Eccentric Flower talk:200909/Things and Stuff

Bunny42:

"Our constitution does not say that the president must have been born in the United States."

Interesting you should mention that, since there was also quite the dustup about John McCain having been born in Canal Zone.

Great trio! Kinda puts me in mind of George Shearing style (talking of "back in the day") only I don't recall Shearing with a flute. Thanks for sharing.

"The Lord helps those that help themselves"

AAAGGGGH! Sean will love that you said this. I've been smacking his head with "Who" refers to people, "that" refers to things. He says nuh uh, it doesn't matter, and everybody does it. And, sadly, he appears to be right. Again...

-- 17:25, 21 September 2009 (BST)

Columbina:

Funny thing is, I initially wrote "who" out of sense of grammar, but then changed it to "that" because if I had left it as "who," ten people would think I was misquoting it. Of course it should be "who," but I have heard it 97 times out of 100 as "that." Go figure.

-- 17:28, 21 September 2009 (BST)

Joy:

Hypothesis Confirmation is a known human bias, and everyone is susceptible to it. Yet another reason to be depressed!

-- 17:29, 21 September 2009 (BST)

Columbina:

It doesn't depress me that we are susceptible to it. It depresses me that some people are actively embracing it.

We are not responsible for our born biases, only for our failures to overcome them.

-- 17:38, 21 September 2009 (BST)

Bunny42:

Do you really think we are born with biases?

-- 18:10, 21 September 2009 (BST)

Columbina:

Perhaps "biases" was the wrong word. Substitute "instincts."

-- 19:02, 21 September 2009 (BST)

Joy:

Yes, I do. But I mean at a pretty basic level - you have perceptual biases to view things in particular ways, and your neural connections are set up to do certain kinds of processing easier than other kinds. For example, you have biases that let you see the contours and angles of occluded objects as all belonging to the same object versus being a random assortment of object pieces, and you have a bias to take a new name for something (when a child learning words) as referring to the whole object instead of one little piece of the object.

One of our biases is that we tend to "see" and believe evidence that confirms what we already believe/know and discount evidence that contradicts that. It probably has quite a bit of survival value, to be able to sort through information quickly to find what we're looking for, but when it gets applied to complex social situations you end up with what we more commonly call biases/stereotypes/etc.

-- 20:00, 21 September 2009 (BST)

DanLyke:

"Boston is the historical homeland of scholarship and higher education in America. You are embarrassing us ..."

Uh. Nicholas Negroponte. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Believe me, as the home of "scholarship and higher education in America", the hollow-earthers are a long long way from being the highest priority embarassment to Boston.

-- 20:14, 21 September 2009 (BST)

Columbina:

I didn't say anywhere that there was a quota on embarrassments.

I keep hoping Negroponte will actually go to one of these countries where he's trying to peddle wildly inappropriate merchandise and actually learn something about conditions there. Then again, I dislike the man fervently and I also hope he will be eaten by a lion.

-- 20:20, 21 September 2009 (BST)

Columbina:

P.S. Because I have the argument with certain people every time I bring up Negroponte about "why One Laptop Per Child is a really stupid idea," and I don't care to have it again, I'm just going to note that I hated Negroponte long before OLPC. He is a flaming gasbag of pure ego, who conceives of half-baked projects whose only criterion for getting the thumbs-up is whether they advance his legend. He then farms out the dirty work to poorly-paid underlings, ignores them if they tell him the pie is in the sky, and walks away from the inevitable wreckage unscathed.

OLPC is a failure.

[italics mine]

I wouldn't go that far either, because it is merely the latest and most obvious of Mr. Negroponte's vanity projects. One day, in an ideal world, someone will stop giving him money to churn out his ill-conceived farts of technopuffery. But I'm not holding my breath.

-- 20:33, 21 September 2009 (BST)

Columbina:

Oooh, ouch. I'm sort of in a moral quandary here. See, John Dvorak also thinks Negroponte is much ado about nothing. The problem is, Dvorak is a Blowhard of Legendary Proportions himself. (They even resemble one another.) If one correctly disses Negroponte, does that imply one must embrace Dvorak, the man who has "made a career of pretending to have idiotic, badly-written contrarian opinions"? Is the enemy of my enemy necessarily my friend? This is a toughie.

At least Dvorak baits Apple zealots, which is always fun.

-- 21:29, 21 September 2009 (BST)

Bunny42:

Joy, I suppose I was hung up on syntax. I see what you are saying about basic level instincts. I am sure that some are born with inate ability, which I would call talent, not bias, to hear things on different levels or visualize outside the box. If that's the concept you refer to, then bias just seems like not the right word. I think of bias as something learned after the fact, and with a negative context.

I read something recently about perfect pitch. The premise was that no one is born tone-deaf. If they were, then Chinese children would not be able to learn to speak. They need to be able to differentiate the "pitch" of a word in order to comprehend the different meanings inherent in the same basic symbol. There are purported to be many, many more Chinese with perfect pitch as we know it, because we don't have a need as children to exercise that particular talent (bias?) and therefore lose the ability after a time. Interesting, I thought.

-- 23:00, 21 September 2009 (BST)

Andy:

If you've only heard that movement of the Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano, you should listen to the rest of it; it's all wonderful.

-- 23:14, 21 September 2009 (BST)

Mel:

I am far more into "The Lord helps those that help themselves" than "The Lord will provide."

If you think about it, "The Lord will provide" is just another version of The Secret and various other philosophies involving wish fulfillment: if you wish hard enough, or believe fully enough, it will come true.

I have been very down on religion lately, but it's not really religion in general I have a problem with, it's these people professing to be Christians and then preaching hate, which is a whole different kettle of fish than the wish-fulfillment crowd - and much worse, as far as I'm concerned. I suspect that the louder they yell, the more they're turning people off, anyway. I just hope I'm right about that, because they've been scaring the pants off of me.

