Patrick Julius's Blog, page 9

A better Kama Sutra

JDN 2456292 EDT 16:33.

 

The Kama Sutra is a great book, and I really mean "great" in the sense of Hamlet or Iliad or On the Origin of Species. But it is also deeply flawed, and like the Bible its flaws have been preserved over the centuries in the name of religious reverence. Unlike the Bible, the Kama Sutra also has a very open attitude about sexuality (which is how most of us in the West know it), which has also made our puritanical culture wary of discussing it at all, let alone to c...

My personality makes cognitive science easier for me.

JDN 2456291 EDT 12:13.

 

I realized today why so many people have trouble understanding concepts in cognitive science that to me feel so elegant and intuitive. I had been assuming that other people think much the same way I do (Mind Projection Fallacy), and I hadn't been correcting for my highly unusual personality traits.

 

Specifically, I am an empathizer-systematizer. Most people are either empathizers or systematizers, not both. Empathizers conceptualize the world in terms of co...

The Psychopath Test

JDN 2456285 EDT 22:47.

 

Many reviewers praised The Psychopath Test for its irreverence; personally, I think that's its greatest flaw. The book is certainly engaging, and a very quick read; Ronson writes like a journalist, so his style should be accessible to just about anyone. He makes a lot of cute jokes, some of which are quite funny, and they certainly do lighten the mood tremendously.

And yet... I'm not sure I wanted the mood lightened. The topic is psychopaths, after all; and incre...

Yes, there are bad people.

JDN 2456283 EDT 17:23.

 

It's taken me some time to realize this, for a few reasons. My high level of empathy makes me want to see the good in everyone, my liberal sensibilities make me look first to social structures and systems of policy to explain behavior, and my atheism makes me dubious of beings of pure evil like demons or Satan.

Yet, there are bad people, people who are, innately, probably genetically, wired differently from other human beings. They are almost not human beings, in...

The Dosadi Experiment

JDN 2456280 EDT 17:06.

 

The Dosadi Experiment was a novel Frank Herbert wrote in the middle of his career, with some Dune books before it (up to Children of Dune) and some after it (God Emperor of Dune and beyond). Actually, come to think of it, it's roughly "the good Dune books" before and "the bad Dune books" after.

It's a strange novel, longer than it needed to be, and with characters who manage to be complex without being particularly interesting or sympathetic. The closest to sympa...

Why is it so hard to talk about guns in America?

JDN 2456279 EDT 18:57.

 

The Connecticut school shooting, which you've no doubt heard plenty about already, is but the most recent in a long series of wanton shooting massacres that have been occurring in the United States for just about as long as the United States has existed. Thousands of people have died this way.

And no, this is not inevitable. In fact, most countries don't have this problem at all. The US is an outlier in the First World in terms of its homicide rate and especially...

What it is about free will?

JDN 2456778 EDT 21:26.

 

Why does the concept of free will lead to such intense disagreement, even among people who otherwise agree? Jerry Coyne mocks hapless bloggers who make bad arguments for free will, but come on, it's easy to make a bad argument for a good position.

In fact, free will seems to be a situation where even once we agree on all the facts, we still disagree intensely on the semantics. Even once all the fact nodes are set, the algorithm demands one more node.

But here's t...

The real problem with Pascal's Wager

JDN 2456275 EDT 12:06.

 

I would say about Pascal's Wager what Bertrand Russell said about the Ontological Argument: It is much easier to see that it is wrong than to understand exactly what is wrong with it.

In case you haven't heard it, the argument is basically like this: God either exists or he doesn't, with some finite probability that he exists. If God exists and you believe, you go to heaven, which is an infinite reward; if God exists and you don't believe, you go to hell, which i...

Cold feet? Might want to cut down on caffeine.

JDN 2456274 EDT 14:11.

 

During the winter, I sometimes have a problem where my feet and hands get very cold; it's not just a chilled sensation, they are actually colder, as other people can feel when I touch them. I've done some research on this, and it seems I have a mild case of Raynaud's disease; it's statistically correlated with migraine, so I can't be too surprised. Also, caffeine makes it worse, and I definitely consume a lot of caffeine.

Sure enough, on days when I don't have mu...

Holiday stress

JDN 2456274 EDT 19:43.

 

There's no doubt about it: Holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving are stressful for many people. We are constantly bombarded with people complaining about how much work it is to decorate, and get the family together, prepare food, and buy gifts.

Apparently something never occurs to people: We wouldn't have to do this. We choose to have holidays. This is particularly true in a secular society.

In fact, I think that holidays are a good thing. We all need time to...