Month: October 2009

The British Psychological Society's Research Digest asked "some of the world's leading psychologists to look inwards and share, in 150 words, one nagging thing they still don't understand about themselves." Here is Norbert Schwarz:

One nagging thing I don’t understand about myself is why I’m still fooled by incidental feelings. Some 25 years ago Jerry Clore and I studied how gloomy weather makes one’s whole life look bad — unless one becomes aware of the weather and attributes one’s gloomy mood to the gloomy sky, which eliminates the influence. You’d think I learned that lesson and now know how to deal with gloomy skies. I don’t, they still get me. The same is true for other subjective experiences, like the processing fluency resulting from print fonts – I still fall prey to their influence. Why does insight into how such influences work not help us notice them when they occur? What makes the immediate experience so powerful that I fail to apply my own theorizing until some blogger asks a question that brings it to mind?

And here is David Buss:

One nagging thing that I still don’t understand about myself is why I often succumb to well-documented psychological biases, even though I’m acutely aware of these biases. One example is my failure at affective forecasting, such as believing that I will be happy for a long time after some accomplishment (e.g. publishing a new book), when in fact the happiness dissipates more quickly than anticipated. Another is succumbing to the male sexual overperception bias, misperceiving a woman’s friendliness as sexual interest. A third is undue optimism about how quickly I can complete work projects, despite many years of experience in underestimating the time actually required. One would think that explicit knowledge of these well-documented psychological biases and years of experience with them would allow a person to cognitively override the biases. But they don’t.

(Hat tip: Tyler Cowen)

The NYT runs an incredible photo.

 
Isiah Harris receives an H1N1 influenza vaccine at Rush University Medical Center October 6, 2009 in Chicago, Illinois. Rush is one of many hospitals and clinics that have started to distribute the vaccinations against the H1N1 swine flu virus in the United States this week. By Scott Olson/Getty.

After reading Ryan Lizza's profile of Larry Summers, Felix Salmon says that he was wrong and that the government was right to not nationalize the banks. Free Exchange tweaks:

[A]t this point, the question of whether the administration approach (both administrations) was the right one isn't all that interesting. For one thing, it's not a question we'll ever be able to resolve. And for another, even if the administration approach was the right one for the last crisis, it's clearly not the one we want to have to use the next time around. The administration approach largely came down to an acknowledgment that they simply didn't have the tools you'd want in such a situation—resolution authority and enough money to cover the bank debts that needed covering.

Julian Sanchez video-fisks Fox's coverage of the Patriot Act renewal:

A reader writes:

You wrote:

"My doctoral thesis focused on Oakeshott's understanding of religion not as part of the world of philosophy, or of poetry – but of practice. Religion, in one profound sense, is simply what we do every day, the practice of daily compassion and spiritual discipline that brings us closer to God and to our highest nature as humans. The obsession with doctrine is rather modern, let alone the imposition of doctrine through politics or, worse, violence. Religion, properly understood, is less the assertion of facts we cannot prove than the living of a love that transcends fact into mindful compassion."

This IS the heart of Buddhism, especially the Zen tradition. What we believe and what we do are totally separate entities. While our beliefs, our faith, can motivate the action we take, the emphasis has to be on the action, or else the belief is worthless. In Zen, we express this with daily Zazen practice. Make no mistake, Zazen IS Buddhism. You can memorize the Shobogenzo, you can learn Sanskrit, you can recite the timeline of the Gautama Buddha's life and agree fully and completely with the philosophy, but unless you sit Zazen, unless you DO the practice, you are in no way Buddhist. You cannot separate the belief from the action, because they inform one another. Also worth noting is the idea that Buddhism lacks a moral code. Rather, many of the teachings are simply an outline of the morality that practitioners have in common. This common denominator exists in most religions, but as Karen Armstrong points out, its something we often lose sight of.

One of the wonderful things about Oakeshott's Toryism was its openness to all human experience. Montaigne was one of his idols, as he remains mine. And Oakeshott often used Eastern texts and Chinese Zen masters to inform English conservatism's respect for practice as a mode of experience within which he placed religion. If you want to explore this further, my book on Oakeshott's religious teaching – deeply buried in his work – can be bought here. It was the first treatment that focused on his Christianity (which was very close, in some respects, to Buddhism). A much more comprehensive treatment – partly because she was able to use all of Oakeshott's posthumously revealed notes and unpublished work – is in Elizabeth Corey's brilliant book which can buy here. Glenn Worthington's treatment of Oakeshott on faith is also a must-read.

I think a conversation between Christians and Buddhists – the project Merton was intent on before he died – is one of the more important conversations of our time.

A few months ago, Marie Myung-Ok Lee wrote about giving her autistic son pot. She follows up:

I don’t consider marijuana a miracle cure for autism. But as an amateur herbalist, I do consider it a wonderful, safe botanical that allows J. to participate more fully in life without the dangers and sometimes permanent side effects of pharmaceutical drugs; now that we have a good dose and a good strain. (“White Russian”—a favorite of cancer patients, who also need relief from extreme pain). Free from pain, J. can go to school and learn. And his violent behavior won’t put him in the local children’s psychiatric hospital—a scenario all too common among his peers.

What we have in this country is a government attempting to punish people for trying to fight pain and incarcerate people for seeking harmless pleasure. It's insane. There are no arguments for Prohibition that make even the slightest sense. And yet, doing the right thing is apparently a non-starter for the current federal Congress. Because the Democrats, by and large, are a bunch of principle-free panty-waists. And because the Republicans, who should be defending individual freedom, have sold their soul to a bunch of puritans and hypocrites.

Maybe. I think he's too stupid and ignorant to go anything myself.

Make your own mind up. As I've said for ever, I have no idea.

Josh Marshall recalls an article he wrote about how Europeans support capital punishment:

So many people assume that differing attitudes toward capital punishment are one of the defining differences between the US and Europe. But when you look at public opinion data you see a different picture. Yes, there are some differences. But by and large levels of support for capital punishment in most European countries don't differ greatly from those in the US. And in every case I could find, when these countries abolished capital punishment — usually early in the second half of the twentieth century — they did so notwithstanding continued public support for the practice.

The review I did of the survey data seem to leave little doubt that the difference between the US and Europe in this regard could not be explained simply by public attitudes.

The difference in Britain is that parliament routinely defies the popular will, as Burke urged them to at times. And because they treat this question – and others, like abortion and gay rights – as matters of personal conscience which political parties should not interfere with. You can call this anti-democratic, but you can also call it civilized.