Michael Norton points to the difficulties of winning the lottery, then suggests that there are ways to use money to buy happiness. One trick is to spend money on others, especially others with significant needs. His conclusion: "If you think money can't buy happiness, you're not spending it right."
Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss recently sat on the stage at the Australian National University to discuss "something from nothing." What follows are my notes from that conversation. (9) Dawkins offers two methods for illustrating the long periods of time that are critical to understanding natural selection. (13:30) The key idea is that we might be getting something from nothing. Life comes from non-life. Matter appears to come from the lack of matter. (14:47) We are dealing with the new version of "nothing." (16:00) It is plausible that everything started with no matter,and maybe no loss. It might not violate any laws for matter to come from the lack of matter. Especially in physics, scientists have learned to ignore the common sense. The total energy of the universe might be "zero." It might nonetheless be a bubbling brew of virtual particles, and this offends some people. (20) Krauss: The universe doesn't care what we like or what we understand. We need to deal with this. (21) Dawkins: Natural selection has equipped us to be bad physicists and we have to work to overcome this. (22) Space is curved, but we cannot visualize this. Our picture of natural/normal reality is myopic. [More . . . ]
One of my daughters recently showed me an email containing following. This is apparently making the rounds on the Internet, and for good reason:
I was quite surprised at how easy it was to read this passage. Here's another test, though. Try to type the above passage exactly as it is above. You'll find that your body's motor routines strongly interfere with your ability to accurately type this. I was reminded of the Stroop Effect.
In years past, I used to rest assured that I was in good shape, physically, economically and socially. That was before computers gave me the ability to know exactly how I'm doing. It used to be easier to pretend that one was in good health. Nowadays, hundreds of websites let you know about all of the diseases that threaten you, complete with many symptoms that undoubtedly match some of your symptoms. Of course there have always been books and magazines with medical information, but never before could you so easily pinpoint so many symptoms with a free Google search or a quick visit to the symptom-checker at Wrongdiagnosis.com. Economically, we used to put our money into some sort of mutual fund or other investment, and we considered that we were "married" to the account. Computers now give us the ability to track our financial health second by second. Computer-programmed trading also creates crazy jumps and plunges in the market. Ignorance was bliss, and many advisers argue that you should go back to finding a reasonable place to put your money, then ignoring it for long periods of time. Then there is one's social health. It used to be that I could assume that I had an indefinite (large) number of people with whom I had a friendship. That was before Outlook came along to tell me exactly who I did (and did not) know well enough to have a phone number or an email address. In Outlook, you'll get the exact number. Ooops. My social circle is not nearly as big as I'd like to believe. Perhaps you are thinking that Outlook is not the right place to look, and that one ought to look, instead, to Facebook. Thanks to the precision statistics offered by Facebook, we can see that the typical Facebook user has 190 friends. That's it? But what if I get in a bind or I get sick, and I need the help of a "friend." It seems like you could run through 190 "friends" all too quickly. It ultimately presents the same problem as Outlook. It gives you a finite number, and many of them are not really good friends, anyway, as much as I enjoy sharing information with them. A new article in The Atlantic, "Is Facebook Making Us Lonely," by Stephen Marche, should make us even more suspicious of the Facebook phenomenon (the article is in the May 2012 edition, not yet online). We learn (p. 66) that neurotics and lonely individuals spend greater amounts of time on Facebook per day than non-lonely people. He also writes that Facebook has become a place to pretend that one's life is better than it is, and that "believing that others have strong social networks can lead to feelings of depression." He also cites to research showing that "surrogates can never make up completely for the absence of the real thing . . . actual people in the flesh." He concludes that the idea that a website "could deliver a more friendly, inter-connected world is bogus." Further research shows that "the greater the proportion of face-to-face interactions, the less lonely you are . . . [and] The greater the proportion of online interactions, the lonelier you are." He adds that Facebook is not always a bad thing. Like many things, it is a tool that can be used or misused. "It's like a car. you can drive it to pick up your friends. Or you can drive alone." Then again, Facebook puts us into the business of competing with our "friends." "Facebook imprisons us in the business of self-presenting, and this, [according to author Jaron Lanier], is the site's crucial and fatally unacceptable downside." Facebook gratifies "the narcissistic individual's need to engage in self-promoting behavior." So think about this next time you smugly react to your "friend" count. Marche's article is far more nuanced than the above summary, and he would admit that there are many ways to use Facebook. I, for instance, use it to share article, including many articles from this website. I can't help but notice, though, that many people post on Facebook 8 times per day, and they would seem to fall into his description of those having a "narcissistic personality disorder." When you add up your Facebook "friends," then, to see how rich you are with "friends," you might want to set those narcissistic friends aside before counting. So this is life by the numbers, at least if you include this final number, which I take as a challenge, rather than a depressing fact (or use this alternate method of calculating your approximate number of remaining days). In sum, it appears that you will be happier (or at least you will think you are happier) if you get away from the computer and, instead, spend time with a good friend, face-to-face, talking about something other than your health, your investments, and you cyber social circle.
In this TED talk, primatologist Frans de Waal asserts that human morality has evolved, and that the existence of morality doesn’t depend on religion. He observes that “humans are far more cooperative and empathic than they are given credit for,” and that they are, in many ways similar to other primates. From de Waal’s experiments, one can learn that chimpanzees (who have no religion) often reconcile with one another after fights. The principle “is that you have a valuable relationship that is damaged by conflict so you need to do something about it.” What are the “pillars of morality,” that which morality is based on? Reciprocity (fairness) and Empathy (compassion) are two constants. He indicates that human morality includes more than these two factors, but not much more. Check out the beautiful 1935 video of chimpanzees at the 3:35 min mark; they cooperate in synchronized fashion to pull in a heavy box of fruit. Then check out at 4:20 what happens when one of the two chimps is not hungry, thus not motivated to work hard. This is incredible footage that will remind you of a species you often see in the mirror. What makes the uninterested chimp to work at all, according to de Waal, is receipt of a past or a future favor, i.e., reciprocity. [More . . . ]