It's interesting what the sense of a direct translation of hikikomori implies. Original form is (if you have the font)
引き子守
The first two characters imply someone who is dragged along and the second two refer to a nursemaid suggesting nursemaid-ing someone who doesn't want to be here. Not in defense of any such defeatist behavior but there is the question of how (and possibly why) would you impose measures to counteract that mindset if individuals and their support context are comfortable with it?
The second half of the word (the "komori" part) is not written 子守 but rather 籠り, which means "to isolate oneself".
The 引き part is less "dragged along" in this context and more "pull away from," so the literal meaning is "to pull away from (society) and isolate oneself."
Right. So there is a received cognitive operating system which generates an interactive model of 'reality' shaped by historic experience, a facet of this system involves 'hierarchical predictive coding.' When parsing percepts, this subsystem front-loads what aspects of a new experience of interest to accept and what to ignore based on shaping from past experience. A simple example: promise a child a quarter if the correct hand is chosen. Place quarter in right hand then fold fingers up, occluding quarter. Appear to grab coin with left hand, quickly close both hands, and present both fists to child then ask 'which hand holds the quarter?'. Based on past experience it would appear that just a transfer of an object from one hand to another took place so child selects the empty left hand. Then immediately rerun the same test with the new experiential history encoded and find the child (usually with a smirk) chooses the right hand (assuming you didn't pocket the coin to further confuse the child).
Which reminds me of a story from a retired Bell Labs, Murray Hill engineer who related how they would add useless circuits to microprocessors to see if these sections were duplicated or deleted by the old Soviet military engineers. They were duplicated.
However, the above link does point out a convention ripe for abuse:
Because suspects are put through continuous interrogation which could last up to 23 days as well as isolation from the outside world, including access to lawyers, both the Japanese judiciary and the public are well aware that confession of guilt can easily be forced.
The point the articles continues to make is actually the opposite of what you're implying, the very next sentence says:
Consequently, the court (and the public) take the view that mere confession of guilt alone is never any sufficient ground for conviction.
Instead, for confession to be a valid evidence for conviction, the Japanese court requires confession to include revelation of verifiable factual matter which only the perpetrator of the crime could have known such as the location of an undiscovered body or the time and place the murder weapon was purchased, a fact about the crime scene, etc. Furthermore, to safeguard against the possibility that the interrogator implanting such knowledge into confession, the prosecutor must prove that such revelation of secret was unknown to the police until the point of confession.
I find this fascinating. Specifically, this part:
While it is impossible for an innocent suspect to reveal relevant information about a crime even under severe torture, a guilty suspect is likely to crack under prolonged interrogation in isolation and make a damning confession. Activists claim that the Japanese justice system (and Japanese public to some extent) consider that prolonged interrogation of suspect in isolation without access to lawyers is justified to solve the criminal cases without risking the miscarriage of justice.
This is so completely unlike any western approach to justice that is familiar to me that I cannot pass any judgment on it without knowing its efficacy relative to percentage of false confessions.
The argument of this technique's validity is somewhat undermined in the next paragraph where the authors notes that false confessions still happen, so I'll definitely give you that!
As an aside, as someone upthread alluded to, this is a fascinating example of an article that breaks almost all of the Wikipedia editing rules but is surprisingly informative.. probably more informative than it would have been if it omitted the synthesis and OR
> While it is impossible for an innocent suspect to reveal relevant information about a crime even under severe torture
This is, of course, untrue; desperate, babbling can be accurate by coincidence; if you do enough torturing of innocent people, you'll get a measurably-different-from-zero rate of accurate, previously unknown information.
> This is so completely unlike any western approach to justice that is familiar to me
The desire for sufficient proof of guilt before passing criminal sentence is very similar to the theory of proof underlying the utterly pervasive use of torture in some Western systems in the early modern period (which for serious offenses tended to require clear proof like the two-witnesses-to-the-same-overt-act rule still enshrined in the US Constitution for treason, but allowed weaker indications to be validated by a confession extracted under torture, so long as “freely” confirmed thereafter.)
In discussions with older Viet Nam vets there were numerous complaints about the reliability of the earlier M16s. Seems squads would use captured AK47s when they could since they were found to be considerably more reliable in combat scenarios. Always seemed strange that the military wouldn't have adopted some re-engineered Kalashnikov design. The vets chalked that up to bureaucratic chauvinism.
AK had its own issues, especially with accurate full auto fire. Adoption of M16, on the other hand, was partially backed by Project SALVO concept of accurate burst being much deadlier than a single heavier round. Originally it was supposed to be about flechettes, but they couldn't make that work. On the other hand, AR-10 was already there with a design that made recoil mitigation a priority - straight stock in line with bore, lighter reciprocating parts, and recoil impulse directed along the bore axis with no lateral component like you get from a piston. So scaling it down to a smaller round made sense.
And the design is not inherently less reliable - depending on the conditions, it can actually outpace AK. AK is more reliable in a sense that it can tolerate more obstructions in the action before it jams; but at the same time, loose tolerances and the design of its safety make it that much easier to get dirt in. So if you dump a lot of mud on both, AK fails first, even when you pit it against the original Vietnam-era M16 design - take a look:
I'm not sure what you're getting at. The AR-18 was intended as a cost-reduced substitute for the AR-15, hence the change to a stamped steel receiver instead of forged aluminum. Design wise the AR-18 is still more closely related to the AR-15 than the AK-47, although it is significantly different from both.
The AR-18 was in fact a technically inferior design. In an AR-15/M-16, the big deal with the "direct impingement"[0] system is that all the reciprocating mass is in line with the bore axis, which avoids imparting any angular moment into the rifle making it easier to keep on target when shooting rapidly. The AR-18 throws that away by having reciprocating mass (the short-stroke piston) above the barrel.
