psychology

Gray Matter

  • Reading time:2 mins read

It seems to me there is some kind of association between comfort with probability or uncertainty and understanding of compassion or the theory of mind. It’s something about relative, rather than absolute, reasoning. Where I see a lack in one, I often see a lack in the other.

Comfort with one doesn’t necessarily equate to comfort with the other, of course. People will specialize and compartmentalize. But, like… there’s something here, that I’ve not yet picked apart.

Related to this, there’s this thing about autistics supposedly lacking empathy, right. This is based on tests that ask one to draw conclusions about someone else’s mental state based on limited information. Each question has an absolute, correct answer. The way autistics tend to address things like this is, “I don’t want to presume. I’m not that person. There are, like, a thousand possible explanations. Here are maybe a top five, in terms of probability.” And that causes them to fail, and the tester to conclude they have no empathy.

In the neurotypical mind, or at least that of those who pathologize the autistic mind, a failure to project onto another person and so to expect that they’d behave exactly like one’s self, in favor of recognizing that everyone is different and has their own set of reasons for doing things, is considered a sign of defect. Which, uh, in terms of the framing of the exam, is, like. You can see the absurdity here, right—the complete and utter lack of theory-of-mind that goes into the testing of an autistic’s theory-of-mind. To be “empathetic” by this perspective is to fail to understand that people are different.

Anyway. This kind of an expectation that everyone else is some sub-facet of one’s own self, it seems to line up with stuff like trouble with large numbers or what a likely chance is as opposed to a remote possibility. Playing the lottery every week and getting angry each time when you fail to win. Black-and-white thinking. Either it is or it isn’t, and if you say it’s not that simple then you’re fucking around and not to be trusted.

Sock me in the stomach three more times

  • Reading time:3 mins read
In retrospect some elements of Big come off creepier than they were intended, or would have been perceived at the time. In the early ’80s when children vanished, people weren’t so much worried about molestation as they were about bodily harm. The assumption was that the motive for kidnapping was financial gain, rather than a personal drive. What other use is a kid, really, than ransoming him off?

Naive, maybe. But look at the way that products were advertised even back then. Would you buy something based on those ad campaigns? The 1980s may not seem that long ago, but our assumptions and attitudes about the world have changed so much. Racial, sexual, cultural understanding and acceptance are becoming more the norm. Taboo subjects have become everyday discussion. Even things like basic psychology have developed and spread so far.

This movie is grounded in the same mid-’80s American middle-class mindset as much children’s entertainment of the era, written by baby boomers more inclined to reflect on their own rosy memories of childhood than to observe the world and the real logistics around them. The kids don’t speak and interact like kids; they behave the way that adults remembered themselves in the 1950s. Hell, the whole theme of the movie is some baby boomer yearning for his own youth. Except sort of inverted.

I think I can appreciate this movie a little better as an adult, even given its weird cultural obliviousness. As a kid I remember it annoying me to no end. Everything was wrong. Why was everyone so excited about insect Transformers? Insecticons had been around for years at that point. The bulk of the oh-so-droll jokes about social security numbers and workplace politics bored me or went over my head. The only appeal the movie had for me was the setpieces like the FAO Schwartz piano duet, Tom Hanks’ apartment hijinks, and all the Zoltar business. It was all flash and curiosity. Was that really what it was like to move into your own apartment? Was that really what it was like to get a job? Wow, it would be great to be left alone to wander around in FAO Schwartz, or that carnival.

Now I can stand back and understand the movie’s ambition. I still marvel at its blinkered vision, but from within a cultural context that I can appreciate. As a case study, it gets a person thinking.

The Pathology of Game Design

  • Reading time:18 mins read
Originally published by Next Generation.

As I entered adolescence, my mother decided in her wisdom that I was destined to be an actor. That I showed no particular enthusiasm or indeed talent did not dampen this enterprise for years to follow. One summer, between calls for music videos and hypothetical summer blockbusters, I chanced into a tryout for a hypothetical Blockbuster ad. To the best I can recollect, the company was adding Genesis and Super Nintendo games to its rental library, and to demonstrate the premise was sending out a net for the archetypal game-playing teenager.

Thus I found myself lost across a desk from a pockmarked man with a mustache. When the man asked me to show him my “videogame” acting, I hunched over and concentrated at a spot a few yards ahead of me, miming my button presses with an imagined precision. I knotted my brow, maybe gritted my teeth or moved my lips as if to mutter. You can imagine where the scene goes from here. The director keeps asking for “more”, growing frustrated in proportion to my unease. He wants me to thrash in my chair, slam the buttons like a jackhammer, contort my face, and show him my best Beverly Hills orgasm. I am amazed; he patronizes me; I get to go home. Later I met the man they cast as the teenager; he was in his late twenties and had a habit of performing rude gestures to passers-by.

Fifteen years later, despite what seem obvious advances in technology and design, people don’t really see videogames any differently.

Cultivating Fear

  • Reading time:12 mins read
by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation, under the title “How to Make Fear“.

With Halloween at hand, surely there must be some way to warp the festive energy to our own analytical ends. Just see what happens when you invite us to a party! Don’t fret, though – though full of long words, our museum of terror takes the well-oiled form of a top ten list. We know how you like your information, and it’s in bite-sized individually wrapped treats. Please… be our guest.

Consumption

  • Reading time:1 mins read
It bugs me when people make a habit of getting rid of things. Whenever I see this, I can’t help but wonder. What else do they discard?