I found a very odd Google search bug/misfeature on android: I've somehow gotten stuck in Brown Mode.
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They do this, he asserts, because they're trying to repeat the meaningless actions that happened the last time they "won", and got fed.
It's like a lucky pair of pants you always wear when your team wins. -
In both cases, there's no action that leads to the win condition, and no information to accurately predict the outcome.
But both our brains and the pigeon's brain don't work like that. They assume there are patterns and tries to find them. They assume it's not just all random and unpredictable.
That's usually a good thing! It clearly is very useful, for both us and pigeons, to figure out the patterns... because usually there are!
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Many things are related and predictable. Basic physics for example: if a thing is in the air, it will fall down. Get out of the way.
Definitely a pattern there!
(Although you may need to adjust for the "flying" loophole) -
That's why we evolved a "pattern finding" brain. Because there's patterns in the world, and recognizing them is useful.
Anyway, I think of those pigeons, spinning in place, perhaps praying to some God of Food Pellets they invented, and how they don't know there's no pattern and all there actions are meaningless. The cruel scientist man built this game so you can't win, and worse: you don't know you can't win, so you have to keep trying.
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I thing about them and how I've been doing professional "computer stuff" for like two and a half decades now and BOY does it feel like we're spinning pigeons a frightening amount of the time.
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Anyways, A/B testing: because gaslighting is cool if you do it in parallel at scale!
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@foone Have you read "House of Stairs"? It made a bit of an impression on me as a kid. The author's other stuff was similarly intense if I recall.
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@hattifattener yeah, one of my favorite books as kid. I've owned three distinct copies.
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@SnyperWolf yeah! Switched out of dark mode, set a different wallpaper, rebooted to the same brown.
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Still brown at 3:20pm. So it's not time based.
