For the last two Sundays, I attended Sky Church. The meetings involve confronting primal fear, and staring it down. This is done on the basis of a desire to fly, an intellectual understanding of the tiny risks you are in fact facing if you choose to do so. Then, while either staring down your demons,…
The statement “All religious beliefs should be respected!” or the question “To what extent, and how, should I respect religious beliefs other people have?” come up often enough in my correspondence that I have finally decided to record a relatively succinct response that I can send instead of dictating more or less the same thing…
The recent psychological literature has noted a striking increase in depression rates at more or less the same time as the psychological community has turned its eye, and pen, toward what makes people happy.[1] It seems, to an extent, that the more aware we become of our potential for happiness, the more depressed we are.…
The power of example has been so over worked that I hesitated to compose this note. However, recent experience has revived this concept for me in a way worth recording. So here I go. Almost 20 years ago I began developing knee problems while attempting to train for what I thought was to be my…
Stronger, Better Educated Females — A Silver Bullet for Humanity’s Current Demons? Years ago, I ran across E.O. Wilson’s wonderful essay “The Bottleneck” (see http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?arti…). Since then, from time to time, I have wondered whether we have available to us a more powerful social medicine than female education and empowerment. I have not found one so…
I am pulling together my notes on this topic, and am trying to synthesize them into a set of working principles that is short and simple enough for me to remember. I would be grateful to anyone who cares to read this and tell me if they can think of any areas of research that…
For this interested in the long story, see the thread at http://www.aimoo.com/forum/po….. The thread was started by the observation that a prominent scientist said at a recent conference that she found that ditching free will was itself immensely “freeing”. That is, she felt that be adopting a deterministic mindset (that all of her actions were determined…
I finished reading this book this morning, having heard Dr. Goodenough speak at a conference last weekend, and having had the chance to chat with her. She is one of those rare people who project both a sense of personal power and make those in her presence feel both valued and safe. And her book…