Final Post

Why did I stop writing this blog? I still had about twenty draft posts that I was going to write up at some point. The reasons?

I got lazy. I stopped caring. It didn't achieve anything. I had better things to do. Only about 10-15 people read it somewhat regularly, which was OK, but not enough to stroke my ego. And work reduced my energy levels.

One final post - something a psychologist once wrote of the shitness a human can sink in to.

The fun and pleasure world reduces the individual to a basic biological status. The experiences which bring him satisfaction may seem unique to him, but when viewed objectively are not that much different from those accessible to the rest of the human race. The world of psychological rest embraces ordinariness and revels in it. The ability to dwell in a world which has no standards save the reaching of tranquility can be described as complacent in submissive personalities and lazy in dominant personalities. Complacency is characterized by a rigid rejection of depth and conceptual thought, giving access to an easy flow into little and sometimes busy activities which have guaranteed patterns of simple accomplishment. Laziness is characterized by a rigid rejection of goal directed vigor and manipulative mastery, opening the door to an easy receptivity to surface feeling and simple sensuality, guided by guaranteed gratifications.

Conventional individuals find the stress of the search for truth and right overwhelming. One remedy they have available is the attempt to dwell permanently in a simplistic world structured by fun and pleasure mechanisms. Their only psychological goal is to protect their inner state of tranquility and calm. Their perception of the surface world usurps their recognition of the entire psychological scene. They are constantly resting themselves, but they are not resting from anything important. It can be said that they are attempting to rest from the fatigue and boredom which infiltrate the fun and pleasure world when warmth and pride are not equally developed in the personality.

The final word on John Edward

No, this post isn't dedicated towards ridiculing John Edward's beliefs. That'd be easy to do.

OF COURSE the dead don't actually 'exist', much less communicate things (except metaphorically through the evidence that their decaying bodies provide to the forensics!). I was more interested in the question of whether John Edward actually believed that he could speak to the dead. This question is now, perhaps, answered. So is he a liar preying on fools, or just a fool?

I think the Sydney Morning Herald's "Good Weekend" section provides a clue. In the weekly column, they ask various people the same questions every week. When John Edward was asked what his earliest memory was, he stated that he remembers his entire one-year birthday party vividly.
The problem, of course, is that this is entirely impossible. One-year-olds simply don't have the necessary areas of the brain developed to commit what they experience at their one-year birthday party in to their long-term-memory.

So what stands out is that Edwards is the kind of guy who can easily convince himself of that found to be logically or empirically impossible. Of course, it is glaringly more improbable, absurd to convince yourself that you can talk to the dead than that you could remember events from when you were a one-year-old. But we can just put him in the idiot basket, which is a lot more generous than what you could otherwise say about him.

Quote

I don't like the word 'evil', partly because of the heavily supernatural and religious connotations it has (I prefer a scientific, analytical approach to studying the various problems plaguing humanity and think we learn much more this way!), but I like this quote:

"Evil is humanity turned against itself and so conflict and contradiction are fundamental to its nature".

I find the statement quite applicable in our modern judgement of Communism. Communism sought, through brutally-enforced naivety, to bend humanity to behave more altruistically than we are perhaps naturally inclined to. This could lead us to have contempt for, and ultimately to hate ourselves and to be willing to commit atrocities to improve what mankind is.

A Human Being Died That Night

...a book By Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela about her interviews with Eugene de Kock, the so-called "Prime Evil" killer of apartheid South Africa.
Highly recommended. She gets in to her subjects head extraordinarily well, apart from some incidents in which I think she doesn't understand because she's not male and doesn't understand male sexuality.

Anyway my comment about the book for readers: South Africans tried to pretend that nothing was wrong after Apartheid. By jailing the big guys, they tried to isolate the dog behaviour to just a few people, and so the blame was concentrated rather than diffused, where it belonged. What was really happening though, was that the population was disowning its popular leaders, the ones who did all the dirty work which the rest of the population was grateful for.

Blackwater

How did it get to the stage where instead of the Army or the Police doing domestic security or invading other countries / defending ones own country, we now have private companies like Blackwater waging wars, and being paid 5x what regular Army servicepeople would be paid to do so?

It is just so incredibly dodgy that you have private companies now being enlisted to defend the Army or a country's VIPs, and you have civilians of other countries being killed by private security contractors, and legally, this is all acceptable. These dodgy-ass motherfuckers also don't have the same rules apply to them than do other registered killers.

Counterfeiting

Reading about how sophisticated the counterfeiting operation has become for many electronics products. The thing is though, if these products really are practically so identical to the real ones (leading manufacturers to have to use high-tech methods to leave signature traces, like a sort of serial number), then is this such a problem? I mean, if the counterfeits of say a computer processor are so professional that they're otherwise indistinguishable from the real thing unless the owners etches a serial number on the chip in nano-sized writing.....then perhaps as consumers we should be happy to be using counterfeits. If it's still profitable to be doing this, then perhaps the investment that the company made in its innovation process wasn't so great, or perhaps something which others can easily do shouldn't be protected by such strong patents. And the counterfeiter is playing a role in driving down prices through enhanced supply. Obviously when it comes to counterfeiting cash, this is a slightly different matter, though.

Everyone says I sold out

People say others have sold themselves out to this or that.
Can't one buy oneself back?
We use money to buy time, affection, fame, and other things. Not that I am planning to, but why can't we buy ourselves back the freedom to create a personality, a lifestyle, a change of job, a change of perspectives?

The Anti-Philosopher Philosophy

I'll be doing a series of postings about my growing hostility towards the concepts created by many philosophers over the millenia.
I'll take issue with a number of words [including consciousness, rational, immoral, justice, fairness, freedom, subjective, reality, belief] and use my scorn for these words to build a larger case against the practitioners of various philosophical traditions, the Western analytic one being that with which I am most familiar.
The aforementioned words are all exceptionally vague 'suitcase' words, as are their duals; unconscious, irrational, moral, unjust etc. They are supposed to refer to a lot but ultimately lead us in to blind alleys.

Take the word consciousness - we are not 'conscious', there is no single, first-person experience. Consciousness is only mysterious if you fail to realise that it refers to a lot of different things which are simultaneously occurring all of which we have (confusingly, for serious thinkers, but usefully, for laymen) called consciousness. The whole idea of their being a single Experiencer inside our brains which is conscious is a throwback to the idea of a soul, and indeed, the masses aren't able to think beyond simple concepts like the soul or consciousness. If we examine the concept of consciousness it is clear why the concept of soul was simple, irreducible, and shrouded in mystery, eternally so; and yet it seemed like an indispensable concept. However, if we are to be smart about it, we realise that there is no single element which experiences the irreducible sensation of redness, or the irreducible smell of garlic. There is no singular entity which writes a novel, has a child, lives life, though we may name it. There is no Me and no You...except for a conceptual Me, and the concept of there being a single Me or You breaks down under closer examination. Just like there are instruments which can print on a piece of paper that it detects red light incoming, our brain is [note that I'm using a metaphor here, not a simile!!] simply thousands of serial and parallel instruments for detecting light, instruments for talking, instruments for pumping blood, instruments for self-repair. Like all other machines, we're simply a bunch of inputs and outputs with much computation and digestion in between. What you could call "I" is a compound of instruments, parts of machines which can perform a variety of functions from self-reporting errors (it could be emotional issues, or stomach pains) to writing poetry and solving mathematical problems. The 'first-person experience' is a nonsense concept if taken seriously, and a useful communicative tool if understood properly. The dualism here is conscious vs non-conscious, and people who think that creatures are either conscious or nonconscious must of course struggle with the question of whether or not a spider is conscious. Those who then propose that consciousness comes in varying degrees have understood the situation slightly better, but have failed to realise that this demonstrates that consciousness simply refers to the simultaneous operation of many processes, and different machines have different levels of complexity. It is not the case that consciousness is a good, unfairly derided concept, which isn't invalidated by the grey areas at the periphery of its applicability, for instance, to a spider. It is that consciousness is a poor concept, which is better replaced by understanding the components of this concept, and realising that some of the components of what we call consciousness are present in some machines, and not in others. There is no mystery to consciousness, none whatsoever! The only problem here is the inability of a large number of people to think and speak of themselves as machines, to understand how they are constructed, and to have some knowledge of what different parts of their bodies, especially their brains, do. When you learn to, and practise, understanding yourself as a machine, there is absolutely no confusion whatsoever left within the concept of consciousness. Philosophers run in to the same problems that anyone from any discipline does if they take too seriously the concepts that they have created. People somehow stunningly forget a very basic truth about language; we attempt to segment the world in to discrete packages, that is, by naming things. That's all well and good, it is essential for communication and for practical living; however, it introduces an essential inaccuracy - the world is continuous and not composed of categories, nor does nature appear to operate with respect to the categories we have chosen. This presents a myriad of difficulties, but it is amusing that therefore people should be truly troubled about whether or not something belongs within one category or the other and quibble endlessly about it. This inaccuracy isn't so evident provided that we stick to basic categories. Or of course, as scientists do, we can form specialist clubs of people who use and understand technical categories, which can be adapted over time. This necessitates that others will not understand the concept, and they will continue to use other, older words, which are less successful in communicating certain things. There's little confusion over what is a tree, but more about what is a reptile, and more about what is a theory. Nobody is suggesting that we should stop naming things, however, one has to be able to stand back and be able to judge how useful a concept is, and it is scientists' disapproval of words like consciousness which gives rise to their eventual split from philosophy.

