I bet the truth is, when it comes to static imagery, Alex Honnold just registers as excitable about different subject matter.
It sounds like they tried a largely negative gore-oriented image set (injuries and depictions of people in distress) to induce what could probably more accurately be interpretted as an unpleasant state of mind. For regular people of middling intellect who live sheltered lives, being subjected to strange viewing habits in a clinical setting probably registers as extremely odd. Alex, on the other hand approached the experiment after reaching a degree of celebrity that puts him beyond the possibility of an assessment that restricts him from acting freely.
He didn't submit to the experiment, until his career was sufficiently rewarding enough to be innately recognized as highly skilled, and thus beyond the reach of ordinary doctors adjucating him as a threat to himself or others, and thus preventing him from doing what he loves.
Therefore, nothing about the experimental setting was threatening, and he felt no pressure to masquerade with a "normal" response deceptively, or else attract psychiatric scrutiny, perhaps warranting medication and inviting pressure from family members and see other facets of his support network turn against him. With broad fame, he effectively deflects any ordinary institutional authority, and he has social proof of success, no matter what the machine records and reveals unexpectedly.
So then, take other conceptual image sets, and see what does catch a rise out of Alex Honnold, and I bet you'll find he's as human as any of us.
Show him sprawling incredible mountain vistas looking at the sun rise over a himalayan cloud deck, rivaling or far surpassing anything you could hope to see from the top of a tall building and I bet something jumps out from deeper within, than showing him images of a train wreck, because it has to be something real to him. Then the measurements will start showing numbers in keeping with other people's reaction to visual stimuli.
In psychology subject matter specific to the individual counts, and Alex has different tastes.
Or perhaps a rope, dangling 20ft too short, would trigger him. I think you’re right. His “mental armor” technique is noteworthy, though. People often overlook the very significant training he undertook.
Yeah, and honestly, I'm willing to bet that just "showing someone pictures" on some level simply doesn't work on a significant number of people.
Within a certain threshold, simply looking at an image will register an amount of activity in anybody's brain, but I think the context of the viewing situation, combined with the power differential of the individual controlling the slide show, obviously plays more heavily on the mind than the subject matter of the image itself.
For example, a kidnapper asking for a million dollars, and showing you a picture of your own child tied to a chair, while cocking a pistol and pointing it at you, is going to stress you a lot more as a credible threat, than a grad student in a doctor's office asking you to "think about things," while showing you a picture of some random crying child, while an MRI clicks and hums around you.
But for some people (probably many people), the grad student with the clipboard and the MRI, is actually kind of scary in it's own strange way.
These days it is not hard to come across a variety of shocking images and I can imagine that exposure to those could be correlated with the sensation seeking thing, making the images much more ordinary and leaving other considerations as stronger effects.
For some of us, the images themselves would be quite disturbing; just the description of them (that I have heard before) was enough to provoke a fairly strong reaction for me. I might have a somewhat unusually strong reaction, but I would have guessed that it was a fairly small percentage of people who would have little or no reaction. OTOH, a lot of things would make more sense if that percentage was quite a bit higher than I would think.
Also, fMRI descriptions always make it sound like the brain is at rest until it is being activated, but that is not how it works. Obviously the imaging tries to take into account how it actually works, but there can still be a number of issues. I don't know enough to have any idea how likely it is that there are technical issues here, but functional imaging is an area where major issues have gone undetected for surprisingly long periods of time so it should always be considered a plausable theory that the imaging isn't actually showing what we would like it to be showing.
Yes, it should come as no surprise that someone who has dedicated themselves to managing their fear is good at managing their fear. He is not immune to panic, but he is very good at pulling himself together and carrying on.
Dude, this is the only site that loads when I hit my data cap on my phone, and my 4G LTE "unlimited" data plan slows down to something akin to a 56k modem from 1995.
Literally almost no other site loads in under a whopping minute, because all of them slam 10MB of transpiled javascript, and another 20MB of CSS, background images and high resolution sprite sheets for widgets I'll never even click on. Not to mention the pixels and third-party ad-tech, which may or may not be baked into the initial JS payload.
Then the document.ready() kicks in, and maybe a hundred other resources are invited to the party, and the videos try to autoplay with sound, while all the gifs start their loops.
