#I heavily rely on research and personal forums from people with these conditions

[innuendostudios]

Here’s How to Radicalize a Normie, a video essay on how the Alt-Right and their fellow travelers recruit. Clocking in at 41 minutes, 6756 words, 633 individual drawings, and 27 sources (including three full books), it is by far the longest and most heavily-researched video in The Alt-Right Playbook. I am very tired.

It took so long to put this behemoth together that my Patreon started to dip. So, maybe a little more than usual, if you want to keep seeing videos like these, please consider backing me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

Say, for the sake of argument, your friend Gabe is starting to worry you.

Gabe’s always been just, you know, a regular guy. Not very political. He likes video games, sci-fi, comics, Star Wars, and anime. White guy shit. The only offbeat thing about him is you suspect there’s like a 20% chance he’s a furry. For all intents and purposes, Gabe is a normie.

But recently Gabe’s been spending a lot of time on some radically conservative forums, and listening to radically conservative podcasts, and picking some radically conservative arguments with you and your friends. You never would have expected this, not from Gabe, and, given the speed it’s happened, it’s worrying to think where it might be headed.

How have the Alt-Right gotten their hooks into your friend?

If you’ve ever known a Gabe, this video is for you. Here’s How to Radicalize a Normie.

Step 1: Identify the Audience

What you need to know before we begin is: around 2013, the Nazis went online.

Hate groups in the US, as tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Center, had been growing in number since the noughts, but, between 2012 and 2014, they dropped by almost a quarter. Patriot groups dropped by over a third. However, hate crimes stayed about the same. Radical conservatism was not shrinking, but decentralizing. Still radical, still often violent, but now full of white nationalist nomads unlikely to join a formal organization.

This didn’t make them harmless. What it did was protect their asses from the typical hate group cycle: getting the public’s attention, making allies in conservative media, swelling their numbers, and then eventually disgracing themselves with failures, infighting, and, often enough, members committing horrific acts of violence, which come with social and sometimes legal consequences for all the other members.

So the Alt-Right and their fellow travelers these days don’t so much have members. They have hashtags, followers, viewers, and subscribers. This insulates them from their own audience. If Gabe, as a member of that audience, were to go out and commit a crime on their behalf, there’d be little doubt they had a hand in radicalizing him, but it’d be very hard to claim they told him to do it. On some of these sites, where Gabe spends hours and hours of his day, he’s never created an account or left a comment; the people radicalizing him don’t even know he’s there.

This distributed nature is what makes the Alt-Right, and the movements connected to it, unique. (You may remember a notable proof-of-concept for this strategy.) Doing almost everything online has, as compared with traditional hate movements, dramatically increased their reach and inoculated them from consequence. The trade-off, as we will see, is a lack of control.

And so we come to Gabe.

Gabe exists at the intersection of the kinds of people the Alt-Right is looking for - straight white cis men who feel emasculated by modern society, primarily, though they do make exceptions - and the kinds of people who are vulnerable to recruitment. Gabe fits the first profile in that he got bullied in high school, and often feels he has to hide his nerdy side for fear of getting ridiculed. The Alt-Right also has success with men who can’t get laid or recently got divorced or feel anxious about an influx of non-white people in their community. These things can make one feel like less than the confident white man they’re “supposed” to be. And it’s the closest they will ever come to being minoritized.

Regarding the second profile, it’s important to know that Gabe is not categorically different from you or me. He’s a cishet white dude - his problems are not unique. There isn’t a ton of research into the demography of the Alt-Right, but there may be a higher-than-average chance Gabe has a history of being abused or comes from a broken home. You don’t know if it’s true of Gabe, he’s never said. But most abuse survivors don’t become Nazis. The things that make people like Gabe recruitable tend to be situational: it happens often during periods of transition, as dramatic as the death of a loved or as benign as moving to a new city. Things that make people ask big life questions. Gabe has concerns like economic precarity, not knowing his place in a changing world, stressful working conditions. In other words, Gabe is suffering under late capitalism, same as everyone, and it’s entirely plausible he could have gone down the path to becoming a Leftist.

This is not to make an “economic anxiety” argument: the animating force of the Far Right is and always has been bigotry. But the Alt-Right targets Gabe by treating his “economic anxiety” as one of many things bigotry can be sold as a solution to. It is their aim that, when dissatisfied white men go looking for answers, they find the Alt-Right before they find us.

Step Two: Establish a Community

Were Gabe pledging an old-school hate movement, there would probably be a recruiter to usher him into an existing community. But that’s the kind of formalized interaction modern extremists try to avoid. Online extremism has many points of entry, and everybody’s journey is unique, so rather than be comprehensive we will focus on what are, in my estimation, the two most common pathways: the Far Right creates a community Gabe is likely to stumble into, or infiltrates a community Gabe is already in.

The stumble-upon method has two main branches, one of which is just “Gabe ends up on a chan board,” which we’ve already done a video about. The other is kind of the polar opposite of 4chan’s cult of anonymity: Gabe ends up in the fandom of a Far Right thought leader.

These folks are charismatic media personalities (that’s charismatic according to Gabe’s tastes, not ours; I don’t understand it, either). These personalities may gain traction on any number of platforms, from podcasts to reportage to blogging, though the most effective platform for redpilling is, and yes I am biting the hand that feeds me, YouTube. They may get Gabe’s attention through fairly standard means, like talking about or even generating controversy to get themselves trending, while some of the more committed will employ dubious SEO tactics like clickbait, google bombing, and data voids (just pause for definitions, we don’t have time).

What they tend to have in common, especially the most accessible ones, is that they don’t present themselves as entry points to the radical Right. In fact, many did not set out to be Far Right thought leaders, and may not think of themselves as such (though they are often selling products, of which the Alt-Right are among their biggest purchasers, and it’s not like they’re turning the money away). How they present is the same way anyone presents who wants to be successful on social media: accessible, approachable, authentic. The face-to-face relationship a budding extremist forms with their recruiter or the leader of their hate group’s local chapter are here folded into one parasocial relationship with a complete stranger.

Why this person appeals to Gabe is they’re not selling politics as politics, but conservatism as a kind of lifestyle brand. They rely heavily on criticizing or ridiculing the Left: feminists are oversensitive, Black people unintelligent, queer folks doomed to loneliness, and trans people insane; I dunno if it’s a coincidence that these are all things Gabe thinks about himself in his low moments. By contrast, they don’t sell conservatism as having sounder policies or a more coherent moral framework, but that abandoning progressive principles and embracing conservative ones will make Gabe happier. Remember, Gabe isn’t looking for white nationalism or misogyny, what he wants is the cure to soul-sickness, and these friendly micro-celebs are here to offer a shot of life advice with politics as the chaser. It is extremely important that politics be presented as a set of affects, not a set of beliefs.

The second pathway is infiltration, which is its own beast. Media personalities sometimes become gateways to the Right almost by accident: they do something edgy, a part of their audience reacts positively, and, facing no real consequence, they do it more; this leads to further positive reinforcement from conservative fans, the rest of the audience acclimates, and the cycle repeats, the personality pushing the envelope further and further based on what flies with their increasingly conservative audience. In this way, they become a right-wing figure by both radicalizing and being radicalized by their audience.

Infiltration is deliberate.

The Far Right will reliably target any community that has 1) a large, white, male population, 2) whose niche interests allow them to feel vaguely marginalized, and 3) who are not used to progressive critique of said interests. This isn’t to say progressive critique doesn’t exist, or hasn’t been baked into the property from the beginning, but that it has been, so far, easy for white guys to ignore. As such, progressives within that community probably don’t talk politics much, and women and minorities are perfectly welcome to post, same as anyone, but just, you know, don’t, don’t make identity politics, you know, like, a thing.

Given Gabe’s proclivities, he’s probably already in a number of fan communities where he can geek out and not get teased. And this is where the Far Right will go looking for him

Communities are at their most vulnerable to infiltration at times of political discord. This can happen naturally - say, a new property in the fandom has a Black protagonist - or it can be provoked - say, a bunch of channers join the forum and say provocative things about race to get people arguing - or both. Left to its own devices, the community might sort out its differences and maybe even come out more progressive than they started. But, with the right pressure applied in the right moment, these communities can devolve into arguments about the need to remove a nebulously-defined “politics” from the conversation.

The adage about bros on the internet is “‘political’ means anything I disagree with,” but it’d be more accurate to say, here, “‘political’ means anything on which the community disagrees.” For instance, “Nazis are bad” is an apolitical statement because everyone in the community agrees. It’s common sense, and therefore neutral. But, paradoxically, “Nazis are good” is also apolitical; because “Nazis are bad” is the consensus, “Nazis are good” must be just an edgy joke, and, even if not, the community already believes the opposite, so the statement is harmless. Tolerable. However, “feminism is good” is a political statement, because the community hasn’t reached consensus. It is debatable, and therefore political, and you should stop talking about it. And making political arguments, no matter how rational, is having an agenda, and having an agenda is ruining the community.

(Now, it is curious how the things that provoke the most disagreement tend to be whichever ones make white dudes uncomfortable. One of life’s great, unanswerable mysteries.)

You can gather where this is going: a community that doesn’t tolerate progressivism but does tolerate Nazism is going to start collecting Nazis, Nazis whose goal is to drive a wedge between the community and the Left. Once the Left acknowledges, “Hey, your community’s developing a Nazi problem,” the Nazis - who are, remember, trusted, apolitical members of the community who might just be kidding about all the Nazi shit - say, “Did you hear that, guys?! Those cultural Marxists just called all of us Nazis!” Wedge. Similarly, any community members who say, “but Nazis though” are framed as infiltrators pushing an agenda, even if they’ve been there longer than the Nazis have. They get the wedge, too.

