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How do we know what we think we know about the world? In this initial inquiry, we take up a set of questions that examine the ways in which people come to understand how the world works. This set of processes, usefully understood as the
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“Thinking in an anxious state, scientists have found, leads to a pessimistic cognitive bias; when an anxious brain processes ambiguous information, it tends to choose the more pessimistic from among the likely interpretations. Your brain becomes overactive in perceiving threats and tends to predict dire outcomes when faced with uncertainty. It’s easy to understand why brains might be designed that way; being in a punishing environment, one would be wise to interpret ambiguous data as being more threatening, or less desirable, than one might if the surroundings were safe and pleasant.”
― Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking
― Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking
“The Emotion Revolution Before the current burst of research into emotion, most scientists understood our feelings within a framework that goes all the way back to the ideas of Charles Darwin. That traditional theory of emotion embraced a number of principles that seem intuitively plausible: that there is a small set of basic emotions—fear, anger, sadness, disgust, happiness, and surprise—that are universal among all cultures and have no functional overlap; that each emotion is triggered by specific stimuli in the external world; that each emotion causes fixed and specific behaviors; and that each emotion occurs in specific dedicated structures in the brain. This theory also encompassed a dichotomous view of the mind that goes back at least to the ancient Greeks: that the mind consists of two competing forces, one “cold,” logical, and rational and the other “hot,” passionate, and impulsive. For millennia these ideas informed thinking in fields from theology to philosophy to the science of the mind. Freud incorporated the traditional theory into his work. John Mayer and Peter Salovey’s theory of “emotional intelligence,” popularized by the 1995 book of that name by Daniel Goleman, is in part based on it. And it is the framework for most of what we think about our feelings. But it is wrong.”
― Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking
― Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking
“One consequence of all of this has been a severe erosion of democracy, an immediate consequence of sharp concentration of wealth and business power. We’ve discussed some of the means: virtual purchase of elections, radical escalation of lobbying, undermining of voting rights, all facilitated further by the most reactionary Supreme Court in living memory. There is no longer fear of excessive democracy. There’s a lot of fuss, as you know, about alleged Russian meddling in the elections. It is scarcely detectable, but even if it existed on any substantial scale, it would be invisible in comparison with the interference in elections by extreme wealth and corporate power. But these are more things that it wouldn’t do to say. Best to worry about the Russians. One consequence of all of this, also well established in the academic political science literature, is that a considerable majority of the population, those who are lower on the income-wealth scale, are literally disenfranchised. They may cast votes, but it doesn’t much matter. They’re disenfranchised in the sense that when you compare their preferences and attitudes with the decisions made by their own representatives, there’s virtually no correlation. The legislators are listening to other voices. The donor class. During the neoliberal period, the past generation, both parties shifted pretty far to the right. The Democrats abandoned the working class. They delivered them to their class enemies, who try to mobilize them on what are called cultural issues: white supremacy, fundamentalist religion, and in other ways to which we’ll return. And with the promises of decent jobs, which oddly enough are not fulfilled.”
― Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance
― Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance
“Brains are not the product of a single evolutionary line with any kind of plan or reason but a Frankensteinian patchwork of error, theft, malformation, crookedness, accident, and chance: like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, consciousness goes wherever the currents take it.”
― Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness
― Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness
“In the longer term, business itself will be harmed by shifting from R&D to financial manipulations. In earlier days, that might have been a concern. But managerial ethic has shifted from the time when viability of the firm was a serious concern to today’s focus on gain tomorrow. The long-term prospects for the firm become lesser considerations—or for human society generally. Nothing could reveal this shift with more brilliant clarity than a matter already discussed: the virtually reflexive decisions to race toward destruction, with eyes open, if it yields short-term gain. Right now profits are spectacular and CEO salaries have skyrocketed to the stratosphere, dragging other managerial rewards with them, while for the general population, real wages stagnate, social spending is meager, unions and other interferences with “sound economics” are dismantled. The best of all possible worlds. So why care if my firm will go under after I’ve moved to greener pastures, or for that matter, why care if I leave to my grandchildren a world in which they have some chance for decent survival? Capitalist mentality gone insane. There is, of course, the usual problem. The rascal multitude. They’re not too happy about the undermining of functioning democracy and basic rights. I should add the same is true in Europe. In fact, even more so. The attack on democracy in Europe is even sharper than here. Significant decisions about society and politics are out of the hands of the population. They’re made by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels: the IMF, the Central Bank, the European Commission. All of this, all over the world, is leading to anger, resentment, and bitterness. You see it right now in the Yellow Vest movement in France, but it’s everywhere. In election after election, the centrist parties are collapsing. It’s happening here, too. Parties happen to be keeping their names in our rigid two-party system, but the centrist elements are losing their grip.”
― Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance
― Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance
The Atheist Book Club
— 1660 members
— last activity Feb 18, 2026 05:59AM
In these gilded halls we shall discuss the presence of the atheistic viewpoint in the written form. Are you a fan of Douglas Adams' scientific view of ...more
Robert’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Robert’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
339 books
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752 books
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2,821 friends
2,457 books
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267 books
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1,332 books
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674 friends
389 books
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562 books
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191 friends
2,055 books
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322 friends
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