Evolution has endowed us with ethical impulses. Do we know what to do with them?
In Steven Pinker’s New York Times article, The Moral Instinct, this question is raised and discussed as he takes us on a guided tour of ‘moral psychology‘ - a recently invigorated field.
The starting point for appreciating that there is a distinctive part of our psychology for morality is seeing how moral judgments differ from other kinds of opinions we have on how people ought to behave. Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking. This is the mind-set that makes us deem actions immoral (“killing is wrong”), rather than merely disagreeable (“I hate brussels sprouts”), unfashionable (“bell-bottoms are out”) or imprudent (“don’t scratch mosquito bites”).
via Mind Hacks (Pinker is the author of The Blank Slate and The Language Instinct, both books on my 2008 reading list.)
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is due to start smashing protons together this summer which has lead some to theorise that the end of the world is nigh. Not to worry, though: we can all sleep soundly enough, as it’s unlikely anything other than some interesting physics is going to be happening underneath France and Switzerland.
These concerns, however, have raised some interesting questions which The New York Times does a good job of compiling in their essay, Gauging a Collider’s Odds of Creating a Black Hole:
One problem is that society has never agreed on a standard of what is safe in these surreal realms when the odds of disaster might be tiny but the stakes are cosmically high. In such situations, probability estimates are often no more than “informed betting odds”.
The most basic question, “How improbable does a catastrophe have to be to justify proceeding with an experiment?” seems never to have been seriously examined.
via Vitamin Briefcase
What would happen if humans disappeared from the face of the planet right now? What would happen to our infrastructure, the wild animals… our legacy?
This is the topic Alan Weisman tackles in his speculative non-fiction book, The World Without Us (which I’m considering adding to my reading list purely out of curiosity).
The Wikipedia entry for the book is very insightful, but I just love the (interactive) website:
1 Year: Worldwide, a billion annually doomed birds would live when radio and communication tower warning lights cease blinking and high tension wires grow cold. Animals would begin to return to the sites of nuclear reactors, which would have all melted down or burned. Human head- and body-lice would grow extinct.
35,000 – 100,000 Years: Lead deposited during the smokestack era would finally be cleansed from the soil.
7,200,000 Years: Toxic manmade chemical compounds, such as PCBs and dioxins, would likely also still be intact, although mostly buried.
All too often we hear stories of over-zealous security officials hassling innocent photographers doing what comes naturally: taking photos of beautiful structures in the public domain. It appears this is now happing in Dubai with people with SLRs being prevented from photographing the awe-inspiring Burj Al Arab hotel (in order to “protect the hotel’s image”).
However, it seems the security officials carrying out the orders are a bit kinder than their US/UK counterparts:
I wasn’t the least bit upset. In fact, I thought to myself; if all security guards handled these situations in the manner this guard had, you wouldn’t be reading all those stories about photographers getting hassled and abused by overzealous security. I think as photographers most of us understand and respect situations like this, and a little politeness, and professional courtesy, on both sides goes a long way.
via Photoshop Insider
The novelist Jonathan Franzen is skilled at describing the rich and colourful dreams we have about our futures, whilst still managing to portray the bleak reality of life for society at large (I loved The Corrections).
Shanghai seems like a great place for this style to really shine, as a recent audio story in The New Yorker shows:
It was all thrilling. It was as if the gods of world history had asked, ‘Does somebody want to get into some really unprecedentedly deep shit?’ and this place had raised its hands and said ‘Yeah!’”
via Raul Gutierrez