This is how fandoms radicalize. They are built as - yeah, I’ll say it - safe spaces for nerds, weebs, and furries, and are told that the Left is a threat to their safety. Given a choice between leaving a community that has mattered to him for years and simply adjusting to the community’s shifting politics, the assumption is that Gabe will stay. This assumption is right often enough that a lot of fandoms have been colonized.

What is true of both of these methods - Gabe finding the Right or the Right finding him - is that Gabe does not come nor stay for the ideology. He’s here for the community, the sense of belonging, of being with his people, of having his fears validated and his enjoyment shared. The ideology is simply the price of admission.

Step Three: Isolate

There is a vast, interconnected network of Far Right communities out there, and Gabe is, at this point, only on the periphery. In order to keep him in, they need to disrupt his relationships to other communities, and become, more and more, his primary online social space. Having made this space hostile to the Left, they now seek to break his connections to progressives elsewhere in his life.

This is hard to do online. The whole appeal of moving radicalism to the internet is that your away-from-keyboard life doesn’t have to change. You are crypto the moment you log off. Some thought leaders will encourage their audience to cut ties with Family of Origin, or “deFOO,” but, even then, they can’t monitor whether the audience has actually done it the way an in-person movement could. And so alienating Gabe from the Left is less controlled, and, consequently, may be less total. How much Gabe isolates is up to him.

But the vast majority of Far Right media presumes an alienation from the Left. Part of conservative bloggers and YouTubers making the Left look pathetic is doing a lot take-downs and responses. This is a constant repetition of the Left’s arguments for the purpose of mockery, and, for Gabe, it starts to replace any engagement with progressive media directly. He soon knows the Left only through caricature. It also trains him, if he does directly engage, to approach the Left with the same combative stance as his role models. (For reference, see my comment section.) And this is only if he doesn’t partake in one of the many active boycotts of “SJW media.”

In addition to mocking the Left’s arguments, they also, curiously, appropriate them. This is one part sanitization: liberal centrism is more socially acceptable; indeed, many figures on the outer layers think of themselves as moderates, even as they serve as gateways to radicalism. But, also, many of Gabe’s problems could be addressed by progressive leftism, so they sell him racist, sexist versions of it. Yes, there is a problem with workers being underpaid and overextended, but the solution isn’t unions, it’s deporting immigrants; yes, there is a chronic loneliness and anger to being a man in the modern age, but it’s not because of the toxic masculine expectations placed on you by the patriarchy, it’s women being slutty; yes, wealth disparity does mean a tiny percentage of elites have more influence over culture and politics than the rest of us combined, but the problem isn’t capitalism, it’s the Jews. And it’s hard for Gabe to reject these ideas without, in the process, rejecting the progressive ideas they’re copied from; the Right’s “take the red pill” is, to the untrained eye, similar to the Left’s “get woke.” (Or, at least, the bowdlerized version of “get woke” that is no longer specifically about race which came to fashion when white people started saying it, grumble grumble.)

Take the red pill or reject them both; either is a step to the right.

As this rhetoric slips into his day-to-day conversation, even as seemingly harmless “irreverence,” it may strain relationships with people who are not entertained by this shit. Off-color comments about race and gender can certainly be wearying for female and non-white friends, which can lead to a passive distance or an eventual confrontation [“why is everyone but me so sensitive?!”], which only seem to confirm what his reactionary community says about liberal snowflakes. If he says these things on social media, he may get his account suspended, and, if he comes back under an alt, you can bet his new reactionary friends will be the first to reconnect, applaud the behavior that got him banned, and repeat should he get banned again. A few cycles of this and he’s lost touch with everyone else.

Also, his adoption of the insular, meme-laden terminology of this community makes him less and less comprehensible to outsiders.

Over time, sources of information get replaced with community-approved ones: conservative news, conservative YouTube, conservative Wikipedia if he’s really committed. The Algorithm soon takes note and stops recommending media from the Left. He stops watching shows with a “liberal agenda,” which usually means shows starring women and people of color. Now, there is evidence that the human mind responds to fictional characters similarly to real people, and that consuming diverse media can decrease bigotry in ways roughly analogous to having a diverse group of friends, which is one of many reasons we say representation matters. By consuming a homogenous media diet, Gabe stymies his ability to have even parasocial relationships with anyone who isn’t a cishet conservative white dude or one of their approved exceptions.

To the extent that any of this happens, it happens at Gabe’s discretion and at his own chosen pace. It has not been forced on him, only encouraged and rewarded. But the fact that it hasn’t been forced can make him all the more willing to accept it, because it seems safe to consider; even though his life and social circle are changing to accommodate, he does not feel committed. But many Gabes have walked these halls, and, if they close the door behind them, there’s nowhere left to go but down.

Step Four: Raise their Power Level

(...and they say we ruined anime.)

Consider the ecosystem of the Alt-Right as layers of an onion, with Gabe sitting at the edge and ready to traverse towards the center. (No, I’m not just going to reiterate the PewDiePipeline, though, if you haven’t seen it, go do that.)

The outer layer of the onion is extremism at its most plausibly deniable. Without careful scrutiny, the public-facing figureheads could pass as dispassionate, and the websites as merely problematic rather than softly fascist. It is valuable if Gabe believes this as well; that, at this stage, he believe the bigotry is simply trolling, the extremists an insignificant minority, and any report of harassment faked. That he believe where he is is as deep as the rabbit hole goes. And that he continue to believe this at each successive layer.

People in the deepest crevices of the Alt-Right self-report getting redpilled on multiple issues at different times in their journey to the center of the onion. If Gabe’s first red pill is about the SJWs coming for his free speech, he’ll think that’s all anyone in his community believes; there’s no racism here, people are just making a point about their right to use slurs. Then, when he gets redpilled on the white genocide, he’ll laugh at those Alt-Lite cucks who tried to sweep the race realists under the rug, and at himself for having once been one, but acknowledge that those channels and websites are still useful for onboarding people, so he won’t denounce them. At the same time, nobody takes those manosphere betas seriously.

And this process is reiterated with every pill swallowed: gender essentialism, autogynephilia, birtherism, Sandy Hook truth, pizzagate, QAnon if he’s really out there. The heart of the onion is typically the Jewish Question, but these can happen in any order, and in any number. But each layer sells itself as being, finally, the ultimate truth. Each denies the validity of the others; the layers ahead don’t exist, they’re made up my liberals, while the people behind are asleep where you are now awake. That’s why they chose “the red pill” as their metaphor: take it, and everything will be revealed. That’s why it cozies up with conspiracism. But what’s supposed to follow is that this knowledge help Gabe in some way, and it doesn’t. Blaming immigrants doesn’t actually fix the economy, and hating women doesn’t make men less lonely. But, having been alienated from everything outside the onion, once that sinks in, the only recourse on offer is to seek out the next pill.

And pills are easy to find. Those within the network have laissez-faire relationships, even as they, on paper, disavow one another. When they need a source or a guest host, they aren’t going to go to the Left; they’re going to feature each other. The Left is the enemy; their ideas are beneath consideration, and the only reason to engage them is for public humiliation. [Shapiro’s book.] But you can interview “western chauvinists” and that doesn’t mean you’re endorsing them, just, you know, it’s fine to hear ‘em out, nothing should be off-limits in the marketplace of ideas. Besides, Nazis are apolitical.

And because these folks keep showing up in each others’ metadata, regardless of what they say, Google thinks there is definitely a relationship between the guy “just asking questions” and the guy denying the Holocaust. Gabe is softly exposed to many flavors of conservatism just slightly more radical than he is now, and is expected, at the very least, to not question their presence. This is an environment where deradicalizing - listening to the Left - would be sleeping with the enemy, but radicalizing further? You do you, buddy.

Gabe’s emotional journey, however, is somewhat more complex. If you’ve spent any time reading or watching reactionary media you’ve probably noticed it’s really. fucking. repetitive. It’s a few thousand phrasings of the same handful of arguments. Like, there’s only so many jokes about attack helicopters! But these people just crank out content, and most of it’s derivative; the reason to pick one personality over another isn’t because they say something different, but because they say it differently. Gabe just picks the affect it’s delivered in.

Repetition dulls the shock of the most egregious statements, making them appear normal and prepping him for more extreme ideas. Meanwhile, the arguments themselves? They’re not good. (BreadTube will never run out of shit to debunk.) They are repetitive because they’re not good. They’re mantric. A good argument you only need to hear one time; if you can follow it, internalize it, and explain it to someone else, you know you’ve understood it. But a bad argument can’t convince you on its own merits, so it will often rely on affect. This can be the snappy, thought-terminating cliche, or the long, winding diatribe that sounds really sensible while you’re hearing it but when someone asks you for the gist you can only say “go watch these 17 videos and it’ll all make sense.” Both these approaches are largely devoid of content, but, gosh, if they don’t sound sure of themselves.

And that mode can be very persuasive, but it doesn’t stick the way a coherent argument does. It needs to be repeated, the affect replenished, because the words matter less than the delivery. There needs to be a steady stream of confident voices saying “we’ve got this figured out and everyone else is stupid” or Gabe’s gonna notice the flaws. They are not well-hidden.

And the catch-22 of returning to that stream over and over is that these communities are stressful even as they are calming. People afraid they will die virgins go to forums with people who share and validate that fear, and also say, “Yes, you will die a virgin.” People afraid Syrians are coming to kill us all watch videos by people who share and validate that fear, and also say, “Yes, Syrians are coming to kill us all.” Others have already pointed out that rubbing your face in your worst anxieties is a form of digital self-harm, but I need to you understand the toxic recursion of it: Gabe is going to these communities to get upset. Every emotion is converted into anger, because sadness, fear, and despair are paralyzing but anger is motivating; Gabe feels less helpless when he’s pissed off. And so, while he’s topping up on reassuring nonsense, he’s also topping up on stress. And, being cut off from everything outside the network, the only place he knows to go to release that stress is back to the place that gives it to him. It’s a feedback loop, pulling him deeper and deeper on the promise that, at some point, relief will come.

