Book review: Archie Brown's "The Rise and Fall of Communism"
The Letters to Our Daughters Project
Are humans cruel to be kind?
There is humour in political science! The Hobbesian world of democrats.
This is what summers in Finland sound like. You can thank me in two hours when the tune still haunts you. =)
Here's another typically good talk by Dan Ariely at TED. He discusses cognitive biases (one of my favourite topics, in case you didn't already know) and likens these to visual illusions, which distort the way we perceive reality. Enjoy =)
We are influenced by our surroundings far more than we realise. And I am not just referring to social conditions - our physical surroundings also matter. Things like holding a coffee cup can change the way we perceive the next person we meet, for example.
This kind of knowledge is very new, and we owe a lot of this to social psychologist John Bargh at Yale, with whom The Edge has a fascinating video interview. His work deals with unconscious influences on our actions and beliefs; with uncovering the bewildering array of factors that determine what we go through and what we do on any given day. This interview is really good for getting a feel for the kind of research that is going on right now.
One implication of these findings is that the idea of us having a free will (in the sense that we are in control of and direct our own thoughts, feelings, actions or beliefs) is undermined. It is an attack on the humonculous approach to individuals: that there is a 'small person' (figuratively speaking) in our head who directs where things are going. This 'person' is not there - we are a collection of structured reactions to our surroundings, and we are simply not aware of a lot of what goes on inside ourselves. This can be a frightening implication - in my case, one that I understand and accept intellectually, but that makes no instinctive sense. At the same time - probably because of this - it is a fascinating thought.
Of course, this does not imply that humans are easy, or even possible, to figure out. In theory, the absence of a 'little person in the head' means we can be understood completely, given enough data. However, with an abundance of tiny influences being received by our brains every second of every day (even the temperature of a coffee cup affects our interpersonal relations, remember), we are very, very far away from 'unlocking' entire human beings. For more, I recommend the interview.
On ecological fallacies: are Republicans more likely to stray than Democrats?
Research finding: religious prompts make people more obedient.
Can you build a toaster? Who can?
Russia's neighbours are resisting the bully, NYT reports.
Thoughts on the timing of childbearing in academic careers.
Dynamic ad for raising awareness of domestic violence.
This weekend, 26 000 choir singers, 7 500 folk dancers and countless more audience members gather in Tallinn, Estonia for the Song and Dance Festival that occurs once every four years. The participants, dressed in traditional Estonian folk dress, sing traditional folk songs, modern classics and completely new contributions. The event is immensely popular - with a population of 1.3 million, it is necessary to hold choir auditions to determine who gets to sing in the 26 000 strong united choir which looks about like this on stage:
The Song and Dance Festivals have been held since the late 19th century; this year marks the 140th anniversary of the first Song Festival. The event is important to Estonians because it has been a marker of Estonian nationhood and 'togetherness' throughout the first independence movement before WW1, and again during Soviet rule from WW2 to 1991.
The tradition of song festivals transformed into a bona fide political movement in the late 1980s, with a massive song event "Eestimaa Laul" (Estonia's Song) held on the Song Festival grounds in 1988. An estimated 300,000 people attended - nearly a third of the population! The singing movement was such an important part of the nationalist movement of the late Soviet era that (before there were Velvet Revolutions) the Baltic States had a Singing Revolution. It looked like this (I am on a connection that doesn't allow YouTube videos to load, so am embedding the clips from memory):
20 years later, after Estonia had achieved independence, democracy and membership of the European Union, there was a memorial festival on the same spot. Again, the Song Festival area was filled to the brim, and the same songs were sung as two decades previously. I love watching this clip to contrast it with the one above: the same song, the same place, and a lot of the same people... but yet you can see and feel the difference in every single second!
After the success of the independence movement and democratization, there were concerns that the Song and Dance Festivals would become less popular; that they would go out of fashion. Former President Lennart Meri famously disagreed in 1999, saying "The Song Festival has never been in fashion, because the Song Festival is not about fashion. It's about the heart." Ten years later, the 2009 Song and Dance Festival is proving him right.
The laugh of the day comes courtesy of Gary Wood, who is thoroughly fed up with pop evolutionary psychology, lack of evidence-based reasoning and convenient 'caveman' explanations for gendered behaviour:
It’s certainly ridiculous to assume that ‘cave people’ society was based on lots of little semi-detached caves containing nuclear families with mummy sitting at home making apple sauce on the off chance that daddy comes home with a pig. It makes no sense! The societies were probably more cooperative and egalitarian with everyone ‘mucking in’.
As a bonus, I will now explain to you why I find this excerpt funny. You see, I am a woman. In caveman times women had a lot of chances to socialise while childrearing and gathering food. The men were out hunting and had to be quiet in order to not scare the game - and uproarious laughter was completely out of the question, naturally. Thus, women became not only more adept at socialising but also developed a better sense of humour. (If you are a man and found the parapraph funny, then you are just an emasculated exception that proves the accuracy of my otherwise iron logic.)
