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anonymous

Captive Virgins, Polygamy, Sex Slaves: What Marriage Would Look Like if We Actually Fol... - 3 views

www.alternet.org/...we_actually_followed_the_bible

bible marriage polygamy relationships

shared by anonymous on 29 Mar 12 - Cached
  • “Bible-believing” Christians, also called “biblical literalists,” believe the Bible is the literally perfect word of God, essentially dictated by God to the writers. Thanks to the determined work of historical revisionists like David Barton, many of them also believe (very, very wrongly) that America’s Constitution and legal system also were founded on principles and laws drawn from the Bible. 
  • Not all Christians share this view. Biblical literalists are at the opposite end of the theological spectrum from modernist Christians, who see the Bible as the record of our imperfect spiritual ancestors who struggled to understand what is good and what is God and how to live in moral community with each other.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 29 Mar 12
       
      Reasonably minded Christians everywhere thank the author for pointing this very fucking important fact out.
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 30 Mar 12
       
      "Modernist Christians"? I'd say Modernist theology is a big part of the problem. (This is a semantic quibble.)
  • Even though divorce and teen pregnancy rates are lower in more secular parts of the country, Bible believers see both as problems caused primarily by America’s loss of faith.
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  • Let me tell you a secret about Bible believers that I know because I was one. Most of them don’t read their Bibles. If they did, they would know that the biblical model of sex and marriage has little to do with the one they so loudly defend.
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 30 Mar 12
       
      That's the easy explanation, but not necessarily the right one. I've sat in Bible-study groups of fairly wealthy Christians as they spent an hour convincing themselves that Jesus doesn't really want them to sell their stuff and give the proceeds to the church and the poor, even if there are multiple instances of what I take to be fairly clear language saying that Christians should do precisely that. It's that "Modernist" stuff again-our brains aren't that rational.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 30 Mar 12
       
      That's a fair point. Whether you read the Bible or not, that lack-of-rationality thing is surely in play. As you implicitly note, though, this is not the fault of religion - it's our damned species.
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 30 Mar 12
       
      Theologically speaking, it's almost as if God didn't set us up to be able to have Godlike understanding of everything. Like we're limited and mortal or something.
  • Stories depicted in the Bible include rape, incest, master-slave sexual relations, captive virgins, and more. Now, just because a story is told in the Bible doesn’t mean it is intended as a model for devout behavior. Other factors have to be considered, like whether God commands or forbids the behavior, if the behavior is punished, and if Jesus subsequently indicates the rules have changed, come the New Testament. 
  • Through this lens, you find that the God of the Bible still endorses polygamy and sexual slavery and coerced marriage of young virgins along with monogamy. In fact, he endorses all three to the point of providing detailed regulations.
  • Polygamy is a norm in the Old Testament and accepted in the New Testament.
  • Concubines are sex slaves, and the Bible gives instructions on acquisition of several types of sex slaves, although the line between biblical marriage and sexual slavery is blurry.
  • In the book of Numbers (31:18) God’s servant commands the Israelites to kill all of the used Midianite women who have been captured in war, and all of the boy children, but to keep all of the virgin girls for themselves.
  • These stories might be irrelevant to the question of biblical marriage were it not that Bible believers keep telling us that God punishes people when he dislikes their sexual behavior.
  • The nuclear family model so prized by America’s fundamentalist Christians emerged from the interplay between Christianity and European cultures including the monogamous tradition of the Roman Empire.
  • Bible believers, even those who think themselves “nondenominational,” almost all follow some theological tradition that tells them which parts of the Bible to follow and how.
  • But many who call themselves Bible believers are simply, congenitally conservative – meaning change-resistant. It is not the Bible they worship so much as the status quo, which they justify by invoking ancient texts. Gay marriage will come, as will reproductive rights, and these Bible believers will adapt to the change as they have others: reluctantly, slowly and with angry protests, but in the end accepting it, and perhaps even insisting that it was God’s will all along.  
  • anonymous on 29 Mar 12
     
    There's no way to understand politics anywhere without understanding religion, but to an outsider American Christianity -- and so American politics -- can seem almost incomprehensible. Over the last 2,000 years, Christians have quarreled themselves into 30,000 different denominations. On top of that, American Christianity, like American culture more broadly, tends to flout hierarchy and authority, which means that a sizeable number of American Christians consider themselves "nondenominational."
anonymous

The Halo Effect: Why You Won't Believe Your Heroes Have Flaws - 0 views

io9.com/...believe-your-heroes-have-flaws

shared by anonymous on 11 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Edward Thorndike was an educational psychologist in the 1920s. Part of his job involved watching how one set of people evaluated another set of people - generally people in teaching positions evaluating students. Over time he noticed that there was a problem. Teachers tended to favor certain students, and rate them highly in all areas — even ones in which the student was unremarkable. Everyone has favorites, but how could even obvious deficiencies be overlooked? And did the teachers really believe what they were saying?
  • he published the results of of military officers evaluating the soldiers under their command. He found that no soldier was what people in the literary world would call a "complex and multifaceted character." People were all bad, all good, or all middling, especially if they had a few outstanding characteristics.
  • An experiment was done in 1970, in which students were told to watch a tape of a lecturer and evaluate it. Actually, they were watching one of two tapes of the lecturer — one in which he was warm and welcoming to students and one in which he was strict and unfriendly. The students rated the warm lecturer as more attractive, as having a better accent, and his physical gestures as more appealing.
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  • Another test had volunteers rating people whose photos they saw in everything from conventionality to whether they would have lifelong happiness. The more attractive people always scored higher. Studies in which people were shown pictures of people and asked to grade papers supposedly written by them also favored the pretty. Even mock-jurors were more likely to let the beautiful people go, thinking they couldn't be guilty of a crime.
  • Their financial success, however, is often attributed to their leaders, or their marketing team, or anyone who will fit the halo. That can mask problems. And once the success evaporates, the halo becomes horns, and people are willing to drive the devil out without looking at the actual problems that will continue long after one person is gone.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 11 Sep 12
       
      I have noted the tendency of people in my organization to think that once [this person] is gone, everything will get better. I leave it to your imagination as to whether that's actually happened.
  • anonymous on 11 Sep 12
     
    "Why are you constantly being taken in by saviors, leaders and friends who seem like they can do no wrong - until they let you down? Blame the Halo Effect. Turns out that once you've given someone a halo in one area, it's almost impossible to fit him or her for a pair of horns in any others. One good trait, if sufficiently emphasized, will bleed over into everything else you do - provided you work it right."
anonymous

