This is wild to me. As someone who's done some eng management and has also read a lot of psychoanalytic theory, the only things I would actively ask my reports to "open up" about emotionally are what they like and dislike about tasks and processes, so I can better distribute work that satisfies them and remove frictions. That said if they want to tell me more, I'm happy to listen.
Otoh when dealing with peers at director or C level, things tend to get significantly more psychological, likely because their facility of judgment, which is ultimately psychological and moral, is functioning with far higher leverage due to their organizational authority.
I really wish these articles cited more primary sources. I would love (and prefer) to review the empirical work that led to the communicated understanding of these systems.
> However, some people have taken the vagus nerve’s expansive bodily influence as an invitation to engage in pseudoscience. In some corners of the internet, so-called polyvagal therapy — physical or breathing exercises that some claim reset the vagus nerve — is proposed to address(opens a new tab) just about any disorder of the mind or body. There’s little to no evidence that these popular remedies are anything but placebos.
but is the polyvagal theory backed up by concrete scientific evidence? i’ve heard tons about it but practitioners never seem to have real statistics about it all. i thought that the polyvagal theory has never been actually proven?
Porges started with studying the difference in the length of successive heartbeats, and the nerve systems that control this variability. He accumulated lots of data, and published his findings. He looks at the function of the different branches of the vagus nerve before he eventually connects the state of the vagus nerve with the functioning of the social engagement mechanism--the system that enables us to recognize faces and read their emotional signals. He also connects the vagus nerve with fight-or-flight survival mode of the organism, vs. the rest-and-recuperate mode where resources are made available for healing. It is well-founded, plausible, has good explanatory power for how (to give one example) family visits to a hospitalized family member contribute so greatly to their recovery.
Really liked this post, thanks for sharing all the references. I actually did a similar project recently of playing a lot of classic JRPGs, but my research only culminated in a blogpost (https://snav.substack.com/p/26-analysis-rainbow-silkroad) rather than any sort of actual project -- the filesystem RPG is a very cool idea!! Would be fun to get some autogenerated fs dungeons :)
That's funny, I remember playing a little bit of a Silkroad themed (MMO)RPG as a teenager (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silkroad_Online). I wonder if this game inspired it somehow.
Fantastic game. Only thing free my friend and I could play so we'd play nonstop for a summer or two. Learning basic business sense running a shop outside the safe towns was one of those cool things MMOs can really offer. Support harp class was OP as all hell.
I've noticed saturated fats trigger a far greater sense of satiety for me than unsaturated fats, vegetable oils in particular, which I feel I could eat forever. So my personal estimation is sticking to sat fats over unsat fats will result in eating fewer calories.
I actually don’t think so. When you eat fat AND carbs, you tend to eat more of each than if you would have eaten them separately. Source: I’m Swiss and we have dishes like Fondue or Raclette, where each serving is often more than 200g or more cheese. Which would be a lot on its own, i.e. without bread or potatoes. Might also be because it is melted cheese though.
they lived in NYC and the apartment was in Florida, so even the smallest bumps in the road required a round-trip flight just to start figuring out how to solve the issue
basically if the goal was "to make money", there was never a viable path once the rubber hit the road (if they chose a nearer place, the initial costs would never be realized)
that is a uniquely boneheaded approach to managing a rental property. you can say "there never was a viable path" about anything if you chucklefuck your way through it instead of doing it well.
Even when you're not renting remotely (which is the worst possible option in many cases) you still have tons of other things that can come into play:
* Bad tenants (lost rental revenue, eviction costs, property damage, and they're likely judgement proof so that money is just gone)
* No tenants (price too high, nobody wants to move, nobody wants to rent, etc) - rentals should be calculated on 20% vacancy.
* Other property wear and tear and damage (landlords often very badly budget for big ticket items; to be fair, owners are really bad at it too. The IRS depreciation tables are not gifts; you will pay about 1-4% of the value or more a year in repairs, etc.
* Strange legal issues can crop up, not limited to liability, tenant lawsuit defense, etc. But your property can also be eminent domained, declared a superfund site, or more. Sure, it's unlikely, but if you only have one property and it happens, it's going to hurt.
* And the biggest issue from there being a viable path (outside of appreciation gambling) is that you're competing with other single-family landlords who don't account for or care about the issues above, which drives rental prices down to "a bit more than mortgage payment + taxes".
And then if you succeed with the appreciation, unless you relatively constantly churn your property, you're missing out and falling behind what it could do elsewhere. Appreciation when you're 20% down hits 5x harder than appreciation when you're 100% owning it outright, and every payment brings you from one to the other.
