The Secret Lives of Stories: Rewriting Our Personal Narratives. Around the time our daughter turned four, she started making what seemed like odd requests. “Tell me about the sad parts of your life,” she would say at the dinner table. Or, “Tell me about the scary parts of your life.” This phase went on for a while. I played along, telling her about my appendectomy in Africa, the time I almost fell off a cliff, the time I got a fishhook through my finger. We talked about deaths in the family, and she would sit with her eyes wide, not saying a word, listening as if her life depended on it. It wasn’t until I’d gone through a whole list of broken bones and broken hearts that I realized what she was really asking: How can I deal with sadness? After thinking about this for some time, it occurred to me that I had done a similar thing.
In search of answers, like many beginners, I approached other writers and bombarded them with questions to learn their secrets and to find out how they got where they were. When I asked for advice, he tried to wave me off. Illusion of asymmetric insight. The illusion of asymmetric insight is a cognitive bias whereby people perceive their knowledge of others to surpass other people's knowledge of themselves. This bias seems to be due to the conviction that observed behaviors are more revealing of others than self, while private thoughts and feelings are more revealing of the self.[1] A study finds that people seem to believe that they know themselves better than their peers know themselves and that their social group knows and understands other social groups better than other social groups know them.[1] For example: Person A knows Person A better than Person B knows Person B or Person A.
This bias may be sustained by a few cognitive beliefs, including: A group of studies, performed by Pronin, Kruger, Savitsky, & Ross (2001) points to several different manifestations of the illusion of asymmetric insight:[1] Study 1: Close friends' assessments of interpersonal knowledge: We know our close friends better than they know us. See also[edit] NeuroFocusCaseStudy_AnE. NeuroFocusReport_BeijingOlympics2008. Arfwhitepaper. James (1904) Enemyindustry. People and cultures have some non-overlapping beliefs. Some folk believe that there is a God, some that there is no God, some that there are many gods.
Some people believe that personal autonomy is a paramount value, while others feel that virtues like honour and courage take precedence over personal freedom. These core beliefs are serious, in that they make a difference to whether people live or die, or are able to live the kinds of life that they wish. People fight and die for the sake of autonomy. Some folk – the self-styled pluralists – believe that respect for otherness is a paramount political value. According to Philip at Circling Squares Isabel Stengers and Bruno Latour think that this position should enjoin us to avoid ridiculing or undermining others’ values or ontologies. I’ll admit that I find first part of this principle this damn puzzling. B) allows us to have beliefs so long as they are unexpressed.
So I take Philip to embrace c). References Habermas, Jurgen. 1995. Powered by Google Docs. Perplexities-Ch7-Unreliability-091105. Kenan Malik's review of Our Posthuman Future by Francis Fukuyama. Capitalism, Francis Fukuyama announced more than a decade ago, is the promised land at the End of History. The collapse of the Soviet Union confirmed that there was neither an alternative to the market, nor a possibility of transcending capitalism. Not even the events of September 11, which have led many critics to mock the 'End of History' thesis, have given Fukuyama cause to change his mind. The end of history, Fukuyama argues, means not the termination of conflict, simply the recognition that nothing can improve upon capitalism.
Why? Because, as he puts it in Our Posthuman Future, capitalist institutions 'are grounded in assumptions about human nature that are far more realistic than those of their competitors'. Yet even Fukuyama has come to worry that the reports of History's death might have been a mite exaggerated. Fukuyama's argument runs something like this.
While most worried about genetic engineering, other technologies also concern Fukuyama. And therein lies the problem. 135.full. Transhumanist Values - Nick Bostrom. 1. What is Transhumanism? Transhumanism is a loosely defined movement that has developed gradually over the past two decades.[1] It promotes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding and evaluating the opportunities for enhancing the human condition and the human organism opened up by the advancement of technology. Attention is given to both present technologies, like genetic engineering and information technology, and anticipated future ones, such as molecular nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. The enhancement options being discussed include radical extension of human health-span, eradication of disease, elimination of unnecessary suffering, and augmentation of human intellectual, physical, and emotional capacities.
Other transhumanist themes include space colonization and the possibility of creating superintelligent machines, along with other potential developments that could profoundly alter the human condition. Transhumanism does not entail technological optimism. 2. Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers. Francis Fukuyama. Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama (born October 27, 1952) is an American political scientist, political economist, and author. Fukuyama is best known for his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), which argued that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free market capitalism of the West and its lifestyle may signal the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and become the final form of human government. However, his subsequent book Trust: Social Virtues and Creation of Prosperity (1995) modified his earlier position to acknowledge that culture cannot be cleanly separated from economics.
Fukuyama is also associated with the rise of the neoconservative movement,[2] from which he has since distanced himself.[3] Early life[edit] Francis Fukuyama was born in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. Education[edit] Fukuyama was the Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University from 1996 to 2000. Writings[edit] Literary Revolution in the Supermarket Aisle: Genre Fiction Is Disruptive Technology. (Lev Grossman writes about books here on Wednesdays. Subscribe to his RSS feed.) This post is by way of a reply to Arthur Krystal’s “Easy Writers,” a thoroughly thought-provoking piece about the relationship between genre fiction and literary fiction that ran in the New Yorker this week.
I was happy to see the New Yorker weighing in on this, because I think it’s an important part of what’s going on in fiction right now. I think about it a lot. [I want to be clear, by the way, that this is a response in the sense of a (probably one-sided) critical conversation. What Krystal does in “Easy Writers” is introduce the idea that the distinction between genre fiction and literary fiction has, of late, gotten less clear. (MORE: The Year in Novels So Far) Personally, I think the situation is more complicated than Krystal makes it out to be.
So let’s go over the grounds on which Krystal’s conclusions rest. Personally I don’t think it’s anywhere near that simple. LIST: Top 10 Novels of the 2000s. “Fifty Shades of Grey” and Guilty-Pleasure Reading. Obama campaign ads: How the Analyst Institute is helping him hone his message. Two weeks ago, top Obama campaign advisers Jim Messina and David Axelrod announced a $25 million national television buy, a figure rightfully acknowledged with a sense of wonder, given that there were still six months to go before Election Day. But anyone waiting for coast-to-coast shock-and awe must be disappointed. The ads have rolled out at a desultory trickle: a nine-state buy for a 60-second overview of Obama’s first-term successes; a Spanish-language health-care ad running in Florida and another in English about higher-education costs appearing there and in Nevada; and a long ad about Bain Capital that reportedly cost less than $100,000 to place in markets across five states.
In other words, the Obama team has broken nearly every piece of received wisdom that media consultants like to offer about the intensity and duration necessary for television ads to be successful in the modern era. Illustration by Robert Donnelly. This campaign is a different story. Philip K. Dick, Sci-Fi Philosopher, Part 3. The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. This is the third in a three-part series. Part 3: Adventures in the Dream Factory In the previous post, we looked at Philip K. Dick’s intellectual and philosophical ties to the early Gnostics. Now, culturally and politically at least, its time to look at the Gnostic in the mirror. Please read on. Philip K. Leif Parsons Dick’s gnosticism also allows us to see in a new light what is the existentially toughest teaching of traditional Christianity: that sin lies within us in the form of original sin.
On the gnostical view, once we see the wicked world for what it is, we can step back and rediscover our essential goodness, the divine spark within us, our purity, our authenticity. Aside from “The Matrix” trilogy and the direct movie adaptations of Dick’s fiction, there are strong gnostical themes in the two most recent movies of the Danish film writer and director Lars von Trier. Neil Gaiman Addresses the University of the Arts Class of 2012.
Science Magazine: Sign In. Online papers on consciousness. Search tips There are three kinds of search you can perform: All fields This mode searches for entries containing all the entered words in their title, author, date, comment field, or in any of many other fields showing on OPC pages. Surname This mode searches for entries containing the text string you entered in their author field. Advanced This mode differs from the all fields mode in two respects. Note that short and / or common words are ignored by the search engine. Interview: Vernor Vinge by The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy. Vernor Vinge is the author of many novels, including Hugo Award-winners A Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness in the Sky, and Rainbows End, as well as acclaimed novels The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime. His latest novel is The Children of the Sky. This interview first appeared in Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley.
Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the hosts discuss various geeky topics. You’re famous for coining the phrase “The Technological Singularity.” How did you first come up with that? I used that term first, I think, at an artificial intelligence conference in 1982. Actually, it was a conference with Marvin Minsky, the famous A.I. researcher, and several science fiction writers were on the panel—Robert Sheckley and Jim Hogan. That is a consequence of this particular type of progress—that is, in making creatures that are smarter than humans. Paralysed woman moves robot with her mind - by Nature Video. A Modern-Day Copernicus: Peter H. Duesberg by Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD. By Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD by Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), a mathematician and astronomer, questioned the long- held belief that the Earth sits at the center of the universe and the Sun and planets circle around it.
Aristotle posited and Ptolemy (85–165) codified this geocentric (Earth-centered) system. Peter H. Harvey Bialy has written a book about Duesberg titled Oncogenes, Aneuploidy, and AIDS: A Scientific Life & Times of Peter H. In Uncentering the Earth: Copernicus and the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (2006), William Vollman praises Copernicus for having the good sense to die shortly after the publication of his paradigm-altering work, thus avoiding the cruel punishment then accorded heretics. So far, this has been Duesberg's fate: Admired as a "wunderkind" in the 1970s, the NIH (National Institutes of Health) awarded him a long-term Outstanding Investigator Grant; he was a candidate for the Nobel Prize; the U.S. Scientifically flawed. " 2007,%20Bauer,%20JAPSfinal. Discover Magazine: The latest in science and technology news, blogs and articles - AIDS "Dissident" Seeks Redemption... and a Cure for Cancer.
