If I were forced to identify one neurotransmitter for our culture, it would be noradrenaline (norepinephrine) - technology that induces stress, hyper-arousal, fear, and attention to threat. Even if dopamine was hedonic (it’s not) our culture is not one maximizing pleasure.

I see a lot of people reposting this as mocking zombie thought experiments in philosophy, but the first element of 'Anglo-American' philosophy is to be precise with wording - what Sue describes is not the zombie thought experiment and in no way challenges physicalism.

Genes play a meaningful role in all complex traits - even dog ownership! And no, it's not a good argument to claim that genetics can't play a role in changes in obesity rates because genes haven't changed in the last 40 years.

The claim that happiness is a choice is a pernicious myth - the most important determinent of happiness is the social and material aspects of life in a community and country.

This is a basic misconception about the philosophical issue of free will. Beginning with theological determinism, free will accounts are all about the conditions in which an agent can be construed as responsible & giving free will broady to non-human animals would be a reductio.

Compatibilism is the only neurobiologically plausible account of free will that can coherently respond to sourcehood and luck arguments and demonstrates agency as the capacity to exert causal influence that's consistent with contemporary causal frameworks (causal Bayes nets etc).

If anyone would know...

Athletes DO NOT need running shoes to run a marathon. You can adapt to running in loafers.

Another inefficient training ride not on Zwift...

I think Tse is wrong here re interventionism. It can explain causation in the brain by additional variables, conditional probabilities, etc. I suspect Tse uses 'criterial' causation since he's a libertarian & interventionism's counterfactual dependency isn't hospitable to that.

1) I did a deep dive on the debate over whether social media is ruining teens' mental health. TLDR: The evidence is much weaker than Jonathan Haidt suggests, but not as negligible as his critics claim.

vox.com/24127431/smart…

I am happy to announce that the 2024 Simon Rottenberg Award is awarded to Colin Camerer from Caltech.
His insights into human behavior using sports and games has had far-reaching implications and a huge impact in economics research.
Colin Camerer Caltech
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

I was fortunate to spend a decade in the same lab as Crick at the Salk - lab ritual was tea everyday at 3 where we all stopped and discussed the brain with Francis for an hour or so. Despite Watson's quip about a modest mood, Crick was unparalled in his scrutiny of his own ideas.

In The Anxious Child, Jonathan Haidt suggests that: “There was little sign of an impending mental illness crisis among adolescents in the 2000s. Then, quite suddenly, in the early 2010s, things changed.” However, in my view, CDC data tells a different story. 🧵 #MentalHealthcrisis