Observatory

Sydneysiders, go to the Observatory. Me and the gf went last night, the clouds cleared up just in time, and it was great.
It's an awesome thing to see, amongst other things, Saturn and its moons (it looks exactly as it is depicted in junior science books, you can see its rings). They've got a telescope whose motor is controlled by a computer program; and the astronomer just clicks on things that he can show you on that night.


Random fact; did you know that when galaxies collide and swallow each other up, the individual planets/suns hardly ever actually collide? It just screws up their orbits and stuff!

Started Work

So I'm learning to become a market maker. The learning curve is steep, the pace furious, and the work challenging and interesting. It's consuming other aspects of my life at the moment, but it's a great opportunity, an excellent company and workmates, and I'm enjoying it. I did write a lot of posts which were only saved a while ago, but it should be a while again, probably a few weeks, before I start actively blogging again.

Emotions

Are neither good nor bad. The concept of an emotion being negative or positive was a stupid and destructive concept.
Emotions are our motivation engines. Yes, we are sometimes motivated to do things which may or may not be in our best interest, if you can clearly define what is in one's best interest. Some might say, for instance, that rage is a destructive emotion as it may motivate us to commit violent acts, and land us in jail (plus all the damage to the victim(s)). But all emotions have grades and purposes, and trying to prevent them is stupid; we can only manage and control their effects on our behaviour. Only when we succeed in crushing our "negative" emotions do we realise what function they served, and allow those emotions back in to our lives. The human species needs rage, jealousy, depression, resentment and hatred to function. Obviously, our judgements on the appropriateness of emotions depends upon the context in which they are experienced, but there is room for our darker sides as well as the lighter sides, so those stupid religious radio stations which only emphasise being positive in reaction to anything that happens are just confusing people.

Metaphors of the day

It's honestly strange that I've only recently realised this recently...
I guess it is very easy to fall in to the trap of believing that we are processesors of words as symbols with intrinsic meaning, rather than embodied organisms thinking using our bodies! When one is speaking in their native tongue, you could so easily make sense of the words you speak by resorting to abstract concepts. Why not, everybody does it. But it ultimately conceals the truth.
You could forget that your brain actually developed out of scratch, and that it primarily relied on its early visual, auditory, olfactory and tactile senses to make sense of the world, before your "abstract thinking" regions even developed.

Here are some nice ones that prove we think with our bodies :)

INTIMACY IS CLOSENESS: "We're close"
AFFECTION IS WARMTH: "She greeted me warmly"
IMPORTANT IS BIG: "It was an big day for me"
ORGANISATION IS PHYSICAL STRUCTURE: "How do these theories fit together?"
HELP IS PHYSICAL SUPPORT - "Support your local charity" etc etc

THINKING IS MOVING:
"I'm stuck thinking about yesterday". "My mind was racing".
"I've been pursuing this topic for a while now". "I follow what you're saying". "How did you reach that conclusion?" --or sight-- "I see what you mean"

EMOTIONAL STATES (or responsibilities) ARE LOCATIONS / WEIGHTS:
"I'm bordering on depression"
"She's weighed down"

THOUGHTS HAVE A PHYSICAL STRUCTURE:
"That idea has many sides to it". "That is a sweet idea" (is it an accident that we eat lots of sugary food, and say that things are 'sweet' today?)
"Something doesn't smell right about that theory"
"He swallowed that idea whole"
"That idea is too much for me to digest"


Another interesting, related fact
** People who have been moving forward in a queue are more likely to interpret "Wednesday's meeting has been moved forward two days" to mean that the meeting is now to be held on Friday, while those who have not been waiting in a queue are more likely to think that the meeting will now be held on Monday. Weirdness.

The Chaser Song

"The Chaser's War On Everything" song caused a lot of controversy when it mocked people who had died in living memory...saying that Princess Diana "had dirty arab semen inside of her", saying that shock radio host Stan Zemanek's "views were as malignant as his brain" [he died of brain cancer], and that racing champion Peter Brock "was an arsehole who pumped lead in to the atmosphere".

And so in that tradition, I'm going to question what's going on in the head of Ashley Baker, who died fighting for the Australian military in Afghanistan. Sorry to his family for their loss, but let's see what somebody sees at the top of a summary of Ashley's likes:
Ashley's top band: Rammstein
His two favourite movies: Romper Stomper and American History X.
More than a little bit of fascination you had there with the Nazis.
I can just picture you sitting there getting in to the songs whose words you probably don't even understand, and identifying with the characters in those movies.

I

This post is about why I've become disillusioned with Philosophy generally. I've got major issues with its approach as a discipline. With each of its branches. Philosophy might always be around...and doing it was rewarding for me; it helped me to analyse statements, clarifying my thoughts tremendously. And I do "love knowledge". But now I'm more interested in science, onto whose turf Philosophy illegitimately wanders.
I often wondered why philosophy books appeared in the same section as religious books. I thought it was because both tried to answer similar questions, albeit differently and often with mutual suspicion and intolerance, much like those between competing religions. I no longer see as great a distinction between their methodologies and habits, and I see science as something else entirely to philosophy and religion.
I don't consider it an accident that so many people, infant and adult alike, ask themselves these eternal questions at some point, but many adults find that there are problems with these eternal questions. Rarely do I see philosophers question their various methodologies as often or as seriously as I see them arguing over qualia, ethics, art, empiricism or determinism.

Firstly there was my recognition of the complete failure of philosophers to make sense of the way that the world works. This failure is shared with each and every religion. Over the millennia, only recently-developed scientific methods have added to the store of human knowledge and predictive power. Philosophers, like religious people should take this failure of their discipline/ideology/religion to discover facts about how the world works enormously seriously. Philosophers should be wondering why they're making no more progress on their eternal questions about the universe and the experience of life through their metaphysical arguments than religious people did for countless blood-soaked millenia. Or why they've spectacularly failed to create values out of thin air and alter human behaviour, as religion has failed to ground ethics in the Will or nature of God, and has failed to change human behaviour. Philosophers; now turn your attention to your inability to uniformly validate the scientific-mathematical method as the only successful route towards understanding nature.

What ultimately makes philosophy powerless is that philosophers courageously but futilely attempt to use language techniques alone (mostly populated by scientifically outdated concepts and other archaic words) to wrestle with their eternal questions. They do not experiment or observe nature uniformly - like religious people, they're biased towards using intuitively appealing, often introspective approaches cloaked up within a quasi-logical framework, legitimised by convenient but ancient natural language terms. Conceptual confusion abounds in philosophical discourse. The greatest symptom of the problem of using natural language is evident in Descartes' Error, or dualism, from which Western Philosophy has been suffering for a long time. Abandoning it would merely be acknowledging the superiority of the empirical approach. This tendency of the human brain, infused with language, to think using the word "I", has been one of the major sources of confusion over the years, which have led philosophers astray in so many of their questions. Using such a word with such obvious connections to the false notion of a soul, it is not surprising that philosophers scratch around in conceptual confusion. Witness the philosophical debates about free will, ethics, art the like and you see the problem with "I". Read about memetics and you start to see the general scope and power of evolutionary theory and its analogues first to kill the concept of God and then the idea of the soul, and then the human "mind", leaving only the brain. Always at the cutting edge of science, we see reductionist thinking.
Another good step would be to recognise that just as the physical difference between colours of the rainbow are merely different wavelengths and not completely different things (radically different colours, as we perceive them) (and we use our sensory systems to feel, so philosophy is no better equipped to study our phenomenal experiences than are any other disciplines), there is no real distinction between mind and body. The movement of our bodies affects our thinking!! For example, when rotating an object mentally, we do it worse if we're rotating our hand in the opposite direction to when we do it while rotating our hand in the same direction to which we're mentally rotating the object. The act of thinking about an object rotating, which occurs mostly in the visual thought area, is affected by inputs from the sensor-motor cortex which reports about hand movements. Similarly, self control is object control "The boxer picked himself up from the canvas". Self-control is being in one's normal location: "I'm besides myself with anger". Causing the self to act is the forced movement of an object "You're pushing yourself too hard", and self-control is having the self together as a container "She's falling to pieces". Self is an essence that is a found object'"He's trying to find himself in India". Even the Declaration of Independence in the United States invokes our understanding of the Newtonian independence of free bodies. It is no accident that we talk like this. Right from our births, our thoughts are dependent on the use and perception of our whole body. Those who've had fewer sensory systems eg the blind from birth think quite differently. Yes, our visual systems, like our sense of smell, affect our thoughts in many different ways! So no brain-in-a-vat could ever think like a brain inextricably attached to a body like ours could.There are no disembodied minds, no independent, questioning souls, no "I's", unless you are as much your body as you are your mind. And as for "consciousness", whatever this is supposed to be seems to be the tiny, fleeting recollection of whatever happened in the last 500ms, a fragment of your mind's powers to analyse other people briefly turning to analysing themselves, and entering and cycling around in the short term memory and other parts.

