Well I’m going to keep straying away from politics for a while.  Don’t worry, I’ll get back to the serious stuff soon but I just couldn’t pass up posting this video.  The filmmakers (Concord Music Group) recorded one street musician’s interpretation of the Ben E. King classic “Stand by Me”  and then took that recording to other countries, allowing street musicians from around the world to record their own accompaniments.  Then they mixed it all together.  The result is both musically pleasing (its a really creative arrangement) and surprisingly touching.  Street musicians from New Orleans to the Congo riffing together on a song whose message they understand all too well.  Anyway, hope you enjoy it!  Don’t forget to leave your thoughts in the comments.

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I doubt I will ever write many articles that fit better into the theme and mission of this blog than this one.  And despite the fact that the piece it’s based on is over 3 years old, it couldn’t be more topical.  There was an article in the New Yorker in December of 2005 entitled “Everybody’s An Expert” that discusses a book by UC Berkeley Psychology Professor Philip Tetlock called “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?”.  The article is a fascinating read and I’d encourage you to go through it if you’ve got a few minutes.  But it is long so I’ve tried to draw out the more important and politically relevant points and I’ve added them below, along with a little of my own commentary.

The article (and the book) revolve around the information provided by the following study, performed by Tetlock over a 20-year period:

“He picked two hundred and eighty-four people who made their living “commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends,” and he started asking them to assess the probability that various things would or would not come to pass, both in the areas of the world in which they specialized and in areas about which they were not expert. Would there be a nonviolent end to apartheid in South Africa? Would Gorbachev be ousted in a coup? Would the United States go to war in the Persian Gulf? Would Canada disintegrate? (Many experts believed that it would, on the ground that Quebec would succeed in seceding.) And so on. By the end of the study, in 2003, the experts had made 82,361 forecasts…

“Tetlock got a statistical handle on his task by putting most of the forecasting questions into a “three possible futures” form. The respondents were asked to rate the probability of three alternative outcomes: the persistence of the status quo, more of something (political freedom, economic growth), or less of something (repression, recession). And he measured his experts on two dimensions: how good they were at guessing probabilities (did all the things they said had an xper cent chance of happening happen x per cent of the time?), and how accurate they were at predicting specific outcomes. The results were unimpressive. On the first scale, the experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned an equal probability to all three outcomes—if they had given each possible future a thirty-three-per-cent chance of occurring. Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices.” (emphasis added)

So with so many political pundits throwing out predictions on a daily basis, somebody finally decided to check their accuracy.  And surprise, surprise, they’re extremely bad overall.  But they also collected a large amount of data about the personalities and perspectives of the their test subjects and they found that some pundits were much more accurate than others, and I think the associations they discovered are incredibly interesting:

“Tetlock uses Isaiah Berlin’s metaphor from Archilochus, from his essay on Tolstoy, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” to illustrate the difference. He says:

‘Low scorers look like hedgehogs: thinkers who “know one big thing,” aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains, display bristly impatience with those who “do not get it,” and express considerable confidence that they are already pretty proficient forecasters, at least in the long term. High scorers look like foxes: thinkers who know many small things (tricks of their trade), are skeptical of grand schemes, see explanation and prediction not as deductive exercises but rather as exercises in flexible “ad hocery” that require stitching together diverse sources of information, and are rather diffident about their own forecasting prowess.’

“Tetlock did not find, in his sample, any significant correlation between how experts think and what their politics are. His hedgehogs were liberal as well as conservative, and the same with his foxes. (Hedgehogs were, of course, more likely to be extreme politically, whether rightist or leftist.) He also did not find that his foxes scored higher because they were more cautious—that their appreciation of complexity made them less likely to offer firm predictions. Unlike hedgehogs, who actually performed worse in areas in which they specialized, foxes enjoyed a modest benefit from expertise. Hedgehogs routinely over-predicted: twenty per cent of the outcomes that hedgehogs claimed were impossible or nearly impossible came to pass, versus ten per cent for the foxes. More than thirty per cent of the outcomes that hedgehogs thought were sure or near-sure did not, against twenty per cent for foxes.”   emphasis added

