Two puzzles solved by simple neurology.
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(1) Journalists and politicians wonder why we’ve stopped listening to them.
On the D “side”,
Repeat JANUARY_6_VIOLENT_INSURRECTION thousands of times, and it becomes a background hum.
Repeat EXISTENTIAL_THREAT_TO_OUR_DEMOCRACY thousands of times and it’s no longer salient.
On the R “side”,
Repeat ZERO_TAX thousands of times, etc.
Repeat TRANS_BABIES thousands of times, etc.
Repeat TOCQUEVILLE_LARGESSE thousands of times, etc.
If you want people to listen you have to say something SALIENT occasionally, not the same exact phrase billions of times. The cochlea and the higher auditory processing areas in the brain have an exquisitely sensitive mechanism to ignore repeated patterns and amplify new or interesting patterns. This works on simple rhythm, words, meanings, and sentence structures.
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(2)
What Freud called the narcissism of small differences has nothing to do with narcissism. It’s just neurology.
Every sense has two ends on its available range. Inputs to the sense are measured in proportion to the available range, not in proportion to the full range of options or values. Reviewing the hearing version of this proportionality:
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Radio news keeps mentioning a trial in Florida. Young dickheads were harassing an older dude and playing loud music. Older dude got annoyed and Darwined the young dickheads. Well-deserved, and the only form of justice that still exists in this fucked Satan-poisoned former so-called “nation”.
Apparently the persecution is claiming that the older dude had impaired hearing, so he couldn’t be bothered by loud music. This is EXACTLY WRONG. I hope the defense has an expert to counter this nonsense.
Here’s why it’s wrong. Our perceptual system is based solely on proportions and changes.
Let’s take this graph as a baseline for normal hearing. Sound gets louder; your input to the cochlea gets louder in proportion; the perceptual system follows along.
If you have impaired hearing, your physical input starts at a higher level. You don’t hear the fainter sounds at all. The perceptual system tries to maintain its full range, but it has to start where the hearing starts.
Result: Perceived loudness grows faster than it would in a normal ear.
This phenomenon is usually called recruitment, which is a poorly chosen word. It would have been better to call it something like ‘stretched loudness’.
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Other senses also judge the proportion between sensed differences and available range. Status and values and income are senses.
In a small town or a restricted subculture, whether religious or musical or political, a difference between sensed status or values or income feels larger in proportion to the narrow available range. A difference between sensed values will feel smaller in proportion to the wider available range of a big city or a broad-church culture.
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Irrelevant sidenote: The Repooflican repeats are more like concepts, with a few words repeated inside them but not quite the same sentence. The Dem repeats are verbatim CTRL-V copies of the same exact phrase. This might give the R phrases a longer Mean Time Before Adaptation, because they work on a higher-level feature detector.
Polistra's Mill 