The following comes from my book, The Triple Path (available as a free download in PDF or ebook formats, or for sale in hard copy and ebook formats wherever books are sold–the book lists references for the e sources for this passage). My posts from recent days have been about the new religion of Wokism. I will be posting more in coming days on the subject. This passage from The Triple Path (Virtue 4) is particularly relevant: Beware the zealots,…
Note: This is part 7 of a series on morality and ethics. Here are the other parts: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6 (plus additional posts on hypocrisy and free will). The entire series makes up the fourth chapter of my book, The Triple Path, which can be downloaded for free here in PDF and eReader formats or purchased at all major book retailers (in print and eReader formats). The history of religious…
Last post we talked about problems with our politicians, but most voters aren’t any better. In fact, they’re often worse. Most politicians at least know something about the major issues of the day; most voters don’t. Economists say that voters’ ignorance is rational: because each persons’ vote has such a small marginal impact on an election result, it doesn’t make sense to spend much time learning about the candidates or issues. What makes sense for each voter to do on…
Many of us feel like something is going wrong. We feel a deep and growing unease we are moving in the wrong direction, that we’re becoming strangers in our own country. This series of blog posts is an extended essay that explains what is going wrong in the United States and what we can do about it. But first you must realize that the solution won’t come from going back to the way things were. The past is behind us….
We’ve all heard that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. But a recent psychology study indicates that we may be able to make accurate judgments about certain aspects of people’s character “after minimal exposure to [their] physical appearance.” The study is titled “The Accuracy of Inferences About Criminality Based on Facial Appearance”1 and was performed by Jeffrey M. Valla, Stephen J. Ceci, and Wendy M. Williams of Cornell University and published in the Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and…
It is common to hear people say that we need more Americans to drive Priuses, hybrids, and other cars with good mileage. But measuring fuel efficiency by miles per gallon (MPG) is worse than useless: it’s misleading. It makes it almost impossible to easily compare cars and figure out how much fuel each car will really use. We Should Focus on Minimizing the Fuel We Use, Rather than on Maximizing the Distance we Can Drive We use MPG in the…