One thing that helps my reading, paradoxically, is listening to speech on headphones whilst out on a walk. I sometimes find myself visualising the words as I hear them. Presumably this helps me to recognise them more speedily in print.
Hi. I'm founder of Readlax. There is good exercise to block subvocalizing, it's read text by Readlax chrome extension and at the same time counting from 9 to 1 (9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1). It help u read by eyes and block subvocalizing. This technick train brain. We will add this exercise in next release of Readlax Extension
What is done instead of subvocalizing the words? Everytime I look at a word I instantly "hear" it, my imagination isn't good enough to conceive of what could replace that internal experience.
Isn't being more familiar with words a good thing? Another thing that seems to help is keeping a boring old deadwood dictionary next to my favourite armchair.
I take a jam jar containing tap water when out and about ('preserving jar' in US I think). Being made of glass it doesn't leach chemicals plus it cleans conveniently in the dishwasher. It fits fine in a backpack and you can protect it in a sock if there's a danger of it rolling around, say in the boot of a car.
I like the idea of basic income but I confess that my ideal of a basic income recipient is someone akin to the 19th-century amateur scientist subsisting on a private income whilst making original contributions to human knowledge, and, as a side effect, to society.
Whereas the reality of people receiving free money might be somewhat different. There's the drip, drip welfare payments of just enough money to survive without being motivated to find a job. Then there's the fallout, family break-up and chaos that occur in the wake of a lottery win. Both morally questionable.
Or perhaps there might be a settling down period of people acting irresponsibly followed by a recognition that engagement with the problems of civilisation and survival doesn't end because one has food, shelter and internet. There are novels to write, structures to design, problems to solve and of course there's science to be done. Work is more fun than 'fun'. Pick something worthy of your talents or start the slide into mental disorder and addiction.
Whatever the truth it almost goes without saying that a study alone cannot sort these issues out. Perhaps it can help. But in science experiment is insufficient there has to be theory to go with. (This is a major reason why so few studies in medicine and psychology are reproducible. I assume in sociology too.) What makes it more difficult in this case is there are moral components which can't be assessed empirically, only by conjecture and criticism.
>Whereas the reality of people receiving free money might be somewhat different. There's the drip, drip welfare payments of just enough money to survive without being motivated to find a job.
That's why I always clarify that an essential piece of Basic Income is that it is unconditional. Whether you're on the bottom rung of society or the top, employed or unemployed, basic income should be the same amount.
When the choice to get a job changes from "Well I'd lose my benefits" to "Well my basic income is no longer enough, I'll work part time", then state welfare no longer becomes as much of a trap. It can finally make strides towards lifting people out of poverty.
If it isn't unconditional and universal, it's just welfare under a different brand name with the same inefficiencies and rent seeking political problems.
I think the parent comment I was replying to was more concerned about the situation where we have UBI without full automation. In which case there may be a push for jobs not yet automated to be split into part time positions. If society really feels like keeping people employed is a moral good in the face of increasing automation, then there may be pressure to increase workforce numbers and reduce working hours. Especially possible if UBI can close the gap and maintain a safety net.
In addition, full, 100% automation doesn't seem likely to me. Service sectors of the economy may simply keep smaller human staffs in order to keep their hospitality atmosphere. Not enough to offset job loss in other sectors, but there are already plenty of businesses today that have a human element that don't _actually_ need them. It might even look like a luxury business model. No reason that will go away just because robots can do it better.
Certainly not. Any UBI policy has to be set for a universal basic standard of living in a contiguous zone of free movement. US citizens can live anywhere in the US - UBI reverses the current bubble of housing prices that is concentrating people in cities that then resist increasing density and thus just drives property values to infinity. It lets people who don't want to live there the option to move elsewhere that is much cheaper and thus lets them live off the UBI.
Trying to peg UBI to regional cost of living costs an incredible amount of money (the cost of living in the Bay Area has to be at least 10x the rural Rust Belt) and has practically no benefit (because all it means is people get the privilege of living wherever they want on redistributed money, rather than choosing to either live where they want and seek the means to afford it or living where its cheapest and costing society less in macrospect.
This is, by the way, another reason UBI is a Utopian fantasy: It’s impossible to imagine an elected government resisting the temptation to fiddle with the formula to achieve policy goals and reward constituents, just like today’s tax code.
There would be an industry overnight that would pop up to help people migrate where cost of living is affordable on a UBI because that is an insane amount of dependable profit to be made. It would be as simple as "your first month pays the move, and every month after that is last months rent payment".