So the lowest scorers are those who are confident that they understand the world and can predict its future, they are the type who express anger at those who “do not get it”, they tend to be on one of the farther ends of the political spectrum, they have particular themes that they focus on and which they tend to see everywhere, they form “grand schemes” and conspiracies, and they tend to make extreme and probably startling predictions about the future.  Does this sound familiar?  These are the Rush Limbaughs and the Michael Moores of the world.  The Glenn Becks and the Bill Mahers.  In fact nearly all of our most popular pundits would probably qualify as hedgehogs and in fact that’s exactly what Tetlock’s study found:

“And the more famous the forecaster the more overblown the forecasts. ‘Experts in demand,’ Tetlock says, ‘were more overconfident than their colleagues who eked out existences far from the limelight.’…  ’Our system of expertise is completely inside out: it rewards bad judgments over good ones.’”

This probably shouldn’t be too surprising.  I mean can you imagine listening to a “fox” on talk radio?  There would be no angry rants and no apocalyptic predictions about the future.  There would probably be very few claims that their perspective was being silenced or persecuted, and there would be no group to demonize or blame the country’s problems on.  Rather than fitting the events in the world together into a cohesive conspiracy theory and sounding the warning they would be deconstructing the world’s problems and pointing out areas where we still need more information.  When asked to predict something they’d often be able to give their thoughts but they’d frequently have to say, “I don’t know exactly, its an extremely complex situation.  It could go this way, but who knows for sure?”

In other words it would be boring.  The fact is, we like to listen to people who seem like they have got it all figured out.  We are drawn to charismatic TV commentators who can point out the enemy and give us a target for our frustration and confusion.  We enjoy reading books and editorials from people who can fit all the pieces together and make it all seem so simple.  The problem, of course, is that the world is not actually simple at all, current events are the result of millions of actors each with a multitude of motivations, we don’t have half of the puzzle pieces let alone the ability to fit them together, and in the end these people are literally wrong more often than dart-throwing monkeys.

I guess the lesson is, and this seems to be a common refrain on this blog, to be wary of those who seem to think they’ve got the world figured out.  Be careful of those who are confident, popular, or heavily partisan.  I suppose we could say we should try to get our information from “foxes” but perhaps the best course of action is to strive to become one ourselves.  And that’s the conclusion that the article seems to come to as well.  Though Tetlock kind of downplays some of the implications of his study (he is a pundit himself after all) the author finishes off with this observation, which I’ll allow to end this post:

“But the best lesson of Tetlock’s book may be the one that he seems most reluctant to draw: Think for yourself.”

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In 2006, the NEF (New Economics Foundation) released the results of a comprehensive study they’d done on happiness in various countries in the form of the Happy Planet Index.  The goal was to find a way to measure the success of a society other than things like GDP or HDI.  Its a little simplistic to call the index a measure of happiness since its really intended to be a measure of a society’s capability to sustain and produce a happy populace.  Which is more different than you might think.  For those that are interested the Wikipedia page on the HPI discusses it pretty thoroughly.

Anyway, Vanuatu came out on top all things considered.  In fact the top ten are nearly all third-world countries.  But this isn’t too surprising to those who have spent time in a third-world country, since it doesn’t take long to realize that financial success ≠ societal happiness.  I bring this up now because Mental_Floss posted a great article the other day about one author’s travels to Vanuatu in an attempt to find out how they made it to the top of the list.  His observations are pretty interesting I think, and they remind me a lot of Ghana.  Here’s a link to the article:

Vanuatu: The Happiest Place on Earth? | Mental_Floss

I’m not going to launch into any kind of analysis of why these people are happier, but feel free to leave your thoughts about the issue in the comments.  Also, if you’d like to see the rank that the US ended up with on the “Happiness Index”  out of 178 countries examined, just click “continue reading”…

150th.  Right below Lithuania.  But were you expecting anything different?

