Senior Bush official: “I hate all Iranians.”
This comment is an opportunity for us to get a glimpse at sophisticated thought process driving our foreign policy.
Free will: an intensely compelling ridiculous idea
Talk about strange bedfellows! You will never find any ideas supported by a more diverse following than “free will.” What is free will? Allegedly, it’s the ability to “freely” be in charge of one’s own thoughts and actions. It’s the ability to be “in control.” And as I pointed out here, there is almost nothing human beings fear more than being out of control.
It all gets very interesting, however, when you juxtapose the concept of “free will” with the concept of determinism, the belief “that every event, including human cognition and behavior, decision and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences.” A few years ago, a friend of mine panicked when I started telling her of some of the recent findings of cognitive science. These were findings that substantiated that humans are animals that are subject to natural laws. She panicked because I was telling her more than she was able to consider (I wrote another post mentioning this episode). She wanted to believe in “free will,” but the incredible sameness and predictability of human cognition demonstrated by cognitive science caused her to fear that she might be a robot–a machine that utterly lacked freedom.
Admittedly, there is not yet any way for scientists to precisely predict human behavior in all situations. Nonetheless, my friend panicked because science appears to be headed in that direction. In fact, if the more people considered what cognitive scientists were up to more carefully, they …
The importance of control
Of course the experience of control is important, though it's not obvious just how important it is to our well-being. As it turns out, it is critically important. My good friend Ebonmuse, one of the contributors to this blog, recommended a book called Forty Studies That Changed Psychology: Explorations into the History…
The Five-Second Rule disproved
When you drop food on the floor, it's generally OK to pick it up and eat it, according to this article from ScienceDaily. You knew this already, considering how you act when no one is watching!
Al Jazeera English “for real news”?
Where do you turn if you really want to know what’s going on in Burma?
Harry Shearer compares the Al Jazeera English coverage to domestic news services and finds that Al Jazeera wins hands down. CNN’s domestic feed is pathetic, while CNN has been working hard to make its international feed unavailable to those in the U.S.
How bad is domestic coverage of international news:
Once you watch BBC, CNNI, AJE–any of services we’ve been talking about today–and then venture back to the domestic swill, you realize the difference: the international channels are, despite their faults and differences, talking to grownups, the domestic channels are talking either to somewhat bright or somewhat dim children.
The comments fleshed out Shearer’s short post:
…Whenever something significant happens in the world – I either go to CBC or to a lesser extent the BBC for a real news account. The American counterpart is 1% news and 99% hot gas telling us how we should feel about it.
Somewhere along the line – people like Rupert Murdoch, Michael Eisner, and Sumner Rothstein decided that news was supposed to make money and pacify a nation of imbeciles – not inform the citizens of a self-governed nation. . . . And with names like those above – is it any wonder that the American public has been fed 35 years of anti-arab bias? I think back to my childhood watching cartoons – and even in the Bugs Bunny cartoons, the arab is always portrayed as an