Bars are heavily, heavily regulated actually. You could have chosen a better example.

Many jurisdictions do in fact include what drinks are available as license conditions. E.g. A license for beer and wine can be easier to get than a license for liquor. Or brewery (beer only) get a special category with less restrictions (e.g. they aren't required to provide food) etc etc

Actually, in many places there are regulations on these things. For example, in France, they are legally obligated to serve several non-alcoholic drinks if they serve beer and wine.

> but not regarding what liqueur and beer they have to offer

Try selling moonshine you brewed under the counter, and you'll quickly learn how much regulation there is.

> moonshine you brewed under the counter

That sounds like as good a metaphor for addictive and unhealthy social media feeds as any! :-)

Is it like this in Chinese companies? I genuinely have no idea.

It's because all of these sites have stuff to track you and cookies is one of the ways you can do that.

It's not decades of research, the term was coined in 2015. There's a vague reference to something similar earlier but it doesn't constitute pre-existing research. It's an extremely recent phenomenon to research it.

The fact that some people report aphantasia and some people don't implies that their brains are different but it does not imply that the reason the brains are different is aphantasia. For example, aphantasia has some comorbidity with autism, probably because autism leads people to interpret expressions in different ways.

So you’re saying you think people who report aphantasia see mental imagery but don’t think of it as imagery? And that the brain scans indicate difference but not around mental imagery?

Yeah essentially, or alternatively neither group has visual imagery. I think it fundamentally comes down to phenomenology being very hard to express in language.

That’s why the self reports seem valuable to me. If someone says “I’ve never seen something in my minds eye” and then they do dmt and say “oh shit I can see things in my minds eye now I totally get what people mean now” it seems to imply there’s a spectrum of visualization capabilities. There’s also people who’ve gone in the opposite direction due to injury.

But people who do dmt are also liable to say "oh shit I can see the machine elves, I totally get what people mean now". Which is not to say that their reports are unreliable, just inscrutable.

I have aphantasia, but I have had one experience of seeing clear imagery while awake (and it was not on drugs)

They are not remotely similar.

Honestly, your meditation experience sounds more like an altered state induced by the meditation, rather than confirmation of what non-aphantasiacs experience on a daily basis. And I'm jealous you had that experience.

Whether it was an altered state or not, it showed me the ability to see vivid imagery. And the experience isn't even on the high end of reported abilities to visualise.

Yea and it seems weird to assume that since these states are possible that most humans are mistaken when for millennia they’ve talked about having mental imagery. The idea that aphantasia is just language confusion is so strange to me. As someone who has aphantasia I understand the “oh shit” moment when you realize that there’s more going on but the evidence seems pretty overwhelming to me that most people have some internal imagery.

That almost all our language about recalling physical objects talk in terms related to images in retrospect should've been a dead giveaway, and I do remember many instances growing up I found it weird, because it seemed like dumb ways of talking about things you couldn't see...

It's to the point as we see it's hard to even talk about recall without recalling such words - e.g. "imagination" itself presumes images.

I like the player being in "1th" while being behind everyone else. Still crazy though.

This is your steelmanning? God it sounds awful.

I know, right?

Monopolies are not easy to crack.

This is a content-free dismissal. The existence of an effective monopoly in records retrieval for previously published data does not affect your ability to collect presently published data.

Well, if things are gradually getting worse year over year it would always be true.

Some economic planning is not central planning. Otherwise the US in the 30s and post-war France were both centrally-planned economies.

For a while, both were. Certainly once the US entered the war it was a centrally-planned economy.