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Well its long been my position that the largest bias of the media is their bias towards the exciting, tantalizing, scandalous, lurid, and enraging.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the way that the media treats the actions of murderers who commit mass shootings.  I was reading an interesting article in MindHacks (an excellent psychology/neuroscience blog) the other day about this subject and with the immigration center shooting that happened in New York today, I thought this was an appropriate time to post something about it.

A very interesting video clip on this subject and a brief commentary can be found after the jump (which means after you click “continue reading” for my readers who are new to the blog culture)

This video is from a BBC show called Newswipe and contains a bit of commentary about a shooting in germany and an interesting perspective from a forensic psychologist at the end.  Please forgive the bleeped out cussing and sneering tone, it is a British show after all!  ;)

While we didn’t get much coverage of this particular tragedy in the US, it seemed to strongly parallel our national coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings last year.  I mean we were reading essays that he had written for his english class two years ago.  All of his personal webcam videos were broadcast day in and day out.  There were interviews with his family members and teachers.  It was horrible really.  There are thousands of bitter loners out there who feel like they should be famous but the world isn’t giving them a fair chance.  And they now see mass murder as a way to go down in history and make the world see that they shouldn’t have looked down on them.  They know that all they have to do is burst into their school/workplace/local mall and shoot up the place to get their face and story plastered all over cable news for the next several weeks.

But its a hard thing to stop.  Ultimately the news dwells on these details because its what their viewers want to see.  It appeals to our basest and most primal instincts.  Its kind of a modern form of Roman bloodsports.  If everyone else was showing the home videos of the Virginia Tech shooter and one news station refused to do it they’d get destroyed in the ratings.  They’d all have to make the responsible choice together and to do that successfully they’d need an atmosphere of mutual trust that is not even close to existing in the news industry.

It’s a manifestation of a classic economic and business quandary best represented by the famous “prisoner’s dilemma”. A situation in which the “invisible hand” fails to guide self-interested individuals to optimal results because of imperfect information and a breakdown of trust, instead leading all sides to mess themselves over in the long-run in the pursuit of short term goals.  And if modern game theory is correct, there’s really no good way to stop it.

ps – this will be my last post for a few days because it will be a busy weekend for me but i’ll be back with plenty more posts next week.

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The internet was full of jokes today in celebration of April 1st.  I thought one of the best was Yahoo’s new “Ideological search”, both because of its astute social commentary and its near-believability.  Their info page on the subject has this to say:

Tired of being inundated with the contradictory and offensive beliefs of others? Today, the scientists at Yahoo! are releasing a groundbreaking new search filter that keeps controversy out of your search experience. I’m extremely pleased to announce the immediate availability of Ideological Search, which allows you to control the ideology of your search results.

Our research found that web searchers are regularly affronted by articles, blogs, facts, and pages that contain perspectives directly contradicting their own personal beliefs and values –- whether political, religious, economic, scientific, philosophical, etc. If consumers have the freedom in whether they navigate to the HuffingtonPost.com or FOXNews.com, why not extend that same choice to search? Until today, no other search engine could provide this level of personalization –- ensuring that consumers can search with the utmost confidence, knowing that they won’t be antagonized by their results.

Its a sad fact that the news in our country is becoming increasingly politicized.  With both sides accusing the main stream media of liberal or conservative bias, people are now increasingly turning to blatantly partisan news sources.  Local newspapers and organizations like CNN are dying while FoxNews and MSNBC are thriving on the backs of their outspoken, partisan pundits.

Its just easier to bask in the warmth of your own viewpoint than to allow it to be challenged.  I’ve heard several people tell me recently that they don’t discuss politics because it just never goes well.  I say that’s because we’re out of practice.  We’ve lost the art of rational debate.  And the longer we sit in our own ideological corners the more difficult it will be to understand the other side.

Anyway, kudos to Yahoo for skewering this insidious tendency that’s dividing America.  And if you want to try it their ideological search actually works and can be found here.  I wonder how long it will be before a product like this is actually released?

