I saw this at the gym last night, and almost fell off the treadmill! So many opportunities for double entendres - it's classic! Finally, something to thank our republican friends for! Although I refuse to imagine being teabagged by the likes of Armey, Beck or Cavuto! nuff said. Here's the video! (© MSNBC.com, posted by ThinkProgress)
The antipathy with which fundamentalists hold science and reason is difficult to understand. The emotional backlash, more storm than counter argument, often surprises. A simple statement can bring about the most strident denunciations, the pitch and timbre of the debate oscillating out of proportion to the content being discussed. Or so it seems. In the course of debating the truth, validity, utility, or relevance of certain topics, the nondogmatic must come to a point of fatigue by the seeming impossibility of finding common ground. At which time the debate either fizzles, the rationalist yields out of frustration, or the fundamentalist (of whatever stripe, on whatever topic) is ignored and bypassed. This last leads to a situation wherein the argument festers like an infection. It does not go away, often to the dismay of those watching and certainly to those who thought it without merit. You can flip this on its head and make the same claim in the other direction. At least, up to a point.
Consider the following statements:What is the one common, salient feature of each one of these statements? They are each one unqualified and utterly emotional statements. They are statements made in reference to personal belief, without reference to any external corroborative evidence or comparative context. They are, with the single exception of the Earth’s age, unanswerable in any reasonable way. Taken one at a time, therefore: (1) Of course you aren’t. It’s obvious. You’re descended from earlier generations of homo sapiens sapiens.
- (1) I am not descended from a monkey.
- (2) God gave us dominion over the earth.
- (3) Homosexuality is an abomination.
- (4) The earth is only 6000 years old.
- (5) The Bible is the inerrant word of God.
"Did you know there's totally science behind muffins? Totally ruined muffins for me." Ah, the wisdom of youth. That particularly large & shiny pearl came from a blazered private school girl of perhaps 15 who I was standing next to (almost on top of) on my Connex-brand cattle-truck - I mean, "train" - this morning. Girl Student (henceforth "GS") was bemoaning the fact that in her cooking class her teacher explained that the release of carbon dioxide during the cooking process was responsible for the rising of muffins and for the tiny little pockets of air that end up being formed in all things baked. So, in response to this new but unwanted & unwelcome knowledge, GS now proclaims her hatred for - or at least new found apathy toward - the little round cakes she used to love. Naturally, her comment got me thinking. Does GS approach every mundane mystery in her life in such a manner? Would she disavow Myspace if she figured out that barely any of those seventeen thousand and eighty-four "friends" of hers actually qualified for such a title? Would she stop catching the train if she knew a tad more about electricity? What if she found out what keeps planes in the air? Sweet flaming crikey, no more summer trips to the Whitsundays then (probably a good thing, it'd totally suck to find out how that big hot disc in the sky is making you slightly darker). Safer stuck at home I guess, with just the TV/Wii/Blu-Rayer/microwave/mobile phone for company ... on the other hand, perhaps not. Perhaps all those modern wonders are just a fresh crop of parades waiting to be stripped of their brilliance by the acid rain of knowledge. You never know what awful, awful knowledge might leach into your brain if you sit on the remote and accidentally switch to the Discovery Channel.
Why do we do the things we do? Why did you propose that woman, for instance? Or why did you accept a job offer from that man? The January 29, 2009 edition of Nature (available online only to subscribers) takes a look at this question in an article by Mark Buchanan titled "Secret Signals: Are People's Interactions Driven by a Primitive, Not Linguistic Type of Communication?" Scientists have determined that there is a second channel of human communication that (often) acts in parallel with our rational thinking and verbal communication. It's difficult to pin down power and scope of this non-linguistic ability, however. Recently, computer scientist Alex Pentland has started using wearable electronic devices in order to study our ability to communicate using non-linguistic behavior. It is Pentland's aim to try to assist organizations to make better use of their personnel based upon this ubiquitous and powerful hidden communication. Many people resist the idea that many of our choices are not determined by "conscious intentions and deliberate choices." It's time to stop resisting, however. For example, our behavior is highly determined by our social context rather than our innate "character." On this topic I've often recommended an excellent book titled The Person and the Situation, by Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett. See also, this earlier DI post titled "Laughing at not funny things, and the limits of introspection."
I thought it was just me. Over the past few months, while reading some of the comments here at DI and at several forums that I frequent, I’ve been noticing that there seems to be LESS consensus on the hot topics of our time rather than more. That doesn’t seem right. With the wealth of information on the internet literally at our fingertips shouldn’t we all be better informed than ever before? Not so, says Clive Thompson in a recent issue of Wired magazine. In fact he has the stats to back it up!