War and Bluff: Iran, Israel and the United States - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...-iran-israel-and-united-states

geopolitics iran israel united states

shared by anonymous on 12 Sep 12 - Cached
  • The Israeli and American positions are intimately connected, but the precise nature of the connection is less clear. Israel publicly casts itself as eager to strike Iran but restrained by the United States, though unable to guarantee it will respect American wishes if Israel sees an existential threat emanating from Iran. The United States publicly decries Iran as a threat to Israel and to other countries in the region, particularly Saudi Arabia, but expresses reservations about military action out of fears that Iran would respond to a strike by destabilizing the region and because it does not believe the Iranian nuclear program is as advanced as the Israelis say it is.
  • The Israelis have less tolerance for risk than the Americans, who have less tolerance for the global consequences of an attack.
  • From the Iranian point of view, a nuclear program has been extremely valuable. Having one has brought Iran prestige in the Islamic world and has given it a level of useful global political credibility.
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  • Having countries like Russia and China unwilling to see Iran crushed has helped. Iran can survive sanctions.
  • A failed military action would benefit Iran, proving its power. By contrast, a successful attack that dramatically delayed or destroyed Iran's nuclear capability would be a serious reversal.
  • Although the United States hailed Stuxnet as a major success, it hardly stopped the Iranian program, if the Israelis are to be believed. In that sense, it was a failure.
  • The principle of mutual assured destruction, which stabilized the U.S.-Soviet balance in the Cold War, would govern Iran's use of nuclear weapons. If Iran struck Israel, the damage would be massive, forcing the Iranians to assume that the Israelis and their allies (specifically, the United States) would launch a massive counterattack on Iran, annihilating large parts of Iran's population.
  • It is here that we get to the heart of the issue. While from a rational perspective the Iranians would be fools to launch such an attack, the Israeli position is that the Iranians are not rational actors and that their religious fanaticism makes any attempt to predict their actions pointless. Thus, the Iranians might well accept the annihilation of their country in order to destroy Israel in a sort of megasuicide bombing. The Israelis point to the Iranians' rhetoric as evidence of their fanaticism. Yet, as we know, political rhetoric is not always politically predictive. In addition, rhetoric aside, Iran has pursued a cautious foreign policy, pursuing its ends with covert rather than overt means. It has rarely taken reckless action, engaging instead in reckless rhetoric.
  • Herein lies the root of the great Israeli debate that pits the Netanyahu government, which appears to regard Iran as irrational, against significant segments of the Israeli military and intelligence communities, which regard Iran as rational.
  • Assuming the Iranians are rational actors, their optimal strategy lies not in acquiring nuclear weapons and certainly not in using them, but instead in having a credible weapons development program that permits them to be seen as significant international actors.
  • Up to this point, the Iranians have not even fielded a device for testing, let alone a deliverable weapon.
  • For all their activity, either their technical limitations or a political decision has kept them from actually crossing the obvious redlines and left Israel trying to define some developmental redline.
  • Both want to appear more fearsome than either is actually willing to act.
  • The Iranian strategy has been to maintain ambiguity on the status of its program, while making it appear that the program is capable of sudden success -- without ever achieving that success. The Israeli strategy has been to appear constantly on the verge of attack without ever attacking and to use the United States as its reason for withholding attacks, along with the studied ambiguity of the Iranian program.
  • If a country can develop nuclear weapons, there is no reason it can't develop hardened and dispersed sites and create enough ambiguity to deprive Israeli and U.S. intelligence of confidence in their ability to determine what is where.
  • I am reminded of the raid on Son Tay during the Vietnam War. The United States mounted an effort to rescue U.S. prisoners of war in North Vietnam only to discover that its intelligence on where the POWs were located was completely wrong. Any politician deciding whether to attack Iran would have Son Tay and a hundred other intelligence failures chasing around their brains, especially since a failed attack on Iran would be far worse than no attack.
  • Dispersed sites reduce Israel's ability to strike hard at a target and to acquire a battle damage assessment that would tell Israel three things:
  • first, whether the target had been destroyed when it was buried under rock and concrete; second, whether the target contained what Israel thought it contained; and third, whether the strike had missed a backup site that replicated the one it destroyed.
  • if the Israelis had an ultrasecret miracle weapon, postponing its use might compromise its secrecy. I suspect that if they had such a weapon, they would have used it by now.
  • The Americans emphasize these points, but they are happy to use the Israeli threats to build pressure on the Iranians. The United States wants to undermine Iranian credibility in the region by making Iran seem vulnerable. The twin forces of Israeli rhetoric and sanctions help make Iran look embattled. The reversal in Syria enhances this sense. Naval maneuvers in the Strait of Hormuz add to the sense that the United States is prepared to neutralize Iranian counters to an Israeli airstrike, making the threat Israel poses and the weakness of Iran appear larger.
  • When we step back and view the picture as a whole, we see Iran using its nuclear program for political reasons but being meticulous not to make itself appear unambiguously close to success.
  • We see the Israelis talking as if they were threatened but acting as if they were in no rush to address the supposed threat.
  • And we see the Americans acting as if they are restraining Israel, paradoxically appearing to be Iran's protector even though they are using the Israeli threat to increase Iranian insecurity.
  • It is the U.S.-Israeli byplay that is most fascinating. On the surface, Israel is driving U.S. policy. On closer examination, the reverse is true. Israel has bluffed an attack for years and never acted. Perhaps now it will act, but the risks of failure are substantial. If Israel really wants to act, this is not obvious.
  • Speeches by politicians do not constitute clear guidelines.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 12 Sep 12
       
      No kidding.
  • Rather than seeing Netanyahu as trying to force the United States into an attack, it is more useful to see Netanyahu's rhetoric as valuable to U.S. strategy. Israel and the United States remain geopolitically aligned. Israel's bellicosity is not meant to signal an imminent attack, but to support the U.S. agenda of isolating and maintaining pressure on Iran. That would indicate more speeches from Netanyahu and greater fear of war. But speeches and emotions aside, intensifying psychological pressure on Iran is more likely than war.
  • anonymous on 12 Sep 12
     
    "For the past several months, the Israelis have been threatening to attack Iranian nuclear sites as the United States has pursued a complex policy of avoiding complete opposition to such strikes while making clear it doesn't feel such strikes are necessary. At the same time, the United States has carried out maneuvers meant to demonstrate its ability to prevent the Iranian counter to an attack -- namely blocking the Strait of Hormuz. While these maneuvers were under way, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said no "redline" exists that once crossed by Iran would compel an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. The Israeli government has long contended that Tehran eventually will reach the point where it will be too costly for outsiders to stop the Iranian nuclear program."
anonymous

Highest-Calorie Menu Item at McDonald's? Not a Burger - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...3884104577647400959492314.html

shared by anonymous on 13 Sep 12 - Cached
  • Some chains, such as Panera Bread Co. PNRA +0.40% and Au Bon Pain, already post calories on their menus, but McDonald's is the largest chain and the first fast-food company to do so on a national level.
  • Americans now consume roughly a third of their calories from restaurants, up from less than a quarter in the 1970s, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And people spend about half of their food budgets at restaurants now, compared to a third in the 1970s.
  • "If we see a similar effect from other chains you'd see about a 30-calorie per person per day decrease," said Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "The thing about obesity is it's caused by a slow, steady creep in people's weight over decades. For most of us, we're gaining one to two pounds per year steadily over decades and end up being 30 to 50 pounds overweight. The obesity epidemic is explained by about 100 extra calories per person per day, so if we get a daily 30-calorie decrease from menu labeling, that's huge."
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  • Shortly after Panera Bread posted calorie counts on its menu boards in April 2010, the company noticed that 20% of customers began ordering lower-calorie items.
  • A report published last year in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, which reviewed seven studies on the topic, found that "calorie labeling does not have the intended effect of decreasing calorie purchasing or consumption."
  • New regulations requiring operators of restaurants with 20 or more outlets to post calories on menus are expected to take effect by the end of next year.
  • Glenn Kikuchi, owner of 10 McDonald's franchises in Maryland, said he's already seen signs that the highlighted calorie counts are having an effect. "I see that a lot of the moms are looking at it, but also, curiously enough, the teenagers are looking at it, too," Mr. Kikuchi said.
  • anonymous on 13 Sep 12
     
