## [Clearer Thinking Podcast: Becoming a goat to avoid existential dread (with Thomas Thwaites)](https://podcast.clearerthinking.org/episode/222/thomas-thwaites-becoming-a-goat-to-avoid-existential-dread/) Sometimes the best way to understand a thing is to build it yourself. Thomas Thwaites takes this to the extreme when he embarks on *The Toaster Project*--a project to build a toaster from scratch. And when he says from scratch, he really means from scratch. Step one is mining iron ore. The end result is about what you'd expect: ![[Pasted image 20240813093053.png]] There's a fun interview with him on The Clearer Thinking pod at the link. He also talks about his *GoatMan* project, which is his attempt at taking a holiday from being a human. Yeah. ![[Pasted image 20240813093303.png]] ## [[The Self-Typing Typewriter]] I made a typewriter that types itself. It tells the time with poetry, and it can answer your questions. I wrote up how I did it at the link. I mostly focus on the reverse engineering aspect, which is what I'm most proud of. Also, if you have any interest in buying one, please let me know. There's a google form on the page you can fill out. ## [Have we reproduced Rat Park? Conceptual but not direct replication of the protective effects of social and environmental enrichment in addiction](https://jrn.trialanderror.org/pub/reproduced-rat-park/release/1) Rat Park is a famous psychological experiment that purportedly proved that rats only get addicted to drugs when their environment is boring. Put them in **Rat Park**--an amusement park for rats--and their drive to consume drugs is dramatically reduced. Well, unfortunately, like most of these psychological experiments from the 70s, it's probably bogus. > As several reviews have noted (1, 8), an attempted replication of the studies was reported in 1996 and did not show the same effects (9). However, it is not clear that further direct replication attempts are desirable as the original studies had several methodological flaws including lost data, animals dying during experiments and confounding variables such as intake modality. That said, its conclusions might be *accidentally* correct? > While the Rat Park studies did not use methods that are reliable by current standards, enrichment has been shown to reliably reduce opioid consumption and this effect can generalise to other drugs of abuse. Anyway this is just another reminder to do your best to memory-hole early psychology. It's mostly made up, [as we learned from the Standford Prison Experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment#Demand_characteristics).