What Came First: The Village or the Temple? Or, the Mystery of Göbekli Tepe - <AUTHOR> https://bookworm.club/2018/09/sapiens/ <comment><USER2> The thing that consistently blows my mind is that by the time we were getting around to building things in the middle east, Aborigines in Australia had been going back to the same hunting camp for 40,000 years. [https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/11/first-discovery- of-5...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/11/first-discovery- of-50000-year-old-human-settlements-in-australian-interior/)

<comment><USER3> I remember having read something similar a while ago about a cave in France which was used a sort of natural paint supply over a time of around 10,000 years.

Apart from how far back those things span, this also illustrates how enormously the rate of change in culture and living conditions has accellerated in our time.

Think about it: If you could time-travel back to somewhere within those 40,000 years, you might encounter a group of hunter-gatherers.

Their remote ancestors, as far back for them as ancient egypt is for us, were: hunter-gatherers.

Their descendants in the distant future, as far away from them as Star Treck is for us, will be: hunter-gatherers.

Compare this with our time life style and technology is radically different than it was 200 years ago and at least technological innovation seems to be accellerating even more.

<comment><USER4> Yet, as far as I understand, if you took an infant and brought it forward to our time it could grow up to be a theoretical physics professor. That is, they were no different than us. Why the stagnation for so long?

<comment><USER5> I notice that you use the word "stagnation" here, which definitely has a negative subtext. Most people probably feel that same negativity towards the thought of that long period of slow change / stability. I wonder, however, whether that subtext is appropriate. Perhaps they were happy with their lives? Maybe there were no changes because we'd reached an equilibrium, and people were happy enough that no one did anything radical that would change their way of life.

Or, to take a middle ground between those two stances, maybe, well, it was just an equilibrium (sans value judgment about whether it was a 'good' one or a 'bad' one). What's wrong with a system at equilibrium?

<comment><USER6> > _What 's wrong with a system at equilibrium?_

Depends on how are you satisfied with the state of things. For me, things will be wrong until we get rid of suffering, illness and death.

Still, I don't believe there ever was a real stagnation, or equilibrium. Things were always changing, just for most of the recorded history, those changes were very, very slow - unnoticeable to individuals living then. The beginning of an exponential curve is almost flat.

<comment><USER7> > For me, things will be wrong until we get rid of suffering, illness and > death.

For me this doesn't make sense. I'm all for alleviating suffering, illness and death but can't see how total freedom from those things would be possible, or even desirable. I am aware that something called 'trans-humanism' exists, I'd just be interested to hear if anyone could argue for such a stance with reasonable integrity.

<comment><USER8> Lets flip the desirability question. Imagine we invent fast space travel and go out there and meet a smart alien species. Evolution for these aliens has given them an extremely robust bodies and, say, ten million years ago these aliens stopped dying or getting seriously ill. You say to them, "This is not the way to live. Its a much better life if after 100 years every individual self-destructs because XYZ?"

Can you fill that blank? I can't.

Edit: also read this [https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html](https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html)

<comment><USER9> That's a very seductive argument for the individual, but most species do have a finite lifespan, and that in itself is actually an argument for its adaptive benefit. Consider that genetic code could become dated or fragile over long time periods: it's never going to be in the individual's benefit to die, but it's much better in the long term for the species to be adaptable. It's not entirely implausible, but I'm skeptical that this would change in the far future.

<comment><USER6> We've escaped the reign of biological evolution millennia ago. Ever since humans figured out how to learn and later write, we've been evolving society and technology orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution could ever hope to work. We are no longer bound by it. And given what's been done over the past couple decades, we're about to take control of our own genetic future as well. We will be able to repair, "update" and adapt our species' genetic makeup as we see fit, and this might actually be a _prerequisite knowledge_ to achieving life extension.

So no, I don't think this argument for species holds either.

<comment><USER9> It must be a prerequisite for this kind of hyperbole that the technology it describes does not exist yet. Nothing is infinitely repairable or upgradeable, and neither of those things are ever free.

<comment><USER6> > _Nothing is infinitely repairable or upgradeable, and neither of those > things are ever free._

Well yes, there's heat death of the universe that we still have to contend with :P. But beyond that, what you wrote is _not a problem_. The biology itself works around it - it "repairs" by copying and checksumming, and does so using energy. It's not perfect (this is what enables evolution), but it's _perfectable_. We already know enough to realize that we can design systems which allow for reducing the probability of incorrectable errors to arbitrarily low amounts - that's practically infinite repairability. No one is saying maintenance is ever going to become free.

<comment><USER9> You're focusing on the error rate, which is not actually the concern. You could have a perfectly working VAX in front of you, and it would be essentially a museum piece, because technology has moved on. Suggesting that any physical process is perfectable is...subject to qualification and requiring of strong evidence, shall we say. However, if true, it would still be insufficient.

<comment><USER6> So what is the point? That we won't stay the same, because we'll want to be better? If that's it, then great, that's the goal!

<comment><USER9> Better is not universal nor uniformly distributed, therefore evolution occurs, therefore death has adaptive value even in otherwise ideal conditions, and there is no reason to believe in truly ideal conditions even assuming arbitrarily high technology.

<comment><USER6> I don't understand what you're trying to say. "Evolution" occurs, but we've already freed ourselves from the grasp of biological evolution, and are already employing a much more efficient and effective human-controlled evolution. There is no need for death of individuals to play a part in this any longer. Most of our adaptations can be freely removed and replaced without harming their user.

<comment><USER9> > Most of our adaptations can be freely removed and replaced without harming > their user.

Magic does not exist, even in the future.

<comment><USER6> Glasses, winter jackets, cars, guns, etc. are not magic. But they are adaptations.

<comment><USER9> That's irrelevant. You're not going to "roll back" a brain replacement. Future technology does not allow arbitrary reversible manipulations of molecules. Creating new individuals is much less effort than rewriting old ones in any case.

Death is an adaptation. [http://www.necsi.edu/research/evoeco/programmed.pdf](http://www.necsi.edu/research/evoeco/programmed.pdf)

<comment><USER6> But I'm not talking about brain replacements. Just regular technology. My point is that the evolution of collective human civilization is orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution of individual humans, making the latter irrelevant. The only "death" that happens in that faster evolution is loss of mindshare, these days most often seen as failure on the market.

<comment><USER9> You do not get to hand-wave away the fact of evolution, regardless of the level of technology. Populations change genetically over long periods of time, because math, and the idea that gene editing will not occur in the future (near or far) is not credible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looking into the past is not straight forward. In India, the oldest temples that can be found are all stone based structures. But that doesn't mean they were the oldest temples built. There is lot of evidence that shows the original proto temples were all wood based. And the full stone temple designs came much much later. But wood doesn't last 10000 years so there is lots and lots of guess work involved in recreating how society functioned back then.

</comment><comment><USER11> The fact that Gobekli Tepe potentially overturns our understanding of the invention of agriculture, or at the very least completely rewrites the timeline is very interesting. Potentially even more interesting though, what's the deal with all the handbags?:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvdrkSUVn70](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvdrkSUVn70)

<comment><USER12> >> what's the deal with all the handbags?

What's the mystery? It wouldn't be surprising to see many representations of spears in so many ancient cultures: there were hunters / warriors right?

Well there were gatherers too. Handbag is just a natural design for this function.

<comment><USER11> > Handbag is just a natural design for this function.

As someone who has spent many thousands of hours foraging, I've got to disagree on there. You wouldn't be able to fit even one meal for a single person into a bag like that. Consider that a _kilogram_ of mushrooms is only around 25 calories, and this bag probably wouldn't even fit that much. Clearly they would have gotten most of their calories from meat, but even still a bag like that wouldn't hold enough produce for even a modestly sized side of vegetables.

<comment><USER13> A kilogram is closer to 250Cal/1000kJ but you're right - it's not even a meal for one.

<comment><USER11> Ahh you're right, I think I just found a bad site for the first thing I googled. I took a rough measurement though just by holding my arm in the same position, the bag seems to be about 6 inches deep and 4 - 5 inches wide. So maybe you could comfortably fit around 110 cubic inches of stuff in there, which is around 7.5 cups. So lets be generous and call it ~125 calories, maybe a little more if the carvings aren't properly to scale.

But keep in mind also that if you're hunting or foraging you're probably going to need more than just 2,000 calories or whatever.

<comment><USER14> "But keep in mind also that if you're hunting or foraging you're probably going to need more than just 2,000 calories or whatever."

Yes, I guess thats why you don't go after mushrooms when you are hungry out there. (unless you also have oil)

Like the other one said: you want berries, seeds, roots, bark (if you have to), eggs, honey, .... whatever you find that gives you energy.

Mushrooms are a nice addition. Maybe also a medicin or alike, but never something you can live from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Weren't quite a few major cities in Europe founded around monestaries? Seems very reasonable to me that temple sites could be precursors to villages the same way bountiful rivers and coastlines could be.

To vastly oversimplify: Religious/cultural sites become a center for pilgrimage, festivals, etc. Those lead to people being around, those people bring things with them that leads to trade, and eventually some people settle in the area for various reasons and then you have a village.

<comment><USER16> The assumption, as seen in the first set of bullet points, has been: agriculture -> sedentary lifestyle -> large monuments. The discovery of Gobekli Tepe suggests that (in at least some cases), large monuments came first. This is unexpected because there was assumed to be (1) no reason for such monuments before sedentary life (anthropological, i.e. the formation of organised religions was supposed to coincide with the organisation of hierarchies in sedentary life), and (2) not enough manpower to construct such architecture (i.e. nomads wouldn't come together for months to build permanent structures).

