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Curiosity Over Pride (FYI: To comment, send an e-mail to scifidink@gmail.com)
Saturday, May 8, 2010
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The Most Fabulous Objects In The World
- Hitchhiker's Guide To The Universe trilogy
- Lord of the Rings trilogy
- Flight of the Conchords
- Time Bandits
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2010
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May
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- Sol Invictus
- Mercy
- Still paying for his/our sins...
- OK, my first short health care thoughts
- Is it any wonder our economy is a mess?
- Bubble bubble toil and trouble...
- Blame the heterosexuals...
- Strategic dilemmas
- Another one bites the dust...
- Why JS Mill Matters
- Externality quote of the day...
- Yuck
- Plugging oil leaks, Russian style
- Are we "the mark"?
- Get those Guillotines ready!
- Along the quest to find the BEC in my head...
- It's bad enough that Rush Limbaugh is our distant ...
- Finally!! I have been wondering this forever.
- War is fractal
- Health Care Bubble Ideas
- Do you agree?
- Why the fractal nature of health care will doom he...
- Terrific Disorder?
- Why don't we do more of this?
- No one wants to admit it but we really need more o...
- Well, we finally did it...
- Wouldn't you just love one for your backyard?
- Saying "thanks" to the Flying Spaghetti Monster...
- And crazies say immigrants are the problem?????
- Bummer, Kramer's on board. It looks like gold has ...
- How many times do we have to go throught this!!!!!
- Touche!
- The dangers of retrospective modeling...
- Social Cohesion As The Ultimate Policy Goal
- Glen Beck is an Idiot!
- She Won't Float But She'll Feed the Hungry
- Thought for the weekend
- So now I'm not such a fool after all?
- Curse those doctors!!!
- So I need to make $2,000,000/year to finally get a...
- My question for ANY of you (as I don't know the an...
- This is why they call it the dismal science
- Interesting Automatic Earth Post Today
- The more things change, the more they stay the same
- When we don't coopeate...
- Defending the undefendable
- Paul Says "No"
- Be careful what you wish for...
- What a Waste.
- Sometime I just love Tyler Cowen
- More assaults on national sovereignty ;-)
- Well worth reading
- A Nightmare on Wall Street
- Keeping things in perspective
- TED didn't come down
- A demon of our own design
- I think everyone needs to stare in awe at a 12th S...
- Can you derive Ought from Is?
- More "Have we lost our marbels?" links
- Krugman thinks Greece will withdraw from the Euro ...
- Symmetry and Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking
- Artistic Merit
- For Dr John: the problem of prediction
- Another one for Okie
- Yet another practical use for fractals
- For Budding Fractalists
- Oil Spills
- The Time Paradox
- And yet another reason I REALLLYYY hate Rush Limbaugh
- Thought of the day
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May
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5 comments:
Comments
I obviously agree with Carrol
I do think common values are necessary however for society to function
I would agree with his premise that there is a right and wrong way to promote "human flourishing" if you will. The problem is that given a tremendous number of economic, climate, geographic, resource and cultural variables it is not always clear as to what the best way to promote that is.
I find his proposition of attempting to settle this by riding on the back of the science wagon wholly unconvincing. On some very limited level, this is at first certainly appealing and even seems plausible. Why can we not study these things and in the end come up with answers as we do with any scientific endeavor? The most obvious problem is that the scientific approach leads us to new "truths" about the world.We are supposed to start off not knowing what the answer will be.
He seems to want to go backwards. He knows the answer and wants to use a misguided application of "science" to tell him what he already knows. This reminds me of the grossly misguided attempts by psychiatry to find a biologic marker for homosexuality. If they found a gene for it 30 years ago it would have proved it was a "disease". If they found one today it would be used to prove it is nothing more than "genetic variation". Psychiatry is a microcosm of the kind of flawed thinking he expresses.
When the host asks him if he will re-evaluate his thinking on "love" if it is found that the scan of a man who demands his daughter be wrapped in a burka is the same as a man like him who loves his daughter in a traditional western enlightened manor, he back pedals and starts stammering about delusions as if this really is just a mental illness and people can be deluded as to what real love is. Such a deluded state he implies is sickness.
I have no doubt there is a right and wrong way to live. The golden rule works quite nicely. I do not need science to reveal this to me. Those who do are not interested in what science could even tell them on this issue, which is not much.
Amen
I get very very nervous when people use the name of science to "answer" moral judgments the already know the result they are looking for.
While I would certainly expend tremendous amounts of societal resources to stop a father from killing his daughter simply because she was rapped, Harris never once asks what the moral logic of such an act might mean to this particular murderous parent.
And while such moral absolutism is as valid an approach as any other from some kind of absolute space-time reference, it is interesting Harris makes such as comment just minutes after also noting that sacrificing one's queen in the game of chess can make sense on occasion.
People like Harris scare me. To quote Bob Dylan: "sometimes Satan comes as a man of means"
I agree with Harris's point re: common rules as they clearly must exist. I certainly see how not all structures works with all others, but I strongly disagree with him when he pushes the lie that science can answer these questions for us.
"There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven who does not know that slavery is wrong for him.'
Frederick Douglas
I do not know why this concept has escaped so many on this earth for most of human history. Is there something inherent in us which compels humans towards this end? I must suspect so.
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