Links for Monday

• Really interesting article about brain lateralization and open awareness from River Kenna. He argues that many spiritual practices are trying to get you into the vast open mode associated with the Right Brain. I only ever encountered the silly version of lateralization arguments, and admittedly I have not evaluated the evidence for this non-silly version. The general idea that there are two modes of thought, one open and vast, the other narrow, direct, controlling seems intuitively right, but like most 2 system theories is likely at least a partial oversimplification. This reminds me of regulatory focus theory, which also posits there’s an open “promotion” mode and a closed “prevention” mode.

• New paper dropped that looked at survivors of the Nova massacre and whether the drugs they were on affected their PTSD recovery. Seems like MDMA maybe had some benefit? The MDMA outcomes are very high variance though, and the P-values seem suspiciously close to 0.05. I’m not sure how strong this evidence is.

• Blog post by Alan Jacobs about the conflict between Christian values and the exercise of power in creating a high functioning society, quoting Isaiah Berlin. Jacobs brings this up to slam protestors who don’t want to accept tradeoffs. That is not why I’m linking to this — what I find noteworthy is the implied dualistic tension between moral values and the exercise of power, something I’ve written about before. This underscores for me that in order to do good, we likely have to accept being bad.