Probably a similar problem to AI. Using AI for the sake of AI in an engineering workflow probably wastes time right now. Using technology in the classroom for the sake of using technology is probably similar. Is it really creating access, opportunity, saving time. All that? I am skeptical. I have had similar experiences with my children over time. There was a layer of technology that made sense for education. Probably peaked when I was in school in the 90s.
My daughter got a 0/20 for a test that she sat and did. Now she's not a complete idiot so this was suspicious. I asked about it and they said that it was likely that she didn't get any questions right. I asked for them to provide me with a copy of the exam paper so I could independently verify that.
Magically she got a 17/20 grade updated but no paper appeared. I pushed it further and was told it was resolved. I raised a formal complaint immediately and they did a full investigation. The conclusion was there was a defect in the system used for tracking progress and it was losing information imported from the exam system. They had to manually enter over 200 student papers again due to this.
No one had noticed or actioned it or saw it was a serious issue until I raised a formal complaint.
When technology is in the loop it's very difficult for anyone to take personal accountability as demonstrated.
My partner is currently in an online college program for computer science. The platform and way they have structured it feels like actual computing hell. There is so much friction compared to what I know a more seamless learning experience online should be like.
It is very interesting when you explore the neurological mechanics of this. A narcissist is rigid thinking dialed up to 11. It is essential a special and pathological “skill” their brains have learned. They do not have to update their priors or spend metabolic energy on almost anything their life. Their brain figured out the best way to survive and conserve energy was to avoid costly updates to their beliefs. Repeated over years and that system becomes deeply myelinated, a core identity. Unwinding that is a feat.
Some people just have a more narrow set of rigid beliefs (e.g. religion, work skills, etc).
Agreed on your neuro take. It would seem that the rigidness is somewhat reinforced by the pervasive mechanism of digital feedback. As we now can see clips of stupid behavior being propagated online as easily as opening our eyes and tap a screen, the rigid behavior of an overt narcissist is now on display as a model for lesser equipped minds to absorb. The narcissist acquires a visually recognizable position of power through their actions, and this makes them highly desirable by those lacking control in their own life. The audience is global... And where the terrain is fertile.. the said audience also votes for their model.
Social media is a toxic stew of identity based narrative reinforcement. Custom tailored to your specific, and I mean really specific, narratives. Does your identity revolve around religion A, hobby B and C, political views D? The algorithm will feed you exact pro-narrative pro-identity content. Did you react to the rage bait style things that we tried out on you? Awesome, now you are getting even more toxic nonsense streamed to your brain. It is genuinely scary. It just creates and strongly reinforces it. It is like we created a way to chunk memetic hazard into a series of small unidentifiable pieces. The net result? No one would be like "If you open this door you become an extremist and will have really rigid identity beliefs" who would open that. But clicking thumbs up or like on a "funny" political meme? Sure why not.
so .. i guess.. if technology is meant to trigger our impulses then the world is slowly going towards the direction dictated by the impulses that form the largest cluster, pulling the whole environment in their direction. Just like a carriage with many horses that cannot be controlled if a group of horses decide to pull right and go into the ditch. So we will have to endure the fall of everything just for the impulsive unevolved people to learn their lesson. Kind of a grim view... but seems like it right now.
I don't think it is generally hopeless like that. I think some people will funnel in that direction. We are humans. Our consciousness is the original hacker. It took over the hippocampus and used a mostly spatial 3D storage system for our RAM, which is kind of funny when you think about it. We haven't evolved nearly as fast as this technology and many people will point to that and say we have bypassed evolution in the sense that our brains are not equipped to defend against something like social media. And it is true, the layer of indirection is not something our consciousness works well with. But I think it cuts both ways. Deep down, the human mind is still a machine primed to keep you alive from getting eaten by a tiger. It loves not having to spend energy and there is very good evidence of how all that works (Friston's free energy principle, our memory as bayesian priors, our consciousness as a machine using those priors to run something like thousands of monte carlo simulations to figure out what priors match the simulation the best). But it is a messy machine. It is often wrong and will choose higher energy paths. And, I think... something in most of us is just hard wired for certain kinds of "authentic" experiences. I don't know, I have a little window of optimism about where this all ends and that although we are weak to social media, social media is weak to some fundamental aspects of our machinery that map towards authenticity (this is a very vague argument, but I could point to a lot of evidence around this and how we react to nature and other things that can't exist in social media that do exist in the physical world). For example, why do small children often love rocks? No real reason. They are just interesting particularly because of their non-utility in industrialized society. They are novel. The brain has no real category or survival use for it. But there is a kid with a pocket full of rocks after a day at the park.
