Live forever or die trying
My friend Mikko is selling his RV. It’s one of the most pimped out RV’s I’ve ever seen. Check it out.
Haidt and his colleagues eventually recognized that their Moral Foundations Questionnaire was blinkered by liberal academic bias, failing to include a sixth moral foundation, liberty. They developed a liberty scale to probe this moral dimension. Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that libertarians dramatically outscored liberals and conservatives when it came to putting a high value on both economic and lifestyle liberty. Haidt and his colleagues conclude, “Libertarians may fear that the moral concerns typically endorsed by liberals or conservatives are claims that can be used to trample upon individual rights—libertarians’ sacred value.”
Next the researchers wondered, “Might libertarians generally be dispositionally more rational and less emotional?” On the standard inventory of personality, libertarians scored lower than conservatives and liberals on agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion. Low scores on agreeableness indicate a lack of compassion and a proud, competitive, and skeptical nature. Like conservatives, libertarians are not generally neurotic, tending to be emotionally hardy. And like liberals, libertarians scored high on openness to new experiences, indicating that they have broad interests.
Libertarians scored lower than both liberals and (especially) conservatives on sensitivity to disgust. The authors suggest this tendency “could help explain why they disagree with conservatives on so many social issues, particularly those related to sexuality. Libertarians may not experience the flash of revulsion that drives moral condemnation in many cases of victimless offenses.”
Some of the more intriguing results involve the empathizer/systemizer scale. Empathizers identify with another person’s emotions, whereas systemizers are driven to understand the underlying rules that govern behavior in nature and society. Libertarians, unlike both liberals and conservatives, scored very high on systemizing.
I’m very skeptical of studies that purport to analyze the ethics of political groups. Too often, they serve merely to pathologize the groups that the study’s authors dislike. And they rarely make any effort to distinguish between conservatives and libertarians, lumping them together instead. Haidt, at least, tries to make the distinction. Interesting results, that accord with my intuition.
Chris
Via Jeffrey Rosenthal. Haven’t seen anything quite like this before.
http://www.skydera.com/index.html
Python/Django programming experience would be ideal.
Planning to go to this cuddle party tomorrow:
http://cpjan16.eventbrite.com/
“If an error was made in your Page name when it was created, you have the option to edit the Page name to correct this issue. This option is only limited to Pages with less than 100 connections. After selecting to edit your Page, you can adjust this information from the “Basic Information” section.
Unfortunately, the page received more than 100 connections before the typo was caught. There must be some way to do it, as organizations sometimes change names, but to date, I haven’t been able to find out.
I’ve tried emailing “[email protected]”, but I get a message saying it’s an unmonitored email address. I’ve also submitted a bug report for their “Facebook Pages”, but the automated response referred me to their help pages.
Any suggestions for getting the page name fixed?
Thanks!
Just learned that Stanford has a lab devoted to the study of persuasion and behavior change:
http://captology.stanford.edu/
Be sure to check out some of there other stuff:
http://www.thersa.org/fellowship/journal/archive/summer-2009/features/new-rul…
Not every sex worker in the world enters the work because she has always felt a pull towards it. Many have. I know a number of women who have felt the interest from a young age, including myself (and this was before I even had a clear idea of what sex was). Conversations with these women reveal that we all say the same things about our early interest, we all became interested right before entering puberty and common myths about prostitution were not enough to dissuade us from desiring that life-path.
This is a very small sampling and it’s highly unscientific. Given what we know about genes and hard-wired behaviors — it seems more than plausible. Just as homosexual people are born, I am convinced prostitutes are born too.
My inspiration came last year after reading a US-based survey about attitudes toward gay people. The discovery of “gay genes” seems to have really turned the tide in popular thinking and acceptance of homosexuality. It sounds like an argument of convenience for prostitution. But if the range of human sexual orientation is, in fact, genetic; then how come prostitution — an extremely common sexual behavior — supposedly isn’t? What if prostitution isn’t merely a sexual behavior but is actually a sexual orientation? Why has prostitution always been viewed as a deviant behavior? How come people aren’t willing to examine the idea that a prostitute is a perfectly natural occurrence and that it’s society which has formed the deviant behavior around the prostitute?
An interesting hypothesis which I have not heard before.
Beautiful.