Blog, page 10

Jonathan Haidt in his excellent book, The Righteous Mind:

[Dan] Ariely summarizes his findings from many variations of the paradigm like this: “When given the opportunity, many honest people will cheat. In fact, rather than finding that a few bad apples weighted the averages, we discovered that the majority of people cheated, and that they cheated just a little bit.”

People didn’t try to get away with as much as they could. Rather, when Ariely gave them anything like the invisibility of the ring of Gyges, they cheated only up to the point where they themselves could no longer find a justification that would preserve their belief in their own honesty.

The bottom line is that in lab experiments that give people invisibility combined with plausible deniability, most people cheat. The press secretary (also known as the inner lawyer) 27 is so good at finding justifications that most of these cheaters leave the experiment as convinced of their own virtue as they were when they walked in.¹

There is so much fascinating (and useful) information in this book that it was almost impossible to select a single quotation to post here.

Also, here’s a solid review of the book from a Christian perspective.

Footnotes

1. Haidt, Jonathan (2012-03-13). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (pp. 96-97). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. ↩

Brooke Lea Foster in the NYT:

Married or not, many of us sleep with our phones on our night stands, pocket them as we go from room to room and think nothing of using them in the presence of our partners, whether they are talking or snuggling or reading beside us.

Experts say that smartphone use is meddling in our marriages in ways that are sometimes benign but often frustrating, causing quarrels and forcing couples to address an ever more important question: At what point are we choosing to spend more time with our smartphones than with our spouses?

New York Times:

But the brown rats of Europe became the true globe-trotters. As Western European countries colonized other parts of the world, they took the rodents with them.

The brown rats of New York and other Eastern American cities trace their ancestry to those in Western Europe. So do brown rats in South America, Africa, New Zealand, and isolated islands scattered across the Atlantic and Pacific.

Even today, the ports of New York City are visited by rats from around the world.

Maureen O’Donnell for the Sun-Times:

For her funeral, Baby Jazlene was dressed in a white organza dress. It had ribbons and tiny roses, made by Allison’s Angel Gowns, a charity that sews funeral clothes for young children. Catholic Cemeteries donated a plot at All Saints Cemetery in Des Plaines. Funeral director John Glueckert supplied the casket, labor and hearse. Bevel Granite has agreed to provide a headstone. The funeral was organized by a nonprofit group called Rest in His Arms that has arranged Christian services for 33 babies who were abandoned or whose bodies went unclaimed by family.

About 75 mourners attended the service, all of them strangers.

Mourning for society’s most vulnerable: those who are not “viable” outside of the womb.

Health workers can request a blood drop via text message, and it arrives around 30 minutes later. That makes a big difference in a country where short road trips can take hours. Blood loss after birth is one of the reasons maternal mortality is much higher in poor countries than rich ones; it’s the leading cause of death in Rwanda for pregnant women. And blood has to be stored carefully and matched to the recipient.

Article also links to video of first blood drone delivery.

Russel Moore, writing for the Washington Post:

This peril exists now not only for Christian leaders, but for everyone, religious or not. Even for those who are not workaholics, the smartphone gives us an illusion of always being “active.” We don’t just eat; we must post pictures of our meals to Instagram. We don’t just have to care about where our children are; we must respond to some thread on Facebook.

We don’t just have people who are grumpy in line at the supermarket; we have to respond to anonymous critics — or even cyber-bullies — on social media. And we are always just a text message away from the words “I just want to give you a heads-up” upending an entire day or night — no matter if it’s a Sabbath or a vacation or a family dinner.

Maya Dukmasova in the Chicago Reader:

But while the towers of Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes were torn down, [Bertrand Goldberg’s] Hilliard conspicuously survived. Today the quality of life at the development flies in the face of conventional wisdom about high-rise public housing and serves as a call to reexamine the root causes of dilapidation and despair at CHA’s more infamous projects.

“Hilliard is here to prove to you that it can work, and will work,” as one longtime resident puts it.

Opened in 1966, and still going strong.

Chicago Magazines’s Whet Moser on the undertaking to produce a 3D map of Chicago’s underground spaghetti of pipes, tunnels, and cables:

Underneath that [ordered street] grid, though, is the chaos of the underworld: gas, electricity, water. And it can be dangerous. The most famous example is the Chicago flood of 1992, when miscommunication over the location of an abandoned freight tunnel, among many other things, allowed pilings to be driven into the ground next to it, causing the tunnel to fail and flood much of the Loop.

Man, I hope this project is completed. I would love to pore over a map of Chicago’s (and eventually other cities’) underground, including, of course, the Pedway.

See also this excellent podcast retelling of the 1992 Loop flood in which, as ever, Chicago is second to New York.

