Psychology
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On prayer.
Czeslaw Milosz wrote that “if there is no other shore / We will walk that aerial bridge all the same.”
AA, addiction, Alcoholics Anonymous, Aphrodite, Czeslaw Milosz, deities, God, healing, higher power, impulse control, jail, jail poetry, mythology, myths, naloxone, Narcan, odinism, On Prayer, opiates, opiod epidemic, poetry, prayer, prison, recovery, rehab, rehabilitation, Robert Hass, teaching in jail, Thor, TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation
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On sexuality: dolphins.
Where ambiguity isn’t safe, people can be only portions of themselves.
AB, An Aquarium, Aryan Brotherhood, bisexual, CAConrad, criminal justice, desire, dolphin, dolphin sex, dolphins, Enkidu, gay, Gilgamesh, homophobia, homosexuality, human sexuality, identity, internet, jail poetry, Jeffrey Yang, poem, poetry, punishment, Queer, racism, Roman soldiers, samurai, sexual identity, sexuality, sexuality in jail, sexuality in prison, Spencer Reece, teaching in jail, The Road to Emmaus, While Standing in Line for Death, white supremacy
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On psychotropic drugs and optimism.
An optimist can’t help but see the world as it could be.
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On ethics and Luke Dittrich’s “Patient H.M.”
When scientists act unethically, it undermines trust in science … which breaks my heart, since the scientific method is awesome.
A Story of Memory Madness and Family Secrets, Arieh Warshel, biochemistry, brain surgery, cell biology, data, enzymology, epilepsy, ethics, fraud, GCC185, graduate school, human experimentation, immunofluorescence, ketosteroid isomerase, KSI, lobotomy, Luke Dittrich, medial temporal lobe, membrane trafficking, memory, MIT, MPR, Patient H.M., primary data, psychosurgery, publish or perish, reproducibility crisis, research, research ethics, RhoBTB3, science, scientific method, shredding files, Stanford, Suzanne Corkin
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On addiction, crime, Buddhism, and exorcism.
If we want people to heal, we shouldn’t keep them inside bleak boxes.
abuse, addiction, agency, Buddhism, child molesters, Demon, demons, drug dealers, exorcism, free will, gang murder, Harvard commencement, hurt people hurt people, I Will Find You, incarceration, J.K. Rowling, jail, Jason Shiga, Joanna Conners, liberation rite, mythology, nurture, parenting, penitence, poverty, prison, prison rape, Rowling, sex offenders, solitary, Tibetan mythology, trauma
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On goals and Jack Gilbert’s “Failing and Falling.”
We either fail to reach our goals … or they fail us. Striving is fine, but we should enjoy the process of life.
Adam Alter, beauty, death, exercise, Facebook, Failing and Falling, fulfillment, goal-oriented, goals, growth, Icarus, Instagram, Irresistible, Jack Gilbert, Jack Vance, jail poetry, meaning of life, Pattiann Rogers, poetry, prison poetry, process, process-oriented, rec yard, tech companies, The Demon Princes, The Greatest Grandeur, The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, unhappiness, University of Phoenix, withdrawal
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On idle time, coincidence, and Vivek Shanbhag’s ‘Ghachar Ghochar.’
An idle mind often reads supernatural portent into every coincidence.
45, Annie Jacobsen, atheists in foxholes, author as God, CIA, coincidence, conspiracy, conspiracy theory, curse, Donald Trump, foreshadowing, fraud, germination of supernatural belief, Ghachar Ghochar, hewn stone, idle, idle mind, jubilee, lost car keys, Magic, numerology, Phenomena, PotUS, precognition, prophecy, Puharich, science, speculation, Srinath Perur, statistical manipulation, statistical significance, supernatural, Trump, Vivek Shanbhag, wealth
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On government intrusion and addiction.
To beat the opiate epidemic, we need strong communities. But prosecutors’ reliance on police informants destroys communities.
AA, addiction, Akhil Reed Amar, ants on the melon, Bill of Rights, constitution, Cor Urbis, creative writing, Daniel Dennett, death before dishonor, economics, emotion, evolution of emotion, exclusionary rule, FBI, Fourth Amendment, freedom of religion, game theory, Homo economicus, human evolution, jailhouse tattoos, Jeremy Waldron, mandatory minimums, mass incarceration, mosque, NA, opiate epidemic, poetry, poetry in jail, police, police informants, policing, prison, prisoners’ dilemma, privacy, protection, rats, recovery, repeated prisoners’ dilemma, rights, search, signaling, snooping, teaching writing in jail, tip, Virginia Adair, War on Drugs
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On theft and bullying.
Is it fair for the biggest kid on the playground to steal your lunch? What about the cleverest?
Bill Watterson, bullying, Calvin and Hobbes, Cathy O’Neil, civil war, contract theory, Darling I Love You, dumb money, equality, fairness, false belief, financial misconduct, graft, hedge funds, high-frequency traders, human nature, inequality, Leviathan, Ludwig Wittgenstein, might makes right?, Mutts, Patrick McDonnell, Philosophical Investigations, state violence, stealing, Syria, the natural world, theft, Thomas Hobbes, violence, Weapons of Math Destruction, white collar crime
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On perception and learning.
We adults can’t fix the world until we learn from children that it’s okay to be wrong.
analytical philosophy, animal cognition, automated image analysis, Brendan Wenzel, Bring me a slab, childhood development, children’s books, chimpanzee learning, computer learning to find cats, computer science, data clustering, David Lancy, falsifiable theories, Google, human development, identification, language acquisition, learning, Liu Cixin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, mental filters, neural networks, New York Times, parenting, perception, personhood, Philosophical Investigations, principal component analysis, Quoc Le, science, scientific method, Slab!, Stanford, teaching, The Anthropology of Childhood, The Three-Body Problem, They All Saw a Cat, unsupervised learning, Upshot, what is a cat, what is red, Youtube cat videos
Frank Brown Cloud 