Most if not all of my readers live in a country where they have been granted by their country a right to vote for their leaders. I'm not sure how it is in countries outside of America, but more and more I also hear people saying not only that we have a right to vote but also that we have a responsibility to vote?

What is the basis for this statement?

I'm considering saying more, but I think I'll just leave it at that for now.

Tags: politics, questions, voting
Current Location: Remsen Hall, Johns Hopkins University
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: silence

One of my church small groups was recently playing some silly game at a social. This game was a "Leadership Test". It consisted of a questionnaire that involved performing some physical actions. However, if you read the instructions properly, instead of following all the actions the others were doing, you would find that you were really supposed to skip all the questions, sign your name, and wait patiently.

This test did well at demonstrating who could follow directions, and it may have indicated who would not follow the crowd, but I don't see how this has anything to do with leadership.

It's not the first time this idea has come up. My parents used to tell me I was a leader and not a follower. I agreed with them on the latter point -- I'm not a follower. As an example, had I been given the poll that Dr. Bloom gave to his study subjects regarding welfare, to which I referred yesterday[1], I am sure I would have been the exception to the rule (because I don't consider myself either Republican or Democrat[2]).

But does this make me a good leader?

I don't think so. I don't think that "leader" and "follower" are opposites.

A person who is not a follower may well be a very prideful, rebellious person. This is in stark contrast to the responsible, humble leader that I idealize.

I often do not follow because I do not trust that a leader knows the correct "answer"; this in no way implies that I myself know the correct "answer"!

Have any of the rest of you come across this "black and white" idea about leading and following?

And what really does make a good leader?

Tags: definitions, questions
Current Location: our apartment
Current Mood: okay
Current Music: silence

In Paul Bloom's talk, he gave the statistic that 90% of Americans think steroids are a huge problem in sports. When asked why, people usually answered "It's cheating," or, "Because the side effects are so terrible."

It seems Bloom was as confused as I was back when I posted an entry on steroids.[1] Bloom, however, was better able to study this methodically than I.

Now, some clarifications this time around. Steroids are illegal. They should not be used in sports for that reason alone. The question is "If steroids were not illegal, should they be used in sports?"

Bloom asked this question. The overwhelming answer was, "No! Of course not! Steroids are cheating! And they have terrible side effects."

( more of Bloom's study questions and answers )

Bloom finally did find a disturbing way to get almost everyone to say that steroids in sports are ok. He asked: "80% of Americans think that steroid usage is ok in sports; how do you feel about them?"

Amazingly (or not), this caused the vast majority of people to answer that steroids were fine.

Further confirmation of my original ideas on this topic came when he revealed another interesting piece of trivia. Apparently, it took 10 to 15 years before running shoes were no longer considered cheating in foot races.

Bloom suggests that it is really unfamiliarity and fear, not logical thinking, that makes people so leary of steroids. Once a large enough group of people become ok with the idea, the rest of the people will inevitably follow. (What a scary thought for how people come to ethical beliefs!)

Now, I had a great discussion with shadewright on steroids found here. In that discussion, he brought up the very good point that history comes into play. The point of sports is not just to be the fastest human possible or even to simply win. To some extent, the point is to compare oneself to all humans throughout history. So then, to fairly do this, we would need to duplicate as closely as possible the conditions used by the ancient Greeks, for example.

Now, of course, it is not possible to do this. We cannot go back and eat the same foods as those athletes. Running barefoot is not terribly healthy for the feet. And competition in the nude has its own problems. So we forget the idea of genuinely being fair to the ancient athletes. Instead, we try to compromise in the rules of the games we now play. (I think we're fooling ourselves, but even so....) We are allowed to use some synthetic materials, but others we are not allowed to use.

I find a lot of it rather arbitrary, and history has shown that it will all change anyhow based on society's opinions, not on any logical reasoning.

I think that if they wanted to make games like the Olympics genuinely fair, every competitor in a given event would be given exactly the same diet, exactly the same equipment with which to train, and exactly the same gear. But so much for fairness....

Tags: ethics, popular opinion, social psychology, sports, steroids
Current Location: our apartment
Current Mood: hungry
Current Music: The Verve, "One Day"

Dr. Paul Bloom returned to our campus to speak his third out of four lectures. Previously, he spoke on "moral circles".[1, 2, 3] His topic this time around was "Religion Is Natural".

He opened by citing statistics of the number of people around the world who believe in a creation, a god or gods, spirits, and life after death. Those who do not are an exception, not the rule.

As a researcher, Bloom is interested in descriptively studying universals and near universals with which we seem to be born.

It is known, for example, that children have a sort of pre-programmed system of physical understanding. Almost all children believe the world is flat (usually rectangular, actually) until they are taught otherwise. Almost all children believe that a ball rolling down a spiraling ramp will continue to curve upon leaving it, when in fact it will travel straight after that. Almost all children believe that the air is weightless. These seem to be programmed into us.^*

Bloom also believes that people are pre-programmed with a system of social understanding as well, such as programmed morality. (Refer to the previous entries on his lectures for more information.)

