Category: ideas

Evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has spent much of his career studying prosociality – cooperative behaviors that help particular species survive and prosper as a group. Now he’s trying to introduce and increase prosociality as a way to help the survival of the city where he lives, Binghamton, New York.

“Personality seepage is the consequence of that nether-state, when we put too much of ourselves online at once. Windows, boxes, and browsers look so much alike, and sit so close to each other on our laptop screens, is it any wonder that there is some communication – or seepage – between boxes?” A sufferer shares.

“Peter Toohey has written a short book defending drudgery. Dismissed in the past because it is not a big, passionate emotion like love or hate, boredom, he argues, should be respected and cherished rather than feared and reviled.”

“For centuries thinkers have assumed that the uniquely human capacity for reasoning has existed to let people reach beyond mere perception and reflex in the search for truth. … Now some researchers are suggesting that reason evolved for a completely different purpose: to win arguments.”

Social scientists are finding that individual willpower is a finite (if renewable) resource – that, for instance, resisting the urge to buy an expensive leather jacket leaves a person with less willpower to resist eating a tub of Ben & Jerry’s. Now consider that “[p]urchasing decisions that the wealthy can base entirely on preference, like buying dinner, require rigorous tradeoff calculations for the poor.”

“On the one hand, the public is often disinterested and skeptical of scientific claims, often confusing facts with opinions. Evolution and climate change are obvious examples. … On the other hand, use of science within advertising somehow bestows upon the product a higher status, a gravitas, the excitement that this thing that the consumer must have is one of a kind, a rare breakthrough discovery.”

“Never send a boy to do a man’s job.” “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story” “Never look on the bright side; the glare is blinding.” The “dedicated quotation-collector” Mardy Grothe defines these maxims as “dehortations: statements intended to advise against a particular thing or action.”

“Dogs are so in tune with us that they can read our minds, according to a new Learning & Behavior study that also determined canines are probably born with the ability … which actually relies upon hyperawareness of the senses.”

I have heard the words ‘truly original music’ many times over the years. They’re often used to suggest that humans, as opposed to anything non-human, have the ability to pull rabbits out of hats by developing completely new things, when in fact, we humans are, like everything else in the universe, combining and recombining already extant things to produce new and original things.”