Curious Wonder web notes

Dementia is an umbrella term that encompasses the following diseases: Lewy Body Dementia, Vascular Dementia, Frontotemporal dementia, Parkinon's, Alzheimer's, Huntington's Robin Williams had Lewy Body Dementia. He had severe depression caused by his deteriorating mind while the diagnosis to his disease was still unknown to him at the time. Susan Schneider Williams wrote a paper where she recounts his life and his last days.  https://n.neurology.org/content/87/13/1308   excerpt taken from "How the Mind Works" by Steven Pinker     "when the visual area of the brain are damaged, for example, the visual world is not simply blurred or riddled with holes. Selected aspects of visual experience are removed while others are left intact. Some patients see a complete world but pay attention only to half of it. They eat food from the right side of the plate, shave only the right cheek, and draw a clock with twelve digits squished into the right half. Other patients lose ...

Gist on the Resource Curse Comment on watch?v=uiIg4tLTaT0 7/9/21 The most relevant concepts I know of relating to the issues in the middle east are that of Selectorate Theory and The Resource Curse. Wikipedia explains Selectorate theory pretty well but it doesn't do a good job of connecting politics to the resource curse. This book does a great job of explaining both: "The Dictators Handbook: why bad behavior is almost always good politics" Summary by CGPgrey: "The Rules for Rulers" here on youtube. The gist of it is that when a government relies on taxation for revenue, it will be greatly incentivized to invest in infrastructure so that the people can more easily get to and perform their work to earn more and pay more taxes. invest in education and healthcare, since healthy and educated people will earn more and pay more taxes. Allow basic freedoms like free press, assembly and ease of communication; the press to allow people to more easily learn market ...

Instead of imagining humans evolving morality, like fingers. Imagine the concept of morality as the best methods for keeping [high] civility [and well being] within large groups, and evolution forcing humans to adapt a sense of morality so as to better organize ourselves. Take for example, flight. There's the concept of flight and there's the evolution of flight. In order for something to be able to fly, animal or otherwise, it needs to be light weight, aerodynamic and be able to catch air so as to fall more slowly or get lift. Evolution needn't have evolved flight in animals for the concept of flight (or aerodynamics) to exist as a natural phenomenon. Evolution can however adapt certain animals to take advantage of this phenomenon to improve the survival chances of a species.   Humans may have evolved a sense of morality; evolution's best efforts at allowing us to grasp the better and worse methods at organizing large groups so as to allow individuals to prosper and ...

... the reason why Venenzuela turned the way it did was BECAUSE it had oil. it's called the resource curse. Fledgling dictatorships like to use faux and idealistic notions of democracy & socialism to appease their population while they systematically take their rights away. they use the money from oil to pay the military & police to brutally suppress the slightest hint of rebellion. This is all explained in detail in the book "the dictator's handbook: why bad behavior is almost always good politics", it's a good read. CGP grey made a summary video called "the rules for rulers" . Leaders that don't have natural resources like oil, gold, natural gas, etc., will not have the revenue to forcefully keep themselves in power. Their only option for revenue that is left is for them to rely on taxation. since capitalism is a more effective method at revenue production, it is a better option for fledgling democracies. However this doesn't mean that ...

Should/ought statements don't inform on the nature of morality, that is they don't tell us what is or isn't moral. Rather, should/ought statements are made from what we already believe to be moral and it is this morality that I propose we can conclude objectively. (claim, needs examples) Science is at its most useful when it can reliably predict/discover the nature of reality. If we accept this aspect of science to be accurate then we can conclude that fields of study like history, economics, psychology and meteorology can be considered scientific so long as they can predict/discover the past, present and future nature of reality they aim to explain with useful amounts of reliability. That these fields don't follow the scientific method doesn't invalidate them as scientific, it merely means that the scientific method is an incomplete method for explaining reality. (demonstrate the predictability of ethics. Must be rigorous enough to match the usefulness of other ...