An interesting study was recently released (Feb 24, 2021) on morality and atheists v. religious. It started from the observation that while attitudes in the US have improved towards minorities over time, attitudes towards atheists have not. According to a Pew poll in 2019, 44% of Americans think belief in God is necessary for morality (apparently people only behave well if someone is watching). The researchers decided to look at morality among the atheists and religious in the US (a religious country) and Sweden (a non-religious country) and investigate “whether disbelievers differ from believers in how they conceptualize morality.

Psych News Daily reports that Conversations Rarely End When People Want Them to End. Scientific American reports that People Literally Don’t Know When to Shut Up or Keep Talking. You would think this was consistent reporting. Are you sure about that? Psych News Daily states “On average, participants wished their conversations had been 1.9 minutes (or 24%) longer. They also said they believed that their partners wished that the conversation had been 5.

Sometimes (some people would say often) I feel the need to flag some study in an area I am completely unqualified to comment on the substance. I am, however, really good at pulling apart logic, generalizations and over-broad journalistic pronouncements, however, so I feel completely at ease in doing that. What else is the internet for? WARNING: Long read. Cambridge University researchers just came out with a study entitled The cognitive and perceptual correlates of ideological attitudes: a data-driven approach with a rather astounding claim in the abstract: “[W]e uncovered the specific psychological signatures of political, nationalistic, religious and dogmatic beliefs.

I mentioned William James when talking about all the different personas that exist in personal interactions I think William James Undercounted. I think I should mention his On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings. You can find an abridged version here. If I was to summarize as concisely as possible, he says that there is a lot more of life and the universe to appreciate than any of us, encased in our own experiences and training, realize.

One of many quotes attributed to William James is “Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.” Interestingly, no collection of quotes actually provides a cite to when or where he said it. A similar concept was raised by Oliver Wendell Holmes in “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table”.

Groundhog Carols by Gail Pilgrim. Click the title to get to them.

I like the daily comic strip Frazz. The main character is a young man who is a janitor at the elementary school that he went to as a child. He gets along with teachers and kids talk to him about questions they don’t want to ask an authority figure. There are also lots of strips involving kids talking to their teachers. It is a bit of homage to Calvin and Hobbes, with a little less snark.

I thought I would just put Amanda Gorman’s Inauguration Poem “The Hill We Climb” here. I have no idea where line breaks should be. Note to self - there are poetry readings on Youtube, but check out the ones by the poet, not by actors reading the poetry. Do poets do poetry readings on Zoom? “Mr President, Dr Biden, Madam Vice President, Mr Emhoff, Americans and the world: when day comes we ask ourselves where can we find light in this never-ending shade?

Early early draft. Sometimes you drop nuance and need to be heavy handed. This song is a bit unusual in that it starts with an accidental.

I was helping a friend with some data analysis which included a file of roughly 500k quotes collected from the internet. Looking at the “quotes”, I thought a dismaying number were trite aphorisms from motivational speakers/writers and religious feelgood writers. I began to wonder why are sayings I consider “trite” obviously not “trite” to enough people that there is a market? Actually, I seem to be misusing the word “trite”. The dictionary indicates that trite means “not evoking interest because of overuse or repetition”.

Ars Technica published an article on Christmas Day (yesterday) entitled Children’s Belief in Santa is more Nuanced than you Think. The story talks about studies showing that children have hierarchies of belief, with individual figures falling categories like: “Real Person”, “Virtually Real”, “Cultural Figures”, “Ambiguous Figures” and finally “Fictional Figures”. So, like so many things, there is no binary on/off, but rather a spectrum between “real” and “nonreal”. One of the studies argued that three factors influence children’s belief and placement of the figures in the spectrum: Testimony (being told about the figure), indirect evidence (which included rituals like leaving milk and cookies for Santa or hunting for Easter Bunny eggs, and direct evidence like visiting Santa in the mall.

You would think after all the years we’ve been married that we would know each other’s little ways and preferences. That is by and large true, but the spreadable butter question had never come up before. Taking a step back, we normally use some type of easily spreadable margarine and real butter is for cooking and special occasions. Just prior to the COVID mandated cocooning, we had been watching the Great British Bake Off and Shirley started baking a couple times a week in the afternoon.

There is an interesting article on Politico about Grievance Addiction focusing on Donald Trump. The author is James Kimmel, Jr., a lecturer in psychiatry at Yale Med School and he notes that “your brain on grievances looks a lot like your brain on drugs. In fact, brain imaging studies show that harboring a grievance (a perceived wrong or injustice, real or imagined) activates the same neural reward circuitry as narcotics.”