Cure-alls and Remedies
[caption id=”attachment_4477″ align=”alignright” width=”300″] A crying baby, but not *my* crying baby from Flickr user donnieray (CC By 2.0)[/caption] My daughter doesn’t like to have her teeth brushed. She’s not even two years old, yet, so while that worries me, I guess it’s something we’ve still got time to correct. But one question I often…
Replication-gate continues, this time with a successful replication of Arthur Aron’s interpersonal closeness study : To Fall In Love With Anyone, Do This. The odd thing is that the author tried it, found it caused feelings of intimacy with a potential sexual partner, and now calls that love. Because Aron’s whole point was that our…
We’re about to find out what would happen if policing decreased by 66%-94% : It’s not a slowdown — it’s a virtual work stoppage. NYPD traffic tickets and summonses for minor offenses have dropped off by a staggering 94 percent following the execution of two cops — as officers feel betrayed by the mayor and…
In preparation for our own series on militaries in The Good Society , I’m reading this very interesting series from the Military Times: AMERICA’S MILITARY A force adrift Readiness ‘on a shoestring’ The crushing deployment tempo Were the wars worth the cost? A conservative institution’s uneasy cultural evolution It’s worth checking out.
Charles Koch is committed to reforming the criminal justice system : “We are not a nation of bad people. We are a nation that made some bad choices,” he said. “We’ve become addicted to severe sentences, to the point where we are mass-producing convictions in many courts, while not providing defense counsel on a timely…
Eric Schwitzgebel does the math, interprets the lessons: (This past Hannukah, my daughter Kate and I spun a sample of dreidels 40 times each. One in particular landed on shin an incredible 27/40 spins. [Yes, p < .001, highly significant, even with a Bonferroni correction.]) [….] You can, if you want, always push things to…
Shawn Gude at Jacobin discusses The Bad Kind of Unionism : “It’s easy to focus on the individual over the institution. Not a few police officers are drawn to the profession out of a desire to “serve the public.” Many genuinely want to serve, and take great pride in their chosen occupation. Police don’t have…
Insofar as we are engaged in a collective project, we must both mutually support each others’ inquiry and avoid errors. These two goals are at odds: homogeneity can also lead to unchallenged motivated reasoning and thus to polarization and error. But mutual inquiry requires some degree of shared values, assumptions, and methods which make political diversity divisive and paralyzing.
[caption id=”attachment_4024″ align=”alignright” width=”300″] “Get Money Out of Politics” by Flickr user Light Brigading[/caption] Some things live forever in social media. In my circles, one article that comes up all the time is the Gilens and Page study of legislative influence that is often interpreted this way: ” US No Longer an Actual Democracy “…
I’ve been thinking a lot about how the middle-class exercise school choice through real estate decisions, and what that does to the fabric of our cities. Recently I came across a dissertation by Jennifer Burns Stillman that has some interesting references. Here, for instance, she addresses Barbara Ehrenreich’s account of the middle-class mentality . Much…