Superwoman Was Already Here: The Montessori Philosophy, Animated. Madness and Creativity: Is there such thing as the "Mad-Genius"? | Adventures in Positive Psychology. I’m sure you’re familiar the stories of brilliant artists, poets, or musicians who make their mark in social history through their gifted work only to self-destruct due to some mental breakdown. The myth of the mad-genius is prevalent in movies, books, and popular culture and has been a belief that goes back as far as Aristotle. Is there really any truth to this notion? Is there a significant relationship between creativity and mental illness? Research reveals that the rates of psychological disorder in samples of highly creative people are somewhat higher than in the general population.
There are certainly many notable creative figures who suffered from some form of mental instability. Abraham Lincoln has been reported to suffer from depression Vincent Van Gogh was known to be peculiar and suffer from unstable moods. Virginia Woolf was a brilliant novelist who suffered from bipolar mood swings. Specifically, there is research revealing a relationship between bipolar disorder and creativity. I was Once a Consumer but Now I am a Human Being. Race, gender, and the death penalty | The Moral Sciences Club.
Here's an interesting graph from a new paper by Kenny Shirley and Andrew Gelman: The most obvious thing here is white Americans have been and remain much more likely to support the death penalty than black Americans. Indeed, the gap between white and black support for the death penalty appears to have widened significantly since about 1970. Perhaps this is not surprising, as blacks have been and remain much more likely than whites to be executed. But blacks are also more likely to be murdered than whites. If the death penalty is a deterrent, as is often alleged, it ought to benefit blacks more than whites. In any case, if there is a deterrent effect, black Americans are not too impressed. Perhaps the more interesting question concerns the difference between men and women in their support for the death penalty.
This paper by Jonathan Haidt, John Sabini, Dena Gromet, John Darley on "What exactly makes revenge sweet? We also expected to find gender differences. Death! This graph shows the estimate that Kenny Shirley and I have of support for the death penalty by sex and race in the U.S. since 1955: We also found that capital punishment used to be more popular in the Northeast than in the South, but now it’s the other way around. Here’s the abstract to our paper: One of the longest running questions that has been regularly included in Gallup’s national public opinion poll is “Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?” Because the death penalty is governed by state laws rather than federal laws, it is of special interest to know how public opinion varies by state, and how it has changed over time within each state. In this paper we combine dozens of national polls taken over a fifty-year span and fit a Bayesian multilevel logistic regression model to individual response data to estimate changes in state-level public opinion over time.
The analysis is an example of Mr. P.S. P.P.S. Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature. Human nature is one of those things that everybody talks about but no one can define precisely. Every time we fall in love, fight with our spouse, get upset about the influx of immigrants into our country, or go to church, we are, in part, behaving as a human animal with our own unique evolved nature—human nature. This means two things. First, our thoughts, feelings, and behavior are produced not only by our individual experiences and environment in our own lifetime but also by what happened to our ancestors millions of years ago. Second, our thoughts, feelings, and behavior are shared, to a large extent, by all men or women, despite seemingly large cultural differences. Human behavior is a product both of our innate human nature and of our individual experience and environment.
The implications of some of the ideas in this article may seem immoral, contrary to our ideals, or offensive. Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, The Future Of Lies. The Economist says lie-detectors bring “disaster”: The truth of the matter—honestly—is that this would lead to disaster, for lying is at the heart of civilisation. … Homo sapiens has turned lying into an art. … The occasional untruth makes domestic life possible (“Of course your bum doesn’t look big in that”), is essential in the office (“Don’t worry, everybody’s behind you on this one”), and forms a crucial part of parenting (“It didn’t matter that you forgot your words and your costume fell off.
You were wonderful”). … The truly scary prospect … speaking truth to power would no longer be brave: it would be unavoidable. (more) Me-thinks they exaggerate. In the modern world, people often interact with others about whom they know far less than their forager ancestors knew, and with far greater abilities to consciously manage appearances. Good lie detector tech might just bring us back to forager levels of social transparency.
The Morality Molecule (Paul Zak - TED Talk)