As for non-physical pre-programmed systems of understanding, Bloom has found three beliefs to be near universal:

animism

creationism

dualism

Animism is the attribution of consciousness to what are considered (by modern thought) to be inanimate objects. In the previous "Helper/Hinderer" studies[1], for example, the babies seemed to have no difficulty with solid shapes performing moral actions. They preferred the objects based on how those objects behaved "morally".

In general, it has been shown that humans tend to see intention even when something is known to be accident.

Creationism is not limited to a Judeo-Christian, six-day creation belief. No one is born knowing that. But it has been shown that children are more creationist than their parents. Even children with atheistic parents are still very likely to believe that the world was created by a higher power.

People have been shown to "find" patterns where there aren't any. In a line-up of disordered pennies, studies have shown that people think they can see a pattern. One argument, then, is that people think they see design in the world when they are not really seeing these patterns at all.

Children are also more likely to assign purposes to objects than adults are.

An experiment involving order I found to be interesting. Children were shown a picture of a messy room and a clean room and asked which was caused by a sister? There was no significant difference in answers. They were equally likely to suggest that the sister had messed up the room as they were to suggest that she had cleaned it. However, when asked, "Which result was caused by the wind through the open window?" nearly all answered that the messy room was caused by the wind.

This was repeated in babies, using the staring assumption (that babies stare longer when they are surprised by something). When shown an animation of a cartoon person entering a box and either ordering or disordering pins, they did not seem surprised. When a ball was shown rolling and knocking over the pins, they still did not seem surprised. However, if that ball set up the pins, they stared at the image far longer, indicating perhaps their great surprise at this.

Humans seem preprogrammed with the idea that anything can bring about disorder, but only animate beings can create order.

Dualism is the belief that "I" can be thought of separately from the body. This was the topic of his first lecture, which I missed, but he brought up a few examples.

He mentioned how there are many children's books and movies about "body-swapping". They have no difficulty grasping these stories.

Also, more children believe in life after death than adults.

I was not as impressed by his examples this time around, but what he next spoke about was really good. He moved on to discuss hypotheses explaining what causes these initial pre=programmed beliefs to change.

Scientists and thinkers tend to propose two main hypotheses:

Children are like sponges. They absorb new beliefs from their culture.

People come to scientific beliefs from doing science.

Bloom stated that the former is only partly true, whereas the latter is almost entirely false.

Dawkins is a strong holder of the first hypothesis. In his view, children will blindly accept whatever lies they are taught as children until they are wise enough to understand that ideas of religion are stupid.

Bloom, however, doubts this. His and other studies have shown that children are not blind sponges. They have a selection process for what knowledge they accept as true.

In word learning, children are very sensitive to the amount of confidence the teacher shows in the meanings of words. They are also sensitive to past reliability and age of the teacher.

As for this last one, they seem to naturally hold that adults know more facts. However, they pay more attention to peers in matters of accent and slang.

The same trends seem to hold for other kinds of learning.

It makes evolutionary sense for children to have a mechanism to separate truth from fiction.

As for the second hypothesis above, Bloom argues that -- excepting philosophers, theologians, and the like -- people don't care about the details of their so-called beliefs. They may claim to believe in a god, but when asked about that god, they aren't likely to be able to tell you much.

People use what Bloom calls a double deference. They go to "experts" when deciding which beliefs to believe, and they also leave the details to those experts. This happens subconsciously most of the time.

In some (I find) very scary studies, pollsters presented an extremely generous welfare plan and an obviously cruel welfare plan to voters. With each plan came the statement, "The Republicans support this plan," or, "The Democrats support this plan." The researchers alternated whcih party supported which plan. The voters almost always chose the plan that matched with their political party. The scary part is that, when asked why they made their choices, they almost always made up reasons for why one plan was better than the other!

He gave numerous examples of this sort of phenomenon. (One involved opinions on steroids, which I'll give its own entry.) Many of the examples had to do with what people thought other people believed. Take Wikipedia, for example. It is truth according to the masses.[4] Most of us assume that if most people believe something, it must be true.

And contrary to snobby scientists, there is a double deference in science as well. How do I know there are quarks? Have I done the experiments? Can I even understand the mathematics behind their discovery? No. I defer to the particle physicists, whom I trust.

The fact of the matter is that most people who believe in natural selection have no idea how it really works. Most people who believe the earth is billions of years old cannot explain how they "know" this. This is no different than all of the "religious folk" who believe in a god and yet cannot tell you anything about him or her.

Bloom claimed that it is not knowledge that triggers beliefs but rather deference -- whom do you trust?

