Lame "Do Your Research" Statements

It is okay to not take anyone seriously who shares an opinion if, instead of offering validation, submits instead the instruction "do your research" but fail to share their's.

18th Century Solutions Don't Fix 21st Century Problems

A quote from this story about a current issue in the Mormon church: "Excommunication is a nineteenth-century Mormon solution to twenty-first century Mormon problems."

I read this and immediately thought it could also to the U.S. Constitution, only push back the comparison another century.

Ignoring For Millennia What We Know

Time apparently does not wear down our resistance to some of our best realizations.

The humble suffer when the mighty disagree. -Phaedrus (1st century CE)

There's no surer justice in the world than that which makes the rich thief hang the poor one. -Peire Cardenal (13th century CE)

When the rich wage war it's the poor who die. -Jean-Paul Sartre (20th century CE)

Just one more related quote that nicely reveals an insight into why wealth can manipulate motivation.

Riches do not exhilarate us so much with their possession as they torment us with their loss. -Samuel Gregory (19th century CE)

Recent story about how money changes us: "7 Weird Things Money Does To Your Brain"

Letting "Obvious" Claims Slide

One of the most pervasive but easy-to-fix mistakes we make is asserting that a claim about something is so obviously true that it need not be tested. Famous examples from past centuries include the weight of an object affects its speed when falling and the earth being the center of the universe. Modern examples include the claim that abstinence education reduces teen pregnancies and the need for abortions, and the idea that nothing stops atheists from acting in the worst ways possible.

People who have thought this way hold the mistaken notion that the claim contains its own proof, eliminating the need to investigate and verify. This erroneous situation needs to be addressed during everyone's primary school education so that, as adults, people don't make major decisions based on "obvious" claims that fail under scrutiny.

Maligning What Was Requested

It is a common complaint from women that men don't communicate well or enough. But when they do, it is now sometimes disparaged as “mansplaining,” something that's not going to improve things. Why don't we go ahead and start using a term like "bitch talk" to our vocabulary and see if anything positive comes of it.

What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate

Just finished reading A Beginner's Guide to Reality by Jim Baggott. It is an intertwined history of philosophy and science, and I liked the book quite a bit. The people and topics in this book that have been written about by many authors, but every author brings their own take to anything they write about, something that allows us to take away new insights and ideas.

One of the items in this book that is an example of this is a discussion in the epilogue about the "socio-cultural revolution" that takes place in science when an area is undergoing a paradigm shift due a building consensus around a new set of discoveries or ideas. He compares it to similar changes that occur in other segments of human societies, showing that science does not exist outside a society's culture and is, in fact, influenced greatly by it.

This general idea was not new to me, but I got something new from a footnote where he paraphrases Thomas Kuhn : "Kuhn wrote that when this happens, individuals in the communities behave as they occupy different (social) worlds. Even though they may use the same language, many of the words in this language have taken on quite different meanings in these different worlds. The worlds are incommensurable. The words no longer have any common measures by which they can be unambiguously compared."

I couldn't help but see what's happening today as a "perfect storm" of this problem, with political, religious and other social groups currently going through this process at the same time. People have stopped trying to communicate and are just throwing insults around, at least partly because communication has become virtually impossible--incommensurable. The factions into which we have siloed ourselves have combined full-blown defensive postures with no-surrender attitudes with anything-goes attack strategies.

We are also fooling ourselves and missing what's really going with this loss of the ability to communicate on by thinking, "Why don't they realize what we're saying is so obviously true?" We are dumbfounded at "the ignorance" of the other groups and become so frustrated that we can longer justify being civil.

What a mess.

P.S. After this original post, I ran across this short article and video about Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Beetle in the Box Analogy talking about individual perspective versus shared experiences when it comes to shared meaning of the words we use.

Removing Humans From Human Communication

I wonder what the long-term results will be from our growing acceptance of more group-based interactions like social media to our communication options. This adds to the history of technology continuously giving us more not-in-person methods of communicating. Have we gained more than we've lost?

