May 2011

And Many More…

By in omnigatherum No Comments

Today is the natal anniversary of a certain Shanna who regularly haunts the comments here. I asked her if she wanted anything for a gift, and, well, you know young girls — she wanted a bunch of fluff that had to do with hearts, flowers, stuffed animals and the color pink. Thankfully, I managed to convince her that Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards might be something she can make use of for her woo purposes, and she was absolutely delighted by my perceptive thoughtfulness.

So there you go. A gift for Shanna, and an article on Eno for Noel. If only I could have worked in an angle on extreme Scandinavian metal, cycling or wine snobbery for Brian, this post could have had something for everyone! I’ll keep aiming for that trifecta.

Action! Not Words

By in george carlin, psychology No Comments

What’s all this stuff about motivation? If you ask me, this country could do with a little less motivation. The people who are causing all the trouble seem highly motivated to me. Serial killers, stock swindlers, drug dealers, Christian Republicans. I’m not sure motivation is always a good thing. You show me a lazy prick who’s lying in bed all day, watching TV, only occasionally getting up to piss, and I’ll show you a guy who’s not causing any trouble.

– George Carlin
Newly published research points to another factor that feeds this ingrained confirmation bias: Our “Just do it!” culture. In both overt and subtle ways, Americans are constantly being encouraged to take action, and exposure to such messages makes us more liable to ignore dissenting ideas.
“The growing need for activity in the United States may contribute to a loss of objectivity in the way citizens gather information,” University of Alabama psychologist William Hart and University of Illinois psychologist Dolores Albarracin write in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. They found that when people’s minds are attuned to the idea of action, their opinions tend to harden, making them less likely to seek out opposing viewpoints.
So, you see, to the untrained eye, it may appear that I’m just a lazy ne’er-do-well goofing off on the Internet, starting pointless arguments over minutiae with the few people who bother to read my ravings, but my heterodox methods actually make me one of the most diligent truth-seekers there is!

I Thought I Was Wrong Once, but I Was Mistaken

By in nietzsche, psychology No Comments

The surest way of ruining a youth is to teach him to respect those who think as he does more highly than those who think differently from him.
– Nietzsche
If argumentative theory is true, though, it seems like it would take quite a radical shift for people in general to start valuing the input of those who disagree with them:
Here we have a radically different idea that stands apart from the common wisdom in psychology, cognitive science, and even in philosophy. In Western thought, for at least the last couple hundred years, people have thought that reasoning was purely for individual reasons. But Dan challenged this idea and said that it was a purely social phenomenon and that the goal was argumentative, the goal was to convince others and to be careful when others try to convince us.
And the beauty of this theory is that not only is it more evolutionarily plausible, but it also accounts for a wide range of data in psychology. Maybe the most salient of phenomena that the argumentative theory explains is the confirmation bias.
Psychologists have shown that people have a very, very strong, robust confirmation bias. What this means is that when they have an idea, and they start to reason about that idea, they are going to mostly find arguments for their own idea. They’re going to come up with reasons why they’re right, they’re going to come up with justifications for their decisions. They’re not going to challenge themselves.
And the problem with the confirmation bias is that it leads people to make very bad decisions and to arrive at crazy beliefs. And it’s weird, when you think of it, that humans should be endowed with a confirmation bias. If the goal of reasoning were to help us arrive at better beliefs and make better decisions, then there should be no bias. The confirmation bias should really not exist at all. We have a very strong conflict here between the observations of empirical psychologists on the one hand and our assumption about reasoning on the other.
But if you take the point of view of the argumentative theory, having a confirmation bias makes complete sense. When you’re trying to convince someone, you don’t want to find arguments for the other side, you want to find arguments for your side. And that’s what the confirmation bias helps you do.
The idea here is that the confirmation bias is not a flaw of reasoning, it’s actually a feature. It is something that is built into reasoning; not because reasoning is flawed or because people are stupid, but because actually people are very good at reasoning — but they’re very good at reasoning for arguing.
One of the things I like about having a tiny blog is that the conversations in the comments tend to be more nuanced and interesting. I keep saying I would much rather have a few people who argue intelligently with everything I say than a few dozen sycophants who tell me how great every post is. I mean, I know it’s a fruitless, despairing job trying to find holes in my airtight arguments, but I certainly appreciate you guys trying anyway! Keep on keeping me honest!