He also noted that people only say, "I believe...," when there is some uncertainty or controversy. No one, for example, ever says, "I believe in ants."

---

*This is why science education is so difficult. It is not that the students cannot understand science; it is that they come into science with so many incorrect beliefs about the physical world that need to be corrected.[5]

Tags: epistemology, lecture reviews, nature vs nurture, philosophy, politics, religion, science, social psychology
Current Location: our apartment
Current Mood: okay
Current Music: Matchbox Twenty, "Argue"

I've rambled before about how much the term "organic" when referring to food irks me,[1] but this is primarily a matter of terminology.

I am all for healthier food. And it may well be that (some) more "old fashioned" methods of raising crops and animals are healthier.

However, I think it a very faulty idea that natural is always better than man-made.[2]

Still, this idea is very ingrained in many people. It is one of the reasons I think that "organic" food is so popular.

Some other reasons people buy "organic" food are that they are scared of pesticides causing health problems and that "organic" food is supposed to be better for the environment.

Personally, being a chemist, I am well aware of the effects of dilution. The odds of any pesticides actually harming me are so low at the dilutions involved that it hardly warrants the outrageous overpricing stores give to "organic" foods. But "organic" food hardly hurts.

The third reason I mentioned for why people buy "organic" is because people are trying to buy "green", that is, they think that buying "organic" food is better for the environment, because the "organic" methods used in raising the crops and animals are better for the environment.

Consider, however, that most "organic" food is shipped from other locations. This means two things:

The food is not going to be as fresh. Whatever health benefits one may have gained from eating such food are most likely forfeited from the food losing its freshness during the travel. It is almost always healthier to eat fresh non-"Organic" food than it is to eat old "organic" food.

The effect on the environment due to the transportation of the food is more damaging than any benefit to the environment from the farming practices used. For more on this, click here.

(This should not really come as a surprise. The reason "organic" foods are becoming easier to buy is not so much because more companies are concerned with the environment, but rather, they want more money.^* They can charge more for "organic" food and get away with it. Furthermore, since the word "organic" is such a meaningless term, they can get away with selling things as "organic" that aren't natural by any stretch of the imagination. For example, some companies have been accused of selling re-hydrated powdered milk as "organic" milk.)

There is never a simple solution to either your own health or to protecting the environment. Don't be fooled by marketers.

---

*This reminds me of what I termed "trendy charity".[3]

Tags: environment, food, marketing, nature, synthetic vs natural
Current Location: Remsen Hall, Johns Hopkins University
Current Mood: okay
Current Music: delirious?, "Touch" (LaunchCast mix)

Last week was crazy busy. I had started posting this, but it included another poll on your opinions that got far too long.

---

My last public entry did not really trigger much debate on this actual question. I think the science poll distracted everyone (except for jeltzz).

Rather than trying to poll you on each and every possible topic one could teach to those in a culture, I'll just comment on a few things I've thought about. Feel free to add new ones or comment.

Mathematics

I think that everyone in a culture should be able to do basic math skills: count, add, subtract, divide, use fractions, and solve basic algebraic equations.

I believe these are important for everyone to know because I think they are tied to logic and how people think. Everyone in our culture should be able to use logic. Not doing so is not only a detriment to themselves but to the entire society.

As for higher maths, like calculus, I don't think everyone needs to understand them. I think it may even be a waste of resources to teach calculus ot all people. Perhaps it should be limited to those who wish to learn it or who need it for other undertakings, such as in the sciences or engineering.

Languages

Everyone in a culture should be able to speak the primary language of that culture, as well as being able to read and write. While I think it is a great personal benefit to be multilingual -- and I wish I truly was -- I'm not sure if it is a benefit to a culture for everyone to be multilingual.

I think that basic grammar should be taught to everyone, because grammar also enforces logic.

History

I'm not sure what to think about this one. I love hisotry now, but I hated it in school. I hated it because all I saw was a push to memorize dates. I don't see how dates mean anything still, except of course as markers of chronology. But if one can learn the sequence of the chronology, the dates aren't as necessary.

At the same time, I think people can learn much from the important mistakes and triumphs of the past. I just don't begin to know how to determine what is "important".

What are "important historical events"?

Science

A problem with science in schools is that it is often reall science history. Students are taught facts about scientific discoveries, without really learning how to do science or understand scientific thought. Science education should be focused more on how to think in a methodical way, how to make hypotheses and test them.

People need to better understand how to understand science, rather than just accepting everything they hear from scientists because they are scientists or rejecting everything they hear from scientists because they are scientists.

Art and Music

I think everyone should have to learn about art and music to some extent. Art and music are almost like other forms of language.


Any thoughts thus far?