It is a similar dynamic that keeps people in abusive relationships.

When someone in Gabe’s community makes a racist joke, they are presenting Gabe with a choice between the human interaction of laughing with his friends and his societal responsibility not to be a fuckin’ racist. And not laughing seems ridiculous; everybody’s friends here; no one’s getting hurt; this is harmless. And so the irreverent race joke draws a line between the personal and the political, and suggests that one can be safely prioritized over the other. One way to look at radicalization is being asked to stick with that seemingly innocuous decision as the stakes are raised incrementally: first with edgier humor, and then comments that are funny because they’re shocking but you couldn’t really call them jokes, and then “funny” comments that are also sincerely angry, but, in each instance, since he laughed with his bros last time, it stands to reason he should keep favoring the personal over some abstracted notion of “politics.”

This is why the progressive adage “the personal is political” is among the most threatening things you can say in these spaces.

I’m not trying to make a slippery slope argument. Most of us who laughed at edgy jokes when we were teenagers didn’t grow up to be Nazis. It is a slippery slope in the specific context of being in community with people trying to radicalize you. Gabe is a lonely white boy in need of friends, and laughing at a racist joke is personal, while not laughing is political. Staying in a community that has Nazis in it is personal, and leaving is political. The personal is what brings people together and the political drives them apart. (The “only if some of them are bigots” part of that sentence is usually lopped off). There’s this joke on the internet that nerds perceive only two races: white and political. Following that logic, what could be more apolitical than an ethnostate?

They are banking on his willingness to adapt his beliefs to suit an environment that meets a need. That same need can be satisfied by white nationalism. There are few things more seductive to people who doubt their own worth than being told you are valuable simply for being white. And you can sub in male, cis, straight, allosexual, or able-bodied. It just takes priming: by the time Gabe officially embraces bigotry, he’s already been acting like a bigot for months. The red pill is simply the moment he says it out loud.

Change Gabe’s surroundings, and you change Gabe.

Step Five: ???

The final step in a traditional extremist group would be getting a mission. But that is one thing the Alt-Right can’t do. Once you start giving clear directives, you can’t play yourselves off as a bunch of unaffiliated hashtags and think tanks; you are now a formalized movement accountable to its followers, and can be judged and policed as such.

To my mind, Charlottesville was an attempt to become such a movement, taking things offline and getting all the different groups working collectively. And, as so often happens when these people get in the same space - especially with no official leaders or means of control over their members - it backfired. Their true colors came out before they were ready and a counter-protester lost her life.

This would be the point where, historically, an extremist group starts to disintegrate. Their veneer of respectability gone, they’re now hated by the public, the media wants nothing more to do with them, and everyone not in jail turns on each other or goes underground. This is also the point where the liberal establishment says, “My job here is done,” and utterly fails to retake control of the narrative, allowing the next batch of radicals to pick up more or less where the last one left off.

But to an already-decentralized group like the Alt-Right, Charlottesville was bad but eminently survivable. People retreated back to the internet, with its code words and anonymous forums, but that’s where much of the work was already done anyway. The platforms where they organized kept tolerating them, the authorities still didn’t classify them as terrorists, and any disgraced figureheads were replaced with up-and-comers.

The major change in strategy is that it doesn’t seem anyone has tried to formalize the Alt-Right since.

So where does that leave Gabe? He’s gone through this whole process of largely hands-off indoctrination - and I should stress his journey may look like what we’ve outlined or it may look different in places, this video is not comprehensive - but now he’s swallowed every pill he cares to, he blames half a dozen minorities for everything he sees as wrong with the world, and no one will give him anything to do. You’ve got this ad hoc movement frothing young men into a militant fervor and then just leaving them to stew in their own hate. Should we really be surprised at how many commit mass shootings?

This is a machine for producing lone wolves.

Leaving men to take up arms of their own volition is a way of enacting terror while being just outside the popular conception of a terror cell. There are also, of course, more classic militias that will offer Gabe clear directives - they’re recruiting from the same pool. And Gabe may stop short of this step, settling in a middle layer that suits him or finding the inner layers too extreme. But violence is the logical conclusion of an ideology of hate, and, should Gabe take this step, he can approach violence in the same incremental fashion he approached conservatism.

He can start with yelling at people on Twitter, and then maybe collective brigading, DDoS attacks, sharing dox, leaking nudes, calling their phone numbers, texting them pictures of their houses from the sidewalk. These acts of cruelty become games of oneupmanship within his community. All this can start as far back as Step 2, and get more intense the deeper he goes. Some people join explicitly partake in harassment and violence the way Gabe joined to talk about anime.

But this behavior can serve as a kind of buy-in. The Left and the feminists and the LGBTQs and the Muslims and the immigrants are all, within his community, subhuman. You’ve maybe heard the conservative catchphrase “feminism is cancer”; well don’t treat cancer by having a respectful exchange of ideas with it, but by eradicating it down to the last cell. Cruelty against the Left is framed as righteous.

From any other perspective, posting someone’s bank information is something you might feel ashamed of. Which creates a psychological imperative not to consider other perspectives. A thing that keeps people in is staving off the guilt they will reckon with the moment they step out. Gabe is also aware that anything he’s done to the Left could be done to him if he leaves; some communities even keep dox on their members as insurance. And the things he’s been encouraged to do to the Left will likely make him feel that the Left would never take him now; the radical Right is the only home he’s got. Harassment becomes another tool of isolation.

Steadily, options for Gabe are whittled down to being a vigilante or a nihilist. There are periods of elation: moments the Alt-Right feels it’s winning - or, more accurately, the people they hate are losing - are like cocaine. They are authoritarians, after all. But the times in between are mean and angry. They are antisocial, starved of emotional connection, consuming incompatible conspiracies that may at any point run them afoul of one another, devoted to figureheads who cater to but cannot risk leading them, and living under constant threat of being outed to the Left or turned on by the Right for stepping out of line. Gabe took this journey for the sense of community and purpose, and, but for the rare moments everything goes their way, the Alt-Right can’t maintain either. They can only keep promising his day will come, a story he could get from a $5 palm reading.

The feeling there’s nothing left but to kill yourself or someone else is so common it’s a meme.

But there is always a third option: Gabe can leave.

Pre-Conclusion: For Fuck’s Sake Do Not Make Gabe Your Whole-Ass Praxis

Before we continue, I want to state plainly that Gabe went off the deep end because he found a community willing to tell him that, because he is a cishet white man, the world revolves around him. Do not treat him like this is true.

If a fraction of the energy spent having debates with America’s Gabes were spent instead on voter re-enfranchisement, prisoner’s rights, protections for immigrants, statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, and redistricting, Gabe’s opinions, in the societal sense, wouldn’t matter. Reactionary conservatism is a small and largely unpopular ideology that is only so represented in our culture and politics because they’ve learned how to game the system.

And I get it. Those are huge problems that are going to take years to address, where, if you know a Gabe, that’s a conversation you could have today. And, if you think you can get through to him, it is worthwhile to try. This is a fight on many fronts and deradicalization is one of them. But it is only one, so please keep it in perspective. It sends an awful message when we spend more time trying to get bigots back on our side than we do the people they are bigoted against.

Your value as a lefty does not hinge on whether you can change Gabe’s mind.

Conclusion: How Gabe Gets Out

He may just grow out of it. These communities skew young, and some folks hit a point where hanging with edgy teens doesn’t feel cool anymore.

He may become disillusioned after the movement fails to deliver on its promises.

He may become disillusioned if something goes wrong in his life and his community isn’t there for him, if he feels they like his race and his gender but don’t actually care about him.

He may be shocked if he sees the Alt-Right at its worst before being appropriately conditioned. Charlottesville was a step too far for a lot of people.

His community may turn on him for any perceived unorthodoxy, and he may leave out of necessity.

He may be separated by circumstance from the community - a trip with no internet, hospitalization, arrest - and not be able to top up on the rhetoric. This may lead him to question his beliefs.

His community may disappear, either tearing itself apart or getting shut down by authorities.

He may have incidental contact with populations he’s supposed to hate, and have trouble reconciling who they are in person with what he’s been told about them. In his community, people bond over shared intolerance, but, suddenly, being tolerant helps him make friends. (This is one reason the Alt-Right has made a battleground of the college campus.)

He may form or revisit relationships outside the network, people who can offer him the connection he’s been looking for. This may reintroduce outside perspectives. More importantly, it rekindles his ability to have healthy relationships at all, something the Alt-Right has estranged him from.

As with recruiters, it seems these “escape hatch” relationships can sometimes be parasocial; coming to respect a public figure who is on the Left, or is critical of the Alt-Right.

Someone he is close to may compel him to choose, “me or the movement.” A lot of young men leave to save a romantic relationship.

Hearing stories from people who’ve already jumped may help; there aren’t a lot of public formers, and some raise suspicions as to their sincerity, but it is getting more common, and may be the closest we get to exit counseling for the Alt-Right.

He may become aware of the ways he’s being manipulated, or have them revealed to him, maybe because he stumbled into BreadTube, I dunno. Knowledge that you are being indoctrinated is no guarantee it won’t work - you are not immune to propaganda - but it can help one resist.

And he may revisit a core belief system that used to guide him, be it religion or social justice or a really wholesome fandom, and be reminded of the identity he used to have.

Moments like these, in isolation or in aggregate, can inspire Gabe to jump. They are also good times for friends to intervene. The reach and the impunity that comes with the internet means it has never been easier to fall into reactionary extremism. It has also never been easier to get out. People who exit skinhead gangs often fear for their lives; for Gabe, there’s a chance getting out is as simple as going to a different website. Much of his community does not know his name or his face and he may not important enough to dox.