<comment><USER17> Gobekli Tepe may be comparable to Stone Hench in time. That was not a permanent settlement. I think this was not, as well. Seclusion and secrecy is part of religion, so it wouldn't be reasonable to build amidst a sprawling cohort anyway. If it was started as a central hub, the need was maybe not originally religious but it would have been in a good position to be cultivated religiously once the need became obvious.

<comment><USER16> Indeed, it is not a permanent settlement. Suggestions as to its usage generally agree that is was used for several months a year for centuries or millenia, with gatherings of several groups. The monuments of Stonehenge were built by pre-Celtic agriculturalists in Great Britain, not by per-agricultural peoples. Questions remain: why would people aggregate where they did; how would they sustain themselves in a semi-permanent settlement (months at a time) without agricultural products? (Livestock had recently been domesticated by this point, but need to be moved regularly to graze.)

The assumption of its being religious is simple: it isn't shelter, and it has imagery resembling later depictions of religious figures in the region. Religion here is a more general term to encompass the intersection of culture and spirituality. Was it originally non-religious? If so, why aggregate for months to build a structure, before trade was valuable or very necessary?

<comment><USER9> Isn't the concept of trade not being valuable sort of contradictory? Even without the concept of individual ownership, the precondition would seem to merely be that something is valued. Trade is not (remotely) unique to humans, and I don't think it's possible that human society would ever have been without it.

<comment><USER16> I mean trade as an institution, not just sporadic interpersonal bartering and sharing; more like merchants, trade routes, and the like. Exchange is not unique to man; trade, as such, is.

Trade becomes more worthwhile when communities begin to specialise. When people are nomadic, they cross many lands, and can simply find what they want on the way (obsidian from the mountains, shells by the sea, berries, roots, and game in forests). When people begin to stay in one place, long distance travel for trade becomes more valuable. As soon as agriculture develops, we discover that obsidian shards from deposits in the Caucasus are found thousands of miles away in central Europe. You begin to have towns focusing on a specific resource, or serving a trade route as goods and people criss-cross the land (Jericho, among the earliest known cities, for example, was possibly involved in the trade of salt; few things can grow in the soil near it).

<comment><USER9> Forgive me; I'm not really seeing what fundamental distinction you're trying to draw between these two categories of activity.

<comment><USER16> You cannot see the difference between two acquaintances exchanging goods and a merchant loading his pack, traveling long distances to make profit from trade?

It is the same as between a spat and a war; gathering in a forest and farming. It is in scale and in character, a different beast.

<comment><USER9> A difference in degree, not in kind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Likewise, I had a brief conversation with the fascinating Dr Lewis Dartnell where we discussed the origin of barley farming. Did our ancestors grow it for food, and accidentally discover that you can also make beer with it, or did the beer come first and bread second? I had assumed the former, but now that I think about it...

<comment><USER19> i'd bet that proto-beer and proto-bread appeared around the same time, and techniques were developed over generations to calibrate different recipes until they resembled what we might recognize as "beer" and "bread" today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Joe Rohan Experience has an amazing podcast that talks about this.

Here is the clip: [https://youtu.be/Nk3xdMkwMsE](https://youtu.be/Nk3xdMkwMsE)

<comment><USER21> I did watch all the Graham Hancock stuff on JRE podcast, going back years. Really fun stuff. I did get super turned off by the last one with Hancock and the skeptic guy where Hancock can't control his temper. Randal Carson is fun to listen to also.

Whether there's any scientific basis to Hancock's work, I'm not enough of an expert to tell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm half Armenian and I learned about Gobekli Tepe under the name Portasar from my father when i was a little kid. The only sources about the origin of the word Portasar show up online in unofficial sources. I do not read or speak Armenian so I cannot comment on the sources of Gobekli Tepe in Armenian literature. However, one thing that is peculiar to me is that Gobekli Tepe is located on the territory of ancient Armenian Mesopotamia [1]. Anybody else know anything about this?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Mesopotamia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Mesopotamia)

<comment><USER23> Armenians, as an ethnogenetic group, did not arise until around 3000 BCE. Gobekli Tepe was abandoned by 7000 BCE, so there is no historical overlap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> In addition to the common theories on GT, I think this could be anything from an embodiment of a treaty to a family reunion site.

If you had a particularly robust tribe, you would in a few generations outstrip the foraging capacity of your area. Nomadism helps but at some point your group may have to split in two to expand your radius. If you split on bad terms you might become rivals. But what if you split on good terms? You might never see your cousins again unless you made an effort. Let's meet on this hilltop at the summer solstice every year. There will be too many of us to forage or hunt, so bring food and the hunters will find something else to do to fill the time.

We could wrestle. Or carve rocks or something. You know like grandpa Joe used to do. Man I miss grandpa Joe. Too bad about the bear.

</comment><comment><USER25> Jane Jacobs said this decades ago -- cities (well, towns or trading places) came before agriculture. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs)

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm dubious about the attachment of the label 'temple' to Gobekli. Perhaps, instead, it was a _school_.

(Common as it is, calling _any_ ancient site a 'temple' without some pretty substantial evidence ... could be very misleading.)

<comment><USER27> Serious reply --- wouldn't the reverse be true? A school in ancient times would more closely resemble a religious institution than anything like a modern school?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Robert Schoch has some things to say about this too, and seems to back it up.

[https://www.robertschoch.com/sida.html](https://www.robertschoch.com/sida.html)

A bit of a stretch in this article but interesting.

</comment><comment><USER29> an upper paleolithic shakti shrine in india 11kya

[https://www.harappa.com/content/upper-paleolithic-shrine- ind...](https://www.harappa.com/content/upper-paleolithic-shrine-india)</comment>


Small share of U.S. adults produce majority of tweets on national politics - <AUTHOR> https://www.people-press.org/2019/10/23/national-politics-on-twitter-small-share-of-u-s-adults-produce-majority-of-tweets/ <comment><USER2> Journalism would only be improved if every journalist got off of Twitter tomorrow. It's not representative of mainstream opinion. And the artificially created and cultivated Twitter echo chamber couldn't help but warp anybody's neutrality. Unfortunately, it's still seen as the best way to drive clicks.

<comment><USER3> Journalism is over. It doesn't matter what journalists do now. It was a by- product of mass media massive ad business which is being quickly taken over by tech companies.

<comment><USER4> Isn't journalism a pillar of democracy? The well educated professionals who deep, lengthy dives into corruption, raw data, etc. How will democracy survive if no is being paid to spends weeks, years, to go deep on a subject and citizens can't be fully informed?

<comment><USER5> "Democracy dies in darkness."

<comment><USER6> Is that a warning, or a mission objective?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The real number is that _10% of Twitter users_ [1] produce 97% of political Tweets.

(I.e. this is "just" one social media site, used by a minority of Americans.)

[1] [https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/10/share- of-u-...](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/10/share-of-u-s- adults-using-social-media-including-facebook-is-mostly-unchanged-since-2018/)

<comment><USER7> Also, it's 97% of political tweets _from US adults that mentioned national politics from June 10, 2018, through June 9, 2019_ , not 97% of all political tweets (many of which are on behalf of organizations).

<comment><USER8> And was it only american politics? We outside often wonder how often tweets about our politics come from american accounts.

<comment><USER9> We inside wonder how many of the political tweets or memes being shared are from Eastern Europe troll farms. I recently read about a Polish troll farm running "Blue lives matter" groups. The purpose was profit not propaganda like the Russian farms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A cautionary tale for those who are perennially tempted to think Twitter = "the world" or that Twitter is like sooo super important and that it "matters."

Granted, wishful thinking by said parties is sometimes enough to make it matter. For example a corporation that responds to customer complaints on Twitter faster than the ones that arrive in its customer-service inbox, is making Twitter matter more than it does.

</comment><comment><USER11> If you, like me, find the non-political part of Twitter valuable, I have discovered that Twitter has built in filtering tools.

It's pretty simple. Each time I see a tweet I dislike, I pick one word from it and add it to my "mute word" list. It's now filled with words like "trump", "liberal", "minister", etc, and now I see interesting technical discussions instead of political trash.

<comment><USER12> Serious question: what is the benefit of Twitter? I never understood it. Since you've found a utility niche, would you expand on the statement?

<comment><USER13> Marketing, It's great for brands or anybody that has something to sell (a book, a product, an idea,...).

It kind of replaced RSS for many people, expect it's a centralised tool.

Unfortunately "journalists" use it way too often to make up news out of nothing, gather random photos/videos without fact checking and spread rumors and falsehoods as truth. Something like the Covington Catholic school fiasco heavily relayed by the media, based on a footage where people saw what they wanted to see, would have never happened without the viral aspect of Twitter. The irony is that Twitter ended up banning the person that spread it, but none of the Twitter verified people that called for the murder of school students.

<comment><USER14> Eh. I dated a nationally recognized journalist / writer. They use it to network and follow trends. Or, if they're working on a story someone else has covered, to see if there is anything that that person could share that didn't make it into the article (background conversations, etc).

When it comes to the actual work though she spend 99% of her time at the library, archives, prison, or on the phone with sources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> See the 1% rule of the internet:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_\(Internet_culture\))

"... only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk."

This is why "social listening" companies (which often amount to "Twitter listening" companies) present a very warped picture of reality when they try to extrapolate general consumer interests from the content and frequency of posts by a tiny minority of Twitter's users. I also discussed this a little in "Twitter's growth conundrum": [https://muckhacker.com/the-twitter-growth- conundrum-8339eda1...](https://muckhacker.com/the-twitter-growth- conundrum-8339eda162a4)

<comment><USER8> If twitter is bad now, imagine the horror if the silent 99 start speaking up. 1% is more than enough.