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I’m finally catching up on articles I’ve been meaning to write for a long time and this one comes from a New York Times Op-Ed piece which was written last June but which I discovered more recently.  It can be found here. It describes a phenomenon known as “source amnesia”, which serves as yet another example of how none of us are nearly as smart, objective, or discerning as we think we are.

Most basically, source amnesia is just the idea that its much easier to remember a particular nugget of information, than it is to remember the context or source of that information, especially if its information we use, think about, or hear often.  For example where did you first learn that the gas pedal was on the right and the brake on the left?  Or where did you first hear that smoking causes lung cancer?  You’ve probably heard it plenty of times from lots of reputable sources but can you name one of those sources with surety?  Unless you’ve read something in the last few days your mind has probably long stripped away any memory of where you got that information or the context you heard it in, and now just stores it in the part of the brain where it stores “facts”.

The interesting thing is that your brain, in transfering this memory to its “fact bin” often strips out very important context, including whether or not that particular item is true or false, or whether it comes from a reliable or unreliable source.  I’ve long-since learned that its very difficult to memorize negative associations like “T-cells are NOT part of the innate immune system” because when test time comes, more often than not I’m only able to remember that T-cells and the innate immune system were somehow related in my studying and I’m not able to tell whether or not T-cells were or were not part of this system, which is usually the fact I actually need to know.  So I’ve stuck to memorizing only positive associations “T-cells ARE part of the adaptive immune system” because then when I remember there’s an association I can be confident its a positive one.

Well political pundits and partisan news organizations are aware of this little brain snafu and take advantage of it on a regular basis.  News headlines are particularly problematic.  Because of source amnesia the following three headlines:

Obama is a Muslim

Obama is not a Muslim

Is Obama a Muslim?

…are pretty much all stored in our brains in the same exact way.  Just a sourceless association between Obama and Muslims.  And because the source and context of these little factoids are stripped away more severely the more often we hear an association the proportion of people who believe (in this example) that Barack Obama is a Muslim has less to do with the content of any of the articles discussing the matter and more to do with the volume of articles that mention his name and Muslims in close proximity to each-other.

The New Yorker ran a controversial cover at the beginning of last July featuring Barack Obama and his wife dressed as militant Muslims which was supposed to be satirical.  It sparked a new interest into the subject of Obama’s faith and several news agencies ran articles looking into the Muslim connection, each one, of course, finding the idea that Obama was a Muslim to be rubbish.  And yet over the course of that month the percent of Americans who believed he was a Muslim had actually risen to 12%! Up from 10% previously. As it turns out remembering that “Obama is NOT a muslim” is about as difficult as remembering that “T-cells are NOT part of the innate immune system.”  After a while all you have left is the association which only gets reinforced the more often its brought up.

The picture I started this article with is another good example.  Hillary Clinton’s camp released it during the primary knowing full well that it doesn’t matter whether this picture is run with an article supporting (where there even any of these?) or debunking the idea that Obama is a Muslim.  And it doesn’t matter whether it’s seen in the National Enquirer or the LA Times.  The source and context will be forgotten and all that will be remembered is the image of Obama in Muslim dress.  And the more often that picture is shown the more people will associate Obama and Muslims in their minds.

Those who listen to talk radio or frequently watch cable news editorial shows can probably easily identify those times when these pundits are consciously using this technique.  They tend to use certain phrases frequently, associating their enemies with all things bad.  Over time, if you are a frequent listener/viewer these associations are pounded so far into your head that they become firmly rooted in the “fact” area of your brain and you completely forget that the only place you’ve heard them is from an uneducated, partisan, clearly-biased entertainer.  In fact a study on source amnesia at Stanford which was cited in this NYT op-ed, found that the more often someone hears a statement, the more likely they are to attribute that statement to a reputable source:

In one study, a group of Stanford students was exposed repeatedly to an unsubstantiated claim taken from a Web site that Coca-Cola is an effective paint thinner. Students who read the statement five times were nearly one-third more likely than those who read it only twice to attribute it to Consumer Reports (rather than The National Enquirer, their other choice), giving it a gloss of credibility.

