Beyond Rivalry - science_and_tech

What's A Stroke Feel Like?

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 13:38:00 -0400

On Oprah today, regular guest and cardiologist Dr. Mehmet Oz and neuroanatomist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor will be talking about what a stroke feels like and what's happening in your brain when you have a stroke. Taylor's book about her stroke is My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey (2008). You can watch her TED talk about her stroke online.

Dr. Taylor offers a few exercises to help us make the choice to be peaceful and joyful. Here are two:

>> Pay attention to the energy that other people bring to you. Realize that you can observe other people and interact with them without engaging with their energy. Write about a time when someone else's energy affected you in a negative way. Consider how different the situation might have turned out if you had chosen to observe rather than be engaged and swept away by their energy. How might you approach the exact same situation in the future?

>> Brain circuits are very predictable and consistent entities. The more time you spend thinking a thought, then the stronger that circuit becomes and the less outside energy it takes for that circuit to run. As a result, for many of…

Data, Nourishment Capacity of

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 07:05:00 -0400

Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things you thought you knew. And so they're the most valuable sort of fact you can get. They're like a food that's not merely healthy, but counteracts the unhealthy effects of things you've already eaten.

-- Paul Graham

What to do Until Yelled At

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:50:00 -0400

Explore until someone yells at you.

- Dr. David L. Hall, (dean, Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology)

***

Prudence prevents us from following our passions, overruns our intuition, and gives us the illusion of being virtuous when life is asking us to explore territory lying beneath the horizon of virtue.

-- Thomas Moore

Has the Large Hadron Collider Destroyed the World Yet?

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 06:35:00 -0400

Has it?

(fmi)

Evolution and Conversion, cont'd (5)

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 05:30:00 -0400

(Previous posts on this topic: here, here, here, and here.)

The focus of Chapter 5, Method, Evidence and Truth, is evidence, and what kind of evidence or proof is needed for mimetic theory. If you are already convinced that mimetic theory and the scapegoat mechanism operate basically as Girard has posited, then this chapter is probably skippable. Otherwise, it's interesting for its exploration of 'detective novel' evidence -- indirect, and often hidden or muddied by the perpetrator -- and its suggested similarity to Girard's evidence.

The Darwin quote that introduces the chapter speaks for my response to mimetic theory:

"What I believe was strictly true is that innumerable well observed facts were stored in the minds of naturalists ready to take their proper places as soon as any theory which would receive them was sufficiently explained." (in Darwin's Autobiography)

** Concerning evidence and proof:

For Girard, it is the "multiplicity of consistent elements that constitutes proof."

I would say that a preponderance of consistent indirect evidence may not prove a theory (though it can convict a person in a court of law) but it is highly suggestive and should be taken seriously.

Girard seems both baffled and irritated that "modern intellectuals"…

Evolution and Conversion, cont'd (4)

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 06:20:00 -0400

(Previous posts on this topic: here, here, and here.)

Chapter 4, Dialogues and Criticism: From Frazier to Lévi-Strauss, is the shortest chapter. It's primarily a clarification of Girard's influences and a discussion of religion vs. science or scientific method.

Among possible influences mentioned (and mostly discarded) are anthropologist and myth researcher James Frazer, sociologist Gabriel Tarde, sociologist and philosopher Émile Durkheim, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, social anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, classics scholar Walter Burkert, and Christian philosopher and activist Simone Weil.

My notes:

** Political Correctness and Bias (more on this in the next chapter as well)

"The main difference between contemporary anthropology and my work is that I claim that all cultures scapegoat and victimize someone, while it is fashionable to say that only Western culture did that. If one talks about ritual killing in the Amazon, it is seen as a pure fancy of Western prejudice."

