timelets

“...your Russki is insecure, wants to be respected, to be feared like the old Soviet Union. They need recognition, and they hate their second-tier status in the superpower stakes. That’s why Putin’s putting together USSR 2.0, and no one is going to stand in his way.

...as the chain-wrapped corpse of the Soviet was exhumed, hauled dripping out of the swamp, and its heart was started again, and the old prisons were filled anew..."

Red Sparrow, by Jason Matthews.

“When he was finally assassinated in 96 CE, the Roman aristocracy exhaled in relief. Many among them, foremost the courageous, had fallen victim to “that most savage beast,” as a contemporaneous writer described him. Especially during the last years of his regime, he had stifled life in the capital of the far-flung Roman Empire. Survival was bought with submissiveness and silence, enforced by informers who abolished any free exchange of thought and speech. After fifteen years of fear—a time span during which “young men had reached old age, old men almost the end of their days”—even survivors were mere shadows of their former selves, as if “they had survived themselves.”

--- Christopher B. Krebs. “A Most Dangerous Book.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent promised to go big to bring down bond yields. So far, his efforts still aren’t big enough.

https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/bessents-latest-buyback-move-leaves-investors-wanting-more-82d0268b

Math can be difficult, and for those with high levels of mathematics-anxiety (HMAs), math is associated with tension, apprehension, and fear.

...when anticipating an upcoming math-task, the higher one’s math anxiety, the more one increases activity in regions associated with visceral threat detection, and often the experience of pain itself (bilateral dorso-posterior insula). Interestingly, this relation was not seen during math performance, suggesting that it is not that math itself hurts; rather, the anticipation of math is painful. Our data suggest that pain network activation underlies the intuition that simply anticipating a dreaded event can feel painful. These results may also provide a potential neural mechanism to explain why HMAs tend to avoid math and math-related situations, which in turn can bias HMAs away from taking math classes or even entire math-related career paths.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3485285/
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/09/universities-prohibiting-ai-classroom/688509/

The dichotomy that separates humans into motivational and cognitive goes back thousands of years, at least to Aristotle’s distinction between the rational soul – residing in the head (and responsible for cognition), and the appetitive soul – residing in the chest (pertaining to motivation).

... instead of separating cognition and motivation into two separate systems, we propose that any epistemic activity is thoroughly suffused by motivation.

... we first characterize the process of inference, the quintessential mechanism of knowledge construction. Next, we describe the role of motivation in this process. We then identify the parallels between active inference and epistemic motivation and explore their complementarities. Finally, we identify possible applications of their joint epistemic perspective.



All Thinking is ‘Wishful’ Thinking
11 Apr 2020 Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Co-authors:Kruglanski AW, Jasko K, Friston K

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2020.03.004
https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10115009/3/Friston_All%20Thinking%20is%20%27Wishful%27%20Thinking_AAM.pdf

President Trump’s demeanor, name calling, absurd and reckless rhetoric is unbecoming of the office of the president, is a bad example of leadership, and is hurting America’s reputation and place in the world. At this point, he’s no different than an internet troll or one of the many millions of bots that say awful horrible things.

In the past, I supported him because of the policies he professed to support and passionately campaigned on, but now as president he’s been revealed to be the Trojan horse who enforces many of the policies he claimed to be against.

I’m sorry I didn’t see it earlier and wish I had never supported him.

My biggest concern remains that as Donald Trump loses power and influence he will turn more and more towards war and take actions to make himself feel more powerful and in control, as he grasp and clings to the Oval Office.

https://x.com/FmrRepMTG/status/2091149612472062328

Путинизм – это высшая и заключительная стадия бандитского капитализма в России. Та стадия, на которой, как говаривал один полузабытый классик, буржуазия выбрасывает за борт знамя демократических свобод и прав человека.

Путинизм – это война, это «консолидация» нации на почве ненависти к какой-то этнической группе, это – наступление на свободу слова и информационное зомбирование, это изоляция от внешнего мира и дальнейшая экономическая деградация.

–– Андрей Пионтковский, 11 января 2000 года.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210515224000/https://www.yabloko.ru/Publ/Book/Fire/fire_002.html

Like Enlightenment reason more generally, liberalism has often proven emotionally unfulfilling and inept at cultivating solidarity. It has failed to grasp the power of the instinctual realm, and has ignored a darker, more anguished side of human nature in favor of a stubborn insistence on rationality. Long after his youthful succumbing to fascism and later abandonment of Romania for Paris, the twentieth century Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran asked, “And what, basically, is the West, what is the great French civilization, the idea of courtesy, other than a boundary that one accepts on account of reason?”

https://dokumen.pub/one-hundred-years-of-communist-experiments-9789633864067.html

Мне было весьма комфортно (в т.ч. в психологическом плане) жить заграницей, в западной Европе (благо скайп и интеренет давал достаточно русского языка). Хочу объяснить этот эффект в сказочном стиле-). Когда начинаешь жить там, то через некоторое время обустройства и акклиматизации, замечаешь, что вокруг тебя овцы. Натурально, утром идёшь на работу и чувствуешь, что окружающие овечки. У меня как-то с недосыпу даже некоторый оптический обман зрения был... Там я впервые остро ощутила себя волком. Возможно, еще волчонком, но всё равно. Ну да, наденешь овечью шкурку и ходишь, серый нос наружу торчит и ушки треугольные. То есть, действительно, люди вокруг стадные, воспитанно благостные, они привыкли к детально расписанным правилам, всё хорошо пока им следуешь, а если чуть нет, то таблетка. И тут я такая - всегда настороже, с "культура есть ширма", с подсознательным пониманием "всё может разрушиться сразу и совсем, но это нифига не повод", с "делай, что должен" и с "жизнь-борьба", в конце концов, со вшитой памятью о войне.
https://roni-14.livejournal.com/488101.html

“As an economist, Keynes always saw himself responding to the nineteenth-century tradition in economic reasoning. Alfred Marshall and the economists who followed J. S. Mill had assumed that the default condition of markets, and therefore of the capitalist economy at large, was stability. Thus instabilities—whether economic depression, or distorted markets, or government interference—were to be expected as part of the natural order of economic and political life; but they did not need to be theorized as part of the necessary nature of economic activity itself.

Over time he came to the position that the default condition of a capitalist economy could not be understood in the absence of instability and the inevitably accompanying inefficiencies. The classical economic assumption, that equilibrium and rational outcomes were the norm, instability and unpredictability the exception, were now reversed.

Moreover, in Keynes’s emerging theory, whatever it was that caused instability could not be addressed from within a theory which was unable to take that instability into account. The basic innovation here is ... you cannot expect systems to resolve themselves without intervention. Thus, not only do markets not self-regulate according to a hypothetically invisible hand, they actually accumulate self-destructive distortions over time.

Keynes’s point is an elegantly symmetrical bookend to Adam Smith’s claim in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith argued that capitalism does not in itself generate the values that make its success possible; it inherits them from the pre-capitalist or non-capitalist world, “or else borrows them (so to speak) from the language of religion or ethics. Values such as trust, faith, belief in the reliability of contracts, assumptions that the future will keep faith with past commitments and so on have nothing to do with the logic of markets per se, but they are necessary for their functioning. To this Keynes added the argument that capitalism does not generate the social conditions necessary for its own sustenance."

--- Tony Judt. “Thinking the Twentieth Century.”