Thus to our brains repetition=credibility.  And when we’ve heard/read/thought about something enough, we often believe we got it from a credible source, even if we never did.  This is another one of those quick and dirty shortcuts our brains use that are correct more often than not.  I mean generally speaking, the more often you hear something, the more correct it is, especially if you hear it from multiple unrelated sources.  But obviously repetition from a source with little or no credibility, or repetition over and over from the same source doesn’t make a statement any more true.  And our brain really doesn’t take those things into account.

So what does that mean?  Political pundits who frequently use repetitive statements or slogans, or who spend an inordinate amount of time discussing false accusations against their political enemies are literally trying to brainwash you.  And news organizations who frequently use headlines consisting of a controversial statement in the form of a question (Is Barack Obama a communist?  Is John McCain too old to be President?) or who, once again, spend large amounts of time dwelling on false accusations before finally debunking them at the very end of the article are stoking your fear and anger, and in the end, misinforming you for all practical purposes.

I don’t think merely knowing about source amnesia allows you to prevent it in any way.  But knowing how its abused can help you identify those that are taking advantage of it, and avoid them.  Knowing about source amnesia can also encourage us to question those “facts” that we believe we know.  Which doesn’t mean we should just throw up our hands in frustration, but maybe it will help us approach our political discussions with a little more humility. Because even those things that we think are common knowledge, or which we vaguely remember learning from credible sources, may very well be false.

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Just a quick post here.  This is a documentary we watched in class a few weeks back during one of our “culture in medicine” discussion sessions.  It was filmed by Kiri Davis while she was still an undergrad and has won a few film festival awards.  Its short, a little over seven minutes, and is definitely worth watching.

It addresses our lingering associations with dark v light skin, through two methods.  The first is a discussion of beauty with African-American girls with various shades of skin.  They talk about how even in their community, light skin is the ideal and darker individuals are derided and encouraged to try to look less “African”.  This is a phenomenon that many caucasians may not be aware of, but among many minority populations this association between european-looking people and all things good has led many to use dangerous skin bleaching creams and elaborate hair-straightening methods.  This is common even outside the US and we saw these same things manifest in Ghana when we were there in 2006.  

The second portion of the video recreates the famous doll experiment from the Brown v Board of Education trial and I found it very compelling.  African-American children were asked to choose between a darker skinned and lighter skinned doll and were asked questions about each.  You should watch the video for the result but I think one of the most striking moments in the film occurs during this segment around 4 minutes and 45 seconds in.  It really drives home the negative impact that these race associations have on children growing up with darker skin, and its shocking to see how our society’s association of “black” with “evil, dirty, ugly, and brutish” has permeated these children’s psyches.  When you hear people talk about “institutionalized racism” that’s woven into the fabric of our society, this is, in part, what they’re talking about.  How can you be expected to succeed when you grow up your whole life with the unquestioned understanding that you’re worse?

Leave your thoughts in the comments.

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Michelangelo's Jonah from the Sistine Chapel

Well its been a while since the last post, but I assure you its not because my blogging enthusiasm is waning.  Our son Jonah was born last Saturday, and that combined with an unusually packed school schedule has left me with less free time than usual.  Not that I’m complaining though.  Jonah is happy, healthy, incredibly cute, and just about the most amiable baby anyone could ask for.  You can see videos and pictures of him at our family blog GayLynnAndRyan.Blogspot.Com.  Now I said when I started this blog that it wouldn’t be one of those “online diary” kind of blogs and I’m still committed to that idea.  But I can’t let something as life-changing as the birth of our first child go by without some kind of acknowledgement on this website.  And I thought a good way to approach this would be to provide a little bit of insight into our choice of the name “Jonah” for our son, since we’ve had a few questions about it.

