Stuart McMillen

I love the question; James Lovelock came up with Gaia Theory, the idea that Earth was a self-regulating system, illustrated by a warming Earth evolving flowers which reflect more sunlight so they can stay cooler, and a cooling Earth evolving flowers which absorb more sunlight so they can stay warmer, which act to cool/warm the planet (sortof; IIRC). In one of his last books before he died (written at age ~100) he suggests that the warming and expanding Sun means there isn't enough time for Earth to re-evolve sentient life again.

We used oil that seeped out of the surface, and coal that was accessible by pick and shovel. That's become much harder to find now, we have to make floating oil rigs and drill kilometers under the Gulf of Mexico to extract oil, and ship it internationally to refine it. There's no way primitive people could do that again.

Buckminster Fuller was thinking about this 75 years ago when he came up with the idea of 'energy slaves', nicely illustrated by this online comic[2] about how much oil energy we use to keep modern comfortable civilisation going.

So I guess it depends how far the collapse goes! And whether there is heavy farming and earth moving machinery still around and the resources to fill them with biodiesel to pick up from existing farms and mines, and if there are nearly working industries to feed electricity into, or if we have to fall back to making charcoal from wood, or if we're back to a few remote tribes a few generations removed from…

>ctrl+f "rat park"

Not found!? Well, I'm just the motile conglomeration of vermin for the job! "Rat Park", a utopia for rats, is (IMO) a critical component of the pushback against the disease model of addiction. An illustrated summary can be found in this lovely comic [0], while more interested parties can peruse the works of Dr Bruce Alexander, in the form of a blog-retrospective [1], or a slightly more technical presentation to the Canadian Senate [2], or his excellent book, The Globalization of Addiction: A Study of Poverty of the Spirit [3].

A layman-readable synthesis goes something like this: folk wisdom holds that some drugs are insanely addictive, as an inherent property of the drug. But this has generally [4] been borne out by introspective interviews of inveterate drug abusers and highly technical experimentation on lab animals (mostly social animals, like primates and rats). Introspection, for most domains of psychological study, is never used and treated as hearsay (it's not a contentious claim in psychology that people aren't good at examining their own mental states in a scientifically useful way). The methods of the experiments on social animals like rats and primates often dictate cramped, isolated and impoverished conditions. The "Rat Park" study took normal lab rats and placed them in an enormous array filled with nesting-boxes, large open areas, wheels and toys. The control rats, by contrast, were treated in every way identically to a standard addiction…

I'm not who you asked, but I remember being one of the few quiet boys in my classes when I was a young kid in elementary school (in the US that's like ages 4-10, grades kindergarten through 5th grade). I was resentful of the ones who were always being loud and roughhousing in class and talking loud and not doing their work, and they were always boys.

But when I passed a test to get into a better school than my elementary school, that never happened. Everyone was respectful and followed the rules a whole lot better. There was loud talking sometimes, but everyone always got quiet and listened when the teachers spoke, always did their work, always cleaned up after themselves and were respectful. Meanwhile, I heard from my friends who had gone to another school that there were fistfights all the time and that that behavior I described never stopped.

Anyway, this is to say that I don't think this is a thing inherent to boys, maybe more like culture and social class.

On the other hand, this also isn't to say "Screw them, they just need to be better." If boys are doing worse in school now, then why? Maybe it's, like you said, a lack of physical activity. Recess has been getting cut at elementary schools.

I came across a comic that portrayed a study done on a town before it got television, and after it got television: https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/town-without-television-1-notel/

With TV, people gave up more quickly on problems given to them, and children's acts of…

> Variations of this concept are frequently used by drug addicts to justify continued behavior. "It's not my fault, it's society's fault!". Taking ownership of actions and consequences is one of the key pivot points in helping people get control.

I don't think these are mutually exclusive. Society wide problems cause a huge fraction of the population to experience severe emotional trauma, and the process of addiction largely seems to be an experience of trying to escape the feelings associated with that. If you can understand this process, you can take ownership of it, and have a path to beating the addiction itself.

Ultimately, there is a lot of disagreement about what addiction is and how it really works, but I think this emotional trauma aspect is a key part of explaining why one person can use a drug recreationally or for medical purposes without addiction, and another can't. It explains a lot of weird observations that just didn't make sense with the classical chemical/neutrotransmitter model of addiction.

These links I think help explain this better than I can:

How Childhood Trauma Leads to Addiction - Gabor Maté
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVg2bfqblGI

Comic explaining the Rat Park research on addiction
https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/rat-park/

These ideas have explained why I personally have never been able to fight addictions through willpower alone, but have been able to eliminate addiction with other techniques that seem unrelated- therapy,…

I've been reading a lot about this "ancestral hijacking" lately and have tried to cut out on a lot of them. My phone now only has two possible notifications: phone calls and Things app. I have 0 social apps or games. I am also slowly cutting out sugars and extra carbs. I think you guys should read about supernormal stimulus [1].

There is this comic [2] about supernormal stimulus that shows how man, and man alone, has the ability to overcome it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus

[2] http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/supernormal-stimuli/

alias: zevra interests: analyzing and watching people, computer networking, technical theatre, an academic interest in fraud and deception, spiritual beliefs and societal conventions and rules specifically how they effect individuals and populations, lots of other things I can't remember right now. language(s): english link to something you think is cool: https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/deviance-in-the-dark contact info: zevra-contact-5@darken.space