Category: ideas

The recent books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris et al. “sometimes feed a widespread misconception that scientists don’t have the capacity to gambol around beyond the available data. … But good science is always open-minded, and the history of science is one of surprises and overturnings.”

It’s not because of male ego or stubbornness or obliviousness. Studies are indicating that men do indeed apologize less often than women, but only “because they have a higher threshold for what constitutes offensive behavior.”

“The 21st century, indeed, is the time of arts-driven “Close Encounters.” A decade ago, it would have been difficult to imagine a bevy of New York City Ballet principal dancers chatting with patrons shortly before the curtain goes up. Some of them, The New York Times mentioned, still can’t quite bring themselves to leap from silence to sharing. But more and more of them are realizing, and embracing, this notion of humanness.”

A UK company will press your cremated remains into a record. “There are many different packages available. You can choose your own music, or none at all. You could even put the audio from your very best Powerpoint presentation. Think of the possibilities!”

“The upshot is supposed to be that human groups are going about with their grammatical structures lending them fascinatingly different Ways of Looking at the World.” But is this true?

“For millions of addicts around the world, Alcoholics Anonymous’s basic text – informally known as the Big Book – is the Bible. And as they’re about to find out, the Bible was edited.”

Users of the popular online virtual world have developed “avatar therapy – in which [real] therapists interact with their clients avatar to avatar. … The emotions are real. The rewards are real. Only the location is fake.”

Ron Rosenbaum: “The great schism in American culture, the most deeply rooted civil war, is not the rift between the two major political parties but a battle at the center of our other two-party system, the two parties of societal self-diagnosis: the Party of Narcissism (PON) and the Party of Low Self-Esteem (PLSE).”

“Consciousness has long been the province of philosophers, and most doctors steer clear of their abstract speculations. After all, debating the finer points of what it is like to be a brain floating in a vat does not tell you how much anesthetic to give a patient.” But one researcher suggests that consciousness is just integrated information in the brain, and that we can measure it the way we measure data in, say, a cell phone call.

“It’s not that one group is paying more attention to what scientific consensus is. But there’s a pervasive tendency to form perceptions of scientific consensus that reinforce people’s values.”