The study authors speculated that these characteristics may foster “Openness to Experience” (OE), which has been positively correlated to paranormal beliefs in other research.
Benefits often come with a cost... Burdens may yield benefits.... Benefits and burdens may be certain but small or uncertain but large...immediate but brief or delayed but long-lasting. Moral principles only go so far in helping us sort it all out.
Those who are truly stuck in poverty need different kinds of government help than those who are suffering brief periods of hardship.
To be a fearmonger is to traffic in fear. Fearmongering is one way ideological and religious movements gain adherents and then keep them. The world is a scary place. We offer the way out.
Air capture can remove far more CO2 per acre of land than trees. It also has the potential to pay for itself by producing a commercially viable product – low-carbon fuels – from the recycled CO2.
...research on treatment effectiveness should include a comparison condition that controls for personal factors: how the researchers interact with subjects. That means the same amount of compassion, touching, attention, encouragement, and all-around support given to subjects across groups.
Others don’t want to move forward with SRM research because they consider it a distraction from what our main focus should be: cutting greenhouse gas emissions. These critics want us to embrace the necessity of sacrifice, not rely on the hope that technology will save the planet before disaster strikes. Such hope would reduce the sense of urgency to act now, so we mustn’t feed that particular wolf.
Here we have the themes of impending catastrophe, warfare, and paranoia. Advocates of geoengineering are vilified, their motives suspect. Pragmatic explorations are redefined as ideologies. So what’s the deal?
Indignation is pretty much a knee-jerk reaction to perceived injustice and is associated with a desire to punish the guilty party. The guilty party may be seen as having too much of a good thing or too little of a bad thing.
Right now there are about 3 US workers for every retiree. By 2050, there will be 2 workers for every retiree. Also by 2050, the U.S. proportion of GDP spent on just Social Security and Medicare is projected to rise from 8.6% today to 11.5% if no changes are made in these programs.
No one likes being told they're an ideologue or that their profound observations are profoundly ideological.
Thing is, what gets you in isn't what keeps you there. The hardest part is to jump in. To place yourself within a new web of experience and influence. If monetary incentives are what it takes to make you jump, so be it. New reasons for being there will unfold as new rewards are discovered.
The effects of self-determined actions and non-actions come with varying degrees of certainty, immediacy, importance, magnitude, and vividness, as do the effects of restricting self-determined actions and non-actions.
Many employers have reported delaying capital investments because they haven't been able to find enough workers who would be able to operate and trouble-shoot their fancy new machines and equipment.
Unfortunately, new generations of Americans are falling even further behind. Despite unending school reform and the expansion of adult basic education, literacy levels of young adults are lower today than they were a decade ago.
As with the education premium, so with inequality. They have risen together.
What I found with many adult clients reading at the "basic" level (roughly, between 6th and 8th grade level) was that with intensive basic skills training, they could improve their skills even further. If they didn't have a GED, they could get one with sufficient preparation. If they already had a GED or high school diploma, they could complete vocational training or a community college program.
Roughly 45 million US adults read below the 5th grade level, including 19% of high school graduates and half of adults under the poverty line .
The downside of living in such an interconnected universe is vulnerability. Between the psychological harm subtly inflicted years ago by our nonmindful parents, to lack of inner harmony and connection with others, to the myriad of “toxins” in our environment, the world is a dangerous place.
Two recent studies compared magical thinking in mindfulness meditators and non-meditators. Meditators scored significantly higher in magical thinking than non-meditators. The study authors suggested two possible reasons for this difference between groups: the mindfulness meditators came from a Buddhist tradition that incorporated magical ideas; and/or mindfulness is associated with greater open-mindedness.