<comment><USER16> That's assuming the rest have the same behaviors as the 1%, which they inherently do not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not really a surprise - is it? I bet [small-percentage]% of Americans produce [very-large-percentage]% of tech tweets too. Same with sewing tweets. Same with porn tweets.

Being very active in politics is either a career choice or a hobby. And very active in this case means talking about it. It's like knowing about celebrity gossip at this point because that's practically what it is for a lot of this stuff.

<comment><USER7> The most surprising thing to me is the split in age distribution among user base vs. overall tweeting vs. political tweeting. Users 18-49 were 73% of the user base and produced 72% of tweets, but only 27% of political tweets. Users 50+ were only 26% of the user base and produced only 28% of tweets, but 73% of political tweets.

<comment><USER18> > Users 18-49 were 73% of the user base and produced 72% of tweets, but only > 27% of political tweets.

> Users 50+ were only 26% of the user base and produced only 28% of tweets, > but 73% of political tweets.

By these numbers, users 15-17 are <1% of the user base and produce 0% of political tweets. (And even more dramatically, despite being more than 0% of users, they also produce 0% of tweets.) Even after allowing for rounding, this can't possibly be correct.

<comment><USER7> I calculated the percentages for two groups from a chart of four groups, so maybe there's more possible rounding error than you anticipated? The user base numbers in that chart do only add up to 99%, though.

<comment><USER18> Looking at the graphic in the article, it looks like their denominator is "all tweets from US adults". In other words, users 15-17 make 0% of "tweets" by definition. But of course, they are well over 0% of tweets in the ordinary sense.

I see no particular reason why tweets from 18-year-olds are especially more interesting than tweets from 17-year-olds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> People generally, especially in younger generations need to accept that the internet != the real world.

I've had a number of friends on both sides of the isle fall into the internet trap of politics, existential dread and dilution. A few to the extent of developing serious mental health problems, even college educated people.

It's scary to watch this happen to people you know and love. Some might label me, but I enjoy not wasting time following the mainstream media / social media noise.

<comment><USER20> On a much larger scale, _nothing_ equals the real world because the real world is endlessly complicated. To take in the breadth and depth of human perspectives and experiences is simply impossible. This is only a problem when people fail to realize they are only seeing as tiny, unrepresentative sliver so they can adjust their reactions accordingly.

<comment><USER19> I think if more people had an elementary understanding of statistics the values you mentioned would be better understood and considered in common discourse. It's really kind of sad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's baffling why people think it's OK to retweet political stuff just because everyone else does it. If your profile says "data expert" or anything, why then do i get political propaganda when i follow you? At least have the decency to add "and political commentator" to your profile

<comment><USER22> Twitter accounts, like many other venues, are generally _the person_. And while the person might be known to you through one slice of their life (the part that has value to you), that doesn't deny them having other beliefs and opinions. Unless you're paying for their tweets, your opinion on what they should be limited to talking seems remarkably irrelevant.

Having said that, twitter is a profoundly destructive force that is overwhelmingly people just preaching and clucking at each other's cleverness. I absolutely revile it as a platform, but I get and appreciate that it provides value for others.

<comment><USER21> i don't buy this argument. Most prominent people go on twitter for a reason - to disseminate their work or something, the days of salad photos are over. They get something out of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> How could this be surprising? A small fraction of the population of America is a Twitter user in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER24> > Prolific political tweeters make up just 6% of _all Twitter users_ but > generate 20% of all tweets and 73% of tweets mentioning national politics.

I feel like this wording is disingenuous when the methods state:

> The analysis of Twitter users in this report is based on a nationally > representative survey conducted from Nov. 21 to Dec. 17, 2018, among a > sample of 2,791 U.S. adults ages 18 years and older who have a Twitter > account and agreed to allow researchers to follow and report on that > account. This study examines only the subset of respondents (N=2,427)

</comment><comment><USER25> The rest is busy working, studying, raising kids or having a life...

<comment><USER26> I have a life, job and kids. I occasionally tweet about Andrew Yang. Not sure why that would interfere with the former.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Further reason why the "x political thing is trending on twitter" style headline that has become ubiquitous is stupid.

</comment><comment><USER28> I grepped for "bot" on this, the source and their methodology page. Bot activity on Twitter is especially high and not at least mentioning how they accounted for that kinda voids this whole effort. It'd be very interesting to identify the political leanings of automated posts. I bet they could analyze the messages to determine bot networks. Disappointed this wasn't considered.

<comment><USER29> They only looked at tweets by people who previously agreed to participate in the study, so their data cannot be used to analyze automated posts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> And your life is much better off if you mute those people.

</comment><comment><USER31> Wonder what percentage of Americans produce 97% of main stream media news and commentary? Would it be over 0.2%?

<comment><USER32> Not many, if these stats are accurate:

[https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and- communication/home.htm](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and- communication/home.htm)

Also, they don't get paid all that well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> _2.2% of Americans produce 97% of political tweets_

I guess people act the same online as they do at Thanksgiving dinner.

</comment><comment><USER34> Twitter is to political thought what advertising slogans are to consumer goods or soundbites are to news stories. "It's the real thing" tells us nothing meaningful about Coca Cola. "Just do it" tells us nothing meaningful about Nike sneakers. Slogans, tweets, and soundbites are designed to influence our thinking with catchy thoughts INSTEAD OF informed thought. The ability to create concise content is different than the ability to analyze and understand on a deep level; not mutually exclusive of course, but it doesn't really matter: the masses will be overwhelmingly influenced by the former rather than the latter.

</comment><comment><USER35> That comes out to about 6 million people? Seems like a huge number to me.

</comment><comment><USER36> Only a small share of people who use twitter actually tweet and yes a smaller share of those people tweet on a specific subject. I'm no sure how this is news. "Only a small share of U.S. adults product majority of tweets on ______." Fill in the blank.. only those interest in a topic will tweet about it.

</comment><comment><USER37> in the methodology section, the said they only focussed on tweets concerning national-level politics.

they don't mention if they attempted to filter out bots or non-americansposing as Americans

</comment><comment><USER38> A very small percentage of people write books, does that mean we'd be better off without books?

</comment><comment><USER39> aligns with the 1-2% community contribution factor: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_\(Internet_culture\))

</comment><comment><USER40> And <1% read them?

</comment><comment><USER41> So what % of Americans _read_ the political tweets?

<comment><USER42> Much lower than the percentage that read _articles_ about the tweets.

But nevertheless, the content finds its way.

</comment></comment><comment> awinter-py is 13% an unusual rate for a topic? are the bulk of sports / cooking / science / art tweets also each from a 13% slice?

</comment><comment><USER43> You could cross out those last three words.

</comment><comment><USER44> what percent of tweets are political?

</comment><comment><USER45> Unsurprising

</comment><comment><USER46> What percentage of TV users generate any content on television?

Many people just spectate, whether it's TV or social.

<comment><USER47> that is a poor analogy at best. Everyone is intuitive on the amount of friction it takes to get content onto broadcast or cable TV. No one is delusional.

There is relatively zero amount of friction for a twitter user to post political content to twitter. The fact that people are not posting political content, is not due to insurmountable friction.

<comment><USER46> I thought that went without saying. My point is, why would anyone be surprised that not everyone speaks up? The fact that everyone can tweet doesn't mean that they do. Friction of calling radio talk back is low, but I've never done it. Letters to the editor also.

<comment><USER47> friction of calling a radio talk show is orders of magnitudes more than retweeting some political tweet.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


My next chapter - <AUTHOR> http://chrishateswriting.com/post/140641275808/my-next-chapter <comment><USER2> Moot has always appeared to me to be a very talented and bright person. I think it's a mistake to judge him by what some people will say on an anonymous image board. The influence of 4chan on internet culture cannot be ignored: everything from LOLCats to advice animals and countless internet slang terms. He's also had a very unique and unusual experience being in charge of a group of people who believe the internet should be controlled chaos. In my opinion, Moot is a lot like Mike Judge after he did Beavis and Butthead: it's too easy to dismiss him because what he created is a bit crass. But he's a smart and talented person who will most likely go on to build a reputation beyond his first big thing.

<comment><USER3> > _The influence of 4chan on internet culture cannot be ignored: everything > from LOLCats to advice animals and countless internet slang terms._

Moot is not community. You cannot credit him with the inventions that his community came up with. His site was the catalyst, of course, but how much credit should he personally get for it?

Maybe you could judge him by the success (or the lack of it) of DrawQuest and Canv.as.. the two projects that he spearheaded and got VC funding for.

<comment><USER4> And 4chan itself is just a clone of a Japanese imageboard, 2ch.

<comment><USER5> *2chan, also known as Futaba Channel. Futaba is a "clone" of 2ch with support for images.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm interested to see if this is part of a movement by Google towards a different notion of community & identity than Facebook.

Moot has very different position than Mark Zuckerberg when it comes to identity online: [http://venturebeat.com/2011/03/13/4chan-moot-christopher- poo...](http://venturebeat.com/2011/03/13/4chan-moot-christopher-poole-sxsw/)

<comment><USER3> He backpeddaled from that position fairly quickly. Moot banned Tor use on 4chan, he banned VPN use, proxy use was banned, he added ban-tracking cookies, he added unique IDs, he aded country flags to many boards that didn't want them, etc.

