Ed Hoopman

[Mike Hoerger, PhD MSCR MBA @michael_hoerger]

As a clinical health psychologist, I notice that many people are using psychological defense mechanisms to downplay the risk of COVID.

These are my Top 7 examples:

🧵

[Ed Hoopman @EdHoopman]

@Biff234523 Nice. Will this be over the counter since it’s also preventative?

[Ed Hoopman @EdHoopman]

@userisstack zo just said on stream he's staying with josh. they just need a good poi uncon

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

The house centipede in your bathroom is the reason you don't have cockroaches.

That fast, leggy, kinda creepy looking thing you just saw scurry under the door is a Scutigera coleoptrata. It eats silverfish, cockroaches, spiders, ants, termites, and bed bug nymphs. The University of Georgia Extension calls house centipedes "allies in home pest control."

One house centipede can eat its body weight in pests every few days, hunting at night while you sleep. They don't damage your house, don't eat your food, don't carry disease, and don't bite unless you grab one.

Best of all: they're self limiting. When they run out of pests, they begin to hunt each other.

If you kill the centipedes, the pests they were eating multiply. Homes that exterminate house centipedes typically see cockroach, silverfish, and spider populations rise.

The bug that looks like a horror movie prop is doing the work of an exterminator for free. The bug it eats is the one that would actually wreck your stuff.

[Ed Hoopman @EdHoopman]

@DrizziWy @Pollofn6 Superhero shot

[Mike Hoerger, PhD MSCR MBA @michael_hoerger]

If you talk to someone who doesn't understand that people are still dying of COVlD, here I explain excess deaths in a way a 5 year old can understand. The key is understanding mortality displacement.

[Mike Hoerger, PhD MSCR MBA @michael_hoerger]

Let's say you're a dairy farmer. You have 100 cows. Each year, about 5 cows die, and another 5 cows are born. Then, along comes a virus. Let's call it "cowvid"...
1/

[Ed Hoopman @EdHoopman]

@akamysteryfv DQ is disqualified bro

[gerdcastan @gerdcastan]

And the winner is…

Doctor’s offices

with the worst Air quality measured in CO2 levels.

[Ed Hoopman @EdHoopman]

@Genetics56 And nobody is talking about how a cap will just bring back the SEC bag men. I can’t see how the B1G would ever agree to that

[Ed Hoopman @EdHoopman]

@TheKylieChi Look up Vocal Fry. Americans have now deemed it cool to sit back on our vocal cords to get that sexy raspy sound which also makes your register lower.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Stanford psychologist spent 4 years proving that the simple act of walking generates 60% more creative ideas than sitting, and the experiment she designed to kill every alternative explanation is one of the most decisive findings in modern psychology.

Her name is Marily Oppezzo.

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

The result was almost too clean to publish.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves.

On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision.

She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

This is the part of the study that hit hardest when I read it the first time.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it.

Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes.

The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

The history of this is the part that should haunt anyone who still does meetings in chairs.

Charles Darwin built a gravel loop behind his house in Kent called the Sandwalk and walked it 3 times a day for the rest of his life. The theory of evolution was developed one lap at a time on that path.

Nietzsche walked up to 10 hours a day during the years he wrote his most important books and openly said the work was conceived on his feet.

Beethoven composed for the morning and walked for 5 hours every afternoon with a pencil in his pocket for when something landed.

Kahneman said the best thinking of his Nobel Prize-winning career happened on leisurely walks with Amos Tversky. Steve Jobs refused to take important conversations sitting down. He held them on foot.

Every one of them was using the system Oppezzo would not measure until 2014. They just did not know what to call it.

The question worth sitting with is the one almost nobody asks.

Every meeting you have ever attended sitting around a table was a meeting held at a fraction of the brain power that was actually available to the people in the room. Every brainstorm that got stuck inside a conference room. Every problem you tried to solve at a desk and gave up on. Every idea you could not quite get to.

The intervention is the easiest one in modern science. No supplement. No app. No subscription. No training program. Just a pair of legs and 15 minutes.

The Stanford lab proved it. The philosophers knew it. The neuroscience explains it.

And almost everyone reading this is still trying to think their way out of problems sitting completely still.

[Ed Hoopman @EdHoopman]

@Auroria3D @FortniteStatus

[Ed Hoopman @EdHoopman]

@EpicTofuChris @FireMonkey Thanks! Can we make sure the umbrella is silent and doesn’t have that annoying ticking sound??

[Ed Hoopman @EdHoopman]

@Dreckerr Great changes! Can we add gloves and zipline items back into the loot pool? There’s no good way to get across the map now. Or to get height. Shockwaves every 30 seconds takes forever

[Ed Hoopman @EdHoopman]

@TullyAckland Great changes! Can we add gloves and zipline items back into the loot pool? There’s no good way to get across the map now. Shockwaves every 30 seconds takes forever

[Julie @hoolie_r]

This one goes out to my clean air masking folks watching the internet implode at this hypothetical.

[Novara Media @novaramedia]

“There’s one thing more powerful than a billionaire – and it’s a union.”

Hours before the 2026 Met Gala, which was sponsored by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, union organisers put on a ‘Ball Without Billionaires’ in New York, featuring Amazon delivery drivers, warehouse workers and campaigners.

“Working people are underpaid, undervalued and under-appreciated,” said co-host Gabriella Karefa-Johnson. “Let those billionaires uptown have their Met party – we’re going to have something way more fabulous down here!”

[Ed Hoopman @EdHoopman]

@Biff234523 @mdashaldebaran Appreciate it! Yeah it seemed off to me

[Ed Hoopman @EdHoopman]

@Biff234523 @mdashaldebaran Just got my Novavax from CVS in Mass. Pharmacist was surprised I knew the expiration date at end of May. She said after this batch expires, they would be getting new doses (same formulation) after that though. Does that make sense with what you know about supply?