LordRPI

😂😂😂

[The Seeker @TheSeeker268]

Maybe Dr. Fauci should have consulted his own diary first.

"I believe that there will be hell to pay when the American public realizes that they have not been dealt with in a totally open manner."

– Fauci diary, October 2001

[LordRPI @LordRPI]

@virologyanon @politicalmath India and China are far closer to the SFBA than even... San Diego in terms of hiring pipelines. (As someone explained to me as reluctance to interview me)

[ZUBY: @ZubyMusic]

The infiltration of TherapySpeak into mainstream conversations is awful.

[LordRPI @LordRPI]

@gummibear737 That would make sense. As a New Yorker, many of us were cognizant about the fallout had Indian Point been a target.

[LordRPI @LordRPI]

@erichhartmann @shoesonplease Every October I count the days until standard time so I can wake up to light.

It makes getting my daughter out of bed significantly easier too!

Which reminds me… I bet some of the all year DST crowd also push for delayed school start.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

A Soviet psychologist walked into a café in 1927 and watched a waiter do something impossible.

He remembered every open order at every table. Perfectly. Without notes. Without effort.

Then a table paid their bill. She asked him to repeat the order.

He couldn't remember a single item.

She spent the next two years figuring out why. What she found is now the operating system underneath every platform fighting for your attention.

Her name was Bluma Zeigarnik, and she was a graduate student at the time, sitting with her professor Kurt Lewin, watching the waiters work the room. What caught her attention was something so ordinary that it had been happening in restaurants for centuries without anyone asking why.

The waiters could remember every open order with perfect accuracy. Table four wanted the schnitzel with no sauce. Table seven had changed their wine twice. Table twelve owed for three coffees and a dessert. Every detail, held without effort, without notes, without any visible system at all.

But the moment a table paid their bill, the information vanished. Completely. Lewin tested it on the spot. He called a waiter back minutes after a table had settled up and asked him to recite the order. The waiter could not do it. Not partially. Not approximately. The information was simply gone.

Zeigarnik went back to her lab and spent the next two years turning that observation into one of the most replicated findings in the history of psychology.

Here is what she proved, and why it changes how you think about attention, memory, and almost every piece of media you have ever consumed.

She gave participants a series of tasks. Some tasks they were allowed to finish. Others were interrupted before completion. Then she tested recall across both groups.

The unfinished tasks were remembered at nearly twice the rate of the completed ones.

Not slightly better. Nearly twice. The brain was holding the incomplete work in a state of active tension, returning to it, keeping it warm, refusing to file it away. The finished tasks were closed, archived, released. The unfinished ones were still running.

She called it the resumption goal. When the brain commits to a task and cannot complete it, it opens a file that stays open until resolution arrives. That open file consumes a portion of your cognitive bandwidth whether you are thinking about it consciously or not. It surfaces in idle moments. It pulls at the edge of your attention during other work. It is the thing you find yourself thinking about in the shower when you were not trying to think about anything at all.

This is not a flaw in human cognition. It is a feature. The brain evolved to finish things. An open loop is a signal that something important is unresolved. Keeping that signal active increases the probability that you will return to it and complete it. In an environment where most tasks had real survival stakes, this was an extraordinarily useful mechanism.

In the modern world, it is the most exploited vulnerability in human attention.

Netflix did not invent the cliffhanger. But it industrialized it in a way no medium before it ever had. When a show ends on an unresolved question, it does not just create curiosity. It opens a file in your brain that stays active until the next episode closes it. The autoplay countdown that begins at 15 seconds is not a convenience feature. It is a precise calculation about how long the average person can tolerate an open loop before the discomfort of not knowing overrides every other intention they had for the evening. One more episode is not a choice. It is your brain doing exactly what it was designed to do: return to what is unfinished.

The writers who built Lost, Breaking Bad, and Succession understood this intuitively without ever reading a psychology paper. Every episode ended on an open question. Every season finale answered three things and opened five more. The entire architecture of prestige television is a Zeigarnik machine running at industrial scale.

But television is not where this gets dangerous.

Every notification on your phone is an open loop. Every unread email is an open loop. Every task you wrote on a list and have not yet crossed off is an open loop. Each one is consuming a small but real portion of your available attention, pulling fractionally at your focus, degrading your capacity to be fully present in whatever you are actually doing right now. TikTok's algorithm does not just serve you content you like. It serves you content that ends one loop and immediately opens another, keeping the resumption system permanently activated so the cost of stopping always feels higher than the cost of continuing.

The research on this accumulation effect is striking. Psychologists studying cognitive load have found that unfinished tasks do not sit passively in memory. They actively interrupt. They surface at the wrong moments. They are the reason you are reading something and suddenly remember an email you forgot to send. The brain is not malfunctioning. It is running its resumption system exactly as designed. It is just running it across forty open loops simultaneously, in an environment that generates new ones faster than any human nervous system was built to process.

The most important practical implication Zeigarnik's research produced is one that most people use backwards.

David Allen built his entire Getting Things Done system on the insight that the only way to close a cognitive open loop is to either complete the task or make a trusted commitment to complete it later. Writing something down in a system you actually trust has the same effect on the brain as finishing it. The file closes. The bandwidth is released. This is why writing a task down feels like relief even before you have done anything about it. You have not solved the problem. You have simply told your brain that the loop is registered and will be returned to, which is enough for the resumption system to stand down.

The inverse is equally true and far more destructive. Every task that lives only in your head, unwritten and unscheduled, is an open loop burning cognitive resources around the clock. The mental cost is not proportional to the size of the task. A tiny nagging obligation consumes the same active tension as a major project. Your brain does not discriminate by importance. It discriminates by completion.

