links 12/30/24:

• Andy Gilmore art https://www.agilmore.com/
• https://quarter--mile.com/ life & business advice, from an excellence-oriented, rather startuppy perspective
• https://www.persuasion.community/p/propaganda-almost-never-works contrary to popular belief, propaganda (including advertising) does not have extraordinary abilities to manipulate people into believing or doing things they would not otherwise do. I believe this.
  • propaganda is important (and potentially dangerous) primarily for functions besides directly causing people to believe/do what the propaganda says, such as:
    • creating common knowledge and coordination points
      • eg emboldening people who already agree with the propaganda
    • crowding out non-propaganda communication and creating confusion about what the real, non-propaganda story is
    • demonstrating the propagandist's power
  • but people are generally not easy to manipulate in the manipulator's intended direction.
    • this comports with all the failure to replicate the claims that simple priming/context cues (from power poses to stereotype threat) can "nudge" human behavior in a predictable direction.
    • I believe people are, of course, influenced by culture and communication, but we are relatively robust to single persuasive/manipulative interventions. People are agents; we often ignore or defy people's attempts to change us.
    • the marketing literature also shows that advertising is usually ineffective, that most people are indifferent to almost all products, and that the most effective advertising (in terms of increasing sales) isn't about inducing passionate enthusiasm for a product but rather informing/reminding the marginal potential customer that it exists and is conveniently available.
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s43588-024-00738-w  a brain and body model of C. elegans that recapitulates realistic zigzag foraging behavior
  • like many C. elegans simulation models, it's specific to a subset of neurons and body components. We don't yet have a "whole-worm simulation" that does everything a worm does, but we have lots of special-purpose models.
    • A priori, it's worth being suspicious of special-purpose models that "succeed" in the sense of recapitulating a particular worm behavior, since there are lots of ways to (intentionally or unintentionally) set up complex statistical models to guarantee you get the outcome you want.
    • But these guys (from the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, https://eng.bigai.ai/) do eventually want to build a whole-worm, multipurpose simulation.
• https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-core-argument-for-small-l-liberalism
  • I didn't love this. It presents liberalism as a "compromise" for allowing people with different views to live together in peace, which is not exactly wrong but seems a bit ahistorical. Liberalism, as it was born in the 1600s in the Dutch Republic and then England, was indeed a truce between conflicting religions, but it was also conceived, by its advocates, as a positive good that was necessary for true religion, and later as a worldview of its own that represented values like civilization, humaneness, lawful justice, and reason.
  • The linked post is written from within liberalism; it uses concepts that wouldn't be natural for an illiberal (say, someone today who's sympathetic to Hamas, Putin, or Xi.) I don't necessarily think you need to successfully persuade such a person, but you should be able to write to them and say "this is what we believe & value; it is different from what you believe & value, but I can convey why it appeals to us, why it's a continuing passion and not just an unexamined default."
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalonymus_ben_Kalonymus
• https://www.businessinsider.com/evaporated-people-disappearing-from-japan-2017-4 in Japan, the "johatsu" disappear and change their names/identities after a shameful failure like a lost job or divorce.

• https://twittersaudreyhorne.substack.com/p/audrey-hornes-ultimate-gift-guide & https://twittersaudreyhorne.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-mens-gift-guide-2024

  • excellent gift guides for men (taught me about Pendleton blankets, which are Western-style patterns in luxurious high-quality wool)