is both unattainable and undesirable

Value capture happens when your environment presents you with simplified versions of your values, and those simple versions come to dominate your practical reasoning. Value capture offers you a quick shortcut—an opportunity to take on prefabricated values. You do not have to go through the painful process of value deliberation if you can get your values off the shelf.

I want to focus on one particularly clear, and quite common, form of value capture: when an institution presents you with some metric, and then you internalize that metric.

I mean to exclude here from the category of value capture those cases where we use external values as proxies and heuristics under full reflective control—when we select, monitor, and adapt those heuristics in the light of our own richer values.

… we will flourish when we have the capacity to adjust and tailor our values in light of our rich experience of the world living under them. When we tailor our values to ourselves in light of those rich experiences, then our values will be better fit to promote our flourishing, as the very specific people we are.

Kuhn realized that if Aristotle was stuck within his own way of seeing the world, then so are we.

1. The Standard Case
2. Dr. Rock’s Taxonomy
3. Descend into the Particular

By comparing and contrasting these women’s accounts at two time points, this paper demonstrates the stark contrast between ‘lived experience’ of Spinal Muscular Atrophy and the various way(s) this experience was transformed into, and presented as, ‘knowledge’ through the processes of making, and accounting, for reproductive decisions. The analysis highlights that multiple, distinct and sometimes competing experiential frameworks are used to conceptualise SMA across time and context. However, rather than evidence of its fallibility, this finding highlights that ‘knowledge’ is an inappropriate vessel with which to capture and transfer ‘experiential knowledge’. Rather, we need to consider how to value such insight in ways that harnesses its inherent strength without leaving it vulnerable to the epistemological critiques attracted by labelling it ‘knowledge’.

Many people in Silicon Valley and around the world now call themselves ‘Effective Altruists.’ Is there any way they might become ‘Responsible Adults?’

Before you start, be honest with yourself.

If you are like most people, there is a gap between the person you are and the person you wish to be.

There are three kinds of genies: Genies to whom you can safely say, “I wish for you to do what I should wish for”; genies for which no wish is safe; and genies that aren’t very powerful or intelligent.

Nagarjuna seems willing to embrace contradictions while at the same time making use of classic reductio arguments. He asserts that he rejects all philosophical views including his own-that he asserts nothing-and appears to mean it. It is argued here that he, like many philosophers in the West and, indeed, like many of his Buddhist colleagues, discovers and explores true contradictions arising at the limits of thought. For those who share a dialetheist’s comfort with the possibility of true contradictions commanding rational assent, for Nagarjuna to endorse such contradictions would not undermine but instead confirm the impression that he is indeed a highly rational thinker. It is argued that the contradictions he discovers are structurally analogous to many discovered by Western philosophers and mathematicians.

Ideas are not then genuine ideas unless they are tools in a reflective examination which tends to solve a problem.

The renowned theorist of childhood education defines the thinking process as he understands it and enjoins teachers to deploy more “experimental” (hands-on) learning in the classroom: a message which is sadly still needed, over a hundred years later.

For me, understanding is more and more taking the form of understanding the necessity of the tensions and problems and the simple importance of my grappling with them. I do not seek their dissolution, for that would negate the human experience; rather, I seek to understand them, my relations to them, and how best to navigate them.

Do not speak to the ghost [your ghost]
resting outside your head.
He is not real,
he is not real,
he is really [your ghost]

Over Canada / or two hours of frozen waves I assume is Canada /
I’m surrounded by babies / so many babies…

I raise a finger to a point in the night…

How much our minds live (and live on) in the people around us.

Everything’s been said
But one last thing about the desert,
And it’s awful: …

Human horrors
are not inevitable. Some people stop
themselves, before they cross moral divides.

Whatever I learn makes me angry to have learned it.

I share my house with a colony of bats.
They live in the roof peak,
enter through a gap.

You were between two animals.
Between two attributions.
At the crotch of a river’s fork.
At a loss, at least…

What it feels like to have to make a decision.

what counts here does anything count
on the short walk while looking down and then over then up…

Here, with the subsiding of thought and examination, a bhikkhu enters and dwells in the second jhana, which has internal confidence and unification of mind, is without thought and examination, and has rapture and happiness born of concentration. This is called noble silence.

Moggallāna reflects that the second absorption—where thought stops—is the true “noble silence,” and the Buddha encourages him to develop it.

This paper revisits a landmark study of the prevalence of mental illness in the state of Massachusetts conducted by Edward Jarvis in the 19th century. Jarvis drew an improper conclusion about the relationship between social class, ethnicity, and insanity, asserting that the Irish foreign-born had a higher prevalence of insanity in each social stratum. A reanalysis of Jarvis’ data shows that in both the pauper and independent social classes in Massachusetts, the prevalence of insanity was significantly lower among foreign-born persons than among native-born persons.