He supported anonymity for publicity and did a lot on his site to dissuade its use. When he gave interviews on 4chan, he used to tell everyone that "4chan is not anonymous".

About the only thing that's left on 4chan that's "anonymous" is the default username: which is still "Anonymous".

You have more anonymity on HN with a throwaway account than you have on 4chan.

People also give him too much credit when it comes to community organizing as well. He got lucky with 4chan when he copied 2chan and catered it to english- speaking audience. When he tried to actually create something from scratch, both of his apps failed miserably.

<comment><USER7> There's a difference between anonymity of a user to other users, and tools being used by the administration to track and deny bad actors.

Besides, i'm pretty sure HN can track people across accounts as well, and if it hasn't banned proxies yet, then only because they haven't been abused enough.

<comment><USER3> How is using a default name like Anonymous or "Anonymous Coward" (or some other default name on other sites) different from making a throwaway? Making a throwaway might take you few seconds longer but to an admin, it's exactly the same thing. Your IP is tracked in both cases.

It's just that "Anonymous" username is EXTREMELY DECEPTIVE since you're NOT ANONYMOUS at all!

<comment><USER8> OK, here's a throwaway account, for which I had to pick a different user name a few times because of the name restrictions (not to mention a password).

You, on the other hand, are not using a throwaway account, so I can tell that you seem to have a rather violent dislike of moot. If this were 4chan, I would have no idea that you made 3 separate posts trying to tear him down.

<comment> squeaky-clean > You, on the other hand, are not using a throwaway account, so I can tell > that you seem to have a rather violent dislike of moot. If this were 4chan, > I would have no idea that you made 3 separate posts trying to tear him down.

It's been a while since I've visited 4chan, but didn't they add some sort of user ID to comments at some point? Like, they could still generically be 'Anonymous', but there was some sort of ID or hash you could ctrl+f to find other comments by that person within that thread.

<comment><USER9> You must be thinking of forced IDs, the feature itself is several years old but it's been turned on and off through the years.

Something that isn't very well known is that 4chan is actually a lot of smaller communities with only partial overlap, and the culture can differ a lot depending on what board you are.

A strangely effective rule of thumb is that the smaller the community is, the friendlier it acts. IDs are only enabled in the bigger and most controversial boards of the site, where people otherwise don't hesitate to abuse their anonymity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Everyone's gotta pay the bills. If you're thrifty, 4-5 years at a company like Google can get you .5-1 mil for your next venture (maybe more, maybe less, depending on your bonuses & promotions, how well the stock performs, etc.)

I wouldn't expect any meaningful new product or anything to come out of this - if I had to guess, he was probably hired as an IC. Don't expect him to become some sort of new figurehead at Google for anonymity or identity on the Internet.

Have fun Chris.

<comment><USER11> > hired as an IC

Please expand uncommon abbreviations.

<comment><USER12> Individual contributor, as opposed to team lead or manager.

<comment><USER13> Thought it stood for Independent Contractor at first. Didn't think Google hired those.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would be fascinated to know what kind of position he was hired for.

<comment><USER15> New maintainer for Memegen?

([http://www.buzzfeed.com/reyhan/inside-googles-internal- meme-...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/reyhan/inside-googles-internal-meme- generator))

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Curious how he fits into the goals of "Googliness" for new hires.

</comment><comment><USER17> Wow, congratulations!

</comment><comment><USER18> Everything moot does leaves a 4chan shitstorm in its wake.

</comment><comment><USER19> Who is moot?

<comment><USER20> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Poole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Poole)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm really not sure how I feel about this. Moot created the biggest, most toxic garbage fire of an internet community, refused to take management of it, and walked away when it became too toxic for anyone to deal with. In a way, he's a perfect new hire for Google, but Google usually doesn't leave quite so much devastation in its wake.

<comment><USER22> While it might be incredibly toxic at times, it's also the source of quite a lot of interesting Internet culture and movements, many positive works, and a ton of creativity. It's a microcosm of the worst _and_ the best of what the Internet can pull off.

Don't dismiss it out of hand as exclusively negative.

<comment><USER21> Time and time again, the hands-off moderation of anything on 4chan beyond child pornography has had knock on effects in the real world. GamerGate began life on 4chan, and is still making women's lives miserable. All you have to do is ask Allison Rapp, their latest victim. <[http://kotaku.com/the-ugly-new- front-in-the-neverending-vide...](http://kotaku.com/the-ugly-new-front-in-the- neverending-video-game-cultur-1762942381>)

While moot did, eventually, push GamerGate discussion off 4chan, he took forever to do so, and walked away from the site not long after. By not taking a stance on harassment and abuse earlier on, however, he created conditions for such a culture to flourish on 4chan.

Is there interesting and positive stuff on 4chan? Almost certainly. Would it still exist had moot taken a stronger stance on dealing with toxic posters? I'll go out on a limb and say yes.

<comment><USER23> Wait, what makes you say GG started on 4chan? There's plenty of places that are more pro GG than 4chan.

<comment><USER21> Because it did, when Zoe Quinn's ex-boyfriend posted on /v/ to get people to start harassing her.

<comment><USER23> Thanks. I should have just read the wikipedia article.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy)

> Quinn's former boyfriend, published the "Zoe Post", [...] The post was > linked on 4chan,

<comment><USER24> Just FYI, reading the wikipedia article is a really bad idea. A variety of fanatics, political obsessives and involved administrators have been squatting on it for months; it's a dumpster fire.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: If you could ask for a step-by-step tutorial, what would it be? - <AUTHOR> I'm asking because I'm building tutorialearn.com: a platform and a marketplace for step-by-step tutorials <comment><USER2> Adding tests to a large monolithic tightly coupled legacy application using non-trivial examples. I can never find a tutorial for testing that's not using trivial examples or code that's already pretty good and just needs tests.

<comment><USER3> Not _exactly_ a step by step tutorial, but "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" by Michael Feathers is fantastic reference material for this.

<comment><USER2> Have it on my desk right now. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Setting up a web development environment in WSL. Node, NVM, Zsh, Docker, PHP.

</comment><comment><USER5> a step by step guide on DIYing a robot actuator.</comment>


A Peek at GNU Radio's Buffer Architecture - <AUTHOR> http://gnuradio.org/blog/buffers/ <comment><USER2> The double-mapped ring buffer trick is so clever I can't help but wish I invented it. :)

Here's the code for the GNU radio implementation described in the article, it's a good reference for some various ways to set up the mappings:

[https://github.com/gnuradio/gnuradio/blob/master/gnuradio- ru...](https://github.com/gnuradio/gnuradio/blob/master/gnuradio- runtime/lib/vmcircbuf_createfilemapping.cc) [https://github.com/gnuradio/gnuradio/blob/master/gnuradio- ru...](https://github.com/gnuradio/gnuradio/blob/master/gnuradio- runtime/lib/vmcircbuf_mmap_shm_open.cc) [https://github.com/gnuradio/gnuradio/blob/master/gnuradio- ru...](https://github.com/gnuradio/gnuradio/blob/master/gnuradio- runtime/lib/vmcircbuf_mmap_tmpfile.cc)

And here some other links to implementations I've collected:

[http://vrb.sourceforge.net/](http://vrb.sourceforge.net/)

[https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/07/21/the-magic-ring- buff...](https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/07/21/the-magic-ring-buffer/) [https://gist.github.com/rygorous/3158316](https://gist.github.com/rygorous/3158316)

[https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2012-02-03-ring- buf...](https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2012-02-03-ring-buffers-and- mirrored-memory-part-i.html) [https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday- qa-2012-02-17-ring-buf...](https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday- qa-2012-02-17-ring-buffers-and-mirrored-memory-part-ii.html) [https://github.com/mikeash/MAMirroredQueue](https://github.com/mikeash/MAMirroredQueue)

[http://atastypixel.com/blog/a-simple-fast-circular-buffer- im...](http://atastypixel.com/blog/a-simple-fast-circular-buffer- implementation-for-audio-processing/) [https://github.com/michaeltyson/TPCircularBuffer](https://github.com/michaeltyson/TPCircularBuffer)

[http://www.koanlogic.com/libu/api/html/group__rb.html](http://www.koanlogic.com/libu/api/html/group__rb.html)

[https://github.com/ulfalizer/botniklas/blob/master/src/read_...](https://github.com/ulfalizer/botniklas/blob/master/src/read_msg.c)

[https://github.com/willemt/cbuffer](https://github.com/willemt/cbuffer)

</comment><comment><USER3> tl;dr: the old magic ring buffer trick

</comment><comment><USER4> SDR strikes me as good in theory, but breaks down for anything practical.

My core 2 duo was 100% cpu utilization simply from decoding 56kbps 2-BPSK, even with SIMD extension enabled (within GR).

<comment><USER5> Weren't Winmodems handling 56K v.92 fine on much older hardware? Or did they still have more work offloaded onto the hardware?

<comment><USER6> They had an analogue front end to reduce much of the load.</comment></comment></comment>


What Should You Do After Drinking Coffee? - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2014/08/coffee_benefits_nap_exercise_test_creativity_alertness_sex.html

<comment><USER2> This relates to the idea that certain hours of your day are more valuable than others. If you want to spend your time wisely, you should first make sure you're wasting the most valuable time. If you're a coffee drinker, the hours after drinking it are probably the most valuable of your day - when you're most motivated, productive, and focused. So you should use those hours for what your value most, whether that's writing, learning, working out, etc. And then save other activities like cleaning, watching TV, or commuting for times when you're not feeling so sharp.

