iterables: 08.2007

8/29/2007

Nha Trang, Vietnam

8/25/2007

"The dispassionate mind of the 18th-century philosophers allows us to predict somewhere between 0.5 and 3 percent of the most important political decisions people will make over the course of their lives."

-- Drew Westen, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation

: Name: Derwin; Location: Chicago, Illinois, United States

canadian, phd student, university of chicago, likes all types of music, sociology, philosophy

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"One curious thing that separates the social from the natural sciences is that the natural sciences, with much fanfare, immediately communicate to the general public their most exciting new ideas: the social sciences tend to nurse their significant insights in scholarly oblivion. As a result people feel that the social sciences are not doing anything important or exciting. But the opposite is true: probably the most thrilling and potentially liberating discoveries have been made in the fields of anthropology, sociology, psychology…

"But we have also known for a long time that one of the reasons the social sciences work in oblivion is that they are not getting at knowledge that instantly makes people feel powerful and satisfied, that gives them the sense that they are taming their world, taking command of its mystery and danger. The science of man is the science of man's knowledge about himself: it gives a chill in addition to a thrill – the chill of self-exposure. We may be the only species in the universe, for all we know, that has pushed self-exposure to such an advanced point that we are no longer a secret to ourselves... the exposure of this secret is in many ways very unsettling."

-- Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning (1971)

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