johnsmith4739's comments

Factually wrong: https://www.datapulse.de/en/billionaire-self-made/

Also, fundamental attribution error is a thing, and survivorship bias, too.

Of course people are not diseases, what they do is, and is making things worse for all of us.

A benzo before or during SSRI treatment and there are no subjective effects. Depending if you want to administer a single dose or an entire course during a certain period of time.

nicely done

Agreed, it's just my experience, but for fb posts, I usually get over 80% accuracy in tone and voice using open source llms and maybe a dozen public posts from the original author.

For what's worth - we have 2 perception systems, top down (essentially pattern recognition) and bottom up (requires sense-making). When we experience something that doesn't fit the first - automatic - our homeostasis is diminished as we experience less orientation/control ("what's this?"). Surprise is the emotion that activates this reassessment of our approach to the given stimulus. Quickly followed by our attention and then cognitive appraisal of the given stimulus that wasn't classifiable by the top-down automatic system.

The "uncanny" experience is given by this dissonance - "it looks like a face while it's not a face" - and it is just a shape of surprise as emotion. Surprise is a short lived emotion, quickly followed by a different one. The unease associated with the idea of "uncanny" is when we experience disgust as the second emotion. Not everybody experiences that. Some of us experience another emotions, like anticipation/curiosity.

The need for orientation, or to understand what is going on, is tightly interwoven with a sense of control. To have clarity about a situation is to have a sense of control and options become more apparent. When we don’t know what is going on in our environment, there can be high levels of stress and anxiety.

Mini Cambridge Analytica - A PoC for psychographic targeting: https://objective-goldberg-0daad6.netlify.app/

...or maybe instead of friction (it gives you burns) let's add engagement triggers. Clickbait title.

If instinct is level 0 response mode/feedback loop (strictly cause-effect) and intellect/cognition/self-awareness is level 2 (capable to plan and analyse), emotions are level 1.

Instinct is just good enough to survive, if you want more complex behaviours you need to use a dynamic memory that is able to learn new information, thus updating its behavioural sophistication. Emotions are just that - the emotional trigger is stimulus + "perceptual filter" => emotion.

Multiple possible emotions, multiplies the complexity of a possible response: for a given scenario, because of the perceptual filter, one can feel different things: Stimulus: "i see a friend" + perceptual filter "it is a pleasure to spend time with old friends" => joy, a deactivating emotion (meaning that the behaviour it determines is one of 'staying in place and savour). Anger? perceptual filter: "this one owes me money". Etc.

Basically, emotions are quick routines that tell you what to do in a given situation. instead of just cause - effect, there is a updatable memory that by learning can give way to more and more sophisticated behavioural responses. There is a part of cognition there, as much cognition as any animal that has emotions can deliver. The installation of new perceptual filters happens through learning, as much as a dog learning new tricks, for example.

But let's shift focus on how this memory works - the emotional memory is a somatic one, if you want. We never feel emotions, we feel feelings, somatic elements, if you want. Blood boiling? Fists clenched? Anger! that is a somatic memory. A feeling-state, if you want. The whole software works like this: image acquired through senses -> cognitive assessment = threat -> emotional response = fear. At this point 2 things happen as the emotion was triggered: 1 - you feel the feelings related to the emotion, somatic element = knot in the stomach -> you respond to this feeling state by running - this is 2 - the behavioural response.

How much the rest of the systems can affect our emotional responses? Just see how easy is to get angry when you're hungry (low blood sugar).

Fun fact: people who lost the ability to experience emotions also lost the ability to take decisions. Why? Because decisions are taken emotionally: the brain runs by us a series of scenarios and the one that makes us feel optimistic that we will succeed is then implemented. This happens very fast because the memory can retrieve very easily associated patterns. Also this is experienced in cases of "l'appel du vide." In our case, to no avail, because due to no emotional responses to the retrieved scenarios, this loop doesn't break. And yes, this means that our subconscious brains take the decisions way before we are aware of them.

</rant>

I loved what they did in Altered Carbon S01: the concept of double-sleeving, where the same consciousness inhabits 2 bodies at the same time.

Given that (methinks) consciousness is just a sensation generated by a feedback loop, with the exception of a mild confusion caused by the fact that discrete identity (Theseus' Ship) is just a human construct (as opposed to a continuum with everything connected), there is nothing special about this.

For the person who believes they're Jesus, they are really Jesus. How would you know that you are yourself? What if you suffer form amnesia? Make it temporal and you are really onto some mind-bending territory.

Teleportation suffers from the same affliction: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/1

Here's my take: Consciousness is real only to the one experiencing it. Just like Love - yeah, it's as real as anything can be for the subject experiencing it, but for everybody else the only real thing about that Love is how it manifests.

