Tag: short-and-straight

Eugenics

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

Eugenics was a serious academic discipline, and not just in Facist countries. By 1930s it was being studied in universities in Switzerland, Sweden, Russia, Germany, America and Norway. Its founder, Sir Francis Galton, a British anthropologist, even became a fellow of the Royal Society. Galton felt that the average citizen was “too base for the everyday work of modern civilization”.

It took Adolf Hitler and his henchmen to expose the moral bankruptcy of these ideas.

From Frans de Waal’s The Bonobo and the Atheist

You become what you do, not what you think

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According to psychologist Timothy Wilson:

People draw inferences about who they are by observing their own behavior. 

Self-perception theory turns common wisdom on its head. Two powerful ideas follow from it. The first is that we are strangers to ourselves. After all, if we knew our own minds, why would we need to guess what our preferences are from our behavior? If our minds were an open book, we would know exactly how honest we are and how much we like lattes. Instead, we often need to look to our behavior to figure out who we are. Self-perception theory thus anticipated the revolution in psychology in the study of human consciousness, a revolution that revealed the limits of introspection.

But it turns out that we don’t just use our behavior to reveal our dispositions—we infer dispositions that weren’t there before. Often, our behavior is shaped by subtle pressures around us, but we fail to recognize those pressures. As a result, we mistakenly believe that our behavior emanated from some inner disposition.

The scale of our universe

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Here is how John Cassidy explains the scale of our universe.

He instructs us to find a large open space and place a soccer ball in the center to represent the sun. He then directs us to walk 10 paces in a straight line, stick a common pin in the ground. The head of the pin stands for the planet Mercury. Then take another 9 paces beyond Mercury and put down a peppercorn to represent Venus. Step 7 more paces and drop another peppercorn for Earth. One inch away from Earth, another pinhead represents the Moon. Take 14 more paces and place a peppercorn for Mars, then 95 paces to Jupiter, and place a ping-pong ball. Take 112 paces further and place a marble to represent Saturn.

He then inquires, “How far would you have to walk to reach the nearest star, Proxima Centauri?” He instructs you to pick up another soccer ball to represent it and set off for a walk of 4,200 miles. As for the nearest other galaxy, Andromeda, he suggests, don’t even consider it!