I think I can make this! Any tips for identifying the group?

Data point: I would love to come to something like this, but I'm out of town.

I still have no idea why everyone's first reaction was to snap their own fingers.

Important data:

1) Everyone did it. 2) Everyone claimed not to know why they did it (I am taking you at your word - that your dialog is representative)

Both of these point to something close to an involuntary reflex.

Recall the game, "Simon Says". That game is fun because it is hard (under the right conditions) to avoid doing what someone commands you to do. It takes concentration to hear the command and then not perform the action. One might have thought (and one would have been wrong) that someone playing "Simon Says" would hear the command, then decide whether it was in the right form, then follow it. Everyone wants to play it this way and thus win. But the nervous system has a strong tendency to short-circuit the path from hearing the command to performing the action. You try to consider the command carefully before performing the action, but you fail!

This suggests that the mental path from thought to action is only imperfectly under voluntary control. What it takes to suppress, or amplify, this path is presumably not simple.

I'd like to meet some LW people. Couple suggestions in/around Harvard Sq: http://www.cambridgecommonrestaurant.com/ http://www.grendelsden.com/ http://www.johnharvards.com

Hi.

I've posted comments twice, I think, but my read/write ratio is high enough that I think I still count here.

Thanks for writing this article. If the feedback helps, I found your self-disclosure much more illustrative than "gooey."

I made a point of noting non-sadness deficiencies in my status

Did you formally track your mental state at any point? The luminosity series, among other things, has gotten me thinking about the fact that my overall historical impression of my mood status has been a pretty poor indicator of my day-to-moment mood status. I can get fuzzy snapshots by reading through my scattered past writing, but am missing a lot of data. So I've been working on a system to do some more regular, granular tracking, and I wondered if others here have a) found tracking effective at all, b) particular levels of granularity met your needs, c) found any particular system or tool helpful. (I'm considering building a tool for this process if I can't find one, and would happily share here if there's interest.)

Edit: This seems unclear on a re-read. I meant to say my general impression of my past moods approximates the sum of my moment-to-moment moods poorly; I'm planning to take data to get a more accurate estimate.

An excellent parable! The argument against the Nazism meme is quite well laid out, though Colonel Frank comes off a bit like a straw man.

Unfortunately, I think this argument misses the main difficulty the General faces. It's easy to see that it would be better to replace the movement with something more sound. But policy makers cannot simply decide whether to preserve the Nazism meme. Actually changing dominant cultural ideas is a tremendously difficult problem, especially when the belief framework includes a sense of persecution. You cannot simply make it disappear by banning swastikas and slapping pro-democracy slogans on public transit vehicles.

The demise of the Nazi ideology may hold important lessons about effecting cultural change. There is still tremendous guilt about the Nazi movement in the German psyche - they even avoid the word, preferring the abbreviation NS. What happened to cause such a rapid and thorough reversal? Was it simply the revelation of the massive atrocities? I don't know, but I don't think this cause is by itself sufficient. Clearly many factors influenced the fall of Fascism; I would be curious to see this reversal studied in depth.

On a related note, all discussions of religion are now over, and we have lost. Does it make it better that Yvain knew it going in?