October 11, 2009
Britain's Central Planning Death Panels
October 11, 2009
Free Market M.D.
October 11, 2009
Economies of Scale in Compliance
October 11, 2009
Balan's Challenge
October 10, 2009
The Pleasure of Telling Others What to Do
October 10, 2009
Gonick the Great - and How He Could Have Been Greater
October 9, 2009
More Scott Sumner
October 9, 2009
Not From The Onion
October 9, 2009
Thoughts on a Second Stimulus
Evolution had to do an "end around" to get us from lizzard to mammal.
Consider evolutions problem. It wants us closer together, but wants to inhibit our desire to eat the young. What to do?
Evolution could have spent a nearly infinite amount of time adjusting many muscle genes to manipulate our movements and inhibit them, or evolution could have cheated and used olfaction.
Olfaction was a way for evolution to cheaply drug us, it was a short cut, using aerosols to inhibit actions when around members of the species.
Since then, all of our cognitive thought became action delayed. We go through the motions of action in our head, but via the olfaction path, evolution created a means to inhibit the movement itself, leaving the sense of movement behind as thought.
Studying physics and logic are excellent training for the brain. Do everything you can to defeat bias in your thinking. Ideology is deadly; it will make you stupid.
Bill:
Prove it. Bonus points for using only pure logic.
To FC: Bill's claim that physics and logic are excellent training for the brain cannot be proved through logic alone. This is a scientific hypothesis that must be tested using the scientific method. One would first need an accepted and reproducible way of testing the brain's ability to handle logic and solve problems, then one would need to do either case matching or randomization to assign persons to a test group and one or more control groups (such as no studying or studying English literature and sociology). After a period of study, the groups would be retested to see if their cognitive skills improved.