25th June 2007
When I toss out this title of a recent paper, people usually have a negative reaction.
http://www.csom.umn.edu/Assets/71516.pdf
I have to explain the authors are talking about the fact that negative events cause a greater emotional reaction than positive events. This makes sense from an evolutionary point of view. Missing something positive, like a good meal, be annoying but missing something negative like a prowling predator could be fatal.
As I was considering this idea, a lot of random items sort of lined up like iron filings near a magnet.
In the media business - “If it bleeds, it leads”: You get bigger ratings because people react more strongly to negative events.
Politics – negative campaign ads: People say they don’t like them but they work because we tend to react more strongly and remember negative facts about someone else.
Psychology – the fact the optimists are not as realistic as pessimists: Perhaps that is a natural defense mechanism to offset the fact that negative anticipations will be stronger than positive anticipations.
Psychology – the rose-colors glasses that we see our significant other through: People tend to overlook negative aspects of their mates because if they did not, the stronger effect of negative personality traits and habits might tend to drive them apart.
Psychology – risk versus reward: Some recent experiments suggest that a possible gain needs to be about twice as big as a possible loss in order to balance out the emotional impacts.
Religion – the idea that everything happens according to God’s plan: This is a fall back to explain away and soften the blow of negative events.
And so on….
I am sure you will come up with your own examples.
In any case, “Keep your sunny side up!”
Posted in Psychology | 1 Comment »
18th June 2007
For decades they have been blathering about creating clean fusion power. It is always just around the corner. The US has spent billions of dollars in the last 50 years and still has no workable fusion reactor.
http://fire.pppl.gov/us_fusion50yr_dean.pdf
Now we hear about an engineer with a new approach to hot fusion. He started work on this system back in the Eighties, got a government grant for research for 11 years, met every milestone and proved the validity of his approach. The next step would be to build a full scale working fusion power plant for about 200 million dollars. So, of course, the government cancelled any further funding for his project. As he points out, 200 million dollars is well within the reach of a lot of different countries and, since he owns the patents on his technique, he is free to cut a deal with any country that wants to develop real fusion power.
http://www.askmar.com/ConferenceNotes/2006-9%20IAC%20Paper.pdf
One of the reasons I am excited about his approach is that it would also be suitable for a space propulsion system that would have 10 times the specific impulse of any other system developed to date. http://www.ibiblio.org/lunar/school/InterStellar/Explorer_Class/Bussard_Fusion_systems.HTML
Posted in Technology | No Comments »
12th June 2007
Did you ever notice that the environment where a religious mythology originated shaped its idea of the after life?
The Christian Hell is a place of fiery torment just as the danger in the Middle East is the burning sun.
The Greek Hades is simply a temperate realm where the dead gather because Greece is a temperate land.
The Nordic Hel is a frozen wasteland because the great danger in the Scandinavian countries is the cold.
Posted in Religion | No Comments »
11th June 2007
Issac Asimov wrote a series of short stories in the 40s that were collected into a novel called Foundation. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_%28novel%29) It told the story of Harri Seldon who created the science of psychohistory in a far future galactic civilization. Since reading that novel as a teenager, I always wondered if it would ever by possible to create a “science” of history that would explain current civilization and enable the controlled manipulation of future events.
Over the years I have collected books and ideas about a science of history. You will find many references to psychohistory but most are not related to the Asimov series of novels. They deal with a blend of psychotherapy and sociology intended to shed light on historical occurances. Asimov’s system employed principles from physics, mathematics and other “hard” sciences. One author of a recent novel preferred “cliology” from the Greek goddess Clio (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clio) as a name for an Asimov approach to creating a science of history.
For a long time, I didn’t believe that such a “hard” science was possible despite continued attempts to create it by a number of people. Sociodynamics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociodynamic) employs a blend of systems theory and sociology much closer to Asimov’s idea. But the big problem with such approaches lies in the hierarchical nature of human society and infrastructure. There are many situations where the action of a single individual motivated by subjective factors can result in a huge impact on society and history. No system based on the interaction of many identical entities such as chemistry can provide the principles needed for a science of history.
I now think that the best bet for exploring the science of history lies in computer modeling of personalities, groups, institutions and nation states. Of course, the physical environment and technological infrastructure will have to be included. Fortunately, our computers are evolving rapidly toward providing the computational power necessary for such hyper complex sophisticated global models.
Posted in History | No Comments »
10th June 2007
When I was a teenager, I searched for some sort of solid philosphical foundation. The religion of my parents’ protestant church struck me as an amalgam of history, legend and morality system. I did not find it suitable for my needs. I looked at political philosophies including Ayn Rand’s objectivism, communism, fascism, democracy, etc. but none of them seems very solid. Then I turned to the sciences. Here, I thought is some solid ground. Then I discovered relativity theory, quantum theory, and Goedel’s Theorem. There went science and mathematics as solid philosophical ground.
I decided that maybe there would be safety in numbers. If I could find a system that incorporated all the different academic disciplines I would at least have a comprehensive foundation for my personal philosophy. I found General Systems Theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Systems_Theory) and decided that it was a good place to start. As the years went by, I collected more and more systems frameworks such as the Holism of Smuts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holism), the Holotheme of Jolly (http://www.stuartcdoddinstitute.org/dodd-worldculture.shtml), the Pan-Acts Cosmos of Dodd (http://www.stuartcdoddinstitute.org/dodd-worldculture.shtml), Hierarchy theory of Pattee (http://www.isss.org/hierarchy.htm), General Livings Systems theory of Miller (http://www.newciv.org/ISSS_Primer/asem14ep.html), Heterokinetics of Iberall (http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/ecopsyc/homeokinetics/origins.pdf), and others by Young, Gowan, etc.
What was really frustating was the fact that, although there were many interdisciplinary frameworks around, there was no place that they were collected and no common language. I once encountered someone with a degree in library science. I asked her if there was any category in Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress for global theories that incorporated the different major academic disciplines. She said that she had not heard of one. I pointed out that there has been work going on in this area for decades and it was odd that no one thought that a classification was needed. She agreed that it was strange.
Anyway, I have been collecting such systems since I was a kid. One of these days, I intend to go thru the different books I have and see if I can come up with a synthsis that I am satisfied with. If everyone received a global framework of at least the physical and social sciences during their education, it would be a lot easier for people to have educated discussions of major social/political/economic issues. Perhaps our collective decision making would improve.
Posted in Theory of Everything | No Comments »
7th June 2007
I usually try to tailor my conversation to the interests of my audience. The problem with starting this blog is that I don’t know who my audience will be. When I was invited to create this blog, I asked what I should write about. The response was that I should just write about what interests me. That covers a lot of territory.
The first question that had to be answered was what the title should be. I finally settled on the Nexilist’s Notebook. The word “nexilist” is derived from ” Nexialist”a neologism coined by a science fiction author named A.E. Van Vogt in 1950 novel called “The Voyage of the Space Beagle”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Voyage_of_the_Space_Beagle
He defined Nexialist as “One skilled in the science of joining together in an orderly fashion the knowledge of one field of learning with that of other fields”. I changed the spelling because 1) I think his spelling is awkward, 2) I think my spelling is a better use of the root nexus with the usual “ist” ending of a practitioner such as “chem-ist”, 3) Nexialist was already in wide use and the domain names were taken.
I have been interested in interdisciplinary studies since I was a kid. So this blog will cover a wide variety of subjects including how everything is connected. Politics, society, psychology, technology, religion, myth, dreams, the arts, and winning at the game of life. Welcome to my blog.
Posted in Philosophy | No Comments »