The mysteries of the human mind: cell phone videos and religiously-driven 'honor killings' in the same sentence. OR How the rationality of the science that surrounds people fails to penetrate irrational beliefs. by 1KIKI

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

POSTED BY: 1KIKI
UPDATED: Thursday, May 21, 2020 01:24
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VIEWED: 2351
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Monday, May 18, 2020 4:14 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Two women in Pakistan have been murdered in a so-called "honor killing" after a video showing them kissing a man circulated online. The leaked mobile phone video, in which the women appeared, is a year old, but surfaced on social media this month, sparking the family's ire and decision to kill the women, said Khan.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/18/asia/pakistan-honor-killing-hnk-int
l/index.html

Just in case you think only people in Pakistan are that backwards, here's one example from Tennessee:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/blood-tears-teen-was-called-possessed/

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Monday, May 18, 2020 4:55 PM

CAPTAINCRUNCH

... stay crunchy...

What’s with you and Sergiegnym with the 50 word, Private Jews, Jaynestown, sock puppet titles? Did your handlers send you an update about how to manipulate these things called “Search Engines?”

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Monday, May 18, 2020 4:58 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

I made it extra long so people like you can get the point, just in case your mental faculties aren't working properly.

So, you live in Pakistan or Tennessee it take it?

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Monday, May 18, 2020 7:34 PM

WISHIMAY

LOL.

Newsflash, people in general are SHIT and aren't going to do what you think they should no matter how hard you legislate or regulate.

DUH.

You are going to die some fine day STILL thinking we can all work together in a delusional utopia.

It's so sick it's funny.

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Tuesday, May 19, 2020 3:32 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Humans aren't logic machines, we work by pattern recognition. And the context of the pattern makes a difference: Seeing tiger-like eyeshine by firelight is not at all like seeing fireflies in the forest, or shapes in the clouds. That's why people can buy a $30,000 car and then stress about seeing a $20 movie.

I think it would be REALLY helpful for people if we were made aware of the failures of human processing and, even better, given mnemonics to help overcome them. That way we wouldn't have matter and anti-matter thoughts together in the same brain that would explode our heads if ever the thoughts should collide.

There are a couple of things I find helpful ...

One of them is "DEFINE YOUR TERMS". People who get heated up about "freedom" or "human rights",for example, quite often can't even explain WHAT they mean when pressed to define their ideas. Even a concept of something as simple as a "cup" gets a little messy when challenged to define the difference between that, and a "mug", a "glass", a "bowl" and a "Japanese teacup". Most people don't, in fact, have a clue as to WHAT they're talking about/reacting to.

Another trick is to substitute the name of a hated person or event into the narrative tat you tell yourself. It will reveal biases. For example, instead of "Trump" insert "Hillary" or "Biden" or "Obama" next time you find yourself screeching about corruption or what-have-you. "Abortion" and "war" are pretty good substitutes for each other.

And finally, try to put things on SOME meaningful absolute scale. My hubby uses "energy", I use "money". How much do I spend on cable? What about insurance? My metric is "grocery budget". If it starts to equal or exceed "grocery budget", then I know it's ssomething I have to look into. If a vehicle costs me more than a year's-worth of goveries, maybe it's not the vehicle for us. Everyone has to find their own meaningful metric that puts everything on the same scale.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

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Tuesday, May 19, 2020 7:07 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Tuesday, May 19, 2020 9:41 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Humans aren't logic machines, we work by pattern recognition.

Honor killing is tightly interwoven with abstract thought and has a cold logic of its own. See Chapter 6, "Hotheads", from the book How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker.
https://libgen.unblockit.me/search.php?req=How+the+mind+works

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, May 19, 2020 9:56 AM

CAPTAINCRUNCH

... stay crunchy...

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
I made it extra long so people like you can get the point, just in case your mental faculties aren't working properly.

Bullsh*t

You're lying. Again. OR you're just a hack writer.