What doesn’t get Gabe out - not reliably, not that I have seen - is an argument with a stranger who proves all his facts wrong and his ideology bunk. Facts don’t always work because facts don’t care about his feelings. This was about staying in a community, and holding onto an identity, that mattered to him. It was about belonging, and that is something a rando from the other side of the culture war can’t give him and probably shouldn’t be responsible for.

The theme here is human connection. Before he can do the work of disentangling himself, and facing the guilt of what he’s believed and maybe done, he has to know there’s somewhere for him on the other end of it. That the Right hasn’t ruined him. They’ve told him all of history is groups fighting each other over status, and, without his clan, he’ll be an exile. He needs a better story.

I don’t know that lefty spaces are ideal for this, in no small part because bringing someone who’s a bit of a Nazi but working on it into diverse communities is… questionable. And it probably wouldn’t be good for him, either; having just gotten out of a toxic belief system, he’s going to be deeply skeptical of all ideologies. In a perfect world, people who care about Gabe could build for him - to use a therapy term - a holding space. Someplace private - physical or digital - where Gabe can work out his feelings, where he is both encouraged and expected to be better but is not, in the moment, judged. That comes later. It is delicate and time-consuming work that should not be done in public, but we find these beliefs, built up over the course of months or years, tend to fall away very quickly with a shift of environment. Change Gabe’s surroundings and you change Gabe.

But, instead, a lot of people who jump are functionally deprogramming themselves, which is working for a lot of them, but it’s haphazard, and there are recidivists.

If you don’t personally know a Gabe, or have training as a counselor, you may not be in a position to help him. Possibly there are things you can do to disrupt the recruitment process or prevent infiltration of spaces you’re in - I’m looking into it, but talk to your mods - but, elephant in the room: meaningful change will require reform on the part of platform holders. Tools to disrupt this process already exist and are being used on groups like ISIS, but they’re not being used on the Alt-Right because they try oh so very hard not to get classified as terrorists (and also any functioning anti-radicalization policy would require banning a lot of conservative politicians, so there’s that...).

But what makes our story better than theirs is that the fight for social and economic justice, though it is long, and difficult, and frustrating, when it works, it fulfills the promise the Right can’t keep: it materially make people’s lives better. I am not prone to sentimentality, or to giving these videos happy endings. But one thing we have that the Alt-Right doesn’t is hope.

#video essay

[mastcomm]

‘Like Europe in Medieval Times’: Virus Slows China’s Economy

Workers are stuck in their hometowns. Officials want detailed health plans before factories or offices can reopen. Assembly lines that make General Motors cars and Apple iPhones are standing silent.

More than two weeks after China locked down a major city to stop a dangerous viral outbreak, one of the world’s largest economies remains largely idle. Much of the country was supposed to have reopened by now, but its empty streets, quiet factories and legions of inactive workers suggest that weeks or months could pass before this vital motor of global growth is humming again.

The global economy could suffer the longer China stays in low gear. It has been hampered by both the outbreak and its own containment efforts, a process that has cut off workers from their jobs and factories from their raw materials. The result is a slowdown that is already slashing traffic along the world’s shipping lines and leading to forecasts of a sharp fall in production of everything from cars to smartphones.

“It’s like Europe in medieval times,” said Jörg Wuttke, the president of the European Chamber of Commerce in China, “where each city has its checks and crosschecks.”

New figures show the authorities still have a long way to go before the outbreak can be tamed. On Tuesday, they reported a milestone: the overall death toll from coronavirus in China had topped 1,000. On Monday, the number was 908.

In a sign that China’s leaders feel increasing pressure to look like they are in control, Xi Jinping, the country’s top leader, toured a Beijing neighborhood and hospital, in what state media described as an inspection of the front line of the outbreak. Chinese officials have been roundly criticized online even in the face of tough censorship for what many see as a slow initial response and the suppression of early warnings.

On Monday, a team from the World Health Organization landed in Beijing to work with Chinese researchers battling the coronavirus. Their arrival could signal a shift in attitude among China’s leaders, who had balked at a visit and have long worked to show that they do not need foreign assistance to tackle problems.

The organization’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, cited with concern instances of infections among people who had not traveled to China, suggesting that even more cases could emerge. “In short, we may only be seeing the tip of the iceberg,” he wrote on Twitter.

Chinese health officials have been encouraged that the pace of recoveries among victims has outpaced deaths for more than a week. The rate of infection, however, has continued to soar, suggesting that the worst is still to come.

It is becoming increasingly clear that restarting China — the world’s largest manufacturer and a titan of global trade — would be difficult even if the country made major strides in the next few days toward containing the outbreak.

Until then, the damage is spreading.

On Monday, Nissan of Japan said it would shut down its plant in Kyushu, Japan, for four days beginning later this week “due to supply shortages of parts from China.” Other carmakers, like FCA in Italy and Hyundai in South Korea, have already warned that a lack of parts from China could force them to curtail production in their home markets.

Updated Feb. 10, 2020

What is a Coronavirus? It is a novel virus named for the crown-like spikes that protrude from its surface. The coronavirus can infect both animals and people, and can cause a range of respiratory illnesses from the common cold to more dangerous conditions like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS.

How contagious is the virus? According to preliminary research, it seems moderately infectious, similar to SARS, and is possibly transmitted through the air. Scientists have estimated that each infected person could spread it to somewhere between 1.5 and 3.5 people without effective containment measures.

How worried should I be? While the virus is a serious public health concern, the risk to most people outside China remains very low, and seasonal flu is a more immediate threat.

Who is working to contain the virus? World Health Organization officials have praised China’s aggressive response to the virus by closing transportation, schools and markets. This week, a team of experts from the W.H.O. arrived in Beijing to offer assistance.

What if I’m traveling? The United States and Australia are temporarily denying entry to noncitizens who recently traveled to China and several airlines have canceled flights.

How do I keep myself and others safe? Washing your hands frequently is the most important thing you can do, along with staying at home when you’re sick.

The China Development Forum, the country’s premier gathering of business leaders and economists, said its annual meeting, set for next month, had been postponed indefinitely.

Government officials had extended China’s official Lunar New Year holiday by three days to Feb. 3 to keep people home. Major business hubs, like the cities of Beijing and Shanghai and the provinces of Guangdong and Shandong, then further extended holidays until Monday.

As the day dawned, it was clear that business as usual had not resumed. Traffic in Beijing was much lighter than normal, stores remained closed and many residents worked from home or did not work at all.

Daimler, the German maker of Mercedes cars, said it began gradually ramping up production at its Chinese factories on Monday. But other major companies said their factories remained closed or were running slower than usual. Ford Motor said that its joint venture with one of China’s biggest state-owned firms was restarting some production, but that it would “ramp up our production over the following weeks.”

General Motors said it would reopen the first of its huge assembly plants in China on Saturday, and would gradually reopen the rest over the next two weeks, “based on local employees’ safety readiness, supply chain readiness and product inventory needs.”

China’s containment efforts are contributing to the disruptions.

The authorities have locked down a region of central China around Wuhan, the city at the center of the outbreak. The local authorities are taking a tough stance with traffic, meaning workers are struggling to return to their jobs. Many towns and cities have begun imposing two-week mandatory quarantines on arriving truck drivers who picked up cargos in cities with disease outbreaks or even just drove through these areas.

Wu Lin, an associate director at a Shanghai advertising company, returned to Wuhan, her hometown, for the holidays on Jan. 21 and had a high-speed train ticket back to Shanghai on Feb. 2. But her ticket was canceled soon after Wuhan was locked down, and she has tried and failed repeatedly since then to find a way out.

“There is no point to keep looking,” she said.

Shipyards around the country have run into labor shortages, said Tim Huxley, the chief executive of Mandarin Shipping, a Hong Kong freighter shipping company. Shipbuilders and ship repair providers have begun citing these labor shortages to invoke clauses in their contracts that allow them to delay completion of projects for events beyond their control, he said.

Aside from fear of disease, the country’s nearly 300 million migrant workers — almost two-fifths of the labor force — now have another reason to be reluctant to travel to distant cities: Their children are still home. Depending on the province, many schools are not scheduled to resume until Feb. 25 or even March 1.

Even factories with enough workers are running into further problems. The packaging industry is almost shut down, so everything from plastic packing to steel drums is running out, Mr. Wuttke said.

Local regulators are putting up even more barriers.

Before businesses in big manufacturing hubs like Shanghai, Shenzhen, Suzhou or Nanjing can reopen, they must now verify the travel history and health of every employee over the past two weeks. They must have frequent temperature checks of employees, hand-washing procedures and a plan to isolate and refer to hospitals anyone showing even fevers as low as 99.1 degrees Fahrenheit.

Most difficult of all, businesses cannot reopen without approval of their health plans by municipal officials — and larger operations also have to wait for a site visit from a health official.

Shenzhen, a vast sprawl of electronics factories and skyscrapers next to Hong Kong, issued new health and safety rules on Sunday and said factories that made iPhones and other Apple products would have to meet them before opening. Foxconn Technology, a Taiwanese company that owns the factories, said it met all health and hygiene rules but declined to comment on when production would restart at specific locations. Apple declined to comment.

Apple’s iPhone production, which is heavily concentrated in China, could drop by 10 percent in the first three months of the year, projected TrendForce, a technology forecasting firm in Taiwan.

The municipal government in Shanghai, home to more than 20 million people and a vast array of businesses, said only 70 percent of the city’s manufacturers were taking steps to resume production. Few have actually received permission to do so.

Businesses “want to protect staff, but also nobody wants to get caught offsides when it comes to the labor law or the daily announcements from the government,” said Ker Gibbs, the president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai.

It is not yet clear how the ripples from China’s slowdown will affect the United States. Businesses that rely on assembling a lot of different parts from various suppliers could become the hardest hit. At the top of that list is the auto industry — a single car may require as many as 30,000 parts from various suppliers.

