Onward Christian Soldier

I saw a bumper sticker the other day. “Caution: Christian On Board”

I thought, yeah, I’ll be careful. These days christians can be dangerous.

What follows may be a bit on the intolerant side, but I’m sometimes convinced our condemnation of intolerance makes us too unwilling to be simply impatient.  We “tolerate” a lot of nonsense because we don’t want to be accused of intolerance. 

Rumsfeld is gone now, and I’ve been thinking about unanswered questions, assumptions made on our behalf which led to a holy mess.  I remember when Abu Ghraib broke.  I’m thinking about the obscenities from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. People expressed shock, outrage. The president, Rumsfeld, the generals, they were all duly unhinged. They did not approve this. They did not order it or condone it. Congress has them answering questions now as to how such things could happen.

Frankly, the wrong questions were and are being asked. Senators wanted to know who to blame for either condoning it or for “allowing it to happen”–a phrase I find ludicrous in practical terms. It’s like the phrase you hear lawyers and legislators use, you know the one “You failed to do such and such.” Every time I hear that phrase I think “No he didn’t. He didn’t fail. To fail implies that at some point an attempt was made to do something. The attempt failed. He didn’t fail to tell the truth–he simply didn’t do it. He succeeded in not doing it. Failure was entirely part …

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It’s not a conspiracy. It’s a coincidence

Jason’s post about conspiracies reminded me of several books that support Jason’s argument. 

The first book is How We Know What Isn’t so: the Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life, by Thomas Gilovich (1991). Gilovich points to a number of experiments demonstrating that people strive to find order in the world where there is none.  We don’t find random distributions easy to process.  Rather, we allow our imaginations to run wild on randomness:

With hindsight it is always possible to spot the most anomalous features of the data and build a favorable statistical analysis around them.  However, if properly trained scientist (or simply a wise person) avoids doing so because he or she recognizes that constructing a statistical analysis retrospectively capitalizes too much on chance and renders the analysis meaningless. . . . unfortunately, the intuitive assessments of the average person are not bound by these constraints.

Here’s another good example of people finding order where there isn’t, on Mars.  

People are also “extraordinarily good at ad hoc explanations.” Our motives and fears ignite our imaginations:

Once a person has misidentified a random pattern as a “real” phenomenon, it will not exist as a puzzling, isolated fact about the world.  Rather, it is quickly explained and readily integrated into the person’s pre-existing theories and beliefs.  These theories, furthermore, then serve to bias the person’s evaluation of new information in such a way that the initial belief becomes solidly entrenched. . . . people cling tenaciously to their beliefs in

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Conspiring To Theorize

I've seen a couple of those independantly produced DVD "exposes" about the 9/11 disaster--you know, the ones attributing sinsister intent to the United States government, that, in fact, we "knew" and did nothing in order to promote subsequent insanity.  I've been taking these things with large grains of salt for…

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Surrounding yourself with the not-so-bright does not make you look smarter.

When we were teenagers, my sister and I used to discuss how the people around you affect how you look. She was very short, and a little 'plump' and seemed to have girlfriends that were tall and skinny.  I pointed out (just being argumentative, I was the older sister by a…

Continue ReadingSurrounding yourself with the not-so-bright does not make you look smarter.

A haphazard list of some of Dangerous Intersection’s more memorable posts

We recently received this comment from Scholar:

Erich or Grumpy,

May I please have some more links to the discussions here at dangerous intersections which you have found to be most interesting, *must read*, or highlights in general.

Thanks,
Scholar

—

I took Scholar’s request seriously and went back to review many of our posts.  I still can’t get over how many topics we’ve addressed in nine months, covering 592 posts! 

Rather than call these posts the “best of,” I would merely call them the more memorable posts to me, keeping in mind the triple asterisk that comes with the assembly of this list:  1) I simply didn’t have the time to review each of the posts again.  Therefore, this list is only representative, not complete.  2) It is difficult to determine any meaningful criteria on which to base such a list, other than (as I’ve already suggested) the idea that this list includes many of the posts I found memorable.  Other people will certainly have different ideas of what posts are worthy 3) Scholar’s request puts me in an awkward spot, given that I write for the blog. 

To the extent that I’ve included my own posts, then, it should be with the understanding that I am not trying to judge the writing so much as considering whether the ideas addressed are memorable to me, whether the ideas expressed therein seemed important or whether they moved me.  Here’s another way of looking at it:  if you want …

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Continue ReadingA haphazard list of some of Dangerous Intersection’s more memorable posts