Does anyone really know the answer? Ever?
That’s the point of this excerpt from a short essay by novelist Harlan Ellison:
. . . [My] fourth marriage just sort of happened: It seemed like a good idea at the time. In fact—and this is the core of all my wisdom about love—whenever we try to explain why we [...]
We don’t attend to everything we see. As Andy Clark has written in Natural Born Cyborgs, our brains don’t bother to create rich inner models of the world. We can’t create such models because there is simply too much information out there for us to process it all. Further, the world is generally available to revisit periodically, so why bother? In other words, we use the world as its own best model–we “cheat” (because we must cheat). But this cheating can be exposed through dramatic experiments. I’ve previously posted on some of those experiments here (by Quirkology).
Here are some additional experiments demonstrating our need to “cheat.” In this experiment, done by Dan Simons and Dan Levin, only 50% of the subjects noticed that the person to whom they were talking had changed. Here are additional demonstrations by Simons, along with a bit of explanation. Here’s a more elaborate write-up on the “door” experiment. And see here. When I use the word “cheat,” I’m being facetious. Our strategy of using the world as an adequate model is one of the many cognitive heuristics we must use in order to survive.
In the February 2008 edition of Natural History Magazine (article not available online), you can learn where tigers still live in the wild. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were 100,000 tigers living in the wild. Today, there are only 5000 in the wild. Tigers now inhabit only 7% of their original territory, [...]
If you’ve ever had this thought that intelligent people never believe things they can’t prove, consider that some of the world’s sharpest and most skeptical minds have confessed in writing that they too believe things that they can’t prove. You can read all about it in the 2005 Annual Question at Edge.org. The question: “What [...]
Here’s a well-conceived website. Straight-forward and fun.
You will be given 20 short video clips of people smiling. Are they genuine smiles or fake smiles? After you make your picks (this will take about 5 minutes), this BBC site will reveal the correct answers and give you some genuine pointers for determining whether smiles are genuine or fake.
I got [...]
I caught this list of telltale signs over at De-conversion: Resources for Skeptical, De-converting or Former Christians. Here are a few items from the list:
You see nothing wrong with stating “facts” about what God thinks as if you are His personal secretary.
You complain about Christians not being allowed to practice their religion in foreign countries, [...]
In an article entitled “When Words Decide,” Barry Schwartz (writing in the August/September 2007 edition of Scientific American Mind [not available online]) gives some good examples demonstrating the great power of default choices. These examples add more fuel for a long burning fire-that people are not the rational careful-thinking beings (homo economicus) economists have traditionally [...]
If you’re tired of hearing heated yet worn-out arguments regarding religion and science, check out this intellectually nimble and energized exchange published by Edge.org: Responses by David Sloan Wilson, Michael Shermer, Sam Harris, P. Z. Myers and Mark D. Hauser to Jonathon Haidt’s “Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion.” Here’s a link to Haidt’s [...]
Bob Cesca raises the issue of Bush’s inappropriate smirking and provides the images to substantiate the problem.
I went to Catholic grade school and high school and I’ve seen nuns beat the holy crap out of you for smirking at something innocuous. So here’s the alleged leader of the free world repeatedly smirking at matters of [...]
I’m a newcomer to an extremely popular website called Lifehack. The site specializes in “hacks, tips and tricks that get things done quickly by automating, increase productivity and organizing.”
There is obviously a lot to consider at Lifehack.org. One might wonder, though, how much time one should spend on productivity lest one’s productivity sags. Despite this self-limiting [...]
I struggle to see through the rampant commercialism, the over-consumption and the glazed-eyed happiness of the holiday season. But maybe I’ve had a break-through. It keeps recurring to me this month that kind and thoughtful atheists/agnostics have an immense amount in common with millions of kind and thoughtful people who believe in God.
Too many of [...]
Bill Moyers recently interviewed Benjamin Barber, a renowned political theorist and a distinguished senior fellow at Demos — a public policy think tank here in New York City. Barber’s most recent book is Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole (2007). What’s the focus of this book?
[T]he global economy produces too many [...]
I’ve been long-intrigued by Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil. Philip Zimbardo turns that concept on its head in an article from Edge, “The banality of evil is matched by the banality of heroism.” (you’ll need to scroll down to the z’s). Zimbardo’s article appears as one of a series of articles responding [...]