The English language needs to adapt to use as much scientific terminology as best it can or the knowledge generated by English-speaking peoples will slow, and their works will fade in to irrelevancy faster without the aid of new scientific words. Why do we not read Ancient English books anymore? [Well, some people read Bronte, fewer read Milton, and fewer still read 5th-century literature..]. Why do English monolinguals not read Modern French books? Same answer.We don't read things if....insert a million reasons OR If we cannot understand the author. Which is the case for Modern French and Ye Olde English books, as Modern French and Old English are both different languages to English. Sure, modern speakers of English can understand some Old English, but modern speakers of English can also understand some French through their English vocabulary alone...Even if ancient England did more strongly resemble the world that we live in today (which couldn't occur in any real sense without an accompanying change in the vocabulary used by its citizens), the book wouldn't be intelligible to us...because Old English people speak a different language...because the world has changed and language is used to communicate things, many of which are about the world [we also talk about things which aren't part of the world, such as Santa Claus and God]. I find it depressing that the best authors of today will likely be practically unintelligible to readers in the 23rd century, and not so at all to those later. Likewise, words like "kidney" will cease to mean anything concrete after humans have evolved different kidneys thousands of years down the track. So we should reduce knowledge wherever possible and practical to more basic terms. That is, Chemistry books of today will be of more use to doctors of the next century than will Biology books. And physics books will be even more 'timeless' than Chemistry books because of their superior generality.
SO WHAT FILLS THE VACUUM WHEN WE STOP DOING PHILOSOPHY?
- Epistemology could somewhat be replaced by theories and empirical studies of perception, linguistic theory and anthropology (that is, they'd each contribute in the "epistemological vacuum" that would follow)
- Ethics could somewhat be replaced by social and political sciences like psychology as well as by Economics
- Metaphysics simply will collapse on its arse; we have physics, chemistry, biology, history and the like
- Aesthetics; hmm. Art, Music, Dance, Drama, literary theories

******
I don't exist. I'm not conscious! Sometimes, "I" could be hungry, at other times "I think that X", at other times, "I'm absent", or tired, or happy, depressed, or 'conscious', or asleep, or funny. The word "I" has stopped making sense to me and I often actually get confused when I use the word now. Although not here. "I'm hungry" seems to make more sense nowadays compared to "I like X, Y, and Z" or, worse, "I like the idea that X, Y, or Z". "I" is supposed to be the way I remember many things (by relating things back to me), and the way that I make sense of everything that goes on or that went on in my brain. It is all-encompassing and infinitely vague term. It has become unavoidable to use such words, although lately I've done so more successfully when I've wanted to without thinking anything was wrong, and avoided confusion. I won't attempt to do so with this post.

Myergh

Exams. 6 of them. Back 27th

Memory

What'd you do yesterday? Last Tuesday? What were you like two years ago? Five? As a child? How many memories can you bring to mind between the ages of 5 and 10? We hardly remember anything, and it's quite scary.

We think we do, but tests show that our memories are absolutely awful.
It's true for all memories; procedural, semantic. Implicit, Explicit.
We remember less than 10% of the fraction of things that we studied very hard at during university. We forget most faces and names.
It is said that we remember what is important, but this is also mostly wishful thinking. We remember STORIES which we made up about what is important. We don't remember almost any meaningful event accurately (much less scary and dangerous ones), it's just that we repeat, adapt and rehearse stories of the event and our lives to ourselves over and over again, so we remember the stories.

To recall your memories better, be in the same state that you were when you encoded the memory. If you were drunk when studying, get drunk for when writing the exam and you'll probably remember more.
Those who learn lists of words underwater recall those same lists better underwater than on land. Those with bipolar disorder remember things they learnt during a depressive episode better during their next depressive episode than when they're on a manic high. So to recall more, be in a similar setting, time of day, frame of mind and energy level.

Schema-consistent information is also remembered better: Old stories are adapted eg the "black substance that came from mouth" from horror stories of old became "foamed at the mouth". Canoes become boats.
People who witnessed a bank robbery were more likely to later recall that the robber was acting "weirdly" and say that he had a moustache. People first recall their attitude and emotional state during the event. Second, they justify that attitude to the audience of today. Thirdly, they reconstruct the memory from these attitudes.
This is partly how false memories are made, of which we have a surprising abundance. If you ask kids that have never been lost in a shopping centre an average of 7 times whether or not they can remember being lost in a shopping mall, on average, they'll start to say that they can remember it happening once. We use a vividness heuristic (how vivid something is) to judge whether or not our memory is of a real or imagined event, so the longer we imagine something for, the more vivid and hence real it appears to be later.

Lastly, some pointers on if you want to remember something:
- Chunking. You do this all the time, eg with phone numbers 9437-8756 is easier to remember than 94378756 . Now chunk the chunked bits, optimal size 4. You could chunk any type of material
- Translate it in to your own natural mental, idiosyncratic inner language
- Make the information somehow significant to your identity
- Labouriously try to connect the information to everything else you know. Do it cross-modally by connecting it to sights, smells, sounds, and ideas.
- Rehearse it all day. Rehearse it periodically over a long period of time. Set up reminders of it everywhere
- Pnemonics, songs etc. There are people that can't speak that can sing full songs. That should be quite fascinating!

Szasz

What a quirky, brilliant old psychologist Szasz was.
Now I don't agree with Tom Cruise that the whole movement of psychiatry is somehow 'evil', but basically every industry is infused with the profit-making incentive and an evolution of more ancient activities.

You might've thought before that there's something a little odd about the numbers when it is said that 5% of people are allegedly suffering from disorder A, while another 3% are from disorder B and another 6-10% from disorder C. By these numbers, everybody, it would seem, has at least about 10 disorders, and some people have >50.
Now I'm not saying that there aren't an incredible variety of ailments, of things that can go wrong with the human body - things which go "wrong" causing pain or biological dysfunction. But the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) used by psychologists has a history of calling every normal human condition (and things which don't affect functioning) a disorder. Until 1973, homosexuality was classed in the DSM as a mental disorder. Masturbation was also said to be a symptom of insanity! The DSM continues to say that behaviours deemed socially unacceptable are in fact disorders...

It's also important to disentangle "moral"/un-scientific statements from real science. It's true that being fat reduces your life expectancy somewhat, but not by a lot. Historically, a lot of the digust obesity is not based on health concerns (as it might've been for lepers) but based on religious-moral paradigms - for example, thinking that eating too much was sinfully greedy and therefore should be avoided, even if it didn't really harm the subject anyway.
In fact, prior to Kraepelin's classification system, everyone a tiny bit different was "mad", and it was caused by the devil. Electro-convulsive-therapy, it was thought, could be used "to harm the evil spirits inside". Not surprising, when you consider that the Medical Model that most humans were supposed to be using when they thought up their 'scientific' theories was an extremely superstitious/religious one...I mean in most of the world, exorcisms to drive away "evil spirits" are still being performed! In the 21st century!



If you're on the same page as me, you might like this quote from Szasz:

"Mental illness...is a myth, whose function it is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations”...
I disagree with this, because he is saying that ALL mental illness is a myth, and I don't think ALL mental illness is a myth. I don't want to be seen to be playing-down the reality, that a lot of people have crippling disorders...but a lot of "mental conditions" are just concepts created to make profits off people in the form of drugs and/or consultations, or to control them.
What is more primary, pervasive, perpetual and problematic is struggle between humans cloaked up as morality, not mental disease. The vast majority of us are organisms which function incredibly well, and there are reasons why we feel supposedly 'dysfunctional' or 'negative' emotions such as anger, jealousy, spite etc. Here, medicine is acting in the service of social control, not our understanding of nature. It is is unconstrained by the requirement pertaining to all good science, which is to be concerned with fact and entirely ethically disinterested, not concerned with values. "Science" concerning value systems is religion, not science.

And Szasz again:
"The struggle for definition is veritably the struggle for life itself. In the typical Western [movie/novel] two men fight desperately for the possession of a gun that has been thrown to the ground: whoever reaches the weapon first shoots and lives; his adversary is shot and dies. In ordinary life, the struggle is not for guns but for words; whoever first defines the situation is the victor; his adversary, the victim. For example, in the family, husband and wife, mother and child do not get along; who defines whom as troublesome or mentally sick?...[the one] who first seizes the word imposes reality on the other; [the one] who defines thus dominates and lives; and [the one] who is defined is subjugated and may be killed.

Also, Rosenhan's study in 1973: Eight well-adjusted people acted as patients, presenting themselves for admission at psychiatric hospitals, reporting that they were hearing noises/voices...they otherwise told the truth about themselves. All but 1 diagnosed were diagnosed as schizophrenic, and then hospitalised and prescribed medication. Perhaps to be expected. But what was interesting was that the psychiatric staff interpreted all of their otherwise normal behaviour as being somehow "insane"...

The Little Red Schoolbook

It's amazing that a book that would be largely uncontroversial today received so much attention in the early 1970s. I mean, can you imagine, a book which explained to kids what sex actually involved. Australia was so much more a conservative place.
t's funny to hear how over the ages people have justified censorship on the grounds that people are somehow incapable of processing material deemed to be morally questionable...they really thought this book was going to tear apart the fabric of society and turn kids in to monsters. But then again I suppose some of the people who hated that book probably do think that kids nowadays are monsters
***
"What do you mean by 'it began as a joke' ? It was the joke that was brilliant!"

Richard Pratt

So the court says that Richard Pratt's company Visy ripped off Australians to the tune of $700million by fixing the prices of carboard boxes.
This really ought to outrage you a lot more than it probably does. Just about everything you buy has travelled through one of his overpriced cardboard boxes at some stage, so you've been paying through your eyeballs for everything.
But then the powerless court fines Visy $36million. Quite a return on his investment for Pratt, isn't it? Make $700 million, lose $36 million...it's a no brainer. Pratt should be in jail for a long time (without the possibility of managing a company afterwards), and he should've had to return the $700 million plus about another $700 million and interest on the lot...and then to start prosecuting everyone else aware of what was going on.

What's ironic though, is that it is ultimately EVERYBODY ELSE BUT PRATT that will pay the $36 million, because Visy will simply put up the price on its cardboard boxes. Although I guess Pratt also has to buy things from Boxes so he probably pays a couple cents to himself.
***
"A person today has no heart if they've never been a communist before, and has no brain if they're still one"

Trips

As of last year, I had been to 26 countries, but I had not travelled much within Australia, except along the East Coast (usually to the same places, involving a lot of alcohol and/or other substances) dozens of times. Now obviously the remote, the mysterious, the inexplicable is more interesting and stays with you for longer, but my shunning Australia as a tourist destination had become unforgiveable.
I've recently done two trips, so for all my international readers [Quite a lot in Turkey and Japan for some reason], I'll explain where I went and what I did.
My first trip was to Australia's red centre [Alice Springs in the Northern Territory and surrounding areas] on The Ghan train which left from Adelaide, capital of "The Defense State", South Australia. Australia is a very arid country; 2/3 of it is covered by desert., and the Red Centre is so named because it is filled with red rock, red sand, red sunsets and (where they are successful) red animals. And green spinifex, which we'll ignore. It is a beautiful area which contains Ayers Rock, the most incredible rock in the world. A gigantic clump which formed from a now-eroded mountain range. I recommend that all go here, as you see the Olgas too (one of the 7 natural wonders of the world).
Many Australians are unaware that Australia was originally inhabited by up to 690 different Aboriginal tribes, which spoke a staggering 250+ distinct languages, many of which are completely different. Most Aboriginals (sensibly) lived along the coasts, but those that couldn't eeked out an unlikely existence in a climatically extreme area. People often mock the Aboriginal people because their way of life didn't change for a long time (they did not invent many of the things that European settlers did). However, it should be pointed out that (aside from the small numbers of people on the coast) the Aboriginals couldn't grow crops due to the irregularity of rain, and struggled just to survive...Most of their artwork and myths are related to the scarcity of water and available food and how to find it. They also have some judicial autonomy in some regions, so tourists...behave yourselves. One wrong move and the Australian Court may give the Aboriginals the right to deal out tribal justice to you, which could involve spearing your leg...or, if you were Aboriginal and had earnt a death sentence but ran away, killing your next of kin [mother, father etc].

My second trip was to Melbourne, in Victoria. I also went along the Great Ocean Road (a road built by WW2 vets whom the government had to do something with), which has some beautiful views of the coast (including the Twelve Apostles).
We passed towns which hold races where drunk people swim from a lighthouse to a pub at night, past the towns like Torquay where US soldiers based in Australia invented surfing after WW2, and where 'surfing' clothes brands like Billabong and Rip Curl started up.
There was a town, all of the buildings in which burnt to the ground during fires, except that of an Austrian engineer who had specifically designed his house to survive a fire. Sitting on the veranda of his odd Bahaus home as the fire consumed everyone else's home in the town, he must have felt vindicated.
The Aboriginals came up again too. There was a convict and four fellow-escapees from prison who wandered around. This convict's four fellow-escapees became so desperate that they voluntarily returned to prison. The convict staggered on, walking through the town 1 hour's drive from Melbourne that is now Geelong. After falling unconscious, he woke up surrounded by Aboriginals, who nursed him back to health. He spent 30 years amongst the Aboriginals. then, 30 years on, the British recognised him as the escaped prisoner. In return for not going to prison, he helped translate the Aboriginal language in negotations in which the Aboriginal people sold the entire plot of land that is now Geelong to the British for a sack of hay. The Aboriginals had not understood the concept that man can own the land. They would be exploited because of this.
Another random fact: "Fair dinkum" is an Australian slang term which roughly means "Do you mean that seriously?" It came from Chinese goldminers who came to Australia in the 19th century goldrush, who used to excitedly shout "Den Kum" (sounds like 'dinkum'), which means "Real gold" in Cantonese, so you can see where the inquiry about the sincerity of the speaker comes from. Ok I'm as bored as you are. -- update, no, this language fact is apparently not true. folk etymology. but i'm leaving it in because it sounds funny.

Hirschhorn

A tribute to my retiring History of Maths lecturer, Mike Hirschhorn. (He also takes a whole bunch of other Maths subjects and is widely known at UNSW). He's an old-fashioned, old stubborn dude who is even better than myself at mental arithmetic, knows a lot, and you have to admit, he's an arsehole, but he's pretty funny too. I especially like it when he mocks essays written by students in my class. He goes "What kind of idiot wrote this? He says that trisecting an angle HAS BEEN LABELLED AS IMPOSSIBLE. Who LABELLED the problem as being impossible? Did somebody take a labelling machine and label an A4 sheet of paper containing the problem as impossible?" If you can imagine that kind of anal annoying but funny person.
****** "To avoid congestion, commuters are advised to distribute themselves along the platform.."

Which One

Some say that a person simply knows who they are. To another, that person is closed to change. And so we ask: "Have you considered..." and we hope for the best

Another SBS series

Next in the series of crazy, excellent SBS TV shows; it's a series called "Why Democracy".
One episode, called "For God, Tsar and Fatherland" features a fat man swimming in his freezing swimming pool while his servants do petty chores inside his sprawling castle and garden. He has convinced them that they need his religious guidance and that Imperial Russia needs a strong Orthodox faith to defeat the Imperialist, rotting West. The fat man illuminates, proving (quite convincingly) that God's soul is not democratic and (less convincingly), that therefore a society which doesn't recognise the necessity for an inherently hierarchical order in human society will inevitably crumble....Quasi-scientifically, he says that because successful wolf packs have this absence of equality, so too must humans follow God and then Tsar, and religion understands this "basic fact". I must that the plausibility of his argument [that religion allied to nationalism might prove a strong opponent to an increasingly divided, atheistic West] scares me a little. And also, within Western countries, those in the shrinking religious minority have more and more elitist, co-operatively inspired power than the rest of us divided atheists...look at the influence of the Christian far-right in USA and Australia especially. Oleg, a lawyer, is one of the adults oddly taken to this re-education camp by his ageing mother.

It is true that Russia is growing again, and the fat man has me thinking about the fact that more religiously observant societies tend to be poorer. Somebody once said that religion was only for the poor, weak or disillusioned, although now I think religion (at least in the modern world) causes the poverty which breeds national weakness and personal disillusionment, which reinforces the drive towards theocracy which then perpetuates the misery. Chicken and egg, and all chicken-or-egg problems have the same structure of solution...I suppose in the west the chickens are fewer and the eggs are easily broken.

Hey religious people out there, if citizens in a society are not striving for understanding and mastery of all things material (science)...in any case, what is non-material anyway? :p AND hoping for the most efficient acquisition of all things material (through capitalistic competition), it's not surprising that you should fail to obtain the material things which you desire, and so not surprising that your country lacks wealth and so global hard (military) and soft (cultural) power.
And down below, a man in Iran protesting against the Danish Mohammed cartoons holds a sign saying "Freedom of Expression Go To Hell" and in the backdrop, the words "Down with the USA" have been literally carved in to the wall, presumably an officially-funded artwork.

See whydemocracy.net -- The 10 questions posed by "Why Democracy?" are:

Who would you vote for as President of the World? What would make you start a revolution? Can terrorism destroy democracy? Is Democracy good for everyone? Are dictators ever good? Who rules the world? Are women more democratic than men? Why bother to vote? Is God democratic? Can politicians solve climate change?

Crazy Things

This post is dedicated towards the absurd scenes (newstainment) beamed in to our homes from SBS television. I don't mean to be cynical, I do love SBS, and it and the ABC are the only quality free TV stations.

On Forreign Correspondant, we are shown video of prisoners in a chronically overcrowded Philipino prison run despotically by the inept, cosmopolitan brother of the pretty Eurasian Cebu Governor, Gwen Garcia. Garcia has ordered these prisoners (many of whom were transferred there after spending up to 10 years STANDING due to lack of room in prisons WITHOUT TRIALS) to DANCE 2 hours a day. They're now dancing to a musical, led by transvestite murderers, who rock and shake to Michael Jackson's "Thriller" and other 80s songs.
Now that is exactly as Michael Jackson would have intended it to be.

When Sense is Nonsense

Religious people like to "make sense" out of random tragic events; the events assume a cosmic significance, or become part of the divine plan of a God.
Likewise, conspiracy theorists create conspiracies because it makes more sense to them that a big event should be caused by a powerful human agency; it is not comforting to realise how little control humans have over many events.

In doing so, these religious people and conspiracy theorists are creating a LOSS of sense...it takes sense to realise that many processes in the world are random, and therefore to truly understand.

**
Bipedal genital displays to strangers are now considered an offence rather than a courtship ritual legacy

Democracy

I notice that a lot of people confuse the concept of democracy with the state of freedom from various forms of oppression [Hardly unexpected, for the neural networks in our brains are basically just elaborate systems of association maps which correlate the firings in our brain which constitute different concepts, memories, emotions and other thoughts...].

Some countries are relatively democratic and the citizens enjoy relative freedom from oppression (Australia, Canada, Sweden etc). In other countries, citizens enjoy freedom from oppression, but live in a non-democratic environment (something closer to Hong Kong), and, in other countries, citizens are neither particularly free, nor is there a democracy (eg Saudi Arabia, Sudan). I admit that there is a strong correlation between freedom from oppression and the level of democracy in a country, but it is still isn't useful to conflate the two concepts.
Dictionary definitions of democracy tend to usually mention "majority rule", or the rule of representatives elected by the people and for the people. An incredibly vague definition when you think about it, but good enough for most purposes. Basically, we think that each person should at least have an equal say in determining which party is elected, come election time.

Surely this involves political parties not being allowed to accept donations from the public? From any type of institution, donations clearly motivate politicians not to govern in the interests of the general body of people, but on behalf of those that they receive money from, and especially those which helped them be elected. It's stupid, and it's certainly doesn't foster democracy. I don't know how the hell this practice could ever be justified, it doesn't smoothe the practical functioning of any democracy. But what irritates me is how easily people are seduced by gushing speeches from politicians about how great our democracy is, when, in fact, some citizens clearly have a far greater say in how the country is run than others by virtue of their greater wealth.

