Culture
razib | June 15, 2007James Hrynyshyn has a post up about circumcision and its relevance to cutting the risk of HIV infection & loss of pleasure. There are a priori reasons to believe that circumcision could reduce the risk of catching diseases through intercourse & that pleasure might be curtailed, ceteris paribus of course in both cases.1 Assuming a straightforward acceptance of the likelihood of the possibility of both which factor should be taken into consideration when making a decision regarding male circumcision? That decision must be, I believe, conditioned upon the prior facts in a particular…
cortex | June 15, 2007I'm a fan of both Dennett and Rorty*, and I thought this touching anecdote from Dennett really captures a crucial difference between the two philosophers:
At one three-hour lunch in a fine restaurant in Buenos Aires, we [Dennett and Rorty] traded notes on what we thought philosophy ought to be, could be, shouldn't be, and he revealed something that I might have guessed but had never thought of. I had said that it mattered greatly to me to have the respect of scientists--that it was important to me to explain philosophical issues to scientists in terms they could understand and appreciate.…
cortex | June 15, 2007Over at the Economist, Jason Furman worries about the long-term implications of growing societal inequality:
Regardless of the cause of rising inequality, lefties, utilitarians, Rawlsians and anyone with a deep-seated reverence for markets and the capitalist system should all be concerned. As Alan Greenspan memorably stated, "income inequality is where the capitalist system is most vulnerable. You can't have the capitalist system if an increasing number of people think it is unjust."
I'm as concerned about inequality as the next liberal. I can't help but listen to my inner Marx when some…
cortex | June 14, 2007Imagine you are a doctor, and a patient comes into your office with a serious case of back pain. You begin by performing all the standard diagnostic tests, including an MRI and X-ray. Then, you perform an extensive interview. You ask about his psychological history, and rate his level of depression, fear and anxiety. You also assess him for a variety of risk factors that tend to correlate with back pain, including his job satisfaction, and whether or not he is involved in pertinent litigation. After this extensive medical evaluation, you try to predict how intense his back pain is and how…
cortex | June 14, 2007If people were rational creatures, you might expect them to respond to rising gas prices by doing less solitary commuting. The cost of filling up the tank would provide an incentive to either carpool or use a heavily subsidized mass transit system. But that hasn't happened:
Despite high gasoline prices, the share of commuters driving alone has increased slightly since 2000 while the proportion in car pools dropped and those using mass transit remained about the same, according to a Census Bureau analysis released yesterday.
Nationally, the share of people car pooling dipped, to 10.7 percent…
razib | June 13, 2007Waitress is a sleepy little comedy which serves as an enjoyable way to pass an afternoon. The film stars the ethereal Keri Russell as the centerpiece of a drama set in a sleepy little town left unspecified, though the mention of Biloxi suggests the Deep South. With that in mind Andy Griffith's starring role is apropos, because just like The Andy Griffith Show this film attempts to communicate southern charm & authenticity sans black folk (I do recall one or two at a bus stop). This sort of surreality pervades other aspects of the film, Russell's fine and crisp beauty seems more Boston…
razib | June 13, 2007Dan Everett, linguist who was the subject of a profile in The New Yorker a month ago, gave a talk to Edge, and the transcript is online (the video is still in progress from what I can see). There is a lot of detail there, and most of it is pretty unbelievable to me. I've commented in the past on their supposed immunity to religion. Everett says some more:
I sat with a Pirahã once and he said, what does your god do? What does he do? And I said, well, he made the stars, and he made the Earth. And I asked, what do you say? He said, well, you know, nobody made these things, they just…
cortex | June 13, 2007Felice Frankel is a model of consilience:
When people call Felice Frankel an artist, she winces.
In the first place, the photographs she makes don't sell. She knows this, she says, because after she received a Guggenheim grant in 1995, she started taking her work to galleries. "Nobody wanted to bother looking," she said.
In the second place, her images are not full of emotion or ideology or any other kind of message. As she says, "My stuff is about phenomena."