** What I see as the craziness of academic bickering: Scapegoating the object!

Girard is asked how he responds to Bruno Latour, who "claims that you are doing away with the object and in some sense you are 'scapegoating' it. He answers, "Latour wants to make me anti-objectal..." Anti-objectal? LOL Anyway, his…

Mob Violence, 'Fluid Morality' and Sociopathy

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 13:45:00 -0400

The NYT Magazine is running an article this weekend titled "Malwebolence," about internet 'trolls' who enjoy causing harm to others, either because it's just fun -- they speak of "the joy of disrupting another's emotional equilibrium" while "you chat with friends and laugh" -- or perhaps because they have the notion that they are helping others learn how to handle explosives by blowing them up in their faces. One troll says his passion is 'pushing peoples' buttons' and he "frames his acts of trolling as ... sociological inquiries into human behavior." He also says: "'It's not that I do this because I hate them. I do this because I'm trying to save them.'" It seems fairly obvious through the article that this particular troll is trying to save himself, as well, though it may be too late: "'Am I the bad guy? Am I the big horrible person who shattered someone's life with some information? No! This is life. Welcome to life. Everyone goes through it. I've been through horrible stuff, too.' 'Like what?' I asked. Sexual abuse, [he] said." At age 5 he was molested by his grandfather [his mother confirms this] and three other relatives.

The article's author, Mattathias…

More Self-Bias

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 07:25:00 -0400

On the heels of research indicating that we're more lenient on ourselves than on others when it comes to assigning tasks and judging fairness, there comes this report:

"In a report titled 'Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Enhancement in Self-Recognition,' which appears online in The Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Nicholas Epley and Erin Whitchurch described experiments in which people were asked to identify pictures of themselves amid a lineup of distracter faces. Participants identified their personal portraits significantly quicker when their faces were computer enhanced to be 20 percent more attractive. They were also likelier, when presented with images of themselves made prettier, homelier or left untouched, to call the enhanced image their genuine, unairbrushed face. Such internalized photoshoppery is not simply the result of an all-purpose preference for prettiness: when asked to identify images of strangers in subsequent rounds of testing, participants were best at spotting the unenhanced faces."

Bias and Diet

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 09:55:00 -0400

Stuart Buck at Overcoming Bias looks at the overarching theme of bias in Gary Taubes' book Good Calories, Bad Calories [published as The Diet Delusion in the UK], "a book of some 600 pages (nearly 70 of which are the bibliography). ...

"Why is Taubes so interested in bias? For several decades, it has been the conventional wisdom that dietary fat (and especially saturated fat) contributes to obesity, heart disease, and cancer. Judging from Taubes' exhaustive research -- indeed, I'd be surprised if any other book examined bias within a particular scientific field in such detail -- the conventional wisdom was based on unreliable and slender evidence that, once established and institutionalized in government funding, set a pattern of confirmation bias by which further research was judged (or ignored)."

Examples follow, including that dietary researchers ignored or suppressed "studies showing that diet, cholesterol, and heart disease were not even correlated ... or even that low cholesterol raises other risks of death."

Taubes' contention, by the way, is that heart disease and other "diseases of civilization" are more likely caused by high triglyceride levels, which are elevated by eating refined carbohydrates.

In a January 2008 interview with the Telegraph, he admits "that…

What I'm Reading Lately: Death, Dog Poisoning, Novelty, Flawed Heroes, Psych Experiments, Limiting Generalisations

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 06:15:00 -0400

A mish-mash of my recent online reading, pondering, etc.

>> Alpine murder mystery: Are sheepdogs being poisoned to save the grey wolf? (Independent, 18 July 2008):

So far this year, 17 sheepdogs (including Great Pyrenees) have been poisoned -- with slug poison placed inside pork meatballs -- in the high Maurienne mountains, just inside the French border with Italy. The killings seem to stem from an ongoing dispute between sheep-lovers (and shepherds) and wolf-lovers. "'The pork meat balls were left, some time during the night, most likely just before dawn, in a place where the dogs would be sure to find them. This is the work of a maniac – a madman. What if the meat had been found by a small child? There are tourists everywhere at this time of year, including many British tourists.'"

"The dogs have often died in great agony.... [The poison] causes instant and catastrophic diarrhoea and lung failure in small mammals like dogs. 'They finish up dying completely dehydrated but, before that, they drown in their own bronchial fluids.'"

There are about 100 wolves in France. There is a sheep-protection plan in place in the area, and there have been no wolf attacks on sheep…