I thank Tony for not taking the immediately self-benefiting path of profit and instead doing his small part to raise the sanity waterline.
zaph
Rationality, Community, and Death
Possible personal implications of the Israeli Hunger-Probation study
Couldn’t that just be due to a higher number of total votes (both up an down) for the OP? I would assume fewer people read each comment, and downvoters may have decided to only weigh in on the OP. A hypothetical controversial post could have a karma of 8, with 10 downvotes negating 10 upvotes, and a supportive comment could have 9 upvotes due to half of the upvotes of the first post giving it their vote. The comment has higher karma, but lower volatility, so to speak.
There was a case in my local area where a teenager beat another teeanger to death with a bat. On another blog, some commenters were saying that since his brain wasn’t fully developed yet (based on full brain development being attained close to 30), he shouldn’t be held to adult standards (namely sentencing standards). This was troubling to me, because while I don’t advocate the cruelty of our current prison system, I do worry about the message that lax sentencing sends. The commenets seem to naturally allow for adult freedom (the kids were all unsupervised, and no one said that was problem), then plead biological determinism. To me, morality is about how communities react to transgressions. “Ought not to” has no utility outside of consequences. Those may be social, like the experience of shame, to physical, like imprisonment. I think discussing morality as being solely a quality within individual agents is a dead end.
And thanks for starting this discussion. This is the type of rationality that I find not just interesting but important.
“Its importance is not merely the individual Games, but the idea of what a Game is and why people Play them.”
From Berne: “Because there is so little opportunity for intimacy in daily life, and because some forms of intimacy (especially if intense) are psychologically impossible for most people, the bulk of the time in serious social life is taken up with playing games. Hence games are both necessary and desirable, and the only problem at issue is whether the games played by an individual offer the best yield for him.”
So, you can debate the validity, but my take on the Berne-ian view would be that the game Catcall is the attempt to create a social boost for males by gaining a female’s (albeit negative) attention.
Moreover, no woman is ever going to be drawn to that, at least that I’ve ever heard. So it doesn’t make sense as a grossly misguided pick-up strategy. Thinking about it and reading the thread, the more I think something along the lines of the Berne Games People Play dynamic is at work. It’s the most charitable reading you can give to the behavior at least; the jerks taking part in this are getting some kind of attention from the woman they’re targeting, even though it’s negative attention. Still extremely hurtful behavior, but I can believe (or at least kid myself into believing) that men can gain insight into the behavior, realize what’s going on, and stop doing it.
One of the more humiliating moments of my adult life was when two guys were making lewd comments to a female friend of mine across a parking lot. I felt absolutely helpless (I’ll be blunt, they were far away and it was obvious they would kick my a__), and I can only imagine what my friend went through. She weathered it, but I’m sure that came at some cost to her psyche that women spend to much time and effort bearing. I can only say it’s in the best interests of men and women if this was all curtailed.
Prior to reading that one study, I would be in complete agreement. After, though, I’m not so sure. Really for any job where routine judgements are being made, I would have just naturally assume that habit would take over. That’s why the study was jarring for me; it really does seem to demonstrate that at different times, supposedly expert decision makers came to different conclusions based on their physiology. Now, it could be that legal issues are more based on personal opinion and biases, and really don’t rely on making decisions based on rational standards. My thinking, though, is that these are two domains (medicine and law) that share the common element of making a decision based on certain pre-established criteria.
Zimbardo discusses the members of the experiment in his book the Lucifer Principle. They were from very different backgrounds than criminals, though they seemed to be very countercultural as well, which still makes the end result surprising. Regarding Zimbardo’s take on the whole thing (ethics & impact), I think he does cop to the experiment being unethical, and his behavior being unethical as well. I don’t know if it’s a case of being localized to Stanford, but I do completely agree that it’s a case of guessing the password; in fact, that’s pretty much how I read Zimbardo’s take on it. He was creating an environment where the password was the increasingly abusive behavior. That’s why he sees the experiment as being relevant to Abu Ghraib; guards were living up to an implicit password within the context of their roles on the nightshift. The next and more practical question would be whether or not the existence of such passwords is really universal.
There was an attempted replication that Zimbardo critiques in his book. That replication (which was a reality show, btw; so more confounds are present, though whether that’s anymore real than a Stanford LARP is up for debate) had very different results than Zimbardo’s. Prisoners there found some solidarity, which Zimbardo predicts would be broken by a more repressive prison structure. It’s at that point where I’m fine with the arguments staying observational and theoretical and not moving into experimentation. It’s not that I don’t think the study of humanity’s darker sides aren’t important, it’s just that I don’t think it’s acceptable to move into what would seem to be very unethical experimental setups.
Considering the source was Nature, I doubt your analysis is correct. The researchers are from Ludwig-Maximilians-University and ETH Zürich, which appear to be respectable institutions. I found a write-up at Science Daily (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100727082652.htm) that provides some more details on the research. From that link:
“The teams at LMU and the ETH Zurich have now shown that the result of a measurement on a quantum particle can be predicted with greater accuracy if information about the particle is available in a quantum memory. Atoms or ions can form the basis for such a quantum memory.