Cool Green Grass on Forgotten Tombs

By in the big sleep No Comments

Jesse Bering:

Although the idea of green burials in wildlife preserves or park-like settings is not new, and it’s likely a desirable prospect for certain future dead soul who’d prefer absolute oblivion, it seems to me that this is not going to appeal to most individuals because we human beings tend to have a pressing need for “symbolic immortality.” This was a term coined by the cultural anthropologist Ernst Becker in his book, The Denial of Death (1973), but which has since been empirically elaborated by scientists working on terror management theory. The basic idea behind the construct of symbolic immortality is that cultural artifacts that survive the individual’s literal death while also containing some reminder of the person’s special existence can meaningfully reduce human death anxiety.

That’s interesting. On a personal level, I can understand wanting to have some sort of object to ground one’s feelings in, something connected to the deceased, but as far as some sort of general object to announce to the wider world that I was once here, whether a typical tombstone or some other sort of monument? Nah. I’d rather go into that good night knowing that I had profoundly changed someone’s thinking, indelibly influenced them in a way they’d always remember. That would be a nice sort of symbolic immortality for me. Music, too. Leaving behind some sort of recorded music would feel like part of me was still alive, still interacting with the living. The rest just seems like silly vanity.

This is the End, My Only Friend, the End

By in augean stables, jesus tie-dyed for your sins, religion, the madness of crowds No Comments

Raw Story:

While discussing the failed May 21 Rapture prediction on MSNBC’s The Last Word Monday, Obery Hendricks of New York Theological Seminary said that people like Rep. Michelle Bachmann and Glenn Beck, who focus on the end of the world, divert attention from the real message of Jesus.

…Which was, as I thought to be common knowledge since Albert Schweitzer, that you need to act this way and that in order to be on the winning team come the violent end of the world, which, by the way, is going to happen any day now. If you’re looking for some kind of role model for how to live humanely in the world with all its horrors and imperfections, there are millions of more worthy candidates than some ancient apocalyptic lunatic who spent too much time fasting in the desert sun.

You Wasted Life, Why Wouldn’t You Waste the Afterlife?

By in extraordinary popular delusions, foolosophy, science No Comments

Sean Carroll:

Adam claims that there “simply is no controlled, experimental[ly] verifiable information” regarding life after death. By these standards, there is no controlled, experimentally verifiable information regarding whether the Moon is made of green cheese. Sure, we can take spectra of light reflecting from the Moon, and even send astronauts up there and bring samples back for analysis. But that’s only scratching the surface, as it were. What if the Moon is almost all green cheese, but is covered with a layer of dust a few meters thick? Can you really say that you know this isn’t true? Until you have actually examined every single cubic centimeter of the Moon’s interior, you don’t really have experimentally verifiable information, do you? So maybe agnosticism on the green-cheese issue is warranted. (Come up with all the information we actually do have about the Moon; I promise you I can fit it into the green-cheese hypothesis.)
Obviously this is completely crazy. Our conviction that green cheese makes up a negligible fraction of the Moon’s interior comes not from direct observation, but from the gross incompatibility of that idea with other things we think we know. Given what we do understand about rocks and planets and dairy products and the Solar System, it’s absurd to imagine that the Moon is made of green cheese. We know better.
We also know better for life after death, although people are much more reluctant to admit it.
You don’t even need to understand anything about physics to grasp this; many Buddhists have been reasoning their way to an understanding of the incoherence of the idea of a personal soul for thousands of years. The tragic thing about the belief, to me, is that it does nothing to alleviate a much more pressing issue — that of people drifting through the life they’re actually living with no curiosity, no deep appreciation of what they have; their thoughts mired in the future or the past, oblivious to the present. I don’t even mean that a life well-lived has to be devoted to manic thrill-seeking, just that a sense of “magic” is perfectly attainable through mindful awareness. Some would have you believe that the concept of souls and afterlives are necessary to give life meaning; I would counter that metaphysical beliefs can just as easily act as narcotics, or as incentive to procrastinate. Why make the most of this life if you think you’ll have endless chances for more? Why face up squarely to the fleeting impermanence of the most important relationships in your life and the imperative to not take them for granted when you can just assure yourself you’ll meet up again at some point down the road? People talk big about all the things they’d like to do before they die, but look at the reality of how most people live day to day, and tell me why they think they need an indefinite extension at the end. What did you do with the several decades you already had?
I think the science in cases like this needs to be paired with something like therapeutic reasoning, though. Not that it’s not vital to point out the nuts and bolts of why something like a soul couldn’t exist, but it’s probably more useful to try to show people why believing in one doesn’t actually enhance their life anyway.