Tags: art, education, grammar, history, language, mathematics, science
Current Location: our apartment
Current Music: silence

Last night, I began co-teaching a course on chemistry for science teachers. The other teacher showed a video about the American science education system and problems with it. Our students were also given a test on common chemistry misconceptions. I was amazed at how poorly both the ones interviewed in the video -- Harvard graduates, even -- and those in our classroom -- who are supposed to be teaching science -- did at answering questions correctly.

Here are two sample questions. See how you do.

Edit: The second question should read, "...bulk of the mass of a log...." Also, "diozide" is supposed to be "dioxide". Sorry.

Poll #1129593 A Couple Basic Science Questions
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

If Bob puts 1 quart of water on the stovetop and Sally puts 2 quarts of water on the stovetop and each of them wait till their water boils and inserts a thermometer, whose thermometer will read a higher temperature?

Where does the bulk of the mass in a tree come from?

---

( The Topic of This Post )

Tags: chemistry, culture, education, libertarianism, polls, questions, science
Current Location: NMR Lab, Remsen Hall, Johns Hopkins University
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: silence

It is no secret that I hate fads.[1] In fact, I generally will avoid doing or buying something I might thing is good if it is currently a fad. I'll wait until the fad has passed, because I do not want to be associated with the fad in any way.

Fads occur in so many areas of life, and dieting is no exception. For a while, it was Weight Watcher, then Atkins, then South Beach. I'm sure I've missed quite a few; I've never cared enough to pay much attention, as I've been skinny all my life.

We started the SBD on the recommendation of my parents, for whom it worked well, long after the fad seems to have died out.

Last night, we were eating out at Ruby Tuesday. I was surprised to find no "Low Carb" section in the menu. I was simultaneously disappointed and delighted -- the former, because I am looking for foods with few carbohydrates on this phase of the SBD; the latter, because it is a good indication that the fad of the SBD is dying.

This is not the only restaurant I've been to recently where this has happened. A year or two ago, it was hard to find a restaurant that did not have a new "Low Carb" section in their menus. From my observation, that section is now starting to go disappear again.

anyhow, just some observations, not anything terribly deep...

Tags: fads, food, self-observation
Current Location: Remsen Hall, Johns Hopkins University
Current Mood: okay
Current Music: Matchbox 20, "Rest Stop"

My wife and I are currently watching two British nature documentary series, "The Blue Planet" and "Planet Earth", both narrated by David Attenborough.

I find them at the same time utterly amazing and... depressing.

There is so much variety, so much beauty, so much majesty, so much extraordinary.

Yet, there is also so much pain, so much suffering, so much struggle, so much death.[1]

It has been interesting watching the "diaries" segments included with each episode, where the photographers and teams describe how they captured the difficult shots on film -- often a process taking up to a month of simply waiting.

In those segments, more than once I have heard one of the teammembers share my amazement and sadness. For example, they were delighted to actually observe (with night vision cameras) a pride of 30 plus lions take down an elephant, but they were all too sad to watch the elephant struggle as it died and was then eaten. Or those filming the great white sharks -- they cheered each time a seal outmaneuvered the monster. They couldn't watch when a wounded seal hid under their boat. Yet they were exhilirated by the shot of a shark breaching the surface by two meters to snag a meal.

Most of the time, they mention how they will not interfere, just observe. But in a few cases, they broke their own rule. They found a baby emperor penguin trapped in a hole in the ice, so they rescued it. It happily wobbled back to its waiting and concerned mother.

Why save the baby penguin and not a baby whale being slowly drowned by killer whales? I don't see the distinction. Is it because one is cuter than the other?[2]

I suppose I can understand the reasoning behind not helping prey escape from predator. But some of the animals were just struggling from other matters, like getting lost in the desert in a sandstorm or falling into a pile of bat dung. It seems cruel to me to just let the animal suffer. Yes, nature is cruel, but in this world where many environmentalists are vegetarians, why the heck not help a poor bat-dung-trapped bird?

How is it cruel for humans to hurt animals, yet not be cruel for animals to hurt animals?

What depresses me the most is not that animals eat other animals. Heck, I eat animals. It is the slow suffering that saddens me. Yes, sometimes, the predators take out the already-dying,[3] but, as often, they take out the young. Many animals slowly kill or, worse, play with their prey, all the while, the prey scream and cry out for someone or something to save them.

Tags: animals, death, films, nature, pain
Current Location: Remsen Hall, Johns Hopkins University
Current Mood: hungry
Current Music: U2, "The Unforgettable Fire"

At the last GCF meeting, daschwartz asked a fun question about the moral qualities that different cultures attribute to different animals. I thought it might make a good poll, but I'm not sure I have enough readers from non-Western cultures to get a good sense of any trends. Even so....

( Animal Moral Stereotypes )

Tags: animals, culture, polls, stereotypes
Current Location: Remsen Hall, Johns Hopkins University
Current Mood: hungry
Current Music: Lifehouse, "Wash"