The researchers have, for the first time, derived a formula for Heisenberg’s Principle, which takes account of the effect of a quantum memory. In the case of so-called entangled particles, whose states are very highly correlated (i.e. to a degree that is greater than that allowed by the laws of classical physics), the uncertainty can disappear.
According to Christandl, this can be roughly understood as follows “One might say that the disorder or uncertainty in the state of a particle depends on the information stored in the quantum memory. Imagine having a pile of papers on a table. Often these will appear to be completely disordered—except to the person who put them there in the first place.”
This is one of the very few places online that I’ve seen thoughtful discussion on the implications of quantum mechanics, so I felt research that could impact quantum theory would be relevant.
I’d add that a good boycott has an end in mind. What’s the point of a boycott without returning once certain conditions are met? This, in my eyes, lends more credence to the idea that this is about drama and self-promotion. It would have been much less eventful had they merely demanded that, say, Michael Shermer appear in interview dismantling creationism, or better yet, a creationist (’s arguments—of course).
Thank you, very much appreciated.
But you have to take a Scientologist class to join? You couldn’t just join a Toastmasters somewhere else and then show up, for instance?
Thanks Isparrish. It was pretty hard to get all of that out. Your grandmother’s funeral sermon sounds like so many other funerals that I’ve attended. The need to pretend death out of existence just seems so central to what religious approaches to death are all about. The other side of it, saying that death is exactly what it seems, feels so daunting. The fact that their memories lives on can feel flimsy, even if it is absolutely true. I don’t have a neat and clean method of dealing with grief, but preserving those memories for yourself I believe is integral, or at least it was for me.
I reservedly second Wedrifid’s comment that the little piece of paper at the end is worth it. I know people who have gone far in life without one, and I don’t mean amazing genius-savants either, just folks who spent time in industry, the military, etc. and progressed along. But I’ve also seen a number who got stuck at some point for lacking a degree. This was more a lack of signaling cred that smarts or ability. The statistics show that people with degrees on average earn more than those who don’t, if that’s of interest to you. But degrees don’t instantly grant jobs, and some degrees are better preparation than others for the real world. It sounds like you’re interested in a degree in math, which carries over into a lot of different fields.
I think it’s great that your taking stock of what your education experience is giving you. As Wedifrid mentioned, the motivation is an important part of schooling, and if you’re in a program that is known to be rigorous, the credentials are definitely worth it. But those have to be weighed against current employment options. I’d encourage you to consider working with professors on research, investigating internships, etc., so that you get the full educational experience that you’re looking for, and not be one of those graduates that only took classes and then expected a job to be waiting for them when they graduated.
I think a forum here would be fantastic. I don’t believe it would detract from the articles, it would just give discussions that have potentially smaller interest bases a chance to still develop.
Would the most vulnerable people exposed to creationist arguments really read these online debates, though? I don’t know, I consider this all more of a public education campaign than a “debate” per se. I’m not against creationism being persistent because it’s wrong; I’m against it because it’s wrong and harms the public good.
Perhaps you could write an article discussing the ways the differences between rationality and rationalization can be identified? I for one would find it useful. I find myself using rationalizations that mask themselves as rationality (often too late), and it would help me to do that less.
I think that if there was such a straightforward hack like EY was looking for, he would know about it already. I just don’t really believe that a hack like that exists, based on my admittedly meager readings in experimental psychology. Further, I think the idea of a “mind hack” is a cute metaphor, it can be misguided. Computer hackers literally create code that directs processes. We can at best manipulate our outside environment in ways that we hope will affect what is still a very mysterious brain. What EY’s looking for would be the result of a well-funded and decades long research project. Unless there truly is a Dharma Initiative looking into these things while staying behind the scenes, I don’t think there’s going to be a journal article that will provide the profound insight he’s looking to fin.
I do want to mention something about Seth Robers, which he sort of casually mentions in the Shangri-La diet. He wrote something along the lines that he was eating much less frequently, eating probably one full meal a day. That’s something referred to as intermittent fasting. What the Shangri-La Diet book misses, I would postulate, is how Seth used the no flavor calories to transition to that kind of diet. IF is something being suggested as a way to control calories because people’s bodies cue hunger to when their accustomed to eating. If you aren’t accustomed to eating, you eat a bit less (since you’re only filling your stomach the once, or so goes the idea). I certainly don’t think I have the complete picture from noticing that on how diets should now be constructed. But I do feel that Seth Robers, attentive as he is, did not fully consider all the changes he had made, and was considering he reduced meal frequency solely as an aftereffect. In writing his popular book, he did not consider all the hacks that he had put into place for himself.
Akrasia-conquerors will need to find the ways to win against their lesser but still powerful drives. Teachers of akrasia-conquering will need to be able to honestly detail everything that they did, which will probably entail very keen observers as peers and students. The need for a perfect system to be in place before on attempts to overcome akrasia is an example of akrasia.
The use of absurdity seems more like a tool to enforce group norms than a means of conversion. That doesn’t mean the beliefs aren’t absurd, just that pointing out the absurdity of outsiders is common practice by in-group members. Most creationist-minded believers would use some similarly absurd way of describing evolution, with the group benefit of passing along “evolution is stupid” meme. That said, it is important to start to tease apart just how many other enforcement strategies are out there, as they are going to need to be dealt with one by one.