CDS Journal

  Treaty 6 notes In reading more about Treaty 6 and Treaties in general, I've learned some basic things. Treaties are just agreements... contracts. Nothing more. However, the reason there seems to be a different name used for them is because they are typically created outside any single country's legal system. This is due to the fact that they are usually agreements between sovereign nations. There are three important things I learned at this point. First, there is no clear authority to enforce treaties because while there is such a thing as International Law, it is not an absolute authority... adherence to it is voluntary and therefore "possession is nine tenths of the law" is the reality of that system. Second, while treaties can be between any kinds of entities (individuals, businesses, etc), the most common kinds are nations... and the bigger and more established the nation, the more power it has to decide whether or not it wants to honor the treaty. The collectio...

I learned of Quentin Tarantino's thoughts on the movie Joker and was interested in his explanation of what he called "subversion". The term means " a process by which the values and principles of a system in place are contradicted or reversed, in an attempt to transform the established social order and its structures of power, authority, hierarchy, and social norms ". Tarantino uses the term to explain that this is what is happening in the climax scene of Joker because he says the filmmakers " got the audience to think like a fucking lunatic and to want something they would never normally want ". I disagree with Tarantino and, possibly, with the understanding of Subversion itself. As I have come to understand human psychology, it is far more likely that what's being changed in the process Tarantino is describing is that a more honest level of morality is being revealed. The definition of Subversion suggests that people's morality i...

"In order to understand how people were induced to obey unjust regimes and participate in atrocities such as the holocaust, Milgram set up an experiment. Volunteers were told they were taking part in scientific research to improve memory. Separated by a screen, the teacher would ask the learner questions in a word game and administer and electric shock when the answer was incorrect. They were told to increase the voltage with each wrong answer. Two thirds of volunteers were prepared to administer potentiall fatal electric shock when encouraged to do so by what they perceived to be a legitamite authority figure... in this case, a person in a white coat." Milgram experiment 1963 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kzd6Ew3TraA Milgram experiment - https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

Curiosity Cures Addiction Instead of relying on willpower, the brain makes choices and forms behavior based on a built-in, primitive, reward-based system called reinforcement learning. Whenever the brain has a choice, it gravitates toward the more rewarding option. By intentionally bringing awareness and curiosity to any action, you upend the reward value of a habit, and in turn, change your response to it. https://www.inverse.com/mind- body/curiosity-awareness- behavior-change/ This can be tied in with: - TED talk about breaking bad habits by being more curious about them,   - A toddlers' natural expression of curiosity by asking "Why?" - The "AI Stop Button Problem" (pressing your own stop button becomes a way to hack your own reward system) - The idea of "doing things backwards" in order to slow down to override our brain's tendency to ignore detail to be efficient (ie. reading a paragraph backwards makes it easier to spellcheck it) - The use of...

A friend of mine told me that after practicing the game of darts for long enough, he experienced a noticeable change… it got noticeably easier to play better. I’ve seen this phenomenon explained in an experiment someone did called the Backwards Bicycle where they demonstrated that after a certain amount of practice, the brain simply “adapts” to the activity being done and the experience from the point of view of the person doing it is that its like what I’ve heard described as “getting over the hump” of learning something… the point where lots of the processes involved in the activity become automatic and don’t require as much conscious intentional thought to execute… making the activity require significantly less effort than it did previously. While exploring this whole idea more, I found something interesting that refers to the " Reticular Activating System " (RAS), which is described as a human radar system, and that it is a key thing to understand when it comes to learni...

The "5 Monkey Experiment" is a very common story told as a way to try to understand human behavior... but it is usually presented as a way to say that humans are "flawed". If you do a Google search, you'll find many tellings of the story... here's one: LINK The story talks about understanding behavior by explaining how a group of monkeys behaves in an experiment... but there is one critical thing missing from it... the experiment does not account for the presence of the experimenter and the impact this has on the outcome. In the experiment, a group of monkeys is treated with some negative experience (ie. sprayed with cold water when they try to get some bananas). This negative experience is just accepted as the foundation of the experiment and there is no attempt to see THAT part of it as critical to the entire story. The monkeys behavior BEGINS with a negative experience... and their natural behavior is what simply passes it on efficiently. If the initial e...

This post contains notes about another post - CDS Journal: The Trap (2007) The Connection Between Conditional Love and the Cold War This documentary explains that during the cold war in the 1950’s, Friedrich Hayek maintained that societal altruism was destined to fail, and that unregulated individual self-interest was a better solution. The documentary explains how his idea began to prove true with scientific studies into the 1960’s and 1970's. In order to explain, the documentary spends time showing how things unfolded… which involves understanding what the concept of Game Theory is, how it came about, and how in the early 1960’s a psychiatrist named R.D. Laing used it to study private family life. Here is a rough transcript of the section of the documentary that talks specifically about the family study and the results. If you want to jump to the section of the video that these words are transcribed from, click HERE (Part 1, 24m 12s) : In institutions, Laing had noticed that ...