As first an artist in residence and now a research scientist at M.I.T., and now also a senior research fellow at the Institute for…
cortex | June 13, 2007So I guess this belongs under the shameless self-promotion tag - I helped plan the show - but the latest Radio Lab is on a topic near and dear to my frontal cortex. It's about the dishonesty of memory, the way we are constantly recreating, reconsolidating and refining our sense of the past. Highlights include interviews with Joe Ledoux, Oliver Sacks and Elizabeth Loftus. The show also digresses into the necessity of protein synthesis for the remembering process, the possibility of implanting false memories and, in my favorite section, the case of an amnesiac who can only remember reality in…
razib | June 12, 2007A few days ago I posted on "Islamic finance," which to non-Muslim eyes looks an awful lot like an intellectually dishonest "work around." This sort of thing is not limited to Muslims, at one point the Catholic Church took the ban upon usury seriously, opening up a niche for Jews as moneylenders. But what about financial transactions amongst the Jews themselves? The reality is that Orthodox Judaism is not nearly as friendly toward exploitative financial transactions between Jews, in a manner not dissimilar to Islam, and so naturally "work arounds" emerged which followed the letter of the…
cortex | June 12, 2007So everybody is talking about the Sopranos. I might as well weigh in. Personally, I thought the ambiguous ending was pretty brilliant. The Sopranos is always being compared to literature, but the engineered vagueness of that final scene is perhaps its most literary act. As the literary critic Frank Kermode famously pointed out, classic literature is defined not by the certainty of its meaning, but by its linguistic instability, its ability to encourage a multiplicity of interpretations. What makes a novel or poem immortal is, paradoxically, its complexity, the way every reader discovers in…
cortex | June 12, 2007Freud thought that the male psyche was forged by our relationship with our mother. Our repressed Oedipal wishes form the "nuclear complex" of our neuroses. As a result, Freudian psychoanalysis tends to emphasize the role of the maternal figure when excavating our childhood. (Look, for example, at Tony Soprano and Dr. Melfi.) A new study, however, casts some skeptical light on this Freudian/Sophoclean hypothesis. It turns out that, at least when it comes to depression in male adults, our mothers matter less than our siblings:
Men who had poor relationships with siblings during childhood are at…
razib | June 11, 2007A few weeks ago I posted on a bizarre fatwa having to do with adult breast feeding. At the time it was kind of a joke, and I wasn't totally sure that it was even a real story (though I did check for multiple sources). Well, today The New York Times has this up: Egypt's Muslims Seek Fatwas on a Variety of Issues:
First came the breast-feeding fatwa. It declared that the Islamic restriction on unmarried men and women being together could be lifted at work if the woman breast-fed her male colleagues five times, to establish family ties. Then came the urine fatwa. It said that drinking the urine…
cortex | June 11, 2007Richard Rorty has died. I was one of those innumerable undergraduates who, after failing to understand Heidegger or Wittgenstein or Quine or Davidson, picked up Rorty and felt enlightened. The man had a tremendous facility for interpreting the philosophy of others. After reading Rorty on Dewey, I went out and purchased a selection of Dewey books. I soon discovered that I preferred Rorty's Dewey to the actual Dewey. (For one thing, Dewey was a terrible writer. Rorty, on the other hand, was one of the few modern philosophers who cared about his prose.)
One other Rorty note: I've never…
voltagegate | June 9, 2007...but you make it so damn hard.
MTV has been incessantly airing their latest movie award travesty all week, and I've caught a couple of segments while channel surfing. Another year, another boring awards ceremony. Even Sarah Silverman's jabs at Hollywood couldn't make up for the mediocrity.
I have a hard time letting go of MTV. I know it's crap - I think everyone does, including the producers - but I still have a lingering hope that things will change. Most of my younger friends from college don't remember when MTV actually was down to Earth, played good music and had some sort integrity…
cortex | June 8, 2007I discuss the neuroscientific sensitivities of Saturday, Ian McEwan's 2004 novel, in my forthcoming book, so I was happy to read this paragraph in Jonathan Lethem's review of McEwan's latest novel. Lethem is wondering why McEwan, despite his dabbles in modernist structure (Saturday is modeled on Mrs. Dalloway), doesn't feel like a late modernist:
The answer may lie in the fact that modernism in fiction was partly spurred by the appearance of two great rivals to the novel's authority, psychoanalysis and cinema -- one a rival at plumbing depths, the other at delineating surfaces. McEwan, who…
cortex | June 8, 2007David Leonhardt makes a good point. Controlling health care costs - one of our most important domestic policy problems - will require our politicians to make hard (and unpopular) decisions.
In Idaho Falls, Idaho, anyone suffering from the sort of lower back pain that may conceivably be helped by the fusing of two vertebrae is quite likely to have the surgery. It's known as lumbar fusion, and the rate at which it is performed in Idaho Falls is almost five times the national average. The rate in Idaho Falls is 20 times that in Bangor, Me., where lumbar fusion is less common than anywhere else.…
razib | June 7, 2007The LA Daily News is doing a lush series on porn. They're flash files, so be aware of that, though nothing I saw was not work safe. The ubiquity of porn chronicled in that series in America today is worth keeping in mind when we simultaneously have a teacher convicted of a felony because she inadvertently exposed some of her students to porn pop-ups (spyware which another teacher mistakenly installed).
cortex | June 7, 2007Reductionism is seductive, especially when it comes attached with a nifty sounding brain region:
Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information. Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation
of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people's abilities to critically consider the underlying logic of this explanation. We tested this hypothesis by giving naiÌve adults, students in a neuroscience course, and neuroscience experts brief descriptions of psychological phenomena followed by one of four…
razib | June 6, 2007About six months ago the great evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers won the Crafoord Prize. Well, he is now in a public dispute with Alan Derschowitz, resulting in the cancellation of a talk at Harvard. Frontpage Magazine has an amusing article up.