Franzen sees the all-consuming warrior spirit of climate change activists as potentially hurting other environmental causes by redirecting priorities and resources away from conservation projects to the cause of reducing green house gases. Climate change is one threat to biodiversity but there are others, such as habitat loss and fragmentation.
The private sector can’t do everything – we need government, regulations, and taxes. But why are government agencies so encumbered by bureaucratic inefficiency? Here are some possible reasons....
According to Kabat-Zinn, not living mindfully is to be in a world of “loss and grief and suffering” (FCL, Kindle p. 440). Mindfulness makes it possible for us to be “fully awake, not lost in waking sleep or enshrouded in the veils of [our] thinking mind” (ibid, p.2346) Living unmindfully, we are “half unconscious…reacting automatically, mindlessly” (ibid, p 9894).
Heuristics that are useful except when they aren’t: 1) It depends; 2) Context is everything; 3) The devil’s in the details...
...people generally react in a very basic way to the threat of dire consequences and horrific scenarios. They simply repress and doubt what they hear - a common strategy when faced with alarming prognostications....
...The authors speculate that the placebo effect may be an important factor in the decline in CBT's efficacy. They note that the “placebo effect is typically stronger for newer treatments; however, as time passes and experience with therapy is gained, the strong initial expectations wane. One may question whether this is the case with CBT....
The assertion that a religious experience is incommensurate with a “regular’ experience is common to believers of many persuasions. To be incommensurate is to be on a different level altogether. When two things are incommensurate, they don’t share a common measure and so cannot be compared. The rules that apply to one side are irrelevant to the other. The conviction of incommensurability protects beliefs from critical scrutiny to the extent that these beliefs are thought to stem from religious experience.
In the market place, value boils down to the point of overlap between what buyers are willing to pay and what sellers are willing to accept. Value is not a property of the object but of the transaction.
Useful “savoring strategies” included focusing attention on the present moment, engaging in positive rumination, and telling others about positive experiences. The authors conclude: “Hence, our findings contribute to the increasing body of evidence emphasizing the importance of the flexibility of biological and psychological processes for well-being…. our research suggests that practicing as many savoring strategies as possible...
According to Clifford Geertz, religion creates “an aura of utter actuality. It is this sense of the ‘really real’ upon which the religious perspective rests” (Interpretation of Cultures, p. 112; my italics).
Both action and inaction have consequences. To the extent that these consequences matter to us, we have to decide what to do and what not to do – often under conditions of uncertainty and risk. None of this has to do with “free will”.
Bottom line: more police, less prison time. The DOJ piece says prison doesn’t have much deterrence effect – but if it had no deterrence effect, being caught would have no deterrence effect. How much prison or jail time is enough to make one think twice before committing to some criminal act
Once a country achieves a certain standard of living, inhabitants become less focused on doing whatever it takes to survive and start caring more about the world around them. Poorer countries tend to chop down forests, richer countries to plant them.
My beef with cognitive approaches to motivation, emotion, and behavior: cognitivists tend to consider what happens in the head as products of what goes on in the head, with the implicit opposition to what happens "objectively" "in the world". I see what happens in the head as tethered to the world that exists beyond the head.
Scarcity is about a perceived mismatch between what is available (supply) and what is desired (demand). You pay more attention to things associated with scarcity, whether it’s scarcity of guesses, friends, time, or income. Scarcity creates a mindset affecting what we notice, how we decide and how we act.
Larger businesses promote economies of scale, higher wages (known as the big firm wage premium), and de-materialization of production, logistics and transportation (meaning fewer emission per unit produced). Of course, there needs to be a mix of large, moderate and small businesses, and monopolistic power should be avoided.
The definition of ideology I will be using borrows from Robert Jay Lifton and Willard S. Mullins: an ideology is a relatively comprehensive and coherent set of convictions (a “vision”) about how humans and the world works, which is powerful enough to influence one’s thinking, feelings, evaluations, and actions. In this sense, I consider mindfulness as an ideological movement.
A living wage is the hourly rate that an individual must earn to support their family, if they are the sole provider and are working full-time (2080 hours per year). As adopted in the US, living wages are often set so that a full-time worker with a family of four earns more than some measure of poverty (usually the official federal poverty line).
The problem with this “small is beautiful” mentality is that small landholders tend to operate on very small margins and are the least likely to afford sustainable practices like letting a portion of their land fallow every year and to allow some bordering forests to remain intact. In poorer countries, when times are hard, the trees are chopped down to sell the wood....
One of my favorite parts is Litman's list of "methodological potholes" frequently encountered in science writing. These are based mostly on Huron (2000)* and include: