Wikipedia Works Because It Focuses on Process

Over the ensuing two decades, editors amended policies to cope with conspiracy theorists, revisionist historians, militant fandoms, and other perennial goblins of the open web. There were the three core content guidelines of Neutral Point of View, Verifiability, and No Original Research; the five pillars of Wikipedia; and a host of rules around editor conduct, like the injunction to avoid ad hominem attacks and assume good faith of others, defined and refined in interlinked articles and essay...

 Bushido is Zen for the Samurai

The Rinzai School of Zen was introduced into Japan in 1191 by the Japanese T'ien-t'ai monk Eisai ( 1141-1215 ), who established monasteries at Kyoto and Kamakura under imperial patronage. The Soto School was introduced in 1227 by the extraordinary genius Dog en ( 1200-1253 ), who established the great monastery of Eiheiji, refusing, however, to accept imperial favors. It should be noted that Zen arrived in Japan shortly after the beginning of the Kamakura Era, when the military dictator Y ori...

 Skepticism on Blue Zones

I started getting interested in this topic when I debunked a couple of papers in Nature and Science about extreme ageing in the 2010s. In general, the claims about how long people are living mostly don’t stack up. I’ve tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world (the other 20% are from countries you can’t meaningfully analyse). Of those, almost none have a birth certificate. In the US there are over 500 of these people; seven have a birth certificate. Even worse, only abou...

 Hiroshima's Remarkable Recovery

Other examples of remarkable societal resilience are more recent. We can consider, for example, the atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945. The bomb the United States dropped was 1,500 times more powerful than any previously used.32 The fireball at the hypocenter of the blast reached several thousand degrees Celsius within one-ten thousandth of a second before igniting all flammable material within one and a half miles.33 Ninety percent of the city’s buildings were at leas...

 Types of Do

Japanese term, written in Kanji (Chinese character) Do (ppronounced as Doo) is translated semantically as the Way, the Path, the Truth, the Art, Tao and many scholars had implied the diverse epistemological meanings with reference to one's interpretive subjectivism of Do concepts associated with human pursuits. We strive to achieve highest human potentials physically, mentally and spiritually through artistic endeavors, and through its process we find deep meaning of self-worth, reason for ex...

 Okinawa Culture as a Blue Zone

We found our second Blue Zone on the other side of the planet, about 800 miles south of Tokyo, on the archipelago of Okinawa. Okinawa is actually 161 small islands. And in the northern part of the main island, this is ground zero for world longevity. This is a place where the oldest living female population is found. It's a place where people have the longest disability-free life expectancy in the world. They have what we want. They live a long time, and tend to die in their sleep, very quick...