Even if you falsely believed that you had a say in who was elected, if you're poor you've got absolutely no chance of influencing the policies that the winning party actually implements when it gets in to power. All you can do is lodge a protest vote at the next election, which will simply hand power to another party who will also only listen to those that give it money...not a lot of voting power you have there, unless you've worked or bought your way to a position where you can donate money or advise the government....just like in Communist states where everyone tries to work for the government because of the priviledges one receives.
If you want to celebrate the fact that you live in Australia instead of in Saudi Arabia or Sudan, do so because you are relatively free from oppression in Australia, and enjoy a higher living standard in Australia. It is irrational pride to celebrate the democratic nature of our country, because we, like just about every other democratic country, have never been particularly democratic. Not that it's necessarily stupid for some to have more say than others; experts in science or history or anything else have to have more input on most matters than regular people (and perhaps the motivated deserve more influence than the apathetic), but the practise of donations [bribes] must stop.

While we're at it, it should be made illegal for political parties of any type to spend public money on advertising. It's so annoying to see the hundreds of millions of dollars pour down the drain in the lead up to the Australian election on politicians trying to get themselves re-elected.
There's no conceivable reason why citizens would want to pay to watch propaganda, unless that propaganda was bankrolled by people who want certain politicians to get in because they'll work for their agenda. And at the Ministry of Truth website, there are some good suggestions for making politicians more accountable for proven misinformation about facts. Another interesting website: http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/democracy.html

How strong is our democracy? Stronger than in say, Egypt, or Sudan, or China. But perhaps that's not enough to be proud of it, particularly if it may be weakening. Let's make these changes, and take further incremental steps towards a better democracy...

**
Scared monkeys hold each others' penises. I can't help but find that really weird

Gross National Happiness #2

As mentioned before, whilst I agree that there's more to quality of life than total income, it would be absurd to measure Gross National Happiness and try to improve it.



I'm constantly amazed to hear people questioning material wealth, citing the true fact that while we've grown richer, we've not grown happier. So what? Increases in human life expectancy from 40 years to 80 years today weren't accompanied by an increase in happiness either. Does that mean we should go back to living 40 years only? Once again, what justification is there to try to change the status quo? And why would leading a less material life as humans have done in the past make us any happier?



As an aside, human happiness levels are invariant over time and circumstance; even the gravest of misfortunes tends to cause only a temporary decrease in happiness, after which the person returns to their baseline happiness rating (which has remained in the 7.2-7.3/10 range since people started measuring in the 19th century). Likewise for events such as winning the lotto. We didn't evolve to be happy, we evolved to survive, and in all likelihood, those who were always very happy wouldn't be very good at surviving, especially when the ones they're struggling against can be very determined buggers.

It seems to me that the average citizen could be poor and score a 7.3/10 on happiness, or be richer and score a 7.3/10 on happiness...it is up to us to decide whether the average person is wealthy and a 7.3/10 or poor and a 7.3/10.

****
Sigmund Freud said the Irish cannot be psychoanalysed, and clitoral orgasm was a sign of madness

Immortality

Our bodies are sinking ships, and we like to salvage things from sinking ships before they go down. So we pass on our genes while we're alive, so that they don't go down with the vessel.

I've often wondered what profound changes human immortality would have for society. It is equally valid to wonder what profound changes would have to occur in society for us to figure out how to become immortal; I'll leave that to the science fiction writers.

In the meantime, being immortal would almost certainly reduce our incentive to have kids. As we live longer, we have kids when we're older and older. If we become immortal, we could always throw our genes off the sinking ship that is our bodies another time. Just as consumption goes down where there is deflation, why create a dependent NOW if our ship is not sinking but perhaps even being upgraded?

A great deal of people would do it anyway; it'd be strange, as a 900-year-old parent, to have kids who are 850, 700, 200 and 50 years old respectively. What would the concept of maturity mean when you have 700-year olds being taught by 800-year-olds? What would responsibility mean? Would there still be any social order to speak of? What would progress mean? [A sticky concept even today!] More disturbingly, what would people aim for? Thousand-year plans? Revolutionaries and conservatives alike mightn't be so happy to work towards anything in particular.
My best guess would be that the concept of a family would no longer make sense at all, and that we'd kill ourselves well before we turned 850. I'd also be betting humans wouldn't do so well as a species.
Anyone else like to speculate?

When Judges Err

Haha Judge Judy is funny, and generally, being smart, a good debater. She was wrong about one thing though. That cute little dog that attacked that cute little kid wasn't a poor little defenseless dog as she had said. To be sure, dogs have the ability to defend themselves against small children. That cute little dog took matters in to its own hands (or teeth), and took assertive, confident, and ultimately righteous steps to defend itself against the annoyance of that little girl poking at it with a stick, as her temporary cut attests. After all, the dog was in the right, and the cute but sadistic little girl was in the wrong.

The Schizophrenia Of Losing One's Faith

The old religious person in you dies, causing discomfort for the person, or even to more than one of the people inside of you, who has a dying individual inside himself/themselves.
Religion is an enormously powerful, well-adapted memeplex (combination of self-perpetuating ideas, habits, imitations, compulsions, social customs and expectations), and it, being enormously powerful and encompassing of the identity to which religion so expertly attaches itself, was very difficult to extricate. When one does, a great part of one's identity dies, and another is born; I'm just glad I managed to do it sooner rather than later, so that I developed a much stronger identity than that of belonging to this or that religion/tribe, dependent on just another person, or in this case, non-entity, for my fulfillment and to govern my thought.

Changing the rules before China rules

I like my own type of study on nationalism. Ask people to rate different countries out of 10. How much they like them. That simple.

France? 7/10, they say. Romania? 4/10. Germany? 8/10. Ivory Coast? 3/10.

What about China? What do you give it?

At APEC, some legitimately expressed their dislike of George Bush, which I happen to share. But where was the protest against leaders other than Bush who have committed far more heinous crimes? And where was the pressure on countries like China to change the conditions for its own citizens? I welcome Beijing to balance the power of Washington, but ultimately, I'd prefer to live under the autocratical rule of the USA than China.
Issues under which world governments are likely to unite in order to pressure China.

Environmentalism, Equality, Human rights, Corruption and Governance, Good Institutions, Safe Products.
The stress should be to change, but slowly...we cannot force these things on China overnight, and the prosperity of the whole world is dependent on the prosperity and stability of China.

In the mean-time, is there really a decline, a decadence in our own societies which threaten their ongoing viability? We're so dependent on our cheap imports from China! Where will the next great factories be? And it seems to me that 1860-1939 was where such a great flurry of important scientific, philosophical and economic work was done, and more is being outsourced offshore all the time. Obviously since then, we've also had the computer and Internet revolutions, but standards seem to have dropped according to longitudinal studies, with the exception of amongst skilled migrants.

Language Again

I continuously am fascinated by language.

Somebody once told me that I should be grateful to the English because they helped my native tongue conquer the globe, so that now I can communicate with so many people. I might've learnt the language of another conqueror or English anyway, but knowing English is advantageous over being say a Russian monolingual. I will learn more about the roots of this language.
"The adventures of English" TV show was fascinating and taught me more about English, which is a West Germanic language not a Romance one like French or Italian.
What makes English a superior language is that it has grabbed words from so many different languages, and this in term glorified English society and continuously legitimated the Monarchy, although stealing huge quantities of Gold from Spanish ships also probably was indispensable for British survival, just as a mosquito or lead piping probably brought down the Roman Empire.

English coevolved mostly with French following the Norman invasion of 1066 in which rich French people all ate the produce of the English, who became a slave race. Most of the wealthy Englishmen (who also spoke French) died at the hands of the black plague later, which is why fewer Brits know French now.
English has grabbed many German and Scandinavian words too, as well as mathematical ones from Arabic, and scientific ones from the Latin as well as other Romance languages.
It is fascinating to trace the roots back to Olde English, where Northern England people seemed to be speaking German. Or to hear the varied dialects of English spoken in Singapore or in Africa by the Iron Ladies of Liberia, or in different corners of any city by Italian or Chinese or Lebanese people (strange how it varies!). And to see the physiological changes produced by speaking a certain language.

Many Old English words narrowed in meaning - "wasten" for apple disappeared, and the word "apple", which used to refer to fruit in general, came to refer to apples only. A codger was a man that handled birds of prey, and now any old dude could be a codger. Weird indeed.

Overempathising

Is just one kind of multiple-personality disorder?
I, like Douglas Hofstadter, am a strange loop!

Learned Helplessness

We're apathetic about politics because we've learnt our helplessness, as a dog might. It follows that people will only become politically active if they are powerful or could be powerful; where they can see or could imagine that they do have influence and the ability to change things (if only by changing the opinions of others). The unabomber was certainly a madman, and a criminal. But he was right that people need to be involved in "the power process" more than they are today. Perhaps had he been he wouldn't have committed the crimes that he did.

Chaser Stunt

It's old news, but I'm adding my bit about it.
I thought it was damn funny, and served its purpose.
Did it make it to the news in your APEC country?

Russian Tankers and Machinery

Had a psychedelic dream of flashbacks to when I was in Cuba, and I saw an old Soviet cement mixer still in operation, slowly chugging its way up a steep incline, pollutant spewing through its exhaust pipe as its socialist messages inscribed on the mixer spun. The mixer must've been 50 years old, and the 25-year-old Russian Ladas, their steering wheels now reduced to the bars underneath, sped past it angrily.

