Isaac Newton summed it up: ""If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." Humans are at their best when they use each others' good ideas. Every human being "steals" hundreds of others' good ideas every day. It amazes me how this concept has been turned on its head by pissy woke scolds. Bill Maher comments on this issue and other dysfunctions on full display at this year's Olympics.
This cheat sheet is courtesy of the Oregon Association of Scholars. The authors are Drs. Bruce Gilley, Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay. Click on the image to view it larger at its source.
The Oregon Association of Scholars is a non-profit organization incorporated in the state of Oregon that promotes excellence, freedom, and merit in higher education in the state.
"There is no swifter route to the corruption of thought than through the corruption of language." George Orwell
I've decided to test the waters to see whether I can sell prints of types of images I have been creating for the past few months. Last week I applied for the trademark of "Digicrylics, given that these are digitized acrylic paintings (painted, photographed, then intensely processed via Photoshop). I've registered numerous images for copyright protection. I've also started building my website and started brainstorming my business plan. In the meantime, I continue to explore and experiment. It's been a ton of fun, even though are many more failures along the way than ideas that "work."
Fascinating. So what is it, at bottom, to call someone "mentally ill? Is it essentially name calling? We are surrounded highly functional people who periodically and temporarily seem highly dysfunctional in specific ways. We have been cobbled together by natural selection, living Rube Goldberg machines, we are also equipped with sophisticated built-in PR departments that make it seem like we are more purposeful, more functional than we actually are. Further, Randolph Nesse has made a strong case that many "mental illnesses" are adaptive. What does it help use a global stamp of "mentally ill"?
Here's an excerpt from Nesse's 2020 book, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings:
The question “What is a mental disorder? ”has been addressed by Jerome Wakefield, a social worker, clinician, researcher, and philosopher at New York University. His pithy conclusion is that mental disorders are characterized by “harmful dysfunction.”“Dysfunction”means a malfunction in a useful system shaped by natural selection. “Harmful”means that the dysfunction causes suffering or other harm to the individual. Wakefield’s analysis grounds psychiatric diagnosis in an evolutionary understanding of the normal functions of brain/mind, the same way the rest of medicine understands pathology in the context of normal physiology. His cogent analysis has, however, had little influence on how psychiatrists make diagnoses.