    "McDonald's Corp. MCD +0.32% customers will have an easier time of it next week, when the burger giant's restaurant and drive-thru menu boards across the country will show that the Big Mac, at 550 calories, is 200 calories leaner than the other burger. But other choices won't be so clear-cut, like the Double Cheeseburger with 440 calories or the Southwest Salad with Crispy Chicken, which weighs in at 450. McDonald's highest-calorie item isn't a burger at all, but the 1,150-calorie Big breakfast with hotcakes and large biscuit. And the healthy-sounding 22-ounce mango pineapple smoothie matches the 350 calories in the grilled chicken sandwich."
anonymous

If Alcohol Were Discovered Today, Would it be Legal? - 0 views

www.alternet.org/overed-today-would-it-be-legal

shared by anonymous on 17 Sep 12 - Cached
  • This false distinction is a large part of the communication problem I encounter whenever I try to emphasise how harmful alcohol is. It has a separate language – you get “high” on drugs, but “drunk” on alcohol, drug addicts need a “fix” but alcoholics need a “drink.”
  • We are currently facing a public-health crisis of immense proportions. The increase in harms caused by alcohol over the last 50 years in the UK is comparable to the Gin Craze in the early 18th century, when the urban poor of London were consuming a pint of gin a day per head on average.
  • It’s certainly true that most societies throughout history have brewed some sort of alcoholic drink, and that this has been part of the human diet for so long that many of us are genetically adapted to consume alcohol.
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  • So, drinking alcohol is “normal,” in a sense – people who possess the high-activity variant of the ALDH2 enzyme, come from a long line of people whose bodies adapted to consuming and breaking down alcohol. Indeed, until the 1850s weak beer was often “healthy”: it was the safest thing to drink, because most water was contaminated with viruses or bacteria. However, in the past most of what was drunk was mostly relatively low strength beer and wine, and its consumption was surrounded by custom and ritual to mitigate its social harms.
  • We’re at a similar point now in the UK: the access people have to cheap, high-strength alcohol is almost unprecedented, and binge drinking of the sort we see today is something our ancestors would rarely have been able to indulge in even if they’d wanted to.
  • The drug does have some positive psychological effects, and it can be calming for some people with anxiety disorders (see Case Study 1 below) although with heavy use the effects of withdrawal will start to make them even more anxious when they’re sober.
  • Physiologically, alcohol’s benefits have never been proven, but the idea that low levels of drinking are protective is a pervasive myth – and a very useful one for the industry.
  • However, this may be because this group has more healthy lifestyles, or because of the “sick teetotaller effect” – where many people give up alcohol because they are ill (perhaps from some other disease); their worse health outcomes may have nothing to do with whether or not they drink, but do make the health statistics of non-drinkers appear worse.
  • There is no such thing as a safe level of alcohol consumption. Alcohol is a toxin that kill cells and organisms, which is why we use it to preserve food and sterilize needles.
  • Alcohol is a depressant (similar to GHB, and benzodiazepines like Valium) which, if taken at high enough doses, will produce amnesia, sedation and eventually death.
  • Alcohol also indirectly stimulates the noradrenaline circuit, producing some stimulating effects. This is what creates the noisy energy we associate with drunkenness, even though the drug is a depressant.
  • Some interesting recent research showed that alcohol interferes with our ability to recognize emotions in facial expressions, which may be part of the reason drunk people are so quick to take offense and start fights.
  • Millions of people, not a tiny minority, suffer harm from their own alcohol consumption, or cause harm to others.
  • These are all perfectly valid choices, yet non-drinkers are often heavily pressured to consume alcohol in order to fit in with others. This message is constantly reinforced in the press, on TV, and in alcohol advertising.
  • Far from being safe, there is no other drug which is so damaging to so many different organ systems in the body. Figure 6.2 illustrates how alcohol can harm almost every part of the body through its toxicity alone.
  • But there is a fundamental conflict of interest: however much the industry wants to pretend otherwise, you can’t reduce harm without reducing the amount people drink, whereas companies looking to maximize profits need to sell as much alcohol as possible.
  • anonymous on 17 Sep 12
     
    "A terrifying new "legal high" has hit our streets. Methyl-carbonol, known by the street name "wiz," is a clear liquid that causes cancers, liver problems, and brain disease, and is more toxic than ecstasy and cocaine. Addiction can occur after just one drink, and addicts will go to any lengths to get their next fix - even letting their kids go hungry or beating up their partners to obtain money. Casual users can go into blind rages when they're high, and police have reported a huge increase in crime where the drug is being used. Worst of all, drinks companies are adding "wiz" to fizzy drinks and advertising them to kids like they're plain Coca-Cola. Two or three teenagers die from it every week overdosing on a binge, and another 10 from having accidents caused by reckless driving. "Wiz" is a public menace - when will the Home Secretary think of the children and make this dangerous substance Class A?"
anonymous

Jonah Lehrer and the Problems with "Pithy" Science Writing - 1 views

www.alternet.org/problems-pithy-science-writing

shared by anonymous on 12 Aug 12 - Cached
Erik Hanson liked it
  • The world economy is crumbling and unemployment is soaring. But let me talk to you about an intangible tipping point that could change your life forever or tell you what happens in your brain when that proverbial light bulb goes off in the cartoon equivalent of a thought bubble. Because talking about the actual economy is much too real and depressing.
  • Science writers have always had to try harder to be interesting. In trying to entice the general public with the tedious, sometimes boring work that goes on in a research lab, they often reduce the nuances and complexities of science—workings of intricate systems like evolution and the human body, the mathematics of financial bubbles, and the inevitable warming of the earth— to interesting tales that combine a tiny bit of data with copious amounts of speculation without context or background.
  • Pop-science writers like Gladwell, Lehrer, Dan Ariely, and Charles Duhigg take a slightly different approach—they combine decades of scientific research with hearsay and speculation, metaphysical analysis and societal trends, and offer it to the audience in bite-size palatable pieces.
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  • Lehrer’s neuroscience in Imagine contains some obvious elementary errors—arguably more dangerous than a couple of manufactured Bob Dylan quotes. While Gladwell talks about our amazing powers of cognition in Blink, he doesn’t venture to give a detailed account of how these processes occur in the brain.
  • Our blogging culture is partly to blame for this. The demand of our 24/7 news cycle, first created by cable television, and now carried on by minute-by-minute updates on the Internet creates constant demand for new information that never quite satisfies the insatiable appetite of the limitless Web.
  • What a newspaper or magazine would call ‘A model to help cure cancer,’ for instance, could realistically only be “an adaptation of a previous model to simulate cancer tissue in order to determine if it can be used to study cancer cells and eventually help find a cure.”Want to try that for a headline? Exactly.Confirming a hypothesis or a hunch with empirical evidence is the very essence of science, whereas in journalism—like much of the humanities—theories and schools of thought can rest on their own. However, science journalism, like science, needs to be rooted in fact and observation, without which it would lose its basis.
  • The problem with these examples is not that they are untrue, but the helplessness and futility of the advice. What are you to do to make these “breakthrough” moments happen? Nothing, apparently, except wait for them.In a journalistic equivalent of motivational speeches, these erudite writers hail subconscious processes in the brain that we have almost no control over, stopping just short of saying, “it will happen if you believe.”
  • anonymous on 12 Aug 12
     
