Passionate Environmentalism---Sign Up, If You Care

It's pretty easy to use emotional cues to convince someone to take a stand on an issue. That is what propaganda like "An Inconvenient Truth" is all about. Sucking you into the "feel" of doing good.

Humans are irrational. They do not understand most of the things they do, or believe. If this is true among highly intelligent, university trained people, how about people who are drowned in superstitions their whole lives, starting life with less than average intelligence and going downward from there?

The world is not what you think it is.

Hip Hop Perspectives on the Universe, Regenerative Medicine, Nano Simulations

Some of you may wish to turn the volume down and select your own music for this "powers of ten" video.

Advanced Nano blog alerts us to progress being made in regenerative medicine.

The idea of growing an organ from one’s own cells or healing spinal cord injuries with cells transformed from embryonic stem cells used to be considered fodder for science fiction movies, but no more. Companies are not only developing technologies that can do exactly that, but these methods provide real potential to cure certain conditions and diseases.

According to “2020—A New Vision: A Future for Regenerative Medicine”, from the U.S. DHHS, regenerative medicine has the potential to exceed $500 billion within the next 20 years. Companies will be coming together to share their progress in this area at the “Termis North America Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Conference”, to be held in June.

Read more specifics at the source.

Michael Anissimov points to a blog full of nanotech simulations. These are the nuts and bolts of molecular nanotech machines. Go to the earliest sims in March, and work your way back to the present to better understand the progress being made by the blog author.

If you sit and wait for the mainstream media to tell you about the future, you will be much too late to profit from it, to any large degree. The future is being built behind the scenes in small steps. Small steps come together to make larger steps, and so on. But you will never know about these steps soon enough if you wait for the BBC, CBC, ABC, CNN, or Fox. Because by the time the "science journalists" tell you about it, everyone else will know already.


With all the information sources, free courses, tutorials etc. available on the internet, there is no excuse for any intelligent person not to have a reasonable understanding of basic science and technology. The problem is not really a lack of available knowledge. The problem is a lack of understanding of where to place the knowledge inside a larger knowledge framework.

Educational systems in the west are preoccupied with teaching students not to offend anyone. A basic understanding of the universe and how it works is considered unimportant next to politically correct sensitivities. Therefore it is up to you to teach yourself, and although the educational system receives hundreds of billions of tax dollars to use in teaching, you have no one to blame but yourself if you choose to rely on mainstream sources.

Now, the nanotech simulations at Machine Phase blog are fascinating, but I have the same reservations about them that I had when I first read Drexler's Nanosystems.
Why would someone believe that imitating macro-scale machines on the nano level is the best way to achieve nano-efficacy?

The many lessons yet to be learned from molecular biology may very well point to more efficient and efficacious ways of getting things done at the molecular level. So while the engineer in me thrills at the tiny gears, shafts, bearings, and other molecular machines designed into computer models, I am constantly thinking of alternative approaches to accomplishing the same thing.

Modern Leftism: No There, There

A generous commenter might say that the modern left is living off its seed corn. But the sad truth is that the seed corn was eaten over a decade ago. The modern left is living off something far less savoury.

This same conundrum confounds Western liberals. They, as Postel documents, have been silent in the face of repeated student protests in Iran, imprisonment of Iranian activists and numerous other human rights violations that should have logically attracted their support. They are so locked in the singular prism of anti-imperialism that they are unable to make peace with the idea that it is liberalism rather than radicalism that is the true fighting creed in Iran. They are even less amenable to the reality that "the denunciations of U.S. Empire in Iran today are the rhetorical dominion of the Iranian Right, not the Left". As Postel states, "it is the reactionary clergy who wield the idiom of anti-imperialism and regime hardliners [who] legitimate the suppression of Iranian students". This aversion to recognising reality in Iran has exacted a huge cost; it has delegitimised the Western left and exposed its disinterest in championing the cause of Iranian liberals and pro-democracy fighters who suffer daily at the hands of an increasingly repressive regime. Postel exposes how the insistent prioritisation of anti-imperialism over all else has produced a repugnant inversion of itself - a new form of imperialism equally blind in its U.S.-centric perspective as its ugly counterpart.

....Postel recounts an incident in which Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi, during a visit to the U.S., was confronted by an anti-war protester who suggested that she stop talking about human rights abuses in Iran because her arguments could be appropriated by the neo-conservatives. Ebadi's response was clear and unequivocal: "Any anti-war movement that advocates silence in the face of tyranny can count me out."

