I agree, it’s a massive problem. We used to have a significant estate tax. GOP congress killed it in 2010. That, among other things, is the scandal, as is legally allowing ownership to reap all the rewards of successful corporations. Maybe we should have a 35% corporate tax. Oh, we had that until 2018. Maybe workers should share more in the profits of successful companies? Sure, we’ll work with McConnell on that. Excessive wealth accumulation at the top is a huge issue, but it’s much more a structural political issue than a bad boy billionaire issue.
This was posted a while back - turned into a big kerfuffle because I implied that almost all small commune type situations should work, regardless of political philosophy - except for lol libertopians who can’t even decide if they should tell Karen to stop feeding the bears.
Hilarious story.
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As I noted in another thread, dealing with trash is very much a minimal competence test for any society. Libertarians failed. Let’s see them get running water, sewage treatment, and electricity up and running in a society where it doesn’t already exists. They think roads are hard, they should deal with those.
A really good book recommendation for you specifically is Sapolsky’s Behavior, I think you would really enjoy it.
Basically, yes, conservatives think this because it’s true of them and they cannot understand it’s not true of everyone. Most likely the conservative brain played an important role in evolution, but it is tribal, antisocial, and selfish and so it has a ton of drawbacks.
The constant attacks that they are incapable of figuring out the real motivations of liberals and that everything is projection are both correct. These people suck bad at a deep level and it’s not fixable without a ton of education and experience that goes against their tendencies towards fear and aggression. Their brains actually get wired differently and so many more stimuli get wired to their amygdala where fear and aggression take hold. For more liberal/educated people, these impulses happen too, but the signal then goes to the prefrontal cortex where cognition takes place and tells us stuff like “that guy of that race isn’t that scary” or “this situation doesn’t call for fighting,” stuff that we have to learn.
I’m on a tangent here, but another horrific truth is that conservatives get stress relief from taking their aggression out on the powerless and non-conservatives don’t. This will surprise nobody, but it’s an awful truth that they legitimately get physical relief from displacing the frustrations of their small existence onto others.
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I thought keed might have a more favorable opinion of Gates, considering his investment in this thing called nuclear.
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Looks interesting. As a skeptical guy with a background in cognitive science, I’m a bit leery of these kinds of books, mainly because I’m skeptical of many assumptions in psychology and cognitive science (I was in a research lab doing fMRI experiments in the 90s and was like, “oh so we define a behavior as X and a little area lights up. This may not be as informative as people seem to assume”), but he’s got strong credentials and the book has good reviews. Surprised it wasn’t on my radar. Again, however, I am dubious of discussions of social behavior that mention neural organization or neurotransmitters, but it’s at least as promising as anything else these days. (If anything killed an academic career for me it was never really believing that our neural organization tracks with our language about mental processes. I’ve always been more skeptical than is useful for my own good.) I have Patricia Churchland’s Conscience on my nightstand but haven’t read it yet. Patricia Churchland: your brain invents morality and conscience - Vox but added Behavior to my wishlist. Will likely order it when I finish one of the 8 other books I’m juggling. (edit: ordered on Kindle for $9.99, sorry Frederick Douglass.)
Form that Churchland interview:
Yes. There was this experiment that totally surprised me. Researchers rounded up a lot of subjects, put them in the brain scanner, and showed them various non-ideological pictures. If you showed subjects a picture of a human with a lot of worms squirming in his mouth, you could see differences in the activity levels of whole series of brain areas. There were much higher levels of activity if you identified as very conservative than if you identified as very liberal. Just that one picture of worms squirming in the mouth separated out the conservatives from the liberals with an accuracy of about 83 percent.
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Hey if he actually gave away like 10 bil to actually build a nuclear plant that’d be great.
He’s not much interested in traditional nuclear power plants.
More broadly, once a person realizes that Ozymandias Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley | Poetry Foundation is the best one can hope for, that you can’t buy much quality of life above $100k/yr (empirically demonstrated), that happiness comes from friends and relationships and personal satisfaction with your own deeds (“did I do a good job based on my abilities?”), that there are a 100s of billions of stars in the universe and that the earth is 5 bn years old, then the idea of massive wealth accumulation while others strive for sustenance just doesn’t make any sense. Even enjoying excess wealth requires a stable society and that most other people buy into the system. You can only have so many gang bangs in walled fortresses before it all gets tiresome and inconvenient. (See Berlusconi). Best you can do is maybe buy an ambassadorship or similar if you love having your ass kissed. I think about Sumner Redstone, who spent his last year or so eating steak and watching TV in bed and getting handjobs from his nurse, who walked away with like a $100M. That’s best case if you live long enough.
To horde wealth is quite irrational and indicative of mental or personality disorders, or at least sever intellectual derangement (“God wants me to have this money to show that I am good.”) Really, massive wealth accumulation is a childish fantasy, and society should be organized to prevent it, at least beyond what’s necessary for some minimally efficient allocation of capital.
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That is interesting. I’ve brought up The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr a few times. Despite the title, it isn’t all that sciencey but I still found it a compelling point of view for understanding behavior. There are several references to Behave in Science of. I may impulse buy the kindle version later tonight.
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My libraries (Long Beach and Los Angeles) both have it available on ebook and audiobook.
Thanks! I just checked out the e-book from the SLC library. Trouble is it’s a long book and my focus sucks so I’ll probably end up buying it if I want to finish it without having to renew like 10 times.
I’m not sure I like audio books but have been listening to it on Audible trial while walking my dog and things like I normally do with podcasts. It’s still mostly introductory stuff but this is the book I was talking about. Recommended as hilarious from the I Don’t Even Have a Television Podcast
https://www.amazon.com/Libertarian-Walks-Into-Bear-Liberate-ebook/dp/B083J1FXY8
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It’s incredible hubris to think you can figure out the human brain before we’ve even solved 1% of fish or worm brains.
aren’t worm brains like 600 neurons or something?
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320 for c elegans. Flashing Neurons in Worms Reveal How the Brain Generates Behavior | UC San Francisco.
Leeches have 10k, so kinda goes to which worm you mean.
Interesting wiki:
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I hope you all are enjoying some Beethoven today.
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Good thing that saint is already dead or he would be in a world of hurt.
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I don’t know a lot about it, but I was under the impression that the Gates Foundation does a massive amount of objectively good work. Is that not true?