The trolley problem is a favorite of researchers studying moral decision-making. Many consider it a good test of individual differences in approaches to moral dilemmas, basically variations on Hot versus Cold decision-making: emotional versus cognitive, empathetic versus detached, aversion to directly causing personal harm versus impartial concern for the greater good.
My goal is not to provide answers. It's to stimulate thought. Thought reveals and lights the way. Thought conceals and distracts. Self-correction is more likely when we think with humility.
...if the brain and its tracking systems didn’t do a reasonable job of approximating reality, I wouldn’t be able to write this sentence because Homo sapiens wouldn’t even exist. An animal has to be tuned into the world in order to survive that world.
When we try to resist temptations, there's a tension between immediate, certain reward and later, uncertain reward. The more certain the later reward, the more likely temptations will be resisted. But certainty is just one part of the equation. Later rewards may feel far-off, abstract, and only intermittently compelling, while temptations are concrete and immediately satisfying.
Good News! Just last night, while I was singing the glories of these tiny housing units, the Berkeley City Council voted unanimously to move ahead and solicit bids to build them...
...you can’t get people to stay on the path without frequent reminders of the suffering and darkness that would befall them should they lose their way.
Residential hotels used to fill a niche: an alternative to homelessness for the down-and-out. If all else fails, you can get a room, with a shower down the hall. But building residential hotels is a low margin/high hassle business and they just aren't being built like they used to be.
Don’t get me wrong: there is a general scientific consensus that climate change is happening. But there’s no consensus on the rate or extent of global warming.
What matters is a sense of control and hope within a lifetime. The feeling that through my actions, I can make progress towards something that matters to me. Self-efficacy! Not that I’m the master of my destiny – more that there are things I can do that will make it better.
If you want to save water for dry years, it’s groundwater.
- Dr. Jay Lund, director of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences
Political coalitions are more or less ideological. On the less ideological side, they may be held together by alliances of convenience, whose common cause may be more dislike of the other side than broad agreement on a range of issues.
An ideology is an army of convictions about how the world is and how it ought to be. As befitting a military force, ideologies are fueled by a sense of threat - kept at bay through a fortress-like structure called the ideological square.
It makes sense that states with the most progressive tax systems often get into fiscal trouble. High earners have especially volatile incomes.
A new study for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University ranks each US state’s financial health based on key fiscal obligations.
These considerations wouldn’t matter so much is there were no costs to actions/policies based on worst case scenarios. If all actions and their effects were equal, then go with the worst case! Nothing to lose and everything to gain!
Whenever we seek goals under conditions of uncertainty – not knowing the best way forward, perhaps not being sure what success even looks like – we are faced with explore/exploit trade-offs as we guess our way to what we think we want.
The AMA campaigned against Medicare, FDR’s efforts to include health insurance with Social Security, Harry Truman’s universal-insurance scheme, and Bill Clinton’s healthcare plans.
Life is full of unavoidable suffering: we can’t hold onto happiness, everything changes, nothing lasts, everybody dies, pain in inevitable, we are endlessly seeking and desiring without lasting satisfaction; an inner emptiness haunts our every moment.
Here is the theme of endemic pain and suffering in our everyday lives, in which minor and transitory negative feelings become something deep and debilitating...
Some neural networks are associated with attention capture, where the stimulus rules. Other networks are associated with attention deployment, where goals rule.