131–140 of 150 posts
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> Communities, rife as they were with gossip, ostracism and superstitious cruelty, were always based on mutual need To counter your easy dismissal I'd say modern individuals, rife as they are with selfiness, consumerism, lack of empathy and of time to connect to their neighborhood, are mostly basing their circles on career paths and personal interests, and other people being their cultural split image.
How is my dismissal 'easy'? I haven't heard it from anyone else and it acknowledges an unpleasant truth. What I dismiss are sentimental media ideas about 'community' which are all too common. What both arbitrary socialising and consumerism have in common is that they are focused on selves whereas truly important activity primarily relates to abstract ideas. It is ideas that create the solutions to local problems. Btw…
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You have time and have nothing better to do with it than to kill it? My condolences. Try having kids; it rids you of free time quite well! :) Really, with current online life, people have contact less with random strangers and more with like-minded or otherwise interesting individuals. If in an [abstract] countryside you have to talk to you neighbors because there's no one else around, on the Internet the choice is w…
You miss the point. I'd rather share a fire with living people, than a glowing screen. Even if those people are less witty than the glowing screen. Not to mention the internet tends to form echo chambers. It's good to meet people who are not like-minded...
And yes, meeting people that are not like-minded is very important; is it beside a fire or through a glowing screen, does not matter.
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How is my dismissal 'easy'? I haven't heard it from anyone else and it acknowledges an unpleasant truth. What I dismiss are sentimental media ideas about 'community' which are all too common. What both arbitrary socialising and consumerism have in common is that they are focused on selves whereas truly important activity primarily relates to abstract ideas. It is ideas that create the solutions to local problems. Btw…
Those ideas about community aren't just sentimental, they're reflections of real human needs. Humans value community to a tremendous degree, shaped by evolutionary pressures evolving from our tribal roots. We want to feel part of a larger group, whether it is our family, neighborhood, city, company or country. This isn't a relationship born out of "creating solutions," it independently nourishes an innate emotional n…
It could be the other way around: we are born into families and nations and therefore we post-hoc accept and value them.
We can't wait to leave and get away to the big city and then, eventually, from time to time, we yearn to return home. Not due to some innate preference or unexplained genetic mechanism but simply because that's how we grew up.
However, few are willing to give up their new-found freedoms for a circumscribed tribal existence. Which doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't honour our pasts.
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You have time and have nothing better to do with it than to kill it? My condolences. Try having kids; it rids you of free time quite well! :) Really, with current online life, people have contact less with random strangers and more with like-minded or otherwise interesting individuals. If in an [abstract] countryside you have to talk to you neighbors because there's no one else around, on the Internet the choice is w…
You miss the point. I'd rather share a fire with living people, than a glowing screen. Even if those people are less witty than the glowing screen. Not to mention the internet tends to form echo chambers. It's good to meet people who are not like-minded...
People forget that 100 years ago that wasn't really an option.
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I think we would be better off with more businesses and less private landlords in the UK. The current situation doesn't work very well for many tenants.
How would fewer private landlords help?
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You miss the point. I'd rather share a fire with living people, than a glowing screen. Even if those people are less witty than the glowing screen. Not to mention the internet tends to form echo chambers. It's good to meet people who are not like-minded...
It's not about staring at the screen. It's about using that screen to contact your friends who live beyond your street to come over and sit around your fire. People forget that 100 years ago that wasn't really an option.
BTW, the telephone was invented nearly 200 years ago. Although, yes, travel options were more limited.
Since we're living around like-minded individuals but subjected to top-down centralized lawmaking, there is a large disconnect between what's happening in our backyard, in the state capital, and in Washington. Often the City Council office is out of touch with one part of the city or another, imposing rules on all that about half disagree with. The federal system in America is supposed to emphasize differences in the…
> But Washington has been taking more power away from the states for the last ~100 years or so. Yes, and there are very good reasons for that, beginning with us having to fight a Civil War because the South felt the need to keep slavery and continuing on to us having to fight the South to get it to enforce the laws preserving Civil Rights for black people and other minority groups. Shifting power back to local govern…
So should we repeal the 9th and 10th Amendments?
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And before we roll out Internet tropes about correlation and causation, maybe we should first read the underlying studies. The article fails horribly by not quoting any of them, but here's a good starting point: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3402200381.html Or, if you want a list from the guy who did the initial investigations into the phenomenon, start here: http://www.psc.isr.umich.edu/people/profile/478/Jame…
> I'm far from an expert on the topic, but from what I read, a causal relationship is at the least very strongly implied. Scientists don't imply cause-effect relationships, they demonstrate them, using evidence, to the exclusion of alternatives. Then they offer an explanation -- a theory about the evidence. These properties are rarely present in psychological studies, especially the explanation requirement. Here's an…
You mean like Einstein did with the theory of relativity? Oh. Wait. That was only proven 30+ years later by Ives–Stilwell.
You mean like String Theory is completely proven to the exclusion of alternatives? Oh. Wait. It isn't.
Science observes, formulates hypotheses, and then falsifies or shows them to be true. It is never "to the exclusion of alternatives", or we'd be done with science by now. It is about forming the model that best fits the world, given our current knowledge.
> I've met the same evidence requirement the linked article does, and the latter is being described as science.
The "linked artice" is journalism, not science. Try following up on the links in there, to the actual science.
> one without any effort to explain it or demonstrate a cause-effect relationship.
You didn't read any of the papers, did you?
> After reading the original work, one is left with the same impression the linked article provides
Ah. You digested 35 years of research, and found no evidence? Or you skimmed the overview I provided, and chose to not further investigate?
Yes, there is no clear mechanism, yet. That's because we don't understand psychology well enough to always define clear mechanisms. That's what science is about - furthering our understanding.
The work on establishing actual causal pathways is still going on, and probably will for quite a while. The metastudies indicate that research is doing a decent job to control for other factors, and still reproduces nicely.