-- 23:53, 21 September 2009 (BST)

Bunny42:

Mel, I'm a card-carrying Republican and they terrify me, too. Right now, I'm feeling pretty disenfranchised, because the Fundamentalist wackos seem to be taking over the party. My leanings are decidedly conservative, especially fiscally. Socially, I'm moderate, and these screaming mimis are preaching a brand of hatred that is utterly foreign to me. So I don't really belong anywhere, these days.

-- 00:20, 22 September 2009 (BST)

Columbina:

Andy: Ordered it the instant I found out who the performers were. The full CD will be arriving any minute now.

-- 00:20, 22 September 2009 (BST)

Iain:

I read this morning that Jeph Jacques apparently feels "that basically the only thing I am any good at in life is this comic (and I'm not even very good at that!)"

All's I can say is: My, that sounds familiar.

So, assuming his mother was a US citizen in good standing at the time of his birth - and no one has tried to suggest she wasn't

Actually, I'm pretty sure they have, on the "if you marry a person who is a foreign citizen, you and your children are perforce foreign citizens" principle. That, and they try to say that she renounced citizenship for herself and her children when she moved to Indonesia. Of course, she didn't, and it doesn't work that way for her children even if she did.

-- 00:25, 22 September 2009 (BST)

Patrick:

Try feeding people the best idea in the world at a thousand words or more and watch in pain as they all refuse to read it, or claim that they've read it but then prove through their remarks that they haven't. Words are a nearly lost art. Pictures, on the other hand - you can occasionally still manage to present a real idea and have it absorbed through pictures. Ergo: Your skills are more valuable than mine.

Nope, and you know that's not what the difference is. Jacques isn't any more skilled as an artist than you are as a writer, it's just that Jacques has honed two skills you steadfastly refuse to employ: persistence and self-marketing.

-- 00:43, 22 September 2009 (BST)

Mel:

I'm also pretty sure I heard somebody say that Obama wasn't a citizen because he was born outside the US AND his mother was a minor married to a foreign citizen. I have no idea if the minor part is true or not; he was clearly born in Hawaii, anyway, so it's moot. But of course they don't want to hear that part.

-- 01:00, 22 September 2009 (BST)

Joy:

Bunny, I'll just say that bias is a technical word used in a lot of sciences to refer to propensities to process information in one way or another. It doesn't get reduced to instinct because sometimes the biases are at a cognitive (thought) level, which are much more complex than a simple instinct. Not all biases are purely biologically/genetically driven, but the idea is that our biological and cognitive system is set up so that it tends to function in certain ways (another example, the left hemisphere tends to be dominant in most right-handed adults; it might derive from the left hemisphere being ever so slightly bigger/faster in utero and at birth, so that it wins a bunch of the competitions for cognitive functions, which then sets it up to be bigger). Then, of course, experience interacts with these initial biases to create the whole system.

-- 01:38, 22 September 2009 (BST)

Peebles:

I know we are always going to disagree on this, but I find these people, both the birthers and the charioteers of the gods, absolutely fascinating. I find it amazing the diversity of ways in which people cling to irrational beliefs that are easily dispelled by readily available evidence. Socialized medicine is inefficient! Gays in the military destroy morale! Mark Bittman knows how to cook! That sort of thing. So weird!

As for the sense of humor business, I don't see what the alternative is. I'm not going to be able to change their minds. Are you? Bitch and moan and gnash your teeth all you want to, but unless you've got a way to fix human nature, that's just the way things are going to be, and it's a waste of energy to get all het up about it.

-- 04:07, 22 September 2009 (BST)

Columbina:

Peebles: Oh no, I think yours is the far more constructive response. I wish I could bring myself to laugh at them too. But the anger and nausea just kicks in too strongly for anything else to work.

Iain: Of course that reaction is familiar! That's my point. Anyone I admire is supposed to be better-adjusted in that direction than I am. I don't like learning that my heroes have the same neuroses. Sure, everybody has neuroses, but I expect them to have better and different ones!

Kidding aside, I have this weird idea of "bigger people = bigger problems" that I have never been able to shake. I see myself as a small person, a very insignificant person, with problems that aren't even very interesting problems. If someone I think is bigger than I am turns out to have some of the same problems, then that means either they're not as big as I thought or I'm bigger than I thought. Either conclusion is disturbing, but for different reasons.

I realize that makes absolutely no sense.

-- 14:26, 22 September 2009 (BST)

Columbina:

Following along these lines - not that this adds clarity: While it is disheartening to hear that someone a little bigger than I am - someone I admire but whom I still consider to be human - has the same sort of petty neuroses and quirks I do, it is actually encouraging to learn about neuroses in people who have gotten so big that they are quasi-mythological. I was heartened to find out that Abraham Lincoln was a gravely neurotic person, for example - it brought him back down out of the level of the gods for me. I don't like the idea of gods walking among us. Makes me nervous. But the idea that my local personal heroes might have the same clay feet I do also makes me nervous. Go figure.

You may ask, is there anyone I want to set lower on this hierarchy than myself? Yes. People I don't respect or like are supposed to be more damaged than I am. However, with mythological villains, finding out that they had human traits is disheartening, not encouraging. I don't want to know that Hitler actually had a gentle side or to better understand his motivations.

In other words, I am not comfortable with quasi-mythological heroes walking through the pages of human history, but I'm quite comfortable with having quasi-mythological villains doing so.

God. Sorry for all these posts. I became aware yesterday when I posted the Negroponte crap that what I was really hungering for was a long, deep conversation/argument with another human in person. Hence the verbal diarrhea.

-- 14:37, 22 September 2009 (BST)