So the article makes sense in recommending different activities for different people - it just reflects their priorities.</comment>


Ask HN: What will coding be like in 25 years? - <AUTHOR> What do you imagine programming to be like in 25 years? <comment><USER2> It will probably be much the same as it is today. Styles will go in-and-out of fashion(today: OOP is not cool; FP is hip), but in 25 years I for one will probably be typing ASCII characters into a text editor, debugging with logs & debuggers & print statements, and using a command line.

<comment><USER3> 25 years ago it was much the same as it is today. In 1992 people were typing ASCII characters into a text editor and debugging with logs and print statements.

You can do so much more with a line of code now and there are so many more ways to make user interfaces, but the fundamental actions of the programmer are the same.

<comment><USER4> Fundamentally it's just a good level abstraction. Much like we still use writing for most communication even though we have audio and video options.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I hope that we stop sharing an ASCII language with the compilers.

It is the root of many of our difficulties in programming.

If we create very good "program editor" (not text editors) and store our programs as a data object in a database a lot of our current "problems" automatically vanish.

Every node of the program will have a unique identifier so the editor can keep track of it across the lifetime of a project.

We will get automatic version control. Syntax war will end because you will be able to customize the syntax exactly how you like.

The editor can track the association between tests and documentation with the objects in the program.

And so much more. At the moment we share an ASCII language with the compiler. This creates a fundamental tension between the human and the computer.

On one hand we want to specify lots of things about our programs to make it more maintainable and reliable on the other hand we want to keep things easy on the eyes and parseable.

So we create a strong dis-incentive to providing information about the code to the compiler.

Because all we have is a single layer of text which will quickly become polluted.

We need our programs to be able to have lots of meta-data but have an editor that is capable enough to allow us to view what matters at a given time.

This can only be achieved if we stop thinking about programs as lines of text, but rather as data objects.

This is known as "Intentional Programming" if you are interested search for it on Youtube.

Also see Isomorf.io for a basic demo ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awDVuZQQWqQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awDVuZQQWqQ)) (I'm not affiliated with them).

<comment><USER6> What would take to use for example image editor like mspaint to write programs instead of text editor? We would still need to write text for interfaces with users i guess

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure I fully understand your question.

Of course text would still be highly involved in the process. But the unit of a program will not be lines in files stored on a file-system.

The program will be a data structure and what the editor presents to you is just a editable projection of that structure.

And that doesn't mean some clunky tree editor GUI with drag and drop either. A sufficiently capable editor could present itself to you almost like a text editor but under the hood it would be operating on rich data objects that form the program not on lines of text.

This opens up a lot of opportunities, for example in project navigation. You could label an entire section of the program as something (example: "Create user") then the editor could give you nice fold/unfold features you could incrementally dig down and navigate the program that way.

You could tag objects in the program with stuff (example: tag a set of functions with the business topic that they deal with).

Because the editor accurately tracks meta-data related to program objects, for example it could be always aware of documentation related to a particular section or function in the program.

So that editor could give you a shortcut to instantly switch to a "documentation view" or "test case view".

I know some of this stuff is already sort-of possible with smart IDEs but they are still quite fragile and inaccurate and easily tricked as they rely on fragile tricks and heuristics to associate things with each other or they rely on conventions that pile up on top of each other and conflict with each other (file naming conventions to indicate something is a test case, etc...).

Treating programs as data objects gives us a strong foundation upon which we can make these fancy features with ease and high accuracy so that you can let your guards down and trust the editor to always be correct.

<comment><USER7> If you were going to take a new try at building a system like this, do you think something like Datomic's codeq[1] would be useful? It allows for navigating code semantics across multiple projects using a database query language as the interface. I've never actually used it but maybe it could help for data storage of an intentional programming system?

Thanks for the links, this was the first time I've heard of intentional programming. Neat idea!

[1] [https://github.com/Datomic/codeq](https://github.com/Datomic/codeq)

<comment><USER5> Hmm I don't know enough about Datomic/codeq.

Data storage for a demo of something like that is not really hard. Something as simple as a json object would work fine.

One hard part is to make it tolerant of incomplete/invalid objects.

If it's sufficiently tolerant you could make it look very similar to a normal text editor but it would have magical powers under the hood.

You could do all sorts of cool text-editor-like features but because you have a much richer object under the hood you could be much more magical.

The concept of "file" stops having any significance. You'd think in terms of your domain logic and program objects.

So your sidebar project tree could be organised arbitrarily (not dictated by the file system).

You could do fancy keyboard shortcuts. Imagine with key up/down you navigate around a list of objects that are highlighted (like functions). While the function is selected you'd press "d" and bam out pops the function documentation (because documentation would be an attribute of that function and tightly attached to it).

You'd type "h" and see the entire history of that function from day 1, who created it who worked on it, etc...

"r" and it asks you for a new name (name could be a phrase like "login the user into the system" because no text-parsing).

When you enter an entry is added to the history of that object (it has a unique id) "[timestamp] greenyouse renamed this function to 'login the user into the system'".

Then imagine the possibilities for CI/CD.

You could have constraint-based deployment and integration.

For example if any objects in the program tagged with 'security' have been created/modified/deleted you could require stronger code review sign-off etc...

You could "query" the diff of a software revision and do stuff based on that. For example all your "SQL query" nodes would have a pre-determined type.

So when a new revision is pushed you could tell if new SQL queries have been introduced in the system you could notify the database team "Revision #458 has introduced the following 3 SQL queries (click to view)".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Mainly AI writing code under our guidance, detecting patterns, applying patterns, suggesting best practices, digesting decades of Stackoverflow to solve problems at higher level.

</comment><comment><USER9> You'll explain what you want to the computer and it'll do it's best to implement it. You'll definitely still need technical understanding but a lot of the boring stuff like debugging and typing text will be like how we see punch cards today.

</comment><comment><USER10> It will probably be like electricity: Invisible, crucial, handled by a gigantic infrastructure. Similar to the internet today, you subscribe to a service then it's up to you to create products on top of that.

Depends how fast automation/AI will grow within the development field.

</comment><comment><USER11> 99% of code will be analytics tracking user actions, 1% actual useful functionality.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think we will come a far as we've done in memory safety with "logic safety", making programs that can't misbehave.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. I just hope we're not stuck in the same spot we're in now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think that the current responses aim too low.

Isomorph is really cool, but it's a "next 5 years" (or not) – not 25 years.

The future will be declarative. It'll allow voice input, possibly as the primary modality. Objects and functions will be passe.

IOW, describe what you want the program to do, then we'll refine (i.e., sculpt the details together).

<comment><AUTHOR> Like how the engineers, scientists, and techs code on the Enterprise. That would be nice!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> less relevant

<comment><USER15> Yes and also totally hilarious as in like in my day we had to walk uphill both ways. Jeez you guys had to actually program? That must've sucked, Grandpa. No vr you can just point at and say/think what you want? (Like when Grandpa was a kid and his dad didn't have a computer)</comment></comment>


Cheddar Spotify Spotlight – News on Spotify - <AUTHOR> https://open.spotify.com/user/spotify/playlist/37i9dQZF1DWWDc0ZpH9tWk?si=xgvZpfrESJO1hCT21tF9pw <comment><AUTHOR> Spotify Spotlight is a new format the company has rolled out. We created the first weekly news show on Spotify with video and music interspersed in one playlist. Give it a shot! And follow our playlist!

<comment><USER2> Very cool to see you commenting here :-) I'd shied away from digging into this new feature but tried this one and.. it opened Spotify's Web player with a 5 song playlist but no video, alas. I'm guessing it's region or client locked for now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Try on mobile

<comment><USER2> Aha, that got it!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Most commonly followed Twitter accounts by various groups of people - <AUTHOR> http://tmf.tylerp.me/

<comment><AUTHOR> PG's tied with Bill Gates among tech investors[1]. Overall though, it's all pretty dull. I wonder if they have lists or separate accounts to privately follow what they care about or is this it.

[1] [http://tmf.tylerp.me/results/tech- investors](http://tmf.tylerp.me/results/tech-investors)</comment>


There Is No Such Thing as Unconscious Thought - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/62/systems/there-is-no-such-thing-as-unconscious-thought <comment><USER2> I think the conclusions the author makes are way too broad.

What generates consciousness, appears to me to be a function of what the neurons are all 'doing'. The brain has two features that are devoted to linguistic processing, and you have to activate them in order to find words for the things you think.

Thoughts that 'bubble up' all the way to linguistic representation in the mind are definitely conscious, while it's also possible to make some sense out of brain activity that doesn't quite find words. For example, playing ping pong or some other sport would be exceedingly difficult if you had to use the linguistic part of your brain in order to make sense of what you're doing.

If you meditate, you can focus on that 'line' between when thoughts become linguistic and when they don't, and if you do trance work, you can block out the sensory world and so generate experiences using 'only' the mind. From here, you can work out that brain activity becomes conscious at some point.

Also, obviously there is brain activity that does not reach consciousness, the brain for example needs to do things like regulate heartbeat, and certain aspects of our experience we're only dimly conscious of much of the time. Consciousness is a continuum, not a binary.

So our brains can be doing a lot that we're not aware of.

<comment><USER3> In the book "The Elephant in the Brain", the author makes the argument that our consciousness is entirely the PR department of the brain, making explanations for the "company" but not truly knowing what's really going on.

That is, all our thoughts are post-event justifications to make us feel good.

There's this famous experiment where they show two different things to each eye of a brain divided patient. The patient would then follow instructions from 1 eye, but provide a justification based on what the other eye saw. Like a PR rep having to do the job but with email and communication being down.

