SatanicNotMessianic

@SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml

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Why do most people refuse to accept that they are wrong

I have come across a lot’s of people like these. like 99% of them. Sometimes it makes me think twice if what i am saying is wrong? What’s wrong with them. Is it so hard to swallow your pride and acknowledge that the other person is speaking facts? When they come to know they are wrong they proceed to insult/make fun of...

SatanicNotMessianic,

Evolutionary biologist here.

This is actually a tricky one. Lying (and I’m going to fold the projection of false confidence in with that one because I’m talking about deception, intentional or otherwise, not a moral concept) is only effective if others believe you.

Humans, as the most highly social of the primates and ranking among the most highly social animals on earth, have adapted to believe each other, because this helps with trust, coordination, shared identity, learning, and so on. However, it also creates a vulnerability to manipulation by dishonest actors. Again, I’m not talking about a moral dimension here. There are species in which mating is initiated with the gift of a nuptial present (eg a dead bug) from the male to the female. Sometimes the male will give a fake present (already desiccated insect, eg) to trick the female, and sometimes it works. Deception and detection are an arms race, and it’s believed by many to be one of the drivers that lead to the development of human intelligence, where our information processing capacity developed alongside our increasing social complexity.

The problem is that when lying becomes the default, then the beneficial effects of communication cease. It’s like when you stop playing games with a kid that just cheats every time, or stop buying from a store that just rips people off. It’s a strategy that only works if few enough people play it. There’s tons of caveats and additional variables, but that’s the baseline. So why do we still see so much of it?

The first component of course is confirmation bias. If 90% of our interactions are trustworthy, the ones that stick out will be the deceptions, and the biggest deceptions will get the most notice. The second is that the deceptions as a whole have not been impactful enough, over time, to overcome the advantages of trust, either in biological time or in social evolutionary time. You will notice that more trust is given to in-group rather than out-group members, and a number of researchers think that has to do with larger social adaptations, such as collective punishment of deceivers - sending someone to jail for writing bad checks, say, is easier if they’re part of your community as opposed to a tourist from another country. We can also see cultural differences in levels of trust accorded in-group and out-group persons, but that’s getting into a lot of detail.

The third major operator is the concept of the self. This is a subject where we are just being able to start making scientific headway - understanding where the concept of a self comes from in terms of neurobiology and evolutionary dynamics - but this is still very much a new science layered on top of ancient philosophy. In the concept of the self there is a component of what I’m going to calll the physical integrity of the structure. People find being wrong painful - there are social situations that activate the same parts of the physical brain as physical pain and distress do. This is especially true of those ideas are seen as being held by other group members, because you now have the group structural integrity on top of the one in idea-space. That’s where you get people willing to literally die on the hill of Trump winning in 2020. For the evolutionary construction and nature of the self I’d recommend Sapolsky and Metzinger - it’s too new and too complex to get into here. If you want to just summarize it in your mind, call this component ego defense.

I think that’s most of what’s going on, at least as we understand it so far.

SatanicNotMessianic,

All hail Discordia!

SatanicNotMessianic,

Yes, I have read that they’re starting to develop wills of their own.

I’m assuming this one was trained off of fashion designer Santino Rice, of Project Runway and Drag Race fame…

How often to you bail on a half-written post or response?

I have had a tendency since my earliest days on social media where I will get halfway or more through a response, and end up just cancelling it. Sometimes I feel like I’m just being to over the top with snark or otherwise don’t want to be that kind of person, but a lot of the time I’ll decide I just really don’t care...

SatanicNotMessianic, (edited )

I remember the first time I caught myself doing this with a magazine. Tech transition points are hard.

SatanicNotMessianic,

My background is in theoretical biology, but I was mostly publishing in public health, physics, and computer science journals. We paid for every paper because I feel very strongly about research being made available to everyone, especially in the case of publicly funded work. I just make sure to budget for it.

I had a couple of papers in one of the PLOS journals, which afaik are fee-only pubs.

It’s been about ten years since I’ve had to worry about publishing, as o decided to sell out and join a commercial company, and they’re pretty averse to publishing. My information might be out of date.

I do think the academic publishing industry is atrocious, however, and I have always encouraged people to check on sites like arxiv, the personal web page of the lead author, and as a final attempt contacting the lead author directly. Most journals that I dealt with permit authors to upload preprints to sites like arxiv, and if you do it with your final revision the only difference would be the formatting. Of course, that doesn’t count as a publication for academic purposes, and it doesn’t get around paying fees for the journals that charge them, but it is an avenue for people to make their research more globally available for free. I’m sure you know of that, I’m just mentioning it for students looking for a copy of a paper.

SatanicNotMessianic,

Of course you can put it anywhere you’d like. Services like arXiv specialize in hosting pre-prints of published papers as well as white papers that only have an institutional association.

The problem is that the job of an academic is to publish. That’s how you build credibility and seniority. For it to count as a “published paper” it needs to have undergone peer review so that the people who want to read/cite the paper at least have the confidence that it’s at least been reviewed by other experts in the field.

There are some “journals” that will publish anything as long as they get their fees. Most academics are wise to that by now, but it can still impress people in business for whom a pub is a pub.

SatanicNotMessianic,

I’m not even sure what he’s talking about. Open access journals are the ones who charge authors to publish.