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Tuesday, May 19, 2020 11:06 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

I've wasted my time reading whole books by Pinker. With his grandiose failure to find hard facts and his use of amorphous words, when all is said and done, Pinker might possibly be remembered in history as a small-time derailment of progress on any topic.

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Tuesday, May 19, 2020 12:44 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
I've wasted my time reading whole books by Pinker. With his grandiose failure to find hard facts and his use of amorphous words, when all is said and done, Pinker might possibly be remembered in history as a small-time derailment of progress on any topic.

Predictably you'd write that. It is something about How Republican Minds Work. When asked whether the presidency of Donald Trump in the United States poses a threat to progress, Pinker says the Republican "indeed is a threat to many of the forms of progress that we've enjoyed. All the more reason that we should appreciate them, to know what we have to lose."

Religion can be another barrier to progress, according to Pinker. "Religious institutions themselves evolved under the influence of the Enlightenment," he argues. "They become more humanistic to the extent that they have, then they can be forces for progress."

"But yes, I believe that appealing to supernatural forces, appealing to doctrines that only people [who] are born into a particular religion share or that they can't be persuaded of, does go against progress."

www.aljazeera.com/programmes/upfront/2018/03/steven-pinker-trump-viole
nce-religion-180323165958898.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, May 19, 2020 2:50 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Quote:
Predictably you'd write that. It is something about How Republican Minds Work.

... according to Pinker ... "But yes, I believe that appealing to supernatural forces, appealing to doctrines that only people [who] are born into a particular religion share or that they can't(?) be persuaded of, does go against progress."

Hmm. I must not be a republican, because my objection to the historic arbitrariness of religion is similar to Pinker's, except mine is based on fairness while his is based on progress.

Quote:
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=63626&p=2
But when it comes to religion, they ALL promise to be The ONE & ONLY REAL DEAL© (accept no substitutions!), with eternal damnation for everyone else. And I rankled at the idea that salvation could be so arbitrary as to condemn virtually the entire human race for the sin of being born in the wrong time, at the wrong place. As proposed by religions, salvation is a roulette wheel, except the chances of winning are infinitesimally small.

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Tuesday, May 19, 2020 3:12 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
KIKI: I've wasted my time reading whole books by Pinker.

Unlike SECOND, who only knows this guy from a TED talk

Quote:
KIKI: With his grandiose failure to find hard facts and his use of amorphous words, when all is said and done, Pinker might possibly be remembered in history as a small-time derailment of progress on any topic.

SECOND: Predictably you'd write that. It is something about How Republican Minds Work.

Liar

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

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Tuesday, May 19, 2020 3:57 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
KIKI: I've wasted my time reading whole books by Pinker.
Unlike SECOND, who only knows this guy from a TED talk
Quote:
KIKI: With his grandiose failure to find hard facts and his use of amorphous words, when all is said and done, Pinker might possibly be remembered in history as a small-time derailment of progress on any topic.

SECOND: Predictably you'd write that. It is something about How Republican Minds Work.
Liar

Harvard professor Steven Pinker explains the disturbing truth behind Trump's 2 favorite phrases
www.businessinsider.com/meaning-of-fake-news-and-make-america-great-ag
ain-steven-pinker-2018-3

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quoting Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

In writing this book I have adopted a voice that is analytic, and at times irreverent, because I believe the topic has inspired too much piety and not enough understanding. But at no point have I been unaware of the reality behind the numbers. To review the history of violence is to be repeatedly astounded by the cruelty and waste of it all, and at times to be overcome with anger, disgust, and immeasurable sadness. I know that behind the graphs there is a young man who feels a stab of pain and watches the life drain slowly out of him, knowing he has been robbed of decades of existence. There is a victim of torture whose contents of consciousness have been replaced by unbearable agony, leaving room only for the desire that consciousness itself should cease. There is a woman who has learned that her husband, her father, and her brothers lie dead in a ditch, and who will soon “fall into the hand of hot and forcing violation.”21 It would be terrible enough if these ordeals befell one person, or ten, or a hundred. But the numbers are not in the hundreds, or the thousands, or even the millions, but in the hundreds of millions—an order of magnitude that the mind staggers to comprehend, with deepening horror as it comes to realize just how much suffering has been inflicted by the naked ape upon its own kind.22

