02 SEP 2016 by ideonexus
De-Romanticizing Voting
Ugh. In actual outcomes, voting isn't an expression of your heart, your soul, or even your emotion. The result of a vote isn't "the right thing" or "the thing I love" or "the cure for social ills" or "the perfect solution." It's not a mechanism of protest or a chance to be dramatic, and it's not a "gesture" or a stand -- that's what demonstrations, letter writing, and petition campaigns are for. A vote is a functional choice for the preferable viable outcome, an act that adds 1 to a tally th...19 MAR 2015 by ideonexus
The Chain of Human Rights to Morphological Freedom
The right to life, the right to not have other people prevent oneself from surviving, is a central right, without which all other rights have no meaning. But to realize the right to life we need other rights.
Another central right for any humanistic view of human rights is the right to seek happiness. Without it human flourishing is unprotected, and there is not much point in having a freedom to live if it will not be at least a potentially happy life. In a way the right to life follows from...From Anders Sandberg's "Morphological Freedom – Why We Not Just Want It, but Need It"
24 MAR 2013 by ideonexus
Enthusiasm Improves Productivity
When we are engaged in what we are
doing, all sorts of things happen. We
persist longer at difficult problems—and
become more likely to solve them. We
experience something that psychologist
Tory Higgins refers to as flow, a presence
of mind that not only allows us to extract
more from whatever it is we are doing but
also makes us feel better and happier: we
derive actual, measurable hedonic value
from the strength of our active
involvement in and attention to an activity,
even if the activi...And it creates a cycle of enthusiasm as our accomplishments increase our positive outlook on the task, increasing our focus.
19 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Opening Text from the Declaration of Independence
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endo...Affirming equality according to the laws of nature.