American businesses have been trying to diversify away from China as President Trump’s trade war with Beijing has made it less economical to manufacture there. But a lot of steering parts, electronics and even door hinges still come to the United States from China, said Razat Gaurav, the chief executive of Llamasoft, a company in Ann Arbor, Mich., that handles supply chain logistics for big automakers and aerospace companies in North America.

“If the current coronavirus crisis continues to impact production capacity in China,” he said, “it will ultimately impact auto assembly plants in the U.S. and Mexico.”

Ben Dooley, Jack Ewing and Raymond Zhong contributed reporting. Cao Li contributed research.

from WordPress https://mastcomm.com/business/like-europe-in-medieval-times-virus-slows-chinas-economy/

#Business

[douchebagbrainwaves]

OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT PAGE

Almost by definition, if a startup regularly does new deals and releases and either sends us mail or shows up at YC events, they're probably going to live. Since we hosted all the stores, which together were getting just over 10 million page views per month in June 1998, we consumed what at the time whether this was a proper use of the Internet, which was getting from place to place. Lots of hot startups will end up succeeding. Another danger of less known firms is that people will assume, correctly or not, patents were at least intended to. A conditional is an if-then-else construct. In return for the unique privilege of sharing his office with no other humans, he had to share it with 6 shrieking tower servers.1 And nowhere more than in matters of funding.

The word venture capitalist is sometimes used loosely for any venture investor, but there is no great demand for them. That sounds like a joke, but it's not much use in practice because the search space is too big. The reason is that good design requires that one person think of everything. Some people know at 16 what sort of work they're going to do, but in some situations it could mean founders will have less power. I found spam intolerable, and I suspect the human brain is just as steep, and when there's only one of us so far and no word yet for what we are. If you want to understand economic inequality—and more importantly, if you tell everyone your idea, we'll protect it for you.2 This suggests an answer to a question people in New York admire more.3 I doubt Microsoft would ever be so stupid. He was also a lawyer, which was still then a quasi-government entity. The fund managers, who are called general partners, get about 2% of the fund annually as a management fee, plus about 20% of the fund's gains. You can never tell what message a city sends? And not just inexperienced angel investors, but part of what it might have been.4

And everyone knows that if you pick some number to focus on one type of ambition do.5 But as I explained in The Refragmentation, that was an anomaly—a unique combination of circumstances that compressed American society not just economically but culturally too. But this model doesn't work for software.6 Seed firms will probably have set deal terms they use for every startup they fund. It's no defense to say that the novel or the chair is designed according to the most advanced theoretical principles.7 People will say things in anonymous forums that they'd never do as pedestrians—like tailgate people, or the idea—or more precisely, archive, in the short term, because they rely heavily on first impressions. Can you do more of that? It certainly has to be under the control of a development machine is no more miraculous by present standards than the iPhone itself would have seemed by the standards of 1995. In the real world, VCs regard angels the way a jealous husband feels about his wife's previous boyfriends. As hackers, one of the founders of a company, all they want to get market price, work on something till they think it's finished, then they release it.8

Notes

They can't estimate your minimum capital needs that precisely. If anyone wanted to make a formal language for proofs in which multiple independent buildings are traditionally seen as temporary; there is undeniably a grim satisfaction in hunting down certain sorts of bugs, and partly because users hate the idea that evolves into Facebook isn't merely a complicated but pointless collection of qualities helps people make investment decisions well when they want to get out of a safe will be familiar to anyone who had to resort to raising money in order to switch to a degree that alarmed his family, that probably doesn't make A more accurate predictor of low salaries as the little jars in supermarkets. Ii.

I mean this in terms of the art business?

If you were going about it as a percentage of GDP, which means you're being asked to come in and convince them. Fortuna! The first big company.

It's a strange task to write your thoughts down in the narrowest sense. The reason we quote statistics about the size of a handful of consulting firms that rent out big pools of foreign programmers they bring in on H1-B visas. And it would take their customers directly, which was acquired for 50 million, and this destroyed all traces. Though it looks like stuff they've seen in the back of Yahoo, we could just expand into casinos than software, we can teach startups a lot on how much we really depend on closing a deal led by a big factor in high school.

For example, probably did more drugs in his twenties than any other company has to work in research departments. But it is. It's sometimes argued that kids who went to Europe. You can build things for programmers, it is not much use, because they suit investors' interests.

I chose this example deliberately as a child, either, that you can discriminate on any basis you want to hire any first—A Spam Classification Organization Program. False positives are not mutually exclusive.

Writing college textbooks are similarly misleading.

It did. Siegel, Jeremy J. I'm skeptical whether economic inequality is not much use, because there are some good proposals too. Its retail price is about 220,000 per month.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #idea #size #Internet #fund #question

[ellymackay]

Are You a Lucid Dreamer?

Are You a Lucid Dreamer? is available on https://www.ellymackay.com

I’m fascinated by dreams. I know I’m not alone in this. As a sleep expert, I’m constantly being asked about dreams. People want to know what their dreams mean (I’m often as stumped as everyone else about the strangeness of dreams). People want to know what purpose dreams serve (scientists who study dreams are still searching for an answer to that very big question).

I’m especially fascinated by a particular type of dream: lucid dreams.  In lucid dreams, the dreamer is aware of the fact that he or she is dreaming. During lucid dreams, dreamers often can even manipulate or control their dream as it’s happening.

Dreams have preoccupied humans for as long as we’ve been dreaming. And we’ve always been interested in how to control our dreams, to use them for creativity and insight. Thinkers and discoverers from Aristotle to Edison to Einstein have tried to harness the power of dreams to take advantage of this free-flowing, no-boundaries form of consciousness. That interest continues today, as we explore new ways to intentionally cultivate lucid dreams.

Let’s take a look at some of the latest science on lucid dreaming—what it is, why it happens, and how we might be able to train ourselves to become lucid dreamers and take greater control of our dream worlds.

What’s it like to have a lucid dream?

Have you ever been in the midst of a dream and found yourself thinking about the fact that you’re dreaming? Maybe you’ve had a moment of self-aware laughter at the oddity of a dream, or been able to temper your fear of a frightening dream episode because your mind grasps that what you’re experiencing isn’t “real.” Have you ever been able to control the circumstances or the action of your dream—as though you were the director of your dream “movie” and not only an actor in it?

Self-awareness of dreaming and the ability to control dreams are two central characteristics of the experience of lucid dreaming. They don’t always occur together, however. People who experience lucid dreams may have self-awareness within their dreams, but not the ability to control dream content. And the lucidity of our dreams can be fleeting—that’s to say, bursts of self-awareness within dreams may be very brief.

If you’ve never had a lucid dream, it can be tricky to imagine what this is all like. Think for a moment about what “regular” dreaming is like. During non-lucid dreams, we experience dream experiences as though they’re actually happening to us. It’s only after we awaken and recall our dream—even if that recall lasts for only a moment before we lose our dream memory—that we gain an awareness of having been dreaming.

The difference between this commonplace, non-lucid type of dream and a lucid dream is the ability to reflect on what’s happening in our minds as it is happening. That self-awareness of our thoughts is what’s known as metacognition. It’s generally understood that metacognition—an active ability of the human mind while awake-all but disappears during sleep. Lucid dreaming appears to be an exception.

In lucid dreams, at least two states of consciousness—a wake-like, metacognitive state and a dreaming state–appear to be mixed together. In this extraordinary mixed state of consciousness, we can both experience our dream and see ourselves dreaming—and maybe even control those dreams as they unfold.

Why do we have lucid dreams?

Not all of us do dream with lucidity. It appears to be pretty common for people to experience a lucid dream at some point in their lives. Research suggests that more than half of us may have at least one lucid dream during our lifetimes. But regular lucid dreaming is much more rare than that. And there appear to be a very small number of people who not only experience lucid dreams regularly, but also can exert some control within those dreams.

Scientific studies have shown that our brains behave differently during lucid dreams than in other states of sleep and dreaming.  Research has found lucid dreamers displayed significantly higher brain wave frequencies than non-lucid dreamers.

Lucid dreamers also appear to have increased activity in regions of the brain’s prefrontal cortex, areas of the brain that are typically inactive during sleep. These parts of the brain are deeply involved with conscious awareness, a sense of self, as well as language and memory. Recently, for the first time, scientific study documented that the brain activity of lucid dreams shares several characteristics with the waking state of metacognition.

It’s not clear why some people have lucid dreams, while others do not, or why some people experience lucid dreams quite often, while most of us may only have this experience a handful of times in a lifetime.

But there are some interesting clues about what may distinguish lucid dreamers from non-lucid dreamers. Some research indicates that certain personality traits and cognitive styles may be linked to lucid dreams. Imagination and creativity have both been associated with more frequent lucid dreaming. Introspection, and a tendency to rely more heavily on internal thoughts (rather than external information) have also been linked to lucid dreams. Research shows that people who can effectively split their attention between different tasks, or points of focus, may be more apt to have lucid dreams. There’s also some indication that people who experience nightmares more often may be more prone to lucid dreams.

And some research suggests that stronger overall dream recall—a greater ability to remember all types of dreams after waking—may be linked to a greater capacity for lucid dreaming.

Recently, studies have shown lucid dreaming is more common in people with narcolepsy. In narcolepsy, brain activity is atypical, and some of the neural activity that promotes wakefulness and suppresses sleep are altered. This results in poor sleep control, intense and persistent daytime sleepiness, difficulty sleeping at night, and dream-like hallucinations. People with narcolepsy tend also to have more nightmares and better dream recall than people without the disorder.

Some fascinating recent research conducted by scientists in the United Kingdom has also linked lucid dreaming to sleep paralysis, another striking sleep experience. Sleep paralysis occurs when we wake from sleep unable to move or to speak. Both sleep paralysis and lucid dreaming appear to be related to transitions in and out of REM sleep. During REM sleep, the body is largely paralyzed (a condition known as REM atonia). And REM sleep is a sleep stage characterized by vivid, active dreaming.