    "The really troubling aspect of the Jonah Lehrer story is not so much that the media allowed his self-plagiarisms and misquotes to slip through the cracks, but that it placed him on such a high pedestal in the first place."
anonymous

Gut Microbes May Drive Evolution - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

shared by anonymous on 09 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • A 2010 experiment led by Eugene Rosenberg of Tel Aviv University found that raising Drosophila pseudoobscura fruit flies on different diets altered their mate selection: the flies would mate only with other flies on the same diet. A dose of antibiotics abolished these preferences—the flies went back to mating without regard to diet—suggesting that it was changes in gut microbes brought about by diet, and not diet alone, that drove the change.
  • These studies are part of a growing consensus among evolutionary biologists that one can no longer separate an organism's genes from those of its symbiotic bacteria. They are all part of a single "hologenome."
  • Researchers believe that the microbiome is essential to human evolution as well. "Given the importance of the microbiome in human adaptations such as digestion, smell and the immune system, it would appear very likely that the human microbiome has had an effect on speciation," Bordenstein says. "Arguably, the microbiota are as important as genes."
  • anonymous on 09 Mar 12
     
    "The human body harbors at least 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells. Collectively known as the microbiome, this community may play a role in regulating one's risk of obesity, asthma and allergies. Now some researchers are wondering if the microbiome may have a part in an even more crucial process: mate selection and, ultimately, evolution."
anonymous

Rand & Human Nature 20 - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...rand-human-nature-20.html

shared by anonymous on 09 Mar 12 - Cached
  • Empirical studies have shown, however, that human beings do not "follow" reason, but rather tend to use their reasoning skills to justify whatever conclusions they reach via emotion, desire, sentiment, and/or intuition.
  • To a certain extent, Rand was aware of this: it is a theme of much exasperation in her writings. But rather than assuming that the non-rational was a built-in feature (or bug) of human nature, Rand hunted for an explanation for why so many human beings refused to "follow" reason.
  • She found her answer in a contrived and implausible theory of history, where she placed the failure of human rationality squarely on the shoulders of modern philosophers, particularly Kant.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • It was by framing the issue is such extravagently anti-empirical terms that Rand was able to avoid the more obvious conclusion: namely, that human beings don't follow reason because, as Hume explained, reason as at best a method, not an aim or desire; and, morever, that attempt to reason from "is" premises to an "ought" conclusion is invalid.
  • In other words, it turns out that truth is, in many circumstances, a "collective" endeavor: it is a product of individual minds within group dynamics. This is especially the case whenever truth is in the least controversial. Individuals can find truth on their own when that truth is mundane and doesn't violate special agendas or trample upon rooted convictions. But whenever we are confronted with a truth-claim that is controversial, then an individual's judgment is not enough. Open debate involving empirical testing becomes necessary. Where this is impossible truth becomes difficult and consensus impossible.
  • That reasoning power may be effective when attacking rival truth claims, but it does not perform well in establishing it's own claims concerning matters of fact.
  • Although she strongly urged others to "check" their "premises," this was not advice that she herself ever followed.
  • On the contrary, she often responded with intense hostility to criticism. Typical in this respect was her response to Sidney Hook's review of To the New Intellectual. Instead of responding to Hook's criticisms point by point, Rand insisted that Hook should be publicly condemned. Because Leonard Peikoff and Barabara Branden were students of Hook, they were were given a pass; but everyone else, including even Rand's friend John Hospers, were expected to take part in the public condemnation.
  • she had very little conception of the manners and morals of professional academicians: they can get along well and even be friends, while disagreeing strongly with one another on rather fundamental issues.
  • But for Ayn this was a betrayal. It almost cost us our friendship. In the end she attributed my attitude to the misfortune of having been brainwashed by the academic establishment, at least with regard to their code of etiquette.
  • What Rand failed to appreciate is that the "code of ettiquette" that Hospers writes about is the glue which holds together communities of truth-seeking intellectuals. If everyone began publicly condemning those they disagreed with, that community would break down and all that remain would be a loose assemblages of ideological factions crying anathema against each other.
  • Rand and her disciples can wax eloquent about "reason" all they like, but at the end of the day they know very little about truth seeking within the limits of human nature. There is a price for denying human nature, and not understanding how truth emerges as the property of a social system is one of them.
  • anonymous on 09 Mar 12
     
    Rand regarded "reason" as the supreme virtue: "I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism," she wrote; "and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows."
anonymous

A New Thermodynamics Theory of the Origin of Life - 1 views

www.simonsfoundation.org/...2-a-new-physics-theory-of-life

shared by anonymous on 23 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat.
  • Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity.
  • “You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England said.
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  • “I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong,” he explained. “On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.”
  • The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.
  • His idea, detailed in a recent paper and further elaborated in a talk he is delivering at universities around the world, has sparked controversy among his colleagues, who see it as either tenuous or a potential breakthrough, or both.
  • Eugene Shakhnovich, a professor of chemistry, chemical biology and biophysics at Harvard University, are not convinced. “Jeremy’s ideas are interesting and potentially promising, but at this point are extremely speculative, especially as applied to life phenomena,” Shakhnovich said.
  • England’s theoretical results are generally considered valid. It is his interpretation — that his formula represents the driving force behind a class of phenomena in nature that includes life — that remains unproven. But already, there are ideas about how to test that interpretation in the lab.
  • “He’s trying something radically different,” said Mara Prentiss, a professor of physics at Harvard who is contemplating such an experiment after learning about England’s work. “As an organizing lens, I think he has a fabulous idea. Right or wrong, it’s going to be very much worth the investigation.”
  • At the heart of England’s idea is the second law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of increasing entropy or the “arrow of time.”
  • Hot things cool down, gas diffuses through air, eggs scramble but never spontaneously unscramble; in short, energy tends to disperse or spread out as time progresses.
  • It increases as a simple matter of probability: There are more ways for energy to be spread out than for it to be concentrated.
  • cup of coffee and the room it sits in become the same temperature, for example. As long as the cup and the room are left alone, this process is irreversible. The coffee never spontaneously heats up again because the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against so much of the room’s energy randomly concentrating in its atoms.
  • A plant, for example, absorbs extremely energetic sunlight, uses it to build sugars, and ejects infrared light, a much less concentrated form of energy. The overall entropy of the universe increases during photosynthesis as the sunlight dissipates, even as the plant prevents itself from decaying by maintaining an orderly internal structure.
  • Life does not violate the second law of thermodynamics, but until recently, physicists were unable to use thermodynamics to explain why it should arise in the first place.
  • In Schrödinger’s day, they could solve the equations of thermodynamics only for closed systems in equilibrium.
  • Jarzynski and Crooks showed that the entropy produced by a thermodynamic process, such as the cooling of a cup of coffee, corresponds to a simple ratio: the probability that the atoms will undergo that process divided by their probability of undergoing the reverse process (that is, spontaneously interacting in such a way that the coffee warms up).
  • Using Jarzynski and Crooks’ formulation, he derived a generalization of the second law of thermodynamics that holds for systems of particles with certain characteristics: The systems are strongly driven by an external energy source such as an electromagnetic wave, and they can dump heat into a surrounding bath.
  • This class of systems includes all living things.
  • Having an overarching principle of life and evolution would give researchers a broader perspective on the emergence of structure and function in living things, many of the researchers said. “Natural selection doesn’t explain certain characteristics,” said Ard Louis, a biophysicist at Oxford University, in an email. These characteristics include a heritable change to gene expression called methylation, increases in complexity in the absence of natural selection, and certain molecular changes Louis has recently studied.
  • If England’s approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization.
  • They might find, for example, that “the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve,” Louis said.
  • anonymous on 23 Jan 14
     
