prespectiveCryonaut

• prespectiveCryonautApr 9, 2012, 6:49 AM

  4 points

  in reply to: maxmore’s comment on: Al­cor vs. Cry­on­ics Institute

  Thanks for your reply, Max. It does seem that Darwin is a bit harder on Alcor, but perhaps some of that is just because it’s closer and more personal to him from having worked there and being signed up with them.

Al­cor vs. Cry­on­ics Institute

• prespectiveCryonautApr 8, 2012, 9:16 PM

  −5 points

  on: Two ar­ti­cles about fu­tur­ism [LINKS]

  A sample of Alternet headlines from the front page:

  The Supreme Court Is Ruled by Right-Wing Extremists—Can the Court’s Moderate Women Counteract Their Radical Bent?

  Politicians Swallow Pink Slime to Prove Their Allegiance to Corporations.

  Voter Suppression 101: How Conservatives Are Conspiring to Disenfranchise Millions of Americans

  And, from Campaign for Change’s About section:

  “We live in a remarkable political moment: precarious, yet potentially transforming. At the Campaign for America’s Future, our daily work is to bring about the progressive transformation.

  After three decades of conservative dominance in American politics, we Americans are threatened with economic disintegration, environmental devastation and international isolation.”

  When I tried to read the first article, a widget complaining about wolves caught in inhumane traps popped up, and I couldn’t get rid of it. The article itself was pretty vague and almost bereft of examples. Take this paragraph: “4. If it’s taboo, it’s probably important.

  The thing you are not discussing—the elephant in the room—has a very high probability of being the very thing that will put an end to the present era, and launch you into the next phase of your future. Worse: the longer you ignore or deny it, the more at its mercy you will ultimately be when the change does come down.”

  Yet she doesn’t cite any examples of taboos that could be important, perhaps because she can’t think of any (other than perhaps that Conservatives are less intelligent than liberals and the elderly need to be euthanized), or she can think of genuine taboos, but she is unwilling to acknowledge them for fear of offending the sensibilities of her far-left readership (like the ominous growing body of data on race and IQ differences).

  The second article was even weaker than the first.

  (P.S.: though I disagreed, I didn’t downvote.)

• prespectiveCryonautApr 8, 2012, 7:25 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: Gastogh’s comment on: [link] TEDxYale—Keith Chen—The Im­pact of Lan­guage on Eco­nomic Be­hav­ior

  What about the work of Lera Boroditsky?

• prespectiveCryonautApr 8, 2012, 6:10 AM

  1 point

  on: [link] TEDxYale—Keith Chen—The Im­pact of Lan­guage on Eco­nomic Be­hav­ior

  So after years of denying Sapir–Whorf, have the linguists finally admitted their error, and have they begun to back away from the strong version of their beloved Universal Grammar hypothesis?

  From the first article:

  “The Chomskyan school also holds the belief that linguistic structures are largely innate and that what are perceived as differences between specific languages – the knowledge acquired by learning a language – are merely surface phenomena and do not affect cognitive processes that are universal to all human beings. This theory became the dominant paradigm in American linguistics from the 1960s through the 1980s and the notion of linguistic relativity fell out of favor and became even the object of ridicule.”