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Nobody chooses their genes or their early environment. The choices they make are determined by those things (and some quantum coin flips). Given what we know of neuroscience how can anyone deserve anything?
In response to
Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided
"Nobody chooses their genes or their early environment. The choices they make are determined by those things (and some quantum coin flips)."
All true so far... but here comes the huge logical leap...
"Given what we know of neuroscience how can anyone deserve anything?"
What does neuroscience showing the cause of why bad people choose to do bad things, have to do with whether or not bad people deserve bad things to happen to them?
The idea that bad people who choose to do bad things to others deserve bad things to happen to them has never been based on an incorrect view of neuroscience, and neuroscience doesn't change that even slightly.
In response to
Politics is the Mind-Killer
I see politics as unimportant. For most of us, our political opinions have essentially no impact on the world. Their main effect is in our personal lives, our interactions with friends and family. On that basis, one should choose a political position that facilitates such "local" goals. There is little point in trying to be correct and accurate on large-scale political matters, other than as a bias-stretching mental exercise on a par with doing Sudoku.
You couldn't be more wrong. What you should say is that you don't notice the impact your political opinions have on the world, because it happens slowly, because people with radically different political views tend to live in far off countries that you don't think about or in the distant past, and because currently people like you have somewhat sensible political opinions in terms of their short-term consequences (but not at all sensible in terms of their long-term consequences).
Your life would be very different if you lived under a different political regime (Islamism, Communism, Fascism, etc.). And the future of the world will be very different depending on the political views of people like you. It's just hard to see from your point of view.
There are multiple apocalypses headed your way within the next century, and you have limited time to take political action about them. So I'd encourage you to change your mind, and do those bias-stretching mental exercises, to work out a rational political response.
I'm assuming it's something about how the assertions in the story are "the sky is blue" and "the sky is green" instead of "the spectrum of the light from the sky peaks at around 460 nm" and "the spectrum of the light from the sky peaks at around 540 nm", since there can be an honest cross-cultural confusion between just what real-world colors "green" and "blue" translated to the respective languages correspond to.
What about if the parable had red instead of green then? There are no human cultures that conflate red and blue according to the cultural color term chart.
But there can't be any cross-cultural confusion, because it is written in English. Vietnamese or Japanese people either know what the English words "blue" and "green" mean, or they don't speak English at all and wouldn't be reading this story.
And if the story was written in Vietnamese, it would use "xanh lá cây" which means green and "xanh dương" which means blue, rather than just "xanh". Just because people normally use the same word to describe two different colours, doesn't mean they can't see the difference between those colours, and don't have ways of describing the difference when they need to.
No, blue is what's perceived as blue. There are problems with physical definitions because of an endless list of exceptions involving perceptual disorders, optical illusions, lighting conditions, etc. etc. etc. People worked on this problem, and there is no objective definition of color that I am aware of.
No, blue is what is collectively perceived as blue, while also not being collectively perceived as any other colour (or color if you are a "gray"). That's how they came up with the objective, standard, scientific definition of blue above.
And the sky isn't pure blue, it's a quarter of the way between blue and green.
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I believe the key point of this article is very wrong.
I urge you to either show some evidence to support your statements, or retract them.
There are huge differences in personality from person to person.
When I kick a vending machine, it IS because I have an angry personality. Even when I kick the vending machine because the bus was late, the train was early, my report is overdue, and now the damned vending machine has eaten my lunch money for the second day in a row... it's still because of my angry personality, and it's a well proven fact that many other people would not do that in the same situation. There are whole countries full of people that would just feel sad, or blame themselves, or just let it go, or get only a little angry inside.
This has been well studied, and almost everyone who's studied it honestly has arrived at the conclusion that people do have different personalities, which account for their behaviour more than the events do, and which are the best predictor of their future behaviour.
So, I'm going to take (or at least emphasise) the opposite position... "We tend to see far too little correspondence between others' actions and personalities, when in reality that's the main cause.... <Genetics rather than environment and all that stuff.>"