    Why does life exist? Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and "should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill."
anonymous

Why Is the American Dream Dead in the South? - Atlantic Mobile - 0 views

m.theatlantic.com/...283313

shared by anonymous on 28 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • We like to tell ourselves that America is the land of opportunity, but the reality doesn't match the rhetoric—and hasn't for awhile. We actually have less social mobility than countries like Denmark.
  • Think about it like this: Moving up matters more when there's a bigger gap between the rich and poor. So even though mobility hasn't gotten worse lately, it has worse consequences today because inequality is worse.
  • There isn't one or two or even three Americas. There are hundreds.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • The research team of Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Herndon, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez looked at each "commuting zone" (CZ) within the U.S., and found that the American Dream is still alive in some parts of the country.
  • Kids born into the bottom 20 percent of households, for example, have a 12.9 percent chance of reaching the top 20 percent if they live in San Jose. That's about as high as it is in the highest mobility countries. But kids born in Charlotte only have a 4.4 percent chance of moving from the bottom to the top 20 percent. That's worse than any developed country we have numbers for.
  • You can see what my colleague Derek Thompson calls the geography of the American Dream in the map below. It shows where kids have the best and worst chances of moving up from the bottom to the top quintile—and that the South looks more like a banana republic. (Note: darker colors mean there is less mobility, and lighter colors mean that there's more).
  • The researchers found that local tax and spending decisions explain some, but not too much, of this regional mobility gap. Neither does local school quality, at least judged by class size. Local area colleges and tuition were also non-factors. And so were local labor markets
  • But here's what we know does matter.
  • 1. Race. The researchers found that the larger the black population, the lower the upward mobility. But this isn't actually a black-white issue. It's a rich-poor one.
  • 2. Segregation. Something like the poor being isolated—isolated from good jobs and good schools. See, the more black people a place has, the more divided it tends to be along racial and economic lines.
  • That leaves the poor in the ghetto
  • So it should be no surprise that the researchers found that racial segregation, income segregation, and sprawl are all strongly negatively correlated with upward mobility.
  • 3. Social Capital. Living around the middle class doesn't just bring better jobs and schools (which help, but probably aren't enough). It brings better institutions too.
  • 4. Inequality. The 1 percent are different from you and me—they have so much more money that they live in a different world.
  • it doesn't hurt your chances of making it into the top 80 to 99 percent if the super-rich get even richer.
  • But inequality does matter within the bottom 99 percent.
  • It makes intuitive sense: it's easier to jump from the bottom near the top if you don't have to jump as far. The top 1 percent are just so high now that it doesn't matter how much higher they go; almost nobody can reach them.
  • 5. Family Structure. Forget race, forget jobs, forget schools, forget churches, forget neighborhoods, and forget the top 1—or maybe 10—percent. Nothing matters more for moving up than who raises you.
  • Or, in econospeak, nothing correlates with upward mobility more than the number of single parents, divorcees, and married couples. The cliché is true: Kids do best in stable, two-parent homes.
  • It's not clear what, if any, policy lessons we should take from this truism.
  • we don't really have any idea how to promote marriage.
  • Flat mobility is the defining Rorschach test of our time. Conservatives look at it, and say, see, we shouldn't worry about the top 1 percent, because they're not making the American Dream any harder to achieve. But liberals look at it, and say see, we should care about inequality, because it can make the American Dream harder to achieve—and it raises the stakes if you don't.
  • The American Dream is alive in Denmark and Finland and Sweden. And in San Jose and Salt Lake City and Pittsburgh.
  • But it's dead in Atlanta and Raleigh and Charlotte. And in Indianapolis and Detroit and Jacksonville.
  • Fixing that isn't just about redistribution. It's about building denser cities, so the poor aren't so segregated. About good schools that you don't have to live in the right (and expensive) neighborhood to attend. And about ending a destructive drug war that imprisons and blights the job prospects of far too many non-violent offenders—further shrinking the pool of "marriageable" men.
  • anonymous on 28 Jan 14
     
    "The top 1 percent aren't killing the American Dream. Something else is-if you live in the wrong place. Here's what we know. The rich are getting richer, but according to a blockbuster new study that hasn't made it harder for the poor to become rich. The good news is that people at the bottom are just as likely to move up the income ladder today as they were 50 years ago. But the bad news is that people at the bottom are just as likely to move up the income ladder today as they were 50 years ago."
anonymous

