Richard

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New Scientist posts this snippet:

"Intuiting God's beliefs on important issues may not produce an independent guide, but may instead serve as an echo chamber to validate and justify one's own beliefs," writes a team led by Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

To many, this seems a quite evident and non-controversial comment. After all, what are the chances that someone with, say, a hatred of any given act be drawn to any religion that fails to condemn or even embraces the act? Ah, but the article gets more interesting when we discover why the researchers were led to this conclusion:

The researchers started by asking volunteers who said they believe in God to give their own views on controversial topics, such as abortion and the death penalty. They also asked what the volunteers thought were the views of God, average Americans and public figures such as Bill Gates. Volunteers' own beliefs corresponded most strongly with those they attributed to God.

Next, the team asked another group of volunteers to undertake tasks designed to soften their existing views, such as preparing speeches on the death penalty in which they had to take the opposite view to their own. They found that this led to shifts in the beliefs attributed to God, but not in those attributed to other people. . . .

"The experiments in which we manipulate people's own beliefs are the most compelling evidence we have to show that people's own beliefs influence what they think God believes more substantially than it influences what they think other people believe," says Epley. (Emphasis mine.)

This smacks of perhaps something related to the Overton Window. By simply being exposed to opinions that vary from their own, this second group shifted not just their own opinion, but the opinion God is likely to take. Perhaps this is a variant on the old canard "Vox Deus, vox populi," or "The voice of the people is the voice of God." I say variant simply because the second group didn't sway from what they felt other people would say on the issue, a point illustrated by further brain scans:

Finally, the team used fMRI to scan the brains of volunteers while they contemplated the beliefs of themselves, God or "average Americans". In all the experiments the volunteers professed beliefs in an Abrahamic God. The majority were Christian.

In the first two cases, similar parts of the brain were active. When asked to contemplate other Americans' beliefs, however, an area of the brain used for inferring other people's mental states was active. This implies that people map God's beliefs onto their own.

So, we store and consider the opinion of others in different place in the brain than the place used to mull our and God's existences. Interesting.

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Oh, and before you smug left-leaning folks out there take this as ammo for future dealings with the Faux News crowd, other researchers have been doing great work showing how one's political persuasion influences how credibly one accepts or rejects unsubstantiated claims. Here's one such graph. There are more. Each shows that all of us are susceptible to misinformation, to accepting the unproven. What bad knowledge that happens to be simply depends on the mis-info spreader tying the particular lie to the proper spin, one that resonates well with other preconceptions.

I realize that politics and religion are to many minds separate issues, but I feel both topics have share a "grounding" in the brain, are held by the adherents of those beliefs because they resonate well with preconceptions held by the adherents. Both political and religious beliefs are, after all, the mental models we humans use to frame the world around us. (For a really powerful if somewhat hackneyed take on this, has anyone read Philip K. Dick's The Eye In the Sky?) The old saying "Never discuss politics or religion" in polite company recognizes that both topics prove for most people difficult to discuss dispassionately since the topics carry deeply-held and therefore non-negotiable elements.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to see this research mentioned in New Scientist replicated in a political context with similar results.

Went to town, bought blanc cards for my Christmas cards, bought a steamcooker and 10 frames for 8$ (yay! framehoarder is happy now!)


Yes, I am making Christmascards this year again. I have a certain amount I will be leaving open for trade (I cant give em free any longer, they cost me) and the rest is invite only. You will, as usual find the Christmas dragon somewhere begging to verify your address.
IF YOU DO NOT VERIFY THE ADDRESS YOU WONT GET A CARD.
please understand if I do not include you in my Christmascard list this year, its definitly nothing personal. If you really really REALLY want one, drop me a line.

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I will be SELLING ENIGMA this Sunday on ebay. Starting bid will be 70$ because he is pretty and he's a unique edition. If you come before Sunday here via journal I am willing to shed him for 60 (postage not included) (thats a steal as a price... seriously).
He will be sold with an "ARTIST RECOMMENDATION", which only few pieces of mine receive. Artist recommendation stands for something the artist considers and outstanding piece, something that is special in its being and that the artist is not that willing to part with. Yes, Enigma is a cast, but he definitly is the best to date right now.

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kmo delivered another great podcast the other day, interviewing economist Frank Rotering. Prof. Rotering has an interesting take on human progress and the limits the planet itself places on our expansion, part of which resonates well with what I accept.

For example, I whole heartedly agree that our biological imperative drives our expansion, the desire to eat the richest food (to give us strength and build our energy reserves as fat) and live in the best areas conducive to sating our desires to, well, eat and reproduce a lot. The number of simple behavioral studies that reveal this simple unconscious drive abound, each confirming that despite what we say, we are greedy little piggies that crave tasty (meaning energy-rich) foods and sex with the most reproductively viable candidates. Remember, folks, Darwin's "survival of the fittest" referred to reproductive winners, the organisms that most successfully got as many biological copies of themselves made before they croaked.

Where Frank went off the rails in the talk with kmo, though, was where he started talking about . . . capitalism. Wait, haven't I gone over this already?!?

But then the Professor did something very few who throw the C word about willy-nilly actually do: He explained what he meant. I'm not saying he got it right in my eyes, but I will say he at least had the courtesy to quote Marx's writings directly and explain the nitty-gritty details that might elude the less familiar. Someone who has obviously read Marx so carefully is rare to find even amongst Marxists. That was refreshing.

This explanation, though, confirmed something that has been nagging at me for quite some time: That Marx himself missed the most salient element of capitalism's expansionist tendencies, specifically by ( by conflating the necessity to expand with the ability to expand. )

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Remember just a few weeks ago Warren Buffett bought BNSF outright? The press blather was predictable: "Our country's future prosperity depends on its having an efficient and well-maintained rail system."

Last night, though, while discussing an oil-poor future, my economist friend mentioned an alternative situation for buying the rail: electrification.

From The Journal of Commerce:

Earlier this year, BNSF Railway’s chairman, president and CEO, Matthew K. Rose, said he was in talks with transmission line companies that want to install new power lines in the railroad’s right of way. And he said BNSF was exploring whether that could help the railroad convert large parts of its sprawling western network to electricity.

Industry sources indicated other large carriers were looking at the same options, as Congress and the Obama administration push to upgrade the capacity of the U.S. electricity grid and tie in more alternative power sources including wind energy farms.

My friend also sent me a post from a rail site (sadly, one locked down to members only) which said:

If the wind- and solar-power crowd are really able to create some critical mass in their plans for mass conversion to such energy generation, transmission corridors for new high voltage lines are going to become necessary in the West. The battles for these rights-of-way are already starting to brew in several places in the West. . . .

Single steel pole towers, which are more easily situated on a railroad right-of-way than the old wider-footprint lattice-work towers, are now capable of handling up to the 765,000 volt lines being discussed for transmission from potential wind and solar fields in the West. . . .

Combine this observation with Buffett's planned wind farm facilities and one sees a definite business plan shaping up.

Buffett started as an oil man. He knows what's coming: Fuel shortages leading to ever higher fuel prices. Electric rail lines -- fed by the power lines sharing the corridor -- give him an incredible advantage, if he can get the major routes powered in time. And because he bought the rail outright, he won't have to dither about with quarterly stockholder reports. This means he can take his sweet time electrifying without worrying about "enhancing shareholder value" every few months.

ah.... one thing to cross out in my "things I wanted to do before I die" list:

make my own noodles from scratch


placed right between making a movie from my novel and achieving world domination