Don’t Run Away from This, Dude! Goddamnit, This Affects All of Us!

By in omnigatherum, writing No Comments

I certainly hope IOZ’s cryptic post is just announcing a hiatus rather than an end to his blogging career. He’s long been one of my favorite writers on the web. His prose is alternately highfalutin and comfortably familiar, but always highly enjoyable and sometimes even breathtaking (I can easily find several instances in my own writing where I can clearly see his stylistic influence). I love his calm insouciance and even his disdainful sneering, especially when answering angry hecklers with quotations from The Big Lebowski. (I even watched that movie for the first time years ago so I could understand all the references.) And most of all, even though it was an acquired taste, I deeply appreciate the fact that he often forced me to think about things in a new way, not by being cheaply provocative or predictably contrary, but by being a genuinely iconoclastic thinker. I’ve often found myself uncomfortable and even pissed off by the things he wrote, especially early on, but I quickly came to realize that in many of those instances, it was because he was forcing me to confront my own intellectual laziness, that he had essentially zeroed in on something that I had been complacently accepting without careful scrutiny. It was the same sort of irritation that you feel when you’re comfortable on the sofa, and you’re asked to get up and move. Eventually, I came to eagerly anticipate and delight in the provocation, and even when I still disagree with him, I’m glad for having had the chance to be challenged. I imagine he must be a fun person to shoot the breeze with.

If you are done, IOZ, here’s a heartfelt thanks for all of it. Best wishes.

Behold, I Will Corrupt Your Seed, and Spread Dung Upon Your Faces

By in psychology No Comments

Jonah Lehrer:

Psychologists refer to this as the paradox of power. The very traits that helped leaders accumulate control in the first place all but disappear once they rise to power. Instead of being polite, honest and outgoing, they become impulsive, reckless and rude. According to psychologists, one of the main problems with authority is that it makes us less sympathetic to the concerns and emotions of others. For instance, several studies have found that people in positions of authority are more likely to rely on stereotypes and generalizations when judging other people. They also spend much less time making eye contact, at least when a person without power is talking.
…But here’s the catch: We still think we do care, at least in the abstract. That’s because power quickly turns us into hypocrites.
…The larger lesson is that Foucault had a point: The dynamics of power can profoundly influence how we think. When we climb the ladder of status, our inner arguments get warped and our natural sympathy for others is vanquished. Instead of fretting about the effects of our actions, we just go ahead and act. We deserve what we want. And how dare they resist. Don’t they know who we are?
This is why I enjoy self-depreciating humor. Not only is it just simply funny in and of itself, it keeps you from taking yourself too seriously, and it keeps people from wanting to give you any power. I’m fugly, stupid, boring and untalented. Don’t ask me to do anything; I’ll just fuck it up. In fact, I can’t write well, either. Why are you even reading this? Don’t you have anything better to do? Go away!
There. Now my immortal soul is safe. Socrates would nod approvingly.

