Month: December 2011

My live-blog of the Huckabee Forum is here.

It looks like it, in which Iowa is a battle between Paul and Gingrich for Cain's base.

Avi Steinberg compares the sanitized drawings to reality:

As everyone knows, the story contained in this pamphlet has little to do with anything resembling the truth. If shit goes down, if that horrifying alarm is sounded, will your fellow passengers really calmly place oxygen masks over their faces? Will that crazy lady sitting next to you inflate her life jacket in a quiet and orderly fashion? (“Put it on as you would a waistcoat,” a 1930s British Imperial Airways card advises its clientele.) In the history of aviation, has any plane ditched over the north Atlantic, leaving its passengers floating in the mountainous, frigid waves of the open ocean with serene expressions on their faces? Airline safety cards aren’t instructional guides, they are works of fantastic imagination. 

(Image by Flickr user aomd88)

Christie Aschwanden isn't convinced by studies touting the physiological benefits of sex:

None of the studies…would qualify as top-shelf medical research. Even Irwin Goldstein, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Sexual Medicine, admits the evidence is flimsy: “This is sort of, you find what you want to find. The papers are controversial. It’s a lot of anecdotal work.” Some have criticized Stuart Brody’s work in particular as showing a bias toward specific heterosexual acts. (“He’s obsessed with PVI,” one expert told me.) But almost all the studies in this area suffer from a suspect methodology.

Damn high if you're an elite gay lawyer from Greenwich, CT who went to an ivy league school:

[The law firm] Davis Polk was the clear winner here among the firms. It's site lists 682 lawyers, which means that in just one year, 1.3 percent of its lawyers announced their wedding in The Times. That seems insane to us. … Odds improvement: 974 times more likely than the average American.

Question? askandrew@thedailybeast.com Video archive here.

A study earlier this year examined why soldiers in the United States experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at a rate of 30 percent, while the British report it at only 4 percent:

U.K. rules prohibit soldiers from spending more than 13 months in combat during a three-year period, and average tours of duty are six months—half the length of American soldiers’. Even more important are programs that send U.K. soldiers for a few days of “third location decompression” on the island of Cyprus before returning them to their home communities. “One to four days of R&R on a Mediterranean island with members of the same fighting unit apparently helps veterans come home with an easier mind…"

Daniel Kahneman recently answered a variety of questions from the Freakonomics crowd. On the relation between pleasure, utility and happiness:

[B]eing happy (on average) in the moment and being satisfied retrospectively are not the same thing. People are most likely to be happy if they spend a lot of time with people they love, and most likely to be satisfied if they achieve conventional goals, such as high income and a stable marriage.

Sam Harris interviewed Kahneman earlier this week. How Kahneman's thoughts on happiness have evolved:

I used to hold a unitary view, in which I proposed that only experienced happiness matters, and that life satisfaction is a fallible estimate of true happiness. I eventually concluded that this view is not tenable, for one simple reason: people seem to be much more concerned with the satisfaction of their goals than with the achievement of experienced happiness. A definition of subjective well-being that ignores people's goals is not tenable. On the other hand, an exclusive focus on satisfaction is not tenable either. If two people are equally satisfied (or unsatisfied) with their lives but one of them is almost always smiling happily and the other is mostly miserable, will we ignore that in assessing their well-being?

My take on Kahneman's new book here.

Last month, spurred on by an atheist's conversion to Catholicism, Will Wilkinson rejected the notion that life's meaning relates to God's existence:

If you ask me, the best reason to think "life is meaningful" is because one's life seems meaningful. If you can't stop "acting as if my own life had meaning," it's probably because it does have meaning. Indeed, not being able to stop acting as if one's life is meaningful is probably what it means for life to be meaningful.

Ross Douthat tweaks Wilkinson's argument. To make his point, Ross thinks about soldiers who keep fighting because "they know the war has meaning because they can’t stop acting like it has meaning":

In the context of the war, of course the battle feels meaningful. In the context of daily life as we experience it, of course our joys and sorrows feel intensely meaningful. But just as it surely makes a (if you will) meaningful difference why the war itself is being waged, it surely makes a rather large difference whether our joys and sorrows take place in, say, C.S. Lewis’s Christian universe or Richard Dawkins’s godless cosmos. Saying that “we know life is meaningful because it feels meaningful” is true for the first level of context, but non-responsive for the second.