Disunity
Aggressive interactions can strongly influence an animal’s performance in subsequent contests. Winners of aggressive contests are more likely to win successive contests and losers are more likely to lose successive contests
Close friends seem to communicate almost telepathically. A single word or phrase can be loaded with meaning that would take pages of text to explain to an outsider. This linguistic compression is undeniably efficient. But is efficiency the only reason friends tend to speak in code? In a series of studies, we show that when people use “insider language” with each other they feel closer. Friends, as expected, use insider language more frequently than strangers, but even strangers are able to incorporate it into their conversations. While the content of insider language varies between friends and strangers, both groups experience heightened connection when it is used. These results suggest that the human ability to say more with less confers a social advantage beyond mere efficiency—one that may be challenging for conversational AI to replicate.
The Disunity of Consciousness in Everyday Experience
Online Dating Caused a Rise in US Income Inequality, Research Paper Shows
if there are macroscopic structures awaiting discovery in humans, imagine how much more true that will be of every other species that we haven’t been studying with extreme diligence and self-interest for millennia. […] Chickens are one of the commonly used model organisms in laboratory studies, and the basis for a multi- billion-dollar food industry. Surely we must know everything there is to know about their anatomy? (Spoiler alert: we do not.) […] A chicken or a cat has about the same number of body parts as a human, they’re just smaller and harder to see. Frogs seem to be a little simpler than shrews or hummingbirds, but it may also be that we know them less well, and dissect them less patiently and completely. […] Where is all this new anatomy hiding?
