Everyone knows the experience: you happen upon a wreck and know you shouldn’t look but can’t help it. While there is a chance of seeing something disturbing, you look regardless. There should be a word for this and in the absence of one, I will call it car-wreck voyeurism. I felt something like this after [...]
Tags:adaptation·ancestral environment·ASD·Aspergers·autism·autism spectrum disorder·autistic·EP·evolutionary psychology·fantasy·fitness·foraging·gathering·hunting·Jared Reser·Just So Stories·maladaptive·orangutans·Panglossian·Panglossian Paradigm·parsimony·peer review·pleiotropy·Plio-Pleistocene·Psychology Today·Satoshi Kanazawa·sociality·solitary forager hypothesis·spandrels·speculation·Thomas Hobbes
In a recent essay on the cult of David Foster Wallace, Nathan Heller notes that DFW’s mature work deals with the crisis of contemporary pluralism: “how to think intelligently and truthfully about the world when that world is full of intelligent and truthful people who adhere to irreconcilable schools of thought.” While Heller [...]
Tags:Alan Sokal·Catholic·confirmation bias·David Foster Wallace·evolutionary psychologist·fantasy·group level selection·group size·Jesus·language·Matt Rossano·Nathan Heller·natural law·Panglossian·parsimony·pluralism·Pope Benedict·postmodernism·resurrection·science·storytelling·supernatural selection·technology·truth·wish fulfillment
Today, while examining the key word searches that have led people to this blog, I noticed this interesting query: “Are tea partiers psychotic?” This Google search must have pulled up my post “Tea Parties and Monkey Gods,” in which I observed that Tea Partiers seem to be animated by a toxic combination of anger and [...]
Tags:anger·angst·autonomy·dependence·faith·fantasy·fear·fiction·free markets·fundamentalists·Hegel·identity·imaginary·individualism·J.M. Bernstein·libertarians·metaphysical·metaphysics·paranoia·Pierre Bourdieu·psychotic·rage·religious right·structuralism·sturm und drang·Tea Party·The Stone