Emily Badger in the NYT:

But that’s the power of this perception. The phrase “inner city” is often used to suggest that the historical image and the modern place are one and the same — or even that the “inner city” is still a meaningfully identifiable place at all, with clearly implied demographics (black, poor) and connotations (violence, decay). It still evokes the particular context when the phrase became popular in the 1960s and’70s.

In reality, the central neighborhoods of many major American cities are thriving. A recent analysis by researchers at the Federal Housing Finance Agency found that home values had risen faster in the heart of big cities than anywhere else in the country over the last 25 years, a sign of their turnaround and a trend Mr. Trump, as a real estate developer, is likely to be aware of.

I’ve not been the only one cringing at this political season’s application of “inner city.” It’s reminiscent of how the word “blight” was used in the 1950s and 60s.

(link h/t Gordon Venturella)

Richard Florida in CityLab on the intersection of urbanization and globalization, citing data from Brookings:

Globalization might make us feel small in a growing world, but the lessons of urbanization should remind us how much more powerful we can be when we get connected. Together, these 123 global cities power global competitiveness. They generate a third of global economic output, account for nearly two-thirds of all innovations (based on patents), and represent more than 80 percent of all venture-capital investment in high-tech startups, while housing just 13 percent of the world’s population.

h/t Brent Storms

Jared Wilson in “The Story of Everything”:

The importance of the church — and the fundamental purpose of the church — is to keep pointing away from the world for the hope of the world. While everyone else points to government, family, good deeds, and whatever else as The Secret, the church keeps pointing to the alien, heavenly power of grace as the hope for our problems and for our false hopes.

h/t Toney Salva

Excellent piece by Andrew Sullivan in NYMag on the Internet taking over our lives. Includes this bit from Louis C.K.:

On the Conan O’Brien show, C.K. explained: “You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away,” he said. “Underneath in your life there’s that thing … that forever empty … that knowledge that it’s all for nothing and you’re alone … That’s why we text and drive … because we don’t want to be alone for a second.”

He recalled a moment driving his car when a Bruce Springsteen song came on the radio. It triggered a sudden, unexpected surge of sadness. He instinctively went to pick up his phone and text as many friends as possible. Then he changed his mind, left his phone where it was, and pulled over to the side of the road to weep. He allowed himself for once to be alone with his feelings, to be overwhelmed by them, to experience them with no instant distraction, no digital assist. And then he was able to discover, in a manner now remote from most of us, the relief of crawling out of the hole of misery by himself. For if there is no dark night of the soul anymore that isn’t lit with the flicker of the screen, then there is no morning of hopefulness either. As he said of the distracted modern world we now live in: “You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel … kinda satisfied with your products. And then you die. So that’s why I don’t want to get a phone for my kids.”

Reading the article made me recall Chris Travis’ observation that “attention is the scarcest resource” in our society today.

Eric Posner, interviewed on Freakonomics Radio:

The great lesson of Roman history was that, for quite a long time, the Roman Republic had a limited government. It was not run by kings or emperors, and it was also highly successful. By the standards of the time, it was wealthy and it conquered lots of places. It was a fantastic kind of role model for the Founders who were very ambitious for the U.S. but who didn’t want a king. But then the Roman Republic collapsed and was replaced by an emperor.

So the Founders, looking back, said, “We’d like to be powerful like the Roman Republic, and we’d like to imitate the constitutional structure of the Roman Republic to the extent that it was able to maintain both liberty while creating a powerful country. But we want to avoid the errors they made which paved the way for an emperor.”

Good interview, full of other insight from Posner, like the principle that limitation of presidential power might help America to be great, but often by over-stepping (or ignoring) that limitation presidents become great.

Posner’s paper here.

Instead of any substantive exploration of the candidates’ proposals, we will be treated to a mélange of showmanship and complaining, obstinacy and irrelevance, petty quibbles, grandstanding, pandering, half-truths, and punchlines. The candidates will be rehearsed, the moderators timid, the questions calculated, and the answers at once too short and too long. We will learn little to nothing that could not be discovered at this very moment by any Google user of modest skill.

I would love to see an Oxford-style presidential debate. And the idea to replace the audience with in-ear laugh tracks is brilliant.

NYT:

But the political issues, [refugees Anwar and Daleen] said they knew only from television. Their closest interactions with Americans have been largely with the members of Johnson Ferry Church, like Mr. Stocks. It was members of the church… who outfitted their tiny apartment and showed them how to navigate America’s cavernous grocery stores. They also steered Anwar through the health care system as he prepares for heart surgery.

Excellent case study of people disadvantaging themselves for the advantage of others, especially those who might be perceived as political “untouchables.”

The title the NYT gave to article — “Evangelicals Ignore G.O.P. by Embracing Syrian Refugees” — betrays the mistaken view that church ministries should somehow be beholden to a particular political platform.