Fortune Tellers Make a Killing Nowadays, Me Oh My

By in alan watts, atheism, extraordinary popular delusions, spiritual-not-religious No Comments

Jessa Crispin:

But the atheist’s statement was not simply about the Nobel-winning poet. Had I retorted with the information that I have a wonderful relationship with my tarot card reader, with whom I have sessions every three months or so, or that I know the house placement and sign of Mars in my horoscope and that I have had entire conversations complaining about that placement and sign, or that I am a lapsed atheist who has strayed back into belief and my belief is actually very important to me, his sadness would have spread to all of humanity and our silly, superstitious ways.
…And yet the atheists keep on, telling us that we don’t have to believe in God. It maybe never occurred to them that perhaps we want to.
…Informing neo-Druids of their falsified lineage is probably not going to do much to sway them, anymore than an advertisement on a bus proclaiming, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life” — like the recent campaign that ran on London buses — is not going to do much to sway me. I’ll still be reading my Maud Gonne. In a time of great grief, having lost her son at the age of 1, right around the time Parnell died, she decided to use her will to fight against the current sad circumstances in her life. She began to research how she might reincarnate her dead son back onto the earthly plane. After a night of ritualistic sex on his grave (Yeats reports in his Memoirs, disapprovingly), a daughter was born nine months later. Maud was convinced that Iseult, as she named her daughter, contained the soul of her lost son. Those needs — for solace, for change, for order, for a little magic and irrationality — are not met with the ideals of the Enlightenment, and pretending those needs don’t even exist is not the way to win converts.
Would it surprise you if I said that I have no problem with people falling short of a rigorous standard of perfect rationality? For example, I pretty much agree with what Alan Watts said here:
Indeed, an exponent of the I Ching might give us quite a tough argument about the relative merits of our ways for making important decisions. We feel that we decide rationally because we base our decisions on collecting relevant data about the matter in hand. We do not depend on such irrelevant trifles as the chance tossing of a coin, or the patterns of tea leaves or cracks in a shell. Yet he might ask whether we really know what information is relevant, since our plans are constantly upset by utterly unforeseen incidents. He might ask how we know when we have collected enough information upon which to decide. If we were rigorously “scientific” in collecting information for our decisions, it would take us so long to collect the data that the time for action would have passed long before the work had been completed. So how do we know when we have enough? Does the information itself tell us that it is enough? On the contrary, we go through the motions of gathering the necessary information in a rational way, and then, because of a hunch, or just because we are tired of thinking, or because the time has come to decide, we act. He would ask whether this is not depending just as much on “irrelevant trifles” as if we had been casting the yarrow stalks.
In other words, the “rigorously scientific” method of predicting the future can be applied only in special cases – where prompt action is not urgent, where the factors involved are largely mechanical, or in circumstances so restricted as to be trivial. By far the greater part of our important decisions depend on “hunch” – in other words, upon the “peripheral vision” of the mind. Thus the reliability of our decisions rests ultimately upon our ability to “feel” the situation, upon the degree to which this “peripheral vision” has been developed.
Every exponent of the I Ching knows this. He knows that the book itself does not contain an exact science, but rather a useful tool which will work for him if he has a good “intuition”, or if, as he would say, he is “in the Tao”. Thus one does not consult the oracle without proper preparation, without going quietly and meticulously through the prescribed rituals in order to bring the mind into that calm state where the intuition is felt to act more effectively.