You say old fashioned, but even wikipedia is bloated and horrible when my bandwidth allowance gets throttled by my mobile carrier. If HN didn't load, I'd either have to find a hobby and talk to people (The Horror), or cough up like $90 a week (what would actually happen) because every other web page tries to show me 2GB of video in ads alone, as if I'm going to patronize any business that blasts a cacaphony of unwanted sound in my face when I'm trying to read, all of which I suspect might be a concerted effort orchestrated as part of a conspiracy between advertisers and ISP's to poison net neutral rate plans and price gouge the hell out of anyone using their phone for internet related things, aka: everyone.
And, as an addendum, all this ties directly into your mention of <img/> versus $ajax();
First of all, that very mindset is the foundation of the bloat we see everywhere else. Complicate a non-problem with a non-solution, because behind the trend is really a desire to shun open standards, in favor of obfuscating intellectual property as an effort to lock user behaviors, and prevent scrapers from ripping off designs that aren't even innovative. An example of the backlash against this sort of thing was the re-adoption of semantic and/or restful URL paths, because so many back-end goons were packing query strings with hundreds of CGI variable parameters, to control page state that no one could paste or email links to each other, and even advertisers started framing a renormalization of URLs under the SEO buzzword, because they saw their page rank taking hits from the drop in sharability.
Second, once you introduce $ajax(), not only does backwards compatibility hang in doubt (as you mentioned) but cross-browser compatibility and forward compatibility may also be sacrificed. Not to mention, you branch into an entirely different area of development. Because in order to make sure everything works everywhere, all the time, you'll need an ajax library, but which one? Choose carefully, you may seal you fate, if the maintainers disappear. Not only that, any JS error for any reason at all, including async resource errors, could kill alllllllllll of your images. So now we need unit tests and a QA team? Is that right? Gee, why not just use <img/> tags, like every browser has supported by default, since... oh... the mid 90's?
You make it seem as though AJAX is some unstable, bleeding edge experimental feature that no one ever uses. There's no danger of sacrificing backwards compatibility, or of browsers no longer supporting AJAX in the future.
However, Hacker News does use AJAX, and I don't think it even uses whatever img tag trick OP is referring to. The only img tags on the page are the icon and the vote arrows. If it's there, I couldn't find it.
But read the javascript yourself - AJAX support is just a single, simple function. No unit tests and QA team, no depending on some flaky maintainer. Maybe they do unit tests, I don't know, this place is kind of a black box sometimes.
I think he's annoyed that lots of people are trying to re-implement the wheel using a poor AJAX based solution when an older solution is better, but no one likes using anything "old".
Cross-browser AJAX is= a solved problem at this point. You can just go to Stack Overflow or find one of countless libraries to handle it to whatever degree of compatibility you want.
And all code is a moving target - nothing is future proof, especially where javascript is involved, but AJAX seems a lot more future proof than hacking image tags to do something other than loading images. It's baked into front-end templates and the caching strategies of the biggest sites on the web so it's not likely to go anywhere anytime soon.
No one agrees on what a nicer style is. Most proposals would either make the site less text-oriented or lower its information density. That's not nicer.
Dude. It's one page of plain text. Maybe two pages. It will be transcribed by brute force in less than an hour, if need be. Probably by an unpaid intern.
You either want recruiters to help do all the leg work for you, or you don't. And you either want the job, or you don't.
If they have a policy of lubricating introductions under a branded letterhead, it's gonna go down that way.
The file format protects nothing. And by nothing, I mean absolutely nothing.
It doesn't even change the pace of what happens by slowing things down.
In the past, I've been a hiring manager receiving resumes treated this way by agencies.
They always, always screw them up. The resume is hard to read, formatted incorrectly or whatever. Most of the time, I simply went by the linkedin profile.
I've been in the situation of an interviewer, having to painfully show the skills the recruiter edited into their resume to get them an interview.
I absolutely agree with OP about being worried about edits, except I generally take it to the maximum extreme and don't use dedicated external recruiters at all when looking for work.
If it's encrypted, no one can read it, and thus it cannot be transcribed without a key file.
If a person can read the words, it can be transcribed and reduced to an unformatted string, including an amount of white-space padding.
If the information on your resume cannot survive a reduction to plain text, and still remain relevant, something is wrong, because that's the premise of a resume: to standardize job applicants.
