Recent Feeds + Reads

Interesting discussion of What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael Sandel (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2012).

Sandel, a gifted teacher and political philosopher who teaches at Harvard University, conducted, three years ago, a very popular PBS show based on his book, Justice; What is the Right Thing to Do? Sandel has no problems with markets and the economy. But he laments that “we drifted from having a market economy to being a market society.” He sees a prevailing ideology which underscores faith in markets as the primary means for achieving the public good. But, he argues, “we need a public debate about what it means to keep markets in their place.” As he tellingly asks: “Do we want a society where everything is up for sale? Or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?”

While the market-based approach can produce efficient and desirable outcomes, it is not a cure-all.  Bolstered by the general success of markets in the commercial sphere*, market-based solutions have been proposed in other areas, ranging from personal weight control and quitting smoking, to human organ transplants and population control.  Sandel goes further, questioning whether markets are even appropriate when trying to solve various social problems.

* leaving aside the global financial crisis for the sake of the argument

Is there a greater cultural sin than a good story spoiled? The accepted modern posture is that knowing too much beforehand about the plot of a novel, a play, a movie, even a TV series, ruins the magic of experiencing it for the first time — renders it damaged goods, not worth one’s time or money. The phrase “spoiler alert” (with or without multiple exclamation points) has become a standard warning klaxon in news articles and on online comment boards. Media critics catch hellfire from readers if they reveal too much of what happens to whom and when. And we’ve all been insulted by movie trailers that play like Mini-Me versions of the features they’re supposedly selling.

…  It’s a given: Everyone hates spoilers.

Except when they don’t. Two researchers in the psychology department of the University of California at San Diego recently decided to test whether we really hate spoilers, or just like to say we do. What they found surprised them: The majority of people apparently like having a story spoiled for them. In fact, we may enjoy spoiled stories even more than the unspoiled versions. Is it true? Do we secretly crave predigested plots the way some foodies sneak Big Macs when no one’s looking?

Most of the time, I try to avoid spoilers.  But when it comes to sport, I generally want to know the result before spending a lot of time watching a game.  Perhaps that’s because I usually have better things that I could do with the time, so watching my team lose would make me feel even worse.  Also, I’m just not as into sport as I was when I was a kid.

Christopher Hamilton’s Living Philosophy: Reflections on Life, Meaning and Morality (2001) … “includes a fascinating essay entitled ‘The Need to Sleep’, where he notes that philosophers have not paid sufficient attention to this extraordinary phenomenon. Well, a decade on, this is the beginning of a response to Christopher’s wake-up call.”

Since all animals sleep, we assume it has a biological purpose. The trouble is, we don’t know what that purpose is. There are many theories – energy conservation, growth promotion, immobilisation during hours of darkness when it might be dangerous to be out and about, consolidation of memories – but they are all open to serious objections. William Dement, one of the leading researchers of the last century and co-discoverer of Rapid Eye Movement sleep, concluded from his fifty years in the forefront of the field that “the only reason we need to sleep that is really, really solid, is that we get sleepy.”

It is easy to see why philosophers have, on the whole, avoided talking about sleep. Those who see the aim of philosophy as being to cultivate the most unpeeled mode of wakefulness are likely to treat sleep as an enemy.

Dreams, of course, have figured more significantly in philosophy. Being a mode of consciousness – prompting Aristotle to say that “the soul makes assertions in sleep” (On Dreams 458b) – dreams seem one step up from the mere putting out of zzzs.

Most of us spend a third of our lives asleep, so perhaps we need to think a bit more about it.

According to a poll of 846 critics, programmers, academics and distributors.  Here are the top ten:

1. Vertigo

2. Citizen Kane

3. Tokyo Story

4. La Règle du jeu

5. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

6. 2001: A Space Odyssey

7. The Searchers

8. Man with a Movie Camera

9. The Passion of Joan of Arc

10. 8½

I’ve only seen #1, #2, #6 and #10.  I’ll have to seek the others out some time.

There’s also a list of the top ten films according to 358 directors:

1. Tokyo Story

2= 2001: A Space Odyssey

2= Citizen Kane

1. 8½

2. Taxi Driver

3. Apocalypse Now

7= The Godfather

7= Vertigo

1. Mirror

2. Bicycle Thieves

I’ve yet to see “Tokyo Story” and “Mirror”.

An interview with the author of Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age.  Sounds interesting.  This quote struck a chord:

There’s been an enormous focus in the field of religious studies over the very term “religion,” and half the discipline wants to reject it all together. My own problem with definitions of religion, and why I use them only as starting points, is that they too often concern only beliefs. But religion is a thing you do. The misinterpretation of people like Dawkins and Hitchens is that religion is just a mistaken proto-science. But religion is about action, and faith is about trust.

This gets to the heart of a main concern with the New Atheists’ agenda.  By focussing on and critiquing the scientific basis of religion, they are effectively using a straw man argument.  Humans are not, and should never be, wholly rational beings.  In fact, there is plenty of evidence that sometimes we’re not very rational at all.  There’s a place for religion, philosophy and art, as well as science, in the pursuit of finding out what makes us tick, both individually and collectively.

When I talk to people who leave startups,it comes down to one thing -  People stick in companies as long as they can tell a good story about it. When an employee can’t tell her/ himself and their friends a good story for a while they quit.

There are a few triggers that help with telling better stories, outlining three general ones-

1. Mission/ values/ goals

2. Success

3. Perks

1. People have always hated commercials.

2. People have more options to watch shows than ever before.

3. Compelling shows are all over 500 TV channels.

4. The Internet is its own source of entertainment.

5. TV’s cable and satellite dish economics don’t make sense.

Reasons #1 and #4 ring truest for me.