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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


Really appreciate it


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


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