Parking rules raise your rent - 0 views

grist.org/...parking-rules-raise-your-rent

shared by anonymous on 26 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • What’s all the excavation for? It’s for parking. Underground parking. In most cities and in most soil conditions, the giant holes are only there to satisfy off-street parking rules, and to do that, you need a deep, deep hole. A hole like this one.
  • One Portland developer told me that each successive layer of excavation — each floor down in the garage — costs two to three times as much as the previous one.
  • City requirements for off-street parking spaces raise rents. They jack it up a lot at the bottom of the housing ladder. Proportionally speaking, the bigger the quota and the smaller the apartment, the larger the rent hike.
  • ...35 more annotations...
  • For one-bedroom apartments with two parking places, as is required in places including Bothell and Federal Way, Wash., as much as one-third of the rent may actually pay for parking.
  • a case study of residential real estate development may illuminate how critical parking is to the affordability of housing.
  • But there’s a problem, the architect points out. She reminds you that your city requires you to provide off-street parking on the property for each of the apartments you build. 
  • access ramps to the underground garage will subtract six apartments, and your general contractor estimates that excavating will cost $55,000 per parking space — almost as much as the $60,000 you’ve budgeted to build each apartment.
  • To make a 7 percent return on investment, you’ll have to raise the rent up to $1,300 a month on the remaining units. Will the market support that price?
  • You contemplate whether to dig a second subterranean level in the garage, but the deeper you go, the contractor explains, the more expensive it gets.
  • You’re now considering a building with 30 apartments, plus 19 spaces behind. That’s only 0.6 parking spaces apiece, so you’ll still be in trouble with the city. To get one space per apartment, you’ll need to drop down to 25 apartments or fewer and raise the rent again.
  • The whole situation is aggravating, because the area surrounding your building has vast, untapped reservoirs of parking: surface lots at grocery stores and movie theaters, underground spaces at shopping complexes and office buildings, and idle spots at nearby apartments.
  • You could even rent a group of overnight spaces at a nearby garage and sublet them to tenants, but such innovative solutions are not a legal substitute for on-site parking in your city.
  • You’re stuck with no good options: a long and risky waiver application, underground parking with extremely high rents, or a half-sized building with high rent and slots out back.
  • You now understand why architects, in moments of dark humor, change their discipline’s mantra of “form follows function” to “form follows parking.” And you’re starting to understand how parking requirements are such an enormous barrier to affordable housing.
  • How do parking requirements raise rents? They do it in five ways, some of which affect all of the housing market and some of which only affect parts of it.
  • More costly housing.
  •  Parking quotas drive up construction costs. (“But supply and demand, not cost, set prices,” I hear my Econ 101 professor Hirschel Kasper pointing out.
  • There’s no way you can legally build your no-parking $800-a-month apartments, nor can anyone else, anywhere in town. The whole apartment market will be missing its bottom end.
  • Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute has modeled a typical affordable housing development and concluded that including one parking space per dwelling raises the cost of each rental unit by 12.5 percent
  • adding a second parking space doubles that to 25 percent.
  • Less housing.
  • Parking quotas constrain the supply of dwelling units, particularly of modest, economical ones, which causes their price to rise.
  • Building conversions blocked.
  • Parking quotas often make it prohibitively expensive to adapt buildings for other uses. Developers cannot convert vacant warehouses into lofts, or aging office blocks into condos, unless they somehow shoehorn floors of parking into the historic structures.
  • Dispersed housing.
  • By suppressing the number of apartments on each city lot (see Nos. 2 and 3), quotas force housing demand to spread outward across the landscape.
  • Billing non-parkers.
  •  Parking quotas shift the cost of storing vehicles from those vehicles’ owners into the rent of non-owners. By flooding the market for parking, quotas make it impossible to recoup the full cost of parking by charging its users.
  • This effect does not raise the rent on average beyond what effects 1, 2, and 3 do, but it does shift the cost of storing vehicles from car owners to non-owners. Even tenants who do not use parking pay for it.
  • A forthcoming Sightline analysis will likely reach similar conclusions. If preliminary results hold up, it will show that, at actual apartment and condominium projects in Seattle, the cost of parking is as much as 35 percent of monthly rent.
  • The cost of parking, furthermore, exceeds its market price almost everywhere in King County, so even tenants who do not own cars end up paying for parking through their rent.
  • These five effects interact and reinforce one another. They knock the bottom off of the apartment market, pushing working-class people to double up or commute longer distances. They raise the rent for everyone, driving up the cost of living while lowering the price of parking. And they shift parking costs to those who don’t use it.
  • In 1961, Oakland introduced a quota of one space per new apartment. Immediately, as housing economist Brian Bertha has documented (see page 143), the construction cost per apartment jumped by 18 percent and typical apartment buildings shrank: The number of units per new building fell by 30 percent. Developers built fewer, larger apartments, and the rent rose.
  • A newer proof comes from urban planning professor Michael Manville of Cornell University. He described in the Journal of the American Planning Association what happened in downtown Los Angeles after 1999 when the city enacted an adaptive reuse ordinance (ARO).
  • Quickly, the deregulation of parking yielded more than 6,000 new apartments and condominiums, some of them in previously dilapidated historic office buildings that dated from the Art Deco era.
  • When parking requirements are removed, developers provide more housing and less parking, and also … developers provide different types of housing: housing in older buildings, in previously disinvested areas, and housing marketed toward non-drivers. This latter category of housing tends to sell for less than housing with parking spaces.
  • Minimum parking requirements do not jack the rent up much in the kinds of pricey buildings where the developer would have installed an abundance of parking anyway.
  • What’s more, half of the parking spaces developers provided to tenants were at neighboring or nearby properties. In fact, at 16 of the 57 ARO buildings, all the parking was off-site. These developers did what you wanted to do for your 50-unit building: They secured tenant parking not by pouring concrete but by sipping coffee with the owners of nearby garages.
  • anonymous on 26 Sep 13
     
    "Have you ever watched the excavation that precedes a tall building? It seems to take forever. Then, when the digging is finally done, construction rockets upward in no time. For the past few months, I've been watching a crew excavate the site of a new condo tower on Seattle's First Hill. It's on a route I walk three times a week, so I've had a ringside seat. And here's the thing that finally dawned on me, after years of not really thinking about these holes in the urban ground: What's all the excavation for?"
anonymous

5 Things My Gen X Manager Taught Me About Millennials - 0 views

www.policymic.com/...er-taught-me-about-millennials

shared by anonymous on 06 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • 1. Despite what you’ve heard, millennials and Gen X are natural allies.
  • Gen X was actually the first generation to have less affluence than the Boomers, to understand the joke that is social security, and to begin incorporating daily technology use into their careers.
  • 2. Millennials are not going to leapfrog over Generation X.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Many of us aren't accustomed to the same kind of work that Gen X has been doing for years. Over half of millennials would like to start their own business, and many have relied heavily on freelancing
  • Gen X can provide millennials with insights and cautionary tales in ways that our Boomer counterparts cannot.
  • Millennials like me will be better recieved in the workplace when we respect its processes, when we acknowledge that every generation has paid its dues — maybe not the same dues, maybe not as hefty a price, but dues nonetheless. 
  • 3. Technology has changed the game for millennials, for better or worse.
  • The downside of our generation's widespread use of technology is how easy it's been for us to forget the value of in-person interactions. In the workplace, that means millennials can unconsciously neglect what our Gen X counterparts consider the common staples of communication
  • 4. Yes, millennials are screwed, but the next generation will have it even worse.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 06 Dec 13
       
      I *really* hope this is more debatable. Only because I'm crossing my fingers for the economic reconfiguration that doesn't look due for another 10+ years.
  • Gen X has less affluence than the Boomers, millennials even less than Gen X — what exactly will be left for Gen Z?
  • If current trends continue, the competition we face now will only get more intense, in part because Boomers and Gen X have had to delay retirement and are staying longer in positions.
  • 5. Mentorships are best when they form naturally.
  • While a networking event can introduce us to executives in our field, the perfect mentor on paper may have absolutely zero emotional connection to us.
  • anonymous on 06 Dec 13
     
    Largely fluffy in that way-broad brush, but still contains some nuggets to keep in mind on our journey to oversimplify generational changes. :) I will note, though, that the most important bit (to me) was the idea that Gen X'ers are more relatable than Boomers. This simplification is largely true, in my experience. This isn't because of any innate goodness, just economic realities. My boomer dad-in-law is super nervous about having [extremely low amounts] of medical debt: for him it's a *very* new phenomenon. For his kids, it's far huger debt and quite regular and we simply accept it. See also: Old Economy Steve. "Concern over our careers (or lack thereof) continues unabated for all of us 20-somethings entering the job market full speed ahead. While plenty of people have proffered advice to the newly minted generation of workers who do manage to get a job, and plenty of managers have offered advice to other managers on how to hire millennials, there's a distinct lack of genuine dialogue between millennials and Gen X-ers in the workplace- a shame, because our generational differences are largely superficial. "
anonymous

