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3.96 AVERAGE
3.96 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
binker pls tienes más razón que casi la mitad de la gente que criticas pero eres muy cansino
Read this book. In fact, read anything by Pinker. No, really.
Преди да прочета тази книга не знаех, че формирането на човешката природа е толкова спорен въпрос в интелектуалните среди.
Изгледа, много хора смятат, че например насилието е болестно, несвойствено за човека състояние - и да се каже, че склонността към насилие всъщност е еволюционна адаптация за справяне с определени ситуации е същото, като оправдаване на насилието. Също според тях, откритието, че съществуват известни вродени разлики в начина на мислене и в емоциите на мъжете и жените, породени от различия в мозъка и хормоните им - е подтикване към дискриминация към жените.
Понеже книгата е изключително обемна и разглежда широк кръг въпроси, позволявам си да преведа част от описанието и от издателството, което според мен успява отлично и накратко да я представи:
"В книгата си, Пинкър разглежда идеята на т.н. "човешка природа" и нейното морално, емоционално и политическо значение. Той показва как много интелектуалци отричат съществуването на каквито и да е вродени характеристики у човека и вместо това догматично приемат три постулата:
- Tabula rasa: човешкият ум няма каквито и да е вродени характеристики, таланти, наклонности и т.н. - всичко това зависи и се формира от средата, в която човек израства;
- Благородният дивак: хората се раждат добри и невинни и биват "покварени" от обществото, на което се дължат всякакви лоши техни черти и поведение;
- Духовен свят: човек има душа, която мисли и чувства независимо от биологията на тялото, което обитава.
Всяка от тия три догми носи своя морален и исторически багаж и техните защитници прибягват до понякога отчаяни тактики, за да дискредитират учените, които ги отхвърлят."
Доста по-интересно е, отколкото успявам да опиша. Сори.
Изгледа, много хора смятат, че например насилието е болестно, несвойствено за човека състояние - и да се каже, че склонността към насилие всъщност е еволюционна адаптация за справяне с определени ситуации е същото, като оправдаване на насилието. Също според тях, откритието, че съществуват известни вродени разлики в начина на мислене и в емоциите на мъжете и жените, породени от различия в мозъка и хормоните им - е подтикване към дискриминация към жените.
Понеже книгата е изключително обемна и разглежда широк кръг въпроси, позволявам си да преведа част от описанието и от издателството, което според мен успява отлично и накратко да я представи:
"В книгата си, Пинкър разглежда идеята на т.н. "човешка природа" и нейното морално, емоционално и политическо значение. Той показва как много интелектуалци отричат съществуването на каквито и да е вродени характеристики у човека и вместо това догматично приемат три постулата:
- Tabula rasa: човешкият ум няма каквито и да е вродени характеристики, таланти, наклонности и т.н. - всичко това зависи и се формира от средата, в която човек израства;
- Благородният дивак: хората се раждат добри и невинни и биват "покварени" от обществото, на което се дължат всякакви лоши техни черти и поведение;
- Духовен свят: човек има душа, която мисли и чувства независимо от биологията на тялото, което обитава.
Всяка от тия три догми носи своя морален и исторически багаж и техните защитници прибягват до понякога отчаяни тактики, за да дискредитират учените, които ги отхвърлят."
Доста по-интересно е, отколкото успявам да опиша. Сори.
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
Content Warnings
Controversial - nature versus nurture and nature wins for Pinker.
This was a lot of words to say "Authoritarianism is bad" and "both far left and far right thinkers simplify things".
I learned some things, and thought more about nature vs. nurture, but I didn't find this book very clarifying and I wouldn't recommend it as an intro to someone not too familiar with the field (like me). It's clear throughout the book that the author takes highly uncharitable views of extreme positions he disagrees with, and is able to find the nuance in extreme positions he feels favorable toward.
With Pinker's insistence that rationality should lead us to consider ideas on their merits, he seems like he's writing only to sound smart by presenting opposing views in their most extreme forms and often debunking them on the logic of their extremes. I feel I would have learned more if he had engaged with nuanced versions of arguments, but the only think he convincingly explained is that nature and nurture interact in complex ways to form the complex individuals that make up society. From his framing this was a brave theory at the time, but without knowing more about the research, I don't feel like I can trust his interpretation of major threads of thought in society.
