Clicking on the image goes to both a video and accompanying article. The video may be a little slow to load, so if that’s all you want, you might have to wait a few seconds more for it to appear.
Brain research & free will
The latest in social robots
People that study economics may be less socially conscious
Philanthropy: Not all giving
“The overworld so slow with ice, contrary to the committee’s advice”
The Church, The Great Machine, https://youtu.be/qi3WpbZI4pM
Not sure what the video has to do with the lyrics, but it gives you a chance to hear the song.
The Culture of Complaint
Reaction
We know that other animals can feel. Why is our reaction to confine them, hurt them, kill them and eat them?
We have a way to avoid doing any of that: http://howdoigovegan.com
Marriage
This video offers some reasons why if you marry, you’ll likely choose the wrong person—which it tells us is only to be expected.
It also suggests we don’t really want happiness, but the familiar. This defies one of the key goals of life, and there are no compelling reasons given why it’s right.
The discussion avoids the real basis of successful partnership: the substantive values people find in each other.
If they don’t hold the right values—ones that favour success in living—and they don’t complement each other, they have no logical way to predict whether a marriage will last.
While romantic episodes often revolve around illusions—for example, that physical attraction provides a good basis for a relationship—enduring relationships involve more sober asssessments.
If marriage is really the goal, people need to evaluate what they want from life, what their values are, whether the values of their parter complement theirs, and the achievements, goals and principles of their partner.
Wealth and appearance might be factors, but with a lower weight, and not without context.
This is on the basis that people involved are rational, which might not be the case, or only be partial.
The video also offers a fish dinner and cashmere sweater as signs of happiness, which more accurately represent the concealed misery inflicted on other animals by humans.
For anyone unaware of this, you can find out more here.
The video suggests that in time—maybe jokingly, a few centuries—we’ll make partner selection a more systematic process that won’t end up with so many mismatches.
In the meantime, the video that follows provides some direction in contrast to the uncertain laundry list of the initial video.
Science’s Journal of Irreproducible Results
http://www.vox.com/2015/5/13/8591837/how-science-is-broken
This title of this post isn’t meant to suggest science is pointless. Just that it shouldn’t be accepted as unqualified truth.
Excerpts from the article:
- In an analysis of 300 clinical research papers about epilepsy — published in 1981, 1991, and 2001 — 71 percent were categorized as having no enduring value.
- [R]esearchers at Amgen were unable to reproduce 89 percent of landmark cancer research findings for potential drug targets. (The problem even inspired a satirical publication called the Journal of Irreproducible Results.)
- In his seminal paper “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” Stanford professor John Ioannidis developed a mathematical model to show how broken the research process is. Researchers run badly designed and biased experiments, too often focusing on sensational and unlikely theories instead of ones that are likely to be plausible. That ultimately distorts the evidence base — and what we think we know to be true in fields like health care and medicine.
- Because of these now well-known problems, it’s not unusual to hear statements like those from The Lancet editor Richard Horton that “Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.” He continued: “Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”
- Long before it was mainstream to criticize science, Sheila Jasanoff, a Harvard professor, was arguing that science — and scientific facts — are socially constructed, shaped more by power, politics, and culture (the “prevailing paradigm”) than by societal need or the pursuit of truth. “Scientific knowledge, in particular, is not a transcendent mirror of reality,” she writes in her book States of Knowledge. “It both embeds and is embedded in social practices, identities, norms, conventions, discourses, instruments and institutions — in short, in all the building blocks of what we term the social.” In a conversation since, she cautioned, “There is something terribly the matter with projecting an idealistic view of science.”
Cellular 