And "shits were it eats" jokes aside, the 'DI' system of the AR-15/M-16 is very reliable. If you look at close in high speed footage of AR's and AKs being fired, you'll see that both rifle designs vent a lot of combustion gasses into the receiver when the cartridge is ejected, so the cleanliness of an AK compared to an AR is somewhat exaggerated.
[0] Which is in fact a piston, with the 'piston' being the rear of the bolt, and the bolt carrier forming the cylinder; driven apart when the hot combustion gasses are piped in between them. But this is a controversial nitpick.
Well, looks like these Monroe Institute activities segued into CIA interest into what was called 'remote viewing' for use as a possible supplemental espionage methodology. Apparently one H. E. Puthoff was one of the primary researchers in this activity and there's an online history of this CIA initiated RV Program at SRI that he authored which may be of some interest:
> Well, looks like these Monroe Institute activities segued into CIA interest into what was called 'remote viewing'
This document is dated June 9, 1983. Your link says the US intelligence agencies' program started in the early 1970's. It started as a threat analysis [3] of a mistranslation of intelligence [0] on Soviet activities, but developed into something much more than that.
The Gateway program is Robert Monroe's system for helping people develop the ability to have out-of-body experiences. Monroe started spontaneously popping out of body in the 1950's, and thought he was dying. After a few years he decided he wasn't dying, and started to explore the phenomenon. His first book, Journeys Out of the Body [1], was published in 1977, and was essentially just "hey I've decided I'm not dying and our western culture has no context for these experiences but these are my findings." Lots of people wrote to thank him for validating their own experiences.
Robert Monroe's followup book, Far Journeys [2], was much more rigorous. It was published in 1985, about 2 years after this submission's PDF was written.
Your link tells of Ingo Swann's pivotal role in the remote viewing program... My earlier comment [0] tells of the time I met Swann in Las Vegas. (Edit: hah, just noticed your link pdf was generated from content originally hosted at Swann's website, biomindsuperpowers.com)
edit: [3] Your link uses the terms 'threat potential' and 'threat assessment'. Quote from your link: "In broad terms it can be said that much of the SRI effort was directed not so much toward developing an operational U.S. capability, but rather toward assessing the threat potential of its use against the U.S. by others. The words threat assessment were often used to describe the program's purpose during its development, especially during the early years."
Your link tells of Ingo Swann's pivotal role in the remote viewing program
About 10 years ago came across research papers (not via Blavatsky) on an old mind-altering Buddhist copper wall setup which involved a wooden chair oriented towards magnetic north placed over a thick panel of glass with a sheet of copper suspended vertically in front of a sitter with a 50 gauss magnet (N up) suspended by cord over the sitter's head. Colleagues with an interest in this subject pointed me in the direction of Ingo Swann, Elmer Green, with the Monroe Institute as a possible source of information. Via an email exchange with Ingo Swann and later with his ameneusis Tom Burgin it turned out that Swann had a copper wall setup in his flat which he found useful in meditation. Elmer Green, on the other hand, decided to construct an entire room with copper walls and ceiling emulating the original idea, which Swann (and others) commented drove them into overload. OK, Faraday-cage format out. What about emulating a pair of facing mirrors with two copper sheets, one in front and one behind the sitter? May act as an amplifier. Figuring this was an obvious experimental configuration decided to contact Skip Atwater over at the Monroe Institute:
was planning on experimenting with a classic 'copper wall' setting. If you are not familiar with this set up, essentially an individual is seated upright in a wooden chair placed over a panel of thick glass situated between 2 large vertical facing Cu panels affixed to parallel walls, and a 15 to 150 gauss magnet (North up) is suspended by an insulated cord above the subject and brought to within a centimeter of the crown of the head. (cf Elmer Green's work). I would imagine that you have worked with this configuration and am curious whether you have such a sensory amplification chamber which is available for monitored use.
response:
Yes, I am familiar with Elmer's work and years ago I was in Kansas an actually saw the copper wall setup. His work has never been replicated but as I know of his work for years, I believe it remains as an important finding. He also knew Bob Monroe personally.
We have not experimented with the "copper wall" setup. I would think that such experimentation would be valuable, however. Please keep good record and let us know how things go for your work.
Skip Atwater
results: overload. Stick with the original configuration if you want to experiment. :-(
BUT, this is HN not a Psychic Times :-) so stick to a data suggests motif if you feel like commenting and data-mine away :-)
I have a copy of Elmer Green's report on the Copper Wall research project at the Menninger Institute. Swann's book Psychic Sexuality tells of his experience of being the lab rat in those experiments... This text has been republished by the Estate, and is now available in ebook format.
> BUT, this is HN not a Psychic Times :-) so stick to a data suggests motif if you feel like commenting and data-mine away :-)
Data suggests that good hackers are more "psychic" (intuitive) than less-effective hackers.
I suspect that it might have also been considered as a cover up in the style of "carrots improve eyesight" for radar deception. Deliberate vaguely "plausible" bullshit.
Of course given they sent the Loony Toons division after Castro it is possible they are simply a bunch of monsterous incompetents.
Even scarier. Imagine someone with evil intent feeding captured feature vectors for any individual into a 3D printer scripted to render high-def latex masks? Privacy could then be the least of our concerns.
I have since found a better, more recent version which doesn't have the OCR problems of the list I linked to above. You can find both the new Oxford 3000 and 5000 lists in several forms by clicking on the download button here: [1]
引き子守
The first two characters imply someone who is dragged along and the second two refer to a nursemaid suggesting nursemaid-ing someone who doesn't want to be here. Not in defense of any such defeatist behavior but there is the question of how (and possibly why) would you impose measures to counteract that mindset if individuals and their support context are comfortable with it?