I learned some things, and thought more about nature vs. nurture, but I didn't find this book very clarifying and I wouldn't recommend it as an intro to someone not too familiar with the field (like me). It's clear throughout the book that the author takes highly uncharitable views of extreme positions he disagrees with, and is able to find the nuance in extreme positions he feels favorable toward.
With Pinker's insistence that rationality should lead us to consider ideas on their merits, he seems like he's writing only to sound smart by presenting opposing views in their most extreme forms and often debunking them on the logic of their extremes. I feel I would have learned more if he had engaged with nuanced versions of arguments, but the only think he convincingly explained is that nature and nurture interact in complex ways to form the complex individuals that make up society. From his framing this was a brave theory at the time, but without knowing more about the research, I don't feel like I can trust his interpretation of major threads of thought in society.
Muy interesante, poco más tengo que agregar. De los pocos libros de no-ficción que he leído con el mismo interés que leo ficción.
I really should not even count this book as read, since I mostly gave up halfway through. I did skip ahead and read the chapter on "Gender", but that was as annoying as the rest. Boring, verbose, pedantic....and BORING; this book made me realize that the few hours I did spend on it is time that I'll never get back. The only good thing about it was that I used to read it right before I went to bed, and when it bored me to exhaustion I'd fall asleep. Next time I'll try Nyquil or something. UGH.
I wish I had read this 10 years ago. I've never read a book that explained so many relevant issues in modern society so well. I can say with confidence that my perspective on the world has been greatly affected by this book.
In the proccess of examining 3 widely-held beliefs: The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine, Pinker delves into relevant issues and modern ideas about concepts such as Eugenics, Free-Will, Genetic Determinism, Rape, Feminism, Modern Art, Totalitarian Social Engineering, Nature vs Nuture, and a multitude of other fascinating topics that delight my brain.
The book challenges many beliefs that we take for granted that permeate through out our culture. What exactly are morals and ethics? What is the soul? Is violence something ingrained in our DNA or is it needlessly destructive? What is equality and is it actually destructive to society and our individualism?
Big ideas that I really took away from the book:
- Parenting. Your kids are really just little adults. They have their own innate desires and preferences. As a parent you have actually very little control on how your kids turn out. You can greatly affect their quality of life through how you treat them but you can not decide how they will live their life. We are all predisposed towards certain things. Two identical twins separated at birth, raised in different environments are eerily similar. Two adopted kids raised in the same household are no more alike than two strangers you pick off the street. Nature has a much greater influence on us than we are conditioned to believe.
- Modern art as a symbol of status. Thanks to innovations in technology it is no longer difficult to own something of 'beauty'. An abundance of talent in our globalized society and the accessability of art (much easier to learn how to paint, play a instrument, etc, today than hundred of years ago) has created indistinguishable but quality works of art. New art arises so that only a select few can understand it showing their higher status. Time spent learning an art is a status symbol as it is 'useless'. A person capable of devoting time to something that is 'useless' shows that they are not struggling in life and shows abundance in energy and time. We use art as a status symbol in the same way that animals do, to convey our status to attract desirable mates. Our mind rationalizes this as a calling and towards higher-level abstractions.
- Modern push towards fluid gender identities goes against the face of biology. Proponents of this idea overvalue nurture in the equation and society (culture) influence on the being when there is little to support this idea. Male children who lose their penis at a very young age and are raise as a girl will display male tendencies such as an interest towards violence and even trying to pee while standing up. Simplified idea is to view male vs female as simply having different physical attributes, but to ignore that their brains are also very different. Different hormones. Same mistake as thinking that a person might 'choose' their sexual orientation. Their brains are wired to like a certain thing, and the left are falling to the same fallacy as the right in a different area.
- Income gap, unequal representation of females in certain work sectors. Females, generally, do not enjoy working with computers. Not to say that ALL don't, but people will find work in the field that they enjoy and many women in engineering stated they felt pressured by parents and society to pursue that field. Irrational belief that every field must be 50% occupied by both men and women despite the fact that generally, they enjoy different things, such as working with space, tools, and working with other people, relations, psychology, and children.
