Friday, July 31, 2015

"An Honest Liar" (2015)


Not only is this film a layered look at the role of truth and deception in The Amazing Randi's own life, it gives evidence of the stubbornness of people's will to believe in the paranormal and the supernatural, even in the face of decisive refutation. 

Uri Geller, who has been exposed as a fraud repeatedly over the years, both by Randi and by others, still makes a living doing his tricks--even though he stopped referring to himself as a psychic, and now denies that he has psychic powers. It's pretty frightening that even exposed, admitted frauds can still find people to support their flim-flam, and make millions of dollars in so doing. As the film points out, people WANT to believe, and they will, even when the person deceiving them no longer bothers to hide the deception. That's powerful stuff. 



Update Regarding Ed Burger's "One Mind"



Mr. Burger's previous work includes the film "Amongst White Clouds," which provided an introduction to the Chinese Buddhist hermit tradition.

These film projects were inspired in large part by Bill Porter's book Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits, which chronicled Porter's travels searching for Buddhist and Daoist hermits in the Zhongnan Mountains. More recently, he wrote a book called Zen Baggage, which chronicled his pilgrimage to sites associated with the earliest Zen Patriarchs. Porter is most well-known as a translator of Chinese Buddhist texts under the nomme de plume Red Pine. 

Thursday, July 30, 2015

Same Study, Different Headlines (Bonus: POTUS Sips a Cuppa in the Land of its Origin)

This is what a cup of coffee looks like, in case you were wondering.

Compare: 


Vs.:


Opposing or even opposite headlines about the very same study seems to be a common problem with the media's reporting on scientific research. In this case, there seems to be a relatively simple explanation for the disparity (in other cases of this sort, it often takes some digging to figure out what explains the opposing headlines). To wit: the study found an association between low coffee consumption and cognitive impairment, and between increasing coffee consumption and cognitive impairment, but not between high coffee consumption and cognitive impairment. 

In other coffee news:


Of the many contributions Ethiopia has made to the world over the centuries, I’m certain that Americans want to thank you for one in particular, discovering something that sustains people around the world, day and night, and many people in the White House, and that is coffee. Thank you, Ethiopia. We are large consumers of coffee in the White House.
I thought coffee was invented in Yemen. (Addendum: According to the ever-useful WIKIPEDIA, coffee is definitely native to Ethiopia, but there seems to be some uncertainty and some dispute about where and when it was first used by people as a stimulant, and about where and when where it was first domesticated.) Either way, Ethiopian coffee is truly excellent. (As is Ethiopian cuisine, music, art, architecture, etc.)

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Bullying as Aphrodisiac?

Jennifer Wong of Simon Fraser University

A disturbing new study shows that high school bullies have higher status, more self-esteem, less depression, and even have more sex than non-bullies. In addition, the usual interventions to stop bullying are ineffective, but the researchers have identified one that works: give bullies a putatively high status job, such as being a door-greeter at their school, and the bullying decreases.

Beware the Internet Mob

"Justice for Cecil."

The shaming of Walter Palmer strongly resembles a witch hunt. Who among us would survive such scrutiny? Even if we haven't killed a lion, most of us have done some stupid or immoral things. Sometimes repeatedly. "He who is without sin, throw the first stone." (Right?)

Clarificatory update: I actually agree that it was wrong to kill the lion for sport, that the wrongness was made worse by the fact that lions are endangered, and was also made worse because of the role this particular lion was playing in the ongoing research on how to protect the endangered lion populations. So I agree with many of the grounds that people are citing to justify their criticism of and use of social sanctions against Mr. Palmer. But the response to Palmer seems excessive in the light of his actual moral error, and is yet another example of the angry internet mob's frightening power. You could be next!

Second clarificatory update: Lots of people cross moral lines and should be punished, whether through the criminal justice system or through social sanctions. I am not opposed to using social sanctions against people who commit moral crimes, or against people who break the law. We should shame murderers, rapists, and thieves, for example, and Palmer also deserves a certain amount of social censure. But we also have a duty to make judgments about what legal punishments or social sanctions are justified in a calm, rational manner, lest we inadvertently make moral errors ourselves through disproportionate responses to others' immoral actions. Anger, hatred, scorn, and the other passions associated with moral outrage have a way of burning unchecked. It's not that we should forgive everything and punish nothing, but we owe it to ourselves to be careful in how we go about judging and punishing others. I fear that the internet is enabling and encouraging us to give into crude vigilantism and a mob mentality (even in cases where someone really did do something morally wrong). The short of it is, you can't reduce considered moral judgment to instant, unchecked outrage. I don't like where this is going, and I fear it will not end well for our society.

Third clarificatory update, now with more Reason: Three points worth bearing in mind: First, even if outrage is sometimes morally permissible or obligatory, what seems to be happening is people are equally outraged by all immoral actions, regardless of the severity of the immorality. For example, people seem just as outraged against Palmer (or even moreso) as they would be if he had killed a person, or 20 people, or 200 people.

Second, even if it is correct to be just as outraged against Palmer as many people are, there is still something troubling about the way the Internet and social media are causing people to focus excessively and obsessively on the particular day's cause celebre, and ignore everything all of the other crimes that are going on in the world. This excessive, obsessive focus is feeding our lack of proportion and perspective, and is leading to the harassment, firing, bankruptcy, etc. of people around the world (sometimes people who have legitimately done something wrong, but don't necessarily deserve the level of harassment they receive, occasionally people who don't seem to have actually done anything wrong in the first place, and therefore don't deserve any level of sanction or harassment).

Third, there is a case to be made that outrage in general is not morally permissible, at least if 'outrage' entails burning anger or hatred. As the Dhammapada puts it: "Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a law eternal." (Dhp I.5).

Addendum: It seems others have been writing about this as well. 

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Sunday, July 19, 2015

The Original Meaning of "Know Thyself"

The famous saying inscribed over the south entrance of Eno Hall at Princeton University.
"Know your place" is perhaps a fitting motto for the Ivy League.

According to this piece by Elizabeth Cady, the original meaning of the famous Greek saying gnothi seauthon was actually "Know your place," and it was intended to warn entrants of the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi to avoid the sin of hubris. Socrates seems to have imaginatively reinterpreted the motto when he used it to express the ideal of the examined life.

Saturday, July 18, 2015

In Decline: Today's Libraries


The stacks are being downsized or eliminated, and to add insult to injury, more acquisition funds are being spent on fewer e-books because of current pricing models:
In evolving, librarians are steering tight acquisition budgets to e-books, which are more expensive than print because, among other reasons, publishers fear large databases of free e-books will hurt their business.
Also, as a disappointed library user, I have noticed that most e-books' user interface sucks compared to print books. No doubt one day it will all be fixed, but how many years will we have to wait for the publishers and libraries to get their acts together?