Category Archives: Culture

L&C: Rationality in Language

Something a bit abstruse for today. This is via a Facebook post by David Brin on December 21st.

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Ls&Cs: Never Too Many Guns; Conservatives Against Modern Medicine

NYT, Farhad Manjoo, 13 Jan 2022: We Must Stop Showering the Military With Money

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Ls&Cs: The Fiction Novel

About how language changes, how some cultural assumptions are common among some but unknown by others, and how some people don’t know any of the things that anyone reading this blog know. With my own personal experiences of such matters, … Continue reading

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Ls&Cs: Is DNA Safe to Eat? Is America Undergoing a Mass Psychosis?

Paul Krugman on Republican resistance to investments in the future; a concern about whether DNA is safe to eat; about watching Fox News every day; and about Carl Jung’s warning about mass psychosis.

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Pursuing Books During the Pandemic and Supply-Side Crisis

Via book reviews and Fb posts, I’m aware of 2 or 3 new nonfiction books published every week that look interesting enough to consider reading. I restrain myself; at most I buy 2 or 3 new nonfiction books a month … Continue reading

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America is a gun

This is circulating again on Fb; it’s been around for years. This is America’s reputation in the world!

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Ls&Cs: Interviews and Excerpts: Pinker, Harari, Graeber & Wengrow

Michael Shermer interviews Steven Pinker about Rationality; NYT interviews Yuval Noah Harari about the simple story that can save the planet; and an excerpt from Graeber & Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything.

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Ls&Cs: Stuff, Terms, Panics, Rules

Maybe we should all just buy less stuff. How citizenship has given way to consumerism. Why partisans deliberately confuse terms like expenses and investments. And how some rewrite history in support of ideological narratives.

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L&Cs: Christakis on COVID and Altruism

A Big Picture item: what does our COVID response say about humanity’s capacity for altruism?

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Ls&Cs: Problem-Solving, Ethics, Out-Group Prejudice, and Padding Bestseller Lists

Several links that I collected on April 20th, the day I went to the hospital for what led to my heart transplant.

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