Maxims, rules of thumb and other observations on human cognition and sociocultural affectations

This will be added to on an irregular basis...
  • What is said to humans directly is received with skepticism and considered with dubiousness while that which is heard in passing, especially that which most conforms to their mentality or prejudices, is readily believed.
  • Humans have a certain cognitive latency between exposure to new information or experiences and the ability to think dispassionately and intellectually about it.
  • Humans have a certain cognitive spectrum starting with the moment of exposure to new information or experiences and ending with some point at which the thing is effectively "in the past" for them.
  • This cognitive spectrum is linked to the emotional process often referred to as shock, anger, denial and acceptance.
  • The more and faster information or experiences are presented to people and the closer the quarters and the lesser the distance between people, the more their early reactions in the passionate emotional stage are reflected back to them in the manner of responses to those reactions from others in light of those responses.
  • The more outrages which are suffered without sufficient time to allow emotional bleed-off, the farther the bar for subsequent reaction and outrage are pushed, and the more further events must progress before reaction and outrage.
  • It is possible for serious detriments to eventually sit below this threshold for long enough for their damaging effects to build and multiply until their entire society undergoes some reactive convulsion.
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Tuesday, April 08, 2008

BULLSHIT SCARE DE JOUR

End of the world as we know it - The Arizona Republic

Money shot of stupid:

After all, no alternative energy sources scale up to the level of a few million people, much less the 6.5 billion who currently occupy Earth. Oil is necessary to extract and deliver coal and natural gas. Oil is needed to produce solar panels and wind turbines, and to maintain the electrical grid.

Read the article and in fact, do a word search on that page for the word nuclear. It doesn't occur until the first response on the page about what the French are doing.

As was pointed out by conservatives a very very very long time ago regarding the left's obsession with preventing nuclear usage at all costs, it is not so much about a fright of accident based on sober scientific and technical assessments, as it is and much more so, about their obsession with the idea that modern advanced technological society is bad.

Watch The Science Channel and try really hard to miss the subtext in shows about pandemics to come. You will have to struggle to miss the point being contended, namely than mankind's ability to travel and interact with each other puts us at risk.

MUCH of the scientific establishment is not so much the Professor from Gilligan's Island as, well, the guy who wrote this article.

Guy R. McPherson is a professor of conservation biology at the University of Arizona.

If you, like me, are well aquatinted with the fact that the majority of college and university teachers hail from the bottom quartile of college and university students, well, this is not really too surprising. Further, if you also are aware of the heavily politicized, largely radical, and mostly leftist nature of academia, then it makes more sense.

I entreat you the reader to defend yourself against this obnoxious corruption of straightforward logical rational endeavor by the more venal aspects of man, namely political aggrandizement and appeasement of ego, and try not to cast off all belief in science. Yes, my fellow technical types are rife with veritable oceans of stupid afloat with much flotsam and jetsam of utter brainlessness, but once you get past that, you might find something to make a useful stake the put through the hearts of these sociopolitical vampires, who seek to suck dry the world's belief in a brighter future.

Meanwhile, I'll do the dirty work and call this article a fucking crock of horseshit. We have technology in hand to safely and elegantly empower our society for centuries and millennia. We merely lack the gumption to tell people like this to shut the fuck up. It is not the job of academia to read tea leaves, entrails, or their own vomit after spring break and foretell the future. It is their job to find way to make the future prosperous and wondrous for all mankind.

That's the way I was trained in science, that's my story, I'm sticking to it. Too bad I have to deal with so many sensationalist prick hacks fobbing off utter crap to an undereducated, miseducated, and all too credulous society of people emotionally drained by a political system running on crisis creation and mismanagement, and with the attention span of a Bill Clinton groupie.