The Fact of My Ignorance

If you’re a reader of my blog then you probably already know that I’m a big fan of the concept of civil discourse,  both for practical and moral reasons.  And the decline in quality of our political dialogue stresses me more than pretty much anything else in the realm of politics right now.  I’m not just talking about recent events.  In many ways the anger, distrust, fear, misinformation, and outright hatred we’ve seen on display recently are just the natural result of several decades of steadily crumbling communities and increasingly isolated and individualistic lifestyles.  And quite frankly, new technological methods of communication that allow anybody with an internet connection to appear to be as credible as actual experts, that facilitate the specialization of news so that citizens can wrap themselves in a cocoon of their own perspective, and which enable people to say increasingly inflammatory things while hiding behind a veil of anonymity are just accelerating the degradation.

So can you imagine my delight to find that my church has chosen to speak out against this very problem.  The LDS church put out a press release a week or so go entitled “The Mormon Ethic of Civility” that I thought was well-written, insightful, and extremely relevant.  While it’s written by LDS leaders, it should be an interesting read for Non-LDS readers as well.  It can be found here on the original LDS newsroom website, but I’ve also posted the full text after the jump. Continue reading

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,… Continue reading