The PR rep has to interpret things in a way that is in harmony to the external environment. Making the self seem self-less or hardworking or moral, etc...

Where it gets interesting is that the resulting PR effects affect the environment which then trigger new behaviors resulting in new PR spin. The PR rep has a degree of control over the system yet at the core of it, the PR rep is installed by language/culture/society and is somewhat of an outsider. Like an overly idealistic justice warrior sent to whitewash some corrupt company and being frustrated by the job.

<comment><USER4> This is similar to the thesis of Antonio Damasio's "Descartes' Error", which argues that all our decisions are ultimately taken by an unconscious emotional part of the brain, and that the conscious reasoning part is merely one of many inputs to the unconscious decision-making part.

Which means we literally can never explain the "why" behind any decision we make, because we _never_ know it -- yet that is our true "self", our free will if you choose to interpret it that way.

It's why we can have every rational reason to _not_ eat the cookie, and zero rational reason _to_ eat it (we're not hungry and we rationally know it's in our best interest to lose weight)... and then we eat it anyways. We can't give any rational explanation for why we ate it... it just comes down to, in the end, I wanted to due to emotional factors I can only hypothesize in hindsight.

It's a pretty powerful thesis.

<comment><USER5> > It's why we can have every rational reason to not eat the cookie, and zero > rational reason to eat it (we're not hungry and we rationally know it's in > our best interest to lose weight)... and then we eat it anyways. We can't > give any rational explanation for why we ate it... it just comes down to, in > the end, I wanted to due to emotional factors I can only hypothesize in > hindsight.

I don't really think this is as a convincing example as a lot of people think. It has less to do with people having no control and more with people not understanding what "rational" is.

You eat the cookie because you do not, in reality, think eating the cookie is that much of a problem. The issue is that you likely have 5 other layers sitting trying to convince you that you don't want the cookie, because you're trying to fit in with society or whatever.

If you _really_ didn't want to eat the cookie, you wouldn't.

The problem is that the average reason a person has for not eating a cookie is very unconvincing. It's often something along the lines of "well, people, somewhere, think I shouldn't eat too many cookies". "Cookies are unhealthy" also doesn't register, it's too broad. If someone told you the cookie was poisoned with cyanide, trust me, you wouldn't eat it.

It really doesn't have /that/ much to do with raw emotion, except in so far as emotion is composed from values, and your values don't care about eating cookies that much at the end of the day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Suppose, instead, that while focusing our conscious minds on generating > foods, unconscious mental search processes can work away, in the background, > unearthing a string of countries. Then, when we switch to countries, we > should be able rapidly to download these—they would not need to be found > afresh, because unconscious search would have identified them already. ...

The author seems to have a model of "unconscious" as being deliberate or task- oriented or focused, just like conscious thought, except sequestered somehow from the conscious section of our minds.

Obviously it's not like that, and I don't think anyone thinks it is like that. So the article can be perhaps summarized as "man has obviously wrong idea of how phenomenon works, tests his hypothesis, finds that it can't work that way, declares the phenomenon must not exist at all."

</comment><comment><USER7> There are plenty of times in the day or night where we may be "thinking" about things but not attending to our thoughts very much or at all, such as while dreaming or zoning out while driving. Actually, driving itself is a great example of a complex activity that requires very little conscious oversight. While driving, you can suddenly realize you have no recollection of the last ten minutes. If your brain can drive "unconsciously," surely it can work on a problem unconsciously; after all, you've been thinking longer than you've been driving. Moreover, you can be driving home from work after a hard day, and your brain can switch back and forth between emotional processing of your day and keeping an eye on the road, and you can still have that feeling where you can't remember the last ten minutes.

None of this contradicts the idea that your brain can only work on one problem at a time, but the overall thesis of the essay only works by blurring different concepts together under the terms "thought" and "consciousness."

Let's distinguish between these different brain/mind functions:

1) Parallel, perceptual work (like recognizing an image)

2) Serial, conceptual work (problem-solving, "thought")

3) Verbal, narrative mental occurrences ("thoughts")

4) Conscious awareness

Cognitive behavioral therapy demonstrates that (3) doesn't imply (4) as much as you'd think; you can have a verbal thought very rapidly that you are at most dimly aware of and immediately forget. Rather than implicating consciousness awareness in a wide range of mental activities extending all the way to problem-solving (2), I would say that most things the brain can do with awareness it can also do without awareness.

Those of us familiar with non-verbal "thinking" as we solve a problem know that (2) doesn't imply (3), either. Meanwhile, the thesis of the essay seems to require that (2) implies (4), which is quite a stretch.

<comment><USER4> > _If your brain can drive "unconsciously," surely it can work on a problem > unconsciously; after all, you've been thinking longer than you've been > driving._

I don't think that follows -- driving is a habitually developed skill which we know can be done unconsciously, while "working on a problem" has nothing to do with habits or skills, and it's hard to argue that kind of symbolic manipulation can be done unconsciously.

In your framework of 1-4, I agree that (3) doesn't always imply (4) because we can produce language out of habit/instinct rather than thought (yelling a curse word involuntarily).

But I find it hard to believe how (2) wouldn't always imply (4). But perhaps this is semantics -- from my understanding, (2) and (4) are merely different terms for the same thing, each implies the other. We're almost always solving some problem at each point during the day and therefore consciously aware -- and when occasionally we're not, that's when we daydream or space out and lose conscious awareness.

<comment><USER7> Brains don't solve problems by manipulating symbols. None of these layers are intended to be synonymous. Meditation is basically 4 and 1, with 2 and 3 coming and going. Driving is intended to be an example of just 1 and 2. Saying that driving is a "skill" and "we know it can be done unconsciously" suggests to me that other skills can be done unconsciously, too. A lot happens in ten minutes of driving; options are weighed and decisions made. Music composition and doing mathematics (stopping short of the actual symbols) are also habitually developed skills over years of regular practice.

Edit: I just remembered that Jonathan Blow reports programming "unconsciously" in the same manner as the driving example. Also, on a good day my consciousness is not devoted to "problem-solving" every second of the day; that would be miserable. I don't see why conscious awareness is seen as so necessary for thought, the only explanation for me being that many people experience themselves as being their thoughts and not their awareness. It is a journey many of us are on.

<comment><USER8> Without the symbols you have a big somewhat structured blob of experiences. It's apparently enough for hunting, mating and the like. It is apparently not enough for being the most technologically advanced species. [0] is of interest here. Ildefonso didn't like to talk about his life without language and called it dark.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man_Without_Words](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man_Without_Words)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not quite convinced of the article's thesis. It may be true that the brain doesn't chug along on a background problem continuously for days, but instead it checks in on the problem every so often when it is in a different state. But the act of reconsidering a problem from a different mental context is the essence of problem solving.

The experiment involving retrieval of foods and countries is suggestive, but I think it cannot be generalized outside of that experimental paradigm. The same for doing arithmetic in one's head. Creative problem solving is a different beast, and the flashes of inspiration described in the article which take place after a matter of hours or days are indicative that the mind revisits the problem in the unconscious.

<comment><USER10> It might be arguable that the check-in on the problem isn't so much an automatic process, but one of stimuli triggering a pattern match on a problem, or conscious triggering of the thought process.

When people are working on a problem, simply saying out loud "I'm trying to work out this problem" has an effect lighting up the neurons associated with the previous thinking done on that topic. If there is new information, (like a snake eating its tail), that may be integrated unexpectedly into the consideration.

I would suggest that there are prompts all around us that will trigger a "revisit" of a problem, it is conscious (or at least autonomous based on stimuli) action, but not directed.

<comment><USER11> > I would suggest that there are prompts all around us that will trigger a > "revisit" of a problem, it is conscious (or at least autonomous based on > stimuli) action, but not directed.

That doesn't explain dreams. The notion that the brain requires constant external stimuli to keep it pumping along doesn't fit known phenomena.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Having before college stumbled across the "study then toss it to the background and wait for inspiration" method, and used it successfully ever since (& having studied neuroscience in college & seen other similar mistakes), I can say that the author's study & results are likely accurate, and _definitely_ irrelevant.

The key is NOT, as the author describes, to work hard on topic B while topic A is expected to percolate in the background process. This will have the exact result that he found, no progress on A, and indeed many studies show that it will actually interfere with learning/cogitating A to immediately switch to work/study/cognition on topic B.

Instead, the method requires focus on topic A until near exhaustion, then active rest -- do something not requiring any big mental energy/focus, e.g., go for a walk, do work with your hands, go to a cafe for idle conversation, and await inspiration (with writing implements at hand ready to write furiously & in no particular order when it arrives).

He highlights a nice little study showing 1, stuff we already knew (similar to studies I read of decades ago), and 2, are irrelevant to the question at hand.

I'd go even further to counter his title and say that there is barely any such thing as conscious thought, and that the vast majority of thought is unconscious.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is really taking the Von Neumann computing device metaphor to the extreme.

Opposed to this, I'd rather suggest that there is no such thing as an active thought process (which is probably more like an illusion). Also, the concept as described in the article really fails to account for the experience of creative insight or impulse, neuroses, or "metapsychological" phenomena.

Edit: By applying the idea/concept of threaded processes (pretty much the only concept sufficiently defined in the piece), it really illustrates how much we adapted culturally to the technology we use, which, when introduced, was clearly pictured as an restrictive abstraction from how we would model such processes or how the underlying "architecture" was described by McCulloch and Pitts. (Comparatively, we might add an observation on how Freud was influenced by the then prominent technology of telephone networks on how this was reflected especially in his first topic.)