There already exist communities and retirement homes whose entire agreement with its residents is "give us your social security checks, we give you food shelter etc". If you know constant money is coming in, arranging your business around being super easy to use for that money is a very lucrative opportunity.
It means putting 99% of recipients, or more, into illustion which will result in nothing but a severe depression in a few years. Suddenly being able to contribute to the world in a 'larger' way, they will quickly realize that they can't - just as many startup founders. Maybe, need to meet the bills by mind-numbing work is really a blessing for most people - i had stable income almost without work for years and i got very, very depressed.
Having to work to survive keeps people engaged with reality and I think this may explain why people in the past and in developing countries today seem to be at least as happy and mentally resilient as modern westerners, maybe more so. In spite of hardship, disease and early death.
Whereas many of us spend our limited freedom chasing pleasurable (and unpleasurable) illusions that lead only to disorder and despair. That said, there are plenty of sane, wealthy people in the West who do important work for the sake of it, because they wish to. How do more of us become like them?
Also, despite apparently comfortable conditions, there are plenty of survival problems which remain. For example, meteor strikes, super-volcanoes, cancers, toxic ideologies/religions. Plus an unlimited number of as yet unidentified problems.
These problems are more abstract than working for a pay packet to buy food but they are nonetheless real. And they are not being sufficiently addressed! Universal Basic Income could turn out to be an important breakthrough in this regard, I think, if we also address the question I posed at the end of paragraph 2 above.
I disagree that everyone would be depressed. Cityfolk probably but they deserve it because they will be the ones voting in ubi. They will also be the ones starving when us country people start only making enough food for ourselves and spend our days at the river drinking beers and fishing or hunting
There is already sizeable group of have independently wealthy people with inherited money. If we look at how many of these people behave in different wealth categories, it might give a clue.
If it's determined that money makes lazy and that's moral hazard there should be really high tax for inheritance.
>switch to the low level dual of this problem [...] reinforcement learning.
But that is itself a theory about the problem of consciousness! So why not do both? There's no obvious short cut through the confusion, but discoveries in one field may guide questions in the other. In general I think it helps to have one's feet on the ground as well as one's head in the stars (for instance Newton ground his own lenses).
What I mean is that the idea that reinforcement learning is a 'low level dual' of the problem of consciousness is also a theory about the problem of consciousness. It's part and parcel of philosophical topics that one can't get out of the game...
Emily Deans writes very informatively about nutrition topics in a sea of dross (also about medicine, psychology, biology if I recall correctly). Another use of Magnesium is as a adjunct to Vitamin D3 supplementation, since magnesium is used up in its metabolism and action.
Got linky? I can google, but you may have the best link. ALso, anyone know of any good but inexpensive purchasable supplements that target magnesium / related compound mixes to reasonable research results like this? (or just to buy them separately)
Can't recommend a specific link, but I remember when looking into vitamins and so on several years ago I found the Vitamin D Council and the Weston Price Foundation both interesting and useful.
Yes, as Daniel Dennett says, groping around trying to find the right questions is what philosophy is. The confusion can be upsetting for both philosophers and non-philosophers. Creating a space for questions and contradictory ideas is a must for any intellectual activity, however.
>18th-century scientists trying to make sense of heat
All that mucking about with the problems of phlogiston could have been a necessary step towards thermodynamics. Similarly, speculations about consciousness could turn out to be a necessary step towards AGI (or vice-versa).
Point taken. One reading of the article is that meta-consciousness is the new consciousness (whatever that was).
I think of consciousness as being 'what you are paying attention to and what it is like'. One problem with this is that when you're attending sufficiently strongly to something you can't actually notice what it is like; there isn't enough bandwidth free. Yet some of the associated ideas ('qualia') may linger in working memory for a more relaxed examination afterwards. Which proves that you were paying attention and that mental work was going on. (Perhaps it also shows that trying too hard is counter-productive due to lack of integration with the rest of the mind.)
This seems consistent with my experience that when I'm attending hard to a task I have no idea what it is like.
>For instance, it is the occurrence of a sense perception that triggers the metacognitive realization one is perceiving something. N, in turn, evokes X by directing attention back to it: the realization one is perceiving something naturally shifts one’s mental focus back to the original perception. So we end up with a back-and-forth cycle of evocations whereby X triggers N, which in turn evokes X, which again triggers N, and so forth.
This also seems plausible since we can't perceive a new thing accurately without a prior expectation of what it's like. This could be solved by an iterative cycle of increasing realisticness and accuracy.
