Welcome…
I grew up in Amherst and I live in Toulouse. I try to be curious.
These posts represent points of light that have illuminated the dark corners of my understanding.
261006
What are the motives for violence?
There are ideologies, such as those of militant religions, nationalism, Nazism, and Communism, that justify vast outlays of violence by a utopian cost-benefit analysis.
If your belief system holds out the hope of a world that will be infinitely good forever, how much violence are you entitled to perpetrate in pursuit of this infinitely perfect world?
Well, as much as much as you want, and you're always ahead of the game. The benefits always outweigh the costs.
Steven Pinker, evolutionary psychologist and author of "The Better Angels of Our Nature" (2011).
261002
A Key Quest of Human Existence
Adam Mastroianni, on why one shouldn't accept incentives as the main motivation for human behavior:
A key part of human development, I think, is figuring out what's right, what's wrong, and how you personally can increase the right and decrease the wrong to develop a value system.
This feels to me like a part and parcel of like the development of secondary sexual characteristics in adolescence — that happens, and meanwhile, you're also trying to do this thing.
This is part of the human mission as you go through life — to figure out "how do I slot into things? Like, where can I help? What's going wrong? How can I help something go right?"
And if you don't do that, if you outsource that process to a bureaucracy, to an incentive structure, to the ambient norms of the culture around you, you have declined a key quest of human existence.
And to me, that's just loser behavior… that is allowing someone else to colonize your value system in such a way that you are giving up this key part of your identity.
source: EconTalk Podcast
tags: #philosophy #morality
260717
An Inscrutable Omen
In July 1992, I read The Road Less Traveled, and the last section of the book is about whether God exists.
I finished the book on a Sunday. I want to emphasize that I was really into the book, and after finishing I kept thinking about that last section about God.
· · ·
Monday morning I went to work at the Daily Camera newspaper, doing advertising design.
As usual, on my break I did the next day's crossword puzzle (a perk of working at a newspaper).
I couldn't get one square of the crossword. The clue was "a famous French Illustrator", G_DE. It was infuriating — the missing letter didn't have a second clue.
Then I read the next day's Calvin and Hobbes (also a perk of working at a newspaper):
I had moved to a new apartment over the weekend, and I had two boxes of books that I wanted to sell.
When my break came, I drove down to Pearl St. and double parked in front of the bookstore. I dropped off the two boxes, then came back out to move the car.
Returning to the bookstore on foot, I had to wait for two young women to walk by, in front of the door.
As they passed, one said (quite clearly) to the other: "Have you read The Road Less Traveled?"
I entered the bookstore, saw that the clerk was occupied, walked straight across the room and pulled a random book out of the shelves.
Litterally one second after hearing the two girls, I saw on the cover, much larger than the name of the author, "Illustrated by André Gide".