Evolution seems to have "equipped" us with a tendency to believe that which is stated with seeming confidence and an appropriate tone. Perhaps in addition to reading, writing, arithmetic, science and speech our schools should have courses in which the students are not only randomly but convincingly lied to with various degrees of subtlety, as they are today, but also graded on their ability to sort out the lies. This could also be used to arm them against being told falsehoods that they would like to believe. They would, of course, also have to be taught how to "go along" in courses in which it is not the point for the lies to be detected.
Fat chance that! Except on the subversive impulses of some faculty. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
Perhaps in addition to reading, writing, arithmetic, science and speech our schools should have courses in which the students are not only randomly but convincingly lied to with various degrees of subtlety, as they are today, but also graded on their ability to sort out the lies. This could also be used to arm them against being told falsehoods that they would like to believe. They would, of course, also have to be taught how to "go along" in courses in which it is not the point for the lies to be detected.
oh man, that's good.
how to sharpen up the collective awareness in one generation...
getting 'raised' in a family where dad was adman was a little similar!
:=) ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
Universal teaching of bullshit recognition would be great. But isn't the modern society utterly dependent on all sorts of corporate bullshit? Isn't the effect of standard education to accept more of it? Who would stair education the other way?
Yet evolution is not necessarily that bad stupid. The modern absolute heed of corporate needs is not a normal circumstance, and it probably won't last long.
But to go from there to saying that "modern society" is utterly dependent on it is something of a stretch. Production of goods is important, but it is not the sum total of society.
And the production of goods does not have to be organised like it currently is. It should be possible to find another system of production where demand is managed without having to convince consumers to consume ever more useless junk.
We'd have to jettison the delusion of having a "free market economy" for the parts of the economy that are actually planned. But that is a change in perception, not in reality, since the corporate bullshit makes a mockery of the "free market" anyway.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
There's a very appropriate quib about it that Orwell puts in the mouth of Winston Smith in 1984: The best books are the ones that tell you things that you didn't know that you already knew.
Data analysis is about finding unknown knowns: You have all the data, but you don't understand it. That is probably what is so satisfying about it. (See, that was another unknown known: I knew the Orwell quib, I knew the way data analysis works and I knew that both are satisfying. But I had never put them together before...)
(The tricks life plays are that we can learn things, then forget them again. And in modern developed economies, an entire marketing, advertising, and communications industry is there to help us.)
("Ah, so they've invaded Afghanistan because of the Transafghan pipeline, that sounds just like those Big Oil Bush administration people, and Cheney was even CEO of Halliburton!") Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
In the case of me and Galbraith, the notion that there is a strong difference between the regulated private company and the public service got a rather heavy dose of salt.
Of course, there is still a difference, in that the private sector is steeped in a number of cultural myths that are less strongly present in the public sector.
And, of course, there is still outrage when a public official pays himself a million € a year. Which tends to weed out one particular type of narcissistic sociopath.