On the basis of his misperception, Jarvis constructed elaborate etiological theories. These theories made a strong impact on the mental health service policies of his day. The effects of incomplete examination of data on etiological theories and mental health policy in current times are highlighted in this article.

Childhood lead exposure has devastating lifelong consequences, as even low-level exposure stunts intelligence and leads to delinquent behavior. However, these consequences may be more extensive than previously thought because childhood lead exposure may adversely affect normal-range personality traits.

In a preregistered investigation, we tested this hypothesis by linking historic atmospheric lead data from 269 US counties and 37 European nations to personality questionnaire data from over 1.5 million people who grew up in these areas. Adjusting for age and socioeconomic status, US adults who grew up in counties with higher atmospheric lead levels had less adaptive personality profiles: they were less agreeable and conscientious and, among younger participants, more neurotic.

Next, we utilized a natural experiment, the removal of leaded gasoline because of the 1970 Clean Air Act, to test whether lead exposure caused these personality differences. Participants born after atmospheric lead levels began to decline in their county had more mature, psychologically healthy adult personalities (higher agreeableness and conscientiousness and lower neuroticism), but these findings were not discriminable from pure cohort effects.

Our findings suggest that further reduction of lead exposure is a critical public health issue.

Beliefs can be highly resilient in the sense that they are not easily abandoned in the face of counterevidence. This has the advantage of guiding consistent behavior and judgments but may also have destructive consequences for individuals, nature, and society. For instance, pathological beliefs can sustain psychiatric disorders, the belief that rhinoceros horn is an aphrodisiac may drive a species extinct, beliefs about gender or race may fuel discrimination, and belief in conspiracy theories can undermine democracy. Here, we present a unifying framework of how self-amplifying feedbacks shape the inertia of beliefs on levels ranging from neuronal networks to social systems.

Sustained exposure to counterevidence can destabilize rigid beliefs but requires organized rational override as in cognitive behavioral therapy for pathological beliefs or institutional control of discrimination to reduce racial biases. Black-and-white thinking is a major risk factor for the formation of resilient beliefs associated with psychiatric disorders as well as prejudices and conspiracy thinking. Such dichotomous thinking is characteristic of a lack of cognitive resources, which may be exacerbated by stress. This could help explain why conspiracy thinking and psychiatric disorders tend to peak during crises. A corollary is that addressing social factors such as poverty, social cleavage, and lack of education may be the most effective way to prevent the emergence of rigid beliefs, and thus of problems ranging from psychiatric disorders to prejudices, conspiracy theories, and posttruth politics.

They were very disoriented, obviously, after flipping. They got out of their seat belts and out of the car and, because I had skidded, my head was bleeding profusely…

A scientist talks about the difficult process of recovery after her traumatic head injury.

I think most people, who see and experience these statistics take them passively as just like, “That’s just concrete information.” They don’t think of it as a question of like, “Who’s the person you want to be?”

… your conscious mind is more a press secretary. You’re not the president or the king or the CEO. You aren’t in charge. You aren’t actually making the decision, the conscious part of your mind at least. You are there to make up a good explanation for what’s going on so that you can avoid the accusation that you are violating norms.

When we observe people around us, one of the first things that strikes us is how different people are from one another.

Personality is a carefully created balance of traits and behaviors in each unique person.

In this video, we’re going to look at some prominent climate deniers, what they have to say, why what they say is clearly wrong, [and] why they seem to believe it anyway

As the entrepreneur of its own self, the neoliberal subject has no capacity for relationships with others that might be free of purpose. Nor do entrepreneurs know what purpose-free friendship would even look like.

The idiot [however] does not exist as a subject – he is more like a flower: an existence simply open to light.

The greatest power of games is that you can explore this landscape of different agencies. The greatest danger of games is that you can get sucked into this experience of wanting to be in a clear, crisp and gentle universe where you know exactly what to do and exactly how it’s measured.

If anyone could see into the future of the British economy it was John Maynard Keynes.

The secret of super-forecasting? It’s a willingness to change your mind.

… one of the most interesting things Open Philanthropy does is the way you intentionally divide up your giving portfolio into buckets based on really different ethical, arguably even metaphysical, assumptions. So tell me about “worldview diversification.”

Experiencing autonomy—being allowed to make those choices that constitute an autonomous life—as a learner is a better way of learning to be autonomous than being told what to do.

Education of whatever type cannot be sustained without some notion of imparting a belief system.

A rigorous philosophical analysis of how humans acquire mental categories which argues that human values are always already present in any act of teaching or learning, thus solving some of Wittgenstein’s problems and encouraging us to ask radical questions about what our education system currently values, and what it might be designed to value instead.