Socialist realist art, I have to say, is awesome stuff; I'd like to see its productio n well past the death of the ideology. The stark, 2D characters, their red fists impossibly holding children as their smiley, cold faces beneath the sun turn proudly towards sleek tanks somehow tiptoeing through fields blooming with flowers

Vagueness

Vagueness, I love it. One of the harshest criticisms that we can make of another person's mind is that the thoughts within it are vague..."not thought out well"...'unsophisticated' by virtue of an impoverished vocabulary or a variety of other ailments.
But I love vague people. Through their vague utterances and the less-vague responses of people, I learn more about how they, and their peers and parents think. To be more specific (less vague?..hm. maybe not), I learn about what associations most people make. Less vague people often work with the same assumptions and associations, but cloaked up in more sophisticated language.

This sentence is false

One of the supposed paradoxes of logic - if

"This sentence is false" is true - then it is false - which presents a contradiction. But if it is false, then it is true, which also presents a contradiction.
"BUT WHICH ONE IS IT?"
There are thousands of other examples of the same structure - some which involve combinations of sentences, some of which refer to others. Etc.

I have a problem with their logic...
What exactly, the fuck, does the above sentence refer to? To the SENTENCE? A sentence is a string of words, and if it doesn't make reference to something real or representative of something real - like a tree - or a concept - then it may just be a MEANINGLESS sentence. Does a meaningless sentence need to be true or false? I don't think so.
In any case, the sentence doesn't make sense, because the statement which it attempts to say is FALSE is...empty. No logical statement is by itself a contradiction - false and true simultaneously. We need to work with premises and statements of fact and then test whether other sentences are validly implied by the above, or not.

Glossary Game

Something I play when I'm bored in psych class...

See how well you can define things in the glossary...

Hey you learn a few things. Like how to think about the terms precisely and economically, and you get to anticipate what terms probably mean and see how right or wrong you were.
Just a quirk.

Perfect Victim

Crazy - This woman was abducted when she was 15, and kept in a dungeon for 20 years as a sex slave (amongst other things) - repeatedly tortured psychologically and physically, and kept barely alive. The man and his accomplice wife who captured her would take her for walks on a leash in their gigantic backyard. Gradually, she became convinced that she was the legal property of her tormentor, and when the couple let her roam around the town 20 years later (telling her to be back by that evening), she obeyed, knowing nothing better. Years later when out on the town she realised that she was a slave, somebody finally managed to convince her that this was not legal, and she allowed the memories to come back...

Fascinating and sad how deeply confused people can become over time.

But Life

Often we think "Hey, I'd like to do this now, BUT..." or "I'd like to see you now, BUT..."

Obviously, we're not entirely free to do what we want to do when we want to do it...we can allow some spontaneity in to our lives, but many things require a great degree of planning, and this has various, often unanticipated consequences for one's own happiness.

Life and other mundane things are the "but"

I often think when people talk about their "soul"and things like that (or spiritual needs), they're talking about those high-order needs like self-actualisation - reading, the development of a distinct and strong personality, the achievement of one's potential.
Eating and drinking and sleeping and shitting are usually thought of as not connected to the "soul" or "spirit", because the soul or spirit (for me, the brain that wants to think when it wants to think) longs to not be dependent on anything, not to be living bound up in flesh, to be waiting for a paycheck to clear or to work just to allow one to work more rather than to live.

This is also why when people are too busy with life that they tend to complain that there is a spiritual void in their lives. It is just not being able to focus on things that one WANTS to focus on, and when they want to. Those on a spiritual quest might find that void filled with a little more more free time in which to think. To use their brains. If they haven't forgotten how.

***

Capitalismis a good slave and a bad master

The Poor

Grow or decline not in strength, certitude or spirit, but in numbers only.

Revolutions don't happen quickly, only change does. When people talk about "The Russian Revolution" or some other event confined to a time period of a few years, they're talking about changing circumstances in Russia, not a change in Russians.

Human behaviour in all its potentialities is invariant over the short-term, but changing circumstances and political realities create a strong illusion that human behaviour is highly variable...unless one wants to narrowly define human behaviour as just whatever they happen to be doing in some corner of the century.

What I'm interested are revolutions in the way that people think. Take the Darwinian Revolution...that has been taking place for more than a hundred years.... or the possibility of real changes in our genotype. and the consequent effects..

Free Will

Confusion, illusion, error, self-deceit and deceit all rolled in to one.

Maternalistic and Paternalistic Societies

What exactly is a maternalistic society and how would I know if I were in one? Refer to the past if you must, but try to imagine it as an adaptation to or restructuring of the world today.

Experiment with dog

Haha, I pretend that one of his toys is having sex with the other, to see his jealous reaction. Having a dog is endlessly fun. Trying to work out what is going on in his little head, how he feels about things, and how he will react is always amusing.
And cruel.
For every one of my experiments (even those that give the dog food), the dog is wondering why he must jump through such strange loops to get the food which I deliberately entice him with, making him so jealous!

Sport

People screaming. People, often those who feel powerless, feeling part of something bigger, being outraged or sad or joyous. The mania and the passion of the crowd and all the ridiculous behaviour that it creates. People crying because their team lost. Hey, I've been passionate before about Australian Cricket Team/Newcastle Utd/Rugby Team/Hockey Team/Swimmers etc etc etc (list goes on forever)...but tears...because your team lost? Gimme a break! The Game more important than life? No way!

I'm rediscovering the joys of playing sport after a long period of laziness but being a spectator usually doesn't do it for me.
Except for Rugby Union.... Go The Wallabies!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lawyers

Which professions primarily involve an optimistic attitude, and/or idealism, aside from, say, some roles in the UN?

I was thinking that lawyers can and must be "pessimists", in a "poor mood" because they have to be able to anticipate everything that could go wrong in a contract when advising you.
The one that catastrophises the best and anticipates every single snare and disaster is the best lawyer

Banana Smell Everywhere!

Can somebody explain this???

I ate a banana 4 nights ago, and I've been smelling banana ever since. Everywhere. Not only at home. It's a strong smell, and it's ALWAYS there. When I go to sleep and wake up and when I'm at uni and at the movies and even when I'm eating other foods, I'm smelling banana. All the time.

This is the third time this ever-present-smell thing has happened, and each time, it has involved banana - last time it lasted for about 6 days.
It's doing strange things for my memory too - am constantly remembering things that I did during the last 'episode' of all-present banana smell. I'm busy trying to enjoy myself now so that I'll have good memories for next time...
Btw, I've not had any traumatic events occur in my life involving a banana

Efficiency

No, people, email does not make life 'easier'; that we can instantly communicate with anyone anywhere does not make life easier overall.

No technological fix will permanently make life easier - this is because life is a competitive game..Any invention which increases our productivity (letting us do what we could do in eight hours in two) will only raise the expectations of us, and we will still work 8, but accomplish much more perhaps. Anybody who tries to achieve the same number of things in two will be destroyed by those willing to work as long or longer than before.

Strange Crime

Excerpts from a dictionary of crime:
-A man who would hold pre-pubescent girls at knifepoint on their way home from school, ordering them to take off their shoes and socks. He then licked their toes and ran off
-The panty bandit - a man who would rob stores, order women to take off their panties and run off.
Read about the Panopticon!

Ignorance

Often enquiring about the certainty of another's opinions shows very quickly how ignorant they are; there are some people who believe very strongly that we (and/or humans) know a lot, and others who are sure we know very little.

And others have no idea what exactly, the fuck, "knows a lot" or "knows little" means.

United States

When I went to study in the USA, what I found odd was the vague familiarity of America. It's people and the way of life. Obviously America is varied (although not as much as most countries are, perhaps). But nothing was very foreign, and some things seemed more familiar than their 'equivalents' in my home country, Australia. For example, the archetype of "the nerd" in Hollywood movies such as "Revenge of the Nerds" seemed more easily recognisable in America than at home. Such is the power of Hollywood to alter one's identity.

Random

I think parts of the brain of the human species are going to atrophy as we use them less and less. Apart from all the things which we'll probably add to the human brain, natural processes might leave us unrecogniseable to people living today.
What abilities do you think might go first?
Memory?

Posts to come:

Psychology: Anxiety disorders, Adolph Hitler's personality, associations, dieting, masochism
AND
The UN, hosts in Japan, crowd behaviour, informal "preference surveys" (ratings) of different countries, fund managers.

Also, it's about time I got stuck in to religion; my attitudes to it have been obvious but I'm yet to explicitly comment on it.
- The presence of religion in language
- Environmentalism as a new religion (Paying to make oneself carbon neutral is like paying the church to forgive you for your sins..)
- Evangelicals

Late nights

It's 2am, and I'm doing a heavy gym session and listening to Stargazer, by Rainbow. One of the earliest metal songs. I'm in a pretty manic mood, fluctuating wildly. Very unusual for me.

In the heat and the rain
/With the whips and chains
/To see him fly
/So many die
/We built a tower of stone
/With our flesh and bone
Just to see him fly/
But don't know why
/Now where do we go?
...
Take me back/
You, give me back my will
I imagine a Mayan worship scene and a human-invented God, nourished on the blood of sacrifices.