Of course there’s a lot that goes into choosing a name for a child.  Its got to sound nice when paired with the last name, its got to be something that isn’t too easy for kids to make fun of, it needs to be a name that won’t be considered a “grandpa name” or something like that when he’s still in high school, and of course there’s also the meaning of the name to consider.  The sound of a name is a subjective judgement and we personally think its got a nice ring to it, and we liked it because its unique while not being unpronounceable or difficult to spell.  The meaning of the name initially gave us pause but after much contemplation its become one of my favorite aspects of his name.  Let me explain…

So most readers are probably at least somewhat familiar with the scriptural Jonah. His story is told in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim texts.  He was a prophet, but he was kind of an unusual prophet, in that his story as presented in the scriptures doesn’t necessarily portray him in a very favorable light.  For those who need a refresher, here’s a summary from Wikipedia:

According to the book of Jonah, he was the son of Amittai (meaning ‘My Truth’). God orders Jonah to go to the city of Nineveh to prophesy against it “for their great wickedness is come up before me”. Jonah seeks to flee from “the presence of the Lord” by going to Jaffa and sailing to Tarshish. A huge storm arises and the sailors, realizing this is no ordinary storm, cast lots and learn that Jonah is to blame. Jonah admits this and states that if he is thrown overboard the storm will cease. The sailors try to get the ship to the shore but in failing feel forced to throw him overboard, at which point the sea calms. Jonah is miraculously saved by being swallowed by a large fish specially prepared by God where he spent three days and three nights (Jonah 1:17). In chapter two, while in the great fish, Jonah prays to God in his affliction and commits to thanksgiving and to paying what he has vowed. God commands the fish to vomit Jonah out.

God again orders Jonah to visit Nineveh and to prophesy to its inhabitants. This time he goes and enters the city crying, “In forty days Nineveh shall be overthrown.” Probably to Jonah’s surprise, the people of Nineveh believed his word and proclaimed a fast. The king of Nineveh put on sackcloth and sat in ashes and made a proclamation to decree fasting, sackcloth, prayer, and repentance. God saw their works and spared the city at that time .

Displeased by this, Jonah tries to excuse his earlier flight to Tarshish and asserts that, since God is merciful, it was inevitable that God would turn from the threatened calamities. He then leaves the city and makes himself a shelter, waiting to see whether or not the city will be destroyed.

God causes a plant (in Hebrew a kikayon) to grow over Jonah’s shelter to give him some shade from the sun. Later, God causes a worm to bite the plant’s root and it withers. Jonah, now being exposed to the full force of the sun, becomes faint and desires that God take him out of the world.

But God says to him,

“Are you really so very angry about the little plant?” (or “The good is what you are angry at!” – according to a traditional Jewish translation)

“You were upset about this little plant, something for which you have not worked nor did you do anything to make it grow. It grew up overnight and died the next day. Should I not be even more concerned about Nineveh, this enormous city? There are more than one hundred twenty thousand people in it who do not know right from wrong, as well as many animals!” (Jonah 4:9-11 NET)

So basically Jonah is commanded to go do some prophesying, he runs away, repents while in the belly of a fish, prophesies, gets angry when the people actually do repent, then pouts in the wilderness, spites God, and wishes he was dead.  So is that really the kind of person we want to name our son after?

Well first off I think its important to remember that Jonah, despite his very apparent flaws, was a prophet, and so was obviously a pretty stellar individual overall.  We’re only getting a very small glimpse of his life, and we’ve just happened to catch him during a moment of weakness.  Similarly its pretty safe to assume that most, if not all, of the other prophets in recorded scriptures had similar faults.   They were, after all, imperfect human beings.  But in the end it wasn’t the person of Jonah, but the story of Jonah that we found inspiring.  I guess we named him Jonah, not with the intent that he emulate Jonah’s actions, but with the hope that he would remember the lessons that the story of Jonah teaches.

