deathmtn

Never knowing the outcome makes it harder to stop pulling the lever.
Intermittent variable reinforcement is a defining feature of not only gam-
bling and addiction but also, tellingly, abusive relationships. Abusers veer
unpredictably between kindness and cruelty, punishing partners for
behaviors that they had previously rewarded with affection. This can lead
to something called traumatic bonding. The victimized partner finds her-
self compulsively seeking a positive response, like a gambler feeding a slot
machine, or a Facebook addict unable to log off from the platform - even
if, for many, it only makes them lonelier.

Headteachers have been told to release girls one by one after school, in order to discourage gatherings and make it easier to spot any gestures of protest, and to remove the austere pictures of the revolution’s founders from classrooms, so that the girls can’t tear them down and stomp on them while their friends film them on their phones and upload the videos.

In her town – like many of Iran’s rural areas, it is more conservative than Tehran – she’s often scolded in public by tiresome old women for showing too much hair, even though she covers her hair by choice. Mandatory hijab, in her view, encourages the controlling tendencies not just of the state, but of parents and relatives at home, and strangers on the street.

In 2019, Postyn Smith, another former Amazon warehouse worker, described the more sophisticated FC Games (after "Fulfillment Center," Amazon's name for its warehouses) he encountered on screens in stowing and picking stations, the department with the highest attrition rate at his warehouse: "Most of the games involve some aspect of competition. You might race one-on-one as flying dragons against a nearby worker or compete
as a floor against another floor for your Amazon mascot to run faster around the course. In another game, you attempt to complete missions that have you work faster and faster for longer periods of time. They also provide incentives that boost your score for returning from break faster. The programs
have finely tuned tricks to tap into your mind so that we work harder, faster, and longer."

“You can actually feel really sympathetic for artistic communities and want to support them and also be like, there’s no way,” she said. “If we did that, it would essentially be saying machine learning is impossible.”