zenwrit

no sharp boundary between one person’s ideas and knowledge” and “those of other members” of the group

favor (or oppose) an immigration ban without knowing what I’m talking about

The farther off base they were about the geography, the more likely they were to favor military intervention

As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,”

If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless.

much detail as they could, the impacts of implementing each one. Most people at this point ran into trouble

pent less time pontificating and more trying to work through the implications of policy proposals, we’d realize how clueless we are and moderate our views.

science is as a system that corrects for people’s natural inclinations

by researchers who have no motive to confirm them. And this, it could be argued, is why the system has proved so successful.

field may be dominated by squabbles, but, in the end, the methodology prevails

experience genuine pleasure—a rush of dopamine—when processing information that supports their beliefs. “It feels good to ‘stick to our guns’ even if we are wrong,

At this point, something curious happened. The students in the high-score group said that they thought they had, in fact, done quite well—significantly better than the average student—even though, as they’d just been told, they had zero grounds for believing this

Once formed,” the researchers observed dryly, “impressions are remarkably perseverant.”

Even after the evidence “for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs,” the researchers noted

that reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational

“confirmation bias,” the tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and reject information that contradicts them.

Those who’d started out pro-capital punishment were now even more in favor of it; those who’d opposed it were even more hostile.

Such a mouse, “bent on confirming its belief that there are no cats around,” would soon be dinner.

we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own.

ewer than fifteen per cent changed their minds in step two.

getting screwed by the other members of our group.

There was little advantage in reasoning clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments

roviding people with accurate information doesn’t seem to help; they simply discount it. Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science. “The challenge that remains,” they write toward the end of their book, “is to figure out how to address the tendencies that lead to false scientific belief.

samples are out of the highest desirable limit or exceeded the permissible limit

one advancesconfidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live thelife which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpectedin common hours.

desire to speak somewhere withoutbounds; like a man in a waking moment,

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in suchdesperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his com-panions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Lethim step to the music which he hears, h

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it andcall it hard names

Do not trouble yourself much to getnew things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them.Things do not change; we change.

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us.Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day todawn. The sun is but a morning star.

Once, in recent corporate history, anger forced an industry to make basic changes. That was the campaign in the 1980s demanding divestment from companies doing business in South Africa. It rose first on college campuses and then spread to municipal and state governments; 155 campuses eventually divested, and by the end of the decade, more than 80 cities, 25 states and 19 counties had taken some form of binding economic action against companies connected to the apartheid regime. "The end of apartheid stands as one of the crowning accomplishments of the past century," as Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it, "but we would not have succeeded without the help of international pressure," especially from "the divestment movement of the 1980s."

it's as if the gay-rights movement had to be constructed entirely from evangelical preachers, or the abolition movement from slaveholders.

A more efficient method, of course, would be to work through the political system, and environmentalists have tried that, too, with the same limited success.

According to the Carbon Tracker report, if Exxon burns its current reserves, it would use up more than seven percent of the available atmospheric space between us and the risk of two degrees. BP is just behind, followed by the Russian firm Gazprom, then Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell, each of which would fill between three and four percent.

In December, the Canadian government withdrew from the treaty before it faced fines for failing to meet its commitments.

hypocrisy

no one paid it much attention,

prescription for long-term disaster.

Its purely voluntary agreements committed no one to anything, and even if countries signaled their intentions to cut carbon emissions, there was no enforcement mechanism

biggest environmental issues

outsourced your pollution

but at the expense of the American public.

And I said my job would be to associate them with the reality out there. They're insulated -- heavily insulated -- they don't deal with reality.

And they, if you notice, I haven't seen any of their annual reports that put in the cost of the natural resources that they use

People are extracting

I said, how can you as CEOs of corporations do what you're doing, in terms of extraction, without looking at the consequences?

And that's the problem.

He says, well, as you know, if somebody is living in those terms, they're not going to progress. They're just going to be happy just the way they are. There'll be no progress. And he says, as you know, the bottom line of our civilization is greed.

selfishness

teach them to be selfish, so they can progress

The responsibility of leadership is to look that far ahead

directly due to the idea of capitalism

to give thanks, be thankful for what you have, and to share. And the third one would be respect.

hat's was people power did that. Germany didn't want it, East Germany didn't want it, nobody wanted it. People wanted it, and nothing could stop them. Once they get in a move in that direction they become a force. It's very difficult -- it's not a manageable force -- and that's why leadership is so vital and important.

leadership and the control factor for human beings, in particular, is moral. If you don't have moral law you don't have any law. If there's no moral law, you don't have any.

there's no mercy

There's only law

You're going to suffer the consequence, and that's right where we're headed right now. Six-point-six billion people and more coming every minute as we sit here. That's a compound

And it takes some understanding to rise to the occasion. You've got to comprehend what's going on.

When the Peacemaker talked to us about the foundation of the confederacy, he said the first principle is peace. And you know the Indian word for peace; it also means health. The same word.

It starts with the people; the earth, everything that grows on the earth, bushes, trees, what lives in the trees, what lives on the earth; water, what lives in the water; and food, what grows, where it grows. And the leaders, the animal leaders, who lead the animal. We acknowledge thanksgiving for them.

You're supposed to develop them and then share with those that don't have them. That's how everything has equity. So you come back to that.

And what can we do about it?

bout the world's "accelerating" race toward environmental calamity,

t's always about progress today

No, you sacrifice.

You know, how often do you hear that the United States uses one quarter of the earth's resources and we're only 7 percent of the population. And we use one quarter.

is a persistent myth.

The concentration benefits of mindfulness training aren’t just behavioral; they’re physical. In recent years, mindfulness has been shown to improve connectivity inside our brain’s attentional networks, as well as between attentional and medial frontal regions — changes that save us from distraction.

the core of mindfulness is the ability to pay attention. That’s exactly what Holmes does when he taps together the tips of his fingers, or exhales a fine cloud of smoke. He is centering his attention on a single element.

But Wallace-Wells’ piece was not about that. It was about what will happen if we keep on as-is.

He’s merely describing what could happen if we cease to act, which no one wants ... except one of the two major political parties in the world’s most powerful country, including the man in charge of the executive branch and military

There’s been a sort of general failure of imagination that means we’ve accepted what’s the median-likely outcome as a worst-case scenario. As a result we’ve been a bit handicapped in thinking about how much action needs to be taken.

Things stay roughly as they are” is just as improbable as the worst-case scenario he lays out, yet I’d venture to guess it is believed (or more importantly, envisioned) by vastly more people. Part of that is because envisioning the best-case scenario is easy — it looks just like now! — while envisioning the worst-case scenario is very difficult. It’s especially difficult because the worst-case scenario is treated by the very few people who understand it as a kind of forbidden occult knowledge to which ordinary people cannot survive exposure. Nobody can talk about it without getting scolded by the hope police.

it’s just weird for journalists and analysts to worry about overly alarming people regarding the biggest, scariest problem humanity has ever faced.

When there are important things that people don’t understand, journalists should explain those things. Attempts at dime-store social psychology are unlikely to lead to better journalism.

nobody really knows anything. Even if there are accurate statements about how people in general respond to messages in general, they won’t tell you much about how you ought to communicate with the people you want to reach.

Similarly, the dry, hedged language of science is not the only serious or legitimate way to communicate, though climate scientists often mistake it as such.

consciously pitched to reach and inspire some mythical average reader (as encountered in social science studies filtered through popular journalism) tends to be flavorless and dull.

engineering

a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us.

it is another thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only provoked it

I just try to communicate like I would like to be communicated to, frankly and clearly, as though I’m talking to a friend in a bar.