(Coincidentally, here is one recent story on this topic.)

Abandoning Ourselves

All those who have gone through a business school or spent any time in a job exposed to how major business decisions are made know that people are seen as no different than any other aspect of a corporation. The phrase "human capital" is sometimes used to place people in the same category as machinery, buildings or other materials. By de-humanizing people this way, we have actually convinced each other that we should be indifferent to ourselves, that we don't matter any more than a barrel of oil or a box of paper clips. Is this really a tenet worthy of our continued support? It should be seen as terrifyingly insane to create a system on which we are all supposed to rely that abandons actual people so unsympathetically. This is eligible to be a plot for a horror story.

Villain's Victims as Cheerleaders

Sometimes when I encounter certain protesters and pundits, the feelings I get seem to be what it might be like if I were to witness a cheerleading squad made up of victims of a villain still rooting for their tormentor.

In addition, the scene from "Animal House" comes to mind where the pledges to a fraternity are being repeatedly wacked on the ass with a huge wooden paddle and having to say after each hit, "Thank you, sir. May I have another?" In this scene, the "victims" are going through the ordeal because they know they will eventually be accepted into the exclusive and privileged group delivering the punishment. Similarly, those who accept repeated punishment from the most powerful and privileged in society put up with it because they expect the same. But they don't realize that their hopes of being allowed to take a shared place among the powerful are being deceived; their devotion will never be rewarded.

Selective Agitators

After watching a documentary about the civil rights movement of the early '60s, I was reminded that the most repeated complaint by conservative southerners at the time was that those who were pushing against their racist culture were "agitators." Again and again, racist political leaders openly told anyone who would listen that if "the agitators" would just leave them alone and stop trying to end racism, everything would be fine.

I couldn't help but wonder if the people of Iraq had used the same language when the U.S. invaded, would the same conservatives supporting war there (and everywhere else they've been the only proponents of war) on the basis of "liberation" agree that they were also "agitators" and should therefore stay away?

Sex Drive v. Love Drive

The differences between love and sex have been discussed since the beginning of thought, but it seems that we never advance on the topic. It's not usually a problem for people to realize that love and sex are not synonymous, but we continue to act otherwise, so let's take a look at this by using the terms sex drive and love drive, and sex bond and love bond. Trying to frame it this way may make it easier to realize that these desires are not always identical and can lead to (hopefully) some new insights.

To be clear, these are not always mutually exclusive either. One can drag the other along for the ride if it's strong enough. (An analogy that might help is an old fashioned radio dial where one station bleeds over into another one if the signal is too strong.) This happens frequently enough that we often end up seeing them as inseparable, forgetting that they don't have to be.

This is most apparent with the accusation of cheating from someone in a long-term love-sex relationship. The person who "cheats" by having sex with someone else is almost always seen as having violated the couple's love bond as well as the sex bond. But it's the rare person who hasn't also learned that the act of cheating can be said to have happened when an emotional bond takes place with someone outside a relationship--even if there has been no sexual act. We have a tendency to see a violation of the sex bond or the love bond as a violation of the love bond, with little ability or desire to even try and keep them separate.

As any couple who has argued over this can likely attest, the person who cheated will rarely say they don't love their partner any longer with the other partner being dubious, seeing no difference between a violation of the sex bond and the love bond. It may actually be true that the person does still love their partner even after having had sex with someone else. But, with neither partner fully understanding that the love drive and sex drive can be separate, the argument usually gets resolved poorly--if at all.

We should admit to ourselves that resolving a sex bond issue can be different from solving a love bond issue. Even if these two desires have been nicely brought together by a couple for most of their relationship, looking at them separately when necessary can help to resolve problems with either of them and then, if desired, re-combine the love bond and sex bond more closely. (Another analogy: When a mechanic repairs a car, it is almost always required to remove and separate the parts, take care of the one that's malfunctioning, then put it back together. Trying to fix an alternator problem by working on the battery will always fail.) The real problem we have is not seeing sex and love and separately when it is appropriate.