....This book is a timely indictment of the Western left's apathy, which justifies itself by constructing a deceptively dualistic model of Western engagement with the world. The time has come for the emergence of a new "radical" liberalism that rejects such misguided political perversions....

Source

Blind subservience to earlier generations of thinkers--revered in spite of their patent inferiority--is the hallmark of the modern left. With academia, journalism, and the popular media firmly under the thumb of blind leftists, it becomes ever more important for the alternative streams of thought and action made possible by the new media technologies to come to the forefront.

Cultivating a Sense of Perspective

The Images are from the wonderfully contrarian website IceAgeNow.

Happiness is When You Stop Slamming Your Own Head Against the Wall Part II

People inherit a "set point" for happiness. But it is what people do with that inherited "set point" that determines their actual happiness.

Tiberius looks again to ancient philosophers who suggested people should develop their character if they wanted to have a good life. One way to do that is to gain some perspective on your life. Volunteer at a homeless shelter for even a day or two and you'll quickly realize how fortunate you are.

"We all spend too much time being upset over things that really don't matter that much," Tiberius says. "You know, something like worrying that your new kitchen cabinets won't match the countertops or something like that and calling all your friends to complain about it. We'd all be happier if we tried harder to keep our reactions proportional to the events in our life. And the fastest way I know to do that is to get outside of ourselves and do something for someone else."

Source.

But don't go outside expecting to find happiness. Go outside to gain perspective and to build character. The happiness that happens comes from inside yourself, when you stop slamming your head against the wall.

Guess what? You were sold a bill of goods. Nothing out there can make you happy. Nothing. You want to know why? Because things change. You change. That beautiful girl you married changes. Women that are worth knowing really don’t care what kind of car you drive. Men who are worth knowing really aren’t as concerned with the smoothness of your skin as they are the love in your eyes. It’s been said before, and it will be said again - The only thing that doesn’t change is that we live in a world of change.

Source

As important as happiness feels to us, it is not the meaning of life.

To over-simplify things down to the basic evolutionary origin, happiness is what we feel when we achieve a goal. It's the indicator of success. (The actual emotion of happiness is far more complex in rats, never mind humans, but let's start with the simplest possible case.) By seeking "happiness" as a pure thing, independent of any goals, we are in essence short-circuiting the system.

Source

In terms of brain function, happiness is a balance of brain activity--reflected in brain wave behaviour.

For general health and wellness purposes, we need all the brain wave types, but we need our brain to have the flexibility and resilience to be able to balance the brain wave activity as necessary for what we are doing at any one time.
What stops our brain from having this balance all the time?
The big 6:

1. Injury
2. Medications, including alcohol
3. Fatigue
4. Emotional distress
5. Pain
6. Stress

These 6 types of problems tend to create a pattern in our brain's activity that is hard to shift.

In chaos theory, we would call this pattern a "chaotic attractor". Getting "stuck" in a specific kind of brain behaviour is like being caught in an attractor.

Source

What we are looking for is balance--the well-lived life. Humans are notoriously bad at predicting what will cause them the greatest happiness. We need to learn to listen to our true inner needs. To do that, we have to provide ourselves time away from noisy distractions and clamoring demands--and learn to listen to the voices behind the voices.

Wisdom

A lot of people are confused about the relationship between wisdom and intelligence. Author Paul Graham was one of those confused people, until recently. But now, he says he knows the difference.

A few days ago I finally figured out something I've wondered about for 25 years: the relationship between wisdom and intelligence. Anyone can see they're not the same by the number of people who are smart, but not very wise. And yet intelligence and wisdom do seem related. How?

What is wisdom? I'd say it's knowing what to do in a lot of situations. I'm not trying to make a deep point here about the true nature of wisdom, just to figure out how we use the word. A wise person is someone who usually knows the right thing to do.

Source.

This is very similar to an Al Fin posting in July 2005:
To be wise is not a state of mind but a state of action. Wisdom is acting in the best manner given all the information at hand. Some of the information may be unconscious, out of reach of verbal consciousness. Wisdom takes account of all information available.

Paul Graham goes on to suggest that intelligence and wisdom may have more in common than most people believe:

So a wise person knows what to do in most situations, while a smart person knows what to do in situations where few others could.

....In the time of Confucius and Socrates, people seem to have regarded wisdom, learning, and intelligence as more closely related than we do. Distinguishing between "wise" and "smart" is a modern habit. [5] And the reason we do is that they've been diverging. As knowledge gets more specialized, there are more points on the curve, and the distinction between the spikes and the average becomes sharper, like a digital image rendered with more pixels.

.... Wisdom seems to come largely from curing childish qualities, and intelligence largely from cultivating them.

....The wise are all much alike in their wisdom, but very smart people tend to be smart in distinctive ways.

....The path to wisdom is through discipline, and the path to intelligence through carefully selected self-indulgence. Wisdom is universal, and intelligence idiosyncratic. And while wisdom yields calmness, intelligence much of the time leads to discontentment.

Source.

I think that Graham has pulled some important pieces of of the puzzle from the pile, and placed them near their proper places. His advice on developing intelligence is in agreement with some of the best recent research on developing mental abilities in children. Wisdom and intelligence development are indeed arrived at differently. Graham is certainly correct that modern society tends to value wisdom less highly than did ancient societies. What else would you expect from a "youth intoxicated" culture?

The ingredients most valuable for developing next level humans include innate talent (intelligence), self-discipline (character), and wisdom (experienced perspective). By learning how to develop innate talent, along with character and perspective, all of those ingredients become aims of an enlightened educational process.

Unfortunately, most modern education is geared toward the avoidance of useful real-world experience and meaningful self-discipline. Pandering to self-esteem too often takes the place of teaching mental development. The end result is a psychological neoteny that reverberates throughout the society, rendering it impotent to meet the challenges it must face.

This Video Is Always Good for Some Perspective

There are some nice "Powers of Ten" websites where you zoom in or out very rapidly, to gain a perspective of the universe of very large and very small objects.

This short video does something similar. Some people use it to meditate on the significance (or lack of significance) of everyday worries within the greater cosmos.

As Good As It Gets?

Humans are quite good at complaining. Humans complain about just about anything. Even when an objective observer might see that the persons have relatively little reason to complain, they still find plenty to complain about.

In a democracy, people express their displeasure through the election process. If a nation's economy is doing extremely well, if a severe threat of homeland terrorism has been reasonably controlled, if the nation's military is involved overseas in a conflict that involves relatively little bloodshed compared to other wars--even then many voters can become incited by incessant negative news coverage to view their nation's situation as "unbearably bad." Many people have relatively little "personal ballast", and are easily moved by outside opinion. (as opposed to objective data that has been placed in perspective) This is naturally true of young people with little real life experience. But it is also true of older people who fail to develop personal depth. People without personal heft are people who are easily affected by special interest morons including those who populate the newsrooms of North America and the western world.

The recent US election will have very little substantive effect on the actual situation of most US citizens. But the "stylistic" effect of the election will occupy the pseudo-journalists for months and years. That type of superfluous "analysis" is expected from the type of person who typically goes into journalism. As time goes by, people looking for alternative points of view, and more data-based coverage of the world, will find what they are looking for in the internet.

The mid-term election of 2006 is similar in many ways to the election year of 1992. In both cases, voters were tired of several years of republican domination of national politics, and decided to "send a message" to complacent republicans. This many years after 1992, the salient fact about that year's election is what happened in the mid-term election only two years later, in 1994. Not only a reversal, but a reversal with a vengeance.

The founders of the USA were wary of democracy, and mob rule. They tried to build checks and balances into the system, to limit the "madness of the mob" that afflicts democratic forms of government. The incredible madness of the Palestinian territories, where decent people are afraid of walking the streets for fear of being gunned down by different radical Palestinian factions, is an example of a society where democracy can not work. Iraq--with its deep ethnic and religious divides--may very well be another example.

Partition of Iraq into three near-autonomous regions may be in the cards. But it will not be the cure-all that many people anticipate. Iraq is merely a prominent symptom of the problems in the islamic world, and the undeveloped world in general. The US is there, holding a spotlight to the problem. Even after the US leaves, the problems will be there, just as bad or worse. That is how that part of the world is, without strong-arm dictators like Saddam, Assad, or the mullahs in Iran. Does the US experience a benefit by directing the world's attention to the endemic problems of that part of the world? Will withdrawing the coalition troops so as to re-direct the world's attention to other parts of the world mean that the problems are gone? Will the fact that fewer coalition military members are killed in combat be balanced by more civilian deaths in coalition countries--when the islamic combatants are freed up to travel outside their native regions? Maybe.

An interesting dilemma, and not susceptible to the easy solutions that any of the vocal critics are suggesting. Critics are a dime a dozen. But acting in the world, no matter what one does, necessarily brings mixed results. By focusing on the negative--as the media often does--without looking at the larger picture, humans who need to understand never will.

As good as it gets does not mean perfection. As good as it gets means that everything you do will have at least some negative results. Pretending that is not true is commonplace, but not very intelligent.