Corporate world is tribal, if not feudal. Reason why the Nobles can do nothing wrong by default, and the Villagers are always the villan. If I may have a suggestion, Buckminster Fuller - Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth is a short and great perspective over these dynamics.
For me there is a simple test: how the algorithm decides what to put in my feed.
If the feed is made of posts belonging to the connections i follow (be it business pages or persons) in temporal order, then chances for addiction are low. If the algorithm decides for me what is relevant and from whom and in what order, then chances are high for addiction potential.
Algorithms are optimised for engagement (time spent there and interactions), not for my benefit (keeping up with my connections and interests). And they usually follow reinforcement/reward schedules -> specifically the Variable Ratio pattern. Just like gambling.
"For example, in a lab setting, this might involve delivering food pellets to a rat after one bar press, again after four bar presses, and then again after two bar presses. Gambling and lottery games are good examples of a reward based on a variable ratio schedule."
For FB, it could be how many irrelevant posts do i see before i get an update from a friend.
A benzo before or during SSRI treatment and there are no subjective effects. Depending if you want to administer a single dose or an entire course during a certain period of time.
Agreed, it's just my experience, but for fb posts, I usually get over 80% accuracy in tone and voice using open source llms and maybe a dozen public posts from the original author.
For what's worth - we have 2 perception systems, top down (essentially pattern recognition) and bottom up (requires sense-making). When we experience something that doesn't fit the first - automatic - our homeostasis is diminished as we experience less orientation/control ("what's this?"). Surprise is the emotion that activates this reassessment of our approach to the given stimulus. Quickly followed by our attention and then cognitive appraisal of the given stimulus that wasn't classifiable by the top-down automatic system.
The "uncanny" experience is given by this dissonance - "it looks like a face while it's not a face" - and it is just a shape of surprise as emotion. Surprise is a short lived emotion, quickly followed by a different one. The unease associated with the idea of "uncanny" is when we experience disgust as the second emotion. Not everybody experiences that. Some of us experience another emotions, like anticipation/curiosity.
The need for orientation, or to understand what is going on, is tightly interwoven with a sense of control. To have clarity about a situation is to have a sense of control and options become more apparent. When we don’t know what is going on in our environment, there can be high levels of stress and anxiety.
If instinct is level 0 response mode/feedback loop (strictly cause-effect) and intellect/cognition/self-awareness is level 2 (capable to plan and analyse), emotions are level 1.
Instinct is just good enough to survive, if you want more complex behaviours you need to use a dynamic memory that is able to learn new information, thus updating its behavioural sophistication. Emotions are just that - the emotional trigger is stimulus + "perceptual filter" => emotion.
Multiple possible emotions, multiplies the complexity of a possible response: for a given scenario, because of the perceptual filter, one can feel different things: Stimulus: "i see a friend" + perceptual filter "it is a pleasure to spend time with old friends" => joy, a deactivating emotion (meaning that the behaviour it determines is one of 'staying in place and savour). Anger? perceptual filter: "this one owes me money". Etc.
Basically, emotions are quick routines that tell you what to do in a given situation. instead of just cause - effect, there is a updatable memory that by learning can give way to more and more sophisticated behavioural responses. There is a part of cognition there, as much cognition as any animal that has emotions can deliver. The installation of new perceptual filters happens through learning, as much as a dog learning new tricks, for example.
But let's shift focus on how this memory works - the emotional memory is a somatic one, if you want. We never feel emotions, we feel feelings, somatic elements, if you want. Blood boiling? Fists clenched? Anger! that is a somatic memory. A feeling-state, if you want. The whole software works like this: image acquired through senses -> cognitive assessment = threat -> emotional response = fear. At this point 2 things happen as the emotion was triggered: 1 - you feel the feelings related to the emotion, somatic element = knot in the stomach -> you respond to this feeling state by running - this is 2 - the behavioural response.
How much the rest of the systems can affect our emotional responses? Just see how easy is to get angry when you're hungry (low blood sugar).
Fun fact: people who lost the ability to experience emotions also lost the ability to take decisions. Why? Because decisions are taken emotionally: the brain runs by us a series of scenarios and the one that makes us feel optimistic that we will succeed is then implemented. This happens very fast because the memory can retrieve very easily associated patterns. Also this is experienced in cases of "l'appel du vide." In our case, to no avail, because due to no emotional responses to the retrieved scenarios, this loop doesn't break. And yes, this means that our subconscious brains take the decisions way before we are aware of them.