- Genes. Everything we do and look for in each other is good genetics. This manifests in any hundreds of ways but things like intelligence, proactiveness, aggressiveness are highly weighted over physical attributes such as height, shape of face, etc. The whole of dating, sexual evaluation, rests on the foundation of us judging each other for good genes.
- Illusion of free-will, backwards rationalization, and a 'soul'. Phineas Gage's radical personality shift after an iron rod was driven through his brain. Our brain goes to great efforts to make it seem like we are in control. Hooked to test subject's brains, asked to press a button at random, researchers can know 10-15 seconds in advance when the test subject will press the button. Severing the corpos calossum in the brain, the subjects are shown two images to either hemisphere and then are asked to pick an image. When they end up pointing to two images, they make up a reason on the spot about why they did so. We lie to ourselves all the time. An insane person does not believe he is lying or crazy. Can stimulate a part of the brain to make a person get up and walk. When they do it and the person gets up and walks they ask him why and he says, to get a book off that table. Even after being told about the experiment the subject doesn't ever believe or make the connection to himself that he could be doing the same as others.
What is a soul? Where is a soul put into the human being? Abortions vs pro-life. What is the point of conception? If we evolve from apes, do apes have soul, or are humans special? I believe that consciousness is not a binary switch, but more of a dimmer. It's an evolutionary advantage to be conscious because we can continually go more meta and meta, allowing us thoughts that are unique to us. As the human species evolved, the consciousness dimmer got slightly brighter and brigher. As a baby grows up, his own dimmer gets slightly brighter and brighter, and through the pursuits of education and spiritual virtues, can grow even more.
Different truths for different people. We have truths for children, truths for adults, truths for educated adults, and so on. At the lowest level, humans do not believe in free will. As such it is manifested in their lack of proactivity and their failure to realize their goals. At a step above that (and the level that nearly all people are on) we do believe in free will. We want to hold each other responsible so that we can condition and shape each other's behaviors. We work actively towards our goals and beat ourselves up for failing to do so. At a step above that, one realizes that there is no evidence of free will. It's a societal invention. Quantum mechanics destroyed the notion of determinism but it did not provide evidence for free-will in the human brain. What makes us unique to having free-will but perhaps not a dog or a grasshopper or a blade of grass? Are we not just following our own innate biological drives, albeit at a very high, complicated, and abstract level? And then, I believe, at the highest level, you must reconcile this paradox; free-will is an illusion, but one who believes in free-will is more likely to accomplish their goals, feel happier, and be more fulfilled in life, as they will believe they are in control. By resolving this paradox, you can come full-circle and see the yin-yang of life in that dualities must coexist. You have a full-understanding, one that is both practical and theoretical.
In the proccess of examining 3 widely-held beliefs: The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine, Pinker delves into relevant issues and modern ideas about concepts such as Eugenics, Free-Will, Genetic Determinism, Rape, Feminism, Modern Art, Totalitarian Social Engineering, Nature vs Nuture, and a multitude of other fascinating topics that delight my brain.
The book challenges many beliefs that we take for granted that permeate through out our culture. What exactly are morals and ethics? What is the soul? Is violence something ingrained in our DNA or is it needlessly destructive? What is equality and is it actually destructive to society and our individualism?
Big ideas that I really took away from the book:
- Parenting. Your kids are really just little adults. They have their own innate desires and preferences. As a parent you have actually very little control on how your kids turn out. You can greatly affect their quality of life through how you treat them but you can not decide how they will live their life. We are all predisposed towards certain things. Two identical twins separated at birth, raised in different environments are eerily similar. Two adopted kids raised in the same household are no more alike than two strangers you pick off the street. Nature has a much greater influence on us than we are conditioned to believe.
- Modern art as a symbol of status. Thanks to innovations in technology it is no longer difficult to own something of 'beauty'. An abundance of talent in our globalized society and the accessability of art (much easier to learn how to paint, play a instrument, etc, today than hundred of years ago) has created indistinguishable but quality works of art. New art arises so that only a select few can understand it showing their higher status. Time spent learning an art is a status symbol as it is 'useless'. A person capable of devoting time to something that is 'useless' shows that they are not struggling in life and shows abundance in energy and time. We use art as a status symbol in the same way that animals do, to convey our status to attract desirable mates. Our mind rationalizes this as a calling and towards higher-level abstractions.
