Scott Alexander

asymmetric weapons: Guided By The Beauty Of Our Weapons

this gives me a sense of like... the kind of conversation I might want to strike up with him next time I see him, that might get us into useful jamming

> I've previously quoted Stephan Guyenet on the motivational system of lampreys (a simple fish used as a model organism). Guyenet describes various brain regions making "bids" to the basal ganglia, using dopamine as the "currency" - whichever brain region makes the highest bid gets to determine the lamprey's next action. "If there's a predator nearby", he writes "the flee-predator region will put in a very strong bid to the striatum".

> Stimulants increase dopamine in the frontal cortex. This makes you more confident in your beliefs (eg cocaine users who are sure they outrun that cop car) and sometimes perceptions (eg how some stimulant abusers will hallucinate voices). But it also improves willpower (eg Adderall helping people study). I think all of these are functions of increasing the (apparent) level of evidence attached to "beliefs". Since the frontal cortex disproportionately contains the high-level conscious processes telling you to (eg) do your homework, the drug artificially makes these processes sound "more convincing" relative to the low-level reinforcement-learning processes in the limbic system. This makes them better able to overcome the desire to do reinforcing things like video games, and also better able to overcome the prior on motionlessness (which makes you want to lie in bed doing nothing). So you do your homework.

> To make things clear for the fish: humans have a strong, perhaps even innate, need to tell their own story. This is what makes social media so addicting—it allows you to endlessly curate your own self-image, forever perfecting your personal story for others’ consumption. Losing the ability to tell our own story feels like loss of agency—a violation. The teenage girl subject to a high school whisper campaign feels violated even though no one has touched her. I will not call it an act of “violence,” though some have.[17] “Violation” describes the experience well enough.