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VR Study Says 40% of Us Are Paranoid
Roland Piquepaille writes "UK researchers have recently used virtual reality to check if people had paranoid thoughts when using public transportation. Their VR tube ride experiment revealed that 40% of the participants experienced exaggerated fears about threats from others. Until now, researchers were relying on somewhat unreliable questionnaires to study paranoid thoughts which are often triggered by ambiguous events such as someone laughing behind their back. With the use of VR, psychiatrists and psychologists have a new tool which can reliably recreate social interactions. As the lead researcher said, VR 'is a uniquely powerful method to detect those liable to misinterpret other people.'."
Maube I am being paranoid here, but 40%????
That would explain a lot of the stupidity going on with terrorism and other tools uses to manipulate the public.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Paraonia is an opinion. If someone's laughing right behind you, it's 100% normal to wonder if it's about you. That's basic social interaction and everyone who's paying enough attention SHOULD be concerned. If you completely ignore it or assume it's not about you, you're a sociopath. The morons that ran these experiments probably started with the basis that nobody should be worried about anything ever unless they're being attacked by a tiger or something. Apparently they forgot that if I take one step towards a bird without even looking at it or intending to eat it, it flies away. It's not paranoia, it's normal.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
This is Britain they're talking about. If you live in Britain today and you're not paranoid, you're crazy.
It seems to me that it would be impossible to extrapolate this VR study to real life. I mean, you strap on virtual reality goggles, and are presented with a scene from riding the tube (subway). It's like a video game, so of course you think the characters in it are about to pull out an AK47 and start shooting at you. Plus you are doing it as part of some experiment. What are you told before you strap on the goggles?
But in a an actual ride on the tube, you would be thinking about something else -- you wouldn't be watching all the people, trying to figure out what is going on, as you would during some VR lab test...
Deconstruct the State
The more repressive and invasive a government or other powerful entity gets, the more paranoid people become.
I don't get cautious around most white people. Being a US academic I'm surrounded by them. They are my friends and colleagues. However, in every city I've lived in except Los Angeles, I have had whites yell "nigger" at me as they drive by in cars. In three places spanning a dozen years, drunken young white male students have challenged me to fight (tried to provoke an excuse to beat me); so far, I open my mouth, they see I'm intelligent, and they go away.
These white men look like any thousands of white men I've seen all my life. Appearances count, in my case, for absolutely nothing.
I wonder, how may times have you been accosted by a black, gangbanger lookalike or otherwise?
blog
"Saying "don't judge a book by its cover" toward people is irrational. Appearances are one of the most effective ways to gauge what sort of person you are dealing with."
People dressed in thug clothing are making an effort to associate themselves with a culture of violence. Therefore, the way they look tells you something about their mindset and values.
The study mentions "exaggerated fears" of the threats from others. Sure, it pays to be a bit overly-cautious with strangers on public transportation. That doesn't translate into "extreme, irrational, psychotic, they're-all-out-to-get-me" paranoia... I think "mistrust" is a far more accurate term.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
George Orwell/Eric Blair was British. I think its safe to assume that was the primary reason he chose England. After that I would actually put forth that the UK was the least totalitarian power in Europe and especially so given the recent history at the time of the writing (1948). If he intended to chose a society where one would be 'justifiably paranoid', the UK would have been a very odd choice given the other nations he had available to him (Communist Eastern Europe especially but also Franco's Spain, the recently fallen fascist Italy or Japan, etc). I'm pretty sure you couldn't be more wrong.
Or Feminisation, as this was done in the UK. Shame on you for paying attention to instincts which protected your particular history of DNA for millions of years to the present. The government says you must not resist your mugger, your assailant, your attacker. Sit there and take it or be branded mentally divergent.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
This is the UK we are talking about after all...
UK 'unsafe, dirty and anti-family'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/2980028.stm
I don't even live there and I think the same
If you persistently tell people they should be afraid -- they WILL be. It matters not at all whether they SHOULD be.
Witness that, lacking both better things to do and the ethics to do better things, our American news media plays up every negative incident as OMG the sky is falling, run for your lives!! Consequently, ask the average American (or any of our detractors) whether they think violent crime is out of control in the U.S., and they will uniformly declare that it is -- despite that the *actual* incidence of violent crime has been dropping steadily for almost two decades.
See stats at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/gvc.htm
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
So the definition of Paranoia is clinical, political, helpful, fearful all at the same time. That's more or less the point of England nowadays.