</comment><comment><USER14> The unconscious is the opposite of the conscious, if you walk down the road you are _thinking unconsciously_ about where to put your limbs.

You might say "aha! walking is not thinking", but surely you would think very hard about where to put your limbs if you were to walk through a minefield, etc. Is walking thinking if the conscious mind does it? So whether "thought" can occur unconsciously or not is a question of English not of neuroscience.

<comment><USER5> > if you walk down the road you are thinking unconsciously

I think this statement makes the same error as the article, just in reverse: making a very strong claim that's impossible to prove.

I don't think walking uses "thinking". That sounds incredibly inefficient. Wouldn't unconscious thinking be slow, just as conscious thinking? If not, why not? Wouldn't the body be better off using its short-circuited system, as opposed to thinking through it?

And consider animals whose brains are not very large or known for their mental ability, yet who are very good at body kinematics. I'm inclined to think these are not related at all. The body likely uses some short-circuited system for kinematics, similar to how spiders' legs work, just more advanced. If we figured out how such a system works, we'd be able to build very good robots, but right now we try to make our robots think about how to control each individual part of their limb, so it's cludgey, slow, and inaccurate.

> but surely you would think very hard about where to put your limbs if you > were to walk through a minefield, etc.

I'm not thinking of how to put my limbs there, only where to put them, which is a very different task from actually putting them there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The author jumped from an experiment he did which suggests that our brains can't pull different objects from our memories at the same time to "There is no unconscious thought."

I think he needs stronger evidence

</comment><comment><USER16> The thesis of this article (that the brain can't multiprocess because neurons are all interconnected) is presented without evidence or any elaboration. It's not hard to imagine that brain has a way to maintain the integrity of multiple distinct thoughts at once, even though they're all running on the same hardware network.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, this is like saying that CPUs can't truly multiprocess because cores _can_ share memory

<comment><USER16> Or like saying that a room can't carry multiple sounds at once because all the air molecules in the room are touching each other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Any experienced psychonaut knows this is utter bullshit. It doesn't take a lot of LSD or psilocybin for one to experience "unconscious" thought, it is amongst the first things to manifest on a trip. To clarify, this is cognitive activity that results in various streamS of thought that is ordinarily hidden from the conscious self but one can become aware of under altered states of consciousness.

Moreover, if we examine more powerful trips (mystical experience, induced psychosis), there can be no doubt whatsoever as to the presence of a multitude of intelligenceS that one can communicate with. In fact, one can take away the psychedelics and learn to gain access to these parts of the mind through other methods (Jung - active imagination, western esoteric tradition, shamanism). It boggles the mind that the author of this nautilus drivel has nothing to say on these matters.

Finally, he makes the classic mistake of assuming that the unconscious processes of the mind work in the same way as the conscious ones, in terms of one taking advantage of them, when he describes the experiments he uses as proof, that are based on verbalisation and language instead of visualization and symbol reinforcement.

<comment><USER19> One time I smoked a lot of weed and I felt myself rising and falling with the music in my room. It was quite pleasurable.

What does this profound experience with drugs tell us about human consciousness/thought? Literally nothing.

<comment><USER18> First, the definition:

Psychonautics (from the Ancient Greek ψυχή psychē ["soul", "spirit" or "mind"] and ναύτης naútēs ["sailor" or "navigator"] – "a sailor of the soul") refers both to a methodology for describing and explaining the subjective effects of altered states of consciousness, especially an important subgroup called holotropic states, including those induced by meditation or mind-altering substances, and to a research paradigm in which the researcher voluntarily immerses themselves into an altered mental state in order to explore the accompanying experiences.

Smoking weed with music playing in the background (your own words) is pretty far from doing _research_ by immersing oneself into altered mental states. Psychedelics are powerful but one, of course, needs a modicum of understanding into how to best take advantage of them and the ability to do _research_ with one's own psyche as the subject. I could rephrase your comment as:

"One time I drove a race car and I had a lot of fun, it was quite pleasurable. What does this experience tell us about the limits of the human body in such situations? Literally nothing." => Because you are not in the position to evaluate the inputs you are receiving besides the rudimentary level of "having fun". Or as the old Hermetic proverb goes:

"The lips of Wisdom are sealed; except to ears of Understanding"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The arguments in this article were unconvincing. It's not surprising that naming foods and countries together is no easier than naming them separately. These are two similar, focused tasks. There is no time for the unconscious to do any work amidst this focus. The unconscious mind requires a more diffuse state, which is best attained by walking in the park, taking a shower, or something like that.

</comment><comment><USER21> > A natural answer might suggest itself: "I must have been unconsciously > working away on these images—and solved or partially solved the mystery > without even knowing it. Then the answer 'broke through' into consciousness, > when I saw the image again." Yet this would be quite wrong—the same sudden > "pop out" occurs when we continuously contemplate the image, and there has > been no opportunity for unconscious background pondering.

The statement "and there has been no opportunity for unconscious background pondering" doesn't seem true here. There is always opportunity for "background pondering", even if you're apparently focusing on something. There's no reason to think two parts of the brain aren't working in parallel.

Something close to the reverse might be true. It's possible the apparent act of focusing may not have helped solve the problem, and it's always solved by some background effort. I can't say that I'm consciously aware of how to analyze an image, in the same way that I'm aware of how to multiply.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wouldn't be _too_ surprised if this is true... but there's no way in hell that's enough evidence to reach that conclusion. We do not know 100% that brains are ran on a single conscious mind, even.

Following the conclusion of this article, given that it uses fairly broad definitions, I'm not sure how it is possible to understand a concept the morning after a good night of sleep. _Something_ has to be going on sufficiently powerful to solve a problem, even if it's not a "thought" in the experiential sense.

I'm inclined to believe the opposite, the brain does a hell of a lot of work unconsciously and not that much consciously. I generally found that I reach better conclusions from throwing a lot of information at my brain, as opposed to trying to build a logical chain. The latter generally happens after.

</comment><comment><USER22> Right. So we have no idea what consciousness is, or how it works, or where it comes from, but yet we can deduce that there is no such thing as unconscious thought?

</comment><comment><USER23> >If unconscious thought is impossible, any background racing around our mental archives is entirely ruled out. That is, if we are scouring our memories for foods, we cannot simultaneously search for countries, and vice versa.

The author is not arguing against unconscious thought. They are arguing against background thought. I've never heard of anybody claiming to gain unconscious insight while concentrating hard on something else. It's only claimed to happen while dozing or walking or similar. I'd always assumed that unconscious thought used the exact same brain resources as conscious thought, and the only difference was the lack of consciousness. Obviously if you're using those resources for something else then they won't be available for unconscious thought.

<comment><USER5> > I've never heard of anybody claiming to gain unconscious insight while > concentrating hard on something else.

I feel like this might have happened to me here or there...

You never felt like you thought about one thing, and, in the background, something else was processed?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've never seen so many unsupported assertions presented as fact outside of the realm of politics.

</comment><comment><USER25> _Poincaré and Hindemith cannot possibly be right. If they are spending their days actively thinking about other things, their brains are not unobtrusively solving deep mathematical problems or composing complex pieces of music, perhaps over days or weeks, only to reveal the results in a sudden flash._

No, the brain is reconfiguring itself during REM sleep to be more able to solve the sort of problem that you had been working on. It doesn't happen when you're thinking about other things, particularly. There's a ton of research relating REM sleep to improved skill at problem solving and Poincaré was certainly sleeping on the problems he was trying to solve.

</comment><comment><USER26> Nautilus is built on this kind of psycholo-garbage. The conclusions go way too far, but the title gets clicks.

</comment><comment><USER27> Off topic, and IANAL, but I believe this website breaks European law by refusing to serve the article to european residents who block cookies.

Under the ePrivacy legislation (and GDPR's redefinition of consent), you must obtain "freely given consent" to use cookies that are not necessary for the proper functioning of the site (and under this definition, analytics cookies are not necessary).

By refusing to serve the site to those who opt to block cookies, they ensure that consent can only be given under duress.

<comment><USER19> > they ensure that consent can only be given under duress.

Not being able to read a random website is not "duress".

<comment><USER28> The randomness of the website is irrelevant to the requirement, at least as I understand it.

<comment><USER19> Irrelevant to the main point. Since you're being childish I'll explain again.

Not being able to read a particular article or articles is not duress. Duress is if nautilus would threaten to send killer ninjas to your house of you won't accept the cookies.

<comment><USER27> You're right to complain that conquistadog's comment was irrelevant to your main point. It's frustrating when people miss what you are saying and get so hooked on trivialities. Incidentally, your nitpicking about my use of the word duress is also irrelevant.

Next, you call people childish, when you are acting immaturely. How does name- calling generally work out for you as a means for settling disagreements?

It also bugs me that you are not even technically correct. You see, I looked up the definition of duress before I posted. I am British, so I used the OED and it told me that in the legal sense of the word, duress is, "Constraint illegally exercised to force someone to perform an act." Based on that definition, I don't think I could have picked a word that would better suit my intention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Importantly, the cycle of thought proceeds one step at a time. The brain's > networks of neurons are highly interconnected, so there seems little scope > for assigning different problems to different brain networks. If > interconnected neurons are working on entirely different problems, then the > signals they pass between them will be hopelessly at cross-purposes—and > neither task will be completed successfully: Each neuron has no idea which > of the signals it receives are relevant to the problem it is working on, and > which are just irrelevant junk. If the brain solves problems through the > cooperation computation of vast networks of individually sluggish neurons, > then any specific network of neurons can work on just one solution to one > problem at a time.

