What happens when an egghead hatches? Whatever it is, I bet it's not good.
/pessimist
Is your morning coffee half empty? Do you feel it's always darkest before it goes pitch black? Have you ever wondered why you, like each of us here, is such a pessimist – apart from, y'know, the fact everything inevitably goes horribly wrong all the time? Well, now scientists think they may have figured the out answer. …
I thought we were all supposed to install something else now.
Can't remember the cute name. Perhaps Ethereal, no - that's WireShark.
Oh, Wire-sumthin.... WireGuard - https://www.wireguard.com/
I think my PIA OpenVPN vendor is thinking about moving to WireGuard but these things take time, and a reason to do so.
Pessimists were tinfoil hat wearers. Now, post the events above, Pessimists seem closer to realists... There is an inherit bias anyway is using terms that evoke immediate negative connotations. Behavioral Science is a science like Economics if that's even a science post 2008.
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Economics, the dismal science.
It's worth remembering that Carlyle called it that because economic theory undermined his support for slavery. Because of this it gets at least one cheer from me in spite of the idiocies perpetrated by politicians in the name of economic principles.
"The researchers believe that activating the caudate nucleus drove the animals to focus more on the negative consequences of the reward, and made them more apathetic about the value of the juice.""
And how do they know that stimulating the caudate nucleus did not make the blast of air more painful, disagreeable, etc...
The cause and effect seems highly debatable here....I think if I had a choice between having my brain "stimulated" with electric probes might actually put me off a lot of things when the other choice is not to have the brain stimulated....
Indeed. Remember that the journalist's version isn't the same as the actual scientific paper. In particular, the j-version tends to focus on the paper's context and its plausible conclusions, as well as soundbites from the authors or peers, rather more than all the necessary scientific caveats and details of technique present in the actual work.
Consider this sentence of the abstract, and in particular its fourth word: "Here, we identified potential sources of such persistent states by microstimulating the striatum of macaques performing a task by which we could quantitatively estimate their subjective pessimistic states using their choices to accept or reject conflicting offers."
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people ask me why I am so pessimistic I reply "Simple. It saves time".
It is Friday afternoon. Almost beer o'clock. The weekend is looking good.
That seems pretty optimistic to me. Shouldn't you be assuming the pub will be shut, or that your other half will have too many jobs lined up?
Me, I bought barbecue charcoal, even though the forecast is rain. Life's too short to be pessismistic. Or is that too pessimistic an outlook?
Science has always had a fascination with electricity on the body. Even, for the longest time, bringing back the dead.
If you had something in your head constantly buzzing your brain, an additional blast of air in the face might be one straw too many.
Now, if you shove that wire somewhere else, perhaps you'd be more receptive?
Their own research possibly identified the area of the brain that might interfere with risk/reward assessment and have run a experiment that may have shown this for a small group of tortured monkeys.
Of course this might just be my own pessimistic view - so I'm off for some fermented fruit juice whist having air blown in my face (we all need hobbies).....
The fact that some of us are pessimistic and cynical has nothing to do with the shape of some brain nodule or other, but simply the fact that we've had to deal with all the fads, nonsense, bullshit and bad management found in the IT industry over the last x years every day in our work?
It's an integral part of what makes me, me. I also need my scepticism, my bullshit detector and my immediate, reflexive and unrelenting response to anyone spouting buzzwords or inviting me to a "meeting," which is mangler-speak for wasting every bugger's time while trying to reassign credit for achievements upwards in the hierarchy of incompetence.
Quite aside from us being nobody's fools, these qualities allow us to navigate the fog that lays heavy and grey across the rolling, bull-pat littered landscape of this industry. Misanthropy, assumption that everyone is an arse trying to make your life difficult, a healthy aversion to giving anyone money for things that can be done in-house, never being at anyone's mercy for data recovery, being very stingy with permissions, having two-part epoxy for USB ports and having root would also be advantageous in this position.
I am not a pessimist. I am paranoid. My major jobs have required paranoia.
I ran and helped maintain a large Van de Graaf generator. It had high voltages all over the place. Bad things could happen if those voltages got loose. The machine even gave me electric shocks when I wasn't careful to keep me alert.
And then I joined the museum world. Let me put it straight: entropy is out to get your stuff. Your job is to find all the ways entropy can get in, and block them.
As for the glass being half full, or half empty? Forget it. The glass is twice as large as it needs to be to handle the drink.
a small device that uses electrodes planted "through" the caudate nuclei, with nano-scale electric "shocks" introduced using a Raspberry Pi with a step-down transformer "thinking out loud, dunno if it even makes sense"?
Such a device could theoretically "induce" pessimism. Useful for the three-letter agencies?
The glass is neither half full nor half empty, it is at 50% of maximum capacity.
All these people who spout the glass half full/empty crap are morons who take homeopathic sugar pills and believe that the moon landings were fake. Reality has repeatedly proven your beliefs wrong, but you persist in living in cloud cuckoo land with a gormless grin on your face. If it makes you happy to believe all that crap, then you go for it. If you try and ram it down my throat then you are gonna get exposed to a verbal thrashing that will make your tiny little brain shrivel and hide.
As for the experiments, if you electrocuted my brain while offering me fruit juice I'd also refuse all fruit juice for the enforceable future. I'd also be plotting your downfall!