Common in gaming culture. Kind of a meme template. S tier is the best tier of something. People make tier lists of all sorts of things with that grading.
What you experienced was the gut-brain axis failing under extreme metabolic stress in real time. 3-4x caloric demand and your enteric nervous system was under enormous strain dysregulation of serotonin production, inflammatory signaling flooding the vagus nerve upward into brainstem arousal states, directly degrading the prefrontal predictions that normally keep your self model coherent and future oriented. the nihilism wasn’t a psychological response to difficulty it was your predictive hierarchy collapsing from the bottom up, the higher level model of who you are and why this matters losing the competition against overwhelming lower level distress signals. The fact that it resolved when the intestinal distress subsided is actually clear indicator that mood and cognition are downstream of gut state more than we like to admit. our gut makes a like 80% of our serotonin or something
What is free will? In Friston’s predictive processing framework, free will isn’t a force that stands outside the brain and overrides it… it’s what the system calls the experience of higher level predictions outcompeting lower-level ones. The brain is a hierarchical prediction machine constantly minimizing surprise, and what feels like a decision is the resolution of competing models, where your prefrontal self model of who you are and what matters generates a stronger attractor than the opposing signal. The sense of “I chose this” is likely a post hoc narrative the DMN constructs after the resolution has already occurred.. agency as story rather than cause. There’s no ghost in the machine, just a very sophisticated model of a self that includes the prediction that it can choose.
Through the vagus nerve and serotonin availability, a dysbiotic gut amplifies lower level threat and conservation signals, making them harder for higher level prefrontal predictions to outcompete. What feels like weakness of will may partly be the system running on a degraded substrate… the DMN then constructs a story about discipline and character over a causal chain that started in the enteric nervous system.
So, you can’t even really perceive some of this. But you essentially can’t overcome it either. The decisions are made before you thought about it.
Serotonin produced in the gut doesn’t get into your brain.
This factoid is repeated everywhere but it’s misleading without knowing that gut serotonin is a different pool than brain serotonin and they have different functions.
The brain synthesizes its serotonin locally within the brain.
Serotonin from the gut affects vagal neurons. They carry that signal directly to the brain. That has a significant effect on up and down regulation of mood and arousal.
Okay that’s like my company that uses Salesforce that sends an invoice to another company that also uses Salesforce.
The fact that we both use Salesforce does not matter. It’s internal and doesn’t mean anything outside the company. Both the brain and gut re-used the molecule for their own internal signaling. Evolutionarily it was cheaper to use an existing molecule.
To the brain, the invoice is just “I’m full” or “I’m hangry.” It doesn’t care how much serotonin the gut had to produce internally to issue that “invoice.” The brain will produce its own serotonin from the signal of satiety but it won’t give you any more than you can from just feeling full.
It is a powerful neuron hormone. The mechanisms are different. It is still important to recognize the rather dramatic influence this has on the brain. That was what this article was about. This pathway can easily lead to depression and significant broad down regulation in the brain. Serotonin inside of the brain works very specifically. The vagus nerve signal has a very broad impact and should not be hand waved. If your vasovagal system has dysregulation it can lead to all sorts of specific brain internal negative outcomes systemically. I think your model of how this works is not very accurate regarding how broadly connected the vagal signaling pathway is and how that impacts how your brain functions.
The blood brain barrier is a deny by default firewall. If there is no transporter configured for a particular molecule, it doesn't get through. There is no transporter for serotonin
See: vagal neurons and vagus nerve. Serotonin from gut directly impacts those. Your brain still directly interprets that signal from the vagus nerve and uses that to up and down regulate mood and arousal. Impact is still significant
To extend the metaphor, the brain may have a robust firewall, but it also transacts with millions of clients over a separate (electric rather than chemical) network.
This share link has direct ties to my current technology designs I am developing but since the majority of systems work goes unseen many do not care as nearly all just want it to work when they need it. Design always changes over time yet many neglect to consider time within their moment of thought and thus those who fail to comprehend the long term need of such security changes. I have been fortunate to have lived and been involved in this change several times in my life and comparable too exactly this design change are the countless folks in the mid 1990's that told me no one would be buying things online as I architected and developed an online payments platform. After many decades of building secure technologies, some of which that has been acquired, this security critical technique addresses a growing problem that is impacting everyone, even those not yet connected.
