Category: ideas

“The primal flaw in our culture’s journey into the bereavement and counseling industry … is that Kubler-Ross was initially writing ‘about the experience of facing one’s own death, not the death of someone else’.”

Psychological research indicates that “we are significantly more likely to contribute when the crisis in question is the result of a natural disaster (say, a hurricane or earthquake) rather than human activity (such as the civil war in Sudan). … The researchers attribute this unfortunate tendency to the Just World Hypothesis.”

“What works — especially for the largest, most intractable problems — are little deals we can make now. And, indeed, if you look at the recent successes in international cooperation, they have all involved modest agreements: the eradication of smallpox, restraint in use of nuclear weapons, protection of some endangered species, worldwide bans on some harmful chemicals.”

“The people who successfully predict extreme events, and are duly garlanded with accolades, big book sales, and lucrative speaking engagements, don’t do so because their judgment is so sharp. They do it because it’s so bad.”

A new study dismantles “the common belief that this generation has been coddled into laziness. Rather, these young adults have come of age at a particularly merciless moment. Even before the recession, which will wreak lasting havoc on their earning power and trust in government, the market had ceased rewarding diligent, low-skilled labour with reasonable pay and benefits.”

“The notion that physics might have metaphysical meaning for human beings is as old as physics itself. … And the new physics of the 20th century has certainly sparked a welter of speculation as to whether the meaning of life is written in the stars.” Does all this speculation, as it were, add up?

Do humans have an innate “killing instinct,” a natural propensity to violence that comes with being a higher primate? Not necessarily, says biologist Ursula Goodenough, and we’ve inherited a couple other tendencies from our social primate ancestors that more than balance things out.

“Individual human brain cells can be savvy shoppers, tuning their behavior to precisely reflect the worth of a candy bar, finds a study published [this week]. … Understanding how these bean-counting neurons operate may help scientists get a better idea of how the brain assigns value to objects.”

“As it turns out, there is a simple method to both transform people psychologically and signal power to others: altering your body posture. Across species, body posture is often the primary representation of power.”

Last year, Stephen Hawking suggested that if any beings advanced enough for interplanetary travel should find Earth, their arrival would have on us more or less the same effect that Europeans’ arrival had on Native Americans. Marcelo Gleiser begs to differ.