This research showed an association between the frequency of sleep paralysis and the frequency of lucid dreaming. It also highlighted some important differences between the two sleep phenomena. Sleep paralysis was connected to higher stress and to lower sleep quality. That’s not surprising to me, given how upsetting and scary episodes of sleep paralysis can be. On the other hand, lucid dreaming appeared to be a much more positive sleep experience. In this study, lucid dreaming was not associated with stress or reduced sleep quality. It was linked to more positive waking daydreaming experiences, and to more vivid waking imagination.

Can we induce lucid dreaming?

This a big question, for dreamers and scientists alike. How can we encourage lucid dreaming?

You might be asking: why would people want to encourage lucid dreaming? We don’t know the fundamental purpose of dreaming. But dreams have long been thought to be vehicles for emotional processing, problem solving, idea exploring and creativity. Since ancient times, dreams have been thought to be a forum for both healing and discovery related to our waking lives. In our modern age, rigorous scientific study has given us data to support all of these long-held thoughts about the usefulness of dreams.

Scientists, sleep experts and therapists (including me!) are interested in the specific potential of lucid dreams a therapeutic tool. Working intentionally with lucid dreams can be effective in reducing the intensity, frequency and emotional disruption of nightmares. In a lucid dream setting the dreamer has the capacity to push back against negative and disturbing dream narratives, emotional content and events. In a real sense, the dreamer may be able to re-script a cream to create more positive, empowering, calming outcomes. That makes lucid dreaming potentially useful in a range of psychological situations, including the treatment of waking-life phobias and traumas, issues with mood, and in relationships.

Lucid dreams have also long been sought as a way to enhance creativity—and that continues to be true today. People are understandably curious about how to mine their dream worlds to unlock creative powers, as well as to enhance other cognitive skills. And let’s face it: it’s pretty thrilling and cool to contemplate being able to control our dreams, and bring about self-awareness and self-reflection within them. The experience alone is enticing and desirable for many people.

Ways to promote lucid dreams

There are a number of techniques and tools being explored by scientists as ways to increase lucid dreaming. Studies show that the drug galantamine, which is used to treat dementia, may be effective in increasing the frequency of lucid dreams. Galantamine works to stop the breakdown of acetylcholine, a brain chemical that is an important facilitator of reflective thinking, reasoning, and memory. Acetylcholine also is involved the the regulation of REM sleep. Research is also exploring how sensory and environmental cues might be used to stimulate lucid dreams.

If you’re interested in cultivating your own lucid dreaming abilities, there are some techniques you can try on your own.

Reality testing. This simple technique involves checking in with your surroundings throughout your waking day. As you observe your waking environment, ask yourself: am I awake or am I dreaming? This practice may spur the mind to ask this question inside your dreaming consciousness.

Wake back to bed, or WBTB. Using WBTB, a person sleeps for 5-6 hours, then deliberately wakes for a period of time—as little as 10 minutes, or up to an hour—before going back to sleep. The idea here is to send yourself immediately into REM sleep (which occurs most abundantly in the final third of the night), where most, if not all, lucid dreaming occurs. (One note: don’t use WBTB if it shortens your sleep amounts or leaves you feeling tired and shortchanged on rest. Lucid dreaming isn’t worth actually losing sleep over!)

Mnemonic induction of lucid dreams, or MILD. This is one of the best studied lucid dream techniques. It uses intention to stimulate self-awareness in dreams. Before going to sleep, say to yourself: “The next time I’m dreaming, I will remember I am dreaming.” You can also use MILD with specific dream recollections. Take a moment to recall a dream you had recently, and think specifically about an oddity or anomaly in that dream. (Maybe street signs were in a strange language, or the furniture in your living room was all rearranged.) Visualize yourself returning to that dream and recognizing that anomaly, while also saying to yourself the same intention from above.

A 2017 study investigated these techniques and found that using all three together was effective in stimulating lucid dreaming.

Enhance dream recall. Strengthening your ability to remember your dreams is one way to potentially develop your ability for lucid dreaming. Keeping a dream journal is one way to increase dream recall. Keep the journal at your bedside. As soon as you wake, write down everything you remember about your dream. There’s also some pretty interesting recent research showing that Vitamin B6 can help enhance our memories of dreams.

Scientists at Australia’s University of Adelaide found that taking a high-dose (240mg) of vitamin B6 supplements before going to bed for five consecutive days led to greater dream recall. You can increase your vitamin B6 intake by eating whole grain cereals, legumes, fruits (such as banana and avocado), vegetables (such as spinach and potato), milk, cheese, eggs, red meat, liver, and fish.

Meditate. Meditation is a practice of mindful awareness, of attention to the present moment. Practicing meditation during your waking day will help you develop your capacity for awareness of where your mind is in the moment. That skill may translate into the dream world, increasing your ability for self-awareness—aka lucidity—in your dreams. A 2015 study found that meditation and mindfulness were connected to more frequent lucid dreaming. Other research shows meditation has benefits for dreaming as a whole. Mindfulness practices have been shown to reduce negative and disturbing content in dreams. And as I’ve written about before, mindfulness practices, including meditation, can help you sleep better overall.

Let me know your experiences with lucid dreaming, and any questions you have about our dreaming lives! I’ll continue to talk about lucid dreams as we learn more about this extraordinary form of dreaming. Until then, here’s a link to all of my articles about dreaming.

Sweet Dreams,

Michael J. Breus, PhD, DABSM

The Sleep Doctor

www.thesleepdoctor.com

  The post Are You a Lucid Dreamer? appeared first on Your Guide to Better Sleep.

from Your Guide to Better Sleep https://thesleepdoctor.com/2019/02/26/are-you-a-lucid-dreamer/

from Elly Mackay - Feed https://www.ellymackay.com/2019/02/26/are-you-a-lucid-dreamer/

[justinrmcneill-blog]

The Selection Effect and Personal Finance: Are You Affected?

If you've been reading The College Investor for any length of time, I hope you've come to the conclusion that smart money management isn't rocket science. Even the jargon-laden field of investing isn't so difficult once you understand the basics.

However, even people who have taken the time to research and understand personal finance end up making big financial mistakes. Why is that? Part of the answer is that it's hard to do things that we know we should do. The other part of the answer is that sometimes the “right path” turns out to be a dead end. Our cognitive biases may prevent us from making wise financial decisions even when we're trying our best.

Below we explain five different ways that cognitive bias could hurt your pocketbook.

Quick Navigation

Survivorship Bias and Investing

The Skin-in-the-Game Effect and Investing Advice

Sampling Bias and Income Advice

Anchoring and Insurance Sales

​Confirmation Bias and Financial Advice

Final Thoughts

Survivorship Bias and Investing

Survivorship bias is the idea that people often focus on people who “survive” some process while neglecting to think about those who didn't survive. This type of bias can be particularly influential when making investing decisions.

One of my favorite subreddits is called WallStreetBets. The people who post on this forum are taking some of the riskiest bets in investments. When I first started following the forum, shorting oil futures was the hot investment. These days, the forum focuses mainly on options trading.

One reason I love this forum is that most users are faithful to report their losses as well as their profits. That being said, posts proclaiming a $10K, $50K, or even $100K gain are a lot more interesting than a post declaring a $350 loss. When studying this forum, it could be pretty easy to assume that most investors make a ton of money with every trade. In fact, that's not true. It's just that those are the investments that get reported.

Instead of assuming that investors are always giving sound advice, it pays to try to figure out how many have failed along the way. Additionally, if you're interested in active investing, and you don't want to get your shirt taken, I strongly recommend looking into the Kelly Criterion which can help you determine the size of bet you should take (relative to the size of the portfolio).

The Skin-in-the-Game Effect and Investing Advice

Survivorship bias refers to a personal cognitive bias that can lead to suboptimal outcomes in investing. However, another bias can lead to you accepting some pretty bad advice (particularly if you don't know who is giving the advice). The skin-in-the-game effect refers to the idea that someone who isn't exposed to the consequences of certain advice may give bad advice.

If you're posing questions on online forums (particularly about investments), you're bound to get some pretty bad advice. If you ask whether you should put your $50,000 into Ethereum, someone is likely to respond, “Why the hell not?” That person has no skin in the game. It doesn't matter to them if you lose all $50,000, and they don't care about you personally.

On the flip side, if you're talking to someone about a random alt-coin, there could skin-in-the-game that you don't realize. They could be encouraging you to invest in something simply so they profit. I see this with some online social media personalities who are "pumping and dumping" alt coins and other speculative investments.

I think it's great to seek advice online, but be careful before taking action. The people giving it aren't going to bear the consequences of your actions, but you are.

Interestingly, the skin-in-the-game effect can lead to overly optimistic advice in the world of more traditional financial planning. For example, many financial advisors (as well as financial independence bloggers) advise clients to rely on a 4% withdrawal rule. That means investors can live on 4% of their base portfolio, adjusting for inflation.

However, these advisors have never personally lived on an investment portfolio and may not truly have accounted for possible massive or long-lived stock market recessions. The math of the 4% rule may be perfectly sound, but living the 4% rule is assuredly different than advising others to live by it.

Sampling Bias and Income Advice

One of the most difficult biases to overcome in the digital age is “selection” or sampling bias. When it comes to crowdsourcing ideas, you need to be very careful to take the ideas with a grain of salt. You need to ask two important questions: who is answering my question and who isn't?

When it comes to personal finance, I see sampling bias most significantly when I see questions related to income. In particular, when I see people pose scenarios about how to raise their income, I'm shocked to see some of the advice.

In several Facebook groups that I'm a part of, the advice on raising income boils down to asking for a raise, getting a new degree, or getting a second job. This isn't necessarily bad advice, but it's advice from average people with average jobs. Nobody who is crushing the income side of the equation is chiming in. Salespeople who bring in six figures aren't recommending their favorite books, and entrepreneurs aren't explaining how they launched their first product.

