Bits and Bobs from life as Equine Staff

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

anyway yeah DELETE YOUR FUCKING ADVERTISING IDS

Android:

Settings ➡️ Google ➡️ all services ➡️ Ads ➡️ Delete advertising ID

(may differ slightly depending on android version and manufacturer firmware. you can't just search settings for "advertising ID" of course 🔪)

iOS:

Settings ➡️ privacy ➡️ tracking ➡️ toggle "allow apps to request to track" to OFF

and ALSO settings ➡️ privacy ➡️ Apple advertising ➡️ toggle "personalized ads" to OFF

As we look around the world today—across fascist regimes, authoritarian governments, dictatorships, and even democracies that show increasingly authoritarian or warmongering tendencies—there is one common thread that is difficult to ignore: old men. Old men running countries. Old men airing decades-old grievances. Old men behaving as though the world still exists in the era they grew up in. Old men clinging to power and insisting the world remain their way. If there is one uncomfortable truth we need to confront, it may simply be this: the world is too often run by people who will not live in the future they are shaping. And that is a serious problem.

The Myth Older Generations Tell

There is a story most of us are told growing up. It goes something like this: older generations want to leave the world better for their children. Sometimes that is true. But too often it feels more like a comforting myth than a consistent reality. Many parents—especially mothers—do seem to think in nurturing terms about the future. They want a world where children can prosper, where the next generation is safe, healthy, and secure. But when we look at power structures around the world, that same nurturing instinct often seems absent.

The political systems shaping our future are disproportionately dominated by older men—people whose lives were formed in a different era and whose incentives are often rooted more in preserving the past than building the future. While history is full of examples of men risking their lives to defend others, those examples are exceptions. They are not the norm of how power operates.

The Problem With Age and Power

There is a harsh reality about aging that people rarely discuss openly. As people get older, their psychology changes through a process often called "cognitive crystallization." Research suggests that while "fluid intelligence"—the ability to solve new problems and identify patterns—peaks in early adulthood, "crystallized intelligence" relies on accumulated knowledge. This makes older leaders more conservative in the literal sense of conserving things as they are. Change becomes uncomfortable.

Stability becomes more desirable than transformation, and risk becomes something to avoid rather than embrace. When the people making decisions for entire societies are the ones most biologically resistant to change, it creates a serious mismatch. Older leaders often try to preserve the world they remember—like the industrial carbon-heavy economies of the 20th century—rather than building the digital, sustainable world that is coming. This leads to stagnation at best, and conflict at worst.

The Democratic Imbalance

There is another fundamental problem with age and power. For the first 18 years of our lives, most people in democratic societies have virtually no say in the world they live in. Major events shape their futures—wars, economic crises, cultural shifts—but they have no voice in the decisions that produce them. Many people remember moments like this from their own lives. Events such as school violence or global crises suddenly reshape daily life, and young people are forced to live with policies designed almost entirely by older people who have not experienced those environments in decades. Adults who haven't stepped inside a high school in years suddenly decide what schools should be like, yet students themselves are rarely asked. The result is a generation forced to live inside systems designed by people who no longer inhabit them.

The “Hotel” Problem

There is a simple metaphor that captures this imbalance. Imagine checking into a hotel. Now imagine discovering that the entire guest experience—the rules, the design, the policies—was determined by people who checked out years ago. People who will never stay there again. That is how politics often works today. Those closest to the exit are frequently the ones deciding the experience for those who have not even arrived yet.

The Incentive Problem

This leads to another uncomfortable truth. Older leaders often lack the strongest incentive to think long-term. Not because they are malicious, but simply because they will not be around to experience the full consequences of their decisions. A person in their seventies or eighties making policy about climate, technology, or national debt will not live through the world those decisions create.