Maybe you can separate it from the 'machine' running it, put it in another machine, but is it the same? Yes, of course, for the machine(s) running it, not so much for the outside observers that cannot experience a given sensation outside themselves.

The individual =/= its (current) consciousness, therefore uploading consciousness achieves just as much as 'uploading' my genes into a new individual (a child). Something will go on existing, but it's not me. It's another machine that might have my memories and SENSE of identity.

(prescriptive input at the end) I work specifically on improving Trial-to-Paid and here are some pointers:

-> Most companies calculate their T2P churn incorrectly because they combine both the Right_Audience and the Wrong_Audience within the Trial.

-> Get rid of the Wrong_Audience with better customer acquisition Qualification (e.g. if I sell bats to bullies people will get hurt, if I sell bats to sports teams, well... chances are lower for misuses)

-> Get better conversions with the Right_Audience with an Orchestrated Trial

Most trials are just the product but free for a while. This leads to exactly the situation you describe.

An Orchestrated Trial focuses on reducing the Anxiety of your Right_Audience, so that they can decide easier to switch to paying. Full access to the product changes nothing in conversions, people already know what the product does from your description. The point is to reduce specific uncertainties and unblock the subscription decision.

(prescriptive) To do this, the Trial has to be Orchestrated around getting the Right_Audience to say "AHA! This actually does what I want." And if they have the money, the decision is straightforward. No need to give the access to what the solution does, that's for paying users.

Let me know if I can help

Pedantic: It's "LEGITIMATE SALVAGE" not STEALING

Managing Growth in a late-stage startup: most depts (hr, mkt, sales, cs) perform growth experiments, I coach/facilitate/educate;

Think like this: most metrics can be improved with expertise; known knowns - - but some metrics need new solutions, and for that you need to analyse, hypothesise, experiment... unknown unknowns. And this is why growth is everybody's business.

Growth process is informed with insights from data science + behavioural science (this is my background)

Experiment design + implementation (randomised trials) + interpretation (bayesian based)

Decision to implement in production or scrub and start again.

quick wins: //> a tweak to the search button yields 15% more sales

//> a change in ad copy lifts conversions 17%

//> behavioural recruiting interviews to be more objective...

//> ...and we do around 200 of these per year

I'll give you an even better one: locus of control

People with internal locus of control are 5x more likely to use failures as stepping sones toward improvement. I know because we did the research. We use this, among other behavioural traits, to recruit talent.

You are right in being skeptical.

First, behavioural responses vary from person to person and from culture to culture (Americans will smile in most social situations, Russians don't smile unless there is a laughter coming in).

Second, we are far from associating an internal subjective experience (joy) to an external objective behaviour (smile). It's actually one of the greatest challenges in psychology today. Also, how do you gauge my level of happiness compared to yours?

Third, the whole article is superficial and they don't hide it: first they measure who smiles more ... then they jump to the conclusion - all bronze winners perform the same cognition. Pure speculation.

Even if smiles would denote an emotional episode (joy) it would have to be right in the moment of the emotional episode - and it would be a micro expression (under one second).

Quote: "they studied medal stand photographs" -> posed circumstances.

I have a sad realisation that "engagement" is more likely "enragement." Humans are activated best by anger. Joy? That is a big deactivator...

The algorithmic approach to the feed reminds me a model I work every day with: human perception.

Because there is an "algorithm" put between sensory perception and perception/awareness - and because the signal is highly processed - aaand the way processing is done is not available to our conscious awareness - you get all kinds of strange behaviours.

Where you cannot control how stimuli are processed and perception formed, you are for all intents and purposes manipulated, or at least denied control.

Unfortunately, any SM algo has to fit the same purpose - alter our perceptions and influence our behaviours. Guess I should delete my FB now...

Absolutely, I'm just trying to do some sense-making: figuring out monetisation seems a B series kind of problem, isn't it?

Fair points, I agree

Good advice, thank you. I worked on redesigning the layouts, the first version was a bit crude... Here is a sample, if relevant: https://imgur.com/gallery/Bn0iyN0

Hi HN fellows, it’s the author here. One of the most rewarding experiences in the past year was to show people different psychological concepts and how to use them to understand themselves and others. This inspired me to design this set of cards. Easy to understand concepts, illuminating examples and simple explanations.

One thing I had in mind was to help parents teach kids about their emotions, for example. However, because I struggle with anxiety, I found it important to make them in physical form, to help me focus on their texture and shape, whenever I feel the need to ground myself.

Long story short, it was an amazing experience creating them and I’m happy to share with you anything you would like to know.

Social Conformity - it would be costly for the participants to say no, from a social standpoint, but when the wallets have to open, there is always an excuse.