There isn’t “knowledge” as we’re used to thinking about it: figuring out, given observations and experiences in the world, what is “true” and once you come to “knowledge” you get to keep it for life. I now appreciate that everything is beliefs, is just a best guess.

How all reasoning is Bayesian.

True confidence only comes about once the teachings have led the disciple to personal verification of their efficacy.

Faith is a starting point for the realization of truth.

Of course, it is worthy and noble to be passionate about people and causes you care about. It’s also easy to fall into the trap of attempting too much in the pursuit of trying to have it all.

But that which is called ‘mind’ and ‘sentience’ and ‘consciousness’ arises as one thing and ceases as another by day and by night.

An ignorant person might become free of attachment to their body, but not their mind. Still, it would be better to attach to the body, as it is at less changeable than the mind, which jumps about like a monkey.

Where will stops, there is freedom.

Ajahn Brahm explains his belief in “Free Won’t.”

The age of haste, its cinematographic succession of point-like presences, has no access to beauty or to truth. Only in lingering contemplation, even ascetic restraint, do things unveil their beauty, their fragrant essence.

A spirited defense of slowing down in a world obsessed with acceleration.

So there’s a tension in the Buddha’s recommendations about faith and empiricism. Few of Asian Buddhists I know find the tension uncomfortable, but Western Buddhists — raised in a culture where religion and faith have long been at war with science and empiricism — find it very disconcerting.

The delicate, but wonderful balance of faith and empiricism in Buddhism.

Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu highlights that it is direct seeing that liberates a practitioner, and faith operates as a working hypothesis. The essay also focuses on the psychological importance of faith.

The mountain is in fact an industrial park in Hsinchu, a coastal city southwest of Taipei. Its shrine bears an unassuming name: the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

A journalist gets an inside look at the people, machines, and ideology behind the world’s most advanced computer chip manufacturer.

Although sucking feels uncomfortable, we shouldn’t shy away from activities we enjoy simply because we aren’t great at them.

What happens—biologically, cognitively, and socially—when we communicate?

A short introduction to the science of human communication.

Bhikkhus, what one intends, and what one plans, and whatever one has a tendency towards: this becomes a basis for the maintenance of consciousness.

The scope of the six fields of contact extends as far as the scope of proliferation. When the six fields of contact fade away and cease with nothing left over, proliferation stops and is stilled.

What is there when the senses cease?

The precise ways in which human cognition differs from that of other species remains a topic of intense debate, but many data currently support the hypothesis that it is an early emerging set of social skills for reasoning about conspecifics as intentional agents, coupled with a distinctly cooperative and prosocial motivation, that fuels many of our most remarkable cognitive achievements.

When your heart is not overcome and mired in ill will … even hymns that are long-unpracticed spring to mind, let alone those that are practiced.

On how the Five Hindrances cloud our judgement and fog our memory.

We do have something that is very unique about us as animals. And that’s that we can build alliances with any other species […] to build loving, supportive, safe relationships to save us from the difficulties of life

On how advances in science are undermining the dualities we have long assumed separate us from the “lower” animals, and a proposed alternative narrative for what makes humans so special.

thinkers developed the notion of a ‘concept’ in order to explain how it is that words are capable of applying to real objects, and how concepts can be used to capture elements of word meaning extending beyond reference to real objects. In particular, I will focus on the developments made by Phywa pa Chos kyi seṅ ge in the middle of the twelfth century, as well as on reactions to those developments by Sa skya Paṇḍita

A metaphor can also die when it becomes so common that we forget it is a metaphor. It no longer functions as a figure of speech; its meaning is taken to be literal. This is what happened to the computational theory of mind

An extended meditation on what it means to be a sentient being in this disenchanted era.

Witless fools behave
like their own worst enemies,
doing wicked deeds…

The deity Khema utters a series of verses in praise of good deeds. The Buddha responds with a simile for someone who departs the path of the good.

It’s like a bungalow with a bad roof. The roof peak, rafters, and walls are unprotected. They get soaked, and become rotten.

Protecting your mind is like protecting a house.

Hannah Arendt knew what was at stake. In 1951, she published a hefty book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, which traced the roots of what was happening in Europe…

The people I love the best
jump into work

… even consciousness is shared, to a large degree, with a lot of other creatures, so death stops seeming like the enemy and starts seeming like one of the most ingenious kinds of design for keeping evolution circulating and keeping the experiment running and recombining. And to go from the terror [of death] into that sense that the experiment is sacred, not this one outcome of the experiment, is to immediately transform the way that you think even about very fundamental social, economic, and cultural things.

A passionate defense of the importance of Buddhist philosophy in charting a path out of the Anthropocene.

I would frequently see adults recount something a child had said that was particularly provocative or deep by describing it as “adorable.” “How cute they are.” Even well-meaning adults just kind of dismiss children’s larger questions and ideas.