Observations: Saturated fat is not the major issue - 0 views

www.bmj.com/...-saturated-fat-not-major-issue

shared by anonymous on 28 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Aseem Malhotra, interventional cardiology specialist registrar at Croydon University Hospital in London, says scientific evidence shows that advice to reduce saturated fat intake “has paradoxically increased our cardiovascular risks.”
  • Saturated fat has been demonised since the 1970s when a landmark study concluded that there was a correlation between incidence of coronary heart disease and total cholesterol, which then correlated with the percentage of calories provided by saturated fat, explains Malhotra. “But correlation is not causation,” he says. Nevertheless, we were advised to “reduce fat intake to 30% of total energy and a fall in saturated fat intake to 10%.”
  • One of the earliest obesity experiments, published in the Lancet in 1956, compared groups consuming diets of 90% fat versus 90% protein versus 90% carbohydrate and revealed that the greatest weight loss was in the fat consuming group.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Malhotra also points to the United States, where percentage calorie consumption from fat has declined from 40% to 30% in the past 30 years (although absolute fat consumption has remained the same), yet obesity has rocketed. One reason, he says, is that the food industry “compensated by replacing saturated fat with added sugar.”
  • And despite the fact that in the UK, 8 million people take statins regularly, he asks why has there been no demonstrable effect on heart disease trends during this period? Adopting a Mediterranean diet after a heart attack is almost three times as powerful in reducing mortality as taking a statin, writes Malhotra. “Doctors need to embrace prevention as well as treatment.”
  • Commenting on the article, Professor David Haslam, Chair of Britain's National Obesity Forum said: "It's extremely naive of the public and the medical profession to imagine that a calorie of bread, a calorie of meat and a calorie of alcohol are all dealt in the same way by the amazingly complex systems of the body. The assumption has been made that increased fat in the bloodstream is caused by increased saturated fat in the diet, whereas modern scientific evidence is proving that refined carbohydrates and sugar in particular are actually the culprits."
  • Professor Robert Lustig, Paediatric Endocrinologist, University of San Francisco added: "Food should confer wellness, not illness. And real food does just that, including saturated fat. But when saturated fat got mixed up with the high sugar added to processed food in the second half of the 20th century, it got a bad name. Which is worse, the saturated fat or the added sugar? The American Heart Association has weighed in - the sugar many times over. Plus added sugar causes all of the diseases associated with metabolic syndrome. Instead of lowering serum cholesterol with statins, which is dubious at best, how about serving up some real food?”
  • anonymous on 28 Oct 13
     
    "Professor Robert Lustig, Paediatric Endocrinologist, University of San Francisco added: 'Food should confer wellness, not illness. And real food does just that, including saturated fat. But when saturated fat got mixed up with the high sugar added to processed food in the second half of the 20th century, it got a bad name. Which is worse, the saturated fat or the added sugar? The American Heart Association has weighed in - the sugar many times over. Plus added sugar causes all of the diseases associated with metabolic syndrome. Instead of lowering serum cholesterol with statins, which is dubious at best, how about serving up some real food?'"
anonymous

How consciousness works - 0 views

www.aeonmagazine.com/...how-consciousness-works

shared by anonymous on 23 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • I admit that the theory does not feel satisfying; but a theory does not need to be satisfying to be true.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 23 Aug 13
       
      Somebody tattoo that on the back of everyone's eyelids.
  • And indeed, the theory might be able to explain a few other common myths that brains tell themselves. What about out-of-body experiences? The belief that awareness can emanate from a person’s eyes and touch someone else? That you can push on objects with your mind? That the soul lives on after the death of the body? One of the more interesting aspects of the attention schema theory is that it does not need to turn its back on such persistent beliefs. It might even explain their origin.
  • If awareness is a model of attention, how is it simplified? How is it inaccurate? Well, one easy way to keep track of attention is to give it a spatial structure — to treat it like a substance that flows from a source to a target.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Science commonly regards ghost-ish intuitions to be the result of ignorance, superstition, or faulty intelligence. In the attention schema theory, however, they are not simply ignorant mistakes. Those intuitions are ubiquitous among cultures because we humans come equipped with a handy, simplified model of attention. That model informs our intuitions.
  • The very existence of the out-of-body experience suggests that awareness is a computation and that the computation can be disrupted. Systems in the brain not only compute the information that I am aware, but also compute a spatial framework for it, a location, and a perspective. Screw up the computations, and I screw up my understanding of my own awareness.
  • a study by the psychologist Gerald Winer and colleagues at the University of Ohio in 2002 found that about half of American college students also think that we see because of rays that come out of the eyes.
  • Our culture, too, is riddled with the extramission theory.
  • Why should a physically inaccurate description of vision be so persistent? Perhaps because the brain constructs a simplified, handy model of attention in which there is such a thing as awareness, an invisible, intangible stuff that flows from inside a person out to some target object.
  • We come pre-equipped with that intuition, not because it is physically accurate but because it is a useful model.
  • Many of our superstitions — our beliefs in souls and spirits and mental magic — might emerge naturally from the simplifications and shortcuts the brain takes when representing itself and its world.
  • We have the ability to rise above our immediate intuitions and predispositions.
  • Most of us intuitively understand it to be an active thing: it helps us to decide what to do and when. And yet, at least some of the scientific work on consciousness has proposed the opposite, counter-intuitive view: that it doesn’t really do anything at all
  • It seems, therefore, that at least some of our conscious choices are rationalisations after the fact.
  • But if consciousness is a story we tell ourselves, why do we need it? Why are we aware of anything at all? Why not just be skilful automata, without the overlay of subjectivity? Some philosophers think we are automata and just don’t know it.
  • This idea that consciousness has no leverage in the world, that it’s just a rationalisation to make us feel better about ourselves, is terribly bleak.
  • It is not a theory about the uselessness or non-being of consciousness, but about its central importance. Why did an awareness of stuff evolve in the first place?
  • Because it had a practical benefit.
  • the attention schema theory is in agreement with the common intuition: consciousness plays an active role in guiding our behaviour. It is not merely an aura that floats uselessly in our heads. It is a part of the executive control system.
  • To attribute awareness to oneself, to have that computational ability, is the first step towards attributing it to others. That, in turn, leads to a remarkable evolutionary transition to social intelligence.
  • We live embedded in a matrix of perceived consciousness. Most people experience a world crowded with other minds, constantly thinking and feeling and choosing.
  • anonymous on 23 Aug 13
     
    "Scientific talks can get a little dry, so I try to mix it up. I take out my giant hairy orangutan puppet, do some ventriloquism and quickly become entangled in an argument. I'll be explaining my theory about how the brain - a biological machine - generates consciousness. Kevin, the orangutan, starts heckling me. 'Yeah, well, I don't have a brain. But I'm still conscious. What does that do to your theory?'"
anonymous