Zeigarnik published her findings in 1927. The paper sat in academic literature for decades before anyone outside psychology paid attention to it.

Then television got good. Then the smartphone arrived. Then the entire attention economy was engineered, largely by people who understood intuitively what she had proven scientifically: an open loop is the most powerful hook available to anyone who wants to hold human attention.

Netflix knew it. Instagram knew it. Every designer who ever made a notification badge red instead of grey knew it.

The café in Vienna is long gone.

The mechanism she discovered there is now the operating system underneath every platform fighting for your time.

Every "to be continued."

Every unread notification.

Every thread that ends with "part 2 tomorrow."

All of it is the same waiter, the same unpaid bill, the same brain refusing to let go of what it has not yet finished.

Zeigarnik noticed it over coffee in 1927.

A century later, it is the most valuable insight in the history of media.

And nobody taught it to you in school.

[LordRPI @LordRPI]

@gummibear737 I'm still ok if you go after crooked hillary and gavin new scum in not so nice ways. After all, you're definitely not from Minnesota

[LordRPI @LordRPI]

@Cernovich It would have been far safer for doctors to prescribe it than risk people taking the veterinary version - even if it were 100% ineffective

[LordRPI @LordRPI]

@AlexBerenson Women give terrible relationship advice to everybody

[LordRPI @LordRPI]

@boriquagato @Rothmus Perhaps should be changed to a dingo and “would eat your baby”

[LordRPI @LordRPI]

@gummibear737 I don't think there's enough sand in this world

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

This hits home

[LordRPI @LordRPI]

@_HeartofGrace_ @elonmusk @IterIntellectus Uhhh, Mary Wollstonecraft was not a philosopher?

[Ben Heckendorn @benheck]

Code comment fun.

[LordRPI @LordRPI]

@gummibear737 @davereaboi It’s the same thing with code.

1st draft. Ok. Ask for revisions? Slop.

Start new session, clearly state your first revisions. Ok. Ask for revisions? Slop.

And so on and so forth.

[LordRPI @LordRPI]

@Cernovich Even if you move out of state, California still wants the taxes on RSU vest if they were granted while you were a California resident.

But alas. Carlsbad…

[LordRPI @LordRPI]

@Cernovich @aakashgupta Wait until they find out how lax IP and property laws are

[Jay Bhattacharya @DrJBhattacharya]

I think this thread is posted in at least a simulacrum of good faith, so I'll give a substantive response.

It is obviously true that in the moment of crisis, leaders face tremendous pressure to do something dramatic to address the crisis, and often those decisions turn out, in retrospect, to be wrong.

In the case of the covid crisis, the problems were confounded by a determined unwillingness of scientific and public health leaders to respond to data -- in real time -- that showed that core assumptions underlying the lockdown strategy were wrong.

Here is a short list of facts about covid that undermined these leaders' core assumptions:
* covid is airborne,
* covid spreads asymptomatically,
* covid infection fatality rate << case fatality rate,
* covid has a sharp age gradient in its infection mortality risk,
* lockdowns cannot suppress covid spread or protect the vulnerable for long,
* lockdowns crush the lives and well-being of children, the poor, and the working class, and almost everyone other than the laptop class
* lockdowns cause a form of psychological terror that guarantee they could never last just two weeks

The WHO and public health leaders got all of these facts wrong in 2020, which I suppose is understandable.

What is not understandable is that these same leaders conducted "devastating takedowns" of even well-credentialed outside critics who pointed out that the WHO's core assumptions were incorrect, and accepted these assumptions as true even as overwhelming data to the contrary emerged in real time.

What is not understandable is the utter confidence that the WHO and public health leaders expressed in these ideas and lockdown policies to the public as the only way to protect the population, going so far as to call for censorship of contrary voices on social media and elsewhere.

The closest analogue I can think of is the set of "best and brightest" advisors who told Pres. LBJ that victory in the Vietnam War was just around the corner, based on a whole host of faulty information.

Leaders who come out of such situations having embraced such a litany of catastrophically failed ideas and policies have a few choices on how to handle the post-crisis era.

1) They can, in good faith, admit their failures and work to reform systems so the disaster never happens again. This would be best, though I would understand why the public would want a new set of leaders to design and implement the reforms. I personally am very happy to work with and learn from public health leaders who choose this option.

2) They can pretend to have done nothing wrong, clinging to power for as long as they can, hoping against hope that history will vindicate them, crushing public trust in the institutions they lead.

3) They can try to pretend they never recommended or adopted the catastrophically failed policies, hoping that the public has a short memory. This is the current strategy that the @WHO is taking.

4) They can appeal to the difficulty of the job of handling a crisis under considerable uncertainty, not in a spirit of reform, but rather as an excuse to avoid responsibility for their failed crisis management. This is the approach that Koopmans is taking in her thread.

I have very little sympathy for the covid crisis leaders who choose options 2, 3, or 4. Their job was to manage the uncertainty with wisdom and humanity, which they failed to do. They cannot, at this juncture, turn around and expect public sympathy because their job was hard, or expect the public to forget their failure. These leaders have destroyed public trust in public health, and should step aside as a new set of public health leaders works to fix the damage they caused.

[FFmpeg @FFmpeg]

Today marks 25 years since the first commit to FFmpeg by Fabrice Bellard

FFmpeg was made to play DVDs, DivX and other video files for free, and continues to be developed by enthusiasts

FFmpeg changed the world, powering all online video

Happy 25th Birthday FFmpeg! 🎉🎁🎂

[LordRPI @LordRPI]

I now identify as the number 67