Note that the researchers have a downloadable Android app for using the technique at home.

For 20 min prior to sleep the experimenter played alternating audio and visual cues at 1-min intervals. Participants were instructed to practice a mental state of critical self-awareness, observing their thoughts and experiences each time they noticed a cue. This procedure associated the cues with the trained mental state. Subsequently, participants were allowed 90 min to nap, and the audio and visual cues were presented during REM sleep to activate self-awareness in dreams and elicit lucidity. A control group followed the same procedure but was not cued during sleep. All participants were instructed to signal their lucidity by looking left and right 4 times (LR signal). Signal-verified lucid dreams (SVLDs) qualified as dreams in which the LR signal was observed and the participant reported becoming lucid. Across the 2 nap times, this protocol induced SVLDs in 50% of cued participants. In the absence of cueing during sleep, participant SVLD rate was 17%. Of note, 3 successful participants had never before experienced a LD, suggesting this protocol may be effective across the general population.

https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fcns0000227

Instead of waiting for dreamers to tell us about a dream after it has ended, when they have transitioned to the waking state, we sought to obtain evidence showing that it is possible to interview them about their dreams at the time they are experiencing them. Our experimental goal is akin to finding a way to talk with an astronaut who is on another world, but in this case the world is entirely fabricated on the basis of memories stored in the brain. Demonstrating the viability of this “interactive dreaming”—when experimenter and dreamer communicate with each other in real time—would be a large step forward to promote future progress in dream research.

Here, we report multiple demonstrations of successful two-way communication during lucid dreams achieved by four independent scientific teams in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the USA. We substantiate the validity of this interactive-dreaming phenomenon by bringing together results obtained using a diverse set of strategies. Several methods for communicating into and out of dreams were used, as shown in Figure 1. Lucid dreamers were able to follow instructions to compute mathematical operations, answer yes-or-no questions, or discriminate stimuli in the visual, tactile, and auditory modalities. They were able to respond using volitional control of gaze direction or of different facial muscles. There were three different participant categories: (1) experienced lucid dreamers, (2) healthy people with minimal prior experience who we trained to lucid dream, and (3) a patient with narcolepsy, a neurological disorder characterized by excessive daytime sleepiness, short-latency REM sleep periods, and frequent lucid dreaming. Evidence of two-way communication was found with all three participant categories, and also with both nocturnal sleep and daytime naps.

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)00059-2

[Education about conspiracy theories] won’t be effective if it tells a too simplistic story, where all consensus claims are true and all conspiracy theories empty. In reality, a consensus can be wrong, and a conspiracy theory can sometimes point toward an overlooked or hidden truth — and the approach that Caulfield proposes, to say nothing of the idea of a centralized Office of Reality, seem likely to founder on these rocks. If you tell people not to listen to some prominent crank because that person doesn’t represent the establishment view or the consensus position, you’re setting yourself up to be written off as a dupe or deceiver whenever the consensus position fails or falls apart.

I could multiply examples of how this falling apart happens — I am old enough to remember, for instance, when only cranks doubted that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction — but the last year has given us a thuddingly obvious case study: In January and February of 2020, using a follow-the-consensus method of online reading could have given you a wildly misleading picture of the disease’s risks, how it was transmitted, whether to wear masks and more.

Is there an alternative to leaning so heavily on the organs of consensus? I think there might be. It would start by taking conspiracy thinking a little more seriously — recognizing not only that it’s ineradicable, but also that it’s a reasonable response to both elite failures and the fact that conspiracies and cover-ups often do exist.

If you assume that people will always believe in conspiracies, and that sometimes they should, you can try to give them a tool kit for discriminating among different fringe ideas, so that when they venture into outside-the-consensus territory, they become more reasonable and discerning in the ideas they follow and bring back.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/opinion/misinformation-conspiracy-theories.html

I forget where I ran across this, but it’s a pretty incisive critique of contemporary culture through the lens of Hollywood movies.

