OF THE
TIMES
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well... You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect...
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
From reading this article, it is apparent that the fascist government model is alive and well, but for many not seen. They just give it a new...
I post this again, this is so important to the fundamentals, the creation of any free society. What is important here to my mind is, the very...
let's not forget......Home EC. All the guys I took Home Ec with in high school loved it. They learned to sew buttons on, hem their pants and they...
I watched a Documentary about a year ago which highlighted wealthy Israelis flying to China to get organs harvested from the Falun Gong. The...
Thanks JennB for your insight and humour, a firestorm of comments, with more to arrive, I suspect. Great Work!
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The researchers of this Swedish study assert that it: “..demonstrates that moral choices are no different from their preferential and perceptual counterparts; they are highly constrained and coupled to the immediate environment through sensory interaction.”
The researchers imposed a time limit of 3 seconds for the subjects to answer 63 “moral” and 35 “factual” questions. The subjects were asked to express their confidence in the answer during an additional 1-second timeframe. Answers after these time limits were discarded.
Could you give a 3-second informed decision that reflected your true feelings to the “Inflicting emotional harm is just as bad as inflicting physical harm” question, and then express your confidence on a 1-7 scale within 1 second? How about the “Developing a child’s character is central to raising it good” question?
The supplementary material showed that researchers “..justified our design. When no time-out condition was included, 33% of participants realized that their eye movements were influencing the timing of the trial.” The 3-second timeframe was thus imposed to keep the subjects from gaming the experiment rather than to properly model moral decision-making.
The study begins by stating: “Moral cognition arises from the interplay between emotion and reason..” I don’t see that 3 seconds allows a person’s feeling brain to connect with their thinking brain to produce emotionally informed yet reasoned successive responses to a 98-question battery.
But the time period wasn’t the only area I question. The researchers focused on eye gaze as the important factor. However, each subject’s eye gaze is not necessarily the same. It is learned behavior that may have many historical components.
Other studies found that we pay attention to the present through the windows of perception that we’ve developed from our past, and our long-term memory usually selects what we pay closer visual attention to. Individual factors such as each subject’s desire to gain the researchers’ approval, the stress they felt during the experiment, or their conditioning to conform and comply with directions may have also influenced their “moral” decisions.
If you force people to make snap judgments within an artificial environment, they may perform with instant conditioned or thinking brain answers, yes. But if the study’s results really support the finding that “..moral choices are no different..” then deciding whether “One should never intentionally harm another person” is no different than a “top of the head” answer to “Is Denmark larger than Sweden?”
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