I think one of the biggest lessons we can draw from the story of Jonah is that God is patient and merciful.  Its really a strikingly merciful story if you think about it, especially for its era.  The city of Ninevah is really quite wicked, yet God wants to give them another chance.  When Jonah runs away and is cast into the sea, God sends a fish to swallow him, not as a punishment, but as a protection.  When Jonah sulks in the wilderness God sends a plant to give him shade.  I mean Jonah is repeatedly blessed, even while he’s in the act of defying God.  And its often that way with us as well.  The story of Jonah really highlights God’s great mercy towards us, even when we mess up repeatedly, and it can hopefully help us recognize and be thankful for those acts of mercy in our lives and inspire us to be similarly merciful to our fellowmen.

Another big lesson from the story of Jonah is that nobody’s perfect.  I think there are really two ways your progression can be halted in this life, the first is by not caring enough about becoming a better person, and the second is to paralyze yourself with unrealistic expectations.  And I think sometimes our (inaccurate) conception of ancient prophets as near-perfect demigods can fuel our unrealistic standards and lead to depression and hopelessness.  The story of Jonah, on the other hand, provides an unflinching and thorough report of the pretty significant faults of a prophet.  I think this can serve as a reminder that if this imperfect man can be used as a tool in the hands of God, then we shouldn’t think that our many imperfections disqualify us from being his servants either.

Which isn’t to say that you can go off and reject God’s will outright and not expect consequences, but in reality its important to remember that we all reject God’s will on a daily basis.  Everytime we think a bitter or hateful thought about someone, display a lack of charity, allow ourselves to be lifted up in pride, pine for some new material thing, refuse to forgive completely, act selfishly, show a lack of love towards anyone including our enemies, take it upon ourselves to judge others, or betray our integrity, we’ve rejected God’s will.  But as was outlined in the paragraph above God is patient and merciful, and I think this story teaches us that we can still be used as a tool for good in the world despite our imperfections, if we have a humble heart and are striving to be better.

The other reason we really like the name Jonah is because of its definition.  Now it has multiple translations and the most literal meaning is “dove” or something like that but the meaning we like best is “man of peace”.  The world is often a tumultuous place, and there are few problems more universal these days than a lack of personal and familial peace.  We hope that Jonah’s name will be a reminder to him of the importance of peace and being a peacemaker in his community, his family, and in all his relationships.

So I hope that gives some insight into our name choice.  Choosing a name for our son was difficult for us, but we were finally able to agree on a name that we both felt was unique, practical, and meaningful.  Plus we think it sounds really cool.

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I’ve been reading a blog called Mind Hacks recently, and they’ve been featuring several stories on the emerging field of “experimental philosophy”.  Essentially this is a new attempt by researchers to apply the scientific method, or parts of it anyway, to the normally very “soft” science of philosophy.  The results so far have been pretty fascinating, and I think one of the most striking, and universally accessible, studies to come out of this early movement is the one featured in the YouTube video above, and described in this Mind Hacks Article.  Now the video is great but honestly I almost think the scenario it presents works better when read so I’ve included my paraphrasing of the situation below:

In our first scenario imagine that a vice president goes up to his CEO and tells him, “We’ve got a great plan for a new project.  It will create huge profits for the company, but it will harm the environment.  What do you want to do?”  The CEO responds saying,… ”I don’t care about the environment, all I care about is maximizing profit.  Lets do it.”  So the plan goes forward, the company makes boatloads of money, and the environment is indeed harmed.

So the question is, did the CEO in this scenario harm the environment intentionally?  There’s no right or wrong answer just think to yourself for a minute and figure out what you think.  Got it?  Ok, move on to the second scenario.

In our second scenario imagine that a vice president goes up to his CEO and tells him, “We’ve got a great plan for a new project.  It will create huge profits for the company, and it will help the environment.  What do you want to do?”  The CEO responds saying, “I don’t care about the environment, all I care about is maximizing profit.  Lets do it.”  So the plan goes forward, the company makes boatloads of money, and the environment is indeed helped.

Now ask yourself, in this scenario, did the CEO help the environment intentionally?  Analyze your feelings on the issue and then move on.