The advice you receive is generally a function of whom you ask. When it comes to asking for advice about income, I recommend asking people who are doing amazing work to give you their advice. Otherwise, average advice will yield average results.

I love this quote by Jim Rohn:

You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

So, ask yourself, who are the five people you're surrounding yourself with that are impacting your financial life?

Anchoring and Insurance Sales

One cognitive bias that I've personally fallen for is the concept of anchoring. Anchoring is focusing on a single piece of information when making a decision. Anchoring can be a helpful heuristic; for example, I anchor my portfolio performance expectation with the S&P 500. When the S&P 500 is down 25%, I'm not so worried if my portfolio is down 28%.

However, anchoring can lead to some pretty nasty financial outcomes particularly related to buying insurance-type products such as whole life insurance or annuities. Personally, I think that whole life insurance and annuities are derided too heavily. I can think of scenarios where these financial products would play a role - especially annuities (less so whole life - especially with the new estate tax limits). 

Less-than-ethical insurance salespeople may anchor buyers' attention on a single product attribute (for example, internal rates of return or guarantees) without explaining the assumptions. For example, I purchased a whole life insurance product that assumed a 7% internal rate of return which is nearly impossible for a bond-heavy portfolio to hit these days. I purchased it because I was anchored in the 7% internal rate of return, not because whole life insurance meets my particular financial needs.

Before becoming enamored with particular features of a product, you need to be sure that the product itself is a good fit for your needs.

This also comes close to the category of financial whataboutism that we talked about before. This is where people make comparisons such as "what about this" to try and anchor the discussion around something that really doesn't matter. 

It can really be a costly bias.

​Confirmation Bias and Financial Advice

The last cognitive bias you (and your wallet) should beware of is confirmation bias. This is one of the most deceptive forms of cognitive bias. Confirmation bias is the concept that we share ideas with people who are likely to agree with the validity of the idea.

For example, if you're in an entrepreneurship group, and you have an idea to start a business, the other group members are likely to applaud you. Take that same idea to your grandmother, and she's likely to wonder why you don't like your stable job in the air-conditioned office building.

In general, we're going to seek out the opinions of the people who agree with us. Personally, I think confirmation bias can help us get up the guts to do something a little bit risky, so it can be helpful. That said, if you're trying to understand a financial decision from multiple angles, confirmation bias is a sticking point. 

If you only seek advice from people who think like you, you're unlikely to come to a great decision. I see this a lot in Facebook groups focused around Dave Ramsey and Mr. Money Mustache. Both of these individuals have really "die hard" rules about money and life. Some of these groups create an extreme confirmation bias effect around each other and really refuse to listen or acknowledge that alternative approaches might be beneficial.

Before making any type of big financial decision, you need to acknowledge multiple angles to any situation.

Final Thoughts

As more and more personal finance discussions happen online, it's really important to keep these cognitive biases at the forefront of your mind. It can be hard to do - our perceived reality of the world can become skewed very quickly with different opinions, advertisements, groups, and more.

But I always remember a key lesson I learned early on about money online:

People who aren't doing well will reach out and/or post on forums much more frequently to complain, vent, or to try to improve. People who are crushing it typically don't talk about it online publicly. I think the ratio is usually 10 to 1. Keep that in mind everywhere you go financially online.

The post The Selection Effect and Personal Finance: Are You Affected? appeared first on The College Investor.

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Cambodia’s Coronavirus Complacency May Exact a Global Toll

SIHANOUKVILLE, Cambodia — When Cambodia’s prime minister greeted passengers on a cruise ship amid a coronavirus scare on Valentine’s Day, embraces were the order of the day. Protective masks were not.

Not only did Prime Minister Hun Sen not wear one, assured that the ship was virus-free, his bodyguards ordered people who had donned masks to take them off. The next day, the American ambassador to Cambodia, W. Patrick Murphy, who brought his own family to greet the passengers streaming off the ship, also went maskless.

“We are very, very grateful that Cambodia has opened literally its ports and doors to people in need,” Mr. Murphy said.

But after hundreds of passengers had disembarked, one later tested positive for the coronavirus. Now, health officials worry that what Cambodia opened its doors to was the outbreak, and that the world may pay a price as passengers from the cruse ship Westerdam stream home.

Before the Westerdam docked in Sihanoukville, fearful governments in other countries had turned the ship away at five ports of call even though the cruise operator, Holland America, assured officials that the ship’s passengers had been carefully screened.

Prime Minister Hun Sen’s decision to allow it entry appeared to be a political calculus as much as anything else. The region’s longest-serving ruler and a close ally of China, he is known for his survival skills.

But Mr. Hun Sen’s critics worry that the aging autocrat might have acted rashly.

“Of course, he had to do the dictator thing: photo op, roses, exploit this for its maximum value,” said Sophal Ear, an expert in Cambodian politics at Occidental College. “Whatever is in the best interest of Cambodians is completely irrelevant to him.”

It is too early to tell whether the decision to let hundreds of passengers from the Westerdam fly off has the makings of an epidemiological disaster. Cambodian health authorities said that 409 of the 2,257 passengers and crew had left Cambodia for their homes scattered across the globe. The rest remain in hotels in Phnom Penh, the capital, or on the ship.

But deficiencies in screening for the coronavirus aboard the ship, along with continued complacency about the epidemic in Cambodia, are raising fears this small Southeast Asian nation could prove to be a surprising vector of transmission for a virus that has already killed more than 1,700 people, mostly in China, the epicenter of the outbreak.

Updated Feb. 10, 2020

What is a Coronavirus? It is a novel virus named for the crown-like spikes that protrude from its surface. The coronavirus can infect both animals and people, and can cause a range of respiratory illnesses from the common cold to more dangerous conditions like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS.

How contagious is the virus? According to preliminary research, it seems moderately infectious, similar to SARS, and is possibly transmitted through the air. Scientists have estimated that each infected person could spread it to somewhere between 1.5 and 3.5 people without effective containment measures.

How worried should I be? While the virus is a serious public health concern, the risk to most people outside China remains very low, and seasonal flu is a more immediate threat.

Who is working to contain the virus? World Health Organization officials have praised China’s aggressive response to the virus by closing transportation, schools and markets. This week, a team of experts from the W.H.O. arrived in Beijing to offer assistance.

What if I’m traveling? The United States and Australia are temporarily denying entry to noncitizens who recently traveled to China and several airlines have canceled flights.

How do I keep myself and others safe? Washing your hands frequently is the most important thing you can do, along with staying at home when you’re sick.

Many health experts urge people who have been in contact with coronavirus patients to self-quarantine for 14 days, lest they add another spoke to the contagion network.

But on Monday, Mr. Hun Sen directed officials in Phnom Penh to treat passengers from the Westerdam to a sightseeing jaunt.

“To tour the city is better than staying in rooms or at the hotel feeling bored or scared,” said a post on Mr. Hun Sen’s Facebook page.

The lack of urgency in Cambodia, where officials milled around the ship on Monday without protection, points to the obstacles in trying to contain a virus that experts warn is spreading faster than SARS or MERS.

“This is influenza-like transmission,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “It’s like trying to stop the wind.”

Last week, when the Westerdam docked in Sihanoukville, the Cambodian government and the cruise operator deemed the vessel virus-free.

The declaration was at a minimum premature.

Only 20 people out of the 2,257 onboard were tested for the virus before disembarking, and that was because they had reported themselves to ship medical staff with various ailments.

The woman who twice tested positive after traveling on to Malaysia, an 83-year-old American, was not among those 20, Holland America said.

Health monitoring for the rest of the passengers was limited to a handful of temperature checks conducted with infrared thermometers, passengers said. In a statement, Holland America said that during one of those screenings, not a single person on board recorded an elevated temperature.

On Monday, an announcement broadcast to passengers remaining on the Westerdam warned that they should avoid the ship’s hot deck and return to their air-conditioned rooms to avoid falsely high temperature readings.

Some health experts have questioned the efficacy of infrared thermometers, also known as temperature guns, saying they measure the heat emanating from the surface of the body, rather than core body temperature.

Various environmental factors can distort thermometer gun reading, said Gary Strahan, who runs a small infrared device company in Texas.

“In Cambodia, you have warmer background temperatures,” he said. “It could impact the measurement. That’s the issue with any noncontact thermometer.”

Even if temperatures are accurately gauged, people may be taking medication that lower their temperature, like some arthritis drugs.

And in any case, people who are asymptomatic can still pass on the coronavirus, scientists have found.

“A person who does not present as feverish is not necessarily uninfected with a disease or a virus,” said Jim Seffrin, an expert on infrared devices at the Infraspection Institute in New Jersey.

In the wake of the positive test in Malaysia, Cambodian health officials said they would be relying on a domestic lab to test all passengers and crew members still in the country for the coronavirus.

On Monday evening, passengers celebrated news from Cambodian health officials that a first batch of 406 people in Phnom Penh had tested negative, although there was no certainty they would not later test positive.

“People on the ship are very grateful to the people of Cambodia,” said Tammie Graves, an American from Kansas. “I was a bit worried that they might be afraid of us, even at the hotel, but it hasn’t been like that at all.”

On Monday afternoon, more than 100 Westerdam passengers took up Mr. Hun Sen’s offer of a capital tour, piling in buses to see the royal palace and other sites.

In pictures of the excursion, posted on a government-linked website, only one person can be seen wearing a mask.

Despite cases of coronavirus popping up in Southeast Asia, Mr. Hun Sen has campaigned against masks, arguing that they are better at spreading fear than stopping germs. At a news conference last month, he announced that he would kick out anyone who dared wear a mask.

Even as other governments instituted China travel bans that angered Beijing, Mr. Hun Sen traveled to the Chinese capital and met with Xi Jinping, China’s leader, in another photo op.

