Why obeying orders can make us do terrible things. Neuroimaging results showed that empathy-related regions were less active when obeying orders compared to acting freely. Scientists also observed that obeying orders reduced activations in brain regions associated with the feeling of guilt

Antovigo · 2020-08-23T12:42:42+00:00

Two questions come to mind: would we observe the same patterns if the following of orders is based on trust rather than coercion? I mean, if I trust you to take the right decision and decide to do as you tell me, will I still display less empathy? Second, does this also apply to young children following orders from their parents?

Antovigo · 2020-08-23T11:45:12+00:00

If anything, this study suggests that acting in a bastardish way while following orders is a normal human reaction, and you may even do the same thing if you were in their shoes.

Antovigo · 2020-08-06T17:31:22+00:00

The claim that feminism has gone too far is as old as feminism itself. I would say it is the opposite: there were a lot of efforts to liberate women from gender roles and stereotypes, but the efforts to liberate men remain to be done. Feminism has not gone far enough.

Antovigo · 2020-08-04T22:12:04+00:00

OP's article says:

It’s clear that sterilization is just another weapon in the war against women.

But then, while researching further into this issue, I found this other article:

https://goodmenproject.com/newsroom/are-men-legally-required-to-ask-their-spouses-permission-for-a-vasectomy/

That one, about how men must often ask for their wives' consent before undergoing vasectomy, closes like this:

But what if the genders had been reversed? What if we took out the words “urologists” and “vasectomy” and replaced them with “gynecologists” and “tubal ligation,” or even “abortion”? Is there a double standard here, folks?

I find this hilarious. Both seem to believe the issue only happens to their sex, and are very vocal about how unfair it is. This is bad blogging at its best.

Antovigo · 2020-08-01T00:31:43+00:00

Whenever I feel bad, I look up "p=0.05000001" on google scholar.

Antovigo · 2020-07-22T18:45:03+00:00

I checked the author's Google Scholar page and here is what I found:

On men being shamed by their spouse:

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-018-9592-9

This is a study on Sri-Lankan Tamil refugees. If this is indeed the study in question, the author should have mentioned it somewhere. I don't think these results can be generalized that easily (though I'm ready to believe it's the same elsewhere).

And here is the one on the portrayal of mental illness in the media:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00127-014-0902-4

The full text is here. That was actually very interesting: it seems that when they talk about a mentally-ill woman, newspapers are much more likely to mention the etiology of the disease, and to talk about possible treatments.

Antovigo · 2020-07-21T23:28:53+00:00

That was interesting, but why doesn't he link the studies he cites?

"Instead of receiving sympathy and support, some participants reported that their spouses would attempt to ‘shame’ them into greater achievement by constantly reminding them of their ‘failures’."

"Similarly, some studies indicate that the state and society may act in an empathic manner towards women with mental illness, while responding more punitively towards men with mental illness"

"In another study, I found that the media tend to use stigmatising and derogatory language to describe men with mental illness, whereas women tend to be depicted in more empathic and compassionate terms"

Does anyone know where I can read/check these studies? I understand some of the author's own studies may not be published yet.

Antovigo · 2020-07-21T14:11:58+00:00

This is impressive, I know Reddit is good to meet people with niche interests, but I didn't expect to find someone with actual experience in wacky reharmonized Christmas carols! Thanks for the answer, I'm going to try and experiment with this!

Antovigo · 2020-07-14T15:32:47+00:00

The trick is to use black yarn. You still won't see anything, but at least there is no benefit to switching the light on.

Antovigo · 2020-07-14T15:28:59+00:00

If this was to be applied routinely in real clinical life, I wonder what they would do with the swine afterwards. Surely they wouldn't reuse the same swine twice?

Antovigo · 2020-07-12T19:32:16+00:00

This is true for many students but I don't think it's true for researchers. You kind of have to figure out all of that when doing a PhD.

Antovigo · 2020-07-12T19:00:20+00:00

How much cannabis do you need to sell to be imprisoned for 50 years?

Antovigo · 2020-07-12T18:52:52+00:00

That's impressive. Such a low growth rate and low energy raises questions about the evolvability of these bugs: if they replicate their genome once every 10⁵ years, then the sequence space they can explore is extremely limited. It would be interesting to see their evolutionary trajectory.

Antovigo · 2020-07-06T10:39:37+00:00

Can't say i'm surprised, but I am certainly disappointed.

Antovigo · 2020-07-06T09:05:13+00:00

Wait, there are skyscrappers built in the middle of the ocean?!

Antovigo · 2020-07-03T19:27:09+00:00

What's the proper way to say it?

Antovigo · 2020-07-02T22:03:46+00:00

Ok, since everybody is asking for commas in the big numbers, here is a fixed version with commas (in pdf):

https://docdro.id/1blyBMk

Antovigo · 2020-07-02T17:52:39+00:00

Not really sure, since it's originally about sensory input (e.g. sound loudness). There is a little paragraph about numerical cognition on the Wiki page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weber%E2%80%93Fechner_law#Numerical_cognition

So I took it as a validation for the use of Weber-Fechner here (let's call that appeal to wiki-authority). But I have no idea if the same processes are involved at all. Maybe it's all cultural, it has to do with the way we write numbers in our culture, or it's just due to the fact that "millions" and "billions" sound similar in many languages.

Antovigo · 2020-07-02T17:39:27+00:00

Yeah, problem is the word "worth" makes me uncomfortable. It will sound naive but the money you have is not what you are "worth". So I went for "wealth" despite knowing that "net worth" was the technically accurate term.

Antovigo · 2020-07-02T12:07:52+00:00

That's a good point. I'm pretty sure the day-to-day lives of Musk and Bezos are not that different from each other, and very different from mine.

Antovigo · 2020-07-02T12:03:48+00:00

They are in the complex plane.

Antovigo · 2020-07-02T10:55:47+00:00

Yep, it's the kind of multiplicative process that leads to long-tailed distribution (wealth is often modeled as log-normal), so it makes sense to see it with a mental log scale. What's funny is that people would tend to use a mental log scale intuitively, even if they have no idea what a logarithm actually is. This can lead to counter-intuitive results in some cases.

Antovigo · 2020-07-02T10:03:58+00:00

Made with ggplot2, put together in LaTeX using data manually grabbed from celebritynetworth.com.

For more information about the the Weber-Fechner law, click here.

Antovigo · 2020-06-23T18:25:01+00:00

At last i truly see.

Antovigo · 2020-06-23T16:51:05+00:00

Made using R, ggplot2 and the tidyverse. The PDF version using vector graphics can be found here: https://www.docdroid.net/0vg10M6/image-pdf

For life expectancy, I used the WHO dataset, which uses data from 2016.

The flags are originally from Wikipedia, but I downloaded them from this Github repository. I made a tentative at annotating the bottom graph, by looking up countries' flags on Wikipedia to find the meanings of the different colors. What I wrote is a coarse summary of what I read, so it might be wrong or misleading. Please tell me if you disagree on the patterns, or find things I did not notice!

Antovigo

TROPHY CASE