by Chris Bertram on February 29, 2004
I recently read Nietzsche’s “The Genealogy of Morality”:http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/Nietzsche/genealogytofc.htm with a group of colleagues. To the extent to which I understood the book (and despite the book’s brevity I’m feeling somewhat sympathetic to those snakes who have to sit around whilst they digest a large mammal), my comprehension was greatly assisted by Brian Leiter’s excellent “Nietzsche on Morality”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415152852/junius-20 . Reading the reviews and commentary on Mel Gibson’s Passion, I was immediately reminded of a passage from the second essay, where Nietzsche is writing about the genesis of guilt from the sense of indebtedness (at first to ancestors) and remarks on the further excruciating twist that Christianity brings: on the pretext of having their debts forgiven, believers are put in a postition of psychological indebtedness from which they can _never_ recover (He sent his only son, and we _killed_ Him):
bq. …. we confront the paradoxical and horrifying expedient with which a martyred humanity found temporary relief, that stroke of genius of Christianity—God’s sacrifice of himself for the guilt of human beings, God paying himself back with himself, God as the only one who can redeem man from what for human beings has become impossible to redeem—the creditor sacrifices himself for the debtor, out of love (can people believe that?), out of love for his debtor! (sec. 21)
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by John Q on February 8, 2004
Since the discussion on Chris’ post on mumbo-jumbo went straight from the ludicrous Edward de Bono to the Flynn effect, I thought I’d repost a lightly edited version of a piece on the Flynn effect and The Bell Curve that was on my own blog a couple of months ago, but might be of interest to CT readers.
The Bell Curve got a thorough hammering on statistical grounds when it came out (this review by conservative economist Jim Heckman in Reason is damning, and it was one of the polite ones). But the thing that most annoyed me when I read it was their discussion of the Flynn effect, namely that average scores on IQ tests have risen steadily over time, by amounts sufficient to wipe out the differences between racial groups on which Murray and Herrnstein rely. As Thomas Sowell points out in this review (reproduced by Brad de Long), it’s hard to see how any claim that differences in IQ test scores observed in Western societies are mostly due to genetic factors can stand up in the face of this observation. But Murray and Herrnstein slide straight past it, saying that they are concerned with contemporary inequality, not with time trends. This is about as reasonable as a “nurturist” deciding to ignore twin studies on the grounds that most people aren’t twins.
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by Chris Bertram on January 31, 2004
The Guardian has “a readable and disturbing piece”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,1134105,00.html about what happens if you try to fake your way into a mental instutution:
bq. In 1972, David Rosenhan, a newly minted psychologist with a joint degree in law, called eight friends and said something like, “Are you busy next month? Would you have time to fake your way into a mental hospital and see what happens?”
Lauren Slater reports on the extreme hostility this researcher faced when he published and since, on the fact that his fellow inmates could tell he was sane even when the doctors couldn’t, on how he wrote down his experiences and had this labelled as “writing behavior” (which I suppose it was). But what would happen if you tried to do the same thing today? Slater tried ….
by John Q on January 31, 2004
I just got the latest issue of Scientific American, and noted with interest the Table of Contents, in which the Skeptic column promised an evolutionary explanation of the mutiny on the Bounty. I vaguely expected the usual stuff about alpha and beta males or somesuch, but I found that the ev psych boffins have come up with a startling new discovery. Young men like having sex. At this point the mathematics and biochemistry get a bit complicated for me (oxytocin is in there somewhere), but apparently this has something to do with the survival of the species.
Even more startling, though, is the fact that
Although Bligh preceded Charles Darwin by nearly a century,
he managed to anticipate this discovery. Who would have thought that a former governor of New South Wales (
and not a successful one) would share with EO Wilson and Stephen Pinker the honour of founding evolutionary psychology? In Bligh’s words
I can only conjecture that they have Idealy assured themselves of a more happy life among the Otaheitians than they could possibly have in England, which joined to some Female connections has most likely been the leading cause of the whole business.
Delivery times are somewhat strange here in the Antipodes, and I thought perhaps I had an advance copy of the April edition, but the cover says February.
by Maria on November 5, 2003
Why is it that people with ‘real’ illnesses like heart disease, cancer or ‘flu can receive unqualified sympathy and support, while those suffering from an equally organic illness like depression are so often told to ‘just snap out of it’?
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by Ted on October 8, 2003
The whole thing is worth reading, but I’m just going to quote two paragraphs from a fascinating New Yorker article about people who commit suicide off of the Golden Gate bridge.
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