The Weirdness Of Dreams

I used to keep a dream diary. Just read some old ones.
Ah, the weirdness of dreams

3/6/03: I am on ski trip, although I resemble myself now, not as I looked on ski trip. Andrew, the excitable “Jumbaroo Fun and Games” camp leader is behaving strangely. He approaches me slowly with an increasingly insane, deeply upset look on his face. I suddenly become aware that I am desperately close to the edge of a massive cliff. I actually pause momentarily to consider why we’re situated here…is today abseiling? His continuing approach forces me to disregard the circumstances, at least temporarily, and return to the reality of the situation. I become angry. Angry at the inattention I have just paid toward the urgent danger that he poses to my safety. In those seconds in which I had stopped to contemplate, he could’ve done anything. I tense myself, facing him. He cannot verbalise the reason for his state of distress. His jaw moves erratically, but only squeaks come out. People crowd around us, in a circle. They seem to be analysing my movements, rather than enquiring about what is wrong, or attempting to resolve the dangerous situation. My perception is that the overwhelming ‘opinion’ of the crowd is against me. I cannot qualify this opinion. Surely, I’m not responsible for Andrew’s frenzied state! I stare at him straight in the eyes, and then effortlessly toss him over the vertical cliff. He seemed to be weightless; my impression was that he was a bag of hot air. While in the air, he twists around. As he disappears, his body shape suggests he is meditating. He reminds me of a Buddhist monk. Why is he so calm, as he hurtles down?

6/8/03: I am at a concert of some kind..possibly Metallica as I recently bought a ticket off eBay (real life). The people who accompany me are the most unlikely Metallica fans; Terry, Dani, Danny. There is a metal framework stretching up high in to the sky (in an Eiffel Tower like fashion). All those at the concert are tugging on to the tower, however with no apparent fright of the fall that might occur at any moment. There is a pool below, but it would not provide safety as it is full of people. People are playing volleyball from ‘floor to floor’ on this metal tower. The smell of chlorine and summer warmth seems to be everywhere. Water seems to be streaming down from the top…..I adventure to the top and find that there is ANOTHER POOL at the top…I go up, and open a door through which I climb in to it…water does not come down on me as I open this trapdoor. At the top, is a “private party”, many of the girls are topless. I am glad to be at this party. Wakes up.

Weird indeed. I accept that some dreams give us insights in to our subconscious thoughts, but most of them are just random thoughts swirling around.

Growing up

Some people will inject themselves with botox more and more frequently
Have facelifts more and more frequently
Die their grey hair more and more frequently
Exercise frenetically to keep in shape
Continue to buy clothes that young people buy
and a myriad of other things to deny an obvious fact - that one is ageing.
I accept that some people still "feel young" or have a lot of energy, but what I'm talking about is people who've not grown up, matured, or those whose ego otherwise rests on them being able to do what young people can do. There are a lot of adults who refuse to grow up emotionally and intellectually; others still cling to tooth-fairy-esque notions of God or live in sharp moral worlds inhabited by God and the Devil, cops and robbers and other things.

Wouldn't it be easier to just accept ageing and do so gracefully?
To accept that your role in society and your behaviour will accordingly change?
Wouldn't that make it a little less hard when your turn to die comes? Or are you just preying for a way to reverse the signs of death too?

Addiction #3

Why is kicking an addiction hard, beyond the physiological reasons? Say, for example, a caffeine addiction. Caffeine enables a lifestyle that is impossible without it. One can do more of whatever one pleases. The cost, of course, is the come-down (although this can be made to fall at convenient times), as well as health risks eg kidney failure. Part of why kicking the addiction is hard is because you have to sacrifice the lifestyle benefits, and change your habits, and perhaps even your work/life balance...it's not only the chemicals themselves!

Psychology

Ah, Psychologists. The power to help humans or to manipulate them towards almost any ends. How sad it is that we can so easily be understood and manipulated by marketers, psychologists, politicians with an innate (or learned, heh) understanding of human psychology etc etc

Had a lecture was about Variable Reinforcement: If you reward a worker after them doing something 60 times, they'll invariably take a short break after doing it, then get back to working towards their next reward. Likewise if you reward them after every 180 times, except that they will break for longer; usally more than 180/60=3 times as long as before. But make their rewards arrive at uncertain intervals (eg sometimes twice in a row, sometimes with a gap of 100 in between), and they will break for almost no time. This is part of the reason why gambling is so addictive!!
There is such a fine science to the way in which certain pokie machines, for example, will reward people, to keep them on the track towards destruction (others simply pay-out according to a fixed probability-generating mechanism).
On that note, 21% of the world's pokie machines are in Australia. We really are a nation of losers.

Another one I've noticed: If a journalist simply states that public opinion is "overwhelming" on some matter, it influences people enormously. This is because (most) people don't generally like the idea that they disagree strongly with all their friends, and the rest of society. eg after publishing an article saying that "an overwhelming majority of Australians support gay marriages", experiments suggest people who have just read this article will profess more support for gay marriages than those that didn't read the article (although many who don't will lie in both scenarios, this is controlled for).
Some other funny ones
-- The man who works out why he left his wife AFTER he left her
-- You can help your chances of getting a job by imitating everything that an interviewer does during the interview. They lean forward, so do you. They talk faster, so do you. They lean back, yep, you've guessed it, you lean back. Just repeat his tone, direction etc.
A pity though that psychology, like other fields, often ends up serving the moral agenda of its practitioners.

*******
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjGkRFFBd0A

Archaeology

Historians of the future will have to be able to program computers, so as to interpret past data storage formats eg jpeg in 2030 and use their insights to piece together what has happened in the past. Or to create a program to convert old formats to new etc etc.

Scientists and Philosophers

Hey, Philosophy can be fascinating.
But one has to ask at some point why it is that it has essentially failed in many respects. Sure, philosophers will disagree with my criteria for failure. One of my reasons is that the same questions keep popping up, unsolved, and sometimes in different guises.

The questions of Philosophy might be eternal because they're relevant to the existential anxieties of humans (but do not have universal significance); I suspect religion shares this feature with philosophy, and naive, first-year-at-school philosophy probably activates the same areas of the brain (logic, ethics and philosophy of language would be less likely to do so!!)

Or Philosophy's questions be eternal because they are poorly phrased questions.
They might be poorly or imprecisely phrased. They might be phrased as well as is possible, but natural language itself is obviously inadequate for understanding natural processes, which, say, are modelled by computer models governed by mathematical equations or any number of other things. Why wouldn't the same be true for the brain, leaving neurobiology as the vital tool to understanding questions of identity, belief and other issues which appear in philosophy?

The questions often seem to basically refer to nothing, just artefacts of the human mind. They often create artificial dichotomies, contradict scientific evidence (which renders the question non-sensical eg Identity Theory), or contradict themselves when taken as a set.

Doing philosophy can give insights but eventually frustrates. Not because it raises more questions; that, I find an advantage. But because it never answers your questions. And science will. That is the lesson of the last few centuries; the scientific method answers questions to the required degree of certainty, metaphysical postulating does not. All that does is create religious warfare or leave humans too preoccupied to manage their own existence.
This is probably essentially the same problem religious people have - introducing a God may help you to "solve" your questions, only if you are complicit in convincing yourself that they're solved. Which usually involves NOT OBSERVING THE PHYSICAL WORLD, instead postulating axioms and drawing the logical conclusions from them.

I think Philosophy is best used as a tool to clarify one's thought processes, although I will think along the lines of its varying branches for the rest of my life.
I am becoming more aware of the fact that I agree with Rudolph Carnap and his Vienna circle of logical positivists. They call themselves the defenders of the scientific method.
Philosophers could claim that "only knowledge acquired through the scientific methods of hypothesis, test" and the techniques of skeptical enquiry, conservatism etc is itself a philosophical statement, an epistemological belief. That would like trying to claim somebody else as their own. Perhaps a Christian saying that a Muslim really is Christian at heart or something else weird like that.

Military People

Related to the blog post below;

Aren't military personnel often viewed as would-be-criminals?

I've heard that domestic crime levels in the US have fallen while 250,000 of tis soldiers are fighting wars in Iraq etc.

Michael Moore seems to insinuate that many of the soldiers in Iraq don't have many prospects back at home, and are reliant upon military salaries. Statistics would seem to confirm this view; soldiers predominantly come from lower-class, lower socio-economic backgrounds, with poorer education levels and fewer prospects.
It is probably a good bet that the average soldier is also more aggressive than the average person.

If war weren't so expensive, a smart but evil state might send its soldiers to war to
a) reduce crime levels at home
b) genetically engineer the population to be less aggressive by changing the gene pool

Aligning Incentives

Our society is based around getting people to do things by giving them the right incentives...

Although I dislike him in many ways, I've always thought Michael Moore's suggestion that US senators who vote to apply military force must send their own kids to war is....heading in the right direction. A little extreme and/or impractical, perhaps, but heading in the right direction.

Things have gotten so dangerous and ridiculous that even high-ranking military personnel have stopped going to certain areas of Iraq in which more lowly soldiers are fighting "because it is too dangerous". People who make such big decisions claim that they pay a price of conscience when it becomes apparent to them that they've made a big mistake, but I'd like to see them have a much greater, more tangible incentive to make informed, well-planned decisions on such big issues.

God as parenting authority

People often like to invoke the concept of a God to reinforce the virtues of obedience to blind authority.

For example, some priests, due to ideological reasons, would rather not supply condoms to African populations to protect against AIDS infection.

When they say that God is punishing those that come down with AIDS, this is what they're saying:

"I want only the obedient individuals who submit to my perception of my God's demand for abstinence to survive. I would rather the obvious solution (condoms), which allows promiscuity and is effective protection against AIDS not exist. I'd prefer to kill off those promiscuous ones, to punish them on behalf of my God, because I desire to live in a society which does not tolerate maximal sexual freedom for humans"

There are parents, too, who'd prefer to see their child come to serious harm in order for their child to learn some ideological 'lesson' rather than to just take measures to prevent that child being harmed

Nature vs Nurture, Learning vs Instinct

Learning vs Instinct (sometimes characterised as Innateness vs Learning, or Genes vs Environment, etc). People, again, things are NOT THIS SIMPLE. The above is a false dichotomy. There are extremely inflexible learnt behaviours, for instance. And then there's epigenetics, the inheritence of genetic changes due to environmental cues... Probe a little deeper and stop vascillating between two extremes, both of which are wrong. Matt Ridley's NATURE VIA NURTURE might be a good place to start

Dogmatism

The Swedes are less dogmatic than the rest of us. They're been exploring a substitute for nicotine, which is also addictive, but does less harm to the body and removes the craving for nicotine.
But ideologues in countries such as Australia still are opposed to such measures on ethical grounds. Utter stupidity, we really ought to be less dogmatic.

