Liberalism: Weaknesses & Failures

I often criticize conservatives for their tendency toward higher rates (relative to liberals) of motivated reasoning about political issues. It’s not that conservatives are generally less rational on all issues, rather primarily on political issues. It’s not even that conservatives are less informed, rather that they are more misinformed; in fact, the average conservative is [...]

Is Psychological Research Liberally Biased?

http://www.polipsych.com/2011/02/10/liberal-academics-study-conservative-ideology/ I don’t know if reality has a liberal bias, but I can think of one factor that relates to liberalism and the ability to assess reality. One study I’ve seen showed that liberals were on average less susceptible to confirmation bias than conservatives. Maybe it is unsurprising that conservatives wouldn’t be attracted to a [...]

Jonathan Haidt’s Liberal-Minded Anti-Liberalism

Jonathan Haidt wrote a new book, The Righteous Mind. I haven’t seen the book, but I listened to an interview by Bill Moyers. I recommend checking it out. Haidt does have an insightful view, although I think his view would be even more insightful if he synthesized his own research with other psychological research about [...]

Neuroscience, Neurolaw?

One of the panelists made a great distinction between factual knowledge and collective beliefs. He pointed out that people used to believe in phlogiston and thought it was a factual description of reality, but scientific discovery presented a better theory about chemical structure and interaction. Similarly, people once believed in souls, but psychology presented a [...]

Against Individualism

I suspect modern individualism is a cultural artifact rather than being inherent to human nature. It was taken to an extreme with Western Civilization and in particular capitalism, but it seems to have it’s origins with the Axial Age. Julian Jaynes proposed the theory that earliest literature such as from the Greeks doesn’t show signs [...]

Right Vs Left: Personality Differences

Here is a video on one of my favorite subjects or rather my favorite intersection of subjects. It’s an interview with Jonathan Weiler who recently wrote a book about the sociological study of authoritarianism in terms of US politics (I just bought his book and so I probably will be writing more about it). This [...]

When Stupid People Don’t Know They’re Stupid

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect http://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/18/health/among-the-inept-researchers-discover-ignorance-is-bliss.html?pagewanted=1 http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolved-primate/201006/when-ignorance-begets-confidence-the-classic-dunning-kruger-effect

TFA and Perspective of Perspectives

TFA and Perspective of Perspectives Posted by marmalade on November 30, 2007 at 7:14pm in Open Forum View Discussions I think the best integral model is about perspectives because a model itself offers a perspective and its only through our individual perspective(and our cultural-historical perspective) that we can understand a model’s perspective. Another type of [...]

Criticalness, Integralism, and Type

Criticalness, Integralism, and Type Posted by marmalade on January 19, 2008 at 12:02am in Open Forum View Discussions This is in response to the thread titled ‘Should Integralists Storm The Religous Battlefield’. I’ve been involved in a thread at IIDB, an atheist discussion board. Its a thread about Acharya’s theories about astrotheology which is related to comparative mythology, and Acharya has [...]

Type and Development

Type and Development Posted by marmalade on January 9, 2008 at 4:58pm in Open Forum View Discussions I’m fascinated by both horizontal and vertical models, but most integral discussions emphasize the vertical. What I’m curious about is how the whole picture becomes more complex when the two are combined. Introduction to Volume 7 of the Collected [...]