More information is not necessarily better

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!

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Rachel Maddow says good riddance to Bush’s good-bye

Rachel Maddow says good riddance to Bush's good-bye, starting things off with a few staggering statistics regarding Bush's legacy. I'm wondering whether there a live audience to this deplorable confabulation by George W. Bush.  If so, where they required to remove their shoes before entering the room? [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32-cZnvyU_k[/youtube] Click here…

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Does the Human Mind Prefer to Work With the Concrete?

Concrete ThoughtOne of our regulars has posited that “The human mind as you well know prefers to work with the concrete.” The implication seems to be that our limited intellects cannot conceive of bigger things than what we can see and feel. But anyone who has studied semantics, cybernetics, higher math, or any system in which symbols are explicitly manipulated independent of their referents, knows that this is silly.

Our minds only manipulate abstract symbols. We first learn to simply identify objects and to manipulate thoughts about them. Anyone with children remembers how they discovered their toes, and learned that the toes were a part of themselves that they could feel from within and without. And then later to control. These are abstract concepts that are so familiar by the time one learns the word “abstract” that people are generally unaware of the process they went through to learn them. Most people never learn that the image in their minds is not the object itself, that a map is not the territory. One might believe that an image witnessed is solid proof that an object existed. Ask a UFOlogist.

But with training, we can abstract things by many degrees with conscious awareness of the process. A word (as in this post) is not an idea in itself, but a cluster of marks representing a series of sounds representing a class of ideas. Each member of said class itself representing a different set of objects. Quite abstract.

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What if there were far too many people, but no one had the courage to talk about it?

What if there were far too many people living on planet Earth, but no one had the courage to talk about it? According to Global Population Speak Out, that is exactly our situation. Consider that we repeatedly see news reports about scarce and dwindling resources (e.g., water, food, fish, fuel, topsoil), but these news reports rarely consider the exploding population on Earth as a major contributor to these problems. This refusal to consider the carrying capacity of Earth is truly staggering. As a thought experiment, consider how our "environmental" issues would be altered if each country had 25% fewer people than it currently does. Or 50%. Instead, we the human population of earth is at 6.5 billion, headed toward at least 9 billion by 2050. When it comes to discussing sex, reproduction and birth control, we freeze up, even when out-of-control population growth threatens our way of life.

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Al Franken May Yet be a Senator

Did you think that the election was over? Nope. In the Minnesota Nov 4 Senate election, Al Franken (D) lost by 206 votes (out of almost 3 million). This close of a margin requires a hand recount. About 34,000 votes were rejected by machines (uncounted), primarily in Democrat-heavy districts. With this…

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