- Modern push towards fluid gender identities goes against the face of biology. Proponents of this idea overvalue nurture in the equation and society (culture) influence on the being when there is little to support this idea. Male children who lose their penis at a very young age and are raise as a girl will display male tendencies such as an interest towards violence and even trying to pee while standing up. Simplified idea is to view male vs female as simply having different physical attributes, but to ignore that their brains are also very different. Different hormones. Same mistake as thinking that a person might 'choose' their sexual orientation. Their brains are wired to like a certain thing, and the left are falling to the same fallacy as the right in a different area.
- Income gap, unequal representation of females in certain work sectors. Females, generally, do not enjoy working with computers. Not to say that ALL don't, but people will find work in the field that they enjoy and many women in engineering stated they felt pressured by parents and society to pursue that field. Irrational belief that every field must be 50% occupied by both men and women despite the fact that generally, they enjoy different things, such as working with space, tools, and working with other people, relations, psychology, and children.
- Genes. Everything we do and look for in each other is good genetics. This manifests in any hundreds of ways but things like intelligence, proactiveness, aggressiveness are highly weighted over physical attributes such as height, shape of face, etc. The whole of dating, sexual evaluation, rests on the foundation of us judging each other for good genes.
- Illusion of free-will, backwards rationalization, and a 'soul'. Phineas Gage's radical personality shift after an iron rod was driven through his brain. Our brain goes to great efforts to make it seem like we are in control. Hooked to test subject's brains, asked to press a button at random, researchers can know 10-15 seconds in advance when the test subject will press the button. Severing the corpos calossum in the brain, the subjects are shown two images to either hemisphere and then are asked to pick an image. When they end up pointing to two images, they make up a reason on the spot about why they did so. We lie to ourselves all the time. An insane person does not believe he is lying or crazy. Can stimulate a part of the brain to make a person get up and walk. When they do it and the person gets up and walks they ask him why and he says, to get a book off that table. Even after being told about the experiment the subject doesn't ever believe or make the connection to himself that he could be doing the same as others.
What is a soul? Where is a soul put into the human being? Abortions vs pro-life. What is the point of conception? If we evolve from apes, do apes have soul, or are humans special? I believe that consciousness is not a binary switch, but more of a dimmer. It's an evolutionary advantage to be conscious because we can continually go more meta and meta, allowing us thoughts that are unique to us. As the human species evolved, the consciousness dimmer got slightly brighter and brigher. As a baby grows up, his own dimmer gets slightly brighter and brighter, and through the pursuits of education and spiritual virtues, can grow even more.
Different truths for different people. We have truths for children, truths for adults, truths for educated adults, and so on. At the lowest level, humans do not believe in free will. As such it is manifested in their lack of proactivity and their failure to realize their goals. At a step above that (and the level that nearly all people are on) we do believe in free will. We want to hold each other responsible so that we can condition and shape each other's behaviors. We work actively towards our goals and beat ourselves up for failing to do so. At a step above that, one realizes that there is no evidence of free will. It's a societal invention. Quantum mechanics destroyed the notion of determinism but it did not provide evidence for free-will in the human brain. What makes us unique to having free-will but perhaps not a dog or a grasshopper or a blade of grass? Are we not just following our own innate biological drives, albeit at a very high, complicated, and abstract level? And then, I believe, at the highest level, you must reconcile this paradox; free-will is an illusion, but one who believes in free-will is more likely to accomplish their goals, feel happier, and be more fulfilled in life, as they will believe they are in control. By resolving this paradox, you can come full-circle and see the yin-yang of life in that dualities must coexist. You have a full-understanding, one that is both practical and theoretical.
So I think I've exhausted the need to read popular books in psych, because all the skipping over the parts that I've already read somewhere is becoming distracting. The first third was new for me, where Pinker goes over how the Blank Slate theory developed, etc; should've stopped there.