Radio interview with Lee Goldman, MD, about his new book Too Much of a Good Thing, subtitled “How Four Key Survival Traits Are Now Killing Us”. This is about the familiar idea that our species is optimized for survival in an environment quite unlike the modern environment. Thus we evolved to gorge ourselves on sweets whenever available, when sweets were rare — but now that they’re readily available, we’re still prone to gorging, thus obesity. The other four are about our taste for salt, our tendency toward violence, and (one I hadn’t heard before) how blood clotting kept people from dying from trauma and childbirth in our ancient past, but now more often has the deleterious effect of leading to heart attacks and strokes. (So much for ‘intelligent design’.)
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NPR: No Warp Drives, No Transporters: Science Fiction Authors Get Real
About The Martian, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora (my review) and Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves (which I haven’t yet read).
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Harper’s essay by Alan Lightman: What Came Before the Big Bang?.
Short answer: nothing. Any more than there’s something farther north than the north pole.
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Website for a delightful short book, illustrated, about “bad arguments”, i.e. logical fallacies and cognitive defects. You can buy the book, An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments from Amazon, which I’ve done, but the entire content is on this site.
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Finally, I’m reading a book by Mathew Hutson, The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking, subtitled, “How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healty, and Sane”. Most of his content is familiar to me from other sources, how superstitions and motivated reasoning pervade our thinking, even those of us who think ourselves rationalists. His spin on this is that these tendencies are part of the human condition, and that by recognizing them and taking advantage of them, you can improve your own psychological life. More on this once I’ve finished reading the book.
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But here’s an essay, at website This View of Life, on the same issue: God Is Watching You: How the Fear of God Makes Us Human, by Dominic Johnson. About how these irrational beliefs nevertheless function to promote human culture and society.
