Yes , logic dictates that the discussion be "watched" ....( to avoid the sin bin).
Figure out that logic. Emotion is predictable (logical) once the variables are defined. "Con men" apply this concept with much success.
OS
OS--- As another example, I once worked at a company that employed a clinical psycholgist as the head of Human Resoruces. More than once I witnessed her make situations turn out for the good of the company, despite the emotional outbursts of employees. She just had it going on. She understood what made people tick, and used it for busness. I would suggest that what was happening there could be called logic and emotion in one. And power is of course kinda sexy.
I would suggest that what was happening there could be called logic and emotion in one. And power is of course kinda sexy.
Logic and emotion in one has another name - wisdom.
<edit> Just found this example which illustrates nicely our topic - Google being evil but rationalising it by saying 'customers will get confused'.
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=21579
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Human derived, well-characterized for proliferation response, sensitivity, and reliability. MCF-7 proliferation has been the gold standard for about 15 years. Extraction solvent choice follows FDA regs for food simulants for plastics. The androgen assay is an ongoing project- we brought in another biochemist/toxicologist (he was a prof at U Rhode Island) to move that along.
Indeed taken as a compliment.
So here's something else to consider - what's typically taken as 'evil' or 'immoral' is a sacrifice of long term goals over short-term aims. I'll illustrate with that story about Google.
The trashing of Skyhook is emotion-based (as opposed to logical), that much is clear from the story. Its instigated by fear - fear of loss of market share, fear of loss of control. Fear always works to push longer-term (sustainable) goals further out. Google managers' fear damages their business in the longer term for perceived short term gains. In the longer term, as more stories like this come out, customers will come to trust Google less as there's an obvious contradiction between what they're really doing and what their stated aim is: 'Don't be evil'. Customers hate such incongruities, which is why companies work hard to cover them up. So short term gains (here, destruction of 'competitors') work to sabotage longer-term goals - that of expanding the business and delivering stake-holder value.
In a nutshell, greed (which I characterize as fear of 'not enough') simply does not pay in the longer term for a business.
I have lived and worked in Microsofts back yard sence befor the company was founded. A while back, I did a short contract job for a hardware project connected with the "zune" product. Quite an eye opener! They have fallen into the trap of thinking in short term goals like no other company I have seen. "fear of loss of market share, fear of loss of control-- they wrote the book" Also Google is over due for a wake up call.
WE ALL are overdue for that call. My 20 bags of toxic trash a week , the 10 tons of spent cellphone lithium BURIED down the road. Walmart is also due for that call. As the economy continues to stagnate , DIY will become a growth industry. So will "victory gardens"
(below - 100ft. row of real tomato's). One winter of mexican tasteless 4.00USD/LB product shows how fragile the centralized global food chain really is. I,m scared (emotion) , add logic (and lots of diggin') , canning jars - no more "tasteless/expensive".
Same with gas - stop driving , price will drop. Happened first time in 2009 , 5.00 gas ... I-75 became quiet for 2 weeks , price dropped to 2.30 , now they are back to that level of travel but at a sustained $3.75. Cause and effect = wisdom .os
Attachments
Wanting to know what impelled SY and colleagues to pursue their current interest, I Googled 'sperm count decline' because my "everything else", which is curious, told me that might be a place to start and I got this:
"sperm count decline" - Google Scholar
On the same basis I Googled 'sperm counts' bpa
and I got this:
"sperm counts" bpa - Google Scholar
Seems to me they're onto something
Another example:
Some years ago I was convinced there was something to the thesis of anthropogenic global warming. Some very intelligent people I know were not convinced, and I was mighty PO'd they din't agree with me. So I started researching since facts are something of a defense against superior intelligence.
Googling around wasn't so useful because there was so much stuff published I couldn't possibly sift through it without some kind of filter.
The filter I devised was simple. I would only look at work done by folk who had serious degrees and track records in hard science like physics, chemistry, astronomy, geophysics, geology, advanced statistics, meteorology, and also work done by reputable historians and paleontologists.
After some months of serious reading (I tend to obsessiveness) and spirited discussion with a very large number of people my conclusion is anthropogenic global warming is not proven and is probably unlikely. Conclusions I'm willing to defend, but not in this thread and not now, because I don't have time.
The initial push this time was anger - I kept losing the arguments.
My point is this: Reason vs. emotion is not a very helpful polarity to use when trying to dig up insights into why people believe things.
Everybody has two modalities (that I know of). There is (1) the linguistic, analytic, narrative stream, and and (2) the big picture the - "everything else" - that contains (1).
The two modalities normally communicate.
Both modalities carry emotion.
Both modalities contribute to reason.
The modalities operate by "time sharing". When one is "on" it tends to occupy our consciousness and the other is excluded. But the other is still doing stuff.