Your intuitions are not magic - 0 views

lesswrong.com/...your_intuitions_are_not_magic

criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 11 Jun 10 - Cached
  • As a formal system, pure math exists only inside our heads. We can try to apply it to the real world, but if we are misapplying it, nothing in the system itself will tell us that we're making a mistake.
  • When someone says "correlation", they are most commonly talking about Pearson's correlation coefficient, which seeks to gauge whether there's a linear relationship between two variables.
  • A person who doesn't stop to consider the assumptions of the techniques she's using is, in effect, thinking that her techniques are magical.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Our brains keep track of countless pieces of information that we will not usually even think about. Few people will explicitly keep track of the amount of different restaurants they've seen.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 11 Jun 10
       
      This should probably read: "Our brains keep track of countless pieces of mis-remembered information"...
  • But like explicit statistical techniques, the brain makes numerous assumptions when building its models of the world.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 11 Jun 10
       
      Which this alludes to. :)
  • Thus, people asked to estimate the frequency of different causes of death underestimate the frequency of those that are underreported in the media, and overestimate the ones that are overreported.
  • like the person who was naively misapplying her statistical tools, the process which generates the answers is a black box to you.
  • he science seems absurd and unintuitive; our intuitions seem firm and clear. And indeed, sometimes there's a flaw in the science, and we are right to trust our intuitions. But on other occasions, our intuitions are wrong.
  • And what is ironic is that we persist on holding onto them exactly because we do not know how they work, because we cannot see their insides and all the things inside them that could go wrong.
  • That is why we need to study the cognitive sciences, figure out the way our intuitions work and how we might correct for mistakes.
  • anonymous on 11 Jun 10
     
    By Kaj Sotala at Less Wrong on June 10, 2010.
anonymous

For a New Generation, an Elusive American Dream - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...07generation.html

generations

shared by anonymous on 10 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Complicating the generational divide, Scott’s grandfather, William S. Nicholson, a World War II veteran and a retired stock broker, has watched what he described as America’s once mighty economic engine losing its pre-eminence in a global economy. The grandfather has encouraged his unemployed grandson to go abroad — to “Go West,” so to speak.
  • Yet surveys show that the majority of the nation’s millennials remain confident, as Scott Nicholson is, that they will have satisfactory careers. They have a lot going for them.
  • The Great Depression damaged the self-confidence of the young, and that is beginning to happen now, according to pollsters, sociologists and economists. Young men in particular lost a sense of direction, Glen H. Elder Jr., a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, found in his study, “Children of the Great Depression.” In some cases they were forced into work they did not want — the issue for Scott Nicholson.
  • anonymous on 10 Jul 10
     
    By Louis Uchitelle at The New York Times on July 6, 2010.
anonymous

Gaming Tree - 0 views

www.adweek.com/...3da65e51c14c3deaa4e13bba604197

quickthoughts gaming social

shared by anonymous on 19 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Socially conscious games -- as well as educational ones that raise social issues -- have increasingly been making headlines.
  • But are kids and their parents paying attention? Apparently, they are. A 2008 Pew Internet & American Life Project study of 1,102 U.S. teens ages 12 to 17 found that 97 percent of them play some kind of digital game, with 44 percent saying they play games that teach them about "a problem in society." The games about the U.S. government have generated a significant following. Fifty-seven percent of students who played Do I Have a Right? -- one of the first free Web games iCivics released last yearin the classroom went on to play it, unprompted, at home. In addition, 550,000 unique players have played the three judicial branch games featured on Ourcourts.org more than 700,000 times, per iCivics.
  • These numbers have not gone unnoticed by philanthropic experts, especially with charitable giving taking a dip since the recession. But they don't want to reach adults only; they feel it's an opportunity to attract a younger audience, too.
  • anonymous on 19 Jul 10
     
    Can gamers bring about social change? AdWeek explores the question in their special digital issue on gaming. There's a desire among some gamers to show that the medium can do more than just entertain. I'm skeptical, but I'll reserve my judgment for now.
anonymous

Rational ignorance - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Rational_ignorance

criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 13 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Rational ignorance occurs when the cost of educating oneself on an issue exceeds the potential benefit that the knowledge would provide.
  • Much of the empirical support for the idea of rational ignorance was drawn from studies of voter apathy, which reached particularly strong conclusions in the 1950s.[2] However, apathy appeared to decline sharply in the 1960s as concern about issues such as the Vietnam War mounted , and political polarization increased [3]. This suggests that voters' interest in political information increases with the importance of political choices. Additionally, rational ignorance is scrutinized for its broadening effect on the decisions that individuals make in different matters. The investment of time and energy on the specified subject has ramifications on other decision areas. Individuals sometimes forget to take this into account when unconsciously assessing the investment cost versus payout. The external benefits are therefore not adequately taken into account.
  • anonymous on 13 Jul 10
     
    Definition: "Rational ignorance occurs when the cost of educating oneself on an issue exceeds the potential benefit that the knowledge would provide." I got a great pointer by Adam Gurri about this Wikipedia page.
anonymous

Coordinated Punishment Leads to Increased Cooperation in Large Groups - 0 views

www.physorg.com/news191860413.html

society longgame

shared by anonymous on 06 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Humans are incredibly cooperative, but why do people cooperate and how is cooperation maintained? A new research study by UCLA anthropology professor Robert Boyd and his colleagues from the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico suggests cooperation in large groups is maintained by punishment.
  • Group members cooperate because they do not want to hurt their friends by not participating in group efforts, and also because they may want help in the future.
  • in a larger group, like a tribe, those mechanisms for maintaining cooperation are lost. All group members experience the benefits of the large group, even those members who stop cooperating and become "free-riders."
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Boyd and his colleagues suggest cooperation is maintained by punishment, which reduces the benefits to free riding.
  • To address the problem, Boyd and his colleagues changed the assumptions built into previous cooperation/punishment models.
  • First, they allowed for punishment to be coordinated among group members.
  • Second, the researchers allowed for the cost of punishing a free-rider to decline as the number of punishers increased.
  • Their model had three stages in which a large group of unrelated individuals interacted repeatedly.
  • The first stage was a signaling stage where group members could signal their intent to punish. In the second stage, group members could choose to cooperate or not. The final stage was a punishment stage when group members could punish other group members.
  • anonymous on 06 Jun 10
     
    By PhysOrg on May 1, 2010. Found on my uncle's Facebook page.
anonymous

Afghanistan: The Significance of Mineral Wealth - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...an_significance_mineral_wealth

shared by anonymous on 15 Jun 10 - Cached
  • much of what is being discussed dates back to two studies done in 2006-07 by the U.S. Geological Survey in conjunction with the U.S. Agency for International Development and Afghan geologists.
  • The Chinese experience shows that what little progress is being made in terms of foreign investment in Afghan mining projects is already slowed by problems relating to poor infrastructure, awkward logistics, security threats, and corrupt or opaque negotiations.
  • STRATFOR has been focusing and continues to focus on how these reports came about just in the past week. There is clearly a media blitz now under way, and it is important to understand why. Over the next few years there will be little meaningful impact on the ground in Afghanistan in terms of investing in and developing the country’s minerals. The key question at this point is how Washington will play this mineral-wealth story to serve its interests in the region, especially as the United States struggles to break a stalemate in southwestern Afghanistan and force the Taliban to the negotiating table. But local mistrust of U.S. intentions may counter any potential benefit of playing up Afghanistan’s economic potential.
  • anonymous on 15 Jun 10
     
    It's old news, but why has it resurfaced? June 14, 2010
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