And as other countries organized airlifts of people trapped in Wuhan, the city where the virus is believed to have originated, Mr. Hun Sen said he would not ferry Cambodian students home because they should be “joining with Chinese to fight this disease.”

The sense of solidarity makes sense in a country heavily dependent on China for its fortunes, after having turned its back on a West that was demanding progress in human rights in return for aid and investment.

A torrent of Chinese cash has remade Cambodia, nowhere more so than in Sihanoukville, a once sleepy beach town that is now a sprawling construction site of gilded casinos and towering residential blocks. More than 90 percent of businesses in the city are now Chinese owned.

On Monday, Oeun Yen, a masseuse here, worried about the massages she had given three female passengers from the Westerdam before the virus case was confirmed by Malaysia. She was not afraid at first, she said, because the prime minister had assured people all was fine.

“Now I am more concerned,” she said.

In a country where Mr. Hun Sen has dissolved the biggest opposition party and political assassination is not uncommon, such mild concern is as much as many ordinary residents are willing to muster.

But there is also widespread skepticism of the government’s contention that only one person in Cambodia has so far tested positive for coronavirus, a Chinese citizen who has since returned home.

“There is a natural lack of credibility and trust associated with the Cambodian government,” said Ou Virak, a human-rights activist and founder of the Future Forum, a local think tank. “This is Hun Sen’s Westerdam problem, because even if he was doing the right thing, purely as a humanitarian, he will be seen as the puppet of China instead.”

On Monday, Mr. Hun Sen announced yet another publicity stunt: He wants to invite the passengers of the Westerdam to a party.

Masks won’t be welcome.

Reporting was contributed by Sun Narin in Sihanoukville; Roni Caryn Rabin and David Yaffe-Bellany in New York; and Richard C. Paddock in Denpasar, Indonesia.

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China’s Powerful Growth Engine Idles as Coronavirus Spreads

Workers are stuck in their hometowns. Officials want detailed health plans before factories or offices can reopen. Assembly lines that make General Motors cars and Apple iPhones are standing silent.

More than two weeks after China locked down a major city to stop a dangerous viral outbreak, one of the world’s largest economies remains largely idle. Much of the country was supposed to have reopened by now, but its empty streets, quiet factories and legions of inactive workers suggest that weeks or months could pass before this vital motor of global growth is humming again.

Global growth could suffer the longer China stays in low gear. It has been hampered by both the outbreak and its own containment efforts, a process that has cut off workers from their jobs and factories from their raw materials. The result is a slowdown that is already slashing traffic along the world’s shipping lines and leading to forecasts of a sharp fall in production of everything from cars to smartphones.

“It’s like Europe in medieval times,” said Joerg Wuttke, the president of the European Chamber of Commerce in China, “where each city has its checks and crosschecks.”

New figures show the authorities still have a long way to go before the outbreak can be tamed. On Monday, the authorities reported the most deaths from the new coronavirus in a single day, raising the death toll by 97 to 908.

In a sign that China’s leaders feel increasing pressure to look like they are in control, Xi Jinping, the country’s top leader, toured a Beijing neighborhood and hospital, in what state media described as an inspection of the front line of the outbreak. Chinese officials have been roundly criticized online even in the face of tough censorship for what many see as a slow initial response and the suppression of early warnings.

On Monday, a team from the World Health Organization landed in Beijing to work with Chinese researchers battling the coronavirus. Their arrival could signal a shift in attitude among China’s leaders, who had balked at a visit and have long worked to show that they do not need foreign assistance to tackle problems.

The organization’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, cited with concern instances of infections among people who had not traveled to China, suggesting that even more cases could emerge. “In short, we may only be seeing the tip of the iceberg,” he wrote on Twitter.

Chinese health officials have been encouraged that the pace of recoveries among victims has outpaced deaths for more than a week. The rate of infection, however, has continued to soar, suggesting that the worst is still to come.

Updated Feb. 10, 2020

What is a Coronavirus? It is a novel virus named for the crown-like spikes that protrude from its surface. The coronavirus can infect both animals and people, and can cause a range of respiratory illnesses from the common cold to more dangerous conditions like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS.

How contagious is the virus? According to preliminary research, it seems moderately infectious, similar to SARS, and is possibly transmitted through the air. Scientists have estimated that each infected person could spread it to somewhere between 1.5 and 3.5 people without effective containment measures.

How worried should I be? While the virus is a serious public health concern, the risk to most people outside China remains very low, and seasonal flu is a more immediate threat.

Who is working to contain the virus? World Health Organization officials have praised China’s aggressive response to the virus by closing transportation, schools and markets. This week, a team of experts from the W.H.O. arrived in Beijing to offer assistance.

What if I’m traveling? The United States and Australia are temporarily denying entry to noncitizens who recently traveled to China and several airlines have canceled flights.

How do I keep myself and others safe? Washing your hands frequently is the most important thing you can do, along with staying at home when you’re sick.

It is becoming increasingly clear that restarting China — the world’s largest manufacturer and a titan of global trade — would be difficult even if the country makes major strides in the next few days toward containing the outbreak.

Until then, the damage is spreading.

On Monday, Nissan of Japan said it would shut down its plant in Kyushu, Japan, for four days beginning later this week “due to supply shortages of parts from China.” Other carmakers like FCA in Italy and Hyundai in South Korea have already warned that a lack of parts from China could force them to curtail production in their home markets.

The China Development Forum, the country’s premier gathering of business leaders and economists, said its annual meeting, set for next month, had been postponed indefinitely.

Government officials had extended China’s official Lunar New Year holiday by three days to Feb. 3 to keep people home. Major business hubs, like the cities of Beijing and Shanghai and the provinces of Guangdong and Shandong, then further extended holidays until Monday.

As the day dawned, it was clear that business as usual had not resumed. Traffic in Beijing was much lighter than normal, stores remained closed and many residents worked from home or did not work at all.

Major companies said their factories remained closed or were running slower than usual. Ford Motor said that its joint venture with one of China’s biggest state-owned firms was restarting some production, but that it would “ramp up our production over the following weeks.”

General Motors said that it would reopen the first of its huge assembly plants in China only on Saturday, and would gradually reopen the rest over the following two weeks, “based on local employees’ safety readiness, supply chain readiness and product inventory needs.”

China’s containment efforts are contributing to the disruptions.

The authorities have locked down a region of central China around Wuhan, the city at the center of the outbreak. The local authorities are taking a tough stance with traffic, meaning workers are struggling to return to their jobs. Many towns and cities have begun imposing two-week mandatory quarantines on arriving truck drivers who picked up cargos in cities with disease outbreaks or even just drove through these areas.

Wu Lin, an associate director at a Shanghai advertising company, returned to Wuhan, her hometown, for the holidays on Jan. 21 and had a high-speed train ticket back to Shanghai on Feb. 2. But her ticket was canceled soon after Wuhan was locked down and she has tried and failed repeatedly since then to find a way out.

“There is no point to keep looking,” she said.

Shipyards around the country have run into labor shortages, said Tim Huxley, the chief executive of Mandarin Shipping, a Hong Kong freighter shipping company. Shipbuilders and ship repair providers have begun citing these labor shortages to invoke clauses in their contracts that allow them to delay completion of projects for events beyond their control, he said.

Aside from fear of disease, the country’s nearly 300 million migrant workers — almost two fifths of the labor force — now have another reason to be reluctant to travel to distant cities: Their children are still home. Depending on the province, many schools are not scheduled to resume until Feb. 25 or even March 1.

Even factories with enough workers are running into further problems. The packaging industry is almost shut down, so everything from plastic packing to steel drums is running out, said Mr. Wuttke.

Local regulators are putting up even more barriers.

Before businesses in big manufacturing hubs like Shanghai, Shenzhen, Suzhou or Nanjing can reopen, they must now verify the travel history and health of every employee over the past two weeks. They must have frequent temperature checks of employees, hand-washing procedures and a plan to isolate and refer to hospitals anyone showing even fevers as low as 99.1 degrees.

Most difficult of all, businesses cannot reopen without prior approval of their health plans by municipal officials — and larger operations also have to wait for a site visit from a health official.

Shenzhen, a vast sprawl of electronics factories and skyscrapers next to Hong Kong, issued new health and safety rules on Sunday and said that factories that make iPhones and other Apple products would have to meet them before opening. Foxconn Technology, a Taiwanese company that owns the factories, said it met all health and hygiene rules but declined to comment on when production would restart at specific locations. Apple declined to comment.

Apple’s iPhone production, which is heavily concentrated in China, could drop by 10 percent in the first three months of the year, projected TrendForce, a Taiwan-based technology forecasting firm.

The municipal government in Shanghai, home to more than 20 million people and a vast array of businesses, said that only 70 percent of the city’s manufacturers were taking steps to resume production. Few have actually received permission to do so.

Businesses “want to protect staff, but also nobody wants to get caught offsides when it comes to the labor law or the daily announcements from the government,” said Ker Gibbs, the president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai.

It is not yet clear how the ripples from China’s slowdown will affect the United States. Businesses that rely on assembling a lot of different parts from various suppliers could become the hardest hit. At the top of that list is the auto industry — a single car may require as many as 30,000 parts from various suppliers.

American businesses have been trying to diversify away from China as President Trump’s trade war with Beijing has made it less economical to manufacture there. But a lot of steering parts, electronics and even door hinges still come to the United States from China, said Razat Gaurav, the chief executive of Llamasoft, a company in Ann Arbor, Mich., that handles supply chain logistics for big automakers and aerospace companies in North America.

“If the current coronavirus crisis continues to impact production capacity in China,” he said, “it will ultimately impact auto assembly plants in the U.S. and Mexico.”

Ben Dooley and Raymond Zhong contributed reporting, and Cao Li contributed research.

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