We are so used to this we hardly notice it when things are going right, and much of the time we don't notice when things are going a bit wrong, but we sure notice when things are going badly wrong.
Problem is, we find it easier to notice when stuff's going wrong with other folk, right?
"sperm count decline" - Google Scholar
On the same basis I Googled 'sperm counts' bpa
and I got this:
"sperm counts" bpa - Google Scholar
Seems to me they're onto something
Another example:
Some years ago I was convinced there was something to the thesis of anthropogenic global warming. Some very intelligent people I know were not convinced, and I was mighty PO'd they din't agree with me. So I started researching since facts are something of a defense against superior intelligence.
Googling around wasn't so useful because there was so much stuff published I couldn't possibly sift through it without some kind of filter.
The filter I devised was simple. I would only look at work done by folk who had serious degrees and track records in hard science like physics, chemistry, astronomy, geophysics, geology, advanced statistics, meteorology, and also work done by reputable historians and paleontologists.
After some months of serious reading (I tend to obsessiveness) and spirited discussion with a very large number of people my conclusion is anthropogenic global warming is not proven and is probably unlikely. Conclusions I'm willing to defend, but not in this thread and not now, because I don't have time.
The initial push this time was anger - I kept losing the arguments.
My point is this: Reason vs. emotion is not a very helpful polarity to use when trying to dig up insights into why people believe things.
Everybody has two modalities (that I know of). There is (1) the linguistic, analytic, narrative stream, and and (2) the big picture the - "everything else" - that contains (1).
The two modalities normally communicate.
Both modalities carry emotion.
Both modalities contribute to reason.
The modalities operate by "time sharing". When one is "on" it tends to occupy our consciousness and the other is excluded. But the other is still doing stuff.
We are so used to this we hardly notice it when things are going right, and much of the time we don't notice when things are going a bit wrong, but we sure notice when things are going badly wrong.
Problem is, we find it easier to notice when stuff's going wrong with other folk, right?
Correction to above: The two modalities normally communicate with each other.
Sometimes I write rubbish.
I meant to say "reason" vs "emotion" is often unhelpful as a polarity we can use to explain why folk come to believe things.
If we think about it a while, I think it's fairly clear that without some kind of emotion no belief is possible - less strongly, without some emotion it's very difficult to hold to a belief or even pay attention to it.
In fact, without some sort of accompanying emotion it's pretty hard to do anything at all, isn't it?
There's been an assumption in many posts in this thread that emotions lead to errors in reasoning but I'm not sure that as a general formulation this is true.
I think it was Hume who said reason is handmaiden to the emotions and perhaps so, because emotions tend to seize us, but it isn't a hard and fast requirement always that she serve all the emotions equally or only serve one or two. It isn't necessary, for example, to revisit in our 'mind's eye' the circumstances that led to an outburst of anger and thus feed more anger. On the other hand, it might be worthwhile to pursue circumstances which pique curiosity. Wikipedia has quite a list of emotions:
Affection
Anger
Angst
Annoyance
Anxiety
Apathy
Aroused
Awe
Contempt
Curiosity
Boredom
Depression
Desire
Despair
Disappointment
Disgust
Dread
Ecstasy
Embarrassment
Empathy
Envy
Euphoria
Fear
Fretful
Frustration
Gratitude
Guilt
Happiness
Hatred
Hope
Horror
Hostility
Hysteria
Indifference
Interest
Jealousy
Loathing
Loneliness
Love
Lust
Misery
Pity
Pride
Rage
Regret
Remorse
Sadness
Satisfied
Shame
Shock
Shyness
Sober
Sorrow
Suffering
Surprise
Wonder
Worry
It seems to me that rather than complaining about her subjugation to her inescapable, hydra-headed boss, Reason needs to marry him and promote herself to position of butler and manage their circumstances to their mutual convenience.
That's a terrible metaphor but I've created worse.
Is playfulness an emotion? It seems to have the right experiential aspects.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Even scientific facts are not "proven", only "believed to be true." More facts can make them more true. Or do you mean tooth fairies and Santa Claus?
And can't one be emotional about reason? And have reasoned emotions? This is shorthand for what you are saying if I understand you correctly.
I'm afraid that the reasons are more mundane. While one of the co-authors (GDB) really is a save-the-world sort and thoroughly sincere about it, my motivations are much simpler: it's a very hot research area (NIH has made endocrine disruption research a very high priority, and the head of NIH is in fact a specialist in this area), it is intellectually interesting to me, and there's a lot of new stuff for me to learn. Not exactly altruistic motivations, but I think pretty typical for research scientists. We're curious folk, we like puzzles and challenges, and we like the sense of finding out new things.
I took a huge pay cut to do this work, but "interesting" unfortunately outweighs "lucrative." And as a side benefit, it dropped me in the middle of perhaps the finest city in the world for live music.
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