Tag: identity
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For the past few days I've been thinking out loud about the importance of narrative form to the mind—that way we have of being much more impressed by information in story form than in statistics or other raw data. Not everyone agrees with the advocates of "narrativity" that narrative is an ... Read More
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As I mentioned in yesterday's post, it is a very popular idea in psychology, philosophy and various social sciences that people experience their lives as a story or collection of stories. For example, the philosopher Dan Dennett explains the mind as a master novelist: "We try to make all of our ... Read More
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Literary types used to run the world. To understand life and society, people counted on great orators and poets and interpreters of sacred texts. Political, moral and literary power were the same: Apt analogies and convincing metaphors were taken as arguments, not just pretty wordplay. In medieval ... Read More
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Happy International Day of You, women of the world. Unfortunately it remains internationally respectable to argue that science has shown that men are inherently better at math and scientific pursuits than you are. This belief is based on the gender difference in scores on standardized tests ... Read More
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For some time now, cognitive scientists have been sure that the mind is not made for logical reasoning. That ability is just a lucky side effect of the work brains actually evolved to do. For example, people can learn, with some difficulty, to solve a logic problem with abstract symbols. But it's ... Read More
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Everyone in politics pays lip service to data. "Our opponents say X but the facts are plainly Y, which they would admit if they were not (pick one) deceived or paid off or deluded by weird beliefs." Is there an older political argument in the book than this? Strip away the silliness, we like to ... Read More
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Why can't the Greeks be more like the Germans? Could it be because they speak Greek? There's no doubt some nations save more money than others, and plan better for retirement, and watch their collective weight, but the proposed explanations for different levels of future-mindedness have been ... Read More
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Twenty years from now, could veterans of Afghanistan be trading war stories over friendly dinners with ex-Taliban fighters? It sound inconceivable, but then, it always is—when the war is still on. Yet ex-soldiers in past wars have felt a bond with fellow-fighters, which they don't share with non ... Read More
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Newt Gingrich was almost right about the Palestinians when he said they were an "invented people" (though the difference between right and almost right, to paraphrase Twain, is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug). Gingrich's statement would be accurate if only he'd go on to say ... Read More
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"A second-class intellect but a first-class temperament" was Oliver Wendell Holmes' assessment of Franklin Roosevelt, reflecting an old and widespread notion that the smartest and most ingenious person in the ditch is probably not the one to lead everyone out of it. Human beings seem always to have ... Read More
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About Mind Matters
In markets, medicine, justice, politics, psychology, and economics, "Rational Man" is dead. As the science of human behavior enters the post-rational era, we no longer think of ourselves as cool calculators in pursuit of our objective self-interest. Mind Matters is about this change and its effects on how we live. It's about the reasons people perceive, feel, think, and act as they do, and the gaps between what we think we're doing and what research says we're doing. Most importantly, it's about how this sea change affects the institutions we live by: courts, hospitals, governments, stock markets and other entities that still run on the presumption that people act rationally.
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In A Shipwreck, Your Heart Is More Likely To Go On If You're Male