“But who’s more wrong—the person who droningly insists, jerking like an automaton, that the world is round, has always been round, and will always be round? Or the one who knows that this earth is not a given, and that we can imagine a whole weary planet into new and different shapes?
The real cleavage, in other words, isn’t between those who believe in God and those who don’t, but between those who want to change the world and those who just want to repeat it.”
from: October 3, 2016 at 11:10AM
from: September 28, 2016 at 08:56AM
“We know from the now-iconic 1970s Good Samaritan study that the single greatest predictor of uncaring, unkind, and uncompassionate behavior, even among people who have devoted their lives to the welfare of others, is a perceived lack of time — a feeling of being rushed. The sense of urgency seems to consume all of our other concerns — it is the razor’s blade that severs our connection to anything outside ourselves, anything beyond the task at hand, and turns our laser-sharp focus of concern onto the the immediacy of the self alone.”
In other words, evolution couldn’t care less if you perceive objective reality. It only wants you to have sex successfully. As a consequence, your apprehension of the world is tuned to whatever allows that to happen. Thus, your perceptions at the root level have nothing to do with some fundamental physics upon which the fundamental nature of objective independent reality is constructed.
“Beware the semi-erudite who thinks he is an erudite. He fails to naturally detect sophistry.
The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited. He thinks people should act according to their best interests and he knows their interests, particularly if they are “red necks” or English non-crisp-vowel class who voted for Brexit. When plebeians do something that makes sense to them, but not to him, the IYI uses the term “uneducated”. What we generally call participation in the political process, he calls by two distinct designations: “democracy” when it fits the IYI, and “populism” when the plebeians dare voting in a way that contradicts his preferences.”
“[Hillary Clinton] is everything everyone dislikes about the front row kids. And this election is about everyone else throwing them out.
Bill Clinton was a back row kid at heart. That is what he came from. (Go visit his hometown. Really.)
Trump is what the back row (and middle rows) often love best. Someone from the front row who joins them.
Not only is Trump joining them, he is shooting spitballs at the kids in the front. Making them all mad!
And what does team Hillary do? Goes full front row on everyone, throwing scorn. “How dare you behave so awfully! Grow up! Bad kids!”
That is why “basket of deplorable” was so damaging. It is exactly how everyone who isn’t in the front row thinks the front row thinks about everyone else.”
“Socialist experiments have failed no matter when and where they have been tried. Instead of tranquility and prosperity, they have resulted in strife and impoverishment. Yet socialism keeps on reappearing — albeit in different guises — throughout the world. From Venezuela since the early 2000s to the strong support for Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign on American college campuses today, socialism continues to enjoy a surprising degree of popularity. What accounts for that? Are socialist instincts, including zero-sum thinking and egalitarian sharing, parts of human nature that evolved in our premodern ancestors thousands of years ago? And if they are inherent to the design of the human brain, can they be overridden so that it is possible to more effectively explain the benefits of free markets?”
from: September 21, 2016 at 09:00AM
Since the end of the Cold War, America has been mesmerized by two ideas that have given hazy coherence to the post-1989 world: “globalism” and “identity politics.” Formidable political movements in America and in Europe, still raucous and unrefined, now reject both ideas.
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“But you can start by remembering these four giant problems our brains have evolved to deal with over the last few million years :
1. Information overload sucks, so we aggressively filter.
2. Lack of meaning is confusing, so we fill in the gaps.
3. Need to act fast lest we lose our chance, so we jump to conclusions.
4. This isn’t getting easier, so we try to remember the important bits.”
“The dominant strategy of the outsiders is to focus on the negative, exposing and denouncing the failures, imperfections, and corruption of the insiders. On the left, this means heaping blame on the institutions of capitalism and free markets. On the right, this means heaping blame on the institutions of government. Neither side will propose, much less implement, an effective reform agenda. Instead, the only thing that the outsiders can accomplish will be to undermine the trust in and effectiveness of both markets and government.”