Links for 2010-04-14

"This is a story about control. It is about, in the unintentionally candid terms of one of the main actors, "absolute authority" and the desire to wield that authority over a text so that the text, in turn, may be used to wield absolute authority over others.

It is a story, in other words, about mortals who covet the authority of God and the lies they tell themselves and others when trying to usurp that authority.

Our story takes place at an institution calling itself "Reformed Theological Seminary.""

"Cheap flights are good, but sometimes there's such a thing as a market that's too efficient. We might all find ourselves a little bit happier and a little bit less frazzled if prices were a few dollars higher and, in return, there were a few less decisions forced on us every day."

"The following sections show examples where, for psychological reasons, people assign meaning to meaningless groupings, significance to insignificant coincidences, even invest in outright frauds based on mistaken perceptions of reality."

"I don't know.

One the one hand, it would seem that teachers (and really I am talking about grade school level and maybe middle school) need to be good an managing students. What should a teacher have to help students? I think the first big question is "what is going to happen in the classroom?""

"Harris argues that not only is this "ought not" a useful contribution, he insists that it is all that's needed: "All lesser ethical concerns and obligations follow from this." This strikes me as either demonstrably false, or just useless. I don't know of anyone who thinks that their ethical system will tend to produce the most possible suffering for all sentient beings, or which outside observers claim would maximize suffering for all sentient beings. A guide to which moral values are right or wrong but which cannot actually distinguish between any extant moral systems is fundamentally not helpful."

"When people ask me what I'm doing I tell them I'm a physicist. Then they ask me if I'm in experiment or theory. And I'll tell them I'm a phenomenologist. More often than not, the reply is "A what?" So here's what it means, or at least what it means to me. "