If you publish in a journal that has closed access, there is generally no fee to publish. If you want your paper to be open access, you can tack on an additional open access fee so that your paper doesn’t end up behind a paywall. The last time I looked - and this was several years ago - the going rate for making your paper open access in a closed access journal was about $2-3k. We always budgeted for publication fees when we were putting together our funding proposals.

The fee structure is similar for open access journals, except that there’s not a choice about paying them. For researchers whose work isn’t grant funded, it generally means they’re paying out of pocket, unless their institution steps in.

I had a paper published in a small but (in its field) prestigious journal, and the editor explained to me that he only charges people who can afford it, and uses those funds to cover the costs of the journal. He explained that he had a paper from a researcher who couldn’t cover the publishing fee, and he let me know that I was helping out the other person, too.

What I don’t understand is how anyone how has gone through academia doesn’t know this.

SatanicNotMessianic,

That gambling tower is defying the laws of physics and it will come crashing down.

Just like gambling, I guess.

SatanicNotMessianic,

If you haven’t yet, I recommend reading A Stitch in Time. It’s written by Andrew Robinson and the audiobook is read by him as well.

SatanicNotMessianic,

One of them also apparently had the lead in that year’s production of Hamlet.

SatanicNotMessianic,

The whole YOLO thing never made any sense to me. If you believe in reincarnation or an afterlife, then you have every excuse to risk your life doing whatever you want. There’s usually some kinds of moralistic restrictions, but except in the most extreme religious fundamentalist societies, I suspect wingsuiting on weekends is fair game. If you’re going to live forever no matter what you do, why not?

On the other hand, if you only live once - if you’re one and done - that seems like a demotivation to risk your life before you’re actually done with it.

SatanicNotMessianic,

There’s an old borscht belt joke about insurance - “What if something terrible happens, and you don’t die?”

SatanicNotMessianic,

Dear God, Hope you got the letter and I pray you can make it better down here.

SatanicNotMessianic,

Ed is the standard text editor.

SatanicNotMessianic,

I am talking about a single person. I’m not going to name them for obvious reasons but they are in an area where the commercial desire for PhDs is extremely high, and the compensation vs that of academia is also higher. They were disappointed with the PITA and politics aspects of academia that they made the decision that their line was ending with them. We sometimes for our own amusement trace lines of descent in academia - who was a student of whom, and what that means for their core ideas and approaches - and he decided that he would not be bringing any more academics into the world.

SatanicNotMessianic,

I was colleagues with one professor who hated academia so much that he refused to take on any grad students who wanted to go into teaching.

question about "synchronic displacement" in TNG 'Times Arrow'

So in this episode they go into a cave, and can read some sort of energy field, as well as Troi having a sense that there are lifeforms present. Geordie explains that the people must be displaced in time, but only by a few milliseconds. If that’s true, how is there not overlap? Say the people are a few milliseconds ahead of...

SatanicNotMessianic, (edited )

I think OP is implying that time works like a film strip, so that if I’m five minutes behind you, I see where you were five minutes ago.

That’s the way time travel in Trek works. If you travel from Time B in the future to Time A in the past at a given place, you see the place as it was at that time, including the people who were there.

I think that rather being just shifted in time a la time travel, they were actually dealing with a flex in spacetime, like a curve in the road you can’t quite see around, but Diana could see their essence like light from the tail lights, as in your example.

In other words, they were caught in a time warp, again.

SatanicNotMessianic,

Evolutionary biologist here.

I am someone who believes that multilevel selection is a primary driver of evolutionary dynamics and works at levels ranging from the organism to the ecosystem (at various levels of effectiveness). Kropotkin is nice philosophically, although he is read about far more often than he is read. That’s entirely reasonable, because his theories provide a foundation for lines of investigation we still pursue today but are obviously outdated, as are the ideas of everyone whose work predated discoveries like genes.

If you want a more modern view on the evolutionary benefits of cooperation, I would suggest starting with Harvard biology professor EO Wilson, who specialized in ants and ended up concluding that humans were in fact a eusocial species - unique among primates and one of very few on earth. He invented the field (or at least added additional formalization to the study) of sociobiology - the evolution of social behaviors. It’s the same category as ants and bees. For an anthropological and cross-cultural perspective I’d suggest Graeber. For a mathematical and economic perspective, I’d start with Sam Bowles. For the foundations of pro-social behavior in primates, I’d recommend Frans de Waal.

I’d be happy to try to answer any questions on the subject.

SatanicNotMessianic,

The oldest crpg I ever played was called advent, because the Vax computers could only use 6 characters for file names and so the people who ported it couldn’t use the actual name “adventure.” It was basically the same as the game infocom shipped as Zork.

Apparently the original implementation was on the PDP-10 in 1976. There might have been a couple other games that predated it by a year or two, but adventure was the big one in my opinion because it led (eventually) to the creation of the infocom text based game engine and a whole line of games ranging from hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy to leather goddesses of Phobos.

SatanicNotMessianic,

What if we move in the opposite direction and go with doctrix?

And I mean for everybody. Like a gender-bending neutral.

SatanicNotMessianic,

Grad school pro tip: Do not become the “computer person.”

SatanicNotMessianic,

The car phone is cool, but what’s that little trike thing parked across the street?

SatanicNotMessianic,

My lab was a machine that turned tax dollars into computer models of things like viral propagation.

What’s wild is that what counts as “a lot of funding” differs by an order of magnitude between academic and commercial research.

SatanicNotMessianic,

If my client supported DMs I’d be so up in Stamets’ business that he would know I was a fun guy.

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