G as in Good H as in Happy

"Evil is a Sucker for Solidarity"

May 7, 2008

Plenty of Traditionalists will not be on board, but for some of us, Joseph Brodsky's commencement speech at Williams College sings:

The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even -- if you will -- eccentricity. That is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned impostor couldn't be happy with. Something, in other words, that can't be shared, like your own skin: not even by a minority. Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balance sheets.

Stampede based on M. Baldwin painting

Smoke, Mirrors, Fire: Change of Heart

March 14, 2008

David Mamet, the terse and edgy playwright recently celebrating the deposit of his archives with the University of Texas, undergoes, or at least publicly registers, a change in his political perspective, or self-identification. How encouraging! As he had said to an admiring student, "politics is not difficult to understand -- the only things you need are literacy and a brain." The Daily Texan appears not to have weighed in on the latest developments.

J. Budziszewski, also from these parts,

Permanent Things

September 8, 2006

Prompted to post by today's One Cosmos.

David Warren

June 8, 2006

David Warren in the Spectator is always sane and diverting:

"Neuro-economics is just getting started"

April 20, 2006

Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowan's first New York Times gig:

People are not consistent or fully rational decision makers.... Researchers can see on the screen how people compartmentalize their choices into different parts of their brains. This may not always sound like economics but neuro-economists start with the insight — borrowed from the economist Friedrich Hayek — that resources are scarce within the brain and must be allocated to competing uses. Whether in economies or brains, well-functioning systems should not be expected to exhibit centralized command and control.

The practical application of this is immense, especially as applied to leveraged decision-making like investing. And measuring "states" as brain location via imaging machines may show much of what neuro-linguistic "state" lore has hypothesized:
There are many different personalities running around in there.

So who is here right now?

Update:
Orbitofrontal cortex neurons are located that assign value in choice.

Economic choice is, at its essence, a choice between goods as opposed to a choice between actions.

Ethics and the Future

April 18, 2006

Steve Sailer takes a lot of flak for arguing that genetics/heritability/family/ethnicity matters, profoundly, in the impact on society, history, civilization. His arguments are often worth considering. Here he discusses Risky Transactions: Trust, Kinship, and Ethnicity, responding to the review in Albion's Seedlings of Moisés Naim's Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy.

Risk Paralysis

April 17, 2006

Much of the time, we at Chez Dilys are overeducated all-purpose dilettante amateurs, sputtering or opinionating on some matter we have tried to think through, but about which we have no particularly specialized information. We particularly appreciate the part of the blogosphere that taps experts we wouldn't otherwise get to talk to.

So when an apparently real risk analyst [his wide-ranging web site] addresses the Borders and Comedy Central capitulations to the spectre of angry Muslims*, we take notice:

In both the case of Comedy Central and Borders, neither appears to have followed any reasonable risk management application that would be expected pursuant to their executive responsibility.... Numerous more appropriate mitigation/response strategies appear to have been ignored.

This harks back to our cri de coeur to the clumsily ineffective -- who is sometimes us. 

Get

Some

Help!

We leave to our own resident experts to qualify his ideas on energy catalysts.
_____________
        *A risk the great Dante undertook, without censoring The Divine Comedy.  A recent Italian cartoon of Mohammed's role in that great art work "drew immediate fire from Italy's Muslim community."

What truly cannot be countenanced is anything that outlaws major parts of the inheritance of Western civilization. Dante, or the Bible, or Shakespeare, are fit fodder for argument. But not to be mothballed in dhimmitude.

Conditions and Remedies

April 14, 2006

A medical student offers a summary of some of what we know about brain function, and how little what we know yet impacts ordinary psychotherapeutic practice, or the organization of modern life.

We Get Hedons from Catching Flies, Too

April 9, 2006

As usual, a couple of interesting posts from Wilkinson.

Mind at Work

April 4, 2006

Assistant Village Idiot has brain-development links.