I thought this board might appreciate a bit of crossover analysis in biology, behavioral psychology, mass psychology, and technology.

First, neurotransmitters and mood and the science of addiction and division.

When you see a post that makes you mad here or otherwise on social media

1. It hits your amygdala. This is before you can rationally process the information, it is your emotional center.
2. When you have been primed, emotionally to react to certain information in certain ways, this is perceived as a threat
3. This activates the Sympathetic Nervous System and triggers something called the SAM pathway (Sympathomedullary pathway)
4. In the brain - again, before this has been processed by the part of the brain you'd consider "yourself" - you release norepinephrine and then adrenaline/ephedrine (it has to make it to your kidneys - the "ad renal" latin root)
5. The norepinephrine impacts your cognition. As you read the post that makes you angry, you'll notice you start to feel a heighted sense of focus, vigilance, and your vision (and, more broadly, attention) will tunnel at the post to the exclusion of other things.
6. The adrenaline will impact your physiology, and create the classic fight-or-flight response. You may clench your fists, feel your heart rate increase, feel a knot in your stomach, or grimace and grit your teeth.

At this point you can back down and recover. If you do not, and start responding or reading more posts to get your dander up, you activate the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal axis system.

1. This triggers the release of the steroid cortisol, which will alter your metabolism, cardiovascular system, and mood (among other things)
2. This lingers and is why, even if you walk away, it will take you some time to cool off
3. This is an evolutionary response to sustained danger, and not a great thing to activate when trying to discuss others views

This is where dopamine enters and it gets quite bad, and the software industry has a lot of liability, particularly social media

1. Since you have activated a fight-or-flight response by viewing a non-threatening arrangement of lit up dots on a computer screen, there is no actual danger to resolve. You can't fight it physically.
2. Commenting back hijacks the need to act upon the threat. You have dealt with your adversary by writing a stern and angry note.
3. At this point, your brain has been further hijacked to think you have done something, and that deserves a reward. So it releases dopamine, like morphine.
4. Even worse, when you subsequently get a like, a recommendation, or an upvote from someone else you get further hits of dopamine.

This creates an addictive loop, just in terms of cognitive structure. You read something bad, it creates a stress response and anger, and you resolve it by angrily responding to the thread, which releases a chemical reward similar to taking drugs. At this point, this is self-reinforcing.

Of course, this has happened to the person on the other side of the keyboard. They are addicted and you are just yelling at each other.

This is where it gets much worse.

Let's imagine two anthropological system

1. An economic system fueled by attention and incentivized by engagement

This is, obviously, social media today. There is a widely publicized epidemic of mental illness, particularly anxiety, in children. It is laughable, to a degree, that this is somehow a mystery. We have embedded ourselves in a loop of cortisol release followed by dopamine release. The attention economy runs on keeping people hopped up on cortisol and stressed, and offers a dopamine hit from engaging with their platforms.

AI is quite nefarious there, as it can recognize this and simulate social media participants to specific effect, by recognizing your mood and state of mind from your prior posting history and other metadata the platforms have about you. You will click or post again if they rile you up. If you are riled up enough, you might need to stress shop, which is even better (from the platform's perspective, as it makes their click rate for advertisements more valuable). You are simply livestock to those platforms, much like foix gras gooses, and they stuff grains down your gullets to make you angry, predictable, and profitable.

2. a political system where a small minority is seeking to keep rival factions from combining to form a threat.

This is the US political system. 1% of this country is rich and is strip mining the resources of the country via tax cuts, tax loopholes, and favorable legislation.

The actual political axis of the US is not liberal of conservative, it is rich vs poor, and everyone eventually understands this when they've thought about the problem sufficiently. Wedge issues function exactly the same way that ragebait does in social media. When I have classified the other side as "baby killers" or something else horrible, this hijacks the behavioral psychology pathway and makes the targets of the propaganda into threats.

In the truly disgusting union of political propaganda, media, and social media it creates a flywheel where anger creates political power by dividing ones rivls and making ones own supporter addicted to being mad and dehumanizing them (and completely unable to compromise). This is profitable for the companies distributing the political propaganda. It is increasingly profitable to the social media companies with advanced AI capabilities that can literally shape people's moods with intent before placing the propaganda material in front of them.

It takes extraordinary mental discipline to be aware of this, to fight this, and transcend it.

Honestly, most people are not capable of it, and it is only getting harder with frontier models capable of even more advance profiling and shaping, at massive, massive scales. What Cambridge Analytica did in 2016 was in an absolutely different world of capability in terms of compute and model maturity, and it flipped the election.

People deserve to be protected from this, but the political power relies on this state of constant anger is durable and the wealth that it accrues can be used to dismantle societal protections encoded in regulation.

The only saving grace is that this eventually makes people numb, just like junkies eventually crash out.

I write this all in the hopes that it changes the way some participants in this forum behave.

1. If you argue with someone, you are debasing yourself and going down the path of addiction. You cannot win, the only winning move is not to play.
2. If you do argue, it will eventually embitter you with constant stress/reward cycles and harm your health
3. If you engage in this behavior, you are most likely being taken advantage of.
* It may be to make money from your suffering
* It may be to get you to vote a particular way
* It may be to keep you from reaching common cause with someone and creating a voting constituency that is a threat to particular power structures
* It may be just adversaries of your country "shitting in the pool" and weakening societal cohesion to their own advantage.

I may post a follow up to this about defending yourself from psychological warfare techniques, but I've gone on long enough today.