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Upregulation & Downregulation IRL

Pilots & heroin & voting & endorphins & 2-way streets Bihari thinks naltrexone works by increasing endorphins, I think excess endorphins are often the problem, and the antagonist can sometimes be helpful. —Ray Peat   When pilots test for a license to fly airplanes they have to demonstrate that they can do instrument navigation. Instrument navigation is used when a pilot can’t see the environment he’s flying in, either because it’s nighttime or it’s cloudy.   To do instrument navigation he has to learn to shut off his sensory perception, especially that streaming into the eyes because the sensory field is incomplete for flying safely. Under those circumstances shutting off the senses & trusting only the instruments is not easy to do. There is always risk of confusion & inadvertently reverting to the senses, even when they are sensing incorrectly. In the dark the senses may tell a pilot he’s going down when he’s really going up, or that he’s going up when he’s re
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Pandemic Papers: Thinking Part 4

The CHAZ & the virus & labs & bibliographies & a guy on a bike. The CHAZ and All That Jazz As monuments are toppling & state legislatures are agreeing to take down confederate state flags, a great mountain of indignation is pouring out of America. Even the meme “Democracy in a can” [tear gas can] was looking poignant. The lockdowns had given with one hand what corporations and bankers had for most of history taken away with the other:  free time for engaging in politics  as the payoff for having driven the system with crippling debt, plus lockdown during a pandemic. Mayors & governors were having to figure out which side they were going to dance for, the epidemiology probability models, or the oligarchs. Somewhere in between was the capacity for sweeping away what wasn't working & building something much, much better. Cynicism, made out of deprivation & a lack of nutrients in the basics [food, mutual care, time, quiet, money, art, conscience
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Pandemic Papers: Thinking Part 3

Masks & the economy & Teen Town & The Canoe & the pandemic. If a journalist, a biologist, & a political philosopher sat down together to talk politics & science it is unlikely that they'd run out of things to say for weeks because they'd have to practically invent a new language. Pandemic Papers Parts 1 & 2 were about what everyone could see was happening in the first 3 months of the pandemic. It was dedicated to perception . Now, a person with a curious brain is always at work trying to make sense of what we see & media messaging. Everyone detects some media nonsense somewhere. Spoiler: media nonsense is a feature, not a bug. Since we can't go out & see everything first hand, then we have to work out what is really happening the best we can. Pandemic Papers: Thinking Parts 3 & 4 are about where the cultural messaging about the pandemic is open to criticism. It suggests some strange answers. I have so many questions. Mas
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Pandemic Papers: Perceiving the Thing Part 2

The fear, as I analyze it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear.                                                                 ― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception How bad was it really though? The critics are right that the pandemic comparatively hasn’t killed as many people as other causes. But the real point should be that we don’t take other causes like degenerative diseases or accidents or substance abuse deaths as serious social problems. They’ve been normalized as matters of personal frailty & moral dissipation, not as having any social cause at all. Politically, society hasn't even existed since the 1980s when Reagan busted the unions & Thatcher just outright said so. Like people who secretly think, "Shame on those people who eat sugar." Dude, seriously? Mitochondria are the powerhouse of t
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