Yes, that’s always been more or less the case. However, the brain’s uptake/use of neurotransmitters like Dopamine has been understood for decades to have at least some specificity to it. We always knew we were shooting flies with shotguns, though.
Dopamine doesn’t flood the brain as once believed – it fires in exact, ultra-fast bursts that target specific neurons.
Thank you. Almost every word of the sentence above is very much not what college freshmen have been taught for 30+ years. Dopamine was never thought to “flood the brain.” For a few decades it’s been understood to have highly targeted action, restricted by various factors not least of which is the fact that dopamine is only produced in/near certain synapses.
Straw men are sometimes the most annoying men.
If you have a worldview that includes gods, spirits, fairies, the universe as an entity, etc., that worldview often also provides you with the “meaning” bit. It can be stifling, reassuring, motivating, or depressing, depending. That was me for a few decades. Without that set of beliefs there is no built-in meaning afaik. You can study the stars or atoms or human behavior or plants your whole life and those things will not reveal a purpose or meaning for you, the universe, or humanity.
In the absence (for me) of any built-in meaning or purpose, we make our own meanings. If your meaning is “nothing matters so fuck it,” that is the meaning you are choosing or accepting as some kind of default. Like many other people I choose meanings around happiness: the greatest good for the greatest number, as Spock (and probably some lesser figure) said. In this mechanistic universe we somehow came to be, and we can think and feel and understand and learn. That is almost unimaginably amazing to me. We are people, not just idk viruses grinding away. I choose a set of meanings that value people and their happiness. Life is miraculous and apparently rare. In that special group we, humans, are the most phenomenal thing we know of in the universe. I choose to value us.
The usual: in college, desperate for work in a saturated college-city market I worked for Vector Marketing selling Cutco knives–one of the more humilating periods of my life–and interviewed for several other “jobs” that turned out to be MLM sales (e.g., I think a knockoff perfume company called “observe l’essence”?). I also tried to sell cars. Holy shit the people I worked with were horrible humans (except 1.5 of them).
In a slightly less horrible vein I spent a summer (late 90s) in a call center for BellSouth.net, which mostly consisted of telling people to type their passwords in very carefully or reboot their computer. When someone found out I spoke Spanish I was given all Spanish, Portuguese, and even Italian customers, and released from all quotas and average call time metrics. This was good, because trying to work out what a Brazilian customer was saying on the phone was hard enough, but Italian (and maybe one time Romanian)? Took hours.
Oh, the scammy part of that was minor: we were in a faceless warehouse on the outkirts of Columbus, Ohio, but we were instructed to always keep websites open for Atlanta, GA and to talk about the weather, sports, etc. and pretend we were in Atlanta.
The oddest part of that job was that our floor of the warehouse/call center was shared with a brand new and kind of weird company that had just started running TV ads: priceline.com. We had breaks with priceline employees on a regular basis.
This reminds me of Foucault’s Pendulum :)
Yes, critical thinking is hard.
“I have no response to that.”
Wait, in the first one it looks like the S has a cape.
As a man, I’ve found this applies to almost any traditionally* feminine activity.
Thank you for typing this all out. It was lovely and inspiring to read.
Thinking one step further: Even if I somehow got into MENSA (unlikely), I can’t imagine ever saying, “I see you have a MENSA discount…” ugh.
Don’t forget racists. Plenty of those are drawn to the Mensa labels, too.
This is worth the entire post and more. I’m chuckling while my kid gives me weird looks from the other room.
This goes a bit deep. Seems like it’s going to be about customers being too stupid to figure things out, but it ends up for me a story about engineers not accurately anticipating customers’ needs.
10 years ago I wouldn’t have imagined this, but this is me every time I have to use Windows (e.g., occasionally for work) or help someone else with it.
According to almost every photo I take, about 3 degrees off.
Pretty sure this is a psychophysics question, though I don’t know that field well enough to know what’s there.
If it helps, you’re not alone. I’ve spent decades of my life pursuing a career, and in the past five or so years I’ve come to realize I will never accomplish the things I used to dream about, like making an impact in my little field, etc. It’s a really, really unpleasant realization. The only silver lining I can find for myself (and it is helpful) is that I can let go of the “must excel” and “must go above and beyond” mentalities. It frees up time and mental resources.
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And that’s how it’s been understood for decades. The article creates a silly and false premise.