A funnier one - toilet manufacturers in the Netherlands often print a fly on urinals - turns out that men like to aim their stream of pee at the fly, and the bathrooms with such imprints end up being much cleaner than the average bathroom.

Voodoo and Haitian Science

Who would've known that Haitian Zombie science may actually have a basis in reality?

Haitian accounts write of men who went blue during death, were buried, and were 'resurrected' by a black-magician 12 hours later, and turned in to slaves. These were justifiably dismissed by Western Science as mumbo-jumbo.
It turns out, though, that there is a clinical state which scientists can now induce (using a Haitian root) in which the patient appears to be completely dead (but is not). Their hearts are actually beating though, just extremely infrequently, but enough. Giving them a psychoactive drug even two days later can sometimes "restore them" to life. Such a drug mashes parts of their brain, bringing them in to an obedient, trance-like state, during which they can then be turned in to slaves...similar to the phenomenon of hypnotism. Haitians wrote of another bush which could be used, which contains exactly this psychoactive drug.

Another group of scientists examined a claim of acupuncture, namely that a needle in a certain area of the (thigh, I think) can force a baby to re-orient itself within the womb so that it comes out head-first. In a trial of 1000 cases, in 70% of the cases, such a procedure worked. What I'd be interested to know, is how was such an "energy point" discovered. The methodology which might give rise to such a discovery is completely unknown to me.
Anyway, I take such things with a grain of salt, but the possibility of zombie slaves is too cool to ignore.

Introspection

Self-deception evolves to serve deceit.

It would appear that if you can be completely blind to aspects of your own personality, you can more easily deceive others about a range of things. If you think about this, the liar is more likely to be the one that fails to introspect. But then selective exposure and honesty is another way to conceal things...

Schizophrenia

Split between thinking and feeling.
This is what is known as schizophrenia. Although, see back to DSM IV post...
According to this definition, it seems certain that everybody has a mild case of it. Who out there really experiences their emotions and their thoughts as a perfect harmony...?
Few people act according to abstract ethical philosophies, because we do not usually have a deeply emotional response to intellectual realisations during our pursuits of abstract moral theories. And we often do not form our theories on the basis of what we feel.

The idea that thoughts and emotions could be mutually informative of the other can only be true up to a point...

Disorders and DSM IV

A 'disorder' is meant to not only make you weird/unnormal within a social group, but to reduce your ability to survive. (A friend put it that "weirdness" of character is usually a phenomenon which arises from analysing an individual relative to a SMALL group. That is, in amongst a group of 80, somebody might appear "weird", but in a larger population, say 20 million, there may be 50,000 others like that person. A humorous way to see this is that if a genius is a 1-in-a-million person, there are at least 6,000 geniuses in this world.). Once we've measured averages, we could construct Bell curves in many dimensions, and determine an overall "weirdness" factor for any given person.

As always, things which under many circumstances help people survive (but don't necessarily earn the affections of others in their social group) such as aggression/cunning/lying or even a compulsion to steal are characterised negatively, as disorders. Such a classification is understandable from the point of view of society. [We have an uneasy relationship with social manipulation, finding it at times funny and, usually, a flavour intelligence, which we like, but then, it is also exploitative, and we don't like things which threaten ourselves...so socially awkward people would be more likely to condemn socially exploitative behaviour]

But looking at DSM IV (Diagnostics and Statistics Manual, what psychologists use to diagnose their patients), it seems that a ridiculous number of normal behavioural traits are being called 'disorders'.
What DSM IV contains is nothing more than a moral straitjacket being put on the normal spectrum of human behaviour.
Often, the 'disorders' that it describes are HIGHLY adaptive, or useful under many circumstances. In other areas, its criteria are at times absurd, mutually re-inforcing or contradictory, self-fulfilling, or otherwise useless.

Hitler

Two random facts about Hitler which most people probably don't know

He is strongly suspected to have killed his niece, and 6 of his 7 fiances attempted suicide (some successfully)...
His hatred of Jews was contributed to by his jealousy of the famous philosopher of language Ludwig Wittgenstein, a Jew in his class who would always outdebate Hitler

Common Surnames UPDATED

My lecturer jokes that people with common surnames should be embarassed of themselves. But the not-so-funny thing is that many take this very seriously, and change their surname to a less common one, to cover up their so-called peasant, inferior predecessors.
Thus a (black)Smith becomes a doctor or a wise man.

Articles

Some particularly interesting ones:

The hidden racism often Nerds: I must say, I do dislike and try not to identify with rapper culture, although I definitely disagree that this makes me racist. And no way could I ever be a white supremacist. Those people disgust me.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/magazine/29wwln-idealab-t.html?ex=1343361600&en=ac18fa16f2d11ac3&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Fascism on the rise in Russia
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=471324&in_page_id=1770

Language Fun

"I had a book stolen from the library"

-- Can be interpreted in 7 different ways!!! Try it!!


**
WTF: The Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. Feminist Science.

Modafinil

Has anyone ever taken the cognitive enhancer Modafinil? Does it work?

Please share your experiences!

Explanation as orgasm

When we say we love knowledge for its own sake, aren't we simply saying that we get a kick out of discovering things?
Just as somebody may become addicted to heroin, the serial academic may have become addicted, chemically, to the rush that accompanies the discovery of something profound. Or to the hunt for knowledge..

Morality and Delusion

There is no morally just tax rate. A religious friend once said to me that "as there is no moral good in reality, all that we can hope for is that people are so deluded in their attempts to discover reality, that they think, with a religious fervor, that there IS an absolute morality, which just happens to be welfare maximising...this, they will blindly follow…"
I found this a startling admission - not to mention an odd statement to reconcile with his own religiousness - a very strange life philosophy.
Not to mention how challenging and deceitful it would be to try to bend their own perceptions of some absolute moral good in to continuously-changing "welfare-maximising" outcomes...

Human Nature and Government

I was thinking that various political parties have different conceptions of human nature, which are evident in their policies.

For example, consider attitudes toward charity. When the Australian Liberal party saying we should rely on voluntary donations to charity, they place a (perhaps misguided) faith in participants in free markets to give money to the poor (say, by setting up, and donating to, a charitable institution). In doing so, they affirm that they believe human nature is good enough to ensure that the most destitute will be looked after by the more fortunate individuals. An individual who doesn’t believe this may believe it necessary to charge a higher tax rate than the Liberals would. ie, the Australian Labor party.

Any dimension of policy could be analysed with the respect to the party's implied ideas about human nature.

Chaos Theory of Axioms

I was writing the other day about how strange it is when you start out from slightly different axioms you may end up with entirely different theories, ethical philosophies etc...a sort of "chaos theory of axioms", for a sensitive dependence on the initial axiom

A guy on edge.org writes (and I love the clarity);
"...What we discovered was fascinating: Each major philosopher seems to take a small number of metaphors as eternal and self-evident truths and then, with rigorous logic and total systematicity, follows out the entailments of those metaphors to their conclusions wherever they lead. They lead to some pretty strange places. Plato's metaphors entail that philosophers should govern the state. Aristotle's metaphors entail that there are four causes and that there cannot be a vacuum. Descartes' metaphors entail that the mind is completely disembodied and that all thought is conscious. Kant's metaphors lead to the conclusions that there is a universal reason and that it dictates universal moral laws. These and other positions taken by those philosophers are not random opinions. They are consequences of taking commonplace metaphors as truths and systematically working out the consequences"

Birth-order theory

States that the older child should be systematically different to later children.
On average, they should generally be more conservative, more disciplinarian and more conservative. And, ultimately, more independent.
This is because, amongst other things the parents will probably pay more attention to the first child, being parents for the first time. They will spend more time trying to make the baby "perfect" than their next. They will be more disciplinarian and less lax generally, and will likely make more mistakes, being novices.
Obviously this might apply in a different way - the opposite could be true in some cases.
The point is though that parenting attitudes change over time, and they try to learn from their mistakes, with a probable affect on the children's personalities. Does this apply to anyone out there?

Another woman I respect

Stacey Gelgor.
She picked up on what must have been a Freudian slip of mine?
She's probably smarter than Ayaan Hirsi Ali anyway.
She may be of uncontroversial appearance and has no fatwa against her, but I'm sure she's got some dark ideas brewing, and is definitely busy changing the world. Cheers to Stacey!

Conflicts of Interest

An increasingly complex society = inevitably, more conflicts of interest. To what degree can we expect society to manage this? Say one person M owns shares in X where company X owns a stake in a fund that owns shares in Y and company Y’s CEO’s cousin is married to or in some economic partnership with M. Could that be called a conflict of interest? Ok, that's a little extreme, and nobody wants a new monolithic bureaucracy out there to monitor such things.
But the law seems so dodgy and uninterested in this respect.

I'd be interested to know from anyone out there what standards exist in what environments..I can't find anything on law sites. It seems there are so many other ways in which one's actions could be affected without being directly linked materially or socially to somebody else. What about the trail of nepotism in the suburbs, in company hiring policy...it would seem unfair to demand a business owner justifies a decision to hire his daughter over a million other more qualified people, but...but...argh. Idealism again.