Some other scenarios to consider include those who have been in a long-term love-sex relationship and sometimes engaged in sex without having the desire to do so. This clearly indicates that the sex drive is not permanently connected to the love drive, otherwise this would never happen. With the love drive intact, a person "not in the mood" may engage in sex anyway because it's what the other partner wants. With this in mind, we should also be able to more openly accept that the act of sex--inside or outside of a long-term relationship--does not have to involve the love drive. In these cases, the sex drive is on its own.

To complicate matters further, the sex drive and love drive can be triggered by other emotions (from inside or outside the relationship) that have nothing to do with either. Things that can trigger them to varying degrees include physical attractiveness, wealth, fame, humor, intelligence, a self-less act, shared experiences, common interests, similar personalities, and more. Having had the love drive or sex drive triggered by something outside a primary relationship doesn't necessarily mean that these desires have been diminished within that relationship. It can mean that, of course, but it could also be temporary and/or minimal.

If we really want to have love-sex relationships that work, ignoring what's really driving our behaviors is always going to fail. If, instead, we accept the difficult reality that our love drive and sex drive do not always get triggered together, and our love bonds and sex bonds can't be nurtured if we always see them as a singular bond, we will be heading for major improvements.

Indifferent Democracies Fail

It is a neglected democracy that keeps electing those who are among the least respected, a product of an indifferent populace.

Yes, No Are Not the Same

I find it hard to understand the claim that the major political parties are "just the same," as so many people declare, especially when they are looking for a reason to not vote. Anyone even casually exposed to politics can't have missed the enormous number of partisan votes at all levels of government, even the Supreme Court. There are consistent groups of people on opposite sides of almost every vote. How can some people voting "yes" and others voting "no" be "just the same"?

While it's certainly true that final votes come after a political "sausage-making" series of events that include a wide variety of influences, in the end, the voting is almost never bi-partisan.

There are differences among people given the temporary power to run the government. To pretend they aren't there makes matters worse.

Faux Justice

It is fair to say that our justice system has little of it.

Never Enough Torment

On Iraq, I get reminded of the "Seinfeld" episode where Elaine asks George as he contemplates inflicting yet another caustic event on the family of his dead fiancee, "Haven't you done enough to these people already?"

Golden Rule MIA

I find it unfortunate that there is no commonly used word to note the universal absence of any version of the Golden Rule when one attempts to justify a war they've started.

Political Package Deal

This is going to be unfair, but it's how I feel sometimes...

Liberals can certainly be assholes, but conservatism has a much harder time making it optional.

Myths to Regulate Male Behavior

The issue of gender equality has once again risen to the top of the public's attention. This issue has been a recognized problem for thousands of years with one of the oldest attempts to handle it involve cultural myths.

From The Seven Story Tower by Curtiss Hoffman: “...the function of [some myths] is to delineate a societal...problem: the propensity for adolescent males to commit hybris when confronted with the feminine. This argument suggests that every culture will need to develop myths...as a means of regulating male behavior... We must grant that this is a common problem, one which many males in our own society never outgrow. This might cause us to wonder whether the rates of abuse of women are so high...because we lack such a myth.”

Roundup Ready Humans

Given the ability and financial incentive to patent genes, will there eventually be a version of Roundup Ready for people?

Mistaken Support for Simplicity

It is an unfortunate twist that Occam's Razor is used to mistakenly promote simplicity.

Many people have twisted Occam's Razor from the notion that answers with the fewest assumptions are likely (but not guaranteed) to be the most accurate to the idea that the simplest answer is the best, and incorrect warping of the actual idea. What this error does is give support to those who do not understand (or don't want to understand) complexity when they promote a simple idea instead. This is a prominent problem in politics and religion, but not restricted to those areas. It's certainly easier to hold something simple to be true, but it also allows those who eschew complexity to find comfort in ideas that take no work to adopt.