Are we to conclude upon observing the crossing paths of trains and passengers that a rail system can service only one route at any moment?

</comment><comment><USER30> This is a "just so" story.

The _bulk_ of our thinking is unconscious (in the sense that, whatever your subjective awareness is, it doesn't contain perceptions of the process of most thinking your system does.)

In fact, you have a distributed brain in your gut that does a great deal of thinking about food, both what to eat and what to do to handle what we've already eaten. (To give an extreme example, it's what decides you have to throw up.) And the spine and motor cortex form a kind of brain also. But even the head-brain thinking is mostly outside of your subjective awareness.

Certainly it's possible to cram your brain with information, then take a break and sleep on it (literally or otherwise) and then come back and suddenly the answer appears, or your understanding has increased.

</comment><comment><USER31> The article doesn't succeed in presenting a good argument. There's a lot of attempts at making examples and using thought experiments but it doesn't actually present any sort of mechanism or model for the mental process involved.

</comment><comment><USER32> I wonder if the key evolutionary development for intelligence was a way to reliably harness it for survival purposes.

Chomsky thinks that there's a sharp divide between language and non-linguistic communication, in that a language is infinite. Turning to formal languages, even regular languages are infinite, so I think he's more talking about Turing equivalent languages - and given just a little complexity, just about everything is Turing equivalent.

Some people equate language with intelligence. But it's possible intelligence is a cause of language (or both are caused by something else).

</comment><comment><USER33> "Science and Method" (1908, "Science et méthode" -original title in French-) is Poincaré's book the blog post author is speaking about. In my opinion, Poincaré's book is very valuable, and useful for anyone dealing with non trivial problems, no matter if there is "unconscious though" or not.

</comment><comment><USER34> So what is the Default Mode Network doing during daydreaming/"inactivity"? Nothing at all?

</comment><comment><USER4> tl;dr: When you have a flash of inspiration, it isn't because your mind was subconsciously putting it together in the background prior to that, or preparing you for it -- you just had the inspiration in that moment like any other thought.

However, I'd make two counterpoints:

1) The article completely ignores nighttime dreaming, when our brain _does_ reorganize information we've processed during the day, and perhaps prepares us for the subsequent flash of inspiration we wouldn't otherwise achieve.

2) The idea of "unconscious thought" is a contradiction in terms -- thought is generally defined as exclusively conscious -- so the article sets up a bit of a semantic strawman. But the research here in no way invalidates our unconscious knowledge or instincts, which of course play a huge role in psychology.

<comment><USER35> I think the counter-argument for 1 would be that, as we are dreaming, we ARE explicitly putting things at the forefront of our mind to organize it. We just mercifully forget it when we wake up. I guess that raises the question of how that queue of stuff to think about forms, and where sits until runtime?

<comment><USER5> > I think the counter-argument for 1 would be that, as we are dreaming, we ARE > explicitly putting things at the forefront of our mind to organize it. We > just mercifully forget it when we wake up.

I don't know if this really passes the... sniff test, if you will.

Even if something is not remembered, it would need to be processed long enough for the subject to also be able to recognize it and/or wake up as a result, with an emotional reaction. This doesn't really seem to happen. Most cases of people waking up with a strong reaction involve nightmares and similar.

"Anything can happen if we can forget it" is not really that solid, since things happening here-and-now nonetheless have effect, even if not remembered.

Conscious thought requires effort, is tiring, for some painful, etc. I find it unlikely that, during sleep, this activity suddenly becomes more viable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> A long, meandering article making some sort of argument about consciousness and thought, seemingly without defining either (I stopped reading halfway through) when when it really hinges on what exactly these things are.

</comment><comment><USER37> > "A natural answer might suggest itself: "I must have been unconsciously > working away on these images—and solved or partially solved the mystery > without even knowing it. Then the answer 'broke through' into consciousness, > when I saw the image again." Yet this would be quite wrong—the same sudden > "pop out" occurs when we continuously contemplate the image, and there has > been no opportunity for unconscious background pondering. The phenomenon of > sudden insight stems not from unconscious thought, but from the nature of > the problem: Searching for a meaningful interpretation with few helpful and > unambiguous clues."

The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Just because we have an instance of conscious thought leading to the conclusion, and a scenario where it is possible that the unconscious is playing a role, the conclusion that in the second scenario the unconscious does not play a role based on the ability to come to the conclusion consciously does not follow. The nature of the problem here is not given enough of a definition for one to conclude that there is only one way to get to the answer, either.

>"The brain's networks of neurons are highly interconnected, so there seems little scope for assigning different problems to different brain networks."

Except we know very well that the brain solves different kinds of problems in different areas... the Occipital lobe, Wernicke's area vs Broca's area, are different "sub problems" the brain is working on which the conscious part gets information about. Maybe different creative problems use the whole frontal cortex differently, but the "computational machine" that is our brain is definitely divided up into sub-problems; some are very, very obviously unconscious, like the "problem" of keeping our hearts beating.

>" If it is indeed possible to search for foods or countries simultaneously (even though we can consciously report the results of only one search at a time), then the rate at which we generate answers in both categories should be substantially greater than the rate at which we can generate answers from either category alone."

I think this is a bad experiment and a bad conclusion. It's a bad experiment because in the "control case" (only listing foods or only listing countries), the unconscious, if helping, would still be helping in these cases, trying to generate a list while the conscious mind is also trying to generate a list. So it's not really a controlled experiment, because the unconscious mind is never "stopped" \- it is assumed to not be used. It's a bad conclusion then because the premise is faulty; we wouldn't expect someone to list two separate lists more quickly if the same unconscious mechanism is a poor assistant when making the lists alone, too.

</comment><comment><USER38> What behavioralism lacks in charm, it tries to compensate for with persistence.

</comment><comment><USER39> We clearly think in ways that aren't available to the conscious parts of the mind, read most any Oliver Sachs or VS Ramachandran book for clear evidence of that. But what part this plays in specific problem solving isn't clear.

And this article dismisses unconscious thought but doesn't offer a good explanation for what is happening. For instance, what actually happens when you figure something out? And while what actually happens is undoubtedly related to flashes of inspiration or seeing an optical illusion in a new way, these things are only part of the story. A story that isn't told by most conventional models of learning or understanding.

But with careful observation, you can find clues for a simple explanation of epiphanies, solving problems in your sleep, and acquiring greater understanding over time. And that explanation is that the mind grows during rest/sleep in response to cognitive effort, most significantly during a period starting at least 24 hours afterwards and maybe peaking 36-48 hours later. That time frame here is from my own observations, the actual numbers aren't important to the explanation here. But it seems probable that learning and understanding is the result of "brain growth" that occurs as a result of thinking about something, and that this growth is specific to what you've been thinking about, and is cumulative. Your brain is not consciously thinking during this, and likely not unconsciously thinking about it either, but instead is just growing in a specific area. The result of the growth is that you are better able to perceive and grasp ideas that you couldn't previously.

We already know that memories are "consolidated" during sleep. Likely this consolidation is just some kind of structural or neural growth in the brain. Other parts of the brain are unlikely to be much different. The flashes of inspiration can be sudden understandings of a simple problem, but understanding deeper concepts or ideas requires brain growth in the area. I'd guess the flashes of inspiration type of understanding is analogous to short term memories, whereas deeper understanding and learning is the result of accumulated brain growth. When that brain growth becomes sufficient to grasp a concept, the sudden understanding (or epiphany) moment doesn't necessarily come with a realization that your brain is different and only has just then been able to grasp or figure out a problem.

Also, my intuition tells me that maybe we don't actually know anything at all, and we really only "figure out" everything. In other words, our brain is just a very good JIT (just-in-time) prediction engine. And when we think we know something, it's actually just the case that we predict or model it in real time at the moment we begin thinking. And memories are reformed every time we try to recall them, by neural structures that recreate the same pattern over and over when it's asked for.

This also explains things like prodigies, who typically spent many formative hours immersed in something over a long period to develop their abilities, and even acquired savant syndrome that can occur after head trauma (which does occur until after the brain has healed in response to the trauma).

</comment><comment><USER40> What garbage. I can't even make sense of the author's point, it's so diluted with random asides and free-association tangents (poincare, etc).

Perhaps we should start by defining terms. What is "unconscious," and what is "thought." Depending on how you define that, visual processing, dreaming, operant-conditioning, all fall into that category.

There is also strong peer-reviewed evidence that our mind is constantly reviewing what we have just learned, and interrupting this will inhibit our learning. Perhaps the author should discuss that [1].

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interference_theory#Retroactiv...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interference_theory#Retroactive_interference)

</comment><comment><USER41> f off dull professor at Warwick Business School

<comment><USER42> Posting like this will get you banned here. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER41> it was an emotional reaction. i do think the subject is worthy of more rigorous discussion. please accept my apologies</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Online legal forms subscription. Worthwhile? - <AUTHOR>

Has anyone had experience with this site/service or anything similar?
http://www.formsmadesimple.co.uk
Costs 85 pounds, we're thinking about forking out as it should save us a lot of legal fees if we're able to draft and get lawyers to review our docs. <comment><USER2> My local library here in Ohio has a Gale Legal Forms subscription for Ohio legal forms which it makes available to its online patrons for free. Other libraries in the US offer something similar. I don't know what's available at UK libraries but it's worth checking out.</comment>


Amazon Echo adds Spotify support - <AUTHOR> http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2135731 <comment><USER2> this is it! I have to get Echo now!</comment>