Over the next four decades, Duesberg would throw himself into his passion for science, traveling thousands of miles from his homeland. Even so, he still peppers his conversations, no matter the topic, with World War II metaphors and references to Hitler and his henchmen—and to the “good Germans” who did as the government demanded. It is hard to understand him at times, not just because of his sharp German accent and odd phrasings but because he makes mental leaps that can leave a listener exhausted. In rapid-fire sequence he jumps from scientific minutiae to grand political comparisons (viruses, bacteria, oncogenes, even researchers who study these entities can be transformed into Goebbels or “good Germans”), and then he might toss in an entirely new idea before returning to his original topic—all within seconds.
“We’re supposed to be ‘good soldiers,’ following orders from higher-ups.” –Peter Duesberg The reaction was explosive. Philip Kitcher: The Trouble With Scientism. Before 2014, catch up on the best of The New Republic. For the next few weeks, we'll be re-posting a selection of our most thought-provoking pieces from the recent past. There are two cathedrals in Coventry. The newer one, consecrated on May 25, 1962, stands beside the remains of the older one, which dates from the fourteenth century, a ruin testifying to the bombardment of the Blitz. Three years before the consecration, in one of the earliest ventures in the twinning of towns, Coventry had paired itself with Dresden. That gesture of reconciliation was recapitulated in 1962, when Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem received its first performance at the ceremony.
Since the 1960s, historians have worked—and debated—to bring into focus the events of the night of February 13, 1945, in which an Allied bombing attack devastated the strategically irrelevant city of Dresden. In English we speak about science in the singular, but both French and German wisely retain the plural. Rowan Willams « Per Crucem ad Lucem. Call me theologically naïve, or ignorant, or not well enough read, but I simply do not understand some of the criticisms directed at Rowan Williams.
Archbishop Williams is a person of deep faith and prayer, of contagious love for Christ, for the Scriptures and tradition which bear witness to him, and for Christ’s church, and who for decade after decade has been among the church’s finest public theologians (and poets!) , producing first-rate scholarship with exemplary integrity and gospel-spirited passion, and helping a new generation of Christians to find the words and posture to understand and bear witness to the deepest realties of their faith in a rapidly changing cultural landscape.
Put differently, I keep an eye open to read and digest everything he writes. And why not, when it is so edifying and educative, and models a way of doing theology so worthy of emulation, if not entirely uncritically so. ‘Be patient, don’t assume the end of the story is come. Like this: Like Loading... Marilynne Robinson on The Art of Fiction « Per Crucem ad Lucem. The Last Magic Show: A Blind Brain Theory of the Appearance of Consciousness « Three Pound Brain. Amazon. A Bestiary of Future Literatures « Three Pound Brain. Just-world hypothesis. The Birth of a Nation. Gossip. E. O. Wilson. Joseph Carroll's Books and Essays on Literary Darwinism. OnFiction. The Neuroscience of Your Brain on Fiction. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (9780547391403): Jonathan Gottschall. Why fiction is good for you How fiction changes your world - Ideas.
Mind and Life XIV -- Day 3 pm - with the Dalai Lama. Amazon. Amazon. Nāgārjuna. Amazon. Madhyamaka. Madhyamaka. Svabhava. Anatta. Pratītyasamutpāda. Śūnyatā. Intact rapid detection of fearful faces in the absence of the amygdala. Social conservatives have a lower I.Q.? (probably) : Gene Expression. Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice | Racism, Bias & Politics | Right-Wing and Left-Wing Ideology. Race, Evolution, and Behavior. Michael Trust Modern Political Thought in the Context of Evolutionary Psychology. Modern. Reading List: The Cosmic Landscape (Fourmilog: None Dare Call It Reason) Superintelligence. IQ and the Problem of Social Adjustment.
Untitled. Why Intelligent People Do Foolish Things. Untitled. Plymouth. Vox Popoli: Difficult, but not impossible. Www.alifeofthemind.com. Interpersonal Intelligence and Mental Violence « blog.forret.com. Vox Day’s New Low – denialism blog. If you hand me some stupid, yes, in fact I am going to hit you over the head with it. Because you absolutely deserve it. Vox Day: Mindlessly parroting antivaccination myths again. I DON'T BELIEVE: Xian Mail: Theodore Beale. The War in Heaven. Previous Post » The Postmodernism Generator » Communications From Elsewhere.
Best evidence yet that a single gene can affect IQ - health - 16 April 2012. Cognitive Science and Religion. Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion. Cognitive science gaining ground in U.S. academic religion studies | FaithWorld. Gene Expression: James Watson Tells the Inconvenient Truth: Faces the Consequences. G. Chaitin on Metabiology (UCM Madrid) (day 1 part 1)
Powered by Google Docs. The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight. Untitled. Richard Carrier Blogs: Books on Ancient Science. Up with Chris Hayes. IQ scores reflect motivation as well as 'intelligence' Two kinds of human anti-evolutionism: macro and micro, religious and Leftist. S&E Indicators 2010 - Chapter 7. Science and Technology: Public Attitudes and Understanding - Public Attitudes About S&T in General. Most scientists in this country are Democrats. That's a problem. AlterNet. Inside the Political Brain - Chris Mooney. I Did It For Science: Female-Friendly Porn. Joss Whedon on Comic Books, Abusing Language and the Joys of Genre | Underwire.