Consider the "Sunk Cost" of ancient grievances. For a leader born in the 1940s, a border dispute from the 1970s is a fresh wound. To a teenager, it is an irrelevant ghost. Yet, the youth are drafted to fight "ghost wars" over 20th-century pride. A younger leader has a personal stake in the long-term future because they have to live in it. Someone who expects to be alive forty years from now has a very different incentive structure than someone who does not. Wanting a future—and knowing you will experience it—is the strongest motivation to avoid destroying it.

The Uselessness Problem

There is also a cultural reality many people hesitate to say out loud. In modern society, many older men in power simply do not contribute to the future they regulate. They are no longer working in the modern economy, they are no longer raising children, and they often pass responsibility for family life to the next generation. What remains too often is commentary rather than contribution—sitting on the sidelines complaining about a world that has moved beyond them. This is not universally true, as many provide wisdom and mentorship. But politically, the voices that dominate public discourse often belong to those least connected to the future being debated.

Moving Beyond “Oldocracy”

None of this means older people should be silenced or stripped of rights. Wisdom and experience matter. But we should question why they dominate power so completely through seniority systems that act as bottlenecks for new ideas. If democracy means rule by the people, then it should reflect the people who will actually live in the future being created. Right now, much of the world resembles a gerontocracy—rule by elders. And that imbalance has consequences, from the defunding of education to the ignoring of environmental tipping points.

A Future Worth Living In

Younger leaders would not solve every problem. They could still make terrible decisions or pursue power ruthlessly. But there is one difference that matters: they would have to live with the consequences. They would have to inhabit the world they create. That simple fact might be the strongest motivation humanity has to build a future worth living in.

Produce = Fresh. Tasty. Nutritious. Contains some ppm of Love.

2014 Vienna Philharmonic New Year's Concert with Daniel Barenboim — Johann Strauss I, Radetzky March, Op. 228

It was made to keep cow udders from drying out and cracking in the fucking frigid winters of Vermont. If it can keep cow tiddy supple at -10 farenheit, it can keep you nice and moist. In fact, it can keep your face, your lips, your hands, your entire epidermis head to toe, your dog, and any dairy animals you might possess properly lubricated!

Is your tea getting cold?

Did you turn on your kettle and forget about it and now the water is cold again?

Is the tea bag still in?

Did you intend to start the tea making process and forget?

First, you need to understand that the rule that jurors can’t just google things is coming from a good place. Like imagine that you are on a jury that’s considering, say, a medical malpractice lawsuit and one of your fellow jurors comes into the jury room and says to you, “I think the victim’s expert was lying because WebMD totally contradicts everything they said.”

And you might be like, “But WebMD is notoriously unreliable website and the expert you’re talking about is a researcher from Mayo Clinic.” But this person cannot be swayed.

Like, we can all agree that would be bad.

So even though these rules can contribute to unjust outcomes as in the case above (and seriously, the fact that the defense attorney didn’t fact check that is probably grounds for legal malpractice), they also prevent jurors from just looking up bullshit online and taking it more seriously than the actual experts the court has put on. And I think in the era of anti-vaxxers/QAnon/COVID denial/etc., we can all understand why it’s a bad idea to trust that people can tell fact from bullshit online.

So in light of this, how do you as a juror fact check something?

The key here is that you have to ask the court for information. Jurors can ask questions of the court during deliberations, so if something you said sounds off to you, you can ask for more information.

The key term you want to use here is “credibility.”

The job of a jury is to decide what are called “questions of fact.” Long before the trial even starts, lawyers will have hashed out all the “questions of law” --- like, what the statute of limitations is; what laws, exactly, were allegedly broken; whether the court you’re in even has jurisdiction; stuff like that. Jurors are responsible for deciding which side’s version of the facts has more credibility.

For instance, if the prosecution’s witness says X and the defense’s witness says Y, the jury is responsible for deciding which is true, X or Y. And you do this by weighing which one is more credible.

So in this case, if the juror had known to, he could have told the judge, “In order to properly assess the ICE agent’s credibility, I need more information about his tattoo. I have doubts about whether he was telling the truth about it, which would impact how credible I would find his testimony. Can the agent please provide evidence that it really is what he says it is?”