Interestingly, the vast majority of the population says “Yes” to the first question and “No” to the second.  So they say the CEO intentionally harmed the environment in the first one, but did not intentionally help the environment the second time.  Isn’t that interesting?  That we’re so much more likely to assign people blame for the side effects of their actions when those side effects are negative, but we don’t give them credit for the positive side effects?  

I’ve got my own tentative ideas about why this may be, and I think this case has some interesting applications to modern politics, among other things.  But in an effort to get some discussion going around here, I’m going to try something new and open this up to you guys.  I know you’re out there reading this, I get the statistics every night.  So speak up!  What is going on?  Why does there seem to be this discrepancy, or is it a discrepancy at all?  How does this affect our every day lives?  What do you think?

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Socrates - humble intellectual extraordinaire

Well after years of talk I’ve decided to finally start a blog.  Not the public diary kind mind you (we have one of those here) but the kind where I can discuss politics, philosophy, religion and other of life’s more weighty matters.  Even those who know me well are probably unaware of the enormous percentage of my daily free time that’s devoted to researching these subjects.  It’s far more than I’d care to admit frankly.  But I’ve long been without a significant outlet for the information and ideas that are constantly swirling around in my head and I’m hoping that this blog will rectify that situation.  But more than just an online sounding board, I’m hoping that this blog can become a place for similarly-interested individuals to discuss these complex issues with dispassionate rationality and constructive debate.  Which brings me to my next topic.

So why the stupid name?  After much thought I’ve decided to name my blog for one of the principles that I hold most dear: Intellectual Humility.  This is a perspective, born of knowledge and honest self-reflection, that recognizes that what we know about the world and life pales in comparison to what we still have yet to understand.  Its a principle that Einstein talked about frequently, and Lao Tzu touched on, but which Socrates said most succinctly when he said, “I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance”.

Interestingly, this kind of intellectual humility tends to grow with increasing knowledge.  This principle has been clearly demonstrated to me since starting medical school, as I’ve already learned far more about many subjects than I knew there was to learn.  The subject of immunology is an instructive example…  On the surface its simply a subset of human physiology, which is a subset of biology.  Couldn’t be too complex right?  Well I’ve got an entire class on it right now and my mind is regularly blown by the complexity of the human immune response.  But even more mind-blowing is the knowledge that there are probably a hundred PhD’s out there who have dedicated their entire lives to studying the details of each of the bullet points on each of our slides.  Those people could probably give an entire class on the content of one of our slides.  We think we’re getting the in-depth treatment but more and more I realize that we are just blowing through summaries of what is an almost unimaginably huge topic.  The end result of this experience is that while I objectively now know more about the immune system than I did before, the net effect is that I feel somewhat stupider, because I thought I knew a fair amount about the immune response before I started, and now I realize that I know 2% of what there is to know, max.

So we see that the acquisition of knowledge is fatal to unrealistic pride.  And an intensely impassioned, uncompromising, or unequivocal opinion about any given subject is almost always a sign of ignorance to the complexities of the topic.  The lesson learned is to be wary of those who seem sure of themselves when discussing complex issues, because its likely that the only reason for their confidence is that they don’t even know what they don’t know.

With that said you’ll likely read a fair amount of passion in my posts on this blog.  And I’ll likely express some strong opinions.  And part of that is because I, as an imperfect human being, am not always aware of what I don’t know.  But its also because including qualifiers before every single phrase is frankly cumbersome.  I’ve always thought that the short-hand for verbally expressed intellectual humility is an unspoken understanding that we are all uninformed human beings with limited understanding.

So while we may debate vigorously we must be able to divorce our own egos from our fallible ideas and tear apart and rebuild arguments without fear of personal offense.  We should always understand that our stances on issues are our stances “so far” and we must be willing to alter them when presented with new truths.  If we can debate serious issues with that unspoken understanding then there will be no contention, there will be no anger, we will be practicing intellectual humility, and we will grow that much closer to understanding the truth.

Now go to the Home Page and start reading/commenting!

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