I think it may have been John Gray who used the metaphor of conscious awareness being like a penlight being used to scan a darkened warehouse full of information. Point taken. There should always be consideration granted to the “peripheral vision of the mind”. There may be something to your intuition whether or not you have a coherent articulation of it. Much of what grabs our attention or motivates our action never rises to the level of being officially noticed or labeled. But this strawman atheism that says we’re not allowed to enjoy music, art, literature, love or a feeling of the sublime in nature without being able to reduce it to its constituent atoms and define it in terms of chemical reactions is a little tiring. Who actually claims this? Would someone please point out the one brainy, obnoxious, newly-minted teenage atheist who delights in taking an empirical hammer to everyone’s metaphysical fine china so we can all join together in solidarity and go kick the supercilious shit out of him and be done with it already?
You know, I don’t think any of my offline friends are atheists. Most are what I call spiritual-not-religious. Some are into alternative healing and therapies, some are buffet-style spiritual dabblers, and some are what I think of as quantum mystics. Most of them have subtly imputed arrogance to me if they haven’t outright accused me of it. I’m fairly sure they think my worldview is bleak, sad, empty, or lacking in joy, imagination and creativity. If anyone ought to be complaining about slings and arrows, you’d think it would be people like me.
But I love ’em all the same. I don’t take our differences there any more seriously than I would if they were fans of different fútbol teams. It’s something fun to argue about, but once the contest is over, there are more important things in life, and more significant contexts in which our beliefs may manifest themselves besides that of an official statement of dogma and principles. Why is my confidence unruffled by being the odd one out? Why am I not so defensive and thin-skinned about what they think of my lack of metaphysical beliefs?
I’m starting to wonder if it’s because I have a sharper distinction drawn between objective truth and aesthetic truth. Objective truth about the world is pretty bleak and disheartening. You have to lead a sheltered life or a willfully blinkered one to avoid facing up to the unimaginable suffering that has always permeated it; the countless lives of people just like you, with just as much a feeling of importance and a desire to live, who died suddenly, terribly and anonymously without having fulfilled anything like what we think of as purpose. Aesthetic truth – at least in the sense that I define it – ameliorates that to a large degree, allows us to get on with our lives as if they matter. The optimistic prospects for Liverpool Football Club next season, the writings of my favorite authors, the new music on the horizon, the love of my girlfriend; they all give my life meaning in a way that couldn’t necessarily be justified to anyone skeptical of them. None of them offset the fact that my ultimate destination is a crematorium, but they sure make the journey there a lot more pleasant. You either get it or you don’t. It doesn’t diminish my profound enjoyment of Nietzsche’s writing if a friend thinks he’s too bombastic, shrill and offensive. Why should it diminish their woo-woo beliefs if I point out that, strictly speaking, your personality is not conditioned by the position of stars in the sky at the time of your birth, that the nurse in the delivery room exerts more of a gravitational pull on you than the distant planets, and that paying careful attention to the specific details and circumstances of your individual life might perhaps serve you better than scrutinizing playing cards associated with a grab-bag of vague generalizations about human nature?
At the heart of it, most of us don’t think much of ignorance, willful delusion or cowardice in others and certainly don’t want to be thought of as possessing any of those traits ourselves. The problem seems to be, it’s hard to claim honest belief in most religions or spiritual beliefs without harboring at least one of them. It would be one thing if people were clear on the fact that they’re only using tarot cards, say, as a convenient means of enabling lateral thinking, but if they haven’t clearly distinguished between “the way the world is” and “the way I feel and act within it”, the hurt feelings are probably going to continue.

Help Me I am in Hell

By in fresh hell, religion No Comments

American believers, then, need both clarity and humility about hell. Denying the reality of hell might suit modern tastes, but it doesn’t stand up to the overwhelming weight of the Christian scriptures and historic tradition. But confidently asserting that bin Laden is now in hell also treats this fearsome, mysterious reality with far less sobriety than it warrants.

Emphasis mine, hee hee. Via Gawker, this is indeed amusing. On the other hand, though:

Treating fairy tales with sobriety: that’s what makes USA Today the greatest newspaper in our planet’s 6,000 year history.

Yeah, thank goodness it’s just McPaper. It’s not like prominent young intellectuals in serious news outlets would ever be given space to write about such… oh.
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