On taking children seriously as philosophers and as fellow human beings.

Oh, when will I stay in a mountain cave,
alone, with no companion,
discerning all states of existence as impermanent?

Oh, when will I rise up,
intent on attaining freedom from death,
hearing, in the mountain cave, the cry of the crested peacock in the forest?

Embossed tattoos like small notes on sheet music.
Dots and lines, strands and strings

sometimes i want to ask the earth,
was it beautiful      here
without us…

A blur in the periphery,
like the mind if the mind
were airborne, a buzz…

Where am I going? I don’t quite know.

Once I heard a scientist with
Alzheimer’s on the radio, trying to
figure out why he could no longer
draw a clock.

A poem based on this radio show about a scientist losing his mind to dimentia.

… language, concepts, and meanings are embodied through our dispositions, abilities, comportment, and actions

After identifying two related, Zen “dogmas”—(1) that language obscures reality and that (2) Buddhist practice is about cultivating the experience of emptiness—this essay sets about to refute these by examining the way that concepts are enacted and embodied.

… you have this young brain that has a lot of what neuroscientists call “plasticity”. It can change really easily, essentially. But it’s not very good at putting on its jacket and getting to preschool

A deeply optimistic and warm view of children as “explorers.”

… in this state of not knowing, curiosity and engagement with the world arises. And that engagement, that curiosity is intimate and very, very alive.

A defense of taking seriously the life in things and expanding the range of “normal” ways of being with the world.

The mind becomes clearer and clearer and you will be delighted.

A conversation on the central role of meditation in Buddhism.

While I disagree with Bhante G’s dismissal of mantras and labeling as techniques, his teachings on the theory of mindfulness are always worth a listen.

You never begin by saying, “I’m going to be a tyrannist dictator, and I’m going to ruin your life.” You don’t start out that way. You start out by saying, “I’m going to make things so much better. And you want that, don’t you, Ezra?”

We don’t begin with fundamental things. We start with fundamental relations. Our mind and our body are constantly interrelated and interconnected.

… unlike other Buddhist traditions based on teachings contained in one or more Buddhist sūtras, the Zen school validates itself on the basis of being “a transmission outside the sutras” (kyōge betsuden). That is to say, a transmission of the Buddha-dharma from the enlightened mind of a Zen master to his/her disciple(s). But what happens in those cases when the “enlightened master” isn’t truly enlightened?

Given certain Zen Masters’ vociferous support of Japan’s militarism during World War II, how can their students today claim to have a legitimate “Dharma transmission”?

For a critique of Brian Victoria’s attack on Makiguchi specifically, see A Critical Analysis by Daniel Metraux.

Avalanches above, business continues below.

Ben and Andrew trace how the song “Time to Pretend” was made, from its dorm room origins, to its first recording, to re-envisioning it with Grammy-winning producer Dave Fridmann.

The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite. […] May the House in its Beauty shelter us both.

A man imprisoned in The Labyrinth of Forgotten Things makes sense of his new/old/perpetual Home.

The novel resists a simple, allegorical reading, but instead hums with symbolism and irony as it dances around its heady themes. While intellectuals will enjoy turning those over, ultimately it is Piranesi’s sincerity and emotional strength that ensure the book won’t soon be Forgotten.

… the majority of philosophy is based on assumptions about the basic cognitive endowments of average individuals that totally disregard what is known about human development

A critique of the Western assumption of the rational citizen and a full-throated defense of education as activism.

Acknowledging it doesn’t change your vulnerability. You’re vulnerable whether you develop a language to think about it or not.

If a person has faith, they preserve truth by saying, ‘Such is my faith.’ But they don’t yet come to the definite conclusion: ‘This is the only truth, other ideas are silly.’

The Buddha instructs a Brahmin on the right way to talk about religion and how to make our way through the thicket of views to arrive at the truth.

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

A classic of modern psychology, Thinking, Fast and Slow explains the two halves of our brain and how they contribute to our sometimes-less-than-rational behavior.

Meditation can be seen as the ultimate in “[restructuring the] lower-level components” of the mind. We abandon all the higher-level cognition built upon words and concepts and return, as much as possible, to the preverbal experience in order to “re-engage and reshape” our way of being in the world.

In general, we humans are a self-interpreting species for whom the practice of recollecting and redescribing ourselves is a crucial necessity. For us the reconstruction of identity is a continuous process wherein the past is selectively crafted into a history. It is a creative and self-constitutive exercise. We come to know each other and ourselves not by exchanging resumes (mere inventories of events), but by telling our stories. And our stories change as we do; they reflect what actually happened and what we think is worth remembering, they reflect who we were, who we are, and who we would like to become.

An impassioned defense of asking big questions, especially in the context of our postmodern search for meaning.