Skip (David) Everling > Recent Status Updates

Motives for terrorists follow unique psychology but similarly rooted in (mis-guided) altruistic ideology.

Cognitive grouping, reasoning behind automatic categorizing of people. Problems arise because 1) people over-apply attributes, beyond the underlying statistical relevance 2) people moralize categories (eg war enemies are evil) 3) people essentialize, attributing some qualities of category to individual innately

Long Peace supports Immanuel Kant's thinking on international peace: costs to human-beings increased with awareness. Three explicit correlates are 1) Democracy favors peace, 2) Trade favors peace, 3) multi-national governmental organizations coordinating specific sets of policies for mutual gain (IGOs) favor peace.

Democratization a major factor in Long Peace trends from 20th century into 21st century

War awareness (empathizing) literature may have spurred decline in war much the way earlier novels did for cruelty and capital punishment

Murders and mega-wars are the ones to worry about. The stuff in between isn't so bad (statistically speaking).

Wars are statistically a nonstationary (varying probability) Poisson process with a declining rate parameter.

Description of Poisson Process (ie randomness clusters, contrary to intuition).

p. 180 "The universe of ideas, in which one idea entails others, is itself an exogenous force, and once a community of thinkers enters that universe, they will be forced in certain directions regardless of their material surroundings."

Books and literacy propelled The Humanitarian Revolution beginning around the 18th and 19th centuries. Allowed greater perspective taking, empathy. p 177 Ordering: tech advance in publishing, mass production, expansion of literacy, popularity of novels, major humanitarian reforms.

Pinker rebukes Freakonomics' hypothesis of violence decline because of Roe v Wade allowing abortion of likely criminals (re unfit parenting).

Practical and research-based alternative solutions to difficult social problems (e.g. drug & alcohol abuse, recidivism), and for changing self-perception through "story editing" and behaviorally forced cognitive dissonance.

Reading the series of descriptive accounts of pre-state violence is a slightly uncomfortable experience. Which I suppose is the intended reaction. Still, the blitz review of creative tortures seen across the array of human cultures is pretty gruesome even in the academic tone. If Pinker hasn't already debunked the Noble Savage psychologically in The Blank Slate, he's doing as much sociologically now.

Positive Psychology with the eye of an outcomes researcher. Reminds me of books like Freakonomics and others that take a harder analytical approach to "common sense" practices.

Counter-factual happiness journal > happiness journal

Ch 3 Meaning-making after uncertainty resolution

Recommend to be read in times of low mood only

Listening to abridged audiobook

Engaging narrative style. Reminds me of Krakauer writing.

Into Romantic period

New appendix chapter (meeting with Jesus during the vigil) describes gods as "memes"! Glad the explicit analogy was made.

Full cast audiobook is great. Gaiman reads the "Coming to America" stories.

Last lecture rebukes Clarke's Third Law to an extent. I think a counter-argument for magic by self-consistency principle is appropriate though.

Classical era Forms: Theme & Variations, Minuet & Trio, Rondo, Sonata-Allegro