20 MAR 2018 by ideonexus
Social Media Distorts Socialization Through Gamification
The problem with social media isn't that we aren't sure how much privacy we want to have or how long the things we say should stick around. The problem is that social media is a gamification of social interaction, and it causes us to behave in ways that we normally wouldn't.
In normal life, people don't take turns loudly stating their political opinions to a room of people and then looking to see how many people agree with them. They also don't have product placements or subtle advertising i...
1 08 JAN 2018 by ideonexus
Negative Attention is Better Than No Attention at All
To give and receive attention is a fundamental human need. In the 13th century, King Frederick II of Sicily wanted to find out what language children would naturally grow up to speak if they were never spoken to. He took babies from their mothers at birth and placed them in the care of nurses who were strictly forbidden to either speak to or touch them. The babies, as it turned out, didn’t grow up to speak any language, as they all died of attention deprivation within a fortnight of the start... 1 
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notes02 SEP 2016 by ideonexus
Neil DeGrasse Tyson's Rationalia
In Rationalia, the Constitution stipulates that a body of convincing evidence needs to exist in support of an idea before any Policy can established based on it. In such a country, data gathering, careful observations, and experimentation would be happening all the time, influencing practically every aspect of our modern lives. As a result, Rationalia would lead the world in discovery, because discovery would be built into the DNA of how the government operates, and how its citizens think....26 FEB 2014 by ideonexus
Science is Growing Bigger and Bigger
The history of physics is littered with unrealized grand experiments: old blueprints buried in file drawers, half-built machinery packed in crates, excavated earth filled with pooling rainwater—the detritus of Big Science. As the frontier of human knowledge pushes forward, so, too, does the cost and the complexity of further exploration. Telescopes grow larger. Space is probed at greater depths. Atomic particles are smashed more forcefully. Many scientific questions now demand resources that ... 1 notes
notesAnd in order to keep expanding it is requiring more and more collaboration between countries and more resources to build more and more epic experiments.
08 OCT 2013 by ideonexus
Evolutionary Theory Does Not Justify Greed
Human nature as it now exists was formed in accord with the laws of evolution under conditions pertaining well before recorded human history. Fossils discovered in Ethiopia and Kenya now date human ancestors back at least 5 or 6 million years. Distinctly human species arose in Africa at least 2 million years ago, while present evidence indicates that modern humans are only about 100,000 years old. Therefore the conditions relevant to which genetic mutations were advantageous and which were no... 1 notes
notesMany economic theories relying on "human nature" assume we are greedy, but this is not supported by the evidence. We might just as likely be generous and that is our evolutionary advantage.
24 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
Sexual Selection to Explain Human Intelligence
Even if the survivalist theory could take us from the world of
natural history to our capacities for invention, commerce, and knowledge, it cannot account for the more ornamental and enjoyable aspects of human culture: art, music, sports, drama, comedy, and political ideals. At this point the survivalist theories usually point out that along the transverse lies the Central Park Learning Center. Perhaps the ornamental frosting on culture's cake arose through a general human ability to learn ne...Folksonomies: sexual selection mating
Folksonomies: sexual selection mating
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notesHuman intelligence goes too far and is too artistically-bent, rather than scientifically-bent, to have evolved for survival alone. We should entertain the possibility that our big brains evolved for the same reasons peacocks have ornate tails.
30 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Philosophy Without Empiricism is Nonsense
Logic is not concerned with human behavior in the same sense that physiology, psychology, and social sciences are concerned with it. These sciences formulate laws or universal statements which have as their subject matter human activities as processes in time. Logic, on the contrary, is concerned with relations between factual sentences (or thoughts). If logic ever discusses the truth of factual sentences it does so only conditionally, somewhat as follows: if such-and-such a sentence is true,...Folksonomies: empiricism
Folksonomies: empiricism
1 notes
notesEmpirical science is the only thing capable of determining if a sentence is true.
12 DEC 2011 by ideonexus
Human Behavior is Dictated by Laws of Nature, but Too Com...
While conceding that human behavior is indeed determined by the laws of nature, it also seems reasonable to conclude that the outcome is determined in such a complicated way and with so many variables as to make it impossible in practice to predict. For that one would need a knowledge of the initial state of each of the thousand trillion trillion molecules in the human body and to solve something like that number of equations. That would take a few billion years, which would be a bit late to ... 1 notes
notesSo the hypothesis that we have freewill is convenient, and the Economic model that we act in our best interests helpful, but not always correct.
21 SEP 2011 by ideonexus
The Laetoli Footprints
team of paleoanthropologists led by Mary Leakey confirmed the
bipedality of A. afarensis with another remarkable find in Tanzania: the
famous “Laetoli footprints.” In 1976, Andrew Hill and another member
of the team were taking a break by indulging in a favorite field pastime:
pelting each other with chunks of dried elephant dung. Looking for
ammunition in a dry stream bed, Hill stumbled upon a line of fossilized
footprints. After careful excavation, the footprints turned out to be an
??-foot... 1 notes
notesNot only do these prints demonstrate A. afarensis could walk upright, but the nature of their preservation, having been made in volcanic ash and their proximity to one another, paints a image of two ancestors huddling together in an ashen landscape.
28 AUG 2011 by ideonexus
The Difference Between Science and Pseudoscience
What I had in mind was that his previous observations may not have been much sounder than this new one; that each in its turn had been interpreted in the light of "previous experience," and at the same time counted as additional confirmation. What, I asked myself, did it confirm? No more than that a case could be interpreted in the light of a theory. But this meant very little, I reflected, since every conceivable case could be interpreted in the light Adler's theory, or equally of Freud's. I... 1 notes
notesScience makes risky predictions, predicting things that the theory must be strong in order to prove. Popper compares early psychology and its explanations of human behavior that work in all cases with Einstein's theory of relativity and it's risky predictions.