Yet while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, that species has also found ways to bring the numbers down, and allow a greater and greater proportion of humanity to live in peace and die of natural causes.23 For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment we can savor, and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible.

https://libgen.unblockit.me/search.php?req=steven+pinker+angels

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Wednesday, May 20, 2020 7:36 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Quote:
Predictably you'd write that. It is something about How Republican Minds Work.

... according to Pinker ... "But yes, I believe that appealing to supernatural forces, appealing to doctrines that only people [who] are born into a particular religion share or that they can't(?) be persuaded of, does go against progress."
Hmm. I must not be a republican, because my objection to the historic arbitrariness of religion is similar to Pinker's, except mine is based on fairness while his is based on progress.
Quote:
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=63626&p=2
But when it comes to religion, they ALL promise to be The ONE & ONLY REAL DEAL© (accept no substitutions!), with eternal damnation for everyone else. And I rankled at the idea that salvation could be so arbitrary as to condemn virtually the entire human race for the sin of being born in the wrong time, at the wrong place. As proposed by religions, salvation is a roulette wheel, except the chances of winning are infinitesimally small.

Pinker used your favorite President/political party as a punching bag in his most recent book:

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Preface
The second half of the second decade of the third millennium would not seem to be an auspicious time to publish a book on the historical sweep of progress and its causes. At the time of this writing, my country is led by people with a dark vision of the current moment: “mothers and children trapped in poverty . . . an education system which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge . . . and the crime, and the gangs, and the drugs that have stolen too many lives.” We are in an “outright war” that is “expanding and metastasizing.” The blame for this nightmare may be placed on a “global power structure” that has eroded “the underlying spiritual and moral foundations of Christianity.” from Donald Trump’s inaugural speech, Jan. 20, 2017

In the pages that follow, I will show that this bleak assessment of the state of the world is wrong. And not just a little wrong—wrong wrong, flat-earth wrong, couldn’t-be-more-wrong. But this book is not about the forty-fifth president of the United States and his advisors. It was conceived some years before Donald Trump announced his candidacy, and I hope it will outlast his administration by many more. The ideas that prepared the ground for his election are in fact widely shared among intellectuals and laypeople, on both the left and the right. They include pessimism about the way the world is heading, cynicism about the institutions of modernity, and an inability to conceive of a higher purpose in anything other than religion. I will present a different understanding of the world, grounded in fact and inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment: reason, science, humanism, and progress. Enlightenment ideals, I hope to show, are timeless, but they have never been more relevant than they are right now.

https://libgen.unblockit.me/search.php?req=steven+pinker+enlightenment

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, May 20, 2020 12:38 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Thanks for making stuff up about me just because you can't understand the words I post. So, with me being both a democrat and agnostic, your post count as 2 strikes.

And do I have a 'higher purpose' outside of myself and religion? Why, yes I do!

The question is, do you?

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Wednesday, May 20, 2020 1:42 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

No, SECOND does not have a higher purpose. He has a lower purpose, which is driven by hate.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

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Thursday, May 21, 2020 1:24 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

The mysteries of the human mind: cell phone videos and religiously-driven 'honor killings' in the same sentence. OR How the rationality of the science that surrounds people fails to penetrate irrational beliefs.

The answer that Signy pointed to seems to be 'context'. And if you want to convince people of something, you can do that by putting it in a 'context' that makes it palatable.

One 'context' that can be invoked in the mind is that of the in group v 'other' groups, where the 'in' group is righteous and 'they' are scum. And you can draw that line between 'in' and 'they' using any characteristic to define a group: skin color, religion, political party, sex, age, health, and so on.

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