There is a reason that professional real estate companies that invest in housing want to invest in multi-family dwellings, because it lets them control for some or all of the risks above. If you want to move from gambling on appreciation to actually being a profitable landlord, you end up imitating them.
I really like this site for info on various tunings, including Just Intonation, where the intervals ARE perfect mathematical ratios: https://www.kylegann.com/microtonality.html
One tidbit I always think about:
> I've had interesting experiences playing just-intonation music for non-music-major students. Sometimes they will identify an equal-tempered chord as "happy, upbeat," and the same chord in just intonation as "sad, gloomy." Of course, this is the first time they've ever heard anything but equal temperament, and they're far more familiar with the first sound than the second. But I think they correctly hit on the point that equal temperament chords do have a kind of active buzz to them, a level of harmonic excitement and intensity. By contrast, just-intonation chords are much calmer, more passive; you literally have to slow down to listen to them. (As Terry Riley says, Western music is fast because it's not in tune.) It makes sense that American teenagers would identify tranquil, purely consonant harmony as moody and depressing. Listening from the other side, I've learned to hear equal temperament music as a kind of aural caffeine, overly busy and nervous-making. If you're used to getting that kind of buzz from music, you feel the lack of it as a deprivation when it's not there. But do we need it? Most cultures use music for meditation, and ours may be the only culture that doesn't. With our tuning, we can't.
> My teacher, Ben Johnston, was convinced that our tuning is responsible for much of our cultural psychology, the fact that we are so geared toward progress and action and violence and so little attuned to introspection, contentment, and acquiesence. Equal temperament could be described as the musical equivalent to eating a lot of red meat and processed sugars and watching violent action films. The music doesn't turn your attention inward, it makes you want to go out and work off your nervous energy on something.
It's difficult to do that though isn't it, because it's inherently then also a function of the recording and your playback equipment.
Much like you can't expect a (useful) recording in a speaker review.
It'd be a bit more reasonable here I suppose because it's almost certainly going to be the weakest link, so everything else is to some extent preserving characteristics of it.
My expectation is that the PWM output would sound characteristic / interesting enough that it would be worth hearing a recording -- but maybe I'm setting myself up to be surprised if it has a reasonable amount of fidelity.
> A very common practice in videogames is to make your game visually immersive—that is to say, to visually portray the game’s elements in such a way that makes the player, to some extent, feel like they’re “really there.” The most obvious way this is employed is via a firstperson point-of-view camera, as seen in titles like Counter-Strike or Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. In these titles—especially in the highly fantasy-simulation-dependent Skyrim—part of the idea is to “immerse” the player in the world.
> The problem is, this isn’t where “immersion” really comes from. Ever notice how people get incredibly immersed in a great novel? What could be further away from the literal, realistic portrayal of reality that Skyrim brings than a set of glyphs in black and white printed on dead trees? And yet novels routinely engage people to the point where they are completely and utterly immersed.
> The myth is that immersion comes from visual/auditory messages, but the problem is the human mind wanders quickly. We’re curious and inquisitive and while a picture-perfect image might in fact immerse us for a moment, if there isn’t an engaging system there for us to keep us immersed, we’ll quickly snap out of it and remember that we’re just tinkering with some computer program.
> The thing that engages people in interactive systems is actually quality interaction—for games, this means interesting, difficult and meaningful decisions as frequently as possible.
I think that quote confuses intellectual immersion with sensory immersion. Those are separate things. Yes, you can be immersed in a chess game or a good book or a PacMan game, but it's not the same as having a VR headset on?
It's real. I remember bracing myself every time I got someone's number off a dating app for the inevitable comment about my "green bubble". These are people in their 20s in NYC. And (for most people), a rant about ecosystem lock-in and being able to do what I want with my hardware etc wouldn't exactly make me come off as more attractive...
Not to invalidate your frustration, but if someone rejected me based on the colour of my chat bubble in a messaging app, that would be decisively unattractive to me.
I have the confidence to feel that now, but dating apps imbue a sense of helplessness in users like my past self, who would get maybe 10-20 matches total, ever, most of whom wouldn't even reply. So perhaps my experience speaks more to the psychological game of dating apps than anything about bubbles and phones.
And, to be fair, they didn't reject me per se, they would make slightly judgmental comments or observations. It just felt like it knocked me down a peg in their eyes and made it all the more difficult to make a real connection.
Otoh when dealing with peers at director or C level, things tend to get significantly more psychological, likely because their facility of judgment, which is ultimately psychological and moral, is functioning with far higher leverage due to their organizational authority.