When Paul Verhoeven adapted Starship Troopers in the late 1990s, did he know he was predicting the future? The endless desert war, the ubiquity of military propaganda, a cheerful face shouting victory as more and more bodies pile up?

But the scene that left perhaps the greatest impact on the minds of Nineties kids—and the scene that anticipated our current cinematic age the best—does not feature bugs or guns. It is, of course, the shower scene, in which our heroic servicemen and -women enjoy a communal grooming ritual.

On the surface, it is idyllic: racial harmony, gender equality, unity behind a common goal—and firm, perky asses and tits.

And then the characters speak. The topic of conversation? Military service, of course. One joined for the sake of her political career. Another joined in the hopes of receiving her breeding license. Another talks about how badly he wants to kill the enemy. No one looks at each other. No one flirts.

A room full of beautiful, bare bodies, and everyone is only horny for war.

https://bloodknife.com/everyone-beautiful-no-one-horny/

Excellent essay by Greenwald.

That speech is “dangerous” and “incites violence” and therefore must be stifled has been the cry of censors for centuries. It is the claim used to try to silence Communists during the Cold War, Muslims during the War on Terror, and pro-Palestinian activists now.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-ongoing-death-of-free-speech

Interesting speculative interview with the founder of one of the major coding bootcamps:

https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/the-american-dream-as-a-service

The whole essay may not be worth reading for most, but I wanted to call out these bits where he gives some of the more amusing and/or troubling recent excesses of the journalistic consensus given in NYT, WaPo, etc:

Consider, for example, a Washington Post story about a New York University report calling claims of conservative censorship on social media “a form of disinformation.” The report says:

The claim of anti-conservative animus is itself a form of disinformation: a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it. No trustworthy large-scale studies have determined that conservative content is being removed for ideological reasons.

What I find troubling about that one is that it demonstrates how the term “disinformation” is being stretched lately to cover way too much.

I’m posting this next section specifically for the links:

As The Narrative gets more things wrong, the enforcement has become increasingly Kafkaesque. Today, you’ll get banned on social media for sharing statements by the WHO from a few months ago, or unedited vaccine trial results, on grounds of contradicting the WHO. This week’s front-page news was last week’s cancel-worthy conspiracy.

In the face of the public’s revolt, there is a growing inclination in the media to jettison objectivity in favor of antagonism. As a Times staffer said: “We’re at a barricades moment in our history. You decide: which side are you on?” According to The Narrative, there are only two sides: for or against The Narrative. Everyone on the other side is the same. When Elon Musk tweeted a meme about rejecting The Narrative, the Times responded with an article that consisted of his name and a salad of loosely connected words with negative associations like “incel,” “Trump,” and “racist.”

A number of the links are to Zeynep Tufekci’s Twitter feed — she’s been great recently about calling out these sorts of developments (her Substack is also terrific).

The Narrative and Its Discontents – Quillette

This Russian artist makes just ridiculously adorable resin & fun dolls of various imaginary animals. Too expensive for me to actually buy one (they run about $500 and up) but they’re sure fun to look at 🙂

https://en.santanitoys.ru/

Max Roser of Our World In Data takes a close look at historical economies. I’m drawing attention here to the ‘Malthusian Trap’ section, not the parts after that. He makes the case that pre-industrial economies are essentially Malthusian: new technology doesn’t improve people’s lives, it just results in more very poor people. I don’t think that’s very controversial, but the charts really bring it home.

https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth

Interesting read on critical thinking in an environment of unreliable information:

One of the things I noticed throughout the past year has been that a lot of my friends who had grown up in authoritarian or poor countries had a much easier time adjusting to our new pandemic reality. My childhood was intermittently full of shortages of various things. We developed a corresponding reflex for stocking up on things when they were available, anticipating what might be gone soon. That was quite useful for the pandemic. So was trying to read between the lines of official statements—what was said and what was not, who was sitting with whom on the TV, and evaluating what the rumor networks brought in. It turns out those are really useful skills when authorities are lying at all levels…

https://zeynep.substack.com/p/critical-thinking-isnt-just-a-process